A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  I’d planned not to sleep at all but had set the alarm should I doze off. For hours I lay in the dark and listened to the dogs barking down in the valley. Now that I was leaving this house forever, I was tiptoeing through it mentally and prizing its luxuries – the shelves lined with blocks of identical cans (my father ordered everything by the gross); the linen cupboard stacked high with ironed if snuff-specked sheets; my own bathroom with its cupboard full of soap, tissue, towels, hand towels, washclothes; the elegant helix of the front staircase descending to the living room with its deep carpets, shaded lamps and the pretty mirror bordered by tiles on which someone with a nervous touch had painted the various breeds of lapdog. This house where I’d never felt I belonged no longer belonged to me, and the future so clearly charted for me – college, career, wife and white house wavering behind green trees – was being exchanged for that eternal circulating through the restaurant, my path as clear to me as chalk marks on the floor, instructions for each foot in the tango, lines that flowed together, branched and joined, branched and joined . . . In my dream my father had died but I refused to kiss him though next he was pulling me up on to his lap, an ungainly teen smeared with Vicks VapoRub whom everyone inexplicably treated as a sick child.

  When I silenced the alarm, fear overtook me. I’d go hungry! The boardinghouse room with the toilet down the hall, blood on the linoleum, Christ in a chromo, crepe-paper flowers – I dressed and packed my gym bag with the bottle of peroxide and two changes of clothes. Had my father gone to bed yet? Would the dog bark when I tried to slip past him? And would that man be on the corner? The boarding-house room, yes, Negro music on the radio next door, the coquette’s shriek . . . As I walked down the drive I felt conspicuous under the blank windows of my father’s house and half expected him to open the never-used front door to call me back.

  I stood on the appointed corner. It began to drizzle but a water truck crept past anyway, spraying the street a darker, slicker gray. No birds were in sight but I could hear them testing the day. A dog without a collar or master trotted past. Two fat maids were climbing the hill, stopping every few steps to catch their breath. One, a shiny, blue-black fat woman wearing a flowered turban and holding a purple umbrella with a white plastic handle, was scowling and talking fast but obviously to humorous effect, for her companion couldn’t stop laughing.

  The bells of the Catholic school behind the dripping trees across the street marked the quarter hour, the half hour. More and more cars were passing me. I studied every driver – had my friend overslept? The milkman. The bread truck. Damn hillbilly. A bus went by, carrying just one passenger. A quarter to seven. He wasn’t coming.

  When I saw him the next evening on the square he waved at me and came over to talk. From his relaxed manner I instantaneously saw that he’d duped me and I was powerless. To whom could I report him? Like a heroin addict or a Communist, I was outside the law – outside it but with him, this man.

  We sat side by side on the same bench. A bad muffler exploded in a volley and the cooing starlings perched on the fountain figure’s arm flew up and away leaving behind only the metal dove. I took off my tie, rolled it up and slipped it inside my pocket. Because I didn’t complain about being betrayed, my friend said, “See those men yonder?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could git you one for eight bucks.” He let that sink in; yes, I thought, I could take someone to one of those little fleabag hotels. “Which one do you want?” he said.

  I handed him the money and said, “The blond.”

  THREE

  Until I was seven my parents, my sister and I lived in a Tudor-style house at the end of a lane in the city where my father remained after the divorce. Our house and three others formed a wooded, almost rural enclave set down in the midst of an old, poor section of the city. I could never quite situate our enclave in the world outside; I remember my astonishment the day I roamed through the hollow behind our place, climbed up the far hill, pushed aside branches – and stared out at a major four-lane thoroughfare I’d been driven down countless times but had never suspected ran so close to our property. Certainly not behind it, of all things. To me the city lay entirely in front of our gates in a dirty, busy antechamber. I consulted with my sister. She was four years older, could read, went to school and knew everything. “Sure, dumbbell,” she said. “Of course it’s behind the house. Where’d you think it was?” She screwed her fingertip into her temple and said, “Duh.”

  She began to chant a colorless litany of “Dumbbells.” I stopped my ears with my hands and ran, crying, back into the house.

  My sister had friends she’d met at Miss Laughton’s School for Girls who came home to play with her some afternoons. They all belonged to a club my sister had started. She was the captain. Her success as a leader could be attributed to the methodical way she worked out her ideas: her approach lent an adult, step-by-step orderliness to projects that otherwise might have seemed wild and incomprehensible.

  One afternoon she ordered each of her team members to steal a belt from her father that night and bring it with her tomorrow. Of course every girl must be clever in stealing and hiding the belt; if caught, she must be even more resourceful in denying the real reason for filching it. The next afternoon the girls gathered in the hollow and presented their booty to my sister, who lashed each girl with her own father’s belt. In one case her zeal left welts, which led to parental questions and eventually exposure of the whole drama. My sister, at that time a tall, taut platinum blonde who didn’t like grown-ups, answered my mother’s furious questions with indignant yeses and noes, lowered eyes and a set jaw. She was afraid of my mother, the interrogation alarmed her, but not for a moment did she feel guilty or question what she had done. She was the queen of her tribe of girls.

  My sister resented the interest some of the girls took in me and banned me from the meetings held beside the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. When I disobeyed her and toddled smilingly into the assembly, she spanked my bare legs with a hairbrush. My father, resolved that his son should hold his own, pinioned my sister’s arms behind her and ordered me to switch her on the back of her legs with a stinging branch. But I knew that soon enough he would disappear again, my mother drive off, the maids look away; I dropped the branch, howled and clattered up the stairs to my room. I think I also knew that my father preferred my sister to me and that his interest in me was only abstract, dynastic.

  My sister was his true son. She could ride a horse and swim a mile and she was as capable of sustained rages as he. Still better, she was as blond as his mother. My grandmother had not wanted my father; as she told him, she’d pummeled her stomach with her fists every day while she was bearing him. Nonetheless, my father somehow got born and survived to serve his mother humbly and lovingly, washing the family’s sheets in the bathtub when he was still only a child and brushing out her blond hair every night. One night, soon after my grandmother died, I stole into my father’s study and found him standing behind my sister’s chair, brushing her hair and crying.

  Right now I’m looking at an ancient photograph of my sister and me. I’m three and she’s seven, both of us bundled up for winter and posed against a door under an ominously black Christmas wreath. She’s much taller than I. My sister is dressed in a fashionably cut camel’s-hair coat belled out above black leggings. She’s sporting a matching hat bordered in brown piping, the front brim flipped up and the whole thing placed rakishly far back on her head. She’s smiling a thin-lipped, obviously forced smile. Her eyes, so blue they’re bottomless and white, express the pain of an unhealed convalescent, as do the shadows, like bruises below her temples – bruises forceps might have left.

  Because my sister tormented me and I loved her but feared her, I turned away from her to imaginary playmates. There were three of them. Cottage Cheese, the girl, was older than I, sensible and bossy but my ally. She and I tolerated our good-natured younger sidekick, Georgie-Porgie, a dimwit we fussed over for his own good. We felt n
othing of this benign condescension toward Tom-Thumb-Thumb, the hellion who roamed the woods beyond the barbed wire fence guarding the neighbor’s property, off limits to us and to him too, I’m sure, though he ignored this rule and all others. He was just a rustle of dried leaves, a panting of quick hot breath behind the honeysuckle, a blur of tanned leg and muddy knees or a distant hoot and holler – an irrepressible male freedom (all the freer because he was a boy and not a man). He needed no one, he’d listen to no reprimand. One time Cottage Cheese and I cornered him (we’d taken him by surprise as he was furtively pawing my father’s untouchable tools in the garage) and we lectured him at length, but his eyes, the whites flashing wonderfully clear and bright through the matted hair, never stopped darting back and forth looking for an escape route – and then he was off, leaving behind him only the resonance of the concrete vault and our voices calling Tom, calling, calling out to him, Tom, to behave, to be good, Tom, as good as we had to be.

  He never cared for me. Cottage Cheese and I, determined that naïve Georgie-Porgie should not fall under Tom’s spell, made a great show of listing Tom’s faults – but privately I worried about Tom and at night I wondered where he was sleeping, was he dry, was he warm, hungry. I even envied his sovereignty, though the price of freedom – total solitude – seemed more than I could possibly pay.

  Tom’s independence and Georgie’s dependence rendered them both unsatisfactory as playmates. If the family was going on a trip I gladly left the boys behind so long as I could take Cottage Cheese with me. My mother made sure there was always a place for Cottage Cheese beside me in the back seat of the pale blue Chrysler with its royal blue upholstery, its delicate chrome ashtray tilting out from the quilted rear panel of the front seat and its translucent celluloid knobs on the window cranks – although once Cottage Cheese, in an uncharacteristically willful moment, insisted on riding the exterior running board as I held her hand through the lowered window. Her skirts flew up and her taffeta hair ribbons bobbed crazily behind her until she looked as windswept as the silver figurine on the hood.

  Ordinarily Cottage Cheese was a calm, sensible girl content to wander with me through the endless days as we surveyed our world and sententiously described it to ourselves: “Now here’s that slippery log, make sure you don’t slip on the slippery log, step over it, that’s right – oh, look, there are the poisonous red berries, don’t eat them, they’re poison.” She took my afternoon naps with me, a deflating heap of dry, hot organdy and drooping white stockings as she settled on the bed beside me, only the feeblest ectoplasm when I first awakened until I was able to pump life and body back into her.

  She was not a pretty girl. She had freckles, big black glasses and ears that kept poking their tips out through limp hanks of straight hair. She was something of a tomboy, not by being athletic (she was as afraid of sports as I) but by being straightforward, hearty, confiding. I prized her companionship and liked it when she told me to brush my teeth or flush the toilet. She liked to bathe with me but, I am pleased to say, never undressed to do so.

  And yet I didn’t really like my imaginary friends precisely because they were so irritatingly vague and unreal. My mother went to great lengths to respect my whim – in fact, she may have known how to deal with my imaginary playmates better than with some of my other more disturbing vagaries. And I might have held on to these friends longer than need be precisely because they earned me a certain deference. A place was laid at the table for Cottage Cheese and my parents inquired after her often. But the imaginary friends were almost, at times, less real to me than to my indulgent mother – the imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

  And yet on my third birthday a professional marionette troupe performed Sleeping Beauty in our living room before an audience of my mother’s lady friends’ children, imported for the occasion. The plates from which we kids had eaten cake and vanilla ice cream were collected and the curtains drawn, creating night in day, a magic trick I associated only with afternoon naps. It was a warm, sniffling, giggling audience. A little raised stage framed in blue cloth had been erected at one end of the room. The toe of a big brown shoe protruding from beneath the hem of the proscenium draperies kept in mind real dimensions only for a few more minutes; soon the reduced scale of the stage had engulfed me, as though I’d been precipitated through a beaker and sublimated into another substance altogether. I had never heard the story before. The curse of Carabosse, the Princess’s mishap in the Rose Garden, her long sleep and the funny, frozen postures of the courtiers, the arrival of the Prince and the joyous nuptials all transported me to a world of boldly modeled faces from which character could be readily deduced, a world in which menace foreshadowed disaster, evil was defeated and love crowned. In this lighted cube my emotions coalesced because they were given a firm bounding line and because things devolved with the logic of art, not life.

  For if the imaginary playmates were insubstantial, the overly material people who surrounded me were opaque. Now only these miniature figures – with a hooked nose punctuated by a wart, a skein of lustrous blond hair, lace cuffs, velvet trains – only they seemed lit from within and legible as they floated up out of the bottomless floor, gestured wildly, gazed as though blind in only the general direction of an interlocutor, shook with tearless sobs, growled or piped, then flew at one another for hearty, back-slapping embraces until they were whipped up into the wings. That was the secret of the imagination – its creations were feeble only to the maker but stronger than life itself to the observer. When the curtains were opened again and the puppeteers – balding husband and bespectacled wife – emerged with shy grins and joined the party, a deep sadness sounded inside me.

  When I was seven my mother divorced my father. My sister and I, aroused by the declamatory tone of the grown-ups downstairs, sat in pajamas on the front stairs and listened to the speeches. How odd and thrilling that where we’d live and go to school could be decided in this manner. My father, my mother and the woman who’d eventually be my stepmother took turns giving speeches, although my father was mostly silent unless prodded into murmurs by the women. My mother was saying, “If she is the one you really want, then far be it from me to stand in the way of your happiness, yet if I might speak in my own behalf . . .” The complex sentences with their unfamiliar locutions sometimes tripped my mother up, as though she were a debutante in her first long dress.

  Everything about the conference seemed dramatic – the late hour, the formal tone, even the notion that something momentous could or should be decided all at once. Soon my sister and I, sitting in the bleachers of the dark stairwell and peering down into the brightness, had sworn our own complicity by dissembling: both of us were excited by the prospect of living in a new city and shedding our difficult father, but we both pretended to be grief-struck.

  The real excitement, of course, lay in learning that a life could be changed and that one could enter a brand-new, better world (“I shall move wherever the children will have the cultural and educational advantages of a major metropolis,” our mother was saying). That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant. How its body would be formed and what its temperament would be like would surely remain unknown – along with the color of its eyes, the cubits of its height and the beauty of its face – up to the moment of birth. Until I heard the three adults discussing their lives and our lives (“I cannot lead my life in this way,” “The children have their whole lives before them”) I had never suspected that I’d been impregnated with this “life,” this tragic embryo. The divorce, for me, was primarily an accession into self-consciousness.

  It was also a deliverance from my father. Since he slept all day, I seldom saw him. But sometimes my mother would say, “Your father’s awake. Why don’t you go in and rub his back?” Reluctantly I’d enter the bedroom, in which the drawn cur
tains stained the late afternoon light. On the bed, face down, lay my naked father under sheets, like a sea monster beached and sick in a tide pool of foam. The mingled smells of night sweat and stale cigar smoke awed me; I toddled out and told my mother he was still sleeping. “No, no,” she said, smiling and guiding me back in. I looked around the room from which I was usually barred. Everything was silent except for his breathing and the tick of his gold pocket watch on the night table beside him. Within my father’s half-closed closet I could see his shoes. I intuited one shoe from no more than a single burning vertical line of light that followed me by traveling glassily across the black leather rondure above the heel. Floating up there, high above the shoes, hung a smoky cashmere Olympus of all his discarded but potential selves: his suits. Now to the bed.

  I sat beside him and lightly patted his back. He murmured encouragingly and I worked my way up the thickly padded torso to the shoulders. The pores looked huge, some of them specked with black. A film of sweat seemed to be methodically seeping out of him; I sniffed my right hand; it smelled funny. My job seemed to be to creep over him as a lone climber, with nothing but rope and crampons, might assault a glacier. If he was fully awake he didn’t let on, as though a state of torpor were all a father owed a very little son – or at least all the son would accept from such a massive father.

  He was entirely naked but shrouded up to the waist in sheets. Whereas my sheets were small, sufficient for my cot where I slept in the governing shade and disturbingly intimate smell of my black nurse, these sheets were sculpturally white, vast and twisted, testimony to adult nights of passion or strife.