Momma will then stalk into wherever Daddy is and say to him, “Charley, you can be mad at me, I’m used to it, but just go take a look and see what you’ve done to the child.…”
My uselessness toward him sickens me. Anyone who fails toward him might as well be struck down, abandoned, eaten.
Perhaps it is an animal state: I-have-nothing-left, I-have-no-place-in-this-world.
Well, this is his house. Momma tells me in various ways to love him. Also, he is entrancing—he is so big, so thunderish, so smelly, and has the most extraordinary habits, reading newspapers, for instance, and wiggling his shoe: his shoe is gross: kick someone with that and they’d fall into next week.
SOME MEMORIES huddle in a grainy light. What it is is a number of similar events bunching themselves, superimposing themselves, to make a false memory, a collage, a mental artifact. Within the boundaries of one such memory one plunges from year to year, is small and helpless, is a little older: one remembers it all but it is nothing that happened, that clutch of happenings, of associations, those gifts and ghosts of a meaning.
I can, if I concentrate, whiten the light—or yellow-whiten it, actually—and when the graininess goes, it is suddenly one afternoon.
I COULD NOT live without the pride and belonging-to-himness of being that man’s consolation. He had the disposal of the rights to the out-of-doors—he was the other, the other-not-a-woman: he was my strength, literally, my strength if I should cry out.
Flies and swarms of the danger of being unfathered beset me when I bored my father: it was as if I were covered with flies on the animal plain where some ravening wild dog would leap up, bite and grip my muzzle, and begin to bring about my death.
I had no protection: I was subject now to the appetite of whatever inhabited the dark.
A child collapses in a sudden burst of there-is-nothing-here, and that is added onto nothingness, the nothing of being only a child concentrating on there being nothing there, no hope, no ambition: there is a despair but one without magnificence except in the face of its completeness: I am a child and am without strength of my own.
I HAVE—in my grief—somehow managed to get to the back deck: I am sitting in the early-evening light; I am oblivious to the light. I did and didn’t hear his footsteps, the rumble, the house thunder dimly (behind and beneath me), the thunder of his-coming-to-rescue-me.… I did and didn’t hear him call my name.
I spoke only the gaping emptiness of grief—that tongue—I understood I had no right to the speech of fathers and sons.
My father came out on the porch. I remember how stirred he was, how beside himself that I was so unhappy, that a child, a child he liked, should suffer so. He laid aside his own mood—his disgust with life, with money, with the excesses of the women—and he took on a broad-winged, malely flustering, broad-winged optimism—he was at the center of a great beating (of the heart, a man’s heart, of a man’s gestures, will, concern), dust clouds rising, a beating determination to persuade me that the nature of life, of my life, was other than I’d thought, other than whatever had defeated me—he was about to tell me there was no need to feel defeated, he was about to tell me that I was a good, or even a wonderful, child.
HE KNEELED—a mountain of shirtfront and trousers; a mountain that poured, clambered down, folded itself, re-formed itself: a disorderly massiveness, near to me, fabric-hung-and-draped: Sinai. He said, “Here, here, what is this—what is a child like you doing being so sad?” And: “Look at me.… It’s all right.… Everything is all right.…” The misstatements of consolation are lies about the absolute that require faith—and no memory: the truth of consolation can be investigated if one is a proper child—that is to say, affectionate—only in a nonskeptical way.
“It’s not all right!”
“It is—it is.” It was and wasn’t a lie: it had to do with power—and limitations: my limitations and his power: he could make it all right for me, everything, provided my everything was small enough and within his comprehension.
Sometimes he would say, “Son”—he would say it heavily—“don’t be sad—I don’t want you to be sad—I don’t like it when you’re sad—”
I can’t look into his near and, to me, factually incredible face—incredible because so large (as at the beginning of a love affair): I mean as a face: it is the focus of so many emotions and wonderments: he could have been a fool or was—it was possibly the face of a fool, someone self-centered, smug, an operator, semicriminal, an intelligent psychoanalyst; it was certainly a mortal face—but what did the idea or word mean to me then—mortal?
There was a face; it was as large as my chest; there were eyes, inhumanly big, humid—what could they mean? How could I read them? How do you read eyes? I did not know about comparisons: how much more affectionate he was than other men, or less, how much better than common experience or how much worse in this area of being fathered my experience was with him: I cannot say even now; it is a statistical matter, after all, a matter of averages: but who at the present date can phrase the proper questions for the poll? And who will understand the hesitations, the blank looks, the odd expressions on the faces of the answerers?
The odds are he was a—median—father. He himself had usually a conviction he did pretty well; sometimes he despaired—of himself—but blamed me: my love: or something: or himself as a father: he wasn’t good at managing stages between strong, clear states of feeling. Perhaps no one is.
Anyway, I knew no such terms as median then: I did not understand much about those parts of his emotions that extended past the rather clear area where my emotions were so often amazed. I chose, in some ways, to regard him seriously: in other ways, I had no choice—he was what was given to me.
I cannot look at him, as I said: I cannot see anything: if I look at him without seeing him, my blindness insults him: I don’t want to hurt him at all: I want nothing: I am lost and have surrendered and am really dead and am waiting without hope.
HE KNOWS how to rescue people. Whatever he doesn’t know, one of the things he knows in the haste and jumble of his heart, among the blither of tastes in his mouth and opinions and sympathies in his mind and so on, is the making yourself into someone who will help someone who is wounded. The dispersed and unlikely parts of him come together for a while in a clucking and focused arch of abiding concern. Oh how he plows ahead; oh how he believes in rescue! He puts—he shoves—he works an arm behind my shoulders, another under my legs: his arms, his powers shove at me, twist, lift, and jerk me until I am cradled in the air, in his arms: “You don’t have to be unhappy—you haven’t hurt anyone—don’t be sad—you’re a nice boy.…”
I can’t quite hear him, I can’t quite believe him. I can’t be good—the confidence game is to believe him, is to be a good child who trusts him—we will both smile then, he and I. But if I hear him, I have to believe him still. I am set up that way. He is so big; he is the possessor of so many grandeurs. If I believe him, hope and pleasure will start up again—suddenly—the blankness in me will be relieved, broken by these—meanings—that it seems he and I share in some big, attaching way.
In his pride he does not allow me to suffer: I belong to him.
HE IS RISING, jerkily, to his feet and holding me at the same time. I do not have to stir to save myself—I only have to believe him. He rocks me into a sad-edged relief and an achingly melancholy delight with the peculiar lurch as he stands erect of establishing his balance and rectifying the way he holds me, so he can go on holding me, holding me aloft, against his chest: I am airborne: I liked to have that man hold me—in the air: I knew it was worth a great deal, the embrace, the gift of altitude. I am not exposed on the animal plain. I am not helpless.
The heat his body gives off! It is the heat of a man sweating with regret. His heartbeat, his burning, his physical force: ah, there is a large rent in the nothingness: the mournful apparition of his regret, the proof of his loyalty wake me: I have a twin, a massive twin, mighty company: Daddy’s grief is at my grief
: my nothingness is echoed in him (if he is going to have to live without me): the rescue was not quite a secular thing. The evening forms itself, a classroom, a brigade of shadows, of phenomena—the tinted air slides: there are shadowy skaters everywhere; shadowy cloaked people step out from behind things that are then hidden behind their cloaks. An alteration in the air proceeds from openings in the ground, from leaks in the sunlight, which is being disengaged, like a stubborn hand, or is being stroked shut like my eyelids when I refuse to sleep: the dark rubs and bubbles noiselessly—and seeps—into the landscape. In the rubbed distortion of my inner air, twilight soothes: there are two of us breathing in close proximity here (he is telling me that grownups sometimes have things on their minds, he is saying mysterious things that I don’t comprehend); I don’t want to look at him: it takes two of my eyes to see one of his—and then I mostly see myself in his eye: he is even more unseeable from here, this holder: my head falls against his neck. “I know what you like—you’d like to go stand on the wall—would you like to see the sunset?” Did I nod? I think I did: I nodded gravely: but perhaps he did not need an answer since he thought he knew me well.
WE ARE moving, this elephant and I, we are lumbering, down some steps, across grassy, uneven ground—the spoiled child in his father’s arms—behind our house was a little park—we moved across the grass of the little park. There are sun’s rays on the dome of the Moorish bandstand. The evening is moist, fugitive, momentarily sneaking, half welcomed in this hour of crime. My father’s neck. The stubble. The skin where the stubble stops. Exhaustion has me: I am a creature of failure, a locus of childishness, an empty skull: I am this being-young. We overrun the world, he and I, with his legs, with our eyes, with our alliance. We move on in a ghostly torrent of our being like this.
My father has the smell and feel of wanting to be my father. Guilt and innocence stream and restream in him. His face, I see now in memory, held an untiring surprise: as if some grammar of deed and purpose—of comparatively easy tenderness—startled him again and again, startled him continuously for a while. He said, “I guess we’ll just have to cheer you up—we’ll have to show you life isn’t so bad—I guess we weren’t any too careful of a little boy’s feelings, were we?” I wonder if all comfort is alike.
A man’s love is, after all, a fairly spectacular thing.
He said—his voice came from above me—he spoke out into the air, the twilight—“We’ll make it all right—just you wait and see.…”
He said, “This is what you like,” and he placed me on the wall that ran along the edge of the park, the edge of a bluff, a wall too high for me to see over, and which I was forbidden to climb: he placed me on the stubbed stone mountains and grouting of the walltop. He put his arm around my middle: I leaned against him: and faced outward into the salt of the danger of the height, of the view (we were at least one hundred and fifty feet; we were, therefore, hundreds of feet in the air); I was flicked at by narrow, abrasive bands of wind, evening wind, veined with sunset’s sun-crispness, strongly touched with coolness.
The wind would push at my eyelids, my nose, my lips. I heard a buzzing in my ears that signaled how high, how alone we were: this view of a river valley at night and of parts of four counties was audible. I looked into the hollow in front of me, a grand hole, an immense, bellying deep sheet or vast sock. There were numinous fragments in it—birds in what sunlight was left, bits of smoke faintly lit by distant light or mist, hovering inexplicably here and there: rays of yellow light, high up, touching a few high clouds.
It had a floor on which were creeks (and the big river), a little dim, a little glary at this hour, rail lines, roads, highways, houses, silos, bridges, trees, fields, everything more than half hidden in the enlarging dark: there was the shrinking glitter of far-off noises, bearded and stippled with huge and spreading shadows of my ignorance: it was panorama as a personal privilege. The sun at the end of the large, sunset-swollen sky was a glowing and urgent orange; around it were the spreading petals of pink and stratospheric gold; on the ground were occasional magenta flarings: oh, it makes you stare and gasp; a fine, astral (not a crayon) red rode in a broad, magnificent band across the Middle Western sky: below us, for miles, shadowiness tightened as we watched (it seemed); above us, tinted clouds spread across the vast shadowing sky: there were funereal lights and sinkings everywhere. I stand on the wall and lean against Daddy, only somewhat awed and abstracted: the view does not own me as it usually does: I am partly in the hands of the jolting—amusement—the conceit—of having been resurrected—by my father.
I understood that he was proffering me oblivion plus pleasure, the end of a sorrow to be henceforth remembered as Happiness. This was to be my privilege. This amazing man is going to rescue me from any anomaly or barb or sting in my existence: he is going to confer happiness on me: as a matter of fact, he has already begun.
“Just you trust me—you keep right on being cheered up—look at that sunset—that’s some sunset, wouldn’t you say? Everything is going to be just fine and dandy—you trust me—you’ll see—just you wait and see.…”
DID HE mean to be a swindler? He wasn’t clear-minded—he often said, “I mean well.” He did not think other people meant well.
I don’t feel it would be right to adopt an Oedipal theory to explain what happened between him and me: only a sense of what he was like as a man, what certain moments were like, and what was said.
It is hard in language to get the full, irregular, heavy sound of a man.
He liked to have us “all dressed and nice when I come home from work,” have us wait for him in attitudes of serene all-is-well contentment. As elegant as a Spanish prince, I sat on the couch toying with an oversized model truck—what a confusion of social pretensions, technologies, class disorder there was in that. My sister would sit in a chair, knees together, hair brushed: she’d doze off if Daddy was late. Aren’t we happy! Actually, we often are.
One day he came in plungingly, excited to be home and to have us as an audience rather than outsiders who didn’t know their lines and who often laughed at him as part of their struggle to improve their parts in his scenes. We were waiting to have him approve of our tableau—he usually said something about what a nice family we looked like or how well we looked or what a pretty group or some such thing—and we didn’t realize he was the tableau tonight. We held our positions, but we stared at him in a kind of mindless what-should-we-do-besides-sit-here-and-be-happy-and-nice? Impatiently he said, “I have a surprise for you, Charlotte—Abe Last has a heart after all.” My father said something on that order: or “a conscience after all” and then he walked across the carpet, a man somewhat jerky with success—a man redolent of vaudeville, of grotesque and sentimental movies (he liked grotesquerie, prettiness, sentiment). As he walked, he pulled banded packs of currency out of his pockets, two or three in each hand. “There,” he said, dropping one, then three, in Momma’s dressed-up lap. “There,” he said, dropping another two: he uttered a “there” for each subsequent pack. “Oh, let me!” my sister cried, and ran over to look—and then she grabbed two packs and said, “Oh, Daddy, how much is this?”
It was eight or ten thousand dollars, he said. Momma said, “Charley, what if someone sees—we could be robbed—why do you take chances like this?”
Daddy harrumphed and said, “You have no sense of fun—if you ask me, you’re afraid to be happy. I’ll put it in the bank tomorrow—if I can find an honest banker. Here, young lady, put that money down: you don’t want to prove your mother right, do you?”
Then he said, “I know one person around here who knows how to enjoy himself—” and he lifted me up, held me in his arms.
He said, “We’re going outside, this young man and I.”
“What should I do with this money!”
“Put it under your mattress—make a salad out of it: you’re always the one who worries about money,” he said in a voice solid with authority and masculinity, totally pieced out with various sel
f-satisfactions—as if he had gained a kingdom and the assurance of appearing as glorious in the histories of his time; I put my head back and smiled at the superb animal, at the rosy—and cowardly—panther leaping; and then I glanced over his shoulder and tilted my head and looked sympathetically at Momma.
My sister shouted, “I know how to enjoy myself—I’ll come, too!…”
“Yes, yes,” said Daddy, who was never averse to enlarging spheres of happiness and areas of sentiment. He held her hand and held me on his arm.
“Let him walk,” my sister said. And: “He’s getting bigger—you’ll make a sissy out of him, Daddy.…”
Daddy said, “Shut up and enjoy the light—it’s as beautiful as Paris, and in our own backyard.”
Out of folly, or a wish to steal his attention, or greed, my sister kept on: she asked if she could get something with some of the money; he dodged her question; and she kept on; and he grew peevish, so peevish he returned to the house and accused Momma of having never taught her daughter not to be greedy—he sprawled, impetuous, displeased, semifrantic in a chair: “I can’t enjoy myself—there is no way a man can live in this house with all of you—I swear to God this will kill me soon.…”
Momma said to him, “I can’t believe in the things you believe in—I’m not a girl anymore: when I play the fool, it isn’t convincing—you get angry with me when I try. You shouldn’t get angry with her—you’ve spoiled her more than I have—and how do you expect her to act when you show her all that money—how do you think money affects people?”
I looked at him to see what the answer was, to see what he would answer. He said, “Charlotte, try being a rose and not a thorn.”
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 33