THUS BEGAN THE SUMMER OF 1960. Regan was still traipsing around Italy, and Daddy hardly seemed to notice that William had returned. The firm’s recent absorption of its largest competitor had made all sorts of extra work, and after long days at the office, he often ate dinner at Felicia’s new penthouse across the park. William got the feeling from certain silences among the domestic help that his father might even be sleeping there, but he couldn’t prove it; when he came downstairs in the a.m., Daddy was always in his customary spot at the breakfast table. Which is not to say that this, their only real time together, was free from Felicia’s encroachments. She would arrive halfway through the meal, not to eat (she never ate), but to natter at Daddy about wedding plans while he receded behind the Times. William tried to scare her off with dirty looks, but Felicia Gould was to all appearances unscareable.
His last stand came in mid-July. Regan was supposed to be returning from Italy that day, and William was determined to drive Felicia off for at least an afternoon. He came to breakfast in a loosely belted kimono he’d found at a secondhand shop downtown and a pair of bright white briefs. He sat back from the table, crossed and uncrossed his legs, let his thighs flash suggestively. This old routine had never failed when he wanted to outrage a schoolmate. (Nancy? He’d give them nancy.) But all he got now was Daddy glancing over the top of the business section, like an ornithologist at some mildly diverting bird. “What you need is a good suit.”
William had heard this before—the virtues of formalwear being one of roughly six things Daddy could talk to him about—but what the subject recalled for them both was the child-sized black suit still hanging in the closet, the long-dead lilies he’d pocketed rather than toss, and Daddy had eventually let it drop. Now that it had become apparent that William’s first big growth spurt, a year earlier, would also be his last—that he had topped out at five foot six—Daddy must have felt it was time to try again. Or was he just showing off for his intended? “I’ll give you the number of my tailor. You could take care of it this afternoon.”
“What do I need a suit for?” William asked. “I don’t need a suit.”
Daddy looked meaningfully at Felicia. “And we should get you a dinner jacket while we’re at it. You’re going to want one for the wedding.” Ah. Here it was. William having completed fifth form, the World’s Longest Engagement had become a finite quantity.
“I’m busy this afternoon.”
“I can imagine,” Daddy said, and began to refold his paper the way he always did—meticulously, so that there was no evidence of his having read it.
“Don’t you remember? Regan gets into Idlewild at one.”
“Is that right?” Felicia trilled. “Bill, darling, why didn’t you tell me? You should take the afternoon off. We could all drive out to meet Regan—” And then, as if the mere mention of her name had magical properties, his sister’s voice was out in the foyer. Before William could push back his chair, Daddy was hurrying toward the door.
Regan had always been his favorite, and William had long suspected Felicia of being jealous. If only she would confirm it now through some nervous adjustment to her silverware, or one of her unfunny jokes, it might compensate him, somehow, for the omnidirectional jealousy he was feeling himself. Instead, she leaned forward. Her only visible flaws were cracks in the foundation around the mouth. (This much he remembered about his mom’s face: smiling had never caused a crisis there.) “What your father was trying to tell you, William, is that we’ve finally set a date. It’ll be next June, as soon as you graduate.” That was just the thing, he wanted to say; he wasn’t going to graduate. But whatever he may have mumbled was quickly forgotten as Daddy led Regan in.
She glanced nervously around from behind dark glasses. “We landed early. I took a cab.”
She looked at once thinner than William remembered and slacker, like a deflated balloon, though maybe that was her cardigan. Still, when he hugged her, she smelled pristine—bath salts and sweet white flowers and something else he couldn’t place. He let his head rest in the hollow where her slightly damp hair met her shoulder, while Daddy fetched the camera. “Take off your sunglasses, honey, so we can see your eyes.” They were bloodshot, but wasn’t that why it was called a redeye?
After stopping the butler from taking her luggage upstairs, she brought out gifts. For Daddy, there was a briefcase, a little à la mode for his taste but made of leather soft as caramel. Felicia voiced actual oohs and aahs as it got passed around the table. For William, there was a Spanish guitar and a heavy, cloth-bound book on Michelangelo. He was disappointed the plates weren’t in color (and noticed that the price-tag, weirdly, was in U.S. dollars) but he would keep it in his lap for the rest of breakfast, prompting Felicia to warn him about getting coffee on it. Finally, it was her turn.
“For me? You shouldn’t have,” Felicia said, as her hungry hands plucked a small package from the table. She was one of those people who actually unties the ribbon, slides her finger under the flaps to avoid tearing. From a narrow box came a tube that said Italia on the side. “A pen,” she said. In other words, the crummiest gift imaginable, drained of the thought that counted. “It was duty-free,” Regan said. And silently, William cheered: all was not lost! Then his sister excused herself; there was a lot of unpacking to do.
REGAN STRUCK ANOTHER BLOW FOR THE RESISTANCE that weekend, when she informed Daddy she wouldn’t be joining him on Block Island, where he planned to repair with the Goulds for the month of August. “But when else would we see you, darling?” he said. “You hardly got back, and you’ll be at school again after Labor Day.”
“I thought I wrote you about this.”
“Wrote me about what?”
“Did I not mention this? The internship I applied for starts Monday. It’s at a little theater down in the Village.”
Here Felicia, who’d been touching up her lipstick in the hall mirror, turned. “But what ever will you do there?”
“Whatever they ask me to do, Felicia, that’s what ‘internship’ means.” To Daddy, she said, “I can’t back out now; people wrote me recommendations.”
Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were perfectly calculated to jam his circuits. Well, you know, we’ve already booked you a seat on the first manned spaceflight, but I suppose if you have an internship …
On the other hand, it threatened to blow William’s plans all to hell. Amory Gould had driven up a week ago to open the summer house, and waited there now. Which meant that, unless Regan reconsidered, it would be father, son, and the two Ghouls alone. He heard himself blurt, “I’ll stay, too.”
“And what, exactly, do you propose to do with yourself for the rest of the summer?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. Walk. Think. Be a human being.”
“This is absurd. I’ve given the staff vacation. Who would feed you two? Who would do your laundry?” But Regan had already annexed William’s cause to her own.
“Daddy, he’s seventeen years old. He can do his own laundry.”
“Bill,” Felicia said, with a hand on his arm. “If it would make you more comfortable, the kids could stay over on Central Park West. As a kind of test-run for next year, when we combine the households. The new place is too big to just abandon for the month, anyway.”
Regan looked skeptical. “Who else is going to be there?”
“Just my maid, Lizaveta. I dare say she’s as much of a cook as your Doonie ever was.”
Daddy was doomed, and knew it, but made one last attempt; if you didn’t know better, you’d have thought he wanted his son by his side. “Regan I understand, but if William’s going to persist in doing nothing useful with himself, he might as well do it at the shore.”
“Maybe I won’t do nothing, though,” William said. “Maybe I’ll follow Big Sister’s example. Look for some kind of …” What was that word again? “Internship.”
IF IT ALREADY FELT ODD, moving
across town for a month—why couldn’t the maid just come over to Sutton Place?—the deal Regan reached with Lizaveta made it odder: she would take most days off, Regan would keep the refrigerator stocked, and they’d both keep it from getting back to Felicia. And so, for the duration of August, the younger Hamilton-Sweeneys were marooned in that enormous penthouse across the park, animals atop Mount Ararat.
That there were two of them did little to blunt the loneliness. In fact, William and Regan were together even less than he and Daddy had been. Her internship started promptly at nine, and by the time he rolled out of bed, she’d have left. She was often still gone at dinnertime, and was on some kind of weird diet anyway, which she must have picked up in Europe. And when she did get home she returned to the great library on the second floor, or to the adjoining guestroom, where she was staying. The one time she always managed to be around was Saturday afternoon, when Daddy telephoned. “Oh, we’re fine,” she said. Otherwise, her message was clear. She’d abetted William’s escape from Block Island for his sake, not her own, and now she wanted to be left alone.
At first, William filled the empty hours with soap operas. He’d become a partisan of As the World Turns. But the sheer size of the apartment he was rattling around in (paid for, he was sure, with Daddy’s money) made him feel decadent, and not in the good way. He’d always thought of his family as merely well-to-do, like their Sutton Place neighbors. Money was stupid, but it wasn’t wrong. Here, by contrast, the denizens of the lower floors, affluent though they may have been, stayed hidden from view, as if they occupied a different plane of existence from the truly rich. And further cracks were appearing everywhere he looked. The newscasts that came on after The Guiding Light carried images of Communist upheavals in Indochina. Of black kids in neckties being cold-cocked at lunchcounters. Of busloads of protesters rolling toward the South. He thought of Doonie, forced into early retirement. Where was she now? Still in that tarbox neighborhood in the outer boroughs where she’d taught him how to drive? Certainly not in a place like this, with its acres of Persian rug.
He started going to public pools in the hot hours before dusk, just to feel connected to the lives of other people—to break free, somehow, of the prison of class. His favorite was 145th Street, where the Negroes went. At first, they stared skeptically at his baggy trunks and underdeveloped muscles and the thick novel he pretended to read to hide his nerves. But the attitude up here was live and let live, and by the third day, William was an accepted fact of life. He propped the book on his shock-white chest and, shielded by the cover, admired the gleaming bodies of the men stretched out on the concrete a few yards away.
One evening, after showering off the chlorine, he went up to the library to look for Regan. It was deserted, its windows muffling the dying noise of rush hour to the south. Sunlight gushed in, crimsoning the bindings on Mom’s old books. They must have been moved over here recently, as everything would be someday. Libraries had never been William’s thing. The vastness of their surroundings made the small clutch of books a person was capable of moving through in a lifetime seem puny, and the shelves themselves merely flimsy bulwarks thrown up against the slow fire of acid on paper, the great red H-bomb of mortality. He reached for the handle of a French door and stepped out onto a balcony. On the next balcony over, maybe five yards away, Regan sat in dungarees with her knees to her chest and one arm dangling a cigarette. She made him think of the Pietà from his Michelangelo book—an effigy of loss so bafflingly deep it made his own look like a birdbath. Worse: he didn’t know why. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” The way she could become instantly casual irked him a little.
“Is that a Continental thing, the cigarette? Un’ affectazzione?”
She let a boll of smoke hang before her open mouth. Sucked it swiftly into her nostrils. “If you’re angling for one, forget it.”
“You know damn well I’ve been smoking for years,” he said. “I’m coming over.”
When they were side-by-side on her balcony, though, silence again prevailed, not counting the traffic below. He wanted to assure her that whatever was eating her, she could tell him, but that felt suddenly impossible. All he could do was put an arm around her. Again, her hair had that smell he couldn’t quite place. It must have been a new shampoo, he realized. Italian. “Hey. Can I ask you something? When you came back from the airport that day, your hair was still damp. How did you have time to wash it before you got here?”
“Do I seem in the mood to talk?” She must have heard how snappish she sounded, because after a minute, by way of apology, she offered him a drag of her cigarette.
But he saw as he took it that the summer would end without any deeper understanding between them. She would trek back to Poughkeepsie, and he’d be packed off to yet another school with the intercession of Uncle Artie. In short, other people were not to be relied on. If there was to be any growth here, any meaning, he would have to make it himself.
SNEAKING OUT AT NIGHT after Regan had gone to bed was a cakewalk: straight through the lobby, past the concierge who never said a word. William had been going to bars on and off since he was fifteen, but always under the banner of youthful high spirits. Now a kind of grim fury held sway. Where he’d once favored student dives and no-cover jazz clubs, or the iconic Cedar Tavern, hoping to catch a glimpse of de Kooning, he began to consult the atlas of cruising spots and fern bars he’d been compiling half-consciously for years. He’d known that whole time that he was a homosexual—had done little to hide it and had sometimes even reveled in it, as a weapon against people who wanted him to feel bad about himself. But the designation had remained largely theoretical until the school before last, where, with a handsome but confused senior from Westport, Connecticut, he’d had his first real physical encounter. The boy had been an eager enough collaborator as they spelunked each other there in a storage room behind the auditorium, but William’s reputation was already atrocious, and afterward the boy had avoided him. William couldn’t be sure, but he thought a complaint from the boy’s parents might have been what led to that expulsion. At any rate, he’d been living for months like a sexual camel. Now he was ready to go further.
The art of the pickup happened mostly with the eyes. Usually all it took was one volley of glances. You felt someone looking at you, and the second you looked back he looked away … and then when he felt you still looking and looked back, you looked down at the surface of the Manhattan you’d ordered because somewhere you’d gotten the idea that’s what grown-ups drank, and a claim had been staked. William would feel his legs jittering beneath the table; later, he and his subject would rendezvous outside, in cars with the engines already running. If he was being honest with himself, the danger was part of the rush. But his conquests mostly turned out to be dispiritingly courteous: shy, married men from New Jersey whose single greatest fantasy was to swap hand jobs with a teenager. He’d end up under the West Side Highway, staring out across the empty Hudson, and in the instant of his coming the pallid digits beneath him would dissolve and he would feel, paradoxically, a suspension of his loneliness, a widening of his life into something brighter, bigger. Then the damp and the cold would set in and he would feel lonelier than ever.
When the bars ceased to feel risky enough, he graduated to the Park. He bought Benzedrine strips from hopheads and dissolved them in cups of deli coffee and waited under his favorite streetlamp. Then, in the darkness under the trees, his repertoire expanded. There were young men in the Park as well as old ones, black men as well as white, and he found he wanted these particularly. He wanted them to be rough with him, to punish him for something. For wanting that, maybe. It would later seem a wonder that the worst he came away with was a little chafing. By September of 1960, when he arrived at his new and final school, he brought with him more experience, more awareness of how to get from other people what he was after, than he could have acquired in like a dozen internships.
THE DOWNSIDE was that, away from New York again, he no longe
r stood in the way of the wedding. He did indeed graduate, and the start of the following summer, a year after it had first been mooted, William found himself in the fitting room of a wizened Jewish tailor whose question-mark posture seemed designed to save him the trouble of bending to take inseams. Daddy had insisted on bringing William down here personally, as if it were some rite of passage, the fitting of the armor that would gird another Hamilton-Sweeney for the battlefields of the haute bourgeoisie. From the changing room, William could hear him out there on the sales floor. “We’ll need a couple of suits, too, Mr. Moritz, in addition to the tuxedo. William has an interview at Yale.” Which was ridiculous; he was a Hamilton-Sweeney. But if Mr. Moritz noticed, he didn’t let on. His shop had a clubby air, at once polished and musty. No female had set foot there since the time of the Borgias. The front door, open to the unseasonal heat, wafted back a breeze of cigar-smoke and leather. “And the dinner jacket is for Friday, if you can do it. He’s agreed to be my best man.”
The William in the mirror had stripped down to boxer shorts and an undershirt discolored under the sleeves. He’d been wearing the shirt last night, in the bushes near the Ramble. A few leaf-crumbs still clung to it. There were cuts on his legs from the branches. He tried to remember if his dad had seen these legs in the years since they’d become hairy—wondered if he would even recognize this body as his son’s, or how he would feel if he’d known what other men were doing with it in the Park, in the dark.
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