The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Nonie touches me with a wan, vaguely athletic coolness, a tenderness poised, not deadened—partly hysterical, though; but it’s real, it’s between us, it’s been gained. And one’s appetite for consolation can rest here—or mourn its inevitable loss-to-come or simply observe it for a moment, at this moment of existence, a truce of wills, of breath.

  Comfortable, in a way, we are with each other, hands and bodies childishly in touch—she has a lasting tact about some of the pragmatic realities of childhood.

  But that tact turns outward and is clearly part of a case of Nonie’s being the center of decency in her system, the central repository of civilization: she is a young girl of suffering semi-equilibrium now, a consciousness stretched taut over certain inadequacies, of consciousness. She has for a moment a quality of sweetness, nerve-ridden, luminous—she’s comfortable, to a degree, too guilt-ridden, too naked to persist in it wholeheartedly; but if I bother to remember this moment clearly, what is clearest is her affection for the child and the intelligence of that affection in that time and in that household . . . A faint light in the mirror—a smallish after-flicker of nearby lightning, that’s all—cheats her of immediate escape. At once, Nonie flings herself, holding me, to the floor, and the rubbery weight of her body and its thrashing, at her gasping and twitching, are crows’ wings, and her breath’s cawing is all over me, all around me—I’m in the darkness under her body, in the gasps and thrashings, in the shadow of all that she was; I get banged around by that. Completely used, completely ignored, I’m there—it means too much that I’m there—I’ll just put myself there and forget meaning, but still, the meaning exists whether I ignore it or not. Where I am, under her body, it’s like the end of the world, as Daddy said—rhetorically—then and there it is an odd childhood apocalypse . . .

  Nonie’s grunting and twisting. Nonie rolls back and forth.

  S.L.: “Oh, Christ, why doesn’t it stop? It’s killing me. It’s like the end of the world . . .”

  (Lila: “She doesn’t like to stop. You have to stop her. Be a realist: IT’S THAT SIMPLE.”)

  No, it’s not.

  “DADDY, THE THUNDER IS TERRIBLE. YOU BASTARD . . . OH, YOU BASTARD . . .”

  It was a small thunder.

  On the floor, under her body, where I am, it’s warm and roiling and breath-tom and dark and smelly.

  It’s okay.

  Daddy stoops and puts his arm around us—her and me; and he scoops us up at an angle. “Nonie, that’s not bad thunder—now, come on. That’s not real close, Hon. Come on.”

  She’s gagging more than she’s crying in the rubbery bleakness of this almost-an-afterward.

  A gray-green light is at the windows and is in the room, watery and flickering. Nonie’s sweaty neck is a river of light. The light pulses on her concise neck—an illuminated rhythm unexplained as beauty but still beauty whether it is explained or not, this symptom of life—of her life . . . It glows and grows steadier in speed and assurance but is not very steady for all that—the pulse, her life. The sputter and jerk of her skin continue. Her pulse is scared. It isn’t exactly calm. I hear it, I see it, I’m close to her.

  The thunder shakes the floor a little. Inside the warm interfacings and smells, I feel Nonie shake. Nonie is shaking a lot. I cover her with myself.

  Her face.

  My belly’s bent over her. Her face.

  I do and don’t care what this means.

  I don’t care what has happened.

  Besides the other things I do is this: I embrace her will and shame, her being Evil . . . It’s okay with me so far . . . Maybe only in a family sense . . . But I doubt that . . .

  Nonie was right to think that lightning lay in wait for her and she was right to think I did not ever have her interest at heart in a way she could really like . . .

  But something was there in me, and concerned with her.

  For instance, I think that to the best of my knowledge—maybe this is just stupidity—I would prefer to have had Nonie go crazy on this occasion, for good, and for her to say crazed things, and to become mistaken in the names of things and then to die young and nice and pitiable than for her to live out the life she had in the way she did, in fact, live it. I wish she’d died and been satisfactorily dead for most of my life.

  And I would have the memory of having loved her madly—even if such terms are beyond using, they are so sentimental.

  Yet that’s not entirely true . . . I wish that I’d been as clever as she was, and that while I hugged her I’d hurt her mortally . . . What I’m getting at is that I’m not much glad that the gesture stands, my hugging her—my accommodation, my fearless embrace and affection with Evil, my shy hatred, my being conned into and out of equality, superiority, inferiority, favors, reparations, all of it—all that. I’m not glad . . . But it stands . . . I stand behind the act.

  I partly do accept my life. Her. Possibilities of willed goodness. Jesus, I did love her at times—I loved that mess of putrefaction . . . Also, the girl in her . . .

  The fire that killed her—in California, in her bedroom—it wound up burning through a wall, it set the lawn on fire, then shrubs; the trees were blazing on the lawn as in a disaster of a war—and then the house—the house she lived in—burned up . . .

  A cousin called to tell me. “Nonie’s dead,” said the long-distance voice; then, in a whisper, “Goody-goody.”

  In Nonie’s room, in the increasing light—the rain is letting up—in Daddy’s funny grip, I hold her in my short, bony, childish arms in a kind of ecstatic sternness of possession. Of my protection of her. Me, not the demons, not Daddy or Anne Marie, I’m the most powerful one here, in the end, sort of—maybe it is an illusion. My sweetness rules here—one way and another. And I’m scared—I’m not an invincible conqueror. I kiss her. She kisses my hair—in a slow, webbed, maybe drying-her-terror way. Nonie and I rule here. An intelligence in each of us about the other and about such an embrace as this strips and informs us, it is a childish knowledge, a vulnerability. We weren’t clumsy with each other always. We were clumsy and sometimes skillful . . . sometimes in order to hurt each other in certain ways. We were maybe clumsy at life, but we did all right with each other as enemies and during truces, too, and in some rivalries, too, we had real skills about each other.

  I embraced demon-filth Nonie. She had her arms around killer-trash Wiley. We are insiders. The enmity, the hate, is real. It is very real. We twine arms and legs and necks. These childish hugs of differing creatures, the sense of two lives being present—I remember the considerable excellence of how mutual it all was despite the disparities in size and mind and state of mind and in the passions and degrees of violence between us . . . at that time. We know this about each other at this moment of the child’s peculiar victory–half-victory; we know this, too. Among the knowledges that were there . . . We huddle and combine. At this moment, we are lives and heat in a knot, in a sickening real marriage, a combination of souls. Her arm snakes and then tightens on the small of my back. For a lifetime. Her chin presses into my shoulder. Her breath moves on my skinny back, familiarly. She is family . . . Well, that term is sentimental: for eternity . . .

  The Preparation for the Eulogy

  Our attachment, our embrace: I see the point of lying, for eternity, changing all connections, all meaning. Lila said to me before she died: I tell you, Wiley, people felt sorry for her: she had to live with you—you would try the patience of a saint—anyone human would have felt sorry for her . . . You hurt her all the time; you judged her . . . This stuff hurts: Ma—being blamed. I judged her. I judge her now. So what. Big deal.

  Lila, S.L., when in battle with me, often would impose her on me: Goddamn it, don’t act like she disgusts you . . . You’re going to have to live your life with people, Wiley . . . She loves you . . . You ought to love her . . .

  Are hatred and jealousy, dislike and will, cleverer than sweetness? Does that remain to be proved? You have to learn to get along with her . . . In the familiarity
of half-concealed, mostly concealed enmity? You have to learn to live in the real world, I was told.

  To which I replied, So does she. But no one understood me. She is the world . . . She is a definition of the world . . . I am not. But what if I am? What if some people who said I am not are wrong? Nonie is not my definition of the entire world. But she is an inescapable presence and a necessary part of the reality of everyone, in my view. She is what I look for in someone, traces of her reality—the shadow of that reality is largely how I judge people. Lila, in the last seventy hours of her life, had the nurses and nuns keep Nonie out of her room—away from the deathbed. It has been a lesson to know her, Momma said, dying: I learned it the hard way. But Momma told me Nonie wasn’t worse than other people: she asked me to take care of her. Nonie said to me once, Take my side or else . . . That didn’t seem strange. Most of the people I knew in New York tried that, did that. I partly didn’t understand, even if I expected it, the echo of this crooked experiment, this genetic crusader, this agent of disappointment, the enraged child, the pink-legged girl . . . Perhaps sweetly and normally wronged, a rivalrous person—a rivalrous girl. Daddy used to say, We’re not such good people, we’re not such bad people . . . He was trying for a reasonable moral assessment in real time, outside of books. He hoped for a daily basis of good judgment. How curious the forms of civilization are . . .

  When Nonie went to live with Aunt Casey, Lila said to me, It serves you right—you’re stuck with us now . . .

  I want to say I don’t understand it, any of it. I want to be an okay-seeming narrator, not one so implicated that he is hardly better than someone you would know in life. Nonie’s jealous rivalries, her maybe extraordinary, maybe ordinary hopes for herself: I cannot be her accomplice, her friend, her brother without my taking part in some conscious or unconscious cruelty of large dimension in some direction, toward her, toward others . . . Lila said to me, You are oversensitive and spoiled. I hate to tell you this and ruin your day but you are naïve, you are very naïve, Wiley . . . I am afraid. I am afraid. Lila said, She’s better when you’re not around, you should see it sometimes; you should try to put yourself in her place sometimes—it wouldn’t hurt you . . . And: Wiley, she LOVES you—

  Love’s like that? Big deal . . . I don’t care . . . I DON’T CARE . . . CHRIST . . .

  I said, I don’t care if she loves me or not: just keep her away from me . . .

  On her deathbed, Lila said, We did a bad thing; we treated Nonie as if she was okay. I’m sorry you had to go through it; I’m sorry what you had to go through with her, all of it, I apologize; I apologize to you . . . At first, I was on my guard, but you know how it is: things wear out; things wear down . . . Lila had lived long enough that I was at college—a good college. Harvard, a tall boy, neurotic and easygoing: she thought I had risen to the moral simplicities, the purities and law-abidingness of a much higher social standing than she had achieved in her life. From inside my new life, I saw her die, you know? She said, I’m a little afraid of what you think of me—I confess . . . Besides, the ghost of your real mother comes to see me here, on my deathbed. I’m everything of everything now that I’m sick—I’m my old self once I get a little steam up: then I’m not afraid of anything—just of you now that you’re a Harvard man . . .

  She thought I could be sentimental and aloof toward hatred and ordinariness from then on. I said, “Yeah, sure, but I’m still on your side, Mother . . .”

  I know of no neutral judge.

  Lila may have lied in what she said to me about Nonie. Or it was a mood. A deathbed statement has a kind of brilliance to it that makes it not like an easy truth. When Nonie tried to force her way into the room, Lila screamed, KEEP HER OUT! KEEP THAT ONE OUT!

  She said, I’m no shrinking violet but that one takes the cake . . .

  The promise at the end, Lila making me promise to be good to Nonie—I broke that promise. I never even tried to keep it. I remember Daddy shouting, Why can’t you two love each other? I want a home with some love and peace in it, Goddamn it: is that too much to ask? You think that’s abnormal? You think I’m strange? I want you two to learn to get along . . .

  Fat chance. Lila said, S.L. maybe was wrong now and then but he really loved you—you should forgive him—he wasn’t the type to be a policeman all day long. What can you do? People aren’t mirages—if you don’t like real people, you wind up with no one; you know that, don’t you? That’s true even at Harvard, isn’t it? She meant was the truth the same there. Is it all the same when you’re lucky or do you see things in a different light? Sickness makes me see things in a different light—and that’s God’s ordinary truth, Sonny Boy . . . Forgive me if I talk too much. It’s the morphine. It makes me like the way I sound. I love you, Wiley. Be nice to her, if you can . . .

  A Eulogy (of sorts)

  Nonie’s death I take as a generous absence on her part—I mean this. I wake up sometimes and think with a rush of warmth that it is nice that I cannot possibly hear from her except from among the shadows as a revenant ghost or as a memory speaking. I like the feel of the moments that don’t have her in them—or her voice, or the dread unreason of her ambitious pain—or the grimacingly painful-funny stuff—of her reality: I like the moments to be empty of that although, often then, the moments have the presence of someone else being that way in them. I don’t bother with blame much. I feel shame, grief, giddiness, relief—pity for people: each of those things is different from liking . . . I’m glad to be done with her. But just below that as-if-painless gladness, as if down shadowy wooden stairs into a basement, is a further gladness, like further shadows: a heat of sympathy and disdain, pity and, actually, horror—and self-recognition, a sense of being like her. And here it is painful and real. Here is my brute acceptance of her death and my isolation. But down the as-if-basement steps into further darkness and silence and self-judgment, down there stands a shadowy, shamed boy: all the while that she was alive he kept quiet about her. He sheltered her with his silence . . . She has to live, too . . . Yes, I know. But now that I am old, well, I don’t know . . .

  My feelings don’t fit any grammatical or syntactical model. They do not suggest a requiem. I imagine in my eulogy a moment of my being prepared for the loneliness that comes to me at her absence and real love sort of floating in a void since she is the object of it and old feelings, daydreams, hotly desirous, of her and me making peace. I want her to become generous, to be made it by discipline—or to be generous through success. Or so educated by death, illness, love, money, by the pain of being deceived, if that is necessary, that she knows what kindness is, in real moments, existing second after second and being interrupted by a telephone or a fire or an air raid. I am sorry I wish this. I would have liked to have been a different man. Standing on the basement floor, near the drain, I feel pity, charity, forgetfulness . . . But it is because she is dead. It is because she is not present in reality with her shadowy eyelids and her as-if-innocent malice. Romance as truth—as unromantic, ordinary truth . . . how different it would be for her. The romances in her life were ironic and fantastic tactics of greatness, of perfection, of something she felt to be universal and absolute, total and perfect. She is a girlish Samson, a fierce David. Kindness and charity hurt and erase her and tempt her to wrestle with them as with demons. They are demonic in some forms. For me not to hate her—for me to love her charitably at my own will insulted her. She had to force people to feel what they felt—otherwise, she felt their feelings to be valueless and that she was a valueless and dead object in relation to those feelings—that was how it worked for her. Feelings we had on our own about her were like found objects, a kind of trash, without merit: she felt she could do as she liked with them . . . This is what I think she felt, that we could do as we liked with such feelings: it did not matter to her—all of that was only trash. She would have liked a more common sort of eulogy than this.

  If I summon her physical presence—breasts, skin, dyed hair at an adult age—I feel in her huffy b
reath and in her gaze at me how I hurt her when I was not coerced and edgy in her presence. I can feel how hints are to her liking and outright statements of rage and clever or stupid actions are to her liking—and how it scares her that she is the way she is—she is doubly scared because of me—I exist and I do fairly well in the world. That I am, in sum, a truth, a something that is the case, this widens her eyes: this makes her ill . . .

  If I imagine us meeting after death, for eternity, as souls were thought to do, maybe, by some poets, I imagine the slow reconciliation in limbo in the slow alteration of souls, the spiritual education.

  How much pain those old poets proposed as part of one’s instruction. I cannot imagine her greeting me with pleasure at seeing someone of a nearly common history in the great unchanging light of HEAVEN . . . History would not matter then, of course . . . All sentiment aside, no one could break off from the searing final bliss for a sentimental moment. But if I allow myself, unseriously, then to imagine a meeting after death, I see in my imagined moments a stiffness. I doubt that even in a pliable and sentimental Heaven that she would address me in such a way that what we meant to one another would fill her with heavenly warmth and a wish to share any of it with each other.