Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  “WHY DO YOU LIE TO ME! WHY DO YOU LET NONIE LIE!” I shout at her. I think it is fair to have one’s masculinity on terms—masculinity is not a gift, as femininity is.

  When I am young and these scenes occur, Momma says, “Why are you making this so difficult! Now I’m telling you for the last time: come here, come to me and get what’s coming to you.…”

  The hot tears gush. I may scream then—or I am silent, breathing hard, but thinking: Do I have to give in? Have I been defeated? Or I scream, as I said; I am convulsed with screaming—with flailing and kicking. Nonie may run up and grab my shirt and she can go heb, heb, like a villain, or Momma can pick me up—if I am quite little—and if I kick and wiggle she may drop me. Nonie may choke me—not seriously at first, but when she means it her fingers tighten like a noose: I start to black out; I say, “Momma!”

  Sometimes Momma cannot bear the event, either, and will want to simplify it; and she will say in a tired, patient voice—as if she had never been in a different mood, “Stop kicking—Nonie’s not hurting you.”

  Momma cares for the happiness a man feels, as for a man’s pain, only if she has bestowed it on him; and then she regards the happiness very highly and wants to be repaid for it.

  She says, “Stop that yelling. Do you want the neighbors to know you’re a mollycoddle? Don’t you know yet how to grin and bear things?”

  If I then become silent and grave and resigned, she will say, “Don’t stand there and be so disapproving. It makes me sick. I hate holier-than-thous. You’re only getting what you deserve. Can’t you be big and admit that?”

  And: “Don’t you dare judge me. Do you hear me?”

  Momma’s breasts smell sweaty. Her shaven armpits have a mechanically sweet odor—of a deodorant or whatever. Her clothes make noises. Her pubic hair rustles against its covering. Her body squeaks, rubs, gives off heat: her shoes have wrinkles in them. I can, as a child, almost absorb the reality of her.

  If she cannot punish me, she is indeed a slave.

  She can’t just grab me and spank me. Sometimes she spanks me as if to get material for an anecdote: “I spanked the child the other day.” (She thinks spankings are elegant—rich—high-class.) I have almost no reaction when she spanks me like that: I have been hired for the occasion: I lie in her lap, limp and sullen and absent: she can’t tell if I am punished or not. She gives up in disgust: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I’m done. Get away from me.” She is disgusted that I don’t know how to be spanked, that I don’t know how to amuse her when I’m spanked by her.

  Sometimes I stiffen and resist and make an issue of having been spanked, until Momma shouts, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it: he’s a monster!”

  Sometimes she spanks me so lightly that Nonie will cry out, “You’re not hurting him, Momma—”

  Momma will say, “Then here—you do it—”

  But if Nonie tries I will fight “like a madman” or “the madman from Borneo.” Nonie cannot spank me without looking brutal. She knows that.

  She shifts from foot to foot: “You let him get away with everything!”

  Momma does not want to be browbeaten by Nonie: “Stop it—don’t be any more of a fool than you have to be.”

  The two women try and try, but neither can control the other, although they can hurt each other—they are like medieval champions who are evenly matched.

  Momma says, “I am sick and tired of scenes! All right, Nonie, you run the house. You deal with your father—and the child. Let’s see how far you get—”

  She will say to Nonie, “You think I don’t know what really went on here this afternoon? You think everyone’s a fool but you?”

  Momma is a pudgy, somewhat giddy and obscure, obstinate version of a policeman.

  She may say to me, “Lie still—you have to learn your lesson.” It is not clear what I am learning—it is never clear what a child is learning.

  If I don’t forgive Momma for what she does, the household enters on a period of difficulty—the difficulty is a joke if everyone is getting along with each other, but no one gets along with anyone long in our house, Momma with Daddy, Daddy with Nonie, Anne Marie with any of them, if I am in bad shape.

  I am the child.

  Momma can persuade Daddy for a while that I’m spoiled; he peers and suspects there is that in me, or worse. But then she is stuck with him, with Daddy: he will remember that he knows her; often he can’t abide her; meanwhile, I am crushed, silent, listless, angry, sinking, half suffocated—ah, but uncomplaining. There is an unmasking: Daddy grows uneasy—where is his home, where are his chances for comfort, has Momma fooled him?

  His heart constricts; he says, “It’s ugly in here.” Why is that child suffering? Why are we leading this life? Sooner or later, Momma has to placate me.

  She will begin by offering me a tentative, self-conscious, phony smile of bravery, of oh-let’s-not-be-petty, or some such thing.

  I will turn away, my mouth harsh, my eyes showing contempt, pain, and dislike.

  She is trying to get me too cheaply. She acts as if I required nothing. When I am upset, I am partly blinded: colors vanish; I fail to hear things. “Is he deaf—is he in a state again?”

  She will say, “I don’t know what I did—remember, I make mistakes, too. If you can’t tell me what I’ve done, I don’t think you should blame me, so be a nice boy and forgive me, what do you say?”

  She used my comparative inability to describe things to indicate her comparative guiltlessness—and when I can describe what she did, she says, “Oh, I think that’s awfully petty, don’t you, to blame me for that?”

  No.

  She says, “I couldn’t have been so bad if that’s all you can think of to say—be reasonable now.…”

  She will say, “It’s small of you to hold a grudge … to fight with a woman. You have a terrible temper. You have the temperament of an I don’t know what.”

  She will say, “Listen, my fair-haired little friend, I assure you forgiveness is good for what ails you—you’ll ruin your good looks if you go on like this.…”

  Or she will scream, when I am older and ugly, “I don’t want you in my house! You have no heart!”

  She believed or hoped that any pain she suffered released her from any compulsion to carry out a duty.

  When I am young, I keep track that she has not yet apologized to me for anything. She has not yet seen to it that there is any truth for me.

  When I refuse to be fooled by her into too easy a reconciliation, she begins grudgingly or with amusement to admire me.

  Or if she detects any plotting or firmness in me, dark, ill lit, obscure in expression, she will lighten, and she will make some offer: “Let’s be friends—I’ll stand by you, you’ll see.” And: “Don’t hold out for too much—believe me, I know whereof I speak—being stubborn is a losing proposition. Listen to me and learn: I’m the best friend you have.…”

  When I was young, the house was often as much mine as it was my mother’s.

  Then and later, I will always let my mother make peace with me. She will say, “Ah, you don’t intend to be a pain in the neck any longer—”

  Sometimes I set her free—when I set her free, she usually puts me on a shelf: I become one of the things she doesn’t have to worry about at the moment; her attention flies on to other things.

  When I don’t set her free … whenever I entered a room where she was, she would jerk with awareness, with memory: she would mention that I was angry; or she would suddenly glance at me with an entire consciousness that I was there: with calculations of how-to-handle-me.

  I was cleverer with her than I was with anyone else.

  The women uttered a lot of heavings, puffings, moans, exhortations to each other as I fought in various ways. I’d kick and shout, “You leave me alone!”

  “We’re not doing anything to you,” Momma would say—disingenuously.

  Sometimes, when I am older, I can drive them off, make them break off the fight b
y yelling that everyone knows how awful Nonie is or that some boy she liked had laughed at how big her behind was: I can threaten to repeat things outside the house; I can on occasion silence Momma by repeating Daddy’s views about her.

  Momma said, “You always have to win.” And: “Why do you always have to win?” She said, “Why do you have to fight like this?”

  I hide underneath something or other and confront her from there.… I run across the room and stand behind a chair and confront her from there.

  She and I.

  What is to become of us if I don’t listen to her?

  I don’t know what I expected to gain.

  There is always present the crushing idea that we-deserve-each-other—we deserve each other because we know each other, because this has gone on all my life.…

  She will say, “Save your breath—I’m not listening to you.”

  Or: “I’m not listening to you—I never listen to people who are rude.”

  Some people think the amateurishness of family life is the most widely distributed human beauty.

  “Are you willing to listen to reason? You have to give up now,” my mother says. Perhaps I know only a small world, a false world. She will say, “Are you ready to show me some respect now?”

  She says, “All right, let’s get on with it.” She means: that woman, that woman sitting there—that if I love her I have to help her hurt me now.

  But I only have to help her hurt me if I love her. Otherwise, I can laugh and leave her sitting there forever, in memory, alone, ignored, unobeyed.

  My mother.

  More or less.

  VERONA:

  A YOUNG

  WOMAN

  SPEAKS

  I KNOW a lot! I know about happiness! I don’t mean the love of God, either: I mean I know the human happiness with the crimes in it.

  Even the happiness of childhood.

  I think of it now as a cruel, middle-class happiness.

  Let me describe one time—one day, one night.

  I was quite young, and my parents and I—there were just the three of us—were traveling from Rome to Salzburg, journeying across a quarter of Europe to be in Salzburg for Christmas, for the music and the snow. We went by train because planes were erratic, and my father wanted us to stop in half a dozen Italian towns and see paintings and buy things. It was absurd, but we were all three drunk with this; it was very strange; we woke every morning in a strange hotel, in a strange city. I would be the first one to wake; and I would go to the window and see some tower or palace; and then I would wake my mother and be justified in my sense of wildness and belief and adventure by the way she acted, her sense of romance at being in a city as strange as I had thought it was when I had looked out the window and seen the palace or the tower.

  We had to change trains in Verona, a darkish, smallish city at the edge of the Alps. By the time we got there, we’d bought and bought our way up the Italian peninsula: I was dizzy with shopping and new possessions: I hardly knew who I was, I owned so many new things: my reflection in any mirror or shopwindow was resplendently fresh and new, disguised even, glittering, I thought. I was seven or eight years old. It seemed to me we were almost in a movie or in the pages of a book: only the simplest and most light-filled words and images can suggest what I thought we were then. We went around shiningly: we shone everywhere. Those clothes. It’s easy to buy a child. I had a new dress, knitted, blue and red, expensive as hell, I think; leggings, also red; a red loden-cloth coat with a hood and a knitted cap for under the hood; marvelous lined gloves; fur-lined boots and a fur purse or carryall, and a tartan skirt—and shirts and a scarf, and there was even more: a watch, a bracelet: more and more.

  On the trains we had private rooms, and Momma carried games in her purse and things to eat, and Daddy sang carols off-key to me; and sometimes I became so intent on my happiness I would suddenly be in real danger of wetting myself; and Momma, who understood such emergencies, would catch the urgency in my voice and see my twisted face; and she—a large, good-looking woman—would whisk me to a toilet with amazing competence and unstoppability, murmuring to me, “Just hold on for a while,” and she would hold my hand while I did it.

  So we came to Verona, where it was snowing, and the people had stern, sad faces, beautiful, unlaughing faces. But if they looked at me, those serious faces would lighten, they would smile at me in my splendor. Strangers offered me candy, sometimes with the most excruciating sadness, kneeling or stopping to look directly into my face, into my eyes; and Momma or Papa would judge them, the people, and say in Italian we were late, we had to hurry, or pause and let the stranger touch me, talk to me, look into my face for a while. I would see myself in the eyes of some strange man or woman; sometimes they stared so gently I would want to touch their eyelashes, stroke those strange, large, glistening eyes. I knew I decorated life. I took my duties with great seriousness. An Italian count in Siena said I had the manners of an English princess—at times—and then he laughed because it was true I would be quite lurid: I ran shouting in his galleria, a long room, hung with pictures, and with a frescoed ceiling: and I sat on his lap and wriggled: I was a wicked child, and I liked myself very much; and almost everywhere, almost every day, there was someone new to love me, briefly, while we traveled.

  I understood I was special. I understood it then.

  I knew that what we were doing, everything we did, involved money. I did not know if it involved mind or not, or style. But I knew about money somehow, checks and traveler’s checks and the clink of coins. Daddy was a fountain of money: he said it was a spree; he meant for us to be amazed; he had saved money—we weren’t really rich but we were to be for this trip. I remember a conservatory in a large house outside Florence and orange trees in tubs; and I ran there, too. A servant, a man dressed in black, a very old man, mean-faced—he did not like being a servant anymore after the days of servants were over—and he scowled—but he smiled at me, and at my mother, and even once at my father: we were clearly so separate from the griefs and weariness and cruelties of the world. We were at play, we were at our joys, and Momma was glad, with a terrible and naive inner gladness, and she relied on Daddy to make it work: oh, she worked, too, but she didn’t know the secret of such—unreality: is that what I want to say? Of such a game, of such an extraordinary game.

  THERE WAS a picture in Verona Daddy wanted to see: a painting; I remember the painter because the name Pisanello reminded me I had to go to the bathroom when we were in the museum, which was an old castle, Guelph or Ghibelline, I don’t remember which; and I also remember the painting because it showed the hind end of the horse, and I thought that was not nice and rather funny, but Daddy was admiring; and so I said nothing.

  He held my hand and told me a story so I wouldn’t be bored as we walked from room to room in the museum/castle, and then we went outside into the snow, into the soft light when it snows, light coming through snow; and I was dressed in red and had on boots, and my parents were young and pretty and had on boots, too; and we could stay out in the snow if we wanted; and we did. We went to a square, a piazza—the Scaligera, I think; I don’t remember—and just as we got there, the snowing began to bellow and then subside, to fall heavily and then sparsely, and then it stopped: and it was very cold, and there were pigeons everywhere in the piazza, on every cornice and roof, and all over the snow on the ground, leaving little tracks as they walked, while the air trembled in its just-after-snow and just-before-snow weight and thickness and gray seriousness of purpose. I had never seen so many pigeons or such a private and haunted place as that piazza, me in my new coat at the far rim of the world, the far rim of who knew what story, the rim of foreign beauty and Daddy’s games, the edge, the white border of a season.

  I was half mad with pleasure anyway, and now Daddy brought five or six cones made of newspaper, wrapped, twisted; and they held grains of something like corn, yellow and white kernels of something; and he poured some on my hand and told me to hold my hand out; and
then he backed away.

  At first, there was nothing, but I trusted him and I waited; and then the pigeons came. On heavy wings. Clumsy pigeony bodies. And red, unreal birds’ feet. They flew at me, slowing at the last minute; they lit on my arm and fed from my hand. I wanted to flinch, but I didn’t. I closed my eyes and held my arm stiffly; and felt them peck and eat—from my hand, these free creatures, these flying things. I liked that moment. I liked my happiness. If I was mistaken about life and pigeons and my own nature, it didn’t matter then.

  The piazza was very silent, with snow; and Daddy poured grains on both my hands and then on the sleeves of my coat and on the shoulders of the coat, and I was entranced with yet more stillness, with this idea of his. The pigeons fluttered heavily in the heavy air, more and more of them, and sat on my arms and on my shoulders; and I looked at Momma and then at my father and then at the birds on me.

  Oh, I’m sick of everything as I talk. There is happiness. It always makes me slightly ill. I lose my balance because of it.

  The heavy birds, and the strange buildings, and Momma near, and Daddy, too: Momma is pleased that I am happy and she is a little jealous; she is jealous of everything Daddy does; she is a woman of enormous spirit; life is hardly big enough for her; she is drenched in wastefulness and prettiness. She knows things. She gets inflexible, though, and foolish at times, and temperamental; but she is a somebody, and she gets away with a lot, and if she is near, you can feel her, you can’t escape her, she’s that important, that echoing, her spirit is that powerful in the space around her.

  If she weren’t restrained by Daddy, if she weren’t in love with him, there is no knowing what she might do: she does not know. But she manages almost to be gentle because of him; he is incredibly watchful and changeable and he gets tired; he talks and charms people; sometimes, then, Momma and I stand nearby, like moons; we brighten and wane; and after a while, he comes to us, to the moons, the big one and the little one, and we welcome him, and he is always, to my surprise, he is always surprised, as if he didn’t deserve to be loved, as if it were time he was found out.