The World Is the Home of Love and Death Read online

  THE WORLD IS THE HOME OF LOVE AND DEATH

  Harold Brodkey

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  The Bullies

  Spring Fugue

  What I Do for Money

  Religion

  Waking

  Car Buying

  Lila and S.L.

  Jibber-Jabber in Little Rock

  The World Is the Home of Love and Death

  Dumbness Is Everything

  A Guest in the Universe

  Keep Reading

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE BULLIES

  The hard rain sounds like a heartbeat. The heavy green canvas awnings around the three-sided screened porch buck and grunt and creak; they sag with the hard rain, and they drip, and then suddenly they rise and twist and water splashes out. Inside those passionate sounds, the porch glider squeals and the wicker chair squeaks. Ida Nicholson, Momma’s guest, in expensively crude, heavyish, wrinkled linen and with stylishly stately curls on either side of her head (her hair smells of hot iron even in the rain), sits with bossy nervousness in the wicker chair.

  Momma has on rouge and eye shadow; and her lipstick is so bright in the damp air that it shouts in my eye. Ma’s porch grandeur. She is all dressed up. Her eyes are not fully lit; they are stirring like half-lit theaters. The lights never go on, the scenes are not explained. Her nakedness of but only half-lit soul puts a disturbance into the air—I feel shouted at by that, too. Her art is immersed in darkness. The floor of the porch—concrete with an oval straw rug—smells of the rain. Lila’s voice: “Ida, everything that I do on this matter, I do because S.L. loves this child—he’s pretty, isn’t he? You wouldn’t think he was just flotsam and jetsam. You know me: I may vote Republican yet; I’m not the maternal type—the child is S.L.’s pet project. S.L. makes the decisions; if he doesn’t call in a doctor because the child doesn’t talk, there’s an excellent reason: S.L. has thought it out: if the child is real sick, what are we going to do? How long can we keep him? Now he’s doing fine. S.L.’s in no rush: sufficient evil unto the day. I can’t tell you what to think, but I can advise. I recommend it to everyone, Let’s live and let live. I’m not an inexperienced person, Ida; in a lot of battles, I count for more than a man.”

  Ida is delicately made but ungainly—that is a kind of sexual signal. It is an indication of will. Her movements and eyes are more for purposes of giving social and political and intellectual messages than sexual ones—this is a matter of pride as well as of defiance, a useful grotesquerie. Her alertness is a kind of crack-the-whip thing—not uncommon in the Middle West but uncommon there to the extent she takes it when she is not being folksy and Middle Western. Her style of dress, expensive and sportif, French, is obliquely sexual in the manner of women athletes of that day, golf players and tennis players, and is without the insolence that marks the project of the arousal of men: she is seriously chic, magisterially so, and that includes a mock dowdiness.

  Lila does not try to compete with that: big-breasted Lila, in white with polka dots and a wide patent-leather belt, is sadly heterosexual—theatrical at it—but convincingly real, not even faintly a pretender. She has the gift, or art, or intrusiveness, of apparent personal authenticity.

  Ida’s legs are thin—toylike almost—above flat shoes with fringed shields over the laces. Lila’s legs are those of a cabaret singer, in high-heeled patent-leather pumps, very plain and yet noticeable anyway. Ida has on a white-and-blue tie, Lila a white-and-black polka-dotted scarf caught with a diamond pin. Ida’s “polite” inexpressiveness, a powerful quality in her, and her social rank (her position in relation to what others want from her) add up to her being a dry person, someone with a dry wit, a wonderful person, really, and(to go on using Momma’s terms) she was in charge. Who was I? We were nobodies.

  Ida has a pronounced quality of command—but it is not local-dowager stuff—it is charmingly in-and-out—taking turns, fair play (Ida’s phrases)—but (Lila said) she was always the referee and the judge (of what was fair).

  Ida feels that nothing in the way of feeling or intellect is a puzzle for her. Her omniscience had lapses but she did not overtly confess to them: she could not have run her kingdom then. Her confidence came from her triumphs: her sister married a newspaper-and-magazine potentate in the East (Boston chiefly). She may have influenced the policies of the newspaper. She always said she did. She was a dilettante philosopher in public conversation and good at it. Then, there were her successes in Europe—social ones, with women: the most difficult kind. She divided feelings into those of pleasure—by which she meant feelings of self-love, the acknowledgment of merit and standing, of the powers of the self—and the feelings of emergency: hurt, rage, self-pity, the necessity for fighting.

  Knowing Ida meant you were playing with fire. For Ida, incoherence is ill-health: she becomes an invalid from contradiction—in herself, by others of her. The fluctuation in others of contradiction, the foreign actuality of others’ thoughts, plus her ignored feelings when others show their strange thoughts, cause her nervousness. Ida feels as a Christian (lady) that historically the serious work has been done and that certain forgiveness obtains nearby for silliness—forgiveness overall and acceptance: a truce. For her, religion has altered into manners—through manners she has a high-speed connection to what she considers to be the tragic; and she has a tactful attachment to silliness (everything that is not tragic but is merely sad). She hungers for transcendence. This gives her a beauty that Lila is aware of, an ugly beauty of a sort, a real beauty, the kind men don’t know about: Ida is a someone. Ida’s moral illiteracy, her ethical inanity, are not anything unusual—they are the common human matter of power.

  When Ida was on her high horse, you could forget she hated everybody and could do anything she liked and when she did it she didn’t apologize: there was a lot to her. If luck had gone her way, who knows what she could have done? She was a brilliant person who was also no good.

  Ida—this is in a moment without men in it—asks, converting her full rank into tentative silliness, with a great deal of calm and yet nervous music in her voice, “Well, Lila—” Pause. “What do you think of the rain?”

  Lila sits suddenly still on the porch glider. Her face seems to recognize a great many notes and possibilities in the question—this is sort of a joke—and she replies as if carefully, the false carefulness making an ambiguous music, “I don’t mind rain; my hair holds up in the rain. I’m lucky: I don’t get frizzy.”

  Ida puffs on a cigarette. Momma suddenly—naïvely—poses as someone who is not watching Ida.

  Ida looks at Momma’s hair—the widow’s peak, the shininess above and below and around, past the polka-dot bandanna (and its tail); and she says, “I’m a daughter of the pioneers, Lilly. I have prairie hair—I get frizzy; it’s a bane: I’m just a workaday person—Lilly—”

  That’s special Midwestern talk, including Momma’s grade-school name.

  Momma has a drink clasped in a ringed hand; she keeps her eyes lowered even when her old name is uttered. Ida has a drink, too, and a cigarette. Momma sighs: so much deciphering—Ida’s clothes and money and voice and the moment—and then Momma shifts her posture and suddenly “gives up,” as if with overwhelmed innocence or naïveté or ignorance: this is her most common tactic with a powerful woman, to give in, give up, and not mean it: it’s a kind of wit—a kind of sexuality. Ma’s face shows she decides to be the hostess—ordinary. There is a question whether Ida will allow it. Will Ida insist on being at home in Lila’s house? Will she treat it like a pigsty? The particular music�
��the cast of voice, of face—with which Ma gets ready to do this marks her as worthwhile, as not a novice, as having social promise: “Ida, we have some little sandwiches; Annemarie put them together for you: she stayed away from the noisy lettuce you don’t like—I told her what you said that day at the governor’s luncheon. She made them especially for you—I told her you were coming. You impress—her.” Ma rose and walked across the porch—a sort of workaday hostess: a version of workaday to offer Ida a plate of sandwiches. Momma’s dress has birdlike lights in it and rustlings: she is enclosed in a watery aviary of small lights and small noises. She has a sweetish, and slightly sweaty, full-bodied smell—startling. Her red mouth is, too.

  Ida blinks and takes a sandwich and tilts her head like a fragile queen who yet has a sinewy strength of mind. She says, in educated, rapid, smart tones of a kind that Lila has never heard from anyone else, never heard a version of in the movies or onstage: “And you, do I impress you?”

  Lila recognizes the power and feels thrilled. She feels the “class” thing her way, as beauty and as enmity—the possibility is that she will be hurt; she is game.

  But (in Ida’s terms) she is infinitely sly—Momma has her own fairly complete realm of knowledge and she has her own power: she hears not a complete woman (Lila’s term) but a girl bookworm and a woman who doesn’t smell like a rose: someone lonely, wooden, undemocratic, locally solitary—it’s the Christian snobbery: that mingling of truth and the ideal (Momma’s dichotomy), the truth being loneliness and a kind of poverty of life, of soul, and the ideal being a social reality, symbolized by Ida’s Parisian suit, with its man-cut jacket and pleated skirt, the real ideal (Ma’s term) inside the ideal being the satisfaction of the impulses of a woman of rank (in America, in imitation in this case of European examples): satisfactions, consolations, and rank. What Lila understood as the ideal was earthbound, but it was earthbound romance, self-loss—suicidal bursts of love and extravagance with money to make a real story, a legend around here. Not that she practiced that form of suicide, but she played at its edges. So to speak. What Momma meant by the ideal was the most advantageous human thing for a woman. In order not to be aggravated and go mad or give up: when Momma says she is not young, is not nineteen, this is part of what she means.

  Ida feels herself to be a Christian warrior, Ida feels she is a vessel by blood, by blood lineage, for illumination and heroism as part of the matter of competing, as a mark of victory—i.e., of government. She is very stubborn about this.

  Lila thinks that is banana oil.

  But the fact is that at moments Ida is her ideal.

  Ida knows that The Ideal Figure is the one that gets loved but not necessarily embraced.

  Ida is impatient with reality and minds it that if you solve one problem, that does not solve all problems.

  She has a very elevated notion of personal greatness as a social matter and as an aspect and reward of heartfelt, transcendent belief.

  So Ida is often afraid she is being laughed at—terror and anger then display themselves at a distance—abruptly she embodies them and then drowns them in her usual courage and willfulness: this makes her vibrate and be nervous; this fills her with disgust and friendliness. (The more she is drawn to someone, the more disgust she feels. I think it is so she will not be pushed around by her feelings.)

  Do I impress you?

  Lila’s sense of Ida’s question goes deep in her: Why Ida was asking it was the question. Lila says, “It would hurt my pride to answer that—” Lila pauses. Really, if you have the time and a fine enough nervous system you can study what an elaborate pause it is, what detail work is in it. She says, as if she had not paused, “It would be a risk to answer that.”

  Her tone is ineffably muted, respectful daring, and with a lot of heterosexual good sportsmanship in it. Homosexual women, in Ma’s experience, substitute gallantry for sportsmanship, and Ma does not like that. And Ma thinks she is attractive to Ida to the extent that she, Ma, is not homosexual. So Ma is maybe emphasizing this side of herself a lot.

  Ida shivers. Ida, girlishly (but a ferocious girl), shows on her face that she admires Lila’s courage: it’s not tacked down (Lila’s phrase): nothing is said.

  Ida never—never—detaches herself from considerations of power; neither does Ma, differently, starting from a different background. Ida never associates power with evil, although she says she does, but Ma really does. Ma thinks “goodness” is consolation for not taking the risks to be bad and a leader—i.e., wicked—a good conscience is your reward for avoiding leadership if you ask me.…

  Both women can be comic. Ida thinks the stuff of this exchange so far is charming: she says, “I should have worn a hat and gloves.”

  “Ha-ha,” Momma says. “That’s some song and dance—hat and gloves and pearls.” But her smile indicates she likes it, too.

  So far, so good, Momma feels.

  Ida’s sexual courage is limited—those shadowy reaches among the other’s desires and gusts of feeling—the robot courage, a boy’s humility is beyond her. Ida is too impatient with such ordinariness to know that stuff—her love of power forbids it. Lila is too ashamed of her physical self now (at the age she is) to be comfortable sexually: she would like to be like Ida.

  They smile, eye each other, smile independently and at an angle without looking at each other; they sit and drink and smoke: a certain sort of physical punctuation.

  Ida can sense the presence of the other thing in Lila—that aging sexual power—that power fascinates Ida and makes her a student: this is as docile as she gets, a rebellious student of Lila’s sexual reality, which is, according to Momma’s manner, that of someone whose duty is to be sexual—sexually generous.

  Lila’s rambunctiousness is Jewish “mockery” of that and not simple and not comprehensible to Ida. It is an ultimate defiance: a (Jewish) sacrilege. Ida trusts that Lila trades, as everyone does, in humiliations, that Lila’s defiance is that of a Jewess.

  Ida puffed restlessly on a new cigarette. She sucked smoke in a French manner. She eyed Lila to see if Lila recognized the marvelousness of Ida’s style. She bit into a sandwich. She said, “But these sandwiches are good, Lila.”

  “Praise from you is praise and a half and then some—did you taste both kinds? You haven’t tried the shrimp. The shrimp are from New Orleans. My momma says God will punish us for eating shrimp.” Sin. A Jewish woman entering the secular.

  “This is a perfect cucumber sandwich. I adore cucumber sandwiches.” Ida is encouraging the secular but is respectful toward religion and does not mention shrimp.

  “Oh, I’m a divine housewife,” Lila says, as if she weren’t being shocking about what she ought to be. “I know who to hire. Have you met our Annemarie? She’s a little on the fat side. But she’s a very fine person—she soaks our cucumbers in milk. It’s something she learned in France; she’s from France. She says it gets the acid out—is that important? I don’t know what I think of the acid in cucumbers: probably it’s important to get the acid out—”

  “Lila, these sandwiches: I’m your slave.” (That is, lower me to your peasant level: let’s roll in the gutter for a while: No more religious issues. No more social issues. Lila worries that she looks at people too darkly; but she thinks that’s what Ida means by that remark—Ida doesn’t mean she’ll be obedient.)

  Ida says, when Lila blinkingly and pointedly says nothing, “Your housekeeper soaks cucumbers in milk? I never heard of that.”

  Lila says carefully, without in any way denying the double meaning, “Neither did I. But I guess I go along with it.”

  “Really?” Ida says, looking triumphant in the face of Ma’s being a riddle.

  “I’m not fooling—I’m not a fooler. I’m honest—you can trust me. I’m always impressed when a woman’s honest, I like to be impressive,” Lila says melodiously, unmocking (maybe) or mocking.

  Ida breathes slowly and eats in a way that mingles considerable delicacy with cynical doubt—perhaps about eating and
chewing in general but doubt eased maybe by the happiness of the moment.

  Lila watches Ida eat, and she says, “You’d be surprised how honest I am. I have to be careful—you know what they say? Why be a martyr? I admit I like an opportunity to shine. I like to show what I’m made of. I like a chance to rise to the occasion.” The look in her face may mean she is saying she can lie, she can keep her mouth shut, she can rise to any worldly occasion, or it may mean something else: maybe she thinks two things at once and that enables her to say things that mean two things at least. She says, “But I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this.” She smiles—Momma had so many smiles that you might say, if you counted contexts, that she had an infinite number of them. “People don’t understand always what honesty is when a woman’s honest.”

  “I think of myself as honest,” Ida says with a certain superior curvature of voice; and, having stopped eating, watches Lila through the smoke of another cigarette.

  “You can say that—wherever you speak, you speak from a throne room,” Lila said, leaving the question open and yet speaking more directly than before. “A woman can’t say that who only has a porch. People don’t mind when you show your colors: you have two streets in this town named after your family.” It’s up to Ida to speak first about the happiness of the moment and about human affection, Momma means—maybe.

  The set of her pretty mouth and unlit eyes means Lila’s both sad and cheerful that people sometimes think of her as a villainess (as not honest).

  Ida has that sense of Momma as a pretty Jewish woman, a villainess: clever, ruthless, dishonest—foreign. What does it mean that Momma doesn’t mind? Is it that she’s letting Ida build up a debt and she will get even?

  Ida is—naïvely—pleased that Lila knows Jews are unrooted opportunists, sly satirists, thieves of a sort—thieves of one’s comfort with oneself and one’s thoughts.