The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  “But I was the only mother you had—no one tried but me . . .”

  The cold audacity back then of formally acknowledged mystification in me at Mom’s quasi-formal deathbed narratives, confessions, and the like—a distance between me and the stories, a disbelief—drew her attention: “Oh, you’re a handful—you’re going to pretend you don’t know what it’s like to be the favorite son? You don’t know what Nonie did to get out of the shade? You going to pretend no one chased you? We all took turns hating you, Pisherkins . . . Tell me, Wiley, how much of a child are you still?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, smiling like a Harvard man—a pale, genteel, humble superiority . . .

  “I have a lot to say I’m sorry for but if you’re not going to pay attention, I’m not going to do it . . . I like to be appreciated, Wiley . . . I don’t do these things just for my health. I’ll say it all to you, as much as I can: you can understand it later, when you’re older—if you ever get to be sensible. A lot of the time you was the one we fought over: people cared about who you loved best. We wanted to see who it was. Then we didn’t want to know.”

  A listener’s inattention: the mind wanders among the puzzles; minds wander: it is what minds do. In real life, you surreptitiously and politely scratch your ear while a riddle opens. At times, my parents had been affectionate. If the self-conscious ambiguity of a riddle eats you, if it eats the sense of time in you, then you can experiment in the puzzled dark in which time is obscure to you and in which your mother was always kind and your father had only the character of father . . . You can fool around with time . . . I mean lie about it with answers, riddle-ridden: the whizzing spaceship light-beam eye—with its slanted feet like real light—and the flutter of that other time in which one breathes and will die while one pretends time has these other measurements in it, dimensions of mystification, diaphanous and purportedly instructive—the two of them define how compound one’s awareness is because one’s awareness exists in time and only in time. The truth is . . . The other time of one’s wandering attention mixes and jumbles and wads things and gets mixed up about things that Lila said: it skates right past comprehension—this glorification of the ghostly mind—and scants the body. The mind has no true body—it plays Nonie to the body.

  But I believe in the mind, Momma.

  Momma, dying, was not Momma so much as some sort of last chapter of Momma, or, rather, of a voice doing a certain sort of something purposeful—purposeful, semi-maternal.

  Human at the last minute—as in other minutes.

  “Momma!”

  “Let me catch my breath—I need a little shut-eye . . .”

  I waited out the dying woman’s drug doze.

  If you have no future, or not much; if time is merely two-sided and is fading as an element of things, what then? Lila tried to tell me about life—at the last minute—about one of the important factors: the ways in which women, some women, care for women. Favoritisms, loyalties—kisses in night-gowns, souls in bodies in pajamas and nightgowns, bedtime cocoa . . . Brief lunatic caresses . . . excitable and loony narratives and secrets . . . The secrets go from soul to soul like flung red ants that bite or cockroaches that make you scream—and perhaps laugh: OH NO, NO, NO—UHHH . . . OH, I’M GOING TO DIE . . .

  Sitting in her hospital room, I supposed her first impulse was to be the one truly heterosexual woman I’d known in childhood—the only one who preferred men—the one who was the fairest one of all, the fairest to me . . . In a way. Some women sometimes adopt a solitarily heroic aspect of that for themselves in order to be loved best. I don’t know. She meant to shock—and to be important; she’d told me of a world in which I would never be important and in which she was important.

  She’d said once, “Get a woman—find a smart woman who can fight—only a woman can defend you from women, Wiley . . .”

  She meant to explain and warn, to warn and entertain, to entertain and instruct. It is very odd how people assume those two are mild things. Momma meant to rend and affect and to alter the structures of the mind—entertainingly . . . She meant to be remembered—to have earned her way. She was a fatal, mortal Scheherazade, a Morgan Le What’s-it, fatale to the end—innocent by virtue of death, virtuous chiefly as a come-on—how startling she was for me. And how purposefully dense and out-of-reach of her I’d been for years—a defense. I purposefully missed the point of her after my fourteenth year.

  She meant to tell me certain truths, she meant to do that as a gift on her deathbed, to matter strenuously and rigorously right up to the end. I had pretty much always (often) said I wanted to know the truth. And I had minded the puzzles, the puzzling elements, of the incomplete stories I had been told.

  She had forgotten my ability to evade her and to draw her interest then. It was like Rogers and Astaire, but Rogers is chasing me; and she is also whirling around on her own, divulging secrets right and left.

  “Men are no good,” she said. “Women want their own way.” I’d read that in Chaucer, I said. (In a lot of ways, of course, I’d always known it—since before birth although I hadn’t known the enclosing shell was barn-and-oceanic woman.) She gazed at me. I hadn’t used her liking for me as a premise for understanding something in a long time. Souls dream: lives shift. One pretends but one knows that the realest knowledge is of motions observed. Momma is dying and is telling me things and she is listening to her own stories—not to me, of course. It was always secret that she ever listened to me. What she believes is true has changed and is changed further by the words she uses now; she struggles with the mechanics of speech, with linguistics, in the partly ashen, hard-breathed, and bedraggled moments. She is affected by the accidents of her own speech which become the half-accidents of her thoughts surprising her among the knowledges that have come to her while she is dying. The formal geometry of her usual constraint is twisted by life and by death now; and how she came to know the stuff and what I look like to her now (like a horse, the character and all, or like it’s-going-to-rain, to bring that up again) and what I act like now (a general principle, sort of, of that) and the accidents of pulse rate and of the idioms and associations in her head—and of her showing off to me—and to herself: it seems to be a different part of her life, a different category of life, a far-out order of life-at-the-last-minute . . .

  It is true that she is uplifted in a low-down way: “I said a lot of things, too, in my time,” she said, “to a lot of people; and I’m sorrier than the chow, sir . . .” She’d misheard and thought it was a dining-hall joke. Or I misheard her now—it was hard for her to talk. Or she is making a dumb joke in a locally Midwestern way although we are in California, a joke for a boy from the Midwest. The peculiar sense of assured fact for her means that in reality she cannot be for me now an omniscient narrator. Or for her, either. My belief in (part of) what she says falls back into quoting her to myself . . . Absorbing some of what she says . . . The facts for her being these at the moment, the ones in the room—and her and me—me so changed and her dying now—the chief fact being that she is talking to me, not quite a real me, but one present to her; and her feeling of rivalry with Chaucer and her sense of death and her rivalry with other women and even with what she will not know, with what will happen for me after she dies, and further and further—she is aware of this maybe unbelievingly or achingly or rackingly—I think she is working inside a rivalry with my sort of (Harvard) truth, her own usefulness, with this form of pride . . . She doesn’t quite feel defeat approaching . . . I am impressed and I can see why I liked her best a lot of the time when I was young; I am moved by the seemingly palpable sense of truth—actually, fronds and leaves of a lot of different sorts of truth; but none of it is stuff I can accept as omniscience . . . Truth, sure, truth-and-error, and she is dying . . . If no blazing chariot is in the room and no mystic light, then the truth, yes, without omniscience, her wanting to be right, more right than me, her wanting to know something I could not know, her wanting to be right to such an extent at the end. Trut
h, yes, but still not omniscience. But better than I could do. I doubted that hers was the form of pride that was forbidden, but if it was, I didn’t care. I believed her and I disbelieved part but I was proud of her for dying with so much verve—and in a way so much unlike the ways in which, in his last days, S.L., refusing to talk, and to forgive or to accept death, life, the living, the dead, had been kind of epic and darkly satiric and a silent and maybe lying or swindling or self-convinced know-it-all. I didn’t love him less now or her more, either, not at all; but I preferred her and the way she did things—this was disconcerting. Also, she wasn’t so old she had abandoned the issues and realities of gender—that seemed strange to me—but true, on her part . . . I was kind of shattered but I meant to dance with her up to the edge of the grave if she wanted—to be polite in that way, to that extent, at the end.

  The thinking and remembering she has done is sifted and purified now by one of her purposes, to treat me as her own flesh-and-blood, that is a point of the exercise—one of the points of the exercise. All the times she has thought of this stuff and of telling me, the thinking and remembering—and the decision to speak—the way it leaves me out, doesn’t leave me out: it includes her sense of me which includes her sense that if I talk all this will be wrecked; but my listening is a form of talk; she talks for me, as when I was mute; she steals my speech—but for the sake of doing-good-at-last—her thoughts having occurred over a period of time: the ways I am left out: this tempers the story she tells. Outer time in its unending consequentiality and inner time in its inconsecutive, snotty willfulness (and dictatorial and aestheticized jumble) have brought her to a point of clarity and truth (and last-minute verve in speech) in which things are almost as clear to her at last as laundry of various sizes that she is straightening which the maid or the laundress arranged foolishly, not having Momma’s brains, at least as far as Momma is concerned. But this is, as I said, truth, and not omniscience. Truth, at last, death being here. Things from a drawer—as in clearing out a desk at the end, things she is putting in stacks, not in a carton, but in me; she will bring order—to the mind, to one’s sense of an often cruel past. But I have romanticized the past and made it as ordinary as Nonie did: I don’t want to be bothered by it. Or with a sense of reality derived from it. So, some of her storytelling is really quite strange in the moment because of truth and death and my attitude, maybe scared, maybe reasonable, maybe half-cold, that everything was fine in me now in regard to the past—childhood had been Eden. Some of it is strange because of aesthetic and intellectual differences between us that she has an idea of, her idea of, and which she has, in her view, bridged now.

  Of the lovers, she cannot say, she doesn’t use such terms as Truly-and-intelligently-they-loved-each-other-as-no-one-else-could-love-them . . . (as-only-women-can-understand-love). Or that they loved in arrogance and in defiance and in blasphemy, shocking each other as in saying I shit on war in wartime to each other, in secrecy of that sort (as in a famous book). Momma, although she is sure of what she knows and is relaying scandal on her deathbed, Momma did not say those sentences about love.

  She said, “They were shameless but they were smart.” She said, “Listen, I don’t say it was bad—who’s to say? I say no one is to blame; I don’t throw stones. But it’s worth your while to know what’s what, isn’t it, Boychick?”

  Yes, but I don’t know what she really means—or if it’s true by, uh, serious standards.

  I thought she meant something like the stuff I just said about love, meant it not in an embryonic form but in one like the one that came to full growth in me for a while much later, and then, beyond that, judged it at the last minute . . . “Love?” I said. “Did Casey love Nonie?”

  “You think that’s so impossible? Who knows. They were a pair of cold fish. They carried on—Wiley don’t ask me questions—I can’t talk and answer questions . . . I’m Jewish . . .” (Something of an absolutist.) “I’m dying—” This parade of absolute factors was sort of aerially, and ontologically, dizzying: so many last things, each one total, you know? It’s really hard to know what to do.

  “I want to understand what you’re telling me, Momma . . .”

  She hemmed and hawed and sputtered: “Well, it’s not so hard if you’re not a fool.” She said, “Women like to prove they’re not men—you prove you’re not the son of a man . . . You don’t need to bother with the folderol men put out . . . You’re not dumb—you’re not stuck . . .” I had no real idea what she was talking about except I had some feelings like that for women. “You like your freedom,” she said in a tone and in a sequence that meant she was talking about women—women she knew. An initiation occurs? Gender is mocked and the role-playing that women do in ordinary society? Here, everything is will? Will and escape? That sort of thing? “It can be a breath of fresh air,” Momma said, hurrying on. “It can teach you how to handle yourself . . .” An ace negotiator attacks and attacks and gives you nothing, attacks you until you are willing to settle reasonably despite what your power (such as it is) might give you. But doesn’t give you if you’re not clever and strong. “You have to be a match for Casey . . . What Nonie is—look, Nonie is the same way . . .”

  Private, tissue-y, mysteriously throat-and-lip-stippled unabrasive voices: I’ve noticed them, remarked them, lived with them.

  Momma says, “They kissed . . .”

  If you see, or know, two people kiss, what do you think you know about them or about yourself, about what you’re able to see? What knowledge do you bring to it? Can you see if they’re faking it? Can you see the anti-other-kinds-of-kissing-in-their-lives it is? The elements of resistance to time? Or its specialness—as love? Momma used a manner that was like an open term of reasoned contempt—but it was to her credit—as an intelligence, as a knower, as a woman who’d seen life—that you had to assume supplied the reason.

  I did not imagine the two of them, I did not imagine any part of it, I was not affected by it, I did not feel left out, teased, or excited; I did not picture it as an example as if for some enigmatic textbook—I did not feel left out or initiated: I have a thing I do, I call it, unwisely, deadness or feeling nothing, a kind of life-y entombment—as in a fight when someone rains blows on you, and you wait it out.

  You refused to be affected but not after you’ve been pierced but before. So, you don’t just play dead, you actually go dead—or into a mood of waiting, a sleeping-prince sort of thing, or a winter storage in a bin . . . You can refuse a movie—I never liked Tom Sawyer, the movie that so influenced Dad—or All Quiet on the Western Front, either: I don’t want to be pushed and pulled and have my emotions touched even in negation; I don’t want to be shrill and masculinized and distant—so I am as if really dead, deadened, damaged, done in, a zombie, or a ghost: something belonging to the night, something unpublic.

  For something to be a movie or a subject in a talk, for it to be a public subject is already to license it. All the ways I love Lila, or care about her, and trust her, don’t include trust . . . I know she is psychologically astute. You bury something in silence. Or set it free to be wild. Perhaps if I believed she was helpless, I would have listened—but maybe not. You listen harder usually if you’re uneasy. The heart of what I know about Nonie in Forestville is some such thing as this.

  “Do you want me to have to explain everything to your dissatisfaction, your royal highness,” Momma said impatiently reading my posture in my chair—my male size, my current opinions of things, and getting the word wrong: she meant satisfaction—maybe she was being witty; people have weird ideas about wit.

  Anyway, beyond that, she was saying she was on my side.

  Well, the way someone is on your side depends on what they take reality and the politics there to be: the betrayal here of Casey and of Nonie, the betrayal of women’s secrets in a sense, the way the room was closed to intrusion—and Nonie, specifically, was kept out—only two nuns, specific nuns, and one young nurse (whom Mom expected me to date and sleep with, I think) and I w
ere allowed in.

  Well, it’s confusing but you can feel something is HEARTFELT even when it’s only one heart—a real person’s . . . You can feel the extent—and ferocity—of the adoption at the last minute; and that the kingdom is being turned over to you, to you after all; and, still, it’s only Momma, Momma huge maybe if you let her touch your feelings; or if some automatism or dark thing in you that decides such matters lets her.

  You can be closed down, watchful, discreet, distinguishedly polite, affectionate and respectful—and this can be a teasing thing: Rogers-and-Astaire-ish.