Childish Loves (16 page)

‘That's what I want to talk to you about. I've written you a card.'

‘Why don't you just spit it out, since we're standing here.'

‘Do you want me to read what I wrote?'

‘What's a matter with you, there's nothing wrong with my eyes. Oh, give it me, give it me.' She took it out of my hands and squinted at it, while I fidgeted like a boy on the stoop. At last she said to me, ‘So it's you I have to thank. You might as well come in.'

A little alcove had been carved out under the stairs, with a desk and a bell on it, beside a visitors' book. There was a small black-and-white TV, no bigger than a shoebox, showing a baseball game. The Red Sox were in the playoffs, and the voice of the commentators carried through the house, in spite of the soft carpeting, to the back of the long hall where the kitchen was. There were flies, and a few slices of cake left on the counter, on a stand, under a mesh hood – ornamented by daisies, the kind of thing I had seen only in antique shops. The window over the sink showed a tree in the garden in front of a chain-link fence, but no grass or sunlight. To let in air, the back door had been propped open by one of those dull wire crates Coke bottles used to come in.

‘Did you always take lodgers?' I asked her. ‘Even when Peter was a boy?'

‘What do you think this is, a lodging house?'

‘I assumed, because of the guest-book …'

‘Of course it is. What did you expect us to do? A house this size and only one boy to show for it. Now would you like tea?'

By the time she had made a pot and set it down on the table with two hands, she had decided on the line to take with me. I showed her the copy of
A Quiet Adjustment
I had brought along, the hardback with the image of a woman's head in the oval of a picture-locket; and she said, ‘You could put a vase on this and never worry. I suppose you get paid pretty well for your trouble. If you don't mind me asking.'

‘What are you asking?'

‘Don't be stupid. By rights this sort of thing should go to the mother.'

‘Believe me, I wish it had, Mrs Sullivan.'

‘So what do you get for it, a good thick book like this?'

‘It depends on how many you sell.'

‘Just look at it' – turning it over in her hands – ‘at twenty-five dollars a go. You wouldn't need to sell many, at twenty-five dollars. Mind you, there can't be many'd go for it at that.'

‘It's what people like to call a critical success.'

‘What people?'

‘Publicists. Authors.'

‘I didn't know they were the same thing. So how do you make a living at it?'

‘I don't. I have a job.'

‘And what might that be?'

‘At the moment I'm being paid to find out what I can about Peter.'

‘Is that a good line of work, is it?' she said.

It went on like this for maybe another hour; halfway through Mrs Sullivan brought out the slices of cake. She didn't mind talking about Peter, she said, ‘within reason,' but she didn't mean to be cheated out of her rights. As for looking over the house, or seeing his old room, there could be no question of that. She didn't deny she had some of his letters and books, and not a few of his things, but before she showed me anything I might make use of, she needed to get a fairer sense of the price. At one point she even asked me who to talk to, about an estimate; at her age, for this sort of thing, she didn't know the right people.

‘There's nobody,' I told her. ‘Nobody but me.'

I should forgive her if she exercised the right to her own opinion.

Much of what she told me I could have found out elsewhere. He was born ‘in this house, in this kitchen,' in 1942 or 43. Mrs Sullivan was still sharp enough to resent, with a very natural anger, any slips or gaps of memory. His father died in the war, and afterwards she let it be known that anyone who was clean and sober was welcome to a bed in her house, and breakfast and dinner, for a dollar a week – it started out, a dollar a week. Mostly young Irish men from the Navy Yard, at first. She kept her own bedroom and a sitting room, on the top floor; but there was a bathroom and three other bedrooms beneath her, and Peter didn't need but one of them. It was good for him to have a few men in the house. Mrs Sullivan had three sisters in the neighborhood, and a mother (a widow herself), and it didn't do for a boy to be spoiled by women. Not that he needed company. The worst she could say of him, though he was her own son, is that he kept himself to himself. You couldn't get his face out of a book.

‘He had a great head for books, when I knew him.'

The front door opened and closed, and someone went upstairs; but Mrs Sullivan didn't mind it, so I went on. ‘Did he visit much? When he was out of school?'

‘Was he ever out of schools, that one? But he lived here at college, too, if that's what you mean. And on his first job. And afterwards, again – when he had reason to. But who's paying you?' she asked me suddenly. ‘You said somebody's paying you. Well, who?'

‘It's something to do with Harvard.'

‘I like that, when they wouldn't give
him
a penny.'

‘Is that where he went to university?'

‘I suppose they want you to ask me about that boy. What's his name – Pak or Chung or some business like that. We might as well get all of that over with now.'

‘I wasn't sure if I'd ask you or not. But if you don't mind talking about it.'

‘I don't mind setting the record straight. After all the foolishness people came out with, and not just in the papers. To my own face. This is what I have to say, and that's the end of it. There never was girlfriends and there never was boyfriends. He never gave me any trouble, he was that kind of a boy – the kind that wasn't much interested in anybody but himself. Some boys are like that, just as much as some girls. For myself, I never saw much use to the whole business. My husband liked it. But when he was dead, I can't say I missed it, and Peter was just the same.'

‘Did he bring friends home sometimes?'

‘That's what I'm telling you, he didn't have much use for visitors.'

‘What about the lodgers?'

‘I hope that's not what I'm hearing you saying. This wasn't that kind of a house.'

‘I mean, did Peter make friends with any of the lodgers?'

‘Oh, he sat down with them sometimes, to the radio. He was civil. But nobody could get a word out of him, that's how he was. Mind you, some of them tried.'

She dismissed me at last, saying: ‘If you want more tea, you'll have to go out for it. That's all the cake and I can't be bothered to brew another pot. What I want right now is to sit in my chair and watch the end of the ballgame.'

‘Can I come and see you again?'

‘If you want anything else, you can pay for it, like everybody else.'

‘Shall I leave you his book? I didn't know if you'd read them.'

‘God help me, I tried,' she said. ‘But it was Peter all over: the child couldn't utter a natural word. A great fuss about nothing. The things used to put him in a state, you wouldn't believe. But he was always nervous. He had it from his father. Now his father is dead and Peter is dead, and it's only me again. But they never was much company.'

On my way out, I looked in quickly at the sitting-room door. An electric heater in the fireplace was plugged into a socket by the mantel. There was a coffee-table with magazines spread out across it: a public room, with a TV under the window and the blinds drawn above it. A few comfortable chairs under lamps. I couldn't imagine a boy feeling at home in it, with young men in the armchairs, smoking and watching television. No wonder he stayed in his room. Mrs Sullivan herself sat down to the little black-and-white box in the entrance hall.

‘You can see yourself out,' she said.

‘I'll come again.'

‘I guess you can please yourself.'

A few things stuck in my thoughts on the long walk back, across the bridge again and into Boston, against the grain of traffic with the light in my eyes. A little colder now; the sun gave no more warmth than the glitter off moving cars. ‘One can't be always among women,' Peter had written. ‘It didn't do for a boy to be spoiled by women,' his mother had said. A half-echo. One of those phrases, probably, that knocked around his childhood and came to stand for a whole climate of feeling – for the awkward but necessary, almost formal relations of men and women in his mother's house. Maybe one day a lodger had used it to get him into bed.

It somehow consoled me to hear that he didn't talk much, even as a boy. That this was a fact of his personality, along with the nerves and the self-containment. The love of books. He was present to me also in the bones of his mother's face, in her natural pedantry. I reminded myself to look up where he'd gone to university. Boston College, it turns out, on a scholarship; but if Harvard had accepted him once, I don't know.

*

A few days later, I had an idea and got in touch with a guy I had met through the Byron Society in Cambridge, Paul Gerschon. Gerschon worked at the Houghton, Harvard's rare-books library. It occurred to me he might be useful in helping to prise Peter's papers out of his mother's grasp – that this is something certain librarians become skilled at.

We met downstairs at Café Pamplona, on the corner of a rather ugly side street off Harvard Square. I had seen him only once before, at a talk, with a few dozen people around, but he carried in his hand a copy of
A Quiet Adjustment
. I would have recognized him anyway, by his soft-skinned face and large lips; his pale hair and eyes. It seems too easy to call him
bookish
, yet it is strange, also, that this should be so recognizably human a quality. That the long association with books breeds a certain manner, formal, gentle, curious, hesitant. A tall man himself, he stooped under the low basement ceiling, and we carried our drinks upstairs to the patio garden, which was carved out of the sidewalk and crowded by wrought-iron chairs and tables. The weather was bright but windy, and we decided after a few minutes to drink our drinks and return to his office at the Houghton, where we could talk in peace and warmth. Also, he wanted to show me their collection of Byronalia – nothing first-rate, he said, but still, they had a few interesting pieces.

On the way, he told me stories about Peter. It turns out they knew each other pretty well. ‘We were what my wife calls Society Friends,' he said. ‘Which means there were large tracts of our lives that never came up for discussion.'

‘Because you were sensitive to …'

‘I would have used the word indifferent. We didn't get together to talk about our marriages. We talked about books. But you're right, maybe a part of the reason was the fact that a number of our members, what I would call an honorable minority, lead fairly eccentric lives. Isolated lives. Until recently you might say that I was one of them.'

He had married, rather late in life, and his wife had just given birth to their first child – a boy, now eleven months old. This also provided us with conversation.

‘Then you never talked much with Peter about his private life,' I said eventually.

‘By private life, I suppose you mean the incident at Beaumont Hill School. I don't want to give you the impression that we tolerate in our membership any indecency or unpleasantness. But I will say this. I had, I have, a lot of sympathy for men in Peter's situation – I mean, men who have more or less been denied … a sexual life. Or have denied themselves one. It doesn't make much difference. I wasn't around when Peter resigned from Beaumont Hill, or was forced out. But don't for a minute believe that the Byron Society, as a group of people, is free from the vice of gossiping, especially about sexual matters. It is the Byron Society, after all. We knew the story, we talked about it. Peter himself could be very … funny about himself. I read your preface to
Imposture
, and I must say, I did not recognize the man you described in it. The picture you drew in it annoyed me. Peter was not a silent man, especially on the subject of Horatio Alger. I suppose you know who Horatio Alger is?'

‘I know a little about him; not much.'

‘The author of a hundred-odd stories about the American dream. He had to resign his post at a church in Brewster, Massachusetts, for committing the sin of paederasty with two teenage boys. So he moved to New York and set up a hostel – for impoverished children. And began to write. Nobody reads him now, but Peter used to. It tickled him pink to land a job at a school named Horatio Alger. But I will say this for him. I don't think Peter would have cracked jokes if he had anything to feel guilty about. Anything that counted. You never know what other people are capable of, but I think you sometimes know what they are capable of joking about. Peter was sharp, but he was never cruel.'

‘People seem to me to be capable of joking about anything.'

‘You may be right; this is your line of work. As it happens, the Houghton has a pretty fair copy of Herbert Mayes' book on Alger,
A Biography Without a Hero
. A hoax, of course. He made up whatever he didn't know, diaries, letters, etc. The Macy-Masius first edition, from 1928, a little worn at the edges. Not a rare volume, but interesting to me.'

Interesting
was one of his words. We were in his office by this point, which was carpeted in soft institutional gray, windowless and rather dark, with nothing but a lamp on his desk to light the room. But there were several precious things in it that daylight would have damaged. Paul had made a selection of the Houghton archives for me, which included a manuscript of
The Curse of Minerva
, Byron's poem on the rape of the Elgin Marbles. It was bound in red straight-grain Morocco and inscribed: ‘This MS was written by Henry Drury, the tutor of Lord Byron and was made by him from one of the original nine copies which were privately printed in 1812.' The two young men had become friends, after a bad start, which plays a small part in the action of ‘Fair Seed-Time.'