A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Well, her phrasing was less childish than her hand, I thought, as though the letter were a composition in class that concerned me in no way. Even as this attitude broke over me but before I was drawn into another, more troubling one, I had time to notice she said I was one of her very best friends, an honor I’d been unaware of until now, as who had not: I registered the social gain before the romantic loss. Unless (and here I could taste something bitter on the back of my tongue) – unless the “mature” advice (“I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while”) was actually a denial of the consolation prize, a way of keeping me out of her circle at the very moment she was pretending to invite me into it. Could it be that the entire exercise, its assured tone, the concision and familiar ring of the phrasing, figured as nothing more than a “tribute” (her word) she had piled up before the altar of her own beauty? How many people had she shown my letter to?

  But then all this mental chatter stopped and I surrendered to something else, something less active, more abiding, something that had been waiting politely all this time but that now stepped forward, diffident yet impersonal: my grief.

  For the next few months I grieved. I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for? I cried during gym class when someone got mad at me for dropping the basketball. In the past I would have hidden my pain but now I just slowly walked off the court, the tears spurting out of my face. I took a shower, still crying, and dressed forlornly and walked the empty halls even though to do so during class time was forbidden. I no longer cared about rules. I let my hair grow, I stopped combing it, I forgot to change my shirt from one week to the next. With a disabused eye I watched other kids striving to succeed, to become popular. I became a sort of vagabond of grief or, as I’d rather put it, I entered grief’s vagabondage, which better suggests a simultaneous freedom and slavery. Freedom from the now meaningless pursuit of grades, friends, smiles; slavery to a hopeless love.

  Every afternoon I’d stumble home exhausted to my room, but once there my real work would begin, which was to imagine Helen in my arms, Helen beside me laughing, Helen looking up at me through the lace suspended from the orange-blossom chaplet, Helen with other boys, kissing them, unzipping her shorts and stepping out of them, pushing her hair back out of her serious, avid eyes. She was a puppet I could place in one playlet after another, but once I’d invoked her she became independent, tortured me, smiled right through me at another boy, her approaching lover. Her exertions with other men fascinated me, and the longer I suffered, the more outrageous were the humiliations I had other men inflict on her.

  I became ill with mononucleosis, ironically the “kissing disease” that afflicted so many teenagers in those days. I was kept out of school for several months. Most of the time I slept, feverish and content: exempted. Just to cross the room required all my energy. Whether or not to drink another glass of ginger ale could absorb my attention for an hour. That my grief had been superseded by illness relieved me; I was no longer willfully self-destructive. I was simply ill. Love was forbidden – my doctor had told me I mustn’t kiss anyone. Tommy called me from time to time but I felt he and I had nothing in common now – after all, he was just a boy, whereas I’d become a very old man.

  SIX

  The more isolated I became, the more incapable I thought I was of resisting my homosexual fate. I blamed my sister and my mother – my sister for eroding my confidence (as though homosexuality were a form of shyness) and my mother for babying me (homosexuality as prolonged infancy). At the same time I recognized that my mother was my best and truest friend, that she alone fretted over my health, listened to my term papers, waited up for my return, attempted to understand my enthusiasms.

  In my immense world-weariness I decided to become a Buddhist. My mother had for years encouraged my sister and me to find a church of our own, one that answered our real needs. True to type, my sister in her burrowing if vexed drive toward normality had become a Presbyterian. The local church had the most affable, crew-cut minister (former football coach) and the most prestigious congregation (semi-believers in a heaven of jocks, a hell of brains and a purgatory of friendless stay-at-homes).

  I interpreted my mother’s mandate in a different way. I spent day after day at the library reading through Max Muller’s Sacred Books of the East as one might try on clothes – but isn’t Hinduism just a bit busy? Confucianism? Too sensible, no flair.

  But Buddhism appealed to me. Not in its later, elaborated northern form, the Mahayana with its infinite regress of paradises, its countless bodhisattvas (those compassionate midwives), its efficacious prayers and praying effigies given over to the pornography of worship, squirming nude maidens representing the anima straddling the erect lingam of the meditating animus. No, what I liked was the earlier Hinayana, those austere instructions that lead to an extinction of desire (in Sanskrit, nirvana means “to extinguish,” as one might blow out a candle flame). I felt a strong affinity to this curiously life-hating religion that teaches us we have no soul and that the self is merely a baggage depot where random parcels have been checked (labeled emotions, sensations, memories and so on) soon enough to be collected by different owners, an emptying out that will leave the room blissfully vacant. That emptiness, that annihilation is what the Christian most dreads but the Buddhist most earnestly craves – or would if craving itself were not precisely what must be extirpated. Desire – hankering after sex, money, fame, security – ties us to the world and condemns us to rebirth, “the cycle of rebirth” I pictured as a wheel on which the sinner was stretched and bound, the wheel that crushed him as it turned but cruelly failed to kill him.

  I felt the need to free myself of desire. I must not want anything. I must feel no attachments. Above all, no attractions. I must give up all hope, plans, glad anticipations. I must study oblivion. I must give room and board to silence and pay tuition to the void. Even the slightest flicker of longing must be stilled. Every wire must be pulled until the console goes dead and all dials point to zero.

  My mother discovered a Buddhist church some thirty miles away. She gamely drove me down to it one Sunday (Sunday! I mentally sniffed, already the ascetic snob; Church! I exclaimed, an Oriental purist). On the preceding Saturday night I dreamed of opening wicker gates, the process shot as the wizened abbot walks toward me on a treadmill, getting nowhere fast against a rear projection of a retreating, expanding universe of thickening blue sandalwood incense and swaying, saffron-robed monks.

  Instead I encountered a congregation of grinning Japanese families in a former Baptist church and heard announcements of the Young Buddhists Association’s annual picnic and basketball practice as well as disappointingly melodic hymns with words such as “Dearest Amida, Your Light Is Shining Through the Gloomy World of Sin” sung by us all to a wheezing organ accompaniment, then a tedious sermon on the evils of adultery. I fled, red-cheeked and offended, my puzzled mother reluctantly following me (“But I liked it, dear. It seemed so Christian, though of course they were much better dressed than your average Christian”).

  I desperately needed a new beginning. The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it – unless I could change it completely. If my homosexuality was due to a surfeit of female company at home (for so ran the most popular psychological theory of the day), then I should correct the imbalance by entering an all-male world. In order to become a heterosexual I decided I should attend a boys’ boarding school (for so ran my wonderfully logical addendum to the theory). I phoned my father long-distance and pleaded with him to help me escape my mother. Whereas I loved her I dreaded her mysterious influence, as though she were a plant like rhubarb, stalk nourishing, leaves poisonous.

  “I don’t think you should talk about your mother that way, young fellow,” my father said. “She’s a fine woman.” I heard him gasp as he drew on his cigar. I could picture him at his blond mahogany desk. Perhaps he’d rolled up a pipe cleaner into a hoop and was throwing it f
or his cat, Baby, to fetch while my cat, Herr Pogner, stretched on the sill, yawned, raised her fluffy tail and arched her feathery back, then sank down on all fours, front paws neatly tucked under her downy tortoiseshell chest. The smell of the cigar, the way my father tilted his head back so that he could watch through the close-up lenses of his bifocals as Baby batted the pipe cleaner across his desk, scattering business papers as she went, then tumbled over the edge on to the carpet, then dashed off to a corner (look down, through the upper lenses), the distant drone of a carpet sweeper a black maid was pushing downstairs – this whole dense world came rushing back toward me with his first words.

  “But, Daddy,” I exclaimed, my voice breaking and rising up, up the scale into a soprano delirium, “I love my mother.”

  “Like. Like,” he said. “A man likes things. Girls love, men like.”

  “But that’s just the problem,” I wailed. “I’m too involved with Mommy. I’m not” – and here I put the decisive card on the table – “I’m not turning out . . . as I should. I need to be with men.”

  Long pause. The faint transmitted sound of the sweeper had died away. A click revealed to me that my stepmother had picked up on an extension phone. Three pairs of eyes blinked as three hands held three silent receivers.

  “I need male role models,” I said, delighted that I had remembered the very word my mother liked to use.

  “Role what?” my father asked, annoyed. “To hell with that.”

  I subsided into silence.

  Then suddenly he and I were both speaking at once, both stopped, he resumed: “As I was saying, you could come live here, I suppose.”

  “That would never work. You’re always at the office, Daddy. Last summer we were in the same house three months and I didn’t spend more than an hour with you altogether. You slept all day. I was working the Addressograph machine. No, what I want is to go to a boarding school. I want to live with a bunch of guys my own age and just, well, learn sports” – could he tell how much I was lying? I ended on a rehearsed phrase – “and be with the fellows. You know.”

  “Don’t say ‘you know.’ Poorly educated people say it all the time. It becomes a habit.”

  “Yes, sir.” I could imagine him lighting a new cigar, twirling the brown baton for an even fire, filling the room with thick smoke that engulfed the fussy Herr Pogner on her perch, her gold eyes squinting through that noxious cloud.

  “I don’t want to make a decision over the phone. Put it all in writing. Can you type?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You must learn. There are only two useful things to be learned in school, typing and public speaking. Before you’re graduated I want you to study both. So, print your letter. I want it to be very neat, as neat and businesslike as you can manage, and in it you should present all your arguments for going away to school. Then go to the public library and read through the guide to private schools and pick one. Got it? I’m not promising anything but I’ll consider your proposal carefully.”

  The guide devoted a page to each school. In each case it presented black-and-white photographs of the grounds and buildings, a portrait of the headmaster and a brief description of the “philosophy” of the institution. For hours I’d muse over this volume of future lives, weighing one possibility against another. Did I want to be a senator? Should I attend a school in Washington? A general? Military academy? A monk? I read of a school where each student served as an acolyte at least once a week, since all the priests (the teachers) had to say Mass daily. I pictured a long row of side chapels in a ruined priory on the coast of New England, the aisles invaded at vespers by mist as dense as wool and by sheep as white as mist, sea gulls cooing on the hundred altars, hungrily darting forward to snatch at the Host, the surf pounding out a solemn “Dies Irae” as the funeral procession of a dead brother wound its way over fallen columns up toward the marine cemetery. Or did I need the permissiveness of a Quaker school, all plain wood in clear light, the patrician simplicity that only money can buy?

  The question turned out to be, well, academic. My father chose a school for me merely because it was on the route between his winter and summer houses, a convenient stopover on the long trip for him. Right after Christmas he drove me to the deserted campus, the buildings shrouded in snow like chairs in holland cloth, the rectilinear paths treacherously iced over, the wide-open square, originally designed to resemble a piazza, now an arctic court where the snow played handball with itself, white sports whirling up off the pavement and racing to slam glittering explosions on brick walls tenoned in ice.

  The architecture of the school had been conceived by a famous Finn and built by an army of Scots who’d stayed on as gardeners and maintenance men (they outnumbered the teachers). The school was nothing but reminiscence – of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia for someone else’s past. Because the school was a fantasy and not a reality, its architecture alternated as in a dream between vague, featureless expanses of wall, the ectoplasmic surround of the action, and by contrast the places the dreamer looks at, concentrates on: maniacally detailed ornaments, chiseled gargoyle heads peering down out of the odd niche, tiled Moorish arches framing a rose garden, scriptural and classical mottoes spelled out in stone along the backs of benches. Those benches circled a deep basin surmounted by a fountain as wide as a barber pole and much taller on which was balanced a stone pineapple that expressed, depending on how literally one took the conceit, either juice or water.

  The headmaster of Eton (yes, the name, too, had been borrowed) was a great shaggy and strangely yellowed man. He wore tweeds and smoked a pipe and had pale, glutinous hands – really as sticky and shiny as the gluten in kneaded bread – and yellowing white hair that shot straight back from his liver-spotted brow and huge yellow teeth that looked useless for eating though effective enough for polite baring in interviews with intimidated parents. He was tall and unctuous and unintelligent and lived in a rambling “cottage” with fieldstone walls, low black eaves that curled back under on themselves like ingrown toenails, and leaded panes that rattled decoratively in the winter winds in front of solid, modern, cryptically sealed storm windows.

  He granted us a long interview in which he spoke of the need for “balance” in the training of a young mind and (looking appraisingly over the top of his glasses) of the young male body. A little later he found a way of mentioning again the sound mind that should go with the sound (raised eyebrows) body. I was terrified that what all this meant was more athletics for me, and it did. But my father was pleased, more or less. He distrusted the headmaster’s English accent and melodious voice issuing from someone so obviously weak and fraudulent and American. Dad sniffed a little laugh at all the dark wood, dark sherry, crackling fire of small, evenly matched birchwood logs laid on brass andirons, the whole instant tradition of dear Eton, Anglican primroses amidst the alien corn. But even as he sniffed he nodded approval, for the pretensions were exactly what he was buying for his son, much as a cowpuncher might hire a French tutor for his children – airs fit an heir, even if distasteful to the patriarch.

  The headmaster philosophized about manliness over a feminine clutter of tea things, tiny pots of marmalade, eggshell-thin cups, a linen-lined basket of warm scones and a cozy embroidered on one side with an Art Deco archer kneeling nudely in Aztec profile, crossbow aimed at a five-pointed Gentile star (the archer was the school emblem, ad astra the motto). My father puffed skeptically on his smelly cigar, by now a misshapen stub black with spit, and asked for a Scotch and soda. For my father, sitting uncomfortably in that petit-point chair without arms, manliness was not discussable, but had it been, it would have included a good business suit, ambition, paying one’s bills on time, enough knowledge of baseball to hand out likely tips at the barbershop, a residual but never foolhardy degree of courage, and an unbreachable reserv
e; to the headmaster manliness was discussed constantly, every day, and entailed tweeds, trust funds, graciousness to servants, a polite but slightly chilly relationship to God, a pretended interest in knowledge and an obsessive interest in sports, especially muddy, dangerous ones like lacrosse or hockey or rugby that ended with great sullen lads hobbling off the field to lean on sticks at the sidelines, the orange and blue vertical stripes of their jerseys clinging to panting diaphragms, bare knees scarred, blond hair brown with sweat, an apache streak of mud daubed across a wan, bellicose cheek.

  I was starting school in the middle of the year and knew no one. Two other fourth-formers were also entering between semesters, and they became my companions. One, whose room was just next door, had a Spanish mother. I once caught a glimpse of her trim body in a black suit, her glossy, painted red lips barely visible through the bouquet of violets she was sniffing to distract herself during a dull sermon in the school chapel, her eyes lifting and hanging there like amber worry beads bright from having been told so often. Heberto had those same fine eyes and his mother’s olive skin and those teeth as white as the apples he was always eating. He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of “free” time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert – fully clothed of course – was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler.