The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  The doctor said, a little dryly, that it was a miracle.

  Lila told me stories, she monologued, correcting the past, emending old statements, old tactics. She did it somewhat nervously, ignoring whoever it was that I was then in her room, the guy I had become—not my presence; she flattered that and was aware of it to a terrible degree.

  But she addressed my odd presence scattered over a number of years and present to her now in the form of an older adolescent, eighteen, who was chiefly a compendium of memories similar to hers—that wasn’t true, of course. It affected her in a certain way, that matter of my present-tense presence and the distance between it and her sense of me in multiple moments in the past, down to me ill and diapered and nuts when I was adopted. The stranger there now in her hospital room was tied to her through mental stuff (and various mysteries) and to stuff that was in her head, in her spirit; and, I suppose, in her body, too, although we were really only cousins and not mother and son; but the years we’d spent together had become a mental blood with certain attributes and had become physical knowledge like and unlike the inherited sort.

  It’s funny about love—and about people who want to talk about it with you—I mean it shows a certain liking to start with. She had left me what money she had in her will, but Nonie had gotten hold of a copy of the will, or Lila had teased her, and Nonie had been upset and Lila had backed down and left me two-thirds of her estate: her estate was too little to matter all that much—But Nonie says money is money and she has a point—but she apologized and she said she would like me to know the truth about some things to make up for the lost money.

  When she woke up at three while I was sitting there, arms folded and trying to breathe in Los Angeles after the weird propeller-aircraft flight, she said, “Wiley, is that you? Have you come? I want to tell you some things.”

  Some things? What things? Save your voice. Let’s just sit.

  “No, I want to talk to you . . . This is a legacy: don’t be a fool. . . . A legacy is a good thing: listen, one thing I’ll say for myself is I never was a liar . . . Everyone else in the family lied, you know that? People always lie. Lie, lie, lie . . . What else is new?” Then, all at once: “You blame yourself too much . . . Casey and Nonie was sweet on one another.”

  At first I had no idea what she meant. I had forgotten the Warners as any sort of frequent memory and my early adolescence, Nonie’s life, the whole thing. The idea of it, even the aura of it, wasn’t close enough to the surface of my mind for the memory of those days to be present as important to me.

  But then, all at once, I remembered. I remembered, too, that I had sort of known or guessed some such thing—but vaguely.

  “Your mother had someone like that, too . . . Casey had an old sweetheart from childhood: they always stuck together—Casey couldn’t’ve lived in that small town otherwise . . . And kept her wits . . .” Casey and Emma-Jean Marie . . . At best I only half woke to what Lila was telling me: the reality of it that she hinted at: the real moments of the women. I had no opinions, no overall view, no interest in the subject that I knew of—yet, when she spoke, after a time lag of a second or two, first the memory but sort of akimbo and askew and then my sense of the past as partly hidden from me and of my not being old enough to deal with it, turned into interest, screwy, collegiate: I didn’t want to be a fool anymore. Still, I cannot begin to tell you how strange the sentences with their riders and enclosures of information were to me, how blank they seemed, and then as if blankness were dehiscent in some mind garden, the blankness split open and was vague with not quite credible scenes: puzzling me: how would Momma know these things? What forms of knowledge would lead to such information being fact? A good deal, a great deal of my sense of someone’s meaning when they talk consists of their purposes—toward themselves, toward you, toward the subject—starting usually with what they intend toward me. I can’t know everything that is intended; a topographical oddity intervenes: a hill is between us; she is disguised by her existence, the difference between us of when we lived.

  But one can see a trajectory. And the trajectory can be simple—with sincerity or with pain—but, usually, it is at least triple in intention—toward the past and toward me now and toward the future: Lila wanted to impress me—or she wanted to impress what she thought was mind-at-Harvard . . . Or what she thought a boy’s collegiate mind was: the present tense is awfully sexual—is so inescapably. My looks, such as they were, hadn’t vanished entirely; and some other people did what she was doing—a few. But it is hardly ever a simple matter, or not ever, being talked to. Here, in a hospital room in L.A., in a Catholic hospital, what I was aware of first, with a kind of male-finicky bridling, hidden, I hoped, from her (you know about tact at deathbeds?), was that she meant to affect what I thought about women, what I knew, and that this would go on long after she was dead . . . The seeds, eggs—bits of her talk . . . in me, deposited now and with a deathbed weight. She meant to color my attitude toward Nonie. And toward Casey, who would live on after Momma for nearly thirty years more, and whom Nonie would all her life be fonder of and more admiring toward in a profound way and closer to in her thoughts than she was to Momma. Or to the thought of her. Momma meant to help me. She pushed other women aside—ones that she knew about. She was telling me that she was alone—orphaned, too, Momma was, that she was like me—she was saying that since the world was what it was, I was okay. By comparison.

  At least now. Now that I was in college. At Harvard.

  She was saying as well, by implication and tacitly, that she and Nonie had cared so much about each other, that she and Nonie had talked, had hinted and spied, that she, Momma, had cared so much that she had pried and poked and thought about things a lot and knew-what-she-knew—and Nonie had wanted her to know, had wanted her to find out these things . . . Or to think them. Had wanted it off and on, changeably.

  But a spy system, her having ways of finding out things and of seeing things and of deciding what was going on, I mean how could Mom have done that, how could Lila have known any of this stuff if she hadn’t loved the others—and the awful truth about them, too?

  I think the fact began with knowledge among some people that this stuff was engaged in, known, talked about, and was a fact in a certain ordinary, social sense, not in a school sense, however.

  Perhaps, too, Mom meant that Nonie—and my real mother—had talked to her in sensible ways, partly divulging this and that, partly teasing her, lording it over her, getting even, or pursuing her—and she had kept track.

  She had loved this stuff and them enough to study them—and they had been interested in her—not in the way Daniel had been interested-in-me—but in some other way.

  Was she bitter and editorial—and vicious?

  “When they were downtown shopping, they would duck into ladies’ rooms to kiss . . . They was romantic—but they was careful . . .” In her voice hoarse with drugs and death, in her face, worn and pretty, exhausted, were signs of mood: a forgiving and yet remorseless bitterness and then the staled beneficence of her inclusion with them widening, shocking to include further her half-betrayal of them now, so late in her life, with me.

  But then it was hard to picture Nonie and Casey together in a story without forgetting Mom—it was risqué of Ma to interpose the imagery of such a story on herself dying.

  Were the two women in Forestville stringently romantic? Doctrinaire in their affections and in their acts? Was it half-a-joke to Nonie—an ironic do-jigger to Casey? A toy thing? Did Momma make it up? Did she piece it together later?

  Did they each have a humor, Caseyan, Nonie-esque—a sense of humor, they would call it—in their various defiant, lawless, pretty (and unpretty) banditries, degrees of personal and seductive force—or did they mislead people, partly idly?

  Do secrets actually have power—over particles of the mind and of the eyes, a form of no-light or of watery refraction or a blur of only half shape, a queer definition of reality?

  My real mother—well, Lila
told me a confused story—tact restrained her, the second mother: so did my shyness, if I can call it that—something restrained my responses and constrained my hearing—was Lila right, did I hear correctly, did my real mother, tall, Indian squaw-faced Ceil have a tortured love for a “pretty-maid-of-hers, she led her a real song and dance, that maid was an awful woman, it went on for years between the two of them . . .” Did it? Lila liked to impute murder to women—she was sure Aunt Henrietta had yelled at Uncle Henry when he had a heart attack and saw to it that he died. She often, or off and on, believed herself about Nonie and the infant princes in the tower. She said her own mother had bullied her older sister and caused her death—caused her to get cancer. She almost always suspected women of having infinite will. She said of the pretty maid: “She was jealous of you, and she helped bring on your mother’s death—believe me, you don’t know what jealousy can do . . .” Perhaps I don’t. A dozen years after Lila’s death—I was a better listener and observer then—when all my parents were dead, I came back from a stay in England and I went to see the small town where my mother had lived at the end of her life, not knowing she had so small a part of her lifetime left, and where she died—where she lived in the last eight years of her life and died and where I had been born. Driving in a white Chevrolet around the streets of the place, I found I thought I remembered one house in particular. An oldish woman on the street, when I asked her if I could talk to her, said, “Are you from around here? Are you Aaron Weintrub?” She told me where the maid lived; she lived still; it was the house I remembered. The house where I was born I had driven past without recognizing—I recognized it only from its side yard. It is strange how, when objects from the past are actually present, memory doesn’t seem to be inside you but to be outside in the air . . . The place speaks to me: I had a friend who spoke that way . . . I recognized things from my infancy; the problem of scale and of later experiences tugged at me—I mean, the fact that I knew the wrong things.

  I said, I can’t remember, and then, I saw at the boundary of my failure the mental thing, the thing of impulse and will, of steeping oneself in boundarylessness; and then I did remember—my mother’s smell, her clothes, her bust, her breasts . . . I remembered the quality of life in her: she had a lover, an interest of that sort—and me: she had me . . . You were easy for her; you didn’t torment her . . . The ebb and flow of the tension of actual presences—the absence of emptiness . . . In that other house, the maid lived still—such faithfulness, really. In the first instant when she came to the door, I—no, she—no: In the first instant when she came to the door, I saw someone méchant, terribly pretty still, as an old woman—as pretty as a movie star in a dark-mooded soubrette way: I knew how much was possible with her, for her.

  Her husband was as handsome in old age as she was pretty but he was simple and kind-smiled and yet he looked murderous to me, too. People do, well, odd things to each other. I said to the woman, “This is going to be very strange.” She said, “Aaron?” in an Austrian peasant mountain accent, Tyrolese I think. “I knew you’d come to see me,” and she opened the door wide and tried to look naïve and bland, and perhaps she succeeded, who knows: I saw a very dark-souled woman racked and a bit scared and resigned, awful, mirthless, flirtatious, and defiant.

  All the while I was with her, she called me by my old name—the one I had first. She described my mother’s death in such falsity of detail, let alone in tone, and while touching me and smiling with her truly amazing ancient prettiness, and staring out of movie-star eyes in a puzzled, pretty, scary way; and then this mountain-peasant with no limits in her at all (I felt) gave me a few sideways glances as she lied, glances of such wicked shame and apology, such chagrinned, long-enduring naughtiness, that I became ill, knowing in an illicit way, unproven, what the truth was.

  In the middle of lying she paused and said, with that sly, charming, shameless, chagrinned nightmare look of aged, stained, stale, inflexible naughtiness: “I knew you’d come talk to me someday . . .”

  Love. And the things a woman thinks. Lila said on her deathbed, “Was it all right and proper? Was it just talk? I never asked; I never had the nerve to ask: I didn’t want to know the truth about them . . .” Casey. Nonie. My mother. Her maid. “Once your mother was ill, Max would never let that other woman near you . . .”

  “He knew?”

  “You never know with a man like Max—someone could tell him to teach your mother a thing or two: she was a cold, proud woman, very successful—and in the Depression too. Your mother was a scary woman . . . She was smart but in a lot of ways she wasn’t too sensible. She’d say what she felt like saying to anyone—she was no cream puff, let me tell you . . . not even by comparison to a mean man . . . A tiger—tigers: they was . . . those women . . . I couldn’t’ve lived in that town.” But her tone was that she, Lila, was in luck, talking to the callow boy, tall and recently masculinely silent—Harvard-trained—male—having adopted a long-legged version of that manner most of the time.

  I had hoped the maid would have loved or enjoyed my mother—or me as an infant—and would reminisce.

  But what I felt was the presence of murder and of foulness and of passion and thousands on thousands of phony absolutions—Catholic confession, but it hadn’t taken in her; she came from a part of the world where people feuded for generations.

  Just as in Lila I felt something unmurderous at the end.

  But it is a feeling.

  Lila said, “Both your mothers died young, Pisher . . . You have no luck . . . Watch out for women . . . I tell you, nothing they did, none of it was disgusting to me. A woman has a right to love someone who loves back. A different hell isn’t always such hell, you know. I hope you’re sensible. I’ll tell you something, I’ll tell you a lot, I’ll tell you everything I can if my strength holds out: I don’t know about you; but a woman can never tell a man what he doesn’t want to hear—he hasn’t the ears for it; he can’t make hide nor hair of it; and words don’t always come when you want to talk to a woman—not everything brings out words in people, Wiley . . . I talk to you but I’ve been talking to you in my mind for weeks now . . . The ghost of your mother told me to tell you everything. When I was young, I wanted to try anything . . . I wanted to be everyone and get a taste of what they were like for them but I got used to being me . . . And I don’t want to be anyone else even now; I’d as soon die as not be me. I don’t mind dying; I’m used to the idea. But I don’t want to be anyone else . . . I don’t want to be sent someplace I don’t want to go—I don’t want to be treated like a wife, Wiley . . . WHO I loved I loved. Wiley. That was how I did things . . . that was how I measured things . . . Are you small-minded? Or can you live in a world where things is the way they are? I don’t say it’s easy. I don’t want to do it again and I don’t want to do it over . . . But I don’t mind that I did it once and that it came out the way it did. That took some doing—but I did it—and I don’t mind telling you I don’t care who knows it I’m proud of myself for coming out with a head on my shoulders . . . And no ill feelings for one and all . . .”

  The unstill particles and restless waves were mostly already stilled for her or were quieting into a painted surface of memory and summation that she had a certain use for, part of an intention: Lila said, “I’ve been saving up things to talk to you about. I have the nerve still to say anything . . .” As a form of friendliness, of a friendly laugh, she almost laughed hoarsely. “I’ll tell you how I feel sometimes: I see someone, I like them, and it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back: I go head over heels for a while: you think I’m funny? I don’t always think it’s so smart but what are you going to do? Dry up like a prune? I always liked to have an iron or two on the fire—don’t blame me, Wiley—I did everything wrong and I’m paying for it but I’m tired of thinking of things that way—look: you’re still around; you’re the cat’s meow, if you ask me. Well, now I’m on your side—I get some credit for how things turned out no matter how many mistakes I made—you do me cre
dit, Pisher, and I want to talk to you as if you was really my son, really my daughter maybe: you think that’s funny? You think I’m funny? You think it’s all funny business? Well, I don’t know what I think—I don’t know that I think that’s funny . . . I like to think about things; I like to see what happens when you put your bet on a horse—money always came second to me: laugh if you want: I’m not sensitive anymore: so, listen, I never had a harsh thought about some things—oh you think that’s funny? You’re not very grown-up; Harvard’s not teaching you much. You never knew what I was really thinking,” she said outraged. “I put on a damned good show as a mother—some of the time . . . When you remember me, will you be silly? I want you to remember I was always funny and not so easy to read, personal that way . . . A serious person. Where was I? Oh yes. I remember. Money was never enough for me—it never is for anyone, Wiley, remember that—I want you to know I had a good time, first, last, and always. I never had to be jealous of everything—of course, I was a terror; I had my self-respect: it was an experiment. I didn’t starve . . . This isn’t something you talk about to your children but I was always interested in love. I was really something—I liked it even when it happened to other people. Daniel paid for S.L’s funeral: money didn’t come second with him—I knew he cared: he was in deep; he could be relied upon; he was always someone who was serious . . . You would want for nothing and how foolish you are wouldn’t show. Maybe that’s what a smart mother should do—stand aside and make sure her child wants for nothing and is protected. I’m smart, Wiley, but I’ll tell you something: I never liked to read in my whole life—you want to laugh? You want a joke? Reading used to give me gas . . . I’m not joking . . . I hated it, I hated it, it made me sick, I had to do my thinking for myself . . . Well, Daniel read as much as you did. He liked books. Who wouldn’t want to see a child safe? Maybe I can’t say all I want to say? Maybe I’m not confessing the right things—how should I know? Emily Post wasn’t here to advise me . . . Well, live and learn . . . Daniel shamed me for the way I was with you—you always was too soft—I never liked him—he had to have the upper hand; that kind never comes to no good. He had the upper hand with me, I’ll tell you—I always hated what people did with money: they got no imagination but they sure manage to have their way sometimes . . . They have imagination in that . . . I hate meanness . . . I like people who give in now and then . . . I didn’t want to let you go—I thought you were cute at last . . . You was the one I wanted to talk to: I wanted to get to know you—that’s one of my secrets. You was the only one I could talk to. But I let go. Maybe he wasn’t so nice, you came back in two months,” Momma said hoarsely. “But I let you go and I never got you back—you never really came back to me: did you know that? You were standoffish . . . Do you remember? Did the summer go so bad you blamed me? I think you got conceited: admit it: you was scared of yourself . . . Well, listen, Pisher, I let you learn too much, I always did, and I was too rough: listen to me, Pisher, I want to say I’m sorry . . . I am sorry and I’m scared now . . . I know I often was too shameless with you—the ghost of your mother comes here and scares me, Wiley; Pisher, Pisher, I’m sorry—come hell or high water, I’m sorry—I wasn’t a good mother . . .