The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  He has a sharp intuitive sense that Louisa would like to say yes, but can only say yes to the question as put by herself, and that this all connects somehow to the deep reservoir of anger he can sense in her occasionally, when the conversation drifts over certain topics. She must be the pursuer for the last five steps out of a hundred, while he remains passive. Nothing could be clearer.

  It is nearly always this way with Boswell and people. Since childhood, he has experienced the signature of their emotions with an uncanny directness, and when he cares enough to do so, he can react reflexively to these signatures, long before bringing their logic to consciousness. In this case, only an instant passes between Louisa’s coy smile and Boswell’s turning the conversation in a gentle but complete circle.

  “I shall say not a word more, madam. I suspect I grow tiresome—”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “—and I would be anything with you save that, truly. But come, let us know one another better as two friends. I asked about your husband and how you came to part ways. I would be most honored to share that history with you.”

  Louisa straightens, and then counter-offers: “Well, it is a very personal history, even a secret. But I am touched that you desire to share it. So I will share my own deep secret, sir, in exchange for one of your own. That must be the bargain.”

  “Done.”

  “It must be a thing of which you are properly ashamed. You must swear it.”

  “As shameful as you could hope, you have my word. I swear it on my life.”

  She pulls her head back, considering how to begin. “You should know, then, that Mr. Lewis was an actor in a small strolling company with which I enrolled when I was sixteen, fresh from a dancing academy. He was thirty-two, a quite dashing thirty-two, and he had in mind almost from the start that we would raise a stage family together. Strolling companies are best run by men of large families, you know, as all the children may be brought in for an equal share of the day’s profits. He had other schemes, of course, but this was his principal notion.

  “And to trim a long story short, we were together for three years, with no sign of little tragedians whatsoever. There were other problems, more common problems, but this became the nub of his discontent.”

  “I see,” Boswell says.

  “Mr. Lewis would have an heir, and there was the end of all discussion. And if that were all of it, it might have been another thing altogether. But—here I must demand your utmost discretion, Mr. Boswell.”

  Boswell places a hand over his heart.

  She seems satisfied, and lowers her voice just a touch. “He more than once in the last two years of our marriage tried his luck elsewhere, so to speak. More than twice.”

  Boswell lowers his own. “Tried his luck, what, at having a child?”

  “Or at what men do in the name of having a child. And then stormed and justified and pointed out my failings as brood-mother for his line of thespians when he was found out. You have no experience with this, Mr. Boswell, but I can tell you that when one’s husband or wife finds a bed elsewhere, or simply finds another body elsewhere, it hurts.”

  There are clearly twin universes of misery contained in these last two words, and Louisa pauses for a few seconds after uttering them.

  “Every time a bit less, of course,” she continues, “but every single time, it hurts one. One’s heart, and one’s sense of dignity.”

  She fixes her eyes on a point over the settee, where the paint of the wall has bubbled slightly and cracked. Boswell tries his best to imagine a broken marriage, coming up to London with no one and with nothing, approaching the managers of the storied Covent Garden Theater with nothing save a pretty face and an anger that could be tapped at will and felt from the last rows. Louisa gathers him in with her glance, and Boswell senses this very anger now nearing the surface. “And finally he began to intimate,” her voice drops to a soft whisper, “that I might try my luck elsewhere as well. In particular with the husband of one of the women he had himself been keeping with, an actor in our company. A blackguard drinking companion of his. The idea was that we might all share and share alike, I suppose.”

  In spite of his suspicions about where the story was headed, Boswell finds himself mildly shocked. “Surely, he could not mean that you should—well, that you might try another father? Surely he couldn’t wink at such a thing.”

  Louisa’s look is at once amused and hard. “Surely I think he could mean nothing else. He was not indirect in his phrasing. In the abstract, it was not much for him to give up in order to acquire a great deal.”

  At that, Boswell feels a sympathy that swells suddenly in his throat. A moment passes, and then he has the impulse to reach up suddenly and touch her cheek with the tips of his fingers. She lets him stroke her cheek this way for a moment, body just slightly tensed, eyes on his.

  “I believe it would be giving up the world, Mrs. Lewis,” he tells her.

  Even as he says it, Boswell knows full well that it is the expected, the flattering, possibly even the fished-for response; but that is entirely secondary to the fact that he means it, at this moment in time, with every bit of the part of his heart he feels he understands.

  And in a way already familiar to him at twenty-two, this flood of momentary sincerity from somewhere deep inside him bears the moment of flattery along before it, rendering it inexplicably genuine.

  “Thank you, Mr. Boswell,” she says, with a bob of her head. “That was indeed a pretty thing for you to say.”

  They sit for a moment, comfortably, like two companions in a snug winter room. Then Boswell asks, “But what is there for you to be ashamed of in all this? Madam, you are too hard. You chose to be single and honorable, rather than married and shamed, and surely the Lord would have it so. Look at the stuff of your life, Mrs. Lewis. Has He not brought you to the London stage? Has He not caused you to shine there, for all the world to see? Has He not now brought you that mark of success every woman of the stage yearns for—that final mark of Divine favor—a Boswell of her very own?” Boswell cannot help himself, and his voice rises into a thin giggle. “How much clearer could He make His approbation, truly now?”

  Her laughter thrills him. He can see that he has managed to reflect her life back to her in precisely the terms she might wish, and her expression now is tinged with gratitude and fresh affection.

  Suddenly she holds up a finger, wags it at him. “And now your own shame, sir, as you’ve solemnly promised.”

  Strangely enough—though he has in fact promised, and knew well that his turn was coming—Boswell has brought absolutely nothing to mind to answer this request. He sifts quickly through his life, but can think of nothing suitable, nothing disarmingly candid but essentially harmless.

  Louisa is waiting, though, and so he simply says the first thing that comes into his mind, an admission that seems at first a joke, a way to buy time on the way to something more to the point. But as he says the words themselves, he suspects that he has in fact touched on one of his deeper shames, and one lurking close to consciousness for an excellent reason. “Well, to say truth, I maneuvered my younger brother John once out of something he wanted very dearly. Actually, I should say I cheated him out of it, just a few years ago. Cheated him in a game.”

  “Cheated is a very strong term, of course, Mr. Boswell,” Louisa suggests.

  But he feels the need to insist. “Cheated is the word, I’m afraid, in English at least. I cheated him blind,” he repeats, chuckling in spite of the growing uneasiness he feels remembering it. “In Edinburgh, of course, we would say swicked.”

  It is when their conversation is finished—and partially because he has said not another word about it in the last half an hour, and looks to be leaving without doing so—that Louisa herself returns unprodded to the subject of an assignation. They are walking toward the door of her half-apartment when she stops and slowly takes his arm, and says with a sorry shake of her head, “Do, sir, consider what I’ve said about such a gre
at step as you’ve proposed. It might well bring our friendship down upon our heads.”

  But as she says this, her hand is smoothing the sleek gray fabric of his coat, straightening his collar, finally tracing the flesh of his neck as she stands close enough to be kissed. Rather than kiss her, however, Boswell waits himself to be kissed.

  “I have said that I adore you, madam. I have meant it.”

  “You are persistent, Mr. Boswell.”

  Boswell does not deny this, although he is occupied solely now with allowing her the sensation of persisting. He merely gazes at her, and she at him.

  When he does not move to her, she gives just the hint of a fey smile and covers the last few inches, and kisses him. He can feel in the kiss a marked difference from their last: this she has managed, and she revels in it. He feels the warm press of her lips and then, just at the last, the sly trace of her tongue along the corner of his mouth. Her breath smells of sugar and cinnamon, as though she’s just crushed a sweet in her teeth.

  They remain that way, their faces hovering no more than an inch apart, when the kiss is finished. And she whispers, “If you are still of a mind, come next Sunday, let it be then. When the rest of the house has gone to church. If it is truly in my power to make you blessed, as you say, Mr. Boswell, I will do so with all my heart.”

  Boswell wraps his arms around her, fingers sampling the skin of her bare back, and fights the urge to crush her tightly against him. “Swear it,” he whispers into her hair.

  But she only kisses him again, though more fully still. “A Boswell of one’s own,” she murmurs against his lips, as though speaking to someone other than himself, teasing someone other than himself, “a Boswell of one’s very own, indeed.”

  13

  HAVING GOTTEN BY with cheese and apples at midday, Boswell can now—at just twenty-five minutes past seven in the evening—allow himself a delicious extravagance: a bit over a half-shilling for a sedan to carry him the handful of blocks to Northumberland House. With only 100£ from his father for the year in London, sedan rides are generally out of the question, given that he would sooner slit his own throat than be forced to write to Edinburgh begging for more.

  But the memorandum in his pocket calls specifically for him to take a chair. In order to look a Lord or a Colonel dead in the eye and ask to be handed a commission that would otherwise be purchased, a man must believe he deserves that commission in the first place. He must feel his own worth, falling like lantern-light all around him.

  And his last-night self knew that nothing would light Boswell’s lantern tonight like being carried, every step of the way.

  In the new pink suit with the gold button, then, he strolls over toward the Privy Garden Stair and begins glancing over chairs. There is no moon, and the wind off the Thames is icy, but he passes deliberately over a few battered chairs before settling on a newer sedan, glossy black, attended by two milder-looking men in clean livery.

  At his signal, the men draw open both its door and its hinged top, and Boswell walks up and in, turns, and settles himself down as top and door swing shut. To Boswell’s delight, there is a foot-warmer tucked beneath his bench, and he rubs the chair’s padded-satin wall and feels ten years old as the chair rises into the air.

  It quickly picks up speed as the bearers hit their stride—he hears one of them calling “By y’r leave there!” to clear pedestrians from the path—and now Boswell has leisure to sit back among the cushions and consider what the note asks him to consider: the privilege of being one of only twenty-five invited to the Countess’s Friday night party, the chance that his commission will be secured tonight.

  But somehow he finds that he cannot. Something else has been gnawing at him, beneath the surface of his elation, ever since he left Louisa’s flat. It is his brother John.

  Boswell has known for the last two months that his younger brother, newly a lieutenant in a Regiment of Foot, has fallen ill, ill in his mind. Although the family has not been able to piece together the exact sequence of events, Boswell’s father was able to recount for Boswell the basic facts: John was on watch duty one black evening in mid-October when he began suddenly to rave, to shout at invisible men and things, and then to accuse his fellow soldiers of plotting against him when they rushed to his side.

  For the last eight weeks, he has been confined to a mental hospital in Plymouth.

  Although his father has reassured him several times that John is in capable hands and that he need not worry, Boswell does worry. He imagines horrific scenes, imagines his brother sprawled in a dirty cell, on filthy straw even, with Saturday thrill-seekers passing and leering in at him. Boswell knows that this isn’t the case; his father has had the hospital at Plymouth inspected by an associate, and John’s care there is of good quality. Still, Boswell feels—whenever he allows himself to reach for it—a deep, moldering guilt for not altering his London plan to go immediately to John’s side. His father in fact offered a month ago to pay Boswell’s expenses to Plymouth and back, but Boswell bristled at the assumption that his campaign for a commission might be so easily broken off, and he immediately declined.

  So it comes to him now as a simple emotional equation, impossible to reduce or solve in any other way: John needs him, but he, James, has chosen to go about his business.

  For some reason, since his visit earlier with Louisa, it is not the lurid vision of John at Plymouth that hovers at the edge of his mind, but a memory, something that actually happened: a game they played once, the only time that Boswell has gone beyond brotherly bickering and competition and one-upmanship, gone as far as outright deceit.

  BOSWELL’S SECOND NERVOUS breakdown, at age seventeen, was in fact no nervous breakdown at all. The truth was that he’d been sitting in a stifling classroom at the University of Edinburgh, wishing for diversion, when it hit him like a thunder stroke that he didn’t need his father to conceive of a holiday for him. His five-year-old illness had been lying there in front of him all the while, dusty but serviceable. All he had to do was fail to get out of bed again. That and lie about the reason for not getting out of bed.

  So the next morning Boswell kept his bed. The surgeon brushed and scrutinized the skin at his ankles like Egyptian papyrus. And then, with even less fuss than before, arrangements were made with Dr. Hunter in Moffat, and a room reserved again on the High Street there for a six-week course.

  Boswell was beside himself with delight. But suddenly there was an unexpected fly in the ointment. No sooner had the doctors convinced Lord Auchinleck that Moffat was the cure for Boswell than his little brother John conceived the idea that he would tag along as well. John cried and argued that what one brother suffered now, another brother might well suffer later. Finally Boswell began to sense to his horror that John was making his case, inch by inch.

  And so, two days before he was to leave for Moffat, Boswell casually suggested a bowling match to settle the question.

  He and John had been lawn-bowling with and against one another for years, since they were children. When they were very small, they’d served as bowl-caddies for their father, fighting for the honor of lugging his stray shots back across the fresh-mown grass.

  John in particular loved the game, and had gradually overcome his older brother’s longstanding advantage by devoting himself single-mindedly to his play. Boswell, for his part, still played mostly because the game had become the rage among Edinburgh’s lawyers and judges. When the brothers went to bowl, they were treated like princes by the advocates at the green, all of whom pleaded regularly before their father.

  So between Boswell giving the actual bowling only half his mind, and John practicing mornings by himself on another green near the Tolbooth, they had wound up all but perfectly matched. Perhaps that was why the loaded set of bowls had so struck Boswell a few weeks earlier when he’d seen them in a novelty shop down the Cowgate. Half the bowls in the set were regulation; the other half were secretly weighted. Boswell bought them for two shillings, and then the bowls had
sat in their wooden box at the back of his wardrobe for the past few weeks, like a brace of loaded pistols.

  Once they reached the Heriot green, Boswell almost relented. It was early evening in mid-June, and the air was neither too hot nor too cold, full of the scent of the Hospital’s large gardens. It was that last hour before the fading of the day, and the six-o’clock bells could be heard softly tolling from the Gray Friars Church. Everyone and everything seemed to share a lovely indolence.

  But he couldn’t abide the possibility that having John along in Moffat would hobble him or force him to play nanny. So he opened up the box of doctored bowls and handed John the jack. “Throw away, John,” he offered.

  John winked at Boswell and then kissed the closed fist holding the jack. And then he gave the tiny target ball a nice, distant toss, the sort favored by better players, those with more control. Boswell saw with a start that John had gained more skill in the last few months than he’d realized.

  “You understand, James,” John said, standing back from the canvas, “that if I win, I go to Moffat with you. If you win, I simply don’t go to Moffat with you. I play for something, you play for nothing. Unless denying me is something to you.”

  It was a tough argument to refute, without laying out his actual hopes for the six weeks in the country. But Boswell answered, “I play for something too, John. I play for your agreement not to sulk, while I take the advice of my doctors.”

  “You’re not old enough to have doctors, James. What you have are father’s doctors, and even they think you’re odd. So don’t put on airs. You a’nt a laird yet.”

  It was strange, having the power to alter the game when he would, and Boswell played the first few throws tentatively. But midway through the first game of the match, almost before he was aware of the pieces falling into place, Boswell found that John had surrounded the jack with a very deftly placed trio of bowls, the last knocking out Boswell’s only counter.