The Brothers Boswell (9 page)

No wonder the world’s doors either swing wide or slam shut as he approaches.

I
AM SITTING
high in a gilded box, last in a short gilded row of such boxes along the left-hand wall of the theater. Beside me sits Gentleman. Ostensibly we have come to the box to make sure that the play carries well to this distance, but neither of us is very concerned with the trickery on the stage. Just below the gold lip of the box, my breeches are open, curling away from my linen like some dull fustian peel. Gentleman’s hand is lost inside that linen, the impecunious Irish fist pumping slowly up and down the length of me. I am confused by this, and I am in an ecstasy of a sort I cannot even begin to understand.

Ah, now the mystery is solved.
This
was why all the rush, then, Johnny. This was why you couldn’t be late, not even a second. Not even a tittle.

So what is this thing happening, then? Is it something real, or is it an acted, an imagined thing?

Come, now—you know, Johnny, that it’s both. You know that.

I
T HAS HAPPENED
the last two times I’ve come to the theater with James, and no doubt would have happened the first time had Gentleman been surer of his reception. It is a thing I am forever meaning to haul out of my memory and pore over and take apart
and know, but never do somehow, a thing I’ve been meaning for almost a year to
do
something about.

But it is too slippery to catch, because it exists only here in the Canongate, and only in the high or the far or the dark places of the theater. It exists only with James backstage, as now, or out for a short ale with one or another of the actors. It exists only when Gentleman and I are left alone.

Which is to say it exists only when Gentleman stages it.

Both of us now have our eyes on the little lighted figures in the distance, but he is speaking to me in a low voice as he strokes, coaxing words that are hard to make out, with the exception of the word
Younger.
It is his constant joke, to call James the Older and me the Younger Boswell; but when we are like this, he drops the article and calls me just
Younger
, again and again, low enough so that it becomes almost a simple growl in his throat, indistinguishable from the word
hunger.
It seems only partially an endearment, and partially a reminder to Gentleman himself of what it is about me that excites him.

Even before I know that it is time, he bends down—bends down for all the world as though he has dropped his rehearsal schedule or needs to lace his boot—and takes me into his mouth. The timing of it is all but perfect, and he has only to draw in his cheeks softly once or twice or three times before it is done. In the very last moment, I have the volition to reach out my hands and take his head in them, my fingers sliding into the soft black waves of his hair and understanding its quality, understanding the living reality of it, and of this raw, fantastical act, for the space of a few heartbeats.

But almost immediately, I can feel him preparing to pull away, and I remove my hands from his hair. The wetness from his mouth, the infinitesimal remnant of himself that stays when he retreats, remains with me for only the better part of an instant. Then quickly it cools, becomes nothingness.

I straighten and sort my clothing. All evidence of the thing has vanished.

Gentleman straightens in his seat and fixes me with his eye once before smiling and ruffling my hair. “Imagine,” he says to me then, leaning back against the gilding, “what we might find time to do if your brother actually does buy an interest in this theater?”

It’s not what I expected, although in this strange new play without a name there is never any way for me to know what to expect. So I say nothing.

“Or imagine if you should someday inherit, Johnnie. Imagine that. We’d have a playhouse built special in Ayrshire. Stranger things have happened.”

I nod, because he’s right. Stranger things have.

We make our way downstairs, Gentleman stretching himself and talking loudly about this feature or that of the theater, inching back bit by bit into the Gentleman who is nothing more than he seems when I am with James, Francis Gentleman the impresario, the player.

As we circle back through the lobby, we pass Thomas, now sorting oranges into two piles just outside the auditorium, culling the fresh from the spoiled. He gives me a look as we pass, a knowing look, and when I glance back, he suddenly pitches me a piece of fruit.

But for whatever reason, I’m slow to pluck it from the air, and the fruit sails past me, thumping down a dark stair winding to the cellar. Gentleman doesn’t break stride at the noise. I can only follow him, and as a result I have no way of knowing whether it was a ripe or a rotten thing that Thomas was trying to say.

And of course after all of this, the performance itself is something of an afterthought, an anticlimax.

E
DINBURGH IS A
vertical city, an encyclopedia of elevations. Living near the top of it, we have no choice but to rush down whenever we leave the flat, no choice but to climb slowly and deliberatively when we return home. I know where I am in a day by which muscles I’m in the process of exhausting.

Now James and I trace our way back up the High Street, past the Nether Bow and then the darkened Tron Church; eventually we pass the Luckenbooths, all shuttered with the exception of a dealer in sweets, a shrewd wild-haired old man who takes our measure from a distance and switches to offering ballads and kid gloves by the time we pass.

“You seem tired, Johnny,” James offers as we pass the booth without so much as a word to the man. We leave him standing in his tiny wooden box, waving his cheap calfskin.

“I am,” I tell him. And it is true—my anxiety and anticipation, my pleasures and enchantments and guilts and disenchantments have all combined to register as lethargy. Only a stray ripple of remembered excitement fights the feeling; my legs have no strength, but there’s still a part of me that wants to run back to the Canongate. “Cibber has that effect on me. I watch him, and he makes me almost unbearably tired.”

“That’s because you’re offended by farce,” James says, chuckling to himself. “Cibber means nothing insulting by it. It is his native language.”

James himself seems slightly subdued, introspective. He looks about him as he did earlier this afternoon, noting intriguing people and carriages, but conveying less of the impression that he’d like to embrace and consume them one after another. Now he seems serene, content but reflective, searching somehow.

“You’ve yet to tell me about your audiences backstage,” I prompt.

James swings to look at me, then faces front again. He smiles, very slowly and luxuriously. “Were you right in your prediction, is what you mean. I think you were. Sylvia was quite chaste, and I do believe that was part of allowing me back after the performance, to demonstrate chastity. Score one for John today.”

“I wasn’t trying to score points, Jemmie.”

“Ah, so you say, but I was right too.” He holds a finger in the air. “I did manage to see her fresh from the stage, just as the character
of Lady Betty was in the process of melting away. A
heart-stopping
spectacle. An actress is a miraculous thing, John. I’ve told you before that there are several men trapped inside of me, a hundred men, and to be forced to be only one would be my death. I knew today, watching Betty melt away and Sylvia gather herself up again, that I can only marry an actress. A woman equally many in number. Laugh, but that is the God’s honest truth.”

“I am
not
laughing. You insist that I’m laughing and scoring points. I am not. I’m rooting for you, Jemmie. Because I have a feeling you’ve passed a point of no return. And I would help you, now that you’re helpless.”

He draws in a long lungful of evening air, sorting his thoughts before speaking. Our two pairs of boots make a comforting clacking on the stones, occasionally portioning out into something that resembles the sound of a single horse being led along. Then the sounds diverge, become again the differentiated walks of two Boswells, dragging their way home.

“But, Johnny,” he says after a pause, hand buffing his sword hilt absently, “there is something else. Another reason for asking me to her dressing rooms, it turns out. Something she wanted to tell me. To confess. She is a Catholic.”

I have to reorder my expectations, and even then I can do nothing but repeat his words. “A Catholic.”

“Yes. Devout. Very earnest about the doctrine. Very well read in it.”

We begin to walk again. It takes only a moment for me to rework the day’s half-joking calculations in my mind and come up with a new bottom line.

“But then she cannot be mistress at Auchinleck. Even supposing you were serious about marrying her. Even supposing father would allow it. You must give that fantasy up.”

But James, of course, has come to his own new bottom line.

“Ay, give that up, or give up Auchinleck itself,” he says.

I should have expected it, but I didn’t, and I swing my head to
see how serious he seems to be. If he were joking, he’d meet my eye and wink, but he doesn’t meet my eye. He’s scanning the lighted windows in the Tolbooth, and at some level this contemplation of the incarcerated he intends as a sign of the gravity of his thoughts.

“James, don’t let your mind play down that road. I know you. You’ll get lost and not be able to find your way back.”

“Suppose it weren’t play. Suppose I told you that I’ve read the doctrine and found much there to like. And, of course, the ceremony of the Romish Church, the pomp and the magnificence of it—truly first-rate.”

“It would mean giving up a career in Parliament. You’ve wanted to be in Parliament since you were nine years old.”

“I can live without it.”

“No, you cannot. Take it from me, you cannot. I’m the one’s had to lay in the bed next to you listening to you fantasize endlessly about it, listening to you make a speech on one side of a cause, and then rubbish yourself from the other side of it, back and forth, back and forth. And Auchinleck is the foundation of your entire future. You absolutely covet it, you’ve told me so. We’ve lain awake a hundred nights while you’ve told me all the things you plan to rip up or put down once you come to it. And it is yours by every rule and law and custom you claim to care about.”

Again, he squints off into the smoke layered above the tenements, the oily, ever-present smudge that has always seemed to compromise all choices available to those beneath it. Then he turns frankly to me again. “A Catholic laird is not an impossibility, John. It’s been done. There are ways to manage it.”

With a start I realize that he’s thinking of me, of my connivance in conveying control of the estate to him should he, in his romantic imaginings, be stripped of it. And I feel my sympathy begin suddenly to thin.

But before I can protest, he has tossed that notion away as well. “And besides, a writer doesn’t
need
an estate or a career in
government. A writer needs only two things. He needs to know where his heart directs him, and he needs to obey it.”

“This is
rot
, James. Pure rot.” I can feel myself almost getting angry now, which is absurd. This is the whim of a moment. James will want a thousand and one potential wives before he’s actually wed. It’s just that he’s so vulnerable to exactly this sort of manipulation, by others and more dangerously by himself. “Five minutes ago you were telling me that your happiness depended on being a hundred men. Now you’re killing them off twenty at a time. You’d be miserable, no title, no estate, no career in the law or anything else. A foolish little man who chose poorly. You despise men like that, you pity them.”

“Alexander Pope was no foolish little man. He was a devout Catholic, and they tried to take everything from him. They forced him to live twenty miles outside London. They made a bungler like Cibber the Laureate instead. But he’s still the greatest poet of the modern age. Ask any man if he pities Pope. Pope is revered.”

“You are mad.”

“I am a writer, sir. And I am in love.”

“Twice mad.”

“And
if
that is madness, then I am not afraid of it. I welcome it.”

“Thrice, then.”

“I
embrace
it, I tell you.”

“Quadruple Bethlehem-Hospital mad, then. Stark-staring, spittle-flecked, pissing-your-own-shoebuckles Bedlam
mad.
”

We walk in silence for a few moments then, the joking suddenly turned sour. Given that my father’s younger brother James took to his bed years ago, and left it only to be fitted for a strait-waistcoat, madness has never been a jest in our house. This is especially true for my father and for his son James, whose screaming nightmares about the wizard Union were only one of several shadows cast across his childhood. Only seven years ago, then twelve years old, James woke one morning to find himself without the will to leave
his bed. Almost parenthetically the doctors found a delicate red rash, a nervous scurf, snaking around his thick ankles.

For the scurf and the lassitude—and in a general knock-on-wood against the specter of insanity—James spent nearly two months in a rude little inn at Moffat, drinking from the sulfur springs and being doused with buckets of hot sulfur water in an apparatus like an oversized wine cask. He had a relapse two years ago and was sent to be dunked again.