He has a need for charity and innocence and is a man to be rescued—he has seen this in the movies: I am an instrument of grace—this was his atmosphere when he was with me. Lost, handsome, and prodigal. Lila said of him once that he was from the other Testament.
I was without speech. His identity and mine, besides being a matter of legal fact, was like something having to do with modern notions of molecular structure; we are psychologically to be seen not in the light of scriptures or psalms, or marble sculptures or photographs—enclosed unities of Art from an era of short-lived people—but in the light of atoms and smaller particles and forces and force fields and dark fields of actual existence, of the electricities of the actual world. Our electricity, our substance, renewed itself in ways that were mental and venereal, not like the ways in books and names. Everything we were was restless and open to new interpretations. It always seemed to me our skins were borders for dim mysteries of selfhood. One had certain traits of mind that recognized the fields of force and the areas of space and darkness and of the particular binding that makes one man himself, but these traits of mind were tormented by the actual carelessness of reality. I mean, one such binding thing was that there was S.L.-in-the-world and S.L. as husband, as money-maker, as judge (of truths in the home)—but all these were stories, not fixed things or adjectives. He was more lover than father and the love could flow into other fields of force. I used often to think, in the throes of immense and growing shock and shocked astonishment and blind and sometimes enraged and anguished wonder, Who is he, this man, who is he? Ma said often, He’s not himself, he’s someone else, I don’t think I know him. And: He’s not the man he was, he’s not the same man, he’s changed.
He was obscure. He always hated it when anyone spoke; he listened courteously, up to a point, and then he became lecherous and hiddenly insulting in his restlessness; he would armor himself against the other voice; he would return to a notion of the world in which he was absolute master of most truths.
He philosophized—his philosophy was sometimes disguised as babble or was mixed with it, on purpose, to make it sweet and accessible to the pure in heart (his phrase), but his philosophy had no currency whatsoever in the world except to his employees and debtors, and us, the family, and me, maybe me especially.
Dad liked sweetness. So he was never honestly autobiographical with me. My identity was that of Goodness Needing Charity and so I was The Cause of Worthwhile Goodness in the Good-Hearted, Particularly S. L. Silenowicz (At Times When He Felt Like It).
IN THE SMALL park was a bandshell; he had carried me there.
I moved very slowly on the concrete platform of the bandshell; the temporary babble of child-electricity inside its brief, replaceable skin, its momentary prettiness, moved on the concrete platform beneath the upside-down flower, lilylike, of the roof.
I remember turning often to see him, to see if he was there—windblown figure at the edge of this enclosed deck. At first, he was standing on hidden grass and only part of him showed over the line of the edge of the platform. He is bareheaded in the wind.
He means to buy me; I am amenable.
This drum with its delicately stilled core of air is redolent with its isolation in the near-rain. Dad is talking. Among the columns, floating particles of blue and gray and green-brown move. I see faint mist, air and leaves. Distances are incomplete caves among the slanted columns of rainlight.
S.L.’s voice is as complicated as an eye. S.L. says, “You are really something, you are a bouquet on two legs—you know that?”
I stand in the middle of this secret mosque, unfurnished, unwomaned, this model of a skull. I operate in the same way as a prism, breaking open the white light of the fierce pleasures and horrors of Daddy’s world, intensity and mad speed, into mild pastels, a line or troop of fairies, kind ones, not malicious, showing the delicacy of the world in a flowerlike or pretty servant and little-girl way: the world is O.K. and has good things in it—such good things as this: his pleasure in me on top of his horrors moves like pastel rainbows for S.L. when he blinks his eyes. He moves, he advances and rises luminously and then shadedly: he stands on one of the upper steps—he is partly roofed now—and he is watching me, still more intently, and he talks, maybe nonsense. When I watch him back, he stops, he tires of it, and he turns his back to me and he sits at the top near the horizontal boards and X-pieces of the railing. He half turns, he watches me idly, he watches the air, the pause in the rain—He said, “It’s a great day for ducks—you like ducks? Quack, quack? Gobble, gobble—that’s a turkey; don’t be a turkey or the goblins’ll get ya. Listen: will you tell me why the whole world isn’t like you, there’s no reason people can’t be good, let’s just ship the bad ones off to an island and we’ll let ’em kill each other and we’ll be happy and good—how about that? It’ll just be you and me and—and—Little Lord Jesus, maybe. I like Jesus—he seems like a nice guy to me: don’t tell anyone I told you that.… I don’t like Jews, Wileykins.” It depended on the morning but I think, or feel, that it was more mornings than not that he was his blond self. “You and me now, should we switch? We’re nice people; you tell me: nod once for yes, twice for no. Don’t just stand there—O.K., O.K., don’t look like that: I didn’t mean to complain—oh, you are a sweet thing; oh, you are tenderhearted. Oh, baby, baby, baby, you are my baby; oh, you smell so good: that’s because you are so good; we got to stand by each other; don’t get me wrong, I’m not running out on the Jews, Wileykins: we got to stand by them, too, that’s our heritage, we ckin niver turn ohruh bahck onn thah-ett: they start burning Jews, we stand up and get counted, we fight, we take to the hills with our rifles, bang, bang, blood is blood and family is family—but hey, look at you, lookit you un me, hey? This isn’t blood, this isn’t family, but this is Pair uh diiize, I’m telling you, your sweet hugs are worth more than roobees. Zuh rule we don’t got nohow to like Jews, nosirree bob, I’m telling you, they got mouths on them, they’re crazy, they won’t be people—like you and me—but they want to be heard, like they’re angels; they got no sense, they’re this or that, they’re what they do, they ain’t no fun, I’m telling you that, they don’t smell so good—well, we’re not pushy, you and me, we’re people, just plain people: with a little money: we’re officers and gentlemen; me, I’m a cowboy at heart—a cowboy-king: I got the heart of a king, at least of a duke—Tell me, Sweetie Face, you Pretty Puss, you follow me?”
I lean against his shoulder.
“Ask me what is a Jew and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you someday: it’s not just a matter of money, they’re real ugly people—they don’t want to be happy; well, that’s all right with me: you don’t get pretty people in small towns as a rule; now listen to me, I’m giving you the hot poop, the real scoop: pure and simple: these little one-horse burgs, they drive you away if you’re pretty—they make it hot for you, you have to have the common touch if you want to stay; it’s the rule: your mother and I are the exceptions, but to tell you the truth, we’re scared of big places: your mother in Chicago is a nervous wreck: we shoulda gone but we put it off too long, we were having too good a time. I’ll tell you what it was, it was the automobile and having St. Louis down the block” (it was an hour away). “I guess we thought we’d just drift our way in: your mother wants us to move for you now but we never did it yet: we’re small-town, if you ask me. I am; I can’t get it up in a city: no one personally wants you to live; everyone gets in everyone’s way; it’s ugly—I think it’s an ugly world—except for you, Prettikins: me, I need a small town, I get dizzy if too many people get near me, I get a headache, a bad headache: give me some wide-open spaces where men are men, that’s God’s honest truth: we have rules for everything, Wileykins, but that doesn’t mean they’re true; no one knows what true is: see, what it is is we’re not allowed to be wrong—I ask you, what kind of shit is that? Jesus, now, he was a beaut: he understood, a mistake was a mistake, we all make them, you unhook the wrong brassiere and you get some ugly tits flopping there, wh
addy goin tuh dooo, make a fed’ral kayss uv itt, make un nenemeee? I’ll tell yuh what yuh do, you get intuh a fight—that’s what being ugly means, they fight: I like peace, myself: you think I’m joking? Nosirree, I’m not. No, I am not, my little friend—and heir. Christ-on-a-crutch, I’m not poking fun. I collect this good stuff, I hear people talk and I listen and I think and I save things up, I may be a great thinker, you may not think it to look at me but I think a lot—Jesus made mistakes, he understood mistakes, that’s the man for me—that’s the God I like—uh corse he wa’n’t no goawd”—S.L. rarely stayed inside a single imitation long; the shifts in mimicry were a form of thought and of association—“or if he was, he needed someone to sweep up a(f)tter him: well, never say die—but it’s good, a god that makes mistakes, that’s what it means to come down and be human: you take a human shape, you get hurt; a priest told me that: he was talking about himself, too: he was a fruit priest, you know what I mean? He liked me a lot, he liked me too much: now, Ju(h)eeeesusssss, a lot of the time he was wrong, so, of course, he was mos(t)ly right: you got tuh understand that, that’s how things work: I doan like books, they say things wrong, they clean things up and laugh at people but people are where you find the truth; I’m telling you deep things, deep things—how can a man be a Jew when he could have a nice guy like Christ for a friend but that’s the way it is, that’s our duty in the world, that’s our heritage—we are wanderers, Baby, we are wanderers: Christ-lovers sure have got it good: ev’r(in)time they do whatever’s wrong, they just say they love Jesus and if you love Jesus, you’ll let ‘em get away with it—and Jews do that, too: Wileykins, you can’t win, not in this world, they’re all comin’ after you and it’s devil take the hindmost: this is Tex Arkana, your singing cowboy, who knows a thing or two, so just you lissen tuh me, and yuh’ll be fyennne.… I jes’ keep tryin’, tryin’ away—See, Christ-lovers get to be like him, they get to be like him: I get to be nice because I’m near you: women and Jews got to be finicky—like bureaucrats. Sick, it’s sick. They havetuh get ever’ little thing right and that’s wrong; what’s right is bigger than that, it takes a big man to understand a big truth, it takes a big heart to understand me; you got a big heart—you gonna understand me, you gonna love me? It has got to come from the heart—you can’t shit around, men are men where I come from, ha-ha: listen to me, kid, you won’t go wrong, you got to be an officer and a gentleman even if it kills you unless you do without fucking and the good things in life.
“Oh, baby, baby, I am never right—never, never. I have never been right but you can love me, I’m not picayune, I’ll promise you that. I’m never gonna be right—are you gonna make me right—are you the sign that I’m right? I’ve got my balls still, I’ve got some guts left, that’s about all you can say for me—Oh, that was a bitch this morning, she cut me to shreds, she wants money, Wiley, oh me, oh my, it is a dark sky—You like the sky, I can tell; tell me, have I made a good guess about you?
“Let’s be men together, you and me, Wileykins—let’s not let anyone get us down. Here, don’t back away from a kiss, I won’t bite you, it’s not like that between us: is my breath bad? I had chili for lunch. Don’t be finicky like a woman: they’re all crazy, they’re all up to no good, they’re out for what they can get, they’re grateful for nothing, absolutely nothing, a little sweetness can come along and bite them on the nose and they don’t give a good goddamn, they want to get even with the world for passing ’em by—they don’t know shit from Shinola, they don’t know nothin’—they never get the point. Listen: when I was little like you, if there was a parade, my ma used to seal up the house because of the dirt floating over from the marchers, from the marching—she’d curse out a parade: she never knew a good thing when it came up and bit her on the nose, she always called me a liar, it didn’t matter how far away the parade was, she was a maniac the dust would get in, some one would have a good time, you and me, we have a good time, my mother, she was perfect, she was a perfect lady, and I’ll tell you the truth, she was perfectly crazy all the time, she was madder than hell, a screamer, a nut, a killer, she was a killer, just imagine the black heart in a woman who hates parades, who called me names, I know how to live, she never appreciated that, she was a real headache, let me tell you: she wanted no one to have a good time—the ugly are ugly—a man was wrong, a man was always mistaken with that bitch—I’d like to know what Little Lord Jeeees-ussss wudda dun with my mom—Jew Battle-ax—” Then, in a gentle falsetto: “Suffer the littlekins to cum unto me and she’d say”—this in a bass, harsh, maybe menstrually nervous or crazed voice—“You are a child uh molester—she would, she’d say that to him, ho-ho, she’d say, You’ve tracking in dirt, you’ve crazy, you have no manners, I bet you steal money, that’s what she’s like; he’d say nice things to her and she’d say, I’m not mistaken, I don’t like people who say I’m mistaken, I’m a real good person, and that would be that: she’d hand the carpenter the nails—the other carpenter—which is which—so what are you gonna do? Another day, another dollar—give us a hug—be a man about it—”
His speech is intellectually complicated although not in a bookish fashion. But translations of it would involve stories and investigations of his mother, who accused him of stealing money from her, and about the town in Tennessee, not far from Nashville, where he pretty much grew up, and then about California, where he lived with his parents when they moved there, when his father, a dentist, transplanted himself to Sacramento in order to get away from his mother.
And stories about the First World War, and the army then, the American Expeditionary Force, and about men he knew, and about battles, and French whores, and the 1920s, and making money then in a small town. And the priest who tried to convert him was not a Catholic priest but a Presbyterian minister, strong-minded, devouringly competitive: he wanted to be S.L.’s lover in Christ and also in sin—he detected in S.L. the lecher’s love of fire, of punishment, the great heat of guilt that lies inside those who fuck.
He and I have a brotherhood of error in the name of God and man, sort of. We’re not quite crypto-Christians but it’s one of Dad’s secrets that he’s a better “Christian and neighbor than most of our Christian neighbors are: I’m a helluva lot sweeter,” he said. He said to me, “I don’t like people much, I dislike a lot of people, I dislike most people, to tell you the truth, Ah hates peeuhpull … but hold on, who-uhhhhm I shuhuh dooo lyek youuu.…”
Notions of redemption, of absolution, and of repentance and inner peace are complex in this man. For instance, he believes that no one blames “A Real Man”—a strong man—but that you should—you should blame such a man at times, using Christian notions of meekness and of camels caught in the eye of needles; but at the same time, if he admires such a man, then for as long as he admires him, he, S.L., believes A Real Man is blameless—it’s almost a species thing with him.
“Why are you strutting?” he asks me.
I have backed off from his arms and am moving in the center of the still drum of air on the platform.
I look at him.
“Well,” he said, “be a man about it, give us a hug—the royal us—” He has a version of male swagger. He directs me, he wants a “delicately” knowing hug with some of the “delicacy” hidden, with it as implicit, a submission to the imperial glory of this man of charity. But then he wants the hug to be sheer openness, too, one man to another, on the trail, with a Western tale’s apocalypse near: “Give us a hug for the last roundup, kiddo—I’m wounded unto death, Wileykins—” He arranges and rearranges me; I hear his heartbeat through his shirt, under the folded wings of the lapels of his jacket. “I’m just a poor error-stricken bastard,” he says. “You’re a beaut—” he says. “You’re not really trash—” My lineage. The look on his face, in his eyes, changes into and out of dialect; he shows what he wants to show; he has a kind of circus pain about life. Now he gets sophisticated: “Come on, you little angel, another hug—your hugs are what get me through the day—” My arms go aro
und his neck—my forehead touches his cheek. I don’t like to kiss with my lips—but he butts his head onto my small, startled lips; I purse, peck, pull my head back. “You kiss like a goy, you know that? Can’t you kiss like a Jew with a heart?” He is in his anti-Christian mode. Christ, the misery in his face. Behind his amusement, a storming and continuous wretchedness shows: it is male pain, male braggadocio, real life in him, his life in the world of men.
The shirt he wore was whitish, with gray and white and black lines in it in checks, I think: I remember it clearly but ignorantly, damp cotton cloth, its smell, and his heartbeat and breath, the smells on his skin, the meaty smell of his breath, the smell of damp in his hair.…
The Agreement Between S.L. and Me
HE PICKED me up and carried me across the grass in the gray and blowing light: “Now here’s a real treat for you—” A wall that comes almost to the top of Dad’s thigh runs here like a series of waves along the uneven edge of the park. It undulates and is hard for me to understand or figure out, and I never did come to know it clearly. At its base is wet and shadowed grass. It resembles a narrow path but it is in the air like a bridge or the upper part of a stepladder. Da lifted me onto its pathlike or steplike top. I looked out and I ignored or couldn’t see what was there—then I saw the massive descent and ascent of air, differently lit in its parts, a view.
The view was of the Mississippi River in a wide valley from the top of a limestone bluff perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high and maybe an eighth of a mile long. An enormous ballooning drum, bandstandlike, of open air rose and stretched and fell in front of me—and rose and stretched and fell some more as I blinked and breathed. The wind hisses, a gray-y swan—its hiss of divinity is incessant; its feathery assault makes it that I am thrilled and suffering both—fog, mist, raindrop-filled air: I shift myself from leg to leg. “Are you dancing?” Daddy asks. “How do you like these potatoes?”
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 55