Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Mostly, at school, I sat quietly in my seat and stared out the window.

  The worst time felt black and poisonous. I woke up each morning as if I was rising to my knees in a black, tarry, poisonous pit. I dressed myself sloppily, crazily. Momma made me re-dress myself often. One Saturday, Momma said, “Get some fresh air. You can’t sit around inside all day—I get enough blame as it is.”

  Dully, I sat on the front steps, but when other kids appeared I went and vanished, so to speak, down a driveway, across a backyard—alone, demented, wretched. I observed very little—some sheets being aired on grass, some pretty-colored brick in sunlight. It was hard to walk: I dragged along, all coordination gone.

  In a park, a large park, nearly empty—because it was reputed to be dangerous—amid the trees and sunlight, there came to me a sense that I was alone. Bedded in my stale agony in that tree-y emptiness, in the slowness of time there, I did not scream when three black boys suddenly jumped on me from behind some bushes; and in my deadness I did little more than stare at them when they started to beat me. But my staring stopped them; they ran away; they hadn’t hurt me. I walked on, heavily, gasping for breath, asthmatic—with as yet unfaded terror. Then I saw a wad of violets, in bloom, at the foot of a tall tree that had a plaque on it that said “Red Oak”—some such thing.

  I think I had come to believe, as some natural clock ticked away several months of gradually stabilizing agony, that there was to be no rescue for me ever.

  I was, I think, actually crazed with fear; anyway, fearful: and yet I was calm about it. The wind blew and moved my hair; that startled me; everything was swollen with elements of the incomprehensible-to-me left over from the events in the Cohns’ house.

  When I saw the violets, what I felt, first, was hopelessness: then interest of a tired kind. I knelt—and looked: for a while, my senses wouldn’t register with any orderliness what I saw; I had to touch the flowers to see them: my sensual deadness was familiar—and even reassuring—like a pillow gone flat and a little smelly: there was a balance—one hovered at nothingness. Then perhaps the memory of an old embrace or pleasure, or a current boredom with insanity, tilted the balance; I touched the flower: slowly its purpleness grew clear to me. After a long time, I smelled the odor of the violets. I began to shake quite a bit. I lay down and put my cheek on the violets as on a pillow. Or as on a mother. I put my lips on them—to taste, not kiss. I brushed them with my open eyes, then slowly—it was more pleasant—with my eyelids. I felt coolness in the ground under me, coolness on my fat stomach. Haltingly, with blurs, I became aware of the hues and shapes of the petals of the violets until they filled my eyes and mind and of the odor until it filled my nose and lungs—until a sense of them filled me.

  It seemed to take forever, to involve an interminable mathematics, this restoration of order to the senses and the mind. Bone and muscle attempted to pull themselves together to support this mental suppleness. It seems too elaborate to say it like this, but what happened felt to me as if the unhappiness had been willed, and therefore I could fight it if I chose: I could do it; almost easily, but gracelessly, I lay and looked at the violets for a long time and saw them clearly as I willed. I see them still, the defenselessness, the unparentedness of them.

  “Go on,” I said to myself, “if flowers can do it, and they don’t last very long—people are really terrible to them—you can do it, go ahead, live, just live, go ahead, live.”

  It was a secret, a boy’s secret. No one knows how to take care of you—you’re a monster—but go ahead and live anyway.

  It’s all right to be a monster.

  A child adopts childish reasons: childish reasons have to serve in one’s childhood—that’s what childhood is.

  OF COURSE, I had changed. And, oddly, I knew it—I did not expect other children to be like me.

  I found I still had a position in the school. When an anti-Semitic teacher attacked me as having undue influence on the other children, they still stuck by me—after all, the anti-Semitic teacher was powerful in their lives only for a year but I’d be with them through high school to help with homework; and even for the present year they couldn’t understand her unless I translated what she said to them. Also, no matter how unlikely it sounds, they liked me, and they weren’t sure they liked her unless I said she was terrific.

  In school, I did not speak and was not addressed—it was too hard for the teachers to deal with me. Sometimes they gave me special work; they could not grade it, however; they would get flustered. When I read the textbooks the first day of school, I did not consciously remember what I read but when something was mentioned I would see, usually, the page in the textbook where that thing had been discussed, all the words on that page—and even the clouds or rain or sun outside the window that I had glanced at when I looked up from reading—and I could explain the textbook and point out where it differed from what the teacher said—things like that—and when it was most advisable to follow the textbook and when it was better to listen to the teacher: I told my classmates things like that.

  I worried some about speech, about saying things that would be applicable, that would be worth someone’s trying to understand what you were saying.

  If I did speak in class, the other kids, as if electrified by a current, attached themselves to what I said. The teachers were good, often, but they spoke a school language, a dreary mandarin American that only kids who were the sons or daughters of teachers spoke. I spoke various middle-class Americans, and recess American (shouts, hurried explanations), and local, street, or dirty American; and in play I spoke literary English. I taught the kids after school on a street corner; I was a child, and often—not always—knew why they didn’t understand whatever it was that frightened them in the lesson. I knew their lives—to some extent. I was them-plus-me; and they were me-and-them plus and minus things. When I went to another school—when we moved a few years later—it didn’t happen like this. I mean this was just that one school where I’d been since kindergarten. They knew me and were used to me.

  Because they were sometimes blamed for the way I was being brought up and because the kindness of people to me made them uneasy, both Nonie and Momma got to a point of hysteria, of giddy defiance, especially about my not learning anything fancy or getting ahead of myself: those are their terms. They were in a funny position. They were victors in a way—Daddy was having a nervous breakdown and was afraid of them, and I clung to the house, I spurned outside kindness, I was afraid of them—and yet they were sinking, the ground under their feet dipped lower and lower every month: they were victors-going-under. It must have seemed crazily unfair, eerie, to them.

  After school, after I gave the necessary lesson, kids would beckon me or invite me to play, but I wouldn’t play with them. I hurried home, I lumbered home, a monstrous child, a dog.

  Often, quite often, I had bouts of murderous rage toward my parents by adoption; I felt it inwardly, only inwardly: a scalding thing—grief and hatred.

  I was trying to love the Cohns, so far as I knew; but it was interesting that the more dependence I showed toward them, the more blame they received for my condition; the women Momma courted blamed her. With the greatest and dullest politeness, with a squat, ugly child’s toad-like loyalty, I yet managed to accuse her nearly every minute of an enormous failure toward me. I managed, while being “a good son,” to make her failures patently visible.

  Possibly revenge is curative. Or time. I don’t think I was much more miserable than other children: I think in a way I enjoyed my childhood.

  WHOEVER I played with, I was careful of him, of his pretenses. Anyone I liked or spent time with became, in a way, educated, became the second-smartest person in class and was quickly elected to things and was more important to the other kids than he had been before he was my friend.

  And when I dropped them, they slowly sank through the class and were … oh … semiruined … intellectually: only intellectually.

  I remember one boy: he liked me�
�he hated me; he waited for me to come see him; he hated me if I escaped from him, if I didn’t love him; he was afraid of me; then at moments he wasn’t—and so on. I couldn’t tell if that was “normal”—I didn’t know anymore.

  Nonie wanted me to appear to like her, to adore her if possible. But I disliked her; she bored me; and it showed. “Why can’t we be a normal family?” she would scream, meaning why couldn’t I as a younger brother admire her? I think I managed thoroughly to hurt her.

  She needed me for the sake of her reputation, perhaps for merely human reasons. Some people did like her because they disliked what I stood for—elitism, intellectual luck: I can’t define what they thought.

  I tried to care about Nonie, but she was always the same, threatening me with a hot iron, trying to lock me in the closet, so the hell with her. I don’t see how it could have been otherwise.

  Sanity is rough, is dirty. At least, as I knew it.

  THEN REAL happiness returned—in a special guise.

  A boy I had tutored in reading, and who now reveled in being the second-brightest, or even apparently the brightest, kid in the third grade (since I did not compete), became my friend, and a girl who had liked me in kindergarten when I’d been the boy who was so handsome—she’d run in games when I ran, always a half step behind me and solemn—and who’d always been half loyal but a little surprised, a little betrayed when I turned ugly, liked me a lot again; now that I had a good friend (his name was Meynell), she attached herself to me again. Or I accepted her. Again.

  Her name was Laura. She had been bored. She was somber, freckled, erect, with a milky look and very heavy purple-red hair and purple, or violet, eyes. Grownups admired her. Meynell was in local suburban terminology “an imp” (a woman would cast about for a word to describe him and then come up with that one and would be very proud). The three of us met every morning before school; we looked at each other every few minutes in school; we were known for our friendship—friendship and happiness are legendary. Laura’s parents thought we were too close (one time, in a garage, she lifted her skirt and showed me herself; I showed her myself; we were very calm, unobscene, except I did kiss her belly, and one of her knees). Also, we played Torture a lot, the three of us, pretending to interrogate each other, pretending to break each other’s spirits. We screamed and writhed—in pretend resistance, in practice for pain.

  I was not allowed to have my friends come to the house very often, nor did I want them to. Nonie could not bear it—and my friends found Momma, Daddy, and Nonie odd, perhaps detestable.

  I entered the lives of my friends, and to an extent shared their parents. Older children knew about us—we were envied, liked, smiled at, teased. The three of us together could bear most of that easily. There was a kind of excitement whenever, after a separation—at recess, overnight—we met; we were sharply bitten by pleasure in each other and the intertwined affections; we hopped as if bitten by mosquitoes. Laura did not play many games, but she would talk, and she would climb things—onto garages or up into trees. Also, sometimes she would be allowed to play outside at dusk, on swings, or we would simply run and she would spread her arms and open her mouth and explain—pantingly—later, “I was eating the darkness.” Meynell and I played marbles, mumblety-peg, running games, street hockey, primitive baseball, stoopball, games of imagination: his mother said, “They’re closer than brothers.” The intensity was such that for a while everything gave way before us—family schedules, rules at school. Daddy wanted to make peace now—it was as if he wanted to touch this happiness—he offered peace on his terms: I was to be a very young loving child; he liked baby talk, stuff like that. He did not understand. Nor did Leila, who was forbearing and jealous. Sometimes wicked—but we fought her off.

  Momma said, “I don’t see how Alan does it—he has a gift for coming up smelling like a rose.”

  Momma said to me, “It will never be me who will get the credit for anything you do.”

  She said, “Make it easy for the rest of us—be ordinary; it won’t hurt you; don’t try so hard.”

  I did not try at all, as far as I knew.

  Momma and Daddy were sad but, on the whole, kinder to me. Momma said, “That child is lucky—I don’t know where he gets his luck: he didn’t inherit it from me.”

  Momma said to me, “You talk like a book—that wins people over.”

  She and Daddy were increasingly unhappy in their lives. Momma said, “Sometimes I think it’s not right for life to be like this.”

  Mothers of my friends, Jewish women—not the Gentile ones—would sometimes say something like “I never did like Leila Cohn.”

  Such women often angled to have me as a friend for their children, but I already had Meynell and Laura; and I was kind to other children but no more than that. Still, I was part of Momma’s social leverage—I could help her if I chose. She needed me. She knew I knew that. Usually I wouldn’t help her. She accepted her defeat. She said, “I know, you already have your friends—I wouldn’t trust them if I were you.… If I were you, I’d listen to me.…”

  She said, “I don’t want you to be smart and despise women—don’t ever look down on women: brains aren’t worth it.”

  Of other families and women, Momma would say, “You wouldn’t like them so much if you lived with them—they wouldn’t let you get away with things the way I do; they’d put a stop to your gallivanting around.” That was partly true: my situation with the Cohns forced them to give me, willy-nilly, a great deal of freedom.

  Meynell’s mother suggested I live with them a few days a week; at first, Meynell was wildly agreeable, but then he grew jealous—his jealousy grew and grew and grew: how could it fail to grow? He said, “You’re wonderful and I love you a lot, but I’m silly and I get along with people better than you do.” He didn’t, really.

  A teacher joined herself to Meynell’s unease with me: she said that I dominated Meynell, that he would not get a chance to develop properly if he was anywhere near me. He began to say he wanted to be “equal friends” with a lot of boys.

  With Laura, the issue was my being Jewish—a Jesuit uncle of hers objected to the influence I had with her; her parents had become fond of me, but they, too, felt Laura and I were too close, that she listened to me and not to them.

  At first, Laura fought her parents, but then she gave in; and she liked my sadness at losing her. She could not help smiling sometimes.

  Meynell said, of himself, he was too “wild” to be a good friend to me. I said, “No, you’re not.” He said, “We shouldn’t be such close friends: we shut everyone out.” I said, “No, we don’t.” He said, “You should have other friends.” I was sorry I loved him.

  To some extent, they had to return to the friendship and did, as long as they remained in the suburb—who can surrender happiness easily? But now everyone was troubled.

  Momma said, “See: you’re hard for everyone—you’re hard on everyone.”

  Laura’s family moved from the suburb, as did Meynell’s, the following year—it was a solution of sorts.

  There was an atmosphere around my childhood of its being kind of a joke. Perhaps that’s true for most children.

  Momma said, “I tell you things, but you don’t listen. Don’t show anyone you’re smart: stop being such a fool; I’ll admit you may be smart, but no one can stand it.”

  Sometimes she treats me like a brother or a form of husband, unsatisfactory but better than Daddy and more available for certain purposes.

  She said a hundred times or more, “I don’t want him to be a genius! I have no interest in those things! I want him to be happy! Geniuses die young! They’re not lucky in love! Let him be selfish, let him have a good time. Talk to me: I’m the interesting one around here.…”

  I was a rigid, muscular, tense-faced boy, with odd, squinting eyes, a perpetual look of a resigned jokester’s agony—with a peculiar power of ingratiation. Ugly and proud and secretive and often ashamed, domineering in a silent, incontrovertible way. If I fig
ht Momma publicly, she—oh, all life drains from her: she says, “Don’t let the neighbors know everything—this isn’t nice—please stop.”

  I am a policeman … a young boy … foul, willful, secular—I can taste it in my mouth, how secular I am. What a joke I am. A local child. Nothing else. Leila’s.

  If Nonie tries to pick on me, I say, “Leave me alone—or I’ll lie about you.” (A lie is designed to be spoken and so is easier to understand and often to believe than a stumbling attempt to relate something that really happened: what happened is not designed to be spoken of.)

  Momma says, “You always have to win.”

  I said to Nonie once, “You’re a real mess: when you’re honest and really act the way you are you’re disgusting, and when you lie you’re a jackass.”

  Still, she will come to me sometimes for comfort, for help against Momma or Daddy.

  I am going to make it through my childhood, it looks like.

  There is something about Momma’s life, a dissatisfaction, a distortion—it is partly gender, partly a blackmail she practices, partly a simple truth—so that it is wrong to triumph over her.

  She exaggerates and suffers from and is caught in her differences from me, from everyone.… She does not like “chivalry.”

  If I ask Daddy for something he can’t give me, if I persist until some dream he has of himself is wrecked, he will say bitterly, “Do you want to turn us all into your slaves?”

  He was tired of masculinity. His own. Mine. All men’s.

  I am not Momma’s child; I will outlive her, I have better luck than she does, but she has to take care of me meanwhile anyway and make me happy—such generosity: so unlikely; that is the style for mothers, Jewish mothers, in this suburb; it is a requirement for social acceptance. She and I know that in my surviving in the way I did lay her social

  credit.… I am aware that in some complicated, ill-informed way the world operated more sweetly on my senses than it did on hers—not when I was depressed but most times. She was in a rush, she was tense, she was not entirely well She will say to me, “Give me a helping hand—do you want the school, do you want your father to be mad at me?”