A Boy's Own Story (19 page)

I felt the need to free myself of desire. I must not want anything. I must feel no attachments. Above all, no attractions. I must give up all hope, plans, glad anticipations. I must study oblivion. I must give room and board to silence and pay tuition to the void. Even the slightest flicker of longing must be stilled. Every wire must be pulled until the console goes dead and all dials point to zero.

My mother discovered a Buddhist church some thirty miles away. She gamely drove me down to it one Sunday
(Sunday!
I mentally sniffed, already the ascetic snob;
Church!
I exclaimed, an Oriental purist). On the preceding Saturday night I dreamed of opening wicker gates, the process shot as the wizened abbot walks toward me on a treadmill, getting nowhere fast against a rear projection of a retreating, expanding universe of thickening blue sandalwood incense and swaying, saffron-robed monks.

Instead I encountered a congregation of grinning Japanese families in a former Baptist church and heard announcements of the Young Buddhists Association's annual picnic and basketball practice as well as disappointingly melodic hymns with words such as "Dearest Amida, Your Light Is Shining Through the Gloomy World of Sin" sung by us all to a wheezing organ accompaniment, then a tedious sermon on the evils of adultery. I fled, red-cheeked and offended, my puzzled mother reluctantly following me ("But I liked it, dear. It seemed so Christian, though of course they were much better dressed than your average Christian").

I desperately needed a new beginning. The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it—unless I could change it completely. If my homosexuality was due to a surfeit of female company at home (for so ran the most popular psychological theory of the day), then I should correct the imbalance by entering an all-male world. In order to become a heterosexual I decided I should attend a boys' boarding school (for so ran my wonderfully logical addendum to the theory). I phoned my father long-distance and pleaded with him to help me escape my mother. Whereas I loved her I dreaded her mysterious influence, as though she were a plant like rhubarb, stalk nourishing, leaves poisonous.

"I don't think you should talk about your mother that way, young fellow," my father said. "She's a fine woman." I heard him gasp as he drew on his cigar. I could picture him at his blond mahogany desk. Perhaps he'd rolled up a pipe cleaner into a hoop and was throwing it for his cat, Baby, to fetch while
my
cat, Herr Pogner, stretched on the sill, yawned, raised her fluffy tail and arched her feathery back, then sank down on all fours, front paws neatly tucked under her downy tortoise shell chest. The smell of the cigar, the way my father tilted his head back so that he could watch through the close-up lenses of his bifocals as Baby batted the pipe cleaner across his desk, scattering business papers as she went, then tumbled over the edge onto the carpet, then dashed off to a corner (look down, through the upper lenses), the distant drone of a carpet sweeper a black maid was pushing downstairs—this whole dense world came rushing back toward me with his first words.

"But, Daddy," I exclaimed, my voice breaking and rising up, up the scale into a soprano delirium, "I
love
my mother."

"Like. Like," he said. "A man likes things. Girls love, men like."

"But that's just the
problem,"
I wailed. "I'm too involved with Mommy. I'm not"—and here I put the decisive card on the table—"I'm not turning out... as I should. I need to be with men."

Long pause. The faint transmitted sound of the sweeper had died away. A click revealed to me that my stepmother had picked up on an extension phone. Three pairs of eyes blinked as three hands held three silent receivers.

"I need male role models," I said, delighted that I had remembered the very word my mother liked to use.

"Role what?" my father asked, annoyed. "To hell with that."

I subsided into silence.

Then suddenly he and I were both speaking at once, both stopped, he resumed: "As I was saying, you could come live here, I suppose."

"That would never work. You're always at the office, Daddy. Last summer we were in the same house three months and I didn't spend more than an hour with you altogether. You slept all day. I was working the Addressograph machine. No, what I want is to go to a boarding school. I want to live with a bunch of guys my own age and just, well, learn sports"—could he tell how much I was lying? I ended on a rehearsed phrase—"and be with the
fellows
. You know."

"Don't say 'you know.' Poorly educated people say it all the time. It becomes a habit."

"Yes, sir." I could imagine him lighting a new cigar, twirling the brown baton for an even fire, filling the room with thick smoke that engulfed the fussy Herr Pogner on her perch, her gold eyes squinting through that noxious cloud.

"I don't want to make a decision over the phone. Put it all in writing. Can you type?"

"No, sir."

"You must learn. There are only two useful things to be learned in school, typing and public speaking. Before you're graduated I want you to study both. So, print your letter. I want it to be very neat, as neat and businesslike as you can manage, and in it you should present all your arguments for going away to school. Then go to the public library and read through the guide to private schools and pick one. Got it? I'm not promising anything but I'll consider your proposal carefully."

The guide devoted a page to each school. In each case it presented black-and-white photographs of the grounds and buildings, a portrait of the headmaster and a brief description of the "philosophy" of the institution. For hours I'd muse over this volume of future lives, weighing one possibility against another. Did I want to be a senator? Should I attend a school in Washington? A general? Military academy? A monk? I read of a school where each student served as an acolyte at least once a week, since all the priests (the teachers) had to say Mass daily. I pictured a long row of side chapels in a ruined priory on the coast of New England, the aisles invaded at vespers by mist as dense as wool and by sheep as white as mist, sea gulls cooing on the hundred altars, hungrily darting forward to snatch at the Host, the surf pounding out a solemn "Dies Irae" as the funeral procession of a dead brother wound its way over fallen columns up toward the marine cemetery. Or did I need the permissiveness of a Quaker school, all plain wood in clear light, the patrician simplicity that only money can buy?

The question turned out to be, well, academic. My father chose a school for me merely because it was on the route between his winter and summer houses, a convenient stopover on the long trip for him. Right after Christmas he drove me to the deserted campus, the buildings shrouded in snow like chairs in holland cloth, the rectilinear paths treacherously iced over, the wide-open square, originally designed to resemble a piazza, now an arctic court where the snow played handball with itself, white sports whirling up off the pavement and racing to slam glittering explosions on brick walls tenoned in ice.

The architecture of the school had been conceived by a famous Finn and built by an army of Scots who'd stayed on as gardeners and maintenance men (they outnumbered the teachers). The school was nothing but reminiscence—of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia for someone else's past. Because the school was a fantasy and not a reality, its architecture alternated as in a dream between vague, featureless expanses of wall, the ectoplasmic surround of the action, and by contrast the places the dreamer looks at, concentrates on: maniacally detailed ornaments, chiseled gargoyle heads peering down out of the odd niche, tiled Moorish arches framing a rose garden, scriptural and classical mottoes spelled out in stone along the backs of benches. Those benches circled a deep basin surmounted by a fountain as wide as a barber pole and much taller on which was balanced a stone pineapple that expressed, depending on how literally one took the conceit, either juice or water.

The headmaster of Eton (yes, the name, too, had been borrowed) was a great shaggy and strangely yellowed man. He wore tweeds and smoked a pipe and had pale, glutinous hands—really as sticky and shiny as the gluten in kneaded bread—and yellowing white hair that shot straight back from his liver-spotted brow and huge yellow teeth that looked useless for eating though effective enough for polite baring in interviews with intimidated parents. He was tall and unctuous and unintelligent and lived in a rambling "cottage" with fieldstone walls, low black eaves that curled back under on themselves like ingrown toenails, and leaded panes that rattled decoratively in the winter winds in front of solid, modern, cryptically sealed storm windows.

He granted us a long interview in which he spoke of the need for "balance" in the training of a young mind and (looking appraisingly over the top of his glasses) of the young male body. A little later he found a way of mentioning again the sound mind that should go with the sound (raised eyebrows) body. I was terrified that what all this meant was more athletics for me, and it did. But my father was pleased, more or less. He distrusted the headmaster's English accent and melodious voice issuing from someone so obviously weak and fraudulent and American. Dad sniffed a little laugh at all the dark wood, dark sherry, crackling fire of small, evenly matched birchwood logs laid on brass andirons, the whole instant tradition of dear Eton, Anglican primroses amidst the alien corn. But even as he sniffed he nodded approval, for the pretensions were exactly what he was buying for his son, much as a cowpuncher might hire a French tutor for his children—airs fit an heir, even if distasteful to the patriarch.

The headmaster philosophized about manliness over a feminine clutter of tea things, tiny pots of marmalade, eggshell-thin cups, a linen-lined basket of warm scones and a cozy embroidered on one side with an Art Deco archer kneeling nudely in Aztec profile, crossbow aimed at a five-pointed Gentile star (the archer was the school emblem,
ad astra
the motto). My father puffed skeptically on his smelly cigar, by now a misshapen stub black with spit, and asked for a Scotch and soda. For my father, sitting uncomfortably in that petit-point chair without arms, manliness was not discussable, but had it been, it would have included a good business suit, ambition, paying one's bills on time, enough knowledge of baseball to hand out like tips at the barbershop, a residual but never foolhardy degree of courage, and an unbreachable reserve; to the headmaster manliness was discussed constantly, every day, and entailed tweeds, trust funds, graciousness to servants, a polite but slightly chilly relationship to God, a pretended interest in knowledge and an obsessive interest in sports, especially muddy, dangerous ones like lacrosse or hockey or rugby that ended with great sullen lads hobbling off the field to lean on sticks at the sidelines, the orange and blue vertical stripes of their jerseys clinging to panting diaphragms, bare knees scarred, blond hair brown with sweat, an apache streak of mud daubed across a wan, bellicose cheek.

I was starting school in the middle of the year and knew no one. Two other fourth-formers were also entering between semesters, and they became my companions. One, whose room was just next door, had a Spanish mother. I once caught a glimpse of her trim body in a black suit, her glossy, painted red lips barely visible through the bouquet of violets she was sniffing to distract herself during a dull sermon in the school chapel, her eyes lifting and hanging there like amber worry beads bright from having been told so often. Heberto had those same fine eyes and his mother's olive skin and those teeth as white as the apples he was always eating. He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of "free" time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert— fully clothed of course—was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler.

Heberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth—until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I'd sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he'd been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year.

The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn't resist visiting though I didn't want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he'd ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He'd written away for the "literature" of the American Renaissance Party and proudly showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Führer's legacy, Communist lies about the "so-called death camps" and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall. His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he'd never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who'd emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie's ties came from Charvet on the Place Vendôme because that had been Proust's haberdasher.