The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  Other than his rejection by the duke, he could later remember only two scenes from that very long day when he sat down to record it that evening. His friend Douglas, a surgeon of some reputation, had confirmed that Boswell’s was a very strong infection indeed and might take months to cure.

  And then, in a fit of righteous anger, Boswell had gone straight to Louisa’s flat and broken with her, as directly and indignantly and hurtfully as he was able.

  She had seemed quite genuinely surprised at first, had Louisa. She’d sworn her innocence, sworn the infection could not have come from her, sworn she loved him and could never hurt him so. Boswell answered her arguments, but in truth he was taken aback by the force of her insistence.

  Still, she is an actress, after all, Boswell told himself harshly, and most likely a consummate dissembling whore.

  He swore in his own turn that he had been with no other woman for the last two months. And his own surgeon had told him that the woman who had given him the infection could not have been ignorant of it. “Madam,” Boswell finished stiffly, “I wish much to believe you. But I own I cannot upon this occasion believe a miracle.”

  “Sir,” she said, reaching for his hand, but not before Boswell was able to snatch it back, “I cannot say more to you. But you will leave me in the greatest misery. I shall lose your esteem. I shall be hurt in the opinion of everybody, and in my circumstances.”

  He left her actually in tears, still begging leave to inquire after his health. “Madam,” Boswell had archly replied, his hand on the doorknob, “I fancy that will be needless for some weeks.”

  And while he was proud of the line for most of his walk back to Downing Street, and thought it would look savage and fine in his account of the breakup, by the time he reached his flat Boswell thought worse of himself for it, all the more for insisting that there had been absolutely no women other than she, which was not strictly true. There had been the girl in the yellow bonnet, of course, though Boswell had been scrupulously careful there and had done nothing more than toy with her a bit, in this way or that, and so had run no risk, to his way of thinking.

  Still, his own small inconsistency nagged at him and sapped his vengeance.

  And the following morning, when it couldn’t be avoided for another moment, Boswell entered purgatory itself: he was to remain in his rooms, stay warm, eat little, and what little he did eat was to be plain and easily digestible, toast and tea and weak veal broth and the like. Douglas would drop by his medicines—chalky acidic masses slathered with what tasted like spoiled honey—and bleed him in case of swelling.

  Company was allowed, if kept to a reasonable minimum, and Boswell clung to it as a lifeline. Seeing from his window a chariot stop at his door did more to cleanse his blood than anything Douglas could prescribe.

  After a miserable day or two, his afternoons were tolerably full: Lord Eglinton came to see him, and the Scottish Lord Advocate, as well as his friends Erskine and Dempster.

  John too visited him, faithfully, but mornings only. Boswell had told him, with more than a grain of truth, that by afternoon he was exhausted, and it would be best to meet over breakfast, when Boswell was fresh. John was good enough to respect his wishes, and came bearing newspapers and oranges.

  But Boswell had no illusions; he knew very well that he was keeping John at arm’s length from the rest of his company, but he could no longer bring himself to care. He was sick, and struggling to hold his own life and fortunes together. John was stout and healthy, and must look after himself.

  ALL IN ALL, Boswell has been a model patient for the better part of the last two weeks. But tonight, February 3, marks the opening of Mrs. Sheridan’s new comedy, The Discovery, the very play from which his prologue was so brutally snipped. For some perverse reason, he cannot bear the thought of missing the first performance. Something in him rebels at the idea of passing this particular night at home, ill, diseased, forgotten.

  At three, Boswell quickly swallows an apple tart, then wraps himself well up in two pairs of thick stockings, two thick shirts, and his greatcoat. He has Molly call him a sedan chair, and, once snugly inside, his spirits suddenly rise higher than they have in weeks. He feels fragile, but pleasantly so, like a rare piece of china being transported to a demanding buyer.

  The play is dull, and Boswell savors every moment of it.

  It is only a few hours amusement, but more than enough to send Boswell home in a pleasant whirl. He comes back through the dark streets, the sedan chair bumping along from one pool of lamplight to another, and for the first time in weeks he recaptures the sense of destiny London has always stirred in him. And he is inspired: he will use his convalescence to write a full-scale comedy of his own.

  He comes up the central stair quietly, to avoid disturbing the Terrie family below. Something is odd, though, he sees immediately: although he left his room dark, now candle or lamplight glows in the crack beneath his parlor door.

  Boswell stops just at the top of the stair and listens. He can hear nothing.

  At the door itself he hesitates, although the rooms are his own. Only then does he remember giving John a set of keys some weeks before. But it is only when he actually opens the unlocked door and sees his brother seated at his dining table—two stacks of manuscript pages neatly ranged before him—that Boswell remembers leaving his journal lying out when he left for the theater earlier in the day. It is his general practice to lock the loose pages in a teak chest beneath his bed, but every so often he does not, if he is careless or in a hurry. Such as this afternoon.

  “Hello, Johnny,” Boswell says softly, and he expects that John will give a guilty start. It is not the first time in their lives that they have stood in these respective positions, his younger brother surprised in possession of something not entirely his own, and Boswell allows himself a wry smile.

  The smile is wasted on John, who does not look up.

  “I am glad to see that you have taken me at my word and made yourself quite at home,” Boswell continues, coming into the room. There is a whiff of irony in the words, but nothing challenging; the truth is that Boswell has had a wonderful evening, the first in weeks, and at the moment he is inclined to generosity and mildness in all things.

  And too he takes an overweening pride in his journal, although it is full of what the world may never see. In fact, rather than upbraid John for opening it, Boswell finds himself actually moving about the room a bit more quietly than usual, as any man does when it is his own writing being read.

  Only when John has finished the sheet in his hand and placed it in the proper stack does he look up, and Boswell is startled to find his face distorted with what looks like anger. He seems almost too incensed for words.

  “It is a fine life you lead, James,” John begins, voice quivering, tapping a hand quickly on the stack of pages before him, “finer even than I had imagined.”

  “You must be joking,” Boswell responds, carefully. “You know I see almost no one these days, but keep to my bed.”

  “Almost no one is precisely right. But the afternoons do seem lively enough, what with the small parade of lords and ladies and who knows who coming to pay their respects. I would swear that you said you were far too fatigued by afternoon for visits then, but clearly your medicines are having the desired effect.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what it is you would imply.”

  “Oh, I’m quite certain that you do.”

  “John,” Boswell allows himself a heavy sigh, “you make a molehill into a mountain, truly. Once or twice have I had a noteworthy guest. And frankly I have been delighted when it has happened. It is deadly dull in these rooms, day after day.”

  Boswell has made a conscious decision to ignore the belligerence in John’s voice, and now he begins unbuckling his sword and hanging up his hat as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

  John throws himself back in his chair, arms cinched across his chest, openly glaring. “Perhaps I exaggerate your company today. But what I
truly admire is your life before you were—” John spits out the words “—before you were clapped and then ordered to bed. You breakfast with Garrick. You frequent Court. You aspire to meet Samuel Johnson, even to form a correspondence there. And who knew that the Countess Northumberland holds a lavish private party each Friday evening for a handpicked few, and a grand rout every few weeks for all the world? It fairly boggles the mind.”

  “There is nothing mind-boggling in it. I have a commission to secure, and I have been setting about it.”

  “And it is actors and authors and heiresses that will secure it for you, is it? Please, don’t treat me like a child, James. You have had your nose in every London gathering of more than four people since you arrived. And such gatherings! Where the commissions are ripe for the picking, and one has one’s choice of geniuses and patrons and beauties. It must be a very fine thing indeed. You are certainly to be envied, James.”

  Boswell draws out a chair at the other end of the table, and for lack of anything better to do he takes a sweet orange from a bowl before him, begins peeling it as slowly and carefully as he is able. “John, you misunderstand. You know that before you return home you will most certainly be invited to—”

  “Of course, I understand, Jemmie. There is no need to explain. Plymouth didn’t disturb my understanding to that extent, although what can the mad brother know of the extent of his own disturbance?”

  “Now you deliberately find insult where there is none. You are having a fine time playing the martyr.” Boswell pops a piece of the orange in his mouth, but it is tasteless, and his own voice sounds haughty in his ears.

  “Everything makes so much sense now that I have read these pages. The world fairly falls into place. It makes perfect sense, for instance, that a dear friend of our father, like the Countess Northumberland, would limit her invitations to only one of his sons.”

  “John, you may take offense all around, but clearly none was meant.”

  “After all, she scrapes by on such a modest income that she has no choice but to choose between us. Her economy is truly to be admired.”

  Boswell continues placing orange segments in his mouth, but his chewing and swallowing is purely mechanical, for the show of normalcy; the tension and the day’s exertion have combined to make him almost light-headed, and his forehead is damp. He realizes he is hours past the time to take his medicine. He wants suddenly to hold up his hands in a truce, the way they did when they were young, when one of them was genuinely hurt by a bit of wrestling.

  But John is in no mood to relent, and it is in self-defense, Boswell tells himself, that he for the first time offers a jab in return. “You may be indignant, John, but the truth is that the Lady Northumberland is no doubt entirely unaware that you have come up to Town. You are simply not in her thoughts, I’m sorry to say. And the same is true for Lord Eglinton. That is the reason you have not been invited, John. It is no mystery.”

  John looks at him in genuinely stunned surprise. Only too late does Boswell realize the error in what he has said, and he would quickly correct it, but before he can do so John has pushed the table violently from him and jumped to his feet.

  “Unaware? Of course she is unaware, Jemmie! She is unaware of my presence because you have kept her so. You have kept everyone so! You have all but kept me unaware of myself, by introducing me nowhere, and making sure to take me only where no one is to be found, and it is because you are selfish through and through, and because you are ashamed of me. I am sick to death of it, this evil sort of betrayal.

  “And it is all here, the very precision with which you have done it. Nothing could be clearer from reading through this—” John bats savagely at the taller of the manuscript piles, and some of it spills onto the cloth, and from there to the floor—“this sickening bath of self-love and—and selfish, foolish social climbing.”

  John looks at him, and for a moment Boswell thinks that somehow this last charge has caused the fire to go out of him. John’s voice is lower, when it comes, but it is clearer and colder for the change. “Why did you not come to me at Plymouth? Why did you not come to me when you heard that I was kept there?”

  The questions go through Boswell like a lancet, and he can say nothing, face flushed, sweat suddenly cold at his collar.

  “I hate you, Jemmie,” John says. “You’ve become just the selfish, mean, grasping, cold-hearted little bastard you once swore to me you’d never be, never let Father make you be. But it turns out it had nothing to do with him at all. It is you alone. You and the streaky little pier glass you have in place of a heart.”

  Boswell is struck dumb.

  “I hate you, Jemmie,” John goes on distinctly, his eyes now shining with tears, “and I wish you dead in the ground this moment. Dead in the ground, and your mouth stuffed with wet clay.”

  It is not the first time a mention of hate has passed between them in anger; they are brothers, after all. But never has one or the other of them used the word with such bitter application. And then John takes the pages of the journal, both the read and the unread, and pitches the stacks across the table into Boswell’s face, so that they actually strike him before he can put up his hands.

  By the time the pages have fluttered to the floor, John is gone.

  Only later, on his hands and knees, gathering the scattered pages and shuffling them laboriously back into order, does Boswell notice something queer: tiny burn holes distributed at seemingly random intervals throughout the manuscript, each about the size of a petticoat button, as though the pages had been held deliberately over the candle, just close enough to singe the paper without igniting the whole.

  Boswell sits marveling over the pages, and suddenly the randomness gives way to pattern: John has used the candle flame to remove his own name from the journal, as well as the phrase my brother. The near-mechanical precision of the destruction is remarkable. In each instance, a hole large enough to swallow a brother, no larger or smaller.

  A WEEK LATER, John stops by unexpectedly just before teatime, to apologize and to take his leave, before setting out for Scotland the next morning. It is awkward at first—Boswell is feeling low and feverish, and they had parted so strangely the previous week—but by the time they have finished their tea, he cannot look over at his younger brother without the threat of tears. John too seems deeply affected by the farewell, and grateful to be reconciled. Neither mentions the riddled manuscript, and Boswell feels certain that neither of them ever will.

  It is not until John has stood up from the table, and taken his hat in his hand, that Boswell remembers the spare set of keys. He realizes immediately that there is no way to mention it, though, without moving the conversation back to its initial awkward moments, without reinforcing a separation between them. And John will be back above the Tweed in two days time.

  So Boswell makes a conscious decision to say nothing. Instead he tries to think of the keys as a parting gift of sorts, two small iron tokens of his affection, something palpable of London that he has given freely and without reserve.

  * * *

  With John gone, Boswell is again free to concentrate exclusively on himself, his own health, his own heart, his own dented dreams. By the 28th of February, he has kept the house five complete weeks, taken every foul pill prescribed him, and has been completely cleared by Douglas, his surgeon. His first few chilly walks in the Park are tinged with novelty, and he delights in the feel of his weak legs carrying him about the Ring.

  With genuine spring in London, the unstoppable confidence Boswell brought with him the previous November returns. And although it takes an additional ten weeks, eventually this restored charm makes its effects felt where they have been longest resisted. On the sixteenth of May, nearly five months after the disappointments of Christmas, Davies belatedly proves as good as his word.

  Boswell is standing by Davies’s fireplace in the back parlor, having finished his second cup of tea, Mrs. Davies just gone to see about some business in her kitchen, when the bookselle
r steps up and touches his shoulder. Boswell turns to see that beneath the drab businessman’s wig, Davies’s face is suffused with expectation and mock solemnity.

  He says nothing, merely holds Boswell’s eye.

  “What is it?” Boswell asks finally. “What’s happened?”

  Davies points discreetly to the glass door leading to the bookseller’s shop. “Look, my Lord, it comes,” he whispers, and Boswell recognizes the line from Shakespeare: Horatio alerting Hamlet to the presence of his father’s ghost.

  Boswell turns, and through the panes of the door catches his first full glimpse of Samuel Johnson. In that first passing instant he is disappointed; his eye, trained from birth in the nuances of dress and the corresponding nuances of station, registers the shabby clothing on the big frame, the greased look to the wig. It is impossible not to notice that the lace hanging from the man’s cuffs is dun and limp with age.

  Still, the figure is larger even than he expected, shoulders wide as a door frame, and the movements it makes are odd and brusque and unpredictable.

  As Davies goes to him and makes to shake his hand, Johnson catches the movement from the corner of his eye and rears back slightly, bringing his weak vision to bear as best he can, before smiling thinly. He hulks over Davies somehow, although the bookseller is himself of more than average height; the large hand not engaged in greeting his host curls instead into a fist, which bobs slowly in the air, altogether of its own accord.

  Eventually Davies says something, Johnson lowers his head to hear, and then swivels to pick out Boswell by the fireplace, standing stupidly, empty teacup in hand. Johnson squints across the distance, an unintentional scowl printed over his fleshy face.

  And that is when Boswell’s early disappointment suddenly leaves him, to be replaced by a powerful feeling very much its opposite: the feeling that here is another order of being entirely, something preternatural, greater even than he has allowed himself to imagine, almost biblical in intensity.