The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey
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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 says, “Yes, that’s right! That’s just right!”
Ida, a little drunk, says to herself, Lila is a black torch of a woman. Out loud, she says, “You were always pretty …” By her rules—of ego and selfishness and loyalty—never to give Momma an intense compliment is a sign of love. It is keeping things balanced. Ida lives deeply inside her own biography.
But Ma feels she doesn’t have enough money or standing and that she doesn’t have enough power with Ida to be satisfied with that. Momma is “infatuated” but cross; she is drunk—mostly with the ease of being with someone quick-minded, not male. She wants to show Ida how to be magnetic in courtship: “Oh, believe me, I’ll go on record as saying you’re better-looking than I am, in the ways that count. In the ways that really count, you have the kind of looks I admire most. I count you as the best-looking.”
Ida takes that as her due. She doesn’t see that Ma is enraged and being exemplary. She says primly, “You’re interesting-looking, Lila.” Ida thinks that is a witty way to be romantic. Lila feels Ida continues to be not romantic, not a squanderer. She is reading Ida’s mind: she thinks she sees that Ida thinks it an extravagance to care for Momma in the first place, a penniless no one.
This kind of selfish shenanigans dries Momma up physically, but she likes it on the whole. Momma laughs musically, yet she is disgusted. She says, in a mad way, “I have to laugh: What did you think the excitement was all about? What did you come to see me for?” Ma thinks it’s bad taste of Ida not to be more honest—heartfelt. Momma is called by some people The Prettiest Woman in Central Illinois. Ma is lighting up again, but it’s temper, a squall of will. In a frightened and careless and disobedient way (and in a hysterical and cold and experienced way), Momma knows that in a battle for personal power Ida is the local champion; Momma feels the tournament quality of Ida. Momma says again—odd, mocking, and tender, too, “I’ll go on record—you’re better-looking than I am in the ways that count. I wish I looked more like you.”
She means it, but she’s saying it’s better, it’s safer not to have real looks.
She’s praising Ida and saying Ida is trash.
I don’t shut my eyes and give up; I’m not a goody-goody two-shoes.
Ida half understands the category she’s being put in and she thinks: She owes me one for that. She leans down and touches, with one finger, Momma’s shoe, Momma’s foot. Then she sits back.
Momma’s face, brownish, ill-looking, with lines of nervousness on it, now, in her sensitivity, her speed, her strangeness and as a soul in the cosmos and in her strength—and maybe in wickedness and charity—smooths out.
Ida is big-eyed, calm-faced—but sweaty—full of her own fund of fidgety and fanatic self-approval. She crosses her legs—coarsely—in front of Ma’s now obtuse face. She would argue, I don’t deserve this, I have done nothing to deserve this.
Momma’s eyes go from Ida’s eyes to Ida’s wrists (fine-boned) and Ida’s nails (bitten). The trick for Momma as she smiles a little inside her attractiveness at the moment is to show she is really clear about what Ida is worth as a person. “I have a good time now and then,” Momma says, unable to be innocent and awed. She says this with her head tilted.
The force in Ida’s soul makes her surface twitch a little with puffs of waitfulness. “We deserve a good time,” Ida says, not looking at Momma and then looking her full in the face. Ida sinks down in her chair. Then she sits upright. Like a countess—that took strength of will.
Momma says, in a presumptuous and urgent tone, “Around here you’re supposed to go to special cities to have a good time. I’m from the provinces. But I’m having a good time right now—it’s because of you.”
Ida sighs narrowly and says, “You’re not very Jewish; you’re not like Hamlet.”
Not mild? Not moderate?
Ma