The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  We went on being locally semi-upper-middle-class, though—“Other families do it, so can we.”

  The sounds of Lila’s voice are a softish clicking of sparrow wings and sparrow-chirping, a linear flock of cries. Sparrows—dry-bodied, dry-toned, quick. She is brownish in tone nowadays. The feel of the fabric of the chair I sit in through the tired fabric of my clothes . . . The taste of the air in the room . . . The smell of dusk . . . the restlessness of the soul at sadness . . . Momma’s need to rule—even if over a kingdom of sadness: Momma said, “It’s all for one and one for all.”

  “No thanks . . . I have my life to live.” Nonie said that, actually.

  Momma put me and Nonie up for grabs—who would take us in? It is possible she refused offers for me. She said to me, “You help me look respectable.” I gave her an excuse, she said, to say no.

  But no one locally wanted Nonie to live with them—not even Grandma: “I connt do nuttin mit a yung guhl . . .”

  Lila, lying on the couch, in deeper darkness among the shorter dusks as winter came, said, “They like her just fine but they can live without her . . . She’s not worth the price of admission. I’m an old cowhand; I’ll tell you, I’m at the end of my rope.”

  Nonie said she would tell us what she looked for in the man she would marry: she wanted a young man who was blond, easygoing, a good businessman who knew how to have a good time, whose family had a big colonial house—with pillars and a circular driveway with azaleas along it.

  Lila said, “I want to live in an apartment hotel with good service for a change and I want a smart operator for a husband for a change—I’ve earned it. If you ask me, I’m ready to meet my ideal.”

  The women came home a little sweaty, work-stained, scared, in their good clothes: “What am I going to do? . . . oh God . . . I can’t stand up anymore.” Collapsing in a chair, telling some incoherent tale . . . and you attempt to cheer them up. At times the house stank of fear and of disorder. A peripheral dwelling at the edge of a lighted space . . . Offstage, they were onstage still, in their sadness. Momma did commerce in Nonie’s chances as if they were business futures. Some of this was parody, some was a mysterious cruelty in an infinite maternal comedy. Momma was tired of the world and she was pushing Nonie into it.

  Some of it was affection—some of it was deeper than affection: a passionate and sightless attachment, one that included all the events around us but which excluded me. It gave me gooseflesh—a sense of a dark universe that the women were in. Tempers and favors and rank as they were set in the company of those two women had a peculiar tang or sourness now for me.

  I was used sometimes as a guinea pig for IQ tests at the nearby university. One man there, a professor, used to put his hand on my shoulder while he prepared to say, Get ready, get set, go, watching his stopwatch. I tried to describe the steadying quality of his touch to Lila; and she said, covering her eyes with her arm—she was lying on the couch as per usual (her phrase), “That’s called squiring you—I like it too . . . in small doses.”

  The professor did not think I was a likely child for the Silenowiczes or for Lila now. Lila said, “I need the money you bring in.” But it was not a cold or insulting—or blood-chilling—remark the way she said it, dryly, sadly—realistically. She let me peek at the truth. “All right,” I said. “Just don’t try to talk me into other things and you have to let me do what I want about bedtime and it’s okay.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  She said later, “I never saw a child as independent as you are.”

  But she rented me out to the professor by the weekend—for tests and whatnot. “Is it all right if I don’t pack for you, Macher?” Operator, that means.

  But she liked me, sort of.

  I went to the professor’s house. It was brick, Georgian, with green shutters. He had a smallish, nervous wife. They were polite—they had two children—voices and eyes, favoritisms, veered here and there. Lila had said, You’ll find that it’s like everyplace else in the world: it’s real—real—nothing is ideal.

  Lila called up late Saturday night and screamed at them crazily over the telephone. She was crazy off and on nowadays. The professor, pale and distressed, said to me, “Your mother is a difficult woman . . . Please don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “She wants you to come home tonight.”

  I telephoned her and Lila started in on a tirade about child-stealers. “You’d better come home where you belong.”

  “Why, Momma?”

  “I’m not going to give you any compliments . . . You want compliments? Well, I need to see your pretty eyes in this empty house. Your sister is driving me crazy: she wants to kill me.”

  Sometimes her words evoked scenes—these were just words.

  What is inside the head takes refuge in formulas—capsule things to carry into a present-tense moment. It’s all nonsense, though, if you examine it. When I got home Momma was wearing lipstick: “I’m trying to look glamourous for you . . . Are you embarrassed? Maybe I’m embarrassed: did you ever think of that?” (By my life among people who then talked about her.)

  “I don’t know what you expect me to understand, Momma.”

  “I expect nothing from you . . . Just turn on the radio and sit where I can see your baby blues. I need some friendly eyes . . . My nerves aren’t good . . . I don’t want to be alone.”

  Of the prefessor and his wife, Lila said. “They weren’t exactly heroes, were they? Did it get to them, how smart you were, did they catch on you’re impossible? I’ll tell you a secret: people want to kill you. Stay still . . . The thing is not to care . . . I’m the I-don’t-care girl . . . You and me, we don’t care anymore. Don’t get a swelled head just because you and I are such swell people with such a sophisticated outlook. I can’t live without you. I don’t need you around for company . . . It’s not my peace of mind . . . It’s your real mother’s ghost: she gives me no peace. I need the money your father sends you.”

  At the edge of every statement is what it means further than itself—and what it doesn’t mean. Around us is what she denies: my real mother’s ghost gives her peace, it is Lila’s peace of mind, she can’t live without me. It’s not just money. And so on. I mean you know when it’s just money—the voice is different then. She said, “You’re not so bad—I didn’t know I liked you. I’m like Garbo—I vunt tuh beee uhlohnnnnnn . . . But you’re okay . . .”

  She had never cooked for me; but she cooked meals for me after that. She was a terrible cook, though. Neither she nor I liked her cooking. It was a symbol. (The local idiom was to say it was a symbol, though.)

  Momma was seeing a guy who had liked her when she was a girl: “What it is is it’s Memory Lane.” Then: “Ben is not an interesting man.” A childless widower, he wanted a son. He’d be good to me. Nonie was seeing a rich homosexual guy who’d told her about his being homosexual. He was very rich, Momma said, but Nonie would never sacrifice herself for us—she wouldn’t marry him to help us. Nonie said to me, “We’ll give him you . . . He can have you.” She didn’t mean it: she never let me meet him, even. She said it to Momma but she let Momma meet him.

  In the moments then . . . among the actual breaths . . . nothing that concerned the women was sufficiently in my range then that I can speak of it now with full knowledge.

  “What I want I can’t have anymore,” Momma said on the phone to someone. “I’m spoiled. Ask me no questions, tell me no lies.”

  Even though she spoke to me in the ways she did, Momma hid the world from me as she knew it—her world, if I can call it that.

  I stayed away from the house for days at a time—among boys and sometimes girls and their families, their mothers, women who were unlike my mother and sister. One cannot take the time to remember every moment of a period of a number of weeks: it would take longer than a number of weeks. I wanted to be difficult and bad, ordinary, and free . . . Sly . . . And athletic.

  At a certain date after eleven weeks, a Veteran
s Hospital not far from Chicago called Lila. Someone there telephoned to say that S.L. was ill; he’d had a stroke in his car while he was driving to Chicago—and so on. Lila told me this: No one knew who he was, he was in a coma for three months, but he came out of it and he asked for us.

  That story has certain problems of plausibility. Such a long coma causes brain damage. Daddy had a wallet and a car registration and a driver’s license with him. It is likelier (but not necessarily true) that in the car he began to feel very ill, and he checked into the hospital, and while he was there he had a stroke and went into a coma and came out of it knowing he was an invalid; and then he went on day after day, seriously afflicted with grief—or perhaps for a day or two. He had a time of it, Lila said. He changed his mind . . . He most likely, after a while, now that he would be an invalid or a semi-invalid the rest of his life, chose to let the hospital call us. Or someone did without asking him. I believe all the stories . . . I believe what anyone—everyone—says to me. I imagine him lying in bed and giving up the project of being ill by himself.

  He said to me when he came home that he’d missed me: but I had been unhappy with him before he left; so what exactly had he missed? He had often complained, “You’re too smart for me—you have no heart.” He’d often said he didn’t like me. He said to a couple of men who came to see him when he was at home with us that he told the hospital he had no family and that the hospital on its own had called us and that he would never forgive the hospital—it was a dry, male joke-not-a-joke. He told his brother on the telephone to California that he had been unable to speak all that time (or most of the time he’d been in the hospital) and that he had not wanted to see anyone. He told Nonie the hospital had found out about us among his papers and had refused to give him any more free treatment but had sent him back to Lila, whom he hated. It is hard to know why one decides certain things or why one decides to say certain things. It is hard to remember coherently or sensibly. It doesn’t much matter now. The dragonfly flights of memorial glimpses of this and that in the past change things around anyway.

  More family conferences to see if he ought to come back—if we ought to allow him to return . . . We’ll all just be nurses . . . conferences in the house and on the phone. Lila said, “They all have their axes to grind, I don’t know what the good-sense thing to do is or if there is one.” Momma said to me, “You’re a know-it-all—tell me what you think?”

  I shook my head. I refused to think.

  She said, “It’s not a good idea to say yes—it’s the end of my life, but if I say no, I have to be someone who said no to him now when his back is against the wall.”

  She became odd-faced. Shadows haunted the sockets of her eyes. She was shadowy-mouthed. Meanwhile, Nonie said she would rather be left out of the discussion, too. She told me she was against S.L.’s coming back to us. “The bad stuff will start all over again.” She wanted me to agree with her. In the days of thinking-about-what-to-do Lila got more difficult, catty with people, outspoken (that is to say, rude), and obstinate and hard to talk to. “What starting over is there? What starting over is there at my age? S.L. will pull himself together and he’ll go to work part-time; we’ll make a go of it; we’ll make a comeback—I understand him. Listen, I made my bed and I’ll lie in it . . . I don’t want to get to know another man . . . If he’s no good, I’ll walk out. He likes me well enough: I’m not easy to get along with . . . He would have come back if he hadn’t gone into a coma. I don’t want to start over. I started with him and I’ll finish with him. That’s the way I am.” And: “No one can tell me what to do. I’m going to start over, but with him . . . We’re turning over a new leaf . . . S.L.’s not going to die like a dog in the gutter. I’m tired of thinking. These are my last words on the subject.”

  Nonie said, “She just wants to torture him and the rest of us.’ She hasn’t got any nerve left.”

  Nonie said, “Well, I can’t live in a house with a sick man and make goo-goo eyes at boys I want to get to marry me . . . No one thinks about me.”

  Momma said, “At my age, I know I’m making a mistake but”—she coughed—“but I want to make it . . . and who’s going to stop me, I’d like to know. What I want to know is who’s against me and who will help me now. What about you, Wiley? People say someone your age shouldn’t stay in a house with a sick man . . . Will you stand by me?”

  Her eyes: they were not unfamiliar to me. The defeat—the absence of merriment—the presence of dark amusement—a universe of half-calculated carelessness . . . you have only a second to prevent yourself from being moved. I kissed her eyelids. “Count me in,” I said. I was pretty young. I said it in a storylike voice—like it was all foregone. “I’ll try to help.” I pretty much meant it.

  My face—a doggish, twisted, nervous boy’s somewhat tough face—“You don’t have the face of my dreams, Pisher,” she said that now with a faint smile. And closed her eyes. She put her still-pretty arm over her deep-sunken, deep-shadowed eyes, and from behind her arm, she said, “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Tell our fortune,” she said.

  The cards said we were doing the wrong thing.

  I laid the cards out and said, “We’re doing the right thing.”

  She said, “I know . . . I tell you what my secret is: I don’t love anyone.” She eyed the darkness in the corners of the room. “I don’t know what anything means . . . Well, maybe my luck will change . . . I’m flying blind, I’m flying by the seat of my pants. Well, so be it.”

  An ambulance brought Daddy home—from Chicago. Gray-faced, skinny with illness, scared-looking in a kind of squirrellike way unlike himself before he was ill, friendly and querulous, emotional. Lila in the kitchen said, as if to herself,. “My God, he’s a beaten man.”

  I slept on a couch in the dining room. Dad slept in my room.

  Lila said to others, “Well, it is and it isn’t a second honeymoon, but I will say this, the subject is reopened. My plate is full. I always say, Let the devil take the hindmost . . . See no evil, do no evil, speak no evil—just get on with what you have to do.”

  She was negotiating decency—absolution—death—an ad hoc morality . . . in the face of illness and mortality.

  She said to me late at night when the house was quiet, “I’m making up my life as I go along.” She said, “I don’t know what to do.” Curtains were blowing at the open window. I didn’t feel I liked or loved my parents much anymore or that I needed them—and if I did, it hardly mattered. I was scared, though, not just of having another family—my third, after all—but of the accumulated sadness—the meaninglessness. I thought we should fight death in each other and in ourselves and that we should fight other things, our own human nature, for example, and the way accident and bad things, so to speak, chewed everything up, and that it was more “important,” more “vital,” to do something kind than it was to be smart or reasonable or sensible.

  I “decided” to be “indomitable,” like Ulysses, and not to care about being poor and caught up in this mess but to be a good child to the best of my ability—a son and all that—and to believe in simple things and to be cheerful and loyal and okay. I foresaw my own freedom in that—a weird intellectual freedom that had to do with will: I would do this thing, stay with the Silenowiczes, and behave, and then I could think about what I really wanted to do. But I wouldn’t be haunted by my own darkness, at least. I’d be good to Dad. Uncomplicatedly good.

  Lila saw it differently, understood me differently. “We have to be suckers because it would be worse to be the other thing.” But she looked terrible: it really was killing her. “I can’t help the way I look, Wiley: my life is over now.”

  For the umpteenth time I decided not to remember things but just to go along from day to day.

  Daddy said, “You’re going to stay and be a help? Can’t bear to miss the show, is that it, Pooperkins? Forgive and forget? make no claims: be a gentleman even if it kills you?” He was trying to be noble; he was trying to be skeptical
; he was trying to remind me of the past; he was being a lot of things and it came out like that.

  He looked terrible; he was really ill, really ill and scared. Terrified and angry, bitterly scared in that style—and it showed.

  “Take my advice: leave: don’t stay here—I’m not good for anything, I’m good for nothing now.” Dimly: “Ha-ha . . .” He said, “I can’t protect you from anything . . . I can’t protect you from her.”

  I know it sounds mad but it felt like a pressure from God, an arrogantly experienced wind of death that kept me there and kept me from having seizures or nonstop nightmares: there are a lot of ways to escape a bad situation. One is by going right up to it and standing next to it, or in the center of it, until you either die or feel its normalcy, by which I mean its forbearance, the possibilities of living with it that are in it for you.

  Daddy said again, “You’re going to stay and be a help? Can’t bear to miss the show, Pooperkins? Forgive and forget? a gentleman if it kills you?” Decisions, in real life, of course, are never quite final; you set yourself to be stubborn—you act it out, the finality. But it’s touch and go whether you keep on. Daddy coughs and blacks out, and you hold him until his fear subsides and he begins to peer through his semiconsciousness at the air. I loved him some. Each occasion of seeing him brought, in its train, messages, omens: bits of affection: old dismissals-of-him as well. My sense of the world was refreshed in my losing touch with it.

  Now when I daydreamed it was with new clusters of intensity of actual reference to what was lost. Meanings formed and were clear for a while—like clouds in the sky, their shadows on the ground.

  And other children made a place for me—for a while I did not have to defend myself. I had this rank, this laissez-passer, this other role, so to speak: the kid with the really ill father. A day, a school day, to enter a school day—that next huge trembling block of time—was to enter an immediacy tailored to my being a sick man’s son. One can forget and run in the playground at recess. But then when I stopped running, I felt my heart in him; I held my hand to my chest and wondered if my heart was weak like Daddy’s—I gasped as he did . . . I felt close to him after a while and not human—not like other kids . . . at all.