The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  On the sidewalk she says, “Take my advice.” She sighs. “Be smart: don’t be a hero.” Like upstairs. “Don’t throw your chances away. I know what I know: I don’t live at home like you, Sonny Boy. I’ll write you but don’t expect too much—don’t expect me to gush.” She lit a cigarette, she eyed me, she winked dryly . . . This is a kind of permission, even a kind of offer of alliance.

  Nonie rarely or never squints in sunlight. My hair blows in the warm, sticky St. Louis wind. The sycamore colonnade along the sidewalk, the light, the shadows in it and around it and the thing of being young, I suffer a faintly stinging light-headedness, another erection, the same one in the next chapter of itself that day between masturbations.

  “All set, Lieutenant?” Nonie asks me when the cab comes: that’s to impress the cabby. It’s a kind of social-class thing—I will protect her against him . . .

  “All set, Lieutenant,” the cabby says to me. He is likely to try to make time with her in the cab—a pretty girl, a lyrical and dirty and silent object of thought; he won’t go too far, he is saying. It’s a swindle; he doesn’t know what our wishes are.

  From her point of view, hallucinations are useful air.

  “Carolina is just heaven, you have no idea,” Nonie says to me, cruelly leaving me behind with the sick people I defended. She gets into the cab—she is famously pretty; she has a radiant, hidden-eyed smile: a little piggish—overall, she is exuberantly alive by wartime notions, glossily ripe, gross-willed, hiddenly faintly glum and deep, not disreputable—not rapable. Almost all comparisons with other people crush her. “Carolina is the bestest place what am, Honeylamb . . .” Nonie said from within the cab. I was never one to think that if you weren’t the Czar of Russia, you were nobody . . . but Nonie always did feel that way: if she wasn’t the best, if something wasn’t the best, it was cheap, you were cheap . . . “The BESTEST—and only the best is good enough: you won’t go too far wrong with the best. Union Station,” she said to the cabby. She moved her head right to the plane of the rolled-down window. She said, “Look at us—we’re two heroes; we’re ICE CUBES . . . Remember: rich girls are just as good as poor girls and they’re rich. Don’t let yourself be caught. Don’t get trapped. Men aren’t good at defending themselves from women. Men don’t have a chance. So remember: hold your horses; keep your trousers on—you’ve got time.” And she reached for me; her hands touched and held my boyishly scrawny shoulders with their bits of late-childhood muscle. “You’re too skinny; you’re like a girl,” she said, with self-satisfaction. My shoulders had started to widen but were girlish. And Nonie kissed me on the mouth, borderline dirty, exploratory—a bit wooden—and she spoke between parts of the kiss (I didn’t like the kiss): “Beware of Cupid,” she said. “Learn to have a sense of humor if you want to stay out of the penitentiary . . . And not kill anyone . . . You know what they say: you’re only young once—ha ha ha ha . . .” Then she did a mock-French thing: “La, la, la, la . . .”

  Momma sometimes said to me, Accept her. Learn to live in the world she lives in, Wiley, and you won’t go too far wrong. And: In a way I can’t find it in my heart to make houseroom for her, she loves life.

  ‘It isn’t only adolescent snobbery that makes me refuse her in the ways I do refuse her. It is that I hardly felt like fighting with her as hard as I would have to fight with her over what I was and over what the world was in order to talk to her or be near her—she had no interest in any but her own opinions—that was as a form of self-respect—and nothing friendly or reasonable could force her to think or feel—or live—in a different way—so, if you weren’t like her, and probably if you were, it was an expensive and big-time thing to go near her.

  When I am tall, the small bones of her pink fingers, her sweaty palms are smaller in the scale of things for me than they had been when Nonie was going to work on the first day in 1938 or 1939. I half remember the discussions of what she was to wear, what she ought to wear in 1939, 1940, 1943 . . . Voices of collusion discuss these matters. The politics of American sanity back then were scary to me. I remember when it seemed to rip the heart from Nonie to wake up and dress, have coffee, go to work. I would be sent to wake her. She has on a white nightgown. Her breasts are visible among ribbons. She has a nighttime smell. She screams a little, gasps a little when I say, Nonie, it’s time to wake up.

  A marriageable girl—from a polite family (even if there is illness in the family)—Nonie, Nonie’s eyes are supposed to show a discretionary nothing, a vague, general, exclusive sociability. The limits of the political and economic availability of her flesh, soul, mind, spirit, will—a sort of romantic realism—if you want to have a household you can call your own, some love as well, if you want to have this in a frame of practical good sense, you will do this back then—in St. Louis (and in St. Louis County).

  Nonie muttered—or shouted, “I don’t want to sacrifice myself!”

  I remember Nonie saying in the beginning, “Make Wiley walk me to the bus stop. I’m not a working girl.” She would look more familied if her smallish brother walked her to Delmar Boulevard.

  On the street, even if I refuse to hold her hand, just walking at her side and being short, I can feel her pulse racing in her wrist, which sort of hangs a little below my head and at the level of my chest. I was at that time up to her waist or higher. The hefty swing of her buttocks, girdled and gabardine-skirted, that rear end, its complex side-to-side motions, her high heels—the physical reality of that is part of my childhood (in St. Louis).

  She said to Momma one night, “Anyone who wants to can insult me now. You can’t protect me, and Daddy’s sick—and Wiley doesn’t like me.”

  The family tragedies marked her as not such good breeding stock; I heard her and Momma discussing this. I think I was supposed to be outwitted by her, by her in her strength, her mightiness, and by her use of her privileges as a woman and by her use of her sufferings and horrors and by their reality—the idea was that it was normal for me to be outwitted by her and it cheered her up and kept her going.

  She told me I was boring . . . She figured it didn’t matter what she said: I ought to help her . . . I was her brother . . . But she wasn’t my sister. “I don’t earn money for him . . .” I had to start paying board and room.

  “She feels insulted,” Lila said. And: “Why do you hate her so?”

  Mom kind of pointed out that the only POLITE thing was for me to be heartbroken over her unhappiness . . . Nonie’s. At Nonie’s say-so. “Men are nice to women,” Lila said to me. She instructed me. We wrestled to the death every day really—Nonie and I: my looks, my breathing, my attitudes represent this wrestling. Lila shouted, in a drugged state, “She is not your blood!” That is, I should have adopted her—this was when I was nine. She is a girl and life has wronged her. Mediocre and ferocious and not to be trusted, she can fuck her way to safety—she says so: “I can be a whore”—and I am sexually latent but I kind of know what she means and I kind of wish she would.

  Lila whispered to me, “Give her a hand—don’t let her throw herself away.”

  Dad, in his dark moods of hating the world, doted on her in complex fashions; but periods of such doting did not last: he would check himself into the hospital to get away from her—her ego, he said. One time he refused to come out until she had moved out of our apartment; and she moved out and in with a friend, another bachelor girl, for a while. And he came home.

  Momma would insult Nonie as if it was a regular mother-daughter thing (which it may have been): “You can’t get anyone to like you except second-raters.” She said that to Nonie. She apologized: “We’re all a little crazy now from the war . . .”

  I accepted all of the past in return for being able to live on, to live now.

  Nonie kind of evened things out with me (for my being a boy) by inflicting on me personal details about herself: she had a rash under her left breast, she needed a new bra, the Tampax stuff she used once a month was horrible, she was constipated: “You’re a brat: you may as
well learn what real life is.” If I didn’t listen, if I made faces and laughed at her, or if I answered her back, Nonie would have trouble breathing—like an asthmatic. If I walk off and leave her on the street, she got into that asthmatic state. At night, sometimes, she had screaming fits, tantrums: shouting and falling on the floor and foaming and dribbling at the mouth. Sometimes then Dad hides in my room. Sometimes he fusses over her. Sometimes Lila sobs dry-eyed. Sometimes she closes her eyes and says, “I feel sorry for her but I won’t let her get me down. I have my own troubles.”

  Nonie learned. Her early despair and heartbreak faded. Relatively soon she was, on the whole, a cool, sort of inhibited young woman of quite apparent competence—and of considerable confidence. When she spoke in temper, or crazily, it was a shock: it was like ghosts gibbering at me—boy, was it weird . . .

  What came to be called later in my life the bottom line was called in my early years simply money. “I want my own MONEY NOW,” she said. “I don’t want everything to be sickness and just-plain-awful . . . I won’t do it all myself.” She turned to me: “It’s time you learned to pull your own weight. It’s time you learned how to pull your oar.”

  “Leave him alone,” Ma said.

  “Go to hell, all of you,” Nonie cried out. “I’ll do what I want . . .”

  Lila said to me, “You don’t know what’s tragic—and what isn’t, Wiley . . . Wileykins . . . Nothing is tragic for a Wileykins . . . Help her. Help ME . . .”

  Mood, privacy, self-will become family matters, matters of family politics.

  Nonie went to the school asking for help from them financially. Lila said, “She gave them a whole sob story, she was crazy for a little while—the whole thing backfired—well, she can’t say I didn’t warn her . . .”

  Her predicament was laughed out of court by some people. A number of people became anti-Nonie.

  (I felt old and stern; I called my parents Mom and Dad often.)

  My existing near Nonie worsened things for her. My presence put things that bothered her in a certain light—relatively speaking.

  The “smell” of the predator: I remember this: an active will in a persecuted-by-hunger alertness, the sour smells of her neck, the odors of her hair, the often relipsticked, tobacco-y smell of her lips, the smells of her breath caused sudden pit-of-the-stomach misery; I felt, or saw (to use the idiom, to see), in how she jabbingly smoked a cigarette or talked about her office—and in her smells—how real her sadness was, how sad she actually was.

  “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—she has the temper of a rattlesnake.” Momma said these things.

  In a relatively short time, confident much of the time—on-her-feet, established, Ma said—Nonie preferred her life in the office and the people there, that daylight life, to us, to the life at home. At this time I began to see stories in novels as loonily beautiful, linguistic corrections of real life. I used to think Nonie was a great prophet actually, in the world.

  She used to say of me, His life hasn’t begun; make him help me. I thought Nonie was crooked and awful, no-good, second-rate, dull to be around but really smart in a worldly way. I think she is a hero; but her being heroic strikes me as being a pale, raw thing like a nightgown—like moonlight become such a thing as a nightgown over her soul—thoughtlight depicts this sense of things re Nonie.

  Nonie was promoted soon and often. At the end of six months, she bought herself a small, pretty briefcase and fairly expensive office clothes, a new “office” watch, an “office” necklace. She had new “friends.” This exile, with its moments still of real pain, became a life she honored and enjoyed.

  “You wouldn’t be any good in an office,” she said to me.

  She sometimes then had an executive look in the mornings. And in the evenings, too. Her posture had executive meanings; she had a look of power-in-the-world. She rose in the world even while she fell in it . . . into it. She rose and fell, not symmetrically. The pale-raw courage I mentioned and her fate were mysterious to me. She seemed to me to know about the reality I might not be able ever to live in but would rot in, go crazy in, become ill in, die in.

  Then she went away to Forestville and I grew.

  The boy’s body hardened and was pale, and it was as if I had entered onto being a member of a new species, pubescent, then postpubic—a boy weedy and shy. Everything was different from before. It was as if, since all the motions of the world had become different, existence had moved into a different range of meaning as in the third movement of a string quartet (of a boy’s life); and it was in this range of the quartet, of the instruments generating a four-voiced statement that, now I was taller, I saw when Nonie was home that Daddy and Nonie, the uneasy forgiveness between them was tolerance and affection, not forgiveness, as I’d thought, and was occasional, farfetched occasionally, and changeable; and it was not always tolerant; but occasionally they meant it to be; and perhaps it was a strange model of forgiveness, a next step further on if that is possible . . .

  Nonie was happy or unhappy, angry—and anger made her more clever. Happiness lay in talking afterward, savoring something: “I was the belle of the ball—” today, metaphorically, or actually, at a country club ball. The afterwards was perhaps fanciful, propaganda for the sake of morale . . . or as part of the new, newly grown-up irony she used: a lie for those purposes, propaganda, which Dad did not unmask. I think she went on feeling misused or abused, but not so much that she was driven wild; or driven to marry; she had no intention of marrying: she didn’t need to escape in that way; her breakdowns were mostly premenstrual; her breakdowns did not last.

  In short, she was reasonably functionable, unreasonably bitter. It was scandalous, locally, her disposition now; she snooted our neighbors and was brightly cheerful and bitter and sharp and snooty-haughty, not the-same-as-always at all. Military cars, olive drab, picked her up some days, brought her home at night; and extraordinary-looking men, heroic pilots, fat purchasing agents with extremely alert faces, came to see her, bringing flowers and to take her out to dinner and to go dancing.

  In wartime, her life became again a life of a high-up sort; she was sort of a local vaguely soiled but still mostly pure debutante—but a wartime model of that; she had a future, a chance to be rich—almost no one kept track of the thing that she was a Jew . . . the boys she saw, the men . . . the gossip. She was extraordinarily free to “make a move”—Ma’s phrase. Nonie’s favorite phrase of sexual judgment was “I can’t see him for smoke.”

  She talked about the office differently, about who obstructed her, who helped her, the half-knowable daisy chain of favor-doing, the factions (taking sides), the “flirtations,” the friendships. She put her work first and did not dissolve into sympathy and fear; she felt that requests for sympathy were made “dishonestly,” to subdue her, to control her new-power-in-the-world. “I cannot bear it,” she said.

  This impermeability had a curious effect on her over time: it enclosed her, her wits, in impermeability. She was an unteachable snail, slowed, boneless, armored. One understands the nifty consequentiality of things in a moral history. The way things turn out—God as success—the success of a kiss, the success one has in a rivalry—has the weight of piety. Office piety, semi-debutante piety, social piety. The office thing about stealing pencils: to steal pencils was a privilege; to have others see you do it and then for them to go along with it reflected your civil-service category and a degree of friendly acquaintanceship and human encouragement (of a certain kind). The rank and the alliances, Daddy laughed, in a small bitter way, remembering a lot of this stuff in his own life, when Nonie told him about them and offered him some of the good yellow pencils she’d taken from the office although she and he had no use for them at home.

  His laugh and then the little-breathed, cruel-girlish, sweet-tricky smile of Nonie in answer: their moments together now have a “depth” of exclusion—they excluded Lila, who had never even once “really worked for a living,” and me. She had worked but in a different mood. I
worked, but they did not consider that work in the way they considered their own lives. I don’t lie much. I play human politics differently from them. Nonie was a kind of artist of middle-class privacies . . . and of exclusions. She and Dad, their kind of excluding, well, to me it was like a private darkness in which they met but they handed back and forth a sort of light, a piece of skinny, lighted kindling in a darkness. The absolute heart of the semi-comic and tragic and ultimately filthy universe, they shared that in a kind of bemused and final disgust—which made having-a-good-time necessary as an explanation of one’s will in life, necessary to one’s self. And this struck me at the time as final and dangerous. But I was jealous of this stuff they did.

  I wondered if such moments were what true love and the height of human life were: these kindled states among deprivations.

  I suppose what they shared was a “shrewd” ridicule of any actuality, of its failure of justice, its failure to be simple and steady; but also a sense that they “knew” what actuality really was as no one else perhaps in the whole world did.

  So, one sees them talk. They have a kind of dress-up of the eyes in private (with each other) so that a private costume of knowledgeable sarcasm covers the anatomy of their knowledge of the world in an intimate way not meant to be observed. I remember their posed necks, their dressed-up eyes. Sight becomes thought with them: I see what you mean . . . ha-ha, oh ha-ha . . . (The transfer from one sense to another was extensive: judgment arises from how a thing smells; one gets the feel of it—the taste . . . one gets a grip on the dialogue . . . one has a heart for true meaning.) I cannot veer away from a silence of the senses among the transfers, a gray-and-white silence in me, a kind of snowy snobbery of silence in which hurt moves quietly since I know they are experiencing stuff I don’t know: they are living in the reality of a blood tie.

  In that blood tie, Nonie lights a cigarette and puffs on it. S.L. smiles at her in an experienced, sweet, pseudo-doting way that knowingly and wearily suggests to what extent that smile is paternally edited.