Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Tenderness and self-consciousness of a kind swell the amplitude of my nurse. The partly ill, still unspeaking child doesn’t laugh at the maybe mad, maybe merciless fat woman; immodesty in her maybe does turn her over to Deity or to being possessed. She is in the realm of Holy Fools, naked-voiced, shameless. Shamelessness in her is a marvel, after all, and represents a miracle of faith as well as exhibitionism. The fat woman’s noise is, in one way, a grace displayed, bell-like and sweaty. Her voice peals along. She labors. It is a luminous silliness. Then she shakes her head no.

  I lift my spoon—I stare at her very madly, truly lunatic now; I am inexpressibly maddened, inexpressibly placated by the various blades and whistles of this woman’s choral bellowing. It chops at our loneliness, hers and mine, our solitude on the earth, it is all over me on my outside and all over my inside, the bellowing is. It washes over and accompanies a leftover taste of semivomitous bile in my throat. Some people have real musicians for parents—imagine the lacework of sounds in their heads.

  This woman sings exclamations prettily: God in Heaven, oh, my God, hear thou me, address and exclamation, adoration, real feeling—I duck my head, an American amateur.

  Is it true a soul can be amateur? Ann Marie’s flawed performance fills me up inside and outwardly cups me, cups my oscillating skull and face and all its openings in a blur of white-faced, warm, calf-butting music. It hunts me down; I hate it, no, I like it; I love it, I guess. I put my spoon on the table; I listen with my whole head, which blinks, even its bony part. I blink in the pulsating air. The notes, some of which are glued and some of which are runny, are rhythmic with a flustering emphasis. If I really listen, if I return nakedly to the memory of the actual song, a not-to-be-tested understanding comes to me, is in me; and that is so even though my wits are distorted and euphoric among the glottal rumbles and roars and semishrieks. She is conceited and sly, holy and ordinary, a mad cow and gull and machine of noise.

  Here come more notes. The best ones go skipping and they tug at me. The etiquettes and corruptions of a woman singing touch inconceivable surfaces in me. I owe her this, too: she was an artist, close to being a good one, after all, at moments.

  I am clasped in this music. The touch of her hand is now less powerful than the clasp of her voice. Her voice clasps my promontory head, my causeway neck, my peninsular and shaking arms. I am coated with a glare of audible meanings; it pleases and frightens me; I open my mouth and shut my eyes. The silver blast of one note becomes the platinum tide of a following note, and then that becomes the rapid white pulsations of a cadenza. Oh my God, her song-flexed self so maddens me I try to throw myself from my chair and lie flat on the floor to show that I am dead or willing to nap with appreciation.

  I stare upward to show that I can’t maintain my humanity in the hurricane of music but must be grass, a bird, the earth. She knows. She walks around me, she sings. I hear the rain, a tinny and drumming wobble around the diminished alto of Ann Marie’s tiring notes. I lie on the floor and I see her massive legs. S.L. said about her, “She was crazy all in all, but she was a goodhearted woman. She never did anything bad that I know of but argue with me and save your life.”

  If you allow for the music of what he meant, that’s not such an exaggeration, what he said.

  THE

  BOYS

  ON THEIR

  BIKES

  TAKE, for example, me and Jimmy Setchell.

  Me at age almost fourteen, James S. the same, yet two grades behind, because of the month his birthday is in and because of my rushing my passage in school. We are American Jews, essentially undefined in the category of falling and ascending bodies.

  Jimmy shouts, “Woo-hoo! Whoopsy-daisy—” We are on bikes; the wind twists and edits syllables. The words sound odd and young. He wants to sound more grown up, and so, in a tougher manner, he says, “Upsy-daisy—” That’s no good; so he persists: “Up we go—” Still not the way he wants to sound. He tries “Wowee” and “Geronimo-o-o.” He thinks the last one is O.K. He smiles like a juvenile paratrooper and sails down a declivity and starts uphill.

  I am looking out of my eyes at that moment. This moment. I am slouching in my biggish, skinny body, at the edge of a weedy field of the whole moment.

  I intended to end a remainder of innocence in me from my childhood that day. I intended to end my vow not to kill anything, or harm anyone, if God made things reasonably O.K. for my father—my father by adoption—who had been a youngish man, in his early forties then, and let him live for a while unterrorized and undespairing, not shamefully. That had been the grounds of the vow. Now my dad was dead, but that wasn’t it: I was glad he was dead and probably wouldn’t have done much to stop his death—this was five, nearly six years after the vow, which I had pretty much kept. It was that I was tired of the way I had been good; it had been a foul way to live. So I intended to kill something in the course of the day. I had a disassembled .22, borrowed, extorted, from another boy. Jimmy carried it for me in a canvas pack on the bike rack in back of him.

  Or I might decide not to kill. I might still refuse to kill. I might choose to remain solitary and pure, relatively undefended, even if that maneuver, of retreat, retreat inside my self, had gone so sour in the failures of the world and of my fathers that it had ruined the angle of the line of my inner fall—or ascent—for a long time. My desire now to use the rifle—well, I feel it as this thing that propels me toward life: perhaps fake, perhaps real, life. I proceed in a famine of companionship toward companionship. After my years as a child, I see companionship as a blood deed. I intend, today, to play with guns as a step toward acquiring social abundances and social knowledges. Let actuality begin—that kind of thing. Of the young man I was, it can be said, He has an edge like a guillotine.

  This is meant to describe my mood, the killing something; and the question won’t be resolved in this account.

  I grin, I grimace as I pedal. I am very bookish. I name the nontran-scendence, the nonthought of this excursion a day off, a no-day, all real, nothing much, tilted (from the ordinarily moral and busy, from the sense of the future that is not secret). This is a form of private gaiety. My forehead and my mouth and my mind, my legs and my genitalia enter the next moment. I remember the sense of enlistment. I remember the brute intoxication of irrevocability.

  I take the declivity and more or less shout, “Geron-i-m-o-o,” too. Then I start pedaling furiously as I think I saw Jimmy do. My heart has trebled, quadrupled in the last year, and it is a new and noisy drum, a kind of smooth and then tormented engine. It startled me that I had new parts of myself, real sections, now. I hadn’t had compartments as a kid.

  My hands and wrists were new and big, my mouth was like a small salmon on my face, in looks and in how it felt to me: it leaped and spawned—words sometimes, sometimes expressions, in its excitements, in compulsions; a lot of my time now I lived in a chemical high, drugged, intent, and in chemical lows, furtive paranoias.

  On a steep section, where the road lay as if sunken while it climbed between steep, shading rises of broken rock, with bushes and a lot of very skinny, very tall trees rising up on arched trunks well above me, here in the shady underworld, long after Jimmy starts angling on long diagonals while he pedals aloft, I continue straight to see if I am, as I half believe and would like to show, much stronger than he is and latently better at sports. The bike slows and goes yet slower. The bike locks onto the smudged rhythmlessness of making no headway. It’s a little as if the front wheel is rotting or as if the bike was plowing into an airy hedge. I persist. Breathless, then, partly defeated, I give in only the airy half-lurch before keeling (a fall), but I give in actively, heroically, more as if fighting back, me, now, the underdog—but mighty nonetheless. I right it, the bike; I grab the bike upright with my arms; I am leveraged on the straining arch of my body, my legs: calfless legs, handsome in their way, fairly strong but clumsy at the moment (my arms haven’t much shape, either, but they’re good-looking anyway—also—and strong), and I
curse to mobilize myself. I threaten the hill with hell and God’s wrath; the bike—its frame an edited, two-dimensional diagram, lime green—is lifted (the front wheel comes off the ground); I aim it diagonally, on the lesser slope, and then the galvanized half-leap and semiglide forward means what I did was O.K. I am decently, skeletally athletic.

  I then embark on the irresolute, crooked stitching back and forth, a tactic to get uphill farther; the bicycle occasionally lurches in a deadened, nerveless way.

  Now the morning swimmingly, sweatily jerks around in zigzags in front of my eyes, and I get postcardlike rectangles—road, roadside, ditch, fences, lawns, houses, window sashes, carriage lanterns, façades. The postcard rectangles, the pictured morning, is not looked at but indirectly seen and instantly remembered while I pedal and sweatily blink. It cuts and slaps paperishly at me. Behind my forehead, in my buzzing skull, my mind winces in steady little slips. My legs do not pulse and bulge, though, and my eyes do not protrude, and my lips don’t hang open as they did when I was small and went uphill on my bike, this bike; its seat is raised now.

  I resented it that I had to remember in order to know what I saw; I have to put a step, a jackleg, a distance in, if I want to know what is in front of me. If I see alively, I sort of know, but I can’t be sure.

  The morning’s crimped edges slap my inward eyes, which are less shy because they see only when I blink or when the jackleg is in operation, when the corridors are patrolled and speed is regulated—they are more elegantly mindful than my outward eyes.

  I use my weight to force down the obstinate pedals, this one, that one, and they jerk up oppositely. The powering, or enabling, motto—the motto motor—is Get your ass up the hill.

  The light, the rays of the sun at a morning angle, strikes my eyes and then my wheeling ears and side of my neck as the bicycle slowly, heavily advances on an erratic line and switches directions again and then again. Flowers of glare flourish on my handlebars and on the spokes of Jimmy’s bike. Jimmy is maybe sixteen yards ahead of me. I slouch more and more, becoming miniature in admission that I am clumsy, that I have certain deficiencies in my body and mind, omissions of experience and some muscular training and knowledge because of my father’s having been ill and what was asked of me, and that I am not gaining on Jimmy and am not a better athlete than he is—at this moment.

  Everything in the world measures me and other men, and me against other men. I try to follow my duty. I try, also, as a mindly kid, to “know” what happens. That means to keep track, with a continuing sense, of what is done in the movement of time: that is, of what is actual. After a while, I remember too much and seem strange and bullying to some people—seem and am. Sometimes the abundance itself weighs me down, and this stuff crumbles into a pile, a single point or two, or indicators: Here I am—sort of—sorry—this is a lousy hill. At this time in my life, I haven’t the ability to phrase this, and so it slides around like something unfastened in the trunk of a car, but I live it with an odd stubbornness.

  Let me get up this goddam hill.

  I do the nut-thing of maybe its not true that I’m here. This shreds the brute intoxication of irrevocability. This destroys the fabric of the real—I mean, for me as audience of my own doings on this slope. My identity as an adolescent male, the space around my senses, titters now, and scowls in opposition to The Real: I’m a man, sort of, and I can do and think what I want: I’m not dependent like a woman or a child: I am and I’m not.

  I start being in a schooly state, an agony, a restlessness, a reckless boredom: I am persecuted, deftly oppressed: What kind of person am I, why am I doing this, God?

  I seek asylum as a brainy kid, I flee the country of such matters as maleness, and I think about books and soak myself in a pretense of rationality and escape the strain of bicycling.

  At school, in order to pass as correct, since I won’t risk being eccentrie or having doctrines, I lie always and don’t tell the teacher or the class when I make a book report or answer a question that a book or sentence or line in a poem is not the same for me on two successive readings, ever, the same sentence, the same word. Don’t be a philosopher; you tire everyone out, Wiley (Wiley Silenowicz, Ulysses Silenus in a Jew-American version, since my adoption when I was two, when my real mother died). The second reading, which is meant to check the first, always so alters the snowy reaches of the first reading and my notes or impressions that it silences me: it’s as if I was always wrong if I am right now. I hate myself because I lie about this and pretend I think it is mad stuff when I really think it is obvious and true, and basically useful. But I try to fit in, even at the expense of truth. Don’t tell people what you think; that’s crazy. So I don’t. And I have daydreams of confessing someday to what I see. But I’m only a kid.

  I am not A Good Kid with a single spine of doctrine and character. As I said, I have become restless; other people might say I started to get nervous—or they’d say Wiley’s about to act up—again; he’s mischievous, he likes to make trouble, he overreacts. When I feel good, I don’t judge things much except to say things like These are people’s lives, let’s be kind, but when I’m bothered, like now, the neatened houses, wood and half-size brick, medium-strength dilutions of ideas of farmhouses, a prairie turned into cozy and self-conscious nooks, make me embarrassed for everyone’s life and for the sorrow in their lives and for the Middle West; and I know that would irritate a lot of people—I mean, if they knew.

  I don’t understand, but I’m really unhappy suddenly, so I call out to amuse and interest myself and to be a sport and to get back in touch with reality while I sweat and pump in the crisscross pattern upward: “Hey, Juh (breath) IMMY.”

  My mood is uncured, and maybe worsened. This isn’t felt as a smooth thing but lurchingly, among breaths and gasps. Anyway, the enlarged trees and shrubs of the lawns seem out of place in the Middle Western light, which is, after all, illumination for a prairie, for a vegetable sea, rising week by week in the summer, all summer long, a rippling broth of weeds and high grass and tall flowers, elbowing each other and leaning and bowing, culminating in sunflowers, farfetched and gargantuan, giraffelike, maybe, August steeples, giant disks, solar, coarse, and yellow, nature’s pragmatic and almost farcical climax before the collapse in autumn in a brown rush of cold.

  The hill was once a burial mound. Now it’s got these houses. The burial mound was once filthy, stinking—savages are no better than we are. Savages and everyone and everything else—each thing in the universe, with or without consciousness, has intent; a limitless will is a bloody tyrant-emperor: I mean, each thing tries to run everything, to have its way. Everything is imperial—without exception. Everything drags at you. This is a universe of trash tyrants. You have to sacrifice your life to prove goodness exists. Do you think doing your duty sweetens things? I sort of asked Jimmy in my head. Here’s a secret: we are not entirely subject to laws. Everything can be cheated on for a while; you can put “an alternate irrevocability” into the system; you can quickly give something away, for instance, against your self-interest.

  “Hey-ay, jUH-immy—YOU THINK GOODNESS egg-zisss(T)s?”

  “Hunh?”

  “YOU THUH-INK WE’RE IMPROOVING THE GAL-AX-EE?”

  “WHA(T) DYOU WUHNNN(T) TO KNOW FORR?”

  “I DON’T KNOW, I FORGOT, I’M OUT OF BREATH.”

  This is what I shouted, with various long pauses, or holes in the sound. But I wasn’t exactly talking to him, and I wasn’t quite talking to myself: it was an early-adolescent version of weeping and sweating and being red-faced.

  “WE’RE ALL TIE-RUNTTS—” I know he won’t get that: no one understands, no one listens through the technical haze of problems that inhere in speech.

  As I pump, I feel an immoderate extent of will. I also get an erection, as I often do when I am in despair: this is a source of further despair. I go mad with sensual restlessness—a mode of despair; but even if I am to be a bad person in my life, I want to be it clearly and as a disappointed good
man, do you know what I mean? When I feel the bike pedal scrape the macadam on one of my wobbly turns, I dismount. Good or bad, I am a free man.

  I don’t want to prove this in words, I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to argue anything; I want to be free. Now the neat lawns, the cretinous, nice houses (frightened, ill-educated), both decent and for sale—like new and still partly unconvinced whores—watch us. So does a weird-eyed nine-year-old girl, who stares from the seat of a hydrocephalic plastic tricycle; the tricycle is bloated beyond my comprehension, a plastic machine.

  “Hey, Woohiilee—wha(t) suh—(y) udu wing?”

  He switched syntax in midstream from something on the order of What’s the matter to What are you doing, so there are a lot of alternate tones and possible sentences in his shout. I can read his noises, the bright, bent, burning wire hangers of syllabic shape: they’re important noises, in a way.

  The honest rejoinder that I make, almost absently, is “Duhwhuh?-wuh(t) arR-(y)uuuw uhn-(eh)ee(ng)?” I indicate the last word because I want to say simultaneously (which shows interest and affection), “want,” “doing,” “saying,” “shouting,” et cetera.

  I’m in cut-off Levi’s, and I am shirtless. The road has a tar and tire and outdoor stink of a kind. My T-shirt is wrapped around the bar below the bicycle seat. Obviously, I ought not to unwrap it and wear it for what I think I am going to do. My eyes blink. I am half miserable. I don’t understand what I am doing any more than I can understand at this point in my life why the houses along this road seem so decent and yearning to me at one minute and then bogeyed with ghosts and weird-ness the next, and then itchy to my mind with a whisper of the wishes of the people who live there, their hopes about themselves, the long-extended efforts of their lives, some lives good within this framework of streets and houses, and then the houses seem sly or communion-attending, love-armed and just about fully whorish the next. The same houses. Nuttily touching, then furtive, then merely things for sale.