by Laura Argiri
“He’s yours now. His name is whatever you want it to be.” Again, the shrug, and a smile that he hoped repressed some tears for this creature she had relinquished.
“What did you call him? I wouldn’t wish to confuse him with a new name.”
“Doriskos.”
“It’s a lovely name. Who was his father?”
“He didn’t give the baby his name,” she said, showing her ringless hand with some impatience, wanting this transaction over.
“But what was his name?”
“Klionarios. A good-looking devil.”
But she lied, the golden whore. The name was just a pretty name, the first that came to mind, and the father could have been any one of a dozen men.
In truth, Stratton-Truro surmised as much, but he did not change Doriskos’s name. He meant to; he stopped in Malta, the first place where he could arrange an Anglican baptism, to take the curse off that cash transaction in Athens. Yet, standing at the baptismal font cradling the child, he couldn’t. The baby, in a christening dress dripping with Venetian lace, was quiet; his black eyes were calm and interested in the cathedral glass above. He was exquisite, but he was very obviously not English, and it seemed wrong to deprive him of his exotic flower of a name and make him go through life as John Christopher Stratton-Truro. “Doriskos Hyakinthos Klionarios,” Stratton-Truro had said, and that was that.
Stratton-Truro dreaded going home, anticipating that his father would be furious at the results of this Classical Antiquity tour. He would have procrastinated longer, but on the boat out of Malta, Doriskos came out of the haze that had resulted from being drugged silly on tincture of laudanum most of his life and began howling as if it were some debt he was owed. The baby wasn’t seasick; Stratton-Truro was, violently, and wanted to howl, and felt that if one of them was entitled to do so, this person was himself. He vomited and dozed, and Doriskos cried and dozed, and their fellow passengers complained. He managed to cry most of the way to Dover. Yet the doctors whom Stratton-Truro consulted there pronounced him strong and healthy, as any fool could have surmised from the power of his lungs. Stratton-Truro, yearning for a nanny and a couple of nursemaids to keep the vigil, braced himself to face his father’s wrath.
“I’ve always known you for a useless mediocrity, but I didn’t know you were a lunatic into the bargain!” yelled the old viscount at the pallid son who would never have been able to present him with an authentic grandchild of such beauty. “You go to Greece to buy icons, and you come home with a baby you’ve bought from a lady of the night! How much did you pay for that creature?”
“Fifty pounds.”
“You’re insane!” said Milord. “You’re raving mad! And he’s probably unluckier in you than you’ll be in him! No wonder the poor little devil screams, he knows he’s been bought by a young ass of a madman, he’s got intimations of what he’s in for! You keep yourself out of my sight until you regain your senses, sir! Just what in Hell did you intend?”
Stratton-Truro later wondered what he had intended, if intention was even a factor in such a monumental madness. Certainly, if he’d ever intended even in a weak and secondary fashion to do this child a kindness, he hadn’t succeeded. He had deliberately not asked Doriskos’s mother her last name or noted down her address, and as the English winter wore on into spring, he wished he had so he could write and ask her some questions—he remembered her remark about her baby crying. It was a mark of Stratton-Truro’s ignorance, or something worse, that he hadn’t asked her what this child liked and what soothed him. Certainly he was not comforted by being picked up to rest on Stratton-Truro’s shoulder. He fought Stratton-Truro’s embrace as alien flesh and yelled with panic and anger. Stratton-Truro had hired a wet nurse, as he’d simply refused to be weaned, and he couldn’t let him starve. His time against the wet nurse’s bare skin seemed one of the few things Doriskos liked. He slept and fed just enough to refresh his energies for yelling, then commenced again to wail and howl.
And then there came a resolution of sorts, two months into this Hell. When he was thirteen months old, Doriskos hauled himself up on his strong brown legs and walked; he could soon climb out of his crib and get himself up and down the stairs. This accomplishment seemed to ease his fright and sense of powerlessness in his new life, and the constant crying stopped. By the middle of that April, Stratton-Truro had bought him a coatee and leggings of brown velvet and was taking him, dressed in this fetching costume, for walks by the Serpentine. Seeing him move confidently through daffodils chest-high to him and pull flowers and discover mud, Stratton-Truro felt his sense of ravishment revive. When the summer fruits came in, Doriskos got interested in them, filled his sturdy stomach with plums and cherries, and soon weaned himself. He was glossy-haired and chubby, with a brown rose of a skin, and people stopped Stratton-Truro in the street to tell him how beautiful his child was. He was often obliged to say, “Please, I’d rather nobody touched him, it startles him and makes him cry,” for it still did. Usually the person would say, “Is that so? Well, he’s a lovely boy. Bright, too, I’d wager.” One woman held up her somewhat younger baby, who grinned; she said to Doriskos, “Can’t you smile?” To Stratton-Truro’s intense surprise, Doriskos did, and Stratton-Truro realized that this was the first time he’d seen him smile since that time in his mother’s bed. He declined to repeat the trick in private, though.
If Doriskos had been old enough to be malicious, Stratton-Truro would have sworn that the child simply liked to worry him by his remoteness, his own particular brand of balking. Every time he was due to take a step forward in his journey toward adulthood, he found something troubling to do instead. After the crying came the silence, the wait for him to talk. Doriskos was so slow about it that Stratton-Truro began to worry about whether he was backward, though backward was not precisely what he seemed.
Indeed, quite the opposite. He would not speak in sentences until he was four, but at three he had suddenly begun to draw on his nursery walls. And the drawings were remarkable. Some of the little sketches were of present objects: a potted gardenia, the sculptural purity and matte and solid quality of its blooms accurately rendered; a vaseful of jonquils; the cat, Nika. But others were of things the child had seen, some long ago: the pattern, for instance, of an old carpet in a bookstore he had visited in his foster father’s company, months before. Indifferent to the books, he’d crouched down and murmured lovingly over the old rug, and now his visual memory had replicated it as perfectly as anything short of a daguerreotype could have done. It was as if those big black Byzantine eyes of his had the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. To a man like Stratton-Truro, introspective enough to understand his own complete lack of all exceptional talents, it was a frightening wonder: the surety Doriskos had with a piece of charcoal or chalk in his hand, natural as breath! When he drew, he seemed released to his element, a little fish thrown back into water after gasping on one’s palm.
Soon after this discovery, Stratton-Truro made a hasty trip to Oxford and brought back to London a contemptuous expert who was ready to sneer at the young lord’s prodigy child. But after watching Doriskos perform for half an hour, the expert was in fervent agreement and aching to hold the miracle child on his lap for five minutes, to touch him and see if he was real. Stratton-Truro, inflamed, did not care how much he spent or if he made himself ridiculous. The next five years of the child’s life were dominated by twice-weekly trips on the train, London to Oxford and back, for his special drawing lessons. His teachers seemed to think that he was extremely intelligent as well as an authentic art prodigy; they marveled at his instinctive solutions to quite complex spatial and geometrical problems, which he produced long before anyone taught him about perspective—out of some inborn understanding of distance, mass, and space.
Even after Doriskos had learned to talk, though, Stratton-Truro found him the most uncommunicative and mysterious human being he had ever had the misfortune to meet. He didn’t like to talk—worse, he didn’t seem to see the need of it
. Perhaps he viewed it as one more onerous form of etiquette that demanded his compliance; he didn’t mind silence as proper people did, and loneliness did not seem even to be a concept for him. After some pleasant gathering that Stratton-Truro had wished him to enjoy, Doriskos would look drawn and exhausted, as if he’d run a gauntlet; if you surprised him at solitary play, he’d look up with what Stratton-Truro could only call an expression of interrupted happiness.
He could not get a handhold on the child. Doriskos was well behaved, indifferent to the things that make most children risk adult savagery. His academic studies bore out the art teachers’ enthusiastic ideas of his innate intelligence, his music teacher wanted to make a concert pianist of him, and from the age of seven forward, he had his drawing and painting lessons with the august John Ruskin himself. But Doriskos’s lifeless good manners filled Stratton-Truro with rage; at times, he would have paid Doriskos five pounds to sauce him, or to do some other nasty thing he could understand. He’d wanted a child unlike himself, and now he had one unlike himself or anyone else he’d known. What he did not have was a chance to experience ordinary parental love; it became painfully apparent to him that he barely knew the child, and that the creature existed in some sort of crystal shell, some inalienable solitude and silence in which speech and human attachment were artifices to be forgotten at the first chance. It would not have occurred to him that he himself did not know the lessons of ordinary love and thus could not teach them to anyone else, or that from the first, he had treated Doriskos as some sort of human curio too beautiful to touch. He blamed the chilling accretion of silence in the house on Doriskos, who in his own peculiar passivity was merely cooperating with it. Barely talked to, Doriskos became more silent; uncaressed, shown no love, he developed that wary inexpressiveness that chilled Stratton-Truro through. Even the boy’s feckless mother, who would have slapped him around, screamed at him, wrenched his ears, but also lavished him with angry affection, might have done better by him in this way.
One day, back in their London house, Stratton-Truro looked up from a group of his child’s drawings—he was just beginning to think about selling them—and the bleak irremediable loneliness and ugliness of his own life hit him like a toothache. The cats offered more in the way of humanlike companionship than this changeling. Besides, some child of his own loins, spectacularly gifted or even merely talented and comely, would have vindicated him and let him walk about in a fatuous glow of pride. The fact of Doriskos’s gifts was just as amazing—that woman and God knows what kind of rascal had produced between them a child with a faultless connection between his eyes and his hands and a face that people turned to stare after in the street. However, not a credit to him, the beauty and genius became a reproach, and Stratton-Truro became militant in his dissatisfaction. Doriskos was simply Doriskos, a wonder of nature to whom nothing could be added, from whom naught might be taken away; Stratton-Truro often thought that all the amenities and gifts he lavished upon the creature made no impression on him. And Stratton-Truro wanted to make an impression on him.
And his irritation, his sustained loneliness and exasperation, led him into a huge blunder. Having survived Eton himself, he convinced himself that it might benefit Doriskos to survive it too. He entered him there when he was nine, hoping someday to take him home humanized and boylike, facile with a cricket bat and talking public-school argot.
This did not happen. His chosen cure cured nothing, and in one big, bold, authoritative stroke accomplished immensities of harm.
Doriskos would not talk about what had happened at Eton, not ever. Stratton-Truro pried at him like a timid and clumsy thief trying to crack his first safe; the Eton authorities pounced on him from all sides, intending to break and remake him.
At Eton, his composure shattered; he forgot his lessons and burned the toast of the boy he fagged for to carbon; he wandered off in the woods at mealtime, hungrier for quiet than for black pudding; he hid himself in a closet late one night, lit a candle, took a lump of coal from his pocket, and illustrated all four narrow walls. And he paid for every bit of it. To be accustomed to peaceful vistas of solitude in his white-walled schoolroom in London and to be thrust into a life without privacy, to be formally and publicly beaten for his distractions and omissions after a lifetime of never being struck, was more than his sensitive and specialized nervous system could tolerate. Moreover, after the closet affair he’d been forbidden to draw, and his brain soon became crowded and feverish with images, and he could not sleep either. He had not had more than a couple of hours of sleep per night for a fortnight when his inevitable snap came.
“What’s the matter with you, Klionarios?” asked the young master of his house, finally—he’d come to feel as if he’d been beating a blind horse, or otherwise assailing some creature incapable of its own defense. “Can’t you do anything?”
“I can do things, only different things. I can’t do these things,” said Doriskos. He could feel his speech going; he was practically delirious with fatigue. Thinking in words and forcing them out was the hardest thing. He needed to be able to say, I was sent here so I’d become human, though I already am; I am simply a different kind of human. What is not human is this place. If this is human, I don’t want to be. When I’m grown, I’ll find some place where there’s no one, and I shan’t ever let anyone touch me again. What he actually said, with great effort, was, “I draw. I can do that.”
“See, we don’t put any stock in that here,” said the young man. And, intending to put a paternal hand on the child’s shoulder and give him a paternal lecture on what England required from its young, he got the child’s strong white teeth—a rock-hard inheritance from that peasant mother of his—right in his pasty hand. Doriskos had decided that when anyone at Eton reached a hand in his direction, they meant to inflict some physical indignity. He had not consciously decided to beat the next attacker to the draw; his act had been quite reflexive. When, yelping like one of his own victims, the master finally managed to pull himself free, his thumb was bitten to the bone and his blood was on Doriskos’s mouth and down the front of the child’s shirt. “He’s mad!” cried the man. He would always remember the child’s expression—empty, mild, almost polite, withdrawing like water down a drain behind his eyes—as Doriskos backed into a wall and slid down.
No one disputed the story, least of all Doriskos, who did not speak for more than three months after that. Stratton-Truro received an urgent wire to come and collect him; he’d lasted just over two months. In the time that he didn’t speak, he drew with a sort of tireless compulsion all through his waking hours; if he ran out of paper, he reverted to drawing on the walls. Stratton-Truro had no idea how long this might have gone on. All that Stratton-Truro ever knew was that Ruskin, who’d been vehemently opposed to the Eton plan, came to visit and talked in private to the child. When he came out of the boy’s room, the don looked at the viscount with freezing contempt and said, “He will talk to you if you don’t perpetrate any similar atrocity upon him in future.”
Stratton-Truro edged into Doriskos’s room, and the child looked up from the print book Ruskin had brought him—Dante Rosetti, he noted—with an unaccustomed flash of black anger.
“Mr. Ruskin says that you’ve decided you’ll talk to me,” said Stratton-Truro timidly. Doriskos made no reply. “I was wrong. To send you to school, that is. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. You might say something, damn all.”
“I’ll say hello to people and talk about the weather, but I won’t say real things,” said Doriskos, scowling—the scowl in almost-welcome contrast to the dead voice. As Stratton-Truro took a couple of steps toward him, he added: “I’ll talk to Mr. Ruskin. But I won’t say anything to you if you touch me. No one will ever touch me again. And certainly not you.”
Rebuked, Stratton-Truro could only stand back and hope that the damage he had inflicted would heal itself. And in a sense, it did. Doriskos resumed his art lessons, then his pianoforte studies, then his normal schoolroom routine with
his private tutors. But the aftereffects of Eton lasted for years, perhaps never really ceased. Stratton-Truro’s gentle, distant faun of a child was now a stranger who feared him, distrusted him from the depths of his soul, and whose lifeless civility made Stratton-Truro want to put a gun to his head. And it is hard to regard with selfless, undeviating love a person who makes you want to commit suicide.
Once, visiting an old friend who’d fathered a pack of brawling children, watching the fireside wrangles and little rapprochements of the family, Stratton-Truro thought, “Even difficult love is love, and looks like love unmistakably. You can even be sure when a hound or horse is fond of you. Even before I sent him off, I couldn’t tell for sure what he thought of me. Maybe he’s like a gazelle or deer, something which was never meant to love a human being!” This excused him to himself.
And yet, in his dreams, Stratton-Truro told himself the truth about his deeds.
He dreamt of cathedral glass shattered at his feet. Yet it was not the usual kind of cathedral glass, pictures or geometrics in keen, ice-bright colors. The pieces were thick, opaline, a milky filter for the light. Mauve and cream and pearl and an acid green like the new foliage of a spring tree were the main colors. From the shards, he could tell that it had been a spiral dome; the pattern had been very strange, a sort of fluid abstract most resembling light through leaves. I wish I’d seen this! he thought. He had never seen these colors together. Who made this? Who broke it? What was it like before? And then he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the pattern had been a wonder, and that he had been the one who’d broken the dome.
He dreamt of a nautilus, knocked by a steel rod into a wet mess of shards, and the soft creature itself, quivering in its pearly blood and pierced by the sharp broken bits of its erstwhile shelter. He knew what it had been like before it was ruined, he’d seen nautiluses—a perfection mute, inscrutable, and sealed. You could not truly see what the nautilus was like until you ruined it. Once you had, it was almost impossible to believe that the naked whelk had formed that exquisite housing, and certainly it could not perform the trick again once you’d unhoused it. It died.