Short Century (6 page)

Nonetheless I was fourteen that summer with a broken leg and two functioning arms, so I wanted my sister as far away as possible from my essentially unavoidably constant masturbation, masturbation that was particularly disturbing since the fantasies I was now finding most effective occasionally involved stopping my brother as he was about to rape one of his girlfriends, a brunette named Suzy or something like Suzy, who would repay my heroism willingly. Maybe once or twice the image of Emily bloodied on the beach popped in, but I stopped it, and I told Emily that I did not want her to bring me tea anymore. Mother or the maid could bring me my meals. This made her cry harder than I had ever seen her cry; she cried so much that she resembled a crumpled tissue.

On the third day of my enforced isolation, Emily opened the door holding a tray of tea. She told me not to be mad, and then she told me that she had a surprise. She had a bouncy little walk when she was a child, and she bounced out of the room. When she returned she grinned, and then whipped her ponytail from one edge of the grin to the other. In one hand she held a naked female doll with its hair cut off. Her other hand she held behind her back.

“It's Paul!” she shouted. “He thinks he's a big man but he's really just a stupid girl. And the Prince and Princess sentence him to death. Off with his head!” From behind her back she produced a pair of scissors and cut at the plastic neck, though she wasn't strong enough to do more than squeeze the plastic together. I told her to stop, fearful of what would happen if my mother found her destroying Paul in effigy, but she wouldn't stop. So I grabbed the doll from her and ripped the head off myself.

“Paul is fallen!” she shouted. “Paul is fallen!” She ran out onto the landing and called out: “Paul is fallen! Paul is fallen!” That is when I heard my mother's soft voice carrying upstairs.

“How did you know?”

Apparently, my mother had just received a phone call saying that Paul had checked in to the Chappine and hanged himself.

I told Emily over and over again that the timing had just been a strange coincidence and that she was absolutely not responsible in any conceivable way. Each time, she told me: “I
know
, Arthur.” To my considerable surprise, she did not display any sign whatsoever of actually feeling guilty, and as if to underscore the point, she brought a bright, polished apple to the funeral, hiding it in a pocket of her black dress. During a lull in the service she led me to the wooded area beyond the cemetery, took the apple out of her pocket, took a bite, and held it up to me, ostensibly so that I could eat it while I balanced on my crutches, but really so that she could deprive me of a choice. She just shoved it into my mouth and I took a bite. Then she opened her hand and let the apple fall on top of some twigs and some dirt.

“Goodbye, Johnny Appledead!” she said, looking up at me for approval.

There are times when I regret what I said immediately afterward more than I regret anything else I have ever done. “Our brother just died,” I said, still chewing the apple. “You're a horrible person.”

These words etched a great deal in her tiny face: confusion, betrayal, shame. She hadn't started crying yet when she turned and ran away, her well-combed blond hair bouncing against her black dress, but I heard her sobbing before I had hobbled all the way back to the funeral site. My mother and some of my parents' friends had their hands all over Emily's head, their own faces breaking at the thought of this little girl who had lost her champion and protector, and under such terrible circumstances. My father propped himself up a bit off to the side. A few distant cousins approached with the coffin, and my father looked longingly at it, as though, having failed to keep his son alive, he should at least be able to hold his coffin aloft. Pallbearers bearing Paul suddenly struck me as funny, and I wished I had not antagonized Emily and could whisper about it with her. When Paul's coffin had been laid in the ground, my mother pushed Emily toward the grave, so that she could throw some dirt on it, but Emily shook her head and shouted:“No! No!”

“Poor thing,” my mother said. “She misses her brother.”

“No, I don't,” Emily said, but I'm fairly certain that all the attendees mentally completed the sentence to say: “I don't want to pour any dirt.”

My father, on the other hand, did want to pour some dirt, and he shrugged off the kind offers of graying men in expensive suits. He wanted to pour the dirt himself. One colleague tried again after being rebuffed and my father shoved his crutch at him. Then he dropped this crutch and leaned on the other one while he swung down, ape-like, to scoop up some dirt and hop to the edge of the grave to throw the dirt in. He did this successfully, but everyone present was so afraid that he was going to fall in that it was impossible to feel moved by the sight, mostly it just looked ridiculous. My father must have agreed because he suddenly started to guffaw with an abandon I had never heard before.

“On crutches or underground,” he said, looking at me and putting on a fake British accent. “Tally ho, Huntington men, tally ho!”

f

For the next several
years Paul was never very far from my thoughts, even apart from Emily's birthday weekends at the Chappine, which started soon thereafter. The fact was that I
missed
Paul. The cliché about missing your enemies turned out to be true in my case, and not only that: I found that I truly respected him in ways that I hadn't previously understood. You have to understand that all of this is quite difficult for me, insofar as I am trying sort out exactly what it is that has caused me so much pain in my life and that caused me to cause so much pain in others. I suppose that on some level I had come to love my tormentor, just as oppressed populations come to love their dictators, a phenomenon I examine at length in my book
That Which Is Caesar's
.

When I was fifteen I had a swift and comprehensive growth spurt; by the time I left for college I was over six feet. Everybody started telling me that I looked like Paul. It was easy to see in the mirror. I was Paul's height, and shared the sharp cut of Paul's chin, the face that looked like a V for victory, and a small nose that turned very slightly up at the end. My mother saw it, our doorman saw it, even Mac Bundy
3
saw it when he came for drinks.

One Sunday afternoon while I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some math homework, I heard my father thumping by, and as soon as I looked up he threw a baseball in my direction. When I instinctively cowered and the baseball shattered the mirror behind me, he told me that Paul had had excellent reflexes and that Paul had never failed to catch a ball thrown at him. “But at least you're strong enough to pick up broken glass.” Then he hobbled away. I bent down to pick up the shards and Emily came running to help me.

“Don't touch the glass. It's dangerous,” I said. But she couldn't be dissuaded, and with her still small hands she picked up the shards of glass and made funny faces into them. She stuck out her tongue and twisted her mouth. She held her eyelid open with her thumb and held a shard up close, making her look even more bug-eyed than normal, and even though I was nervous I laughed. Then she held the shard up to my strong jaw.

“You don't look anything like Paul,” she said. “They're just trying to keep him alive. You don't look anything like Paul.” When she said this the second time her voice cracked just as the mirror had, and it certainly wasn't effective to show me the mirror when I could see beyond it to a picture of Paul in a prep-school uniform that matched my own.

Over the next several years, Emily grew more and more precocious, cutting our initial age difference, intellectually speaking, from an original four and a half to three, and then to two, and then really to nothing at all. She read all the books that I read and she looked to me for my opinion, which typically became her own, though her reasoning was usually a bit clearer. It was often intoxicating, I have to admit, to hear her defy our mother and father but almost always defer to me.

Toward the end of high school I became friends with a small dark-haired kid two years below me named James Hickham. We started spending a fair amount of time together, mostly because he was the only kid I knew who liked foreign movies, and occasionally I wanted to see Truffaut with someone who wasn't my sister. I didn't like to admit it, but Hickham intimidated me; he was younger than I was but he had already almost certainly read more books. He had already read both of Tolstoy's big books—or claimed to, but I think he was probably sincere. When we met I was ahead on Dostoevsky, having read
Crime and Punishment
and about half of
Brothers Karamazov
, but by the winter of his sophomore year, he had read both of those plus
The Possessed
. One of the more backward kids at school called him a “Jew,” which in addition to being racist did not really make a great deal of sense, given that his name was James Hickham, though Hickham explained to me later that all of his grandparents were Jews who had changed their names. I could see it a little bit—his features were rather Mediterranean. He looked a lot like a younger Jean-Paul Belmondo, albeit one whose nose had been smashed.

As much as James liked to read, it was not particularly interesting to talk to him about books, because he was obsessed by two grand theories, one dull, the other repugnant. The dull one had it that men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid. This was more or less what everyone thought already, but for some reason James considered it his solemn duty to proclaim this belief to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldn't. If he couldn't get a listener to sit still for the boring belief, he would move on to the repugnant one (itself no less boring or clichéd): all women secretly long to be raped. He would use this theory to spin long, usually boring interpretations of classic texts (
Hamlet
was about Hamlet's conflict over whether to fulfill Ophelia's desire for him to rape her). I knew it was a terrible idea to talk to Emily about this, but Emily was my primary confidant at the time, and I couldn't help but tell her about this horrible, frankly somewhat evil theory. I was absolutely horrified when she said that she thought it was interesting. She was barely fourteen at the time and I suppose that I still thought of her as for the most part asexual, and the fact that she would find something like this intriguing made me worry. One time, Hickham came back to the apartment with me and he started chatting with Emily. He started in on Hamlet and Ophelia and then said something about how Penelope had to wait twenty years to be raped by Odysseus, and he even touched Emily's arm at one point and that was the end of my hanging out with Hickham.

I wound up going to Yale, amusingly enough, out of an attempt to defy my father. Yale by this time was run by Kingman Brewster. Brewster had been a good friend of my father's when they were undergraduates at Yale together, but my father had never truly forgiven him for opposing American entry into the Second World War. My father had wanted me to go to Harvard or Princeton. So Yale was, yes, my teenage rebellion.

I should say here that something was happening to me in the middle of the sixties. My awakening did not exactly track that of the rest of the country. I had been used to thinking that there was something wrong with the way that society was structured, and specifically with my privilege within that society, but somehow, oddly, I did not like to learn that other people seemed to be beginning to agree with me.

This is how I came to have a series of conversations with George Bush. Leftist magazines and blogs like to caricature me as “a George W. Bush crony since their days at Yale,” but this is not accurate. He was a year ahead of me at school, that's true, but I hardly knew him. Yes, both his father and my father were Skull and Bonesmen, but so was Yale's chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, and it was his hatred of Coffin that led Bush to befriend me in the first place.

Because of my family, Coffin recognized me on sight, so we happened to strike up a brief conversation one day when we passed each other on campus. As soon as Coffin walked away, I felt a tug at my collar that reminded me of Paul.

“Arthur Huntington, right?” asked a dark-haired kid. We had met in a large group a few months earlier, and I was surprised that he remembered my name; it wasn't until decades later that I learned that he possessed an unsettlingly acute gift for remembering names. Once I had checked that my tie was unmolested—whenever I'm invited to speak at my alma mater, I can count on a few laughs by recalling that in my day, Yale men wore ties, and were called “Yale men”—I responded that yes, I was and always would be Arthur Huntington. (Amazingly, he recalled this line when I was invited to dinner at the White House, and he ribbed me about it.)

“Why were you talking to Coffin?” he asked, and didn't give me a chance to respond before he launched into a story that, in later years, he loved to recount to reporters (Coffin wrote Bush a note saying he had no recollection of the incident; Bush responded that he was quite certain it had occurred). Bush's father had just lost the race for Texas Senate, and he sought out Coffin for consolation. Coffin said: “I know your father. Frankly, he lost to a better man.” This crystallized for Bush what he hated most about the wealthy: lack of loyalty. Everyone else is loyal to the small group of his or her birth; why do the wealthy think they have the right to be different?

This basically tribal approach to the world was much on my mind in the run-up to the Iraq War, an endeavor as far from tribal as any in recorded history. The major purpose of that war was to liberate people who were nothing like us. (If you go back and read what I and other war supporters wrote about the war in 2002 and 2003, and compare that to what the so-called “anti-war activists” wrote, I think you'll find that they and not we were the racists. I make this point at greater length in a post I wrote in 2004 for a symposium
Slate
hosted in which “liberal hawks” were supposed to beat our heads in anguish over how wrong we were about the war.)