A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  The summer I was twelve I was sent in a Greyhound bus to a camp for boys. We lived in tents in rows on the grounds of a famous military academy. The massive, reddish brown buildings with their green turrets and gables were closed for the season, but the adult staff – the captains and generals in perpetual uniform – stayed behind to run the camp and earn an extra income. The campers, though younger than the usual cadets, were nevertheless submitted to the same military discipline. In fact our camping activity, beyond nature hikes and swimming lessons in a chlorinated indoor pool, consisted of nothing but drill and inspection. We learned to make a bed with hospital corners and to stretch the rough flannel blanket so taut a coin would bounce on it. Everyone owned precisely the same gear, stowed away in precisely the same manner. Shoes were placed just under the cot, each pair four inches from the next, each shoe of a pair two inches from its mate. Trumpets awakened us and sent us to bed. We marched to the mess hall where we were served cold mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage; more horribly at breakfast we ate bacon in congealed grease and scrambled eggs floating on hot water. After breakfast we marched double-time back to our tents, where we had an hour to prepare our quarters for white-glove inspection. Our captain saw everything and forgave nothing. He could find that single pair of kneesocks at the bottom of a steamer trunk that wasn’t properly rolled and he would hand out to the offender enough demerits to fill all his free time for the rest of the summer.

  He was a small, wiry man with black eyebrows so full that if they weren’t pressed or combed into place they would stick out in disconcerting clumps like brittle, badly cared for paintbrushes or could droop down over an eye in a droll effect at odds with the commands he was barking. His skin was a tan mask clapped over a face that always appeared seriously exhausted; the dark circles and drained, bloodless cheeks could be seen through the false health of his tan. I ascribed his wariness to irritation. In fact he was much older than the other instructors. He may even have been close to retirement age. He might have been ill and in pain and perhaps his irritation was due to his ailment.

  After lights-out he became someone new. Although he was still in uniform his tie was loosened, his voice seemed to have dropped an octave and a decibel, he had Scotch mysteriously and pleasantly on his breath, and his regard had grown gentle beneath its thatch of drooping eyebrows. He stopped by each tent, sat on the edge of each cot and spoke to each boy in a tone so intimate that the roommate couldn’t eavesdrop. My roommate was a tall, extremely shy and well-bred redhead from a small town in Iowa: someone who seemed not at all eager to confide in me or to seek my friendship or even comments, although he recognized that this life, at least, was worth enduring only if it remained unexamined. And yet his silences did not guarantee that he was altogether without thought or feeling. At unexpected moments he’d blush or stutter or in mid-sentence his mouth would go dry – and I could never figure out what had prompted these symptoms of anxiety.

  One night, after our captain had lingered longer than usual in his cloud of Scotch and then passed on to the next tent, I asked my roommate why the captain always stayed longer beside him than me.

  “I don’t know. He rubs me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Doesn’t he rub you?” the boy whispered.

  “Sometimes,” I lied.

  “All over?”

  “Like how?” I asked.

  “Like all” – his voice went dry – “down your front?”

  “That’s not right,” I said. “He shouldn’t do that. He shouldn’t. It’s abnormal. I’ve read about it.”

  A few nights later I woke up with a fever. My throat was so sore I couldn’t swallow. My sheets were wet and cold with sweat. Even when I lay still I could feel the blood running through my veins; a metronome was ticking loudly within me and with each tick an oar of sensation cut into the water and pulled against it. No, now I could detect a line of divers jumping off the prow to the right, the left, right, left – the columns of marching boys advanced across the floor of the chlorinated pool. I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat pluck a string in the harp of my chest. Was the night really so cold? I had to get help; the infirmary; otherwise pneumonia. My roommate was propped up on his elbow speaking giddy nonsense to me (“I like, I like, I like the Lackawanna”) until I opened my eyes and saw him serenely asleep, his face the cutting edge of the prow as it parted a sea of liquid mercury. The flow, clinging to itself, boiling but cold, had swept me overboard with a chipmunk who was singing snatches from the Top Ten through the painful red hole in his neck – I sat up. I could barely swallow. I whispered my roommate’s name.

  When he didn’t respond I put on my regulation cotton robe and regulation black slippers and walked up and down the raw clay roads between the rows of tents. Was that the first streak of dawn or the lights of a town? Should I wait till reveille? Or should I wake our captain up now?

  I walked and walked and watched the night sky phosphoresce like plankton in the August sea. Gold would glimmer at the horizon and then feed its way up through delicate glass circuits into the main switchboard, where it would short out in a white explosion that would settle into a fine jeweler’s rouge. Were those bats overhead? I’d heard that bats lived in the school towers. Here they were: blind, carnivorous and getting closer, lacing their way from eye to eye up the tongue.

  At last the captain heard my knock and came to the door. He had a whole tent to himself, I could see, and he was still awake with a mystery novel and a bottle of Scotch. He appeared confused – at least he didn’t know who I might be. When he’d unraveled my identity and figured out I was ill, he urged me to spend the rest of the night with him. We’d go to the infirmary first thing in the morning, he said to me. We’d go together. He’d take care of me. I had to insist over and over again on the urgency of my seeing a nurse now (“I’m really sick, sir, it can’t wait”) before he finally relented and led me to the infirmary. Even as I was pleading with him I was wondering what it would be like to live in this spacious tent with him. But why hadn’t he noticed me before? Why hadn’t he tried to rub me? Was I inferior to my roommate in some way? Less handsome? At least I wasn’t abnormal, I said to myself, glancing over at his haggard unshaven face, at his profile with its shelf of eyebrows in the darkness bright with mercury.

  The next summer I refused to go to camp until my mother lied and told me I’d be a junior counselor in charge of dramatics at a lovely place in the northern woods where practically no discipline existed and what there was would be waived in my case. I rode up north before the season began with the owner of the camp, who humored me (“Yes, well, you’ll have to decide which plays you’ll want to stage – you are the dramatics department”). After he said such things, he seemed to choke on his own generosity; his mouth would contract into an acidic kiss.

  We were driving farther and farther north. I sat in the front seat with the owner of the camp and looked out at the tall pines, so blue they were almost black against the gray spring sky. The road was the same color as the sky. When we came to the top of a gentle rise and looked down, the road below seemed forlorn and distant, enchanted into the shadows. But as we sped through the valley, the road came close and brightened and the crowns of the blue-black trees slid over the car’s polished metal hood. In the backseat behind me lolled a special camper my mother, upon the advice of the owner, had warned me to avoid (“Be polite, but don’t let him get you alone”). She seemed reluctant to explain what the danger was, but when I pressed her she finally said, “He’s oversexed. He’s tried to take advantage of the younger boys.” She then went on to assure me that I mustn’t despise the poor boy; he was, after all, brain-damaged in some way, under medication, unable to read. If God had gifted me with a fine mind He’d done so only that I might serve my fellow man.

  In this brief parting word of warning, my mother had managed to communicate to me her own fascination with the wild boy. The day had turned cool and the car windows were closed. The motor ran so smoothly that the t
icking of the dashboard clock could be heard. When I cracked the vent open I heard volleys of birdsong but the birds themselves were hiding. In the valley below, empty of all signs of humanity except for the road, a mist was curling through the pines. I didn’t really know the owner of the camp, and so I felt awkward beside him, ready to discuss whatever he chose but afraid of tiring him with my chatter. I sat half-rigid with expectation, a smile up my sleeve. And I felt the sex-crazed boy behind me who was half stretched out on the backseat, the sunlight from between the passing pines rhythmically stroking his body.

  After it got dark we stopped for gas and a snack. Ralph, the special camper, said he was cold and wanted to sit up front with us just to keep warm. There was nothing affectionate or come-on-ish in his manner to me in the coffee shop; I could tell desire and affection had not clasped hands across his heart. He was alone with his erection, which I could see through the thin fabric of his summer pants. It was something he carried around with him wherever he went, like a scar. In the dark interior of the car, brushed here and there by a dim, firefly glow from the panel, Ralph’s leg pressed mine. I was forced to return the pressure lest I lean against the driver and cause comment. When I caught sight of Ralph’s face in the magnesium explosion of passing headlights, he looked exhausted, mouth half-open, a thirsty animal whose eyes had turned inward with craving.

  The camp, when we finally arrived at midnight, was a sad, cold, empty place. The owner had to unlock a thick rusted chain that stretched from tree to tree across the narrow dirt road. When we reached an open field our car waded slowly, slowly through grasses as tall as the roof and wet and heavy with dew. At the foot of the hill glimmered the lake through a mist – more a chill out of the ground than a lake, more an absence, as though this fitful, shifting dampness was what was left in the world after everything human had been subtracted from it. I was given a bunk in a cold cabin that smelled of mildewed canvas; Ralph was led off somewhere else. As I tried to fall asleep I thought of him. I pitied him, as my mother wanted me to. I pitied him for his dumb animal stare, for his helpless search after relief – for his burden. And I thought about the plays I would direct. In one of them I’d be a dying king. In my trunk I’d brought some old 78s of Boris Godounov. Perhaps I’d die to those tolling bells, the Kremlin surrounded by the forces of the pretender, his face red and swollen with desire.

  There was a week to go before the other campers were due to arrive. Some local men with scythes swept their way through the overgrown grasses. Someone else repaired the leaking roof in the main house. Stocks of canned food were delivered. The various cabins were opened and aired and swept out. A wasp’s hive above the artesian well was bagged and burned. The docks were assembled and floated between newly implanted pylons. The big war canoes came out of winter storage and were seasoned in the cold lake. I worked from the first light to the last – part of my duty as a junior counselor. Ralph had no chores. He stayed in his cabin and came out just for his meals, led wherever he trudged by the big implacable bulge with the wet tip in his trousers.

  Every afternoon I was free to go off on my own. The chill still rose off the lake but at high noon the sun broke through its clouds like a monarch slipping free of his retinue. The path I took girdled the hills that rimmed the lake; at one point it dipped and crossed a bog that looked solid and dry, planted innocently in grasses, but that slurped voluptuously under my shoes. I’d race across and look back as my footprints filled with cold, clear water. A hidden bullfrog makes a low gulp and repeats the same sound but more softly each time under the steady high throb of spring peepers in full chorus. A gray chipmunk with a bright chestnut rump scurries past, his tail sticking straight up. Canoe birches higher up the hill shiver in a light breeze; their green and brown buds are emerging from warty, dark brown shoots. A hermit thrush, perched on a high branch, releases its beautiful song while slowly raising and lowering its tail.

  I came to know every turn in the path and every plant along the way. One day, late in the summer, I pushed farther into the woods than I’d ever ventured before. I clambered through brambles and thick undergrowth until I reached a logger’s road sliced through the wilderness but now slowly healing over. I followed that road for several miles. I entered a broad field and then a smaller clearing surrounded by low trees, although high enough to cut off all breezes. The sun burned hotter and hotter, as if someone were holding a magnifying glass over me. I took off my T-shirt and felt the sweat flow down my sides to my stomach as I bent over to pick blueberries from low bushes. The ground was wet. A huge bee hung buzzing, motionless, in the air.

  I was so happy alone and in the woods, away from the dangers posed by other people. At first I wanted to tell someone else how happy I was; I needed a witness. But as the great day revolved slowly above me, as the scarlet tanager flew overhead on his black wings to the distant high trees, as an owl, hidden and remote, sounded a hoot as melancholy as winter, as the leaves, ruffled by the wind, tossed the sun about as though they were princesses at play with a golden ball, as the smell of sweet clover, of bruised sassasfras leaves, of the mulch of last year’s duff flowed over me, as I crushed the hot, sweet blueberries between my teeth and then chewed on an astringent needle from a balsam, as I sensed the descent of the sun and the slow decline of summer – oh, I was free and whole, safe from everyone, as happy as with my books.

  For I could thrive in the expressive, inhuman realm of nature or the expressive, human realm of books – both worlds so exalted, so guileless – but I felt imperiled by the hidden designs other people were drawing around me. The tender white bells of the flower by the rotting stump, the throbbing distillation of blue in the fringed gentian, the small, bright-green cone of the Scots pine – these were confidences Nature placed in me, wordless but as trusting as a dog’s eyes. Or the pure, always comprehensible and sharply delineated thoughts and emotions of characters in fiction – these, too, were signs I could read, as one might read a marionette’s face. But the vague menace of Ralph with his increasingly haggard face, this boy at once pitiable and dangerous, who had already been caught twice this summer attempting to “hypnotize” younger campers and was now in danger of expulsion, who studied me at meals not with curiosity, much less with sympathy, but with crude speculation (Can I get him to do it? Can he relieve me?) – this menace was becoming more and more intense.

  After the other campers appeared and the summer’s activities had been under way for a week, I understood that I’d been betrayed. There wouldn’t be any plays for me to put on, and I had exhausted myself for no good reason with all-night fantasies of the rehearsals, the performances, the triumphs. My mother’s promises had just been a way of getting me out of the house for the summer. A few miles away my sister – shy to the point of invisibility in the winter, unpopular, pasty, overweight – had emerged once again into her estival beauty. She was Captain of the Blues, bronzed and muscular, her hair a gold cap, her enthusiasm boundless, her manner tyrannical (“Get going, you guys”), as though all she needed to flower was the complete absence of men and the intense, sentimental adoration of other girls. She’d always been able to command other girls, even when she had been a child and had ordered them to bring her belts for their own chastisement.

  Once my sister and I were out of the house, our mother was free to pursue her amorous career; would she present us with a new stepfather on Labor Day, someone too young and handsome to seem quite respectable?

  One afternoon, while the other boys were off on a canoe trip, my counselor showed me some “art photographs” he’d taken, all of a naked young man on a deserted beach. The cabin was quiet, the light dim as it filtered down through the old pines and the half-closed shutters, the blanket on Mr. Stone’s bed rough under my bare legs as I sorted through the large, glossy prints. I’d never seen a naked adult man before; I became so absorbed in the pictures that the cabin vanished and I was there before the model on that clean white sand. My eyes were drawn again and again to his tanned back and narrow, intricat
e, toiling white hips as he ran away from me through a zone of full sunlight toward a black, stormy horizon. Where was this beach and who was this man? I wondered; as though I could find him there now, as though he were the only naked man in the world and I must find him if I were to feel again this pressure on my diaphragm, this sensation of sinking, these symptoms of shame and joy I fought to suppress lest Mr. Stone recoil from me in horror as it dawned on him my reactions were not artistic. Was my fascination with the model abnormal?

  Mr. Stone inched closer to me on the bed and asked me what I thought of his art photographs. I could feel his breath on my shoulder and his hand on my knee. A thrill of pleasure rippled through me. I was alarmed. I stood, walked to the screen door, made a display of casualness as I stooped to scratch a chigger bite on my ankle. “They’re neat, real neat, catch you later, Mr. Stone.” I hoped he hadn’t noticed my excitement.

  At that age I had no idea that hair could be bleached, a tan nursed, teeth capped, muscles acquired; only a god was blond, brown, strong and had such a smile. Mr. Stone had shown me a god and called it “art.” Until now, my notions of art had all been about castles in the sand or snow, about remote and ruthless monarchs, about power, not beauty, about the lonely splendors of possession, not the delicious, sinking helplessness of yearning to possess. That young man pacing the beach – with knees that seemed too small for such strong thighs, with long, elegant feet, with a blur of light for a smile, a streak of light for hair, white pools of light for eyes, as though he were being lit suddenly from within that delicately modeled head poised on a slender neck above shoulders so broad he’d have to grow into them – that young man came toward me with a beauty so unsettling I had to call it love, as though he loved me or I him. The drooling adult delectation over particular body parts (the large penis, the hairy chest, the rounded buttocks) is unknown to children; they resolve the parts into the whole and the physical into the emotional, so that desire quickly becomes love. In the same way love becomes desire – hadn’t I desired Fred, Marilyn, my German professor?