Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (76 page)

“So whatever I know, I know only from hearsay. I heard she wore black a lot; I heard they got along better than you might think. I heard she was very charitable—with everyone but me, I guess; you know, you never know with Christians; money’s not the least of it with them; she told me she didn’t approve of usury, but I guess her disapproval died a natural death when she got a chance at it herself—I heard she and her husband lent money; they were moneylenders and they got into funny business, although I will say this, she had a good reputation around that little town, Lillyburg—so she couldn’t have been too grasping.

“Who knows, who knows anything? Who knows what it was really like for someone like her? I’ll tell you something: I hope she was lucky; she was a good woman and she deserved to have a good time, but I don’t think someone like that knows how. She didn’t know much, and a lot of what she knew was me. I bet she dressed like me.…

“Oh, I don’t want to sound cynical; you want a happy ending, I’ll give you one: the last time I saw her was six months after her wedding; she came to ask about you. I wouldn’t let her see you, and she was sad; she looked happy when she arrived, but she was sad, she was angry with me, she said unpleasant things. She was a hard worker and a hard judge—I’ll tell you the truth: she was happy telling me hard things about myself.… Isn’t that a happy ending? She thought you were wonderful, but you were more trouble than any six other children in the state. She said to tell you she liked you and she missed you—I think I told you that at the time, but you didn’t want to hear, and anyway, what she said I was to tell you was too sentimental for me to repeat. But really, Wiley, she really did care about you, I’ll vouch for that, she watched over you night and day—it’s too bad it was so harmful. I never can see why it is things can’t work out, but they never do, are you old enough to know that yet?”

A
NN
M
ARIE
always made it a moral issue with me that I believe her whether she actually lied or not. I was to trust her, trust her motives, trust her love and my luck and God’s will with the world, and not blame or doubt her. I can’t see that I ever did, although in the real world she was good to me as such things go.

When she talked, Ann Marie’s phrases were short, politely unastonished,
often commanding. She owed it to God to talk like that, sort of. And that made it hard to know what she meant, since if she was tired, and I knew she was, I would still hear her say to people that she wasn’t. I believed I was supposed to agree with her and take her literally and trust her, whatever she said.

Ann Marie would say she was cheerful: “I’m
gut
—I’m always
gut—
ha-ha-ha.”

But sometimes she was angry, sometimes low in spirit. She suffered queerly strong dips of will that seemed to move toward her being black-spirited, a berserk melancholy that was very willful, that vibrated with anger and maybe with some deep physical pain or dysfunction that didn’t stop her from working; when she was like that, the house seemed to tremble darkly until she was better. She might toss her head or do some version of a physically appealing act, but hers would be a gross version,
like a circus elephant
(Momma’s mean phrase)
or like a circus horse: take your pick,
and she would say she was good, nothing was ever wrong with her.

I remember listening in wonder at the considerable difference each time in what she said, even when the syllables and circumstances were similar to each other.
Gut
might sound more like good or less like good, and she might be anywhere in the spectrum from very sad to very angry or in a good mood really and without sarcasm, or in a good mood but sarcastic and self-effacing, when she said it. The word,
gut,
the word was offered as if it had a fixed social quality, as if
it did her credit
—the last phrase is Momma’s.

She paid attention to what women wore, but not shrewdly or acutely—and, according to Momma, Ann Marie didn’t listen to women at all and that was a mistake “for someone in her position: men aren’t going to teach her anything, you know.”

Sometimes Ann Marie was
sensitive to what was going on
(Momma’s phrase), with an energy and a coerciveness that make me shiver even now. “You really behaved for her and for no one else.” S.L. said that.

The idea of loving her was warm and heaped up, like leaves or dirty laundry at the bottom of the laundry chute.

I sit in the hurly-burly of Ann Marie’s stillness and fixities of goodness and her claims of good judgment. I watch her lift a spoon of cottage cheese and applesauce, the only two foods I can manage; and I am suspended inside my fear of sickness as well as inside my trust for her. We have our drama of trust and digestion or distrust and nervous
anorexia. Failure condemns me, or perhaps condemns us both—both, if we are sincerely attached to each other.

I look at Ann Marie. I contemplate swallowing the applesauce. I live and tremble; and spasms of nausea assail me, every smell and every sight of food, every one, forces me toward illness. I teeter now on some borderline between illness and just managing not to be ill. Cramps, the inner twisting of my pained self, push my consciousness toward the opening of the pit of illness while I cling to the sight of Ann Marie. I will be ill if I eat just as surely as the floor will hold my weight if I stand on it, but I trust her that it is required. This is in the real world, this drama of my nausea and her pride.

She knows what’s going on—more or less. She knows my life depends on her, on her knowledge of things. I have to believe in the real nature not just of her wishing me well but of her ability to see what I can’t see, things about life that make it O.K. for me to suffer this, this loss of control when I swallow—that make it O.K. and
reasonable
to live in these circumstances; she oversees the chance or vague hope of meaning in these circumstances—ill luck, ill health, all of it. She is surer of her purposes than Momma is.

I start to swallow the stringy homemade applesauce, it has cinnamon on it; my eyes bug out and it seems to me likely that I’m going to die. She averts her gaze strenuously—vibratingly—she does it pointedly, for the sake of my dignity; she doesn’t like to be looked at ever, even when she’s not throwing up. If I look at her hard when I’m not sick I get drunk on the sight. She might be sitting on my bed and I will wriggle and twist if I look; and later, when I was stronger, I did jump up and down and grab at and muss her hair and throw myself on her, her neck, or her shoulder, or even her lap, where I wriggled and burrowed and made faces as if I were blind-eyed and digging. I could be noisy—I could be “wild,”
“vuhhh hi eldd(t) Vuh iii leee”
I often suffered just because the sight of her inflamed me, set fire to vats of feelings in me and then spilled them in patterns of fire, in molten tides in me, and I made her suffer then too; I made her join me—she and I had dozens of ways of more than banishing loneliness, of transforming it into some papery thing of time and laziness and distance; and then we jumped through, we tore it up, we burst through the hoop, we butted and stared and meddled and served each other until we were together in a paper chamber of silly childishness and nursing, companionship and collaboration. She seemed to believe in all my outcries, some of which were so tiny that some
people never noticed them. She believed the ill child was not a liar, was not so ill, would not always be ill, was worth
the time and labor and pain to her nerves
(Lila said this:
where I just would blow up, you drove me mad, I thought you wanted to be sick, as far as I could see, you just wanted attention and you didn’t care what happened to whoever took care of you, well, I’m not that sort of sucker, believe me).
She was rarely mournful in front of me; she was cheerful and unyielding and strong; and since a child’s trust is slavish, she had more power over me than an empress would have: S.L. said that; and it was the power of life and death.

Forbearance on both sides was really pretty vast between me and Ann Marie—often: not always—sometimes she was too passionate, and sometimes she was too cold, but she never winced or flinched as Lila did—or as S.L. did. Lila flinched at the smells and at the pain, and S.L. could set himself to bear the smells but never the pain.
He was no good near anybody or anything that suffered; if you hadn’t cheered up, we couldn’t have kept you in the house.

The spasm of illness, of nausea and retching, well, I throw myself on it, as onto the sand in a sandbox or pit or at the shore, and I hug it to make it be still, I do this out of love, the spasms become a determined spasm of love seesawing around a spasm of illness—it’s very like ejaculation later (when I am older), awake or in dreams, and it is how I will experience pain from now on.

We are like teammates, or fellow congregants, or communicants—and yet we are not: we are like lovers or brother and sister—we have a community of feeling here, a literally warm thing.

She knows a lot; she can see—even with her eyes averted—how a spasm of love rides on top of the nausea in me; she sees me wrestling with the bull stench of nausea—and then, uh, ah, er, all
hell
broke loose because I lost; nausea won; it erupted; it asserted itself and entered the world—and I am racked, twisted. But except on the first days, the first weeks, not freely so: I fight, and I fight it some more; I fight and fight—in her name, of course—and then it didn’t go so far, the nausea; I managed to swallow a lot of it back, to keep some food down—I can wear out the sickness or nervousness in my own body in her name; using her will, sometimes, sometimes her will to fight; I did it. I sat there, shaking and pale, feeling more ill now than during the worst part of the spasm since I felt more conscious than at the worst of the spasm. I want to die, except I want to please Ann Marie, too.

I was sure of her love after a while, and of mine. Look at me smiling
from my furor of near illness, sweatily and sweetly at her, in the furious fevers of heroism and the wish to please her. The child sits there and looks at her like that.

Now I start to tease her, which is unwise; I turn my face away, and hide my head under my arm, my hand:
I don’t
want another bite, please don’t
feed me; let me starve, oh, oh, oh.

This is real.

By that, I mean it isn’t
a game
—a game means I won’t lose to a really disastrous point—but then it does become a game—that is to say, I don’t believe in defeat as serious at the moment: I have lived all morning in the wilderness and I am still alive—and I glance at her, not wildly but with a wild intonation of the eyes:
I know what love is.

Old Fatty there, she knows a lot herself.
“Liebchen—essen—mein guter Ritter—” Ritter
—knight—cavalier—Galahad—Don Quixote—Don Juan—
to the quest
(a joke). The crooning woman, the siren, this good woman leads me now, she wants courage and she wants me to be quiet both, my heroism is a settled matter: it is a ruse on her part—a bluff—a trick—in part.…

In a state of love and respect I allow myself to be fooled and guided, I trust her to direct my destiny, my wishes; it was love, it was faith, I will escape later—and besides, what she’s asking me to do, to calm down and take another swallow, is too soon after the first swallow; she hasn’t yet learned to allow me several minutes between swallows. Lila said, “It took a year out of my life to feed you once. Ann Marie was a saint, a saint, she was smart as a whip and she had the mind of a snake with you and the patience of a saint—” She must learn to sing and tell stories while time applies a sort of anesthesia of calming seconds to my aroused and unhappy system. I gag and twist half off my chair just looking at the spoon of food she waves—and tears spurt from my eyes and my hand waves idly in the air as I throw up now—but not surrenderingly, not weakly—I am fighting it, as she wants; she says,
“Nein, non, stoihhppp itt—Kleine
—No, no.…”

I am wrestling, I am straining, in my throat—with my lips—with my eyelids and my hands—oh, horrible suffocation—oh, blackness and blankness—and the rest of it.

“I vili moppp opppp—now youuu, Ihh vunttt youuu—to eeeeet
—essen—Ritter, Liebchen
—I vuhunntttt yuhuuu beckkk in dee pihnnkkk—” (in the pink: S.L.’s phraseology).

She leans over and she strokes my hair and my ears, while, thin
legged, I bustle and wrestle in my struggle. Her touch distresses me, excites me. She sees it, she is very shrewd. She stops, she goes into watchful stasis—like a statue of a goddess or of the Virgin
waiting
in its cloud of implied mercy, so to speak. She sits, she settles back and doesn’t look at me—she makes an atmosphere of stillness, of calm—love and mercy: not a joke.

Her arms are like cushions covered in light, heat, pallid sunflowers of glary highlights—my eyes buzz at her, her arms, her face, her face is a giant and fat pallid sunflower. Ann Marie’s attachment-to-me makes Ann Marie flourish and smile, maybe sadly (especially if my mother or father are there taking precedence as the ones who supply the money, taking precedence over her mind and her will and her rule and her knowledge of things). She is often
melancholy
and intent—she is often indirect—this indirection takes the place of being gentle in her soul, which she is not; she is fierce.

Love is hard on fat people.
Momma has said;
she won’t leave that child alone, she won’t let up; I’ll have to find her some friends or Wiley will end up more dead than alive, more choirboy than Huckleberry Finn and more Lutheran than the Pope, ha-ha, well take the spirit for the deed, do you take my meaning?
Momma goes soaring into her local, hooty, small-town, Midwestern Englishness.
Well, it’s just a figure of speech; I know how to talk.
Momma competes with everyone. So did Ann Marie.

It was never clear to me that it was not serious; they each had to come first in the whole world, or they would avoid me. Ann Marie’s holding out another spoonful of poisonous applesauce. She has brought out some processed cheese and a dry cracker that she crumbled on a plate with a little honey on it, and she’s brought out some cottage cheese, but my reactions were all violent, and I did—nobly, nobly, nobly—struggle to control them. The applesauce, that poisonous stuff, is the most possible nourishment. Ann Marie has to make notes of how much I eat, and if I don’t eat enough, I am taken to the hospital in St. Louis for sedation and feeding.