Alec

by William di Canzio

  In tonight’s first piece, The Blessed Damozel, singers would join the orchestra—a women’s chorus and soloists. He took some comfort in that; maybe the voices would make it less strange to him. He read over the text in the program, an eerie poem about a dead girl longing for her lover, who was still alive. Alec was unprepared for what followed, for both the sound and his response. He did not know that music could shimmer like light or water; that it could stir him sexually, cause him chills in a hot crowded hall; carry him off to a heaven where the saints were ladies and knights, where the Virgin held court among her maidens in a rose garden, where paradise itself was incomplete without your earthly beloved, because in this particular afterlife, love of flesh and love of God were one.

  Ecstasy—that was the word. Hadn’t Professor Grant told them that, for the Greeks, it meant a state of bliss—divine, demonic—that took you outside yourself? In the dark, Alec found Maurice’s hand with his own, laced their fingers together, and held firmly. After the break, the Pastoral Symphony brought him back to earth, but such an earth where his soul was happily drunk and dancing, even when fleeing a musical thunderstorm. During the ovation, Alec grabbed Morgan around the shoulders and yelled above the applause, “That was—! What the hell was that?”

  “So you liked it?”

  “Yes!”

  The three friends got separated in the crowd on their way to the doors. Alec noticed a glamorous lady by the staircase creating a nimbus around herself with the smoke drawn from the cigarette at the end of a long ivory holder. It was his former employer, Mrs. Wentworth. He knew better than to greet her: she would not recognize him or, if she did, would pretend not to. But before he could look away, their eyes met. He expected her to cut him immediately, but instead she bestowed a little smile, a tinier nod, and the very slightest wave of her hand—or rather of her cigarette holder. In spite of himself, he felt flattered to be acknowledged in public by such a personage, yet at the same time hated what he took to be her condescension. Hadn’t she once tried to pimp him? Did she think she could still beckon him to wait on her? Then he decided it would be ungallant for a man to ignore a woman’s greeting, so he approached and stopped at a respectful distance: “Good evenin’, ma’am. Did you wish to speak to me?”

  “Tell me, darling, what did you think?”

  “Of the music?”

  “The Debussy.”

  “I thought it very beautiful.”

  “Oh good. That means I’m allowed to like it too. Your set is miles ahead of me, and it’s safer to ask before I venture an opinion.” She laughed and drew smoke. Alec smiled but did not join in her laughter. He saw she was starting to fear she’d made a mistake: “Help me, now—I’m such a forgetful biddy. You’re one of Tavy’s sweet friends; do remind me where we met.”

  “Scudder’s the name, ma’am. I was once in your service in Dorset, the gamekeeper’s boy.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s all right, ma’am. Glad you enjoyed the concert. Good night, now.”

  He found Maurice and Morgan in the lobby, talking with a third man, tall and skinny, in evening clothes, whom he also recognized. “Our young scholar,” Morgan said to this third one, introducing Alec, “who studied Italian cities with me at the WMC.”

  Risley, squinting through his glasses, did not know him at first, but when Alec stood close to Maurice, who then rested his arm across the back of his waist with such chummy nonchalance, the man’s eyes widened with a double blast of recognition: this radiant youth, with the perfect parted lips and brilliant eyes of a Regency portrait, was none other than the faun he’d once tried to rent in the woods, and Maurice Hall—unjustly handsome, fatally dull—had somehow tamed the Arcadian creature and was blessed with his affection! Risley, momentarily speechless, was preempted by Alec: “I’d the honor of servin’ Mr. Risley once when I worked in Dorset—two years ago, was it, now? How d’you do, sir?”

  “Oh, here you are, Tavy,” Mrs. Wentworth said as she joined them and took Risley’s arm. “Hello, Morgan.”

  “You look gorgeous as always, Cornelia,” Morgan said to her. “Meet my friends Maurice Hall and Alexander Scudder. Mr. Hall was at King’s with Risley.”

  The lady extended a gloved hand to Maurice. Alec watched him receive it lightly with a smile and a nod that somehow suggested a bow. When she extended her hand likewise to Alec, he imitated the example. She gave no sign of their prior acquaintance. To the group, she said, “Wasn’t that lovely, especially the French piece?” and added, turning to Alec, “The experts are saying, ‘Very beautiful.’”

  14

  At each place at the table, a booklet: menu and program printed together with the day’s date, June 28, 1914. Within, a kind of manifesto:

  Our aims have the simplicity of need:

  —We want a place given up to gaiety, to a gaiety stimulating thought, rather than crushing it.

  —We want a gaiety that does not have to count with midnight.

  —We want surroundings, which after the reality of daily life, reveal the reality of the unreal.

  —We do not want to Continentalise, we only want to do away, to some degree, with the distinction that the word “Continental” implies, and with the necessity of crossing the Channel to laugh freely, and to sit up after nursery hours …

  The design was jarring. The typeface suggested medieval monastic script, but the illustrations were up-to-the-minute—jagged figures, primitive, with masklike faces; men lunging at each other; women either running, naked and anguished, as if shrieking with grief, or chicly dressed at café tables with cocktails. The Cave of the Golden Calf. The club, set in the low-ceilinged basement of a textile warehouse, attracted a clientele that took pride in their self-selectivity: artists, socialites, intellectuals, expatriates, queers of both sexes (some of them artists, socialites, intellectuals, or expats). They supped till 2:00 a.m. and drank till dawn at tables arranged before a toy-box of a proscenium stage. Dancing commenced at midnight, after the show. FOR MEMBERS ONLY. Club status defended the Calf from censorship. Alec and Maurice were not members, but were guests tonight, along with Morgan, of the pair at whose table they sat: Octavian Risley and his friend the Baronne du Thoronet.

  Alec had come around to tolerating, even liking Risley, at least in small doses. He was clever, funny, acerbic, never hesitant to speak his mind. After meeting the lovers at the concert last fall, he’d snorted at Morgan: “Maurice Hall, that tailor’s dummy! And his Tess of the d’Urbervilles. ‘I ’ad the honor of sarvin’ Mr. Risley in Dorset…’ I could have slapped her smug little face. Impossible. Men like those two never meet—it’s not fair. Oh never mind. And the way they beam at each other! Unforgivable! An affront to the Misery of the Human Condition. But really, humping a servant…”

  Morgan laughed. “You wanted to hump that one yourself.”

  “Of course I did, but not to marry him. It’s just the limit. What can they possibly talk about?”

  Morgan answered with a skeptical smile.

  Risley, narrowing his eyes, hissed, “Mark my words, they won’t last six more weeks.”

  Nonetheless, Morgan persevered. He argued that they were all, in the end, brothers-in-arms, so to speak; he also nursed his friend’s bruised pride. He asserted that Alec’s rejection of the proposition in Dorset had been in no way a judgment against Risley’s charm; rather, the simple, honest youth had qualms, understandably, about accepting money for sex from such a well-spoken (and attractive) gentleman.

  “Bollocks and balderdash.”

  “If only you’d wooed him with your famous wit instead of trying to bludgeon him with cash, you’d no doubt have won the lovely boy.”

  “Well, perhaps I may have been a bit too direct, but how could one know that a servant would prove so sensitive?”

  “That’s exactly why he’s so charming.”

  Morgan prevailed. In due time, Risley became an ally, as did his friend the baroness (the former Mrs. Wentworth). Alec found his relationship with her even mor
e odd than Risley’s reluctant bonhomie. In a group, she would sometimes take him aside. “It’s suffocating, Alec, darling,” she once said to him privately, “marriage for a woman, and a paradox, because unless she subjects herself, she has no freedom at all. It’s not even a matter of appearances, because everybody knows. It’s about the lies we agree to accept. A widow is presumed virtuous, but a divorcée, dangerous. Yet a married woman may go months on end never seeing her husband and still remain somehow ‘safe.’ She’s even better qualified to be someone’s mistress.” The baroness found her present arrangement quite satisfactory, its price a reasonable percentage of her windfall from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the sale of Michaelmount. In addition to the money, her new husband had gained an English passport, and she, a French title. (“Napoleonic,” she confided, “but in London they’re not fussy.”)

  Alec discerned that if she would speak thus to him, her onetime servant, the lady must be lonely. Maybe it was their inequality that put her at ease with him. She seemed at the same time to crave intimacy and to defend herself from those who came too close. So Alec, maintaining a respectful distance, was content to listen and learn about the world.

  If his social life was expanding in ways once unimaginable for him, Maurice’s was shrinking. He routinely declined invitations. At first this withdrawal made him uneasy, because dining had always been a way to bring new business to his firm. But how could he leave Alec behind while he went out at night? Their love changed the way Maurice met life. In the light of its truth, he could name what was false. He knew that tonight was false, though less false than dinner with bankers, where he participated in the lies of others by his silence and allowed them to believe he was what he was not. Here with Morgan, Risley, and the baroness, the lovers were more than accepted for who they were, they were esteemed. But this modish place, smug and self-congratulatory, seemed untrue to them in its own way. He wondered if there would be anywhere they might ever feel at home, except in their own rooms. For now, though, Alec was flourishing in the city, its exuberance, its people—all new to him—and that made Maurice very happy.

  He still winced with shame on recalling how he’d met Alec’s bravery at Penge with abandonment, driving him to threaten blackmail. A foolhardy, even craven gesture on Alec’s part, for certain, but how much better was his desperation than indifference would have been! Now Maurice marveled that anyone could feel as deeply as he did, to fear his own death less than any harm’s befalling his beloved. Alec’s passion had unlocked his own.

  “I’m still trying to educate you,” Risley said to Maurice, indicating their surroundings.

  “You’ll recall I’m terribly slow.”

  “Far less than I once believed.”

  Onstage, a goateed man with a rooster’s comb of coarse brown hair stepped out in front of the curtain. Ezra Pound, the program said, who was reading from his new poems based on the work of the troubadours. He spoke with an exaggerated American twang, his diction like hammering typewriter keys, hitting the space bar twice between each word.

  When the poet stepped off, Mrs. Strindberg, the club’s owner, visited the table. She was the (second) ex-wife of the Swedish playwright, whom she’d left, the baroness later told them, to take up with another playwright, the German Frank Wedekind.

  “It’s terrible, of course, the violence, I mean, but, forgive me, in my opinion the archduke was a bit of a hound,” Mrs. Strindberg said to the group, meaning Franz Ferdinand, shot to death that morning in Sarajevo. “Austria might be better off without him. Though who am I to say? Anyway, it’s very sad about the wife.”

  She moved on to the next table as the houselights dimmed and the curtain rose on the little stage, set—cheaply, imaginatively—with crinkled cellophane, lit from within, and fake wisteria flowers. An unseen musician played a flute while the light changed color. “Syrinx,” the program read, a new piece by Debussy. When Alec closed his eyes to listen, he saw the kingfisher, dancing in her flight above and under the water. When he opened his eyes, here was Maurice beside him, as he had been last summer when he’d opened his eyes in the boathouse. We shan’t be parted no more …

  15

  In that passage from sleep to waking, Alec would realize, to his delight, that the sunlight coaxing his eyes open had not fought its way past chimneys and sooty bricks, but was flooding freely through fields. His many months in the city had been so crammed with excitement that he’d no time to miss his contemplative countryside. Now he marveled he’d put up with London for so long. Here, amid these woods and pastures, tension had drained from his shoulders. And had his pulse slowed too? Not that he felt at all sluggish, only peaceful.

  At the offices of Hill & Hall, on June 30, 1914, succession had at last been effected. Maurice was now a client of the investment firm where he’d once been partner. For his part, Alec had gladly given notice at Harrods. He’d come to dread his days there, shuffling boxes in the stockrooms’ sunless dungeons.

  Morgan, true to his word, had introduced the lovers to his old friends—old in both the sense of long-standing acquaintance and of age. Ted was soon to turn seventy; George was forty-eight. When Alec rolled out of bed in their guest room, opened the curtains (sewn by his hosts’ own hands), and squinted into the July sun of early morning, he saw them, as was usual this time of day, naked in the backyard, Ted reading, George gardening. Rare birds, those two. Ted believed that “air baths” enhanced both mental and physical well-being. To judge from appearance, there might be truth to the notion. On the verge of his eighth decade, he was trim and spry. The younger, stockier George carried himself with the swagger of a well-set man in his prime.

  They’d been together for thirteen years now; for the last six, they’d lived openly as a couple in Ted’s house near the village of Millthorpe in Derbyshire. (To Alec, it looked like the heart of England on a map.) Morgan had brought his young friends to them for advice about buying land, though his deeper purpose was pedagogical. These elders had much to teach them, chiefly about how to live with honor as men who loved each other.

  Like Alec and Maurice, they’d contended with a difference of class. Ted came from a rich, well-connected, strictly religious family. After Cambridge, he’d even been ordained in the Established Church and had served briefly as a curate. He later renounced his ordination over a matter of conscience. He rejected the teaching that his sexual nature was unnatural and sinful. Rather, he discerned that the desire for “homogenic” love was innate to certain persons, therefore part of creation’s order, and therefore good. He had come to distinguish himself in his long career as a writer and speaker on topics ranging from international politics to Hinduism, and as an activist for prison reform and the rights of coal miners.

  In contrast, George had grown up in the slums of Sheffield, one of nine children of an alcoholic father and a good-natured mother who learned to make do with her lot. George inherited her resourceful temperament, along with her talent for joking and cursing. At thirteen, he’d taken a job at Sheffield’s public baths, where he frisked around in no more than a towel all day and became a great favorite—particularly of the constables who lounged there after their shifts, or sometimes during. He showed his young guests a provocative photo, taken outdoors when he was eighteen, of himself in no more than a scant pair of trunks—handsome and grinning, smooth and shapely—standing next to a fully uniformed bobby, the man’s arm draped over his shoulders and a look on his face saying, How lucky am I! Later, George had worked in pubs, tending bar, serving tables. Since he came from a home where Victorian values were turned upside down and the kids took care of the parents, he learned not to be ruled by the expectations of others, much less by their mores. And the amorous bathhouse constables had exposed to him the law’s hypocrisy against his kind.

  On the day they met, he knew little of Ted’s credentials. Rather, the handsome older gentleman with whom he’d locked eyes on a train was the object of his desire, and so he pursued him. When Ted detrained at Millthorpe with his
cohort of feminists and socialists, George followed, although it was not his stop. He lagged some distance behind the group walking to their host’s house. Very much aware of the jaunty stranger’s attention, Ted fell back, thus tacitly inviting him to catch up. George did so and said, “I seen you about in Sheffield, but missed you last winter. Where were you?” Before Ted could answer, he went on, “Never mind. Let the others go now. Come back to my place. Come with me. Now. You want to. You know you do.”

  By all means Ted did want to. He found this bold fellow very attractive indeed. And so their life together began.

  In the guest room on this summer morning, Maurice opened a drowsy eye. He humped the mattress lewdly and said, “Whar’s Licky?”

  Alec, standing naked at the window, turned to show him his outsized good-morning erection. Maurice ducked under the covers. Alec hopped onto the bed and yanked them aside.

  Millthorpe was proving to be an Eden for the young lovers as well as a school, as Morgan had hoped. Here nothing was more natural than their hosts’ love for each other, and therefore their own. The older pair had created a gracious home, where they welcomed and cared for their guests. If queer life in the city was a thing apart, rarefied, nocturnal, always furtive, here it was plain life, lived in the sunlight and unburdened by what Ted disparaged as “civilization.”

  George’s lessons were, not surprisingly, down-to-earth, chiefly about food and sex. Ignoring such contemptuous categorizations as “women’s work,” he’d turned himself into an excellent cook, who liked to amaze guests with dinners of three courses, featuring food raised on the farm. By eating (heartily, gratefully) and by observing, by slicing, chopping, and cleaning up in the kitchen, the younger ones learned that their manhood would not of itself condemn them to a life of bad meals in the home they planned to make for themselves. Their hosts also encouraged them to spend their time outdoors nude (but please to stay out of sight of the road). George liked nothing better than to join the naked lads on a stroll, an arm around each. “We’re in heaven here, ain’t we?” he’d say and draw them into a three-way embrace.