Thanks to the footlights and his well-rehearsed posing, Murray did resemble the Farnese Hercules—massive chest, arms, thighs; flesh shaved smooth and oiled. He rippled his glistening midsection like a belly dancer. The audience admired and murmured. When he pivoted to show his back, they grew silent, as though they were witnessing something scandalous: the loincloth was cut away to a mere string behind, so he seemed nude. He displayed his equine buttocks as proudly as his arms and shoulders, shifting his hips left to right, resting his weight first on one leg then the other in voluptuous contrapposto. He pivoted halfway around, untied one side of the loincloth, and pulled it forward, covering his sex in his hand, so they might enjoy a sideways view of his undraped physique top to toe. The crowd cheered. Murray, pleased and disdainful, refastened the loincloth and exited.
Then the competitors entered—barrel-chested, chastely covered in tights and leotards. They showed their strength in conventional ways by lifting weights. They were applauded lukewarmly. Alec was disappointed: their burly physiques struck him as commonplace. And not one was from Dorset. This particularly annoyed the crowd. A man yelled from the audience, “They’re all practiced showmen! Where’s the sport in that? Can’t a regular fellow compete? How come we’ve no one from Dorset?”
Hubbub ensued. Meantime, a young man walked up the steps from the audience to the stage and talked privately to the MC, who then held up his hand for order. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Here’s a lad from Osmington asking if he might show. What do you say?”
Of course the crowd hollered in favor; onstage, the competitors smirked. The newcomer was trim and fair, with a youthful bit of a beard, dressed in well-worn rustic tweeds. Alec’s eyes widened: he knew the man. Rowena Blunt’s brother, the one with the risible name, Ivanhoe. Van, as they called him, was some years younger than Fred; the two used to go about together, until their lives turned old and serious, Fred with his girl and Van with his family’s farm. But Alec liked Van: he was thoughtful and calm (unlike Fred), and when Alec had started to notice the beauty of men, he’d admired Van’s straight eyebrows and smooth, strong neck.
Van behaved matter-of-factly, unlacing his shoes, removing his tie and collar, even whistling softly while the audience chattered and joked. They quieted down as his stripping progressed. When he was standing before them in singlet and drawers, they murmured: Here was a splendid man. Nature had graced him with narrow hips, wrists, and ankles in pleasing contrast with the shapely muscles; his proportions, height to shoulders, arms to legs, were just. He pulled off his singlet and showed them a torso honed to tautness. His drawers were tight and transparent enough to reveal his sharply defined middle zone (the Belt of Apollo, as Professor Attila called it): he lowered them to display the lines of muscularity carved there (incidentally uncovering the stem of his cock and, when he turned around, the top of his buttocks). His legs were particularly fine, thighs and calves swelling, knees supple. His skin had a golden cast to it. Alec’s heart was thumping.
Murray, dressed now, came back onstage and reviewed the contest’s criteria. He awarded the prize to a man from Gloucester, which evoked a round of booing. He then said that he was making a second prize from his own pocket to the young man who had stepped forward impromptu and shown how the benefits of physical culture and hygiene were within reach of all.
A half hour later, Alec was waiting for the tram back to Osmington, rereading the contest’s fly sheet, kept for a souvenir. Behind him a familiar voice called, “Young Scudder, is it? Fred’s little brother?”
Alec blushed so deeply he broke a sweat. “That’s right,” he answered. “Just Alec.”
Van noticed the flyer. “Been to the show, have ya? Devotee of physical culture?”
Alec had to swallow before he could speak: “Uh-huh…”
“Do you practice yourself?”
“Some.”
“Good for you, then!” said Van.
They sat side by side on the tram. Van made little of his prize: he hoped the money at least would quiet his father, who’d complained about his taking the afternoon off from the farm. Rather than boasting, Van drew Alec into a conspiracy of laughter about their siblings, staid Fred and foulmouthed Rowena. “Poor little Wee-wee Cunt. But how can you blame the child?” Van said. “That family she comes from! What kind of people call their kids Rowena and Ivanhoe and their workhorses Thomas and Sally?”
The more Alec tried not to picture Van’s valiant thighs under his trousers, the less he could think of anything else. Besides, the ride kept jostling them closer together, and Van stretched his arm across the back of the double seat, frequently marking their chatter with a squeeze of Alec’s shoulder. He told Alec he’d mail-ordered some dumbbells and set them up in the barn, where no one disturbed him.
When they were parting at the Osmington stop, Alec ventured to ask if he might try Van’s dumbbells sometime. “How about now?” Van said. “There’s still a good two hours till supper and evening chores.”
“Uh … all right.”
Van had left his bicycle at the station. He lifted Alec onto the crossbar and pedaled the two of them through the countryside in the May afternoon. “This here’s the secret of prizewinnin’ legs,” Van yelled into the breeze.
Inside, the Blunts’ barn was higher than St. Osmund’s nave, with sunlight streaming aslant through the loft’s open shutters. The horses’ stalls adjoined. The place smelled of them a little, pleasantly, to Alec’s nose—Van was fastidious about keeping the livestock clean. He offered Alec a ladle of water, then poured the rest of the bucket into the trough. He patted the horses’ necks. They whinnied. “With me out of the way all afternoon, you’ve had a good rest?” he said to them. “And here’s a friend come to visit.” He beckoned Alec to stroke them. He nodded toward a sunny corner. “Yonder’s the shrine of manly pulchritude.”
There among bales of hay were three pairs of dumbbells, an old wooden bench, and an even older wardrobe mirror, all cracked and crazed. Alec picked up a pair of dumbbells, feeling their heft and curling his arms. Van laughed and said, “Just like Professor Attila the Hun!” In the mirror Alec could see that, behind him, Van was taking off his clothes. He splashed water from the trough on his face. He met Alec’s eyes in the mirror and said, “I’ll show you some moves I’ve made up myself.”
He demonstrated: he leaned with one hand on the bench while with the other he raised and lowered a dumbbell, then changed sides. “That’s for the upper back,” he said. He sat on the ground with his back to the bench, pushed with his legs till his back arched and his shoulders rested on the bench, reached overhead with a dumbbell gripped by both hands, and raised and lowered the weight. When he sat back on the ground facing Alec, he was breathing hard. He said, “Broadens the chest, I believe.” But Alec had been speechless since seeing him nude. When Van spoke to him, Alec avoided his eyes in shame. “Have a go at it now, why don’t ya?” Van said. “Get out of them woolens and collar.”
In silence, Alec obeyed. He turned his back as he slipped off the knickerbockers. His hard-on made him too embarrassed to take off his drawers; he tried shifting it to one side so at least it didn’t stick straight out. When Van saw him out of his clothes, he said, “Well, look at you, now! How fine you’ve grown, a sturdy example of our Dorset architecture.” He felt Alec’s arms and shoulders approvingly; Alec smiled and shied away, but Van drew him back. “Yes, very nice,” Van said, then mussed his hair and turned him to face the mirror. “See what I mean? Look. Don’t tell me you’re modest. It’s only just me and yourself.”
Alec saw in the long mirror what he couldn’t see in the bedroom at home: his body had changed, mostly by nature, but also encouraged by Professor Attila’s art. His childish waist had grown firm; his thighs sinuous, chest wider, arms rounded. Unlike Van, who was tawny, Alec was very white, with a hint of blue veins under the skin where his pectorals swelled.
Van guided Alec through some exercises. To adjust Alec’s form when he was curling the dumbbells, Van had h
im face the mirror again and stood close behind. He slid his arm around Alec’s waist and told him to shift his weight back up against him. “So it’s your arms doin’ the work, not your back.” Alec, weak-kneed from the pleasure of Van’s holding him, closed his eyes. He faltered. Van mistook the wobble for loss of balance and said, “It’s all right, you can’t fall, I’ve got hold.” When Alec said nothing, Van asked, “What, have you hurt yourself?”
“No, I’m not hurt,” said Alec. He stepped away from Van, turned to face him, and looked guiltily down at his drawers: full front and center, his hard-on, now leaking, would not be denied.
Van chuckled. “Well, what’s to expect?” he said. “Sure we’re stiff day and night at sixteen, that’s nature’s way, no matter what the vicars might tell ya. And trust yer aged pal here, at twenty I find it’s no different at all. Look at me now, startin’ to grow, just seein’ you spunky.”
Alec was too naïve to take heart from Van’s arousal. He felt even more anxious, so much that he trembled. “It’s more than that,” Alec said.
Van felt his arm: “You’re shivering. What, are you cold?”
“Not cold, no. It’s more, I’m tellin’ you.”
Van looked puzzled.
Alec said quietly, “It’s me…”
Van was quiet for a moment; then his face turned gentle. “Ah,” he said, “yeah … that’s all right…” Again Alec avoided Van’s eyes in shame. “But don’t I know how it is?” he said, seeking Alec’s gaze with his own. “I know…” He reached out his hand: “Will you come here to me? Come.” Alec accepted his hand. Van drew him closer and embraced him. “How’s that, now?”
In Van’s embrace, Alec believed he was realizing his deepest longing. Their warmth and the streaming-down sunlight; their breath and the spring breeze through the wide-open barn; the scent, the pleasure of their flesh together. It was glorious, a fulfillment of all of his senses, but Alec, who was favored by love, was mistaken about the depth of the feeling. He would one day know a joy even deeper, when he would accept not only another’s embrace, but his mind and spirit as well, and give himself in return.
“Better?” said Van.
“Yeah.”
Van tugged Alec’s drawers: “Now kindly remove these damn things.” Van wanted to play, and that playfulness helped put Alec at ease. Van snatched the drawers, sniffed them, declared them “ambrosial,” and tossed them aside. He opened his arms and ordered, “Here. Stand on my feet.” Alec was shorter, so when he stood on Van’s feet, they met eye to eye. Van squeezed Alec’s backside till he giggled and squirmed. “Now do me the same and wiggle your toes on my instep … Ah, yeah, that’s how…”
Locking eyes with Alec, he grew a bit serious. He reached down to position their pricks; his, upright against Alec’s belly, and Alec’s between his own thighs. He held Alec close. “Comfy?” he whispered.
“Oh yeah…,” Alec said.
Van flexed his thighs tighter. “And how’s that?”
Alec moaned with the pleasure.
“Do ya like that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are ya sure you’re not joshin’ me?”
“Uh-huh…”
“Thrust a bit back and forth.”
“I’m gonna—”
“Good, let me help.”
Van licked two fingers, reached around behind, and chucked Alec’s prick under the head. “Aw fuck!” Alec said as he tensed and shot, spattering hay, dumbbells, mirror. Then Van tightened his embrace. Alec felt a warm spurt on his belly up as far as his chin. He gasped, let out a long breath, and relaxed. They held each other in silence, Alec resting his face against Van’s neck. He said, “I…”
“Sshh,” Van said, “I know, I know…”
* * *
The next time they saw each other, their amorous flesh was confined in their black Sunday best at St. Osmund’s. The vicar preached on a passage from 1 Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” At the end of the service, he announced the first banns of marriage for Mabel White of Wool and Ivanhoe Blunt of Blunt Farm, Osmington, who were to be wed at the bride’s parish of Holy Rood three months hence. The congregation tittered with approval.
Outside, Fred was congratulating Van on his good match. Alec joined them. He shook Van’s hand and earnestly wished him health and happiness in his life to come. He also said goodbye. School was finished; Alec was leaving the village.
3
When Michaelmount Priory, the Benedictine monastery for women, was founded in 1391, the cloister attracted families of good name but limited means, those who could afford (or were willing to pay) a fetching dowry for only one or two of their daughters; the others they consigned, with a modest bequest and a servant or two, to a celibate life of prayer. The house’s first superior, famously elegant, kin to the Duchess of Cornwall, was said to have been Chaucer’s model for the coquettish prioress in The Canterbury Tales; this lady led her canonesses to renown for their erudition and eccentric mission of educating girls. The mission ended on February 11, 1531, when Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church of England, dissolving the priory and claiming its wealth for the crown. The canonesses went back to their families with neither bequests nor servants.
As a secular estate, Michaelmount was bought and sold among generations of titled families who overwhelmed the original building with additions and decked the park with follies—the most famous among them the Temple of Reason (1783), an arch of a ruined Roman aqueduct (while Byron was fighting for Greece), and a Burmese pagoda (when Victoria was hailed Empress of India). Now the priory was in its fifth year of ownership by the Wentworths, a couple with no title but unlimited means, thanks to holdings in the B&O Railroad and Cunard and White Star, plus the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. They wanted to smarten up the old place. To that end they were hiring more staff, like young Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper’s assistant.
Alec was of two minds about his new life. He liked being out from under his parents; he liked having money, little as it was, without needing to beg every penny. He liked much of his work—raising the birds, stocking the streams; he especially liked his own particular charge of taking care of the boathouse on the big pond, where he could cool off in the summer. He also felt somehow he’d entered the world: although Michaelmount was no closer to London than Osmington was, the great house kept its eyes on the metropolis as the village never had.
But he hated being a servant. Back home he’d had nothing to do with the upper classes. He despised them, of course; everybody did. They’d take the first pews in the church, so the commoners could admire their well-tailored backs by the hour on Sundays. He was taught to show respect by making way and doffing his cap, which he did grudgingly, though he found such gestures merely annoying, not painful, because it was no different from how you showed decent manners to elderly neighbors. But now it irked him to call those his own age—or even younger—sir, while they called him Scudder or hey there. He tried rationalizing: After all, didn’t everybody, even the king, have to do what other people wanted? At heart, though, he knew servitude was different. It was all about pride bought for the price of somebody else’s degradation. This was a new phase of his education—learning how the world worked.
His discontent, though, was more a matter of head than heart, because at this time of life it was difficult for Alec not to be happy. He was young and healthy; well-fed, clothed, and sheltered; and he spent his days mostly outdoors. He even discovered a certain asset to his queerness: it kept him out of trouble with girls. At nearly eighteen, his looks were maturing: his face, once round, was leaner and strong; his lips, once pretty, were sensual. Work kept his pale skin ruddy, and his coloring was set off to advantage by his habitual shirts of homespun flax or wool. He’d grown a couple of inches taller; faithful to Professor Attila’s discipline (with his first month’s wages he mail-ordered a pair of dumbbells, which he wrote to te
ll Van about), he was becoming more fit and shapely day by day. In short, Alec was a pleasure to look at (“A near occasion of sin,” quipped the Irish laundress), a pleasure by no means lost on the thirteen girls and women in service at Michaelmount.
The young ones vied for his notice; the older ones mothered him and urged their favorites on him. If Alec had been made in the usual manner, he no doubt would have succumbed to such bounty and been husband and father before he was out of his teens. But he was not made in the usual manner. He was still young enough to treat the women’s matchmaking as teasing. As for the girls, he played along with their flirting, but hoped that by keeping a certain distance, he might avoid hurting anyone’s feelings or betraying his own lack of attraction. The matrons thus ruled he was virtuous (and therefore all the better a catch); to the girls, he was fetching but dull, aloof, and spent too much time reading. As for Alec himself, he accepted, grudgingly, that at this time and place there’d be no love for him, not the kind he craved. He wondered if there ever would be such love, union with a like-minded man. Or maybe Van by his marriage was teaching Alec a lesson about manhood. If that were the case, he asked himself, if like Van he was fated one day to marry, then surely when the time came, when he was older, wouldn’t he (as Van did, he imagined) feel the appropriate urges? Meanwhile, he lived his young life.
Of his employers, the best he could say was that he rarely saw them. The Wentworths stayed mostly in the city, in an apartment in a showy new building near Kensington Palace. They dined in restaurants; they traveled for pleasure, often to France or the States, and separately: a London daily reported that a certain Mrs. W. had sailed the Caribbean for a week on a yacht given by an admirer to her friend, the movie star and “most beautiful woman in America,” Anna Q. Nilsson, while Mr. W. visited Paris.
Alec Page 2