And what was in their minds. And in the ways they touched you. I can use the sense of women-among-women from back then—more and more, I heard as she spoke in these last days odd little snippets of things: by association: weird sorts of memory-producing voices as if the voices were ignited by what was said and became visibly audible: she or Nonie saying—back in time, a long time ago, and then perhaps mockingly recently, perhaps even now in the hospital: Sssh, here he comes . . . Little pitchers have big ears . . .
The words the women use, the way they touch each other are like whirring, fluttering moths on my skin, large, whitish moths: Little Pitchers have big eyes too . . . Well, it’s time for a change—you go to the boy’s room from now on . . .
What does it mean? what does it mean?
That returns.
Perhaps one should pretend to be a baby and to lie there quietly and be infantile—will they talk then in front of you?
Momma is dying. She is the woman I knew best in the world. I listen to her, when I do listen, with the most comprehension of a certain kind that I can manage with anyone.
Love . . . Is It Love?
You want to know what went wrong? Everything always goes wrong—what do you think? You think people are reasonable? The trouble started early: Nonie would let anyone come to see her in their house who wanted to; they came in groups, four or five soldiers—sometimes a hundred . . . People took photographs of her . . . It was a patriotic time; she was a patriotic girl. War is hard on people; you have no idea the sacrifices people made—you have no idea what people are capable of when the chips are down—blood, sweat, and tears—but people who have some life in them, there are laughs along the way, they don’t just roll over and die, Wiley . . . Well, how do you think Casey felt? Proud? You can look for reasons if you want to—Casey had a nice house, she didn’t like having strangers come to it wholesale, she was house-proud . . . You can say Casey liked to run things, you know . . . You can say, Well, Nonie is Nonie: you know Nonie: she took over the house . . . She has to be the star of everything. She’ll fight with you and say it’s all your idea or you have to do this but it’s just Nonie . . . You can imagine . . . She didn’t pick and choose: once the ball was rolling, she went along with the war; she wasn’t a good sport, you know, but she could go along with it. You think the army was made up of nice boys? Who do you think does the killing? You think people are sweet? Don’t put your head in the sand. A lot of them are no better than they should be and that’s being wishy-washy about the subject . . . Casey carried on like they were dirt—maybe they were—some of them stole things . . . They wanted souvenirs . . . War makes people wild. What do you think it should do? Casey was in favor of winning the war but not this way; and I’ll tell you something: the way Casey acted makes no sense [if] you leave out the other, unless she loved Nonie and lost her to the war . . . Well wouldn’t you be jealous of that kind of excitement? Talk about being belle of the ball . . . She was Queen of the Whole War in that town . . . in that state . . . I tell you it nearly killed Casey; I heard about her carryings on all the way out here. Abe never could stand Nonie; he flirted with her and dropped her; but he let fly a few things that got to me out here . . . I can tell you what I use to measure by; I can tell you how I acted—and believe you me, Nonie always said I was jealous of her being young; and I had moments of that. But I told my momma, it was worth it, her coming to America, Nonie had a moment in the sun . . . You don’t know what it’s like to be given a reason for your being who you are—it’s like a breath of spring after a bad winter. Women’s lives are hard, Wiley . . . and a lot of what’s hardest is the bad reasons and the no-reasons people give you . . . It’s in the Bible or it’s this or that . . . It gets so that if you think for yourself you expect to get struck by lightning . . . Nonie was never independent to the same degree I was but she had a mind of her own. She had a sense of what she looked like—she looked like the girl next door but she had better features. She was a little on the pudgy side on the rump and arms but she was thin, too, but she didn’t scare anybody, not unless they were terrible-looking. And whatever YOU think, Nonie wasn’t shallow: she’d been around S.L.; he’d been sick . . . She’d fought with you all her life: she could make sense—a lot of people thought she was interesting . . . And she didn’t make them feel like lowlifes. What I’m saying is scratch her and you’d see she wasn’t just another pretty girl: she knew that people could pass away . . . She knew about being over-shadowed. She knew what it was like to feel terrible—to lose everything overnight. She knew about books, not from reading them, but she disliked them; she struck people as being funny but she wasn’t silly: she was someone who knew there were cemeteries in the world . . . She knew how smart people talked . . . I don’t care what you think—all in all, she is a deep person. I don’t take the credit. She rose to the occasion and she was deep for a while and I was very, very proud of her. I knew she had no staying power—you think I’m a fool . . . I know her faults backwards, forwards, sidewards, and up and down. I’m proud of her still—I’ll say a terrible thing: it’s too bad for Nonie the war didn’t go on forever. What she was then—and it doesn’t matter what you think—and I never liked her—she never fooled me once, not when she was a child, not when she was in Carolina either—what Casey did was she loved somebody, Nonie was a somebody, Nonie was the rage in the state of Carolina, North Carolina, Casey was silly for a while . . .
One time at a war-bond rally in the First War, I got up onstage and several thousand men looked at me and I felt it—it was like a hot blast of air: I could read their minds . . . I started to smile but you know what? I remembered seeing women get a silly look onstage, and I didn’t want to be undesirable; and I drew myself up and looked, oh you know, like a vamp—and the way people clapped their hands and whistled, I knew I was just a girl, I wasn’t an actress, but it was at that moment I knew I was an outstanding person . . . in my way . . . for a while . . . I was never conceited like you are—the way Nonie is . . . I’m smart, Wiley: I’m telling you a thousand men at a time cared what Nonie did and said—she was the mascot, the belle—I don’t know what-all . . . A lot of things depended on her—the way people felt. I’m not talking nonsense, I’m talking about a WAR. I’m not a child; I may not be a Harvard professor; but I know what’s what. She was important. You don’t know what that’s like. What really goes on is people want a piece of you. A lot depends on whether people are nice people—or not. Not too many are. You don’t know how jealous a woman like Casey can be . . . of what she thinks she wants, of what she thinks her position is; she starts fighting right away . . .
I barely half know.
But Nonie starts before you have time to say hello to her . . . The things men say—a lot of it isn’t nice . . . Nonie wanted a little world to call her own: she wanted something Casey couldn’t touch—that Casey couldn’t tell her what was good manners and what was bad, and smack her fingers, and make it clear she was giving her a good life . . . If Casey had known what was good for her, she would have learned to give Nonie her head . . . I’m saying Casey shouldn’t have listened in . . . People get hurt. War is war. It was what you might expect if you weren’t going to be a fool about it . . . Of course, men came in droves: Nonie had the looks for the war; and she caught on how to act; and she was nosy—and she was happy—she was happy in her way . . . So, let her play: it’s not a sandbox but so what. I’ll hand it to Casey about one thing—she was trying to save feelings . . . She didn’t want the wartime spirit to ruin the people she cared about; but Casey lost her head if you ask me: she wouldn’t let Isobel have anything to do with soldiers and she wouldn’t let the boys swear: I’m telling you she lost her head . . . Maybe I’m a bad person and she’s a good person . . . The soldiers trampled dirt everywhere, they broke everything—Casey has a thing about people having big feet anyway—they took a dislike to her—well, that happens . . . But it’s a case of what do you think the story was? Was Nonie teasing her? Was they sweet on each other? It’s only human
. . . A colonel wanted to leave his wife for Nonie . . . It doesn’t make sense how Casey carried on—that kind of thing happens all the time; it happened to me more times than I can shake a stick at—you have a nice smile, someone’s gloomy, and the next think you know you’re the Mahatma Gandhi for them . . . The Messiah, the Second Coming, but you’re a woman and you don’t scare him like you’re going to change the whole world and drop a bomb or send people to hell. So someone chases you, and there’s a little drama—it’s not the end of the world . . . Unless your smile is the Messiah for someone. Ask me: I spent a lifetime keeping my eyes open. I know you, Wiley: you don’t want to listen. You want to play Little Lord Fauntleroy and think everything is hunky-dory when it’s not. Well, I can’t tell the story to suit you. I would but I thought about it and I won’t. The F.B.I. and Army Intelligence, they came too; Nonie kept an eye on things for them: she was smart; no one knew for sure; everyone knew a little. She told me what she did; she threatened me. It was a stick she could hold. Casey couldn’t stand it. Nonie did it for the war effort—Nonie wasn’t the type who balked at things like that—hard things—she made trouble for people . . . Those other people protected her—I think she needed people to protect her—how could she trust Casey? She would have if Casey had been on the up-and-up—Casey was honest about money matters, you know; so why didn’t Nonie trust her? I tell you Nonie’s no devil; she’s just an ordinary person, as dumb as they make them. You have to know who you can call on for help and she liked to give orders, Nonie did—she often needed help—was she such a fool? All right, all right. It could be religion. It could be politics. Maybe it was social. I’m telling you it won’t make good sense unless you think of them both as women tired of usual things. All right, I’m being mean. Why shouldn’t they be tired of things? Why didn’t Casey stand by her? Why? Don’t tell me it was principle—Casey stood by Abe his whole life; she stood by her friend lifelong—and they were a pair, those two.
It was for me, she told the story to me; but her solitude—her solipsism—was like someone attempting to write a novel. She wanted to know the story herself; she was examining things—humanly balancing the fact that she had banned everyone from her room. She said to me when I got there that she was glad to see me, she meant to die in my arms, she said. But now this was something else: this was the anger, the rage of the dying I’d seen sometimes when I worked in hospitals and that I’d seen some of in S.L.—the logical madness of the dying, of the genius in them. The rage and shock which like someone driving a car she crashed into me with inside the other stuff that was going on. Gleams and splatters of light on the window screen are like tiny match flares. Or, seriously now, like reflections of distant gunfire. I am trying to sound sane and above-it-all and I tried to be it then, too. Justice in real life, short of apocalypse, has to do with cleaning a situation up as well as you can under whatever circumstances are present—and it hurts—and assault and anathema then have to do with injustice and are tactics that refer to justice in the face of apocalypse—the threat of entire violence . . . Do you want to understand the world—this world—our world—ours in some sense? Then you have to know about this. You have to admit it. You sit and hear the California wind stir outside, warm, laden with heat, and Mom’s anguished, laboring, laboringly angry breath—sure, I wanted to be somewhere else; yes, I didn’t want to see this; but this was what shocked and hurt and harmed and sheltered (at times) and helped shape me. I will confess now that I was never to be in the presence of such rage again—I have managed to be evasive, private, and powerful enough to have an effect on what people dare. Anonymous letters, sure, and hints of this.
Even with Mom I was pretty sure that if I drew in my breath noisily—and warningly—that she would change how she spoke.
Or if she insisted on it, we could manage as equals. It was the combination of pathos, pitiability and willful ugliness and rage that was pretty much beside the point that was unpleasant, that seemed humanly wasteful, although one couldn’t judge such things in someone who was dying.
She and I had long ago agreed that she would spare me this reality. We had agreed that this reality harmed her health.
But just as the absence of the future freed her for a kind of display of feeling that warmed me and, in a way, straightened and firmed the floor of my existence, so it freed her for this; and this stuff supplied a sense of shadowy walls at night—an enclosure in which, in a half-spoiled way, I lived.
I didn’t blame her—it wasn’t that at all: I swear it. I did blame her; and I didn’t want to hear this crap; but I “understood” it was part of the other—part? It followed along in the curve of the moments’ reality: it was why I hadn’t wanted to be with her when she died.
It was like looking into a pit of hell—not that she was really so hellish directly as it was a matter of the implications: ordinariness, to use that term again, the enraged days of embittered or hardworking or of liberal people: I don’t know. Hell is having not done something? And hating someone who did it? I don’t know. I’m not even sure it was hate, that it wasn’t comedy, or a form for speaking of an attraction something has for you when, really, you’re quite modest—oh, not modest so much as enraged and sour, or not sour, but commonsense-smart-ass: bitter . . . Do you regret your life? Do you fester?
I don’t know under what circumstances one can speak of the limitations of real voices. Or of the law of compensation. Or of reality as a dark thing. Surely, one is fortunate to hear a voice at all. To be loved. One doesn’t feel that way, though, always.
One speaks of what I was given. It is not autobiographical: it is a way of dealing with actuality, perhaps responsibly.
But one lies in just that way, too, not always but sometimes: given? In what sense.
Mom moved into a comedy aspect of her story: Upsy-daisy . . . round and round: a lot of what happens, people deserve; a lot not even a dog deserves, Wiley, she said self-righteously.
Then she said it again, in a warm depth of feeling, without anathema: A lot not even a dog deserves, Wileykins . . .
I think I felt that she cheated on feelings and on discipline and felt alive and stayed alive for an hour or two more: you know how it is?
She even said, It feels like a straitjacket . . . Dying does. Telling a story. You have no idea how ugly people can be—I knew Gentile women who said they knew people were worse even than the Devil was—even than God was when He was angry . . .
But, Mom, how can that be: it’s a matter of comparable and of incomparable powers; you have to show some care toward the comparisons.
I don’t have to do anything: I’m dying and I have a little money in the bank; and I can cover my expenses. I’m not scared of God—He’s smart; He knows how to listen—I’m scared of what I feel . . . People get hurt: you get ashamed—you get nervous . . . I never meant for her to come home and interrupt us, Wiley . . . I know you went off to college and left us. You left us to go have a good time. You left me because I wouldn’t let Nonie go . . . I blame myself, Wiley . . . There’s something wrong with Casey: there’s something wrong with the way she’s mean . . .
It’s one person talking about another.
Wiley, put a nice look back on your face . . . I’m telling you what I know: you always wanted to know . . .
Momma, Nonie used to complain that your stories were mean. And not true.
About the undercover stuff which Mom had hinted at, with despair before, when I asked Nonie, Nonie said: I was a big shot, I kept an eye on everyone . . . That was verification maybe . . . She said, No one tells me what to do . . .
I suppose someone did.
Don’t be a smart aleck . . . Mostly it is my sense of Nonie later that forms the ideas I had of Nonie back then as I am putting it together now . . . I asked Nonie when she came back to St. Louis—this was from war novels about serious stuff—Did your conscience hurt? In the war. Among the things you had to do.
You talk like a baby, she said.
I’ve read a lot of books—[I
know that] it’s hard on a person . . . War . . .
She said, War is hell . . . You read too much—sticking your nose in a book is a good way to ruin your looks.
For a while, she acknowledged as real about me only what I looked like, how I looked.
Different emotional realities: a story of popularity (in wartime), a girl’s success, the competition for her daughter’s attention, the control you have over your own life—even as you die: she said, Momma said:
I don’t mind it anymore what happened. Maybe it was all life-and-death for them. I’m dying young and I’m getting tolerant, I can manage to be tolerant . . . Well, I want to make a good impression—She was, again. If there’s a lot of carryings-on after you die, if they’re all standing there, my momma and your mother, poor Ceil, and my poppa, if you ask me, it’s time to be a nice person—you have funny tastes—well, what can you do? Both of them disliked me—Casey and Nonie—they thought I had bees in my bonnet—they thought I was bad news; THEY WENT TOO FAR—THEY WERE THAT KIND OF PEOPLE . . . So they got together, there they were, two of a kind, one with the other and they were better than me, they laughed at me, got even with me, you think I didn’t care? I didn’t. I’m having the last laugh—it’s not much of a laugh but what can you do? I had more brains than both of them put together; I had better legs; I had more life in one half of my rear end than they had, put together . . . But put two heads together and it feels good, a lot better than one, but there was a string attached, ha-ha: they were stuck with each other . . . It doesn’t do you any good to be too smart . . . It’s good to be nice now and again: you don’t turn so sour; you don’t end up looking like a battle-ax. I’ll tell you about me: I got thrown out of college for having too many men buzzing around but I always kept an eye on women; I get along with women; but Casey was one of those who had to outdo the men—she had to outfox them; she was a good liar; she kept her end of bargains unless she had good reason. I’m someone who can see a little ways ahead—Casey couldn’t. But she was lucky. She played it by ear—moment by moment—and it all worked for her. I still think I knew what was going to happen . . . I had bad luck . . . I got surprised . . . Bad luck came along and took me for a ride: you feel sorry for me, Pisherkins . . . But I wasn’t bad . . . I wasn’t even half bad, ha-ha . . . People had respect for my opinions—I saw to it they did . . . I have no faith in you, Pisher, but you did all right so far, and that’s something—that’s something to write home about. It wouldn’t hurt you to wake up and see what’s going on—you should try a little of it, of real life. You know what they say about Harvard men, you can always tell one, but you can’t tell him anything . . . My mind is a little of this, a little of that . . . I hope you can take care of yourself . . . I wasn’t the world’s best mother to you but I would like to have an easy mind at the end in case I have to meet your mother; she comes to this room and talks to me. The root of evil is it’s monkey see, monkey do—that was always my downfall. What’s the point of doing something because someone else does it? It’s a trap. Do what you can do. I had too much ambition. I still do. Casey was always so calm: she’s cold; well, she’s not sick . . . She has feelings; she’s crazy, you know. People say they have no feelings but they do it just to get your goat—it takes a lot of feeling to have no feelings. It’s a way you are to get things done—you can’t draw breath without feelings . . . Men don’t care about lies; they care about results: why should women care? What happens happens . . . Women do what they can . . . I’m not someone who gives up but I’m dying young, so what do I know? I like to talk to you but I think you’re the wrong one to talk to. You ought to have some respect for what happens to people . . . And you, you give up too soon. No one’s life is perfect—you can’t hold that against someone . . . Something or somebody comes along and a person thinks, Maybe this will be nice—it’s time I learned something worth my while about the sunny side of the street—you think that and you get involved and then where are you? I’ll tell you: you’re in never-never land is where you are and I wouldn’t wish that on a dog . . . Mockingly-seriously-shyly, almost catching herself up: Are you fascinated? Do I talk as well as the people you know at Harvard? I’m a little on the ignorant side but I always had some fire in me . . . Nobody ever said I was somebody with nothing to hide. I’m somebody who has a little something to her . . . I’ll take a look—you say . . . you say it to yourself . . . and then you’re in deep . . . and you know what? you don’t care . . . It’s a horse race: it’s a case of what the other person puts first as what’s most important and can you get them to change it before you go mad and upsetting things right and left. People have their pride in odd corners . . . S.L. and I was a mismatch but it wasn’t a bad marriage: I was interested in what became of him; I could get him to change his mind—it always hurt me, what he thought of me . . . I never got him out of my system . . . Of course, HE said he never had a chance against me, but who knows what that meant? I’m dying and don’t shake your polite little head. Casey and Nonie—those were two peas in a pod—and Nonie held her own: not an ounce of fear in either one of THEM . . . They each had a vocabulary of about two words . . . Well, I don’t have to tell you . . .But you don’t have to talk to be smart in this life . . . Look at me on my deathbed—with my tall, silent cutie pie . . . Don’t be self-conscious: it doesn’t suit me . . . Then softening: Well, what’s so bad about feeling a little something for a change? I think that’s how everybody stays alive. I think that’s why people come to America in the first place—to have a little time and money to flirt around in on their own—I don’t mean just one thing: anything that interests you: charities, the P.T.A., a dog, you can flirt around with a smart idea someone has once you get it in your own head—did you know I was a skeptic—did you know I was skeptical? I hid it from you. Did you forget me at Harvard? I’m cynical—did you know that about me? I’m a cynic who believes that being foolish about someone or something is what makes the world go round or you put a bullet in your head. Or you get sick and drop dead. I mean it. I’m a generous woman in my way—I love you, Wiley, but I lost out, didn’t I? I lost out. In a lot of ways. I hoped they wouldn’t find out about each other too soon; I hoped they would be happy in their crush on each other; they both let me know right away what was going on: Casey upped the amount of money she sent; and a new bed jacket, a new bedside lamp for the sick woman, painted china, the lamp, with pleated silk shade: you think I’m ungenerous? You think I didn’t know what she was telling me? She was taking care of her rear end, she was covering her flank, covering herself. She wanted no enemies. I don’t know . . .And Nonie on the phone, all icky-drippy—Casey wanted her to call: Let’s make up, she said: I KNEW what that meant . . . She wanted me to know . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 79