Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Read online

  Praise for Harold Brodkey’s

  STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE

  “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode [is] a mammoth collection of short stories, the best of which are so sensitive and wise that they truly deserve to be classics.”

  —USA Today

  “[Brodkey’s readers] will uncover writing that is very, very good, full of layered insights and ironies.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Writing at this level of intensity, of seriousness, of risk: that is the work of a master.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “The pleasure of reading Brodkey in this form is great … These stories are freighted with a magnificence of language that reveals Brodkey’s singular ability to convey the truth and complexity of a moment in time.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[In Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,] the layers of the insights, the density of the language, the power of the memory—these, and for those who have never read him, Brodkey himself provides cause for celebration for any literary explorer.”

  —Houston Post

  ALSO BY HAROLD BRODKEY

  First Love and Other Sorrows

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright© 1963, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1983, 1985, 1988 by Harold Brodkey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1988.

  For information about the original publication of the

  stories, see Bibliographical Note, this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brodkey, Harold.

  Stories in an almost classical mode / Harold Brodkey.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76677-9

  I. Title.

  [PS3552.R6224S7 1989]

  813’.54—dc2o 89-40114

  v3.1

  For Ellen and Elena and my Ann Emily

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Abundant Dreamer

  On the Waves

  Bookkeeping

  Hofstedt and Jean—and Others

  The Shooting Range

  Innocence

  Play

  A Story in an Almost Classical Mode

  His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft

  Puberty

  The Pain Continuum

  Largely an Oral History of My Mother

  Verona: A Young Woman Speaks

  Ceil

  S.L.

  The Nurse’s Music

  The Boys on Their Bikes

  Angel

  Bibliographical Note

  About the Author

  THE

  ABUNDANT

  DREAMER

  MARCUS WEILL has said he is chiefly concerned with virtue and death in the movies he makes, but the truth is that his usual theme is that we are not capable of much virtue because we are afraid of death. He would have us believe that we flee from logic and order because they remind us that we must die, while illogic and disorder soothe us by proving that nothing makes sense, that nothing is certain, not even death. In his movie La Nouvelle Cléopâtre en Avignon, the narrator says, “Do not be cross because our characters do not always have the same faces; they are being true to life and death.” The narrator says, “We hope to demonstrate not Euclidean but mortal geometry, the grand trickery of theorems we place in nature and find there for our own delight.” So the image exists for Marcus. In La Nouvelle Cléopâtre en Avignon, the heroine bends over her lover. One hears a clock and the heroine’s breath; one sees the drowsy pulse, the lecherous tic beside her lover’s eye and the heroine’s finger stealing out to touch it. The narrator says, “Is it not time for her to guess that the flesh is a clock, an unrenewable clock?” The narrator says, “It is an axiom in the mortal geometry that the noise of a quarrel will drown the sound of all the clocks in a room.” When the lovers quarrel, we are not permitted to hear what they say; we see their faces change and we see that from moment to moment they are different people. The narrator says, “Uncertainty increases their passion,” and the scene of reconciliation is the most passionate in the movie. The hero lies asleep. The heroine enters his room and wakes him with her kisses and her tears. He opens his eyes and abruptly she ceases to cry and moves her head until she and her lover are face to face; then she assumes a dizzying, not quite convincing—so bright is it—smile. The camera is suddenly a great distance from the bed; the lovers embrace in a room with melting walls. Trees appear, their branches agitated as in a summer storm. Among the trees, lions and monkeys and snakes and tigers glide and prowl or sit or crouch or sleep. Shadows are flung back and forth; in the room, the shadows have the fish shapes of terror. The lovers on their bed are figurines inside a cracked glass bell, a thin, cracked glass arbor in the middle of a wind-torn, window-haunted garden. The heroine cries out, “Ah, God, I am so happy,” and the scene ends.

  Marcus is thickset, temperamental, good-looking. He has made five movies in France, one in Belgium, two in Italy, one in Greece. Four of his movies have been shown in this country with considerable critical and public acclaim, one with no acclaim. Exhibitors would like to show the others, but Marcus is careless and somewhat grasping about money, and he has signed too many contracts: who is privileged to sell what, who is to receive what is under litigation in three countries. He was born in New York and often uses as backgrounds vistas of a city—distant, seen through windows, light-struck, overexposed, resembling the sun-washed backgrounds, pale and geometrical, of early Renaissance paintings: Piero della Francesca and Botticelli; against such backgrounds his people move in simplified costumes, linear, eyes and mouths like pebbles, and dominant. He is a Jew. He avoids dialogue in his movies if he can. In life, he experiences very little simply and directly; nothing is merely itself. “For me,” he has said, “it is like the glass walls in that place in Proust—the restaurant reflected in its own walls, and the diners, and through the glass the flowers outside.” A kiss is a moment—heavy, round, a melon; the sharp abridgment of isolation is a knife into the melon, parting the tough skin; the soft pastel interior appears. Lo, it is hollow. In the hollow, seeds. His emotion for a woman tends in the early stages to be formal and dark. It is as if he were practicing one of the early religions with superstition and awe. But later she becomes a girl (or two of them) he used to know, or a bucket too small for the live fish in it, or the Rond Point: tourists, garishness, art moderne, flowers, fountains, all of it. He cannot evade this elaboration of the sensual event; it is a circumstance of his existence.

  A movie is to him primarily an arrangement of recognitions, an allée laid out so that at every step what is being seen alters the sense of what has been seen. The audience must be paradoxically surprised by logic, as if logic were unpredictable. Success is to have the audience accept the conclusion in the full pride of having recognized the geometry that caused it. At the end of the film comes a recognition that the allée could lead nowhere but to this. In Rome, about to commence shooting on Rencontre du Voyage, he says, “The beginning will be very simple. She is in the Sistine Chapel, in a crowd of tourists, looking up at the ceiling. She is sad and restless and frightened in that crowd, looking at that ceiling. Then we know her.…” He speaks slowly, asthmatically breathing through his mouth, at breakfast on the terrace of the large villa outside Rom
e his backers have rented for him. The movie is to go before the cameras in an hour. Below the terrace lie a largely untended garden and a swimming pool, and, beyond an uneven hedge of oleanders, greenish-yellow fields (a sunburned golf course), and the hills leading to Rocca di Papa; in the middle distance are the ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct. It is not quite eight o’clock in the morning, and some coolness remains in the air from the night, but it is unsubstantial, wispy, and will soon disappear.

  From the head of the table, he addresses his writer, Loesser; his cameraman, Alliat; and his stars, Jehane Duret and Oskar Haase. (Marcus’s family—his children and his housekeeper-companion—are in Paris; he has brought only his valet.) Jehane Duret is his mistress, but the affair is dying. She is tall, with a taut body, a broad, self-assertive mouth. “You are both restless,” he says to Jehane and Oskar—“Oskar le Beau” the French papers call him. “They—You must see this thing about them.” He has trouble finding words. “They are ordinary—not in looks … not in soul … but in the guesses they make.…” His voice trails off. His auditors stare at him with incomprehension. He frowns. He says pleadingly, “One could photograph them anywhere. In front of a department-store window—they would look suitable there!” His audience stirs, sensing something performable; they wait for further instruction. Marcus jumps up. “Look. Look, I will show you.” He is a poor actor; there was a time when he tried to act, but no matter what part he was assigned he was onstage merely an overintense, large-eyed young man anxious to be an actor. He embarks on a pantomime. His smile fades; he looks bored, distant; he wrinkles his mouth, knits his fingers.

  A maid hurries out of the villa, her shoes loud on the stone pavement; observing the pantomime, she tiptoes the last few feet, a finger to her lips signifying she does not intend to say a word, and she slips a cablegram into Marcus’s hand. Marcus shrugs and resumes his pantomime, turning in a slow circle until he confronts the striking view—the slow, yellow-brown descent of the fields to the aqueduct and the skirts of the bluish hills rising to Rocca di Papa. He hopefully scowls, reaches out his arms, turns away, head drooping. It is a ludicrous performance. Loesser, the writer, says in a low voice, “Isolated—sensually and personally. Trapped. Unable to feel.” Oskar Haase exclaims, “Ja! Gut!” He nods, but he looks eager to please rather than penetrated by understanding. Jehane’s eyes are shut, probably with embarrassment at Marcus’s performance.

  Marcus says, “They feel this way in front of expensive automobiles and movie theaters. Their guesses are crooked.” Oskar and Jehane sit up, actors’ shrewdness and voracity in their eyes. The cablegram rustles in Marcus’s hand. “So you are very restless,” he instructs them, adding, “and cold. If there is no self-pity, you cannot pity others.” He turns to the cablegram. It is from America, from his stepmother, and states: “NANNA DIED IN SLEEP LAST NIGHT FUNERAL TWO-THIRTY B’NAI SHOLOM BOSTON SEVENTH JUNE.”

  The sun lies heavily on Marcus’s white shirt; dampness wells from the ocher walls of the villa.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Jehane asks.

  “Ma grandmère est morte.”

  “Oh, pauvre petit,” Jehane says. Her actress’s face plunges into sympathy, the muscles of the strong, self-assertive lips loosen, the eyes grow somber. It is a familiar sight; she has stayed up with him for long nights on lawns, in rooms: “I cannot sleep.” “Pauvre Marc. Shall we play cards?” “I am too nervous for cards. The picture is not growing. La mort vient et je suis nu.” He is afraid of being tired the next day, but he fears death more and cannot sleep. “I’ve taken three Seconal, but they don’t work.” Jehane has walked with him for hours in the city, among lampposts: “Our orchard,” Marcus calls them. He can always sleep after dawn.

  Jehane is thin-shouldered, long-necked. Her hair is straight, an arras. The famous eyes ripen with emotion, and Marcus scowls, wanting to discourage her; shooting is about to begin. He has no intention of being upset because a cablegram has announced that Nanna is dead. He hears—it is imaginary—a metallic clang, a corrugated metal door sliding shut, rollers spinning in the curved tracks (he sees them); the door bangs. What was a doorway is as solid as a wall. Fingertips creep along the bottom edge of the door, work it up an inch or two; is this memory? Nanna’s neatly waved, short gray hair, like ribs of grayish-brown sand.

  “She is a rich woman,” he says, careless of his tenses. “Perhaps she’s left me her fortune.”

  His senses bucket uneasily on the tide of sunlight. Marcus rides their plunging momentum, legs braced, paunch distending his belt; the figures at the table are cut about with shadows. His eyes, his nose, the features of his face are full-formed, fleshy; nothing in his face is skimped or in short supply: not flesh, not shapeliness, not intelligence. The thick quarter-moons of his eyelids blink rapidly over the strained eyes. To control the blinking he squints. He does not want his actors to be distracted or alienated. Actors are sentimental, harshly ceremonial like children, and, like children, suspicious; should they be put off, they will disbelieve his judgment, they will evade his will, commit surprises in front of the camera. “She was not very kind to me. Or to my mother,” he says sternly.

  To his mother, no. Noreen was pretty, long-limbed; her hair was gold red. His mother, Noreen. A gay, laughing Irish girl—so she saw herself—bringing love and joy and religious truth into her husband’s family. Pretty Noreen said, “I’ve always admired Jews, their close family life.” She was taken by surprise. Her husband’s rich German-French Jewish family looked askance at the gift of love and joy brought by religious truth—intensities and rivalries and everything ugly breathed out through the confessional as through a whale’s spout. They practiced self-cultivation and seriousness and owned to a bewildering complexity of attitudes and rites. It seemed that they already had a religion. Noreen sat, laughed, displayed her jollity, showed off her full trousseau of beliefs on all matters, her acceptance of Jews, and her in-laws watched her politely, with good-natured patience, until they grew bored, and then they ignored her. The child Marcus looked on, and thought of a Maypole that danced and threw out streamers to dancers who would not move to pick them up. Noreen drank a good deal. “Oh, it’s four o’clock! I’m in the mood for a drinkie. Anyone else want a drinkie, too?” Marcus, catching Nanna’s eyes studying him, realized that in some lights he appeared ordinary, a doubtful quantity.

  Marcus abruptly sits down at the table. The others, to soothe their uneasiness, talk of their grandmothers; Oskar mentions a Grossmutter killed in the bombing of Hamburg, Loesser a grandmother who played pinochle with her nurse between attacks of angina. Marcus listens. Nanna walked with her sons after dinner at Scantuate, in the garden, above the sea. The flag crackled blusteringly on the flagpole. The children in a crowd went out at dusk to lower it. Nanna was small, well formed, neat gray-brown—beside Noreen a thrush next to a flamingo. She wore dark floral-print dresses that had no particular style, and hair nets; she did not like to have her hair disarranged. Marcus sees her old-woman’s hair, grown long during illness, blowing loose, unconstrained; her uncapturable minnow eyes (he had never as a child managed to control them, hold them, as he wished, to his will: One day when he was five, he knelt by the ornamental pool in the garden. “Are you trying to catch fish, Markie?” He shook his head. “I can’t. They won’t let me catch them”) and her round cheeks, and the small almond chin that was the focus of her old-woman’s prettiness, and the thin, always somewhat awry, intelligent lips are as constrained and without vivacity as if, in a game of turnabout, they have been netted and her hair has been set free. Her face—to him a creature, like a marmoset—has been extinguished. Jehane has told a story of her grandmother bidding her obey the nuns at school or risk hellfire, and now she leans her head on Marcus’s shoulder; sweat breaks out on Marcus’s skin. He does not want to be consoled. He is concerned with facts. A fact is, he is not grief-stricken. Another fact: Nanna will not again give her letters to Nils, the chauffeur, to mail. Nor write checks.

  NANNA WROTE checks in s
uch numbers that one could not see a checkbook without thinking of her. “Markie,” Noreen said, “Nanna’s sent you another check.” Nanna’s emanation arrived in the small apartment in New Rochelle where he lived with Noreen after her divorce from his father. They brought privileges: clothes and lessons—riding, tennis, piano—summer camp, books; a bicycle, a cashmere scarf, a globe of the world for Christmas. Nanna’s checks made him special, separated him from the other children in the block of shabby apartments. Nanna wished her grandsons and granddaughters to pursue interests, hobbies, projects; hobbies, followed seriously, became distinctions. Nanna believed a Weill was, by definition, able. To go to see Nanna was to have a darkroom in the large cellar beneath the house at Scantuate, the walls of which thrummed when the waves broke on the bluff on a stormy day. Was to have Nanna look at him again, reconsider him. “Would you like to go away to school?” He went to Andover on Nanna’s checks like a north-woods boy on snowshoes. The doctors who tended him that spring, when the nervousness he’d suffered at school turned into pneumonia, said he must have sun, air, and untroubled rest. He spent the summer at Scantuate with Nanna. Nanna said, “I would like to buy you a present.” He said, “I am very happy you could let me come. That’s a present. I don’t want anything else.” He could not look at her directly; it seemed a hand that signed a check could circumscribe a heart. He absorbed calm from the brown, ugly house, the carpeted rooms, among the Chinese bronzes. “You should be outside—swimming.” He said, “I thought maybe you wanted company.” She said, “Later. You must have exercise, Marcus.”

  “Dear Mother,” he wrote, “I am fine. I am well. I miss you.” He wanted to be polite.

  He made two comic books, lithographing the pictures. One comic book was “Madame Bovary”; one was “Wuthering Heights.” He showed them to Nanna. “I like to tell stories with pictures,” he said. “Would you like a movie camera?” Carefully, Marcus said, “I would like one, but I don’t think I deserve one. I mean, it isn’t my birthday. I haven’t done anything to earn it.” The chauffeur brought a movie camera from Boston, a model recommended by Nanna’s lawyer, whom she telephoned for advice. “You must think about going to visit your mother sometime this summer. Perhaps after Labor Day,” she said. Marcus said, “But you’ll be alone then.” The next day, she said, “Since you don’t seem to want to leave me, I have written your mother and asked her to come and visit us here.” Marcus was intent on making his first movie with Nils, the chauffeur, and with one of the Irish maids. “Now, you’re a murderer. You come sn-sneaking,” Marcus stammered to Nils. He had stammered when he was younger only at moments of high excitement, but lately—for the past year—he had begun to stammer more; he stammered almost all the time now. “You c-come around the garage door with the knife.…” He set the Irish maid running along the bluff, hair and skirts awhirl. “You are in mortal t-terror of your life.” Noreen came, almost as pretty as ever. He showed her the darkroom, the comic books he’d lithographed. The comic books upset her; they were lewd. Noreen said she was seeing a man named Little, a hardware dealer. “We just may get married, Markie. You’ll have another father—won’t that be fine?” she asked hopefully.