The World Is the Home of Love and Death (19 page)

Momma was meaning and song and Dad was the world in which meaning was a male secret that women commented on.

You can never have meaning and the world at the same time.

She brought me back alive to this burg
, he said to guests, it was part of his social routine to say that; he and Lila had
started out in Fort Worth but my mother was too hard on everyone, so we loaded our furniture on a train and shipped it to New Orleans and then we had it put on a barge and we watched it sail up the Mississippi: I never had a lot of gumption, I didn’t want to go north, I was scared, I admit it, but I liked seeing our furniture on that barge, it was a funny sight, and people here weren’t so bad, they were trash, but I got used to them; we were in Memphis for a few days and heard some real good music and met some nice people, gangsters, but they knew how to party, we had a good time with each other in those days, your mother and I, it sure was funny going north on the Mississippi; the three c’s, cotton and cows and corn, I’m just a country boy.

He sweats lightly, a nervous whore, he’s also armored, sure of himself,
a smart-aleck.

Whenever he’s away from her during the day or for longer than that, he moves at the edge of scandal, but when he’s with her he’s suddenly within the bounds of propriety:
without me, he goes crazy, he’ll never admit it, but it’s true.

Lila is his sanity.

A man’s life is a scandal—nature and war, it’s all shit.
His life was filled with scandal. Lila said,
Men get into trouble but it depends on their wives what happens to them because of that.

On their social rank—and on being a Jew. Maybe it depends on their being political about their lives as well as on their qualities of the phallic and of violence. Daddy rode a cock horse whether or not it was thought of as scandalous or O.K. or ordinary for
a man like him
to do that. S.L. said to me,
I had a famous prick—now come on, let’s see yours, kiddo.

He was held captive, captivated—she felt she’d outwitted him and gained control
but he got even, he wasn’t good to me; he was good to me sometimes but he got even, let me tell you. I didn’t think he could be such a good fighter as that.

She said to me once,
He proposed to me the first time we met, it was at a dance: my mother was taking me to visit other towns to get me away from the man—Bert Sorenstein—who was the love of my life. But Bert had no job, he was a gambler, and I was at this dance in Dallas, I was a sensation, I say it who shouldn’t, it’s not smart to toot your own horn, but I will say it, and this blond man, I asked him if he was a Jew, and he said he was whatever I liked best, whatever would make me smile: you know I never had a really good smile: my best feature was my being serious. So I wouldn’t smile and he got frantic, so I knew he liked me, I could tell he was mad about me. Not just the you-know-what
(an erection).
No one ever looked at me like that but Bert but Bert was cool, he was a gambler in everything. S. L. had a breathlessness that moved me; he really didn’t care about a thing but me; he told me right away it was the war had ruined him, he didn’t care about nothing; did I say he was in uniform? A summer uniform? He was so gorgeous you wouldn’t believe it, you couldn’t believe it. I shouldn’t have believed it and I didn’t but I didn’t want an ugly man, they spend all their time getting even. That first night was a night I can’t forget, I still think about it, everybody was staring, we were scandalous, they knew what was going to happen. Of course, I’m dark and he’s fair, so some of it was coloring. But he was so set on me, well, the first time we danced for about ten seconds, I was a very, very good dancer; and he danced for a while and then he said, “Will you marry me? ” That’s how it started. I made him let me dance with someone else but he came right back so fast it was funny, I can’t laugh now but I laughed then. I guess I have to laugh now, too, we were so dumb, but who else was there for us? He wasn’t a bad dancer; he knew a lot, and I could make him look good even when he was in that mood. Momma almost died because of his uniform: it was like her daughter was dancing with the Czar. I knew S.L. was no good but Momma wanted him, and if she wanted to throw my life away, I was willing: does that sound crazy? Well, she was crazy but she wanted me to have what she never had: my father wasn’t a good-looking man. I figured I’d have a good time, I’d make my bed and I’d lie in it.

He said something very similar:
I thought she was something, I knew she was trouble, but I thought I could teach her, and if I couldn’t, well, I’d make my bed and I’d lie in it.

Lila said,
Really the truth is, Momma chose him, he courted Momma and she liked him, but I had to live with him. She was quick to think he was rich. I thought she always kept her nerve and knew what was going on and I could relax and trust her, so I believed her. Every few minutes, from right off the bat, he would ask me to marry him. He didn’t put a price on anything, you don’t know what that’s like. It’s like a breath of fresh air; he was maybe the fiftieth proposal I had, but it was never fun at that stage before, we got along fine, and that was a surprise to me, he didn’t torture me, so we decided to get married. I’ll tell you the truth, he thought I was rich and I thought he was rich, and we liked each other’s looks; so, we both got fooled, but we stuck it out.

They made their bed and they lay in it.

I wanted a man who couldn’t boss me and tell me what to do and he wanted a woman who would tell him what to do, not that he likes to listen.

He said to me,
I thought she was real smart, I like brains in a woman, no one ever excited me like that. It was all worth it for a while but in the end, nothing’s worth it, that’s the trouble, nothing in the whole goddamn world is worth it including you my goddamned fine feathered friend.

Then he grabbed me and whispered,
I love you, Wileykins.

He said,
I like the devil better than the other one: the devil’s a gentleman and gives you a contract. When you’re a kid, you’re sweet, but I don’t think kids are happy, they don’t know anything about anything that counts, you have to have money and you have to have your balls before you can know what’s good and what’s bad. With good balls and a pocketful of money, the world is yours if you want it, if you can stand the ashes and the discontent. Wiley, I won’t lie to you: everything turns to ashes. You put an apple in your mouth and you start to chew and it turns to ashes. There’s no such thing as a lucky man, there’s no point envying any man, they’re all lying, everyone’s sad.

Samuel Lewis Silenowicz—self-willed, powerful, a male loose in the universe: he told me when I was older that
I wanted to be near women, I wanted a little happiness, is that so bad? It must be, it must be, because you sure do get yourself punished if that’s what you enjoy in this world. There’s not a woman alive who can be nice to you if she likes you. They have to despise you or you can’t get the time of day from them. They like to pretend they worship you. I don’t understand it. I do understand it. I hate it. I hate them. You’re the one for me.

After he and Lila were dead, I was told something that she never had told me:
He was much too broken and unstable a man to be able to manage anything, he was a sweet man but he’d been in the war, and Lila and her mother knew it, someone always had to take care of him.

The adoption people said he was too unstable to be allowed to adopt a child; a lot of people felt very guilty toward you for keeping their mouths shut about this.

That was an opinion. It was true after the fact. It was partly true before—Lila never admitted to that but others had spoken of it to me, his doctors chiefly:
We aren’t sure,
they said. We weren’t sure.

You have your real mother’s mind and you don’t have S.L. ‘s craziness in you.

But I do.

Other people said he was
a good-natured but bad-tempered man … a climber and a little wild … a man who liked to make trouble.

Sometimes at home in the bedroom, in Portsmouth, the biggest room in the house—it had a sleeping porch and a dressing room and a really big bathroom—he would walk around, naked or dressed in a towel, when he was young. His vanity—and his style—changed somewhat when he was thirty-six or so, and he got heavier, and his face bulked out and
he got a small-town face, not pretty anymore, but people still looked at him plenty on the street sometimes.
He still had a look of voluptuous vanity then, and a kind of openness and snobbery, I think, and sensual presence, sexual power that was arresting and strange. He would walk around singing,
I can live without my wife, I get a lot of news of my wife—isn’t it a stupid life?

He would say,
I never wanted to be a rich man, I just wanted to be a good man for a party.

On the downtown street in Portsmouth, in the bright light, Daddy and the bandaged child could be registered as pain. Certainly, they are not happy men. Daddy pushes open a swing door, and we enter an automobile showroom. Maybe eight, maybe ten polished and bulky Buicks and Oldsmobiles are in it. My bandages show white in the mirror at the back of the showroom. The patch of white in the mirror that runs along the whole back wall marks where I am in that Italianate mural, a prince’s mural.

The cars have a great novelty of outline—they wear a distress of mirrorings, thin flowers of reflection, parti-colored. Some are as gray and as pale as water. The floor is highly polished and has reflections as well.

Daddy calls out, “We’re here, live customers, live bait, where are the sharks?”

Three salesmen are materializing among the reflections: I doubt they are happy men, but I don’t know.

“Hi, there.”

“Hello, hello.”

“Hi, hi, y’all.”

In the eerie indoor light, their reflections hover and drift in the back mirror and on the waxed and shiny floor and on the waxed metal skins of the cars.

They are male presences attending to us.

Contradictory beams of light from the front windows and the overhead fixtures and small streaks of reflected light make us all as if airborne but solid, too. Thin hints of reality persist and make it grander that the men and Daddy are marvels, men who are flowering bushes of images and reflections—it is a near miracle.

At the same time, I know better. They are men: they smell; their smells are foreign smells, foreign to my life. The fabric of their clothes and the soap they use—the food they eat—makes their smells distant and strange to me. One of them is wearing a vest—and one is in shirtsleeves—and one is in a morning coat—and spats.

Daddy, silver-framed with shadows flying everywhere around him when he moves his head, says more or less in my ear (he is carrying me), “I’m a regular P. T. Barnum, did you know that? You like it here?”

This stuff, the room, gripped the child’s heart at once through the walls and veils of illness and unhappiness—through the pain—faintly at first but unyieldingly; and although he resisted, still his squeezed heart, his little boy self slowly bent inwardly as if he were hugged by what is here and his presence in it.

“This place is jolly like a jelly,” Daddy said.

His hand is on my shoulder. Without entire conviction, I shrugged it off; and then, in further childhood politics, the child closed his eyes against this awesome, joyous,
earnest
place.

“Go ahead, pick out a car,” S.L. said. He said, “That’s what we’re here for. I’m gonna let you buy a car for your mother.” I stared at him and then alongside him, alongside his face in the white light. “Won’t she like that? I bet you she will, you’ll like it—” I didn’t understand; I didn’t believe what he was really saying—that I was to choose the car, the colossus, and I couldn’t understand him, if you follow me. He whispered—his harsh breath flowing over me—‘A Jew, Raskob, he runs General Motors for those bastard DuPonts—he’s the brains—go ahead and buy and don’t worry about the politics, the politics are good enough, O.K.?” He smiled past me at the salesmen. In a kind of nervous exuberance, he said, “I have to hand it to G.M., their engineers are on their G.D. toes; they know their goddamn chrome from a hole in the ground. Ignore the two Oldses over there, Olds is a pile of tin. The Buicks are good solid cars. They stand up to punishment, and people are impressed when you drive up in one of them. It’s time a fine, bright boy like you started to learn how to spend money, and no nickel-and-dime stuff, man-sized money, the little shaver’s got man-sized money to spend, now pay attention, you nice men hear me? Howdy … howdy,” S.L. said to them in Ruralese. He has a grand overarching look in his face in this moment of
shopping.

He likes shopping. It interests Daddy
a whole hell of a lot:
it is part of what has led
him
from his father’s way of doing things. Still, he’s an outsider at it, still.

The men’s breath and voices—"Well, yessir, yessirree, yessirree bob,” and “Who-ho-ha-ho—” and “Hot ain’t it? Whew.” “Hot enough—hot ain’t no word for it, I don’t think even
boiling
will cover it, what do you think of that?"—one of the salesmen, a skinny man, did a riff like that.