The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  I had been chosen by her dead husband, who’d been a difficult man, chosen because of what I looked like but that included character, as in what a horse looks like—and the sense of the machinery of the household that I had is part of why he chose me or contingently chose me. This sense of the machinery is different emotionally (although it has some emotion) from the reactions I had to the house—some of which were faked. I don’t know. You say, It looks like rain. The real boy is a local case of the normal comparatively, arbitrarily, among the paradoxes in Quite a Nice House.

  Among such realities, I could, up to a point, find my way as a visitor better than they could as Old Inhabitants—since they had blinded-blinding notions of how things were at home and clear notions of how things worked there. So, I could predict things they would do at home or outside—I could tell their fortunes, imperfectly.

  Momma had told me often, It’s always the same wherever you go . . . Learn to keep some things to yourself—learn to keep your mouth closed—don’t even show with your eyes that you notice nothing . . .

  So, I am the resident fool—the asshole.

  Benjie called me Sherlock Sure-shot Not-all-there . . . Not entirely at home . . .

  I belong to the what-is-there . . . Simply that.

  In the garden, in the heat, earlier that week, I was swimming my late-afternoon laps—a hundred and fifty . . .

  Daniel says about Casey: “I hope you don’t blame her. She can’t help the way she is. She’s going through a bad time of life . . .” He had begun to use the tactic of scaring and praising me. He was setting out the grounds of his emotion, the feeling that he wanted me to feel emotion. I understood him in a young way.

  I had climbed out of the water; I was gasping; and I lay on the cool-and-hot stones alongside the tiled edge of the pool. I was dripping on the stones; spears of grass among the flagstones tickled me.

  “After all, she is not a villain—we are not villains,” Daniel says.

  Lila is a villain, he has said. I am innocent and not-innocent. I am the villain—the newcomer. The moral dimension in each thing done—and said—widens breathingly into a question—imperfection: the moral question does exist more strongly in what-is-imperfect; or, rather, there is no moral question otherwise.

  What is inescapably present in Daniel—he is an absolutist—is that he avoids the reality of imperfection by choosing to see immediacy as borderline apocalypse—the war, bankruptcy, personal ugliness toward each other. In the light of moral and spiritual apocalypse, then he is the most moral one here—the one nearest being absolutely right. His decisions are final—mostly. His comparisons are of one absolute moment to another. What may be most horrible about most real crime is that it wrecks the reality of everyone blundering along and lying within notexactly-okay limits but not with the extreme limitlessness of massacre or of robbery, of economic massacre (and rape).

  Daniel was no villain. But I am a villain. That is ironic and affectionate. But if he is sexually available, then he is the villain—in a way. The weight of real things as a crime is uncertain.

  “I can’t help the way I am, either.” Morality’s pet imbecile.

  I judge his intentions in regard to A Ghost Boy and to A Real Boy in whom, actually, I expect him to have no interest. A kid my age would want to know me, if he did, in order to steal some of the structures of what I was and can do; but Dan has a different theft or thing in mind. I am lit only dimly and distantly and can’t see myself in the third person.

  He studies my back—my backside—if we are rich, other things are not supposed to matter so much. Or if you have a studiable backside, sympathy and envy flow lopsidedly.

  “It is de luxe here . . . It is luxy . . .”

  “What are you up to?” Daniel asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I have been rescued and it’s eating me up—without mercy or remorse or absolving explanation. I don’t want him to fuck things up between us. I want things to work.

  “I think saying I don’t know is pious . . .”

  Then he is quiet. Among the diversities of weird, unstoppable motions is the one of loving just being silent and stupid in the human wreckage of partial and time-dissolved, temporary submission for one reason or another.

  All crimes do not have the same weight. One uses books as other lives one has had. One simplicity, time, is not simple at all if you look at it—time has been called a crime for thousands of years.

  What I am he does not want—he wants the aura, the envelope—he wants to do something to it, for it. I don’t know what. Love supposedly excuses greed.

  “You have a knobby spine,” he says. Then he says (as nearly everyone says to me sooner or later): “I don’t believe a word you say.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, adolescent, desperate.

  “Are you telling me to shut up?” he asks, sadly amused.

  “You never taught me to drive,” I say trying to enter onto being human the way other kids are.

  I imagine him talking-to-me. The other breath, the other voice that I imagine is always time speaking without error to me but then I have to correct it to someone speaking to me with error above the hushed whisper of time in its forcefulness, carrying, pushing, pulling, sweeping us, me into the next moments. You have to understand time is on the verge of becoming a voice at each of its advancing corners, inwardly and outwardly; each of its elements is, like it, essentially syllabic—time occurs as a sentence does . . .

  “I’ll teach you to drive—we could take a trip through the Blue Ridge . . .”

  I try to say yes . . . I hear myself in my imagination say yes.

  “No,” I say without knowing the reason I don’t want to be near him in that way.

  He looked suddenly terrible, wan or pallid, twisted hurt—the villainy I am suspected of now exists and if I defend myself by saying to myself that Daniel is dignified and fine, fine enough if you don’t look at him too closely, if you don’t have to embrace him spiritually or sexually and touch his balls or accept his soul and take his credo into your mind, then the outline of the villainy is clear.

  “You play by different rules,” Daniel says.

  The same ones—differently considered. I say, “Should I go back to St. Louis now . . .”

  “No: don’t be silly . . .”

  It is to my advantage that he regards life in a boy as superior to life-in-him. But he is still utterly the emperor. The inconsistency—and wrongness—of that is amazing.

  I say, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” I really hope he won’t.

  I was sick with fear for myself—and him—at my saying no. At what-life-is. I don’t know what-all.

  He says, “Don’t you take any wooden nickels.” Then, since it doesn’t at all sound the same—or even seem to have a similar meaning—he says, “I don’t understand you.”

  I say, again, but smiling hard now, hard but privately, while my eyes and face are turned to him, but I turn away while I speak—turn to my own privacy, “Don’t take any wooden nickels now—”

  He mutters defeatedly—lecturingly—“Stupid . . .”

  And he gets up from the pool chair and walks toward the house, pausing only to say, “I hope you don’t take any wooden nickels . . .”

  “I-uh thee-unk we-uh should treat him as a Gypsy pree-ince—” Benjie said.

  He hems and haws and fetches from odd points within him bits of what he will say—and he descends-and-rises into manner, into delivery. Daniel says with contempt that Benjie gives forth, he spouts. What Benjie meant, in part, was that my homelessness, my being a wild boy—my wild worthlessness—freed me to journey in mystic worlds and to see things and to be a sexy performer.

  A half-sad, half-snobbish thing of I had nothing to lose by being truthful and being amused by truth—by actual life . . .

  Between and among intensities, Benjie—you don’t have to get the point but I expect you to laugh—in Utopian upper-middle-class moments�
��moves awed by power and in regard to physical sensation and freedom (mostly of phallic confrontation, watchfulness, and voyeurism, and phallic intrusion)—and he moves breathing an oxygen of ambition from a mask of education and of art in a sense. His thought-out notion of sanity is to do nothing for once and for all.

  “Snobbishness goeth before a fall, Benjie,” Isobel said. Isobel is Rita-Hayworth-and-Carole-Lombard-irresistible tonight—she isn’t really; she’s a bit drunk—charming, lackadaisical, and with a certain audacity of a local sort—a swindle usually leading to moments of confession: I like to pretend but I’m really quite simple . . . But a swindle suggests the real thing. Isobel says, “We’re simple people—too simple—we’re provincial—nothing happens . . .”

  “It’s great when nothing happens,” says the gawky Gypsy prince.

  “Ooh, you’re young . . .”

  “If people don’t want to listen to you—maybe you’re doing something wrong in the way you talk,” Daniel said.

  “I don’t like to fight over ideas,” I say. “Nothing is settled as it is in books—it just gets down to complicity . . .”

  Benjie said, “Our Little Gypsy Boy’s got every fault in the book but he ain’t ugly and he ain’t a mouse . . .” Then: “But he never thinks how to treat people. Speaks first, thinks later . . . Thinks never.”

  Then I say, “That’s just a lot of shit . . .” Then: “It’s such a lot of shit, it’s a joke.”

  Benjie repeats it but when he does it it sounds different: it has a different meaning—anti-me.

  Daniel—hurt—strained—“passionately” tormented—spurned—says, “Swearing is lip filth.” Then: “I hate the way we trample on everything . . .”

  The summery and rustling masses of motion and hot breath and particles of unclear, camellia-ghost moonlight and the eight citronella candles burning in the various areas of the porch, smelly, uneven, changeable . . . And light from the bedroom and from Benjie’s and Isobel’s cigarettes. Bits of such illumination on arms, on noses.

  “Wiley, we’ll make Coral Emma-Jean give us lunch and you tell us if Coral Emma-Jean is normal—or not.”

  Daniel said, “I’m not coming. Count me out.”

  “Pretty please—with sugar on it,” Isobel said.

  “Drama, drama, drama!” Benjie said, ‘almost shrieking.

  Isobel leans forward: “Do you like me, Wiley? Wiley, am I your favorite cousin? Oh, it’s boring when you’re not devastatingly in love with someone really devastating. Wiley . . . I can’t wait to hear a fresh impression of Emma-Jean . . . My trouble is I’m too blasé.”

  I saw why Daniel wanted people to be roles and codified virtues and that was all.

  Daniel said disgustedly and with resignation, “I can’t make small talk.”

  “You want heavy conversation, we’ll have to all go into training for they-it,” Benjie said.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you,” Daniel said.

  I said, “Things ought to mean something,” meaning to take his side.

  The day of the luncheon, in the dissolving atmosphere of further information—in the registry of truth—and the social lies, the imbecile boy asked: “How do you talk to Coral Emma-Jean Marie?”

  Daniel said, “You don’t. Coral Emma-Jean Marie does all the talking.” Daniel said, “You don’t have to do anything.”

  Isobel said, “She’s socially prominent. Her house is A SHOWPLACE.”

  Her house: A tall, decorative iron gate painted green in a nine-foot-high red brick wall with a white coping was opened by a big guy in coveralls and a straw hat. A pink gravel road went up and down and around past small ponds and willows and flower borders among very large trees. The house was pink brick and had black shutters, seventeen chimneys, a severe white-columned portico and a pediment with a coat of arms on it.

  We left the car in a big, beshrubbed gravel oval that opened onto the gravel turnaround in front of the portico. We walked up the steps and through a big hall and then through a smaller, narrower hall that opened off the large. We walked through the smaller hall past gold-framed pictures on the walls and small half-tables set against the same wall—the other wall was empty except for a pictorial wallpaper of a colonial town and countryside and seaport—until we came to a pillared side verandah almost as large as the portico and with similar white pillars.

  And there we sat in wicker and in metal chairs. A one-lane gravel continuation of the driveway wound past us, directly in front of the porch; on the other side of it three trellised walks and pollarded trees and topiary shrubs radiated from a dowdy fountain with two half-life-sized figures among flower beds of a big, bloomy sort and then willows and hillocks of grass to a small stone wall over which one could see not terribly distant green and brown foothills and blue mountains showing off a sub-Alpine profile not very far away. From a trio of old oaks at the corner of the scene—and bounding it, closing it in—where the driveway came around from the front of the house, came an almost limitless squawking and caroling and whistling of calls and songs of small birds; the leaves rustled continuously here and there with inner motions, and various birds, an oriole, a bluebird, a robin would fly out and return later. The air stirred lightly and touched one’s face where one sat in the creaky wicker chair with the floral cushion one sat in. It was superlatively fancy—at least in an American way and pretty or lovely and surpassingly beautiful in a moderate way but ungeometrical and a little stiff.

  Two maids passed around lemonade and cookies; a butler served hard booze.

  “I like it—but it is showy,” Isobel said to me; she sat in a wicker love seat which she made rock slightly. Then she said to me, “Gross, isn’t it?”

  Suspecting an Isobellian trap—that thing of using conversation as a sort of combination gym class and labyrinth testing you that some women did—I said, “No . . .”

  Then, without any sign of duplicity, Isobel said, “I love it. I think it has real class.” Time permits unadmitted changes of mind, sequential relativism, compromises, inconsistencies, incoherencies. Traps. Duplicities. Compromises. As normal. Or ordinary—within some social arrangement.

  “So do I,” I said, happy, relieved, tilled with a loosened ease or satisfaction at being in some sort of ultimate setting, the ruling class, rewarded people.

  “Forestville is not famous house country,” Isobel went on, displaying the sense of hierarchy, of nuances and flat things of rank, that bring real life into an arrangement of clarities. “Most of this house was built after the Civil War. But”—I could see—I mean this—a lesser beauty here then. Isobel went on in a louder, porch-open-air voice—“I love it, I just love it. It has such class, don’t you think?”

  “It’s pretty nice.”

  Whatever its faults—whatever its realities, whatever the elements of its reality were that were shabby or ill-proportioned or in need of modification, amendment, correction—it was far too nice—that is to say, beautiful and lovely with the effort, which was perhaps gigantic, that went into its existence, effort and taste, taste such as it was—I mean one knew it wasn’t one of the famous gardens in the state, let alone in the world—it was junior and perhaps ascending to such radiance or it was in decline and would not ever rise so high—but in its mêlée (or medley) of colors, in its vegetable zooish displayishness, and in the soft cleanness of the air, the privacy, the claim of rank, the instruction because the place was empty except for us and people working to make the place habitable and, so, was dreamlike—I mean, obviously real and yet it was walled in, not as much as a skull, and was silent: a garden for waking or awake sleepers, for the woken ones, to use a Southernism.

  And such instruction in dreaming and in dreamed-up, trumped-up reality—in swindling such privilege from rank nature and a semi-raw continent—suggested a largeness of soul—airy, gardeny, unlike that of sick people—such that one understood the pride finally of people of rank and of money to be not just that they were so courted and pursued, because of the power of money to be turned like a ma
gic metaphor into all sorts of reality, maybe into every sort (and maybe not); but because of their efforts and abilities—that is to say, their possession of beauty.

  I said to Daniel—since he sometimes listened to me, “The prettiness here”—i.e., the beauty—“might be tainted, might be really ugly at bottom, but on your way to the bottom you feel really good about things—some things,” I amended it to, seeing his face. Just at that moment a small-boned, kind of pudgy woman with an interesting but very moderate, very self-contained intelligent owner’s manner, and with an odd face, a little coarse and unreal looking and heavily made-up, came out wearing jodhpurs and a really big shirt and boots. “Well, hi, you, all,” she said mingling automatism of address with some curlicue of acknowledgment almost one by one of all of us and of those members of her family who were on the porch and who’d already been introduced—I skipped that part: they did look like people who lived here. There was a kind of proof of effect in their faces—and in their hair—the category of people who lived dulcetly, in a high-up American way, among spaces and servants and various kinds of power which they were allotted and which were not truly rooted in them at all, at least not yet. “Well, hi, you,” the owning woman said to me. “It’s just real nice to meet you. Randall,” she said to the butler-guy, “did y’all remembuh Beefeater gin with the tonic for Mrs. Wahnuh?” (Casey.) “Hi, you . . . Casey, you didin tayll mee he uh looked jus’ lyuk Errol Flynn and my father . . .” I looked nothing like Errol Flynn; that was such a joke that Isobel tittered and Benjie laughed outright.

  But it placed my looks as marketable, as talkable-about. It touched me somewhat scaldingly, like a heated towel at the barber’s. The precocity rests on ignorance and only partial knowledge, after all.