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

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      Ida has gooseflesh.

      Ma says, “I’ll be frank; I’ll be brutally frank: I’m nervous, I’m nervous about you. You’re intelligent, you like books, but watch, I don’t have a yellow streak. If I make a fool of myself, I expect you to know you have only yourself to blame; you know where you stand in this town, you have genuine stature around here. It’s more than that: What you say counts. So, if I get tense, blame yourself … blame your own … stature. Will you do that for me?” She is being Brave Like Ida.

      “Lila, are you someone who might be a good friend? I see that you might be that. Oh, it is unbearable.”

      “I am a good friend. Don’t let the way I look fool you. I have the soul of a good friend.”

      “You’re a darling!”

      But the world is unbearable: a chill goes through Momma: in Ida’s voice is a quality of unyielding announcement on the matter. Ida is someone who has to run things—I wasn’t good enough for her to hold back and let me speak, too. I think what Momma sees is that her seeing Ida as having a realer “beauty” is not triumph enough for Ida—Ida wants to hurt Momma, so that Ida can know more satisfactorily than in Momma’s being merely temporarily agreeable that she, Ida, is splendid, is the more splendid creature. You can’t call Momma “darling” unless you do it with a note of defeat, or conspiracy, without causing trouble with her. To Ma, what Ida does seems romantically naïve.

      This is what I think Momma saw: Ida owns everyone in sight. Momma is sexed angrily and ignorantly and is sexually fired by curiosity. And she did not marry for money. Ida sometimes to Momma seems only to have the shine and edginess and sharpness of calculation of money, and to be hardly flesh and blood at all. Momma feels that Ida is like her, like Momma, but is less well educated in love, that she is at an earlier and more dangerous stage: Ida is sexed ungenerously, like a schoolgirl.

      Momma’s romantic standing is not a “safe” thing for her. A woman like me finds out love is a different kettle of fish—I should have been a prostitute. This stuff boils in Momma; it is her sexual temper—it supplies the vivacity in Ma’s sultry, wanting-vengeance prettiness. Tempestuousness and mind—Ma suspects everyone of cheapness when it comes to love—except S.L., her husband. Lila romanticizes his emotional extravagance, his carelessness—perhaps he is romantic.

      She is alive and reckless and glowing now and does not seem devoted to remaining at home and being respectable—but she has been that so far in her life; and she feels clever in her choices. I think she is as morally illiterate as Ida, and as unscathed so far: this is what she claims by being so willful—that she is usually right, unpunished. This is what her destructiveness comes from.

      Both women feel that women draw you in and are grotesquely lonely and grotesquely powerful in intimacies. Ida has a coarse look. What it is is that Ida has to be the star. Ida’s courage is self-denial and self-indulgence mixed.

      Momma’s performance is ill-mounted, since it rests on Ida’s having a heart. Ma has risen from the void of dailiness and nobodyhood to flutter in the midst of her whitish fire, but she flutters burningly in avoid of heartlessness: it is worthless to be a pretty woman, but everything else is worse.

      Ida governs herself shrewdly.

      Momma is excited-looking: conscious-looking, alive, symmetrical—alight.

      Ida “loves” Lila’s temporary brilliance—perhaps only as a distraction. But Ida looks, and probably is, happy for the moment—but in a grim way:This is where the party is. Ida is game. She says, “Oh, Lila, I am happy to be here, deluge and all. Isn’t it nice that we are neighbors? What would life be without neighbors? A desert? A bad Sahara?” She smiles nervously—boldly. A kind of sweat breaks out on her upper lip; she doesn’t care.

      Lila, being so pretty, has lived with this kind of drama since early childhood and she has a peculiar air of being at home in it: Momma’s eyes and eyelids consider the speech, the praise. Momma looks selfish rather than surrendering—that means she’s not pleased as she studies Ida’s offer, its number of caveats. What it was was Ida is being careful. She should have spoken extravagantly, but she is too sure that Momma can be bought reasonably. Ma is a marvel of disobedience and a mistress of local manners carefully learned and fully felt. Her face is a somewhat contemptuous wound: comprehension and expressiveness tear her face when she catches on that Ida is smitten but impervious, made of steel, when that shows. It shows that Ida has more class than I do; that’s where the battle lines get drawn, although I will say this for myself: I give credit where credit is due. That’s a lie, often. Often she is destructive and fights the worth in other people. This is a democracy, and who’s to stop me from doing what I think is best for me?

      Ida is enamored and is immune to her, superior, la-di-da and all.

      Lila arranges her voice: “I’m glad you came to see me.” It’s not her being a femme fatale or whatever, or being amusing anymore—she is holding back. She sounds a little like Ida.

      Ida raises her head, blinks, puffs on her cigarette—looks at Ma, level-eyed, looks away.

      This is interwoven with Ma shifting her legs, then her torso, and its burden of breasts on the slender ribs.

      Both women are controlled—and full of signals—so many that I don’t see how they can keep track of what they are doing in the world, what with all their speed and knowledge and feelings and all the breaths they have to take.

      They avoid each other’s eyes, except passingly, for more than a minute—it is as intense as speech. Then they are still. Both have small smiles. This is where the lions and the tigers walk.

      Momma has a dark light coming from her. She is a nervous star that gives a dreamer’s light even at this late date.

      She says, “Did you come over in the rain to see me for a purpose? You wanted to see me all dressed up for a party, when I was nervous? A ready-made fool? All dressed up and no place to go.”

      Ida says at once, “Oh, Lila, no—no lovey-dovey.”

      She tramples on Lila’s music—that request for sympathy.“I hate lovey-dovey—lovey-dovey is brutal. It’s terrible.” A love speech, bossy, intent, deep-feelinged: Ida’s sort of deep feelings.

      Momma is perplexed by so much intensity, so much style, and all that energy, with none coming toward her—except maybe nibblingly, condescendingly—but directed at Ma’s flirtatious mockery. It was a love speech asking for rough play.

      Ida’s personal fires are alight and skeletal. They are not like the expansive whirlwinds and fires in which Momma is trapped and consumed; Ida’s have focus and great style. Momma feels Ida’s unforgivingness as character and strength, but it’s directed toward what Lila is—a beauty of a certain kind, a flirt and willful, a Jew—and that is unforgivable. But that’s how things are. You have to take love as you find it.

      Ma’s tolerance and acquisitiveness and Ida’s nervousness—and her courage—are the paramount social factors, the strong movers in the board game, in the scene: both women tacitly agree on that. The soft surrenders (Lila’s phrase) that go with love when it works are what Ida was forbidding in her love speech.

      Momma СКАЧАТЬ