MICHAEL BRODSKY
213
Thus, Mrs. Fall. What was the implicit message of the banknotes that
came regularly from home. She could not write
to
them and ask. They
were strangers
to
innuendo, so they thought. Meat and potatoes, meat
and potatoes, the unspoken litany. She became despondent but she
didn't stay despondent for long. A kind word from her accusers
refunded all their latent good will, a kind word from a single accuser,
no matter how peripheral, refunded the good will of all those who had
abandoned her, though continuing
to
pace before her. Whereas I was
resigned to my orphaned state. Oddly enough, whoever spoke the kind
word was consigned to oblivion, forgotten, at the greatest possible
distance no further balm could traverse, smothered by all those his kind
word evoked. A single word became the world's welcome. So in some
ways she differed from me, or, at least, I liked to think she was different.
That way we were distinguishable, partitioned, and avoided mutual
engulfment. I even held my fork a little differently, I was so afraid of
being confused with her.
The crisis began about the time the lilacs molt, when the too
voluble leaves (perfectly heart-shaped and churned by the wind to
foam) have had enough of the mute spikes riding them. The crickets
began. I wanted her to think a little more about my plight. But she had
little patience for a plight whose malignancy, existence even, was
uncertain. Whereas she had accusers, upon whom all her resources
were focused. I could only persist in my blighted delivery of their mail
in the hope that the infirmity wou ld make itself known stand and
deliver, emerge from beneath the shroud of symptoms and confront
like a man the dubious daylight. I talked about all we would be leaving
behind if we let the townspeople drive us away. But as usual my
sentences annihilated the target of their concern, so deft were their
construction , so resonant was my inflection. I had to traverse an
infinite distance back
to
my targets, bypassing the words that obscured
them, when possible. I was trying to get back to the sources of my pain
at the same time I was propelled forward by the illusion of one more
sentence, one more, clearing a path through all the others, scythe
through shrubbery. Sometimes I produced such a sentence, or seemed
to,
dyke against the echo of those that came before and fermentation of
those
to
come, against all phenomena that cry out for the poultice of
sentences, against all deciduous things. Phenomena appal and they
appal most when unlabelled. But perhaps they appal most when I have
the sense they can be labeJled. For some things I saw and heard there
were no words. Sometimes I was frightened and sometimes relieved.
Some would say I evaded with words, with sentences, probing to a
