Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  She said, “Listen, I’ve known people who went off and became famous: I went with Gaynor Milton: he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor; he is one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood. He was always miserable—he had such an ego—he was very lonely: ask me, I’ll tell you. I wouldn’t wish that on the child. And I’ll tell you something: if he’s so smart, he’ll amount to something in good time— enough is as good as a feast: that’s an old saying and a true one, believe me.…”

  She was sincere at times. She said to me, “I don’t think you know what’s going on, but maybe you do: you’re always watching. Listen, life is funny: I may be a bad woman—people have always said I was: I’ll tell you the truth: sometimes I think I am, but I don’t care; I don’t know why I have to make all the decisions: it won’t hurt you to be normal. Your father, Daddy, S.L., you love him, don’t you? He doesn’t like bookish people—he and I don’t really get along; we’re not suitable; but I made my bed and I’m going to lie in it: he loves you—it’s me he blames: he thinks he has no … right … to be your father … if you’re so damned smart: if you love him, you’ll he sensible, listen to me, don’t ever show him you’re smart.…”

  I didn’t believe Momma: I didn’t understand what she was saying—I felt that Daddy loved me—there were emotions in him; I see them when he puts me to bed, when he gives me a good-night hug and kiss—I was surer of him than of her.…

  I didn’t understand any human issue—this was an enormous game.

  More and more, I make Daddy angry—he says I like to make a fool of him. Momma is desperate—almost tragic. He blames her (he will leave her). Daddy is not proud of me (he says he likes “ordinary kids who have good hearts”), and so I snub him—and then he gets angry and puffish: he thinks he can be disgusted and still put me to bed affectionately and get the affection he needs after he’s made me angry and miserable and embarrassed for him: I feel as if I dislike him a lot—how can I hug him? Then his breathing gets loud. “Oh, you’re a real brat,” he says, “you’re a beaut.” The room is dark, it’s bedtime, he stands there.

  But I began to be uneasy. I asked Momma if she liked me. She said, “Now, now, you know I love you—” I became vilely uneasy: that was the sort of thing that someone said when they were going to leave you, when they weren’t being honest. I preferred an obvious love clearly marked on someone’s face.

  One could not play a game, a child’s game—play it hard—and keep one’s mind on one’s suffering at home. There was a peculiar mental thing that happened when it was time to go home, when you were called or when players started to disappear; or you were picked up by your mother and driven home: there was an alteration in the nature of time, of history, a change of scale, accompanied by an almost overwhelming sense of faithlessness and of longing which one could erase with the passion or the refinement of the hug one gave one’s parents when one got home. To home’s immensity. One had played, the game had ended: one had rushed along the sidewalk—or one dawdled—toward this other story.

  Or in reverse, one ran away and played. One visited in neighbors’ houses. One never had to boast—the neighbors did it for me. One could turn in any direction and find a hero’s happiness.

  The child, at home while his parents are getting ready for dinner, languishes on a porch glider, bending his back, among the cushions, unobserved; he is being giddily vain, spine-and-neck-and-one-leg-bent: he is feeling—or thinking—he is very smart, (A LOT OF PEOPLE SAID SO.) His feeling lay around him like peeled sheets of obtrusively royal raiment.

  One’s blood raced, slowed, raced again; a mass of sprinters, caterpillars shoot along inside; caterpillars, invisible ones, crawl on prickling skin.

  Another time, Nonie and I are laying out pads on the dining-room table: oh, I remember that: one half-smiles. She is being a child—or childish—out of bitterness, in a spasm of competition: she doesn’t dare advance into adolescence and leave the field of childhood to me.… One remembers the eyes of the girl, the feel of one’s own shirt, of buttoned cloth over one’s chest, the movement of one’s foot on the shifting pile of the carpet, the smells of the house, of dinner, of these expensively made pads. Nonie “knows,” she feels the presence of circumstances available to her, waiting for her if only I did not exist. But I do exist in that room; the objects in the room include my eyes, my breath. She loves-and-hates me all the time, whereas I am largely indifferent to her or ashamed of her. I have won out for the moment.…

  LEILA DESCRIBED my real mother as “a very fine woman.”

  Leila said, “Your mother never had any luck—not any that lasted—and without luck what good did all her qualities do her?”

  I really had forgotten my real mother. And that there was another family, other than the Cohns: my family—I remembered none of them. Then Leila and S.L. called in my real family, to share me with them, to share the responsibility, the expense, and perhaps the glory. Most likely, vengeance and a wish to handle me both were involved. Many of my real family were what Leila called “ignorant people”—unlettered, not very clean, violent (my real father had threatened to shoot S.L. if I wasn’t given back posthaste)—and no psychologist or referee was called in to oversee or advise—I was to be taught a lesson, I think.

  After all, wasn’t Daddy, S.L., angry as a lover often is? Sometimes, perhaps always, people when they love you can’t really care what happens to you if it’s not going to be in their arms, so to speak, or give them solace.

  Leila resisted and said the thing wasn’t a good idea. She mentioned future earnings, the dubious respectability of this enterprise, the social advantages of a bright son now, in the suburb where we lived. But Daddy was firm; he did not want to “steal” me, he said—and Leila’s sister and Nonie, of course, were fervently in favor of giving me to someone, anyone. I kept passing through rooms, or lolling idly in doorways, listening, and then being sent away, having heard scraps of argument, none of which I understood at all: “real family,” “he doesn’t belong here,” “his father.” I imagined no evil.

  When I was told clearly that I was to see my “real father again,” it was by Leila and in front of company, where my pride would not let me show fear or consternation or anything but what a fine boy I was. What crap. By the time the company left, I was in a state. I knew something “bad” was happening. What did this mean, I asked. I don’t like it. I don’t want to do this, I argued.

  S.L. took me on his lap and said in my ear that I would love my real father; he said my real father was “better-looking” than S.L. was, and that he, my real father, would “buy you ice cream and cake, all you can eat, and lots of books, and all the toys in the world.” S.L. ran off at six in the morning of the day the meeting was to take place; and Leila would not let me meet my father in the house: “If I let him in, he’ll kill me; he has a terrible temper and he hates me.…” She pushed me out the front door and locked it. I went alone to the curb to meet my real father. I was too proud to have hysterics in the neighborhood, where I was so well known and admired. So I behaved bravely. But I was uneasy.

  I had imagined that a “better-looking” man than S.L. would be taller than S.L. and have a craggier and more serious face, and gentler and clearer and more knowing eyes. My father, an ex-boxer, and currently a junkman, was short, broad, not clean, and he looked like an angry or ferocious, squirrel-faced clown, with sunken eyes, heavily shadowed and small, and almost no lips, and a small, misshapen nose. He spoke broken English, always in a shout. He could not read or write—he could not read street signs, for instance. He purposefully yelled at and threatened and terrified everyone he could—it was a joke and a matter of necessary ego to him. His father had been a scholar, so there was some psychological black magic, rebellion, at work in what my father was, in what he had become: “I killed t’ree men in mein life,” he said boastfully, menacingly, maybe apologetically as well. “You do what I tell you,” he said. He spoke only in a shout until one’s head rang; he said, “YOU GOT TA LUV ME, I’M YOUR P
OP!”

  At first, uneasy as I was (at having been pushed out the front door and at not being able to guess what was polite in this case and what any of this meant), I wasn’t afraid of him but only uneasy, as I said: I thought him silly, like a clown, like the clown he resembled, and I did not feel any similarity or kinship. I felt some embarrassment, though. When he threatened to hit me if I did not call him “Pop,” I told him I would shout for help and tell the police I was being kidnapped; and there was enough difference in the way we looked for him to think the police would make trouble, and he gave in, he deferred to me on that.

  He said his feelings were hurt, and I was too polite to say so what, but that’s what I felt.

  He insisted on buying me clothes—he said the clothes the Cohns had given me were disgusting. I wanted to be polite. I let him buy me clothes and re-dress me; the clothes were ugly and itchy, and he wanted me to wear a hat that looked like a grownup’s: that was too foolish, I thought, and I refused that. He wanted me to have my hair cut and to start speaking Yiddish immediately—I think he intended me for the Chassidic rabbinate, under pressure from his relatives, and to excuse his invasion of my life at this time as a rescue of me for God.

  He had some relatives I liked—I later met them—but he also had a virulent, curse-hurling harridan of a sister. (She said to me years later, “You know what keeps me alive? Hate. I know how to hate.”) This harridan called down curse after curse on S.L. and Leila—death and rot, cancer and pain without end—and she threatened to curse me if I didn’t immediately love her and the rest of my new family, if I did not become “a real Jew” at once and stop loving the Cohns and wanting to go home.

  I might have borne that, and even the smell of her house—dust and cabbage and animosity—but they kept speaking of my dead mother; and that meant a shaky grief and obstinacy that I could not and would not face but would endure with lessening strength. They spoke of what my “real” mother wanted me to do—from the grave—and of how much she had loved these two and loathed Leila. There was no real mother for me—only a skeleton rotting in the ground. If part of me remembered her, that part, too, found these mentions of the actuality of that woman insupportable; and then the threats these people made never to return me to the Cohns at all but to keep me forever mingled with that woman’s shadow, or rather with the shadow of the irreconcilable infant grief, and the fact that they would not listen to me, made me throw up. I couldn’t stop. This frightened me and them, and they took me home, but I was ill by then, genuinely ill, and out of my mind in a childish way. (I had lasted about ten hours.)

  CHILDREN, gathered on my lawn or on nearby lawns, waiting for me to play, saw me through windows, crying, being carried to bed, covered with vomit. I stank of fear, really. The memories I have of that return (and of the months that followed) are black, scorched. I yelled at Leila, “DO YOU KNOW I DON’T LIKE THIS? DON’T YOU CARE?”

  Momma said, “Leave me alone—I can’t face this. Go talk to your father.”

  I ran to S.L., a tear-splattered, beslobbered, vandalized child; and I yelled, “DADDY, BE NICE! HELP ME, DADDY!”

  And he said, “Don’t be a whiner—I can’t stand a whiner—” He was embarrassed: he would not look at me: what had he expected to happen? He said, “Don’t act like this—don’t be a snob—I can’t stand snobs.…” He said it over and over.

  MOMMA, as I said earlier, often spoke of her looks as being in defiance of a world of what people did to her—in return, you had advantages—but meanwhile you had to bear up under storms and against storms: she used to say, “I haven’t lost my nerve.”

  Well, I lost mine.

  A childish cure. I will be fat, and then only true lovers will fight over me. I will be ugly. I will be silent.

  I stopped playing with other children—how could I play? One is worried: one wants to be an ugly child—unlooked at. I wanted to spare the other children. I wanted no more jealousy. I wanted only one family. One becomes afraid to sleep: dreams are not tactful.

  In my case, childish hate became a matter of dying—I did not like having to die. I think my old self died—largely so, anyway.

  So—to be melodramatic myself—the Cohns watched the destruction of the personality they had helped give me. They took it back, in a sense. The child presented himself as dull, unwilling to leave the house—that sort of thing—and very ugly, and then he said, “You’re my parents—why don’t you love me?”

  Often I played at being very stupid—I loved and hated them in this way—by being ugly and much, much, much smarter than they were. I would suddenly show them how smart I was; and then I would be silent and wait to see if they regretted anything, if they had learned to love me yet in this new guise.

  I would say, “I only want one father and one mother,” but they refused to understand. Sometimes they turned on me and threatened to put me in the Orphans’ Home—and one time they did. Sometimes I was scared of them and then I think I intended to make myself a pure Cohn, to placate them that way. And since Leila was not very steady, and S.L. was S.L.… I became … very strange. Perhaps I did get to be like them.

  To carry out my imitation, I did not take my eyes or senses off the Cohns for a minute.

  I was, in a way, as surprised as everybody else that I became so strange, but I did not stop being important to the families: my fate weighed on everyone, including me: this gave me some satisfaction.

  I wouldn’t talk in school, to anyone—except occasionally I would answer questions from the teacher that she asked another child, one who was too embarrassed to answer or not able to answer. I took care of my class intellectually; they were my parish.

  Psychiatric treatment was offered. Two psychiatrists: one I simply disliked and would not talk to at all; the other did not believe me. He probably would have in time, but he did not say what I wanted to hear: “The Cohns are your real parents; that is your real home.” So I snubbed him. I was too bright, too sensible when I chose to be, for my opinions to be ignored, even though I was a child. The psychiatrist pompously retreated.

  Meanwhile Momma—Leila—who was increasingly selfish about money and strange in her own life—was more and more polite, openly affectionate toward me as toward a visitor, toward someone who wasn’t so lucky after all, who was maybe worse off than she, Momma, was, than she, Momma, was as she aged. She made it quite clear, though, that she disliked my suffering—it was my stubbornness she admired, the victories I won in being ill (I made everyone leave me alone). The worst of this partial return to life was that I had an ineradicable sense of cowardice—the Cohns had made me afraid. I began to talk, however—this was after about six months of silence and fatness—to neighbors: only grownups. I was very polite, uncertain, then suddenly loud—but they liked me anyway. Meanwhile everything S.L. said to me struck me as unendurably stupid and not worth listening to: I’d listen to him with a look of disgust. He seemed weary—he disgusted himself. He left Momma three times that winter.

  Defiantly, I went back to being smart in school. I read the textbooks the first day of classes, and that was that. If a child asked me to explain something, I would. When a teacher addressed me, I might or might not be rude and show contempt for her vocabulary, evasions, or the dizzy fuzz of her explanations. Teachers said I was “a terror”—even so, some were fond of me, and no one among the children I knew or had known ever turned on me or did more than mention with surprise, expecting an explanation of, my new ugliness. Perhaps they needed me because I explained school subjects to them. Maybe they were an un-cruel bunch of children.

  Maybe I was unusually tough—or lucky—or a horror. But I never did have to suffer in some ways as much as some kids did. Any number of kids in my class were unhappier and more helpless than I was, except at moments, at the worst moments. Then I felt I was a mongrel, a dog—a mangy one.

  Sometimes the parents of the kids in the class would defend me—they’d go to school and remonstrate with a teacher or with S.L. and Leila about me, although I h
adn’t asked them to, and hadn’t complained; sometimes their concern was that I ought to be placed in a higher grade because they thought their children were being overshadowed and I was being “wasted” but they were also very often kind for no other reason except kindness. Sometimes they liked something I said, or my tense ugliness, or something I did, some quirk of behavior, violent or nonviolent, in me. They’d shake their heads over my parents—I brought a good deal of dislike on Leila and S.L. from others, and enmity from people who worried about me. Leila said, “Let them adopt you—let’s see how long they can stand it.”