The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Daddy says to Anne Marie, “Don’t be a second-guesser. Stand back. That child knows. He’s got a good heart. He knows what he’s doing. Let him do what he wants to do.”

  Nonie shoved, she pushed, she almost lifted the child, pushed him toward the window. The disappearing light had drawn back, as if it had been poured out by tilting our house toward that window. The light flowed down rainy perspectives—the fading light of the beast. The thunder was big, thunderous and threatening, wooden and empty, mere bulges of sound now, sturdy and fat. I was joggled, I tottered. I was thrown to block it, to dam the sound, the huge, bodiless gavelling.

  It is possible I never knew Nonie well.

  The child, at Nonie’s shove, plays S.L.’s old role, when he used to go stand on the lawn, or the torn doll perhaps—a sacrifice, a feint—a Golden Apple—an experiment to distract the beast.

  Daddy can’t go to her. My father’s illicit, hapless, shamed excitement, automatic and sad, means he can’t go to her.

  Then abruptly, with squinting eyes, she stumbles forward, grabs me, and she turns in an overburdened circle. She’s hugging and carrying me now—like a dog, a captured dog, a doll. Are you frightened? Will the horror be that she will put out my eyes? This is an environment in which few come to actual harm, this suburb, isn’t that so? Her movements, our sorrow, are a cumulative muffling, a sort of special silence. She turns in a clumsy circle, like a walker in a snowstorm. I disappear in the white.

  Lila has said, Don’t be a fool, S.L. You know the things that happen.

  She means: Be cautious. Don’t trust people.

  If Nonie is an ordinary woman and if, as an ordinary person, she doesn’t matter, what am I to forgive her for? If she does matter, forgiving her is a spiritual thing that occurs in relation to her continuing repentance, which never occurs. And so my forgiveness is never quite apt, never quite real, never quite there. Only my folly (my being fooled) is there. She’s a fighter. Of what spiritual use is my forgiveness to her? It has only a tactical value for her. I can only just bear to admit that she causes me pain and has shaped my life day by day, every day for most of my life—no: all my life. Indifferent forgiveness is a vile concept: Your sins don’t matter; shut up; go away; they don’t matter; you’re not in trouble; go away.

  Indifference is a sort of pragmatic absolution. And a mode of destruction of the mind by disregarding the potency of others . . . I spent years with Nonie; and indifference to her means losing huge chunks of myself, and distrusting my own darkness. It means losing my sense of why certain kinds of lousiness occur. That might be absolution, but it’s also blindness and stench. I’m not a pope, a saint, a prophet . . .

  Nonie is experiencing the direct intrusion of God in her vicinity.

  Carrying me in that burdened and clumsily staggering way, she says, “TAKE AWAY THE FAT ONE THERE. LOCK HER IN A TRUNK—IN THE DARK, DADDY . . .”

  Us—against outsiders . . .

  Nonie keeps moving in a trapped circle, joggling and resettling me constantly. Nonie wants God to go away. We can’t live together much longer if Nonie continues to shame me with my inability to console her, my inability to keep her from her violence and her undoing herself or whatever this is.

  What Nonie is is truer over a longer period of time and more complex as truth than almost anything I later studied in school.

  But because of what she was, and I was, she became minor for me, despite the extent to which she is a conduit for Evil entering my world in my presence, minor because I had no choice but to love her to some extent for a while and little choice except to dislike—and ignore—her later . . . But she is not minor. Still, I cannot imagine myself punishing her—only competing with her—and not face-to-face, once I have the power to live as I choose. Also, I wear out, my nerves wear out—they forget her. The changeability of my nerves applies a disguise to evil in my world.

  Or is she merely ordinary and a common type?

  And then, of course, I am like her in some ways. I am complementary to her, and Daddy is like her, and other men and women I know are like her.

  I must live with her, she enjoys attacking me, and I want someone to attack her for me—she’s a girl—and so the part of me that’s like Nonie becomes more a part of me: I hold back like some girls, although if I could catch Nonie in an act of foulness, I might be able to kill her—I don’t know. She likes it that I loathe her; she’s addicted to it. It excites her—it soothes her some when I hate her maybe she will be tough and famous in the world. I don’t know. When I pause and listen to my own breathing and sort of firmly want her dead, I then abruptly half laugh.

  I really do truly want someone else to kill her.

  I don’t want to be guilty of her death—this is a kind of inhibition; maybe it’s despicable.

  We’re still fighting away—against the dark, against the light. All at once, the adopted child is shoved into black, wet, breaking window glass—is this in a dream? My eye is gone, my eye is put out, my face is bleeding, the facial nerves are cut: and my vision will be uncertain all my life now.

  WATCH OUT.

  She doesn’t want to be sacrificed for my sake. It is a dream . . . She did not push me through the window. (She did on another occasion, and I was cut on my chin and forehead and eyelid, and my vision was tampered with by the wound and by the nervous fear that affected the muscles of my eyes after that.) Today, she shoved me toward the window and then grabbed me back before I plowed into the windowsill.

  She doesn’t want an unhappy life—she’s normal.

  The child, the boy, is a locus of powers she hasn’t recognized yet. Maybe I’m more resigned about things in my life than I should be . . . than I would have been if it hadn’t been for watching her and thinking her bad and distasteful . . . But still I went on living with her heat, the suggestion of excitement and of shelter for me in it, and the strength of it. Of course, no protection exists for me in her except as it suits her. A number of my definitions of things start with her, here, in her room. I am not a god. I am, for her, supremely not-God: I am a brother. Nonie’s is the nearest childhood, the most accessible portion of the world to me. We are the most explicable beings for each other, the most handily available for inspection, for some experiments, sources of a lot of further information close by when things are obscure and we are singly too narrow to have a satisfactory view of the mystery.

  In her voice and body she keeps up her manner of defiance, of courage—the claim of her herohood in what she does is her true vocation. “YOU’RE DISGUSTING AND I’M NOT”—to Daddy. “YOU’RE NO GOOD. I DON’T LOVE YOU . . .”

  Her affection is incurably strange to me. It smells of disorder. Her skin is hot; her breath peppery and foul.

  “LISTEN TO ME. YOU DON’T LISTEN. I’M A GOOD PERSON—”

  But I listen; I hear her; I want to know what she’s saying—she is familiar and lunatic and bad—look at her mouth, look at her eyes—no, don’t. No one studies Nonie except me. I’m the best student of what Nonie is at this moment.

  Nonie is struggling to walk, carrying me in front of her—she is choking me. Ha-ha. It is a farce. I am partly unconscious; I’m unhurtable; I’m a dear child; I’m an innocent—I’m the elaborate semi-existence of something remarkable in her eyes. If she can hurt someone unhurtable, a dear child, but innocently, then that’s evidence that she is not hellish but potent-and-misunderstood—this is a dear ambition of hers. Then she can confront the lightning and be innocent and wronged.

  I am nearly unconscious in her arms. She’s scared of the lightning but she has a dulled—and pretty—child in her arms whom she has not meanly hurt; it is a maternal posture but boyish, maybe strange, that she has. This moment is giving her strength; it is a pattern from which strength is derived; she has an animal obstinacy. It’s all right if I love her—isn’t it? This is worth it, that we do this, that I have to live having been through this with her? Isn’t it? The ecstatic fear and dauntlessness in her shout, “MAKE IT GO AWAY, YOU BASTARDS. MA
KE IT GO AWAY. WILEY’S NOT MAD AT ME. I’M NOT DOING ANYTHING TO HIM.” Nonie’s voice: I never understood the utter sincerity of will and rigor of her voice and the falseness and obviousness of her tone, the way she lied—the limited sagacity.

  What a bold thing it is to shrink and then harden one’s entire self and never be able to have the rest of one’s self, or one’s other self, for the entire period of one’s life on earth. She did that, and if I stop loving her I’ll be doing it. If I can’t love her at all, if I can’t figure a way to do it, to risk loving her, I’ll become at least a sort of bastard.

  I mean, we know I have to forgive her—don’t we?

  Even if she is monstrous. Anyway, I can’t tell if she is monstrous—right? I am a corrupt and inadequate judge—isn’t that so?

  If she is ordinary and like everyone else, it will be terrible for me not to love her—bad consequences will follow me all my life. Maybe.

  If I had been angry, her rage would have been cold and settled against me for accusing her at such a time as this. My life would have been easier if she hadn’t admired and liked the child in between the times of hating what he’d done to her life, what his existence had done to her life. I mean her reaction to his traits and moods and deeds was natural and particular to her, not typical, but hers: that’s okay. She loved him, pursued him from time to time—the smaller child is fascinating and strange and peripheral to Nonie—and he arouses jealousy and other feelings on an uncomfortable scale—sometimes a gigantic scale: she is shrieking inside with temporary hope . . . “I WANT TO BE ALONE . . . I WANT TO BE ALONE WITH WILEY . . .”

  She takes me into the closet—her closet . . . Now we are in Nonie’s closet, with the door closed. Daddy is outside the door; he is in the room with the rain noises. Nonie and I are closed off in here . . . Ah, the suspense of real life. It smells of clothes and of Nonie here. She bites me shakingly on the side of my jaw—she quiets her mouth that way, maybe. She drags her teeth over my chin . . . I quiver. I feel her hot breath, I am suffocated against her quivering neck. I lean against the vibrating tissues and bones of that girl’s shoulder and chest. She’s squatting in the close, dark air in here. In the uproar of human heat and childish temperament and evil and fear we were in, I kissed the wet pulp of the chewed corners of Nonie’s mouth.

  Outside the closet, Daddy said, “Nonie, do you feel any better in there? I think the storm is getting lighter. Are you any better yet?”

  He can’t see us in here, in the dark.

  He says, “See, Wiley’s not afraid of the lightning.” He says it in that funny, less intense way of someone talking through a door; he claims to see in a way: he’s worried. Has she observed that her fear is not universal? He is less interested and more defeated in speech under these circumstances, when he can’t see our faces. It’s as if only the side of his voice, the part that’s like a beam of wood, falls inside where we are; his voice is sawed and shortened, is deprived of the authority it has when it is attached to his face: he likes his own face; he likes his own voice less. “Wiley knows no one here is a bad person, he knows no one’s going to be hit by the lightning today,” he said with the disinterest and obliquity of being on the other side of the door.

  Nonie pants. She hates him for saying I was a good judge—she shouts at him: “YOU’RE DISGUSTING. YOU SPY ON ME WHEN I UNDRESS.”

  (Momma used to ask me, Why do you hate Nonie so much?)

  Nonie’s indignation is crumpled in here but large and dark anyway. We have no light in here.

  Daddy did sometimes wander down the hall in his pajamas to get a look at Nonie. He would do that when he was undressed and warm-fleshed—in his pants, say, and no shirt, or in shorts or naked or in pajamas or a robe. Daddy didn’t think about things like this—he sort of lived them, offering his body for contemplation, for regard, and his feelings as well: The Father’s Body, a grown man’s; The Father’s Feelings, a grown man’s. Momma said he had the gift of not thinking—she meant the gift of conviction that he was moral in what he did, at least according to his own lights, on the ground that he was a real man and could rely on his reactions, on his innate decency—all his innate decencies—and that what was moral was obvious and he could be expected just regularly and automatically to do it.

  Nonie burned to death; I said that, didn’t I? A portable heater shorted out—this is what I was told. And she was drunk.

  Her fear of being burned by lightning was prescient, I guess. She said often, at various ages of her life, that she was going to be a rich woman. But she never did become rich. She owned some buildings at one time; she ruled over her tenants probably in a foul way—I can’t believe she ever stopped assaulting people’s lives. I don’t know what moral authority she ever gained in her community, but my guess is none. I used to hope something favorable would happen to her that would validate our childhood—mine with her, I mean: that she would become rich—rich even if foul—or moral and fine: then all the meanings would be there, wouldn’t they? It’s different if she’s nobody. All the meanings are different. All. One wouldn’t have to look back and wonder if silence was essential if one was to go on living now . . .

  Wishing aside, if Nonie had opened her mind and become brave on a larger scale and become rich or moral, it would still have been dangerous for me to know her unless some great miracle occurred in her of generosity—over and beyond the possibility of moral generosity, I mean. And I can’t imagine it, her making room for me generously. Maybe one of Nonie’s sons—she had five—will accomplish something extraordinary, world-shaking, big-time, and be admirable—wouldn’t that be good? And he might like me. I’d be surprised, though. But I’d think differently, and better, passionately well then, of Nonie. I’d blame myself for not having had the sense to love her, anyway. For not having taken the world as it was and being warm, anyway.

  She’s dead. I’m glad. Her sons, I’m told, are litigious, rigid, competitive, black-mooded, difficult, detestable—not successful—or religious. “They are to be avoided,” I was told. “It’s sad how regrettable they are.” And: “They’re mean the way she was—they’re not good people.” I suppose I ought to go West and see them for myself, but I don’t want to know if they are not fine-nerved and obstinate; I don’t want to know they are not bringing up fine children. I don’t want to face any more than I have to.

  For the moment, I am with Nonie in the closet, and she is a young girl with some sort of halfway-promising future and I’m a little kid and in her company, within the range of her prowess; and I know I am like her and I am aware that she can be happier than she is. We’re all trash but in different ways. In the dark, in the closet, among Nonie’s clothes—they rustle and rub me and smell—the child wriggles in Nonie’s grasp; Nonie is silent except for protracted mutterings and whimperings and threats toward the grown-ups and the storm—and me, too, but vaguely—and at the center of her mêlée she’s strangely still . . . she’s in pain . . .

  She does things to me—trespasses, sexual, hurried . . . Farcical . . . Faintly tender . . . Overly abrupt . . . Then she starts to push my hand into my own stomach while she tightens her arm on my throat as if to choke me into forgetfulness—or whatever . . .

  Anne Marie and Daddy on the other side of the door Anne Marie calls out at the sound the choked child makes. Nonie screams too.

  She screams, “LET HIM HELP ME!”

  “Es is nicht gut.”

  She always loved you, Wiley; it’s just that it was Nonie [who loved you]—she was a handful and you weren’t so easy yourself.

  “No!” Anne Marie says to Nonie’s plea. Anne Marie is out in the bedroom, in the big cube of air where the rain sounds are and where the rainlight quivers on and on. Her voice is large and has a room shape—but at a distance. When it enters my ears, it is partly muffled and partly wrinkled, like the sleeve of Nonie’s middy coat lying against my forehead.

  A line of light becomes a thick pole of light growing to be a torso of light and then a doorway. Of gray light. I s
ee Nonie’s bedroom and Daddy and Anne Marie. Anne Marie has wrenched the door open. Our shelter—Nonie’s, mine, I guess—and our darkness are gone. Anne Marie knew. Nonie’s fingers are in my mouth as if I might cry out otherwise. She has partly undressed me. Her fingers are digging into my waist. I can’t breathe because of Nonie’s hand and fingers on my mouth and nose. Anne Marie says in her heavily accented voice—as she hauls us out of the closet—“Let go of him, look at his lips . . .” The purpling lips.

  Maybe we’re just a trashy family.

  “THE LIGHTNING SHOULDN’T GET ME. I’M GOOD,” Nonie says from the half-darkness near the shoes from which Anne Marie is dragging her . . . And me . . .

  “You? La-la-la—don’t make me laugh.”

  “Oh, my God,” Daddy said, “this is no time to be hard on her.”

  Still set on my earlier purposes—obstinate and unlearned child—I reach, I grasp, I lean out from Anne Marie’s grasp, and I grasp Nonie as Anne Marie lifts me—I hug Nonie’s head.

  Nonie is surprised; she stiffens; I hug the rumpled hair and the hard bone inside the rumpled hair. Nonie began to hug me back. She hugs my torso, my ribs, sliding her pink arms around me and avoiding Anne Marie’s fat, yellowy-skinned arms. Nonie hugs the small body, the small-ribbed child’s body. Nonie in her physical proficiency, her marred grace—her hugs can be vile; this one is, but it is also startlingly adept, knowing, athletically tender, smooth. She pokes me hurtingly and with one finger for fear she is making a mistake—it was like a curl of irony, a small, localized physical brutality, a curl of affection in her language, and a matter of safety first. And it was a piece of brutality of spirit to mix with so expert and in its way so wonderful and still so vile and so personal and so well remembered a hug. A confession. Nonie smelled of the closet and of stale sweat and pee, and she was scattered in her wits, and she was alert, blinkingly; her mind is on a number of things: this is Nonie’s hug.