Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Doris never said she was my mother; she never insisted that I had to love her; she asked things of me on the grounds that I was selfish by nature and cold and cut off from human feeling and despised people too much, and she said, “Be manly—that’s all I ask.” She said, “I don’t ask you things that aren’t good for you—it’s for your own good for you to be kind to me.” She would yell at me, “It won’t hurt you to help me! You have time for another chance!” Doris yelled, “What do you think it does to me to see you exercising in your room—when I have to die?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Does it bother you a lot?”

  “You’re a fool!” she screamed. “Don’t make me wish you’d get cancer so you’d know what I’m going through!”

  If I ignored her or argued with her, she became violent, and then temper and fright—even the breaths she drew—spoiled the balance of pain and morphine in her; sometimes then she would howl. If I went to her, she would scream, “Go away, don’t touch me—you’ll hurt me!” It was like having to stand somewhere and watch someone being eaten by wild dogs. I couldn’t believe I was seeing such pain. I would stop seeing: I would stand there and be without sight; the bottom of my stomach would drop away; there is a frightening cold shock that comes when you accept the reality of someone else’s pain. Twice I was sick, I threw up. But Doris used my regret at her pain as if it were love.

  She would start to yell at me at times, and I would lift my arm, my hand, hold them rigidly toward her and say, “Momma, don’t … don’t …” She would say, “Then don’t make me yell at you. Don’t cause me that pain.”

  It seemed the meagerest imaginable human decency not to be a party to further pain for her. But the list of things that she said caused her pain grew and grew: It upset her to see high spirits in me or a long face; and a neutral look made her think I’d forgotten her predicament; she hated any reference to sports, but she also hated it if I wasn’t athletic—it reflected on her if I was a momma’s boy. She hated to talk to me—I was a child—but she had no one else to talk to; that was a humiliation for her. She hated the sight of any pleasure near her, even daydreaming; she suspected that I had some notion of happiness in mind. And she hated it when anyone called me—that was evidence someone had a crush on me. She thought it would help her if I loved no one, was loved by no one, if I accepted help from no one. “How do you think it makes me feel? They don’t want to help me, and I’m the one who’s dying.” She could not bear any mention of the future, any reference especially to my future. “Don’t you understand! I won’t be here!”

  Sometimes she would apologize; she would say, “It’s not me who says those things; it’s the pain. It’s not fair for me to have this pain: you don’t know what it’s like. I can’t stand it, Buddy. I’m a fighter.”

  She said, “Why don’t you know how to act so I don’t lose my temper? You aggravate me and then I scream at you and it’s not good for me. Why don’t you understand? What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to be so smart but I swear to God you don’t understand anything—you’re no help to me. Why don’t you put yourself in my place? Why don’t you cooperate with me?”

  She had scorned whatever comfort—or blame—her family had offered her; she said it was incompetent; and she scorned the comfort tendered by the rabbi, who was, she said, “not a man—he’s silly” and she suspected the doctors of lying to her, and the treatments they gave her she thought were vile and careless and given with contempt for her. “They burned me,” Doris whimpered, “they burned me.” Her chest was coated with radium burns, with an unpliable, discolored shell. She was held within an enforced, enraged, fearful stiffness. She couldn’t take a deep breath. She could only whisper. Her wingspan was so great I could not get near her. I would come home from school and she would be lying on the couch in the living room, whimpering and abject, crying with great carefulness, but angry: She would berate me in whispers: “I hate to tell you this, but what you are is selfish, and it’s a problem you’re going to have all your life, believe me. You don’t care if anyone lives or dies. No one is important to you—but you. I would rather go through what I’m going through than be like you.” At two in the morning, she came into my room, turned on the ceiling light, and said, “Wake up! Help me. Buddy, wake up.” I opened my eyes. I was spread-eagled mentally, like someone half on one side of a high fence, half on the other, but between waking and sleeping. We sometimes had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. The jumble of words in my head was: emerging, urgent, murderer, emergency. I did not call out.

  She said, “Look what they’ve done to me. My God, look what they’ve done to me.” She lowered her nightgown to her waist. The eerie colors of her carapace and the jumble of scars moved into my consciousness like something in a movie advancing toward the camera, filling and overspreading the screen. That gargoylish torso. She spoke first piteously, then ragingly. Her eyes were averted, then she fixed them on me. She was on a flight of emotion, a drug passage, but I did not think of that: I felt her emotion like bat wings, leathery and foreign, filling the room; and I felt her animosity. It was directed at me, but at moments it was not and I was merely the only consciousness available to her to trespass upon. She said, “I scratched myself while I slept—look, there’s blood.”

  She had not made me cry since I was a child; I had not let her; nothing had ever made me scream except dreams I’d had that my first mother was not dead but was returning. Certain figures of speech are worn smooth but accurate: I was racked; everything was breaking; I was about to break.

  I shouted, “Stop it.”

  She said, enraged, “Am I bothering you? Are you complaining about me? Do you know what I’m suffering?”

  I said, “No.” Then I said—I couldn’t think of anything sensible—“It doesn’t look so bad, Momma.”

  She said, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you talk stupidly?” Locks of hair trailed over her face. She said, “No one wants to touch me.”

  I raised my eyebrows and stuck my head forward and jerked it in a single nod, a gesture boys used then for O.K. when they weren’t too pleased, and I climbed out of bed. My mother told me at breakfast the next day not to mind what she had done, it had been the drug in her that made her do what she did; the bat wings of her drug flight seemed when I stood up to fold back, to retreat inside her: she was not so terrifying. Merely unlikable. And sickening. I put my arms around her and said, “See. I can hug you.”

  She let out a small scream. “You’re hurting me.”

  “O.K., but now go back to bed, Momma. You need your sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep. Why don’t you want to kill the doctor for what he’s done to me …?”

  She said for weeks, whenever she was drugged, “If I was a man, I’d be willing to be hanged for killing a man who did this to a woman I loved.”

  She’d had five years of various illnesses and now cancer and she still wasn’t dead.

  I would come home from school to the shadowy house, the curtains drawn and no lights on, or perhaps one, and she would be roaming barefooted with wisps of her hair sticking out and her robe lopsided and coming open; when I stood there, flushed with hurrying, and asked, “Momma, is it worse?” or whatever, she would look at me with pinched-face insanity and it would chill me. She would shout, “What do you mean, is it worse? Don’t you know yet what’s happened to me? What else can it be but worse! What’s wrong with you? You’re more of my punishment, you’re helping to kill me, do you think I’m made of iron? You come in here and want me to act like your valentine! I don’t need any more of your I-don’t-know-what! You’re driving me crazy, do you hear me? On top of everything else, you’re driving me out of my mind.”

  Feelings as they occur are experienced as if they were episodes in Kafka, overloaded with hints of meaning that reek of eternity and the inexplicable and that suggest your dying—always your dying—at the hands of a murderousness in events if you are not immediately soothed, if everything is not explained at once.
It is your own selfishness or shamefulness, or someone else’s or perhaps something in fate itself, that is the murderer; or what kills is the proof that your pain is minor and is the responsibility of someone who does not care. I didn’t know why I couldn’t shrug off what she did and said; I didn’t blame her; I even admired her when I didn’t have to face her; but I did not see why these things had to happen, why she had to say these things. I think it mattered to her what I felt. That is, if I came in and said, “Hello, Momma,” she would demand, “Is that all you can say? I’m in pain. Don’t you care? My God, my God, what kind of selfish person are you? I can’t stand it.”

  If I said, “Hello, Momma, how is your pain?” she would shriek, “You fool, I don’t want to think about it! It was all right for a moment! Look what you’ve done—you’ve brought it back. … I don’t want to be reminded of my pain all the time!”

  She would yell, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you know how to talk to me! My God, do you think it’s easy to die? Oh my God, I don’t like this. I don’t like what’s happening to me! My luck can’t be this bad.” And then she would start in on me: “Why do you just stand there? Why do you just listen to me! It doesn’t do me any good to have you there listening! You don’t do anything to help me—what’s wrong with you? You think I’m like an animal? Like a worm? You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t understand anything, you’re no good to me, you were never any good to me. I’d laugh at you, you’re so useless to me, but it hurts me to laugh: what good are you to me? Do something for me! Put yourself in my place! Help me! Why don’t you help me?”

  Sometimes she would say in a horrible voice, “I’ll tell you what you are—I’ll tell you what everyone is! They’re trash! They’re all trash! My God, my God, how can my life be like this? I didn’t know it would be like this.…”

  I really did not ever speak to anyone about what went on at home, but one of the teachers at school suggested that I apply for a scholarship to Exeter, so that I could get away from the “tragedy in your home.” And get a good education as well. I was secretly hopeful about going to boarding school a thousand miles away. I did not at all mind the thought that I would be poorer and less literate than the boys there. I figured I would be able to be rude and rebellious and could be hateful without upsetting my mother and I could try to get away with things.

  I remember the two of us, Doris and me, in the shadowy living room: I’m holding some books, some textbooks. She’s wearing a short wraparound housecoat, with a very large print of vile yellow and red flowers with green leaves on a black background. I’ve just told her casually I can go away to school; I put it that I would not be a burden on her anymore or get on her nerves; I told her I did not want to be a burden—I said something like that; that was my attempt at tact. She said, “All right—leave me too—you’re just like all the rest. You don’t love anyone, you never loved anyone. You didn’t even mourn when your real mother died, you don’t ever think about her. I’ll tell you what you are: you’re filth. Go. Get out of here. Move out of here tonight. Pack up and go. I don’t need you. No one will ever need you. You’re a book, a stick, you’re all book learning, you don’t know anything about people—if I didn’t teach you about people, people would laugh at you all the time, do you hear me?”

  I went into another room and I think I was sitting there or maybe I was gathering together the ten or fifteen books I owned—having with a kind of boy’s dishonesty, I suppose, taken Doris’s harangue as permission to leave her, as her saying yes in her way to my going away, my saving myself—when she came in. She’d put on lipstick and a hair ribbon; and her face, which had been twisted up, was half all right: the lines were pretty much up and down and not crooked; and my heart began to beat sadly for myself—she was going to try to be nice for a little while; she was going to ask me to stay.

  AFTER THAT she seemed to feel I’d proved that I belonged to her; or it had been proved I was a man she could hold near her still. Every day, I came home from school, and Doris fluttered down from her filthy aerie of monstrous solitude and pain: in a flurry of dust and to the beating of leathery wings, she asked me a riddle. Sometimes she threatened me: she’d say, “You’ll die in misery, too—help me now and maybe God will be good to you.” Or she’d say, “You’ll end like me if you don’t help me!” She’d say it with her face screwed up in fury. She’d say, “Why don’t you put yourself in my place and understand what I’m going through.” It occurred to me that she really didn’t know what she was saying—she was uttering words that sounded to her close to something she really wanted to say; but what she said wasn’t what she meant. Maybe what she meant couldn’t be said. Or she was being sly because she was greedy and using bluff or a shortcut and partly it was her own mental limitation and ineptness: that is, she couldn’t say what she hadn’t thought out.

  It wasn’t enough that I stayed with her and did not go to Exeter. She railed at me, “You’re not doing me any good—why don’t you go live in the Orphans’ Home: that’s where heartless people who don’t deserve to have a family belong.” We both knew that I didn’t have to go to the Orphans’ Home, but maybe neither of us knew what she meant when she demanded I help her. It was queer, the daily confrontations, Doris and me not knowing what she wanted from me or even what the riddle really was that she was asking. She crouched there or seemed to at those moments, in the narrow neck of time between afternoon and evening, between the metaphorical afternoon of her being consigned to death and the evening of her actual dying, and she asked me some Theban riddle while she was blurred with drugs, with rage, and I looked at her and did not know what to do.

  But after a while I knew sort of what she was asking: I knew sort of what the riddle was; but I couldn’t be sure. I knew it was partly she wanted me to show I loved her in some way that mattered to her, that would be useful; and it was wrong of her to ask, I knew because she was ashamed or afraid when she spoke to me and she averted her eyes, or they would be sightless, unfocused from the morphine. In a way, pity could not make me do anything, or love. The final reasons are always dry ones, or rational and petty: I wanted to do something absolutely straightforward and finally loyal to her, something that would define my life with her in such a way that it would calm her and enable me to be confident and less ashamed in the future and more like other people. And also if I was going to live with her for a while, things had to change; I wanted to know that life for me did not have to be like this. Things had to be made bearable for both of us.

  It doesn’t sound sensible—to make her dying and my being with her bearable. But it is language and habit that make the sense odd. It was clear to me that after a process of fantastic subtraction I was all that was left to her. And for me, what with one odd subtraction and another, she was the only parent I had left to me; she was my mother.

  * * *

  I COULD half see, in the chuffing, truncated kind of thought available to my thirteen-year-old intelligence, that the only firm ground for starting was to be literal: she had asked me to put myself in her place. O.K. But what did that mean? How could I be a dying, middle-aged woman walking around in a housedress?

  I knew I didn’t know how to think; I guessed that I had the capacity—just the capacity—to think: that capacity was an enormous mystery to me, perhaps as a womb is to a woman. When I tried to think, I wandered in my head but not just in my head; I couldn’t sit down physically and be still and think: I had to be in movement and doing something else; and my attention flittered, lit, veered, returned. Almost everyone I knew could think better than I could. Whenever I thought anything through, I always became a little angry because I felt I’d had to think it out to reach a point that someone better parented would have known to start with. That is, whenever I thought hard, I felt stupid and underprivileged. I greatly preferred to feel. Thinking for me was always accompanied by resentment, and was in part a defensive, a rude and challenged staring at whatever I was trying to think about; and it was done obstinately and blunder
ingly—and it humiliated me.

  Death, death, I said to myself. I remembered Doris saying, “I don’t want to be shut up in a coffin.” That was fear and drama: it didn’t explain anything. But it did if she wasn’t dead yet: I mean I thought that maybe the question was dying. Dying. Going toward a coffin. Once when I was little I’d found a horizontal door in the grass next to a house; I had been so small the door had been very hard to lift and to lay down again because my arms were so short; when the door was open, you saw stairs, unexpected in the grass, and there was a smell of damp and it was dark below, and you went down into an orderly place, things on shelves, and the light, the noises, the day itself, the heat of the sun were far away; you were coolly melted; your skin, your name dissolved; you were turned into an openness, into being a mere listening and feeling; the stillness, the damp, the aloneness, the walls of earth, of moist, whitewashed plaster, soaked you up, blurred you; you did not have to answer when anyone called you.

  And when you fell from your bike, while you were falling, the way everything stopped except the knowledge that pain was coming. The blotting out of voices, the sudden distance of everything, the hope, the conviction almost that this was a dream, the way time drew out, was airy, and nothing was going to happen, and then everything turned to stone again; it was going to happen; the clatter of your bike crashing, your own fall; and then finally you sat up with disbelief and yet with knowledge: you saw your torn pants; you poked at the bleeding abrasions on your elbow that you had to twist your arm to see. You felt terrible but you didn’t know yet, you couldn’t know everything that had happened to you.