It hardly made a difference at first. Everyone (I think all the watchers) waited, not knowing what to expect or to hope for next. What came next was simply a somewhat sluggish return to a usual afternoon light, a Yankee sobriety of Massachusetts glare at 4:06—approximately: it was not clear at what moment It was gone, and some people were crying and others were carrying on somewhat, and that was distracting. I was bathed in the afternoon’s ordinary river of white light, yellow light, its faint heat and the damp coolness near the ground and struggling to grow, an invisible harsh corn, into the ice fields of winter.
A dead edge of cold’s in this air, an autumnal vinegar—in my salad days: a joke. The cold is smooth, this mixture of heat and cold is like the rough feel of a cat’s tongue. I feel the Cambridge damp as pale, always pale, a thin, decaying heat, a near lightlessness. Darkness comes on. I am in a thinning, fraying light. Vague mist, like lint, lies among some distant buildings in the perspectives here and among or near some of the trees. The restlessness of ordinary time lies between me and the adventure and the vanished light. The Seraph. There is only a make-believe point of stillness, an illness perhaps, a frozen affection, a passion of study and of concentration, to suggest any timelessness to crawl into or to climb on in the attempt to know what happened. Hustled by real time, I am filled with a kind of hushed rage of thought, spilled and quiescent, spilling and restless: What does it mean? When I was young, I lived in a pulsing urgency of thought, thought as flame or bone and blood unless I was in the sun or busy at a sport. It was a kind of rage of thought. It’s hard work and focus and a rage of a sort. Labor in the mind punctures and bruises emotion. I think that meaning is a human idea. Only a human one. Someone who thinks that can’t be a Messiah, right? No crucifixion for someone who advocates that—right? No.
A kind of disbelief afflicted some of the watchers such that I don’t think anyone looked at anyone—much. I did now check the audience: no one looked excited or seemed talkative; words, even exclamations, even the use of one’s breathing, the use of setting its tempo as a label for one’s use of ordinary sight, for one thinking this is not an emergency, I don’t have to be overly alert or whatever—all of that was unappealing and present. A few people did persist in absolute awe for a while, I would guess—maybe not: I have no real evidence from the world on this topic.
I think no one wanted to testify without letting some time pass first, really time for knowing better what had happened, for the newspapers and television to speak as The Seraph hadn’t, for one’s heart and one’s life and one’s dreams to express opinions and to allocate worth to this or that belief about things, to judge one’s ambition to testify, and time to argue inside oneself first to see what one meant cloudily and as a start, and time to see what others said, to see what would work in the ages subsequent to the event in The Yard.
I did and did not love The Seraph, The Angel. Something so massive, so spectacular, can take care of Itself. It told no one what to do, it was apparent from the clumsiness and abstractness and allegorical nature of the references to The Event that It advised no one and governed no language uttered in Its behalf. It had said nothing and It had vanished, and perhaps that meant it was best if one just let It go, that was what It had advised.
In the end, what was startling was that no one testified at the time. Or rather, it was all journalism and shock at first. And then came lyric attempts, and much cross-referencing back and forth.
Only after many years were there convincing but frail and as if whispered attempts at honesty, of which this is one.
Bibliographical Note
The stories in this book originally appeared, some of them in significantly different form, in the following publications:
“The Abundant Dreamer” The New Yorker, November 23, 1963
“On the Waves” The New Yorker, September 4, 1965
“Bookkeeping” The New Yorker, April 27, 1968
“Hofstedt and Jean—and others The New Yorker, January 25, 1969
“The Shooting Range” The New Yorker, September 13, 1969
“Innocence” American Review, 16, February 1973
“Play” American Review, 17, May 1973
“A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” The New Yorker, September 17, 1973
“His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” Esquire, August 1975
“Puberty” Esquire, December 1975
“The Pain Continuum” The Partisan Review, Volume XLIII, I, 1976
“Largely an Oral History of My Mother” The New Yorker, April 26, 1976
“Verona: A Young Woman Speaks” Esquire, July 1977
“Ceil” The New Yorker, September 9, 1983
“S.L.” The New Yorker, September 9, 1985
“The Nurse’s Music” The New Yorker, August 22, 1988
“The Boys on Their Bikes” Vanity Fair, March 1985 (abridged version: “Falling and Ascending Bodies”)
The Quarterly, 6, June 1988
“Angel” Women and Angels, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HAROLD BRODKEY was born in 1930, in Staunton, Illinois, grew up in Missouri, and was graduated from Harvard College. Since the early 1950s his stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and other magazines. His many honors include two first-place O. Henry Awards (1975 and 1976) as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has taught writing and literature at Cornell University and at City College of the City University of New York. His previous book, a collection of his early stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, was originally published in 1958 and was recently reissued. He lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Ellen Schwamm.
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
The Abundant Dreamer
On the Waves
Bookkeeping
Hofstedt and Jean— and Others
The Shooting Range
Innocence
Play
A Story in an Almost Classical Mode
His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft
Puberty
The Pain Continuum
Largely an Oral History of My Mother
Verona: A Young Woman Speaks
Ceil
S. L.
The Nurse’s Music
The Boys on Their Bikes
Angel
Bibliographical Note
About The Author
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 71