Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (54 page)

Her sense of self-sacrifice was so great that she felt it right to do anything at all with unparalleled emotional extravagance in the way of making demands, of temper, of pull-the-temple-down-to-hell-with-you-my-rage-is-my-beauty-now. She had puffs of swiftness and remorselessness—as a pretty woman—mothy, puffish, yet fatal. And when people were angry or put off and retreated from her, they also laughed at her in a funny way: in a sense, all traffic between her and everyone had been rerouted.

Daddy was gently, obdurately triumphant—even when she managed to depress him and scare him and make him helpless; he had only two moods at home, really-on-top-of-the-world and then nervous-breakdown, in which he’d lurk in his bedroom or dressing room and then he’d
hsst
at me to call me in to give him a hug to keep him company just as in comic movies about harridans, or in comic novels. What was odd was that Nonie would take his side in words—“You’re terrible to Daddy,” she would say to Momma—but she would ignore him or pick at him when he was defeated: she would ask him for money, which depressed him.

He was often lost and he would hum disconsolately to himself; he took to rebuilding clocks and model cars—in the bedroom.

But even then he smiled a lot to himself—as if he had won out. His looks had changed, too, but he was still physically glamorous; he was, by and large, indulgent toward Momma. She hated that, I think.

She said, “I have to hold my head and my shoulders right or I get terrible lines.” You could see how tired she was after a few hours of “being presentable to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes down the pike.” If she relaxes, she looks—ill-natured, remote, partly erased. When she pulls herself together, she is a vaguely stunning cripple, a matron.

Going out in the evening, after giving Daddy some sort of tongue-lashing or gibing at him while they dressed, she would adopt an I-have-lived-I’m-happy-to-be-the-age-I-am-all-storms-are-over-I-am-Aging-Loveliness-Itself-Sweet-Experience-turned-into-a-sheer-perfume-of-knowledge-all-for-you glamour. To her sweetly serene public matronliness she would add this aura of romance:
there-is-still-time-for-one-last-tragically-passionate-and-important-communication-to-pass-between-us.

I’m not sure she meant it—it was just a bargaining do-jigger. And the quality of it was sometimes that of a joke, a joke she played purposefully and satirically on you and on herself but in a way that said
you’re-a-fool-and-I’m-not-and-your-being-a-fool-while-I-am-not-is-one-of-the-great-pleasures-of-my-aging-womanhood.

Sometimes it had a vaguely churchly, sermonish quality of it’s-over-for-us-now-don’t-you-realize-that. And: let-us-repent-in-this-twilight-you-go-first-you-need-repentance-more-than-I-do.

For daytime things, for women, she used a friendlier form of that—more conspiratorial, more obviously lonely, a daytime version.

There were times when it was so noticeable that she’d lost a lot that I would avert my gaze as if from nudity. She often ruined conversations now by taking chances that no one forgave her for anymore—and then, too, her charm, when she was charming, was so practiced it was like a deformity of spirit; and her alertness was awful, since it was incomplete and was like that of a bird which did not speak a human language: I mean she was so fascinated by her situation, she so extended it as being the chief ground of existence, that she didn’t see your mood, really, or your youth, if you were a child, as I was. She made sweeping entrances into a room still and reproached salespeople or offered sudden friendship to them, but it was wrong now, the way she did it. She would then become sour, poised over resignation about this but anxious to be smart
or to get even for it—to be smart about it. Some days, she looks young, and then she dresses up to it, laughs brilliantly: she seems oddly at home and yet uneasy on that ground which will, after all, cave in under her as soon as her tiredness grows, like a fungus, on her face.

She says with finality that it is humiliating to pass as young anymore.

She romanticizes or exaggerates or sees in an odd perspective the strength and resilience and happiness of being young.

She talked about refusing sex with Daddy. She talked about it in front of company, in front of Nonie and me: “We’re past all that, S.L.—our skin hangs.…”

Supposing that he’d used to come at her like some animal occupied by a god momentarily, and there she was, more or less gleaming in the dark, with the residual, supine, slyly and softly complete good looks that had drawn him to her in the first place: supposing she, lazily, from inside her beauty, embarrassed at first, and then with experience, a limited experience, setting herself to enclose and elaborately swallow his excitement and then snuff it out into the darkness of comfort, of oblivion: perhaps she had always buried his passion within the ground of her pride, in a great mausoleum of pride.

Perhaps she had no interest in tenderness, in the clever knowingness of an embrace set in the different key of being older: she only liked the earlier glory and savagery of attraction. She may have wanted to punish him. She may have wanted to break off before she was led into servicing him, into wanting him more than he wanted her.

I had entry to her mind, to the outside porches and some of the inner rooms of her mind—but only at moments. Often, she hid herself from me: “There are some things that aren’t fit for a child.”

She didn’t count on my liking her.

Often, I can see the nerve gathering in her—the sense of umbrage at her luck, a gathering of willful unholiness, or of righteousness mixed with the criminal thing: she gathers herself together and then flares out into a heavy middle-aged leap of being outrageous,
impossible,
flabbergasting, psychologically or ideologically, as. once she’d been physically flabbergasting, overwhelming
everyone.…

I think people had expected her to be a better loser.

They were titillated—amused—horrified—severely displeased—saddened that she was middle-aged in
that
style. Partly her middle-aged replacing of one power by another seemed like a horror because the later power seemed even more unearned than the earlier one—or was earned
only by the earlier one’s having been a self-sacrifice or a right due her; I mean none of it was earned in a job or by an
accomplishment
or in motherhood. She knew this and half thought it was fair, and in a mental way she became intensely motherly; she tried to “achieve” something in her charities: she spoke of
needing
a job.

Meanwhile, the power was simply seized, wielded well or ill, femininely.

She based her righteousness on the issue of the wide-ranging general applicability of her life—as The Life—or as What Life Is.… Her mind, outlook, judgments, experiences, and techniques were the issues she cared about. Well, why not? In a way, everything was being withdrawn retroactively because she was losing physical authority—she grew frantic. Why shouldn’t she grow frantic? She wanted to be
general
and to be a leader, her life corroborated, like Caesar’s when he seized the government.

People did the equivalent of making the evil eye at her; of course, often that was at moments when she was behaving and being really nice, soft-voiced, mannerly, and concerned; then she’d be enraged because she was given so little credit (people were afraid to trust her because of the way she blew up from time to time, so they didn’t want to be lured when she was nice), and she ascribed a malevolence to life by which you were given credit only when you were young and good-looking. Some people pitied her—she often tried to use that pity ruthlessly and maliciously in order to despoil and cheat the one who pitied her. Momma said of people who avoided her that they were poor sports.

Or that they weren’t “real men” or “real women.” She added a new aspect to her public characterization of herself: she was a woman of gentle but hard-minded regret, primarily sexless, erect, who’d never liked sex or sexual power but who’d been a good sport about it for years—but now she’d been set free.

She claimed in an apparently tactful way—between outbreaks of her outrageous temper and cruelty of speech—to have a broader mind and broader perspective than other people; she claimed to be a woman who laughed at all pretensions, who was without self-pity, who condemned no one. She said of one of her relatives, “Well, she was always a lesbian, you know; she held on to her dignity; I felt sorry for her husband and children—you never saw such confused children in your life, sweet but confused: the boy is tender; and the girl is tied up in knots, she’s so boyish. Well, live and let live, I always say—I don’t
blame anyone: it’s a hard life but it’s all we have; it’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”

She said, “I know how to laugh at myself.”

She said, “I know who I am: I’m Leila Cohn. You’d think after all this time, after all I’ve been through, that name would mean a lot to people, but it only means
me
—of course, I’m somebody still—ha-ha.”

She said, “I don’t like to swear, but women have a goddamned hard row to hoe.”

She grew narrower and more intense—just as prejudice said about middle-aged women.

Less sensible, less well-informed, more selfish, more willful.

Momma.

I
BECAME
aware all at once, when I was five—I mean the thought became clear, although it was wordless (I was sitting in the back seat of a car she was driving: she was in the front seat with Anne Marie)—that Momma was now half mad with impatience and maybe exhaustion and a kind of fear and a nothingness.

And another time: I was crossing a lawn, me and two other little boys; we were carrying, each of us, a toy gun, and I saw Momma running down the middle of the street, in dress-up clothes—furs, fancy shoes, hat, purse; she ran sort of with one shoulder moving mostly: still, it wasn’t really bad running, considering how unexercised she was and how she was dressed; it wasn’t fast, but it was graceful, and there was a kind of physical expertness to it at times between bursts of panting, stumbling clumsiness, as when her shoes caught on cracks or unevennesses in the pavement. I curved out away from my friends and ran to her, ran alongside her. I’m not sure I asked her what was wrong, or that I said anything: I may have just joined her and run alongside her, carrying my gun, and concentrating on staying at her side.

I learned later, from eavesdropping and from asking questions and working over the answers (which rarely meant much when I first heard them, so I’d store up the words, some of the word sequences, and then go somewhere and be alone and
think
—or ponder—what the words could possibly mean, in the sense of referring to real life, real pain), that she’d been driving a car and had thought that the driver of a bus was harrying her, and, in a fit of rage, she’d rammed the bus; then she was amazed at the damage to her car and she remembered she didn’t have
the power over policemen she’d once had (this was a different town, a suburb, and we didn’t live on a ridge anymore but in a sort of slightly damp valley, with very large, dampish trees), or maybe she couldn’t bear the way the men who gathered looked at her or the way one said she was a terrible driver, but she called them, or one of them, an obscenity, which made her afraid to go to court—“The judge will think I’m a God-knows-what”—and then she opened the car door. By then there was a traffic jam; and she took off: she ran off among the cars, and then between two houses, and then down streets.

Maybe she felt like running, like being physical.

But by the time I saw her, by the time she reached our block (the accident happened maybe two blocks away), she was anguished and tragic, her running was tragic, she was hunted and—I don’t know what.

When we got to our house, she opened the door without ringing for the maid; she drew all the curtains—maybe the maid wasn’t there; I guess she wasn’t—and Momma took off her furs and dropped them on the floor behind a chair, and she and I hid, she squatting behind the couch, me there beside her; she had on some jewelry and a black dress: one knee was up, near her chin; one of her hands, long-nailed, with a pretty diamond-and-pearl ring on it, rested on the floor; she muttered something about the maid’s never cleaning behind the couch.

Someone knocked on the door: there were noises as if there were four or five men outside: Momma said it was the police; she said to me, “Hush,” and she held my hand with her one free hand while we squatted there, more or less facing each other, coconspirators but not two children.

When they went away, Momma stood up, went to the window, peeked out through the curtains. Then she threw herself down on the couch and lay there and stroked my head; when I said, “Momma, what was it?” she stopped stroking my head and she said, “I’m getting old—don’t ask me questions—go out and play.”

I stood there and thought over if I wanted to be stubborn and ask again or if I wanted to go outside.… It was the darkness in the room, in her: I didn’t like the airless, curtained darkness in her. I went outside, blinking in the air, in the revolving, settling late-afternoon light.

Maybe her successes were more and more temporary, less and less complete when they occurred: apparently, Daddy made less money; and while she didn’t take the blame—she said he wasn’t supposed just to listen to her, he was supposed to use his head, too; she said he was a lousy
businessman and so on—she seemed to gather to her, like the dark folds of a mysterious garment, a regret, an admission of failure, of lack of authority. Her new friends were “colder,” she said, quicker to be bored, to drop someone “without actually dropping them—just all at once they’re busy, or they’re going to Florida: do you want to come, too? But you haven’t the clothes or the ticket, so what kind of invitation is that?” Maybe the madness was of failure, after all.

But maybe she was bored by success and concentrated on the failures because they explained things or suited her mood: “I guess it’s my turn to lose—I’ve always been too lucky.”

A
LSO
, she wasn’t very healthy anymore. She had gallbladder things, and back things; she had to get a board for her bed; she made a joke about it: “I’d probably feel wonderful if I slept on the floor” she had a thyroid thing or maybe not; a hormone thing.… She blamed “difficulties”—her mistakes about business matters, her outbursts of temper, her not handling well the people she set herself to please—on physical pain, physical disorders: “I stood up too late in life—I ruined my back and a lot of my organs.… But I had to slouch when I was young—I was— busty—you know—I was too much for a lot of people as it was—ha- ha…”