The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey

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      “He’ll be sober—when he comes around the mountain.” It is truly jolting when Momma breaks her own style open and imitates Daddy with all the depth of knowledge she has of him physically.

      Ida stares at her.

      Lila says, “I can read your mind. I know what you’re thinking.” She swings her foot.

      “What am I thinking?”

      “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Momma says it seriously, in a musical voice. Ma does not know how small-town this is, but then—with gooseflesh and a sinking in her stomach and a light beading of sweat along her back—she can tell what a mistaken device it is in Ida’s opinion.

      It is Homeric and not Tantric, the way the erotic and the spiritual merge in Ma; but if you use school ideas of things, the erotic is a matter of grasp and idea—that is, a demystification of feelings for the sake of excitement—and it is not spiritual at all: it is merely modern, then. Feelings reside in art and in sex but not in school, unless perceptions and illusions are counted as feelings, which is what Ida does and Ma wants to do—things coming out even, correct answers, being perfect: Ida wants those and the sense of those and the appetite for those to be counted as feelings. Ma is another type, but she has schoolish yearnings.

      The reason school is the way it is is that in a classroom there is only one teacher, one power: a tyranny …

      In life, there are always at least two people, or you can’t call it life.

      “If I said now Ida is my friend, you’d agree, but if I acted on it, woe is me, and that’s where the trouble starts.” Ma says this hastily, as if S.L. might walk in any moment, but then she slows down and finishes saying it in a stately, melodious way. But her mouth and eyes are sultry—are gusty with feeling; she is so complicated now that no scientific theory can be as hard to unravel as her mood is. She is epically grownup in this way.

      Ida, with a curious thwacking gesture of her knees against each other, matches Momma in complexity: she may now be the most grownup person in the world. “Let’s not go into what’s wrong. I don’t believe in diagrams,” Ida says. Lightly.

      Ma says, “If we were a friend to one another, I could take you for granted and you wouldn’t put up with that for one second.”

      Ida does not dawdle when she thinks. She takes the hurdle. “That’s brilliant. Your seeing that. Listen: You can take me for granted.”

      “Now?”Now that I am brilliant. Ma thinks Ida ought to, and will, love her better after today.

      Ida already “loves” her—that’s all been settled. Ida says in a dignified, faintly disgusted way, “I am your friend.”

      Momma says, “Then I have no say in it—” Now she sees the trap clearly.

      “Lilly—”

      “I say someone is my friend when I say so. If you mean one word of it, tell me—you went to Switzerland with Colleen Butterson—that was the word that went out—what was that all about? Tell me if we’re good friends now.”

      “Lilly—” Ida says, in a whole other voice. Don’t be silly. Don’t break the law (of discretion).

      Ma bursts into an angry laugh—angry because she doesn’t want to be sidestepped. “You want me to sign a blank check. We have rules around here—and no one makes them up.” She makes them up, is what that means.

      Ma knows from experience that the truth now between her and Ida (the atmosphere of rich equality) is that Momma is a fool for trying to impose her own sense of truth on a woman as firm-hearted as Ida.

      Ida says, in an intelligently threatening (and wanly disillusioned) voice, “We don’t give pledges, Lilly. We trust each other.” A different law. A notion of law different from Lila’s. Then: “Are we mad?” Ida says, summing up and taking over. “No. Yes.” A witty joke. A party atmosphere. It is clear that in some ways Ida is a nicer person than Lila is. Than my mother.

      Momma laughs. “I like the rain,” she says naughtily—it’s an intentionally clumsy imitation of Ida.

      Ida doesn’t laugh right away. Momma starts to breathe defiantly; and she says meaningfully (her way), “It makes my pioneer hair frizzy.”

      “Oh, Lila,” Ida says, relieved. Then she laughs.

      Lila’s self-satisfaction begins to glow again. “I can’t keep up with you,” she complains. A touch of wit, maybe.

      Neither has the sought-for command of the erotic at this juncture, but that works out in Ma’s favor, since Ma can live in erotic chaos and Ida can’t.

      Momma’s momentum carries her along: “I’ve lived my life in small towns. You have Paris and St. Louis.”

      Ida stares for a small second, locating what is meant, getting the point. Ida says, “What is wanting in Alton is naughtiness—madness—but there’s not much more in St. Louis. You’d find it dull, Lila.”

      Lila thinks of Ida’s excitements and naughtiness as being open to her now as soon as she learns the passwords If I bother. Momma smiles faintly—maternally. Ma pants: It is an effort to keep up with Ida—she’s a real flier. “I’m not a dreamer,” Momma says aloud, almost idly, commenting on the contest.

      Ida says, “It must be terrible to be without daydreams. We would die in this town without our—don’t repeat this—wickedness.”

      Momma suddenly blows Ida a kiss. Everyone knows that Ida always gets even. Then Momma rises: a swirl of heat—the thin, finely curved legs, the pale, night-framed face, the paled, used lipstick (from drinking and smoking), the extreme prettiness of the woman—gusts around the porch. Ma hears a thump like that of a car door—she lifts her head toward the porch roof—then she swiftly bends over and kisses Ida on the mouth: light, quick, and real. A real kiss which can break the heart of the one who receives it and of anyone who sees it. “You are a hero, Lila,” Ida says.

      With a swish of her skirt, Ma turns and walks back to the glider and sits down. She says, “Well, there, I don’t feel inferior now, no matter how smart you are, Ida.”

      Ida moistens her lips for the first time. She smiles dimly—her eyes are filmed or curtained.

      “You look Jewish like that,” Ma says.

      Ida smiles more widely, complicatedly. Her eyes are in focus.

      Ma says, “Let’s wait and see if the house shakes.” She means from S.L.’s footsteps on the wooden floors. She finds the noises men make menacing: they twang at her nerves.

      The rain falls weightily.

      Ma says, “We have another minute or two to be friends in.”

       SPRING FUGUE

      The first orchestral realization that something is up: Playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on СКАЧАТЬ