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

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СКАЧАТЬ get away with it, loving and calling love boring. She isn’t really sure. She is a lively fire of spirit and mood, intention and will, and she can’t really do that herself, take love lightly.

      Lila knows how to keep up a social air when things are tough. It is not a new experience for her that there is tragic hatred in the moment; i.e., infatuation, and rivalry, a lot of failure—love of a kind, of all kinds … women deal in love. Momma’s Theory of the Ego (that everyone and her mother thinks she is the Queen of the Earth) now holds, in this flying moment, that Ida cannot bear not being the prime example of beauty in the room, in the world: She only chases me so she can be better than someone like me: she has to be the star; her husband, Ben, is the same way, but he kowtows to her because she has the money and he bullies everyone else.

      Momma calls a moment like this, this-kind-of-thing, We’re getting in deep. It is her form of mountain-climbing: exhaustion, danger, despair. The fires of mind and of physical courage in her are a working heat for her getting her own way—according to her Theory of the Ego—but in such an extravagantly putting-on-a-show fashion that it does not seem to her to be of the same family as Ida’s putting on a show, which is more measured, purposeful, meanly hammerlike, tap, tap, tap … She’s like a machine. She has a position to keep up—there are demands on her all day long—she can’t give her all to any one thing—that’s Lila being fair … But she’s a fake: that’s Lila being Lila.

      Physical desire in Ida is the trembling of nerves in a strong woman’s frequently disowned body. Ida is warm—or hot—but without dignity in physical negotiation, a rich woman. She maintains her value against Lila’s more and more immodest-seeming glamour: why is this woman still shining at the age she is? (Daddy would say Ma was on a rampage.) A wild pathos and self-pity invest Ida with an air of threat in her desirousness—she feels she deserves erotic reward. Ida’s class, her being superior to Momma in self-control and focus, her sexual abnegation at times, her hardness about defeat and the hurt of others oppress Momma as signs of not being infatuated with her is what I think. Whereas Ida feels love is one substance throughout eternity—that it shouldn’t matter what deformities that will and privilege and folly have forced on the softer tissues of the self in the course of your living the way you live if someone loves you.

      Momma feels that love is invented daily and that each person does it differently. Momma, in some wordless way, trusts herself in these matters. She is at home here.

      Neither woman intends to be a fool—being a fool is something only men do.

      Of course, if you contemplate these attitudes and consider the feelings they have, it is clear that at the moment Ida hates Momma, and Momma hates Ida. But they get along.

      Lila thinks of it this way, that Ida puts a quick kibosh on anything she can’t run. Ida does not know just how two-sided the thing of sex is—or how improvised it is. Momma feels that Ida is being “cute,” attractive in her way, even gorgeous—but not in the romantic vein. Momma often says, A truth about me is that I fight back. Momma is a brute. She would like to break Ida’s bones.

      To put a cast of reason on Ma’s brutality, she wants to hurt Ida in order to frighten her, so that Ida won’t eat me up alive.

      Ma says, “I’m always lovey-dovey. I think I was born that way. Laugh, they say, and the world laughs with you, but sometimes when you laugh alone it gets very dark. Look how dark it’s getting—it’s turning into a thunderstorm.”

      The rain is getting stronger, brackish and threatening; and wind flings the dampness around.

      It genuinely hurt Ida to be cornered—to be straightforward—to admit to having feelings. Her hurt is coldly stormy at the moment.

      But she looks Ma in the face and smiles one of her top-grade, friendly, large-area smiles and says in a tragically rebuking manner, “You’re wearing your diamond bracelets—I suppose that means you mean business today.”

      Momma says stubbornly, “Did you get wet? Did you ruin your shoes? Coming through the rain to see me? Did you do that for me?”

      Ida says, “You don’t show any damage from the rain—you show no damage yet, at all—Lila.”

      Ma’s radiance is skittery in this light. I can keep it up until the cows come home. But that’s not true. Some centrally human element gets worn out in these skirmishes. Why does Ida lie—i.e., avoid things? Does Ida know things (about the world) that I don’t know? So Ma gets depressed about herself. The effect of Ida’s will and style on her. When this sort of thing happens to Momma, she becomes ill. She dies. She becomes stern. Perhaps everything will be all right, I can handle this, I’m not nineteen.

      Ida is relentlessly enthralled and ruthless still, and makes no promises, even with her eyes; her escape will be part of Lila’s comeuppance.

      And this: the beauty Ida feels (and shows) has subsided and is more memory than immediate fact, and that imprisons Ida, who can’t hold back from agonized nostalgia about her own great moments in the same way that Momma can from hers. For a moment, Ida can’t act at all. Ida is not exhausted but she is slain: You have killed me, Lila.

      In exhaustion, Momma is partly set free from her own radiance. Momma doesn’t care at all about anything at all, and Ida is stilled in some ways but is nevertheless a restless spirit and unsoftened and is trapped. So the smart and powerful one has become the stupid and powerless one.

      Opposites flitter and dance in the fairy light: women’s enchantments are eerie. The story is in their eyelids and in the obscure or clear glances they send to each other. Also, they breathe meaningfully. It seems that Ida will not let someone without much education and breeding, who is wild and careless, run things at the moment. Skinny Ida has a don’t-tread-on-me wonderfulness of carriage, plus Very Good Manners and a Christian cheerfulness. A Christian sense of secular silliness, tender just now but hard-souled, too.

      Lila thinks, Ida hasn’t beaten me down. My luck is good. Ida is really very approachable—of course, you have to approach her on your hands and knees.

      The two women continue to breathe meaningfully in each other’s company—this is more or less at a level of happiness, but you can never tell (Lila’s phrase).

      Ida says, “The rain—it’s all water over the dam.” She has a creaturely tension, like a thoroughbred. She means, Let’s forgive ourselves.

      Lila is close enough to sexual giddiness that she blushes spectrally. “It is spilt milk,” Momma says. “Ha, ha, well, well, well, said the hole in the ground—” Momma does a very small version of what she thinks a rich Gentile woman’s intellectual madness coming out as nonsensical talk and a laugh is like.

      Mindlessness seems well bred to Ida, but, of course, not in Momma—Ida does, deliciously, voluptuously, hate Momma. Hatred is elegant in Ida.

      Momma feels ruthless right back. Momma feels apprehension inside, but she doesn’t show it.

      The two women laugh, complicitously.

      Lila says, “And more well, well, well—you know me, Ida, I’m a wife and a mother and a devil, a Jewish devil!”

      Ida says, “Yes, yes. Don’t be hard on yourself, Lilly. It’s hard enough as it is. We don’t need trouble—isn’t that right!”

      Momma СКАЧАТЬ