Childish Loves (19 page)

‘Don't you?'

‘I said, who knows what goes on behind closed doors. Also, don't have any illusions about these kids. They say all kinds of things. But this was not a popular opinion at the time. We were very sensitive to the issue, even before those priests made all this stuff public interest.'

‘What was he like?'

‘I thought you knew him. Very funny, when you could make him out, which wasn't all the time. A good colleague. Not somebody you got to know better or invited home, but somebody you didn't mind seeing in the hall coming your way.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Look, it's been a while. I once had a kid, a foreign kid, not a dumb kid, but couldn't write an essay to save his life. So I talk to his English teacher and Peter goes to work on him, and the kid does fine. Not great but fine. This is the kind of interaction we had together, but believe me, there are teachers out there who can turn even this kind of a discussion into a he said, she said.'

‘Did he ever talk to you about his private life?'

‘This is what I'm telling you. What do I care about people's private lives. All this scandal-mongering. Whenever I hear something like that, I think of what my mother used to say: unhappiness is mess.'

‘Were there people who knew him better?'

‘This is also not the kind of information I keep track of.'

I wasn't sure what I hoped to find out, but this conversation was representative. The people who still remembered him didn't remember him well. Mostly I wanted to get a sense of the life he had lived at Beaumont Hill, whether he had changed much by the time I knew him. One thing I learned: the school has some faculty accommodation on campus. These days it's restricted to teachers willing to take on pastoral responsibilities for the boarders, but while Peter was around, a few of the bachelors saved money by renting rooms in Founders and dining in Hall with the students. For most of his twenty years at Beaumont Hill, Peter occupied one of these ‘suites' – a single room, large enough for a desk, attached to a private bathroom. If he wanted a shower he could use the communal showers. Twenty years was longer than usual but not unheard of. And part of the worry, part of the reason the school board reacted so harshly in the Feldman case, had to do with their nervousness about the possibilities entailed by this arrangement. Which also explained why the teachers' union failed to act in his defense.

There was only one woman at the table, who introduced herself to me as we waited by the kitchen doors to bus our trays. Another quiet talker, with soft red hair and not very much of it, and glasses. Beaumont Hill began hiring women a couple years before Peter left, and there was some controversy over it at the time. A few of the teachers made the women feel very uncomfortable. This lady wanted to tell me Peter wasn't one of them. She taught German and European literature; Medley was her married name, but she was born Katarina Wupperthal. One of the things she remembered about Peter was that he always called her Fräulein Wupperthal.

‘I don't know if this is what you find interesting. It isn't very interesting, but it is what I remember.'

‘Is there anything else?'

‘Sometimes even then he discussed his writing.'

Katarina had a natural interest in children. She was one of those women who can't be around them without, for example, taking off her wristwatch and quietly setting it aside where they can reach it, then snatching it playfully from them until they ask her for it. This partly explains why she said little at lunch; she was amusing my daughter.

‘That's interesting. He never discussed it with me.'

‘Well, maybe I don't mean discussed. I didn't even know at the time he was writing anything, but I remember once he told me he had an idea for a story, or maybe it wasn't a story it was just an idea,
was man auf Deutsch ein Gedankenexperiment nennt
.' (She had heard me speaking German to my daughter.) ‘I think you have the same word in English. A thought-experiment.'

We were sitting outside now, on the cold stone stairs leading down to the lawn where some of the seniors had taken their trays of food. My daughter, who likes steps of all kinds, was busy enough to let us finish this conversation in peace. There were leaves in the grass scattered loosely around the trees, in various colors, and my daughter had decided to place one leaf on top of each of the steps. But they kept blowing away. One of the students, who had noticed what she was trying to do, laughed at her; and she laughed back at him, much more loudly. She also began bringing him leaves.

‘He had this idea of a doctor,' Katarina said, ‘a family doctor, someone who performs routine check-ups and physical examinations, who decides to tell a few of his patients, after these check-ups, that it is clear from the medical evidence that they are suffering really unusual amounts of pain. That nobody else suffers the way they are suffering and that they have simply become accustomed to it. He doesn't offer them any relief from this pain or go into any of the details. It was a part of Peter's idea that after this doctor tells his patients these things that none of them disagrees with him. That it more or less confirms what they had always suspected. At the same time, they don't expect any treatment or any relief and don't ask him any questions about the kind of pain they are suffering, which they take entirely on faith. And they leave his surgery feeling much better than they had before. I haven't read any of Peter's novels, because I take no pleasure from what is called contemporary literature, but when I heard he had published a book I remembered this conversation – maybe I had been complaining to him about my back, which sometimes gives me trouble, though the doctors can find nothing wrong. And I wondered if he had written about it in the book. Can you tell me if he did?'

‘There may be something similar. But whether he used this specific story or not I would say it was very much in keeping with … the tone of the novels themselves.'

Afterwards, this conversation affected me more than it should have. I found it difficult to keep my mind on the necessary small talk while we sat on the steps and watched my daughter play. Kelly appeared behind us, with Bob in tow, carrying her own daughter, and Katarina had a class to teach and left us to prepare for it. We let the girls run around together, chasing leaves, and then I pushed myself up off my knees and chased the girls. It really was time to put them in the car and drive them to sleep, but Bob offered to get us into the room that Peter had lived in, or if not the same room exactly, something very much like it, and Kelly was sufficiently excited by the prospect and pleased with her friend's helpfulness that I couldn't refuse. So we went back to Founders and got a key from the secretary there, a big-permed woman with medical sunglasses she kept shifting on her nose. As it happens, one of the rooms was unoccupied, but she had no way of knowing if Mr Sullivan had lived in it or not.

‘I suppose he was before your time,' I said.

‘There's less that's before my time than you'd imagine. I've been here thirty years. I remember Mr Sullivan. I remember young Lee-Sung Feldman, too, if you want to know, who maybe wasn't the worst kid I ever saw come through Beaumont, but I can't think of anyone to beat him.'

‘I didn't know his name was Lee-Sung.'

‘I said to Mr Feldman once, before this whole thing blew up, what did you want to get a Korean kid for? If you're picking and choosing. It's not fair to the boy, to raise him like that, so he doesn't know what he is. But they figured that out eventually.'

‘That's an ignorant thing to say,' Kelly said. ‘I don't even know what you mean.'

But we took the keys from her and walked through the back door into a hallway that led to the main entrance. Founders, and the land around it, once belonged to a branch of the Holmes family, relatives of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The building still had something of the gloomy grandeur of a private wealthy residence, paneled walls and portraits in oil on the landings, combined with certain technological advances already out of date: a dirty air-conditioning unit propped inside one of the windows. Stippled false ceilings to hide the air vents. But the stairs still creaked underfoot. Kelly said, ‘I don't know why I'm so excited, but I'm excited.' And she put her palms together so that you could hear them sticking lightly when she pulled them apart.

The room Bob let us into, on the second floor of the older wing of the house, overlooked the new parking lot at the back. Gray carpet on the floor; nails in the walls. It wasn't much bigger than my office at the Radcliffe. There was space for a single bed and a small desk and a chair, and a door to the bathroom, which was windowless and had a toilet in it and a kind of hip-bath squeezed between two walls. Probably carved out of the closet that used to be there. The place reminded me of the replica hut at Walden Pond, not more than fifteen minutes by car from Beaumont Hill, which had been built according to Thoreau's instructions in the book. I even said to Bob and Kelly, ‘Self-sufficiency.' To live there for nearly twenty years and then be forced to leave. The window stood directly behind the bed but I don't know what it would have overlooked before the parking lot was poured in. Maybe a garden. Katarina's story was also on my mind, and it was hard not to imagine that the kind of pain Peter had in mind, in his case at least, was sexual in origin.

*

By this point the girls really were so tired we had to get them home. They fell asleep on the way, and Kelly and I sat in the car outside her apartment for maybe half an hour, to let them nap. Talking about Peter but also other things. Her husband had filed a complaint against her, in the Probate and Family Court, to prevent her moving with the kids back to Austin. Most places had a presumption in favor of the right to relocate for the custodial parent but not the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She had to show it was in the best interests of the children. It wasn't enough to say, my happiness is the best thing for them, even though it's what she believed.

‘I
do
really believe it,' she said. ‘I think I'd believe it even if it counted against me somehow. But it's hard to be sure of that.'

She didn't blame Kevin, she just hated arguing everything out in front of other people. And so far he'd been pretty honorable about certain facts he could mention that would help his case. Her lawyer said, You can't trust anybody when it comes to kids, especially not ex-husbands. But she didn't want to live like that, by suspicion. He said, Everybody uses everything they got.

‘What kind of things?'

‘Stupid things. I once slapped a child, not for any good reason, but because I was hardly thinking. Just because I'd had enough – of what, I don't know. The girl got over it in about a minute, but I cried by myself in a stall in the restroom for the whole of my lunch break and looked so red and ugly for the rest of the day I had to complain all the time about hay-fever and forgetting my pills. I was probably crying about other things, too. I'd had some trouble with this girl before, which really means that I'd had some trouble with her parents, and when the dad found out, he tried to get me suspended. The school didn't suspend me, but it's on my record. Then there's the fact that James has learning difficulties. He doesn't really, I don't believe in them, I know that's a stupid thing to say, but I don't. Still we registered him as attention deficit to get him into the school he's going to, which is a good school. And the court might want to know if the school he would go to in Austin is just as good, which it probably isn't. That kind of thing. But Kevin hasn't mentioned it, maybe because he's embarrassed.'

Part of the time we sat in silence, with the door resting open by its own weight, to let some air in. We could hear workmen working a few houses away and see a truck coming and going to the site, which was boarded up. Otherwise the street was quiet enough and almost unnaturally colorful, with leaves and parked cars and painted houses. When my daughter woke first, and woke Kelly's, I think we were both a little relieved that the spell of silence we were sitting in had been broken.

After Caroline came home (it was her turn to put the girl to bed), when I had a part of the evening to myself, I looked into the copy of
Walden
I had bought from the park store on our last visit to the lake. To find something consoling; this is how I put it to myself, thinking of Peter's narrow room. ‘Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think they must have such a one as their neighbors have.' And: ‘To have for the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card –

There is plenty of this sort of thing in the book. I also looked over Peter's two published novels, to see if there was anything in them that resembled the story Katarina had told and which Peter had once brooded on. But the closest I came was a reference in
Imposture
to a tale about a doctor ‘mysteriously in thrall to all the people he had inadvertently killed.'

*

Caroline and I had intended from the beginning to return to London for what she called ‘the whole month of Christmas.' On the Tuesday before we left I got a call from Paul Gerschon at the Houghton Library. He said he had something to show me. Mrs Sullivan had entrusted him with several boxes of her son's old papers and books, which he had brought by taxi to the library to assess, and which were now sitting on his desk. Any time I liked I was welcome to come by. So the next morning I made my way through the carpeted internal corridors of the administrative offices, which even at that time of year felt oppressively air-conditioned, to Paul's door. He was looking over manuscript papers when I came in, blinking under the glare of his desk-lamp, and stood up rather slowly to take my hand.