The World Is the Home of Love and Death Read online

As well as of money often.

  Ida says cautiously, blinkingly, now scoffingly friendly, “Everyone in town puts you on a pedestal, Lila.”

  “Oh, that kind of pedestal is nothing,” Momma says in an old voice, watching Ida.

  “No, it’s serious,” Ida says.

  Her voice is firm—it is not her judgment so much as her temper, her nervousness, that dominates the moment.

  The intelligence and shrewdness required to make one’s nervousness a sign of social class and an intellectual plane of discourse and a sign of emotion mark a leader—this is what Ma thinks, and leader is Ma’s term.

  Lila said, “If a woman has flashing eyes, she can’t joke, she can’t make jokes, but name a street after me and maybe there could be a little comedy—you think a woman like me’s allowed to make fun? I’m a menace. I suppose you don’t know about me.”

  She said it in such tones that flattery of the other woman’s fineness was intended and disparagement of her local standing in politics as a beauty worth listening to.

  Her voice was musical. The voice was nakedly peeled; it gently crooned along.

  Ida is abruptly amused—it is a matter of eligibility: Momma’s. Holding her head and shoulders and back in a pleasantly angular slouch, Ida says, “The women in my family have a motto: that the only foolish thing is to be frightened.” I.e., class equals bravery. So Momma to show class should offer affection first.

  Momma purses her lips and says, very softly, “Well, we say nothing ventured, nothing gained in our family; it’s a good idea to look before you leap.” I.e., you go first: you act so superior.

  “I’m a believer in real courage,” Ida said. “My great-grandmother saw her sister scalped; she did not lose courage; she stayed right where she was, hidden in the woodpile; she didn’t let out a peep.”

  Momma tried this: “Do you think the world is getting better? Maybe it used to be worse. Or is it the same old thing? My mother thinks it’s still bad and going down—she had to hide in a cellar under rags while the cossacks killed her father. And five brothers. But she peeked. I can’t tell the story: some words put the smell of things right up my nose and I get sick. Those cossacks, they put Momma’s father and the five brothers in the ground up to their necks. Wait a moment: I have to catch my breath.” Momma gasps faintly. “They bury the legs and arms so the men can’t move; the beards are in the dirt. Then the cossacks make their horses gallop. She watched the horses’ feet kick them in the head. The brains would run out. Momma said their eyes fell out onto the ground.”

  Ida is listening to the anecdote with an intelligent look—idle but taut and ready to respond although not by making the first move by declaring her interest, or degree of it, to Momma.

  Lila says without transition but softly, vulnerably, “Are you always a careful talker? When the sky’s the limit? When the highfliers are around?” Then: “If there are any.”

  Ida says—slowly—her voice has curlicues of clear inflection—“I’m a careful speaker. It’s an old habit. I don’t know that I’m so special.” Meaning that she was, since she was modest, meaning also Momma’s wit, of its sort, has made a point (of its sort).

  Lila never understood the point of modesty for women. She said, pushily but melodiously, “If I talked like you, what would you think? Do you think I ought to talk like you? Would you like it if I did? You think we ought to talk alike?”

  Momma mixed fineness with naïveté—a social brew—and took the lead.

  Rather than be a mentor to Momma or ask for a twin or say no directly, Ida, electric, luminous, says, “In the matter of how people talk in this country, we need to be called to order.”

  Momma smiles modestly, daringly: “I suppose I’m daring, I’m over people’s heads. I like to take a chance.”

  The rainlight grows yellower, as if it were on its way to clarity, but the rain persists windlessly, moderating itself almost not at all in the sudden light.

  “I mean in general,” Ida says, veiling her eyes.

  Lila says, “In general, I do what I have to do; I prefer to look like a winner. I’m not someone who pleads her case.”

  Ida peers at Lila and then quickly stops peering. She is richer, freer, and “smarter” than Lila—she is in command. She is someone who knows what it is to be top of the heap: for her, for both women, winning is equivalent to guiltlessness; victory represents virtue, blamelessness.

  Regal and modest, as if simple and self-defined, Ida makes a move (Ma’s phrase). Ida smiles—her smiles tend to be fixed, grammatical—but her eyes shift from interest and bullying (or manipulation) into beauty.

  And Ida says, “Lila—” with each syllable cut short and with a smile for each syllable, a differing smile, and a downward flash of the eyes for each syllable and a pause between. And then a still-facedness, almost a smile. It is very intelligent, perhaps it is rehearsed. (You can’t hang someone for how they say your name.…)

  Momma sat very still, and then—making the situation mysterious—she said, in a largely unreadable tone, “Ida,” with a very long dwindle of breath.

  The degree of irony—knowledge of the world as an activity concerned with self-protection—in Ida’s face altered into friendliness; and she said, “Lila, you are adorable, you know I adore you, I hope you know it—you do know it—Lila—you know I’m someone you can count on—lifelong—Lila—”

  Because it had a rehearsed quality—Ida’s speech—Momma thinks she sees the symptoms of the local thing of having-a-go-round with Lila. Ma is ruthless but subject to being ashamed (her term).

  Momma sits in a subdued and pale and cautious way, denying the sexual. She wants romance and feeling—Ida on a string. Besides, the movements of feeling between her and Ida have only irony and subtlety and powers of mind in them, only those—Ida has this effect on people often, and so she thinks the world lacks sexuality altogether.

  Lila says, “Oh, lifelong isn’t necessary: twenty-four hours is enough for me. Where people are concerned, I’m not demanding.”

  Ida says, with a certain twisted loftiness and down-to-earth whine or complaint, “Friendship is usually taken by serious people, Lila, to be something one can rely on.”

  Lila says, “I’m someone who takes chances, but I’m a big frog in a little pond. If I ask someone seriously, ‘What are you doing?,’ people don’t ever listen even to the question; I fall flat on my face. I bet that doesn’t ever happen to you. I didn’t finish college, I was too wild, but actually I know a thing or two, even if I don’t get much credit for it. Well, take the cash and let the credit go—isn’t that how you expect a Jewish woman—a Jewess—to talk?”

  Ida—knowingly, lyrically—says, “If Ida Nicholson were Lila Silenowicz, she would say here, I have to catch my breath …’ ” She did an imitation of Lila’s voice—one of Lila’s voices—she captured Lila’s mocking politeness.

  Lila smiled a soft, plumy smile—dovelike. Then she said, “Ida, I wouldn’t say that: I would say, Ida, you may be too much for me.”

  “I’m still an amateur at being Lila Silenowicz,” Ida says with an air of modesty, of wit that isn’t modest: it’s suffocating in its confidence—its confident pleading.

  Momma doesn’t want to be darling; she says darkly, restlessly, “I think I probably am a streetwalker at heart.”

  “Lila!” Ida waits.

  “Look at us—drinking and smoking. Wouldn’t your mother say we were like prostitutes?”

  Ida is genuinely puzzled, but she is also genuinely combative—not easily put off. What she sees, though, is someone who passed from initial invitation to some depth or other of guilt. Lila doesn’t seem to Ida to have any moral sophistication (Lila feels that way about Ida). Ida doesn’t know whether to keep matters “social” or not. She says with contemptuous readiness of wit (a further mistake sensually), “Oh, Lila, you? The way you change, it’s like the life of a tadpole.”

  Lila feels it’s tomboy seduction that Ida offers—Lila was never a tomboy. She doesn’t speak�
��she waits to see what will happen (to see what her power is here).

  Ida lifts her head and sort of moves it in a nursery way, of pride and mental energy, a brightness of thought. She is convinced of her own sexuality as a matter of argument, no matter what others think.

  Lila is self-willed and illiterate, cruel and unstable. She is full of rivalry and caprice now.

  “Oh, Lila, you are impossible, you are so brilliant, you are adorable,” Ida says. “Isn’t she adorable?” she asks the rainy air. She is bringing Momma to heel. She is aware Momma is jealous of her.

  “My momma has always admired you,” Momma says. “She thinks you probably have tastes in common; Momma thinks men are awful—all except S.L. My husband. You never can remember his name.”

  “Initials,” Ida corrected her.

  Ida wants Momma to admit Ida’s authority.

  Momma wants to be the authority.

  “Samuel Lewis—S.L.” Momma thinks she has the authority here.

  Ida makes a face. The look on Lila’s face is teasing, and not pierced and corrected by Ida’s power. Ida is inclined to think that the supposed intelligence of Jews is a mistake.

  Ida raises her eyebrows and slowly expels cigarette smoke. Her nose and cheekbones are chic. She’s pigeon-chested but handsome-bodied all the same, clean, unwhorish—ungainly. She’s too proud to be pretty.

  The damp gives Lila’s skin and her lips and lipstick and her eyes a luster. She sits and judges the silence. Then she puckers her mouth, too—to get a grip on what Ida is feeling. Lila says, “Oh, I’m not adorable; you’re being nice; you’re being too nice; you’re being way, way, way too nice to me.” Momma has pleasure and power shoved inside a-wildness-at-the-moment: “I’ll be honest, I’m out to be fancy today, so if you feel like that, that’s my reward. I like a kind word or three; I’m easy to satisfy; but everybody has their conceit; I certainly have mine; now you know everything: I suppose it’s more than you want to know.”

  Momma bends her head down defeatedly—adorably. Momma is as brave as a brave child. She is determined—energetic. With her head down, she pushes her skirt lower on her fine legs. The world isn’t a hard place to have a good time in if you use your head. Play with fire and see what happens.

  When she looks up, she has a freed, soft, hot-eyed face. She feels that she is throwing herself on a blade—she is wounded—inwardly startled. Seductive Momma. Momma’s tempestuous assault on the other woman: “I’m what you call reasonable if you decide to reevaluate; I’m a reasonable woman, but I won’t hold you to it, although I’m someone who likes loyalty.”

  “Me, too,” Ida said in a giddy winning-an-argument way. Then, as if she’d thought, She’s not good-looking enough to ask this much of me (the defense of the sadistic mind): “I don’t think anyone thinks you’re reasonable, Lilly. Do you think so, that people do? Do you think people think that’s your type, the reasonable type?” She’s drolly shrewd—it’s what Lila calls Ida’s dry way. “I’m reasonable,” Ida says in humble summing up. A sad and modest Victory. Her mind is very quick but she never did anything with it except be quick.

  “I don’t know,” Momma says. Momma aims her head, a complicated gun, at Ida: “I’m popular. You know what they say—I have papers, I have the papers to show it; you know what the statistics are. I’m reasonable enough. I shouldn’t be the one to say so, but I’ll take that risk: don’t let on I was the one to tell you, don’t let anyone know I was a fool wanting to make a good impression on you.”

  “Fearless! Fearless!” Ida maybe girlishly shrieks.

  A sudden, swift look crosses Momma’s face: You can never tell the truth to anyone to their face or ask it, either. Momma would like to belong to Ida, body and soul—up to a point: let’s wait and see. “Yes? Well, who knows which way the cat will jump tomorrow?” My mother is in deep. She is where the lions and the tigers walk. Perhaps what she is saying is clearer than I understand it to be.

  Ida’s fondness for women attracted women. Women saw her as an impressive friend humbled by caring for them. She knows this. Ida says, in a highly good-natured voice that is ironically moral, “Lila, I adore you.” She grins, openly foolish, as if declaring a truce on meaning. “And it’s lifelong.” She means it only in a way. She is suggesting laws of affection which she means to enforce.

  Momma says, “I know everyone backbites.” She doesn’t mean backbites: she picked something Ida doesn’t do. She means backslides. She means people disappoint you. “I put a sweet face on it, but it hurts me. If you want to hate me, hate me for that, that I’m someone who puts being serious at the head of the list.” She wants to set up what the laws are and what the punishments are. “I’m silly, I know, but who knows how much time anyone has? I haven’t time to waste on getting hurt.”

  Ida looks droll but firm: she knows Momma wants her to love her: Ida thinks, Well, this is war, this is war, and I’m a guest. She says in mostly a droll and clowning and smartly foolish way—richly superior, that is: I’m the one who is the lawgiver here—“Well, I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m always a loyal one.”

  Momma feels Ida is lying all the time. Momma is drunk with consciousness. And purpose. “I’m a seeker, I don’t think I’m a finder. You know what they say? Still waters cut deep. But I’m telling you too much about myself. It’s a free-for-all. I’m going to ask you to be nicer to me. It won’t hurt you to be nice: you’re a first-family woman and I know I’m not, but there are still things for you to learn.”

  “This is my nicest, Lilly. I am never nicer than this—”

  “That’s all there is? There isn’t any more? Then you’re boring—if you have limits like that.” Momma says it with unfocused eyes. She thinks, I don’t care.

  Ida says, “The jig’s up.” She sits straight, a narrow-backed, nervously elegant woman, cigaretted, alert—plain. “Well, this is—regrettable,” she says. Her eyes are shy and weird, then abruptly bold and fixed.

  Momma flinches because she envies Ida her being able to use a word like regrettable without self-consciousness. Nerves pull at Momma’s face, at her eyebrows, at her eyes—her eyes have a startled focus. There’s no inertia in me, there’s nothing inert, and there’s no peace: I always take the High Road. She says, “Well, maybe it’s time I said I had a headache.”

  Ida’s face is a shallow egg—with features scattered on it. A potent ugliness. Now she formally sees how proud Lila is, just how fiery (Ida’s word), and Ida’s heart breaks. She is suffused with sudden pain—sympathy—a feeling of grace—emptiness is dissolved—but she substitutes sympathy for herself instead of for women or for Momma, since she is more alone than Momma is; so the emptiness returns but it’s not entirely empty: it has a burning drama in it. Momma is in agony from the work of her performance and of creating feelings in Ida, but Ida is in pain, which is worse, but they are both enjoying it in an awful way, as Ida might describe it in a semi-grownup way.

  “It’s raining too hard for me to go home just now, Lilly,” Ida says with a kind of gentle grandeur. Then, for the first time sharing her wit with Lila, taking Lila in as a partner in certain enterprises, Ida repeats from earlier, “What do you think of the rain, Lila?” And she gives a hasty smile and casts her eyes down to the porch floor, awake inwardly with the nervous unexpectedness of her own generosity and feeling it as love of a kind.

  Momma wets her lips and says in a haphazard voice, “You know, some religious people take rain as a hint, but you try to have a good time anyway—and give a good time—did it wash away Sodom and Gomorrah, do you remember? Of course you remember, you like The Bible. I have no memory for those things. You know what they say, people and their sins ought to get a little time off for good behavior. I don’t think I know what good behavior is. Well, that’s enough: I’m not good at being silly: I don’t want to be silly in front of you.”

  “Silly is as silly does,” Ida says—perched.

  Momma says, “It’s not raining violets today—it’s more cats and dogs. The r
ain—well, the rain—you know these old houses is like arks. Are. All the animals two by two—I have a houseload of people coming in an hour.”

  The central active meaning of Mom’s life is that in her, when everything is taut on an occasion that matters to her, self-approval when the evidence is in becomes pervasive in her, lunatic, a moonlight, a flattery of the world, as summer moonlight is. Her pleasure in herself becomes a conscious sexual power—the reflexive self-knowledge of a woman who attracts. For the moment, Momma has a rich willingness to be somewhat agreeable in her sexuality.

  For Ida, Momma is the real thing—as if famous and European, of that order but in its own category: self-exhibiting, in some ways discreet; but talkative. Momma can give an impression—breasts and clothes and face—of supple strength and a crouching will and endless laughter and mind and martyrdom: a 1920s thing, from the movies. The drugged catlike weave of shadows on Momma’s belly, her being the extremely fragile and supple huntress—Ida sees this as extreme prettiness and a will to dissipate the megrims, boredom, and ennui, the kind that kill you.

  Ida is here for a lot of reasons. Ida is a nervous collector and judge, but she is in Momma’s shoes when she is in Paris: there she has to perform for the women she admires. She feels she attracts as many people there as Lila does—Ida will compete with anyone.

  That’s a high value to set on yourself, Ma thinks. Ida seems to Momma to be beautiful in her holding back—women’s beauties and abilities seem fearsome and of prior interest to Momma.

  The sight and presence of Ida’s “beauty” (will and courage and freedom) excite Momma, who makes a mad offering of a devoted glance—Ma, who is painfully, flyingly awake with hope, and cynicism.

  Ida has gooseflesh.

  Ma says, “I’ll be frank; I’ll be brutally frank: I’m nervous, I’m nervous about you. You’re intelligent, you like books, but watch, I don’t have a yellow streak. If I make a fool of myself, I expect you to know you have only yourself to blame; you know where you stand in this town, you have genuine stature around here. It’s more than that: What you say counts. So, if I get tense, blame yourself … blame your own … stature. Will you do that for me?” She is being Brave Like Ida.