A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Something about that child seemed so wise and cool but tender, and for a moment the idea of rebirth did seem convincing to me, for how else could one explain the wisdom of many lives, cleaned by the refiner’s fire, and placed large and bright and constant within this merest excuse for a body? I felt Tim understood all my own fears and hopes, understood everyone and everything. When I’d brush his hair and see the blue artery ticking in his temple or wash his face and observe the awakened capillaries in his cheeks rush full of bright red blood, or help him out of his shirt and into his pajama tops, as I glanced in that interval of nudity at the inhaled diaphragm pressing up and into the minute ribs, this live and breathing glove pulled over the cupped, inflexible hands of bone guarding his heart – oh, at such moments I sensed that only the thinnest tissue separated me from spirit itself and that the roar Tim was listening to was not far away but here, inside, here.

  Tim was the agent who humanized Mrs. Scott for me. If he loved her, if he could let her tickle him, if he could cling to her knee as she read to him, then she must not be a monster, all appearances to the contrary. When I dropped by their apartment in the afternoon she always had the curtains drawn and was always sunk into a stupor on an old, feeble couch broken in the shanks and bleeding from the arms. Mrs. Scott squatted heavily on this piece of furniture, her chin on her palm, as though she were Death meditating on its latest convert. Sometimes I’d want just to fly through, to kiss Tim or to leave my Latin assignment with her husband, but she couldn’t be ignored. She drank in all the oxygen around her and reversed the magnetism of all metals; one was drawn to her even by the fillings in one’s teeth. Her hair was black and dirty and cut into a pageboy only because hair must be worn in some style; undoubtedly she would have preferred it thick with twigs and matted with mud. She always wore a formless madras blouse flown like a flag announcing defeat over the battlements of her corpulent body. Her teeth overlapped. Her eyeteeth were unusually long and pointed and wet.

  Mrs. Scott was a poet. Her husband also wrote verse. It was understood between them that his lines were very learned but a bit dry and completely the work of the conscious mind, hence inferior. He was of the school of T. S. Eliot – classic, ironic, religious. Her poems, which appeared seldom but then cataclysmically after a night white with lightning, had been purloined from the danker, more sulfurous regions of the unconscious. She spoke with the lentor of alligators through skeins of Spanish moss white and frangible with death; epochs of prehistory bubbled voluptuously and broke with gluey smackings in the lower regions of her sinister art. On the day after one of her nights of vision I’d find her panting with fatigue on the couch, her eyes ringed in black, her smile slightly goofy with sanctity, a reminder that silly once meant “blessed.”

  I stood in front of the cobra throne, her couch, and said, “I understand from Mr. Scott that you’ve written a wonderful poem.”

  “Wonderful?” she asked, aghast, chuckling silently, her many teeth various beiges, yellows and browns, even the odd blue. “Did he say wonderful?” By now her body was heaving under the madras blouse with horrific scorn.

  “Well, I don’t mean to get him into trouble,” I said nervously. “That’s probably not the word he used; I just gathered that he’s crazy about your new poem.”

  The terrible silent chuckle continued behind clouds of smoke. The Cumaean Sybil swayed hysterically over the tripod.

  “Do you think I might hear it sometime?” I asked, my question unexpectedly sounding rude and trivial to my own ears.

  “Don’t make me read it today,” she begged. “Not today.” It seemed her energies, mortal after all, had already been taxed to the limit by creation.

  “Of course,” I hastened to assure her.

  “Help me up,” she said.

  I rushed to assist her. I took her hand and pulled. When she was at last standing beside me, breathing audibly, she let her eyes travel up and down my body in a surprisingly frank way. Then she scuttled off to the kitchen. I followed. She brewed us instant coffee. Sitting with a master’s wife discussing poetry or gossiping about the other teachers and kids struck me as “sophisticated,” that game in which grown-ups pretended I was one of them, that my opinion counted, indeed that I was autonomous enough to have an opinion. Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being. “Sophisticated” conversation with Mrs. Scott was itself inauthentic, of course, delightfully so, since by its very nature it prized artifice – a release from the vague, always changing but ever-stringent demands of teenage sincerity. I wanted to be sincere but I didn’t know how. I could find no method for it except when alone. Sophistication suspended this anxiety, since to be sophisticated is to adorn oneself rather than to strip oneself bare.

  Mr. and Mrs. Scott got to like me, perhaps to need me, and they arranged for me to stay up with them after lights-out and after little Tim had gone to bed. Outside their apartment the long corridors resonated with silence. We inhabited a cube of warmth and light and babble. Mrs. Scott (“Call me Rachel”) would descend from her mystic platform and could even become quite chummy. The heat in the whole dormitory would go off at midnight and we’d move to the kitchen and sit around the lit oven, its door ajar. We drank cup after cup of coffee.

  Soon Mr. Scott (“DeQuincey”) and his wife were confiding bits and pieces of their story to me. He came from a rich Boston family, father remote tycoon, mother perfectionist socialite, three older sisters, all wielding hockey sticks. Little DeQuincey hadn’t been able to keep up, nor did he feel at home in this boisterous female world. Various prep schools followed in a descending, depressing order of academic credibility. The unsavory names at the end of the list were interchangeable with those of mental hospitals or juvenile detention homes. Next, some real hospitals made their shadowy flight over his life (“Quince, don’t go into all that”). A bit of college, some analyst-hopping, more college, a degree in Latin, another breakdown. By this point he’d somehow strayed to Miami, Florida, where two saving events took place: he met Rachel and he converted to what he liked to call “the Church of England.”

  Night after night the story of their lives came together, as though in puzzle pieces, a clump of sky confining the still-empty silhouette of a tree, another piece shaped like a running dog but turning out to be a child’s elbow against four pickets in a fence. One passage, complete in itself but not yet oriented to the rest, would float wonderfully to its correct position on the board.

  Rachel had been brought up by her father, a Miami real estate investor of a cruelty that surpassed description, though incest, starvation and frequent beatings were hinted at. His evil nature I confused with his daughter’s poetic genius. Whereas DeQuincey sniggered, stuttered and shrugged his way through his gruesome account, never more than a wisecrack away from pain, Rachel refused to tell her story, but when she relented she proceeded with great gravity. Each of them, in fact, competed for my sympathy. One night I told the Scotts of my struggles against homosexuality and of my present effort to be cured through psychoanalysis. Although I maintained a flippant tone about sex, the Scotts both stood as I spoke, then came over to my kitchen chair, drew me to my feet and embraced me, tears in their eyes. “You poor boy,” Mr. Scott said again and again, searching my face for the stigmata of mental illness. “You poor, poor boy. But surely you haven’t acted on these impulses, have you?”

  It took a moment for me to realize they hoped I had only thought about sex with men but never actually engaged in it. I assured them I was very experienced, though I wasn’t. I exaggerated the depth of my depravity. Although I was content to accept their sympathy, I didn’t want them to pity me for crimes I had merely contemplated. My admission put them off a bit, as though the fact of sex were a coarse redundancy and the idea of it quite sinful enough.

  My confession spurred them on to more daring feats of self-disclosure. I learned
that DeQuincey had also been homosexual briefly, a period just before his marriage and conversion, a period adumbrated as a time of faltering, of humiliation, exhaustion and confusion, of bouts of madness alternating with briefer and briefer zones of lucidity, as an accelerating train leaving the station might roll faster and faster under dim lamps before plunging into the blackout of night. Now he was no longer homosexual, not in any way, nor did he ever experience even the slightest twitch of forbidden desire. This complete change he attributed to Christ and Rachel.

  The November night went on and on endlessly, exactly like that ghost train in my story, dim rolling stock gliding slowly over the clicking place where the tracks switched, the constant bass hum of that somnolent progress passing over that one tenor break, the riveted and rusting bulkheads emblazoned with the mud-spattered logos of distant places, everything stately as destiny. I could hear the night’s freight cars clicking past, and the sky shook out its hair, silver clouds backlit by the moon.

  In this measured silence Rachel told me about her own conversion from Judaism to the Church of England, an enlightenment she attributed to her chance reading of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and the simultaneous revelation that Jesus had quite literally died for her sins. She spoke with peculiar emphasis about the nails in Christ’s wrists and hands and she even drew a little sketch on the telephone message pad of how she thought the nails had looked (she’d been doing some research into Aramaic pig iron).

  When I nodded respectfully but with a visible mote of scorn in my eye, she quite accurately read my thoughts. “Oh, I see, you think. I’m some no ’count Baptist, huh, some raving redneck?” She spoke with an unaccustomed crudeness.

  “Well, I respect your religion,” I spluttered, “but I’m a bit of an agnostic personally and I –”

  “You’re full of shit,” she told me. She was looking right into my eyes. She was breathing emphatically, as though breath were psychic italic marks. She’d pushed her pageboy back from her face and shoved the sleeve of her madras blouse up to expose a pale biceps. She was halfway up out of her chair and leaning toward me. “Shit,” she said, her eyes darting for a second up to some invisible cue card before fixing me again. I felt she was torn between shyness and holy fury. “Jesus died for you,” she said, “and that’s something the greatest poets, Eliot and Dante and Donne, that’s something they knew – and they weren’t Florida crackers.”

  “Bravo,” DeQuincey whispered in awe. He turned to me with an isn’t-this-gal-great? grin – “She’s done it again, she’s really done it this time” – and he shook his head in admiring disbelief at the sheer wacky brilliance of his wife’s spiritual daredevilry.

  Exhausted by her performance, she shrank back into her chair, then rose and toddled off to the dark bedroom beyond. The moment DeQuincey and I were alone he stiffened, which I attributed to the embarrassment he must be feeling about his confession to me of his homosexual past. Not that he was attracted to me, nor I to him, but the possibility of attraction existed now and our sexual self-consciousness richocheted like sunlight in the Hall of Mirrors.

  That autumn with the Scotts I remember as a tender haze of tiredness, as the sight of their bright windows projecting a lattice of cross-barred shadows on flower beds filled with chrysanthemums, then dead leaves, then snow. The talk was continuous, it lasted for months, with interruptions only for our lives, which we grabbed at in short, obligatory snatches. Even during the day I’d pop in for ten minutes before lunch or on my way to class. I’d find Rachel foundered on her couch, a bilingual volume of Rilke cast aside, the air around her streaky with angelic transits.

  More and more I was spending my long afternoons with Rachel rather than with my old friend Howie. Over the summer Howie had grown taller and his skin had cleared up. A broad pair of shoulders had been clapped like football padding on to his previously sloped body. Last year he’d worn his fussy, dandified clothes from Paris even when he was alone in his room, and I had often found him rooting about in sachet-scented drawers full of paisley foulards, mauve pocket squares, silk shirts, horrible black garters and knee-length ribbed stockings. Now everything was different. Now he was getting himself up in button jeans, cowboy boots and bright checked shirts, a style that flattered his newly acquired height and slimness. He still wore his crooked horn-rimmed glasses (which looked preposterous the one time he donned his ten-gallon hat in my presence), he was still shy and still refused to undress in front of me or even to walk about in his underwear, but this shyness, so to speak, had now gained confidence and he no longer needed to disguise his shyness as belligerence.

  Along with his cowboy clothes he had taken up a gentle Western manner. No longer did he inveigh against Jews in high finance, he no longer denounced our idiot teachers, parents, classmates, the entirely barbaric hemisphere we were unfortunate enough to have been born on. The Juliette Greco record had been banished in favor of one by the black folk singer Odetta. Howie himself had taken up the guitar and he favored the old songs of the IWW period. His change in height had led to a change of wardrobe that had in turn inspired a change in his politics. No longer did he pore over hagiographies of the Fuhrer; now he was reading Emma Goldman’s Living My Life. And this change was as temperamental as ideological, for suddenly he seemed sensitive to the labor of the many gardeners and cooks and janitors at Eton who were always in the background of everyone’s snapshots and who maintained the miles and miles of grounds. We’d stroll past a frosted-over greenhouse on a cold November afternoon and through the cloudy glass we’d see the Scottish gardeners hovering and stretching and reaching as they bedded down bulbs for the winter or repotted plants or misted giant tropical ferns, and Howie would start grumbling about the unfairness of things: “Why should they have to work so hard to make things beautiful for us?” I felt like pointing out that a gardener’s life was pleasantly varied by the seasons and offered chances for self-expression and in any event was a skilled craft, but Howie’s sympathy for what he called “the poor” came as such a welcome relief to last year’s fascism that I scarcely wanted to discourage it. Any sign of suffering moved Howie, even to the point of tears.

  He was also treating me with kindness and for the first time was willing to listen to me when I talked about my shrink or my homosexuality or my infatuation with the Scotts, although he was dubious about most of my enthusiasms. He thought psychoanalysis was a terrible waste of money and breath. As for homosexuality, he didn’t know what to think about it. Last year he had told me with a saurian little smile that the Fuhrer had liquidated Ernst Rohm for his “inversion.” But now all of Howie’s views were becoming mammalian. I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I’d accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he’d felt about the way he looked. If he couldn’t participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he’d burn the tents and poison the wells.

  This intransigence had now given way to a new optimism and tenderness and a gracious, civilized uncertainty. “I don’t know what to say about homosexuality,” he said to me as we kicked our way down a long hillside of autumn leaves that crackled like the bright, cast-off shells of boiled crustaceans. “But at least you have some sort of sexuality. And you’ve actually had some sex. Which is neat, if you think about it. Not many kids can claim as much.” We were heading toward a Japanese stone lantern half mossed over beside a bridge wreathed in mists rising from the stream that fed into the man-made pond, empty now but in warm weather the home of corpulent, whiskered white fish freckled with pale brown spots. “Now, as to these High Church Scotts of yours, they seem like fanatics to me. Of course, they’re fascinating, I can see why you like them.” He compared them to characters in Proust, but the names meant nothing to me. I envied him his Olympian sureness in placing people according to the typology of classic fiction. I, too, would read Proust someday, but only after I’d mastered Pound, Moore, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Dante and all the other poets the S
cotts discussed every night.

  The talk with the Scotts was not exclusively literary. When we were alone, Rachel would confide in me how much she despised DeQuincey, how unworthy of her he was and how she longed to escape him and to remove little Tim from his debilitating influence. “DeQuincey’s just a creep, weak, ineffectual. You can see it for yourself. I hate him.” She lowered her head and her eyelids fluttered disquietingly as she spoke; she was ashamed of both her husband and her spleen.

  It dawned on me (or rather sunset on me, for this recognition felt old, familiar, auburn) that Rachel loved me or would have had she met me at some more favorable moment in her life or mine, or had I been even a few years older. All these objections, and her proud fear of exposing her love to someone who might not welcome it, made her break off, sigh, fidget with her hair, strum the Duino Elegies and squint into already feeble sunlight further filtered by drawn curtains. That distant, scarcely audible whistle must belong to a coach on the playing fields half a mile away. Her chair creaked. Tim materialized, rubbing sleep and fever out of his eyes. He’d been kept home today with the flu. Without hesitation he climbed up onto my lap and butted his head dully, stubbornly against my chest, frustrated because he was sick. I sipped the hot coffee and smiled inwardly at the thought of this wife and this son I’d acquired, these phantom dependants. Sometimes I caught DeQuincey sneaking an unpleasant glance at me, but I knew he would never exile me or even antagonize me, for he needed me to placate his implacable wife. Once, only once, on a Saturday night we three drank two bottles of wine and we let the talk drift to sex. “Yeah,” DeQuincey said, “Rachel’s got her fantasies. She’d like –”

  “Shut up,” Rachel said without any particular emphasis. An incongruous smile flickered over her features. “Just shut up.” The smile suggested she was anticipating his next move, as a sitter lights up the moment before he is finally shown his portrait.