Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  A child has no sense of the ultimate but only of leaves whirling in bounced proximity to us. Darkness and movement. Ha-ha. The meaning of our joint postures here is genuinely changeable and clear but only in a way. He is the Prince of the Rainy Air. And I am the Prince in Here, in his anatomical chamber and these jostling velocities. I feel my safety, unwisely or not, in the moment, as an Ideal Thing, with a specially lit quality to it, as meaning and as immense, immense, male amusement. We are men. We are suspicious, male, and triumphant. The nature of safety for innocence can be known if the danger is understood, it’s true, but that’s hard to figure out, and it may not be humanly possible very often, if ever, to calculate such a thing. I think it’s not. Anyway, I see (I feel) the resiliency and lacquer and explosive willfulness of this man—he is thirty-three years old. He slows down and pants; he walks rapidly and at a slant. He’s still in the Grand Ascent to the Great Illumination of Love and Defeat. It can be argued that a child devours his own safety—that would mean he remains suspicious, male, and triumphant—and that he doesn’t. I don’t know. The story has happened only this far as yet, as far as the amusement and horror of the portaged child and the frequent seduction by the unlikely and wild sights he glimpsed in the blowing air. We are fools and unsuitable souls in the blowing moment and we do not care: this represents our membership in social illumination. His mind, S.L.’s, is focused very narrowly and ignorantly on his running and walking while carrying me when he is goaded by the wind and the spitting rain and then spared for a few seconds when his breath and timing are slightly worn. He is reverberant with that narrowness, a quality of thunder for me; I was pretty young. I can feel his disarray, his inner physical (and spiritual) focus irregularly slackening and exploding as he jogs and partly trots. I feel his disarray firing off in one hiss after another; this sets me off on some crazed stretching in his arms.

  “Hey now, Wriggle-Puss,” he says. The light inside common things is dark even now, and nothing about me is ideal now or will be ideal ever to come. My face snakily writhes against the fat, resilient bicep of Daddy’s arm. I am now largely on my belly in his arms: “From the backside you look just like everyone else, kiddo—you look like an asshole.” I hang, I arch—like a bowsprit—a branch of the rubbery, muscle-and-spine, oaken pounding-along tree of that man: this is in the state of Illinois, in the now quickening rain; he is running toward the gate of the park: I see the torn rooms of the out-of-doors. Dad says, “NO,” and refolds me in his arms, defining me as Error and A Fool and someone he wants bodily near him, someone whose bodily welfare concerns him: it’s interesting and I start to laugh. The moment is unideal, semi-ideal, this one particular moment. The child’s laughter passes: I am silent, very silent. The feeling as S.L. moves rapidly in the still thin-bodied but now fattening and gray-black air (I mean rain) is of contented fright, a distanced kind of staring at the world. In the world at this moment, in what is contained in it, the future hovers like the mist-hung air. But the kid knows only a general and civilized imperfection and hope. The shrewd-hearted, prying-eyed kid in his shrewd-hearted torpor is being carried home.

  THE

  NURSE’S

  MUSIC

  S.L. SILENOWICZ, when he talked about Ann Marie, went from mood to mood: “You got to hand it to her, she does her damnedest. She makes things nice. She’s got the hand of an artist with fried chicken when she’s in the mood. I’m here to tell you: what a man eats, that’s what a man is; you take a refugee from being kosher who likes his bacon, that’s me; I don’t like bacon that looks like shoelaces. Grease will put you in your grave. A man needs his bacon, he brings it home—well, there you have it in a nutshell; keep it crisp like matzo—manna, they say that’s manna, matzo is—man needs his bacon to be like manna, heavy on the mayo, heavy on Heaven—you know how the angels get fried chicken? They get some booger to cook ‘em up some in hell and they send it right up. Take it easy, that’s the way, that’s the only way to be nice. We all know what it’s like on this here old planet earth, right? Ann Marie is the world’s craziest woman, there’s no doubt about that. She’s mighty ugly, and there’s no doubt about that—I don’t like ugly faces in the morning before I have my bacon, but that fat woman, she sure has the tender touch with (uh)n egg—yessirree. She may be German, she may be French”—she was from Alsace-Lorraine and her last name was Roittenburger, and she spoke more German than French—“but if you ask me, she’s more American than the Pope; just taste her apple pie.

  “And she likes our little Wiley, our little Will-he, Won’t-he-keep-it-down. It ain’t easy with a sick kid, it’s hard, it’s hard to be with him, it’s creepy sometimes, he never speaks—his eyes speak—he don’t make much noise and that’s nice but it can drive you right up the wall—poor little crip—and the old gray mare can’t stand it, she ain’t what we used to be—” Lila, his wife, my new mother, was in her thirties. “It tears you apart, a little tiny half-alive crip of a kid like that—I don’t think I’m all so wonderful, but I think I got a hand with kids; well, I’ll tell you something, she is good to him, good, she is an A-Number One helpmeet in this little ol’ projeck. It’s nobody’s beeswax—you know that old one—how it gets a man to have sweetness in the house—it’s like honey, it’s nectar and ambrosia, it does my heart good to be around that woman when she’s going great guns hell-for-leather all-out sweetness-and-light—you wouldn’t believe (how) she keeps us on our toes, she’s a Nursing Marvel, a Nightingale. Why, you ought to see us go through hoops—she holds our noses to the grindstone, believe you me. Of course, she’s a damned sullen bitch if you cross her, you wouldn’t give her the time of day before you got to know her, but she wants to bring me and Wiley together, she wants to show me the way, she wants to make a home for the little crip, her heart’s right there, her heart’s in the highlands, that fatty, she’s one of the little people if you don’t mind them being not so little, she’s got a heart as big as her ass, but she’s something special, she works hard, she don’t hate you because you write the paycheck, she’s a European, she makes things damned pleasant for me, cooks what I want, cooks it the way I like it, she listens, she listens to me, and that’s nice, that’s damned special. You know?

  “I wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley on one of her anti-Semite days; I wouldn’t want to wake up in bed with her, either—she don’t like Jews none and she don’t like men—but I’m no Goody Two-shoes, you can’t have everything, and I know I need a home, and I ain’t a-gonna get it from Madame Busy Lila. A lot of people think I’m dumb ‘cause I don’t like school and I don’t like books and I don’t like big words, but I know one or two little things: I know what counts, I know how to live, I know how to be happy. I’m a gentleman and a scholar, I’m a peace lover, I say, no blame, no shame, (e)nough said; let’s love one another and get on with it—what else can we do? Ann Marie’s chicken dishes are right out of the good drawer, you’d swear she’d worked for gourmets all her life—tip-top, A-Number One top drawer—and some of her vegetables and her pork are right up there, too, Mount Everest all the way, fasten your oxygen masks, your heart knows it’s found a home. Just the best, it melts in your mouth, her sauerkraut, anything with beans, that stuff can make up for any man’s ordinary day of shit. You get pushed around, you make a couple of dumb guesses, you do business with six murderers and seven thieves and eighteen rednecks, and you sit down, and everyone has good manners, and the good food just melts in your mouth the way you like it, she understands me, I tell you, it’s stupendous—

  “Well, what’s important? I ask you—let’s live in peace, I say, you have to live from day to day, you have to eat—you like to eat? I like to eat—O.K.? So she doesn’t drink, she gets on my nerves, but my life’s no good without her, she’s like an ugly wife, she’ll cook your heart right out of your body, she’s wonderful, and I like a little peace now and then, wouldn’t you?”

  Ma said, “I’m not a romantic, but you should see him and Ann Marie going at it, each one out-good-hearting the
other—and making just so much beautiful music you’d think the Second Coming was over and done with—they’re like lovers. He’s gaining weight, and he’s losing his hair—he’ll be just her speed in another six months—like poor little Wiley is now—”

  “Ann Marie doesn’t know much,” Lila said. “Ann Marie is an immigrant—she comes from Alsace-Lorraine: you know where that is? Her father was no good. She and her mother lived with relatives, her mother sent her to live with an uncle who had a farm, that’s how come she knows about food, she grew up on a French farm—I think her father was German but her uncle was French. The aunt died, and the uncle got a little too friendly, and Ann Marie’s mother didn’t do anything, she was living on an allowance, well, you can imagine what it was like—some stories are so sad they can get tears from a stone, and I’m not a stone, I’m charitable. A lot of things happen on farms. It was on a farm, it wasn’t a nice thing, but Ann Marie has backbone; she may be ignorant but she has some backbone, she left, on her own—she got to be very stubborn about being A Good Woman, you know what I mean? You have to do that when you’re on your own—and sometimes it’s worse when you’re plain: maybe the men are fewer, but they’re surer you have no choice. She’s a little crazy, but a woman’s life is hard. S.L. likes her, I have to hand it to him, he has judgment once in a while.…”

  Ann Marie in a farm courtyard in Lorraine, in the French light when the air has a faint white mist in it, the uncle drunken and—and what?

  “Perhaps she made it all up—she’s plain; you know how women are—they have to imagine a life if they don’t have one—that was never my problem. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me, maybe that’s what went wrong, I lived my life and I’m all used up—” She was being ironic. She was very proud of her looks still.

  If I’m unironic and try to be honest in my turn, I would guess that maybe Ann Marie didn’t know at first what was happening with her uncle or what was meant by his actions, or maybe it was that she was repelled from the start, but got suckered in by propinquity and pity or curiosity or simply the hope of some pleasure. When you’re young, sometimes your body gives you little peace, and then maybe it didn’t work out at all. I mean, sexual stuff involves each person’s personal power over the other, complex arrangements, and probably the uncle didn’t know that. I doubt Ann Marie was a single-hearted unyielding virgin to start with. If I try to imagine what happened, I see her not understanding right away, and then going too far in her imagination, in her hopes; and then things happened; the attempt at love was blasphemy; or maybe just the barest beginnings happened, and she was sickened at once. I think she became virginal; she demanded goodness—toward herself—a kind of rationality; she stayed in her first plump, pale youth long after her youth was gone.

  “She got a job with a family in one of those cities they have,” S.L. said, “and the same thing happened—you know it’s not her imagination, but I don’t know what happened; the same thing happened—that doesn’t mean much, that’s her way of telling a story. Women can either cook or they can tell stories—just you ask me if you want to know the truth about women.”

  A gray stone city and narrow streets.

  “All that work,” Momma said. “That woman has a history of work, you have no idea, dawn to dusk; you have to hand it to her—but she can’t take orders. I found her through some people in Clayton who thought she was scary—they didn’t want her.”

  “Well, honey swats what Molly pins—” Honi soit qui mal y pense. “We landed in clover with this one—my wife’s momma made the decision—she made too many of our decisions, but what can you do?”

  “Momma could take a back seat to a worker like that—the house was nice, it was nice all the time—that’s important, you know.”

  Lila, my mother at that time, used to have one day a week or every ten days when her health, her nerves, collapsed: she would spend the day in a darkened room, “nursing myself.” On one such occasion, she said, “Why do you suppose people have things to hide? Because they’re good, you think they hide anything good? You think people acting open are really open?”

  Momma said to me about Ann Marie, “You be careful. You think she’s so wonderful: she never told me the truth, not once.”

  Momma had no name for the days when her velocity in the world turned into helplessness, or into a kind of screech of nerves. She said, “People tire me out, I tire me out,” and “I have nothing to say good about anyone today—” Sometimes her voice was shrill; often her hair was “wild” (her word); she couldn’t bear to touch herself or be touched; she could bear no clothes except very fine cotton or silk and nothing could be tied tightly; and she would say, “I’ve gone mad, didn’t you know—cramps are the devil’s taking a hand in things.” Or: “God is sending me a headache because I’m a woman who does things.”

  She said, “Everything costs—I pay what it costs, I keep going.”

  Her bedroom was a suite of rooms, two dressing rooms and a bathroom in two parts with a low wall between the parts; and there was a sleeping porch. It was almost half the second floor of the house. She lay on a chaise with a damp cloth over her face. Sometimes she walked and paced and talked, sometimes she raved. “People are bad, why doesn’t everyone know people are bad—”

  She would say, “I’m going to get hold of myself in another hour; I’m tired of my headaches carrying on; what I want is for the bats in my belfry to go bite a few people—let them die, I’m a realist—”

  She said, “It’s an oppression. Why are people so bad? I swear to God there’s no end to it. Even nice people like Ann Marie, who’s not so nice, believe me. Oh, God, I can’t stand it. No one was ever good to me but my father. I swear to Christ, I can’t stand another day of this, I can’t, I can’t, it’s too hard, it’s too hard.”

  When she started to get better, she would almost invariably count her blessings (her phrase): “I have to say that Ann Marie is a treasure, fat or not; she held down the fort for me when I was under the weather; and I don’t care if she’s nuts or not; I don’t care if she gets on people’s nerves; and I don’t care if she’s a hypocrite—let her turn you into a Christ child, I don’t care; she’s a wonderful woman; she has backbone; and she comes through in a pinch; she takes care of me; when she’s around I have a life.”

  AM I BEING too realistic? This is a sentimental subject: the nursemaid who saved my life when I was a small child. I’m trying to be accurate in relation to it and not sentimental and dishonest.

  Ann Marie’s “manner,” her voice, her vast breast and fat throat, the movements of her nakedly pink and small and interestingly curved lips, these all say that she absents herself from corruption. Momma says, “Well, she’s left out, she’s never had a life; but she handles it well.”

  Some of it Momma says with jocular little hints, or seriously (if she’s being a socialist, then she’s seriously sad about Ann Marie’s deprivations). “Part of what it is, is she’s sexually reliable. I mean cold. I don’t mean this as an insult, not at all.”

  Momma says, “It’s a cheat, she’s been gypped if you ask me, but then it’s as plain as the nose on my face what I married S.L. for.”

  She and S.L. were good-looking, moody people—very good-looking, very moody.

  Momma says, “No one wants Ann Marie, but there’s more to the story than meets the eye. She doesn’t fix herself up. Maybe she’s got other fish to fry; she was sweet on me for a long time. What it is, is I will have to marry her off. I owe her, you know. I think she’s scared and won’t admit it; who isn’t scared in this crazy country? Do you want to know the truth? She’s scared and she’s a liar—and she’s a very, very good woman.”

  Ma said, “She’s been in love with all of us one by one—Wiley’s the one she wound up caring about.”

  That meant: Lila first, the two women seriously having a crush on each other and taking responsibility for each other’s lives in this household, and Ann Marie taking care of me out of duty or goodness then. Lila said, “I work lik
e a dog, no one gives me credit, I bought her attentions that you like so much, Mr. Fine-and-Dandy.

  “And then she got fond of you, you won her over, it was interesting to watch.”

  Ann Marie lived in our and her broth of emotions, a stew, a soup of simultaneous feelings, plots and feuds, and moral and immoral stuff: the Day-by-Day is an intense drama, although we ignore this.

  “Once she got on her feet, she became my rival; we had to be rivals; that’s the way it is; pretty as I was, she couldn’t stop herself; she couldn’t stop herself from thinking she was winning; she had to be a rival with Lila Silenowicz just like everyone else; and with S.L.; we were all rivals over you at the start; we all wanted to be the chief nurse; it’s no wonder you have a swelled head—she loved you, Wiley, it was handy for her—she was a good nurse to you, she was a good friend to me even when she started to hate me.…”

  Momma says, “Don’t ever laugh at her, don’t ever embarrass her, she doesn’t have an easy life—we’re not easy people, she’s good to us, and where would I be without her? I’d be in a loony bin, that’s where I would be. Be good to her, Wiley, make her happy, you’ll do us all a favor, you make us all happy if you can keep her here, if we can keep her crazy temper in line.”

  Ann Marie is sane but she has periods, menstrual periods maybe, when she is “forgetful”—that’s Momma’s word for a lot of things, Momma being tactful. S.L. says, “When the moon is full, don’t put a knife in her hands.” Daddy is male and realistic in tone when he talks about violence.

  Ann Marie is visited by voices at times.

  Momma says, “Don’t laugh, she thinks she’s Joan of Arc.”

  Ann Marie’s pallor is a white armor in my view. She has little vanity of a physical kind, or maybe a lot, but I mean she stays indoors, where no one can see her. Perhaps she is unsure of herself around here, in America. Lila says, “She’s ashamed she’s fat.”