The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  There was a rapping on the compartment door.

  “Entrez,” announced Mrs. Warshaw.

  The conductor stepped in. Immediately Grady pulled back the curtain, splaying the light. Stephen’s eyes slotted open again.

  “Permit me to excuse myself,” the conductor said in tormented French, “but we are approaching the St. Gotthard tunnel. I shall now light the lamps and make certain that the windows and ventilators are properly closed.”

  “Bien sûr.”

  The conductor was Italian, a handsome, sturdy fellow with a thick black mustache, blue eyes, fine lips. Dark hairs curled under his cuffs, rode down the length of his hands to the ends of his thick fingers.

  Bowing, he stepped to the front of the compartment, where he got down on his knees and fiddled with the ventilator panel. As he knelt he winked manfully at Grady.

  “Oh, I don’t like tunnels,” Irene said. “I get claustrophobic.”

  “I hope you don’t get seasick!” Mrs. Warshaw laughed. “But never mind. When you’ve been through the St. Gotthard as often as I have, you shall sleep right through, as I intend to do.”

  “How long is it again?”

  “Nine miles!” Grady shouted. “The longest in the—” He winced. He had broken his vow.

  “Nine miles! Dear Lord! And it will take half an hour?”

  “More or less.”

  “Half an hour in the dark!”

  “The gas jets will be lit. You needn’t worry.”

  The conductor, having finished with the ventilators, stood to examine the window latches. In securing the one on the right he pressed a wool-covered leg against Harold’s knees.

  “Va bene,” he said next, yanking at the latch for good measure. (It did not give.) Then he turned to face Harold, over whose head the oil lamp protruded; raised his arms into the air to light it, so that his shirt pulled up almost but not quite enough to reveal a glimpse of what was underneath (what was underneath?); parted his legs around Harold’s knees. Harold had no choice but to stare into the white of that shirt, breathe in its odor of eau de cologne and cigar.

  Then the lamp was lit. Glancing down, the conductor smiled.

  “Merci, mesdames,” he concluded merrily. And to Harold: “Grazie, signore.”

  Harold muttered, “Prego,” kept his eyes out the window.

  The door shut firmly.

  “I shall be so happy to have my first glimpse of Milan,” Irene said.

  Why French for the women and Italian for him?

  They had been traveling forever. They had been traveling for years: Paris, the gaslit platform at the Gare de Lyon, a distant dream; then miles of dull French farmland, flat and blurred; and then the clattery dollhouse architecture of Switzerland, all that grass and those little clusters of chalets with their tilted roofs and knotty shuttered windows, like the window the bird would have flown out on the cuckoo clock … if it had ever worked, if Uncle George had ever bothered to fix it. But he had not.

  Really, there was nothing to do but read, so Harold read.

  Orpheus: having led Eurydice up from the Underworld, he turned to make sure she hadn’t tired behind him. He turned even though he had been warned in no uncertain terms not to turn; that turning was the one forbidden thing. And what happened? Exactly what Orpheus should have expected to happen. As if his eyes themselves shot out rays of plague, Eurydice shrank back into the vapors and died a second death, fell back down the dark well. This story of Orpheus and Eurydice Harold had read a hundred times, maybe even five hundred times, and still it frustrated him; still he hoped each time that Orpheus would catch on for once, and not look back. Yet he always looked back. And why? Had love turned Orpheus’s head? Harold doubted it. Perhaps the exigencies of story, then: for really, if the episode had ended with the happy couple emerging safely into the dewy morning light, something in every reader would have been left slavering for the expected payoff.

  Of course there were other possible explanations. For instance: perhaps Orpheus had found it impossible not to give in to a certain self-destructive impulse; that inability, upon being told “Don’t cross that line,” not to cross it.

  Only God has the power to turn back time.

  Or perhaps Orpheus, at the last minute, had changed his mind; decided he didn’t want Eurydice back after all. This was a radical interpretation, albeit one to which later events in Orpheus’s life lent credence.

  Harold remembered something—Huck Finn, he thought—you must never look over your shoulder at the moon.

  Something made him put his book down. Stephen had woken up. He was rubbing his left eye with the ball of his fist. No, he did not look like his brother, did not look like any Pratt, for that matter. (Mrs. Warshaw was correct about this, though little else.) According to Harold’s mother, this was because Aunt Irene, after years of not being able to conceive, had taken him in as a foundling, only wouldn’t you know it? The very day the baby arrived she found out she was pregnant. “It’s always like that,” his mother had said. “Women who take in foundlings always get pregnant the day the foundling arrives.”

  Nine months later Toby was born—Toby the Second—that marvelous boy who rivaled his adopted brother for athletic skills, outstripped him in book smarts, but was handsome, too, Pratt handsome, with pale skin and small ears. Toby had been a star pupil, whereas Irene had had to plead with the headmaster to keep Stephen from being held back a grade. Not that the boys disliked each other: instead, so far as Harold could tell, they simply made a point of ignoring each other. (And how was this possible? How was it possible for anyone to ignore either of them?)

  “Be kind to your aunt Irene,” his mother had told him at the station in St. Louis. “She’s known too much death.”

  And now she sat opposite him, here on the train, and he could see from her eyes that it was true: she had known too much death.

  Harold flipped ahead a few pages.

  Throughout this time Orpheus had shrunk from loving any woman, either because of his unhappy experience, or because he had pledged himself not to do so. In spite of this there were many who were fired with a desire to marry the poet, many were indignant to find themselves repulsed. However, Orpheus preferred to center his affection on boys of tender years, and to enjoy the brief spring and early flowering of their youth: he was the first to introduce this custom among the people of Thrace.

  Boys of tender years, like Stephen, who, as Harold glanced up, shifted again, opened his eyes, and stared at his cousin malevolently.

  And the train rumbled, and Mrs. Warshaw’s aigrette fluttered before the Colosseum, and the cracked glass that covered Trajan’s Column rattled.

  They were starting to climb at a steeper gradient. They were nearing the tunnel at last.

  From the Hartford Evening Post, November 4, 1878: Letter Six, “Crossing from the Tyrol into Ticino,” by Tobias R. Pratt:

  As we began the climb over the great mountain of San Gottardo our mulattiere, a most affable and friendly fellow within whose Germanic accent one could detect echoes of the imminent South, explained that even as we made our way through the pass, at that very moment men were laboring under our feet to dig a vast railway tunnel that upon completion will be the longest in the world. This tunnel will make Italy an easier destination for those of us who wish always to be idling in her beneficent breezes … and yet how far the Palazzo della Signoria seemed to us that morning, as we rose higher and higher into snowy regions! It was difficult to believe that on the other side the lovely music of the Italian voice and the taste of a rich red wine awaited us; still this faith gave us the strength to persevere through what we knew would be three days of hard travel.

  To pass the time, we asked our guide his opinion of the new tunnel. His response was ambivalent. Yes, he admitted, the tunnel would bring tourism (and hence money) to his corner of the world. And yet the cost! Had we heard, for instance, that already one hundred men had lost their lives underground? A hint of superstitious worry entered his voice, as if he
feared lest the mountain—outraged by such invasions—should one day decide that it had had enough and with one great heave of its breast smash the tunnel and all its occupants to smithereens …

  And Irene thought: He never saw it. He had been dead two years already by the time it was finished.

  And Grady thought: Finally.

  And Mrs. Warshaw thought: I hope the signora saved me Room 5, as she promised.

  And Harold watched Stephen’s trousers hungrily, hungrily. Glimpses, guesses. All he had ever known were glimpses, guesses. Never, God forbid, a touch; never, never the sort of fraternal bond, unsullied by carnal need, to which epic poetry paid homage; never anything—except this ceaseless worrying of a bone from which every scrap of meat had long been chewed, this ceaseless searching for an outline amid the folds of a pair of flannel trousers.

  Yes, he thought, leaning back, I should have been born in classical times. For he genuinely believed himself to be the victim of some heavenly imbroglio, the result of which was his being delivered not (as he should have been) into an Athenian boudoir (his mother someone wise and severe, like Plotina), but rather into a bassinet in a back bedroom in St. Louis where the air was wrong, the light was wrong, the milk did not nourish him. No wonder he grew up ugly, ill, ill-tempered! He belonged to a different age. And now he wanted to cry out, so that all of Switzerland could hear him: I belong to a different age!

  The train slowed. Behind the curtain Grady watched the signs giving way one to the next, one to the next: GÖ-SCHE-NEN, GÖ-SCHE-NEN. GÖ-SCHE-NEN.

  By such songs as these the Thracian poet was drawing the woods and rocks to follow him, charming the creatures of the wild, when suddenly the Ciconian women caught sight of him. Looking down from the crest of a hill, these maddened creatures, with animal skins slung across their breasts, saw Orpheus as he was singing and accompanying himself on the lyre. One of them, tossing her hair till it streamed in the light breeze, cried out: “See! Look here! Here is the man who scorns us!” and flung her spear—

  Darkness. Harold shut his book.

  As soon as the train entered the tunnel the temperature began to rise. Despite the careful labors of the conductor, smoke was slipping into the compartment: not enough to be discernible at first by anything other than its dry, sharp smell; but then Harold noticed that no sooner had he wiped his spectacles clean, than they were already filmed again with dust; and then a gray fog, almost a mist, occupied the compartment, obscuring his vision; he could no longer distinguish, for instance, which of the three little prints across the way from him represented the Pantheon, which Trajan’s Column, which the Colosseum.

  Mrs. Warshaw’s head slumped. She snored.

  And Grady pressed his face up against the glass, even though there was nothing to see outside the window but a bluish black void, which he likened to the sinuous fabric of space itself.

  And Irene, a handkerchief balled in her fist, wondered: Do the dead age? Would her little Toby, in heaven, remain forever the child he had been when he had died? Or would he grow, marry, have angel children?

  And Toby her brother? Had he had angel children?

  If Toby was in heaven—and not the other place. She sometimes feared he might be in the other place—every sermon she’d ever heard suggested it—in which case she would probably never get closer to him than she was right now, right here, in this infernal tunnel.

  She glanced at Stephen, awake now. God forgive her for thinking it, but it should have been him, repairing the well with George. Only Stephen had been in bed with influenza, so Toby went.

  Punishment? But if so, for what? Thoughts?

  Could you be punished for thoughts?

  Suddenly she could hardly breathe the searing air—as if a hundred men were smoking cigars all at once.

  Midway—or what Harold assumed was midway—he thought he heard the wheels scrape. So the train would stall, and then what would they do? There wouldn’t be enough oxygen to get out on foot without suffocating. The tunnel was too long. Half a mile of rock separated train from sky; half a mile of rock, atop which trees grew, a woman milked her cow, a baker made bread.

  The heat abashed; seemed to eat the air. Harold felt the weight of mountains on his lungs.

  Think of other things, he told himself, and in his mind undid the glissando of buttons on Stephen’s trousers. Yet the smell in his nostrils—that smell of cigars—was the conductor’s.

  Light scratched the window. The train shuddered to a stop. Someone flung open a door.

  They were outside. Dozens of soot-smeared passengers stumbled among the tracks, the visible clouds of smoke, the sloping planes of alpine grass. For they were there now. Through.

  The train throbbed. Conductors, stripped to their waistcoats, took buckets and mops and swabbed the filthy windows until cataracts of black water pooled outside the tracks.

  People had died. Her brother in Greece, her child and her husband in the backyard.

  There was no heaven, no hell. The dead did not age because the dead were not. (Still, Irene fingered the yellowed newspaper clippings in her purse; looked around for Stephen, who had disappeared.)

  And meanwhile Harold had run up the hill from the train, and now stood on a low promontory, wiping ash from his spectacles with a handkerchief.

  Where was Stephen? Suddenly she was terrified, convinced that something had happened to Stephen on the train, in the tunnel. “Harold!” she called. “Harold, have you seen Stephen?”

  But he chose not to hear her. He was gazing at the campanile of Airolo, vivid in the fading light.

  In Airolo, Harold looked for signs that the world was becoming Italy. And while it was true that most of the men in the station bar drank beer, one or two were drinking wine; and when he asked for wine in Italian, he was answered in Italian, and given a glass.

  “Grady, do you want anything?”

  Silence.

  “Grady!”

  He still wasn’t talking to them.

  Aunt Irene had gone into the washroom. She was not there to forbid Harold from drinking, so he drank. Around him, at tables, local workers—perhaps the same ones who had dug the tunnel—smoked and played cards. Most of them had pallid, dark blond faces, Germanic faces; but one was reading a newspaper called Corriere della Sera, and one boy’s skin seemed to have been touched, even in this northernmost outpost, by a finger of Mediterranean sun.

  Italy, he thought, and gazing across the room, noticed that Stephen, darker by far than any man in the bar, had come inside. One hand in his pocket, he was leaning against a white wall, drinking beer from a tall glass.

  Apart.

  He is from here, Harold realized suddenly. But does he even know it?

  Then the conductor came into the bar. Harold turned, blushing, to contemplate his wine, wondering when the necessary boldness would come: to look another man straight in the eye, as men do.

  Aunt Irene had at last emerged, with Mrs. Warshaw, from the washroom. “Harold, I’m worried about Stephen,” she said. “The last time I saw him was when we came out of the—”

  “He’s over there.”

  “Oh, Stephen!” his mother cried, and to Harold’s surprise she ran to him, embraced him tightly, pressed her face into his chest. “My darling, I’ve been worried sick about you! Where have you been?”

  “Can’t a man take a walk?” Stephen asked irritably.

  “Yes, of course. Of course he can.” Letting him go, she dabbed at her eyes. “You’ve grown so tall! You’re almost a man! No wonder you don’t like Mother hugging you anymore. Oh, Stephen, you’re such a wonderful son, I hope you know, I hope you’ll always know, how much we treasure you.”

  Stephen grimaced; sipped at his beer.

  “Well, we’re through it,” Mrs. Warshaw said. “Now tell me the truth, it wasn’t so bad as all that, was it?”

  “How I long for a bed!” Irene said. “Is Milan much further?”

  “Just a few hours, dear,” Mrs. Warshaw said, patting her hand. “And on
ly short tunnels from now on, I promise you.”

  The Infection Scene

  Tremendous Friends

  Late in his childhood, Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas became best friends with a nephew of one of his mother’s neighbors, Lady Downshire: a boy with the extraordinary name (at least to our ears) of Wellington Stapleton-Cotton. This was in 1885. The boys went to different schools but spent their holidays together, so when Bosie was sent to Zermatt, in Switzerland, one summer, he made sure to cut his vacation short by a week in order to share the last part of it with Wellington. Though Bosie’s mother’s house was palatial, Lord Downshire, from whom she let it, had christened it “The Hut,” for much the same reason that wealthy Long Island families call their oceanside mansions “cottages.” Nearby stood Easthampstead, the really big house, where Lord and Lady Downshire held sway, and where Wellington, a frequent visitor, awaited Bosie’s arrival. But no sooner had Bosie returned than he came down with the mumps and was quarantined. Illness thus separated the “tremendous friends.”

  From his sickroom Bosie smuggled a note to Wellington through the agency of the footman, Harold, suggesting a plan. If Wellington were to contract mumps as well, they could share more than a week; they could share the entirety of their convalescence, in a common bed, and not even go to school.

  I don’t know what Wellington looked like. I do know what Bosie looked like. Bosie was a sickeningly angelic boy. In a drawing made of him when he was twenty-four, he still has soft blond hair, huge eyes with long lashes, a small, wet mouth that asks to be kissed but might bite. Indeed, so famous would this face become over the years that you might say it established a paradigm: beatific loveliness dissembling a corrupted heart.

  As for Wellington, I see him as being both stronger and bigger than Bosie, with dark skin, thin lips, a worried brow. Already he has small tufts of hair under his arms and on his chest. Bosie’s body, on the other hand, is covered in a downy fuzz. He is in the last flowering of childhood, whereas Wellington is in the first flush of adolescence, and thus subject, for the first time in his life, to lust. Yet lust is a mystery to him. He has no language for it. He is at the mercy of impulses that his Victorian education insists do not exist. In this regard he differs from Bosie, who possesses an innate familiarity with lust, even though he remains innocent of ejaculation. In other words, what Wellington feels but does not yet understand Bosie understands but does not yet feel. Therefore he can manipulate Wellington, using his girlishness as bait. He wonders: To what lengths can I drive Wellington? Could I persuade him to risk illness, infection, even death, just to be with me?