Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  The air, the masked rainlight—pounding and webbed feet, hissing beak, it pushes me with its fat, huge breast—the wind is monstrous.

  Dad says, “You don’t laugh enough, it’s nice to see you laugh—”

  His nose snuffles and snuggles in my hair—his breath is a lesser swan in my ear. Bits of drizzle prick my face. He says, “Blow, blow, blow the man down—do you love me, Sweetiepie-Sweetiekins—you love me or not? Tell me right now.”

  It is the sky of not-sleep; I know it is real even though it has limited light in it. In recognition and the conceit of recognition, I am dizzy.

  “That’s the west wind,” Daddy says. “You know about the west wind, it likes to blow at nice kids—”

  Shapely arcs of sky, the stairs and windows of my experience are knotted into stairs of space, into innumerably petaled pale roses of air, doors and sidewalks of air, boxes of air, stacked, transparent windows—they fell and rose.

  “You like that?” Da said. “He liked to ‘a’ died—is that it? Wait till you see what fucking’s like: he thought he saw the end of the world, I guess—” He rehearsed talking about me.

  In the pre- and post-rain brown and green and black air, I saw threads and slices of pastels flittering in the mucky light—luminous strips and rosettes of color. I shivered with crazedness, with chill and nerves. In the windily flexing local air now appear gleams of yellow in scatterings. Then those bits expand and become bands and depths of subdued rainy-day clearing-up light for the moment. Now that is encroached on by streamers of stormy milk and bronze. What I see is weird—it is not all fixed and flat—what I am seeing is in part what I am going to see in a moment and is not yet known.

  A muddied flutter of near blue, the soul of windows, holds numinous fragments in it—birds, bits of smoke—in this recess of the storm. The light alters steadily, blowingly. I blink into and out of sight, into and out of dream under the boiling upside-down floor-ceiling of clouds. Daddy says, “Hey, what about me, remember me?” Expanses of thickened and dramatic bruises of air, in wavering buntings, have scratches of light in them. The thin whee of astonishment in my mind rose and grew. A long road of water is the river: a path of light, pure gleam in the grammar of sight, an arrangement of rules, physical sensation corrected by notions of truth. I can’t see everything at once but have to proceed in stages, with withdrawal, elevation, return, or arrival: I invent a sense of the whole like a picture inside a hole in the ground, a hole in me, and this is what I will see, this construct of my mind in its den, when I say to myself, I saw it.

  Da says, “You act like you just seen God—once you see battle, you go either way—I went atheist—join me in a little doubt, Wileykins—well, enjoy yourself if you want—but if you ask me, I say God is filth—”

  The rapid mud-brown sulks of the water down below become the pure gleam far away: grammar is a bunch of rules of physical sequence for a physical form of an idea that does not have that sequence in itself.

  Look at me: I’ve been brought here.

  Alongside the river are railroad tracks, barge locks, oil storage tanks, a grain elevator—I see them. They are visible in the shifting light while slanted shadows—rain—move here and there behind them, in the distance. I think babies are probably mad from confinement and ontogeny, the upsetting-to-the-memory recapitulation and mad fetal discipline and whatnot, the discontinuities of the other logic—not the mind’s but reality’s—hammering at the blurred mind in the womb’s dulled air, in the pewteriness. I can’t see all at once or merely sensibly: one specializes for a second or two, now on notations of shadow, now on rayed glimpses of cars on roads across the river: distraught and mindful, I frequently collapse and merely lick the air—with my tongue—and then after a few seconds with my eyelids. I went on learning in the prolonged spasm of vision; distance and compendiousness did it: shabby kingdom with a river—it’s me who’s here.

  The enameling of the light moves and shifts: I see a bridge downstream—metallic ripples—metal braid—webby glosses of air in a rain haze at this moment, this pedestal of mind: my attention has two forms—as light and as a river on no clear geographical plane.

  On an aerial diagonal I see the tops of spindly trees behind a bitten-at low muddy mound of a levee. Farther back, fields start shabbily among weeds, old fences, shabby fencelets of trees. Husbandry at its sentinel work. Meaning is movable because of the indiscretions of my mind: without wind or anomaly, and diffusely lit, the view exists in me: it is not itself first seen but is a summary now, off and on: I am expert in it—expert and brief, so that I laughed. Leaning outward, I saw the chalky and sporadically tufted face of the bluff: I was as immodest with mind as a girl is: this occurred on the high-angled shore of an ocean of phenomena. River gulls and crows and starlings fly below me—in the speaking light. Above the perceptible counties in the bruise-colored light, mountain-sized brackish clouds move like barracks or fat wooden ships, dragging giant disks of further shadow over wetly shimmering brown and green fields. Little here is like anything to be found in a famous poem, Chinese or Greek—this isn’t light of a decimal clarity. What has occurred here of statement and denunciation has little resonance with us. We have here a landscape of envy and emptiness—a place of temporary and embattled comforts, an American beauty (that which results from a meeting of what was here and a society of grand acquisitors). I am an acquired child. Simple violence will do here usually. What I saw was a milieu of economic liveliness—I remember the level stillness under everything, which is to say the remaining shape of the prairie. The rainlight is so real to me it can be taken as given that this is remembered in the absence of photography. No photograph can reproduce that place or that light. Or that child. We are so much more than our means to know give us to know. A flickering moment of actual rain blinded the kid and he can’t see the hospitalities and eccentric poverties of the habitable valley, so shabbily used and so delectable. I cleared my eyes; the ocean eye’s pearl distances were unveiled. Small bits of grit strike my face. In the increasing wind, the increasing darkness, the child is in the rain latrine, the exciting foulness of storm; the duties and pornographies of childhood include being thrilled by this parading and now shouting wind, natural Armageddon of the locale. Across the unhistorical model of the world, the massive ill nature of the universe comes pouring in a whistling and howling rapacity of outriders and plumes and holy swans and shouting devastators of wind—or merely Indian warriors in dark colors—sabers of wind, bullets of rain, arrows and catapults, and regiments and battalions of slow and armored clouds, phalanxes and elephants, whale brows—what a barbaric and real incursion—the vast army of whistlers and frowners: the frowning air.

  My partly restored heart likes the onward bumping air, stampeding and galloping, the parade of hooting winds, the deaf-to-me forces of the sky, of everything. The mouths of air become sharp near my face, the beaks of cranes and herons. American enormity. Bird kisses, pale-eyed, scratch me—the eye of childhood flinches at the saltily spitting tears above the pearl froth of distances.

  I am a tremor of acceptance here—a local boy. In the round of my eyes, I have a wakeful fear and self-love again after the debacle, the chagrin of insanity; I am maybe jerry-built like much that is in the view. This immoderate window above the suburban plenum in the now carpentered, wind-distracted view and panicked air holds my semicompre-hension of the casual and hardly pharaonic or permanent buildings—amateur monuments glintingly alight or shadowed according to the oncoming rain.

  “Hold still, hold still; don’t be as wild as a Red Indian: you know what happened to the Indians, don’t you? Play it safe, be a cowboy like your old man—like me, I’m your new old man. We have to go home; it’s getting dark. You’ve had enough, we’ve had enough—Hold on, now: stop being so stiff—hold on to Old Faithful—Old Faithful Essel is able and willing—Upsy-daisy, off we go—”

  He started to gallop. He carries, as if in a warm pouch next to his chest, my dead mother’s otherwise silenced voice in this w
orld; I am her voice being Americaned—although I do not speak yet. I hear my own small maybe mock-national heart next to S.L.’s enormous heartbeat.

  I’m not capable of any further well-fathered ordering of so sloppy a slice of air and earth and affection and what-have-you as this plowed day, dirtied now. The wind is a bunch of black dogs that push at me, they’re drooling on my eyes; they’re tickling and choking me; I kept my face outward in the airily strangling fur—the drool. I’m rolled over and over inside myself, belabored by so big a chunk of feeling as being carried so gallopingly causes and as the day sponsors. The whale’s head, the wooden latrine of the rain, the foul circus elephants of the day, of the circus-odorous day in its rainstink, the earth goes thud-thud with wind, with thunder from the next county (Da explains), and he says, “Don’t be wicked—you’ll bring on the deluge, we ain’t got no ark—” Wicked to him means foolish. “Don’t be foolish,” he says, touching bases. “You want Beelzebub to get us?—Let’s get someplace dry—”

  The Agreement Between Us, Part II

  DAD is carrying me rapidly—I lie against his warm ribs—I’m in his arms—he mutters, “The air is like wet noodles.” He gives birth to metaphor. Wind elongates and splinters raindrops—damp strings in the air—cap-pistol pops of some drops on Dad’s arms, near my ear; storm flags of scuttering brown light. I have riddle points of curiosity about Pa’s downhill march—bumpety-bump—his noisy, smelly, big-footed, big-legged trot; in the moving field of my character, my attention, the gladioli are metronomic gobbets of bloom, smeared arcs. The noises of his and my clothes and breath are strangely syllabic—ah, ah, ah. Soulful particles of practice tears lie in my eyes, pleated and whispering sensations of rain, alphabet dragons of noise.

  Child flesh in its brevity and shine is witty.

  In those days I made foolish guesses about time and the diminutive.

  The time and meanings in which my childhood happened.

  The remarks of living and disorderly people.

  Their near and tricky kindnesses.

  Their versions of constancy.

  The buzzes and whistles and grunts of Daddy’s youth as he half trots with me.

  I had nothing of what might be called a blood right to any language of his, including that of him running, half trotting, with me. I still made sense of what he did, in a way, the odd gestures of this stuff, the house language that is not part of the house in me, if I can say that, but is a slightly foreigned spread of personal sounds—a court English, an over-tongue, a ruling talk. I hear, in a physical sense, its grammar, a physical grammar, as Daddy runs; he trots; the amount of breath he took in with each breath as he runs is like the way he breathes before he starts on a speech. And when he pants and slows, it is like when his breath and voice weakened as clauses proliferated when he spoke: he had the American style of correcting himself as he went along, like a child being a thief and changing his mind whether he is a thief or not, and no one quite listening, no one watching him. I heard him run: this is happening in a specific light as when he spoke earlier. And now this set of motions, this sentence, is going on, and before the sentence ends, before then and after now, fall alterations of a large and also local sort as he runs. I am full of time, a present tense, and this clumsy unrolling of distances. Running movements are everything. Dad can’t talk now: it seems a simpler kind of time than talking, as if what Dad wants to say and what he says occupy the same moment (although they don’t), and as if my hearing and my guessing at what I hear were in the same instant (which they are not). Language was never a matter of God to me. I am self-fathered and have a version of my mother in me, a river of interior comment as an echo of whoever and whatever talks to me, of whatever is noisy here, of whoever carries me in the rain. Being carried is a self-conscious practice of language … mad speech, maybe. I spoke with a generalized grammar inside myself, a compendium and then an averaged version of

  Lila-English

  Ceil-English-Hebrew-Yiddish-Russian-Polish-German

  Max-shouting-English-Yiddish

  S.L.-Nonsense-and-English

  Anne Marie (my nurse)-German-and-English (and some French)

  plus

  pretentious-Momma-Lila on the telephone

  and Daddy talking in his various ways

  and whatnot:

  a babble and still a sighing kind of child sense …

  The inner voice is a bridge between myself as an orphaned child and myself unorphaned in any of a number of ways: time in the real world is often pain. The way in which I felt Time fold around me when Daddy sort of ran and was short of breath, and then heaved me up to make it easier, and then as I slipped down, although he held me pretty close to his chest, made me both sober and scholarly-drunken and full of sunken abject surrenders.

  A seed of anger rests in me, but no voice, no resistance emerges outward from the inward auditoriums of awe that much of my sensual consciousness is. I’m not in my various instructed parts a coherent audience of similars but a badly behaved and singular and always changing senate, a mob of selves gifted in awe; I am tractable and intractable disobedience in my very nature.

  Right now I am in the fleshy circle of this man’s arms, and I am full of new speech and new silence, and he is holding me too tight, but I am under his protection, such as it is. We gallop or jog along and I am intricately, logically available to him and intractably disobedient but only in nature, in suddenness of will, not moment by moment consciously as he carries me. My mother—light is entering a portion of the air, a strange greenish light—arranged all this, my compound mother, one buried inside the other. S.L. is carrying a compendium, a syllabus, an embodiment-in-brief of women’s dreams and thoughts and purposes, in his arms. The child knows a little—only a little—of what people are in relation to children. S.L. carries me squeezingly. My language as I am carried is that of Consciousness-in-the-World. It is not quite that of anyone’s son, is not quite inherited. The dexterities of the pagan language of the moment have a Christ-in-the-world quality, a spiritual visitor with a mastery of absence and a mastery of both real and incomprehensible presence. It is partly a counterfeit since it represents in its presence, its usual absence, the broken silences of my abandonment. I feel them here in this bobbing and rough and heat-glittering nestledness: the nest thing suggesting absence in its presence, as an angel does. The child thinks his being carried is an ordinary grace of ordinary dimension, and yet that it is extraordinary: extraordinarily fine. His individual language comes out of modesty toward his own death, and he thinks all language is that, maybe. I think of fear as a silence out of which one stirs if one can be humble about one’s death in the world.

  The creature-kid shivers in the rainstink: the shaking elephant of his now speaking and imitative mind: I mean, his mind’s sense of the big-nosed infant gray elephant air. His mind and the air stink along. I have had so many parents that I am without shame toward language.

  The jostled but delighted and borne-along child—well, the man carrying him was a son, too, partly my son; he has an old role as descendant and a new one given birth to with me, which does things to him. He is judging himself as he jogs on. Some of it is a game. He is The Opposite of Christ—a man in the world—in his roles. The half rain, the almost rain, is creaking and squooshing in his breath and in the damp heat of his clothes and his body inside his clothes and in the damp cool of the air. He said once, “I’m glad you’re not too smart: if you were too smart, we’d have to give you back; we like you dumb like us.” He said now, “We’re smart enough to come in out of the rain, just barely.” He was catching his breath with his open mouth and his spasmodically spread nose under an oak. He thought I was saddened by how belatedly I was his, by how feebleminded I was, by how much I needed him. The elephant-gray mass and rumble of the air, and the itchy, carpetlike closeness of Da’s heat, and the comedy noodles of the rain, make the kid laugh in an odd as-if-speaking way. Dad said, “I don’t want you laughing at me after all is said and done.”

&
nbsp; The child looks at him and is a contagious example of obstinate wonder.

  I laugh and squirm suffocatedly in Dad’s arms. The yellow, brown-white Negro eye of the air makes me still for a second and then I start up again, the squirming, and Dad is galloping again along the infinite dark wet edge of the rain. “Maybe we’re going to make it. This part is passing over: it’s going somewhere else. Listen to you: you’re a little nut—”

  The pebble color of the air has spots of sea-glass green flatly luminous in it. The blowsy antics of the air in this cathedral space this side of the arcade of oaks so boilingly increase that in restless squirming amazement I clutch Daddy’s shirt and make fake breasts and nipples of the cloth. “Hey there, watch out: I like this shirt.” Da’s wried face is borne through the day. His face is bits of big young loveliness in the rain. I see without synopsis, with primitive and approximate wholeness. I am blind with innocence and sight. I can’t say I really saw His Young Face, but, in a way, I did.

  We gallop again. And I see nothing of his comparative youth but feel it: warm muscle and a species of odor. My side and elbow bump the closed mouth of the cave of his belly; I am in the jouncing howdah of heat-struck darkness and closeness in Daddy’s arms; I am not a child in the way I will be a man, in matters of power and will and choice as facts of motion and as the motors of attention inside the fact of flesh—my power and will and that of others, I mean—but the difficult thing for me, always, was to realize my own innocence as a fact but not a law: one needs no law for what is transparent fact: a child is innocent, will or no will. A man is or is not depending on intention and consequences. But nature has been stingy with sensations of innocence. I echo him, I feel clever and full, I feel in the moment no clear limits to my feelings or his—our feelings—and no noble fixity, just the hot jouncing.