Not long after Nonie left, S.L. and Lila having had a serious fight and living apart, S.L. mostly in the hospital—and Lila’s probably taking a lover and having some kind of period of nuttiness—Lila arranged to have me live with her oldest brother, Simon, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, a much larger place than Forestville—Forestville had only 44,000 people, 59,000 in the depth (or height: Lila said both things) of wartime when it had a staging depot, an army warehouse, and a large air force base, none of which were in full existence when Nonie went off, or was sent off, husband-hunting, or whatever it was—I mean, a child isn’t told everything, or, sometimes, anything; and much of the life at home, and, certainly, a lot of Nonie’s life was kept quiet or private or hidden and secret from me, the child, and from the child’s opinions of Nonie and her, our, parents, and of the things she did.
It was a form of truce: we had the same parents but our tie to each other was officially unacknowledged. This negotiation did not mean that she and I sat down at the dining-room table, in the shadows or the light there, with pads and pencils, to talk.
Or even that we walked along the street and talked or sat on the couch holding hands and talked: the negotiations were among the grown-ups, on telephones and visits; it was a family compromise; and Lila asked me my opinion of it, if I agreed; I don’t really know how much choice I had.
Oklahoma was an unlikely place for me considering the difficulty the local—and very sophisticated—school system already had with me as a student, with me, my grades, my answers in class (I was usually asked not to speak in class as an act of kindness to the teacher) and that there was a local movement, well, three of them, on the part of local Protestants and Catholics separately and enlightened Jews to send me to private school either in Missouri or far away.
Uncle Simon was someone who did not speak to Grandma and who hadn’t visited anyone in the family for twenty years at that time; and he knew least about me; and was willing to pay Lila, or to give her a subsidy, of fifteen dollars a week if I went to live with him.
Lila also had the money sent by my real father.
After a few months of my being away, Lila wanted me to come back, partly because she wanted to return to living with S.L. and he would not live with her if I was not there; he would not come out of the hospital. S.L. said Lila was not nice and was awful to live with and that she insisted on winning too many fights in such dirty ways that he could not bear it.
I returned to live with her and S.L. who rejoined her after I returned; and I envied Nonie in Forestville, living with rich people—rich enough—especially after Lila, mentally kind of off-balance, began to be physically ill, and then in 1943, was diagnosed as having breast cancer and was operated on.
It is to be understood that Nonie in (North) Carolina is a story I was excluded from—although I will try to tell it—even though, perhaps, for a number of reasons (again), I am excluded from it still; but I am interested in the problems of sympathy and judgment and of morality in actual circumstances. And of the reality of good and evil—in us, in me . . . in everyone, perhaps.
That is, how does comparative sinlessness or bystanderishness or limited involvement, limited in some way, work in terms of a referee, a storyteller, a personal or an impersonal judgment?
Law, of course, implies relativism. One would not need law or ritual, study or theory, theological or scientific, without it. Absolutism, of the sort I saw in governments and in people—and more than occasionally in myself—seemed more a principle of argument and of organization of one’s energies, one’s allegiances, as in Lila’s saying, for instance, of Simon, He’s a perfect man to be a father—he was childless—although she also said, He’s a pain in the neck but so are you: the two of you ought to get along like a house on fire.
I told Simon once—I only spoke seriously to anyone as a test of whether they would accept me or not; this was in the middle of the night when I’d screamed in my sleep; Simon didn’t accept this part of me; and, after this, if I yelled, his wife, my Aunt Elizabeth—big dumb Elizabeth, Lila, slightly mad off and on, had begun to call her—came to my room.
I was saying I told Simon once that chaos in the world was possible only among people who had a number of absolute notions including a final absolute notion, that relativism engendered law after law, little ones and bigger ones and still bigger ones. And that permissions and licensings, absolutions were always more formal, more practical among relativists than among absolutists and monomaniacs and Single-Idea semi-Führers who always practiced politics differently. Uncle Simon owned three hardware stores but his real interests lay in politics; he was the sidekick-adviser of the senior senator from Oklahoma, a considerable figure nationally at that time, a florid, brilliant man, stylistically current still, who had a number of sidekicks. Simon, who had been a very good amateur prizefighter—a bantamweight when he was young—was the local political-public-moralist-go-between-compromiser, more and more a lesser figure to the senator as he, the senator, became famous and an institution.
But real politics was the overt or hidden notion that politics came first and was like the stage—the proscenium—or was like the basket that held all the rest . . . Or held it first.
And, therefore, a certain chaos or collapse of meaning, a certain weight, or momentum, of evil was impossible—only another order of evil was possible, a resigned untotality or political level of it was possible, although it must be admitted that language faltered since it is one of the privileges of the absolute that one who believes it can believe in the utter sincerity and accuracy of his or her arguments and purposes: a divine licensing is always dangerous but so is a secular licensing if it is without limits and public examination.
In fact, and in reason, any absolute position can be governed here on earth only by having it cease to be absolute—as among a committee (a comity) of nations or as in public opinion.
The self-importance, the self-assurance, to be derived from absolutes is addictive, intoxicating, blinding—a form of inebriation—of dreaming violently while awake. I believed the Germans had killed Jews and would kill more, too many, perhaps all, partly in the blind licensing of not being part of a community of equals and partly in the dark logic, or willfulness, of an absolute seeking to act itself out, to embody itself as terrestrial fact, which it can never do.
The absolute hierarchy of (supposed) meanings forms a pyramid that dances or a whirling and evolving fir tree that absolutists say is stillness itself.
I mean the one-idea people can never name the idea—it is always a congery of ideas, a political problem in which politics are banished, supposedly, but they always exist; so, the most absolute person rules—that is the rule—and, so, there are no moral limits, not by terrestrial terms.
And, so, I dreamed of death dealers even more than of death, and of the madness of purported logics of the third order but claiming to be final. Only Lila had ever listened to me at all, I said to Simon in the middle of the night, and she always laughed at me but said people could be very bad indeed, and that, indeed, there was a tendency to solitude and dreamlike violence, to forms of moral chaos (in which the hope and purpose is always the birth on earth of the actuality of one-idea madly); and so, she and I, in a small way, had brought over German and then European refugees, mostly but not always Jews.
Simon, in Oklahoma, through the senator, had helped.
But Simon said he didn’t believe in atrocity stories. He’d been fooled in the First World War by all sorts of atrocity tales about plucky little Belgium and the like, but no more. The German Jews he’d met he didn’t like.
I lied and said I’d heard from soldiers who’d dated Nonie that German submarines radioed tales of slaughter and massacre.
“Why is it so important to you?”
“Because I can’t sleep!” I said.
It was the free-will, or complicity, element.
He said, “You’re a regular little dictator yourself.” He said it, not exactly crossly, but dismissively.
He would not listen.
I—I became somewhat fond of him anyway. I gave in and more or less obeyed him and so on but I minded doing it: it hurt, quite a lot.
I am trying to explain my unomniscient curiosity—as well as my dislike even for omissive omniscience in a narrator: it is so immediately a lie, a cruelty to the earth itself and to meaning and to the characters of the story.
The attack on absolutism is, however, to an absolutist, who can, after all, only believe in one truth, that of a lying absolutist—that is, I believe this is a one-way crime . . . Oh, not entirely one-way but, still, mostly a crime engendered by the very nature of acting on, as a premise, any final absolute—even that, supposedly, of art.
But art, even mathematics, although mathematics does not seem so, becomes art only when the variations in the attempts to control the material become, even in the embodiment, as in architecture or music or prose, of geometries, of geometrical notions, practical and human, humane and variable, and when they succeed in embodying the humane, as well as the demoniac, real.
Well, as Lila said—often—Nothing ventured, nothing gained . . . And the story of envy in a life interests me.
Family History
I know very little of the family history . . . Of any of the family histories, on either side, Lila’s, S.L.’s, my real mother’s, my real father’s. But I made notes of what was said: it was interesting, the trends and fashions of snobbery. Anyway, it is possible that the men of the Silenowicz line, S.L. and his father and brothers, were Frankists, Christianized Jews of a sect that believe in promiscuity and in keeping none of the Jewish laws except in a perverse form: this was in hope of forcing the coming of the Messiah. And, also, it is a comment on the disparity between The Law and the actual world, the idea of truth and the reality of wandering minds, in shul and out of it, and of heatedly well-made or heatedly ill-made bodies. This has to do with the palpable torment to the will of actually glimpsed and always, eternally, lost absolutes.
Frankists tend to do well economically and to form rather tightly knit families.
The family came to this country from Lithuania—perhaps. I know that S.L.’s older brother, Raymond, the oldest child in that family, went mad on the battlefield of Château-Thierry in the First World War. Dad told me: Dead bodies had piled up on him and blood went drip-drip: it dripped in his face and he went mad . . . The Marines retook the position and there he was . . . But it was too late . . . God has some sense of humor: the finest white man I ever knew, my big brother, the poor bastard was as crazy as a loon . . .
Dad said that he and his big brother, growing up in North Carolina, reasonably well-to-do, had been good-looking and a little wild, and like fools had enlisted and they had wanted to see active service.
Mom said—but she was talking about Aunt Casey in Forestville (this was after Mom became ill and was, herself, a violent and violently jealous person, openly so) as a jealous person—that Ray and S.L. were close—very, very, VERY close as brothers: you know how it is in a little town . . . When Ray came back crazy, S.L. ran away from them all: he was never someone liked to face things; he was the sensitive type—he wasn’t the sensitive type, but he was sensitive all the same when it came to sickness: he’d nurse you like he was part nun—or he’d run away . . . The brother—what a gorgeous guy—and to end like that, just like a little child, eating peanut brittle all day long . . . Remember this, Wiley, every family has its tragedy . . . Nobody understood S.L.: well, I’ll tell you what S.L. was like, he was like someone who had a brother who’d ended like that, a brother hurt that bad in the war . . . Monkey see, monkey do . . .
I think she meant he hated tragedy, the ordinary kind and the wartime kind, that he was wounded by it—wounded and shaky.
Mom said: It hurt S.L. and drove him away when his mother wouldn’t make him his brother’s keeper . . . The executor . . . She gave that little plum to Casey who got enough income from it to be financially independent irregardless; the mother was a very difficult person—she didn’t like men; she didn’t trust them. Well, life is hard: what can you do? Some mothers favor daughters; some favor sons. Not everyone says they’re sorry. Casey and her mother was close.
Then: Casey never liked me. At every little sign of difficulty between me and S.L., she and that damned screaming hag of a mother wanted me and S.L. to get a divorce. They never got tired of riding THAT hobby horse. They had in mind for him someone who took orders from them. Crazy people—absolutely crazy: they threw a fit when we adopted you, as if that was spitting in God’s eye. They wouldn’t even acknowledge you. We drove all the way to Carolina to show them you. The sight of you would have melted a heart of stone but Casey and her mother refused even to SEE you. What do you think that meant? What kind of fetish is it, to be like that about family blood?
And: Casey said to me that we had a daughter, what did we need a son for? And why NOT get a divorce, why save the marriage by adopting a stranger? Well, when S.L. got sick, she couldn’t wait to save Nonie from me. All things being equal, blood is thicker than water, Wileykins. Don’t be jealous.
I WAS jealous. Envious to such an extent that I ached with it.
I also wondered if Momma was a reliable storyteller—a narrator to be trusted. But in life you take the narrators you are given, the voices that are there; or you have to adopt a doctrine or an anti-doctrine, a system, by the use of which, in all its parts, you seem to yourself to be intelligent; and you have to give up the real world. If I say it interested me to fail ever to believe Lila quite but that she was one of my favorite authors—and, so, was one of the authors of my being although she was my mother only by adoption—does that make any sense?
Saddened (and despairing), darkened by having to stay at home with Lila in these years when I might have been elsewhere and learned how to be a person, I became, in my mind, almost close to Nonie, first in my mind as I grew taller, since she was my nearest model of such a procedure in nature and in the household, and then with her, with Nonie, when she came home, first to visit, and then, after a serious, and final, fight with Aunt Casey, to live with us again.
Perhaps it was that I was close to her because she was not Lila. And because she and I were children who had a rocky time and who, in the area of feeling and of odd emblems, were weighty-bodied (with sadness and event) and were migratory similarly. So, I could be close to her—if that is what it was that I was to her—without feeling an immanence of solitary grief.
Ah, it’s true that I was interested in her, Saint Nonie of The War, the daughter of our parents, the daughter of, forgive me, world events—my sister by the processes of law.
Nonie When I Grew Taller:
1943
Go ahead, look at her . . .
It is not easy. The figure in my mind stands at a crossing of paths as in a woods.
In real light I am in her room in the apartment; I have just come in from a long walk in Forest Park, getting some sun, taking care of myself—a tall, gawky boy with that look.
I don’t quite like or trust my sister but I am, in this moment of time, prepared to be a brother-protector (if someone insults her) and I daydream, dream of, and then act out certain brother-sister scenarios, realities—but bookish ones or as in Disney full-length cartoons: not clearly, or personally, thought out.
I stand in the doorway half smiling to myself in a brotherly way before I settle down on her bed perhaps—she is packing to go back to Casey, to Forestville, after visiting us, Dad and Mom and me. This was during the time Mom was having cobalt treatment. Casey, I know from things Nonie has said, insists on Nonie being a daughter to Lila and a sister to me—remembering my birthdays and the like: “Casey has a lot of rules,” Nonie said. See, the mind skates like a room on ice or like a Hans Brinker who is always partly a real flash of mental light moving through subjects cheatingly like light beams that flaringly and silently touch another year, an opinion, a lost dream and return, reflected Einsteinianly from a spaceship or sailing hither and yon a bit sarca
stically—like Jonathan Swift’s floating kingdom-island of Laputa—and one cannot harness it, the mind; one can’t make it a healthy and wise horse; it is beaten-up and slavish and sly or it is sly and truly prowly and foxylike or it flicks and is windblown and is a lot of theaters and houses and rooms at once—a thought is a theater, a bit of eyesight, of seeing someone: in the theater of a glance before hurrying on—Gypsyishly—to a dream-laden imagining of her with Casey, normal, in a normal life—among rich people, during a war—does that seem strange and incoherent? The coherencies of the mental world begin with self-recognition and self-will in regard to one’s discomfort, one’s discomfort-in-the-universe. A partial coherency: a discomfort toward her, a wanting-to-be-admired, a wanting the past to be over-and-done-with—an enormous absence of trust toward her, her feelings, her touch—even the odor of her in reality: a jangling, ongoing, genderal music. I start with what I know.
She says, “Mr. Cat-Who-Ate-the-Canary . . . Oh, does that open up your ears? Are you ready to think I’m interesting now?”
She’s in good form: she knows how to handle herself: she is in that mode—I mean her emotions, her hidden quality as she finishes packing . . . She does a lot of things right . . . “Are we going to have a little talk? Did you come to say good-bye?”
I blush. I’m a little hot and sweaty saying good-bye to her, but I am socially (with her) reasonably cool. Cool was a term then. But I blush and sweat, cool or not; and this makes her laugh very politely in a far-off grown-up hoarse woman-who-has-a-job-and-who-chain-smokes fashion. She “likes” me—thinks I am interesting, to use her phrase (in The Law of Opposites), in some new way now that I am grown.
She says, almost intimately, ironically (in incredibly gorgeous grown-up irony), “Don’t mind me: I’m just a woman: I don’t count—I don’t have a husband yet.”
The Runaway Soul Page 49