Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (66 page)

I
REMEMBER
her. I hate Jews.

No. I don’t really remember her and I don’t hate Jews.

I
N THE
tormented and torn silence of certain dreams—in the night court of my sleep—sometimes words, like fingers, move and knead and shape the tableaux: shadowy lives in night streets. There is a pearly strangeness to the light. Love and children appear as if in daylight, but it is always a sleeping city, on steep hills, with banked fires and ghosts lying in the streets in the dully reflectant gray light of a useless significance.

I
DO NOT
believe there was any justice in Ceil’s life.

1932: The Child Has Not Been Adopted Yet

H
E AND
I go out onto a wooden porch in a pause in the rain—S.L. and the partly ill and silent child; he carries me high against his chest and twisted at the waist and facing forward—and outside, in the air, suspended softly as if to wrap everything to keep it safe—so that it won’t break—is a batting of droplets and mist. In its mist and stillness the air yet has movement second by second, a pigeon flutter. It trembles, silver-gray, silent. And everything in the world, everything that I see—the small pillars of the porch, the handrail of the steps as we descend, the bushes alongside the steps and around the back of the house—gleams and drips.

S.L. has a style of ironic sadness and of unfocused fondness; we move through this pearl-gray, softly walled rainscape; he sings, tunelessly, an impromptu song:
“Oh what a shame it is.”

The blond field of his singular loneliness, his peculiar state of American self-indulgence and intelligently charitable intent, spreads around us; in it, in the rain mist, his voice is oversized, seemingly unbounded, that baritone. He says, that voice says: “You want to risk getting rained on? We are a nice child in a world of bastards. We’re as happy as a pair of blue jays who turn into ducks when it rains. Little Sweets, Little Sweet Friend, here.” I, the silent child, the not really very well child,
the trembler,
listen.
He,
S.L., says, “Aren’t you the trembler? Well, I won’t bite.” Then his voice grandly imitates a little voice: “Poor Birdy Thing.” The man’s unhappiness adds grace to his sympathy. That I am ill and sad he makes part of his complaint against The World: my condition accuses the world. “Just be friendly and I’ll get the idea that I’m O.K. with you.” S.L., as a general rule, takes his moral absolution where he can find it. He’ll take it in the form of a compliment from nearly anyone, a man saying,
I’ll tell ya, S.L., you’re really all right.
This house, its charity, its details and its major proportions, S.L. supplies the money for, he pays for: S.L. thinks about this a number of times during a day, nearly all the time. “Expensive as it is and was and will be, well, money is no object—I drove home to be with you, just with you.” Handsome, young, and affluent, he is here with me although people (including some children) fight for his company. “I came like the wind in my merry old Buick to have a little happy daytime lovely-dovery, a love feast: you, you are very fine, you are a fine child, a real person, yes you are.”

The backyard is a steep landscape of brown rain mist, almost black, with odd cloudy walls at the end of the yard. In the shifting suffusions of the light in the almost open space, roomlike, among the subtle walls, colors have the quality of being painted—rich and floating and more perceptibly colored whatever they are without the rivalry of the sun. The damp, dulled, particled, dispersed, shredded glow is a special light, a special silence.… The closely shaved stubble of his neck makes a noise on his collar not far from my ear.

At the head of the gravel driveway he puts the child down on the gravel.

He bends over me, he urges me along with his hand on my backside, his forearm on my back. I walk reluctantly. I hear his breath all around my head.

He begins to congratulate me: “Look at you, look at you go, let me tell you, kiddo, you’re not far off seven-league boots, you’re a tremendous walker. You know how wonderful you are? Isn’t it time we all gave you a testimonial? Listen, little bird, little birdskull, oh, you’re a sparrow, you’re perky is what you are, I’ll tell you, well, it’s all over town now, you’re going to be all right now, I say so everywhere, you’re famous, you’re a hero, I’m glad I know you, and the whole town is talking—Jesus, God, Jesus God, ah, shit—” My silence and my despairing walk on the lumpy gravel depressed him.

He lost interest. He mostly hadn’t meant what he said in any way that extended beyond the moment—he wasn’t speaking timelessly.

It depended, for instance, on my responding or not responding now, in these minutes, on what was in him just then and not what was in him forever, for his lifetime, or for a week, or for the rest of the month, say.

He is faintly angry in his sadness, in the sadness in which
tragic
becomes his word of judgment less on things in themselves than on how things go, how things turn out in this world: my God: he spoke like that: he meant,
I am a tragic man, don’t you know that, don’t you understand anything? My life is pain. I hate everyone.
His style hid that but hinted at it, said it in an obscure tongue—a great fineness, a tragic dimension imparted by male pain, S.L.’s dignity, S. L. Silenowicz of Alton, Alton, Illinois.

Suddenly he begins to name everything out loud—he is instructing the child: “House, howdy … howdy, old house.… Hello, lawn—hello, azalea bush with a broken branch on it. Hello, puddle.” He softly recites, “Rain, rain go away, come again another day, don’t make the little kid sad, that is bad, I’ll get mad, and I’m a poet, and I know it. I’m a poet, don’t be fooled—I’m the best, I know what’s good and bad. It’s not all what meets the eye.” He’s a realer poet than famous poets are, although critics wouldn’t say so, he means.

He’s looking at me to see if I am glad that I have been saved from the attentions of women: “You are with a hero of the Marne and points west.” Actually, Château-Thierry and the Argonne. “Smile and see what you get, Pretty Sparrow-Bird.” He is encouraging me to smile and to talk, I am belated in speech, his voice urges me to speak. He wants me to lisp a child’s version of the way he is talking to me. He is lonely.

His manner has a doting nursing thing in it among the riotous sexual qualities and
don’t-fool-me
stuff of his daily postures. When I don’t talk, he says, “All right, be silent, silent knight—uh hemm.” He is pleased and then sad and sensually saintly—wistful, delicate, faintly unmanly as if only women and delicate men were saintly in America. “I do do do like yuuu yuuu yuuu, ditsey, dittlesee dottsy dossippitty—I’m a nursemaid.” He minced for a step or two, being a lordly parody of a girlish nursemaid, then he lost interest but went on mincing, but less so, and sort of absently and tugging my hand so that on one side I was lifted off the ground. He stopped: “I’ll tell you something I’ll tell you something so true it ull burn your breeches, yes, sir, it pleases me, it feels good to
BE
good, yessirree—being kind to you is a privilege, Sweetie-Poots.”

He gives me such names: the child has no real name yet in his circumstances—the child is between names: names, hopes, reaches of safety of various kinds.

S.L. is somewhat sentrylike and dutiful inside his glamour, his luster, self-conscious, a beginner—at being dutiful, a lifetime’s duties, servitudes—a beginner, certainly not yet professional: he is professional at being handsome; he is expert at softening his male willfulness and being soft and pleasant in a real way: the child is a wall of illness and silence. The child’s attention is present beyond that wall. The child’s attention is averted. The wall becomes a dissolved thing, a hedge, maybe; the child is the other side of a pallid hedge and feels S.L.’s presence here, out-of-doors, in a more immediate way than a moment ago, in the actual moment: this is new for him with this man. It is and is not like seeing the man for the first time.

“I like your smile,” S.L. says. It is not a smile; it is a posture of less averted attention, slightly open-mouthed, and not disagreeable. “I know how to read a smile, you have very particular smiles; but you don’t have enough of them if you ask me: well, this is a threat, sheriff, smile or get out of town: I’m gonna make you smile.”

The physical music in his voice, his purposes as they show themselves to me, friendly and temporary (the child has no abiding sense of the future) in this field of attention, the child’s field of inner consciousness on the other side of the waxing and waning hedge becomes nervously alert perceptibly—he is almost immediately in S.L.’s presence.

Then, almost open-spirited, the child, mute Wiley, me at that moment, stares upward, stupefied and beguiled—it is the boundlessness of that man’s voice, a flood outside me in the mist and air, and inside me, overturning my mind, my
head
and its shallow cups of electric comprehension.

Perhaps it was like being a child on a beach, in the sand and sun, in the noise and at the edge of the expanse of water, a new combination at that size—toylike but giant. Giant. His intentions, his purposes as he shows them, as they show themselves to me, are not businesslike but open and strange, like a beach, and friendly and something for the day, for an afternoon, for a visit.

Maybe the women will not only be pretending that S.L. is
good with the child:
maybe it will genuinely be so now.

I turn my head aside but I hear him.

I vibrate with his voice; his intention is to affect me, malely.

To be honest, I have only limited faith in anything human; the child was dark-souled and so am I.

The damaged kid is then further addressed—in very particular tones, caressive but firm, intelligent, reasonable: “You’re a problem—but what kind of problem is there that a whole lot of love won’t solve? Maybe a whole great big amount of love … I don’t know anyone who wants you but me, so you have to put up with me, but you can count on me: I’ll tell you one thing, I’m no liar; and I’m no bully—I’ll never be a liar and a bully to
YOU
—”

After a few seconds, his mood alters into nervousness; he’s not all that sure of himself. He says, looking at a house across the street, remembering something that happened there, or maybe he’s thinking of his dead sons—two sons that died in their first year, whom I, in some degree, maybe am intended to replace in his life—or maybe he’s thinking of business, or of politics, or of crime or war, or of his genital acts, “It’s tragic, there’s too much that’s tragic in the world, it gets a man down.” The
tragic sense
of things that accompanies him almost always gives a feeling of depth, of grace to him, nearly always—maybe only to me and to the women who care about him. He says, “Sometimes like now I can stand still and it just seems to me I can hear everyone in the world who’s weeping. Everyone’s crying but us, kiddo. Ah, sweet mystery of life. You (uh)n(duh) me, we’re happy as larks, we’re happy as clams and lox, we’re happy as—as—as—well, I-uh like-uh you-uh verrr-hee vehhwee mu-
UHOCHUCH-CH(UH).
”

Everything in him, in me, that concerns him and me is from only a limited number of moments, it’s not from all my life. And it’s not eternal. We don’t have a contract. It’s just him and me. It’s just this one time, this stretch of
now.

He said
you
to me in a particular way although he never said
you
in the same way twice to me. He was aware of the Joseph’s-coat colors of his voice, of its labor, its vanity in this regard of naming me in tones, and everyone, of separate and particular musics, summations, emergencies, always in a tone with some section of it specialized to fit or to identify whoever was listening; and as with his clothes and his posture and his
being nice,
he got exhausted from time to time over it as if, after a lost battle, he waited for the conqueror to come and decide his fate and that of anyone else who was in the tent with him at that time. Now he is intimate, conspiratorial—his voice was so intimate, so mournfully affectionate, it so newly but firmly included
me
when he said
you,
and
it was so apologetic toward the world and about the world that the word was like a whole wriggling or gliding animal: bright head and thrust and sinuous neck and strong back and long tail of breath and a rustle of echo from its path in the world: “I-uh like-uh
youhuuuuuhuuuuuuu.…”
Then he rested: he took a breath: and went from the neutrality of a joke, of an imitation, to a kind of sentiment: “Youhuuuuhuuuu—” And it was, it was me, he meant me. Then he added “(Uh)n(duh)—” He paused. Then: “Meee-ihhhhhhh—” Him! That one. This one. The tone of the “Meee-ihhhhhhh—” was modest, even disgusted—it was that modest.

The actuality of the man, like the actuality of his voice, was not familiar, or like a formula to me, but was incomprehensible and real, which I partly minded and partly did not mind, the immensity of the fact and the immensity of my incomprehension.

He says, “I think I’m going to show you a nice park. Are you going to vomit? If you throw up, I warn you, I’ll have to take you home, I’ll know I’m on the wrong track, a man can take only so much humiliation—” His voice floated; it didn’t end with a fall there, or a close. It waits, in the air, for him to go on. Anne Marie (a nurse, a housekeeper, a cook) and Momma will rebuke him. “With those
biddies
at home, believe me, I’m taking my life in my hands.”

I can feel his latent humiliation, how potent a thing it is in his large presence, it’s near the surface, a raw thing, a web of nerves, presentiments, and dislike—for being hurt.

He lifts me by putting his arm around my middle from behind and I am held like a puppy or piglet, he says so: “Puppy pig, piglet, that’s you—there’s your daddy’s car—but we’re going for a walk—are you vomiting?”

I vomited all the time the first year.

If I’m damaged permanently, they will send me away, to a home.

(S.L. hasn’t asked you to marry him yet:
Lila’s said that to me already; she likes being superior to the infant.)