The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  I hid behind being thirteen—behind being a son—behind being modest and shy.

  “Come on, Big Shot, it won’t kill you . . .”

  It’s like being inside a glove—the long-legged skin—being alive that year—can I say that? Jesus, I’d forgotten how different everything was for me that year . . . what my face felt like on my neck, what it felt like to have that neck . . . My feelings? I don’t trust her . . . I’m tired of her methods, her systems of control . . . her ways of having her life.

  “I’m not in the first volume for you, am I, Pisher?”

  The sense of my body and of my face—high in the air so to speak—and the stuff between my legs, the soft, blobby tangle, and its geometrization all the time that year—and my feet in my shoes, my clothes . . . my mind . . . The shifting inequalities and particularities of rank and specific histories of love and stuff for you as a coward here in this apartment—sexual or erotic stuff as generality for the moment and specific to us—and of my having to learn it over and over—the romantic duty and the mutual contempt—and knowledge of each other—the respect and no respect—the comparison and measurement of lives—me, Wiley in the world of others, starting with my mom . . . I am on the other side of the curtain, among the romances—although not-with-all-my-wits-about-me: in Mom’s formulation, You only know what YOU know—well, and who gives a fuck? I’d been seduced by Abe, taken by him, I was taken with him: that was who I would be . . . Mom lies about her romances, her motives, her moods, everything—no, not everything: she lies not totally, not absolutely—to herself and to her confidants, to her lovers and to her husband and to me—she said to me once, I forget a lot of what went on . . .

  “No,” I say vaguely in the scene—a general refusal—as in a book.

  “You give nothing away,” Mom says.

  “No, I don’t want to kiss you,” I say. “We didn’t have to play any of these games,” I say.

  She didn’t have to know.

  I turn and look at her before I leave the room in the muted theatricality of this gesture.

  But in the theater of the politics of a moment in which I am an active participant, she and I know I will return and kiss her; and I will let her fuck up things for me with Abe, but not if he is determined to go on with his abduction—adoption—whatever . . .

  Abe could never stay in anyone’s house: the maids, the daughters, the wives—no one was safe when that one was around . . . It takes Casey with a heart of stone and crazy as they come and with an iron disposition to live with a man like Abe. Casey had a lifelong friend, the wife of the doctor in that town where they lived; they kept each other going. I envy Casey, how she managed things . . . She came out a winner and, believe me, Wiley, life is hard—too hard for you. Abe had the confidence of the devil and he was mean—mean as the devil . . . He was no bargain . . . You were well out of it with him—he destroyed everything and everybody . . . He was kind in many, many ways but he was mean as a skunk—he took all the air in the room, he ate everyone up right and left—such a highflier . . . No one rooted for him: you could be mad about him but you [no one] rooted for him . . . He had his kicks and his kinks—he liked professionals . . . No one could say no to him . . . And he didn’t like any excitement in his own house—no sirree—his kids were prisoners—he’s a nut: a rake like that being such a fuddy-duddy . . .

  Abe had as part of his extreme personal glamour an I-know-how-to-do-this air. Each day or evening, of the three evenings he was there, when I was handed over to him, Lila, she handed me over; I was as if mesmerized . . . or was mesmerized . . . but I was fiercer with him, more disrespectful, than I had ever been with anyone; and it was also like being set free: I felt lost, bitter parts of myself that had vanished, I felt them return. Lila said to me privately, I understand you—you don’t want to be a goody-goody . . . I wanted to learn the odd moral math of a man like that . . . like Abe . . . He wanted me to learn it. If I disliked him after I knew him, there’d be trouble: I mean this was a heavy sacrament—a lifetime promise. Essentially, unapologetically, he gave orders—Some people like that, Wiley—and one saw why Mom had said he was hot stuff but he’s a cold fish . . . The physical effect he made and then his quality of male (and of sexual) focus was as if his eyeing me on first introduction and then on each and every reintroduction was a considerable coldness of attention (his, at those moments) that gripped me coldly with a sense of the heat of his opinion—of his regard: a persisting and insistent checking up on you, your alertness, and your loyalty, and to see if you were worth it—and this, when it came out as approval, still was contagious as cold-and-heat, cold and hot excitement, and one shattered stonily or metallically, chattered watchfully, watching one’s tongue, one was of use to him . . . even in the so-called tough part of one’s heart.

  To be personal, if I reenter the moment, more fully as one of the people there—as a character there and then—if I am fully an I (and not a he or a one), what I felt was, I’m sorry to say, a promotion; I was raised in rank, lifted; and I looked down on Lila’s luck, on the room, on nearly everyone . . . on S.L., on such elements of our histories together as the things he told me in the middle of the night when he could not sleep . . .

  Those things had always the tone and function, the grammar, of nightmare at the busied importance and at the necessities of rank of someone like Abe—no: of important men, women too, the rich ones he’d known and ambitious wives: S.L. felt they hacked up the world and had no conscience, that in the rush of things everyone and everything was cannon fodder for them . . . He, S.L., had spoken of the “harm” Abe had done his children and of Abe being a fiend in the world.

  S.L. had proposed a humanity of being overshadowed—both a statistical and a spiritual thing. And, then, more than that a matter of human stuff, of avoiding despair . . . This was in the tone and tempo of how he spoke, usually in my arms, or lying next to me in my bed.

  It was a cumulative meaning, put together, pieced together over the years of his illness and of my sticking by him—such as it was.

  It wasn’t in the words so much; they suffered from elision, omission, from the very functioning of his omissive omniscience based on pain, accusation, blame, his sense of the cruelty of fate, of him having been fooled and hurt and needing to be held, of him being typical, typically human and important that way, and, as I said, needing to be held, listened to, understood in a manly way.

  I had held him maybe five hundred times so far while he calmed down from nightmare and lived on.

  Abe was one of the models for the causes of S.L.’s nightmares, literally.

  Lifted and promoted? I supposed I showed it. Lila said dryly of Abe, He’s a king among men. He looked at me and chattered some and then he looked at Momma’s thickeningly weak-fleshed arms, and it was a judgment on what she and I were that chilled me and scared me, although I wasn’t scared—and when he looked out the window, I felt judged by that but not merely disowned but as something equal to the climate itself—to the snow itself.

  (Momma said to her friends on the phone, and I overheard her, that he had inherited money and made a great deal more, that he was a millionaire several times over, that he checked out what you were, that he compared you to other people, that he estimated what your price was. She said, If you ask me, I have to say it: he’s one hell of a son of a bitch—but he’s exciting to be around.)

  He asked me, “Are you the apple of your father’s eye? That’s what I hear . . .” It interested him (and a lot of men) that I had shown S.L. a certain long-term respect in his illness. “Tell me: is that right, honey?” Honey? In real life it was shocking, that Southern stuff as part of his dark untranslucency of health and standing, personal power, sexual power—and so on. You knew mysteriously what he felt mostly as a dark joke—the honied quality of youth in a real smart bastard . . . Momma has said, at various times: Casey and Abe have nothing to do with each other but they get along. Well, he was someone of whom that might be true: he was at least that complicated. Momma s
aid, when she spoke of a number of different families at various times, I can’t keep it straight, who loved who . . . I could imagine people fighting for his regard—that was part of his regard—I can’t stand men like that, who manage it there’s a free-for-all for their attention all the time . . . I wasn’t as tall as Abe. He sat in a chair and he took hold of my arm, pulled me over in front of him and said, “You’re not a bad-looking kid—and you’re not hard to talk to, either.” I repeat: a certain automatism attended him when he spoke; a great deal of experience, of conscious choice to say this routine speech and not another: and the free-will part, the tang or savor of the moment’s reality, the poisonously inebriating—or honied—part of it was in the tempo of the speech, was the squeezed and narrowed, edited and amended, set of implications in his face—his being pleased or not pleased.

  And part of it was him breaking into watch fires, heats, the pleasures of discovery—of double-crossings, of self-protection—the living-body thing of nipples and waist under his clothes and of his visible mouth and nostrils and his moods . . . He threw his body invisibly against his own automatisms of system—as certain movie stars did pratfalls in movies of farce-romance—and it was a trick, he didn’t mean it, he just did it—with a secular intention—as a practical matter—so that his purposes, for all their heat and manhandling, you had a leaving-you-alone quality except for the practical matters—of taking you over, I mean.

  But the words that directed you to give him your attention or to shelter him in your agreement with his purposes—or with your companionship for a moment—they weren’t central: “You want a watch? Take mine . . .” He took the watch on his wrist—it had an expandable band; they were new then; I didn’t like such bands—and pulled it off and slid it over my hand onto my wrist and he gripped my wrist hard so I couldn’t step back and we were physically close, but me standing and him sitting, but eye-to-eye on a slant, chest-to-chest on a slant, and he said, “I’m making you take it as a favor to me—and I have a temper—ha-ha—I’m a hard case: try me . . .” And when I grinned fleetingly, nervously, controllably, he laughed some more: almost freely; and he said, “You don’t want to look like a charity case . . .” That was a common remark back then. “Always be on top of the world—like on a crapper—hear me: shittin’ on top of the world . . .” Then: “Listen, I’m going to take care of you—do you know what that means?” He looked past or around me, he moved his head to look at Lila: “The shit is going to stop for you right now . . .”

  “Not your shit, Abeleh,” Mom said.

  He shrugged. “My shit is pure gold, Lila-bet . . . I’m on my feet . . .” She wasn’t, obviously. Anyway, it was a negotiation: we talked about my future; and I said I wanted to go into his business—it was like that—and I said I wouldn’t leave Dad right away; and he said, well, he understood that.

  Then, after that, he sent money each week on top of money that Casey sent—this money was meant for me but I never got it although he telephoned from time to time, checking up, maybe . . . I don’t really know. I presume Lila lied about how she spent it. I don’t want to be too cynical here—after all, lam guessing at what he meant and at how things happened. I never spoke to him again. He sent cards with greetings and a note, too, one suggesting I come to stay with them; and Lila said, “I’ll handle it.” Then he fell ill toward the end of that winter and he died the following spring.

  Lila said, How it happens is you go to bed one night, and everything is what it was, it’s fine, and you wake the next day and you’re sick and everything is over; everything is falling apart—believe me, I know . . . Wiley, Abe got a terrible, terrible thing—(whisper) bone cancer: nothing is worse—it’s terrible; it was agony; his bones break just with him lying on them; it doesn’t matter how thin he gets, his own weight breaks his bones day after day, can you imagine . . . I never gloat over anyone but can you imagine a change in your luck like that; what does it feel like over and over? Casey is loyal and she’s nursing him (Mom hadn’t nursed S.L. much)—it doesn’t matter to her about the screaming; she keeps her nerve . . . All the years he bossed her around and she resisted: still, she comes through for him. She’s a serious person when it comes to her obligations . . . There’s no point your writing him: he’s on drugs: believe me, a man going through something like that can’t be bothered with letters from you.

  He died; and S.L. died, not long after—I never again felt anything of that sort, even close to it with any man again.

  His sons—Abe’s sons—Daniel and Benjamin, came to S.L.’s funeral. Not Casey, not S.L.’s sister. Daniel, the elder son, has a good watch with a leather strap; and he says, “My father never wore good watches when he travelled; he lost them or he gave them away. The one he gave you is no good; and he wanted me to bring you a good one. He picked this one out before he was bedridden.”

  And: “He told me to go take a look at you and see what I could do to help you . . .”

  By then, Nonie had returned home to live with us.

  One of Abe’s Sons

  There are so many ways to be homosexual or partly homosexual—or flatly not homosexual—that you’d have to know everyone who was alive and everyone who had ever been alive to know much about it.

  Abe’s younger son, Benjie, before he died, came to New York; when he was young, he was known for his looks: big-shouldered, square-jawed, blond, with dark brown eyes . . . Lila had said he was very, very likable and had joie de vivre he said at the end, “Now I’m old and my face looks like I got it out of the linen closet . . . I need ironing . . .”

  He had on lip gloss, pancake makeup, and quite a noticeable thick blond wig. I knew a number of heterosexual men in New York who did that stuff: it has more to do with being considered to be charming at some point and you refuse to go on to the next physical phase: who wants to rethink and redesign everything all the time. Benjie was wry and fluttering, embarrassed, comic and obstinate: and serious—charming, I think . . . Lila had said of him that he was undemanding—as bright as a penny: he makes no parade of himself which is really something when you think how much money he’ll come into. I think he’s very, very good-looking—he has bones; it’s not just the luck of the Irish . . . (I.e., his looks were real and not like mine, an accident of mind perhaps.) He doesn’t have willpower, which is a shame—that’s a drawback—he’ll never be a rock or shield for anyone . . . He’ll never defend anyone. But he’s fun . . .

  He said he wanted to talk to me about “secret lives.” I told him I hadn’t had a secret life. And he hesitated for a minute, and then he said, “I loved you . . .” He said it naughtily, airily, while frowning. “I loved my daddy and I loved Daniel so much I thought it would kee-YILLL ME and I thought you were nice: I’m drunk—don’t mind me . . . I took a pill or two [as well]: why waste time when you only have a weekend—in the Big Apple—and it’s costin’ an arm and a leg—a leg and an arm arm—and another arm if you got it?”

  I should say I had been convinced that he’d had an oddly peaceful life—or peaceful in a way—and prosperous; but I hadn’t really thought about it. His jocularity, his limited self-licensing to do harm, his semi-overt plea to be allowed to be corrupt in certain ways: when I was young—when I was thirteen and fourteen, in the various uncompleted ways in which I thought about things back then and knew him—I had thought, not condescendingly, that what he was was almost a fairy-tale thing or fairylike in a number of senses and represented that kind of malicious, playful, wee-people sense of things. Boredom, meaninglessness, meaningless pain—human things—the flesh-and-blood awful stuff of the big people—or some such thing and a gallant and frivolously defiant excellence of social manner: these were his insignia, and his social manner in part, and his taste and his metaphysics . . . It was related in him to the stuff that went on in the kind of house Katie Rogers had lived in in U. City. In a certain obvious sense, Benjie is the perfect child still but he is also a rat, a snitch, a plotter; but he is, also, a factual wit and a man with the gentle death of the wil
l in him offered to you as a sign of how acceptable as company he is or might be if you are nice to him or can be if you will only help and applaud Tinker Bell—I don’t actually mean this snidely but he was extraordinarily devious: he has never been generous, kind, or really good to anyone, never subservient to anyone except his mother, although he has a manner of subservience to everyone; and his manner of sexual subservience partly contains his will and ability to do shit to others—his ability to get them to eat shit. I liked him a lot but he double-crossed absolutely, everyone in the short time I knew him—he did it purposefully and as a matter of sort of last-ditch self-respect . . . He is laughing at me now and he is pleading and he is entirely unsacramental. He is, in a way, beautiful and brave: his social manner and his beliefs and habits don’t stop or alter because of age and the approach of death—he is unrepentant and marvelous and truly awful.

  And his sense that his privileges had been deformities or attached to them did not mean he felt inferior in any final way at all . . . Indeed, he had long ago made the moral discovery that you were at fault for minding his faults.

  He said, “We shoulda seen MORE uv each other—Wileeeee . . .”

  Charm. I had aged, I thought, considerably better than he had—at least as such stuff was to be measured at that moment—and I ploughed through the shit and said to dear old Benjie, testingly (I was thinking of Abe and of Benjie’s brother, Daniel), “Were you tormented? In your life?”

  “Oh shuah but it made me no never mind . . . I’m certainly very glad to see you, Wiley . . .”

  “I’m certainly glad to see YOU . . . BUT DID YOU HAVE A BAD TIME?”

  He laughed, not in any of his old ways. He laughed with a kind of turgid resentment; and he said with irony: “Oh, I forget just how suhyus y’ah—you er BIG-TYIM SUH-YUS . . .”