Isobel said out of nowhere, said to me, “Oh, you’re such a child.”
Casey’s jealousy—if she was jealous and not disgusted or bored: the inner boiling and sinking, the unwellness are unlabelled (Casey saw the whole thing as rude and wild, unnecessary)—was that Coral Emma-Jean liked this sort of talk; she was interested, anyway.
Daniel said stiffly, intelligently (in that kind of voice), “Coral Emma-Jean is a lot more agreeable than I am.”
“Agreeable? You mean brave?” I was out for bear whether I admitted it or not. I was drunk from having given myself some kind of licensing to go wild, be rude, barbaric, whatever.
“I don’t always want to be loved best,” Benjie said, dramatically, placatively.
I looked at him—he never had been loved best.
That he hadn’t been, this animated the silence then with a sense of oppression and of danger and heat—it was like a large animal was pressing against us and might lie on us and crush some of us . . . Its litter. us.
I mean none of us quite understood what was being said, admitted to, denied, lied about, modified.
But if a vote had been taken, I think the majority of responses wouldn’t have been as much unlike my views of what was going on as they would have been unlike anyone else’s views.
I mean people sort of did follow the subject.
“But it doesn’t feel like love, then, does it?” Isobel said. “Then it’s a friendship.” She sounded aimlessly, idly tragic . . . “I’m not a big reader—and I’m crazy, to boot—but isn’t love the world well-lost?”
“Well, Wiley, what do you think?” This was Coral Emma-Jean looking at me demandingly—bored but she was interested. I can’t hope for much more than that, although I would like more.
“I don’t know . . . How do you define best or love—or ANY of these things . . . Or matter . . . matter how?”
“Oh that’s a Jewish way out!” Coral Emma-Jean said. “Par’n me: I am not anti-Semitic.”
“Sure you are,” I said, grinning nuttily—you know? Mad?
“Does love die or is it still love in your breast when you are NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING?” Coral Emma-Jean’s second daughter asked; she cried out, she was letting the cat out of the bag—it was something she did a lot.
“We’re all falling through the air in a parachute jump,” Coral Emma-Jean said. Then she said, manipulating the talk now: “I mean it doesn’t matter if you’re all important in different ways—FIRST IS FIRST.”
“Oh God,” Daniel said, disgustedly—not politely, uncivilly.
I said, confident and exhilarant—and hurt—“I see everyone here has thought about this more than I have.” I tried to sound envious but I felt triumphant, not yet having realized what would happen.
Casey said dryly, with real disapproval, “Is everyone having fun? I prefer good manners, myself. Is this what people think is fun nowadays? I don’t like serious conversation; I prefer good manners but then I’m not an intellectual myself.” She had no fear of repeating things. Or she showed no fear of it, anyway.
I saw the extent of Aunt Casey’s stupidity, maybe for the first time, as painful—as in the phrase painfully stupid . . . Maybe I felt how it affected her successful life—maybe this was the beginning of the collapse.
The extent of Casey’s style: her bold systems of self-assertion, her courage made up for the stupidity, maybe. Maybe they proved she wasn’t stupid.
“A lot of movies are like this,” Benjie said in his Southern limp way. “All this talk meanin’ so much . . .”
Daniel explained to his mother: “People sitting around talking about one theme, one thing—it’s in a lot of movies, Mother.” He said it with affectionate boredom even while he glanced excitedly and disgustedly around the porch. You could see why Casey preferred Coral Emma-Jean to him, if she did.
Benjie said to me curiously, “Why y’all doin’ this, honey?”
I said, “I can’t help it . . .” Then: “You can hate me . . . People pay attention oddly; sometimes everything you say counts and sometimes it doesn’t . . .” Then: “I want to say these things . . .”
It had become clear to me that I thought it was best—the thing to do then, whatever.
That was even though and because these people were so used to one another and were so much not amateur at stuff and were blood children of their parents so that a lot of what they took in and a lot of what they did and a lot of what they misused or ignored was over my head but it struck me as lovely, even beautiful whatever anyone else there thought—even if it all was stale and weird in another sense and a waste of time and self-destructive, pure kamikaze—“It’s beautiful in my view . . . I’m not entirely alone in my reaction,” I said to Benjie and looked at him until he felt part of the reality of his own isolation and his difference from Coral Emma-Jean for instance, and the freedom she had, the libertarian brilliance of the motions of her mind onward.
“Is being the most important how you manage to enjoy yourself?” Mocking, Emma-Jean Etcetera said that. To me.
Casey said, loonily—sort of in the background—“Your poor sister.”
“Your poor sister,” Coral Emma-Jean repeated (it’s easier to repeat something someone else says than it is to think up your own things) but she said it gravely.
“I didn’t do anything to her. I don’t like her,” I said boldly.
“God,” Daniel said.
Pause. Emma-Jean said, “Boy, you’re really somethin’.”
“People have to fight back!” Daniel said.
“Maybe she shouldn’t fight back—if we’re talking moral stuff . . . You ever hear of taking turns?” I said.
“That would be a fine kettle of fish, that would be some world—that would be a horror-show-and-half, [if] you could film that one . . .” Coral Emma-Jean Marie said.
“Coming out on top?” Benjie asked me snidely, feeling my isolation.
“Taking turns?” I said to Coral Emma-Jean.
“Not fightin’ back,” Coral Emma-Jean said with infinite common sense—American common sense . . . “I’m tellin’ you somethin’, boy . . .” Then: “Benjie is the sweetest person here . . .” Marking him as the traitor. Everybody on the verandah was attentive. Coral Emma-Jean then said: “Men are just hell on women . . .” That is, you had to fight back. She said, “I’m Gemini—I’m afraid of fire . . . If YOU weren’t the most important thing in your house, would YOU be invisible?”
“Anonymous,” I said.
Isobel said gaily, “I feel we’re talking very intelligently. I hope Daniel likes it—he’s the one hates small talk . . .”
Coral Emma-Jean said, “I see us all in a special light . . . I do . . . Well, I don’t know—” preparing to shut the talk down: “I’ve hed three martinis—and I swear I’m the greatest woman of the day-and-age—and of any age: ever’body jest has to love me BEST—it’s my gin you all are drinkin’—ha-ha—Casey brought the vermouth—I was low on vermouth.”
I pushed on with the other subject—it was like pushing the conversation like a wheelbarrow with heavy feelings in it: “Oh, it’s a farce: people pretending it’s not an issue, that it’s easy.” Then: “Everyone coming first, that’s a good one.”
Coral Emma-Jean said, half-warningly, but interested all over again—a fair-minded bully: “I’m going to get good and blotto before I think about any of this anymore.” And then, because she was a fair-minded bully—or an intelligent one—or free-minded—like an aging princess—she said, “Well, being loved more than anything else by someone you want to love you, by someone who interests you, that’s a dream come true . . .” Emma-Jean said it with her eyes odd with thought (in my view) but her face alight with combat, with thought truncated, which cut me down to size; while she took over, while she was the one the muses loved best . . . She went on, not shrewdly, shockingly: “Being loved second-best everyone laughs at you then . . .” Then she became shrewd and sort of notably evasive: “Everyone laughs—and knows what’s what
. . . Only a nut would uh’int mind THAT . . . Well, they’re wrong: some of us know and some of us don’t know horse manure—well, we all have to live . . . We do what we hey tuh do,” she said vaguely but overweeningly—a little like Lila: I arouse this in people. Then, with a wild shrewdness, perhaps not shrewd, with political savvy maybe unwise, even crazy, she gave in to me—as Lila sometimes did—she handed me my turn, so to speak: “This is your big moment, i’n’t it, honeylamb?”
The butler stood there listening and forgot to serve people—he looked thoughtful.
Before I could answer Coral’s stuff, while I was still shocked and unbreathing, Benjie said, “Well, I’d be a man about it—being loved second-best. I’d try—I’d put up a good fight.” At not being wicked. At being peaceful.
Daniel said, “I will give anyone who cares a piece of advice: Don’t listen to anybody who says something is first, second, or third: that’s just idolatry . . . On the other hand, I’m an odd duck; and I don’t want to be a man about these things.”
I stared at him, not certain what he was saying, but surprised to think that he was thinking.
Benjie said, still following his train of thought and determined to interrupt Daniel, “I don’t know: if you have to come first, if a lot of people are like that, if everyone is like that, life just i’n’t worth a plugged nickel, it just isn’t worth sheee-it, it’d be so dictatorial: I don’t think life is that terrible, do YOU?”
“Why is this my moment?” I asked Coral Emma-Jean.
“Oh you; you’re not a nice person. I like you but you’re not nice. What a mess you make. I had an Irish setter just like you—we had to have him shot—you are AWFUL—”
See, the whole thing was disintegrating into personalities—that’s what we said in U. City at that time.
It always hurt and amazed me—the way that ideas dissipate their reality in the moments and the way a common concentration on a topic disappears into lives plunging on, not in a repetitive surf, but in the kind of mad surf of God heading on out into the infinity of the pretty-much-unknown future.
I mean, the power and dreadful beauty of time, or part of it, is that you can’t get anywhere in it—except as hallucination and prayer—it takes you with it, an eternal father, with you aloft but you’re dissolving in its arms, too.
You just arrive in further moments without having gotten there so much as scrambled and lasted and floated and swung—like Tarzan maybe or like a band singer or a popular singer back then during the war—and life goes on and not in-the-same-way unless you mean in the same way grandly: if you’re awake and not inward in your thoughts, all the other lives are scrambling near you, alongside you . . . Maybe people move differently in time now in a way you like a little better.
One of Coral’s kids half ignored his mother; he turned his head sideways and made a squished-up face; and said, “This is really really stupid.” Then: “It’s silly.” Then: “I like what he says . . .”
Me?
Me.
Coral says, “My daughter Isobel”—a different Isobel—“has this thing where she says: Why not both? If you have a choice, take all that you’re offered . . . I love greed. I have to come first—there—that’s the end of it.”
One of her daughters said, “But then that means it is JUST impossible around you, Ma . . .”
Coral’s daughter, Isobel, a bold, very tall, young woman, with a coldly hot manner of extreme discretion and distinction, said, not sharply enough to start a fight, “I didn’t come first for her in any way, shape or degree, EVER.”
“Not in any form?” Daniel asked her.
Coral said sharply to him, “Daniel, that’s not important.” She said, “No one comes first with me—I play fair . . . I have my pride as a woman . . .” Starting on yet another martini but blandly: it was a wearied slyness, a laying down of the law: “No one here comes first with anyone else here.”
“Oh my,” Benjie said in a narrowed, looking-inward way—now he saw the power thing and the lies—he glimpsed it flying—and came to see me years later when he was ill, as I said.
Daniel kept looking at me as if to say none of this was true for him except as a victim. You have to be responsible for your acts before I trust and like you.
Daniel said, “Well, if we all want to come first . . . it’s a horse race . . . It’s a crap shoot . . .”
I said, “Benjie, do you play favorites?”
I couldn’t bear to address Daniel directly.
I thought I heard someone say: “Then the so-called heart breaks . . .”
Someone said, “Well, try to enjoy yourself anyway . . .”
Coral said, with narrowed, drunken, responsible-to-truth, irresponsible-to-power eyes, “If you open a can a worms, it’s real chaos. Real—reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel. We all have good reason to think well of ourselves: we did reeeeeeeeeeeeeeel well today—how much do you think those people could learn from Socrates? I’d’a given him a good swift kick—right in his sit-upon . . . You learn zero, crap from Socrates. You really learn from your parents—ask me: I’m the expert here. And your dogs, you learn from your dogs—do you like dogs? Is that why you brought this subject up? Are we your laboratory dogs? So you threw us this question? Is that why you asked?”
“We don’t have to know everything. Enough is enough,” Casey said.
This is and isn’t an accurate transcription. What happened is hard to describe: nothing in life, especially voices and motives and actions, is as clear as it is in a narrative.
Casey was obscurely drunk. Her somewhat mean look was blankly mean in line with a system of organized thought somewhat independent of speech and of perceptibly organized study.
My cousin Isobel had a pointed air of it’s all being common sense. I had never guessed that at the center of what she was was something in her that as part of her free will forbade mystery—as a rule. I hadn’t looked at her hard enough before—it’s not easy to know about the lesser figures. Ever.
In the almost imaginary dialogue, the conversation not with Lila or Nonie, one shortened, cleaned up in regard to the past, to the moments, and so on, Coral Emma-Jean Marie put on a determinedly ordinary look and said, “We don’t tock about feelings all theeee tyimmmm in theee Sow-youth.” Then as if sober: “What this country needs is a good five-cent czar and a little ol’-fashioned censorship . . . Ah’m very very right-wing in my liberal way . . .” She’d turned against her earlier interest in the subject. In abrupt Christian despair, and in real feeling, she said, “What torments me is that when God came to earth, it ended in torture and death, and it’s just like Dostoyevsky said: and it would be the same thing over again if He came back to us.” She was speaking with intense and primary even if probably momentary love of what, perhaps, she loved best. “So, let’s not take ourselves too serious: we’re all just trash . . . I have enough on my plate as it is . . . I just idealized my parents. I do still, ever’ day of my life. They were just the most brilliant people—ev’ybody loved them . . . But they had their little faults. They taught me walk quietly and carry a big stick. You carry a big stick, honey? I don’t know about the rest of you but I am a quite wretched woman who needs her nap. I hev ensirred tooooo minny questshuns, and I am sleepy. I em jest wuyin beeigg snore in spirit—sore all over. I throw things at my dawgs and hev to be put in a home I don’t get a nap. I neeeed my nap. I am jist wohn ow-itt. I em just about ready to cash in my chips. If all of you don’t jes’ go down and stay at the pool and swim and drink in my honuh and for the sake of the old true-blue stars and stripes foreveh while I lie down and refresh myself, I will die. Really. Well, it’s been interestin’. Really. It’s all interestin’ . . . You come back and see me. You know somethin’, little pretty boy: you got to tease us all a little bit, but the afternoon is over and you’re still poor and I’m still rich. I’ll come later and watch y’all swim—hear? I hope you hev pretty legs; your sis, Nonie, had real piano legs. I hate pyanna ligs. See you in a hour.”
Grimly twinkling
at first, she sobered up a lot as she talked and brought in Dostoyevsky, her parents, and Christ, Theodore Roosevelt (the big stick), exhaustion, hospitality and the flag, and death. I would like to write a play some day and I would have in it a character who had a dog called Meaning-and-kindness. I’d have a woman character who said, “Watch your manners!” all the time, even to The Angel of Her Own Death. And I’d have a character like Casey but who would keep on weeping all the time saying, “Oh don’t let us talk about that now!” and one like Coral Emma-Jean who keeps saying, I’m tired of thet, I’m tired of thet, and then who says, I’ll talk about thet . . . And I’d have a character like Daniel in the pronounced statement of a well-tended naked body of someone his age—an actor pretending to be Daniel’s age would have a naked body that would be a pale whisper in the shadows out of which he speaks and acts.
And I will have no character in it like me at all.
“I’m going back to St. Louis,” I said suddenly as we were changing into our bathing suits. I had no energy to be phallic and this or that or to be not phallic and this and that. I knew then a certain amount about myself in reaction to the day—to the mere presence of time in real life so that what you do causes stuff that is over your head and beyond the range of your sight; and you have to lie and be remorseless to some extent or you can’t exist and you can’t help anyone at all. I wanted someone to say something to stop me. No one said anything. Daniel drained his drink. “I’m going back to St. Louis,” I said again. I said, “I’m sorry. I give up. I don’t want to bother you all any more. I want no money for college.”
The Runaway Soul Page 72