The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  If I burst out laughing, she might, she often did, sober up—if I can say that.

  It was almost like seeing a moment—I know a moment is not a thing—but an eyelid room, a room with eyelid-walls that blinked, and a semi-airy stage and a tree-thing-almost-a-letter-of-the-alphabet with me perched in it and Mom on the ground and a rush of wind seen as thin, curling lines—a restless brevity which, having alit, had not alit at all: so grace and patience came and went in my parents in certain moments and took the place of self-concern and mood and then were replaced by this other stuff but always unstably. You never knew what flicker or flight or obstinacy or cruelty would shift the balance, the mood, the shiny or dull-colored distortions. Daddy said it was all disgusting—“but you make a game out of it, Pisher.” He said I was a kid and was okay—sometimes. It was, actually, male forgiveness—alit and not alit—a shifting as of light or as of breath or as of ribs, a distraction, a generosity—a form of love in a given moment . . . a specific moment. Love? Things were often okay in their way. I remember Momma coming into the living room, where Dad and I were listening to the radio, and saying, “Well, is this the best you have to offer a good-looking woman on a rainy night? I suppose it will have to do. Make room on the couch for me, will you?”

  I guess it’s odd to be sentimental about a time of horror and my father’s love and my mother’s half-baked charm, but in a world of Original Sin (maybe) was hidden this almost erotic and weird justice—and it wasn’t entirely pitched beyond one’s hearing—not anymore, although one was a child still in many ways.

  Daddy said to me, “Sometimes I’m sweet.” He said, “Sometimes everyone is sweet.”

  Meanings

  Because of how things changed, walking into our house, then into the apartment we moved to, was like starting in medias res every day. The past kept being rewritten. It came to this new total—or so the two of them, Momma and S.L., would insist.

  Lila maybe was contemplating sleeping with a local corporation head grown rich in wartime, and moving out of the house. Or she was fighting with some woman who was trying to place her in a lower social category than she felt she had been in before S.L. became ill. Or she had won or changed her mind and was having a little case of shell shock, battle fatigue, tonight. You never knew. She and S.L. might be getting along. Reality is duration—in medias res becomes an evening. Three hundred and sixty-five evenings become a year. Things that last longer are not realer even to the mind. But they become what is largely and as-if-intuitively known. I was ten and eleven. Then I was twelve and big—I was long-legged and skinny in a wartime crewcut the barber humiliatingly did not charge me for unless I insisted. The stuff at home had gone on for three years. My feet are big and they bump on things. I keep forgetting I have big feet and that I have grown. It is spring . . . The windows are open. On my way home I saw limp spears of forsythia in the almost longitudinal rays of late-afternoon Midwestern spring sunlight. The aging drapes—heavy, pale blue-gray silk damask things—are blowing as are, in a more active wind-tossed fashion, the white muslin undercurtains. Daddy is visible in the front room. Has he been sneaking coffee in the kitchen? And Momma is on the phone . . . with her sister? Her mother? A friend? The corporation-president lover, or almost lover, or whatever he was? No one will ever explain to me what went on. I know what I know at various ages and almost, it seems, by accident—in the almost unbearable paradoxicality of accident turned into a geometry of accidents, into likelihood and logic-in-real-life.

  I mean the logic starts at a certain point and then extends through certain phenomena in a disciplined way. Momma’s eyes: now that I was tall, I looked down into them and saw that they were like darkened theaters, with things going on in the dark in them; and then the lights would go on in a way; a performance would begin; but not a lot would be explained even then. But I knew this much—in part, only because I was tall . . . And spoiled, she said.

  Sometimes I thought about things in such a way that the truth was transposed; and instead of realizing that I saw things from a different angle, I would think Ma had changed, that in the past—this is in regard to her eyes—a performance would begin but the lights wouldn’t go on and nothing would be explained—but it had been my age, the absence of genital information, may I say that?, and not just her secrecy that made things seem so entirely unexplained.

  Nowadays Daddy might mutter about her: “That bitch,” and I could half tell, depending on whether I was in a steady mood or was upset or not, whether he was angry or was signalling a broken heart.

  If I didn’t know who he was talking about, he might get angry with me because his medical state burned him and altered his temper or because he was okay and just masculinely sneery at me for my general obtusity, my obtuseness, my being dumb in a lot of ways.

  And I would burn with rejection—or I would laugh. You don’t usually disturb a broken heart—or try to cure it—especially if it is also the actual failing heart of a man ill with genuine heart trouble—but by this time Daddy would let me address his broken heart. And this was odd and private, since it was like, in a sick way, I guess, a guy entrusting his son with his car—it was sort of like that. But it was his feelings. But it would be in his eyes: a special area of permission—of car keys and ignition—kind of—and of that sort of distrust and resignation—and a veiling, politic and clever, over that of indulging-the-kid.

  He might enunciate an aphorism, “Gentlemen don’t snitch, gentlemen don’t tell tales out of school.” He meant about him having come to like me.

  He might say, “Flirt with me like a nice fella.”

  Or: “Give us a hug . . .”

  I often felt in him the murderously ribald thundering of his conviction, in a male-ish big-shot way, that this was love . . . worthwhile love.

  But love as meaning. Not piously. But like among the troops, you know? Catch-as-catch-can? Male flibbertigibbet or shed-time and off-duty stuff? He seemed to assume that the truth about his feelings and about his life when I was not there would do him no credit with me, and yet he would discuss some of those things if I remembered to have the air—and some of the reality—of being the other half of a duo, a pair of guys sitting in a bar in an agreed-on-and-loyal-and-yet-sly way with principles-of-despising-women-as-dishonest—us as dirty but loyal pals, mutually. This was if I hadn’t forgotten him during the day and had not, oh, gotten involved at school or something, or in sports, or in daydreaming. This stuff had evolved with him and me over the years.

  When Momma’s nagging (or ragging, her term) got him off his duff and on his feet with a forbidden unlit cigar in his mouth and him looking like a pale parody of his well self, he would talk to me in certain ways then. Sometimes he would complain, sort of as if giving sort of a footnote: “The fibrillations are bad. I’m taking it slow . . . That bitch is asking me to go make money again . . . I’m not in the mood for any bullshit . . . I’ve had a bad day, Sonny Boy . . . Pisherkins . . .” The thing for me with him, when I was twelve and had gotten big, was to recognize with masculine discretion the presence of a not-final, not overwhelming-all-else love.

  This didn’t necessarily extend in two directions to cover my feelings so far as he was concerned, unless he was in a mood to be just either out of a sense of strength or out of a sense of weakness.

  We are inarticulate about a lot of things—no: it was agreed between us that I would not judge or even think about a lot of things: mannerliness was one such thing, mannerliness such as it was for us, with all the stresses and the ailments changing daily and sometimes hourly; and understanding and forbearance were his subjects, not mine; and how to be a lot of things such as masculine without being rough: I didn’t judge that or think about it but more or less trusted Dad’s taste in the matter.

  Of course, a lot of this made you attractive to other people. To be shaped like this, to be the tall, gawky kid who was living through this made you a kid attractive to some people. A lot of the irony was that I was inarticulate some anyway, in ways that hur
t, that burned and stung and tore me apart: embarrassment took the place of guilt and of irony. I thought the universe was dirty. It was okay but it was dirty. It was not to be understood—not truthfully understood—but a lot of theories were floating around, a lot of pieties: and a lot of rhetoric. You could read the rhetoric of battles daily. Or I could think about my dad and break the cheeks of heaven and make them weep and so on, none of it was untrue entirely; but none of it was even almost entirely true either. Sometimes you could just emanate pain—I could—or he could—and the universe did crack open and weep in the sense that the other guy died for you in a way and was quiet about it and did not add to your woeful bitterness or the burning thing by showing you they don’t care about you. One of us stood for them. For fate. The other guy’s a they; they come first . . . Or whatever. This patriotism, this stuff goes on, this sympathy, past the sharpest perceptions, past the dullest ones; and it comes out on the other side of vengeance and of rivalry. The moment ticks; but there is this other stillness in it—of yourself and this stuff as meaning for you, willed though, a kind of secular or pragmatic idea. The actual moments of happiness then: they can happen at the worst times: I don’t know what that means; but it was a truth . . . We had a considerable amount of decency in the house off and on and for days on end—for months sometimes. It just wasn’t there forever—you know? It wasn’t ever forever.

  People will be people, and some of that was tarted up, made use of; some of it was faked, lied about, cleaned up, made visible, oddly edited . . . promoted, shown provocatively. Speaking now in the realm of opinion, I can’t say I ever in my life saw anything lovelier, really, than S.L. sometimes in the horror when he was ill and he decided to dilute the horror—for me. He could be warm, smart, kind, gentle, ironic, knowing, not phony either—he was better than any father in any movie at those times. “What’s a little death between friends,” he would say, getting his breath after a kind of phony asthma attack, his breathing having failed during a bad dream. I would be holding him in my arms. His manner had a swing and neatness. And huge sophistication—huge to me, much more than I would have believed possible. A touch of genius; humane, though. It wasn’t impersonation—or just impersonation. It was a display of knowledge and of ability and of a not entirely ironic courage and, I guess, forgiveness, toward life—Look what you get in the way of surprising things: an example of personal nobility like me in my illness. But he didn’t persevere in that stuff very long. Not usually. Mostly he didn’t keep it up—he didn’t want to. He couldn’t.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I kept Dad company—that was mostly what I did instead of growing up. People said I did a good job; I kept him from being lonely. I didn’t know if I was dead or ill, though—by osmosis, contagion, a fever of reflection of him.

  Lila said, “You’ve done well . . . You came up smelling like a rose again.” I was admired as A Good Son. Admired quite a lot. I didn’t act crazily. But, see, time doesn’t stop. You can’t really have a trauma and freeze things at a moment of praise. Or maybe you can, but I don’t think so, judging from my experiences.

  At the moment she was speaking, Lila felt that people admired me more for being a son than they did her for being the wife she was, the wife who had stuck by S.L. for years now and whose life now seemed over. She said this to me. She said, “Why are you laughing? You got silly when you got tall—you know that?”

  “The something laugh that bespeaks the empty mind . . . the vacant mind. I have a teacher who says that,” I said. You have to remember that time goes on, moment by moment.

  “Yes? Well, that’s how you laugh . . . Like a vacant lot—ha-ha . . . A lot of weeds . . . Stop laughing before you make us both sick. Ha-ha.”

  I used to go into these spells of nutty laughter—almost on purpose: it was like being drunk on purpose: I laughed soberly-drunkenly on and on. We laughed drunkenly differently, Lila and I: Daddy wasn’t supposed to laugh because it endangered his heart. He could smile and do a male kind of tee-hee, though. Lila is laughing in the complicated way of a movie star who remains photogenic with an open laugh—a woman who has learned to laugh photogenically but persuasively.

  Laughing, she said, “I know you: I know what you’re up to.”

  “Yeah? What? What am I up to, Momma? What am I doing?” You have an appetite for information about yourself.

  “Never mind . . . Never you mind . . . You think you can get away with it but I’m on to you.”

  “Momma, tell me, what am I getting away with?”

  Our situation, simply in itself, kept drawing my attention to the actuality of truth and lies, love and not-love in the moments of them doing their routines, the swooping and silent thing of the approach and of the arrival of a moment, of a mood enclosing us; departure and setting us free, or expelling us, already beginning to occur. The lightest, moistest kiss. “Tell me, will we live another week? What do you see for us in the Christmas season?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll do something. Stick around and you’ll find out what happens.”

  “That’s the one interesting thing you ever say.”

  The proposal of curiosity as a reason to live, she meant.

  To this subject of love and action as meaning in Calvin’s world of Original Sin in which I am not sure a virtue can be named, at least for very long, the blessing of time, as I saw it back then, was that it permitted projects such as getting along with someone, and from those projects, as you went along, you and others derived some pleasure, some happiness; and at the usually unclear end, the fading into a result or of the result or the fading away of the result—and on to the next thing—something good came of all of it which continued or which could be passed on, maybe: that was how you measured and judged. Those were the grounds on which you made decisions.

  When you were steady . . .

  The blessing of time . . . I guess that’s a funny thing to say.

  “Lies” keep breaking into moods—they become truths; one lyingly imagines that time is not a component of life, but then evil results. In a grown man’s smile or in a grown woman’s nerved-up laughter, as in those things in a child, one sees outbursts of visible truth—for a while . . . In the racing courtroom of the world. It may not be a final truth: it doesn’t last or necessarily recur—but it sometimes did recur—in the queasy instability of circumstances.

  It is a queer truth you see in a period of brief conclusions, a form of stillness that is not final but which is important to you. In such a zone of stillness, one was sentenced to awe and to some happiness and to some silencing of complaint, which like the seeming message of a particularly fine piece of music formed a complex form of lived truth, unwordedly . . . Music and dance have little ultimately to do with lying—not all the truth of the sounds, of the inflections, of the inflected movements, can be false. Like a child on a beach putting shells in a box, I feel actual time day by day in my youth, omnivorous, omnipotent, ubiquitous time all around me and in me, in my breath and eyes; and in it, the children of time, if I might say that, are the grains of sand of the beach, are the shells, are my fingernails, my eyelashes. These are properly if temporarily arranged, in silence, in the noise of waves and seashore wind, seashells, tidal detritus in a box on a beach near the sounds of the waves; and if the box is shaken, it becomes someone telling the truth—for a while—the truth as can readily be seen—even if the truth is only the child is shaking a box of shells on the beach and I can hear it inside the sound of the waves—whether this stuff is okay as truth or not, it has a beauty which may creep into one’s face. Or one’s manner. Then the other thing will recur—stuff as in childhood, the Let-me-see-your-face other truth of things.

  Then the ugliness—the devil’s stuff recurs, too—when Daddy says, “You got a smug look, you know that: your face sickens me,” and he lies down and turns his face to the wall. “I am bored and scared and you are scum—I am tired of scum.” (“And he’s a man who never kept his word in his whole life,” Lila, who was listening in t
he hall, said later.) “I am tired of fakes and of fake shit and of you . . . The world is shit and I want to die.”

  Lila said he couldn’t bear it, not being the main attraction in the house, the attraction in the center ring, and that he used his (ill) health to be the center of everything; and that if he wasn’t the center, he wanted to quit. “He was always a quitter,” she said.

  It was dying he used mostly, not ill health, just ill health; and it wasn’t fake: he was dying.

  He did the other, too, but he also made his dying into—well, I have to live with this—he made his dying into sincere criticism of the world, of Lila, of Nonie, and of me . . . Maybe not sincere. How do you know? Sincere not as doctrine but in regard to him living. S.L. said that we were ugly people, him too, we had made him ugly, we were ugly in our souls; he said that life was ugly—then, sometimes, if I said, “What about me? Do I have a chance?” he’d change what he said; but sometimes he didn’t; and he said, “You have no chance, no chances.”

  His second stroke, when I was ten—that one was in the middle of the night. I guess he and Lila had been doing stuff. Maybe just quarrelling, but maybe other stuff—you can only think this later when you’re older. Lila said to me when we were waiting at the hospital in the middle of the night, waiting for the moment of S.L.’s death, “I’ll tell you something sad: truth can kill you.” And: “It isn’t always good for people . . . S.L. has had to face things people shouldn’t have to face.” She said, “A lot of people have dropped us . . . They blame me. Well, what can I say? I did it all with my little hatchet—well, Wiley, you’ll see; no one lets you get away with anything. They get even for everything—even for favors.”

  Favors . . . and condescension. Dependence and gratitude. My twelfth birthday came two months after Dad’s third stroke. Dad lived on then, too. He lived on for a little while more. I was surprised I’d made it to twelve. This family stuff went on. When I was ten, Lila, in tones of the collapse of hope: “You never know what you can live without until you try . . . You never know what you can live with, either . . . until you have to.”