Boswell (44 page)

The feeling with which I wrote Mrs. Elwortham was not faked. It was almost as though I had indeed known him as I said. I even signed my name.

I wrote:

Dear Mrs. Elwortham,

Words cannot express the deep sense of shock I experienced when I read Thursday of Edward’s death. We haven’t met, Mrs. Elwortham. Of recent years Edward and I had drifted apart, as even best friends do, and we saw each other only infrequently, but Edward was a friend of my youth, and I have thought of him often over the years. No words of mine can ease the grief I know you must be experiencing now. Edward was a good man. His absence will be keenly felt by all who knew him. I can only pray that time, that old healer, will do its job to assuage your and Robert’s pain.

I notice that the paper mentions the family’s desire to omit flowers. I do not know what Edward’s favorite charity was, Mrs. Elwortham, but perhaps it would be all right if I made a contribution in Edward’s name to the Red Cross. In the meanwhile if there is anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me. With all sympathy, I am…

Writing the check to the Red Cross and entering the figure on the stub was enormously satisfying to me. That’s the sort of thing I mean. Once I wrote a letter to the president of General Electric complaining about a refrigerator. I told him it wouldn’t make ice cubes and that butter melted in the tray.

Although these masquerades calmed me I saw that to continue with them would make me sick.

Late in that first year of our marriage, my son’s grandmother died. I talked my decision over with Margaret, though this was simply a courtesy. I am not one of your typical rich women’s husbands, always sneaking around the comers of his intentions. We have an understanding, Margaret and I, which is that under no circumstances am I ever to feel obligation. I consider taking things for granted part of the marriage agreement, a piece of the dowry. So a year after we were married, when I was thirty-three and he was eighteen, I sent for my son.

Whatever else may be wrong with me I am essentially a civilized man, and as such I enjoy my little scene now and then. I arranged this one with all the old style. I wired the boy a ticket on an executive flight. I sent him money and the address of the best tailor in St. Louis. A car met him at the airport. For the occasion I wore a smoking jacket for the first time in my life. “Boswell, you’re crazy,” Margaret said.

“How is that, my dear? As yet no real link has been established between smoking jackets and cancer.”

I also wore an ascot, flannel trousers, black silk hose and carpet slippers. I made Margaret put on a green taffeta dressing gown. The rustle was deafening, but we looked wonderful.

When the boy arrived I shook his hand and offered to make him a drink. “How are you, David?” I said. “Margaret, this is my son David.”

Margaret shook David’s hand. She has a strong, horsewoman’s handshake which would be advantageous to me in my business, if I had a business.

I stepped brightly to the bar whistling Noel Coward, and mixed drinks for us all. “Water, David? Soda?”

“That’s all right,” David said. “Whichever is easier.”

“Well, neither is terribly difficult, David.”

“Well, whichever is easier,” David said politely.

The problem had never occurred to me. “I think water is easier,” I said from behind the bar. “All you do is turn the tap.”

“Water is fine, thank you. I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” David said.

I wondered if my boy was capable of irony and watched him as I mixed the drinks.

I brought the drinks out with a flourish and stepped between Margaret and my son. I put my arms around their shoulders. “My big family,” I said expansively, looking from one to the other.

David smiled and raised his glass to his lips. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone swallow while smiling. Of course he was uneasy but I began to see that my son was one of those people who were constantly apologizing for their presence, treating themselves like an untidy bedroom through which a housewife reluctantly shows a guest to the toilet. Standing there before me, he seemed to be attempting to hide. There was something maidenly about him, as though he might be trying to cover his privates. David, I saw sadly, was not an ironist but a jerk. It was all my big family needed. I mean, it’s all well and good to play Noel Coward, and considered in one kind of light a sophisticated father and a dopey son have certain comic possibilities, but the fact is David was a disappointment. I had been hoping—illogically perhaps, considering my past treatment of him—for a different type, someone’s roommate at a good prep school, with trees in his past and summer places and a few years in a classy hotel off Central Park, a deep-chested lad who had been to Europe and spoke French and could get down a mountain on a pair of skis and didn’t smile when he swallowed. But the truth was David was scared stiff and looked a little Jewish.

“The trip was—” “Well, David, how was—”

“I’m sorry,” David said.

“No, no, go ahead.”

“No, please. You,” David said.

“Well, how was the trip?”

“The trip was very interesting,” David said.

“I see.”

“It was
very
interesting,” he said again, tentatively forceful.

I wondered what was so interesting about it. Probably the little paper sack, or the funny cellophane packages of butter and silverware, or the brochures, or the instructions for ditching at sea.

“They let you read magazines,” he said.
“Fortune, U.S. News and World Report,
everything. I don’t often get a chance to see those books.”

Why did things always turn out this way? There was something careless about people’s lives, something spontaneous in existence which spoiled it.

I had prepared a speech to make to David. It would have been a silly speech under the circumstances; now it was ridiculous. He wouldn’t know that, I thought, but Margaret would. I decided to give it anyway. Like most people it is impossible for me to change my plans. We are able to forgive and forget the past, able even to ignore the future, but let him beware who treads on our present.

“Now look here, David,” I began and immediately saw my mistake. Thinking I was about to reprimand him, David had jumped back. He looked guiltily down at the carpet, perhaps to see whether he had spilled any of his drink.

“No, no,” I said. “Look, David. I mean, listen, David, why don’t you sit down and relax?”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I can stand. I like to stand.”

“No, sit down,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want to make any trouble for you,” he said.

“Well, it’s not making any trouble for us if you sit down,” I said.

“If you’re sure it’s all right?” he said.

“Margaret, it’s all right if David sits down, isn’t it?”

“Just this once,” Margaret said.

David, who was wearing a sort of a grayish suit, chose a sort of grayish chair. He had a habit of putting his hands out of sight, like a nun. Once he was invisible I began again.

“What I want to say, David, is by way of apology and explanation.” At the word “apology” David moved his lips to make one. I rushed on, feeling lost and more sad in the presence of the real David than ever I had in dealing with the harmed, sensitive, prep school David of my imagination. “There’s too much talk about fathers and sons,” I said. “David, I don’t understand other people very well. The integrity of someone else’s identity is a mystery to me. I’m astonished by other people’s lives, David. For me, every human being is somehow like a man under arms, a good soldier. He seems so sure of his cause that I wonder if it ever occurs to him that he might have to die for it. What I respect in other people, I suppose, is their capacity for victory, their confidence that it will come. I know
I
wouldn’t want to go up against most of them. You’ve seen men. You’ve seen them coming at you down the sidewalk, taking up your space. You know what they’re like. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about human beings. If you believe it you might think the least little thing is capable of breaking people down. My God, David, that can’t be true. Do you think those guys on the executive flight are made of glass? Yet one hears every day of lives ruined by unhappy childhoods, broken homes, nervousness about the bomb, bad marriages, unrequited love. Those things are nothing, David.

“You probably feel you’ve been mistreated by me, denied a birthright. You—”

“No,” David protested. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“Jesus,” Margaret said, “the man abandoned you, sonny.”

“I didn’t
abandon
David, Margaret.”

Margaret laughed.

“I didn’t,” I said again.

“It’s all right,” David said. “I don’t—”

“You don’t mind, I know,” I said angrily. “Look, maybe all I’m saying is that men can take care of themselves. Certainly that’s what I did. The thing is to forget grief, David. If I’ve harmed you by not providing you with myself, then I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken to be harmed.”

“I see,” David said.

“We want you to live with us. I’ve talked this over with Margaret and she agrees,” I said. “You wouldn’t be putting us to any trouble,” I added hastily. Suddenly I foresaw all the objections he would raise, the soft demurs and small effacements that would have to be answered one by one, point by point, until it was obvious to anyone that David did in fact put people to trouble. He surprised me, however.

“I don’t think I could come until June,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to be in school until then,” he said apologetically.

I began to see that my son had the beggar’s trick of spurious withdrawal so that all you finally saw was the hand. His very grammar was deceptively soft. He didn’t
think
he could come, he was
supposed
to be in school, as though the world were always arranging itself independently of his will. There was toughness in his style too, I saw, and if I didn’t approve of his methods I did begin to like him a little more. It has always been reassuring to me to have it confirmed that others are as selfish as myself.

“Well, if you can’t come till June you can’t come till June,” I said. “The fact is, David, that your grandmother was never very committal with us where you were concerned. I didn’t even know you were going to school.”

“I go to hairdresser’s school,” David said very softly.

“Hairdresser’s school? You’re a beautician?”

“Yes, sir,” David said sadly. For a moment he allowed us to see his hands.

“Is that what you
want?”

“In high school the placement counselor thought it might be something I would be able to do.”

“Cut that out,” I said impatiently.

I saw him grin briefly despite himself. “It might be better if I stayed just where I am,” he said.

“Why?”

“You might change your mind about me. Then where would I be?”

“We could give you a check right now,” I said. “That would protect you.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” David said.

“Suit yourself.”

“My teachers think I ought to come to New York after I graduate.”

“Don’t you ever say
you
want anything?”

“I’m sorry,” David said. He shifted slightly in his seat, somehow giving the impression that his back was to us.

“David,” I said. “You won’t be any trouble to us, and if your business forces you to be in New York I see no reason why you shouldn’t stay with us. As you see, there’s plenty of room here. I have a great deal to make up to you for, of course, so I would consider it a favor to me if you would stay with us and allow me to force certain advantages on you that I am now in a better position to give.”

“That’s very nice of you both,” David said slyly. “If you’re absolutely sure I won’t be in the way.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Will he, Margaret?”

Margaret laughed.

Then I made a test. I said something under my breath so that David couldn’t quite hear it.

“I beg your pardon?” David said.

“Don’t you ever just say
‘what,’
David?” I asked.

II

Despite what I may have told David about there being too much talk of fathers and sons, I find that in one respect I was mistaken. Relationship—blood—is a peculiar business. I don’t care how close a friendship is, you can always pull back at the last moment. There’s the possibility of betrayal. The same thing in a family is a higher treason. Somehow one is closer to a first cousin than he is to a wife, for it isn’t merely an alliance of choice, of the will. I’ve spoken to Morty about this and he says I’ve stumbled on an anthropological truth. He points out that all tribes, no matter how primitive, have ceremonies of divorce, but that no ceremony exists anywhere for the undoing of a relationship between kinsmen. My first cousin is my first cousin, no matter how much we may come to hate each other. It’s nature, a fact the way a stone is a fact. How much more interesting, then, is the bond between a father and a son. I never imagined it. I wouldn’t look at him twice in the street perhaps, but he is my son and that makes the difference.

Because David is mine I try to change him. I come into a room where he is deferentially dematerialized against a wall (his old habit of blending with furniture of any style is still unbroken; indeed, I suspect he deliberately dresses for rooms he knows he will inhabit), and I call in a loud voice, “David, where are you, son?” It embarrasses him to be flushed out this way, but he does not yield: next time it is the same. The boy’s will is like iron.

Margaret is left out of this; she understands that David is not her son. We have been trying to have children together. She wants them badly, but mine is the more urgent need. I
must
have them! We are neither of us ardent but we have used no devices since David came to live with us. We make love with an extraordinary frequency and there is a sense of emergency about our throes. In a way that I do not understand, I see that if I have a destiny at all it is to be a father. It’s not that I am putting aside for that rainy day when there will be no more Boswells. I am not concerned with perpetuating my name; that kind of immortality has nothing to do with me. But were I a king whose succession depended upon getting sons I could not be more concerned. (I perceive that as I grow older I become
more
obsessive rather than less. If one day this leads me into a park where I will sit, my fingers inside my corrupt overcoat fondling my erection, waiting for the lunchtime passage of one particular small schoolgirl, that’s just too bad. There are only two kinds of intelligences, the obsessive and the perspectual. All dirty old men come from the former and all happy men from the latter, but I wouldn’t trade places. In this life frustration is the Promethean symbol of effort.) Fatherhood, I think,
fatherhood!
I lust for sons and daughters, but nothing happens. The more I pump Margaret the less good it seems to do. I asked her if there was something wrong.