After I left him, on my way home, to my parents, to that house, I found I was not as sad and as frightened as I usually was going home (I never knew if my father was worse or even dead or how my mother would be acting); and on a suburban street, empty except for me, beneath trees whose leaves lightly clashed in a pale spring breeze, I began to suspect that I had found something very special.
An unfailing hot mitigation.
M
Y PROTAGONISTS
are my mother’s voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.
I was supposed to have a good mind—that supposition was a somewhat mysterious and even unlikely thing. I was physically tough, and active, troublesome to others, in mischief or near delinquency at times and conceit and one thing and another (often I was no trouble at all, however); and I composed no symphonies, did not write poetry or perform feats of mathematical wizardry. No one in particular trusted my memory since each person remembered differently, or not at all, events I remembered in a way that even in its listing of facts, of actions, was an interpretation; someone would say, “That’s impossible—it couldn’t have happened like that—I don’t do those things—you must be wrong.”
But I did well in school and seemed to be peculiarly able to learn what the teacher said—I never mastered a subject, though—and there was the idiotic testimony of those peculiar witnesses, IQ tests: those scores invented me.
Those scores were a decisive piece of destiny in that they affected the way people treated you and regarded you; they determined your authority; and if you spoke oddly, they argued in favor of your sanity. But it was as easy to say and there was much evidence that I was stupid, in every way or in some ways or, as my mother said in exasperation, “in the ways that count.”
I am only equivocally Harold Brodkey. I was adopted when I was two in the month following my real mother’s death, and Harold was a name casually chosen by Joseph Brodkey because it sounded like Aaron, the name I’d had with my real mother. I was told in various ways over a number of years, and I suppose it’s true, that my real father blamed me because I became ill at my mother’s death and cried and didn’t trust him: I had been my mother’s favorite; he kept my brother, who was older than me, and more or less sold me to the Brodkeys for three hundred and fifty dollars and the promise of a job in another town. I saw my brother once a year, and he told me I was lucky to be adopted. I never told him or anyone else what went on at the Brodkeys’.
The Brodkeys never called me Harold—Buddy was the name they used for me. Brodkey itself is equivocal, being a corruption of a Russian name, Bezborodko. To what extent Harold Brodkey is a real name is something I have never been able to decide. No decision on the matter makes me comfortable. It’s the name I ended with.
In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, I was thirteen. Thirteen is an age that gives rise to dramas: it is a prison cell of an age, closed off from childhood by the onset of sexual capacity and set apart from the life one is yet to have by a remainder of innocence. Of course, that remainder does not last long. Responsibility and Conscience, mistaken or not, come to announce that we are to be identified from then on by what we do to other people: they free us from limitations—and from innocence—and bind us into a new condition.
I do not think you should be required to give sympathy. In rhetoric and in the beauty of extreme feeling, we confer sympathy always, but in most of life we do quite otherwise, and I want to keep that perspective. The Brodkeys were a family that disasters had pretty completely broken. My father was in his early forties and had blood pressure so high the doctors said it was a miracle he was alive. He listened to himself all the time, to the physiological tides in him; at any moment he could have a stroke, suffer a blood clot, and pass into a coma: this had happened to him six times so far; people said, “Joe Brodkey has the constitution of a horse.” He was not happy with a miracle that was so temporary. And my mother had been operated on for cancer, breast cancer: that is, there’d been one operation and some careful optimism, and then a second operation, and there was nothing left to remove and no optimism at all. She was forty-five or so. My mother and father were both dying. There was almost no end to the grossness of our circumstances. There
had been money but there was no money now. We lived on handouts from relatives who could not bring themselves to visit us. I used to make jokes with my parents about what was happening, to show them I wasn’t horrified, and for a while my parents were grateful for that, but then they found my jokes irritating in the light of what they were suffering, and I felt, belatedly, the cheapness of my attitude. My mother was at home, not bedridden but housebound; she said to my father such things as, “Whether you’re sick or not, I have to have money, Joe; I’m not getting the best medical treatment; Joe, you’re my husband: you’re supposed to see to it that I have money.” Joe signed himself into a Veterans Hospital, where the treatment was free, so she could have what money there was and so he could get away from her. I was in ninth grade and went to Ward Junior High School.
We lived in University City, U. City, or Jew City—the population then was perhaps thirty-five percent Jewish; the percentage is higher now. St. Louis swells out like a gall on the Mississippi River. On the western edge of St. Louis, along with Clayton, Kirkwood, Normandy, Webster Groves, is U. City. The Atlantic Ocean is maybe a thousand miles away, the Pacific a greater distance. The Gulf of Mexico is perhaps seven hundred miles away, the Arctic Ocean farther. St. Louis is an island of metropolis in a sea of land. As Moscow is. But a sea of Protestant farmers. Republican small towns. A sea then of mortgaged farms.
It used to give me a crawling feeling of something profound and hidden that neither Joe nor Doris Brodkey had been born in the twentieth century. They had been born in years numerically far away from me and historically unfamiliar. We’d never gotten as far as 1898 in a history course. Joe had been born in Texas, Doris in Illinois, both in small towns. Joe spoke once or twice of unpaved streets and his mother’s bitter concern about dust and her furniture, her curtains; I had the impression his mother never opened the windows in her house: there were Jewish houses sealed like that. Doris said in front of company (before she was ill), “I remember when there weren’t telephones. I can remember when everybody still had horses; they made a nice sound walking in the street.”
Both Joe and Doris had immigrant parents who’d made money but hadn’t become rich. Both Joe and Doris had quit college, Joe his first week or first day, Doris in her second year; both their mothers were famous for being formidable, as battle-axes; both Joe and Doris believed in being more American than anyone; both despised most Protestants
(as naively religious, murderously competitive, and unable to have a good time) and all Catholics (as superstitious, literally crazy, and lower-class). They were good-looking, small-town people, provincially glamorous, vaudeville-and-movie instructed, to some extent stunned, culturally stunned, liberated ghetto Jews loose and unprotected in the various American decades and milieus in which they lived at one time or another—I don’t know that I know enough to say these things about them.
I loved my mother. But that is an evasion. I loved my mother: how much did I love Doris Marie Rubenstein? Doris Brodkey, to give her her married name. I don’t think I loved her much—but I mean the I that was a thirteen-year-old boy and not consciously her son. All the boys I knew had two selves like that. For us there were two orders of knowledge—of things known and unknown—and two orders of persecution.
Joe and Doris had not been kind in the essential ways to me—they were perhaps too egocentric to be kind enough to anyone, even to each other. At times I did not think they were so bad. At times, I did. My mind was largely formed by U. City; my manners derived from the six or seven mansions on a high ridge, the three or four walled and gated neighborhoods of somewhat sternly genteel houses, the neighborhoods of almost all kinds of trim, well-taken-care-of small houses, of even very small houses with sharp gables and fanciful stonework, houses a door and two windows wide, with small, neat lawns; and from districts of two-family houses, streets of apartment houses—we lived in an apartment house—from rows of trees, the branches of which met over the streets, from the scattered vacant lots, the unbuilt-on fields, the woods, and the enormous and architecturally grandiose schools.
Every afternoon without stopping to talk to anyone I left school at a lope, sometimes even sprinting up Kingsland Avenue. The suspense, the depression were worst on rainy days. I kept trying to have the right feelings. What I usually managed to feel was a premature grief, a willed concern, and an amateur’s desire to be of help any way I could.
It was surprising to my parents and other people that I hadn’t had a nervous breakdown.
I spent hours sitting home alone with my mother. At that time no one telephoned her or came to see her. The women she had considered friends had been kind for a while, but it was wartime and my mother’s situation did not command the pity it perhaps would have in peacetime.
Perhaps my mother had never actually been a friend to the women who did not come to see her: my mother had been in the habit of revising her visiting list upward. But she said she’d been “close” to those other women and that they ought to show respect for her as the ex-treasurer of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society. She wanted those women to telephone and come and be present at her tragedy. From time to time she’d make trouble: she’d call one of them and remind her how she had voted for her in this or that club election or had given her a lift downtown when she had a car and the other woman hadn’t. She told the women she knew they were hardhearted and selfish and would know someday what it was to be sick and to discover what their friends were like. She said still angrier things to her sister and her own daughter (her daughter by birth was ten years older than I was) and her brothers. She had been the good-looking one and in some respects the center of her family, and her physical conceit was unaltered; she had no use for compromised admiration. She preferred nothing. She had been a passionate gameswoman, a gambler: seating herself at a game table, she had always said, “Let’s play for enough to make it interesting.”
People said of her that she was a screamer, but actually she didn’t scream very loudly; she hadn’t that much physical force. What she did was get your attention; she would ask you questions in a slightly high-pitched pushy voice that almost made you laugh, but if you were drawn to listen to her, once you were attentive and showed you were, her voice would lose every attribute of sociability, it would become strained and naked of any attempt to please or be acceptable; it would be utterly appalling; and what she said would lodge in the center of your attention and be the truth you had to live with until you could persuade yourself she was crazy: that is, irresponsible and perhaps criminal in her way.
To go see my father in the hospital meant you rode buses and streetcars for three hours to get there; you rode two streetcar lines from end to end; and then at the end of the second line you took a city bus to the end of
its
line and then a gray army bus that went through a woods to the hospital, which stood beside the Mississippi. My father thought it was absurd for me to do that. He said, “I don’t need anything—sickness doesn’t deserve your notice—go have a good time.” To force me to stop being polite, he practiced a kind of strike and would not let me make conversation; he would only say, “You ought to be outdoors.” My mother said of my father, “We can’t just let him
die.” Sometimes I thought we could. And sometimes I thought we couldn’t. If it had mattered to my father more and not been so much a matter of what I thought I ought to do, it would have been different. He was generous in being willing to die alone and not make any fuss, but I would have preferred him to make a great fuss. When he wouldn’t talk, I would go outside; I would stand and gaze at the racing Mississippi, at the eddies, boilings, and racings, at the currents that sometimes curled one above the other and stayed separate although they were water, and I would feel an utter contentment that anything should be that tremendous, that strong, that fierce. I liked loud music, too. I often felt I had already begun to die. I felt I could swim across the Mississippi—that was sheer megalomania: no one even fished in the shallows because of the logs in the river, the entire uprooted whirling trees that could clobber you, carry you under; you would drown. But I thought I could make it across. I wanted my father to recognize the force in me and give it his approval. But he had come to the state where he thought people and what they did and what they wanted were stupid and evil and the sooner we all died the better—in that, he was not unlike Schopenhauer or the Christian Apologists. I am arguing that there was an element of grace in his defeatism. He said that we were all fools, tricked and cheated by everything; whatever we cared about was in the end a cheat, he said. I couldn’t wish him dead as he told me I should, but when I wished he’d live it seemed childish and selfish.
Sometimes my father came home for weekends—the hospital made him, I think (letting him lie in bed was letting him commit suicide), but sometimes he did it to see me, to save me from Doris. Neither Joe nor Doris liked the lights to be on; they moved around the apartment in the shadows and accused each other of being old and sick and selfish, of being irresponsible, of being ugly.
It seemed to me to be wrong to argue that I should have had a happier home and parents who weren’t dying: I didn’t have a happier home and parents who weren’t dying; and it would have been limitlessly cruel to Joe and Doris, I thought, and emotionally unendurable for me to begin to regret my luck, or theirs. The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything.… Yet it seemed to me that I was being done in in that household, by those circumstances.