The Mercury Waltz (9 page)

For a time it is a German butcher with whom
Haden lodges, straw bed and salt pork and daily lessons in the proper use of a knife; then a lazy-eyed coiner, unlucky at cards; then a tutor of rich merchants’ sons, met outside a drab
pension
, spelling earnestly from a dog-eared Bible:
Follow along with me, Haden, now, “Blessed are the poor—” But why do you smile so?

Because it’s a joke, an’t it?
looking sidewise at the puzzled face on whom the joke is lost, the besotted tutor who teaches next the Song of Songs, who goes without eating to buy the books his new protégé favors—poetry and history, pleasure and might—and whose satchel library Haden rifles when he goes, abstracting a weighty book of plays and speeches—Ovid, Marlowe, Shakespeare—along with the tutor’s previous faith that goodness and beauty are the same.

It is in this makeshift train of temporary men—always men; he has never slept with a woman, crawled beneath that tasseled shawl, he never will—that Haden leaves the last of his boyhood behind, in the rooms and roosts and quiet avenues, the saloons where he dices and deals cards, wins and loses, batters when provoked; and reads everything, gazes and faces as well as broadsheets and books, with a scholar’s growing skill and a stateless creature’s scorn for authority, for all who choose to answer to authority, who take what a meager life gives them without quarrel or complaint:
Saving their pence, chewing their daily bread,
in a
rentier’s
high-piled bed, litter of goose feathers across the tufted satin, the Christopher medal cool against his naked chest.
So for what? So once a year they can have a bite of beef, drink bad wine, and squeeze the servants’ titties? And then confess it of a Sunday? What a joke.

You’re amazingly cynical for a fellow your age. And speaking of drink,
says the
rentier
not unkindly,
you’ve had enough, Master Malapert, don’t you think?
at which Haden only reaches again for the bottle, expensive black liqueur sucked between his teeth while the
rentier
wriggles and paws: a fellow his age just the right age for these men, who seem to find something very piquant about his cynicism, his lean body and wild blond pelt, his perfectly feral smile. One
rentier
in fact grows so fond that the fondness sours to a maenad’s fury when he finds himself unwanted and his bumbling gifts ignored:
Have this, then!
coming at Haden with an amethyst pin, horseshoe stickpin aiming for the eyes but wounding instead the cursing mouth, blood everywhere and not all of it Haden’s, its spill the only spoor when the constables arrive to find the
rentier
slashed and bubbling and the room in ruins; the sticky stickpin palmed to a sidestreet doctor who drunkenly stitches his lip back together, before in pain he makes again for the road—

—to tramp scarred and bare-headed into yet another city, this city of larch trees and rebus streets and mania for gambling, milk-and-tea shops and tea boys with their tin trays and blue caps, Egyptian cigarettes and thieves’
patois
—“raven” for a criminal’s lookout and “dove” for his fence, “jay” or “picker” for the thieves—and a changing lexicon of exotica, all the names the boys name themselves: ganymedes and fauns and Black Archies, foresters or parkers for the ones who meet the men in dark parks, men like the
rentier
, men who are
rentiers
, and burghers, and ministers and cabinet clerks; men, Haden learns, who greatly value an intelligent, scholarly, amoral young fellow who can hold a conversation as well as squeeze a prick:
You’re a different sort,
he hears it time and time again.
You’re not like the other lads.

But not a lad at all now, is he? nearly grown a man, so how many more mornings ought he wake bare-arsed next to some snoring tub of guts, swab himself with the oversheet, and scuttle back down to the streets? He has read
The Prince,
read it more than once; he has been thinking. So he casts a cool eye on those other boys, those pickers and dryads, and one by one, by persuasion, by force, and by favors, he gathers the best he can find into a cadre, his cadre: Haden’s boys. Why not? Otherwise they will do as they always do, squabble, play pranks, and die at the curb, tossed out like wilted flowers by the men whose passing patronage they flog each other stupid for the having. Instead he is their patron, giving safety behind the hard blade of his knife, and coin, a boy has got to eat after all. But there is more value, much more, in little gifts like a flash topper, or a packet of gipsy smokes laced with good hashish, or the chance to sleep an hour in a quiet garret room, Haden himself to watch over that sleeper, with a taste of Rheinish and a smile when he wakes; there are boys in these streets who would do anything for the having of that smile alone, from Hadrian Mundy become the road’s Haden Marry, then Haden St.-Mary as befits a patron’s
gravitas
.

And night by night and day by day, stealthy dawn by afternoon suck by private midnight fête, his little cullion army is noticed, then watched, then finally approached by an elite and judicious handful of older men who, it seems, will pay him to put that army’s eyes and ears in certain suites and card parlors, restaurants and alleyways; and pay well, too, so well that Haden need never again lie in any bed he does not choose. And if their endless thirst for information sends him to doors he would not, himself, have known to open, why not skim the cream of what his boys see there or hear? A whispered name whispered later to a minister’s secretary, the minister himself turning white as whey in his fine office—how easy it is, such a little name, for such a lot of money to spend at the haberdasher’s, or the vintner’s, or the booksellers’ stalls on French poetry; he cannot read it well, yet, but he is improving.

And sometimes one of these men hates another, or fears him, or badly longs for something not his own—a woman, a position, though the thing desired need not be a great one, Haden has watched one
rentier
ruin another over a shipment of kerosene lamps—so with nimble care, the way a cat walks a slippery fence, he takes that knowledge, too, and tucks it safe away for use, if need be, against these men, these clean and filthy men with their costly gloves and peppermint breath who fuck his boys and would if they could fuck him, too, tame him to a slavey—let them try, he will march in no man’s army but his own; just ask the corporal. And his life is just as he wants it: for pleasure the books, and the gambling—with dice and cards, and the secrets and sins of others, neither stake will ever play out—and for relief his pick of the boys, not always the loveliest, but the ones with a hint of sweetness, the ones whose hearts can still be seen. To play for more, to need more, is to open the door on…what? a darkness and a chaos, the mad glint of a pin, kisses in the smell of burning, love a kind of utter drunkenness no dawn can ever cure….

Yet sometimes, at dawn or at sunset, when he lies on his back in the rumpled bed, when he has drunk the black brandy and still sleep will not come, what comes instead are lines from the poems—
“Come live with me and be my Love, and we will all the pleasures prove”
—chanting to himself and chewing the scar on his lips, watching the sun cross the sky and die; until at last his eyelids flutter and close, and he enters a deeper darkness where there is no longing or leaving, where he bears and is borne like some saint in the water, Charon, Leander, no hero necessary, to some unseen shore where another waits to meet him, to kiss and rule and savage with, to take into his arms, and make his own.

In another bed, in other dawns, other cherished poems are inwardly recited, the humid, gleaming poems of Ovid,
Jove send me more such after-noones as this—
before morning prayers to the Holy Mother, though to Frédéric it seems strange if not actually sacrilegious to pray to a virgin for chastity; or perhaps it is not strange at all. Perhaps, as his father says, he thinks too much, has spent too much time
Worrying over those books,
with a worry of his own for this son who is so different than he himself was as a boy; and not a boy any longer, though his mother seems to want to keep him so, keep him trotting to the church choir with the ladies when he should be learning the importer’s trade. He has excelled at all his lessons, and now it is time to put that learning to use.

For his mother’s part, the prayers sung in Latin—Frédéric’s voice having lost its reedy purity, now become just a pleasant tenor—and the long teas taken afterward are the highlights of her days, the foundation on which she thinks to build a life for her son. In the vestibule after service, she has watched the girls give him their smiles, those minxes, fluttering and squeezing hands, though he is merely friendly to them all. Only one watches with proper ladylike devotion, and sits at tea almost without a word to say, this Marie Mariette with her mother, the head of the Ladies’ Sodality, and her father, the head of the waterworks and already a business friend to Mr. Blum. It is natural for the families to dine together, the young people seated side by side at the table, where Mrs. Mariette may justly boast of her daughter’s needlework skills,
A dozen cradle-caps this week alone, for the poor orphans!
and Mrs. Blum may ask Frédéric to
Sing for us, dear, will you not?
as they sit in the parlor over cakes and cherry confit, while Mr. Blum and Mr. Mariette smoke small cigars in the garden and eye each other as potential relatives. It is the womenfolk’s will, that is plain, and
Young Frédéric seems quite a steady fellow,
says Mr. Mariette, while Mr. Blum offers praise for Miss Marie’s kindness,
My wife tells me she can’t do enough for those orphans,
since he cannot praise her beauty; no one can.

But she too has a neat singing voice, she demonstrates it in the garden once the men have gone inside, the two young people sent out to wait as their futures are arranged:
It’s a pretty song,
says Marie,
“The Pigeon and the Hawk,” do you know it?
and they sing together,
“Coo, coo, coo/The pigeon tends her nest,”
Frédéric beating time with a twig on the arm of the old-fashioned bench. When they finish, Marie looks up into his eyes, then away, her hands grasp unseen at her skirts and
I like pigeons,
she murmurs.
They are homing birds.

They are city birds,
says Frédéric.
In Amsterdam, I have read, they quite cover the square with their
—then stops himself on “droppings,” he ought not say such to a girl, this girl who, by the end of the day, has officially become his fiancée—though not without a desperate last-ditch battle, his mother is especially shocked:
But this is meant only for your happiness! You and she are so alike!
and
It is natural to worry over taking a wife
, says Mr. Blum,
when a man has no position in the world. But when you are at the warehouse—

I want to go to the city,
says
Frédéric, pulling at his collar and cravat, he feels as if he cannot properly breathe.
I want to write.

Write! Write what?

Tracts,
he says promptly,
instructional moral tracts,
the words in brisk march to his mind, as if he is reading from a script, where do these words come from?
For the edification of—of readers.

And so, because he has never evinced a single wish or demand of his own, because there is no actual harm in the writing of moral tracts, and because—as Mr. Blum tells his weeping wife (she weeps all night, Frédéric can hear her through the walls)—a young man needs to sow his oats, and it is best, perhaps, if he do so where
No one knows him, or his family,
thinking he knows what the problem may be, Miss Mariette and her washed-out eyes, her thin shanks—Frédéric boards the train with his father’s consent, as well as an envelope doubly sealed, opened on the journey to reveal, to Frédéric’s startlement, a nice sum of money and two French letters, with a note stiffly instructing him to come home once both are used.

The first thing he sees in the city is the statue of Mercury, the second the city itself. Within a week he has a room in a rooming house, and a job of sorts: a bounder, it is called, as one bounds from newspaper to newspaper, collecting facts and tips and stories to offer to the editors, and also perhaps because the fellows it attracts are not of the highest moral caliber: one takes a deal of money from him at a ninepin parlor, and another tries to steal his bicyclette. Someone else does steal it, right in front of St. Mary of Dolors, when—after a long hour spent praying in that church, in the flicker of a hundred votives, beneath the eyes of St. Mary herself (while adding a shamefaced prayer for Marie Mariette, whose glances he read correctly as his mother had not)—he rises from the green velvet rail to return to his room and write home, that home that seems already as distant as the moon, and announce that he has found a fine position as, yes, a writer of tracts:
Though not under my own name but the publishers’, they say it is a shield from pride,
again where do these words come from, so smoothly from his pen, so entirely a lie, perhaps it is all those years lying about the book of the Greek gods? It is sinful to do so, surely, but what truth can he tell them that they will ever understand?