And all of it out-of-control with feeling and with death being near and with a yet more intense affection—with hidden smiles, smiles of the tomb, sort of, summing up smiles, while on the surface Mom is giving the Harvard guy a serious deathbed visit . . .
So, it is the feelings through the intellect that she addresses: a knowledge of this love will “solve” the problem of knowing about these people and of why they do what they do toward us. It gives an answer. Answers that you believe, even really false ones, strengthen you or seem to—do you see? Does your jealousy require a conviction that what you now see contains all meaning?
Momma can read me: “Fuh [If] you errn’t there, you can still know. You have to make a choice: you choose what you think; about things; choose like a fool, you’re a fool; Wiley, I mean it. Listen this time. I don’t care if you’re going to Harvard or not—maybe you’re the cat’s pajamas and maybe you’re not, maybe you’re what the cat dragged, ahuh, ahuh [a kind of laugh], you’re a fool if you don’t know the whereofs and thereas’s of what you think you know . . .” This is why what happened happened. I will lessen the mystery in your world. I will strengthen your footing as best I can . . . She said that in various ways. To say it was clear is to beg the question—yet it was humanly clear.
So, too, was the maybe overawing degree of sincerity at last . . .
But it was not a sincerity carried on in cross-examination—it wasn’t a case of two voices. It was her speaking to what she thought, or imagined, my voice to be: “Listen, it also happened as a result of what happens—so, live and learn, Pisher . . . This is deathbed advice . . .”
You always have to translate the truth of one kind of thing if it is to be a truth in other moments or in you and not in the book. A kiss, when you are doing it, is rarely seriously what a storyteller was (or is) referring to if he or she refers to a kiss . . .
Even if someone sees you and takes a drug or a lot of drinks and babbles on about your kiss—even if it is the other person in the kiss. It does translate, the thing said does have carrying power, but you have to do some work or you have to undergo the arrival of the weight of revelation—of Oh so that’s what that was . . . The promotion from silence, so to speak, to your being among the figures in other people’s puzzle-dreams as well as among your own often fraudulent clarities is a relative clarity. In reality, the promotion to being an important lover and sinner (of course) is tangible enough to feel even if you can’t testify to it in chatter—the thing of being much higher on the (pagan) tree of others’ attention—you and the remembered kiss come much closer to being an absolute thing in someone’s mind than any kiss is when it occurs—in your mind, too, this happens.
I can try to imagine the epistemology, the truth of how I know what I know about a kiss, or I can now imagine the kiss importantly and only importantly affected—but I’d rather not: I was only eighteen. At twenty-six, knowing Ora’s women suitors—the monocle-wearing countess; the for-a-while-monocle-wearing actress (who imitated the monocle-wearing countess); a show business agent who also wanted to sleep with me or with us . . . I don’t know that the voice—the deathbed voice—was much help. A lot seems pardonable if you are willing, piously, to be a fool. A lot seems unpardonable. If you don’t fool or overpower others what good is there in anything? What good can exist in the world?
I rarely understood much. I know that Momma chose to die among nuns: “They’re nice, Wiley, and they leave me alone because I’m a Jew. But they’re good—they don’t hurt . . . It’s like we all go on tiptoe, hand in hand, like in school—are you still a bad Jew?”
“Yes, Momma . . .”
Lila, Lila talking about these things, Lila dying, is the second of my mothers to die; and I was prepared to have die and vanish—to let me be free, free in a way, free to learn and to be bad and free to do things without thinking if those things did her credit, free to follow out the course of mind—as I saw and imagined mind to be—and life and lust and money . . . I really don’t know . . . She was dying; I was preoccupied. With that as much or more than with her. I was grateful but I resisted inwardly hearing or noticing or being fully and feelingly aware that she was telling me these other truths such as they were: the scandal which is a truth and which explains a great deal.
And embarrassment and a strong feeling that Lila wasn’t so bad had hold of me in my passive-bystander role—I should explain that I am not trying to save her or keep her alive longer—and that we are both aware of this—and that she is noble in not laughing at me or mentioning it. We are, both of us, embarrassed and going very fast, faster and faster, even while much of her is slowing down—vacuums and black spaces form. She has the starring role and she is immense in comparison to me, so immense I could not follow what she was saying, to any great extent . . . I think I saw that just as one time when I was young and had to have an operation—I was seven years old or so and something had gone fairly drastically wrong—and coming out of the anesthesia I had gone into convulsions and Lila was sitting in the room with me, all dressed up, and she had been unable to help me; interns and nurses had saved my life—I think I knew, as a half son might, what she meant in seeing women as murderers and men, too: the omission of something is seen as a murder, or a foretaste of it, the beginning of it.
I could not join her in her perceptions . . . In one of the famous texts I’d read at college that year it said (and I misquote): They kissed shamelessly, one soul embracing itself in two bodies. One can see a kiss that way if one is not one of the people doing it, not one of the people in the embrace; that’s a watcher’s thing . . . Mom, very oddly, was telling me this. If one is doing the kissing, isn’t it true that a kiss can’t be felt that way? I mean, first, can you kiss shamelessly and unself-consciously? I mean can someone who is not me do it? And a kiss never feels shameless . . . That is a part of a tag you put on a certain effort to achieve a certain style or osculant reality.
But it can describe a passage past morality and stuff about murder and shame to suicide stuff—to lovers dying, Romeo-and-Julietishly.
Or a passage to madness.
But women—with no admixture of men . . . Of male cowardice . . . I can’t convey outward what she conveyed to me, the size, among the constellations, among the elements of a constellation, the hard-to-see figure of Cassiopeia in a chair or of the dragon of a story, the images of truth.
Is it true that two people can have one will, one soul? Isn’t that remark only saying one person gives in to the other? Two people agree on NIENTE, a guy at Harvard said to me disgustedly, sadly. On nothing. I think that remark about one soul, two bodies is about bossy longing and is an example of immensely true rhetoric of feeling that you know how to interpret (or should know) but the truth is more like what Mom and I had—the truth about something that did happen. Love and hurt. One soul—if you wanted to be rhetorical—or a dying woman at some sort of height of her powers (if I can say that) and an awed and unawed bystander, partly a fool.
“You, you’ve always liked my stories . . . I always told you stories even when you were little . . . You always complain you don’t know what goes on . . . Okay, listen, I’m trying to tell you a story now that you’re a college man I wouldn’t tell you when you was little . . .” She is noble in her reasons now—although not quite in the way one would be to a child and not easily to be interrupted or turned into another self, as one would be with a lover—even in the last minutes before suicide.
She was never quite like this in the past. I felt with some conviction, too much conviction to talk about it, that she had, somehow, come to love ME at the end.
I suppose I was startled at how things changed for her if she had no reason anymore to protect herself since she wasn’t going to continue to go on.
I saw a certain course of illusion.
And how people might use such a thing.
I still wanted her to die, though, so I could live in my way . . . The sensation of being loved at last didn’t change me—I was geared or set or fixed
in a certain course—I was sad, though, and impressed. She always wins to some extent—that’s one reason she cares to the extent she does care.
I had always known that. And used it sometimes.
But the deepest thing, maybe, for me was the sense of my swinging outward, as on a playground swing, or in some more complicated way—as in flying out a window but actually flying—I’d had this dream—into dark spaces, starlit (to be sentimental about it), into times and realities toward which she had lost hope and was no longer competitive.
I would swear she was having a good time—exasperated some—and noble—as such things go.
She saw much of this; she saw something; I think she saw what was the case and that she turned aside from it even while facing it: “Promise me you’ll remember me . . . Promise you’ll remember what I say here . . . I always preferred you but it didn’t always matter . . . What’s the use: you’re not a good listener anymore . . . You have your own mind now, and how, don’t you, Poopchick? Pisher? In life.”
She stops and starts; she starts again; she veers; she moves in spirals. She plummets (toward death and silence) . . . Listening, I know she will not tell me the details—I know that this is an edited truth. I know it—and only half listen (in a way). “I know what I know . . .” she says with that towering immensity—or sincerity of death—and with the conviction that I will, in a way, listen. She prefers to be noble because the nobility—both the elevated part and the ignoble, low kind—are love—love of different kinds and felt with a self-interest different from any when she was not dying, with a noble self-interest . . .
She’d seen some of this in S.L., alongside me: he’d died five or six times and had come back to life or been brought back—sort of temporarily.
But she’d seen stuff in the hospital; she’d been noble and had gone around in a wheelchair even, dispensing company and help: she had studied actual death, real dying.
“I’m not a writer,” she says. “You have to catch on . . .” She almost certainly will not get the meaning right—how can she?
But isn’t it that way with writers, too?
It is partly that she was the enemy or rival and a partial cause of events—no one is ever entirely out of the story or is objective: me, I mimic being a dying man. Or woman, I guess—I don’t actually know. It is forbidden to bear false witness—it is forbidden even to try to write and to avoid bearing false witness: it is beyond human agency to know the truth sufficiently in these matters.
But she will do it for me. “I was always a bad person,” she says complacently.
Then she says it fiercely, hurtling onward.
It is forbidden to write journalism or fiction but I do it—I try to do it. I dedicate some of it to her, not because she taught me—she didn’t; she is doing it in the end in my honor, in my style as best she can. It is forbidden to deal in scandal because of the primary unknowability of one’s own motives and because one’s judgment of one’s own judgment is subject to fault but she will do it—at the last minute . . . And I do it as if at the last minute . . . Dad used to say of us, What a pair . . .
Truth requires a sense of life and of character—an acquaintance with those things in their real forms, an acquaintance with society. Who Nonie was the first year she went away and then in the other years. And who Casey was and what her life was like—not as a victim only but the interplay between her and circumstances—and without ideality or the false apothegms of false knowledge, of dismissal of knowledge. So, too, Mom’s death and Momma’s powers of unideal truth at the end. And semi-sort-of one-souled love. At the last minute—the end . . . Whatever . . . And ME, as the listener. Lila with the help of death can shame herself into not bearing as much false witness as before and into bearing some and the weight of punishment ever after—if there is an ever after—and the unappreciative adopted son, as unappreciative as she’d always said people were, so why bother . . .
But she is noble and is willing to propagate some truth for the sake of truth—and sometimes, at this or that moment, for a while, to mock, not death exactly, but me and a lifetime’s words—and to show me how it was done—being intelligent—she mocked all of me really.
Nobly. With immense love.
And I wasn’t unappreciative—even though it was only human . . . Even though angels with trumpets and wings and made of wild colors didn’t fill the room and stand along the walls in ranks, on stepped platforms, in utter emotional and entirely timeless significance. I was simply keeping my distance from the deathbed scene and the promises she would extort (and which she did extort). My guess is she would still partly (and sighingly) lie, sometimes in order to suggest a fuller range of maybe approximate truth—as in standing in a wide field in the rain.
You have to break yourself as if by torture; you do it in certain ways, tame yourself, instill an awful humility, kind of a death-camp scandalous thing, scandalous submission—scandalous crimes—scandal—such humility—if you are to be driven and goaded by truth and not by pride and disrespect—a poor, pure ox of narrative—gelded, too—perhaps this is true for her when she is dying. Perhaps nothing broke her entirely. I was not shocked by her—or by the stories. I was pleased and I felt she praised me and I thought it was love and I was enormously, enormously, enormously grateful, but I could do and say nothing. She wanders in a field of purposeful, persisted-in language on the three days of her postponed and then arriving death. In the syllabic windings and unwindings of her breaths, she self-consciously refers to events, people, moments, and to other actual moments. She speaks in a jolly and terrific and really scary nerve-scratchy last-minute breathlessness, lost and daily . . . I cannot interrupt her with what I know and have learned or once thought—or with any sense of how she misread or misestimated or misguessed at me long ago or at my mind or what I read and what I guessed at from my reading and what I knew since I left her, since I went to college, and what I know and have read, and what girls and instructors and some guys have told me, and what I have done. She has said in the past, Wait until I die, I want to talk to you . . . She didn’t mean as a ghost: she meant she wanted me to be available for a last-minute scene.
In which she would double-cross Nonie? Well, tell me the truth as she, Lila, saw it—that maternal weight of specialized truth and the rebellious universalization or half-universalization of it—the usurpation of law. The lawlessness.
The whispers and pits and the gravel sluices and dirty shores of chilly and dark-shadowed rivers (of what she says in the depths of feeling and the heights of attempt here on her part) take on awful implications of a seemingness-of-truth. For me. A seemingness of life-and-beauty in death-and-ugliness. And in a woman’s knowledge of things. Scandal. I was and am often held to be scandalous because of my mind and degree of (hardly universally admired) beauty but I have never been vivifyingly scandalous in my actions . . . Human . . . If I had been, I would assume the right to forgive or to blame, consciously and easily. Maybe not. Still, Casey and Nonie were, in my view, genuinely evil, more so than me and Momma, and Momma more than me; but more than them if you turn the hourglass upside down, although we were not all that guilty, although we were plenty guilty, but even so we were hardly as evil as some others, S.L. and Abe, and me in 1956, and, of course, a million others, millions. Casey and Nonie were in the acceptable communal range—but so were Nazis—but not in any serious group and they were not acceptable for all types of love: only the dark, maybe violent, death-camp and realpolitik and lose-all-the-wars kind of love . . .
I see. I see it then. It half works as a hypothesis—a story is a hypothesis about human events or one event—a bit, a model, for some part of life: hearing or living or kissing or whatever. What I think of as my death in me, as one’s death, the disbanding, the abandon of the congress of one’s selves, the committees of one’s selves, that stuff is listening (even when I was speaking) to Momma, the near and for isolations in my mother, the spaces of listening—hell, Lila even said, “Is there an echo in here? . . . The mor
phine does funny things to me—I hear an echo . . .”—and the trial and error of the effort to find outward terms, those combine; and then the suspense starts of what-next but as truth, as thought first and then of acts, or as truth-at-last—maybe only half-truth in the comparisons made by the listener—Momma is not Aristotle; Momma is Aristotle here—up to a point—the listener, the reader, compares other deathbed truths to this one. “Will you make use of what I say, Wiley?” The thing of you to her is just that for the first time she is sending me off on my own—this stuff, once she has my attention, once it is past the getting hold of me for now, is a thing that has to do with letting me go—she has to—but she is doing it with a certain respect—as if some of my notions about myself were, after all, true—in her view.
If the world is not absolute, then I am mostly right—just not absolutely right. If the world is not the least bit (or not at all) absolute, then I am okay—just not absolute okay. The different ways one hears and grasps a story, grasps the things said, the study of that in the light of time and the unideal—in the light, too, of love (and death)—would my mother have truly spoken if she had truly known me? “I was always unfair to you and I apologize—I always knew what you was but I didn’t want you to make use of that with me; I thought I was pretty special—I thought I had my rights . . . Listen, Pooperkins, I know what you’re like . . . I know this speech isn’t final . . .” She said that. Lila? I think she did know me in part.
No, I thought, she would not speak if she knew me better . . . She feels better if I am silent. If I am silenced and overcome with death.
Actually, I think I was wrong.
She wanted to talk at the end.
Belatedly, inadequately, as a young man, I can pretend it is final—a final scandal—although I hadn’t any desire or impulse to think it was scandal: what mattered was how it unfolded in time, the map or chart it became, the force it exerted, the moral dimension and heat that time arouses like a magic matchbox-cattle-car-immensity of garden in which we flame up, now this way, now that. It is not an easy thing to try to grant finality. To listen and comprehend what a woman says, to believe a woman is hard, Lila said, to do such a thing you have to know the lives of women—the real moments of them. One knows the lives of women, though, maybe. I can check on what I hear now against memories that reappear, that, in this case, reoccur, shocking—and a bit comic—and which are, say, ah, it’s me, I know a little, it’s not just from Mom that I know stuff—this other stuff was from when I was small, six years old say, and among the giant women, those women took me everywhere (and they, gigantic and blowsy, return nightly in my dreams), everywhere unembarrassedly: they undressed and peed and talked. They sometimes touched each other. Until I was seven. In front of me. Women spoke in front of me—I can almost guess at their words . . . They laughed at me . . . Nicely often . . . They took me on their laps . . . They let me stare at their bodies—at parts of their bodies . . . The odors. The garters. Their legs and skirts and eyes—and what was in their eyes and their clothes . . .
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