Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  And then there was her conversation, the words she used: “That was an icky movie.” Some people are austere with silences, others not, but I feel that for us as for primitive man it is language that enables us to move in unison with others, and I did not want to totter with Jeanie.

  But I liked her body.

  Villon wrote:

  Je congnois mort qui nous consomme,

  Je congnois tout, fors que moy mesme.

  I know death, who eats us, I know everything—but not myself. I wanted her; I wanted to set her free; I wanted to be free of her. Above all, I did not want to be guilty of any crime toward her. Gifted with intelligence, aided by thought, we advance on folly.

  “Jeanie, I cannot persuade myself that what is happening is good for you or that anything is right except to separate for a while and study our feelings—”

  Hofstedt at the window not long after, with his back to the girl he did not just then know if he loved or not, a girl with coarse-fibered hair, white bandages on her wrists; Hofstedt hearing echoes of the wild-voiced, unconvincing, yet wholly terrifying scene in the bathroom—a scene reflected in mirrors, in glossy white tile, in the razor blade itself she held: she had said, “You don’t love me, I want to kill myself” —standing at the window after the scene had ended, Hofstedt said in reply to her (but he did not say it; he thought it), You are a spoiled, passionate, perhaps unloving child.

  The shock echoed in him, caused concern and anger; his nerves and feelings were startled. The girl was monomaniacal—Inez-like.

  “God knows,” he said aloud, his back to her, his face looking out at plane trees, at what, after the scene in the bathroom, he could not help seeing as leaves spilling as if from razor-slit bolsters, “I’m a clumsy ass and a bastard and all of that, but can’t we do without the melodrama?”

  The girl with that childish hair and dulled eyes said simply, “No.”

  The wisdom of conventional rules had never seemed more unexceptionable, and the powers of my own mind more problematic. “Leo,” I asked myself, “what do you want to do?”

  I had no idea.

  A French friend of mine, Charles N., came to Paris just then; we talked; he was killed a week later in an automobile accident. But the day we talked he said to me rather crossly—I had been saying unkind things about Sartre’s prose—he said, “Leo, I don’t feel your fundamental optimism proves you are a fool; it merely indicates that you occupy a private world.”

  I said, “But I know it for a fact. None of us is going to die.”

  I TOOK her back to New York; Ett was mad with jealousy; he said, “How do you rate such a pretty girl?” I announced Jeanie’s and my engagement; the college was most indulgent; I met Jeanie’s parents—they seemed normal, clumsy, child-crippling people. I began to write essays to earn money to buy furniture; my second wife had taken everything—“to teach you a lesson, Leo,” she said. “You underrate what people do for you. Legally—the law thinks I did a great deal for you and that I have a right to these things.”

  At a party, my second wife met Jeanie and came up to me later and said, “You’ve shifted to plain girls, have you? Well, at least she’s not a Tahitian.” I have no idea what she meant.

  Jean decided Jeanie was too childish an appellation, and she became Jean, giggling. “It’s about time. Maybe no one will ever mention my light-brown hair again.” She told me she was beginning a novel.

  I wrote:

  It has been many years since I have had an affair of any length with an American woman who did not have a manuscript for me to read sooner or later.

  One night at Inez and Ett’s, Jean held forth on the magnificence and importance of movies, and I said movies were to her what sermons had been to her Presbyterian grandmother—inspiring, part of her Sunday morality, hardly ever intelligent or the source of intelligence but, rather, the source of a good deal of hypocrisy, and so on.

  “Don’t start a quarrel,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to—I was making an observation.”

  Ett had a special, peaceful gaze—with unwrinkled brows—with which he looked at Jeanie. I think he daydreamed about her unremorsefully always whenever he saw her.

  “You’re tired of me,” Jeanie said.

  Inez said mysteriously, “Leo is a very sophisticated man.”

  “My dear,” I said, “if you want to quarrel, let’s go home and get drunk and quarrel in peace and not upset our friends.”

  “We must talk about it!” Jeanie said with a sort of fine desperation.

  “Here?”

  “You talk better than I do. When we’re alone, you win the arguments. But Inez and Ett know you. They know how unreasonable you are.”

  “How unreasonable am I?” I asked, turning to Ett.

  “God,” he said, and threw up his hands.

  “Very,” Inez said. I smiled at her.

  “You need me to bring you down to earth,” Jeanie said.

  I was suddenly very uncomfortable. I said peevishly, “Life will do that, don’t you think? Earth or ashes. Life is instructive.”

  “Don’t put me down,” Jeanie said.

  “My dear, we can’t quarrel on fair terms if you make up all the rules.”

  “Please,” Jeanie said. “You’re still hostile because of last night. Tell me now why you were so mad at what I said.”

  I turned to Inez and Ett; I said, “Last night we were at Simmy Watts’, and Alice Mary Ott said I represented the unsuccessful mating of ghetto Jew with George Bernard Shaw—no: it was George Bernard Shaw and the reform rabbinical tradition. Never mind, I can never keep her epigrams straight, but Jeanie—Jean—yelled at her, ‘Don’t you castrate Leo,’ and—”

  “She was trying to castrate you!” Jean exclaimed.

  “Yes. Of course. But I don’t need you to defend me in that fashion, I don’t want the public image of a virago helpmeet.”

  “You know what he said to her?” Jean demanded. “He said, ‘I’m afraid you’ve nailed me to the cross again, Alice Mary—you never miss.’ I think that was wishy-washy and awful.”

  Inez said to Jeanie, “I wish I had your courage.”

  JEANIE HAS several hundred virtues and finenesses and is not dull so much as merely young, but when I think that what I want chiefly from her is that she grow up and be like Inez, I think I must find a way to break off the affair.

  I encourage her to flirt with younger men. I think she is interested in Max Rankin, who is in his late thirties and who is very celebrated; he is the one who began a novel:

  Hello. My name is Max Rankin. I wish I were a poet. What is a poet? A poet is a man whose words ring—noncounterfeit.

  But I am not quite sophisticated enough really to wish it or push it, not in the way I won the bicycle race that day.

  IV

  THAT DAY. Let us go back to that day.

  Anonymity is a tribute to virgin birth and is sought after as a quality of soul and of physical being in religious orders and by some ascetics in their marriage to sanctity and is considered a dilemma of the democracies. Hard-boned souls feel it a premature burial, as if only special voices have a special endurance, or as if to be unknown were such a grave symptom of injustice, as to be a form of Berkeleyan murder, a casting into nonexistence.

  Inez has not been anonymous to me since Ett married her: I could make out her figure among the swimming cyclists some distance away. “Here comes your better half,” I said to Ett, but he was not looking for her.

  He said, “How long have you been doing aerobics?” She was in part anonymous to him. Isn’t that odd? He was a stony-faced audience for whom Inez was no longer a star, was almost a mother to be escaped from, not to be seen as human. My mother—I have omitted her. She said to me a year or so before she died, “You get tired of people, but when they go away you miss them.” I miss her. Is she necessary to explain how it is that I am cold-eyed and uncharitable? Shall I say my mother rarely reached inward toward the heart, or if she did, I managed to elude her with
some Bedouin-child’s play? But that on the other hand we never made each other cry?

  I spoil Jeanie. I lead her into low emotional habits, I am so easily blackmailed. Is that in memory of my mother? I encourage masochism—that inept term. I do not believe that Jeanie loves me; I am merely the frame in which she wedges the immense Dutch landscape—all thatched villages and dancing villagers—of her great girlish lovingness; the more difficult I appear, and she will tease me into being very difficult, the sharper grows the sense that she is being loving, that it is her love which is occurring: and her identity glows in an ideal light.

  On the other hand, although I believe in divorce, mind you—but I do think people who divorce show they are playing a different game from those who do not divorce—is this not an excellent bargain for a man like me who perhaps needs special lighting or a transposed love of some kind? I feel no great discomfort with Jeanie—yet. She attracts me still, if not so much that I haven’t managed to stave off hungering strongly after other women. One does not want to hurt her; one will lie—lie! what a fine language English is—in the beds one makes. It is not certain we have made a bad bargain (and she claims it is no bargain at all, but love). I haven’t the stringency to inscribe a finish when she is unprepared.

  I am waiting to see. To see what? If Jeanie will tire soon of going on with a man who does not quite love her. If Ett or Rankin will make a move. Ett? Rankin? Rankin envies me and Ett is a friend: it is impossible to envy or admit the worth of anyone without desiring his women.

  We are, in our connections, a linkage of sensibilities, like lawn mowers rigged like reapers to mow the fields of—what shall I say? American Life?

  Inez: how many years have I known her? Fourteen? It does not matter if I speak to her or ignore her, if I am mannerly or forgetful, if I protect her from Ett or start mischief between them; everything I have ever done or not done, everything she has done or not done, has helped piece together an intimacy in which there are so many intertwinings of awareness, familiarities of spirit and conversation and neurosis, that it is like a garden growing rank, a wild and untouched sweetness, a tangle of leaves and stalks: it is as if we have already slept together. The smallest of incidents, and the largest of lapses of conscience, could bring us to the actuality. Inez, once a year, drunk, will complain, “I know Leo doesn’t find me attractive,” and she will sulk. I will reply, “But I do,” and laugh. The danger comes if we permit our eyes to meet. Then the joke falters.

  In Ett’s feeling for her there is a masculine element of surprise; he is astonished that she is there, that he is married, that it is her voice he hears. One could easily be persuaded he was a poor husband to her, that Inez deserved consolation—but honor, so far, that tiresome notion, has made me too lazy to indulge in the wretched strain of such a strenuous insight.

  The discontent is there, in her eyes, even as she bicycles, as she glides, pinkly flushed, not young, delicious, good-hearted, wicked, too, in the way of people who are not professedly wicked—that is, by accident, with eyes closed, striking blind blows. It is easy to prefigure her words; she is not clever enough—or loving enough—to be surprising. She at once serves and reassures and punishes those near her with her durable repetitiousness.

  She said, first displaying the admiration she regularly hands out to Ett: “You men are so strong. You go so fast—like the wind.” She said, “Oh, I’m out of breath, this must be very good for me, I don’t get enough exercise, I think.” She looked at Ett: “Did you win?”

  It was not a hugely wicked thing for her to ask, nor was it so bad of Ett to say, without generosity, “No. He’s switched his exercise routines.”

  But that day, at that moment, my affection for her, for Ett, passed into a sort of tantrum of a lesser order—it felt like weariness of spirit at the time (Je congnois tout), a boredom with their childishness; they seemed so cramped and pitiable, Inez and Ett, so petty and competitive, falling like hammers on my nerves and on each other’s like parents fastening children to dead urgencies. I was tired of the dinginess of Ett’s heart (actually, he has quite a good heart as hearts go: he is loyal) and of Inez’s blindness (she is not so unenlightened, all in all). So that when the girl with the almost plain, nice face inside its cap of coarse-textured, unfashionable, wavy hair, with its exercise-reddened cheeks and rather dim nose and modest chin, riding by on her bicycle between two girlfriends, smiled and flicked her hand shyly at me, that girl who was most likely a student of mine, since she had that lectured look, and her smile and hand flick were so decidedly tenuous that it seemed she knew my reputation for extreme rudeness in public to students, I smiled back. I cannot abide students’ pussyfooting after father surrogates, after extra attentions, their attempts at quasi or real seductions—their way of becoming instantly human. I cannot abide it, I am too easily shaken; I like formality and approaches and smiles as careful as flower arrangements. I smiled merely to express my attachment to the freshness that semi-unknown girl represented. I did not smile at her. I smiled to assert my separation from Inez and Ett and from the stale and intricate branchings of their still living but spindly and often graceless affection for each other. The girl’s face broke. The unexpectedness of the intensity of my response pulled at her composure, gave her face a harsh twist: a collapse of preconceptions. I am not a handsome man, but I teach English prose and poetry. I stink of romance in a marginal way. Too late I wished to retract my smile.

  The three girls glanced at each other, pulled over to the side of the road—I had not really looked at any of them. One of the other girls waited, I think, until my glance moved that way: she had her hand in the air—waiting. When I saw her, I smiled irritably as I usually do and continued to talk to Inez; I suggested we ride on, but Inez said, “A moment—I must catch my breath.” Jeanie’s friends said to her (she told me later), “He only recognizes you.” Jeanie said, “He smiled at all of us.” “No,” said the others, “he only really smiled at you. He likes you.”

  Jeanie said to me later, “They teased me into talking to you.”

  I think Jeanie still sees me as Yeats’s Vicar on earth; she was a young girl. No two souls met that day in the park: two types encountered each other.

  Walking her bicycle, hands on the handlebars, her breasts pressed into a diagonal, her face naive and bold and stupid and lovely in its carnal aggression rising, a dotted square with rounded chin above the oblique lines of her twisted breast—head and breast, head and breast—she moves through the stream of cyclists on that day of easy presumption. Does she think life is safe or kind? Will she wake in my arms, naked, see me looming over her and fear me and the way I think, and cry out despairingly, inwardly, “How did this happen to me?”

  That day Ett and I notice her simultaneously. It is very soon after a divorce, and what I feel chiefly is nothingness. The girl swallows bravely; a flush has overspread her nondescript face; her back is straight. Youthful inanity makes her voice gawky, touching. But I have closed my eyes to her; I am irritated, horrified by her presumption. She is an intruder. She says boldly, “Hello, Professor Hofstedt, do you go bicycle riding often?”

  I am completely unattracted by her, but Ett is looking at her. I see him looking at her in such a way that it is as if someone is underlining a passage in a book.

  “Oh,” Jeanie says angrily to me from time to time, “why do you make everything so complicated?” I shrug, and have yet to reply, “I know no simple stories.”

  Ett’s gaze drew something like a line of light around her—I thought, He sees her as a younger Inez. From that moment, the girl was never to be anonymous to me again.

  THE

  SHOOTING

  RANGE

  I

  ANN KAMPFEL went to Millburg, Illinois, in the summer of 1934, to make a time-motion study of the manufacture of small-bore rifles in the Axel-Lambwell Small Arms Plant. She went as a secret member of the Communist Party. She was twenty years old, a tall, thin, pale-faced girl with large wrists and square, nervous hands.


  She believed in the Party but not as much as she believed in what she thought Communist ideals were—the brotherhood of man and the release of men from economic pressures that distorted them and their lives.

  She was not clever. In her first year at college, a boy, shorter than she was, and with blond hair, had seduced her and brought her into the Party. She soon bored him, and he grew a mustache and transferred to another college. Ann continued in the Party and grew paler and thinner and thought often of the happiness she had lost. She had a mathematical facility, and she was accurate and painstaking, and she entered the Engineering Department, where she specialized in statistical studies of mass-production techniques. The time-motion study of the manufacture of small-bore rifles was to be her honors thesis.

  It cost her five dollars a week to rent two rooms with a bath in the downtown section of Millburg. She went by streetcar—by trolley—to the plant every morning. The owner of the plant, on the chance her time-motion study would be useful to him, assigned his chief foreman to give her what help, information, or instruction she needed.

  The foreman was in his late thirties, a neat, orderly man. He had very light brown hair. His name was Walter Campbell; he had not finished high school; he was married and had three children; he neither smoked nor drank.

  He behaved toward Ann with that unremitting respect which suggests the conviction of one’s inferiority to someone of a higher order, more worthy, more valuable, more delicate.

  Having noticed that Ann rode the trolley, he ventured to suggest she permit him to drive her home in the evenings. He believed it must be disagreeable for a college girl, a “lady,” an “efficiency expert,” to ride on a crowded trolley with workingmen. Ann had tried to explain she did not mind taking the streetcar, but Walter, within his meekness and deference, proved unexpectedly stubborn.

  Ann wondered if anything could be done to arouse a man who was so patently a tool of the bosses.