Childish Loves Read online

  *

  A few days later, I had an idea and got in touch with a guy I had met through the Byron Society in Cambridge, Paul Gerschon. Gerschon worked at the Houghton, Harvard’s rare-books library. It occurred to me he might be useful in helping to prise Peter’s papers out of his mother’s grasp – that this is something certain librarians become skilled at.

  We met downstairs at Café Pamplona, on the corner of a rather ugly side street off Harvard Square. I had seen him only once before, at a talk, with a few dozen people around, but he carried in his hand a copy of A Quiet Adjustment. I would have recognized him anyway, by his soft-skinned face and large lips; his pale hair and eyes. It seems too easy to call him bookish, yet it is strange, also, that this should be so recognizably human a quality. That the long association with books breeds a certain manner, formal, gentle, curious, hesitant. A tall man himself, he stooped under the low basement ceiling, and we carried our drinks upstairs to the patio garden, which was carved out of the sidewalk and crowded by wrought-iron chairs and tables. The weather was bright but windy, and we decided after a few minutes to drink our drinks and return to his office at the Houghton, where we could talk in peace and warmth. Also, he wanted to show me their collection of Byronalia – nothing first-rate, he said, but still, they had a few interesting pieces.

  On the way, he told me stories about Peter. It turns out they knew each other pretty well. ‘We were what my wife calls Society Friends,’ he said. ‘Which means there were large tracts of our lives that never came up for discussion.’

  ‘Because you were sensitive to …’

  ‘I would have used the word indifferent. We didn’t get together to talk about our marriages. We talked about books. But you’re right, maybe a part of the reason was the fact that a number of our members, what I would call an honorable minority, lead fairly eccentric lives. Isolated lives. Until recently you might say that I was one of them.’

  He had married, rather late in life, and his wife had just given birth to their first child – a boy, now eleven months old. This also provided us with conversation.

  ‘Then you never talked much with Peter about his private life,’ I said eventually.

  ‘By private life, I suppose you mean the incident at Beaumont Hill School. I don’t want to give you the impression that we tolerate in our membership any indecency or unpleasantness. But I will say this. I had, I have, a lot of sympathy for men in Peter’s situation – I mean, men who have more or less been denied … a sexual life. Or have denied themselves one. It doesn’t make much difference. I wasn’t around when Peter resigned from Beaumont Hill, or was forced out. But don’t for a minute believe that the Byron Society, as a group of people, is free from the vice of gossiping, especially about sexual matters. It is the Byron Society, after all. We knew the story, we talked about it. Peter himself could be very … funny about himself. I read your preface to Imposture, and I must say, I did not recognize the man you described in it. The picture you drew in it annoyed me. Peter was not a silent man, especially on the subject of Horatio Alger. I suppose you know who Horatio Alger is?’

  ‘I know a little about him; not much.’

  ‘The author of a hundred-odd stories about the American dream. He had to resign his post at a church in Brewster, Massachusetts, for committing the sin of paederasty with two teenage boys. So he moved to New York and set up a hostel – for impoverished children. And began to write. Nobody reads him now, but Peter used to. It tickled him pink to land a job at a school named Horatio Alger. But I will say this for him. I don’t think Peter would have cracked jokes if he had anything to feel guilty about. Anything that counted. You never know what other people are capable of, but I think you sometimes know what they are capable of joking about. Peter was sharp, but he was never cruel.’

  ‘People seem to me to be capable of joking about anything.’

  ‘You may be right; this is your line of work. As it happens, the Houghton has a pretty fair copy of Herbert Mayes’ book on Alger, A Biography Without a Hero. A hoax, of course. He made up whatever he didn’t know, diaries, letters, etc. The Macy-Masius first edition, from 1928, a little worn at the edges. Not a rare volume, but interesting to me.’

  Interesting was one of his words. We were in his office by this point, which was carpeted in soft institutional gray, windowless and rather dark, with nothing but a lamp on his desk to light the room. But there were several precious things in it that daylight would have damaged. Paul had made a selection of the Houghton archives for me, which included a manuscript of The Curse of Minerva, Byron’s poem on the rape of the Elgin Marbles. It was bound in red straight-grain Morocco and inscribed: ‘This MS was written by Henry Drury, the tutor of Lord Byron and was made by him from one of the original nine copies which were privately printed in 1812.’ The two young men had become friends, after a bad start, which plays a small part in the action of ‘Fair Seed-Time.’

  ‘Also not a first-rate piece,’ Paul said, turning to the first page with its beautiful opening lines:

  Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,

  Along Morea’s hills the setting sun …

  ‘But suggestive, don’t you think? I don’t know why he did it. It’s usually the other way around: the student copies down the teacher’s words. But by that stage, Byron was famous.’

  We talked only briefly about the trouble I had had with Mrs Sullivan. Paul promised to do what he could. He didn’t often make ‘house calls.’ Valuing private papers wasn’t really in his field, but he knew enough to ‘pretend a competence,’ he said, ‘which is all that matters in this case. I’ll ask around for a sense of what such things are worth. I can’t imagine she wants very much money, or that her idea of much is the same as yours.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ I said. ‘She’s a canny old – woman.’

  ‘What would you be willing to pay? Well, let’s see what she’s got first.’

  Before I left he offered to show me something else. He’d been playing around with the library’s scanner recently and had uploaded, if that was the word, a box of old photographs onto his computer. From some of the Society ‘field trips.’ There were pictures of Peter among them, from a visit to Missolonghi they’d undertaken together a few years before his death. Peter and Paul at sunset, standing in front of a still, clear body of water, with the sun behind them, a dot of intensity, and their eyes reddened by the flash. A thumbnail of Peter, among two or three others, leaning with his back against a wall. They were watching a couple of Greeks playing roundish stringed instruments; there was a hat on the gravel of the square and some coins in the hat. Another one of Peter, with his glasses in hand, resting his sandaled foot on a rock. A low undistinguished hill behind him, with a path slanting up it.

  ‘Not far from where Byron died,’ Paul said.

  Apart from the sandals, Peter was wearing a pair of denim shorts and a loose T-shirt with a purple lion on it that looked familiar – the school logo. His legs and arms were skinny and muscular, and very brown; and you could see, in spite of the length of his uncombed beard, a broad smile stretching out the lines of his face. The kind of smile my father makes for the camera, to be friendly, without caring much about how he looks. And I saw Peter for the first time as one of your average American eccentrics: fond of hiking and group expeditions and nature; an old, popular high-school teacher on his summer holiday. I could imagine him coming back to class in the fall and talking about the wonders of ‘Europe.’

  ‘This is why the picture you gave of him got under my skin,’ Paul said. ‘He was a popular member of the Society. By our standards, very sociable and lively; good company. His Greek was terrible, much worse than mine, but he used it shamelessly and often made himself understood. While the rest of us counted over our declensions. Peter once said to me that when he was a child, he thought he hated people; it was only when he grew up that he realized he hated children. He qualified this, of course. There weren’t many people he liked – maybe one per cent of the
population, what he called the literate one per cent. But around them, he was a very happy man.’

  ‘What did you say to this?’

  ‘I remarked that he had made an odd choice of profession.’

  ‘And to that?’

  ‘Sometimes, he said, you can make them literate yourself.’

  *

  One of the things I liked about Kelly Kirkendoll, apart from her name, is that we could talk about Austin together. Even though her childhood, the bulk of which took place less than a hundred yards from mine up the curve of Wheeler Street, bore little resemblance to my own. Kelly was homecoming princess and captain of her high-school basketball team, facts I never knew about her till she told me, with the kind of ironic tone you employ towards younger siblings or past selves. Not that she was vain. Or as she said herself, ‘I’m vain about the things I’ve got to be vain about, and modest about the things I’ve got to be modest about. And right now, there’s more things I’ve got to be modest about than vain.’

  For example, as she explained to me, she was captain of the basketball team but not its best player. The girls voted her captain because everybody could get along with her, which was mostly because the smart girls didn’t think she was smarter than them, and the pretty girls didn’t think she was prettier. This was also the reason she got elected homecoming princess, not queen. She was too tall to be really pretty, as she put it. She had big hips and shoulders that were good for playing the post and getting rebounds, but not so good for looking like Barbie. The reason I didn’t know she was homecoming princess is that I didn’t go to my high-school prom. We talked about this, too. Fifteen years after the fact, she liked me for it. ‘I don’t remember much about you, but I remember you were a weird kid. Too tall to talk to for one thing, though I tried sometimes, which you probably don’t remember, either. You were shy with girls. I guess you’ve changed a lot?’ she said, laughing.

  We spent too much of our time together, which was often interrupted by children, discussing our high-school lives. Her life, I should say. I found myself becoming nostalgic over someone else’s past. Only the setting was the same; everything else was unrecognizably different. But when she told me stories about getting drunk in the parking lot of Dan’s Hamburgers, because one of her high-school buddies worked the counter there, on those summer nights in Texas which remain uncomfortably warm until one or two in the morning, but Dan’s stayed open, and instead of the stars, you could see the trucks with their lights on coming along North Lamar, my heart contracted a little, as if I had ever been a part of those carefree good times now permanently out of my reach.

  ‘That’s what used to annoy me,’ Kelly said, ‘about those stories about high-school drinking. I don’t want to say it was always innocent but compared with what? Compared with my life today? Mostly it was just sitting in cars and talking.’ Then she laughed again. ‘Which isn’t much different from what we’re doing now.’

  One of the playground benches had a distant view, across the soccer fields, of the basketball court. While the weather was warm enough, which it was until the second week of November, a handful of the same boys biked over every day after school and played. Even at a hundred yards I can tell who can shoot and who can’t, by the way his off hand falls away from the ball, by the position of the wrist. When I was a kid I used to spend an hour or two a day in the backyard, regardless of weather, working on my jump shot; and nothing showed up the passage of twenty years more vividly than those hundred yards. This at least was a part of my childhood I could feel a decent nostalgia for. Eventually, I started bringing a ball to the park myself. When my daughter fell asleep in the stroller, I wheeled her into the shade of the oak trees that overlooked the court and worked on my jump shot. For as long as an hour, depending on how much she slept. Shooting, silently chasing the ball, planting my feet and shooting again, while the boys at the other basket screwed around and sometimes got under my feet.

  Kelly joined me once. As it happens, she wasn’t particularly good at basketball. Tall for a girl, she used her elbows well but had put on ten pounds since ‘her prom dress last fit her’ and hadn’t played since senior year. Basketball was just another one of those things she picked up because of high school and forgot about as soon as she graduated, like the Bill of Rights. But her play didn’t embarrass her. Even as a teenager she never worried much what other people thought of her. Once in a while she would ‘pretty herself up,’ as she put it, but most days she showed up at the bus stop wearing jeans and a T-shirt and no make-up, and even, if she was running very late, her glasses.

  ‘You probably remember them. Like Coke bottles,’ she said, squinting and lining up a shot.

  Her blonde hair was straight and slightly reddish, and her complexion clear and pink. She never had a problem getting boys to like her, so why should she bother with all the ‘other stuff’? High heels, powder, painted nails.

  ‘I bother a little more now,’ she told me, ‘when I get a chance to go out, which is never. But most of the time you see me as I am. A mess.’

  A low-hung October afternoon, warm rather than bright; and for a good hour, while our daughters slept, we passed a ball around and sometimes pretended to play in earnest. Kelly accused me of running around too much, like a kid brother, and eventually gave up chasing me and began chasing rebounds instead. Passing the ball back to me, talking as I shot. She was still confident of the fact that anyone she liked would like her too, and the rest didn’t matter. Even at thirty-three, with a divorce behind her and two kids on her hands. No job, and the place she wanted to live a plane-flight away.

  ‘I’m not very good at being unhappy,’ she told me. ‘So I don’t try.’

  She talked about her divorce, too, and there were times I had to wait with the ball in my hands to hear her out. Her husband was somebody she had known since high school, though they didn’t begin dating till the summer after graduating college. He’d come back from a place out East and was working part-time at the donut shop on Guadalupe, which is where she ran into him again. For a while they ‘hung out, with a few other friends, too. It was just a summer thing. But then Kevin got a good job, at Dell. And I started my teaching certificate. His apartment was nicer than mine, so I told him I was moving in, and that’s what I did. He was kind of a good-time guy; maybe I bullied him into it. Even when we got married a few years later it didn’t seem like a big deal. He always knew how to enjoy himself, let me put it that way – more than me. Basically, I never did anything I wouldn’t tell my dad about, which included a little pot and a lot of beer but nothing worse. Kevin did many things he wouldn’t even tell me, but then he’d get up in the morning and go to work, so he didn’t see what I had to complain about. And until we had Matty I didn’t complain, much. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great dad, for the five minutes a day he wants to see his kids. But the rest of the time, he’s either working or having fun, or thinking about work or about how to have fun. And you know what, I told him, I don’t care if I’m your idea of fun or not, you’re stuck with me. But I guess he wasn’t,’ she said.

  ‘He walked out on you?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m the kind of girl, if you stand me up once, it’s not a big deal. But after that, I don’t hang around.’

  ‘What does that mean, stand you up? Did he have affairs?’

  ‘It depends on what you call an affair.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My dad, who still likes Kevin, too much if you ask me, has a phrase for what he is. A befriender of women, my dad calls him. Kevin likes to make women like him. He thinks it makes him likeable. And he liked it even more after I stopped liking him, which I don’t blame him for.’

  We might have been back in high school, after class, only this time the girl I was talking to was Kelly Manz. The rest of the illusion held up pretty well: that I was on my father’s court, with all afternoon before us, and a lifetime, too, until my daughter woke up and I climbed the large-stoned wall to the shaded terrace with the picn
ic tables and consoled her. She always woke angry. The next time I saw Kelly she complained of spending the rest of that day in her own sweat. She didn’t get a chance to shower until both kids were in bed, which was nine o’clock, and by that time she was too tired. Her excuse for not joining me again.

  ‘Even if I don’t care what I look like, I draw the line at smelling,’ she said.

  Something had made her uncomfortable, though she couldn’t help herself afterwards and continued to talk about Kevin when we met, in the cooler intimacy of the children’s playground. I was also aware of feeling in some way complicit. But I told myself, you’ve never confided in her about Caroline; there’s nothing wrong with listening. And when she talked to me about divorce law, I talked about Peter.

  Kelly surprised me by having nothing but sympathy for him. After ten years in the public school system, she said, you learn to distrust anything you hear about sexual harassment. Well, almost ten years, and even if it was only elementary school. Men had it harder. She had more or less decided from the beginning to ignore whatever the staff directives on the subject were, because if she got fired for cuddling a nine-year-old boy she wanted no part of the profession. But she had seen teachers with over thirty years experience in education practically in tears because they had kissed the top of a kid’s head when she fell over in the playground. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it was worse in high school, she told me; she knew from first-hand experience that certain girls are asking for it.

  ‘Don’t think for a minute they don’t know what they’re doing. Compared to some bow-tied history teacher who probably had only two girlfriends in his life and married one of them.’

  In Peter’s case, I told her, there was a boy in question.

  ‘Oh boys, girls. The boys are just as bad.’

  She turned out to be useful to me in a practical way. I had driven over one afternoon to Beaumont Hill, a twenty-minute ride from our apartment along the highway towards Walden Pond. As soon as you leave the exit, you see nothing but green streets and shaded houses – one of those wonderful suburban American neighborhoods that conceal their riches under privately maintained natural scenery. But I got no deeper into campus than the school gates. No one without ‘express and expressed permission,’ I was told, could be admitted to the grounds – there was a pre-fab hut with a guard in it by the side of the road, checking names and passes. I could hardly mention the purpose of my visit as a ticket in, but Kelly knew one of the science teachers from Ed. School and offered to get me an invitation to lunch.