Benjie said, “Pooh-pooh, angel, y’all a bee-ig such-siss . . .”
“I’m going back to St. Louis . . . I can’t bear any more shit, my own included . . .”
The reality of the harm I do and of what is done to me.
I mean you act and you can’t possibly know why, at least with any assurance, and you can’t keep track of what happens as it happens, not only at a party or in a battle, but just if you’re alone; and you can’t know how things will go in the moments after you’ve done what you’ve done. The moments open out—like the playground at school when the kids were released at recess and ran into the macadam- and dirt-floored spaces. It takes an incredible amount of courage to live even if you lie about it a lot, to yourself, to others.
No one really knows what they’re doing . . . They only sort of know . . . You have to keep guessing . . . I told some of this to Daniel but he didn’t noticeably listen—why should he? I try to help or be nice but I don’t know enough; and if I’m cautious, I start to go mad with inaction. I’m going to go mad soon if I don’t go home. A lifetime of speech, a lifetime of information is at home. My guesses are better there. I can imagine things more clearly from there.
Benjie, in bathing trunks, said, palping his own body: “I’m getting love handles. Nobody’s nice to me. I manage though, I get along with crumbs just like a little sparrow. You ain’t a-goin’ home, are you, Sonny Boy, ol’ friend, you little ol’ troublemaker, ah you?”
Daniel said in the gloom in the bathhouse, “It’s not a good idea . . .”
I said, “I said it three times—like in a fairy tale . . .” I was trying consciously only to sound young and normal.
I realized too late that the word fairy had set me free, had silenced Daniel.
It was an accident, more or less. But I let it stand.
I don’t know what would have happened if he’d asked me to stay but one truth is that he was too impressed; he said, “We can’t keep you amused around here . . . You’re too smart for us by half . . .” Daniel at the train station, when I left, put his arm over my shoulder; but he withdrew it, having felt the strain in the tendons and bones and skimpy muscles of overexcited refusal and tensed-up permission in the boy whom, in a lot of ways, he was sending off or sending back, refusing—almost as if in a courtship mode. He said, “Mr. Noli-me-tangere, you have the most impossible mother in North America. You don’t know how to act. I want you to know I don’t blame my mother—she’s old, she’s aging, she has a right to her old habits. You are very, very wild: you’re a baby . . . A real know-it-all . . . I have an income of forty thousand dollars a year and I spend only ten of it: ask me for what you need to go to Exeter . . .”
“No, thank you,” I said in a Southern accent.
He persisted and I said, “I’ll write you if I need anything.
Years later, in Boston, Johnno said at South Station—he was disgusted and nervous a little—“Do you believe in kissing someone good-bye?”
“No,” I said, squinting in a confused light of recollection. Then: “Anyway, not you, Johnno . . .”
On the train, I said under my breath, watching my reflection in the train window: “Leave me alone . . .”
But I was sorry he had.
Do you try to understand people according to books or plays? Johnno asked me in college. “I use movies and fan magazines . . .” He said, Do you believe movies AT ALL?
Movies scare me; it is like dreaming in which you breathe in one world and seem to be living in an entirely other one of false but significant plausibility.
Daniel said on the phone, “Ha-ha, I was just thinking about you: so I’d thought I’d call.”
Daniel asked me on the telephone, “You don’t even know how rude my mother thought you, do you?”
“I guess. I don’t know. Whatever you say,” I said. It made me really happy, euphoric, that he did not offer to come and see me.
Casey did not say good-bye to me in Forestville. She never wrote to me that I can recall.
I used to like to think of myself as a cold person.
I made it to our apartment from the train station. Nonie was at home. Momma looked strained and drawn. I said when Mom and I were alone in her room, “I had a good time on the train—I talked to people—Daniel will send me to Exeter, Mom.”
She said, “Don’t look at me like I’m an ogre or something, but I can’t let you go . . . I can’t let you go, Wiley.”
I said, “I don’t know how much more I can take, Mom.”
She said, “Well, let’s just play it by ear—can we do that and just be sensible and hold our horses and wait to see how things turn out: can we do that?”
“No,” I said.
She started to cry. “Don’t leave me alone with Nonie. I promise you I’ll die soon. You won’t have to stay with me long. Just tell me you won’t leave me, Wiley.”
I didn’t say anything and she took the next step: “Well, it’s just you and me now, Kiddo, and what the future brings forth.”
Poor Nonie.
In late 1943, Nonie home on a visit, if I remember Nonie’s actual face I get a sense of somewhat hardworking nobility which wasn’t entirely façade, and of political savvy and of a savagery of lazied and enraged corruption and a competence she’s tired of . . .
She is kind of a shredded person, infinitely touching while being fairly rotten to an extent hard to describe—she is fragilely temperamental and very mean and cold; and she has surrendered to deadened unawareness in order to survive; but she is nervously aware anyway . . . She is having a maybe common-garden-variety wartime breakdown . . . “It’s time for her to get married,” Momma said. Nonie managed to get dressed every day, and when she had on lipstick and eye makeup and had combed her hair, it would suddenly be a question of how loony she was, maybe in just a regular way of someone who’d been through really a lot of very rough episodes . . .
Momma was careful of Nonie but a little thorny toward her; and she said of her, “She’s not at her best but she’s got her nose in the air as per usual . . . She’s been running around with pilots who are nobodies . . . She lost her social sense of things.”
When I saw Nonie with Daddy, I saw that, not androgynously, just flatly, she was as much a man as he was; she was a man like him, almost; she hadn’t seen battle but she almost had. Sitting there, the two of them in the apartment, a toughened small-town upper-middle-class girl and a dying man, Nonie and Daddy, they were, both of them, strongly anti-Lila. Lila had to have her second operation for cancer at this time. Her cancer has recurred. Daddy and Nonie sit in the dining room; and Nonie smokes avidly, addictedly, lost, cold, an oddly gleaming and exotic and knowing personage, shaky and yet determined and weird. Daddy is gray, is lightless. He sparks with life, or light, now and then, though. The two of them, somberly, yet gigglingly (even laughingly), with the cold-hot ruthlessness of their pasts, say now, right out loud, how great it would be if Lila would die now, how great it would be if Lila were dead.
“Come in, sit in on this,” Daddy said to the boy. “We’re thinking how nice it will be around here if your mother would die on the operating table . . .” Nonie laughed a little, spikily, at the grown-upness of this. “We might have a little silence then. Silence—she is wonderful,” Daddy said, in a serious way although jocularly. Part of it was said as mock-prayer, eyes cast upward.
Then he stared into my eyes, Daddy, a wartime hero from an earlier war, that said once he was someone who learned and that he’d become too heroic to be a hero.
Nonie, deadpan-ishly, darkly very serious, very grown-up, is watching me. I start to breathe rapidly. It is like being in a pit of animals . . .
Affronted, I told them they were being revolting. Dad leaned over the table and sort of half punched me, but not really; it was sort of a slap: he kind of slapped at my face. Then he and Nonie shifted their chairs, closing me out.
“Maybe I’ll stay sane for a week or two, maybe I can stop smoking once she’s dead,” Nonie said to Dad.
They, both of them, pointedly ignored me. Nonie gave her brassiere a hitch and looked at Daddy in a sort of foxily conspiratorial way.
Dad was still smoldering. “Let’s ignore the oversensitive little son of a bitch,” Dad said, although they already were doing that.
Lila didn’t die. Nonie went back to Carolina. I am not certain that Daddy and Nonie were friendly with each other after that. I think this was the last time they were friends.
When Daddy was in the last six weeks of his life, Nonie came home from Carolina for good, but S.L. did not want to see or talk to Nonie at that time, when he was dying. He put himself in the hospital. He said dryly that he wanted to spare her.
So, Nonie went East to see a rich guy she’d known when she was nineteen—Ted Prexiter.
“He’s a draft dodger is what he is, but he’s also a catch,” Mom said with a sigh. Mom said yet again that Nonie had grown up—she said Nonie had become serious (at last) . . .
The Prexiters were real money. It would be a nationally recognized career to have (married into) so much money. “Nonie could be as rich as John D. Rockefeller yet,” Mom said. Dad said, “I don’t want to hear about it . . .” I remembered the drama when Nonie was nineteen—the really big carryings-on—when Ted Prexiter had asked Nonie to be engaged to marry him. He’d been twenty-two. Nonie had wanted to live and not marry, at least not then when she was so young. “I don’t want to marry someone so rich and that short,” she said. The family was mostly unhappy at losing the connection to the Prexiters . . . Mom had borrowed money for Nonie’s clothes during the courtship . . . Nonie, giggling obstinately between moments of collapse, or of near-collapse, under the pressure, said she wanted someone she loved . . . Momma said, “It was an uphill battle but, in the end, no one interfered, Nonie got to make up her mind, she did what she wanted, she got away with it . . .”
Nonie wrote Ted, then telephoned him, “and he’s interested—or he wants revenge,” Momma said. Nonie flew East. The Prexiters had a place in New York, on Fifth Avenue, and a place in tidewater Virginia. The weekend Nonie was in Virginia, she said, “they had a cabinet officer there and some other people and ‘a movie guy,’ Ted’s father called him . . . Ted’s father talks that way, very down to earth, I’d marry him in a minute, he’s no creep . . .” Momma said, “Nonie knows how to put a good face on things. She’s finally in the mood to be smart about marriage but it looks like it’s another case of too little, too late . . .” And: “No one in the family has ever done that well but she doesn’t really give a damn . . .”
Nonie’s wartime ruthlessness, her dishevelled and bitter state, her disobedient and clever and commanding wartime disposition, and then her nervousness and oddity now, and her pride “in herself and her accomplishments” and, then, her woundedness: “She isn’t the young girl Ted’d been crazy about . . . She’s not Betty Coed anymore . . .”
Nonie’s wartime glamour, her sexuality at that point, her being responsibly tough: “Those people took her measure and they found her wanting . . . That’s what happens if you don’t strike while the iron is hot: it is a different ball game. She isn’t nineteen.”
She doesn’t touch one’s nerves with her comparative innocence and the perhaps dreadful extent of her coed’s will—she doesn’t stir emotions as she did. “People like Nonie come into bloom once and that’s it for them. It’s over. I know when to cut my losses. I’ll stand by her and I won’t say I told you so to her, but she had a chance to be somebody for the rest of her life and she made a mess of it. I have to say it: all the sacrifices, and a fat lot she did, in the end . . . She just laughed at me and said I was a bad person . . . I suppose this isn’t like me getting the last laugh. This isn’t a laugh. Well, who cares? There’s no rest for the wicked . . . Pisher, your sister’s not going to be the Queen of England—she’s not the Lord High Priestess of soft soap: she can’t get the ones she wants to like her; she’s not so clever in the end. I don’t blame her. I’m not going to let it break my heart.” And so on.
Momma called the Prexiters to reach Nonie to tell her Daddy was dying. Mom said Dad wouldn’t see her if she came back right away; so she might as well stay: “First things first: let’s get all that can get settled be settled.” But Nonie came home and laughed some, in a harsh tone, at the expectations she said I’d had, and she laughed, harshly, at Momma. I had had quite a few expectations. Nonie didn’t weep at S.L.’s funeral. She said, “He always saw to it that I was happy . . . I wanted him to die . . . He wanted to die and I wouldn’t contradict him . . .”
Daniel and Benjie showed up at S.L.’s funeral; and they mostly ignored Nonie: there’d been some sort of quarrel. Nonie said she wanted someone “more of a man” than Ted. She said to me that Ted had “gotten very self-important over the years—all he knows is who and what he is—and all he is is just a stick—I can’t stand that in a man: a nasty little rich boy—and I mean boy. I can’t take conceit in a man—Well, I’ll tell you something, I went through no hoops . . . not for a conceited little no one . . .”
She was still maybe a little crazy. Or ruined by the war. Or by her (or our) hard luck. Benjie said that of her. Momma said it. Benjie didn’t like Nonie much but he never quite broke off with her. Daniel said Nonie made up everything she ever said—I believe he disliked her a lot.
When I think that he was The Real Daniel and Mom was The Real Lila and Nonie was The Real Nonie, then I see a kind of inevitability in things but it makes me sad.
The year after Ted, the next year, Nonie married a Hank Appleberg “from Chicago but his family moved to California and he’s much much more California than Chicago . . . He’s tall and good-looking, and he’s got a medal from the war . . . He’s real smart. And he’s real brave. And he’s A Real Man—and I love him lots and lots—ha-ha—more than is good for me.” Nonie and I weren’t really in touch—things were formal between us. I have no idea what sort of shape she was in or what the story of that courtship was. I never got to know Hank. Momma, resignedly, said, “He’s dumb, she’s dumb.” But I had become cynical about Lila’s accounts by then and did think she had harmed Nonie quite a lot. And reared her, too. Lila said of Hank, she said, “He has no chin . . .” I wasn’t asked to Nonie’s wedding. Momma said, ‘Take it as a compliment . . . You’re a Harvard man . . .” The wedding was held the first week of classes so that there would be no talk about my being there . . . “You draw too much attention . . . Be understanding . . . with human nature . . .” Nonie and I hadn’t fought.
I saw Hank a few times over the years; he said each time, “You can always tell a Harvard man but you can’t tell him anything . . .”
“That’s right,” I said each time. We never got beyond that. I didn’t want to. And he had little interest in me—or my reality, although one time he asked, “What is it that makes people say you’re smart and me not?”
After a lot of back-and-forth stuff, when I tried not to answer, I said, “If it’s true that people say that, then it means that people think I can think what you think but you can’t think what I think . . .”
“Shit,” he said; and it was as if I’d made a scene—it was like Forestville.
Merely being human and inadequate—and somewhat vicious—I started to smile at him. We’d been drinking—beer. Nonie wouldn’t let me drink in her house unless I brought my own booze. And all at once I couldn’t stop grinning; and I said, “The brain has a right lobe and a left lobe; and Loeb and Leopold were thrill-killers, you know; and the right Loeb is a real thrill-killer in the head—which you probably don’t have, old friend . . .”
But he didn’t laugh. Or unbend. I never knew him except as a human presence in the particular jealous mode.
The Harvard thing wasn’t a joke for Lila either, it turned out, although she had decided I should go there. I was called to Lila’s deathbed from Harvard. She was in a hospital in Los Angeles. Hank and Nonie lived at that time twenty miles outside San Diego. Lila’s nurse called me, not Nonie. We didn’t write each other. Or te
lephone each other. I’d spanked her unjocularly for cursing Mom out when Mom was recovering from the anesthetic after the second cancer operation. Momma, who flunked out of Louisiana State University her sophomore year, kept rearing up in bed and saying, “Serpent’s tooth! Serpent’s tooth!” I held no brief for Lila’s treatment of Nonie—I just didn’t want Lila to be punished by Nonie. Nonie said, when I got to L.A., that I had no place there—she meant with the dying Lila; I wasn’t a real child of Lila’s; I wasn’t part of the family. She went on and on, dribbling a little with upset. She said, “You’re too fancy for us.” It got pretty tiresome. Momma’s nurse took me down the hall—no one on the staff was speaking to Nonie. But the nurse—well, Momma had promised I’d date the nurse. Momma spent the last three days of her life mostly talking and really only talking to me. She wouldn’t let the doctor in her room except once. She said she wanted to talk to me on her deathbed . . . And she wanted everyone else to stay put. I’m sick of all of them . . . And I’m sick of being sick . . .
To me she said, “I’m afraid of you—you know fancy people now . . . Tell me about Harvard . . . Tell me about the rich people who go there—how do the girls dress? Tell me some of the things they say when they’re stringing you along . . . How do they talk to you when they’re trying to be nice, Pisher?”
I told her Harvard was a cold place and that the girls were ambitious and that it was not fashionable there to be pretty “except sometimes, as a surprise . . .”
“I think you’re overly picky about too many things . . .”
“Nonie’s having a fit,” I said. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to her?”
Momma, on morphine, said, “There’s something they don’t tell you in school—Freud never taught it, either: Don’t be too boring with your parents or there’ll be hell to pay . . . Well, enough is enough. Tell me, Pisherkin, you think there is a heaven or not?”
Nonie’s marrying Ted Prexiter would have been a bigger thing than my being at Harvard. Or maybe not—worldly stuff is peculiar. Lila said on her deathbed that I’d tricked everyone into forcing me to do what I wanted to do anyway. You’re smarter than you look, Pisher . . . kins . . .” It seemed premature to consider Harvard a step up in the world—I told her—since a lot of the guys I knew were having serious breakdowns, flunking out, fucking themselves to death, becoming alcoholic. A lot of people, a whole hell of a lot of kids, got eaten alive there. By the sharks there. By pride. I had been told there I owed it to society to become a Jew scientist.
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