A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  My father winced, then grumbled something about how they had no business . . .

  He was hurt.

  I was appalled by Kevin’s frankness. At such moments, tears would come to my eyes in impotent compassion for Daddy; this invalid despot, this man who bullied everyone but suffered the consequences with such a tender, uneducated heart! Tears would also well up when I had to correct my father on a matter of fact. Usually I’d avoid the bother and smugly watch him compound his mistakes. But if he asked my opinion point-blank, a euphoria of sadness would overtake me, panicky wings would beat at the corners of the shrinking room and, as quietly and as levelly as possible, I’d supply the correct name or date. For I was a lot more knowledgeable than he about the things that could come up in conversation even in those days, the 1950s.

  But knowledge wasn’t power. He was the one with the power, the money, the right to read the paper through dinner as my stepmother and I watched him in silence; he was the one with the thirty tailor-made suits, the twenty gleaming pairs of shoes and the starched white dress shirts, the ties from Countess Mara and the two Cadillacs that waited for him in the garage, dripping oil on the concrete in the shape of a black Saturn and its gray blur of moons. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party (“Ask this young fellow, he reads, he’ll know”). Then why did his occasional faltering bring tears to my eyes? Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing? Perhaps, despite my timidity, I was in a struggle against him. Did I want to hurt him because he didn’t love me?”

  Within a moment Kevin had made things right by asking Daddy how he thought the hometown baseball team would do next season. My father was soon expatiating on names and averages and strategies that meant nothing to me, the good spring training and the bad trade-off. When Kevin challenged him on one point, Dad laughed good-naturedly at the boy’s spunk (and error) and set him straight. I rested my arm on the rubber tread of the gunwale beside me and my chin on my arm and stared into the shiny water, which was busy analyzing a distant yellow porch light, shattering the simple glow into a hundred shifting possibilities.

  The baseball talk went on for some time as we rocked in our own wake, which had overtaken us. We were drifting toward an island and its abandoned summer hotel, moth-white behind slender, silver-white birches. The motor wallowed, the sound of an old car with a bad muffler. My father usually felt uncomfortable with other men, but he and Kevin had now found a way to talk to each other and I half listened to the low murmurs of their voices – or rather of Daddy’s monologue and Kevin’s sounds of assent or disagreement. This was Dad’s late-night voice; ruminative, confiding, unending. Old Boy recognized it from their dawn walks together and circumspectly placed his nose between his paws on the cushion beside Dad. Little Peter crawled up over the hatch and listened to the sports talk; even he knew names and averages and had an opinion or two. After he’d been silent for a while I looked around and saw he’d fallen asleep, his head thrown back over the edge of the cushion and his mouth open, his right hand twitching.

  By now we’d entered the narrows that led into a smaller, colder branch of the lake. The lights of a car, after excavating a tunnel out of the pines halfway up the shore, dipped from view and then suddenly shot out across the water, which looked all the blacker and choppier in the brief glare. I had rowed laboriously over every mile of the lake; it was a mild sort of pleasure to see those backbreaking distances beautifully elided by the Chris-Craft. For Dad had gunned the motors again and we were sitting once more on our high, thundering throne. We passed a point where the clipped lawns of an estate flowed down from a white mansion and its lit, curtained windows. Late last Sunday afternoon, as I was pulling hard through the turbulent water at the point, I’d seen a young man in a seersucker suit and a girl in a party dress. They had sauntered up the hill away from me, he slightly in the lead, she swinging her arms high in an exaggerated way, as though she were a marionette. The sun found a feeble rainbow in the mist above a sprinkler and made the grass as green and uniform as baize. The light gave the couple long, important shadows.

  All around me – at the post office where we had a box, in the general store, on docks, sailboats and water skis – young people with iodine-and-baby-oil tans, trim bodies and faultless teeth were having fun. A boat would glide across the setting sun, the shadow of a broad-shouldered teen inhabiting the white sail. At the village dock I’d look up from my outboard to see two young men walking past, just a sliver of untanned skin visible under the hems of their shorts. As I sat high up the hill on our porch swing, reading, I’d hear them joking as they sunned on the white diving raft below. I’d see them up close at the country club suppers – the boy with the strong chin and honey-brown hands, in blazer and white cotton pants, seating his mother, her nose like his but pointier, her hair as blond but fogged with gray. These were the women who wore navy blue and a single piece of woven yellow and pink gold, whose narrow feet were shod in blue and white spectators, who drove jaunty station wagons, who drank martinis on porches with rattan furniture and straw rugs and whose voices were lower than most men’s. Up close they smelled of gin, cocoa butter and lake water; we sometimes sat next to such a woman and her family at a communal table. Or I’d see these women at the little branch of Saks Fifth Avenue in a town not far away. They pretended they were bored or exasperated by their children’s comings and goings: “Don’t even bother to tell me when you’ll be home, Scott, you know you’ve never kept your word yet.” I saw it all and envied those sons their parents and those parents their sons.

  My father was never tan. He had a huge belly; his glasses weren’t horn-rim or translucent pink plastic (the two acceptable styles) but black with bronze metallic wings; he seldom drank cocktails; he didn’t act as if he were onstage – he had no attractive affectations. Although my stepmother had risen socially as high as one could rise in that world, she’d done so on her own. My father never took her anywhere; she was as free as a spinster and as respectable as a matron. When she was with us at the cottage during the summer, she forgot about society and helped my father with his steps or his painting, she read as much as I did, arranged for good meals and rusticated. Once in a while, one of her elegant friends would drop by for lunch, and suddenly the house was electrified by the energy of those women – their excitement, their approval, their laughter, their thrilling small talk, an art as refined (and now as rare) as marquetry. My father would beam at these guests and pat their hands and pour them thimblefuls of brandy after their doll-size luncheons. Then they’d limp away in a broken-down car, millionairesses in old cardigans covered with cat hairs, their wonderful vibrant voices their only badge of breeding.

  My father was courtly but dim. I was even dimmer. I read so much in the house (on the bed in my room, on the couch in the living room, on the shaded bench at the foot of the dock) that I hadn’t gotten a tan. At least my clothes were right (my sister had seen to that), but I felt all dressed up with no place to go.

  Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke. I was a sissy. My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s Unfinished. My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d sat not cross-legged on the gym floor but resting on one hand and hip like the White Rock girl. A popular quiz for masculinity in those days asked three questions, all of which I flunked: (1) Look at your nails (a girl extends her fingers, a boy cups his in his upturned palm); (2) Look up (a girl lifts just her eyes, a boy throws back his whole head); (3) Light a match (a girl strikes away from her body, a boy toward – or perhaps the reverse, I can’t recall). But there were less esoteric signs as well. A man crosses his legs by resting an ankle on his knee; a sissy drapes one leg over the other.
A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final g in fucking and I didn’t know where in the sentence to place the damn or hell.

  My father was just a bit of a sissy. He crossed his legs the wrong way. He was too fussy about his nails (he had an elaborate manicuring kit). He liked classical music. He was not an easygoing guy. But otherwise he passed muster: he was courageous in a fight; he was a strong, skilled athlete; not many things frightened him; he had towering rages; he knew how to swear; he was tirelessly assertive; and he had a gambler’s good grace about losing money. He could lose lots of it in business and walk away, smiling and shrugging.

  *

  Kevin was the sort of son who would have pleased my father more than I did. He was captain of his Little League baseball team. On the surface he had good manners, but they were born of training, not timidity. No irony, no superior smirks, no fits of longing or flights of fancy removed him from the present. He hadn’t invented another life; this one seemed good enough. Although he was only twelve, he already throbbed with the pressure to contend, to be noticed, to be right, to win, to make others bend to his will. I found him rather frightening, certainly sexy (the two qualities seemed linked). Because I was three years older, I guessed he expected me to be ahead of him in most ways, and that first night in the boat I was silent in order not to disillusion him. I wanted him to like me.

  Kevin may have been cocky, but he wasn’t one of those suave country club boys. He wasn’t well groomed and I don’t think he thought about such things; he didn’t date girls yet and he wore clothes unironed out of the dryer until they got dirty and his mother threw them back into the washer. He still watched cartoons on television before an early supper and when he was sleepy he leaned against his father, eyes blinking and registering nothing. His seven-year-old brother, Peter, was a nervous boy, morbidly eager to be just like Kevin.

  As my father barked commands, Kevin and Peter and I secured the Chris-Craft to the dock and covered it with canvas. We climbed the many steps up to the house, Old Boy blazing the trail, then darting back to urge my father on. The house was brilliant with lights. Kevin’s parents had bumped me from my upstairs room, the place where last week I had read Death in Venice and luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power I wanted over an older man. And I awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks – more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings.

  Since the house was built on a very steep hill, the basement wasn’t underground, though its cinderblock walls did smell of damp soil. There were only two rooms in the basement. One was a “rumpus room” with a semicircular glass-brick bar that could be lit from within by a pink, a green and an orange bulb (the blue had burned out).

  The other room was long and skinny, the wall facing the lake broken by two large windows. Ordinarily a Ping-Pong table was set up in here, its green net never quite taut. Under the overhead lamp my father would lunge and swear and shout and slam or stretch to the very edge of the net to tap the ball delicately into the enemy’s court (for his opponent was inevitably “the enemy,” challenging his wind, strength, skill, prowess). Whenever my sister, a champion athlete, was at the cottage, she enjoyed this interesting power over Dad, while my stepmother and I sat upstairs and read, curled up in front of the fire with Herr Pogner the Persian cat (named after my harpsichord teacher). The cat dozed, feet tucked under her chest, though her raised ears, thin enough to let the lamplight through, twitched and cocked independently of one another with each “Damn!” or “Son of a bitch!” or “Gotcha, young lady, got you there” floating up through the hot-air vents in the floor. My sister’s fainter but delighted reproaches (“Oh, Daddy,” or “Really, Daddy”) didn’t merit even the tiniest adjustment of those feline ears. My stepmother, deep in her Taylor Caldwell or Jane Austen (she was a compulsive, unselective reader), was never too mesmerized by the page not to know when to hurry to the kitchen to present the inevitable victor – drawn, grinning – with his pint of peach ice cream and box of chocolate grahams, which my father would eat in his preferred way, a pat of cold butter on each cracker.

  Tonight there was no game. The grown-ups were sitting around the fire sipping highballs. Downstairs the table had been replaced by three cots for us boys. Kevin’s parents sent their sons to bed but I was allowed to stay up for another half hour. I was even given a weak highball of my own, though my stepmother murmured, “I’m sure he would rather have orange juice.”

  “For Chrissake,” my father said, smiling, “give the fella a break.” I was grateful for this unusual display of chumminess and, to please him, said nothing and nodded a lot at what the others said.

  Kevin’s parents, especially his mother, were unlike any other grown-ups I’d met. They were both Irish, she by origin, he by derivation. He drank till he became drunk, his eyes moist, his laugh general. He had a handsome face projected onto too much flesh, black hair that geysered up at the end of the formal walkway of his parting, large red hands that went white at the knuckles when he picked something up (a glass of whiskey, say) and a tender, satirical manner toward his wife, as though he were a lazy dreamer who’d been stirred into action by this spitfire.

  She said damn and hell and drank whiskey and had two moods – rage (she was always shouting at Kevin) and mock rage, appealingly ardent sort of simmering. Virtue Stymied: “All right then, be gone with you,” she’d say, feisty and submissive, or “Of course you’ll be having another drink.”

  It was all playacting and intended to be viewed as such. She had “temperament” because she was Irish and had been trained as an opera singer. If she wandered into a room and found Kevin’s T-shirt balled and hurled in a chair, she’d start bellowing, “Kevin O’Malley Cork, get in here and get in here now. Look alive!” Nothing could restrain these outbursts, not even the knowledge that Kevin was out of earshot. Her arms would stiffen, her clenched fists would dig into her slim flanks and bunch up her dress, her nose would pale and her thin hair, the color of weathered bricks, would seem to go into shock and rise to reveal still more of her scalp. Because of her operatic training, her voice penetrated every corner of the house and had an alto after-hum that buzzed on in the round metal tabletop from Morocco. During the mornings she chain-smoked, drank coffee and sat around in a silk robe that revealed and highlighted her bony body. With her freckled face, devoid of makeup, rising above this slippery red sheen, she looked like an angry young man trapped in travesty as a practical joke.

  This couple, with their liquor and cigarettes and roguish, periodic spats, struck my stepmother as “cheap.” Or rather, the woman was cheap (men can’t be cheap). The husband, my father later decided, wasn’t “stable” (their money was by no means secure). Though they lived in a mansion with a swimming pool and antique furniture, they rented it, probably the furniture as well.

  The Corks were both “climbers,” he in business, she in society; they seemed to me fascinating shams. I especially admired the way Kevin’s mother, so obviously a bohemian, hard drinker and hell raiser, had toned down her exuberance enough to win invitations to a few polite “functions,” those given by the Women’s Club if not by the Steinway Club (the Steinway pretended to be nothing but a little gathering of ladies who liked to play four-hand versions of “Mister Haydn’s” symphonies, though it was in fact the highest social pinnacle). In pursuit of such heights, Mrs. Cork had reduced her damns and hells by the end of the week with us to darns and hecks. I had to admire the way Mrs. Cork was pretending to be shocked by the innocent improprieties that so excited my stepmother. I could tell Mrs. Cork had palled around with real screwballs, even unwed couples – it was just a sense I had. When I took her out one day in a motorboat alone, she and I happily discussed opera. We cut the motor and drifted. I relaxed and became animated to the point of
effeminacy; she relaxed and became coarser. “Oh, my boy,” she promised me in her brogue, “you want to hear fine singing, I’ll play you my John McCormack records, make you weep your damn eyes out of their bloody sockets. That ‘Lucevan le stelle,’ it’ll freeze your balls.” I shrieked with delight – we were conspirators who’d somehow found ourselves stranded together here in a world of unthrillable souls. I dreamed of running off and becoming a great singer; I walked through the woods and vocalized.

  Tonight we had not yet made our rapport explicit, but I was already wise to her. She had through circumstance ended up not on the La Scala stage but in this American cottage, married to an affable, overweight businessman. Now her job was to ingratiate herself with people who would help her husband in his career (lawyer for industry); she was retaining just enough brogue and temperament to be a “character.” Characters – conventional women with minor eccentricities – flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she’d failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas.

  “Time for bed, young fella,” my father said at last.

  Downstairs I undressed by the colored light of the glass-brick bar and, wearing just a T-shirt and jockey shorts, hurried into the dark dormitory and slipped into my cot. Nights on the lake are cold even in July; the bed had two thick blankets on it that had been aired outside that day and smelled of pine needles. I listened to the grown-ups; the metal vents conducted sound better than heat. Their conversation, which had seemed so lively and sincere when I had witnessed it, now sounded stilted and halting. Lots of fake laughter. Silences became longer and longer. At last everyone said good night and headed upstairs. Another five minutes of moaning pipes, flushing toilets and padding feet. Then long murmured consultations in bed by each couple. Then silence.