by Laura Argiri
“I’m sorry, I don’t recall anyone of that name but I…I’m most pleased to meet you. Please forgive my disarray, and come inside out of the cold. Who is your father?”
“Oh! Silly of me not to say,” said the creature, stepping in. “He’s really not my father, he’s my foster father. Lord Alfred Stratton-Truro. He says you’re a specialist in lunatics and told me to call on you.” He did not seem to see anything even faintly peculiar in this way of introducing himself to a stranger.
Supplied with a name, Moses remembered Stratton-Truro accurately and with disfavor; he had gotten the letter, in which the Englishman had not mentioned that his son was god-beautiful and, besides, not his son at all. He had been expecting to help find lodgings and supply introductions for some porky, mediocre replica of Stratton-Truro himself.
“I don’t call it being a specialist in lunatics,” Moses said, feeling somehow cheap and confounded before such beauty. “I treat nervous disorders, among other things, and I have had some success. I was confounded when I received your father’s letter about you. I didn’t know him at all well, and I had no idea that he had ever married,” foundered Moses—he would be furious with himself later; no one made him act this way! “He didn’t seem the type to marry.”
“He didn’t,” said Doriskos, with a smile of honeyed hostility. “I’m Greek by birth. He was on a tour buying icons and things. He bought me.” The smile broadened and warmed; in time, Moses would become amply familiar with Doriskos’s bland and plummy delivery of little conversational bombs. “That’s supposed to be a secret,” said Doriskos sweetly.
“I’ll go and tell the whole town at once,” Karseth replied, with his own wicked smile. He thought: It’s early in the morning, and I don’t deserve this at such an hour. Furthermore, Handsome here has earned himself something in return. “Why,” he asked, “does Stratton-Truro send you in my direction? Does he fancy that you’re a lunatic?”
“Perhaps he does,” said this extraordinary Doriskos. “He’s… I never know what the man thinks. I came because I thought you might be able to assist me with some practical information about this place. The location of a livery stable, for instance. I just bought a horse. I have to board him somewhere.”
“Temple Street to Crown Street, two blocks north on Crown, the next sharp left,” said Karseth. “You can’t miss it. There’s a tavern by the stable. The White Wave.”
“Thank you. Well, then…good morning,” said Doriskos. He backed out skittily, as if this little courtesy call had unsettled him as much as it did anyone else, and went back up the street in relieved long strides to where the movers were completing their operations with his furniture.
Moses saw Helmut at the top of the stairs, looking wan but curious.
“What’s the matter? You look as if someone smacked you. Who was that?”
“A lunatic,” said Moses, rubbing his head. “A very good-looking young man who claims he was bought in infancy by an old English patient of mine. And now he’s here to teach. He’ll have all our little swishes in hysterics. That was the most extraordinary conversation…”
To his intense surprise, Moses came home a few days after that to find Doriskos drinking tea with Helmut in his kitchen. He never got the complete story out of Helmut because it involved an Indiscretion—not of the kind that would have made anyone think he was a fairy, but of the kind that would have made most people seriously doubt that he was a servant.
On a tedious and habitual basis, Moses and Helmut argued about windows. Helmut opened them, Moses closed them. Moses argued from the side of secrecy and discretion and Helmut from claustrophobia and an utter intolerance for the humidity of the grim seaboard town. Upon this occasion, Helmut had had the back kitchen windows open while practicing his music, which he did six days a week even in the stasis of his life in America.
Exploring the alleyway that ran behind the street and lingering to admire Helmut’s back garden, Doriskos heard him singing. It was Lohengrin’s aria In fernem Land—a piece he adored. He crept round to the shuttered windows of the parlor where Helmut had his pianoforte, stepping carefully around the daffodils and grape hyacinths at his feet, and listened through a couple of repetitions. A luscious voice, not big enough to sing Wagner on the professional stage but much sweeter and more polished than any real Wagnerian voice. Exquisitely handled—Doriskos knew about these things—riding a little crescendo toward the end of each of the long phrases, the volume carefully reined and controlled in a way that was right for a song of profound sadness and resignation—holding the mezzoforte all the way through the last phrase.
Doriskos went round to the back door and knocked urgently. “May I listen, please? That was gorgeous. I’m Doriskos Klionarios, by the way—Professor Klionarios. I live down the street. I like music,” he finished weakly.
After a nonplussed pause, Helmut smiled, perceiving that he had nothing to fear from this enthusiast. Doriskos wasn’t smiling; he had the look of an alarmed but pleading child who suddenly wants something badly. Helmut clasped his nervous hand and said, “Helmut Kneitel.” He drew him inside; it wouldn’t do to be seen talking to this curious character as an equal.
“You’re German. Why, you speak English with practically no accent,” said Doriskos, excited beyond what little tact he possessed.
“Yes.” Helmut took a careful look at the clock, considered Moses’s schedule for the day, and sat Doriskos down on a low ottoman. He continued his practice session. It was sweet to have a change from his usual solitude in the form of this avid, obviously knowing and discriminating listener.
“You’re a marvelous musician. A professional?” asked Doriskos once his host had finished and invited him to stay for tea. Expecting yes, of course.
“No.”
“A teacher, then? You coach?”
“I take care of the house and the cooking and the horse for Dr. Karseth,” said Helmut, smiling.
“His servant?”
Helmut nodded.
Doriskos’s face worked interestingly but he didn’t press forward with his questioning. Then he said, “Well, you deserve to have someone accompany you when you sing. I could, if you like. I play the pianoforte decently. It would be a pleasure,” he offered awkwardly.
And in this manner, Doriskos and Helmut made friends. Helmut shortly found out that Doriskos was a fine and polished pianist—that and other things. He was the oddest mixture of talent and helplessness and cultivation and innocence that Helmut had seen in all his observant, sophisticated existence. It was no wonder that Doriskos liked Wagner; he was like a Wagner character himself in his lack of irony and some insular, virginal quality that Helmut had never experienced in an actual man. They got comfortable with each other over a series of musical afternoons and pleasant teas.
And before too long, inevitably, Moses came upon Doriskos in his kitchen. Equally inevitably, Doriskos beat a hasty retreat in the first few of these little intersections; he took a while to get used to the energetic man of science, and even when he did, his attitude was one of provisional tolerance rather than anything warmer.
“I wish he wouldn’t excuse himself so pointedly when I come home,” Moses was prompted to say. “I mean, I don’t bite, at least not without provocation. He really is the strangest creature! He must have terrible nerves!”
“That he has, and he’s got just about nothing in the manners line, and yet he’s somehow very sensitive, very acute,” said Helmut. He would have liked to say, He’s sweet and gentle with me in the way you might expect from some totally unlearned man who has no manners but is acting out of empathy. “He’s never asked me any of those things that I can’t speak about, for example,” he added quickly.
“If he was anyone else, I’d think that meant he already knew,” said Moses sourly. “He needn’t bolt like that when I come home, as if he’s afraid I’ll jump on him and thrash him. He acts as if he’s been doing something I ought to thrash him for. And if he were anyone else, I’d think he had.”
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nbsp; “I doubt he even knows what he might do that you would need to thrash him for,” said Helmut. “And that’s the most curious thing of all. He’s been to Oxford, but he’s such a babe, so like a faery child that the trolls stole and brought up in a deep hole under a pond.”
“Well, I’d vote for the hole under the pond if I didn’t already know where the creature came from,” said Moses, who then stretched out his long legs comfortably on his hassock and told what he knew of Stratton-Truro, which was but the thin veneer on a complicated truth.
The Nautilus To begin at the beginning, the young Lord Stratton-Truro, an aficionado of relics and icons and of junk from tombs, was winding down a collecting expedition in Athens in early 1849. Initially, he was not looking for anything but a boat out of that sump of the ex-Ottoman Empire and back to civilization, but a young man lounging in the meager marketplace directed him to the house of a woman who painted icons and made lacquerware, a place where he might be able to get a few stylized Virgins—“and a little something else,” said the idler with a leer. Stratton-Truro shuddered at the bare thought of intimate contact with anything in Athens; he imagined a bed crawling with insects in the corner of a low-crouching, pitiful hovel. Nevertheless, in some of his moods, he enjoyed moderate and carefully controlled doses of trivial danger.
The young woman who painted icons had talent: Her work was naïve but not crude, with a sort of tensile liveliness of line. She was very beautiful in a dramatic, overtly high-strung fashion, and her painted Virgins had her own distraught eyes, black as water under the blackest sky of night and winter and expressing some unceasing grief. Like a surprising number of Greeks in cities that got tourists, she spoke enough French that they could talk business. Stratton-Truro bought ten of her icons and decided to avail himself of her other talents. And after he negotiated her price, stepped behind a curtain that divided her shop from her dismal flat, and got into her grubby bed with her, he was not sorry. Lit with an old oil lamp, her tiny rooms had a dirty golden glow broken by deep shadows, like the stable in a Rembrandt nativity. Art aficionado that he was, he looked her over; he bent over her and fingered the healthy mane of her hair, which was so black it seemed to suck the light from everything in its neighborhood. He could imagine its blue blaze under the sun of July. Lingering over her fine points, he noted also the little silvery stretches in the skin of her lower belly and understood what had brought her to this condition: a child, and no ring on her ring finger. Indeed, the preliminaries were interrupted by the angry crying of the brat, and she sprang up to attend to it.
Stratton-Truro woke up in the small hours itching, as he’d known full well he would. He got out of bed to scratch and look for the chamber pot, which he found in the primitive little kitchen. After he’d finished with it, he lingered to warm his hands and feet at the banked coals, and he heard some faint stirring. It was then that he saw the baby in its basket. It had thrown away the sugar-tit the woman had forced into its mouth a few hours ago, and as Stratton-Truro picked the thing up between thumb and forefinger, grimacing, he understood why the protesting child had dropped off so quickly to sleep. The sugar-tit had a sticky smell of ouzo and laudanum. He bent over to look at the baby, which had its right thumb plugged securely into its mouth and was using its left hand to play with its toes.
And at this point madness came into Stratton-Truro’s life, which until that minute had been characterized by a minor and whining form of desperation but never by overt insanity.
A bachelor, Stratton-Truro was not overkeen on babies as a general thing. But he knew that this was the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. Possibly the most beautiful baby anyone had ever seen. About a year old, with the mother’s dark golden skin and black hair, and eyes like liquid pitch. The young lord looked into that wide-awake stare and saw his image reflected back, a double golden ghost. He coaxed its thumb out of its mouth to see if the mouth was as pretty as the rest, and it was. The woman had a delicious mouth, not small but wondrously shaped, with an upper lip whose curve was perfectly, perfectly like the stylized line of a gull in flight. After a couple of thimblefuls of ouzo, she had given him a smile that had made him consider asking her to marry him and taking her back to London under a brand-new name of his own invention. (“Gentlemen, my wife Medea, Princess Mavrothalassanis…”) A moment later, her authentic expression, that of a petulant part-time whore, brought him to his senses. Beatific, it had been, that smile. The baby had the same mouth, and Stratton-Truro could imagine its smile. It fretted now, and small wonder—sopping wet. The soft feet were cold when he touched them.
“Your baby’s cold,” he whispered to the woman. “Wet and hungry, too. Beautiful as an angel,” he said, relinquishing him to her hands.
“What he is, is a pain,” she muttered crossly. She got up and attended peremptorily to her child, then brought him to bed with her. No more than a quarter awake, she nursed him with no modesty and certainly no extra flourishes of affection. “He doesn’t look happy,” thought Stratton-Truro. “You’d think a baby would look happy on that tit. Have a complacent little look on its face: I’m here and you’re not.” Instead, the child was tight with what looked like anxious concentration and watchfulness, as if he were very hungry and not sure she’d let him finish. Or perhaps she hadn’t enough milk to keep him full-fed, now that he was getting to be an armload, or, likeliest, she didn’t feel any proper love for him, and he knew it. When she was entirely asleep again, Stratton-Truro lay on his side and looked at this unwanted and supernally beautiful child. He stroked its apricot cheek and got the smile, a benediction. He had never fallen in love before, never dared, else he would have recognized the symptoms.
To fall in love, Stratton-Truro needed someone who hadn’t the power to reject him. He had found that article.
Stratton-Truro was not beautiful as an angel himself. He was a dishwater-blond young Englishman with skin that turned a sick red with the slightest touch of summer sun or winter gale. He had taken a mediocre third at Oxford due to distractions too numerous and déclassé to be detailed. The only thing he could really count in his favor was the fact that he would eventually be a viscount. If he ever got married, he assumed that he would wind up with porky, raw-faced sons like himself, and daughters he’d have to pay someone a fortune to marry. He expected a life unbeautiful, cumbersome, and full of bothers. He was, however, just clever and sensitive enough to suffer acutely because of all he lacked. He collected pretty things, from minor paintings to the tropical blooms in his hothouse, in an attempt at self-redemption, at securing his own pardon for the obdurate uncomeliness of the face that swam up at him out of every mirror and the mediocrity of the mind behind it.
And this had much to do with what he did that morning in Athens, after he had drunk the woman’s venomous coffee and had a gallant go at some porridge, worse even than porridge normally is, that she offered him.
“Your son’s lovely,” he ventured. “How old is he?”
“Nearly a year. He’s eleven months. He was born last February nineteenth,” she said, as if surprised to remember the date. “He’s got a pretty face, but he’s good for nothing but crying all night. It’s a waste, raising boys here. Whereas a girl can always, by the time she’s fourteen…” She gave a pathetic shrug.
When her son raised his voice to fret, she picked up the dirty sugar-tit and sprinkled on some fresh ouzo. She had the laudanum bottle in hand when Stratton-Truro’s voice fought its way up his throat. The sight of that child filled him with remorseless delight, and his collector’s urge was like lust in his body. Half-throttled by an alien decisiveness, he said, “Don’t put that in his mouth, it’s dirty. Suppose you were rid of him? I mean, suppose some person of means offered to take him off your hands…adopt him, bring him up a gentleman?” (At the same time, the part of the young lord’s brain that secreted common sense was yelling, “No! No! No!” and pointing out that he knew nothing about babies.)
The woman set her elegant hands, not quite ruined by her daytime call
ing, on her hips. “Now, young sir, don’t make fun. Just how many persons of means go about offering to adopt little bastard brats and bring them up to be gentlemen?”
“I would,” said Stratton-Truro. “I do.” He thought how doomed-sounding the words were, like those of the wedding service. As she stared, he said, “I’m a bachelor, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever marry, but I have a great deal to give a child, and I…that’s the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen. This is no place for that child. I…”
“The father was not much,” she said, as if this actually required clarification. “He was a handsome good-for-nothing, and that’s the long and the short of it.”
Stratton-Truro got up and knelt by his locked box. He unlocked it and got out a suede bag of golden sovereigns. Upon the sticky kitchen table he counted out fifty, setting them in gleaming stacks—in this last-gasp travesty of Hellas, a wild sum. If the woman had seen the Archangel Michael and Saint George descend together in a cloud of fire, she could not have looked more astonished. She nodded. Stratton-Truro gestured to the coins, then got up and lifted the baby from his basket. She would probably spend it all in some flamboyantly silly fashion and end up as poor as she was now, but that, he figured, was her own affair.
Twenty minutes later, he had been given all the child’s worldly property—cloths, a few badly made knitted jerseys, some socks, and blankets. The clothes were done up in a bundle of trivial size and put into the basket with the little traveler along with a fresh bit of loaf sugar tied up in a handkerchief. Stratton-Truro sent the woman out to get him a hack to the docks. In his traveling clothes, he waited in the shop with the complacent child, who was looking reflectively around in the gloom of the January morning. A desolate rain beat upon the thin roof.
“What’s the baby’s name?” he asked her when she had returned and the driver was loading in his box.