Childish Loves (6 page)

Lunch was taken up with re-introductions. A number of people I once shared a faculty lounge with had stayed put. Even their names revived old sympathies: Peasbody, Beinstock, Bostick. Politely I showed an interest in my old life. Politely they responded with curiosity about my new one. But after lunch Heinz led me on a tour of the new grounds, and we had a chance to talk.

The board of regents had raised a great deal of money in the past ten years. The school I had taught in was more or less a Victorian jumble of buildings, complete with cracked-tile hallways and steaming pipes. It had since become a modern college campus. A science observatory, built mostly of steel and glass, offered views across Manhattan of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State. Below it, on the steep slope leading to Van Cortlandt, stood the new theater, surrounded by freshly planted woods. From inside the building you could see the architect's intentions: tall narrow windows let in the silvery birch-light. We might have been anywhere, in the rural wintry depths of a Pushkin story. Even on a warm hazy September day the sunshine came through coldly. Heinz showed more pride in these developments than I would have expected – partly, no doubt, because they contributed to the status of his new position. But, eventually, in the resonant quiet of the theater, he himself brought up the question of the Byron books.

‘So how long you gonna keep this game up with Peter Sullivan? My wife says I shouldn't ask you, so I'll ask you.'

He had pulled two metal folding chairs from the wings of the stage.

‘What game?'

‘Come on. Nobody's buying this business with the manuscripts. I knew Peter. He couldn't write an end-of-year report unless you held his hand.'

‘He didn't like writing end-of-year reports. He liked writing novels.'

‘So you plan to keep a straight face about this whole thing?'

Heinz had put me in a false position. What I wanted was to find out more about Peter. But people have a bias for certain confessions over others. For a minute I considered telling him about the Society for the Publication of the Dead. ‘Look, these are the people I waste my time with …' I wanted to make clear that the past few years had been difficult for me, from a professional point of view. What I needed from him was a little information about Peter, and then I could wind up my responsibility towards his literary remains, such as they were, and begin again.

‘I'm telling you, my first novel cured me of any interest in historical fiction,' I said. ‘The people who matter don't respect you for it. Besides, you know yourself I'm a lazy bastard and have no head for facts. The kind of book I like to read, the kind of book I have been trying to write, is a straightforward but textured account of a mildly interesting experience. Like
Playing Days
. What do I care if Byron slept with his sister? I'll tell you something else, if Peter had lived to push his own books he'd have got sick of such questions, too. All anybody wants to know about is how much is true.'

‘So what are you coming to me for?'

‘I want to know how much is true.'

‘You mean, you want me to tell you what I know about Peter.'

‘That's it. You see, there isn't much left – of his work. A few unpublished stories. And the character of these stories … raises certain questions. If you need any more convincing: these aren't the kind of stories I could have written myself. In me, the shame of the human being is still stronger than the shamelessness of the writer. There are subjects I won't touch, and Peter did not have my scruples.'

‘Oh, the shame of the human being.' He lifted his hand. ‘But you want to know why Peter stopped talking? To me and everyone else. This is a dramatic declaration of character, don't you think? And childish, too. Someone who takes himself with a sense of humor
has
to talk; it isn't the kind of thing you can choose to do or not. Even when those rumors started spreading about him, he kept quiet. That he used to play minor-league ball, or gigged with the Ramones. I found all that bullshit deeply off-putting – this about a guy who never did anything more adventurous in his life than feel up some kid.' After a moment: ‘Is that what you were expecting? I voted to hire him, let me say that. He was a good teacher. He came to us out of Beaumont Hill, outside Boston. They fired him for fiddling one of the boys, but the evidence was weak; there was a lot of family pressure. I said, if the guy's innocent, you got to hire him. Or un-convicted. Anyway, these boys' schools. There's a kind of perfectly reasonable human being who can't help himself at an all-boys school. Just look at the Catholic Church. They're not all bad men. In different circumstances, with different temptations, some of these priests would have healthy, decent appetites and attitudes towards sex. As far as I'm concerned, that's unquestionable. So out of principle I vote for Peter, but by the end of the first year I already regret it. It's clear to me this is not a man with a healthy attitude towards sex.'

‘I didn't know there was such a thing.'

‘Listen,' he said, ‘how old are you. Thirty-three, thirty-four years old. Been married a few years, there's a baby on the scene. Don't blame yourself too much for lecherous thoughts. This is also a phase you're passing through. But someone like Peter; natural to him isn't natural to you or me. He was a sick man.'

‘Then why didn't you fire him?'

‘It wasn't anything he did. At least, not that I know of. But the whole presence of the guy. The dirty clothes, the beard. We went out of our way to make ourselves sociable. It was suggested he change his name for publicity reasons: the case in Boston attracted a certain amount of press. But who's he kidding with this Pattieson business? You think I don't know who Peter Pattieson is? I run an English department, for God's sake.' (Peter took his new name from the narrator of Walter Scott's novels – which is how I managed to break down his reserve. I found him out.) ‘It's insulting, to the boy involved as well. As if this whole thing were an excuse for dressing up. And then stories started getting back to me, things he said.'

‘Like what?'

A boy came in from the wings, dragging a plastic container behind him across the floorboards. He looked up at Heinz and me. A boy already with the stamp of the theater on him, the pallor and pimples, the narrow expressive structure of face and limb. He wore a collared shirt buttoned up to the top and tucked inside his tight legged trousers. ‘Mind if I set up?' he said, gesturing at the stacks of folding chairs to the side. ‘Dr Schwarz lets me out early to set up.' Heinz considered him. ‘Give us five minutes, and we'll be out of your hair.' So the kid sat down on one of the folding chairs with a patient expression, until Heinz repeated, ‘Five minutes. Out of
our
hair. This is grown-up time.'

‘Like what?' I said again, when the boy was gone.

‘At lunch Peter's overheard telling a story about a friend of his. The punchline goes something like this. Anyone who considers a high-school girl sexually immature has never gone down on one.'

‘You heard him say this? I thought his preference ran the other way.'

‘It was reported to me. His
friend
supposedly said it; Peter was just repeating the joke.'

‘So on the strength of something somebody tells you about something somebody once told Peter, you turn against him. You hired the guy because he wasn't convicted, and you convict him on that?'

‘I don't convict him. I quietly have a word with him, about what we consider acceptable lunchtime conversation in this school. And by the way, I'm perfectly capable of hiring a guy according to the presumptions of the law and at the same time thinking he's a sick son of a bitch. Afterwards, Peter refused to talk to me, and pretty soon after that, when the sympathies of the rest of the faculty became clear, he refused to talk to everybody else. What are you looking at me like that for?'

‘Ten years seems a long time to live in purdah.'

‘He could have broke out of it whenever he wanted to.'

‘By doing what? These things get to be a habit. Probably he thought, by speaking to him the way you did, you showed your suspicions about the Beaumont case. Let's say he really is innocent. That's a hell of a thing to live with.'

‘Maybe he didn't fiddle the Beaumont boy, I'm willing to believe that much. But this was certainly not an innocent man.'

‘Even if he never did anything? Even if he only thought it?'

‘Let me tell you something about sexuality. Nobody only
thinks
it. Not with the opportunities Peter had. Now answer me a question. The story about going down on high-school girls, does it sound like him or not?'

‘Yes, it sounds like him. It sounds like the kind of thing he would have mocked you and me for, mature, healthy, heterosexual men. For thinking about in class.' But I wasn't sure. Both of us at this point were aware of the way our voices carried, across the stage and into the empty rows. It also surprised me how angrily I had taken Peter's side. My sympathies with Heinz were basically stronger and deeper. He seemed to feel something similar and asked, more gently, ‘So what are these stories about then, the unpublished ones?'

‘Fiddling boys,' I said.

Afterwards, he walked me as far as the school gates – through the birch wood, then up a flight of stone steps, expensively set into the sloping earth, and along the parking lot.

‘What's in this for you?' he asked me, with a hand on my shoulder. ‘Why don't you get back to your own work? Honestly, I'm glad the Byron isn't your responsibility. It means I can be straight with you. Yes, I've read them, or near enough – read over them. A little
goyish
, to my taste. A little blue-blooded, with all that that entails. Country houses, sexless marriages, Continental tours. Okay, two hundred years later we have our own tours, called cruises, from which God defend me in my old age. But that Peter should have lost himself in these fantasies doesn't surprise me. He had no
people
. You and I – perhaps we don't make it to synagogue as often as we'd like. And I understand your personal history is a little complicated, but this also is the Jewish experience. We have people. The man who wrote these books has ink running in his veins. Everything is
books
with him. I thought maybe something had happened to you after ten years in England.
A Quiet Adjustment
is three hundred pages of repression, of a particularly English kind.'

He wasn't finished, and I felt rising within me the counter-arguments I wanted to get off my chest. We stood on the curb of the school drive, which winds along the side of the hill, downwards and outwards, to the subway station. A late September day still warm enough to make me feel the heat of my ideas in my armpits and smell them, too. Certain conversations also involve a form of arousal.

‘I'll tell you why I didn't mind that novel you wrote about the school,' he said. ‘Perhaps you were expecting more resentment from me, maybe even hoping for it. The teachers are all inverts or perverts. I don't mind that. But in the end, what the girl learns is, she is the child of love. That was the phrase you used – I have a head for quotation, too. There is no love in these Byron books, and I thought, something has happened to the young man I knew. It's a relief to learn you're not responsible. Maybe you had obligations to his friendship I don't understand. Whatever they were, what you've done must be more than enough. Leave him alone; he was no good. Not that I blame him entirely. At his funeral, I introduced myself to his mother – a short, red-faced, real Irish-looking woman, whiskery with drink. Everybody else pretending that what had happened to this man of advanced years is not that he killed himself. Except her. “It was only to spite me,” she says. “As a boy he said he'd kill himself to haunt me. And now he has.” A real piece of work.'

There was more along these lines. Maybe fifteen minutes later I kissed him goodbye on both cheeks, a habit we had somehow fallen into because of his insistence on the blood kinship. And in fact, walking to the station, I felt very strongly (mixed with nostalgia and less sentimental regrets about the course my life might have taken) the passion of our former friendship. His beard was still short enough you could feel it redden your skin. But it was a relief, as it always had been, to escape the school grounds and turn my back on the world of children.

*

I was staying with some friends of my parents, and when I got back to their apartment, it was empty – one of those grand old New York apartments, with high ceilings and interconnecting halls and rooms, whose large windows overlook the cheaper, newer buildings all around it. Their rooftops seemed to be covered in aluminum foil. Hatches and vents and pipes occasionally broke the surface; there were deckchairs, too. A long way below, you could see a slice of Broadway, crawling with traffic and people. In my head, I was still carrying on the argument with Heinz. After sitting down to a glass of cloudy water in the kitchen, I stood up again to get Peter's last manuscript, which I spread out carefully over the kitchen table. It was hand-typed, loose-leaf. I'd been schlepping the pages around in my backpack from Boston to Philadelphia and felt a little guilty about the state they were in.

The manuscript was divided into three chapters. Peter had written the titles in black ballpoint on the front page of each: ‘Fair Seed-Time,' ‘Behold Him Freshman!' and ‘A Soldier's Grave.' As if he came up with them only afterwards. There was also a cover page, with the words CHILDISH LOVES typed in capitals across it; underneath, Peter had added the quote from Byron that serves as the motto to this book. I started reading, to see if what Heinz had told me would change my reaction to the story. ‘Fair Seed-Time' begins the summer after Lord Byron turns fifteen. He's just come home from Harrow School to stay with his mother. Home is Southwell, a provincial town a few miles east of Newstead Abbey, the Byron family estate; but Newstead's in bad shape, the Byrons have no money, and the young lord has been forced to rent out the only habitable part of the Abbey to another nobleman, Lord Grey. All of this I remembered more or less from my Masters in English lit. It was hard to see any personal angle, anything that reflected Peter's own life. But by the end I wasn't so sure, and I sat in the quiet kitchen staring at the last couple pages for several minutes – until I heard the front door opening, at which point for no good reason I quickly put them away.