Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘I’d invite you in for a drink,’ he said, ‘but as you can see, we’re just on our way out.’ He was small-featured and well-groomed, with a short brown beard, though his hair was thinning on top and the hand in which he held the tie was veined and liver-spotted. The way he rested on the edge of the door also suggested a little the weakness of age. Behind him the hallway led in beige tiles to a well-lit kitchen – by the looks of it, recently installed. An expensive, comfortable, not particularly attractive house.

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I’m on my way out to dinner myself. But I gave her my word. I said I would knock on your door and now I have.’

  ‘What a shame. She should have warned us.’ For a moment he looked at me, shrewdly enough. His face had none of the cheerful softness and vagueness of Kelly’s face, which must have come from her mother. His accent was gently southern. ‘Is there anything she wanted you to tell me? I spoke to her on the telephone yesterday.’

  ‘She wanted you to hear from someone who had seen her that she’s doing fine.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said.

  And that was that. I walked back down the hill, under the light of the street lamps, full of some strong feeling that was partly embarrassment and partly something worse. My father was watching television, half-asleep, when I came in the back door; but I woke him, and the four of us climbed into the car and drove to dinner. We went to a place we had been going to since I was a kid, one of the first true Mexican restaurants in Austin, and were seated in a corner of the grand old-fashioned dining hall, which was more like a courtyard than a room, with tiled floors and potted trees and tables lit by lanterns. At dinner my mother wanted to return to her argument with my sister. She felt guilty; she wanted to make herself understood. She wanted to understand herself, she said.

  ‘I don’t know what it is. I have been trying to work it out. And then I thought of course I don’t like to hear that you’re miserable. That’s only natural. But you’re not, are you? Do you remember when you were thirteen or fourteen, you wrote those terrible poems. I only remember their titles, the blood and the pounding, the city of sorrow. From reading too much Edgar Allan Poe. For a while I used to worry about you, but then I thought, it’s only dressing up. And that’s all this is. Dressing up in ordinary clothes. You don’t look unhappy to me.’

  ‘How do you know how unhappy he is,’ my sister said.

  I never sleep well before a flight and I made the mistake after dinner of going to bed too early. Then I woke up at one o’clock, wide awake, with the light of the back porch in my eyes. I could see from the window-blinds that my father was still watching television. A flickering private glow. Or at least that the TV was on while he slept on the couch. Around two or three I drifted off, very shallowly, and woke again at six in the middle of a dream, perfectly aware of what it was I had been dreaming. I had been dreaming about Kelly – a knock at my door. She had come to my office again, but without her daughter. I invited her in, and she sat down in the office armchair and took off her shirt. Her bra looked white and uncomfortable against her white skin. What are you doing, what do you want, I said angrily and woke up. Probably I was angry about the embarrassment of meeting her father, and when my heart stopped racing, I felt relieved to have done nothing wrong, even in my dreams. But not only relieved – it seemed a little strange to me, as I made my sleepless way to the airport (my father drove me) and waited in all the places you wait in an airport, that even in my dreams I had undressed her and turned her away.

  *

  When I got back to Boston I called up an old college roommate of mine whose father works at the Globe. I wanted to find Mike Scanlon, the reporter who covered the story of Peter’s dismissal from Beaumont Hill. Maybe he could give me some clue about how to get in touch with Lee Feldman. The Globe was just then going through a difficult time. There were cuts and strikes; Scanlon,. it turned out, was one of the people who had taken early retirement. The first address they gave me for him was an apartment on Mass Ave, somewhere in Back Bay. But the woman who answered his phone had never heard of Mike Scanlon. She had moved in a few months ago and didn’t know anything about the previous tenant except that he left his grey sports socks behind one of the radiators. I called my friend’s father, who asked around the newsroom and came back with an address in Winthrop where, someone said, Scanlon grew up and used to spend his summers.

  There was no phone number for this place, so I got in the car one Saturday afternoon and drove out to find him. It’s a half-hour drive from Cambridge to Winthrop and it took me two hours. Two hours untangling the knots of Boston’s highways. Winthrop itself is on a spit of land on the far side of Logan airport. It has beaches out to the Sound and beaches towards the harbor where you can watch the planes fly in so low and loud it’s hard to suppress an instinct to duck. In parts the land isn’t much wider than a mile, and the ugly 50s clapboard houses built on the one road running through it have views to either side of water – of ocean out the front, and bay out back, with its piers and private boats. There’s a little hill to the north where the houses pile up more colorfully, and to the south an old cemetery and a new industrial complex. Scanlon had one of the houses between shore and shore. Most of these are summer places, boarded up in winter against storms. Their front porches are stacked with chairs and boating equipment. Scanlon’s house had a car in front and dirty boots on the steps.

  He came to the door in his socks when I rang the bell. A shabbily bearded man in his late fifties, one of those beards where the grain of the hair runs constantly into little knots and looks painful to shave.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I told him that Don MacGillis from the Globe gave me his address; I wanted to follow up on a story he wrote some twenty years ago.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The house was in better shape than I expected, dirty and cluttered, but arranged with some taste. Shakerish furniture; William Morris wallpaper and curtains. Old-fashioned dark green linoleum floors in the kitchen and painted wooden boards in the sitting room. There were views to either side of water and sand and drifts of snow on the sand. It was the house he grew up in, he said. When his mother died he used it as a summerhouse. After quitting the Globe he couldn’t afford to keep up the apartment in town, so he moved in full-time. That’s why he had too much stuff: too many bookcases and rugs and side tables and chairs. It was cold inside and he wore a thick button-down shirt and Boston College sweatshirt on top of jeans.

  The radio was tuned to NPR when I came in and he left it on the whole time I was there, about an hour. Every few minutes an airplane landed or took off, loud enough to make the radio unintelligible. He made coffee and we sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I hope I’m not stopping you from doing anything.’

  ‘This is mostly what I do,’ he said. ‘What story?’

  So we started talking about Lee Feldman. He remembered Lee Feldman perfectly well. He interviewed him first over the phone and afterwards they met up several times in person, first at a coffee shop in Providence, a few minutes’ walk from his dorm room, and afterwards in Boston. Feldman got stir-crazy in Providence, where there wasn’t much to do outside the university, and liked to take the bus into Boston on the weekends. These subsequent meetings had nothing to do with the original story. Scanlon liked the sound of the kid over the phone and met up with him for personal reasons. They had a brief sexual relationship. Brief wasn’t really the word. It lasted on and off for almost a year, but in that time they probably got together no more than six or seven times. Basically, Scanlon waited for Lee to call and then cleared his weekend whenever the kid wanted to come into town. He realized that any pressure he put on the kid himself would have made him look ridiculous. The affair ended when Lee stopped calling. Scanlon wasn’t particularly happy about it, but then again, he hadn’t been very happy at any point in the relationship. ‘Apart from the odd moment,’ he said. All in all he was better off out of the business and realized as much after a few mon
ths.

  ‘What was he like?’ I asked.

  ‘This is what I’m telling you. He had the strongest sexual presence I’ve ever been in the same room with. Aside from that, I couldn’t really tell you. He struck me as a deeply untrustworthy human being. This was no innocent kid, but to be fair to him, he never pretended to be innocent. That wasn’t his game.’

  ‘Did you ever talk about his relationship with Peter Sullivan?’

  ‘A little, at the beginning. Not much. Mostly what we talked about was Lee Feldman, and I’m sorry to say Sullivan didn’t have a very significant part in his autobiography. We talked about his father some. We talked about other boys. The truth is, I never believed anything he told me anyway.’

  ‘Not even when you were in love with him.’

  ‘I was never in love with him. But yes, I looked forward probably too much to seeing him and when I was with him I didn’t spend much time disagreeing, let me put it that way.’

  From the kitchen you could see through the window above the sink the airplanes sliding down the air with their tails down – first the sight of them, and then the sound of them approaching the house after they had already gone. We had finished our coffee but I felt he didn’t object to me wasting his afternoon. I liked him. He didn’t seem to me, in his own words, particularly happy, but he also didn’t seem to care much about his state of mind. And I wondered if maybe he had something in common with Peter Sullivan. If Lee Feldman had a type, and this was it: the older reserved unsocial unhappy educated Irish American.

  ‘Are you still in touch with him?’ I said.

  ‘Six or seven years ago I got a letter from him. Something to do with AA. I know he was changing his name – to the name he was born with, he said. Lee Sung Ho. He was also going through a religious process. Finding God. I held on to the letter for a week and then I threw it away. I thought, this I don’t need. But he shouldn’t be hard to find. The church he mentioned was in the Boston area. Lincoln maybe.’

  ‘How about Sullivan? Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘I know he died. The Globe ran a paragraph on him in the obits, and I did a little extra digging around. An overdose of Plaquenil, which he was taking for his arthritis. Strong stuff; there are also some links to depression. We’d run a story a few years earlier about a woman who killed her mother with these pills, ground them up and put them in her coffee. And then of course those books came out. I think I’ve even got one of them in the house, but I read them both. I thought they were pretty good.’

  *

  Meanwhile ordinary life went on. Winter turned into somewhat milder winter; March into April. The snow had melted and frozen again but more compactly. Parking meant driving up ramps of ice. Caroline and I talked less and less of impractical things, which wasn’t particularly noticeable as we always had plenty of practical things to discuss. How to persuade our daughter to sleep through the night. Who was picking her up when. What should we do on the weekend to get out of the house. I began to have fantasies of breaking down in tears in front of her (I thought about this a lot lying in bed beside her) but the closest I ever came was in front of our daughter.

  Our nanny, an old Cantabrigian, had a child of her own and on Wednesday afternoons, unless her sister could do it, she needed to leave early to pick up her son from school and drop him at swimming. This meant in practice putting our daughter down for a nap and sneaking out around three o’clock, while one of us came home early. Mostly me. My daughter at this time had a strong preference for her mother. When she woke up, she called out first for her nanny (since her nanny had put her to bed), and then for Caroline. Sometimes she didn’t complain when I came into the darkened room, but sometimes she did. Then began a process of negotiation. She could be very stubborn when she wanted. If I tried to lift her up she would writhe out of my arms. If I tried to talk to her she would jump up and down in her cot screaming. It was best to leave her alone but sometimes I couldn’t help myself. ‘What do you want from me,’ I would shout at her, matching her repetition for repetition. ‘Not you, not you.’

  It was possible sometimes to trick her out of her misery by offering treats. Usually cookies or candy, but I remember once, when we had run out of both, sitting on the floor of her room beneath the cot and sharing a bowl of cherries with her. I had to pick out the pits with my teeth before giving them to her through the bars. Her face was soon covered in red juice and I had the taste of the cherries on my lips and tongue. She had been screaming for ten minutes straight but was now very quiet. Just the noise alone was enough to set me on edge. When I stood up to get more cherries from the kitchen, she said to me, in her calm patient reasonable voice, Don’t go, and I sat back down in tears and had to compose myself in the dark so she wouldn’t notice.

  *

  Mike Scanlon had said it wouldn’t be hard to find Lee Feldman, and he was right. In fact, Lee found me. One of my duties at the Radcliffe was to give a talk on the subject of my project. These were public lectures; the college advertised them in the Harvard Gazette and put up fliers by the exits to Garden Street and Brattle. My turn came at the beginning of April. About thirty or forty people showed, most of them other Radcliffe fellows. They filled the first four or five rows of folding chairs lined up in front of what would have been the home-court basket in the days when the Radcliffe Gym was still a gym. Henry Jeffries couldn’t make it and sent his apologies. I half expected one of Peter’s old colleagues or classmates to ask a question or introduce himself, but no one approached me afterwards by the cheese and wine. Mostly I felt relieved to have the whole thing done with. It had occurred to me that someone who knew Peter wouldn’t like what I was doing to his life.

  A week later I got a note in my box, a proper note, written on Basildon Bond stationery and sent by the US Postal Service, from someone claiming to be Peter’s English teacher at Central Catholic High. Peter was, he wrote, ‘a good, quiet sort of student. I believe I have the distinction, if no other, of introducing him to the beauties of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury – a copy of which (one of the old small blue-bound Oxford editions, containing, I am rather ashamed to say, those “additional poems” that brought the anthology up to J.D.C. Pellow!) was my gift to him on graduation day.’ The note had a signature, which was illegible, but no return address or phone number. I phoned Gerschon to see if Peter had left behind any copies of Palgrave’s Treasury, and Gerschon promised to ‘rummage around.’ A few minutes later he called back, having found what I was looking for: a blue-bound edition from 1933 brought out in London by the Humphry Milford Press (‘publisher to the university’). There was an inscription, he said, which he read out to me:

  For Peter,

  On Graduation Day –

  Imagination, intellectual curiosity, and a sense of humanity – essentials for a creative life. I wish you a creative future.

  Fondly,

  Malcolm Longmann

  English Department

  Central Catholic High

  I looked up Malcolm Longmann in various Boston-area directories and found him at last somewhere in Alewife, a few Charlie stops from Porter Square. When I called him, though, he was reluctant to speak to me; he seemed quite shocked that I had tracked him down. He was retired, he said; he had no business with the school any more. It was only by chance he came across that flier for my talk. He had gone to sell a few old books to the Harvard Book Store, which his wife made him do at least once a year (and mostly in the spring), and seen it pasted in the window. The truth is, he said, his memory was not what it was. He remembered all sorts of things that had never happened and very little of what actually had. And then he had had so many students. ‘You have no idea how many.’ Lately he had tried to count them up. Several thousand at least. Probably I should have pushed him further, but a few days afterwards I got an email from Lee Sung Ho and forgot all about Malcolm Longmann, who must in any case have been close to ninety – I would have hesitated to push him hard.

  Lee’s note was perfectly pleasant
. He had heard I was writing about Peter Sullivan and found my address on the Radcliffe website. He thought I might want to know ‘what Peter was like, at that time of his life. I suppose you know who I am.’ At the moment, he was lodging ‘temporarily, until he could get fixed up elsewhere,’ at his pastor’s house, which was a very nice house with a large garden but a long way from anywhere. If I wanted to see him I’d have to come to him. He didn’t have access to a car – he was taking one of his ‘sabbaticals from driving.’ I wrote back to say that of course I would come to see him and we fixed a time and he sent me an address: in Lincoln, as Mike Scanlon had said, not far from Walden Pond. So on another Saturday afternoon, one of the first warm days of spring, I drove with Caroline and my daughter out to Walden, parked on pine-needles by the side of the road, and helped them carry a bucket, spade, spare trousers and a Thermos of tea down to Thoreau’s muddy beach. Then I left them there, in the mild sunshine.

  ‘I won’t be long. I’ll be back by lunchtime,’ I said.

  Feldman was staying with a family called Ogilvy, who lived on one of those large plots of land off the Old Concord Road. The house was a colonial salt-box, recently painted, with a porch built on at the back, jutting out into an English-style garden. Daffodils had sprung up in the long grass; there were still humps of snow under the trees. I parked in a lane of dirt; there were no other cars in the drive. Two modest steps led up to the front door, but the bell made no sound when I rang it, and I had to wander round to the back of the house and enter through the screened-in porch before I found anyone at home – a maid, who spoke no English, and called out very suddenly and loudly, ‘Lee Sung, Lee Sung,’ in the general direction of the stairway.

  Before anyone came down I had a chance to look around me. A quaint, pretty country house, low-ceilinged and dark, though the window-panes glowed green with sunshine. There was a seat in one of the windows, with a dirty flowered cushion; and an upright piano beside it, where the family propped its photographs. The only one I noticed was of a broad-shouldered young man with a moustache standing helmetless in his football uniform. Through an open door, the kitchen appeared brighter and more modern, and then Lee came out of it with a cup of coffee in his hand.