Boswell (3 page)

“I will tell you a lesson. Look for the power. The power is always responsible. Well, it was simple. Who had the power in 1923? Perflidowitz and Heinmacher and Reuss, of course. Their sellout was all that was needed to undermine Europe’s confidence in Schmerler. What, finally, do
people
know about things? These men were professionals. They
wanted
to ruin him. And I know for a fact that it was Perflidowitz himself who started that shameful name going around—
‘Basement Schmerler!’

“I’ll tell you something. History is the record of great men’s jealousies. That’s all.

“You see, don’t you, they had forgiven themselves. It’s ironic. They took the one thing he stressed again and again and used it against him. They had forgiven themselves in advance for all the evil they would ever do. It gave them their strength.

“What could I do? Could I let this happen? What were my obligations to Schmerler whom I had made— and, through him, to Europe, which he had made? Of course. I murdered Reuss. I killed him. Well, what else could I do? These were civilized men, Europeans. Reason ‘they could cope with; emotion they could cope with. Only barbarity they could not cope with.”

He took his palm away from his head, and the skin dropped slowly into place. “Understand,” he said, “I am not speaking metaphorically. This was no symbolic slaughter. I killed
him,
stopped his heart, spilled real blood.” He paused, and then, looking down at Fossier’s oldest boy, appeared to study him momentarily. “Chicken plucker,” he said absently.

“So they knew,” he said, turning to me again. “Heinmacher knew, Perflidowitz knew, that one man in Europe anyway was still loyal to Schmerler and would kill to prevent him harm.
That
took the sting from their jealousy.

“But I betrayed Schmerler, too. My confession is not that I murdered Reuss, but that I have never forgiven myself for murdering Reuss.” He touched my arm. Painfully, it seemed to me, he shook his head, the loose skin and pouches of ancient flesh subtly readjusting themselves. Then I noticed that his right eye, the one he had hidden in his palm, was fluttering involuntarily, the pupil itself seemed to vibrate wildly, while his great, old, almost colorless left eye continued to stare at me. He pushed himself back from the desk.

“It was the clothes,” he said.

He seemed bored, perhaps only tired. The hell with what the papers say,
The Reader’s Digest.
It takes Barney Baruch longer now to make those millions. And Frost is nobody’s Bobby. He’s beyond even Robert. No financier, no poet, no placement officer ever screwed around with time and got away with it. Herlitz still had the stuff, but it was the old stuff. And if that was the source of awe, it was the source of pity, too. However, I was wrong. He was only waiting until I understood.

“The clothes,” he said. “Your clothes. You dress like a pensioner. You’re—what?”

“James Boswell.”

“No, no, your age. Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Oh,” he said. “Already seventeen.”

Clearly he was disappointed. Perhaps I had first struck him as precocious. It was as if whatever there had still been time for if I were fifteen or sixteen, was out of the question now at seventeen. I was not precocious after all. I was retarded.

“All right,” he said, suddenly energetic. “What do you want?”

Again I didn’t understand.

“From life. From life. Those clothes, those wonderful clothes, that sort of effacement at, what is it, seventeen—all right, even seventeen. Remarkable! You almost prove Hibbler. If he were alive to see you he would dance. Do you know that? Of course not, my baby, how could you know that? Hibbler was the great interpreter of myth. A brilliant man. Pointed out that the animal’s threat to eat a child alive in fairy tales is a euphemism for the sex act. Children have understood that for years. Well, that’s beside the point. You know of course the story of the Emperor’s clothes?

“There was once a proud and foolish Emperor. One day the Emperor had to consult with his tailor regarding his costume for a very special state occasion. Now, in the past the Emperor had been unkind to the little tailor, and the tailor, annoyed at the Emperor’s tyrannies, decided to play a trick on him. ‘Sire,’ the tailor said, ‘I knew you would need them and so I have been working on these for nine months. Wear them, your Highness.’ With that the tailor held out to the Emperor—nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Emperor was confused, but the tailor hastened to reassure him. ‘They are woven of magic thread, your Grace. To fools they appear like rags, or less than rags, but to the genteel eye they have the magnificence that only an Emperor would dare to appear in.’

“Well, you have imagination, you’ve already guessed the end of the tale. The Emperor walks naked through the streets, all his subjects laugh at him, and the Emperor thinks, ‘What a lot of damned fools the people are.’ Well, of course, two things are to be seen in the story—a secular rebellion against authority, and what Hibbler called the ‘humorous ghetto defense.’ You were certainly aware that the trickster was
a little tailor.
But what interests me is the use you’ve put the story to, your interesting reversal of it. It was the clothes,
of course. You
have managed to become invisible inside
them!

“What are you, a
voyeur?
Do you ride piggyback past the girls’ bathhouse? You don’t even blush. Invisible again. Marvelous. Use it. Use it. I see your deference to me. Any other lad your age would already begin to be restless, uneasy at my words. Not you. You hang on each one. I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. What do you get out of it, I wonder? Ah, never mind, you won’t tell me. You couldn’t. Yet I think I can find a way to use you. You see, James Boswell Voyeur, we have a perfect relationship. You bite your lips and stare and I bite my lips and am an exhibitionist. Marvelous. There are things you could
do,
Boswell. You could be, for example, a great biographer. Magnificent. No, no, I see not. That would put you in the game. Nothing must ruin your splendid non-intervention. How did you get so wise at only seventeen? Ah, you’re a devil, Boswell.

“All right, why not? I have made doctors, scientists, bankers, artists, presidents. Why not a bum? Why not a great bum?”

He was making fun of me, I thought. All his confessions, his disappointment at my age, his talk about what life was all about and about my clothes were his way of deriding me. He was a sport, this old fellow. And he had known his man, all right. He had picked him from the fourth row—to the side. And why? Because he knew that was where I would be standing, would have to be standing. Oh, the great, the great, the wanton great, they kill for their sport. Then I thought, Do you think it’s easy to thrust someone’s fate at him? Do you think all you do is go up to a person and whisper, “Get thee to a nunnery,” “Pull that sword from that rock,” and that’s all there is to it? The boys in the back room know: none of us choose to run. So if they push a little bit, what then? It’s psychology, Boswell, psychology.

“What,” Herlitz said. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Louder.”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Am I wrong about you? Am I?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It could be. I’m a man. Only a man. Men make mistakes. Let me look closer. You had something else in mind, then? Something better? Softer? More luxurious? Tell.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m all alone. My mother, father—I have a baby already,” I said.

“Wealth, huh? A dynasty? You want to found a swimming pool and teach your child water safety? Never to point a rifle unless he means to kill? Remount horses which have thrown him? What to do with pits? To make a code of the smaller sanities? Well, Boswell, go somewhere else. I do not make men wealthy. I do not even make them happy. I only make them great.”

“Make me,” I said very quietly.

“Louder. Speak up. You are already invisible. Do not be inaudible too. Leave clues.”

“Make me. Make me great.”

“No,” he said. “I can’t because you are not great. I am no little tailor. There is no magic thread. I can’t make you great because you are
not
great. Perhaps you are not even very different. You are only a little interesting. You are Sancho Panza, Boswell. The second team. That’s not so bad, hagh?”

“Is that what you mean by a great bum?”

“Stop it.
Voyeur!
We both know what you are. Stop it! You’re trying to anger me. You’re too young and I’m too old. Boswell, you’re an
utzer.
You egg people on, hold their coats. I’ve already confessed a murder to you. Don’t be greedy. Now, now, it’s not a bad life. Really.”

It was as though he were trying to talk me into going into some sort of institution.

“Come,” he said. “Hand me my cane.”

I picked up the cane and gave it to him. “Is that all?” I asked.

Some reflex caused him to shudder. Then he straightened, and with the cane began to trace gentle, invisible rings. “Boswell,” he said, “you will grow handsome and straight and tall. You will please many hosts. Rooms will be aired against your arrival, towels fluffed and set across the foot of many beds. Train schedules will be checked, planes met, chauffeurs given instructions.” He advanced toward me, making passes with his cane. “You will sit, my friend, at the captain’s table.”

I could not watch the cane. I was afraid he was going to strike me with it. I looked down and closed my eyes. I could feel the cane stir the tops of my hairs as Dr. Herlitz waved it over me. “You will make a fourth,” he said, “hold rings, kiss brides, name children, have passports, hear confessions, drink saved wines. You will sit beside kings in the concert hall. Boswell.
Voyeur,
Eye, Ear, you will pull your chair beside the roaring fire. Boswell, Boswell, Go-between, Welcome Guest, Reliable Source, Persona Grata. I weep for you.”

He stopped. I opened my eyes. “What will I do?” I asked.

Herlitz stood before me. He seemed not to have heard me. Stiffly, awkwardly, he looked like someone who had just come out of a trance. He didn’t recognize me. “What will I do with my life?” I asked again.

Suddenly he dropped his cane. It rolled under the desk.

“What shall I do to live?” I pushed the desk out of the way and stooped and retrieved his cane.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Become a strong man.”

II

It was like a room inside a jungle. We moved with steamy abandon inside our glazy bodies, our muscles smoothly piling and meshing like tumblers in a lock. There was in the atmosphere a sort of spermy power, but a power queerly delicate, controlled, something not virginal but prudish, held back. Everywhere the taped wrist, the hygienically bandaged knee joint, the puckered, cottony whiteness of jockstrap gently balancing our straining balls. Even coming to the gym regularly I could never breathe that acidy air, moistened by the body’s poisons, without being struck by the fact that I was in a place of conservation, of a cautious, planned development of the body part, a sort of TVA of the flesh.

A gymnasium is not unlike a church, a bank. It has the same sense of dedication, of a giving over, a surrender to an overriding principle. It’s not God or money—it may not even be health, finally. Probably it’s just the development of the muscle itself, the aggrandizement of limbs and flesh, a cultivation as real and grand and impractical as the raising of any hothouse bulb. I had come to think of my fellows in the gym as one thinks of the members of some spiritual order. Even though I was one of them (you could not distinguish me from them; Herlitz was right), I felt the same mixture of admiration and fear I have felt about young priests.

And if they were like monks, brothers, like monks and brothers, too, they each had their special saints, their favorite parts. Malley doing knee bends on a dimpled mat wanted powerful thighs. Sisley on the rings wanted his thick shoulders, his great round arms. Levine, lonelily bouncing a basketball in small circles beneath a suspended backboard (I never saw him take a shot), was a wrist man. Lacey running, blowing out his breath in deep wet grunts like a steam engine, his sneakered feet stamping the gym’s white-lined floor, was passionately interested in his wind, his big lungs. Flambeau, patiently centering the broad wheel-based poles of the volley ball net, longed for some total development. Not for him the broad forearm if it meant the spindly leg. His was the big picture, some wider, more elusive ideal.

I had been coming to the gym for two years and was a regular myself (Oh, there are no buddies like locker room buddies. Each day we see each other’s behinds, groins, penises. I have worn Malley’s jock; he has worn mine. What is left but for us to like each other?) although I had no specialty. I did everything, developed everything (not like Flambeau, whose exercise led to a sort of delimiting or self-containment): chest, legs, back, arms, hands, neck, jaw, watching with a kind of pride my companions’ pride in the steady ballooning of my parts, growing, as Herlitz said, taller, but wider, too, expanding, blooming, becoming. I was big now, big, and to strangers watching, my great huge body might have seemed a threat (ah, but they couldn’t see my heart; that grew too—that love limb). I worked steadily, somewhat absently, without either sorrow or joy. In the locker room, for two years, I had been taking my towel from Baby Joe, who pushed it toward me sullenly from behind his wire cage. For two years I had weighed myself each night on the tall, free scale (each time, I mean it, pleased to be getting something for nothing), recording the steady accretion of pounds. For two years sitting naked and wet on the low, peeling bench by my locker, feeling beneath me in the vapory room something like a thin coil of excrement, hearing behind the iron double-deck lockers the rhythmed smack-thwump of Peterson, the handball player. (Peterson is very interested in the development of hands. He no longer wears a glove. I’ve felt the hard, smooth calluses of his upper palm; I’ve seen him hold a match against the unprotected skin.)

And if I had not yet sat at the captain’s table, I had at the coach’s, making with others the rude, brutal shop talk of athletes. The brutality is spurious. There is a real camaraderie here, the intense group feeling of amateurs. We are like crew members of a bomber. The camaraderie shines sportily down even from the walls in the gym’s corridors where hang the framed pictures of the teams: basketball players in trim, incredible shorts, in thick- numbered undershirts; football teams in their intricate, hyperbolic gear; baseball teams in puffy knickers, starchy hose, the players’ brows lost in the shadows of their caps so that they seem faceless. Somehow all seem faceless and—oddly, since these are athletes—bodiless too. Only their uniforms bulge clear. When the pictures are large enough to reveal their features, the men, for all their fellowship, seem sedate, serious, like men getting married.