Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Her being a good sport, her energy, her looks, and her obvious respectability, her care for being protected, for getting away with fraud, added up to a surprising impression of militant aristocracy, one of personal quality, of open, successful greed, rank, and mercilessness.

  * * *

  SHE WAS very conservative and yet she encouraged everyone—men, women, children—to rebel. “Be yourself,” she’d say. “You’d be amazed at what people will put up with.”

  She said, “Plain people have to lie to themselves all the time, but I was never plain—I know what the truth is—I know what I know—I can’t help what I know.”

  (Other women said, “She’s not as attractive as she thinks she is—she puts up a good front and she gets away with it.”)

  She said, “Frankly, I want to be the real winner—all the time—I try to give everybody their money’s worth.… But in the end, I want to win. I don’t think taking a back seat to someone is any fun—ha-ha.”

  Sometimes she seemed to be mysteriously at a focus of heat, at a point of convergence of rays, on purpose, as if she demanded such heat as a matter of personal quality, a measure of her status as a woman; warmth, heat—like being wrapped in sables or spotlights or infatuations.

  She said of independent women—many of whom she liked and visited and had visit her—“They live like prostitutes.” That is, they had no protection, no helplessness: they weren’t given things. In a year or two, when Daddy gets mad at me, he will say, “You’re not fit to live with decent people,” and “You’re a little whore!” He means I’m too tough and independent to deserve a home.

  Momma says to her daughter, “You’re not likable and you hate me, but I’ll see to it you always have a home—give me credit for something—I’ll see to it you always have that backing.…”

  When Daddy said I was a whore, he meant I didn’t deserve to be given things.

  Momma said, “I’m an executive by nature.” That is, she always wanted other people to do things she told them to do, she handed out responsibility. She would say to Nonie, “Don’t push me too far or I’ll make real trouble for you—” She never bothered confronting Nonie head-on. “Live and let live is my motto—if Nonie wants to be stupid, let her—she’ll learn—it’s up to her—her husband will teach her, old age will teach her, my mother learned a lot when she got old.” She would say, “Let the school handle her without coming to me—I have better fish to fry.” She will try to charm people into doing things for Nonie or she’ll nag them into it, particularly Daddy: “You think I like doing this—I’m not doing it for myself, S.L.”

  Momma will say, “I can’t do it, my hands are tied, people don’t trust me, because of my looks.”

  And: “I can’t afford to get indebted—they take advantage of me as it is.”

  (Daddy will say, “You give me no rest.” Momma will say, “There are things I have to do—things are expected of me, S.L.”)

  “No one can teach you how to live if you’re an outstanding person,” Momma said. “You have to find out for yourself and hope it’s the right thing.”

  She said, “Being married to me makes S.L. someone in this little town: I’m S.L.’s recommendation—I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I’m somebody around here—the truth is the truth.”

  If she is angry and no one placates her sufficiently, she becomes large and sloppy with threat, sort of a don’t-think-I’m-a-shy-lovely-woman-who’s-afraid-to-hate-and-make-a-mess.

  When we are at the shopping center, people hurry over to her to speak to her. When she steps out our front door, neighbors call her name, they start to trot toward her.

  She says, “They want to make a little time with me.”

  She said to me, “If people only knew how little they offer and how much they ask when they have a crush on you, they wouldn’t be so surprised they have only themselves to blame for how they get treated—I want you to listen to me: I have a lot to teach you, even if you are a boy.”

  She plays no sports. She is very intense; her heartbeat, unexercised, is always, even when she is sitting down, rapid and huffy, intense: it sounds like muffled hammer blows: when her heart pounds, it means she is angry and will lecture us; people say she has “a bad mouth.” Perhaps she is made angry by too many things—although often she is angered by something and hides it and then shows anger over the next thing that happens, whatever it is. She likes really only very cool people—good gamblers, tough, respectable, or semireputable, or disreputable men and women who get their own way and are careful and distant toward emotion, who laugh at it, and who are dogged and who “accomplish” things: people who can fool other people and can “get their own way” and can be patient, hiding any tremor of ignorance, or seeming to, within the confines of what they know “for a certainty.” They can calm her down, such people: she has an addiction to people of that sort; but when she is with them she maneuvers in much the same way she does with other people—she does not want to fall into their hands; she wants to be the winner with them, too.

  She likes Daddy’s bland ruralness and egoism, but he is too humid—his looks, too: his coolness lies next to a heat in him: she pities him.

  When she is not in the presence of calm people, if she isn’t near someone who damps her down (someone probably cruel and egocentric and compulsive in his or her calmness), then Momma’s momentum, her trajectory, her sultriness go more and more awry. “I don’t know anyone worth it, to test myself against!” she will cry: in her shapeliness and restlessness and quickness of speech and her puffed-out added-on glamour-importance of being pretty and in her thirties, she is short of breath often, unless she is sitting still and is all dressed up.

  She sits down passionately: she starts slowly or languorously and then she gets bored and throws herself backward or falls with a proud carelessness.

  She used to say, “I still have my looks—I haven’t lost my nerve.”

  Her hair was shiny and long; she had a widow’s peak, soft white skin, high arched eyebrows (the shape of which she changed daily), a direct look, which, if you kneeled on the couch and peered into her eyes, you saw wasn’t there at all: her eyes were unreadable, murky, filled with purposeful teasing, with veils, baffles, a peculiar maze or lightlessness behind a surface clarity—a tumult on an ill-lit stage where an actress with a rifle occasionally assassinated this one or that one in the audience but where the lights never came up: the scene never was explained.

  She and Daddy both said of her when she was dressed up that she was “on the rampage” or “on the warpath.”

  She says sensitive people are “obnoxious—all they care about is their feelings; they don’t give a damn about your feelings.”

  She said, “Women don’t have good lives,” and “It’s only interesting to be a woman.”

  She says she is smarter than Daddy and that “the wrong things are in books—what’s in books doesn’t help someone like me—I want to do something in life, I want to do something with my life.” She says, “Anyway, I have no time to read.”

  Momma in sunlight scowls usually and squints and proposes temperament to distract people from what is happening to her face year by year—the knowledge, the lines maybe; she proposes herself restlessly as an object and a force.

  By the time she is thirty-five, she is swifter and more given to assertion, and she outrageously and easily shows hate—even to me: “You dropped your napkin? Well, I’m not going to pick it up. I’m going out of my mind with you; I can’t stand it; you have to eat without a napkin now; go ahead, get food all over yourself so everyone that thinks you’re so wonderful can see what a pig you are—I’m tired of being your nursemaid and your hairdresser and public-relations man—” I stare at her when she’s like that—and sometimes I laugh. Or I stick out my tongue at her. I have some secret with her—I don’t know what it is—but the matter of that secret comes up suffocatingly from time to time.

  She was taut and rustly with temper more and more, sometimes like a shrieking b
ird with dusty feathers or, more lightly, like a used and frail paper kite with thin wooden struts on a blowy, gray day, crackling and groaning in the wind that pushes at it.

  She would say of me, “He gives me reason to like him—he’s the only one who doesn’t blame me.”

  Her defiance grew dark and muffled, and more violent, I think.

  She’s not too honorable. So her feelings for me are amusing, unreliable; she is not without a kind of honor; and so, although I do not trust her, there is some way in which I trust her more than I do anyone else—which is maybe sad, maybe not sad.

  She was the only one of the people I knew who did not care what I thought, who did not insist that my mind had to be a certain sort of thing. She said, “Plain people don’t know how to leave anyone alone.”

  And: “Most people are afraid of being lonesome—that was never my problem.”

  She said, “My looks are going now—I’m boring to look at. Frankly, I’m not sorry; I’m not going to do anything to keep my looks—they go, they go—I had a run for my money—I never liked it—I want to be a woman who’s important to other women now—women will take me more seriously now that I’m a little older—I’m more sure of myself.… To tell you the truth, I don’t mean to boast about my looks, but the whole time I was young and good-looking, if I say so myself—but it’s foolish to talk about it—but it always made me a little sick to my stomach.… I’m not a bad person, you know: people can say what they like about me; jealousy is not exactly rare; but I’m not bad, as people go.”

  “Leila,” some woman would say, “you have a lot of sense—a lot of sense—I have to hand it to you, I have to admire the way you look at things.”

  “Well, no matter what people say, looks and brains go together—people talk to you—I was always good at talking to people—you get a chance to learn that way. I don’t like to boast, but I will say I don’t know anyone who knows as much about life as I do. Oh, I don’t say I know it all: you, as well as anyone, can back me up; I go to a lot of people, a lot of people, for advice; I know what I don’t know; but I know about life—I had a lot of it.… I intend to teach what I know—to my children.… Is it too dark in here for you? You want me to turn on another lamp? I would like to help people with what I know.”

  And: “If I had a choice between ten million dollars and being president of the Jewish Charity League, I wouldn’t hesitate. If women—smart women, who do something in the world—women who know me—if they respect me enough to elect me treasurer—which means, as we all know, that I’ll be president then in two years—I would feel that made my life worthwhile.…”

  HER FACE became only slightly loose: it became prettier maybe: but it fell, if I may say it like this, outside history now. She burned all the photographs of herself.

  She had been three years old and five and sixteen and twenty-five. Now there was no documentary evidence of any of it.

  She said, “There’s a time to flirt and a time to stop.”

  She said, “S.L., let’s move to—” She named a suburb, closer to the nearby city. She said, “I don’t want to grow old in the same town I grew up in.”

  She said to me once, “I knew the right time to leave—go back there and ask anyone, and they’ll tell you how good-looking I was. They remember. They never saw me later.” And: “I don’t like people’s eyes—I don’t like looking at their eyes—or their eyes looking at me.… Listen to me: people aren’t nice; maybe they’re nice to you when you’re a child, but if you’re smart you won’t trust them.”

  She said, “I’ve never been the one who asked.”

  And: “I don’t care what I look like—so long as my life is interesting—and I have a very interesting life.”

  And: “I know what age I am—I adopted this child because I knew S.L. needed someone to admire—Nonie was fat and was going through a very bad phase.… I wonder why they call the devil the Lord of the Flies. I was itchy when I was young—I had a very good time—nothing is as important as being good-looking: if you were never good-looking, then you don’t know what life is really like—you don’t know what life is all about—still, I for one am glad to get off that merry-go-round—it was a lot of work, believe me, and you have to take a lot of disrespect from everyone.”

  She had had the immediate secular importance of someone who had entry to “important” men who were perhaps obsessed with her: their importance had been hers to some extent; she had been like a traveling court, the traveling court of a possibly illegitimate sovereign.

  “Hearts used to beat faster,” she said ironically, “when I was around.…” She said, “Well, why not? I could do things for people!”

  The physical thing for her was always a mixture of stink, confusion, and privilege, of power and secrecy and criminality—and acceptable, like so much else. I mean she accepted her exclusion—perhaps more than she had to. She said, “It’s wrong of S.L. to want me now—he’s bald and I’m not young: I’m his wife—he ought to know better—ha-ha.”

  It had always been a matter of crimes, of men who shouldn’t have loved her, and who she said no to, men who were too old or were not respectable or who were her brothers. She had a lonely, steady, circumambient darkness, an aureole of sin that was also a floating nimbus of surprise at the unexpectedness of having people desire her.

  What is desire worth?

  Then her slyness, her bluff of taking desire for granted, all that stuff that she did to increase her leverage—what was that worth?

  Her self-consciousness when she was young had been fairly secret or ironic but now she made it open: “I stopped playing dumb—people always get a shock when they find out I’m not a simpleton … when they see I know what I’m doing.…”

  It had been that people who had visitors from out of town brought them to our house, and Momma would receive them; toward the end, if she thought she didn’t look good she’d haul me out, display me: she’d assume the sultry, ironic I-don’t-care-about-my-looks-I’m-getting-older-I’m-the-mother-of-this-boy role.

  I mimicked her arrogance, but I was, by nature, different from her, and male.

  SHE HAD helped Daddy and two of her brothers in their businesses; she’d meddled in politics.

  Her looks, her disposition had given her some power over the people around her, many of them—a power that she had never been sure of and that had always been beyond her intellectual powers to be clear about.

  “If you’re a certain type, some people have to like you—” She had theories like that: she wasn’t sure; it had been that she’d get overexcited, very heated, if they did like her. She knew that infatuation made people silly, and sometimes cruel, and dangerous.

  Her power had never been absolute, and a power that is not always there, that is not always noticeable, is not easy to define to one’s self; and since it operates oddly, in silence, it is a source of corruption (and occasionally of amusement). It is black magic, haste, what-have-you. Sometimes it seemed never to have been there: “No one except S.L. ever changed his life because of me—they never gave me anything of their own that they valued, so what did their liking me mean?” (But they had listened to her and given her things, and helped her and S.L. make money.) “I ask you that; I always had to be the one to give everything—I’d rather people disliked me, to be frank about it.”

  Tyranny is a crime in a state, but in a woman, intellectually, it simply means she insists she is right; emotionally, it means she is loved. In my mother’s case, it was part of her mind’s stumbling after the world. She was so unsure of her powers of seduction by the time I was adopted that she’d often dress up and comb her hair especially and wear perfume and a necklace to play with me.

  When I was very young, she took me to see my real mother, who was ill and smelled like someone very ill, while Leila was in a dress that smelled good and she wore her daytime diamonds, and the child was more comfortable with her than with his mother; and another woman who was there said, thirty years later, “I thought it was terrib
le to see that—I could never stand Leila after that—she understood nothing about people’s feelings—she was a selfish woman—no one ever owed her a thing, if you ask me.”

  Momma said, “The world’s not fair, but I don’t see what good complaining does.”

  (Daddy said, “You never stop complaining.”)

  It is assumed older women know a great deal, including how to act, but it’s funny, because few people ask their advice or imitate the way older women behave, and a lot of older women seem crazy and desperate.

  Just a little while before, a year or two earlier, Momma’s advice, intrigues, despairs had been considered interesting. There had been an intense narrative interest about her life. Part of that came from her audience’s forgiving her everything she did because she was public. Things were not like that now.

  Now she really had to know things. Now it was tactically sound not to expect to get away with anything at all. Now when people stared at her, it was as if they were like casual hoodlums toward her, whereas before they’d been like children of friends of her parents, they’d had that politeness and forbearance toward her.…

  Daddy said she’d always been angry. I could never tell if her anger came from the way she was treated or if she had a natural aptitude for anger and now had an excuse. Perhaps part of her anger had always been part of her preparing to be older. She became so ferociously egoistic that those of us who watched her were cut off from her, were no longer her allies, were no longer implicated, minute by minute, in what she did, in having to hope she was happy because she was so pretty and she was ours to boot.