The Marble Quilt (3 page)

To pass the time, we asked our guide his opinion of the new tunnel. His response was ambivalent. Yes, he admitted, the tunnel would bring tourism (and hence money) to his corner of the world. And yet the cost! Had we heard, for instance, that already one hundred men had lost their lives underground? A hint of superstitious worry entered his voice, as if he feared lest the mountain—outraged by such invasions—should one day decide that it had had enough and with one great heave of its breast smash the tunnel and all its occupants to smithereens …

And Irene thought: He never saw it. He had been dead two years already by the time it was finished.

And Grady thought: Finally.

And Mrs. Warshaw thought: I hope the
signora
saved me Room 5, as she promised.

And Harold watched Stephen's trousers hungrily, hungrily. Glimpses, guesses. All he had ever known were glimpses, guesses. Never, God forbid, a touch; never, never the sort of fraternal bond, unsullied by carnal need, to which epic poetry paid homage; never anything—except this ceaseless worrying of a bone from which every scrap of meat had
long been chewed, this ceaseless searching for an outline amid the folds of a pair of flannel trousers.

Yes, he thought, leaning back, I should have been born in classical times. For he genuinely believed himself to be the victim of some heavenly imbroglio, the result of which was his being delivered not (as he should have been) into an Athenian boudoir (his mother someone wise and severe, like Plotina), but rather into a bassinet in a back bedroom in St. Louis where the air was wrong, the light was wrong, the milk did not nourish him. No wonder he grew up ugly, ill, ill-tempered! He belonged to a different age. And now he wanted to cry out, so that all of Switzerland could hear him: I belong to a different age!

The train slowed. Behind the curtain Grady watched the signs giving way one to the next, one to the next: GÖ-SCHE-NEN, GÖ-SCHE-NEN. GÖ-SCHE-NEN.

By such songs as these the Thracian poet was drawing the woods and rocks to follow him, charming the creatures of the wild, when suddenly the Ciconian women caught sight of him. Looking down from the crest of a hill, these maddened creatures, with animal skins slung across their breasts, saw Orpheus as he was singing and accompanying himself on the lyre. One of them, tossing her hair till it streamed in the light breeze, cried out: “See! Look here! Here is the man who scorns us!” and flung her spear—

Darkness. Harold shut his book.

As soon as the train entered the tunnel the temperature began to rise. Despite the careful
labors of the conductor, smoke was slipping into the compartment: not enough to be discernible at first by anything other than its dry, sharp smell; but then Harold noticed that no sooner had he wiped his spectacles clean, than they were already filmed again with dust; and then a gray fog, almost a mist, occupied the compartment, obscuring his vision; he could no longer distinguish, for instance, which of the three little prints across the way from him represented the Pantheon, which Trajan's Column, which the Colosseum.

Mrs. Warshaw's head slumped. She snored.

And Grady pressed his face up against the glass, even though there was nothing to see outside the window but a bluish black void, which he likened to the sinuous fabric of space itself.

And Irene, a handkerchief balled in her fist, wondered: Do the dead age? Would her little Toby, in heaven, remain forever the child he had been when he had died? Or would he grow, marry, have angel children?

And Toby her brother? Had
he
had angel children?

If Toby was in heaven—and not the other place. She sometimes feared he might be in the other place—every sermon she'd ever heard suggested it—in which case she would probably never get closer to him than she was right now, right here, in this infernal tunnel.

She glanced at Stephen, awake now. God forgive her for thinking it, but it should have been him, repairing the well with George. Only Stephen had been in bed with influenza, so Toby went.

Punishment? But if so, for what? Thoughts?

Could you be punished for thoughts?

Suddenly she could hardly breathe the searing air—as if a hundred men were smoking cigars all at once.

Midway—or what Harold assumed was midway—he thought he heard the wheels scrape. So the train would stall, and then what would they do? There wouldn't be enough oxygen to get out on foot without suffocating. The tunnel was too long. Half a mile of rock separated train from sky; half a mile of rock, atop which trees grew, a woman milked her cow, a baker made bread.

The heat abashed; seemed to eat the air. Harold felt the weight of mountains on his lungs.

Think of other things, he told himself, and in his mind undid the glissando of buttons on Stephen's trousers. Yet the smell in his nostrils—that smell of cigars—was the conductor's.

Light scratched the window. The train shuddered to a stop. Someone flung open a door.

They were outside. Dozens of soot-smeared passengers stumbled among the tracks, the visible clouds of smoke, the sloping planes of alpine grass. For they were there now. Through.

The train throbbed. Conductors, stripped to their waistcoats, took buckets and mops and swabbed the filthy windows until cataracts of black water pooled outside the tracks.

People had died. Her brother in Greece, her child and her husband in the backyard
.

There was no heaven, no hell. The dead did not age because the dead
were not
. (Still,
Irene fingered the yellowed newspaper clippings in her purse; looked around for Stephen, who had disappeared.)

And meanwhile Harold had run up the hill from the train, and now stood on a low promontory, wiping ash from his spectacles with a handkerchief.

Where was Stephen? Suddenly she was terrified, convinced that something had happened to Stephen on the train, in the tunnel. “Harold!” she called. “Harold, have you seen Stephen?”

But he chose not to hear her. He was gazing at the campanile of Airolo, vivid in the fading light.

In Airolo, Harold looked for signs that the world was becoming Italy. And while it was true that most of the men in the station bar drank beer, one or two were drinking wine; and when he asked for wine in Italian, he was answered in Italian, and given a glass.

“Grady, do you want anything?”

Silence.

“Grady!”

He still wasn't talking to them.

Aunt Irene had gone into the washroom. She was not there to forbid Harold from drinking, so he drank. Around him, at tables, local workers—perhaps the same ones who had dug the tunnel—smoked and played cards. Most of them had pallid, dark blond faces, Germanic faces; but one was reading a newspaper called
Corriere della Sera
, and one boy's skin seemed to have been touched, even in this northernmost outpost, by a finger of Mediterranean sun.

Italy, he thought, and gazing across the room, noticed that Stephen, darker by far than any man in the bar, had come inside. One hand in his pocket, he was leaning against a white wall, drinking beer from a tall glass.

Apart.

He is from here, Harold realized suddenly. But does he even know it?

Then the conductor came into the bar. Harold turned, blushing, to contemplate his wine, wondering when the necessary boldness would come: to look another man straight in the eye, as men do.

Aunt Irene had at last emerged, with Mrs. Warshaw, from the washroom. “Harold, I'm worried about Stephen,” she said. “The last time I saw him was when we came out of the—”

“He's over there.”

“Oh, Stephen!” his mother cried, and to Harold's surprise she ran to him, embraced him tightly, pressed her face into his chest. “My darling, I've been worried sick about you! Where have you been?”

“Can't a man take a walk?” Stephen asked irritably.

“Yes, of course. Of course he can.” Letting him go, she dabbed at her eyes. “You've grown so tall! You're almost a man! No wonder you don't like Mother hugging you anymore. Oh, Stephen, you're such a wonderful son, I hope you know, I hope you'll always know, how much we treasure you.”

Stephen grimaced; sipped at his beer.

“Well, we're through it,” Mrs. Warshaw said. “Now tell me the truth, it wasn't so bad
as all that, was it?”

“How I long for a bed!” Irene said. “Is Milan much further?”

“Just a few hours, dear,” Mrs. Warshaw said, patting her hand. “And only short tunnels from now on, I promise you.”

Late in his childhood, Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas became best friends with a nephew of one of his mother's neighbors, Lady Downshire: a boy with the extraordinary name (at least to our ears) of Wellington Stapleton-Cotton. This was in 1885. The boys went to different schools but spent their holidays together, so when Bosie was sent to Zermatt, in Switzerland, one summer, he made sure to cut his vacation short by a week in order to share the last part of it with Wellington. Though Bosie's mother's house was palatial, Lord Downshire, from whom she let it, had christened it “The Hut,” for much the same reason that wealthy Long Island families call their oceanside mansions “cottages.” Nearby stood Easthampstead, the
really
big house, where Lord and Lady Downshire held sway, and where Wellington, a frequent visitor, awaited Bosie's arrival. But no sooner had Bosie returned than he came down with the mumps and was quarantined. Illness thus separated the “tremendous friends.”

From his sickroom Bosie smuggled a note to Wellington through the agency of the footman, Harold, suggesting a plan. If Wellington were to contract mumps as well, they could share more than a week; they could share the entirety of their convalescence, in a common bed, and not even go to school.

I don't know what Wellington looked like. I do know what Bosie looked like. Bosie was a sickeningly angelic boy. In a drawing made of him when he was twenty-four, he still has soft blond hair, huge eyes with long lashes, a small, wet mouth that asks to be kissed but might bite. Indeed, so famous would this face become over the years that you might say it established a paradigm: beatific loveliness dissembling a corrupted heart.

As for Wellington, I see him as being both stronger and bigger than Bosie, with dark skin, thin lips, a worried brow. Already he has small tufts of hair under his arms and on his chest. Bosie's body, on the other hand, is covered in a downy fuzz. He is in the last flowering of childhood, whereas Wellington is in the first flush of adolescence, and thus subject, for the first time in his life, to lust. Yet lust is a mystery to him. He has no language for it. He is at the mercy of impulses that his Victorian education insists do not exist. In this regard he differs from Bosie, who possesses an innate familiarity with lust, even though he remains innocent of ejaculation. In other words, what Wellington feels but does not yet understand Bosie understands but does not yet feel. Therefore he can manipulate Wellington, using his girlishness as bait. He wonders: To what lengths can I drive Wellington? Could I persuade him to risk illness, infection, even death, just to be with me?

Yes, apparently, for Wellington readily agrees to the plan.

The next morning a feverish Bosie climbs from his bed and peers out the window. Behind a yew hedge, Wellington is waiting for him. Already Harold has brought the ladder, leaving it, according to Bosie's instructions, propped against the wall. Now he opens the window—the sash screeches loudly—and his friend clambers up and through. Dawn: a late summer breeze freshens the fetid atmosphere with the scent of grass. Wellington hasn't combed his hair. He smells tired. Small clots of what is euphemistically called “sleep” harden in the corners of his eyes. “Hello,” Bosie says, then, taking his friend by the hand, leads him toward the bed, which is still warm and slightly moist, as beds tend to become when the ill sleep in them. He sits down before Wellington, guides Wellington's fingers to his swollen salivary glands. He anticipates by
a hundred years an age when swollen glands will spell terror for men of his kind. But at that time, in that place, most men who desired each other didn't even think of themselves as a “kind.” Not yet. It would take a poem written by Bosie before their love would learn the name it dared not speak.

“Come on,” Bosie says. “Let's get in bed.”

Wellington hardly has time to pull off his shoes.

“We have to make sure the infection takes,” Bosie goes on, pulling the sheets over them.

“How?”

“Like this.” And holding Wellington's face between his hot palms, Bosie kisses him. Wellington, who has never been kissed before, is at first surprised, resistant. But he likes the sensation, the silkiness of the sensation, and, giving in to it, allows Bosie's tongue to open his lips. It is all for the purpose of being together, after all, of being boys together,
tremendous friends
. Bosie licks Wellington's teeth, licks his tongue, the rough surface of his lips. Wellington returns, repeats each gesture. So much early sexuality is mimicry.
Do to me what I do to you
, we think the other's tongue is telling us. Yet there are some things he would like to do to Bosie that he hopes Bosie wouldn't like to do to him.

“Do you think it's taken yet?”

“Perhaps. Still, we can't be sure.”

“Anything else we might try?”

“Yes.” And sitting up, Bosie runs his small hot tongue down Wellington's neck, onto his chest; he opens Wellington's shirt and licks the halos of hair around his nipples. Lower down, an erection pokes Wellington's trousers: no surprise. As for Bosie, his
nightshirt has ridden up. He turns around, grinds his pinkish behind into Wellington's groin. The heat shocks. Wellington can't help but grind back. Sensation floods him, and he ejaculates, soaking the front of his pants.

Church bells chime. It's six-thirty in the morning. Shadows creep toward the bed. In the hallway, the housekeeper is upbraiding a chambermaid for the way she has folded some towels. Hearing them argue, Wellington and Bosie laugh.