Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  We were sitting outside now, on the cold stone stairs leading down to the lawn where some of the seniors had taken their trays of food. My daughter, who likes steps of all kinds, was busy enough to let us finish this conversation in peace. There were leaves in the grass scattered loosely around the trees, in various colors, and my daughter had decided to place one leaf on top of each of the steps. But they kept blowing away. One of the students, who had noticed what she was trying to do, laughed at her; and she laughed back at him, much more loudly. She also began bringing him leaves.

  ‘He had this idea of a doctor,’ Katarina said, ‘a family doctor, someone who performs routine check-ups and physical examinations, who decides to tell a few of his patients, after these check-ups, that it is clear from the medical evidence that they are suffering really unusual amounts of pain. That nobody else suffers the way they are suffering and that they have simply become accustomed to it. He doesn’t offer them any relief from this pain or go into any of the details. It was a part of Peter’s idea that after this doctor tells his patients these things that none of them disagrees with him. That it more or less confirms what they had always suspected. At the same time, they don’t expect any treatment or any relief and don’t ask him any questions about the kind of pain they are suffering, which they take entirely on faith. And they leave his surgery feeling much better than they had before. I haven’t read any of Peter’s novels, because I take no pleasure from what is called contemporary literature, but when I heard he had published a book I remembered this conversation – maybe I had been complaining to him about my back, which sometimes gives me trouble, though the doctors can find nothing wrong. And I wondered if he had written about it in the book. Can you tell me if he did?’

  ‘There may be something similar. But whether he used this specific story or not I would say it was very much in keeping with … the tone of the novels themselves.’

  Afterwards, this conversation affected me more than it should have. I found it difficult to keep my mind on the necessary small talk while we sat on the steps and watched my daughter play. Kelly appeared behind us, with Bob in tow, carrying her own daughter, and Katarina had a class to teach and left us to prepare for it. We let the girls run around together, chasing leaves, and then I pushed myself up off my knees and chased the girls. It really was time to put them in the car and drive them to sleep, but Bob offered to get us into the room that Peter had lived in, or if not the same room exactly, something very much like it, and Kelly was sufficiently excited by the prospect and pleased with her friend’s helpfulness that I couldn’t refuse. So we went back to Founders and got a key from the secretary there, a big-permed woman with medical sunglasses she kept shifting on her nose. As it happens, one of the rooms was unoccupied, but she had no way of knowing if Mr Sullivan had lived in it or not.

  ‘I suppose he was before your time,’ I said.

  ‘There’s less that’s before my time than you’d imagine. I’ve been here thirty years. I remember Mr Sullivan. I remember young Lee-Sung Feldman, too, if you want to know, who maybe wasn’t the worst kid I ever saw come through Beaumont, but I can’t think of anyone to beat him.’

  ‘I didn’t know his name was Lee-Sung.’

  ‘I said to Mr Feldman once, before this whole thing blew up, what did you want to get a Korean kid for? If you’re picking and choosing. It’s not fair to the boy, to raise him like that, so he doesn’t know what he is. But they figured that out eventually.’

  ‘That’s an ignorant thing to say,’ Kelly said. ‘I don’t even know what you mean.’

  But we took the keys from her and walked through the back door into a hallway that led to the main entrance. Founders, and the land around it, once belonged to a branch of the Holmes family, relatives of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The building still had something of the gloomy grandeur of a private wealthy residence, paneled walls and portraits in oil on the landings, combined with certain technological advances already out of date: a dirty air-conditioning unit propped inside one of the windows. Stippled false ceilings to hide the air vents. But the stairs still creaked underfoot. Kelly said, ‘I don’t know why I’m so excited, but I’m excited.’ And she put her palms together so that you could hear them sticking lightly when she pulled them apart.

  The room Bob let us into, on the second floor of the older wing of the house, overlooked the new parking lot at the back. Gray carpet on the floor; nails in the walls. It wasn’t much bigger than my office at the Radcliffe. There was space for a single bed and a small desk and a chair, and a door to the bathroom, which was windowless and had a toilet in it and a kind of hip-bath squeezed between two walls. Probably carved out of the closet that used to be there. The place reminded me of the replica hut at Walden Pond, not more than fifteen minutes by car from Beaumont Hill, which had been built according to Thoreau’s instructions in the book. I even said to Bob and Kelly, ‘Self-sufficiency.’ To live there for nearly twenty years and then be forced to leave. The window stood directly behind the bed but I don’t know what it would have overlooked before the parking lot was poured in. Maybe a garden. Katarina’s story was also on my mind, and it was hard not to imagine that the kind of pain Peter had in mind, in his case at least, was sexual in origin.

  *

  By this point the girls really were so tired we had to get them home. They fell asleep on the way, and Kelly and I sat in the car outside her apartment for maybe half an hour, to let them nap. Talking about Peter but also other things. Her husband had filed a complaint against her, in the Probate and Family Court, to prevent her moving with the kids back to Austin. Most places had a presumption in favor of the right to relocate for the custodial parent but not the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She had to show it was in the best interests of the children. It wasn’t enough to say, my happiness is the best thing for them, even though it’s what she believed.

  ‘I do really believe it,’ she said. ‘I think I’d believe it even if it counted against me somehow. But it’s hard to be sure of that.’

  She didn’t blame Kevin, she just hated arguing everything out in front of other people. And so far he’d been pretty honorable about certain facts he could mention that would help his case. Her lawyer said, You can’t trust anybody when it comes to kids, especially not ex-husbands. But she didn’t want to live like that, by suspicion. He said, Everybody uses everything they got.

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Stupid things. I once slapped a child, not for any good reason, but because I was hardly thinking. Just because I’d had enough – of what, I don’t know. The girl got over it in about a minute, but I cried by myself in a stall in the restroom for the whole of my lunch break and looked so red and ugly for the rest of the day I had to complain all the time about hay-fever and forgetting my pills. I was probably crying about other things, too. I’d had some trouble with this girl before, which really means that I’d had some trouble with her parents, and when the dad found out, he tried to get me suspended. The school didn’t suspend me, but it’s on my record. Then there’s the fact that James has learning difficulties. He doesn’t really, I don’t believe in them, I know that’s a stupid thing to say, but I don’t. Still we registered him as attention deficit to get him into the school he’s going to, which is a good school. And the court might want to know if the school he would go to in Austin is just as good, which it probably isn’t. That kind of thing. But Kevin hasn’t mentioned it, maybe because he’s embarrassed.’

  Part of the time we sat in silence, with the door resting open by its own weight, to let some air in. We could hear workmen working a few houses away and see a truck coming and going to the site, which was boarded up. Otherwise the street was quiet enough and almost unnaturally colorful, with leaves and parked cars and painted houses. When my daughter woke first, and woke Kelly’s, I think we were both a little relieved that the spell of silence we were sitting in had been broken.

  After Caroline came home (it was her turn to put the girl to bed), when I ha
d a part of the evening to myself, I looked into the copy of Walden I had bought from the park store on our last visit to the lake. To find something consoling; this is how I put it to myself, thinking of Peter’s narrow room. ‘Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think they must have such a one as their neighbors have.’ And: ‘To have for the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card –

  Arrivéd there, the little house they fill,

  No look for entertainment where none was;

  Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:

  The noblest mind the best contentment has.’

  There is plenty of this sort of thing in the book. I also looked over Peter’s two published novels, to see if there was anything in them that resembled the story Katarina had told and which Peter had once brooded on. But the closest I came was a reference in Imposture to a tale about a doctor ‘mysteriously in thrall to all the people he had inadvertently killed.’

  *

  Caroline and I had intended from the beginning to return to London for what she called ‘the whole month of Christmas.’ On the Tuesday before we left I got a call from Paul Gerschon at the Houghton Library. He said he had something to show me. Mrs Sullivan had entrusted him with several boxes of her son’s old papers and books, which he had brought by taxi to the library to assess, and which were now sitting on his desk. Any time I liked I was welcome to come by. So the next morning I made my way through the carpeted internal corridors of the administrative offices, which even at that time of year felt oppressively air-conditioned, to Paul’s door. He was looking over manuscript papers when I came in, blinking under the glare of his desk-lamp, and stood up rather slowly to take my hand.

  ‘I get these head-rushes,’ he said. ‘Low blood pressure. It doesn’t help that I slept not much last night. My son is teething. I said to my wife, at my age.’

  ‘So what did you think of Mrs Sullivan?’

  ‘I thought, it’s wonderful the respect certain suspicious people feel for professional titles. I gave her my card and was in and out in fifteen minutes. Do you know how old she is?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘Eighty-three, and still runs the place with some help from a cleaning woman. She told me all this herself in those fifteen minutes. Maybe suspicion is what keeps the brain alive. She also said, four or five different scholars have approached her about these papers. I liked the way she said scholar, as if it’s one of the old professions, like priest or whore.’

  ‘And you believed her?’

  ‘I did not. She’s trying to talk up the price.’

  ‘Is there anything to talk up?’

  ‘A few things, some of them more interesting to me than you. Peter had a first edition of Trelawny’s Recollections, published by Edward Moxon in 1858. In fair condition; bookseller’s notice tipped to front fly. Worth maybe a couple hundred dollars. Then there’s Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lady Byron Vindicated. Another first edition, the English one – published by Sampson, Low, Son, and Marston. The binding’s been repaired with brown paper, probably by him. It’s not worth more than forty dollars, but Peter inscribed it and wrote the odd marginalia inside.’ He began passing me books across the desk, and I took them from his soft hands and looked at them politely and afterwards couldn’t think where to put them, so I put them on the floor by my chair. ‘This is rather nice – the third canto of Childe Harold. Sadly rebound; a third edition, but from 1819. And my favorite of the lot: the war cantos of Don Juan, published by John Hunt in 1823 after Byron’s famous split from Murray. In good condition it would fetch as much as five hundred dollars, arid this is pretty fair.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Oh, just what you’d expect. Marchand’s Life, in three volumes. Looks hardly touched. His Portrait, too, rather more dog-eared. The twelve-volume letters – actually, I think one or two are missing. Byron and Greek Love, by Louis Crompton. My Dearest Augusta, by Peter Gunn. Ethel Colburn Mayne’s chatty little biography of Annabella. Grosskurth’s silly book. A handsome deco edition of the poems, published by Bliss Sands & Co and originally priced at three and six.’

  ‘I mean novels, other poets.’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to go through everything yet. You mean, other than Byronalia. A few Penguin classics. Cranford, by Gaskell. A complete set of the Waverley novels, a show-piece edition, to look good on the shelf, but the bindings suggest he read them, too. Or somebody had. The Heart of Mid-Lothian is held together by rubber band. Persuasion and Mansfield Park. A dozen Jameses, from The Aspern Papers through to The Wings of the Dove. David Copperfield. Moby Dick – you know, the staple diet of a high-school English teacher. Many of these in the Norton school editions. Twenty Years After, by Dumas. Clough’s Amours de Voyage. William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere.’

  ‘And nothing more modern?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by modern,’ Paul said, shifting boxes on his desk and putting his head in them. ‘He owned a well-thumbed copy of Goodbye to All That. Also, The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield. A few American things. Goodbye, Columbus. The Adventures of Augie March. Second or third editions, as if he read them in his youth. Nothing more recent than A Girl in Winter, by Larkin. No, I lie. I’m forgetting the O’Brian novels – you know, those sea-tales. A more or less complete set.’

  By this point, there were books stacked like children’s blocks on the desk and the empty chairs and on the floor.

  ‘Not a terribly large collection,’ Paul said. ‘Just imagine them on the shelf – you wouldn’t need but three or four. I would say, the collection of a book-lover who spent a great deal of his life moving between rented accommodations. A few favorite items mixed in with the necessaries. Did you ever see his place in New York?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know him particularly well. Sometimes we went for walks in the neighborhood – around the school. I heard from my old boss that maybe he lived in Washington Heights. A lot of the teachers did, since it’s affordable and commutable to Riverdale.’

  ‘His mailing address was somewhere in the one-eighties.’

  ‘But this is not what you were looking at when I came in.’

  ‘No.’

  Paul stood up and moved delicately away from his desk, between the books.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down,’ he said and began clearing off more space. There were a couple boxes of papers on the floor and he straightened the pile he’d been looking at and returned it to one of them. ‘Excuse the mess. This is more or less how I live. I remember once going into the Strand bookstore with Peter, in New York. It was sunny when we went in and dark when we came out. For two or three hours we hardly said a word to each other, and didn’t buy any books, either. A whole afternoon. Is this enough light for you? I’m used to reading in these little pockets of light.’

  I edged around him, and we exchanged places. ‘So what am I looking at,’ I said.

  ‘It depends what you want. His mother threw everything in together, but I’ve been busy rearranging. The bigger box holds drafts of the novels. In order, long hand. Not illegible, but a little crabbed. Arrows and clauses added between the lines. Sometimes he used an erasable pen – you can still see the rubber-shavings on the page. Sometimes Tipp-Ex. On those marbled composition notebooks you buy for school; he dated the pages occasionally, in the margins, when he sat down to write. The other box has a few stories and shorter pieces; also, what seem to be letters.’

  ‘Letters people sent him?’

  ‘Not that I can see, though I haven’t made an inventory yet. From what I can tell, it’s drafts of the letters he wrote, which he maybe typed up later when he was satisfied with them, to be sent off.’

  ‘Who to? I didn’t know he kept up correspondences.’

  ‘Just look at them. This is the first part of the business that made me feel this is none of my business. But why don’t I leave you
alone for a minute, in peace. And you can judge for yourself.’

  Paul left and for the next two hours I had his office to myself, until he tapped on the door again and put his head round and suggested we get some lunch. But until then everything was quiet, apart from the faint industrial breathing of the air-vents. You could think of the building itself as a kind of animal, with the motor left running, even in sleep. This isn’t work I’m very good at. I haven’t the patience for archives, or the curiosity. It seems to me that the bulk of what’s interesting about a writer lies in the published material; there’s a kind of perversity involved in digging up from the manuscript pages the half-dozen first intentions he later thought better of. Of course, in Peter’s case, nothing was published until I published it, and maybe what I disliked was the idea that the versions we worked with were only provisional. Paul had left out copies of Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment, for comparison. I planted my elbow in the light of the desk lamp and lifted a marbled notebook from the box under his desk.

  Turning the cardboard cover gave me my first little thrill. Peter had written down in block letters the word IMPOSTURE, and underneath it, this line: ‘The opening and closing of Henry Colburn’s large, red front door had produced in the course of the morning, as if by force of suction, a bright eddy of human traffic.’ There was a date, written in red pen, which suggests it had been added later: June 6th, 1983. Beaumont Hill. The beginning of his summer holidays; Peter was forty. The school campus, on its fifty acres, would have been empty of everyone but a handful of janitors and administrators, and the odd live-in teacher with nowhere else to go. I thought of the desk in the room at Founders, which may or may not have been his desk, just as it might have been his room, pushed up against the bed so that if you were sitting down to write you could turn your head to look out the window. From that angle you’d likely see the back extension of the house. The paper he wrote on, frail to begin with and now curled slightly at the edges, had retained the Braille-like impressions of his pen – you could run your fingers over the lines and feel the words.