The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  He did not go as faf into pretense and into making real versions and actualities for the pretenses as the women in his mind do. His disapprobation, while constant and controlling, had a side of sheer appreciation and of simple, almost courteous dismissal and contempt: you could say no to him. He’d hate you—and dismiss you, perhaps to barbarism—he was as conceited as they were—but he recognized sin and the mind’s wandering and he knew himself to be a child in a number of ways. And he wanted a final kingdom but he was humble in his viciousness (such as it was) and he wanted the finality to be bestowed or to happen logically: he was most reluctantly an evil-doer, as he understood the term.

  Coral Emma-Jean’s husband, she was way, way over HIS head. And over Daniel’s—and the other kids’ heads—and she was over the heads of her ministers and doctors: she behaved but just barely; she often did what she liked—but slyly—within a woman’s framework, inside the walls of being rich, a kind of maddening, fraudulent, unideal Eden.

  If she had operated by the same rules as Daniel, I would have felt her to be, truly, his superior. As it was, I liked her a lot better than I did him; but I thought he was more in the right.

  And I didn’t say to myself, Pay no attention to yourself or Don’t believe this horseshit of yours . . . I took on a kind of authority inwardly—to gamble, to proceed.

  It was because of liking her—or loving her in some way—at sight. I decided she was a lot beyond but not over my head . . . Not over mine. I’m not sure that that is ever any more than an ambitious and an erotic gamble . . . I mean by that that it is an awful sort of compliment. We squared off as equals.

  She permitted it. Licensed it. Had encouraged it—a form of seduction.

  Of course, she hadn’t expected me to be me. Life tended to surprise her, too, but she was spoiled and would stamp her foot and drink too much in order to trample the surprises underfoot.

  Flirtation with her was rough stuff—the combat led to death, death of the ego, death of your life in this place: what happened to you was your business.

  At the same time she was charitable although not necessarily toward you. This can be said geometrically or sexually, sexually or socially, intellectually and piously about her as a woman; it can be treated as a gender do-jigger—a tough woman but she lived in the world everyone lived in, the world of breath—the common world.

  My assumption of equality-of-a-kind with Coral Emma-Jean Marie and my not showing fear, was, I think, a matter of my having a kind of social freedom because of those factors in my life that had led Benjie to call me a Gypsy prince . . . This mimicked and mirrored—muddily—her degree of monied freedom.

  Daniel was more purely what-he-was than Coral and I were what we were. For instance, Coral had an utterly remarkable don’t-touch-me-ish kind of sexual shame that invited trespass (such as mine) no matter what the details of refusal of oneself in it were—by gender or age or class; Coral’s shame was a form of a desire to speak and to live in this world in the sense that freedom of speech and freedom of life is held to be a shamelessness . . .

  Coral openly wanted to fight with me, test me—she was like a shameless tomboy still, one with a rich woman’s cosmopolitan and provincial low-life glamour: Emma-Jean had seceded from the world of Southern propriety—Dan had not. But then he was a Jew.

  I went nuts—berserk—and started in on the real stuff, hacking away.

  Confidence—like being silenced—represents a form of love-at-first-sight.

  “Hi, you,” I said in instant mockery and realized at once that I had gone too far.

  She peered at me: her potato-face and her potato-or-watermelon-tits kind of stilled, then welcoming: she was no fool—she knew, from glancing at me, that I “loved” her.

  She said—I won’t transcribe the sounds—she encouraged me, maybe setting me up as some teachers at school had, she said ironically (but not crushingly so far as I could tell: in my judgment, this is), “I’m sure as shit anxious that you feel right at home, honey—I heard you’re a handful . . . I hope you don’t mind the way I talk: we talk this way around here . . .”

  That is, I could talk if I knew I was eccentric and troublesome. “No, I don’t mind,” I said naïvely—as if it mattered to her what I thought. Everybody was watching by then. “I say shit quite a lot, myself, actually. My mother uses it every other word.” Casey gaped since she knew I was lying—I hadn’t lied at all to Casey.

  “Well, I sure as shit am glad to see you when I’ve heard so much about you,” Coral said stubbornly but not so stubbornly that she didn’t become girlish and give up the matriarchal queen-of-everything tone after glancing two or three times at the rigid and faintly frowning Casey.

  Political savvy is relativism in action, in an impure form, of course, with touches of absolutism and hypocritical acknowledgments of it along the line.

  But Coral Emma-Jean Marie intended to punish my effrontery or to instruct me: as Daniel wanted to do: she was lying in wait. Everybody kind of had bated breath; I was tense myself. Coral was capricious and did as she liked: “I love poetry, don’t you?” Coral demanded, really like a friend, but not one my age, but one who had grown-up ideas and money-and-say in the grown-up world.

  “Naw. It’s too pretentious,” I lied. “I like it when it’s written by people from St. Louis. And Ireland maybe. A love ‘begotten by despair/ Upon impossibility . . .’ What good is a line like that? Who wants to be haunted by shit like that?”

  Daniel knew something was up but it was far from his own experience: he knew what I was doing to be rudeness—which, of course, it was, if you look at it like that. He was watching Emma-Jean and me—and he was jealous . . . Sick with jealousy, actually . . . One had a sense in one’s mind of nervous and strong and blood-flecked hands. And Casey. I glanced at Daniel but mostly I half-kept-track of him in the periphery of my vision because he had been my sponsor and because now, with Coral Emma-Jean, I could somehow feel myself dragging him along; but, also, I forgot him, too.

  I glance, though, fairly openly at Casey . . . At that moment, her face was kind of all twisted and filthy with dumb feelings . . . It occurred to me finally, in battle excitement (if I might be allowed to say that), that just possibly maybe Casey hated all serious talkers and word-minded people except for Coral and to a lesser extent Daniel—and I mean really hated them, as abominations. And S.L. had, too. Hatred in them didn’t wipe out other feelings always. You glimpse this—and then you forget. You hold the more childish sense that she was left out. Or that she felt left out. And that you can fix it by means of politeness—I often feel that way and I mind it when I do it to someone and when it is done to me; but there is maybe a more serious level on which you feel it and do it and it is not a joke but is life and death—you can kill something, some spring or mechanism of life in someone, and they die—like savages; the heart is torn from you; or you say the heart is broken.

  What you have in your favor is not enough to balance this other penury.

  This strange, embittered bankruptcy of the self has degrees and modes—as in psychoanalysis or as in Gestapo torture or as in married life or between brothers or between sisters. Later that night, in bed, I was inwardly writhing with pain and dismay and trying to think out what had happened and to edit and change it when, all at once, I had a sense, and only a sense, that matched one I’d had at a certain point at Coral’s—of the otherness of someone’s life, of a lot of lives, as not like mine, and as having almost at their center a sense of similarity to other lives and of give-and-take as the grounds of a negotiated and partly swindled superiority and sense of perfection and of the ideal and the final . . .

  I mean, as the superintendent of schools in U. City had tried to tell me, that that stuff in a form of existence as true-because-it-wasn’t-true matched and masked the stuff of I am not the other person and what I know to be true is not what is true for her, or for him, entirely . . . The beyondness of another life—such as it was, biologically and in terms of salvation possibly—could b
e matched by the beyondness of a claimed absolutism which is to say perfection of idea—and, furthermore, of idea embodied in actuality—in ritual, say, and in social stuff, and in manners . . .

  And people had always killed because of this. If a kind of unabsolute (in terms of killing each other) but universal (in terms of being in everyone) rivalry exists—if it exists genetically—then how are we to live if someone is the one the others love best?

  By my rules, or laws, of language, true submission is impossible: you can, at best, get enslavement, zombie stuff, living-death stuff. Which, if you are one of the robots, you can claim is life by being shrill. Or cruel—to someone.

  So, then, what do you about the up-and-down thing of X doing better than you?

  You invent means of coercion—laws and so on, police forces, force of various kinds—to protect certain forms of rank. You invent spiritual forms of modesty-while-being-superior. You inflict death.

  Rule is rule. Things collapse. One has an emotional history, which is to say, a history of emotions; and a separate mind, an independent part of the mind, which recalls emotions: that burning linkage may be part of a pain continuum. People die. People are unable to live. Sometimes. Casey with Coral Emma-Jean Marie—the romantic stuff, the assertions, the humilities, the specialized assertions.

  Then the spoiled boy. Was there. She saw him. And she knew. What she’d never had with Coral Emma-Jean as a Jewess confronted by the texts and partly obedient and partly rebellious, as someone effectual but passionately silent she saw someone else having.

  What if, then, it is natural and logical, to struggle? You can’t submit; life and time don’t allow that—they permit only an appearance of submission and certain lies told to oneself.

  Did I see true love on Casey’s enraged, unenraptured face?

  Yes.

  I saw what Daniel—and the other kids (Benjie and Isobel)—were scared of—I mean compared to Casey. I saw how some of the stuff worked in the Warner house, Casey’s house—Daniel’s by law.

  I doubt that Casey slept a night through while I was in Forestville. I had seen her walking the corridors of her enormous house at two in the morning when I had insomnia and was wandering myself on my way to the kitchen or just to the lawn to be out in the darkness in fear and some trembling and in no-fear and the shock of the escape from grief. I saw Casey sitting on her second-floor porch—I saw this from the lawn: she was in a fancy gray overthing and a nightgown in the moonlight; I hid.

  She sat staring at nothing. A creature of motion looks at stillness, an opinion, or perhaps into it, seeing a concluding notion move as the sky does when you stare into it, moves in the attention: it shatters as you become aware of it.

  You bear or do not bear your jealousy. People give up things in order to lessen the jealous-attention-of-the-gods—an English teacher told me this; they give up parts of themselves; they tear their children apart to make them normal—in the sense of not-too-noticeable . . .

  Ambition, however, remains; it is the stuff of breath. Something like a sea of ambitiousness exists among those who have given up a lot or almost everything—some people are nice about this. Disciplines exist.

  But in the emotional history, the linked episodes, the being equal to and the same as had hurt her how often? Had shaped her life how? One imagines eras in a friendship. Dramas. Coral evoked, earned, deserved—this sounds weird—a devoted effeminacy: Casey’s femininely male manner. She had become what Coral most needed. People grew tired of being used by Coral—but, in the end, Casey hadn’t (so far as I know: this is theory).

  The question of what would turn out well in the way of a human being in the role of mother was always open but did Daniel see who his mother loved best—loved best in a way? This was just the beginning of the argument—nothing was proved. In the moments on the verandah, I sailed along, glimpsing and knowing things, being overexcited at being tested by such an intelligent person and was, at best, symbolically, quickly, efficiently (and boyishly) aware of meanings to the right and left and ahead of me and people’s feelings and the like.

  I did what I did under the flag of doing it for the sake of the future—to exercise my willful reality—a thematically disciplined capriciousness in front of someone who understood caprice—I did it for the sake of the lives of the younger people there.

  Not as Julius Caesar. Not as Christ. Not as Antichrist. I had a system from my life at school in U. City—you did stuff in the moment for yourself but you broke off and took nothing for yourself but you preserved the ability to do the stuff again or next time: you didn’t enter a certain line of history; a certain current of time; you didn’t become human in that way . . . I don’t know if it worked.

  I don’t know that it worked at all. It may have worked some, a little—my system, such as it was. And that’s it: I did it for Daniel—in order to get free of him. To show him. To be finished with him and with my indebtedness to him and with his suffering—God, there is so much suffering that has to be factored in: how in hell does one do without an image of perfection and of real escape, without belief in a real yet ideal and perfect escape? How do you bend your neck to the yoke of the actual?

  Oh, fuck, the Gypsy prince can do anything—that’s an absolute formulation. Unless my system breaks down—or someone rescues me—or God (perhaps in the shape of an illness) intervenes, I will have to leave here if I keep on doing what I’m doing: one’s afternoon freedom, one moment’s freedom, things hanging by a hair and falling in a second’s wildness. In the future, at moments, I will have forgotten this afternoon; and the past will semi-recur in me thinking of Daniel; but the sight of him was so curative, so mindful—and remindful—that, in time, he, noticing that, and insulted by it, came to the point of forbidding us to meet, to see each other ever again, even when he was dying.

  What did I do for him that blew everything apart? Well, first of all, everything wasn’t blown apart. Some things loosened is all that happened. I was blown apart.

  Coral Emma-Jean said—offering me a drink—“We all know the kids smoke and drink and do a little naughty-naughty: so let’s just be open about it—here, you want a real drink, pretty little lamb?”

  Casey, now settled in a wicker chair, with her handbag beside her on the chair, next to her thigh, and her long legs crossed, laughed scornfully in the near-distance, off-key.

  An untuneful (and pitiful?) rendition of being a good sport? Impatient? Pissed?

  Then Isobel—affected by the tension—went into a spasm of coughing—a hacking cough.

  I said to Coral Emma-Jean, “You like the movies and true love—you think that’s close to real life?”

  “What?”

  “You believe in true love?” I asked.

  Coral Emma-Jean Marie said, “I love my garden and my dog with true love but everybody else damn well better watch out.” Then: “I love true love in the movies—I don’t know about real life—ha-ha-ha . . .”

  I said in a boyishly trumpeting, and trumping-her voice (an attempt at being better than her, than she was), “Movies are too goddamned sentimental for me—that sentimentality is really a farce . . . I mean that crap about everyone coming first with everyone . . . so that there’s no pain. Or everyone gets killed at the end: so the pain is over that way . . . I read in a book that if you don’t come first, you’re invisible—you’re like a ghost whether you know it or not this has to do with true love . . .”

  Oh boy.

  The silence into which the moment on the verandah moved, the as-if-naïve moment, the denial of its meaning, the refusal even to see its meaning, the admission of the sight anyway of some meaning in it in the silence, was terrific in ordinary life.

  Coral Etcetera said, “Well, that’s an interesting question—if you like interesting questions . . . Me, ha-ha, ah do without interestin’ questions . . . Ah lyuk uh qui-utt lyiff en-duh eeezy questions . . . You huntin’ for bear, darlin’? Honeylamb . . . you’re really somethin’. I niver had a serious talk about love before with
a boy—not at lunch—while drinkin’ . . .”

  I couldn’t talk for a second. I felt the full force of the unreality—the novelty of what I had done. I said slowly: “Uh. No. I was sincere: I wasn’t out to make a fuss—ah wuz jus’ talkin’ . . .”

  I don’t know what the fake accent was supposed to mean.

  Casey erupted then and said, “Oh you, don’t talk—just smile . . .”

  Danny said “She’s not kidding, Wiley . . . Take her advice . . .” He had kind of full-time turned against me anyway and now he was anti-me in an infatuated way. Of course, he was right, as well.

  I said, “I don’t know what I think about coming first . . .”

  “Well, you’re being fairly intense,” Coral Emma-Jean Marie said in a not very bossy voice. She said to Casey, “I like him.” Which astounded Casey but seemed also to substantiate her fears. Coral turned back to me, sort of like a big animal settling itself, and she said in a smallish voice, “I think we should aid and abet one another when it comes to love . . . as good Christians—” Then half in that voice, half in a different one: “Take that, you snot . . .” I laughed in a strangled way. She said—before I took a breath, she cut me off so that I’d made only a foolish breathing sound—“We Southerners hev manners. We can’t stand each other but we stand by each other: we know how to do thet. We know how to get along. We know how to love, we don’t have to think about who comes first with us, who’s first with who—that’s for Northerners . . .”

  In the moment’s weirdness, I said, “You’re just trying to score a point: you don’t mean what you just said . . .”

  “Honey, I’m telling you God’s own truth: families know how to do this . . .”

  “Well, I’ll accept the claim of breeding on this topic but I have my doubts if the claim of breeding works in regard to true love—with real people and not just in an argument—”

  Emma-Jean said oddly—in a vocal inflection that meant she would, at whatever price, enter this argument: I had never heard anyone before do this so completely: “But we’ve been doing the same sort of thing for so many years we might as well call it a habit. We’re Southerners. Does love matter if someone doesn’t love you BEST?” Emma-Jean tossed her head and her hair flew around and she said, “I don’t know. I want always to be loved best. I kin manage it.” She turned and looked at some of the people there, Casey. Her own children. And then back to me. She said—dangerously—“Is this fun?” She asked me somberly, charmingly, ridiculingly, seriously—outrageously—“You think not being loved best causes cancer?”