Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  The rabbi was so jealous of a book called Peace of Mind written by a Boston rabbi, and which became a best seller, that he wrote a book called Peace of Soul—he wanted very much to be famous—and he had it printed privately and mailed to every member of the congregation in a plain brown wrapper with a bill enclosed: a married couple would be sent two copies and two bills, each bill being for three dollars.

  We were members of the temple because my mother’s brother was on the board of directors. He was rich by local standards, and I was smart; and either he had a dim sense of community duty or else his two sons irritated him: he did not think his sons were smart. I thought they were smart enough. One wanted to be an artist and tried the arts, each in turn, and he insisted he was unhappy, which made his father very restless. My uncle was skinny. His other son was a perfect Anglo-Saxon except for a nose shaped like a peanut: that, too, displeased my uncle although this son was brave and athletic and likable enough; he did drink and spend a lot of money, and he wracked up the family Cadillac twice, once by crashing into the gatehouse that guarded the entrance to the enclave where my uncle had his house. Of that son, his mother said, “He’s so brave: his jaw is wired shut and he never complains.” My uncle said his son was meshuggeneh, and to irritate him and the other one as they irritated him, he would praise me and “do things” for me such as send me to Sunday school or finance my entry into the Boy Scouts: not only finance it but insist the troop pursue me since I didn’t want to join. It seemed I owed it to Judaism and the war effort to be a Boy Scout.

  The troop had a reputation for consisting of three types of boys—the refined, the would-be refined who would probably never get there (to refinement), and the wild ones, the crazy or tough ones, pugnacious or obsessive. I always thought refinement was a joke, all things considered, and do still, but some of those boys were very impressive, I thought: two of the older ones, who had remarkable, even tempers and never showed signs of cruelty or of pride except for expecting quietly to be dominant, spoke to each other only in Latin. Another boy knew entire Shakespearean plays by heart. And two of the boys would hum themes from a Brahms quintet—I couldn’t do things like that. But I was famous locally, and they were not. I was powerful at school and could force a teacher to regive a test that was unfair or unclear: not for my sake—my grades were always high; my average was sometimes given as 101—but for the sake of my classmates. Then, too, because of my foul tongue and for other reasons, the working-class kids at school, a minority, accepted me: I was a point where the varying kinds of middle-class children, the few rich, and the slightly more numerous poor met. There were two or three other children of whom this was true (including two political girls), but they were fine children and had not read Thomas Mann. I was considered a fine child because of my parents’ plight and the way I treated my parents, but there was something decidedly not fine about me, something anomalous and confusing; it is very unlikely but it is true that I was treated, on the whole, with respect; and so fineness was ascribed to me to resolve the anomaly and strangeness.

  In those days, fine or “distinguished” families had a decided moral tone: social climbing had a moral cast to it—as in how much you gave to charity and how much charitable work you did—and this moral tone was refined: it included euphemisms such as “passed on” or “passed away.” It was my opinion as a child unable sometimes to crack the grownups’ code of talk that if someone will lie about what to call a fuck, they’ll lie about anything. Also, if you remember, eleven and twelve pre- and during puberty are particularly nasty, intellectual, realpolitik ages—at least for some kids, male and female. I had, decidedly, a moral rank, a high one, but it was not based on the right things; however, people did not keep track, and they would have some vague sense that I was refined. Meanwhile the war blazed. I had enormous maps with flags; and I fretted over strategy, the quality of Allied war matériel and leadership—Churchill was a complete bust militarily—the problems of courage, and the daily and unremitting horror of what one translator of Proust calls “a bloody hedge of men constantly renewed.”

  If life were nice—well, nicer—one would have Einstein’s katzenjammers, space and time for research, a number of anecdotes, nuances, but one is rushed. One has to forgo discussing the names of ranks in Boy Scouts, from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout, and the Merit Badges, and the costume partly designed to mimic the uniforms developed by the British during the Boer War. There is the subject of Anglophilia—where is the Anglophilia of yesteryear?—and the equipment: where did those sleeping bags and axes and knives come from in wartime? Perhaps everyone had an older brother.

  In small towns, social class is comparatively simple: the line is between respectability and the rest—if the small-town rich are not respectable, they are excluded. It’s more complicated in a city. The Scouts from the beginning had an origin in social class but with a built-in ambiguity: there were to be troops for poor boys to give them a chance at purity and so on; but the main thrust, I think, was to keep the middle class or upper middle class trained in outdoorsmanship for leadership in the Boer War. It was a junior paramilitary outfit designed to teach skills for guerrilla warfare in open plains—maybe in the woods. It was not up-to-date: the Scouts in my time were still doing Morse code and stuff with semaphores; and the walkie-talkie was already in use, and slang instead of codes (or so the papers said). Besides that, one knew about the army and social class, that the poor and Southern rednecks made up the troops, and they shot incompetent, cruel, hysterical, or snobbish officers in the back in battle—or so I was told—and how could we practice leadership if we had no rednecks, farmers, or working-class boys in the troop? These things worried me. I was told that as Jews we wouldn’t be given a chance to lead usually anyway, not even in the quartermaster corps. It seemed our refinement, as a troop, was slightly warped by competition toward other troops and was actually an exercise in self-righteousness expended in a vacuum.

  I think a third of the boys in the troop were quite mad—some with unfocused adolescent rage, some with confusions, others with purity.

  One boy, the son of an accountant and a very talkative mother, had a mania for Merit Badges, a silly giggle, acne on his back, large muscles from lifting weights, and a way of leaping from stillness into a walk like a two-legged horse that suggested to me considerable mental dislocation. Some boys were mad with slyness, some were already money mad, some were panic-stricken. There they were, lined up in the temple auditorium in their khakis, with axes in snap-on head holsters, or whatever, on their belts and sheathed knives and neckerchiefs and that damned sliding ring to hold the neckerchief.

  I remember—not in great detail: this is not something I am going to present in the full panoply of reality—going on a fourteen-mile hike. Or was it a twelve-mile hike? I don’t remember, but you had to do it to pass from some rank—Tenderfoot?—to another—Second Class? Maybe. (You had to pass other tests, too.) This hike came quite early in my brief Scouting career before I created the scandal and furor in the troop by insisting that for my outdoor-cooking test I be allowed to use premade biscuit dough from a can—like a real soldier. “Do you hate Scouting?” one of the men who ran the troop asked me. I don’t think I did, but perhaps I did.

  The hike had to be done within a certain length of time, and I think you had to run or jog twelve minutes and then walk twelve minutes, it was twelve somethings or other, twelve paces maybe (the injunction against self-abuse was on page four hundred and something of the manual). The route had been laid out on back roads in the country—roads built in the twenties for developments that weren’t built because the Depression came. They were concrete, mostly, and cracked, and grass grew out of them in spots. I had a new pair of shoes paid for by the uncle whose doing all this was—Boy Scout shoes. A slightly older boy—he was thirteen, probably, with a patch of pimples on one cheek, an exacerbated triangle of them, and then a few single ones on his forehead and chin—was to lead us, instruct us, keep us from cheating. Quiet-voiced, he bore th
e look of someone planed down and cautious from the skirmishes grownups wage, often for the sake of social climbing or in the name of happiness, in order to enforce what purity they can on their young. He had not yet outgrown his freakishness: he was too broad and short-legged and long-necked; he was less freakish than I was—I think he took on the final physical shape for the duration of his youth when he was fifteen. This boy’s eyes were extraordinarily blank, as if he had found childhood and youth to be a long, long wait.

  I can almost count us—five or seven boys were to make the march. Ah, memory—or research. I think there were five of us. The leader made six. The idea of seven comes to me because the five of us doing the march for the first time, the Tenderfoots, were dwarfs. Two were still physically ten years old although they had turned twelve: they were bright and quick, brainy. No bodily growth dimmed their intellects or powers of vision.

  Where did we gather? Someone’s front lawn, I think. I remember we talked about how we were doing more than the statutory distance because of where we started. There were jokes about the humiliation of giving up. We clomped along. I don’t remember the running—the alterations of running with walking: it seems to me some of the younger boys skipped; and we were of such different heights that we couldn’t run with any order; and so we walked slowly for a while, and then faster, then slowly.

  One boy had to give up or thought he did: he had a blister; he was one of the smaller boys—proud and temperamental, too. He didn’t receive much sympathy, but he wasn’t mocked, either—we stared at him; I don’t know why we didn’t mock him: either because this was Scouting or because we were well-bred Jews, you know, compassionate. It was one reason or the other. I remember him sitting by the side of the road in the weeds, an apple-cheeked kid small for his age. Do weeds survive pollution? Was he supposed to walk home or hitchhike: an occasional car did pass on this road but very occasionally. Hitchhiking wasn’t considered dangerous in the county: you knew what a safe person looked like and smelled like; if they had the wrong eyes or smell, you said, “No, thank you,” and if they persisted, you screamed. I don’t remember grownups talking much about children being molested—we children spoke of it once in a while: it is strange to remember the essential panic and curiosity we felt day after day as we struggled to grow up.

  Anyway, we left one child behind or was it two? Did we assign him a companion? We young ones did not know what was going on, and it would have been pushy, like usurping control of the hike, to figure things out. Our leader had no interest in leadership: he had been made a leader against his will, I think, and he found it dull and had no particular talent for it; he would stare off into the sky or into the branches of trees—this was latish autumn, chilly and damp, a gray day—if you asked him a question. I think he had an older brother he was pretty much dependent on—not that it matters now.

  We didn’t know how to walk distances. We discussed how to carry yourself—we put our shoulders back—we rose up on our toes—but none of our particular group was coordinated physically yet, not even our leader; and we progressed clumsily, in haphazard effort, muscular effort; at times, two boys—it was usually by twos—would find a rhythm, find a way of walking, hip joint, spine, ankle, knee, and foot; and they would sail along, sail ahead, ahead even of the leader, who clomped along at the side of the road, sad and dutiful. I had a nail in my shoe—I’ve never been lucky with equipment: I once had a pair of galoshes that leaked. The nail gouged my heel, and it was painful as all hell, but people were always worried about how sensitive I was—how much I noticed, what did I think of them, was I a sissy all in all, did intelligence make a coward of me: that sort of thing—and I was used to concealing pain: in this case I persuaded myself it was preparation for real war, but I hated the pain anyway as unnecessary and part of a fools’ march.

  The route was laid out like a rough figure eight, and when we came to where the two loops crossed, we saw some other boys coming down the far road at an angle to us. They were not dwarfs. We knew them, but I don’t recall if they were from our troop or merely from the county somewhere. I think they were richer Jews—maybe merely older, with real legs, real hands. There was a twenty-mile hike, I think, for passing from some upper rank to one still higher; or maybe it was thirty miles.

  The greetings echoed among the trees on that empty road. But they were not really good-natured. There was some discussion between our leader and their leader—the other leader was not bored and had on at least three lanyards: the ends were tucked into his pleated pocket, but I would imagine he had a whistle, a pocketknife, and maybe a compass. I suppose the ill nature of the greetings came from mutual suspicion: we were outcasts, prepubic; but the other group was crazed and low with Scouting. One forgets how satiric children are just before puberty, how harsh in judgment; and how strange the ones seem who after puberty are cheerful or enthusiastic and not gloomy and secretive.

  The older Scouts were on a rigorous schedule, and yet two of them joined us. The mysteries accumulate and suggest to me the mysteries of that day as I lived it, of being on a road I did not know, doing a faintly foolish thing, among boys I did not know.

  Because of my reputation, I was more or less suffered to ask more questions than most younger children were allowed to ask, but I was not in a mood to use my privilege: I was being one of the bunch. The new boys were quite old and glamorous; one was skinny: in the end I did gravitate to the older boys and to the leader—I felt older than my age, and I was nosy, I believe. One of the newcomers noticed I was limping and I told him about the nail, but he didn’t believe me. An entire lifetime of people saying I don’t believe you suddenly weighs on me. Sighing, I sat down on a stone alongside the road and took off my shoe and showed him the blood on my sock; and then I took off my sock and showed him the wound. There was talk of tetanus from the nail, but one of the dwarfs said his father was a doctor and the nail would have had to have been exposed to manure to be dangerous. I had been told swearing was lip filth, but I did it anyway. I said, “Well, I didn’t shit in my shoe, so I’m probably all right.” This was considered pretty charming and was looked on as revealing a real sense of humor—life was simpler then—and it made the leader like me and the two older boys and some of the dwarfs: I had magically become a nondwarf in the course of the hike, a big shot. Liking led to talk of sex: the boys were walking more or less in a circle around me—some of them walked backward—and told me about fucking. I had heard before, frequently, but I was one of the more latent boys: it had never really penetrated, but now it did; I was disbelieving. “My parents wouldn’t do that,” I said. They had to in order to have children, I was told. “Not my parents,” I said, and then thought about my parents: “Well, they might do it in a closet,” I said. One of the older boys said, “Don’t you masturbate?” I did but wasn’t sure how that related to sex, to fucking; the explanations I was offered were unclear to me. An older boy said, “Didn’t you ever fool around with another boy?”

  “What do you mean? We’re fooling around now.”

  “It’s called homosexuality,” one of the younger boys said, “and it’s a phase.”

  “It’s all right until you’re about sixteen, and then it has to be girls.”

  “How come?” I said.

  “Let’s go in the woods and look at each other’s pricks,” one of the younger boys said—one of the boys with no prick.

  There was a sudden flurry of talk: did we have the time, and one boy had promised his parents he would never do anything dirty; and then we all went into the woods, the two newcomers, the older boys, leading the way.

  We crashed clumsily among twigs and bushes until we came to a clearing, a mud-floored glade. The older boys and some of the younger ones immediately took up positions showing experience—from summer camp or wherever—in a circle.

  But there were two kinds of circle: clumped close together, the units, I mean, and more spread out. Somehow without voting we settled on a spread-out circle or oval—we were about an arm’s length
from each other. I believe one of the older boys counted and then we all unbuttoned; and some boys revealed themselves at once; but some didn’t; and the older boy counted again, and at the count of three we all displayed ourselves.

  It was very quiet. I thought it was all very interesting, but I was a little blank-headed, almost sleepy: I wasn’t sure why it was so interesting: but it was clear from the silence, the way the boys breathed and stood, from the whole atmosphere, that this was more interesting than the hike itself, this curious introduction to genital destiny.

  Then it was decided we should all try to come—I think how it went was someone asked if I could come, and I wasn’t sure—I wasn’t sure what he meant: I really had an enormous gift for latency.

  Some boys didn’t know how to masturbate and were shown the gesture. But before we began, there was a ceremony of touching each other’s pricks. No one in that glade was fully developed. The absence of cruelty became silently, by implication, an odd sort of stilled and limited tenderness.

  Then the circle was re-formed—in the silent glade—and we all began to pull rhythmically: perhaps it was like rubbing at Aladdin’s lamp; perhaps we are at the threshold of the reign of magic and death. The glade was shadowy and smelled vinegary—it also smelled of earth. A few boys came—a drop or two. We cleaned ourselves with leaves and with a Kleenex one boy divvied up.

  The leader looked at his watch and said we were ten minutes behind schedule.

  SO THEN we hurried—we left the woods and went on with the hike.

  There is no time for the rest of what I want to tell about the Boy Scouts.

  THE

  PAIN

  CONTINUUM

  MOMMA occasionally displayed me naked to visitors. My sister, Nonie, often offers me to girls who will play with her—they can play with me, play house.