The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Casey is not yet old. She strides along the platform. One of the men who works for her will carry Nonie’s suitcases. Isobel, Casey’s daughter, four years younger than Nonie, is there. No. Omissions improve the text when you don’t have good information. Nonie looks terrible. Her heart has been broken; her father’s ill; she has undergone an eerie descent in social status. But I saw her before she left—she looked excited, a little sad-eyed, but not much. She wasn’t greatly marred.

  Aunt Casey’s cold glance—which was famous in the family, actually—a rich woman’s glance . . . Nonie returns her aunt’s glance, innocently “Well: you’re here—are you all right? Was it a hard train ride?”

  The professionalism in each of being a good-looking woman—the skin around their mouths, the quality of their eyes, the discretion of their smiles—the two women greet each other with a suffocating and labyrinthine falsity that yet signals a tentative sincerity and which is not effeminate or awful. The slightly moist feminine tact of their kisses when each woman has her own brand of such tact is like speech—it is as contractually informative.

  Aunt and niece . . . Lila has said, Love comes first in a life . . .

  Porters or Aunt Casey’s guy carry the suitcases to a twelve-cylinder 1939 Packard convertible.

  Nonie in the close spaces in the car—the guy in the rumble seat; Casey driving—Nonie’s fingers on window glass—her face shows the pressure she is under to arouse love. Ah: I feel her unhappiness-happiness—one’s own jealousies and abruptness force an ideal notion of the reality of others’ lives on us.

  (Momma said, What can I tell you: it is never easy to live in a rich man’s house . . . Momma is kind of the voice of God in domestic literature around here.)

  I think that at one time I choked on jealousy of this—not of this, of a more simply imagined thing. The burning in me was like being filled with woodsmoke.

  In my exiling Nonie from life and into being a two-dimensional shade (one that lived well) I clearly murdered her.

  One finds no traces in one’s own life of such a state of affairs as I imagined for her. One edits one’s senses and one’s mind in regard to her. One’s mind is on a chain like a pet in regard to her. (Momma said, You was always crazy where Nonie was concerned.)

  Nonie’s speech to Aunt Casey, “Oh, I’m someone nothing has ever happened to. I’m sad but it’s not deep. I wish Momma and Wiley would leave Daddy alone. But my life is fine—there never is, are bad things in my life . . . I’m real easy to have around . . .”

  Then a glance accompanies her sweet smile with a particular further meaning of innocent affection and the pursuit of Aunt Casey’s liking . . .

  She says, “Momma drives me crazy . . .”

  “Let’s think only of cheerful things,” Casey says. “You’re here now . . . One thing at a time . . .” In the bright sunlight.

  Women don’t have it easy, Wiley. Neither one of them was a talker . . . Give Nonie credit: she knew how to walk into a house and make the people there feel right at home with her . . .

  The suspense in a real life story: a young girl is an object of special attention . . . Before I romanticize it, though, I can remember something like that in men directed at boys, that sense of youth, that extraordinary pain of admiration, a thing of being burned by an acid; then the way the scarred person gets even and runs things . . .

  I have often been drawn to people who lead homosexual lives—Lila told me that my real mother was homosexual.

  I have never been accepted in any part of that other world, however.

  Well, did Nonie feel that stuff like something squeezing her? Did it make her laugh? Did she refuse to be bought? Was she wooden but okay in the politics of the carrying on that would not have been the case if Nonie had been thirty years old? Aunt Casey: What is it like to be expert in buying people?

  Nonie, a little sweatily, inwardly exaggerating being happy or a little happy or relieved, is putting on a show: is she being ‘clever’? Will it work? Are her feelings those of a conniving ‘heroine’ in Vanity Fair, Thackeray, a book I’ve read, or of Scarlett O’Hara?

  Does she feel she’s A MOVIE STAR? Johnno, in college, said of a woman star, an ingenue: She doesn’t live in a book, she lives in Hollywood, which is Heaven-on-earth, U.S.A.

  A heroine and movie star, a victim—Mom said, Nonie had nerves—her nerves gave out . . . Nonie, this young woman of circumstance—with bitten fingernails and a quite astonishing prettiness and a bold if troubled spirit and a certain obduracy of heart . . . this young woman outside my range of vision . . .

  I’m her mother, Lila said, but if I do say so myself, Nonie has her days when the sight of her would melt a heart of stone . . .

  The singular quality of her courage gives off a whiff of perfume, a whirr as of a sunny day; the proximity of courage in someone, its motions and its heat, are heartening. The womanly flavor in her physically of an excellent coolness under stress—for a while—and the bedrock directness of her purposes impart to her smiles and to the movements of her eyebrows a dictionarylike quality of no-mystery. Cousin Isobel imitated Nonie in this—the terribly pretty girl with bitten fingernails offering no-mystery as a quality of romance atop her perhaps monumental sort of darkness of spirit.

  And the much, much older woman: they love for a while . . . Well, why not? Why hasn’t this been written about more? These casually found loves, the codified festivity and unmasculinity of them? Silence. Silence. I don’t trust confessions. Or hope. No one human can properly judge anything—one judges legally or personally, that’s all. If you rescue Nonie, it is Nonie you rescue.

  Did Nonie long to be loved best? Perhaps love has very little difference in how it exists, person to person, type by type of feeling, circumstance by circumstance; but I would doubt it.

  How then do you find the will to generalize honestly about someone else’s unobserved life? Casey that year and Nonie in that year of Nonie’s life, was it good luck in all or part for both of them? Lila said, It was good luck for both of them, and then in contradiction, I got even with both of them by sending Nonie off to Forestville that time . . . It might be either thing, both things. Had Nonie longed for years in her spirit for such a festivity with a woman not Lila? Had she had such a thing with an aunt, with a grandmother? Was this a further step toward a codified pleasure?

  They liked each other . . . Casey is not my cup of tea . . . But I have to be obliged to her: that was certainly a load off my mind she took on her own two shoulders . . . Everything was all lovey-dovey between the two of them . . .

  Love as lawless and as new law for two such disparate women—such oddity in a new flood of feelings, new arrangements: someone else is important now—it is a flood of relief after all. I am guessing, of course.

  I imagine boredom eased; and personal power having the leverage, the fulcrum and platform of the exercise of feeling and of gratitude toward life . . .

  Love, love, love . . . Happiness? Was it happiness? Nonie’s self-conscious gestures before she had her new command of irony—was she a girl who had seen too much?

  Had she seen too little?

  Her vulnerability, her availability: she smoked, she chattered—in her office voice?

  I imagine a tense, softened, musical, very personal voice that I never heard her use. Or heard without remembering or perhaps even noticing it—is the moment like a test she can pass?

  Nonie can always run away with some guy if Casey gets her down; I’m not worried about Nonie, believe me . . .

  I am sure that Nonie did love Casey—I saw it in her in later years; she loved her, no one as much, perhaps not even her children—or, at least, if I was there to see.

  I don’t know what was included in that love. Were they evenly matched? Did Nonie eat Aunt Casey up? Casey was a selfish bitch but fascinating as a woman—do you know . . . The classless availability: She’s not weighed down with what you’d call a whole lot of culture and brains . . . The discretion of a photograph, sepia, from the 1920
s, how pretty Casey is, how rigorous in posture, how separate from everyone else . . .

  A still photograph without the melodrama of real moments in it.

  In an unphotographed, unreal moment, Nonie’s aunt rests her hand on Nonie’s back while Nonie leans forward in the Packard to use the cigarette lighter in the wooden dashboard. The touch was welcoming and virtuous and had no hint in it whatsoever of any further meaning except that, of course, in reality, as a real touch, it hinted at things and was real and was not like anything in a movie or in a novel or in any book. Issues are focussed in the faint trembling of Casey’s hand . . .

  If you are sensitive, Wiley, a touch can be enough for you on some days—a touch can change your life . . .

  And so on.

  Nonie and Casey

  I can imagine Casey saying to Nonie, No news is good news, and Nonie responding, in a triumphant and happily not witty way, No news is no news.

  Nonie sits up straighter and turns her face to her aunt, her face, Love with a certain explanatory heat of attention on it—chastity and romance, a physically sensitive caution with the flavor of inclination in it, the delight, the delight and the deliciousness of unfailed love—the fastidious pornography of a sort in it . . .

  And the two women, Casey and Nonie, having piercing moments of comprehension, secret from everyone else . . .

  Such comprehension, and something else too, incomprehension or doubt can be revised by a kiss . . . or can go unrevised punitively . . . Or the teasing absence of kisses can enliven as well as darken a day.

  Here we have the flutter of an eyelid. And the meaning of the flutter . . . companionable affection . . . yesses spread over minutes and contingent . . . both earnest and teasing, appalled and on occasion desperate, a little grovelling, at times they are menacing . . . The creation of a state of affairs, an affair, or merely a closeness, a thing of being a favorite . . . I only know Nonie from when she was in front of me.

  Nonie said of herself and Casey: “We know how to laugh, we laugh and laugh, we laugh together, we’re just like twins . . .”

  A pair of talkative clowns? Comediennes? I was never bored in Forestville, Nonie said—a laugh like the flickering of muscles behind the hide of an animal? “We had a real good time.” If she had been so happy, why didn’t she love me for a while?

  Lila said, They drove each other crazy, if you ask me . . .

  But also: I have to hand it to Casey, she always had the last laugh over me . . . She got the best there was in Nonie—I don’t know why her daughter Isobel wasn’t enough for her . . . Maybe it was me . . . Maybe Casey just wanted to show me up . . . Casey was very worldly—the first day Nonie was there, Casey took her shopping . . . Casey used to keep seventy-five thousand dollars in cash in her bank accounts . . . That was for emergencies . . . And to go shopping on the spur of the moment—for excitement in that one-horse burg . . . Casey was a good shopper for a woman from a little town . . . She’d shopped all over the country . . . She knew her way around and she knew how to settle for things, she was a very, very practical person—that’s the highest sort of person there is—if you ask me . . .

  One of them smiles at the other. Or blows a kiss.

  “I’d give that skirt an A plus . . .”

  Or: “Well, cashmere was never the main thing in my life . . .”

  Or: “I’m too old for cheap cotton.”

  And the light savor of confessions: “I hate red . . .”

  And advice: “What’s your view on black? In wartime?”

  “I don’t think it’s nice. What do you think?”

  And the passionate comparisons: “I have ugly legs—you have perfect legs . . .”

  And: “You are perfect . . . Your hair is just perfect.”

  The touch of each other’s eyes in a glance and fingertips touching in the drama now of handling things, handing them to each other. The thing of straightening the back of a crooked blouse. The intelligence at work in each story-riddled moment is at best-seller level . . . in terms of romance.

  Nonie smoking in a section of a department store devoted to chic clothes (by local standards) and the salesgirl coming near and Nonie lying to her about a burn mark in the sleeve of a dress—the way one tells a lie, one’s style of lying, marks one’s degree of intelligence in the real world—and the judgments and corrections of each other being placed on hold and the terms of derision and of melancholy toward shopping, toward people who don’t know the shibboleths: “Black and white socks, they’re just too-too . . .” And: “I can’t wear rayon . . . But I love those shiny, awful pinks . . .” And: “I’m getting tired . . . Let’s take a break . . .”

  “I smoke too much—you got the Sen-sen?”

  A store called Roth’s, a purple dress, and Casey says brusquely, “They trampled out the purple grapes of Roth . . . I got that joke from Emma-Jean . . . It’s such an old joke, she must keep it in mothballs . . . Ha-ha . . .”

  Perhaps Nonie says, “Ha-ha, everyone knows moths don’t have balls . . .”

  Nonie says, “Oh don’t make me laugh, I’m trying to zip up . . . I love this blue . . . I wish I had the color skin to wear blue under electric light . . . Maybe if I lighten my hair . . .”

  “Oh, don’t do that—you have perfect hair . . . Mine is too wavy; I love fine hair like yours . . . I love YOUR hair . . .”

  Style is fate. Sometimes . . .

  Headaches . . . Changes of mind . . . If you have a mind . . . But you don’t have a mind . . .

  Nonie says to Casey, “I wish I had your body.”

  Casey said, dryly, in her high little voice, “Oh I’m old . . .”

  “I’ll trade for it as is . . . ha-ha . . .”

  Casey, nearing fifty, feels a certain charity toward herself . . . Nonie, heavy-rumped and tremendously pretty, feels her way along in the dark . . .

  The colors of the era, and the women’s lipsticked lips; if black and white are the colors of most dreams, then this stuff is not dreamlike . . . The olive drabs, the simple blues of wartime.

  “This is so nice . . . You’re being so nice to me . . . I’m having a real good time . . . I’m probably making a fool of myself, I like everything so much . . . The decor here is so nice. I don’t usually like to shop . . . It’s superficial . . .”

  Momma said, Life is more work than you can ever imagine . . . People earn what they get—in the long run . . .

  “Now you need a bathing suit—and a sweater . . .” Casey says in her bossy way . . .

  Nonie had her poetry . . . and her prettiness . . . “It’s paradise here . . .”

  The adverbs of flirtation—the diluted or distilled terms and aura of permissiveness . . . Or of restraint . . .

  I imagine Casey saying to Nonie about a low-cut dress Nonie is looking at, “People around here wear more extreme things when they finally do get around to dressing up . . . You look like a dream in that . . .”

  Shopping is at the edge of hallucination anyway.

  Nonie told me that Casey liked tight clothes for herself even at her age . . . And she looks good in them, too.

  Capricious meanness, as a savory thing, almost a toy meanness: “I hate this dress . . . I hate this red . . .”

  And: “How many mirrors do you suppose are in this store? You ever count all the mirrors?”

  “You’re buying me too much . . . Don’t throw your money away—”

  “I want to give you this belt: I like patent leather . . .” A smile. “I’m not throwing my money away . . .”

  The face, the eyes, the breath of sensitive gratitude . . .

  “You look so nice in that sweater . . . Sweetheart.”

  Then later at the house, someone says of them: “It’s a conspiracy of you two against the rest of us . . .”

  Is the honeymoon over? Do they get the prize?

  Nonie said to me, “Dad and Casey and me, we’re nicer than other people . . .” But then: “We spend half our time laughing at people . . .”

  (Lila told
me my real mother had been very funny—she did imitations—I hate to tell you but she could be very mean, you could die laughing, the mean imitations she could do of people . . .)

  I imagine Nonie saying to Casey, “Well, I don’t count my chickens—you never know what’s really going to happen . . . I keep a trick or two up my sleeve. I’m a Boy Scout . . .”

  Certain kinds of love are the consolation of ambition, others are ambition. Some are ambitious make-believe and yet are sweet, but think of the ambition then.

  How much courage does it take? To be unlike me?

  Is there no justice in love? Is there some justice in love?

  In the serious stink of life, in the serious stench of real events, a half-known story with a hint to it of the breath of love’s madness, well, no dream can instruct you in such a thing . . . No dream or act of the imagination can have actual breath in it, or actual death, or even a small part of the reality of love . . .

  Love Story

  Momma said, Travelling broadens people . . . You have to learn to understand people and it helps to do it in a new place. Of course, no one ever learns enough . . . What do you ever understand?

  I hear her being truthful—inspired—a woman of God-given intelligence—revelatory in her analyses, and accurate and just in her anathemas, a daydream perhaps but an actual style . . . a style she uses maybe especially when she talks about love . . .

  Her style then is that she is hardworking . . . a genius . . . experienced . . . An element, always, in the claim of knowledge, is that a daydream has come true for the speaker—this is an actual style a number of women use and some men. It is not universal.

  She said, in a version of that style when she was dying and I was a sophomore at Harvard called to her deathbed: this was when I was eighteen: “You always was a good listener—are you that sort still? Are you that sort of sweetheart still?”

  I had been told she would die within twenty-four hours and I took a night flight across the country and then a taxi and I got to her bedside at three in the morning. She was asleep or barely; but she woke and began to talk; she talked and slept for nearly three days—talking to me the whole time.