The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  “And you?” I tried not to be cross-examinerish but sort of faux–Oscar (or Ockie) Wilde: “And you, my DEAR . . .”

  He blinked—and flinched—at the ways I was being sympathetic and failing to be sympathetic to him—i.e., what he expected. He blinked and flinched, making me—really it was as if he slathered me with makeup and changed the stage lighting—making me villainous . . . But villainous and cute . . . “Oh, we’re all so interestin’ now . . .” he said tactfully. And vaguely. Then he eyed me to suggest we flirt and mean more than our words when we talked. Then brightly (but wearily): “Oh you, you alwez saw right through us . . . You saw right through everything . . .”

  The last was a fairly devastating attack.

  “No, no . . .” Then: “It never occurred to me to be that realistic, Benjie . . .”

  “Me neither and I lived there!” Benjie said in an incredible shriek, changing the subject, maybe without knowing it—and maybe not for him.

  His loud, shrill voice—late joie de vivre—can go off like an alarm clock announcing that it is time to wake up.

  It is a kind of partial if jabby truth-telling and kinds of evasion and self-will now, too.

  “What a charmer you always were,” I said in pursuit of revelations. Then because I have gotten into the habit of explaining myself: “People have to have some reason to speak; kindness turns quickly into silence and you just commiserate then, and you never stay in that state long . . .”

  Benjie said, “Oh, you were always hokey-jokey . . . So suh-yus . . . I was hokey-jokey . . . too . . . [Whe] J‘N you were fourteen—you were the charmer . . . weren’t you just? I ain’t just a-clackin’ my gums . . . Wouldn’t you just love to go back and do jes’ one or two things you didn’t do when you had the figure for it?”

  I felt a kind of agonizing despair at not sharing much with him—at my loss of him, if I can say that. I said, politely blank, “I don’t have that kind of science-fiction sense of time . . . Benjie: If I’m working, if I’m writing, I can’t play around when I talk or I’ll lose my train of thought—in the work . . .”

  He said with the old placatory charm, “You know how it is . . . easy come when you’re young but it’s hard to let go when you’re old . . . I’m so glad with how things turned out for you—I’m glad you finally found peace doing work you respect—I know you had a hard life . . .” Then: “Ha-ha . . .”

  “It’s not exactly peace I found—I don’t think it is,” I said.

  “Oh, I read what you write. You like to talk about the past don’t you? And you jes’ settle right down in it—”

  “The past?”

  “You’re a regular Ancient Mariner when you write—”

  Souls like albatrosses flapping around a restaurant table, some of them from the past, in a story . . .

  “I like to hear stuff about the past . . .” Benjie said. “I learned a lot, you know . . . I didn’t just stand still. I didn’t just tell myself, Hold your water, hold your horses—I went to an analyst—I kept my eyes and ears open—I grew up—some . . . Oh, that stuff is crazy, it’s just so scary . . . you start diggin’ around; I just loved all of us, I was a good kid, but it was a difficult household . . . My oh my. My parents couldn’t stand each other—I bet you knew that . . . You saw through thet and it took me years of analysis to know I have a much better marriage than my father did . . .” He blinked, a film of tears in his eyes—“Don’t mind me: it’s just a little emotion and the pills and my contact lenses . . .”

  “I remember only a little bit at a time, Benjie,” I said. “I don’t remember better than you do.”

  “Oh you DO . . .”

  I remembered that Daniel, years before, had characterized Benjie to me once as someone who thinks my parents loved each other. Well, they had manners . . . I decided not to repeat it to Benjie. Then I decided that wasn’t fair and I told him.

  Benjie, in an emotional mood, said charitably, “That’s all right . . . You don’t have to tell me things about my life . . . Tell me dirty things about your life—I like to have a good time . . . I think only parents should be allowed to look at suh-yus things anyway . . . When I’m in New York, I’m not a parent—I’m a travelling salesman and I’m no good seventeen different ways till Tuesday . . . Isn’t this a good seafood restaurant?”

  “It’s fine,” I said, meaning it wasn’t.

  “Isn’t this a good seafood restaurant?” he said astonished.

  I was startled that he didn’t know. I suppose he couldn’t taste the food.

  “Isn’t this a good seafood restaurant?” he chanted, making a routine out of the moment . . . People at other tables were looking at us. Benjie said cheerily—but entirely without cheer—“I was always just a weed . . . a bad boy . . .” He expects me to understand what he means by what he is saying, but when he sees I don’t quite, he politely asks, “What are you working on now?” He does it with the charm of someone showing he is interested in other people and that he is flexible; he says when I don’t answer, “You always wanted to change the world—me, I only wanted to change a tire—Do you have a spare tire? I’m outright fat. I’m so sad I could die. Nothin’ ever happened to me; all I ever did was have a good time. No sad stuff for me—I can’t deal with sad stuff. Combin’ mah hair—combin’ what hair I-uh hew lef(fi)t—is sad enough for me. I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t hev enny moh hayir. This is A WIG. And I’ll tell you more of the truth, I surely do admire you. I never had the courage to rock the boat. I was selfish but I did a good job of standing by Momma. I had a good time but it was hard—and it was hard on me!” He looked at me with an odd, human smile. “I kept a male lover in San Francisco for twenty years.”

  “Twenty years?”

  “A different one every few years,” he said boastfully-sweetly—changing the story.

  “Casey knew?”

  “She was a difficult person, but she could learn new tricks—she wasn’t an old dog, you know. Are you as sophisticated as I think? Aren’t you very left-wing? Oh, Momma knew how to be difficult with you.” I was thinking that the trouble with confessions was that they were never true enough. When I asked him about San Francisco, he said shame-facedly, “Oh, I shared the upkeep of one.” Then: “Not always the same one . . . Now and then . . .” He muttered the last thing. “It was like Daddy and his show girls,” he said defiantly . . . perhaps hopefully. “I stayed married, too . . . I never knew what I was doing—did you know what you were doing? I wish to hell I knew what it meant. Any help you could give me would be surely welcome.”

  “Was it strange for you? Did you think about the guy all the time?”

  “Oh you know me,” he said. “Out of sight, out of mind.” Then: “I called him from the office; we had a code . . . Them . . . I called them . . . I don’t remember . . . It’s too much, Wiley-pet . . . too much for my old head to remember: it’s all dead and buried—like everyone I knew—and us, you and me, sooner or later—” He leered at me in a friendly and meaningful way: “You know what the doctors say: Too soon old, too late smart.”

  “S.L. used to say that—sometimes. That and Monkeys is the cwaziest people . . .”

  The moments of greeting between the lovers—between the kept one and the keeper—Benjie wouldn’t want to be met at the airport by a guy . . . were the moments obliterating? Passionate, not clearly individual, stylized, highly dramatic?

  “I was always disappointed,” he said.

  I said, “Homosexual ties aren’t necessarily better than heterosexual ones . . .”

  Benjie said, “Ohah uh dohinn’t tayll me thettt! I heff to hev somethin’ tuh dreem uhbut.”

  The past is not a dream.

  Daniel’s Kindness

  I

  DANIEL’S KINDNESS again: Perhaps the boys, Benjie and Danny (as he was called when he was young), took the place of their mother with each other. Their mother had a strong sense of her own life. (Or: Casey being a very cold person perhaps . . .) It is logical that the men in that household w
ould share and soothe each other’s unhappiness—perhaps in dangerously informative ways. Perhaps they adopted modified doctrines of pleasure like their father’s—with such changes as made sense to them. I was unclearly aware of such matters.

  Perhaps they shielded each other from Abe. Or their parents used them. I don’t presume to judge.

  Daniel’s grandmother was S.L.’s mother—that is the degree of cultural proximity. S.L.’s manners and beliefs—his bedtime kisses—tie me to Daniel in some degree—in an odd way. A family thing is not to be explained. I am not unlike Daniel’s mother physically: after all, I was adopted in part because of a resemblance to S.L.

  Daniel looks like a lesser Abe . . . In some respects this is an easier, lesser world than Abe’s was.

  When it’s your own reality, you feel it differently—the story you tell. Momma cannot speak of herself when she speaks of herself—and I can’t either. I don’t know what Nonie’s version of this was, what it felt like to her to be rescued, to be on her way to Carolina. Daniel looks at me in an intensely familiar way: it is a peculiar familiarity, one without great reason: the shared shape of the noses doesn’t explain the familiarity in the staring. We have no humid, sweaty, muscular, and characterological blood-similarity of nerves and senses. Our minds, their acrobatics and flights don’t echo with similar tempos. Or vocabularies. Moods, eyelids and breath, are noticeably very different. Postures and hands—fingers and fingernails—are unlike.

  He has been described to me as the brainy one in the family. He said to me, “Nonie is trash.” If he thinks of intelligence (of some kind) and of disliking Nonie as being very tightly formed, absolute categories, I can understand the look of familiar similarity. People do look at me in that way but then they take it back.

  Some people think S.L. fathered me on my real mother. If that was what happened, then Daniel and I were actually first cousins; and everything here would be explained.

  Everything? Bits of nostalgia echoing and defining something and modifications and bits of information whispering about oneself in a perception, if not of resemblance, then of affectionate semi-twinship—echoing and resonant for someone who might, perhaps, feel lonely.

  Perhaps we are sexually alike; and he, in his greater sophistication, sees and knows this. Something about him is familiar: he resembles his father but is not greatly like him; I wouldn’t trust him to be, in the sense in which people sometimes mean this, his father’s son.

  My sense of his chances in life may be flecked with ill will—and with a curious potency in my corresponding sense of myself.

  In reply to his remark about Nonie which, in its way, offers too much sympathy for the past—his sympathy, expressed even that way, thrums some chord of emotion in me that might dissolve me once and for all—I say, “S.L. said at times I was trash—”

  “People say things . . .”

  “He said—of himself, Perhaps I got the worst of it the whole goddamn time . . . I.e., he suffered from knowing me . . .”

  “It’s a sign you care that you go on about it.”

  “He wasn’t bad to me . . . I was the dangerous one to him. Not all the time . . . He was bad, too, a lot of the time . . . People in the family—people in school—say I talk oddly . . .”

  Daniel did not choose to tease me. He said, “I don’t seem to mind the way you talk.” It was a promise, you know? Not a solid one. The syntactical do-jiggy of seem to mind was a social-class thing.

  Do you arouse feelings in your life as you go along? Did you when you were young? Do you exist among feelings, yours and those of other people, feelings turned toward you and some turned away from you?

  Were people ever a bit on edge and interested? In you?

  He is an employer of a couple of thousand people off and on. He owns stuff, cars, properties—he has more attachments, deeper ones, more solid ones to the world than I do. He is moody, self-willed, powerful: my cousin Daniel . . .

  In our eyes, in our faces, the topic as it develops, trash, as well as being called names by one’s (now dead) father, is not entirely unromantic; a ground of sympathy, it has a certain heat to it which is not unsexual: trash is—threatening: to neatness, to pretensions. Is unserious. Up-for-grabs. Who wants it can have it. Value can be bestowed on it or taken away at will. I sit on the horsehair seat on one side of the compartment. Daniel faces me. I am aware of feelings in him directed at me—but perhaps at my momentary physical self mostly: is this a sad thing after S.L.’s death?

  “Human things come and go,” he says. Human seasons? “You did what you could . . .” He says it intently. I had been for a long time, I had been almost permanently, it seemed, a consoling child. Did you ever love someone who helped you? He was helping me, Daniel . . . Daniel says, “You showed a helping spirit.”

  A blundering brouhaha of innocence and help . . . Blundering is clearly involved here. I am willing as a guest and as a charity case to accept the blundering and not show distaste. Patience, tolerance, forbearance in a guest, a young cousin, are also signs of the wildness in the cousin. A wildness of experience is a tacitly admitted thing between us, a knowledge of (male) life, brainy in a sense, for people like us, for him and me, a community of sympathetic relation between us.

  “We both like books,” he says and smiles.

  One is young but is old enough to know someone younger will replace you as being young. But, meanwhile, this is your turn. Your chance—these are (were) Mom’s terms. This, too, has a wilderness quality to it, knowing this stuff, half knowing it; the reality of it and of knowing it is wild. I have often needed special help but I did not always get it—but perhaps I more often got it than some other people get it, help when they need it . . . Cousin Daniel had come to see if I needed help. And he’d come to see what I looked like; everyone that year was interested in what I looked like—it was talked about a lot. One is not a child anymore—one can say one is not a child anymore—but one echoes with unfinished, unquenched childhood still. This stuff is partly a chapter of childhood. His face—Daniel’s—here in the same compartment with me—surely the interest in it toward me is homosexual . . . The quality of attention . . .

  We are alike. We are not alike.

  Daniel’s attention, if it was not okay, would I know it? Was it noticeably homosexual? Big deal . . . The sexual curiosity in him, the nature, the tone of his attention, perhaps the professionalism of his interest, were bad things. His attention as we travel—his being interested not in his mood so much and not in the curiously hint-filled large flatness of the landscape outside the train windows, the unrolling skin of American earth, the almost-wilderness of scenic novelty out there—but his interest in a young example of his own gender, a brute, undiagrammatic example, me—I am vague and hardly well informed about this stuff; I am theoretical, young and obtuse about it to a considerable extent.

  And I am smeared with death, and obtusely and carefully propitiatory toward people who serve in the army; and I am unexploratory except in watchfulness in my grief; I am aware of the horror and strangeness, the pleasure and the strain of this stuff with a few boys (whom I like) at school.

  A boy aglimmer with doubt, then? And a polite compartmentalization of his boyish attention, a politely purposeful focus? A boyish manner—a purity of such effort, such compartmentalization?

  Boyish pride and the male politics of a moment with an older guy and an ethic—a greatly modified imitation of what other boys did in this matter or about these things socially and humanly? Look, I want Dan to like me; the hope that I might manage to grow up and not be mad, not too loony—not suicidal, not burdened with obscene self-explanation as an addiction or as a hobby—that category of wishes makes me reasonable-and-patient inwardly under a boyish blankness, somewhat tense. That plus a need for immediate semi-absolution and a consequent moral politics of getting along in the world and then a specific sense—please forgive me—of my nipples and ribs and hands and my legs in my trousers and my eyes and mind and my hair as something—making up
a social reality of a kind for a boy of a kind—that stuff is flattered. And I am able to leave Daniel at any minute if I have to, leave him and the compartment and make friends with maybe anyone—male or female, young or old—on that train; I am generally acceptable, says his flattery; and, socially, fairly well protected (maybe). Anyway, mostly not trapped.

  I mean that sort of practical absolution holds me here. I don’t, beyond any of that, mind this stuff. Or I do, but it’s not a big deal—is it?

  A sort of unwise clearheadedness of definitions hung over the actuality of his feelings as if they were maybe fixed and reliable. But that was a form of lying, one that was a form of intellectual truth. He has beliefs about what he is doing. What he is feeling. He is a very specialized observer of a boy.

  How odd he is, how much odder than I am he is as an object of attention. His feeling that he is odd shows. No one has ever been fair to Daniel . . . Daniel liked to philosophize. He believed in final, clear, and absolute meanings. In certain ways I can rescue him, he thinks. He glances at me with a certain austerely insulted and half-hidden delectation. He said for the third time that day, on the train, “We aren’t related by blood.”

  I smiled like a guest—a young guest.

  The temperature in the compartment, my sense of it and of sexual (and social) matters, embarrassment, and my feelings of ignorance are mixed in me with sensations, oh, of a hunted arrogance, a dim sort of excitement.

  I repeat, this was during one of those times in my life—a month, six weeks—during which everyone (or everyone and his brother), as when I was two years old, said they loved me. Or seemed to care. Or be interested. (That was Lila’s term.) Everyone? A lot of people. Everyone who looked at me and did a double take, for instance. For various reasons, this filled me with a regular and rather quick, guiltily glum exhilaration. I knew it was a mode of escape—maybe of expensive escape—and of self-destruction . . . superficiality . . . et cetera. One was primarily ignorant. The ignorance was a blackness, a kind of void of So? and of So what? and of What do you mean? and What does this mean? Of Does this matter to me? If so, how, for how long, how much . . .