Lila said, “A lot of what he does, Wiley, a lot of what they both do, is they like to make you jealous.”
If any of us balk Nonie, if we all do, if we turn against her, her will—fairly or unfairly—she fights shrilly, at the top of her lungs, or with considerable other extremism of mood, to have her own way in the understanding that there is no moral consideration of her on the part of the universe so long as other people do as they like toward her.
Little-boned, smooth-skinned, bent-necked, made-up, and combed, she may scream—if something is asked of her—“I have things on my mind—I don’t want to hear about you . . . I don’t want to hear about your problems—Oh God, another county heard from—LEAVE ME ALONE OR I’LL SCREAM.”
Momma said, “These are the best years of her life. It’s normal for a girl to want her own way then, Wiley.” Then: “It’s easy to hate people: who can blame her—are you too young to know how things work, Wiley? Are you too young to understand a pretty young woman, My Old Kiddo?”
It becomes a strangely moral outcry for me to say to her, as she and Dad (and Nonie) sometimes do, “Leave me alone.”
I want to be blind to some of what goes on. And I want to know stuff and not be blind. So, I often fail to observe the “innocence” in the engeneralled, the colonelled girl being domineering, the sacrificed, pretty-faced, hard-willed, slightly mad girl with her long hair and remarkable eyes. She is luminous with perhaps justified self-pity. She does not propose that you see her (in a real moment) without her reality being tinged for you by your sense of her as ideal. A fine girl.
Nonie: Did-anyone-fall-in-love-with-her-today? Are THEY all sweet on you, Honey? Ha-ha . . . This pornographic frame around a romance of her chastity and Nonie’s speaking of office presents, office graft, sleeping around in the office, romancing someone to get ahead; and of who is a Republican and who is a Democrat who had recommended whom (in order to get the job, the promotion, the raise); and what the payoffs were; and what companies paid how much to have their office supplies be the ones bought: Momma said with a sigh, “Well, we all have to grow up sometime . . . Hush, here comes the child.” What-did-you-do-today?’ if asked of Nonie now, is a compound sympathy and satire about the loss of innocence, her present state of corruption . . .
Nonie would sometimes shriek at her sick parents: “YOU’RE PUSHING ME INTO THINGS . . . YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME! YOU ONLY CARE ABOUT HIM!”
The further whisper of grown-up knowledge: she is jealous in her corrupt state.
“Nonie is still flesh-and-blood,” Momma said. Nonie is defiantly big-breasted—padded—lately. It is a girlish buffoonery thing within the dark satiric thing that she is flesh-and-blood plus cotton batting.
She says it is boring in a suburb.
Mom’s concern for Nonie: “Do you have a headache . . . Do you have a headache again?”
Mom gets satiric: “Do you have hurt feelings again?”
Mom says to me, “She’s making friends. It’s a hard adjustment. She has to fit in: of course, those aren’t our sort of people she’s fitting in with . . . Wiley, you have to learn to handle her with kid gloves when she’s having trouble. I had some hard times in my life but I never had to take orders from anyone . . .”
She did, though, after Daddy became ill.
Nonie says, “Wiley is upsetting me.” Or, to Mom: “You are driving me crazy, I’ll die, I’ll get TB, I’ll go on the streets and become a streetwalker.” She tells Daddy, “You’re getting me down . . . I’ll die . . .”
“No,” he said. “I’m the one who is dying.”
For a while, I was maybe ill in a certain way—in my feelings. In an argument with her, even if she is shrieking in menace or whatnot, I can point out that her chin is slightly off center or that the padding of her left breast is in crooked or that she is gaining weight; and that stops her. Factuality in the face of the ideal is her enemy.
Momma asked me not to fight back too much: “It is Nonie’s turn . . . Stand aside . . . These are important years for a girl . . .” She said, “For God’s sake, let the girl have her chance.”
Perhaps my jealousy of Nonie is the most powerful thing in me. Or is one of the most powerful things, along with grief and other stuff from before I was adopted.
Then am I wrong about what happened? In a family, as in an office, you do a lot of detective work. You chase down who-did-what. You keep track of what you’ve figured out and what you haven’t. Lila pointed out to people she talked to that Nonie was good at that stuff. A good citizen, of use, real use in the real world, good wife material, certain to be important in her community.
Nonie rather good-humoredly, a little sourly, said, “Everyone is all in a rush to get me married.”
“Nonie is an accomplished liar,” Momma said. “A quite good actress . . . In her way.”
In a torrent of new circumstances, Nonie achieves a success: she is of a new sort of wartime woman.
Of office sadism, Nonie said, “I hate cruelty.”
Momma said, “To understand Nonie, if you want to appreciate her, you have to know about being a woman, Wiley. In a lot of ways, Nonie was a saint. I know you don’t believe it but it is true. I am not joking about this.”
Nonie. St. Not-a-Victim. It is important.
She says to me, “You’re a boy, you’ll get everything you want anyway. I’m a good-time Charlie . . . I know how to live . . . Daddy taught me . . . We’re philosophers, him and me: we’re regular saints of knowing how to have a good time . . .” Nonie said, “I won’t go mad no matter what . . . I’m happy-go-lucky—and that’s that. I don’t have to be a saint—I’m normal.”
(Momma said, “She doesn’t have to be a saint . . . She doesn’t have to give in.”)
Before she moved away—and became the person Casey met and liked and “rescued”—Nonie came home at night and mostly complained. Momma said to her, “My God, have a little pity on me—there’s only so much sadness I can take.” Then, in a shrewd tone: “And there’s only so much I can take the blame for . . . I admit I married the wrong man and I didn’t leave him to marry for money so you could go to college and join a sorority. Maybe I ruined your life but have a heart, will you? I’m not exactly in the best of fettle in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Go to HELL,” Nonie said. “You can’t bear to let anyone have any sympathy.”
Mom said to me, “All in all, Nonie and I are not what you’d call good for each other. She holds it all against me . . . every last little thing. Everything . . . Well, what can I do? I can’t do it all over again now . . .”
I listened to as many of Nonie’s stories as she was willing to tell me, stuff about tight shoes, an unoiled typewriter, a balky stamp machine, a boss who pinched her. Her stories were never so complete or clear that I could just listen; each of them rested so much on implication that I couldn’t follow what she was saying unless I consciously set myself to have a kind of obedience to the will behind the story—you had to share attitudes with her to understand her.
I faked some of that. The discipline thing of making myself listen to Nonie in that way, I had this thing of Nonie and me being a team now among the family disasters. But it was clear Nonie and I were not a team; Nonie was interested in my lying to myself about this—she liked to fool me.
Sometimes I let her think she was fooling me. Sometimes she did fool me. I tried to pay no attention to the truth. “She refuses to feed you,” Lila said in exasperation. Lila had an income and so did I: so the argument had been over how the money was to be budgeted, allocated. She had tried to raise money from Nonie by playing on her sympathies. “If you want my advice, you can stop being nice to. her,” Lila said to me. But I thought things over and I decided not to be insulted and not to be fooled by anyone—but not to trust Nonie, either. Nonie was as bad as Mom said, or, at least, was that sometimes. Momma said to Nonie, “I don’t care what you do: just take care of yourself and let us all go to hell—be as goddamned selfish as you like! Just don’t tortu
re me anymore. Don’t try to cut the heart out of MY breast.”
She was blaming Nonie for her cancer by then.
“Oh Christ, you make me SICK!” Nonie said.
Years later, in California, Nonie started out to cook me dinner in her own kitchen, but she fainted. She was boozed-out; but the thing is, she could not feed me. And never did, not once.
Not once.
Nonie in the early days of her working carried on: “I WON’T WALK TO DELMAR ALONE AND TAKE THE BUS AND HAVE EVERYBODY SEE ME!” Nonie shouted. “MAKE HIM GO WITH ME!” A pair of middle-class kids in a time of war. A fine-faced pair, children of disaster, almost brother and sister.
Oddly, Lila and S.L. and Nonie were in agreement that I should not have new clothes. One way or another, through their sceries and borrowings (of my money), their pleadings (for me not to be fancy and vain), I was not allowed to buy new clothes. I wore what relatives sent me. I looked like a fool, maybe a dear, pale fool in one-time expensive and oddly styled and out-of-place and ragged and ill-fitting knickers (from the 1930s), knickers and a moth-eaten red sweater from England, too small, with a thin but highly figured band of Greek and pagan motifs on it, on the upper part of the chest, elegant and quite strange in U. City.
I could not bear to notice the faces of people looking at me, skinny as I was, in the clothes I had, what their looks showed, what their faces showed—when they looked at us then.
I walked self-consciously and comically male, as I had when I was littler and more squat, and very cold inwardly and often mean. When I grew tall, I walked self-consciously and comically male like before, but differently because I was so tall and so shy.
After I was tall, she was home only on visits, two of those; and then she returned for good just as Daddy died.
If she was “mean,” I would go off and let her walk to Delmar alone, a government stenographer. Some days I would laugh at her. On some days I was disgusted and long-suffering. She liked to scoop up pawpaws or strip leaves off privet hedges and drop them in my hair or throw them at me. She said, “You’re a sissy . . . You don’t know anything.”
If I refused to go with her, she would argue, “He’s my brother! He has to walk with me!”
“I get to choose!” I said. “She never says I’m her brother when I want her to do something.” I said to her, “You don’t treat me like a brother.”
“What do you know about it? You’re so stupid, it makes me puke.”
But she never did treat me like a brother that I know of—not when I was ill, not when we got along, not ever. I suppose I mean I never felt it. What would being-treated-like-a-brother consist of?
She would get a sly, crossways look.
Fooling me is the spine of her self-respect, just about.
At Delmar I helped her into an express car, a dowdy public limousine, but a limousine still, in which, for a quarter (it took a nickel to ride the bus), you rode behind a chauffeur but along with eight or nine other people, two of them on the folding seats, in a crowded limousine, you rode the seven or eight miles downtown. The smells of the automobile upholstery, of cigarettes, of the clothes fabrics then. Nonie discussed, seriously, with me what it would be like for her to become a movie star and what it would be like for her to marry Elliott Roosevelt, the president of the United States’ handsomest son. She spoke some of how her soul cringed at the wrong touch—at others brushing against you, others of the wrong sort. When I was thirteen, but earlier too, in a slightly different inward vocabulary, mostly unworded, when I walked her to Delmar, it seemed to me that to know her was a nasty, funny, strangling thing, a hysterically funny thing.
It seemed farcically bad for me to have known her, my having known her.
S.L. said to me from time to time that I was a villain.
An idea is a strange thing. An idea in its posture of attention in supposed timelessness. Not posture of attention in real time. But an idea of Nonie. An idea of me. Dad had no one idea of me. Nonie claimed to have only one idea of each of us.
The moral cast of a moment: one time when Nonie was home and I had grown tall, S.L. had another stroke; and Nonie came to the U. City public library to find me to tell me I was wanted at the hospital . . . Daddy wanted to see me. She was angrily upset. The librarians, good-looking young women, monied, both of whom wore figured silk scarves and round-necked beige sweaters under pale tweed suit jackets, wouldn’t let her interrupt me in the stacks where I was reading. One of them came back to the stacks where I was sitting on a windowsill and reading Stendhal; and she bent over and put her arm around my shoulders and said, “Wiley, your father is ill. They want you.” When I walked into the reading room and saw Nonie standing by the book desk, I felt to what seemed to be a suddenly much fuller extent how different our fates were likely to be—and were, already.
Or really that we were different social classes.
I apologized to her. Or, rather, I started to and she cried, “Stop it . . . Stop it . . . I hate this . . .”
I take her literally, her I hate this.
One builds a truth, scramblingly, in trial and error. It may not be a truth, after all. Momma says, “She has a right to her own life; just leave her alone. Whatever her life is, it’s hers, Wiley. Leave it alone . . . Leave her alone . . . Leave me alone too, while you’re about it.”
I mostly had cast off God—and victory. I mean consciously. I mostly refused God, Whose meaning is triumph, if I was going to triumph and Mom and Dad weren’t. I refused God for the sake of my ill father, who was among the defeated. I was maybe teasing the universe. It was a complicated thing. I adopted failure as beauty.
But I did not want that stuff to overrun and rule the rest of life.
Sometimes I respected Nonie as a failure and sometimes I respected her as a success and sometimes I did neither.
Nonie claimed victory and dominance so that the thing of individual meaning in the hurt person, the sense of failure as inevitable in the world and as beautiful, maybe in a kind of horrible way, that was impossible in relation to her except in a way that was secret. Or that she made use of. She was human. I confess I did not often think of her with respect for her success in being independent, a rebellious woman of will and audacity, somewhat less lucky than I was.
Nonie’s reasoning was rarely visible to me except as a form of deep calculation . . . fairly deep. Philosophers have said we are trapped in ourselves. I think that is unlikely to be true. But I admit that finally she is not me—and that it seems wrong to claim that she is.
I don’t know how to figure the degree of difference in velocity and spirit between her and me.
The War
Mom said, “I know about damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. I’ll tell you this: war makes me sick. Of course, I can say the same thing of life . . . Well, I suppose the least said, the soonest mended.”
But Nonie undertook the moral reality of wartime service. After Pearl Harbor, she began to be nice to me. She sent me things, presents—the tennis racquet that I mentioned, I still have it. The war itself involved her in a curiously taut relation to suspense: Time will tell . . . (We wait on the judgment of the God-of-victories . . . Or we wait out the triumph of the devil.) Her small pink hands, small-knuckled, nifty-fingered . . . Nonie was exasperated by evil. “People are bad, Wiley,” she said.
Nonie’s peculiar seethe and burn of half-hope and her interest in apocalypse and the beauty of her courage: We’re going to bomb and strafe them to kingdom come, her battle cry, and then she said, “I’m becoming burnt out.” In the weird iron festivity of the war . . . (Daddy used to make a joke about Nonie: I knew her as a child—I know her from the bottom up.) Nonie was one of an army of Nonies. Every side has an army of Nonies. It was known that Nonie slept with no one: It’s just a good time and a little smooching—if they’re cute and know how to act—and that’s it. I’m window dressing—and it’s going to stay that way—for the duration.
She didn’t mind if boys were not Jewish. She broadly admired coura
ge with the proviso that it didn’t go with a swelled head: she wanted it understood that it didn’t loosen her legs. She complained about hotshots—hotshot pilots, hotshot heroes, high-up hotshots and hotshot wheeler-dealer big wheels.
Some of the men were nuts: they were loony boys, blood-bespattered—in some cases still ambitious, tricky as they come . . . in some cases, done for. She described an event: “He was crazy and shaky. He asked me to sit on his knee . . . He said it was good for his shaking. He said, ‘I never had malaria but I shake—the trick cyclists LOVE me . . . How about you?’ he asked me.” She told an anecdote of a manufacturer (who was said to be both folksy and grand, dashingly) who leaned over to her during a military luncheon and said, “Are you intreh-hes-teddddd in manuFACTuring, cutie?” She said that when she met him for a drink later, he asked her if she wanted to “‘PUT ON THE FEEDBAG.’ I said, ‘Goody-goody,’ to him,” Nonie said in baby-talk. “And he said, ‘Okay, sugarbaby.’”
In wartime, the actions of an entire people become a piece of an epic poem of a strained and nervous consciousness.
Mom said in a voice of ironic puzzlement: She is my daughter . . . she’s a wartime doozy . . . an angel of the trenches . . . flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. Mom was often drugged by then because of pain. Nonie, of wartime dating, said, “I still can’t bear to kiss a silly man—a silly man, ugh, gives me the creeps. You know, someone who likes to be pushed around by an air force goddess? I am the best there is: I have great morale.”
Lila said that Nonie was a hero like a man.
How frightened I am of reality . . .
Nonie in a wartime jumble of emergencies was evangelical about violence, the necessity for it if we were to win the war. Lila said that Nonie never thought about the things she said; but I think Nonie thought and failed to satisfy herself with thought. Momma said Nonie calculated once and for all and that was that, systematic Nonie, almost always mad, almost always at least a little bit loony: her mother pictured her as representing one idea; she thought Nonie did that to others because Nonie was of that nature.
The Runaway Soul Page 52