Limits of Justice, The (12 page)

“How refreshing.”

On the title page he wrote:
For Benjamin, who sees the beauty in a boy without having to devour it. Fondly, Horace Hyatt.

Then he began leafing through the book, slowly, page by page, as I’d hoped he might.

“I haven’t looked at this one for some time. Some of my favorite portraits are in this book.”

“You’ve obviously had a lot of young men in your life.”

He glanced up briefly.

“I don’t have sexual relations with my subjects, if that’s your implication, Benjamin.”

“That’s hard to believe. So much temptation.”

“I suppose that’s true. But these boys are like angels to me, my perfect angels.”

He adjusted the book at an angle to show me the pages as he turned them.

“Look at them. So pure, so innocent, caught in a moment of complete candor, exposed in ideal light. So lovely, in those final months and days before they cross the threshold into manhood and leave their innocence behind.”

“Mike doesn’t sound so innocent.”

“You have to look for it, but it’s there. That’s one of the problems, isn’t it? We start looking for the bad in our children so early, and punishing them for it, when we should spend more time looking for the goodness and allowing it to blossom.”

He paused at a page featuring a tall, lean black boy, shirtless, in shorts, glistening with sweat on the basketball court, sinewy and potent with sensuality and strength.

“I see a picture like this, Horace, I have trouble believing you keep your hands to yourself.”

“To touch my angels sexually, to use them for my own pleasure? I’d feel like a thief and a murderer, as if I were stealing their spirits and killing their souls.”

I was startled by his words, by the way they echoed those of George Krytanos so closely.

“Is that a concept you’ve spoken aloud before?”

“The boys I come in contact with—I try to instill a sense of dignity and self-worth in them, to get them to see themselves as strong, independent human beings. Especially the gay boys, who face so much pain and confusion in a world with so much hate. I try to get them to see the beauty in themselves.”

He gestured toward a large framed print on a distant wall, a watercolor of two naked young men sleeping on a mound of grass on a sandy riverbank.

“That’s from a retrospective of John Singer Sargent, one of the great American painters. He made his reputation in oils, but he was also a watercolorist. It’s not widely known, but he also painted male nudes. That one’s called
Tommies Bathing,
two British soldiers he came upon sleeping after a swim during World War I. Look at the dreamy sensuality, the homoeroticism latent in the work. Look how their heads seem to be touching, but then, when you look again, you aren’t quite certain.”

“I’m not sure I get your point.”

“John Singer Sargent was an intensely private man. He began sketching a young Italian model, Nicola d’Invemo, when the boy was nineteen. He was part of Sargent’s household for the next twenty-six years, serving as his valet and assistant. Yet there’s no historical evidence that Sargent was ever involved in a romantic relationship. It seems he was disinterested in the sexual act, preferring to sublimate his sexuality and its power into his work. Much the same way the homosexual author Henry James is said to have done.”

“And that’s what you do, Mr. Hyatt, sublimate your sexuality?”

Hyatt’s blue eyes were bright like neon again.

“I began practicing celibacy in the late seventies. It happened quite gradually and unconsciously, quite unplanned. I was in my early thirties and I’d enjoyed a rich and varied sexual life. As I became increasingly immersed in my photography, particularly the younger male subject, sex just seemed to get in the way, to weaken my concentration. Celibacy’s not for everyone, but it’s simplified things for me, cleared up a great many issues.”

He reached the middle of the book, where he stopped turning pages.

“My God, what’s this?”

He’d come to the photograph I’d planted, and was clearly disturbed by it. I spoke quietly, letting his attention remain on the image he’d just discovered.

“I believe that’s Randall Capri, just as he was entering adolescence, before he grew up to become a Hollywood hack.”

Hyatt lifted the photo from the book, studied it a long moment, then turned it over to view the date and the imprint of his studio logo on the back.

“How did you come by this, if I might ask?”

“It was found among Rod Preston’s effects, after he died several months ago. It was in a file his daughter gave to me for research purposes, although I’m not sure she knew it was there.”

Hyatt looked up, his eyes keen, suspicious.

“You placed it there deliberately, didn’t you? You wanted me to find it.”

“I’d like to know how you came to shoot that photo when Capri was so young.”

“You mentioned research. What kind of research would that be?”

“Charlotte Preston hired me to ghostwrite a book that would expose Randall Capri as an unethical biographer and clear her father’s name at the same time.”

“A kind of dual biography?”

“Something like that. She died before we had a chance to work out the details.”

“I believe I read in the newspaper that she took her life.”

“It may have happened that way.”

“Why are you so interested in this photo?”

“I’m wondering why Rod Preston had it, and why he kept it all these years.”

Hyatt stood, still clutching the photograph, and walked over to the glass doors to look out at his peaceful garden.

“I’m not sure I wish to revisit that time in my life or my work.”

“Is it something you regret?”

“I was naïve. I showed poor judgment, made some questionable decisions.”

“Shooting that photo of Capri as a boy?”

He glanced down at the picture without turning around.

“It wasn’t this one so much as the other one.”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Horace, fill me in.”

“I wouldn’t want to be quoted or named as a source in any way.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

Hyatt finally turned, but stayed where he was.

“Rod Preston contacted me twenty-five years ago, when I’d first come to this country from England. I was staying temporarily with my friend Christopher Isherwood, the writer, out in Santa Monica Canyon, and his lover, the artist Don Bachardy. Preston had seen some of my portraits of young men and liked them. He commissioned me to shoot Randall Capri, who had just turned thirteen. He told me that Capri was his nephew, and that he needed the photos taken quite soon, for a birthday gift, something like that. Years later, I was to learn that they were actually lovers, if one can use that term so loosely.”

“Preston was having sex with the boy.”

“Capri was apparently quite enamored of Preston, even at that young age. Some boys are, you know. Preston was a famous movie star, after all, and quite a good-looking man. Randall was physically mature for his age, developing rather quickly. That’s the reason, apparently, Preston was so anxious for me to get the pictures taken.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“From what I’ve heard over the years, Preston didn’t have much interest in boys after they went through puberty. He was a true pedophile, the kind who lusts after underage children, and Capri was apparently his favorite. He wanted photos of the boy, capturing his likeness before his body changed. If I’d known what it was all about, I would have had nothing to do with it.”

“Surely you’ve shot photos of boys who’ve engaged in sex with men. Mike, for instance, sells himself on the street.”

“If a boy wants to engage in sex with a grown man, that’s his business. But for God’s sake, at least let him reach a certain age, when he knows what it is he wants and why. But not a thirteen-year-old. Not a child.”

“Do you know what happened between Capri and Preston after the boy matured?”

Hyatt’s eyes shifted uneasily.

“One hears things.”

“What was it you heard, Horace?”

“It’s all so unseemly, so dreadfully sick.”

He crossed back to the book, placed the photo inside, closed the book up, and handed it to me.

“I’d really rather not go into it.”

“You’re ashamed of it then.”

His smile was small, painful.

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“You look like a man who’s been carrying it around for a while.”

His eyes darted away, and his smile became more grim.

“I love young men, Benjamin. Young men, boys of a certain age. I find them indescribably beautiful, wonderful to look at and contemplate. But I have no stomach for pedophiles who act on their desires, gay or straight.”

Hyatt apparently needed to talk, so I let him. He crossed to a recessed bookcase, scanning titles. He pulled out a book and brought it back to me.

“Are you familiar with the work of Wilhelm von Gloeden?”

I shook my head.

“He was a Prussian baron, born in 1856, who went on to become the first and perhaps greatest photographic master of the male nude. His most famous subjects were the peasant boys of Sicily, specifically the village of Taormina. Before von Gloeden’s death in 1931, he shot thousands of plates with local boys posed in Arcadian scenes that emphasized their innocence and classic beauty, sometimes in togas or laurel wreaths but more often completely unclothed. Some of the boys were quite young, not even pubescent, a few fairly muscular and manly. But most of von Gloeden’s subjects, his great love, were young men who had just passed through puberty, in the range of fifteen to seventeen, on the edge of manhood.”

Hyatt held open the book, turning pages, showing me dozens of sepia-toned photographs of naked, uncircumcised boys against villa or mountain backdrops. None was in a state of tumescence, even though many of the boys had been posed in amorous embraces, body to body, touching without shame.

“As much as von Gloeden loved the physical images of these boys, it was their innocence that captivated him more than anything. You can see from the pictures that he wanted to reveal their sensuality, to capture their pure and natural affection for each other without turning them into sexual objects. Take a look—not an erection among the bunch.”

“Awfully well hung, though.”

Hyatt smiled, raising his eyebrows a little.

“Italian, after all.”

I glanced at the images as he turned the pages.

“Surely some of the boys became aroused as von Gloeden posed them, or as they clung to each other so closely. That would be perfectly natural in a healthy young male.”

“Yes, but he never printed those, you see. That’s just the point. Looking at these photos, von Gloeden’s vision is obvious. He worshiped these boys—yet he treated them like gods, not like whores.”

“You seem quite impressed with his work.”

“Inspired would be more accurate. After reflecting on his art, the way he immortalized his youthful models, I hoped I might become to Los Angeles what von Gloeden was to Taormina.”

“Yet none of your subjects is naked.”

“Given how times have changed, I have to work harder to capture the innocence.”

“And all this has some connection to Rod Preston?”

The mention of Preston’s name seemed to dim the fire that had been rekindled in Hyatt’s eyes. He cast them slightly downward.

“Preston also knew of von Gloeden’s work. Several years after I shot the photos of Randall Capri, he brought me this book, along with another boy he wanted me to photograph.”

“Another ‘nephew’?”

“That’s what he said. I was suspicious this time, but he told me he wanted the boy photographed just as von Gloeden would have shot him, in classic poses of innocence and purity. He’d picked out several of von Gloeden’s most famous portraits and wanted me to duplicate them. The boy I was to shoot, a twelve-year-old, was quite beautiful.”

“So it was purely an aesthetic decision, a matter of art.”

“I wish that were the case. Preston offered me a great deal of money, which I needed at the time to open my own studio. Regrettably, I accepted his proposal.”

“You photographed the twelve-year-old naked.”

“It was done with extreme care and propriety. The pictures Preston had picked out were such that there would be no frontal nudity involved. Here, look, I still have the pages marked.
Cain,
the famous portrait of the naked boy on the rock, clasping his head to his knees. And this one,
Youth Sitting on Two Rocks
—again, a profile without the genitalia visible.
Sicilian Youth,
the boy playing the flute, shot discreetly with his legs crossed. And so on. Preston himself posed the boy for the shots, so that I never viewed his nakedness myself.”

Hyatt suddenly closed the book.

“At least, not until that one moment, quite by accident.”

He rose, crossed quickly to the bookcase, slipped the book back among the hundreds of others, as if hiding it away.