The other oddity was that I judged S.L.—when I was nine years old. See, he and Lila needed me there to arouse interest, pity, compassion in doctors. The child’s presence, his loyalty, inspired loyalty. Sometimes, walking home in the wintry light, I wished I knew less, but to choose to continue walking toward home, the thing of refusing to choose anymore, was to be filled with breath. It was the opposite of suffocation. It was not like being adrift in airlessness. One did this stuff for them in order not to have worse memories about oneself. It was okay.
I hung around the house a lot the first months S.L. was home. I cut school. The school protested, but I kept on. At first S.L. was upset by illicit presence: “I want no sacrifices from you, I want no sacrifices from a child.” I couldn’t help feeling (seeing) that he didn’t like me although he cared-about-me.
I was a tough, frog-faced, tense-nerved nine-year-old.
But also, in the seconds, I could feel his breathing change when I entered his room. And when I drew near him, I could see in his eyes a changing condition, a lessening of solitude. Part of it was because I was dumb to have stayed: we both knew this—and that it made room for him. This efflorescence of stupidity. The specific feelings of a specific boy. He straightened his hair with his hands. He’d get up, even, and brush his thinning hair—I was important company, ugly and young and stupid or not.
Some days he might ignore me . . .
Some, even though he was lying down, he would put his arm around my waist and say, “Don’t talk . . . Just sit here and look at the light in the window with me.” Once or twice he said, “I can’t stand the things you say, you know that? Here, have a piece of licorice: someone brought me licorice: it’s bad for you: have some.” He said, “I like watching the light . . . I have become a simple man, Pooperkins.”
It wasn’t true but it was okay. The yews, the light in the yews alongside the house, outside the bedroom window, the light on the grass, on our backyard fence: we watched the late-afternoon light as if it were a show, Daddy and I.
Daddy said—over and over—“I can’t do nothing for no one—not a thing—not for a single human soul. Stay if you want—but you’re a fool . . .”
I could feel his heart lift . . . his heartbeat straighten out . . . in his relief at being in the presence of a fool.
So what? I have nothing else to do as interesting as this. I told him that once. He said it wasn’t a kind thing to say. Then that it was. Then that he didn’t want to think about it.
One is no longer shy. One is abrupt, little-boyish, crude, and stupid—not one’s real self: perhaps this is one’s real self now, the self you offer someone in companionship.
Daddy said, “Maybe that’s the point of having nothing. You get to enjoy the company of a fool . . . Then the next thing you know you even like being with yourself. Remember that . . .”
It was more complicated than I can show here.
Various relatives gave moral support and a number of others sent money. Momma preferred the relatives who sent money. Grave remedies were considered, including a set of operations that would last several years. The project was dropped: it was too expensive, too uncertain, he was too old, the wrong body type, the wrong mental sort. He was not worth it . . . something like that.
I paid no attention.
My parents loved me a lot—really a lot—not simply but really a lot, noisily, you might say, then, for a while.
Nonie still said nothing kind to me—not ever—not once—not even then.
But she was different in manner . . . faintly respectful or in fear of me . . . a little.
Love
Love? A Calvinist sense of the merely human in oneself and one other person, or in a family, a Calvinist sense touched by willful grace here and there, in more than one person, touched by some obstinacy, some persistence in identity and attachment which is a sort of piety: touched off, set off, lit and fired by the presence of stupidity or faith—stupidity-with-a-purpose—stupidity of a certain kind for the sake of a family?
“Well,” Lila said, sincere and yet ironic and laughing at me, “let’s put a good face on things . . . let’s all pull together—let’s make a home and see what happens.” She said to me, “Are you listening? You ready to put your best bib and tucker on? You have your good manners ready? Will you be a bright spot in a dark, dark world for the rest of us?”
Nonie said to her, “Leave my feelings alone . . . I want to be young, I want to have these years for myself. I have to get married and try to save what I can.”
Momma said, “She never lifts a finger to help anyone . . . and she never will. She wants to save herself is all it is with her. What it is is silly . . . Well, that’s not always the worst thing in the world to be.”
But sometimes it is . . .
Momma said to me, “Oh, you, you’re a boy—you can make sacrifices, you can let things go for a little while and you can pick up right where you left off—you’ll still have a life.”
Momma was bluffing. And Nonie was amiable—and patient—but merciless. I assumed a similar mercilessness could be applied to her. One might bluff with Momma. One might have, with either of them, an equivalent concern for oneself.
Some of Lila’s remarks at this time:
I’m no one’s sweetie pie anymore—
Nobody wants you when you’re old and gray—if you’re the realistic type.
Life is a battle, we have our own little war, we’re a hospital unit.
Thank God, God put the spirit of toughness in us, we don’t lie down and play dead . . . We put up a good front.
A percentage of what she did was always sincere.
In 1940, Daddy changed. He had been difficult all along, mostly difficult—frightened and surrenderish, overexcited, and sometimes determined to act as if he were well. Daddy, acting as if his illness had been imaginary all along, or had been a dream, became more or less wild, vengeful toward Lila—and death. He blamed her. In order to argue with her, he was vengeful toward health, even toward daylight at times. He and Nonie joined forces.
And Momma, showing off, was a heroine-commander—she was very commander-in-chiefish—I don’t mean noble: she gave in to anger and to despair. The daily reality in the house was like being in a firing line. “We’re in the trenches,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing . . . We’re under bombardment from indecency—I can’t go on . . . I want you to go on, Wiley.”
Daddy fell ill again and died and was resuscitated, sort of. Nonie went to live with relatives in North Carolina. Once she was out of the house and we spoke maybe every six weeks on the phone, I tried to ask her for advice if Momma and Daddy fought—or if I was sad. I won’t say I missed her. Yes, I will say it. Perhaps, too, I imagined missing her as a proper thing to do.
On the telephone, long-distance, if I spoke about the family, Nonie would cry out, “Don’t talk to me about that: I can’t stand to hear about those things . . . I can’t stand the way you talk about things anyway: I want things to be nice. Other girls don’t have sick fathers. If I smile and have a good time, people wonder if I have regular feelings about my father. I don’t want boys to wonder about me.”
Lila said, “There’s too much life-and-death around here for her . . . For me, too.”
Nonie would ask how we were eating. Momma had said that getting food on the table would kill her—we had a maid who cooked three times a week; and three nights, we had cold cuts or Chinese food that one of us went to the restaurant and ordered and brought home in little white cartons with metal handles. One night a week, Momma cooked and I washed up. But it wasn’t the cooking she meant. Momma said she couldn’t go on selling insurance and “nursing” Daddy and “keeping my looks at my age when I don’t have an easy life. I don’t have a friendly life, let me tell you, it isn’t decent to ask so much of one person—I’m not a saint.”
Daddy, who felt terror (and shame) at being ill, said to me, “Did they stick you with the latrine detail? Well, you always were a fool, weren’t you?” Momm
a refused to nurse him; he refused (or had refused) to talk to her. I never knew the details of that story (although I can imagine them). I took over the stuff of taking care of him mostly; and he helped; mostly he took care of himself once he recovered from the second serious episode.
But it got weirder. Momma told me that the way men treated her, that the thing of being a woman without a man around to protect her—she didn’t explain in what way—sickened her as it had Nonie. “That’s the real reason I sent her away, where people will look after her rights.”
Anyway, Momma quit her job—or was partly fired—she stayed home and had, she said, a nervous breakdown—a long and complex tantrum or spell of longing for life to be other than it was.
Momma said she couldn’t stand being a charity case but she became one full-time. She said she was breaking in two. She said to Dad, “This is your doing, S.L., this is the life you gave me.” She said to me, though, that she did this, was unkind to S.L., at the doctors’ urging; she said she was supposed to “shame” S.L. into trying harder to live, to live a more active life. “The doctors want you to put up a fight, S.L.; it’s not good medicine for you to be a coward.” Daddy called her Madame Goebbels-Poison-Mouth and said she was killing him; and she said he was killing her—and me. He never again forgave her, or if he did, it was in such dark ironic ways I didn’t like to see it; and I don’t want to think about it now, my dad’s ironic mercy. Momma said, “I don’t understand Original Sin . . . If everyone has it, it can’t be very original.”
She would gouge charity out of everyone she could—clothes, invitations (to get out of the house and away from Dad)—to prove she wasn’t helpless or ground down into mere piety by illness, comparative poverty, growing older, despair. Sometimes it seemed to me that a dozen unlikely truths were visible every day at home. Lila said she could not survive if she wasn’t herself, did I want her to die, and Daddy said he could not live if he wasn’t himself, did I want him to die, and each said to the other, Look what you’re doing to the boy—do you want HIM to go crazy? It seemed to me that self-preservation was lousy, a lousy thing to do. I don’t know. It was hard to think up some meaning that would accept all three of us.
But without such a meaning the days were impossible. Kindness was impossible. Sanity was impossible. The accusations: Are you trying to kill me? And: You are dragging us all down . . . And: You ARE ugly; you’ve brought us to A Pretty Pass—this is the end, I guess . . . made the house a rough place. Dreams and omens, views and moods, feelings, there is a buildup, an accumulation, of events and of opinions in odd ways, but no central truth makes itself known by miracle, not even an I will save myself. Maybe that was because Nonie exemplified the latter. Teachers came to the house to plead with the Silenowiczes to release me; but, in some moods, Lila believed I had put the teachers up to that, egged them on, tricked them, and Daddy would half go along with her in some kind of quick alliance about that . . . Anyway she believed in having me around. You can look from face to face in our living room and see nothing but people being people: you can see the failure of every idea. You can listen to the breathing and see how human people are. It got so it made me laugh—in a way—the fifteen bad minutes on a humid rainy day of hysterical and overtly shrill and even screaming and genuine horror in one or both of them, my parents. In school, for Current Events, I argued the probable reality of death camps given Nazi statements and “human nature” and lies and carelessness about consequences . . . carelessness and blindness . . .
And then, if you’re stubborn, things calm down and we go back into truce—into being good and noble or ordinarily patient, long-suffering, tolerant for a while. I was there: the suffering was blurred . . . changeable. I was a kid. Lila said, “No one’s to blame: we tried, we’re trying: listen, I’m not slow to cast a stone; but I don’t see that that’s called for here. I wish S.L. would try harder . . . He’s the world’s worst patient: that’s where Nonie gets her selfishness: the two of them are the most selfish people you can ever know—well, monkey see, monkey do.” (She explained Hitler that way, too: “He’s a success—that impresses people—you know what happens—monkey see, monkey do . . . Well, what do you expect?” She could do a lot of variations with catchall phrases.)
She said, “I don’t think being sick gives S.L. the right to lord it over me. I know he’s under a strain, but we’re all under a strain and enough’s enough. I blame no one but I’ll tell you this: I don’t know HOW MUCH LONGER I CAN GO ON—AND THAT’S THE TRUTH.” She said, “Even in suffering, people are just people.” She was ill herself by then, gall bladder and the first hints that she might have cancer.
S.L., unhappy, tense, and bitter, said to me, “Is that woman handing out a lot more shit than usual? Why do you listen to her? Don’t you know anything? Do you know about learning to come in out of the rain?” He said flatly: “You should save yourself from her. DON’T BE A SISSY . . .”
He couldn’t sleep if I wasn’t in the house. Sometimes he said, “Save yourself from me” and sometimes he said, “Don’t save yourself from ME . . .” Gosh, it was creepy.
“Try not to think about it,” Momma said. “Hang on to your health.”
Sometimes Momma would be downright cruel to S.L. “He lorded it over me long enough . . . He’s good for nothing now.” She said that to him—in the third person like that, wearily, dramatically.
If she saw me listening, she said to me, “Curiosity killed the cat; you know that, don’t you?” In my dreams, curiosity, an adolescent boy, killed and dismembered a dog.
My parents had an edge of mercilessness, not always unconsciously or drivenly, sometimes semiconsciously, sometimes consciously fully—with wild breaths and chemistries akimbo, fully conscious, merciless.
I didn’t have to be honest about it with myself. I saw that they cared about each other in some way, that, off and on, they preferred this stuff to a merely medical fate.
The bad time worsened. They resented it that I was alive . . . By then, in a sense, they were permitting so many things in themselves—indulgences in wartime or because life was hard—that they slid easily into disliking me at times just because I was there. It was habitual for them to go too far.
But if I yelled or protested quietly, their states worsened, accelerated by guilt almost. Anyway, I brought money into the house but nothing was spent on me—not for doctors or clothes or anything. No schoolbooks, no notebooks. Sometimes not even milk for me. Momma said, with a wrinkled face and a look of honesty, “I can’t bear it. I can’t take care of anyone. We all have to be in the same boat OR I WILL GO MAD.” Scary egalitarianism.
But human.
Nothing in my life announced that I could endure much of this or that I might live through it and on after it for a while in some kind of regular life.
It is very strange to have no books, no lessons, no notepaper or pencils or stamps, nothing but ragged clothes and haircuts you get for nothing as charity, crewcuts, and you’re still sort of semi-upper-middle-class. We had a spectrum of poverties, a continuum of deprivations in the house. The moments of self-control became fewer and fewer. My father had little time or strength for nobility. My mother had no hope and no wish to exemplify lies. I had no innocence about any of this after a while. I tried to get the two of them to be simpler and less violent for my sake, so I could be innocent—I may have sounded like Nonie.
Momma, quite mad by then, loony, said, “You want us to make sacrifices for you: go live somewhere else.” She never said that to Nonie. I could escape in that way. I tried to leave at that point; I moved in with some people who lived a block away and I stopped off at home every day. Lila, though, came after me and stood in the rain on the sidewalk in front of the house on Water Place where I was staying and screamed at the house, at the doors and the windows of the house where the people lived I had taken shelter with: “Wiley, your dying father loves you and needs you, you bastard!” People said she was crazy—that it was the strain and that she was that age . . . And that I sho
uld go away to school. Dad said she had always been crazy, that now everyone could see what she was like. The circumstances of our lives—as I said—made me laugh.
I asked Nonie for help—this was on the telephone to Carolina. Nonie said, “I’m young, don’t ask me to interfere . . . You’re their pet now: you won out—do what you like.”
Lila said to me: “I know what you’re doing: you’re laying up grievances so you can leave us in the lurch—you’re just like Nonie, that’s what you’re like: when you’re good and ready, you’ll take off and have your life. And we’ll die here like dogs.”
The thought had occurred to me that if things got bad enough and I left, I would go on remembering, but if I stayed, I might not remember actively once the worst was over—one of Mom’s phrases. S.L. said, “Life is shit.” The shattered condition of his heart drained his face of color, and not only that, of the power to be absent in thought or attention from a present moment in relation to his condition, his illness . . . He wasn’t there with you—with me—mostly he would talk only to me, see only me (Lila said) at this time—but when I was with him I was in the presence of my father-by-adoption, who wanted me there, but it was all contradictory, contradictory madly: he was entirely (and intently and fearfully) present—to his own danger, his own state—really like a man on a tightrope or like a man being tortured—and yet, even if he was in a sense performing his death-and-life trick in front of me, at the same time, his face, even with its hiddenness gone in performing, his face seemed partly erased, gone from me anyway . . .
Momma got weirder and weirder: she would confront me when I came into the house and she would be half-dressed, her breasts out like wild milk-and-eyes, and she would say, “Tell me how you live through this . . . Tell me how you stay alive.”
The Runaway Soul Page 45