Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  She nodded; to my surprise she was almost in tears. ‘I feel a long way from anything I know here,’ she said. ‘But I know you.’

  *

  One of the benefits of the Harvard connection is that it allowed me to come into contact with the kind of people who might be useful to me professionally. These are all awful terms: connections, contacts, kinds of people. But a few weeks into my fellowship, I went to a reading at the Brattle Theater and ended up at dinner afterwards with several other writers and prominent editors – including the critic Henry Jeffries, who had recently taken a job at the New Yorker. A mild, handsome, balding, middle-aged Englishman. He had arrived in America ten years before, and we compared his first and my second impressions. ‘You must have had the sense,’ I remember saying to him, ‘as an ambitious young man, of always leaning slightly forwards, if you know what I mean. An uncomfortable position, if you have to keep it up long.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, kindly, ‘I do know what you mean.’ After a pause, he added, ‘You must be happy to be home.’

  ‘Well, I’m not really home,’ I told him.

  At one point, I succeeded in starting a more general conversation – on what was ‘essentially the subject of my fellowship.’ For a minute I held the table, feeling in my own voice something of the effect of my personality on others. What can we say about a writer from the way he writes? Or she writes? (Drink had made me fastidious about these things.) His moral qualities; his life. Jeffries had taught with Saul Bellow before his death and told a few stories about him. Mostly admiring; but after receiving the Nobel Prize, Bellow had turned to his son and whispered, This is why I was never around. For this. Or something like it.

  ‘I don’t even know what you win,’ I broke in. ‘Money, a plaque?’

  ‘I couldn’t say if they give you a plaque. But it’s a lot of money.’

  ‘And for that he ducks his duties as a father? When his writing is mostly about the big questions at stake in daily existence?’

  ‘I suppose you blame him for his marriages, too?’

  From the other end of the table, someone called out, ‘You can’t blame a writer for his marriages, God help us.’ Sam Hess, I think his name was. Forty-something, square-shouldered and – jawed and careless of his appearance; he was losing his hair. ‘A writer writes and sacrifices what he needs to.’

  ‘This is only because he’s been told it’s okay,’ I said, ‘by a long line of shirkers and delusionals. Because it’s a part of the culture that attracted him in the first place. But a guy like Bellow should have seen through it. The whole point of his work is the moral sympathies required to navigate your way through a decent life. He should have been great at marriage.’

  ‘Are people good at marriage?’ Hess asked.

  ‘Sure they are. And Bellow should have been a first-rate husband and father. With his sensitivities, and patience for the long game, and powers of restraint. In Herzog he comes up with ideas for children’s books, and these are great books: about the thinnest fat man, and the fattest thin man. And then he has to make excuses to his son? For the sake of a plaque, and money he doesn’t need?’

  Jeffries said, ‘I’m afraid that writers have their vanities, too. But it wasn’t the plaque, as you know very well. It was the work itself that drove him.’

  ‘As if other people don’t work. Who needs to work less than writers? Three hours a day is plenty. The rest of the time he can spend with his children, and cook and shop. Even if we don’t hold him to a higher standard and forgive him a divorce or two, I still don’t know what to make of five wives. Not every divorce is a failed marriage, okay; and people change. Life changes them. But I thought his special gift was character, I thought he was expert in the field of life-changes. Maybe what we should do is take another look at the work. Maybe that’s where the fault lies: it wasn’t profound enough. He needed to be deeper or greater. With more inner resources, he could have made it through ten years of dinner with children screaming and toys on the floor, like the rest of us.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ Hess said. ‘What’s it got to do with the work? A guy isn’t a bad accountant if he splits on his wife.’

  ‘But if he gets audited himself, you might think twice about leaving your returns in his hands.’

  ‘My example was a bad example. But you have to admit writing poses special problems. Writing what you think has a tendency to hurt people. Also, there’s a pressure to be open to new feelings and experiences, which isn’t always helpful to a marriage.’

  ‘That’s a nice way of putting it. Maybe there should be more writers who write about what it’s like not to experience very much, and not to feel new feelings. That sounds to me like the real human condition. Maybe this is what we need.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand you, but what you describe also seems to me a recipe for bad marriages.’

  ‘Is this really the subject of your fellowship?’ Jeffries asked me.

  On the walk home, I cooled down a little, and the flush of high spirits turned into something else.

  *

  Steve Heinz had told me that Peter’s mother was still alive, so I called him and got her name. Mary, he said. I would have preferred Orla or Clodagh, but there turned out to be only six Mary Sullivans in the Boston phone directory, and only two in Charlestown – which is where, I dimly remembered, Peter once told me he grew up. I tried both numbers and let them ring, twenty, thirty times each, imagining the hallways in which they echoed. Another week went by, with my head in Byronalia; when I was bored of it, I called. Once I got an answer from a woman who told me her husband was out, when I mentioned Peter to her, but I think it had little to do with the name itself. She was unused to the phone and suspicious of strangers.

  ‘He’s back this minute,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind ringing back.’

  The addresses listed weren’t more than seven or eight blocks apart – neither one far from the Navy Yard. So one afternoon, because it was sunny out, I put on my coat and caught the T to Haymarket.

  Charlestown is huddled between river and highway; to reach it on foot, you have to cross a six-lane bridge. This is a good place to appreciate what the 1950s did to Boston. What you see is an architect’s vision of human progress: the bright curves of access ramps; the strong splendid verticals of suspension bridges; billboards like movie screens. And between them, fragments of a low-slung Victorian terraced city: the North End. It’s only the noise that’s unbearable, and the nearer view of pot-holed roads and dirty cars. I came over on the wrong side of the bridge and had to chase a gap in the traffic to arrive at the relative quiet of Charlestown Square. From there, the old city emerges again: leafy streets, brick sidewalks and houses; steep hills.

  This wasn’t the neighborhood I imagined Peter growing up in, but Charlestown has suffered a sea-change since his childhood. It has become rich. The greasy spoons have been turned into coffee shops and the bars into restaurants. Most of the pretty row-houses have fresh facades; sometimes you can measure the effects of gentrification in the line of soot that separates one from the next. The first door I knocked on, after trying the bell and hearing nothing, had a basket of begonias hanging above it, still dripping from a spray. A tall narrow house with a dormer built on but in bad repair. Most of the other houses on the block, a side street that dipped then rose towards Bunker Hill, had been cleaned up and turned into flats. This was the only one with a single bell. About three o’clock in the afternoon, mid-October; I could see a dull light shining behind lace curtains on the second floor.

  A short, elderly woman came to the door. There was a broad stairway behind her with a red tattered runner running down it, fringed in gold brocade. An umbrella stand, containing several tall umbrellas; a chandelier with little electric candles, colored by hand; and a row of old-fashioned mail slots hung against the wall.

  ‘Are you Mary Sullivan?’ I asked. ‘I was a friend of Peter’s.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

 
‘Peter Sullivan. I used to teach high school with him.’

  ‘He’s dead now, why don’t you let him alone.’ And she closed the door in my face.

  There was a coffee shop on the corner, but I walked on looking for a stationers and ended up at a pharmacy, which sold gift-cards and envelopes. At the coffee shop, I ordered tea and sat down with a borrowed pen and tried to explain myself. It took me half an hour to come up with something serviceable, but in the end, I lacked the patience for a waiting-game and simply knocked at the door with the card in my hand. She opened it soon enough. I guess old ladies can’t afford to turn away too many opportunities for diversion. But she looked perfectly respectable and sober, in a flower-print dress and sandals, over thick ankle-socks. She had none of the whiskery, red, angry Irish quality Steve Heinz had described to me. Maybe she had cleaned herself up or was only drunk for the funeral. When she saw it was me again, she said, ‘You think you’re the first has come. On account of those books.’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’ve written you a card.’

  ‘Why don’t you just spit it out, since we’re standing here.’

  ‘Do you want me to read what I wrote?’

  ‘What’s a matter with you, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. Oh, give it me, give it me.’ She took it out of my hands and squinted at it, while I fidgeted like a boy on the stoop. At last she said to me, ‘So it’s you I have to thank. You might as well come in.’

  A little alcove had been carved out under the stairs, with a desk and a bell on it, beside a visitors’ book. There was a small black-and-white TV, no bigger than a shoebox, showing a baseball game. The Red Sox were in the playoffs, and the voice of the commentators carried through the house, in spite of the soft carpeting, to the back of the long hall where the kitchen was. There were flies, and a few slices of cake left on the counter, on a stand, under a mesh hood – ornamented by daisies, the kind of thing I had seen only in antique shops. The window over the sink showed a tree in the garden in front of a chain-link fence, but no grass or sunlight. To let in air, the back door had been propped open by one of those dull wire crates Coke bottles used to come in.

  ‘Did you always take lodgers?’ I asked her. ‘Even when Peter was a boy?’

  ‘What do you think this is, a lodging house?’

  ‘I assumed, because of the guest-book …’

  ‘Of course it is. What did you expect us to do? A house this size and only one boy to show for it. Now would you like tea?’

  By the time she had made a pot and set it down on the table with two hands, she had decided on the line to take with me. I showed her the copy of A Quiet Adjustment I had brought along, the hardback with the image of a woman’s head in the oval of a picture-locket; and she said, ‘You could put a vase on this and never worry. I suppose you get paid pretty well for your trouble. If you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘What are you asking?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. By rights this sort of thing should go to the mother.’

  ‘Believe me, I wish it had, Mrs Sullivan.’

  ‘So what do you get for it, a good thick book like this?’

  ‘It depends on how many you sell.’

  ‘Just look at it’ – turning it over in her hands – ‘at twenty-five dollars a go. You wouldn’t need to sell many, at twenty-five dollars. Mind you, there can’t be many’d go for it at that.’

  ‘It’s what people like to call a critical success.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Publicists. Authors.’

  ‘I didn’t know they were the same thing. So how do you make a living at it?’

  ‘I don’t. I have a job.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘At the moment I’m being paid to find out what I can about Peter.’

  ‘Is that a good line of work, is it?’ she said.

  It went on like this for maybe another hour; halfway through Mrs Sullivan brought out the slices of cake. She didn’t mind talking about Peter, she said, ‘within reason,’ but she didn’t mean to be cheated out of her rights. As for looking over the house, or seeing his old room, there could be no question of that. She didn’t deny she had some of his letters and books, and not a few of his things, but before she showed me anything I might make use of, she needed to get a fairer sense of the price. At one point she even asked me who to talk to, about an estimate; at her age, for this sort of thing, she didn’t know the right people.

  ‘There’s nobody,’ I told her. ‘Nobody but me.’

  I should forgive her if she exercised the right to her own opinion.

  Much of what she told me I could have found out elsewhere. He was born ‘in this house, in this kitchen,’ in 1942 or 43. Mrs Sullivan was still sharp enough to resent, with a very natural anger, any slips or gaps of memory. His father died in the war, and afterwards she let it be known that anyone who was clean and sober was welcome to a bed in her house, and breakfast and dinner, for a dollar a week – it started out, a dollar a week. Mostly young Irish men from the Navy Yard, at first. She kept her own bedroom and a sitting room, on the top floor; but there was a bathroom and three other bedrooms beneath her, and Peter didn’t need but one of them. It was good for him to have a few men in the house. Mrs Sullivan had three sisters in the neighborhood, and a mother (a widow herself), and it didn’t do for a boy to be spoiled by women. Not that he needed company. The worst she could say of him, though he was her own son, is that he kept himself to himself. You couldn’t get his face out of a book.

  ‘He had a great head for books, when I knew him.’

  The front door opened and closed, and someone went upstairs; but Mrs Sullivan didn’t mind it, so I went on. ‘Did he visit much? When he was out of school?’

  ‘Was he ever out of schools, that one? But he lived here at college, too, if that’s what you mean. And on his first job. And afterwards, again – when he had reason to. But who’s paying you?’ she asked me suddenly. ‘You said somebody’s paying you. Well, who?’

  ‘It’s something to do with Harvard.’

  ‘I like that, when they wouldn’t give him a penny.’

  ‘Is that where he went to university?’

  ‘I suppose they want you to ask me about that boy. What’s his name – Pak or Chung or some business like that. We might as well get all of that over with now.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I’d ask you or not. But if you don’t mind talking about it.’

  ‘I don’t mind setting the record straight. After all the foolishness people came out with, and not just in the papers. To my own face. This is what I have to say, and that’s the end of it. There never was girlfriends and there never was boyfriends. He never gave me any trouble, he was that kind of a boy – the kind that wasn’t much interested in anybody but himself. Some boys are like that, just as much as some girls. For myself, I never saw much use to the whole business. My husband liked it. But when he was dead, I can’t say I missed it, and Peter was just the same.’

  ‘Did he bring friends home sometimes?’

  ‘That’s what I’m telling you, he didn’t have much use for visitors.’

  ‘What about the lodgers?’

  ‘I hope that’s not what I’m hearing you saying. This wasn’t that kind of a house.’

  ‘I mean, did Peter make friends with any of the lodgers?’

  ‘Oh, he sat down with them sometimes, to the radio. He was civil. But nobody could get a word out of him, that’s how he was. Mind you, some of them tried.’

  She dismissed me at last, saying: ‘If you want more tea, you’ll have to go out for it. That’s all the cake and I can’t be bothered to brew another pot. What I want right now is to sit in my chair and watch the end of the ballgame.’

  ‘Can I come and see you again?’

  ‘If you want anything else, you can pay for it, like everybody else.’

  ‘Shall I leave you his book? I didn’t know if you’d read them.’

  ‘God help me, I tried,’
she said. ‘But it was Peter all over: the child couldn’t utter a natural word. A great fuss about nothing. The things used to put him in a state, you wouldn’t believe. But he was always nervous. He had it from his father. Now his father is dead and Peter is dead, and it’s only me again. But they never was much company.’

  On my way out, I looked in quickly at the sitting-room door. An electric heater in the fireplace was plugged into a socket by the mantel. There was a coffee-table with magazines spread out across it: a public room, with a TV under the window and the blinds drawn above it. A few comfortable chairs under lamps. I couldn’t imagine a boy feeling at home in it, with young men in the armchairs, smoking and watching television. No wonder he stayed in his room. Mrs Sullivan herself sat down to the little black-and-white box in the entrance hall.

  ‘You can see yourself out,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll come again.’

  ‘I guess you can please yourself.’

  A few things stuck in my thoughts on the long walk back, across the bridge again and into Boston, against the grain of traffic with the light in my eyes. A little colder now; the sun gave no more warmth than the glitter off moving cars. ‘One can’t be always among women,’ Peter had written. ‘It didn’t do for a boy to be spoiled by women,’ his mother had said. A half-echo. One of those phrases, probably, that knocked around his childhood and came to stand for a whole climate of feeling – for the awkward but necessary, almost formal relations of men and women in his mother’s house. Maybe one day a lodger had used it to get him into bed.

  It somehow consoled me to hear that he didn’t talk much, even as a boy. That this was a fact of his personality, along with the nerves and the self-containment. The love of books. He was present to me also in the bones of his mother’s face, in her natural pedantry. I reminded myself to look up where he’d gone to university. Boston College, it turns out, on a scholarship; but if Harvard had accepted him once, I don’t know.