The World Is the Home of Love and Death (30 page)

Momma said to me a couple of times, “Everyone is religious—it makes me sick.” Her
everyone
was always men; women she referred to as
women
and never lumped into everyone, only into
they
as in
you know what they say.
Children were always
little children.
Simon’s everyone was journalistic, was whoever was gathered at the fire, or whoever had political clout in Little Rock, or was the philosophers’
all
or mankind but used journalistically with special reference to Little Rock and the surrounding counties.

I felt that Simon (in his way, in his style) was interested in me and what I felt. He cared what I felt. But it genuinely hurt, how he finagled obedience, how he trained me, how he played with what I felt. I missed Momma, not emotionally, but in terms of amusement. She had warned me, “They’re very very dull, they are dull people. Charlotte is really dull, and Simon is—well, you can stay awake by starting a fight with Simon. How sad life is,
pisher
—it has so many details.”

My own brand of American English, my dear Americanola (dear to me), irritated Simon uncontrollably: his nose twitched, his jowls waggled, his eyelids flapped, his lips involuntarily parted: “Roosevelt doesn’t have to do big-shot manly things—he’s a cripple. He gets to be clever—and smart: that’s why he’s so good.…” His obvious androgyny, his wide repertoire of responses, his flexibility of response.

Aunt C. slipped up and sent a pro-war poem I wrote to the Little Rock
Gazette
, and they published it. That made Simon angry. Then he was scornful and haughty in his dry, jibbering-jabbering, nonstop omniscient way. He really thought I was inarticulate and illiterate and unfortunate in terms of language, and he really thought he was the cat’s meow—that’s Lila, of course—the big cheese local panjandrum Mahatma Gandhi: that’s how my father S.L. sometimes talked—when it came to rhetoric and brains.

And if you keep the context small and neat and if you niftily trim the edges and omit sickness and emotions, he was smart. But if you include any of those things or even something as dumb as dogs or flowers, he was a stupid shit. The belief, the faith that Uncle Simon was the center of the universe, the faith that love and being a son or like a son should bring, the sense that universal truths were bound up in him—him not as an object of sarcasm—stinks, and the pain, the teasing agony of it is really outside the scope of these sentences. But one can lie in bed, an ugly, nervous, more-than-irritating ten-year-old and feel the soft busyness of the dark air as acceptable death.

I make Simon mad—but he is interested. Is this what girls find in the world? I see now looking back, my inner tone and outward actions toward him, my attitude toward his merits as a thinker, match, mimic, mirror in some humanly awful way of hopeless ass-kissing and violent, heartbroken sarcasm, mirror in a ten-year-old’s scale his behavior toward me. The staleness of what that felt like was terrible! And my uncle
sensed
that but only as a private set of dog images, me as a dog and like a dog whose pelt has a stale smell. He sniffs at me, he grabs me in his arms as if in a set of jaws, drops me and draws back and comments on my appearance—ugly, bookish appearance, but changing in his house, I must admit.

At other times he rubs me against him in a doglike way—he is a man of language; I am a mere barker and sniffler. His life has attained an awful decency, thoroughly tainted, but not to be judged, his public sinlessness, his important cipherhood. He still deals with the real world but mostly in a dead way, an honorific way; he is careful not to be overstrained. He drags me around with him all day every day unless we are fighting. People are rarely rude to him, I notice, in the ways they are rude to Lila and S.L. It takes me a while but I see after a while: no one flirts with him. He kisses ass, he flirts with customers. Aunt C. obeys him. He says, like Lila—they are brother and sister—“I can get a thing or two done still.…”

Uncle Simon’s perceptions and systems of thought and of public action had created his and my shelter, our position. He knew about male disrespect, male assertion—he knew about sexual pride. He knew about the emotional singularity of the male showiness under the surface manner of salesmen—he had that, or had had it, himself. He knew about the escapee’s pugnacity and he knew how the world treated outsiders. He was primed to deal in humiliation and subservience: I saw it often, in his store, with customers, and he withdrew it and treated some customers as rough equals, slightly lower than himself, and some as dirt although they were clearly men of power; and in some style or other, they took it. Very little was at stake except rank, but the details of this ranking, man by man, were Uncle Simon’s laugh, literally: he laughed, blinked, joked, smoked cigars, leaned back in his chair, stood, and walked back and forth.

But the game was absolute for him; it never lapped over into truce or into real amusement or into really mattering. It was petty. It was a case of splitting hairs but using a smart but not refined ax to do it. It seemed an enormous, enormous, enormous waste, the dried out, pointless, endlessly detailed struggle over precedence.

No wonder Lila had for years refused to visit him. She wouldn’t talk to him on the telephone more than once a year and then only if she had a headache, had taken aspirin, and was spending the day in bed, “doing her duty with the telephone.”

“Here,” he would say to me, “tie this man’s shoelaces for him.” Or: “You got something on the cuff of your trousers, Jim—the boy here will clean it.”

I couldn’t do it. The second time Uncle Simon said this, I said, “No, he won’t. The boy won’t.”

Ah, the scene, the scene. Aunt C. whispered in my ear, “Cry and you won’t have to be punished.”

“Go to hell,” the boy said to his uncle.

“No dinner for you!”
Simon shouted.

But the ill, old people and the black cook sneaked me food. And even Charlotte showed up in my room with bread and jam and milk.

Simon confronted me in my room the next morning. In a serious tone he demanded to know if I intended to live without discipline.

“Why don’t you shut up—or talk to me sensibly,” I replied in the shimmery morning air.

“You want to end up in a home?” Uncle Simon had not lost his temper. He was handling me.

I
blew up.
I
was the one who lost his temper. But it was not real temper; it simply pushed the dialogue toward reality. “I’ll write the school system in St. Louis, the superintendent, in U. City. He’ll come and get me. He’s offered me a home.”

“What are you talking about?
”

“Mr. Baker will come get me.… He said he would.”

“What are you talking about?
”

“I’m not suppot ased to boast,” I said glumly.

“Whare you talking about?
”

“Mom told me not to tell you. I’m a genius, Uncle Simon, and people will help—if I ask them to. I don’t have to take your shit if I don’t want to.”

I represent a foreign “civilization” located in no particular place but only in certain people. I represent layers of other education, of a whole order of other permissions. I know about politeness extended to a child. In a different realism from his—or Momma’s or S.L.’s—I have a position in the world. It’s still the same world; mine is still a childish piece of the ordinary world, but the rules, the position are different. Playgrounds, yards, sports, even mere footraces, sunporches, all are different for me. It is not really a matter of “language potential” or “leadership” although it was said to be that. It might very well be delusory, valueless. One verifiable
fact
about it, though, was that it was not local.

“You’re gonna get a good swift kick and a paddling if you don’t watch out,” Uncle Simon said with almost good-natured violence.

But he was steaming with rage, because of the hierarchy thing. Because he wouldn’t know to dress or address me if I came into his store as a nineteen-year-old. Because his world was local, delusory, a piece of oblivion. Because the very terms were lunatic with their swift implication of another level of privilege and rationality, of realism, as I said, than any he knew of or was used to.

But he was omniscient, intelligent, a shrewd, well-informed Jew, a man of affairs.

I said, the ugly child, not as ugly as when he arrived, said a little wearily, “Might I use the telephone? May I use the telephone?”

He came at me then. He had instructed me to stand up when he came into the room on this occasion. He looked quite happy and furious—no, it was a rictus. He was stricken—by sudden truth … unwanted, somewhat European truth. I ran out of the room and grabbed the phone in the hall. “Long distance!” I said breathlessly to the operator. Operators oversaw all such calls then. “Get me the superintendent of schools in University City, Missouri—that’s outside St. Louis.…” Uncle Simon had grabbed my arm but now he just watched and listened. But he started pulling at me. I told the operator, “I’m a child. Tell him Wiley Silenowicz, Wiley, is in trouble in Little Rock, tell him I’m here at this number.… Ow, ow … Simon Cohen’s house.”

Simon shook me and started to slap me but stopped when I said, “Don’t.”

The phone operator did it. Sam Baker telephoned within the hour, while Simon was shouting at Auntie C. I got to speak to him. Then he called the local school board in Little Rock to find out what kinds of force he could command. Uncle Simon was a figure well-enough known in town that Baker—with what pull or by what accident—reached the senator, who called the house, and, guess what, peace broke out at once.

The senator is a noisy and indirect-eyed but impressively present sort of man. He seems intelligently dishonest and at the same time to have a keel or underlying sense of both sentimental and actual honestyat times. But then he is not total in anything. Talking to a partial-selfed person is more like talking for him than like engaging in a dialogue. But he was a very astute listener. On the other hand, I was smart enough to know that a child’s talk bores an adult, a busy or well-employed adult. They can’t wait to get out of the house and be among adults. The senator always stayed with me longer, sitting or talking, or taking a longer walk, than I liked or than I thought was workable.

For a while Auntie C. pretty much spoke for Unc Simon, who was far from humbled. He was not even silenced. But he said he didn’t understand this sort of nonsense, and he would stand there, in the door to the sunporch, while Auntie C. relayed to me “the marching orders” for the day and she asked me what I wanted to do, but Simon, Uncle Simon, spoke to me and did not respond to any nickname I proposed or to any new form of affection, only to the old form, and the old routine—running at twilight—but with a certain oddly worked-out freedom allowed and no more six summer days a week in the store.

I had said I would make no scandal if he stopped coercing me in everything, but he ignored any idea of scandal—he completely redefined it in his mind. He seemed to have been only slightly affected, but I was at the limit of my strength, and I became silly, or a bit crazy, childishly crazed: “He has to leave me alone if I say it three times,” I said. This was taken seriously as a rule although things I had thought more carefully were ignored.

For a while, I stopped work in the store entirely and spent my days with the limping and fragile and dying old people. Then with the cook in the kitchen who liked me well enough but whose affection was limited. I never knew or came across a devoted Uncle Tom or Aunt Thomasina. Of course, Unc Simmy with his methods of authority in the house and store did. The cook represented a civilization obscure to me but present in her presence—she told me to stop trying to be cute and to remember that Simon was Simon and wasn’t going to change: “Charlotte has a little give, not much, but a little, but he ain’t got none.” She spoke Southern and noticeably so. If we talkedabout books, she spoke a different English but one that wasn’t entirely pure either: “I got too little time to read to bother with trash.” When she talked religion, her English grew stiffer and so did her enunciation, but she was not a passionately religious woman, not a gospeler. I was interested in her, but I preferred to be outside. And she was a grownup.

In the ravine, I met a gang of white boys. I went there alone two days running, and some white boys who used it as their wilderness took to hunting me, a preamble to friendship or to harm. I cared and pretty much didn’t care what happened. I was intent on holding on to my mind but I was tired of it too. I was not a hero. I got beaten up some, hit a lot, kicked. I came to know one of the boys, a sissified boy, the only talkative one. But I didn’t love him or put him solidly in my life either. The gang of boys scared me and harmed me some but, at times, they made me their ex officio leader because of my precocity: I could read maps and explain things and talk to cops and find my way in the woods and get us water or soda in strange houses and adjudicate quarrels and tell stories. They asked me to lead them on an illegal trek along the stream in the ravine to wherever it joined the Arkansas River. The police knew me by then. They let us go on out on a mud shoal in the big river, dirty-legged boys.