Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  “ ‘DUHOOO GOOOODDTTT—blah, blah—devil bad(t)—’ ” or something. Maybe it’s a local hymn, this one.

  S.L. says she is “a fiend about goodness.” He says she is “a punisher.”

  She is teaching me to be good (das ist richtig) and to not be bad; badness has categories starting with toilet stuff and naughtiness and then mounting to hauteur and ill grace, and other manifestations of pride toward good people; then came THE TERRIBLE, THE I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT IT (in a heavy accent: I don’t really mean this as a joke; I mean it was a strain for her to talk about anything that wasn’t easy or a cliché). And beyond that lay treachery and those follies that are the same to her as treachery. And so on.

  Lila says, “A lot of women won’t think about what’s good and what’s bad, but Ann Marie and I are alike in that, we’re like one person there.”

  Spiritual honor involves service and cleanliness; Ann Marie and I are a community of “ordinary” righteousness. I like this very much. And I believe in it and its goodness.

  Momma will separate us on the grounds of “It’s now or never; they’ll never get away from each other if I don’t do something soon. I don’t want him to be a little goy—if he lives: he looks strong but you never can tell—and it’s not good for her—”

  And so on.

  Ann Marie pauses and says,” —ein kleines Kussel für einen kleinen Engel—”

  Her short kiss is a burning moth on the top of my head. Then she exercises her throat with large breaths for more than a minute. She has a certain look of sarcasm which has to do with the throat—perhaps with Lutheran American choir singers and choirmasters who do not understand good vocal production. Who do not perhaps understand God, either.

  America is full of prophets—Ann Marie is homesick for Alsace on Sundays. Everyone says she is somewhat crazy. I breathe sweetly—comically—at her, alongside her. She is awesomely present. I feel a kind of pale wind coming from the arcs of attention of her face. Of her eyes.

  She sings a line and looks off into the air. And she breathes some more; she listens to how she sounded a second ago. “Nein, non, no—” Which I sometimes heard as “I don’t know”: mostly I heard with considerable acuity but without knowing what to do with what I heard. She is rational in spite of being crazy. She tries the note again, and stops and breathes. “Ja, yes, oui,” she says.

  Yes-I-like-it, no-I-don’t, yes I believe (I do), no I don’t (I don’t want to). This is my holiest state—the being very clear, very clearly defined, a simple creature of yes or no: it is for being with grownups.

  She sees me in my yes state. I see her give up on her throat—she is satisfied with her throat for the moment. We look at each other on two slants and with an overlap of haphazard directness—as I said earlier, we cannot look at each other easily—right now, she begins to bark with German laughter. She averts herself—face and torso. She bends over slightly. Usually, her laughter is decent, sociable—a mere uncontrollable bubble beneath a controlled surface. Now it erupts and is crazy for a moment—American.

  She is an awful—awesome, gaping, yawning—chaos of amusement, she is a hurtling and burning body—a bonfire, an asteroid pausing—of a marvelous amusement of an anarchic kind, a beauty: she is about to become very grave—but first she is hauled, gaspingly, into American laughter, into girlish uproar because she laughed a moment ago—at my dwarfishness, in part, my vomiting and so on. I cannot manage the beauty of the meaning involved, her confidence that I will live, her self-praise and faith, her mockery, her boredom.…

  She gets hold of herself in a steady, duty-ridden way, but then when she is almost in control of herself she makes the last self-bridling a sudden thing. She says to me then, “With liberty and justice for all—eh? Isssttt vahr, lieber Vuhiiiileee?” She means the laughing is part of an American holiday. She is sincere and she is mocking, and she is gigantic—all three.

  Ann Marie is drunk with playfulness, and that shades into concern about her voice, even a paranoia about how people look at her singing, how Americans regard her all in all. But she would feel unhappy about how Parisians regard her, too. She’s moved from laughter, short-lived, abrupt, to a paranoid bravado toward the thing that people think she’s fat and different-looking—she’s bounding around in emotional ways inside herself. Her unrecognized mightiness, her greatness, her status in the world, move her now to interrupt her humming, her partly singing, to say, “People laugh at me, don’t you laugh at me.” She does not mind it that we laughed, but she doesn’t approve of it, either, anymore.

  I don’t understand and so I try another small laugh, silent—but happy-eyed.

  This heavy German woman in America, she turns away from my laugh—my guess is she’s heartbroken, elaborately so—her happiness hurts her now; she is hurt; perhaps she always was dissatisfied, as Momma later said.

  She attempts a phrase—a musical one. It (vaguely) disappoints her. She pauses, sighs, is sad and indignant—she listens to herself a couple of times now, she goes back in her head and listens, she sighs and then she sighs again: this queenly sadness—this dissatisfaction with laughter and herself and one thing and another—is part of what leads her to perform.

  She repeats one of the worse notes and she stops and listens—and then she looks at me and makes a face as if she’s going to vomit; it’s just a pantomime.

  She does one of her better notes, then another, and then a roulade. Her eyes become very finely lit up and yet murky and worried but edged with will and power. Ann Marie does not mean to be as individual as she is—it’s too painful to have so personal a stake in the world and in one’s own fate. The way to God and Heaven is to be in a spiritual army, to be somewhat faceless—she wants that lovely subtraction of the self that money provides. She liked the daylight in that small town; and the night noises of wind and cicadas; maybe the absence of pain, of certain pangs, became something like the thing she likes most, the object of her cultivation of her life, a shepherding of circumstances, a penning up of tragedies and of bitter or burning moments, a flight from her nerves, from whatever sensitivities she had—she was maybe both coarse and sensitive: “She could kill pigs, she wasn’t afraid to use a knife or an ax, she did farm butchery, I swear to you—she didn’t have a nerve in her body.”

  I cling to the feelings I have about her—the more she is attacked, the more I defend her.

  She is dimly to be seen in the white enamel surface of the kitchen cabinets, a limp and wavering grayish reflection that moves in a softened version of what I see more directly, her straightening her shoulders and heaving her breasts with comic and angelic urgency.

  She is going to sing harder, she is going to sing really hard, she means to introduce Serious Beauty into our lives for a few minutes now, I think.

  All at once, she’s singing a folk song. She has a somewhat determined rhythm, forceful. She walks around a bit and she comes near me and she smooths my hair. Like Carmen, she looks archly here and there around the kitchen while she sings. The rhythmic settledness is a kind of pounding on me—the will in her shakes me, I am small, I prefer her to be passive and somewhat hurt; now she is not hurt; and what she is doing is thunderous and thrilling, it startles me as if lightning and thunder were going off in my face.

  She moves back, she moves away from me, from my squinting and lurching face, she starts to walk around the kitchen. Her tongue drums out rolls of timed notes—that rattling drum shakes me. My eyelids bob because of that rhythm. I rattle, my eyes squint, stare, rattle—she softens and arranges her voice and becomes more flexible and pretty in style; and this change is like grass on the lawn in the shade in hot weather, when it’s cool and I’m damp and I’m not ticklish, when the grass doesn’t tickle me.

  Light is gathered in her hair, perches on her shoulders.

  Dexterities—captured, flayed—are hung up like game for dinner, and she passes on to others: a sad but bubbling kind of note goes along in a persistent death agony, a diminuendo—I lean forward, worried, draw
n—it is the end coming, it is the end.

  I do not control her to any depth at all.

  She does something at a cabinet and I blink slowly and breathe with a kind of release, and then her voice strengthens and I grow rigid in that pressure—it’s another verse or line of verses.

  She passes near me where I sit at the table, and she takes my hand and puts it over the spoon and she fixes my hand to the spoon while she sings.

  I hold the spoon. She won’t look at me but she knows. I mean, she is watching anyway. And some secondary range of her voice is affected by a sense of me and my love, mine—a child’s, but it has a special quality, it is a specific love.

  She carols and chirps, in a soft voice, at that child in the chair with a spoon in his hand as if he were a German child, as if he were God knows what. Her voice is soft enough for me now—one of the odd things about being musical is the tact that’s involved: music isn’t used for private thought much, if at all; it’s known that it has to have a listener. I believe she bid the child to consider a billy goat; that’s what I believe the song was about.

  The billy goat would eat anything.

  It is this woman’s judgment that I be saved, that I should live.

  She pauses and straightens her skirt. The boy is an oscillant point of nervous life in the room. He is as fragile as glass—you’re a poor cracked glass vase full of roses coming apart (Dad’s odd, maybe senseless poetry)—he’s like a street of lights, like Broadway, Daddy said that—then, regretting the vulgarity, he said, in a farm town around here, in the flat country—seen from the dark, from a darkened road, across fields, the consoling and enticing lights of a town.

  Ann Marie says, “Du bist eine (?) like (?) licht—he ist eine floooor (flower?) wit’ Augen, eyes—”

  She didn’t quite finish that song. She uttered something explanatory to do with her song.

  (Lila said once, “With looks like that he can attract the care he needs—I don’t have to stay home all the time.…I can trust most people with him: he’s so pretty and so pathetic.… “)

  Ann Marie sings a note and then tells me I “musst usen ddynuh sp-ooo-oooon—”

  She is arch, stolid, firm, pious—I move the spoon toward my mouth, I look at the cold taste of silver and at the writhy bits of worms of mushed apple in the back of my throat, I look at nausea and spasms, and so on, and put the spoon to my lips. Ann Marie strikes off a note, a clear, sweet note—she strikes off an absurdly clear and strange succession of the notes of an opening of a lullaby so that I am sick on food and I gag, and I am gay and peaceful with listening, and I am flattered, and I am nakedly without connection to an inner life—all at the same time. I echo and ring, groggily, as marble does, while Ann Marie tinkles out more notes. She points to my limp hand that has the spoon in it. Slowly I stiffen my hand, my wrist, I raise the spoon and take the poisonous stuff somewhat into my mouth; I suck at the applesauce at the edge of its little puddle in the spoon I hold.

  “Ah” (or Ach), she sings, she interpolates: “Mehr more—mehr more—” She likes the sound, and she goes fop-pop-plumply poppolooting around the kitchen, as much in a strut as she can go with her pride and gravity, while I hold nearly a spoonful of applesauce at the top of my doubtful but not yet wildly upset throat.

  Her attention is on her singing, too.

  The fast part of the lullaby slows down.

  I am sick in anticipation, sick with fright—no: I’m not. She breaks off at a bad note. She says, “Essen—eeeeeetttttt (uh), Liebchen, swoewll-ohhhhh—”

  The ohhhhh is a pretty sound.

  I start to swallow and she covers the drama with the notes of a hymn of gratitude about a harvest and about a war. Her voice is crazed, quick, dexterous, and—I think—flat as well as corny and obvious.

  And then, not.

  She’s eyeing me around and over her round, white, mealy cheeks—singer’s cheeks, though; strong and wobbly, both. A kind of wind of faith arises in her voice, a blind improvisation of faith, of giving herself over to her singing. I hold my spoon and have a throatful of applesauce and I can’t quite manage to get my eyelids up in the storm wind of faith and sound and general difficulties and commonplaces of my consciousness and the moment; I sort of aspire along with her but not really. The music is hanging and climbing and festooning itself all over, my nose, my eyelids. She is blurrily triumphant. The clever, proud voice is proof of reason, the grounds of her Right to believe God likes her (in particular)—this is part of the sweeter vibration of the tune now.

  The immediate manners of things toward Ann Marie (she now has a dishrag and is wiping things; I have begun very slowly, tragically, to swallow) and the what-God’s-given-her-to-know, that is to say, a large part of the flooring and superstructure of my mind, her cleverness, her temper, her music, now combine—she has no child except me, by virgin birth: she will leave me, too (Lila said, I’m the one who stayed awhile, didn’t you know?). … It is possible that although she left me, she loved me.

  Ann Marie is warmed up, she is hot and singing—but in a smallish voice and constricted style, although much, much freer than when she began.

  She is singing and I spy on us; other people’s judgments and jealousies, their requirements, do not perhaps distort us just now—still, I feel large mysteries attend her mind as she sings—Christian mysteries? Maybe. What Dad called the sweet mystery of life? Maybe that too. The world depends on her no matter what is wrong with her. I took Ann Marie’s fat arm and her feelings about me to be the arm of the Lord—later merely the arm of Good Fortune: Good Accident.

  Ann Mane’s enormous-to-me bosoms flex fleshily. My legs and belly are limp, semibruised, and warmed. All our stories stop, I want them to stop, I am near her, I am near her sugar-in-gunnysacks large breasts: they float, hang, push near my eyes, quarter seen, heavily sensed, insecurely placed in the air, never geometrically to be comprehended, big, white, slobby to me, small to Lila, whose breasts were famous. Ann Marie’s fat-church and trapeze and crucifix arm adjusts her breasts—she is looking at me fairly hard, she is eyeing me operatically. Somebody loves me.

  Somebody loves me.

  That woman has a rapidly beating heart, she is amateur but a genius in the lit phosphorus of white air. I am swimming in the world—a poet said that about a church once—a rope, a chain, has lowered hope and this architectural display to us from Heaven.

  Make up your mind, make up your mind to get well, and you will get well and have the whole world to play with … Well, to play in—at least that …

  The noise in the theater of my consciousness includes that of the rain thickly slapping the windows and walls, the sides of the house and down the hall, outside the open front door. I will not speak; speech will make me scream. The gray shuddering jaws and noses of the rain move and slip along the windows. She sings. She clumsily feels her way along paths of self-absorption and knowledge of music and notes. The sounded note—she has incipient flusters and half-made near outbursts of release and expulsion, a hurling of bright sound which she holds back while I, still gaudy-mouthed, stare at her, a spoon in my hand. I am swimming in her music—and in her charity in the world.

  Her noises are arcs, bright shoelaces, continuous bands of architectural praise, a folktale marvel but verging on a broad joy in God and Christ. Her attempts to breathe, I notice those. I giggle some. She closes her eyes. I am promptly solemn and blinking. Some of that is with discomfort: her notes are so high, so high and large, the kitchen cabinets vibrate. A melody sung in that range and that loudly (not really very loudly) has a rattling edge, it is cutting and broken at its boundaries.

  Now the notes begin to yammer. She is tired of charity—her singing is crudely frail now but getting stronger and it is passing out of my hearing; she wants A GLORIOUS CHARITY. Glory beckons her—she is a shy, red-faced woman, a girl. Around the enlarged D sharp the kitchen babbles. Part of the color of the music is that it is real music now, a glare and shadow of meaning—and, this one time, I can tell it’s goo
d—I hear something, I hear part of the music.… She moves the engines of music down to inside her chest, behind her gunnysack breasts; they take up throbbing residence there. This is full song, and one can see the extent to which she’s not much good. One sees the pain in her when she knows she’s not much good. She squints and looks taut.

  Now she opens big, soft doors in herself. I am crouched, closed mouthed, in my chair, and the gaudiness that burns in me, in my eye sockets and my mouth, is a kind of hysteria and cruel knowledge about watching her and is only partly a complicity and love; her attempt at art separates us as usual.

  She sweats. Her face is damp. Ann Marie!

  She pushes with her stomach, she flexes hiddenly inside her mouth and throat, she stares at me. She wants, or hopes, my appearance will inspire her.

  Then without warning come some legato phrases, in a slippery key, that seem to be full of love and which give her satisfaction abruptly. They startle her. She’s sweaty; she has a mad but sane look. I negotiate with impermanent nausea a tremble at a memory of applesauce, its strings and uneven surfaces, its smells.

  She’s getting better: she’s walking around the kitchen in a terrific way; her eyes start to shine more and more, now one, now the other (as I see them one by one), in her song-distorted, song-shaken face. I like her singing. I especially like it just now. She is poised in a kind of pleasure on the humped, light-struck windowsills of her song. I hear an accompanying insect buzz of her breath and I hear her rustling clothes. Heroically singing in reverse, taking in her notes, I listen to her. She eyes me. Her lips are too busy to grin. She hasn’t been off pitch for several bars now.