The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Actually, I don’t know what he meant except that Casey had bested him. He said, She has no mercy in her . . . things like that.

  Necking with Isobel, I thought she said that her family was weird, but I don’t remember Isobel’s words. My degrees of consciousness of things and of unconsciousness toward other things meant a kind of staring alternated with unimportant glimpses with not a lot riding on them; and then, as error and self-teasing, when I was jerking off and hallucinating or otherwise daydreaming or inventing scenarios for my life—imagined, partly real, certain-in-outline, authoritarian, omniscient in the way of narratives in books—I throw in my blurred sense of stuff in that family, in that household, with some hope that something would occur to me but nothing did.

  Like bicycling very fast past a wire-mesh fence, the velocity, the blur—perhaps that is a kind of romantic thing when you’re young.

  Then Casey’s husband, Abe, came that winter when I was thirteen, the winter after I’d met Casey and Isobel. I was anxious to escape from the situation between me and S.L. although the fact that I had held out for so long in that situation probably was the chief reason anyone was interested in me.

  That and my future. I had perhaps become the prince in the tower: Lila muttered this.

  I could do research, I could be of use—to America and to my people (no matter how those two terms were to be construed) and I was at a cute age—Gentiles wanted me to stop being Jewish and Jews were concerned about Gentile cruelty to bright Jewish kids—and people are bored and they like to meddle, S.L. said—but it was also clear and known that what I did and thought was strange—or unheard-of: that was Lila’s term: or mad or lunatic or hoity-toity and impractical: no use to anyone—so that the bridge or overriding point in those who were interested was that I had loved my father, S.L.

  I guess they figure enough is enough, Lila said.

  A summary does reduce the opacity of one’s actual experience to one’s own gaze, outward and inward. I had a certain glamour because of various things; and it was almost fashionable to attempt to rescue me—the whole business seemed to me to be mostly a trashy business, although one might be of use in the world, except I thought it was too late for me: I was too odd. I really hadn’t lived in the world from the time I was nine; I had to be defended—I couldn’t do it myself. My ideas did not strike me as readily useful.

  When I did anything, even when I went to sleep, I turned the act over to something other than my worded consciousness; the realest expression of this was that it was like an athlete’s thing, practiced maybe, but not talkable and not observable; and one couldn’t be self-conscious if one wanted to do whatever it was one was doing.

  I mean there was some final part of whatever I did in which whatever I could do or was doing wasn’t really in my power but did what it wanted; so you couldn’t promise it or sell it or rely on it—it was as likely to go too far as it was to be restrained and on target.

  But if, in rebellion or despair, or in despair and curiosity, or in good sense, one gave it up, or destroyed this in oneself and embarked on self-training, long hikes and exposure to the elements, and one grew silent and narrow-cheeked and gave no more answers in class, the books of climate of what I was—well, Lila and S.L. pointed out that I was taking away their positions in the world as ill people, their leverage with others; the chief reason they gave as their being worth so much charity was that they gave this difficult and very loyal boy (me) a home.

  Uncle Abe was on his way to California when blizzards out west stopped all train travel for a few days. He was in Chicago and somehow got to us in St. Louis—a hired car, maybe. It was possible he came to look at what I was, to see what the story was—S.L. and Lila said that he had come to take me away from S.L.—he and Casey had made it a lifelong practice to win out over Lila and S.L.

  Lila, angry with S.L. in a cold, final way and ill now with cancer herself, wanted to hurt Dad; and S.L. did not bother to make a scene; but, instead, to my semi-amused despair, he grew pale with despair and a kind of guilt and he said something on the order of Do what you can for yourself, get what you can out of him—he had never taken an interest in my life apart from him before.

  The issue of loyalty and of true love in actual moments is much too strange to be treated realistically. It is always present, it is omnipresent . . . You’re pretty as a girl, Daddy said . . . That meant he was really upset, too angry and sad to be angry, he just wanted me kind of wrecked—you know? He often used literary allusions: You’re a regular Little Tom Sawyer Fauntleroy . . . Tell me, Pretty Maiden, are there any more at home like you?

  He patted my tush—heinie—hind end, rump, behind, ass—and because I was new at being an adolescent and at being tall and so on, this stuff was quite an issue between us—well, for me.

  But he liked the finality of the disrespect. He’d get a twisty look on his face—a half-smile I find it hard to place.

  I find you hard to get along with, you’re a real head-splitting hair-splitter, Dad said humorously.

  (Lila overheard and said it too: like some movie stars of the period, she adopted male talk at times.)

  He had told me in the middle of the night that I was killing him anyway. He had said it in a dry tone, not decipherable by me then . . . All the terms I am using here are too clear to describe the moments.

  That I was ugly as sin and quite beautiful in an American-looking almost popular way—that the bones and whatever had led to a peculiar result—hardly universally popular—I was aware of . . . I was aware reasonably . . . I forgot it . . . I wasn’t quite a fool—or quite not a fool. This was an area of translucent opacity—one time when S.L. was in the hospital; and Momma was upset with my arrogance; Lila used pull to get me a job selling women’s shoes downtown; I didn’t want to do it; she blackmailed me—and in the end the perverse sexuality (and curiosity) drew me: I was thirteen and to work you had to be sixteen; and I had to borrow a suit and ties; but both those things were arranged; and in the store I was placed in the second group of six seats near the front window alongside another guy, twenty-seven and tubercular, who was extraordinarily good-looking; we could be seen from the sidewalk.

  But I refused to lie to the women and I sold many fewer shoes than the other guy; and the boss, a corseted, tiny-mustached, very, very tall, silly and very tough man, kept moving me around and haranguing me to get me to be more coldly ambitious.

  So, I sort of knew in the translucency and opacity of this stuff, the crowded paradoxes and semi-wonder and discomforts and dangers of it, and a shamed sense of its being trashy and subject to variation as well as to quick death (in time as well as among its own variations or if you grew older with the wrong sense of what to do with yourself) and a sense of doom that attended this condition and then the inner conceit—the thing of knowing stories, of knowing about romance—but maybe not enough—all of this is included in the word okay and in the term half-okay about this stuff—that I never thought about directly or lucidly. I “knew” it was there—and I often forgot. But it would be recalled to me.

  Both my parents made it clear it was wasted on me. I was odd and badly dressed; and if I talked, people pick up their heels and run in the opposite direction, ha-ha-ha, Mom said.

  I was aware that it was considered something, by some people, to look at me—when I was that age; but I ignored this stuff pretty much—I had no sexual interest in myself or in exploring whether what I looked like was worth something in the world—I think that was a modest sense of myself as tinged, tainted really, by sickness and death and by precocity and by any number of things.

  I didn’t really want to know who I was and I didn’t want to translate whatever I was into popular terms. I was pretty sure—in a rather angular, self-possessed, but ignorant way—that my life was unlivable, was unreal, was of no use in the world or to the world or to anyone. Uncle Abe was on his way to San Francisco where he had to do some big-time wartime business. And he was going to Reno to run around with showgirls, Mom said. D
ad implied it was boy dancers but Dad was always very bitter about Abe. Mom carried on a bit about how Abe insisted on staying in hotels but would stay in our apartment this trip—she did this over the phone talking to women: Abe’s fan club, she said. People in town had seen Abe and knew him; but I don’t know how that came about.

  Often during the war you couldn’t get a room no matter how much money you paid as a bribe; even so, he could have stayed with some of our relatives, the richer ones with large houses; but he stayed with us although only for one night; then he moved to a government-run hotel and came to see us once each day.

  Abe was in the food industry and, also, in cotton and tobacco; and a little bit in coal—not a tycoon or a major figure but a part of the war effort. S.L. refused to be in the same house with him; and he checked into the hospital. If I put myself-at-thirteen—really, that other boy in the story—into the third person, I would say that the boy’s adopted father did not want to see the boy place himself on the auction block.

  And the father had no confidence by then that he deserved any further loyalty from the boy—that is to say, he had acted so badly so often toward the boy, not to mention the sexual teasing that was driving me crazy at that point—literally, in long tense nights of pointless disorder: I was strong enough to keep S.L. off me: but some group of perverse elements—that S.L. was dying, that what he was doing kept the books balanced toward me—was as if aroused not by tenderness or his own predicament or by his curiosity at the last minute, but by envy or a wish to tease or a desire to matter, to be the most important influence.

  Well, if you’re going to have a weird life, then, even though you’re in love with normalcy and ordinariness and having a life that’s not weird, you might as well enjoy having it. I used to test my nerve by imagining bad things as realistically as I could—even going so far as to ride in freight cars from the local station for the Wabash Railroad out into the country. I wanted to practice laughing and cheering people up and playing the clown on the way to the death camps—also, I wanted to practice getting away. Only a few people I knew believed in the death camps but I believed in them—I believed in the death trains. I took from the Bible the image of throwing Jews into a furnace. And from history and ritual, the war between the emperors at Rome and their claims of being divine and the Jews. Such wars, like a fight over final earthly love, led, if you were on one side or the other (and everyone was), to your having to be humiliated as extremely as possible in order to prove you didn’t have the blessing or that it didn’t matter if you did—this reflected in some way or other the stuff that went on between me and Dad: my sense of historical reality, or whatever, came from that stuff. The school and Dad and Mom somewhat and Nonie all the time said I had harmed certain people and slowed or pulled awry the course of their functioning. Or I had blocked their ambition.

  Harm was strange stuff. If you’re supposedly the brightest kid—brighter-even-than-a-girl—some people take that a whole hell of a lot further than you do and they wonder if you’re the smartest person in the world or something; and, then, if you are, who they are, by comparison—what hope is there for them—like Dad refusing to be in the same house as Abe. In a sense, I was always fugitive, but so were a number of other kids. Later, when I met Abe’s sons, I noticed they just about never spoke to me about Abe, at least never anecdotally or emotionally—this stuff was as if covered with a fig leaf. I was presented to Uncle Abe in a semi-ceremonial way late one afternoon, in that pale, faded, grayish wintry light; and I saw a man S.L.’s age who was, I saw, with profound shock, the handsomest man I’d seen in my life up until then.

  When I saw what he looked like, I saw some of the elements of my proposed abduction or rescue. I saw the failure of his sons to amuse him, to satisfy him; and I saw elements of his personal power—as a rich man who looked like that. Those elements were like big white birds, albatrosses that had come into the room and were flapping around one’s head. Ah, one’s concussed response. I have never attempted to reenter that moment. He was concussed, too. The electrically amused-looking, theatrically good-looking man, his treble breath, the queer brightness of the quality of his face, the approval or acknowledgment—something like an enormous neural splash refreshed and startled me until, as in being wet, and swimming and using one’s hands to pull one’s hair back and smooth, one forgot much of one’s life until then—I was willing, at least at that moment, to learn common sense from Abe and to take the risk of putting myself and my future, my mind and my beliefs into his hands. Whatever had prepared him and brought him here, he now nodded . . . He was very tall, very thin, handsome-featured, tensely well-built, strong-looking—as if famously (and professionally and usefully and maddeningly-for-his-soul) irresistible—this man with a backwoods fortune and an odd wife. And the thirteen-year-old weirdo in a breathless moment of physical acceptability invisible to him but useful now. One is part of the grown-up system of love(s)—not all of them consummated: such affections amuse the grown-ups and keep them alive and, to large extent, clumsily explain their lives—this is part of the truly awful scandal of being alive, of being real—the embarrassment, the truly terrible experience of being guilty and not caring, a happy guilt, a happily accepted guilt, uncaringly accepted: I’ll take this path—my uncle had almost a violence of amorous and personal alertness—nothing ordinary, nothing to be quickly explained—nothing quite public either.

  I can see why, in most books, and in life, people want for a hero someone passive and colorless: this bastard stank of privilege and power, of kinds of truth and of ruthlessness of will . . . He was not without conscience but it was a different sort of overshadowing, project-absolved, most-important-person-in-the-room conscience.

  It was worth it to be no good around him. Ora in New York, in 1956, felt my disapproval of her and me was bad because it meant I no longer felt her as having this other quality of being worth what she cost. And it was true that Abe was sort of the measure of glamour and of eminence. I was aware from the beginning, as I was in the shoe store, too, where I worked, but not in school, how cheap this stuff was, in a way, how it forced you into a kind of cruelty unless you were obnoxiously pure and nuts. Abe was awful to Lila, idly flirtatious and contemptuously dismissive; he had very little shame—although I knew he prayed every morning; he put on the tefillin—he’s afraid of going to hell in a handbasket, S.L. had said to me: he’s not a good guy.

  He was easily as wicked as S.L. and as quick to put women on the defensive and he was as set on living and on triumph as Mom was. It seemed to me he was more expert at being himself than they were, more self-consciously experienced; he was systematic, as if on automatic pilot on a bombsight run; and his own feelings were automatically safe—as after castling in chess—but it was nice that he was not sweet. He held my hand too long but not sexually but just to get the say-so between us—to get me off-balance and to show he was not ordinary—not predictable. I thought I saw the flicker of sin in him, conscious sin—that sense a man has of regularly going too far and doing it expensively, expansively, and not without generosity, but always alertly; and then a world, a sphere of boredom and rage at having to be like that, at running a large business and at what life was and at himself and then an outraged determination to go on.

  I was tougher with him and felt easier in my own particular wildness of spirit and I yanked my hand away with the help of my other hand.

  He simply took my hand again.

  He said, “Don’t be difficult,” which I didn’t understand clearly. I knew it in real life as meaning, Pay attention to me, you bastard . . . That’s how my Dad talked. And some people in school.

  Lila, who was watching us, said, “Don’t be shy, Wiley . . .”

  Abe said to my mother, with infinite cruelty, “You have to take a backseat to this one now . . . well, live and learn, I guess it’s a real bitch, isn’t it, Lila?”

  He had been rude to her for years—he was one of those men who talk on automatic pilot in echo of earlier speeches. Esse
ntially silent, a man of pained (but excited) action, he spoke only cruelly as a form of giving orders, cruelly and kindly or cruelly with some shade of rushing and automatic judgment—this was a concomitant of rank and power, part of the weight of the world on his shoulders. A kind of staleness of language, like a box he was in. I thought Mom would be insulted but she sat there, trickily amiable-faced, fadedly good-looking, and with her arms crossed—over her mauled breast.

  She said later, of him, of this trip, lyingly, We flirted to beat the band, him and me, let me tell you, we waited a lifetime, and even then we never got around to anything with each other.

  She gave up her bedroom to him; she slept in my room. I slept at a friend’s.

  Perhaps they did flirt—or talk. The phone rang a lot, though, with calls for him . . . No: that was the next day. They had a tie together: a child is lied to (and protected) in regard to the sexual realities of the older people near him and is intruded upon and harmed anyway. Abe took the opportunity to conduct a little business in St. Louis, Lila said later. That is, a government car and two sailors moved him into one of the hotels run by the War Department on Kingshighway the next day. I looked forward to seeing Abe that afternoon; but I didn’t moon over the moments when he was away doing stuff in the snowbound city and I was in school . . . If I did, I refuse to remember it now. Mom found ways to prevent me from going with him on his business rounds. She said she didn’t want to spend the money to buy me clothes to go with him on those rounds. But she wasn’t a miser. That next day when I came home from school, she was sitting in the living room, waiting: “Kiss me,” she said. “Kiss me,” she commanded.

  God, I hate remembering myself.

  She smells of drugs—morphine and gloom—Dad has called her Madame Schopenhauer, Mrs. Doomsayer . . . Her physical pain is visible in the way she sits, visible behind the drug surface of almost ease, of hopeful passage from this moment to the next. Let me escape now. She says, “Are you tired of all the lovey-dovey hanky-panky?” Then: “Are you playing hard-to-get? Are you being a big man on campus? Are you too much a big shot to kiss a woman who’s gotten to be ugly?”