Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (72 page)

Child flesh in its brevity and shine is witty.

In those days I made foolish guesses about time and the diminutive.

The time and meanings in which my childhood happened.

The remarks of living and disorderly people.

Their near and tricky kindnesses.

Their versions of constancy.

The buzzes and whistles and grunts of Daddy’s youth as he half trots with me.

I had nothing of what might be called a blood right to any language of his, including that of him running, half trotting, with me. I still made sense of what he did, in a way, the odd gestures of this stuff, the house language that is not part of the house in me, if I can say that, but is a
slightly foreigned spread of personal sounds—a court English, an over-tongue, a ruling talk. I hear, in a physical sense, its grammar, a physical grammar, as Daddy runs; he trots; the amount of breath he took in with each breath as he runs is like the way he breathes before he starts on a speech. And when he pants and slows, it is like when his breath and voice weakened as clauses proliferated when he spoke: he had the American style of correcting himself as he went along, like a child being a thief and changing his mind whether he is a thief or not, and no one quite listening, no one watching him. I heard him run: this is happening in a specific light as when he spoke earlier. And now this set of motions, this sentence, is going on, and before the sentence ends, before then and after now, fall alterations of a large and also local sort as he runs. I am full of time, a present tense, and this clumsy unrolling of distances. Running movements are everything. Dad can’t talk now: it seems a simpler kind of time than talking, as if what Dad wants to say and what he says occupy the same moment (although they don’t), and as if my hearing and my guessing at what I hear were in the same instant (which they are not). Language was never a matter of God to me. I am self-fathered and have a version of my mother in me, a river of interior comment as an echo of whoever and whatever talks to me, of whatever is noisy here, of whoever carries me in the rain. Being carried is a self-conscious practice of language … mad speech, maybe. I spoke with a generalized grammar inside myself, a compendium and then an averaged version of

Lila-English

Ceil-English-Hebrew-Yiddish-Russian-Polish-German

Max-shouting-English-Yiddish

S.L.-Nonsense-and-English

Anne Marie (my nurse)-German-and-English (and some French)

plus

pretentious-Momma-Lila on the telephone

and Daddy talking in his various ways

and whatnot:

a babble and still a sighing kind of child sense …

The inner voice is a bridge between myself as an orphaned child and myself unorphaned in any of a number of ways: time in the real world is often pain. The way in which I felt Time fold around me when Daddy sort of ran and was short of breath, and then heaved me up to make it easier, and then as I slipped down, although he held me pretty
close to his chest, made me both sober and scholarly-drunken and full of sunken abject surrenders.

A seed of anger rests in me, but no voice, no resistance emerges outward from the inward auditoriums of awe that much of my sensual consciousness is. I’m not in my various instructed parts a coherent audience of similars but a badly behaved and singular and always changing senate, a mob of selves gifted in awe; I am tractable and intractable disobedience in my very nature.

Right now I am in the fleshy circle of this man’s arms, and I am full of new speech and new silence, and he is holding me too tight, but I am under his protection, such as it is. We gallop or jog along and I am intricately, logically available to him and intractably disobedient but only in nature, in suddenness of will, not moment by moment consciously as he carries me. My mother—light is entering a portion of the air, a strange greenish light—arranged all this, my compound mother, one buried inside the other. S.L. is carrying a compendium, a syllabus, an embodiment-in-brief of women’s dreams and thoughts and purposes, in his arms. The child knows a little—only a little—of what people are in relation to children. S.L. carries me squeezingly. My language as I am carried is that of Consciousness-in-the-World. It is not quite that of anyone’s son, is not quite inherited. The dexterities of the pagan language of the moment have a
Christ-in-the-world
quality, a spiritual visitor with a mastery of absence and a mastery of both real and incomprehensible presence. It is partly a counterfeit since it represents in its presence, its usual absence, the broken silences of my abandonment. I feel them here in this bobbing and rough and heat-glittering nestledness: the nest thing suggesting absence in its presence, as an angel does. The child thinks his being carried is an ordinary grace of ordinary dimension, and yet that it is extraordinary: extraordinarily fine. His individual language comes out of modesty toward his own death, and he thinks all language is that, maybe. I think of fear as a silence out of which one stirs if one can be humble about one’s death in the world.

The creature-kid shivers in the rainstink: the shaking elephant of his now speaking and imitative mind: I mean, his mind’s sense of the big-nosed infant gray elephant air. His mind and the air stink along. I have had so many parents that I am without shame toward language.

The jostled but delighted and borne-along child—well, the man carrying him was a son, too, partly my son; he has an old role as descendant and a new one given birth to with me, which does things to him. He
is judging himself as he jogs on. Some of it is a game. He is The Opposite of Christ—a man in the world—in his roles. The half rain, the almost rain, is creaking and squooshing in his breath and in the damp heat of his clothes and his body inside his clothes and in the damp cool of the air. He said once,
“I’m glad you’re not too smart: if you were too smart, we’d have to give you back; we like you dumb like us.”
He said now, “We’re smart enough to come in out of the rain, just barely.” He was catching his breath with his open mouth and his spasmodically spread nose under an oak. He thought I was saddened by how belatedly I was his, by how feebleminded I was, by how much I needed him. The elephant-gray mass and rumble of the air, and the itchy, carpetlike closeness of Da’s heat, and the comedy noodles of the rain, make the kid laugh in an odd as-if-speaking way. Dad said, “I don’t want you laughing at me after all is said and done.”

The child looks at him and is
a contagious example of obstinate wonder.

I laugh and squirm suffocatedly in Dad’s arms. The yellow, brown-white Negro eye of the air makes me still for a second and then I start up again, the squirming, and Dad is galloping again along the infinite dark wet edge of the rain. “Maybe we’re going to make it. This part is passing over: it’s going somewhere else. Listen to you: you’re a little nut—”

The pebble color of the air has spots of sea-glass green flatly luminous in it. The blowsy antics of the air in this cathedral space this side of the arcade of oaks so boilingly increase that in restless squirming amazement I clutch Daddy’s shirt and make fake breasts and nipples of the cloth. “Hey there, watch out: I like this shirt.” Da’s wried face is borne through the day. His face is bits of big young loveliness in the rain. I see without synopsis, with primitive and approximate wholeness. I am blind with innocence and sight. I can’t say I
really
saw His Young Face, but, in a way, I did.

We gallop again. And I
see
nothing of his comparative youth
but feel
it: warm muscle and a species of odor. My side and elbow bump the closed mouth of the cave of his belly; I am in the jouncing howdah of heat-struck darkness and closeness in
Daddy’s arms;
I am not a child in the way I will be a man, in matters of power and will and choice as facts of motion and as the motors of attention inside the fact of flesh—my power and will and that of others, I mean—but the difficult thing for me, always, was to realize my own innocence as a fact but not a law: one needs no law for what is transparent fact: a child is innocent, will
or no will. A man is or is not depending on intention and consequences. But nature has been stingy with sensations of innocence. I echo him, I feel clever and full, I feel in the moment no clear limits to my feelings or his—our feelings—and no noble fixity, just the hot jouncing.

A child has no sense of the ultimate but only of leaves whirling in bounced proximity to us. Darkness and movement. Ha-ha. The meaning of our joint postures here is genuinely changeable and clear but only in a way. He is the Prince of the Rainy Air. And I am the Prince in Here, in his anatomical chamber and these jostling velocities. I feel my safety, unwisely or not, in the moment, as an Ideal Thing, with a specially lit quality to it, as meaning and as immense, immense, male amusement. We are men. We are suspicious, male, and triumphant. The nature of safety for innocence can be known if the danger is understood, it’s true, but that’s hard to figure out, and it may not be humanly possible very often, if ever, to calculate such a thing. I think it’s not. Anyway, I
see (I feel)
the resiliency and lacquer and explosive willfulness of this man—he is thirty-three years old. He slows down and pants; he walks rapidly and at a slant. He’s still in the Grand Ascent to the Great Illumination of
Love and Defeat.
It can be argued that a child devours his own safety—that would mean he remains suspicious, male, and triumphant—and that he doesn’t. I don’t know. The story has happened only this far as yet, as far as the amusement and horror of the portaged child and the frequent seduction by the unlikely and wild sights he glimpsed in the blowing air. We are fools and unsuitable souls in the blowing moment and we do not care: this represents our membership in social illumination. His mind, S.L.’s, is focused very narrowly and ignorantly on his running and walking while carrying me when he is goaded by the wind and the spitting rain and then spared for a few seconds when his breath and timing are slightly worn. He is reverberant with that narrowness, a quality of thunder for me; I was pretty young. I can feel his disarray, his inner physical (and spiritual) focus irregularly slackening and exploding as he jogs and partly trots. I feel his disarray firing off in one hiss after another; this sets me off on some crazed stretching in his arms.

“Hey now, Wriggle-Puss,” he says. The light inside common things is dark even now, and nothing about me is ideal now or will be ideal ever to come. My face snakily writhes against the fat, resilient bicep of Daddy’s arm. I am now largely on my belly in his arms: “From the backside you look just like everyone else, kiddo—you look like an
asshole.” I hang, I arch—like a bowsprit—a branch of the rubbery, muscle-and-spine, oaken pounding-along tree of that man: this is in the state of Illinois, in the now quickening rain; he is running toward the gate of the park: I see the torn rooms of the out-of-doors. Dad says, “
NO
,” and refolds me in his arms, defining me as Error and A Fool and someone he wants bodily near him, someone whose bodily welfare concerns him: it’s interesting and I start to laugh. The moment is unideal, semi-ideal, this one particular moment. The child’s laughter passes: I am silent, very silent. The feeling as S.L. moves rapidly in the still thin-bodied but now fattening and gray-black air (I mean rain) is of contented fright, a distanced kind of staring at the world. In the world at this moment, in what is contained in it, the future hovers like the mist-hung air. But the kid knows only a general and civilized imperfection and hope. The shrewd-hearted, prying-eyed kid in his shrewd-hearted torpor is being carried home.

S
.L.
S
ILENOWICZ
, when he talked about Ann Marie, went from mood to mood: “You got to hand it to her, she does her damnedest. She makes things nice. She’s got the hand of an artist with fried chicken when she’s in the mood. I’m here to tell you: what a man eats, that’s what a man is; you take a refugee from being kosher who likes his bacon, that’s me; I don’t like bacon that looks like shoelaces. Grease will put you in your grave. A man needs his bacon, he brings it home—well, there you have it in a nutshell; keep it crisp like matzo—manna, they say that’s manna, matzo is—man needs his bacon to be like manna, heavy on the mayo, heavy on Heaven—you know how the angels get fried chicken? They get some booger to cook ‘em up some in hell and they send it right up. Take it easy, that’s the way, that’s the only way to be nice. We all know what it’s like on this here old planet earth, right? Ann Marie is the world’s craziest woman, there’s no doubt about that. She’s mighty ugly, and there’s no doubt about
that
—I don’t like ugly faces in the morning before I have my bacon, but that fat woman, she sure has the tender touch with (uh)n egg—yessirree. She may be German, she may be French”—she was from Alsace-Lorraine and her last name was Roittenburger, and she spoke more German than French—“but if you ask me, she’s more American than the Pope; just taste her apple pie.

“And she likes our little Wiley, our little Will-he, Won’t-he-keep-it-down. It ain’t easy with a sick kid, it’s hard, it’s hard to be with him,
it’s creepy sometimes, he never speaks—his eyes speak—he don’t make much noise and that’s nice but it can drive you right up the wall—poor little crip—and the old gray mare can’t stand it, she ain’t what we used to be—” Lila, his wife, my new mother, was in her thirties. “It tears you apart, a little tiny half-alive crip of a kid like that—I don’t think I’m all so wonderful, but I think I got a hand with kids; well, I’ll tell you something, she is
good
to him,
good,
she is an A-Number One helpmeet in this little ol’ projeck. It’s nobody’s beeswax—you know that old one—how it gets a man to have sweetness in the house—it’s like honey, it’s nectar and ambrosia, it does my heart good to be around that woman when she’s going great guns hell-for-leather all-out sweetness-and-light—you wouldn’t believe (how) she keeps us on our toes, she’s a Nursing Marvel, a Nightingale. Why, you ought to see us go through hoops—she holds our noses to the grindstone, believe you me. Of course, she’s a damned sullen bitch if you cross her, you wouldn’t give her the time of day before you got to know her, but she wants to bring me and Wiley together, she wants to show me the way, she wants to make a home for the little crip, her heart’s right there, her heart’s in the highlands, that fatty, she’s one of the little people if you don’t mind them being not so little, she’s got a heart as big as her ass, but she’s something special, she works hard, she don’t hate you because you write the paycheck, she’s a European, she makes things damned pleasant for me, cooks what I want, cooks it the way I like it, she listens, she listens to me, and that’s nice, that’s damned special. You know?