“Does it mean quiet?” I choked out.
“Don’t ask me, miss. I’m the one that’s supposed to do the goddamn asking.”
“I think it means quiet.”
“You think! I think you got it out of some trash heap. Read on,” he commanded.
He let me continue, quavering, for another paragraph or so. Then his arm shot out like a Mussolini salute.
“All right, miss. Sit! Now you! Chester!”
Chester stood. The somnolent veterans were surprised into alertness: they stared across at the ringmaster and his livestock. Now the rapid Brooklyn voice began—a boy’s voice, a boy’s throat. The little pink lips—that rosy bouquet—stretched and pursed, looped and flattened. Chester read almost to the end; Mr. Emerson never interrupted. Humiliated, concentrating, I knew what I was hearing. Behind that fragile mouth, dangerous fires curled: a furnace, a burning bush. The coarse cap of false orange-yellow hair shook—it narrowed Chester’s forehead, lifted itself off his nape, wobbled along the tops of his ears. He was bold, he was rousing, he was loud enough for a man deaf in one ear. It was ambition. It was my secret self.
“That’s enough. Sit, Chester!” Mr. Emerson yelled. “Gentlemen, you’ll never find a woman who can write. The ladies can’t do it. They don’t have what it takes, that’s well known. It’s universal wisdom, and I believe in it. All the same,” he said, “these two, Chester and the lady, I’m not the fool that’s going to let them drop back into the pond with the catfish.”
After that Chester and I had separate writing assignments—separate, that is, from the rest of the class. Mr. Emerson may have been a woman hater, but it was the veterans he declined to notice and looked to snub. His teaching (if that is what it was) was exclusively for the two of us. It was for our sakes—“that plumber,” he sneered—that he disparaged Walt Whitman. It was for our sakes that he devoted minutes every day—irascible still, yet reverential—to praising Brideshead Revisited, the Evelyn Waugh bestseller he was reading between classes. And sometimes in class: while the veterans slid down in their seats like a silent communal pudding, Mr. Emerson opened to where he had left off and fell into a dry recital:
I was always given the room I had on my first visit; it was next to Sebastian’s, and we shared what had once been a dressing-room and had been changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed of a deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that bathroom—the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair—and contrast it with the uniform, clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.
Dry, but there was a suppressed rapture in it—rapture for the brass lever, for the water colours (in their transporting British spelling) dimmed by steam. It was clear that Mr. Emerson himself, an unhappy man with tired eyes—they often teared—did not like the modern world; perhaps he would not have liked any world, even one with picturesque coal fires. In the grip of some defenseless fatigue, he gave way to fits of yawning. His snarl was inexhaustible; also comically unpredictable. He took a sardonic pleasure in shock. Certainly he shocked me, newly hatched out of the decorous claims of Hunter High (finishing-school-cum-Latin-prep), where civilization hung on the position of a consonant struck upon the upper gums (never against the teeth), and mastery of the ablative absolute marked one out for higher things. Mr. Emerson said “God damn,” he said “hell,” he even alluded, now and then, to what I took to be sexual heat.
It was not that I was ignorant of sexual heat: I had already come upon it in the Aeneid; there it was, in Dido and Aeneas. Dido on her pyre, burning for love! And here it was again, between Agnes and Gerald in the dell, in The Longest Journey, the early E. M. Forster novel that was included in our freshman composition curriculum. The first paragraphs alone—well before sexual heat made its appearance—were undiluted pleasure:
“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”
“You have not proved it,” said a voice.
“I have proved it to myself.”
“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.
“She’s there for me,” he declared. “I don’t care whether she’s there for you or not. Whether I’m in Cambridge or Iceland or dead, the cow will be there.”
It was philosophy. They were discussing the existence of objects. Do they exist only when there is someone to look at them? or have they a real existence of their own? It is all very interesting, but at the same time it is difficult. Hence the cow. She seemed to make things easier. She was so familiar, so solid.
None of this was familiar in the spring of 1946; E. M. Forster was an unknown name, at least to me; philosophy lay ahead; nothing was solid. Rickie and Ansell were lost in Mr. Emerson’s mercurial derisions. For years afterward I remembered only Rickie’s limp. Much later I began to read The Longest Journey over and over again, until ultimately I had certain passages by heart. In class it was hardly discussed at all. It appeared to hold no interest for Mr. Emerson, and Chester and I never spoke of it. It was not what we read that counted for Mr. Emerson, anyhow; it was what we wrote. Chester and I wrote—were intended to write—as rivals, as yoked competitors under the whip. “Got you that time, didn’t she? Made you look small, didn’t she?” he chortled at Chester; and, the following week, to me: “Males beat females, it’s in the nature of things. He’s got the stuff, the genuine shout. He’s wiped you out to an echo, miss, believe me.” Sometimes he made no comment at all, and gave back our papers, along with the weekly work of the rest of the class, with no more than a cocky glare. That left us stymied; there was no way to find out who had won over the other. Since Mr. Emerson never graded what Chester and I turned in (he routinely graded the others), the only conclusion was that we were both unworthy. And the next week he would be at it again: “She knocked you off your high horse, hah, Chester?” Or: “You’d better quit, miss. You’ll never be in the running.” All that term we were—Chester and I—a pair of cymbals, ringing and striking in midair; or two panting hares, flanks heaving, in a mad marathon; or a couple of legs-entangled wrestlers in a fevered embrace. It was as if—for whatever obscure reason—Mr. Emerson were some sly, languid, and vainglorious Roman emperor presiding over the bloody goings-on in the Colosseum of his classroom, with the little green buds of Washington Square Park just beginning to unfold below the college windows.
What came out of it, beside a conflagration of jealousy, was fraternity. I loved Chester; he was my brother; he was the first real writer of my generation I had ever met, a thing I knew immediately—it was evident in the increasingly rococo noise of his language, and in Mr. Emerson’s retributive glee. If promoting envy was Mr. Emerson’s hidden object in instigating the savagery of Chester’s competitiveness with me, and mine with him, it is conceivable that it was his own envy Mr. Emerson suffered from, and was picking at. It is not unheard-of for older would-be writers to be enraged by younger would-be writers. The economy of writing always operates according to a feudal logic: the aristocracy blots out all the rest. There is no, so to speak, middle class. The heights belong, at most, to four or five writers, a princely crew; the remainder are invisible, or else have the partial, now-and-then visibility that attaches to minor status. Every young writer imagines only the heights; no one aspires to be minor or invisible, and when, finally, the recognition of where one stands arrives, as it must, in maturity, one either accepts the limitations of fate or talent, or surrenders to sour cynicism. Whether Mr. Emerson was embittered by chances lost or hope denied, or by some sorrowful secret narrowing of his private life, it was impossib
le to tell. Whichever it was, it threw Chester and me, red in tooth and claw, into each other’s arms. It also made us proud: we had been set aside and declared to be of noble blood. (All this, of course, may be retrospective hubris. Perhaps Mr. Emerson saw us as no more than what we were: a couple of literary-minded freshmen whose strenuousness an attentive teacher was generously serving and cultivating.)
We took to walking up and down Fourth Avenue in the afternoons, the two of us, darting into one after another of those rows and rows of second-hand book stores the long straight street was famous for. The cheapest books were crammed into sidewalk racks under awnings, to protect them from the rain. It seemed always to be raining that spring, a tenderly fickle drizzle and fizz that first speckled and then darkened the pavement and made Chester hood the crown of his head with his jacket. We drilled into back rooms and creaked down wooden basement steps; everywhere those thousands of books had the sewery smell of cellar—repellent, earthen, heart-catching. In these dank crypts, with their dim electric bulbs hanging low on wires over tables heaped with comatose and forgotten volumes, and an infinity of collapsing shelves along broken-plastered brick walls labeled “THEOSOPHY,” “HISTORY,” “POETRY” (signs nailed up decades back, faded and curled by dampness), one could loiter uninterrupted forever. The proprietor was somewhere above, most likely on a folding chair in the doorway, hunched over a book of his own, cozily insulated from the intrusions of customers, bothering nobody and hoping not to be bothered himself. Gradually the cellar smells would be converted, or consecrated, into a sort of blissful incense; nostrils that flinched in retreat opened to the tremulous savor of books waiting to be aroused, and to arouse. Meandering in the skinny aisles of these seductive cellars, Chester and I talked of our childhoods, and of our noses. I admired Chester’s nose and deplored my own. “Yours isn’t so bad, just a little wide,” he said kindly. He told me of his long-ago childhood disease; he did not name it, though he explained that because of it he had lost all his hair. He did not say that he wore a wig.
There was something Hansel-and-Gretelish about our excursions, so brotherly and sisterly, so childlike and intimate, yet prickly in their newness. Fresh from an all-girls high school, I had never before conversed with a boy about books and life. I had never before gone anywhere with a boy. Boys were strangers, and also—in my experience, if not in principle—as biologically unfathomable as extraterrestrials. Though I had a brother, there was a divide between us: he had ascended to college when I was in grade school, and at this hour was still in the army. At home, with my parents at work in their pharmacy, I had the house to myself: I sat at my little wooden Sears, Roebuck desk (a hand-me-down from my brother, the very desk I am using right now), and fearfully pressed out my five hundred words for Mr. Emerson, jealous of what I imagined Chester might be contriving on the same subject, and burning against him with a wild will. I wanted more than anything to beat him; I was afraid he would beat me. When I listened to him read his paper aloud, as Mr. Emerson occasionally had us do even well into the semester, a shrewdly hooked narrative turn or an ingenious figure of speech or some turbulently reckless flash of power would afflict me like a wound. Chester was startling, he was robust, he was lyrical, he was wry, he was psychological, he was playful, he was scandalous. He was better than I was! In one respect, though, I began to think I was stronger. We were equally attracted to the usual adolescent literary moonings: to loneliness, morbidity, a certain freakishness of personality. But I felt in myself stirrings of history, of idea, something beyond the senses; I was infatuated with German and Latin, I exulted over the Reformation. I supposed it meant I was more serious than Chester—more serious, I presumed, about the courses we were enrolled in. Chester was indifferent to all that. Except for English classes, he was careless, unexcited. He was already on his way to bohemianism (a term then still in its flower). I, more naively, more conventionally, valued getting an A; I pressed to excel, and to be seen to excel. I thought of myself as a neophyte, a beginner, an apprentice—it would be years and years (decades, aeons) before I could accomplish anything worth noticing. I regarded my teachers not as gods, but as those who wore the garments of the gods. I was as conscious of my youth as if it were a sealed envelope, and myself a coded message inside it, indefinitely encased, arrested, waiting. But Chester was poking through that envelope with an impatient fist. He was becoming gregarious. He was putting his noisiness to use.
And still he was soft, susceptible. He was easily emotional. I saw him as sentimental, too quickly inflamed. He fell soppily in love at a moment’s glance. And because we were brother and sister, I was his confidante; he would tell me his loves, and afterward leave me feeling resentful and deserted. I was not one of the pretty girls; boys ignored me. Their habitual reconnoitering wheeled right over me and ran to the beauties. And here was Chester, no different from the others, with an eye out for looks—flirting, teasing, chasing. Nearly all young women seemed extraordinary that spring: archaic, Ewardian. The postwar fashion revolution, appropriately called the New Look, had descended, literally descended, in the form of long skirts curling around ankles. All at once half the population appeared to be in costume. Only a few months earlier there had been a rigid measure for the length of a skirt: hems were obliged to reach precisely, uncompromisingly, to the lower part of the knee. What else had that meant but an irreversible modernity? Now the girls were all trailing yards and yards of bright or sober stuff, tripping over themselves, delightedly conspicuous, enchanted with their own clear absurdity. Chester chased after them; more often they chased after Chester. When I came to meet him in the commons nowadays, he had a retinue. The girls moved in on him; so did the incipient bohemians; he was more and more in the center of a raucous crowd. He was beginning to display himself—to accept or define himself—as a wit, and his wit, kamikaze assaults of paradox or shock, caught on. In no time at all he had made himself famous in the commons—a businesslike place, where the resolute veterans, grinding away, ate their sandwiches with their elbows in their accounting texts. Chester’s success was mine. He was my conduit and guide. Without him I would have been buried alive in Washington Square, consumed by timidity.
He journeyed out to visit me twice—a tediously endless subway trip from the bowels of Brooklyn to Pelham Bay. We walked in the barren park, along untenanted crisscross paths, down the hill through the big meadow to the beach. I was proud of this cat-tailed scene—it was mine, it was my childhood, it was my Brontëan heath. Untrammelled grasses, the gray keen water knocking against mossy stones. Here I was master. Now that Chester was celebrated at school, I warmed to the privilege of having him to myself, steering him from prospect to prospect, until we were light-headed with the drizzly air. At the end of the day, at the foot of the high stair that led to the train, we said goodbye. He bent toward me—he was taller than I, though not by much—and kissed me. The pale perfect lips and their cold spittle rested on my mouth; it was all new. It had never happened before, not with any other boy. I was bewildered, wildly uncertain; I shrank back, and told him I could not think of him like that—he was my brother. (Ah, to retrieve that instant, that movietone remark learned from the silver screen of the Pilgrim Theater, half a mile down the tracks! To retrieve it, to undo it, to wipe it out!) He wormed his blunt white fingers into his jacket pockets and stood for a while. The el’s stanchions shook. Overhead the train growled and headed downtown. Two puddles lay against his lower eyelids, unstanched by the missing lashes. It was the same, he said, with Diana; it was just the same, though Diana wasn’t a brute, she hadn’t said it outright. He didn’t want to be anyone’s brother—mine, maybe, but not Diana’s. I knew Diana, a brilliant streak in the commons excitements: in those newfangled long skirts she had a fleet, flashing step, and she wore postwar nylons and neat formal pumps (unrenovated, I was still in my high school sloppy Joes and saddle shoes). Diana was one of the beauties, among the loveliest of all, with a last name that sounded as if it had fallen out of a Trollope novel, but was actually Leb
anese. In after years I happened on a replica of her face on the salvaged wall of an ancient Roman villa, with its crimson tones preserved indelibly: black-rimmed Mediterranean eyes fixed in intelligence, blackly lit; round cheeks and chin, all creamy pink. An exquisite ur-Madonna. Diana had a generous heart, she was vastly kind and a little shy, with a penetrating attentiveness untypical of the young. Like many in Chester’s crew, she was single-mindedly literary. (She is a poet of reputation now.) Chester yearned; and more than anyone, Diana was the object and representation of his yearning.
But I yearned, too. The word itself—soaked in dream and Poesy—pretty well embodies what we were, Chester and I, in a time when there was no ostensible sex, only romance, and the erotic habits of the urban bookish young were confined to daring cafeteria discussions of the orgone box (a contrivance touted by Wilhelm Reich), and severely limited gropings at parties in the parental domicile. One of these parties drew me to Brooklyn—it was my first look at this fabled place. The suburban atmosphere of Flatbush took me by surprise—wide streets and tall brick Tudor-style houses flawed only by being set too closely together. The party, though given by a girl I will call Carla Baumblatt, was altogether Chester’s: he had chosen all the guests. Carla would not allow us to enter through the front door. Instead, she herded us toward the back yard and into the kitchen. She had managed to persuade her parents to leave the house, but her mother’s admonishments were all around: Carla worried about cigarette ashes, about food spilling, about muddy shoes. She especially worried about the condition of the living room rug; someone whispered to me that she was terribly afraid of her mother. And soon enough her mother came home: a tough, thin, tight little woman, with black hair tightly curled. Carla was big and matronly, twice her mother’s size. She had capacious breasts that rode before her, and a homely mouth like a twist of wax, and springy brown hair, which she hated and attempted to squash down. She was dissatisfied with herself and with her life; there was no movie rhapsody in it. An argument began in the kitchen, and there was Carla, cowed by her tiny mother. Curiously, a kitchen scene turns up in Chester’s first novel, Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, published in England in 1956, a decade after Carla’s party—the last time she ever tried to give a party at home. The narrator describes a young woman’s “largeness”: “I have always felt that her body was the wrong one, that it was an exaggerated contrast with her personality, and that one must disregard it in order to know Emily at all. It is her fault I have believed this so long, for in all her ways she had negated the strength and bigness her figure shows, and substituted weakness and dependency and fright, so that one imagines Emily within as a small powerless girl.” When Carla reappeared in the living room after quarreling with her mother, she seemed, despite her largeness, a small powerless girl; she was as pale as if she had been beaten, and again warned about dirtying the carpet.
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