Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  When he was twenty, he said, he’d had a daydream about sex, “like most American boys” his daydream was that he would meet a woman whose desires matched his, “and everything would be simple—it’s a very typical daydream.” He had heard about a girl who was “a genuine nymphomaniac. I met her at a college football weekend. She encouraged me, and God, when I thought there I was, included in her nymphomania, well, I just about went out of my mind. There was this party at the frat house—I took her into the den—I locked the door.… Now, I want you to picture this. The den is covered with animal heads—water buffalo, moose, antelope: totems.… This story makes my analyst go out of his head, he thinks it’s so significant. I wanted this girl to think I was nonchalant—I was looped. I, ah, tossed her step-ins over the horns of the water buffalo. It was just Thorne Smith—you know—but she got on her high horse. She wouldn’t have anything to do with me after that. She was a nymphomaniac, but she wanted to be treated with respect. I’ve never been able to handle that kind of dishonesty. I’ve never been a true bourgeois. I’m kind of a radical, but I guess you can tell that from the way I’m dressed.… Do you dream much?” Fennie asked.

  “No,” Ann said. A lopsided moon floated above the rolling slopes of the golf course. “Au clair de la lune,” she said. She was a little drunk. She started down the stone steps. “I want to walk on the grass,” she said.

  When Fennie threw his arms about her near a grove of trees, Ann smiled gently.

  The comedy did not bother her, the laboriousness of the joke. She wasn’t after sex. She thought it would be nice to make Fennie’s dream come true.

  Fennie said, “Thank you for Paradise.”

  “Oh,” Ann said sophisticatedly, maternally. “You’ve never done it outdoors?”

  ANN THOUGHT that for Fennie the other night had not yet finished happening. He wanted sometimes to talk about it with her, but she refused. Fennie said, “You have such a sense of how to live!” He told her that he was known for his gloomy temper. “But that’s because I’m a very dissatisfied person au fond,” he told Ann. His father had been a judge. “I’m not an outcast,” Fennie said. “I get asked to the larger parties.… I like people too much or too little, and show it. I’m not considered reliable.” He went on at length; he disliked Milwaukee; he apologized to Ann: “I’m not romantic. Am I a great disappointment to you?”

  “I’m not romantic, either,” Ann said. “I loved a man once—I don’t want to go through that again.”

  “Yes, me too!” Fennie said. “I’ve had enough Sturm und Drang with my mother.”

  They were very relaxed lovers.

  Fennie said, “I’ve been thinking: after you go back to college, I could drive up and see you weekends—sometimes.”

  Ann’s eyes went blank. “Fennie, there’s someone else.” She was slightly cross; it was all so difficult and complicated.

  “Someone you love?” Fennie asked, breathing like a startled horse.

  “No, no. I told you I don’t love anyone.”

  “Does he love you?”

  “No, no, no, no!”

  “Ah,” said Fennie. With his eyes cast down, he said, “I suppose there’s an—an electricity between you.”

  “I don’t know what there is between us,” Ann said, concentrating.

  Fennie was humble. “I’m jealous,” he said.

  Ann said casually, “You come see me if you want. Just don’t make scenes.”

  Fennie visited her at college every other weekend. Ann admired his stubbornness; it seemed to her he was an undersized football player who knew he might be hurt but who kept on going anyway.

  He thought her very knowledgeable, and he followed her lead and obeyed her hints about the best way to make love. He was in awe of her moods; he was admiring.

  She was taken by a sense of poetry—the approaching summer was, she thought toughly, a time of violence; the yellow sun struck the brown, plowed farmland and left a green bruise: she was afloat on a rhetorical poetry of the senses.

  It suited Fennie, who had paid thirty-five dollars for a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to try to be a simple, uncomplicated man; he complicatedly mimicked the simplicity of such a man. Of a workman, Ann would have said. Of a gamekeeper, Fennie would have said.

  Ann took Fennie one warm afternoon to a meadow outside the college town; the meadow was ringed with birches and oaks and had a dead oak in its center, and Ann and Fennie agreed the meadow looked like nature’s imitation of photographs of the Place Vendôme. Ann and Fennie walked in the meadow, and the weeds and clover they crushed beneath their feet gave off a sweet, vegetable fragrance. Fennie said he was so happy that he wouldn’t mind dying then and there. Then added, with surprise, “I mean it.”

  Ann had not stopped sleeping with the boy from the boardinghouse and in a mindless way preferred him to Fennie because she had known him longer; he had precedence. But that day in the meadow, rising from their afternoon’s rest, Fennie said bitterly as he brushed off Ann’s back and picked bits of grass out of her hair, “There, you look as if nothing’s happened.” Ann suddenly heard the truth of the terrible complaint in his voice; she had been immune to Fennie. She shivered, and broke and ran like a frightened colt toward the road.

  She couldn’t bear it—making a simple, uncomplicated man who admired her unhappy.… Fennie was pleased to see that he had that power over her. He had no other power over her at all—only this, of his unhappiness.

  Fennie took Ann to a hotel one night; their room had immense red roses on the carpet. Ann lay on the bed, her shoes off, an electric fan blowing on her shoulder. Fennie, making drinks, his back to her, said jocularly, “Ann, you’re the cat’s pajamas, I’ll tell the world.” Then, with his back to her, he said he wanted to ask her a question. “The question is,” he said, his back to her, “concerned with marriage.”

  “Oh!” Ann cried.

  Fennie’s confidence rose in proportion to Ann’s dismay, as if any intimation of weakness in her strengthened him. He said, almost deliriously, “Why shouldn’t we get married? Don’t worry about my mother or my analyst!” he said, keeping his back to her the entire time. “I can take care of them.”

  Ann began to cry. She thought, It didn’t matter what I did; this was the one I was bound to end up with. This one will marry me.

  III

  SHE AND FENNIE went before a justice of the peace seven days later. Ann had been determined to have a civil ceremony, with no family present; indeed, neither family knew of the marriage yet. “I don’t want their emotions,” Ann said. “This is private, Fennie. It’s embarrassing enough as it is.”

  After the ceremony, she and Fennie sat in the used 1932 Plymouth he had bought to have his own car to come up and see her on weekends. Her hands were shaking and so were his. The early-morning heat and sun and the Sunday stillness enclosed the car in a fragile envelope. The heat, the stillness held an unfocused and shaming memory; Ann stared palely out the window—perhaps she was listening for an approaching train. Suddenly Fennie leaned forward and put his head in her lap. “You make me so happy,” he said, as if apologizing for having married her.

  Ann kissed the back of his head with straightforward tenderness: “I’ll be a good wife to you, Fennie.” She thought, June 16, 1935, and I’m married.

  Ann walked into her family’s house in Milwaukee while Fennie waited in the car. Ann’s mother exclaimed, “I said to your brother at Easter—'That girl’s ready to get married’!”

  Then Ann called Fennie inside. She thought he would be put off by her mother’s air of triumph, but later, when they were driving toward his house, he told Ann he liked her mother very much. Ann said, “Maybe you just like mothers—period.”

  At Fennie’s house, a maid let them in; Fennie’s mother was sitting in the upstairs parlor. Fennie said from the doorway of the room, “Mother, this is Ann Kampfei Fennimore. I married her this morning. You may have lost the battle but you’ve won a wonderful daughter.”

  Fennie’s mothe
r, a large, plain woman, said, “Oh, Fennie! Can’t we talk this over?”

  Ann covered her face with her hands.

  She meant to protect Fennie from his mother, take care of him, but he did not let her; he was very busy over the next few weeks; he was in a very trance of warfare, fighting with his mother, with his analyst—“I’ve outgrown analysis, Ann. You’ve given me maturity”—and baby-talking with Ann, calling her “wifey-ifey” and getting hurt when she forgot her name was Mrs. Fennimore. Fennie would say, “My mother is a hysterical old bitch! I have a headache.” His mother would telephone late at night—hoping, Fennie claimed, to interrupt his and Ann’s love-making—to say she heard prowlers and wished she had a loyal watchdog; to say she had forgotten to ask Fennie about her rental property in Waukegan; or simply to say good night. She was polite. She said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t phone so late, but I don’t sleep much.” Ann thought Fennie was neurotic about his mother. Ann and Fennie would quarrel; Fennie would shout, “All I’m asking is that you stroke my forehead!” Ann would shout, “You stroke my forehead! I have a headache, too.” Ann’s mother compounded the strain by telling Ann, “That dreadful woman has been saying dreadful things about you all over town.” Ann, who did not mean to be upset, burst into tears when she told Fennie. (And Ann’s brother’s wife was difficult; and Fennie’s cousins and the young women who gave teas were envious: now that he was married, Fennie was a catch; and inquisitive: how had Ann caught him; and pushy, pushy, pushy.) Fennie said, “That woman will stop at nothing to get her own way.” “Which woman?” Ann asked tearfully. “Fennie, which woman?”

  Fennie had dragged her into this world; Ann sometimes woke up from strangely anonymous daydreams, in which a man had a rendezvous with her in a woods, in the country, to find that Fennie was staring at her. “Ann,” he said, “I think the sex you and I have is very interesting. Do you think it’s good?”

  One evening, when the windows in her apartment were open and electric fans whirred, blurring the wine-colored twilight outside, Ann contemplated suicide or divorce. She struggled with her mood. Finally, she said, “Fennie, I think we should leave Milwaukee.”

  Fennie, wet, wrapped partially in a towel, appeared in the door of the room. “What did you say?” She repeated it. Fennie caught his breath. The difficulties were immense, he pointed out; there were any number of things to be afraid of, such as being disinherited. He paused. “I’ve always wanted to leave Milwaukee,” he said. “I never had the nerve.” He said, “I’ll be grateful to you for this, I think, for the rest of my life.”

  Fennie found a job through a college classmate. He would work for the government in Washington.

  It took Ann and Fennie a week to pack; Fennie had a special system for packing their books in alphabetical order so they could easily be arranged on shelves in Washington. Ann said, “I feel a great burden has been lifted from me. I think I’ve been afraid the whole time we’ve been here. Well, I won’t be frightened anymore. What we must remember, Fennie, is that the past is dead.”

  She thought it strange that there were so many beginnings in the beginnings of a marriage.

  ANN SAID of Washington, “It feels like a Southern town.”

  She worked as a statistician and earned eleven hundred and fifty-five dollars a year. Fennie, at the Department of Commerce, as a junior member of its panel of legal advisers, earned three thousand. Fennie had nine hundred and fifty dollars a year from a trust fund. His mother had said she would send him fifty dollars a month, but she sometimes forgot. Ann’s share of her family’s business was eleven hundred dollars a year. Ann and Fennie knew themselves to be prosperous.

  They took a three-room apartment near Dupont Circle. Ann thought the apartment beautiful; she dreamed about it in her sleep and woke to find herself there. Fennie sometimes said to her in the morning, “You’re my s-wheatie, my breakfast of champions.”

  Ann believed that Fennie should share in the work of running the apartment. “Men and women are equals,” Ann said; Fennie agreed. “There’s a lot of dead lumber to be cleared away in these matters,” he said.

  In those early months, they would meet after work and drive home together and shop together. At the grocery, Fennie was excited and unreliable. He would hurry to Ann’s side while she studied two cans of green peas and did the complicated weight-price figuring necessary to determine which was the best buy—Ann felt American industry should be policed by intelligent consumers—and he would whisper, “Honey” (he had started to pick up bits of a Southern speech), “the butcher says he has Virginia smoked ham, the real McCoy.”

  “How much is it?” Ann would ask.

  Fennie was inclined to take Ann’s frugality as a criticism of his masculinity.

  Sometimes Ann and Fennie would be stiff and silent in each other’s company after the difficulties of shopping together, depressed at the differences there were between them. Ann would be the one to break the silence: “Why are all the lights in the windows so yellow, Fennie? Is it because of the dust in the atmosphere?” He had once explained to her that dust in the air caused the brilliance of sunsets. It was her way of making peace.

  Relieved, Fennie would say something silly like “Because chickens cross the road.” Ann thought Fennie’s humor was surrealist; the silliest of his remarks could plunge her into hilarity. She would laugh. Fennie would laugh at the sight of her laughing. Giggling, laughing, and sighing, they would continue home, their laughter following them like tame birds.

  Fennie did not go on very long helping her shop. He did not help her with the apartment, either. Exhausted in the evenings, after a long day of being a new man in the office, he would collapse and ask Ann to make him a drink. “You like to baby me,” Fennie said. “You like to do it because you love me,” he said to her.

  She did not contradict him.

  Ann found it hard to get used to—that people thought of her as fortunate, young, and happy. And interesting. She wanted to be left alone and not have men make suggestive remarks to her or put ideas into her head, and she did her hair in a bun and wore loose-fitting clothes to hide her figure, which was considered in Washington to be very good-looking—long-limbed and slender.

  Fennie pressed on her volumes of Havelock Ellis to read, and Ulysses, and Women in Love, and popular accounts of Freudian theories; Ann grew angry and said he was silly and she would not read them. She knew more about sex than any book, she said.

  On those occasions when Fennie would say that he knew she did not love him as much as he loved her, Ann would say angrily, “That’s stupid, Fennie. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  In some ways—so it seemed to Ann—Fennie was simply an overeducated, overtalkative, middle-class male who overcomplicated things. She was menaced by what she felt in him to be a destructive male element: “Don’t think too much,” she would say to him. She did love him, but she did not want her feelings examined. She sometimes thought of Walter. She would be pale and worn out and sprawled in a chair. “You’re tired,” Fennie would say.

  “No, I’m not,” Ann would cry, and jump up and start cleaning out ashtrays. He did not know everything.

  Sometimes it brought her close to terror when he spoke of her moods, as if he had lunged out at her in a dark hallway and said, “Boo!” in a ringing voice. Her heart would take several minutes to settle down.

  Ann’s and Fennie’s new friends, men and women alike, condemned dishonesty—dishonesty of emotion, of fact, in sex, and in government. They disliked snobbery but could not help thinking that people who were unlike them were unfortunate, foolish, or greedy. The couples spent what money they had on war relief for Spain, Ethiopia, or China, on books, whiskey, superior dentists, and cleaning women; they paid three dollars a week for their cleaning women. They agreed that the world was not fit for people to bring children into and that the men should not be distracted by more responsibilities. Yet an alarming number of Ann’s friends became pregnant as the months went by, especially when the stock market went up. Ann read
the stock-market news and did not admit that she wanted to be pregnant. Fennie did not want children just now. Ann said, with a little laugh, “You want to be the only baby in the family.” Fennie said, “Be reasonable,” and Ann bit her lip and tried to be reasonable.

  It became a point of honor not to think of Walter anymore, and his honesty and his dignity. She was not disloyal to Fennie.

  She thought it almost comic how soon after marriage Fennie stopped respecting her mind. Sometimes he asked her what she was thinking of when they made love; lately he complained. He would say, “Concentrate on me more.” He did not have so much interest in making Ann happy. It was as if love were a long board and he could not carry it from his end and wanted to lay it down, although he loved her sadness—only he could ease it. Suddenly he was interested in his own life again, that part of him that was not attached to Ann.

  “There’s an intelligent man at the office,” Fennie said. He said Clerkenwall Franklyn came from a distinguished Quaker family, was brilliant, was a genuine Philadelphia lawyer. “Franklyn,” Fennie announced, “says we have to come to terms with the bourgeoisie. We can use them and steal the country back from them at the same time! We can do it just the way they stole it from us—legally!”

  “Oh,” said Ann, her lips disapproving, “how can you think you can compromise with the bourgeoisie!”

  “We have to!” Fennie said enthusiastically. “Who else can run local enterprises?”

  “The brighter workingmen,” Ann said, breathing irregularly.

  “My dear wifey-ifey, the brighter workingmen are bourgeois, only without the broader commercial imagination,” Fennie said.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Ann said.

  “Well, let’s talk about it some other time,” Fennie said.

  When Ann was certain she was pregnant, she went to Fennie and told him that if he thought it was a bad time to have a child she would, of course, as three of her friends had, get an abortion. Fennie reminded her of their dream of working for the good of the country. “First things first,” he said. “Am I right?” he asked, omitting to ask if she wanted the child.