“You know, I have an idea,” Danielle said, hearing her voice and reassured by its normality. “You might consider commissioning your cousin for those pages.”
“Bootie? You mean Frederick?”
“I mean the chubby guy with the glasses. Of course I do. He seems smart. And sweet. And a bit lost. He could do something on spec, say; and if it was any good, it could launch him. Don’t you think?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t sound that way. That’s the point of a job like that—you get to nurture young talent. That’s what you get known for.”
“Hmm. I somehow don’t think Frederick ‘Bootie’ Tubb is up to it.”
“You never know until you try. Give the kid a break. He’s your cousin.”
“You mean, out of the goodness of my heart?”
“Something like that.” Danielle paused. “After all, what’s the worst that can happen? You commission him, it gives him some confidence, you spike it, but encouragingly, and next time he’s readier to try. For someone else.”
“Maybe.”
“And you could commission Julius, too. For real, I mean.”
“I could. He seems to need the work. Talk about lost. I just feel like he’s gone, you know? Lights on but nobody’s home? I’ve been trying to figure out whether he’s really getting everything he’s ever wanted from this guy, or whether he’s so bound up with his fantasy—you know, a Long-Term Relationship—that he’s in the middle of some massive delusion.”
“How was that morning?”
Marina gave details of her outing with Julius. She said his eyes had been red, his nose runny. She said he looked gaunt. She said he hadn’t wanted to eat, and had shown little interest in the paintings. “And he smelled a little funny to me.”
“Smelled funny?”
“Like medicine, or something. Not dirty—just sick. Or something. Maybe it was just some new aftershave.” She sighed. “I really don’t think he’s happy, you know. Even if he thinks he is. You know how you feel like people have strengths and weaknesses, and they can choose to develop one or the other? It’s like he’s going all weakness, right now. It’s like his soul is evaporating.”
“Maybe that’s how it seems because we can’t see enough of him to see him clearly.”
“Well, whether his soul is actually evaporating or whether that’s our experience of what’s going on, doesn’t it amount to much the same thing?”
“Not, M. Really not.”
After Marina finally rang off, Danielle returned to her list of ideas, inspired, or almost: Update on AIDS, she typed. Who is most at risk today. Nicky wouldn’t want it. The youth trap, she wrote: What’s becoming of the new generation of college leavers, now that dot-coms are going bust? And again: What’s happening to twenty-something paper millionaires laid off by their dot-coms? As if there weren’t already a glut of such reports. She checked her e-mail. There was a message from Murray Thwaite. He was inviting her to meet a friend of his, an academic who was coming to town to lecture—something about a possible program idea, something worthy and expensive to pursue, about Guatemala. Useless to her. She checked the date on her calendar, and wrote back at once that she would love to come. Then she returned to her ideas file. Fathers and daughters, she wrote. Men and women. And again: Ethics?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A Helping Hand (4)
Less than two weeks in Manhattan and a new life was forming, organically, as if it were fated. Bootie couldn’t quite believe that the path could be so smooth. He couldn’t say he hadn’t expected it, because in some deep, inexpressible core of himself, where he didn’t feel awkward or uncertain, he had foreseen this. No: more than that, he’d willed it. This was the natural outcome of his flight from Watertown, of his plucked courage in calling the Thwaites from Amherst. Had he been given to imagining, this would’ve been the way he’d imagined it all.
First of all, there was Murray. No, okay, first of all, there was Marina. Inevitably, foolishly, he had fallen for her shine, her violet eyes, her throaty laugh. Her throat, even. She was at once natural, girlish, and then formal, almost fake. He loved just watching her, seeing her at an angle, from behind, the dip of her chin when she was thinking, or pretending to think; the way her hand came up thoughtlessly to play with her hair, then paused, as if she, or it, had suddenly observed itself; then continued, and performed the gesture anyway, in a completely different spirit. It was as though, he thought, he got to watch a girl becoming a woman in front of him. Or else, as though he saw a woman whose girlishness was irrepressible. She wasn’t always nice to him—moody, brusque upon occasion—and even that he sort of loved. He would pass her in the hallway as she took coffee and part of the paper back to her room, and she’d barely acknowledge him. It seemed, then, as though she was being real, the opposite of his mother, who was always puffing and flailing and smiling and trying to make everybody else feel better, as though she owed nothing to her true self. Even Marina’s indifference was sexy, and it suffused every night he slept at the Thwaites’, every morning he awoke there, with a faint haze of longing.
And second, there was Murray. What Bootie’s friend Don would call a stand-up guy. For some reason, that was the phrase that stuck in Bootie’s head, for Murray, like Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn, just the phrase that seemed to sum him up. He, like Marina, had a public way about him, a type of jokiness that seemed very New Yorky to Bootie, jaded and a little off-putting; but when you got to know him a little you could see that this was his way of protecting himself, because so many people wanted things from him, and he had to put them off, some of them, as smoothly as possible. Bootie could see, from the first night at the Beavors’, on that giant terrace over the park, how much in demand his uncle was; and he’d resolved from the first not to bore or bother Murray with unnecessary questions or solicitations. He’d thought he would do his best quietly to observe, to see how his uncle worked, to try to glean, at the dinner table, the procedure of his thought, and from his movements, from his study, the daily nature of his intellectual practice. Bootie, that is to say, knew not to overstep. He considered himself a pilgrim; he would have to move on, clearly, as no life could be as blessed as this one; but in the meantime—he’d thought from the beginning, which seemed, after so much emotion, far longer ago than a fortnight—he would be Murray Thwaite’s finest and most discreet pupil.
But he hadn’t been there a week, even—he’d been there five days, or just over, if one was precise—when, to his surprise, and joy, and all but tearful gratitude, Uncle Murray came to him. He did it so naturally, as though he weren’t extending a life-saving hand but merely making polite conversation. But Bootie could tell that when Marina had told her father about Bootie’s independent studies, Murray Thwaite had known exactly what Bootie was trying to do, exactly how meaningful, how vital, even, the undertaking was. He had known exactly.
Bootie had been lying on his downy bed, on his side, in the afternoon, sleepily reading Emerson. He was just beginning the essay “Nominalist and Realist”—“I cannot often enough say that a man is only a relative and representative nature …”—when a knock at the door, very gentle, prompted him to throw down his book, sit up, straighten his glasses and fuss at his hair, because fantasy—ah, fantasy!—had immediately proposed that it might be Marina.
But Murray had entered, stood near the highboy, ruffled his own hair, smiled. “Reading?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me. Just wondered if you were getting a little sleepy, lying in here.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Come next door for a bit. I’ll get you something to drink.”
And Bootie had spent the next hour and a half in Murray’s office, drinking scotch—very slowly; he didn’t care for the taste—at teatime and talking to his uncle as he had only dreamed, before now, he would talk to anyone. “I feel like I need to read these novels,” he said to Murray, “but I don’t really enjoy a lot of them. It’s just weird, you know,
why aren’t I reading, like, history? Which tells you more. I guess I figure I’ll read that stuff anyway, and this is more like homework; but the thing is, I’m kind of drawn to them, novels, I mean; it’s like a love-hate thing.”
“You’re absolutely right. You do need to read them,” his uncle said. “That’s what it means to be civilized. Novels, history, philosophy, science—the lot. You expose yourself to as much as possible, you absorb it, you forget most of it, but along the way it’s changed you.”
“But you don’t forget things.”
“Of course I do. Writing helps. When you write about something, when you really think about it, you know it in a different way.”
“I know. I’ve been trying—for myself, just for myself, to write essays. You know, papers, like for school, about my reading.” Bootie paused. Murray turned his tumbler in his hand. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but—” Bootie had promised himself he wouldn’t do this, exactly this. But he felt a compulsion, as if Murray were asking him to ask, as if Murray knew already—surely Marina had told him? She must have—and was keen to help; but required, as any decent mentor must, that Bootie stick his neck out.
“Ask, my friend,” Murray finally allowed him. “Whatever it is. I can’t say worse than ‘no.’”
“I wondered if sometime you’d be willing to read, maybe just one, even. Because to have your opinion—well, it … well.” Bootie looked at the floor.
“You flatter me. I’m no professor. Have you got one to give me now?”
“Now?” Again, Bootie had to stop. He hadn’t imagined such generosity.
“I’ve got some time this afternoon, right now. We could go over it together.”
Bootie pushed his glasses up his nose, fidgeted. “I’m just not … I mean, I’d love for you—but I want—” He took a deep breath. “I want to show you something I can be proud of. Something that’s my best work.” He felt himself blinking, as he did when fretful. “I don’t think anything’s quite right yet. Do you mind?”
Murray shrugged, smiled. He was so easy. As if all of life could be so comfortable. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said. “But why don’t you tell me a little about you.”
“About me?”
“Frederick Tubb. What you care about. Your ambitions. Your projects.”
Bootie nodded. He didn’t know what to say.
“Your mother told me you dropped out of school. But my sense is that you’re deeply scholarly.”
Bootie wondered only very much later whether there had been irony in his uncle’s tone. At the time, he’d felt himself sit up, open, as if to a magic word. “Scholarly. Yes, I guess. The thing is,” he said, “and my mother would never understand this, but school wasn’t remotely scholarly. Not scholarly at all.”
“Because?”
“Because the educational system is a farce.” Bootie flushed: such a pronouncement, and perhaps he had no grounds to make it. And again: he hadn’t, till now, told anyone what he thought. Nobody knew this much of him.
“A farce?” Murray repeated, in a gently encouraging way.
And Bootie told him. Not everything: even though he was powerfully drawn to tell about Harvard, he kept it to himself. Because he didn’t want Murray to pity him. Not at any cost. And he didn’t want Murray to think that Bootie envied him, that Bootie had been pining for something that Murray had. Better not to mention Harvard. But he did talk about Lurk and Jerk and Ellen Kovacs, and he talked about his revelation; and then he talked about his time at U Mass, how he’d felt tempted to stay, how he thought of it as a little like Christ in the wilderness (he thought Murray frowned, here), how that had prompted him to move on, but specifically to move toward Uncle Murray, who didn’t have any truck with bullshit, whose life was a template, a proof that you didn’t have to give in to the deceit and the mediocrity, ever. When he finished speaking, he felt hot all over. He could tell his cheeks were bright red.
“You flatter me,” Murray said again. “Please don’t. You’ll only be disappointed. But the point here is you, and what lies ahead for you, the great future that’s yours for the taking.”
“I don’t know about that.” It seemed Murray might be laughing at his nephew’s naked soul.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s all a question of attitude, Fred, my dear. Attitude.”
At the end of the afternoon, when Murray, who needed to go over the galleys of an article, showed him out with a warm hand upon his shoulder, Bootie had felt at once giddy and relieved, as if he’d been teetering on a high ledge and had been reassured of the waiting net below. He had spoken, and been heard, been understood.
From this he had taken confidence. He’d been reading, since then, not just the books he’d assigned himself, but Murray’s books, too—the essays in The Fat Lady, about public education, about illegal immigration, about the embattled legacy of civil rights, about the IRA and Sinn Fein (which was the first time he’d really understood about there being two countries in Ireland, with a border in the middle, and he’d learned, too, what they were fighting about, more or less)—and he’d been trying to write an essay about Pierre wandering after the fall of Moscow, about what it meant to be alone and at the limit in the middle of a historic event. It wasn’t going very well, in part, he thought, because it was all an idea to him. He couldn’t imagine being in the middle of a historic event, but felt it important that he try to understand it, in part because Murray Thwaite seemed to be so engaged with the world, to be linked somehow to every big event since about 1960, almost half a century ago. And he strove to listen, as much as possible, to what was said around him.
In this way, after Murray’s award, when he’d been invited by Marina to join the party, he’d heard Marina’s friend Danielle whisper to the sinister Australian guy while Murray was getting more wine from the kitchen, and Marina had gone to help, and five others were still talking volubly about Silvio Berlusconi, for some reason, she’d leaned over and whispered (or maybe he’d misheard? But he didn’t think so), “So, do you still think he’s a charlatan?” Bootie was almost positive she’d said “charlatan.” And then he’d seen the guy smile a small, slow, cruel smile, and gently shake his head, not as if to say, “Of course I don’t,” but rather as if to express amused surprise that she would bring up Murray Thwaite’s patent charlatanry in the man’s own living room.
Loathing had come over Bootie in a wave. Like sickness. He couldn’t fathom that Murray’s favored and fortunate guests would speak of him this way. Unless “he” was someone else? But who else could he be? He’d scanned the room, could think of no one else. And their conspiratorial intimacy, their artificial, cloying manner—he’d tried not to assume the worst about them, Danielle had been kind to him, after all; though he could tell at a glance that he didn’t like the Australian—made him powerfully aware of what he felt for his uncle. As if Murray were a limb, or the girl he loved. Bootie felt fiercely about the Thwaites. He wanted them to be his family.
The night following the awards supper, at the dinner table—just Annabel, Murray, and him, because Marina had been off somewhere—Annabel had asked about his work, his plans. Clearly she’d heard from Murray, some garbled version of his learning program—she seemed to think he was under the impression he could teach himself the sciences, chemistry and the like—and she asked him, in that hostessy way of hers, at once gentle and persistent, even probing, like Stella Woods, his childhood dentist, with her soft voice, her tongue depressor, and inescapable, ruthless, tiny pick. He’d explained again about his reading list, a little about the farce of Oswego, though less than he’d told Murray.
Murray remained silent, but was not uninvolved. Occasionally, one or other of them would cast a sidelong glance at his impassive face, focused on the prosciutto, the caprese salad, the frisée and walnuts, apparently oblivious. Bootie (when would he stop thinking of himself as Bootie? He cursed his mother for it, but Bootie was still the name that rose unbidden;
it was, to his chagrin, who he was) knew that Murray could have rescued him, had the power to free his nephew from this embarrassing repetition. But Annabel continued to probe, and Bootie, albeit agonizingly, continued to divulge his secrets. They came perilously close to Harvard. There seemed something perverse—voyeuristic, or masochistic, or both—in the exercise. He even said, “Please, please don’t tell my mother,” and Annabel reached out a reassuring hand, which did not stretch as far as his arm but lingered, momentarily, on the polished table between them, like a visible thought. At this point Murray finally spoke, placing his knife and fork with great deliberation upon his plate.
“Your mother couldn’t possibly be expected to understand the first thing about you,” he’d said quietly. “She’s a good woman, but she doesn’t have any idea who you are.” He then rummaged about his mouth with his tongue (a trapped prosciutto strand, Bootie had assumed, as he battled with his own) and resumed eating. Only when Murray’s plate was clean did he insert himself again into the conversation. “I’ve been thinking, Fred. Annabel and I have talked about it. And I think there’s something I can do to help you.”
“You’ve already been so generous.”
“I know where you’re coming from, here, my boy. I grew up there myself. I might have ended up at Oswego, and if I had, I might have turned and run. I might”—more dental rummaging—“and I might not. But I can certainly appreciate the impulse.”
“It’s not so much running away, or at least I’d like to think not—it’s—”
“Embracing the future. Your future. Self-determination.”
“And self-reliance, too.”
“Yes, but unless you’ve got a plot of land and are planning on subsistence farming”—Murray paused and blew smoke, dragonlike, through his nostrils—“excepting that rather improbable scenario, you’ll need a job. You’ll need to earn some money in order to finance your studies.”
The Emperor's Children Page 21
