The Brothers Boswell (17 page)

T
HE NOISE OF
their boots on the stairs is louder than I would have imagined, as are their two voices. Most people would drop to a whisper upon entering such a place, but they continue their chatting, in the
basso forte
voices they have used all day to let the world know their business. They stop at the base of the stairs, still within the outer vestibule, letting the light of their lantern pour into the undercroft proper.

“Great heavens,” I hear James say, very distinctly.

Johnson gives a low, knowing chuckle. “Heaven had little to do with it. This was the work of James the First, who would modernize his palace and desiccate his foundations.”

“It is the sort of place that makes a man fear for his life, and his soul.”

“Come, sir. It is a cold cellar. A man who fears a cellar full of nothing cannot properly call himself a man. And this from you, who have spent this year seeking a commission in His Majesty’s Guards?”

“I know it is silly of me. I have never liked a dark place.”

“Take hold of your fears, sir, and strangle them in their cradles, before they are grown. The brickwork is in the Tudor style, and well worth the look.”

It is at this moment that I hear the door grind open again at the top of the stair, and what sounds like a third pair of boots descending to the first landing. And then a man calls out. The echoes of the stairway distort the voice, but I can make out that he is calling for Doctor Johnson.

Johnson answers, his voice a dull boom that fills the undercroft. “Yes, sir, I am Samuel Johnson. Who might you be, sir?” There is a short pause, as though Johnson’s weak eyes were boring in on the newcomer’s face in the gloom.

Then his voice booms again. “Mr. Eccles! It is good to see you, sir. I did not expect to see a familiar face today.” And to James: “You will remember Mr. Eccles. Davies the bookseller brought him to the Mitre on the night of your supper there.”

“I remember Mr. Eccles very well indeed, sir. We spoke together of the wild lonely prospects of Ireland.”

The voices carry effortlessly in the quiet. Eccles has concealed his brogue well, but not entirely. “And of Scotland. You have an excellent memory, Mr. Boswell. How odd to see the pair of you, a moment ago, disappearing into that little door! I was passing in my carriage and thought I must have imagined you at first.”

“I believe, Mr. Eccles, you are come in answer to my prayers. Mr. Johnson has insisted that I investigate the chamber beyond with him.”

“There is little to investigate, sir. It is an old, empty, black hole in the ground, and I believe Mr. Johnson knows it to be so.”

Johnson’s tone grows just a bit stiff. “I know it to be a portion of Elizabeth’s ancestral seat, and I revere it as such.”

“I believe a man may revere a thing quite effectively from afar,” James adds, a deliberate quaver in his tone, and the other two cannot help but laugh.

Then Eccles says, “Might I make so bold as to propose that the three of us leave this historical cellar, which has little to offer the living, and that we reconvene above ground? I find that my throat is bone-dry after my jaunt, and I should like to share a bottle with
the two of you gentlemen above all things, if you haven’t any plans for the next hour or so.”

There is a decent pause, as the original pair consider the possibility of a third.

Johnson breaks the silence. “What say you, Mr. Boswell? We might drink one of our two bottles now, and still have another to our credit tonight, at the Turk’s Head.”

“You have read my mind, sir.”

“Then it is settled,” says Eccles.

“You have saved me, Mr. Eccles! Bless you. I shall never forget it.”

“Do not encourage him in this, Eccles.” There is a unmistakably stern note now in Johnson’s voice. “He would make sport of it, but these irrational fears are unworthy of a man of sense and a gentleman. They mark a flaw in character. He should master them. I have a good mind to drag him back down here when we have finished our bottle.”

“A point well taken, I am sure.”

With that, the three of them begin the climb back up the narrow stairs, dust scraping beneath their boots. Seconds later, the door swings shut. There is a barely audible scratch as the key turns, and the tumblers fall in the lock. Then only silence, and the feel of the sourceless draft brushing my cheek.

The capillary action of disaster. And my most elaborate design is at an end.

I step out of the alcove, in my stocking feet, darkness all about me, and honestly do not know whether to laugh out loud, or to weep. For the first time today, I feel truly alone. Like a nasty game of hide and go seek, in which all of the older children simply run home once the counting has begun.

Before I realize what I have done, I’ve swung my fist at the stone wall with nearly all of my might, and then, before the pain of the impact can wash entirely through me, I have swung again nearly as hard. Something crackles in the bones of my knuckles.

From bright pain, the right hand sinks almost immediately into throbbing numbness, and I suck the blood from my knuckles. One of them feels splintered to my tongue, or even sunk back into the hand itself. After a long moment, I step back into my boots, but the hand is curled and lacing them is difficult.

Finally, I am forced to sit down in the dust and force my way through the process like a boy of four, lace by lace, eyelet by eyelet, all of this by touch alone.

And as I sit there, trying desperately to manipulate these simple strings, a thought comes to me, a series of thoughts really. It is as close to frightening myself with my own imaginings as I have come today.

Perhaps these events in Greenwich show more than the rushing waters of chaos and chance. Perhaps my brother is right, and he is watched and doted over, protected, preferred. Perhaps the Lord Himself put the spyglasses in James’s hand this morning, so that James might see beyond his mortal abilities.

Is it possible for one man to be opposed so actively by the Lord, and never know it? And for his brother to be watched over and yet similarly unaware? And is this the same whimsically cruel Hand that directs madness to strike here in a family, and then to skip a generation, or two or three or none at all, before striking there?

M
Y FATHER NEVER
mentioned his own younger brother, my Uncle James. It was my mother who told my brother James and myself about his illness, on the condition that we never retail the story outside the flat. And I remember very clearly the way she hesitated and slit her eyes as she whispered the phrase
strait-waistcoat.
I had no context for the words, and I brought to mind a more or less everyday man’s waistcoat. A decently tailored garment, though certainly with cunning buckles, for I understood that once in one, it was all a man could do to get himself out.

It was only as one was actually being fitted about me in the
Plymouth Hospital that I finally made the connection: this drapery of canvas and leather, with its coppery smell of sweat and hate, this loose assemblage that suddenly drew tight enough to strain my arms in their sockets—this was my uncle’s particular cut of waistcoat.

And I am not proud to say that the realization threw me into a raving fit worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, and the doctors locked the door and let me careen around in the darkness until I’d made my peace with it.

A peace not quickly reached, however. The rough leather collar of the coat was joined to a leather crown with thickish straps; it held my head and my neck all but immobile, and more than anything it was that headgear that incited the thing inside me. Wild things will bear leashes, but never a muzzle. And so it made me twist my head back and forth, back and forth, for hours on end, blood from beneath the forehead strap finally speckling and smearing my knees. The better part of three days I wrestled.

But finally there was nothing to be done. If you look hard at an image of such a waistcoat, you’ll see that restraining a man is not its only function. As much as anything else, it is designed to force a man to struggle with himself. His fight is all directed inward by the canvas. And perhaps that struggle is healthy in most cases. But not so in mine, not when all was said and done. The thing inside me wanted out every bit as much as I, and finally it was willing to bargain. And so rather than expel it or vanquish it, I treated with it.

For it had a new argument to make, in addition to the old grievances: while the doctors had told me that the strait-waistcoat would not be removed under any circumstances, another inmate across the way whispered that it was indeed possible, if a man’s family came and demanded it, raised the Devil about it, and especially if a man’s family had money.
And so where is your father?
the thing asked.
Where is your loving brother James? Why do they not exert themselves?

It was an argument that became more compelling each week, for
I knew that James was merely in London, begging a commission. Father had cases to hear, but James had only his own weak case to make, and might have left off at any moment.

And so we haggled, away inside myself. I wanted to walk out of Plymouth, to all appearances cured. I wanted the thing where I could manage it somehow. I wanted to be able to go on about the business of my life. It wanted to visit James in London, to show me finally what he was, and was not. Fair enough, then.

G
IL
H
IGGS IS
still waiting, wrapped miserably in a cloak, nearly an hour past nightfall, when I reach the lower landing where his sculler has been tied up these last five or six hours. I imagine he has resolved to cast off twenty times today, and then rehearsed for himself twenty times over the reasons why it might be safer to wait. Rain is now threatening, and the wind has gone cold. Higgs has extended the green woolen canopy forward, to keep the coming rain off his own naked head as well as mine. We will share that little tent all the long way home, I see.

“They will slide by in a moment,” I say softly when I have taken my seat. Higgs notices my bloodied knuckles, but does not reply, simply turns to watch the water.

We wait, three minutes, four, and then their oarsman moves them slowly by us, putting out into the current. Their sculler has a lantern fixed in the stern, making it easy to mark, easy to follow. I nod, and Higgs moves us out as well. His relief at pushing off toward home is all but palpable. I have returned my canary his precious key, and settled my accounts generously with him. No one may say that I have taken out my own disappointments on my good, biddable old man.

While Greenwich was the most meticulously drawn of my blueprints for the day, it is not my one and only, by a long shot. I am certainly prepared for the Turk’s Head as well. But it is a longer, colder journey
back up the river—a shivering cold after the day’s heat—and reviewing those preparations in my mind occupies only a portion of it.

Then there is nothing left but to try to stay warm, and to watch the occasional spray of lights upon the shore, as we drift past an estate or a shipworks or a brewery. Nothing left but to tell over and over again—like a rosary worn smooth or the last few pence in an empty pocket—the moments of happiness I have been vouchsafed by the City. Of this handful, there is one remembrance I treasure above all others, to the extent that I ration my indulgence in it, for fear it will thin and go threadbare somehow. I pull it out only when the wet and the dark become insupportable.

For it is my own first London meeting with Johnson. As James will lavishly mark the 16th of May until the day he dies—the day he finally made the great man’s acquaintance at the home of a bookseller—I will silently mark the 21st, my own moment of commemoration.

My own particular day in May.

P
RECISELY HOW
J
AMES
met Johnson, you well know—for it is known. James has taken no chances there. His memories of that meeting he scribbled down immediately and treasured up in his journal. My older brother has always been horrified of the lightless places in his own mind; he has always looked upon a gap in his memories as the thumbprint of mortality. And so as James sees it, the more he remembers, the more he lives, and the less he allows himself to die. But anyone who believes that his own memory lies in his own hands is worse than a fool: he is a dangerous fool. For he will begin to insist that his own version of events remain not merely his own, but become all the world’s as well.

My own memory is not nearly so obliging, and I have devised no systems to compel it. Since leaving the Plymouth Hospital, I have embraced the absent places in my own mind, with mostly quite satisfactory results.

It is not unlike a progress by Hogarth, this new memory of mine: the six or eight engravings gradually tell a composite story, but one marked by unavoidable gaps in time. And yet the viewer does not experience those gaps as destructive of the narrative, but constructive, rather.

In the first panel of Hogarth’s
Harlot’s Progress
, for example, Moll Hackabout is fresh from the country, clean of dress, carrying a gift of a dead goose in a basket for her London relations. Of course, the London relations have forgotten her, and she is left alone at the station, where she falls prey to the Bawd. That is where Hogarth stops the action of his first panel, just as the hand of the Bawd is about to stroke the cheek of the virgin. Just before the touch that will seal her fate.