The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  “Had your father truly felt that way,” Johnson counters, “he would have cast out the book in its entirety. But he understood it to be indeed a tool, and one of superior English workmanship. One he could not do without. Yet he would posture before his sons.”

  It is at moments such as this when I feel that killing him would be merited. He reveals so very smug a view of the universe, in which England naturally occupies the center, and the English tongue the center of that center, with Samuel Johnson the center-most pin anchoring the English language entire.

  I cannot keep the sarcasm from my tone. “Yes, quite. Your book has had its effect, Mr. Johnson, and you must take responsibility for us, James and myself. We have been shaped by your grammar and syntax, even in the provinces. Your vocabulary has made up our world even as far away as Scotland. We have grown up accenting our words as you would have it done. We are your handiwork, for good or for ill.”

  Johnson is silent a relatively long time, lips again pursed, air whistling through the cavernous nostrils. But when he speaks, the words are uncharacteristically plain and simple. “You are none of my handiwork. And you are not of your father’s making either. He was narrow in his view, and heavy-handed, but clearly he sought to instill respect. And you have none, John Boswell, none for your father, none for your brother, none for your country, none for your self. You are a sadly deluded young man. You have surrendered your reason to gratify your own sickly sense of self.”

  “Mr. Johnson,” James nearly takes Johnson’s sleeve, then thinks better of it, “my brother needs rest, and the care of his doctors. But in his heart, he is as decent a man as I have ever known. You must believe that, sir. John is no criminal, no matter what tonight may seem to say of him.”

  I ignore James, and repeat Johnson’s barb. “I am deluded, then, am I?”

  Johnson sits up, brings his shoulders forward. His eyebrows are thick, and they do not trace a straight line over his eyes but rather slant up at an angle. It gives him an air of perpetual suspicion and doubt and even distaste, an air that now perfectly matches the look on the rest of his face. He has had enough of this night, enough of me.

  “Yes, very obviously so.” He looks around the shack, at his own chair, the lamp, the door. “You have made it painfully obvious, and yet you remain willfully blind of the fact. You have some invented grievance, and you would keep us captive indefinitely while you relive it again and again in the warped world of your own mind.

  “I have done with you, sir. You are no better than a wounded animal that must be dealt with on its own terms. I defy you. Do you understand me? Must I spell it out for you? I defy your games and your threats and dirty things in pockets.”

  He is very near a breaking point of some sort, and I bring both guns to face him. I don’t worry as much about a sudden movement from James; he will remain as passive as he is humanly able. But managing Johnson is a minute-to-minute affair, even when one is holding the weapons.

  “Let us speak then about delusions, but let us begin with your own, Mr. Johnson. For James has revealed himself all but entirely. Let us turn to you.”

  He meets my eye, lowers his jaw a bit. Beneath the thick lids, his eyes are large and protrude just enough to render them unusual, fish-like. I stare into one until he blinks it, then responds finally. “I have no delusions, sir.”

  “As you wish. You said at the Turk’s Head that you and I had never met. You tried your best to bully me out of maintaining that we had.”

  His head is bowed a bit now.

  “And yet on our walk over here you admitted your own falsehood to me, your own attempt to deceive. You admitted not only that you had concealed the truth, but that you were wrong to do so. And I would put it to you this way: that it is you who are deluded, you who remain alienated from your very deepest self. Because the fact is that you and I have shared—”

  Something about the last phrase, or the impassioned way I say it, has both of them staring directly at me, as though I have spoken in another language entirely.

  But I push on with it. “You and I have shared a very great affection. And it has been the saving of my life, sir. And I am not ashamed of it. In fact, I have gone to nearly unimaginable lengths to prove it to be genuine, because I will no longer have it denied or rendered invisible.”

  James is now examining Johnson with outright perplexity. And for his own part, Johnson’s face is a wash of emotions, anger and outrage and something I can only interpret as regret, even shame.

  “Did you not say so on our way over here? Sir, did you not admit it to me?”

  And then Johnson can remain silent no longer. “Yes! I did say so,” he blurts out, hands slicing at the air, his heavy body rocking in his chair with frustration. “I said so in the way that a man on the rack confesses to heresy! Because you left me no other choice, but would have it so! I was trying to end this horrific nightmare. That is all. I thought, for a moment, that hearing me say those words might put an end to all of this. And in a moment of weakness I went along with your damnable lie.”

  “Do not attempt to deny the truth now, now that someone else may hear. Can you not see, James, what this man would be at?”

  Dags or no, Johnson’s voice has risen beyond a bark almost to a shout. “I do deny it! I deny every particle of your twisted and deluded view of the world. We have never met, not once before this evening! You have clearly read my books, and perhaps in some mad way you have construed that—”

  “Oh, do not flatter yourself so, Sir. Other than your dictionary, your books are mildly amusing at best. And at worst they are soporific. They will none of them conjure a world. No, you have already admitted our connection, sir, and I hold you to that admission. It is the one moment this evening you have managed to face yourself in the mirror, actually face yourself.”

  Here I gather in James with my glance, for in some way this has all been staged for his benefit. He is the intended audience, and has been all along, the lone representative of all the rest of the world, as well as the go-between to the rest of my family. He is the one who must hear what must be said.

  “And I will tell James the rest that you will not admit. That you and I met on London Bridge, when you called me to an alcove there. That you came back to my rooms and eventually shared my lodgings, shared my bed. Yes, shared my bed, chastely, as companions, as two who cared for one another, loved one another. That you wrote there, sometimes in the middle of the night. That we—”

  Johnson is out of his chair now, up on his big legs. James has him by one arm, trying vainly to pull him back to his chair. Johnson isn’t closing the distance between us, not yet, but he has lost all other rational consideration. He is sputtering with rage. Still, the words find their way out. “You are more than a mere liar or a damnable thief,” he manages, “you are true evil, and, worse, evil with the appearance of decent family and breeding. You have—you have fattened somewhere in the dark on your own poisonous envy, and you slither into London like the Devil himself, to destroy us, to pervert our understandings of one another, of our very selves. You will not be satisfied until we too are mad, or mouldering in a grave.”

  “He is ill, Mr. Johnson!” James pleads.

  I stay stock-still in my chair while Johnson raves.

  “You say you will allow us to leave when I have capitulated, agreed to the twisted version of the world your fantasy has produced. But you lie. I tell you that you lie through your teeth. For that would never be enough. Never! It is not the past you would control, but the present and the future. You would displace your brother in my affections, and nothing less will satisfy you. If you are not stopped this night, he will have your knife in his back by morning.”

  I cannot hold my tongue any more. “It is you who would manipulate—”

  “Silence!” Johnson thunders.

  And then in the sudden quiet, he yells again just as loudly: “Silence, I say!”

  He could not raise his voice any louder. We have been talking in whispers and low voi
ces for an hour, but this is a genuine bellow, one that must reach the boats moving far out on the darkness of the Thames.

  “You have surrendered your purchase on reality entirely,” Johnson goes on. The blood is up in his face again, and his cheeks are brick-red. “And your greatest delusion is that I would favor you with a single particle of my affection! That I would bring my pen and ink to whatever stinking hole in the earth you have managed to scratch out and line with leaves and twigs and bits of string, and call your rooms! That I would work there, and solicit your opinion! There is an excellent reason you have found yourself in the madhouse, sir, and it is this: you have become a monster. A mad—” Johnson loses his words again in his rage, but then drives on: “—smutty shriveled thing, and no one will associate with you by choice. That is the truth of it.”

  James half-stands himself. His voice is sharper, harder now. “Mr. Johnson, please! He is ill. He is not himself, and cannot be held accountable for his actions. You must remember that. You must find the self-control that he cannot.”

  Johnson turns on him, and James actually averts his face from the direct blast of the man’s anger. “Hold your tongue as well, Boswell! He will know what he is, I tell you! He will know what he is!” Johnson wheels back, and takes a heavy step toward me, daring me almost. His arms are held out at his sides, and he is a great physical presence in the small space. He comes forward swaying very slightly, like a bear nearly too heavy to move on its hind legs.

  “That is why you have been locked away, John Boswell, because you would force yourself on a society that has made the decision to dispose of you. And dispose of you we must, because you corrupt what you touch. Love you, sir? Love you? I could sooner love a maggot curling in my porridge. You would match wits with me? You would attempt to convince your brother that it is I who deals in lies and delusions and trickery?”

  He takes another half-step. He realizes that he is skirting the line where I must defend myself, but he is determined to push me, to push his way out of this situation entirely if he can.

  “For the love of God, look no further than your own two hands! Look at the objects in your two hands. Do you not find it at all strange that a young man such as yourself, busted from the Army, with no claim to inheritance, without work and apparently without a father’s allowance, should be in possession of two pistols cast in solid gold? Even plated in gold? Truly, how could you come by such weapons?”

  Of the thousand different ways James or Johnson might have taken the conversation, this I could not have predicted. He might have settled as easily on my boots, and how I came by them. I cannot fathom his meaning for a moment.

  But then I have it: he means to imply that I have stolen them. And that therefore I am no better than a common criminal, no agent of justice, but a petty thief.

  And while I don’t owe him an answer, I cannot help myself. “I told you I had them from a goldsmith in Parliament Close. They cost nearly every guinea I had. And every guinea I could secure from my father. Money that was meant to last out this year.”

  Johnson has balled his white hands into fists, each as big as a cannonball. He is still standing in front of me, nearly over me, and I am tallying each move of his muscles.

  He points his finger at me, his long fat finger, points it directly in my face.

  “You are deluded, I tell you. Can you not see that? Your weapons are precisely the sort a man such as yourself would be expected to carry. Two hunks of cheap metal. You might buy both for ten pounds, and have the case thrown into the bargain.”

  He thrusts his finger down toward my hand now, his entire arm shaking as he does so. “Your brother will say nothing because he would not rouse you from your sleepwalking. He is afraid you might be injured somehow in the waking. That is because your brother knows what it is to love, sir. That is because your brother is twice the man you will ever be. Not because he is eldest. Not because he stands to inherit, but because he deserves to inherit. That is why he cannot bring himself to tell you.”

  I will not look down, for it is a trick, no more. I remember purchasing the guns at the goldsmith’s shop in Edinburgh, haggling over price. In the last months, I have sat for hours in my rooms, cleaning and polishing them, fitting them for the purpose I had in mind.

  A trick, and a child’s trick, at that. Johnson is just close enough to rush me if I shift my attention, and he has fooled me once tonight already.

  But in the end, it is not really a matter of choice. His taunting has pulled a thread now hanging loose in my mind, and finally I steal a glance down at the dags in my fists. Only to find them gone.

  And in their place, two plain pistols of scratched gun-metal black. Guns without decoration, carving or style. Leaden, mere things. They give back none of the lamplight.

  I hear Johnson give a short bark of triumph.

  And that is something the thing inside of me will not bear, and it takes what it wants. My right arm snaps up, perfectly level with Johnson’s big chest, and before I can complete a single thought, it has pulled the trigger.

  But Johnson is no longer standing before me.

  He is careening away, just as the hammer falls, and in the muzzle flash I see that it is James who has slammed him aside at the last instant, James whose improbably rushing body now occupies the space before the gun’s barrel. James who will die. He has saved his King, after all.

  None of this matters, however, because the gun does not fire.

  It explodes in my hand instead.

  AND THEN I am lying on the floor of the shanty, looking up at the ceiling. James and Johnson are gone away, and there is a horrible ringing silence. I cannot feel my right hand, but my chest is on fire. Sulfur smoke hangs still in the air. I manage to bring up my left hand, then to swipe the tips of my fingers lightly over the flames in my chest. And they come away vivid bloody red.

  But the cause and the effect of it escape me. I cannot seem to piece together what has happened, for some reason. My mind is dull. It is as though, rather than some shard of the pistol exploding into my chest, my heart itself has exploded out of it.

  SOMEONE IS TOUCHING my face, carefully cradling my head. I open my eyes. It is the lark, down on his knees next to me. The black cloth he was wearing is gone, and his eyes are bright with tears. His dusty skin is pale in the lamplight. He never left, even when I insisted upon it, but waited and kept watch somewhere out in the dark timber-yard, in the wet and the miserable cold, all this time.

  He brings his face close to mine, looking into my eyes, and then he presses his lips quickly to mine. And suddenly I know why he could not bring himself to leave.

  “I tried to tell you,” he is saying, berating me softly, for he believes me dead or too near death to matter. “Tried to hammer it into your bony skull. But you wouldn’t have me stay, couldn’t have us seen together even by those two. Not by the great and powerful, even knowing what they are and what they’ve done to you. Stubborn, hard-hearted, stuck-up bastard, you are. Can never be troubled to listen, not for a minute. ’Tis always done your way, isn’t it?”

  He runs a fingernail along my cheek, traces the curl of my ear. “I was welcome at night, and come daylight what was I then? Bit of trash bobbing out in the flood. Wouldn’t notice me on the street. Pretend we was strangers. But you needed me, and I told you all along. All along.”

  He taps me on the forehead with his neat fingernail, for all the world as though he means to remind me, for the next time round. “You needed me all the way from dawn to dark, too, and that’s the truth of it.”

  And I remember it all now, this man and how I know him, and it has indeed been the saving of my life. I remember again the alcove on London Bridge, and in it, there in the gloom, sits this young man, offering no harm of any sort, hesitant himself even to say hello.

  The lark was not the only man I met in those first weeks walking London Bridge, but he was the last, that I know now. He was the last because he turned out to be what I needed, what I had been looking for on the
Bridge all along.

  In the weeks since, he has come to me nights straight from the water, come padding up Fish Street Hill, smelling faintly of salt, his legs and feet cold as river ice. More than once have I chafed the life back into those feet, those legs. We have talked late into the night.

  And it has not been chaste, not even the first night we met out over the water. Mostly it has not because I haven’t ever wanted it to be so.

  But that hunger has been no failing. Just the reverse. As I glimpse it now—as an entire set of memories washing in all at once—it seems almost another sort of fidelity entirely, a chastity shared by two rather than endured by one.

  I can see all of this now because the thing inside me is dead. For all of the things I have never known about it, will never know about it, I have known every minute of the last several years that it was there. Even in Plymouth, as I was telling my doctors I was come back to myself again, I knew it was there, in me. I could always feel it, listening.

  And now I know it is not. It is dead by its own hand.

  All of this I would tell the lark, but I cannot. Dragging breath through the flames in my chest is all that I can manage. And then there is the sound of men tramping heavily up the river’s edge toward the timber-yard, and he presses his thin lips once tightly to my forehead, and I hear his boots scuffing across the floor of the shanty. And he is gone. Back to the flood, forever this time.

  Leaving me alone. In this last, least bastard world.

  Coda

  21

  JAMES AND JOHNSON ran together as far as the Somerset Water-Gate before James could bring himself to run no farther. They had run past the Savoy Stairs, past the German Church, because as far as they knew an armed accomplice was still at large, and he had shadowed them and prevented their escape once before. And so Johnson’s plan was to reach the Somerset Estate, run up the lawn to the main house itself, and secure a party of guards there. Then they would all return in force, hunt up the other gunman and render me such help as they were able.