A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Later, an hour later, he’d descend to his squire’s breakfast, shaved and dressed in a white shirt, silk tie and double-breasted suit, his eyes young, sharp and intelligent in a head I’d seen earlier from an odd, wounded angle. He was now polite to the cook, deferential to my mother and lighthearted and cutting with my sister and me – he who’d been nothing but a felled deity exuding a cold sweat an hour before. This transformation of the mystery man in the tangle of sheets into the bantering gentleman I attributed to the rites of the bathroom mirror and the bracing smell of carbolic soap and witch hazel. How he’d study himself in that mirror, both taps running full blast, as though out of the haze on the glass his true identity might emerge under a swipe of the towel – a cutting of the self if not the full blossoming branch.

  Dad had a friend of sorts – to him possibly a very minor business associate – whom my sister and I worshipped because he gave us money. “Dollar Bill,” we called him, since he was William and always gave us a dollar each. Though we wanted for nothing and we dimly sensed that our way of living cost many, many dollars, this unseen cash meant nothing to us compared to the actual loot Dollar Bill handed over. If the Devil or Hitler had offered us even a single dollar for our parents’ heads, we would have cut them off and presented the bloody, bulky packages in happy exchange. How greedy we were, we who’d learned so early the value and sinister glory of the dollar. How we’d fawn on Dollar Bill, hugging his legs and kissing his neck. How we’d squeal with excitement when we spied him coming down the walk. The grown-ups would guffaw in chorus over our gold-digging antics, pleased to see us miming their own sentiments – much as one might be pleased to see chimps mounting or presenting in inflated purple imitation a human desire less colorful but no less persistent.

  In a sense all of our daddy’s dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly; every dollar was assigned a function and kept out of sight. Dollar Bill, however, liberated two dollars a week from invisible utility. We loved him more than anyone we knew.

  Once my mother became so exasperated with me that she asked my father to beat me with a strap. He marched me into his bedroom; the bed was now neatly covered by a fitted pale yellow satin spread, an antique mirror so shiny it reflected lights and shadows if not coherent figures. “Drop your pants,” my father said. I had already started a sort of gasping, an asthmatic gasping, in anticipation of a pain that seemed impossibly cruel because I had no idea when it would descend on me nor how long it would last. My lack of control over the situation was for me the worst punishment, and I gasped and gasped for air and escape and justice, or at least mercy. Panic lit up everywhere within me; I longed to run or disappear in a burst of chemical smoke and reappear as a white, frightened animal from under a top hat, gently nibbling at the fumes. I thought I could win my father over; I said with sullen candor (I had nothing but candor to work with), “I’ll never do it again. I’m sorry.”

  But he was angry now. His hate, more intense than any other feeling he’d ever had for me, was making his face younger and younger. His eyes no longer had that veiled, compounded look of adults who stare at blank spots on walls or get tangled up in the tulle of thought. Now his eyes were simple and curious, eyes I recognized as those of another child. A scream caught up with me and outraced me. I felt myself inhabited by this scream that was registered in a voice bigger, more released than anything I had ever heard – a scream that seemed even bigger than my fear. It took me over and wouldn’t stop. It was a cry of outrage against a violation at the hands of a child no older than I but much less appeasable – a heartless boy.

  He tugged my pants down and pushed me forward into the glossy spread. The belt fell again and again, much too long and much too harshly to my mind, which had suddenly turned strangely epicurean. The solace of the condemned is scorn, especially scorn of an aesthetic stripe. In that moment the vital energies retreated out of my body into a small, hard gland of bitter objectivity, a gland that would secrete its poison through me for the rest of my life. At last my mother, conveniently tardy, rushed in and asked for mercy; she even had the satisfaction of accusing my father of being unduly harsh.

  While the divorce was still pending and the school year still in session, our mother moved my sister and me to a hotel in a community that had been built to resemble a Tudor village, all half-timbered stucco. That entire spring it seemed to rain. Every day after school I went walking for hours through unknown streets that were nearly empty. The intense, pure colors of traffic signals burned through the rain and cast long edible smears on the wet pavement. Green, yellow, red. A click in the box. Then red, yellow, green. I found a church, ivied and squat, with rounded arches and murky painted windows and, inside, the smell of floor polish. I walked down the resonant deserted aisles and came upon a carved wood door behind and to one side of the altar. A sign indicated that this was the minister’s office. I knocked on the door. A pleasant man in a dark business suit opened it. “Yes?”

  “Are you the minister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind if I talk to you? I have a problem.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Come in.”

  The office seemed efficient with its typewriters and files and fluorescent ceiling lamps and water cooler; it struck a reassuringly practical note of business. He indicated I should sit in a green leather chair. He then sat down and faced me across the desk.

  “Are you busy?”

  “No. I have a few minutes. What’s the problem?”

  “My parents are getting divorced.”

  “Does that disturb you?”

  “Yes. Well, maybe.”

  “Are you going to live with your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you rather live with your father?”

  “No.”

  “Do you dislike your father?”

  “Goodness no.”

  “Would you like to see your parents stay married?”

  The sympathy in his eyes caused me to say, “Yes.” Once I had, I realized that this single lie had made me into a character in a story – just like one of the marionettes. “I want them to – yes.” I felt my face become more beautiful. I hoped the minister would invite me to his house and take care of me, or at least tell my mother how wonderful I was. I hoped the minister would tell his congregation about the wonderful little boy who had visited him one rainy afternoon. “Is there anything I can do? To bring them back together?” I asked.

  “Probably not. You can pray for them, for both of them to make the best possible decision.”

  I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn’t. I was small enough, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn’t really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be.

  This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role – it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I’d look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them.

  We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lo
bby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened on to a ballroom. The windows of the ballroom were heavily and perpetually draped and curtained, but I discovered a tiny door just two panes high that led out on to a narrow balcony. This balcony obviously was not intended to be used, just a strip of gravel over tar behind an escarpment of stone ornamental urns. In good weather I’d hide on this secret balcony and read; my favorite book was about the lost dauphin. On some days the ballroom was set up with long banquet tables bearing napery and floral arrangements between rows of gilt and velvet chairs. Other days the room would smell of stale cigarette smoke and the tables would have been stripped to their scarred wood tops and pipe-metal bases.

  As a little boy I’d scarcely known my mother; she’d seldom been home and I’d been left to my nurse. Sometimes at night, after I’d gone to bed, Mother would perch beside me for a moment before she went out for the evening. She smelled of a rich, unfamiliar perfume and her face glimmered behind a full veil drawn down under her chin, the net woven here and there with dark birds in flight, her hands encased in tiny white leather gloves of a morbid softness. Then she’d sing to me in her thin, high, quavering voice, “I’ll Be Seeing You in Apple Blossom Time.” The birds would seem to move when she sang and in my drowsiness I imagined they, too, were serenading me.

  Now I saw her much more and she became more real to me. She had wonderful brown eyes, sharp and clear, that changed with her many moods, as pearls are said to respond to the different bodies that wear them. She cried easily, when her feelings had been hurt. When she cried I became frantic and held on to her until she stopped. I wanted her to be happy, and I saved up money to buy her presents; if the gifts were ignored I felt powerless and dejected. She could also be sharp-eyed. Though she was in fact impetuous and extravagant, she would occasionally put on her glasses, stick out her chin and ponder a legal or business document for hours. She sat perfectly still on the edge of a chair, her feet barely touching the floor since she was so short.

  She had no humor beyond a low country cackle at things that were silly or naughty. At such times she’d sound like her own mother, an illiterate farm woman who crowed over traveling-salesman stories, slapped her knee and then wriggled like a wet bird back into smooth-feathered sobriety. My mother had no interest in what she called “theory,” by which she meant ideas. What did interest her were plans and arrangements – all the details of daily life. These elicited her full attention, and mastering them brought her the pleasant feeling that hers was a tidy life. Plans were my despair; the minute maps were drawn out of a glove compartment or a calendar was consulted, I retreated into irritable daydreams.

  My mother’s interest in plans and arrangements coexisted with the most peculiar notion of what those arrangements would consist of – and a wild caprice that could over-turn everything she’d worked out so methodically. Naïve and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor. For the first time in her life our mother had a job, one at which she worked long hours. At night she was going out on dates or haunting nightclubs downtown. Because she was seldom at home I ate most of my suppers alone in the hotel dining room; my sister ate at a different hour in order to avoid my company.

  Before her divorce my mother had never so much as written a check. Now our fortunes teetered and careened and ground to a halt. She bought a knee-length mink but economized on food, bought a flashy Lincoln convertible but refused to send my sister to the orthodontist, packed us off to expensive summer camps but on the bus, not the train. She drank heavily and played sentimental records in the evening on the few nights she stayed home; one winter the record of “Now Is the Hour” became so worn the spindle hole grew as big as a dime, but still the voice yearned on and on. Another winter the voice, wobbling sickeningly, sang “The Tennessee Waltz.”

  When Mother was discouraged a smell of physical self-hatred would come off her body; she groaned her way through her self-hatred as though it were a mountain of laundry she had to wash, a dirty, physical, humiliating task. Then something nice would happen. Someone would compliment her or a man would take an interest in her – and presto, she was not only equal to other people but superior to them. The terrible laundering would be forgotten. She’d sit up very straight in her chair and smile a sort of First Lady smile.

  I spent many gala nights, including my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays, in nightclubs beside my mother. She’d split a simple pasta dish with me to save money and then order highball after highball as we’d look longingly toward the man at the bar. Had he noticed Mother? Would he send her a drink? Or would he be scared off by my presence?

  My mother had met a handsome man much younger than she who wanted her to buy him a fishing camp in Kentucky; luckily his greed finally caused her to drop him. On the way down to join him one time in Kentucky, Mother kept the radio tuned to a hillbilly station, but my sister and I mocked the corn-pone accents and sad lyrics. Once we were in Kentucky the handsome man, mustached and cologned, took us out fishing in a rented boat. It rained. No one caught anything. A strict silence had to be maintained when the man cast his rod as though blessing the waters. At night my sister and I slept in bunk beds in the man’s sister’s house. My mother wore a new, dazed expression and treated us with great politeness, as though my sister and I were guests she didn’t know very well. She spoke of our accomplishments and of her own trials and powers of recuperation. The man laid a strong hand on my shoulders, but withdrew it when my mother left the room. At night his family and ours sat together; everyone visited as a bowl of pecans and a nutcracker were passed around the room from one grown-up to another on down to silent children in pajamas stained with orange juice. Our mother was betraying us into this dingy house permeated by the smell of hot grease. Mother was losing interest in me; she’d willingly hand me over to this good-looking fool.

  During the night they fought. The engagement was broken off and the next morning we were in the car again, blinking and exhausted, the radio blaring, the temperature noticeably warmer, familiar plants unseasonably in bloom. Mother started reciting the litany of our lives. She questioned us once more about our father and how he behaved toward his new wife. Each twisted or colored fact we gave her she plaited into a heavy weave. Then she tore that up and started again. He would soon leave his wife or he would never leave her, he was being blackmailed by that woman, no he loved her, he was a man of honor, no he was a man without principle, he had failed us, no he stayed true, he’d tire of her, no she was a born fascinator, this was just an adventure, it was a life, she made him feel superior, she made him feel cheap, he’d soon be back or he’d never return – oh, my mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up.

  I listened to everything, smiling and in possession of my secret power.

  And then there were her other men – the one in California with all the money, who was Catholic and brought brandy alexanders to Mama’s bedside in the morning. Or the captain in the army with the sports car whom she’d met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Or the Jew in Chicago with the sailboat, the Camel cigarettes and the skin that tanned so easily. We’d analyze their motives hour after hour as the towns and countryside sped past. We’d sing songs. We’d listen to the news. We’d point out sights to one another. But soon we’d be talking again about Herb or Bill or Abe. Did he miss our mother? What were his intentions? Was he dating anyone else? Should Mom play harder to get?

  Mother gained weight, sighed beside the phone, cried, hypothesized, thought up schemes of seduction or revenge, and all her technique – that is, all her helplessness – made my sister more and more ashamed of her. We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began b
y admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.

  My mother’s helplessness filled my sister with confusion and shame. She was confused after Mother had talked her way with conviction and obsessive tenacity all the way around the circumference of an absence. Mother would say Abe was just stringing her along, he had dozens of women, she was just another gal – one burdened, moreover, with two brats. Within half an hour she’d convinced herself that he thought so much of her he was afraid of her. She was too cultured, too intelligent, too genteel, too dynamic for him. She frightened him.

  I wasn’t ashamed. I was coldly indifferent as my mind closed its locks and slowly flooded with dreams. I was a king or a god.

  How my mother longed for that phone to ring. When my sister was old enough to date, she, too, waited by the phone. The negligence of men toward women struck me as past belief; how could these men resist so much longing?

  All this waiting, of course, was a petri dish in which new cultures of speculation were breeding. Was he not calling to prove a point? His independence, perhaps? Men hated feeling trapped. His own desirability? Or had he found someone else? Or was he shy and himself waiting for a call? I half wanted to be a man, a grown-up man, but a gallant one who could finally put an end to all this suffering. My other half wanted to have a man; I thought I’d know better how to get one and keep him. Or else how to punish him for his neglect.

  And all this speculation, I noticed, was occurring beside the obstinately mute telephone – brilliant, glittering black proof of the inefficacy of yearning. No thought, no architecture of thoughts no matter how intricate, could make that phone ring. Only beauty, youth, charm, money – only those things worked. The rest (goodness, worthiness, the conjuring of desire) was a pitiable substitute for the brute fact of glamour.