The Brothers Boswell

by Philip Baruth

  Still, Boswell could not get over the fact that his brother had spent nearly the last two months in an asylum.

  Boswell had always been fascinated with hypochondria, if not outright madness, but here now was that fascination brought directly home to him, visited on his own younger brother. It was shocking, like watching lightning play away in the distance and then having it suddenly strike an inch away from one’s boot.

  It seemed undeniably ominous, especially given that their uncle John Boswell’s mind had degenerated so spectacularly in the middle years of his life. And there was the strange dissymmetry at work, as well: while John had been confined to Plymouth, Boswell had himself been turned loose finally in London, had shouldered his way into more than a few of the highest social circles the metropolis had to offer.

  But now that John was free and had made his way up to Town, Boswell couldn’t help but feel that his own fresh new London self was likely to be impacted, changed or qualified or even harmed somehow, and in a way beyond his control. It made him anxious, and it soured his stomach, almost from the moment John surprised him at breakfast. His mind was a tangle of questions.

  And so he had invited John for breakfast the next day as well.

  That was January 6, Twelfth-day, and, rather than breakfast in his flat, Boswell proposed a walk through the City, the sort of thing they used to do together as boys in Edinburgh. John readily agreed, but drew the line at Boswell’s second idea—celebrating the English holiday by eating a penny Twelfth-cake at every shop where they could get one, up the length of Piccadilly and then back down the other side.

  But he followed gamely along as Boswell set about stuffing himself.

  It gave their conversation a pleasant on-again, off-again rhythm, in fact. Boswell would spy yet another tiny bakery tucked into a run of shopfronts, and they would stand together at the window, tricked out with a wren in a gilded cage or a shiny brass lantern. Each time, Boswell would duck inside and pop out again in a moment, with a penny cake sugared over but little bigger than a snuffbox.

  “Twelfth Day!” Boswell would cry, holding the next miniature cake aloft. Only then would he devour it. But between stops and cakes, Boswell watched his brother. And after a while of this, he saw that John watched him in return, which moved Boswell to come to the heart of the matter.

  “You have told me the facts, Johnny. But you haven’t told me how it felt,” Boswell began again, as they waded into the crowd outside St. James’s Church. “You have yet to describe the way it seemed to you. That is what I would know.”

  Although John was taller and wearing a soldier’s coat, the crowd tended not to part for him, and so Boswell was moving them through, holding his stick chest-high. He turned to catch John’s answer, only to find his brother making a sour face.

  “Of all the things I worried about in Plymouth,” John said above the noise, “the worst was that I might in fact be released.”

  Boswell stopped and turned to him. “You were frightened of being released from the hospital?”

  “Indeed. For once outside, I could only expect to be badgered to death by you about how it felt to be inside.”

  “John, I am serious. It is no joking matter, truly it is not.”

  “I can assure you I need no one to remind me of that.”

  Boswell steered them into the street and around a surly-looking group of chairmen, holding the wall. “I was worried about you,” he continued, in a lower voice, “and you know me well enough to know that I am worried about myself as well, Johnny. I admit it. It is a family worry. I have been hoping you would share something of what you learned with me. At least a bit of it.”

  John could hold out no longer. He sighed by way of surrender, measuring Boswell with his glance. The glance stretched out though, and Boswell could sense a trace of something like distaste or disappointment in it. “You would know how it feels to be mad, is that it, Jemmie? Is that what you want from me, then?”

  Boswell hesitated over the blunt language, then simply nodded.

  “Well, then, let me answer once, and let that be an end of it.”

  “Of course, Johnny.”

  They moved forward again, and John thrust his hands into his pockets, twisting them there. He waited for a woman and her two small daughters to pass, and then began. “To be honest, I don’t remember it, not clearly. That you must believe. Those days are murky in my memory. As though someone had attempted to rub out a charcoal impression, if you take my meaning. Dark and blurry. I remember being angry. That I can tell you. Very angry. Angry enough to scream and beat my head against a wall.”

  “Angry enough to harm your fellow soldiers?”

  “Angry enough to want to harm them, want to batter them into rubble if they stood in my way,” John answered, and a little laugh escaped him, but it was at odds with the redness of his eyes, the anxious way he scanned the crowd. His face was thinner, and longer somehow, than Boswell remembered.

  “It is not a feeling one revisits with any pleasure, believe me,” John finished.

  And though he knew he was pushing, prying, Boswell could not help but ask what he wanted to know in yet another way. But he softened it by patting John’s arm.

  “You remember the anger, but not what you thought at the moment? Father said you—” Here Boswell paused, tactfully, tapped his stick along the stones. “At least it was reported to him that you raved at your fellow soldiers, accused them of things. Accused them of some conspiracy against you. Have you no memory of what you were thinking then, what caused the rage?”

  John stood there in the street, and Boswell could tell that he was earnestly searching his memory. Not because he wanted to answer Boswell’s question, necessarily, but because he would know the contents of his own mind, and finally did not.

  “Each time I feel that I might remember more clearly,” John managed, “the recollection steals around a corner. I see only its coattails as it disappears. Enough to be certain I have lost something, but never enough to be certain what it is I have lost.” He hesitated a moment. “It is as though the memories themselves know which way I will turn my eye, and they wait until the very last second. And then they flee.”

  “As though they are taunting you,” Boswell could not help but add.

  “Very much so,” said John.

  That was all that either could say for the moment, because just then Piccadilly opened on the right into Baker’s Pass, and Boswell spied three neat little bakeries standing next to one another down the side street, all perfectly in a row. And although his Twelfth Day vow had originally extended only to both sides of Piccadilly proper, it simply wasn’t in Boswell’s heart to deny England one more small smidgen of devotion.

  BOSWELL STANDS IN the courtyard behind the Black Lion, now cold through to the marrow. If not miserable, he is at least stiff and shivering and thoughtful as he retraces his steps back through the yard and up into the house.

  In reconsidering it, he can’t help but be disturbed by two aspects of his Twelfth Day walk with John. He pushed his brother too hard, Boswell sees now, let his own fears take precedence over any concern for John’s comfort. It was badly done. But also there is the matter of the walk itself. Rather than begin in St. James’s Park and then take in the Strand and Fleet Street—Boswell’s own unfailing daily walk—he took John to the Green Park and walked him afterward up Piccadilly.

  He told himself at the time that the holiday displays along Piccadilly would outdo the Strand, but the real purpose now seems inescapable: to shepherd John away from Boswell’s particular favorite route and the people they might meet along it. There is something in the realization that makes Boswell think less of himself as a brother.

  The ground floor of the Black Lion is alive with lamplight, wonderfully warm. Boswell feels his spirits rise with the temperature. As he nears the stair, the chambermaid passes, head bowed, but he can make out the words, “Mr. Digges, sir,” and again the sheer ludic pleasure of this evening comes home to him.

&nbs
p; At the top of the stair, Boswell stops and draws a folded paper square from his waistcoat. Beneath the chandelier, he carefully untucks its interlocking edges. Even as Boswell’s memoranda go, this one is tiny, secretive, and it blossoms into a message little larger than a daffodil. The voice is, as always, his own:

  You go now to enjoy a woman you suspect you love, a handsome actress seen and desired by thousands of men. Yet it is you she has chosen. You are in full glow of health, youth. A more voluptuous night you may never experience. Remember each detail, and tomorrow walk out for air as she dresses, make notes. The last month of your journal builds the story of this intrigue. Tonight you satisfy Louisa and yourself; tomorrow you satisfy readers. One of whom will be yourself, years from now, in your comfortable Auchinleck retirement. That Boswell will envy you this night. Yet he will thank you, for committing all to paper. Keep best faith with him.

  Boswell moves forward again, reworking and pocketing the square as he does so. His nose picks up the very lightest trace of perfume as he nears the chamber door—so very faint, in fact, that the scent may be generated entirely by his own imagination. But either way, it smells delicious.

  He considers knocking, then realizes that he is well within his fictional rights to simply walk into the room.

  But for the banked coals in the fireplace and a single candle, flickering at the bedside table, the room is dark. And he was not mistaken about the perfume: the scent lingers in the air, not Louisa’s everyday choice, but something sharper, slightly more acrid. A bowl of negus, wine rich with fruit, sits beside the candle, as he ordered.

  Louisa lies motionless beneath the coverlet. Only her dark hair, her slim hand, and a bit of her profile are visible. He sees the rise and fall of her breathing and the suggestion of a smile on her face, but she is silent. Boswell too says nothing, pausing to remove his coat and then his waistcoat, hanging each in turn on a chair near the window.

  His shoes he unlaces and pulls off, then his shirt and breeches and stockings, and still Louisa says nothing. Finally, he comes to the bed wearing only his linen, and sits down upon it. Louisa’s eyes remain closed, but the dimple in her cheek is unmistakable.

  Boswell leans down to the shell of her ear. “Mrs. Digges,” he whispers, “I must have a word with you. The table you set tonight was deficient, shockingly so. The melted butter was oiled,” Boswell presses his lips softly to her lobe, goes on, “and with the meat upon the sideboard I am old friends, I’m afraid, having rejected it yesterday.”

  The dimple deepens, and then finally Louisa cannot help but smile outright. Her eyes remain closed, however. “Please, Mr. Boswell, we must drop the pretense. It is a wicked thing of us, to tell such lies.”

  Boswell leans to the ear and whispers again, a bit more loudly. “I will not have my authority questioned, Mrs. Digges.”

  “Do stop. You are terrible. You positively delight in the subterfuge, I believe.”

  “You could not be more correct. What man or woman does not delight in it? The subterfuge is like the sugar on a Twelfth Day cake. Without it you have a dull mass of flour and grease. But I will bargain.” Here Boswell moves his lips down from Louisa’s ear, to the perfumed hollow between her neck and jaw. “Within this room, we will cease to be Mr. and Mrs. Digges.”

  “I am glad you begin to behave.”

  “If you will agree to act the Queen in Hamlet, while I play the Prince.”

  Her eyes are still closed, but the dimple disappears. “Now you are simply wicked, sir. We must agree to be ourselves, plain and undisguised.”

  Boswell ceases nuzzling. “You are right. A mother and son would not do. Quite right. But suppose I play Claudius to your Gertrude.”

  “Mr. Boswell, please. You go from bad to worse. Claudius is a murderer.”

  Boswell purses his lips, considers it. “What say you to Polonius, then?”

  Louisa buries her face in the pillow, her hands squeezing it tight, and he is uncertain for an instant whether he has pressed too hard, even in jest. But she is laughing, chortling, Boswell can make out after another second.

  Louisa sits up suddenly and brings her arms and bare shoulders out from beneath the blanket, tucking the material snugly back around her breasts. As always, the dusting of freckles across her chest catches his heart. She settles back against the pillows, holding the blanket in place, holding his eye. “Here is the bargain, then, if we must bargain. You may speak any line from Hamlet, and I will give you back the speech that follows. One set of lines, and that is all. You must agree, hand on heart, that you will be satisfied with that and no more.”

  Boswell is impressed. “I may prompt you with any line, by any character? And you will give me the next speech? In the entire play? You have a prodigious memory.”

  “It is my profession, after all. And I work at it.”

  Boswell is almost beside himself with delight, and he takes her hand, brings it to his lips. He can prompt her to speak any set of lines he thinks will best fill out the journal entry he will write tomorrow; and tomorrow he can record the fact that she actually did so in good conscience. It is writing his life as though it were fiction.

  The possibilities are all but endless. But Boswell is nothing if not amply prepared. He settles on the last two lines of one of several speeches he has spent part of yesterday and this morning memorizing. It is Hamlet, because for all of his other joking suggestions Boswell has never for an instant intended to play anyone other than the Prince of Denmark.

  “Those that are married already,” he begins, watching her face for signs of recognition, “all but one, shall live, the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunn’ry, go.”

  Louisa closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them again, she fixes her gaze on Boswell’s face. She looks deeply into his eyes, face impassive. They watch one another for five full seconds, then ten. Only slowly does her expression sadden, and for an instant he thinks she has simply failed to remember the answering speech.

  But the eyes seem gradually to gather the candlelight, and he realizes with a start that the shimmer there is the first hint of tears. Louisa continues to look at him with open, authentic hurt, as though she has somehow seen beyond the walls of the Black Lion, seen him for the worst that he is capable of doing, the very worst that he is capable of being.

  “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” she begins softly, a catch in the voice, and Boswell must remind himself several times as the speech continues that she is not in fact speaking to him, at least not directly.

  19

  IT IS NEARLY one the next afternoon before Boswell and Louisa leave the Black Lion and step into a hackney coach Mr. Hayward has himself personally fetched. It is a later start than what they had planned, but having promised his select readers an extraordinarily voluptuous night, Boswell has hardly been in any mood to see it finished prematurely.

  Only well after three in the morning—when the extent of the voluptuousness could no longer be in any doubt—was he content to sleep.

  And this morning too he has given Louisa a good hour to rise and dress, during which time Boswell patrolled languorously up and down Fleet Street, finally ducking into the Somerset Coffee-House, where he called for a dish of chocolate and wrote up a pleasingly thick little packet of notes for himself.

  Those notes are now in Boswell’s breast pocket, and as Mr. Hayward closes the coach door behind them, Boswell relishes the feel of them there, almost as much as he savors the presence of Louisa on the seat beside him. She is bundled once again in her gown, her boots, green coat, sable cap, feather muff. Only her pretty face is visible, the pale cheeks and red lips, but when he catches her eye, Louisa gives a sly smile, and then turns to look out the window again.

  They are headed for Soho Square, where she has errands to run and where no one she knows will see her alight from the coach. As the coach clatters past the Temple, Boswell catches a quick glimpse of the door to Samuel Johnson’s Inner Temple apartments. In spite of his promise to bring Boswe
ll and Johnson together, Dilly has said nothing about the possibility since Christmas Day, almost two weeks ago, and Boswell is suddenly mildly disappointed all over again.

  Yet, if he had met Johnson on Christmas Day, Boswell has no doubt that he would now be celibate and dedicated to a virtuous Johnsonian existence. The events of last night would never have occurred. There would be no delicious ache in his muscles. The notes in his pocket would not exist.

  And these considerations lead him back to a place his thoughts have taken him more than once before: the suspicion that God himself is ordering Boswell’s year in London, that He has delayed Johnson’s influence for a reason, quite possibly because He too could not resist seeing the Louisa story brought to its sweet, natural conclusion.

  As they reach Holborn Street, Louisa puts the feather muff aside and reaches over to take Boswell’s right hand firmly in both of hers. “Mr. Boswell,” she begins, “I have but one favor to ask of you before we part.”

  “You may ask anything of me. I can deny you nothing now, you must know.”

  She smiles again, presses his hand, but her expression is no longer playful. In spite of fresh powder, he can read the long night in her face, in the tiny lines here or there, the very slight puffiness beneath her eyes.

  She hesitates, then brings it abruptly out. “Whenever you may cease to regard me, or to care for me, pray don’t use me ill, nor treat me coldly.”

  “Madam, come, let us not talk of such a thing!”

  “Please, for that I could not abide. Truly I could not. That sort of calculated coldness designed only to bring on a separation, it is inhuman. Just inform me by a letter or any other way that it is over. Be kind in that way. That is the only favor I ask.”

  Boswell feels his heart go out to her, instantly and unreservedly. He cannot resist taking her in his arms for a moment, whispering to her, consoling her. “Madam, have you forgotten last night so soon? How intimate we have become? Indeed, we cannot answer for our affections. No man or woman can do so. But you may always depend on my behaving with civility. You must trust me for that, if for nothing else.”