The Boy Avengers (3 page)
He didn't act with me as though he was getting what he wanted from you.
You bastard! He's a sensual animal. He'd let
anyone
blow him. You probably made him think it was
droit de seigneur.
Is that all we did?
He wouldn't want you any other way.
Oh, wouldn't he? He looked down at his cock, continued stroking it. I could see Jack Foster's mouth on it, the way he was stroking. I wondered if she could. For the first time I saw my mother at a complete loss. He sucked my cock, my father said flatly.
Why did he leave? What did you do to him? What did you make him do?
Nothing he didn't want to do. Maybe he needed the rest. I spent most of the night with him.
That's a he!
It's the truth. He sucked my cock. What did he do for you?
You bastard! You make everything rotten!
Come suck my cock. See if you're as good as he was. Or even as good as your daddy.
Is that what you want? It seemed to me her voice was deadly calm.
Why not? Look, it's hard even for you. There's no pleasure in fucking you. Why shouldn't you be useful ... wife?
All right, she said quietly.
Come on. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. One hand held his cock invitingly towards her. He was so beautiful, even if his cock seemed incongruously huge to me. Later, when I would see ancient priapic statues, I would invariably be reminded of him. Still, it seemed as beautiful as the rest of him, the head blossoming so beautifully, so gleamingly at the top of that long smooth shaft. Why wouldn't it be natural for her to worship it as she had Jack Foster's? Yet already I was aware, from the undercurrent of the serpent in the garden, that there was evil in his invitation. Had he offered it to me I would have seen only love in the gesture, would gladly have kissed his cock even as I had kissed his lips in saying goodnight.
One thing comes back to me. The night before, though I had fallen asleep after the vigorous, consuming masturbation that relived Jack Foster's sucking of my father, I awakened suddenly, near dawn I think, to find my father bending over me. I reached up to kiss those lips so recently on Jack Foster's lips, Jack Foster's cock, but for the first time he averted his lips. I kissed his cheek, he kissed mine.
He must always have known how much I loved him, but never before had I felt the need to put it into words, to thank him for the beautiful sight of him becoming a perfect circle with Jack. And I, never at a loss for words before, found that such a simple phrase as I love you refused to form on my lips. Goodnight, sweetheart, my father whispered.
Goodnight, I whispered back. I love you. But already he was gone. He could not have heard me even if I'd said it aloud.
Now it seemed to me I could feel only naked hatred between my parents. I knew suddenly they must always have hated each other. As my mother knelt before my father, between his beautiful thighs, and opened her mouth wide to take his cock into it, she looked only grotesquenot beautiful as she'd looked only two nights before when opening her mouth with love for Jack's. My father's handsome face seemed ugly with contempt as he watched her.
She took his cock in her mouth and bit down hard. He screamed with pain and rage. His hands thrashed out. He grabbed up a large brass candlestick on the bedside table and brought it down hard on my mother's head in a single motion.
There was a silent moment of motionlessness. Slowly she fell to the floor. I could see blood gushing from my father's savagely bitten cock. Suddenly her red-gold hair turned blood red. I vomited in my closet. I struggled back to my bed. I lay exhausted, trembling, but after a time a feeling of peace came over me. It hadn't happened. It
couldn't
have happened.
But I lacked courage to return to the peephole.
Next morning I was surprised awake at seven by the voice of my Grandmother Rogers on the intercom by my bed. Curiously, I'd dreamed during the night she'd slipped into my room and stared down at me.
Had
it been a dream?
Are you all right? she asked me.
Of course.
Get dressed and come directly to the library. I'll be waiting for you. Be quick.
Children are portrayed as asking incessant questions, yet I asked nothing. It was Sunday; our family had long since given up the hypocrisy of churchgoing. Usually I put on my most casual clothes in the hope I'd go for a pre-breakfast walk with my father. But today I dressed in my best, most formal clothes. My grandmother nodded in approval when she saw me. Her face was dead white but she was calm. She was wearing a hat.
We are going to Briarwood, she said. It was the name of the estate she'd bought after my grandfather's death, for she'd no intention of sharing a house with my parents. Can you wait for breakfast?
Yes, I said. She took my hand. She had never done that before. In fact I don't remember anyone ever taking my hand, though they must have when I was younger. I did not object. I sensed it was a need in her, a comfort to her. I remained silent until we were in her ungainly Daimler, and through the gates of our estate.
It happened, didn't it? I said. It really happened.
She looked at me, startled. Yes, she said. There was a look of dread on her usually impassive face at what my next question might be. Mercifully, I didn't ask another. I was as reluctant to talk as she.
What I can tell you of the trial is second-hand, of course. But at least it is as accurate an account as anyone else could give you. My father had phoned the police shortly after midnight. He told them he'd heard my mother screaming, found her dead in the tutor's room. His guess, he said, was that she'd heard an intruder, feared it might be a kidnapper, apparently surprised the intruder in the tutor's room, he had killed her and fled.
Jack Foster was questioned immediately. Since he'd been with friends in Greenwich, he had a solid alibi. I was not awakened by the arrival of the police cars because my room faced the back of the mansion. I would not have heard them even awake. It seems odd to me I was never questioned. Of course I wouldn't have said anything.
The only fingerprints on the heavy brass candlestick were my father's. He explained he'd seen it beside the body, without thinking had picked it up and put it back on the table. But he was indicted for her murder, and after a long trial, a jury found him guilty. It seems unusual to me he was not given a death sentence. I have wondered if because of his astonishing good looks the jury, though convinced of his guilt, had been unable to bring themselves to decree his death.
Many wild rumors arose regarding my father. There were reports, totally untrue, I believe, that in return for his keeping silent about his involvement with them in homosexual activities, a number of rich, prominent men, including a former Governor of New York, set up a million-dollar Swiss bank account for him and agreed to get him out on parole after no more than ten years. Of course he did not serve even those ten years. At the end of three years he was knifed to death in a prison shower by a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy whose black lover had armed him with a knife for protection against the many others who openly desired him. I know for a fact neither the Puerto Rican nor his black lover received any additional punishment for the murder. But the black man was given life imprisonment only a year later when he murdered both his lover and the guard who was fucking him. But as with my father,
life
proved to be short. Two years later, the black man, Ronald Martin, was killed in a knife fight over another young Puerto Rican. This was none of my contriving.
JACK FOSTER'S PART IN ALL THIS WAS APPARENTLY not known to anyone but me and father. Their friends must have known or suspected that my mother was having an affair with my tutorespecially those who lusted after the animal themselvesbut I doubt if they knew my father was, too; or if they did, that such a minor thing could have led my father to bash her head in.
The fact is, the murder was an impulsive act. What jealousy there was, caused my mother to remove my father symbolically as a competitor by biting his cock. What caused my father to kill my mother was sheer animal reaction. It was, I think, self-defense, and to my mind, he should have won acquittal on those grounds. But since he concocted that ill-advised intruder story and refused to budge from it, he signed his own death warrant. Of course I am reasoning from the climate of our present times. Perhaps my father knew his own times well enough to be certain that righteous horror would have rendered his very real self-defense null and void in narrow minds, that his desperate gamble was his one chance.
Even my grandmother seemed not to suspect that Jack was involved, for she tried to persuade him to return as my tutor. I was so certain he'd refuse I didn't even protest. My infatuation with him, which had reached a peak when I saw him fucking my father, ended abruptly when my father brought that brass candlestick down on my mother's head. (Ironically, the brass candlestick had belonged to Jack Foster. He called it a family heirloom but never claimed it after the murder.) I set this as an arbitrary moment. I was not actually aware how dead my feelings for Jack were until that first night at my grandmother's house, when I was unable to masturbate with the image of my former tutor's genitals in my mind's eye. I couldn't even get an erection.
I failed to persuade my stubborn grandmother to send me away to school. I had a succession of tutors who came to Briarwood, most of them with imposing academic credentials but inferior ideas on how to teach. One whole year we rented a villa in Florence, and I learned to speak Italian and French fluently, had fascinating sexual adventures (I was a precocious eleven) with uninhibited, completely natural Italian men, the most gifted and understanding of whom was well into his sixties. This would never have been possible in America, or in
any
country but Italy, I think. He had outstandingly enormous and beautiful, responsive genitals, was generous with them, and somehow contrived to make me an equal partner. With the beauty and magnificence of this experience in mind (my first, actually) I have never been tempted down the path of promiscuity. I will never settle for a sexual experience for its own sake. I had not intended to speak of this, for I do not consider my sex life any of the business of this story, but I think it might be regarded as a presentation of my credentials for judging the sexuality of others, as I shall be doing.
For the sake of fairness, I should mention here that my sexual precocity got an important, perhaps crucial boost at Briarwood. Since my parents had been indifferent to books, my grandmother had bodily transferred my grandfather's extensive library to Briarwood, under the supervision of the asexual young man who had been in charge of it the previous several years before my grandfather's death.
My very first day living at Briarwood I'd probed through the library and was astonished to discover that there was an enormous pornography collection. It wasn't surprising my grandmother never spotted it, for it had been discreetly placed on a mezzanine reached only by a narrow spiral staircase. Neither my grandmother nor my succession of tutors showed curiosity about what books I was reading, so I was able to read pornography extensively and openly. The library was complete. There were heterosexual books, beginning with seventeen different editions of the famous
Fanny Hill,
editions in several languages of the Marquis de Sade and other classic works of sadism and masochism, but the bulk of the collection concerned homosexualitypossibly the best, most complete collection in the world. There were poetic, glowing accounts of sodomy as the ultimate in sexual passion between men, some of them one-copy editions commissioned by my grandfather from famous authors who couldn't resist his offers. One of the best was by a noted British poet. I devoured these glowing apostrophes to sodomy with such pleasure and conviction that by the time I met the right person in Italy, I was exactly ready. I shall also confess that my quick assimilation of French and Italian was in furtherance of reading the many books on sodomy in those languages.
When I became fifteen, six years after the tragedy, my grandmother surprised me by asking if I would like to go away to school, to prepare for college. I had been carefully mustering my own arguments to this end. I suspect she guessed this and had decided the events of my mother's accidental death were sufficiently forgotten and that I would not be singled out and embarrassed.
Also, by taking the initiative, she was able to dictate the school. She selected Cornhill, a small Anglican High Church preparatory school in Connecticut, operated along strict lines the better-known schools had long since abandoned. It dated only from the twenties, but the headmaster carried himself as though it dated from the Norman times of its bleak architecture. He had acquired obscure Holy Orders and persisted in dressing in monks' garb. If he wanted to chastise a boy, he had only to slip his cowl over his close-cropped skull. Words were hardly necessary. He ware sandals summer and winter.
I was so pleased to have won a battle I didn't have to fight that I did not quarrel with her choice. Actually, as you will see, there was a minor family connectionif a million and a half can be considered minor.
I have wondered if she ever studied a catalogue of the school. And would she have sent me there, then? Or did she know? My second day at Cornhill, I was literally stunned into numbness by coming face to face with Jack Foster. Had I changed that much? He showed not the slightest sign that he recognized me. He merely gave me the neutral nod he'd have given any other new boy.
I learned that he'd come to Cornhill five years before, after a crash education course at Columbia. He was athletic director and assistant history master. Six years had made little apparent difference. He looked the same, except that his face had acquired deep lines at the mouth that made him look more sensual. Surprisingly, he wore tight slacks, making it obvious that his genitals were larger than ordinary, even to the unpracticed eye. He no longer wore jockstraps except for sports. I learned that the older boys called him Stud behind his back.
I felt not the slightest pang of desire for him. Nor for anybody. Except for the intricate masturbation fantasies I had evolved, I intended to have no sex life at Cornhill. However I had every hope of finding intellectual companionship. I felt that in a world of boys like myself, at last I would find identity; but I learned quickly that similarities in age and sex and wealth and social position did not change things even a little. I found strangers one's own age and sex and social position even more remote than strangers one might encounter at random. What made it especially difficult was that the other boys in my form had been at Cornhill at least five years, and knew and liked or disliked each other intimately. Only the first form, the youngest, had new boys. Some had rooms on my floor. That first night I heard quiet, lonely crying from one of the rooms and envied the lad for being young enough to cry.
After I had been at Cornhill one unhappy week, another new boy arrived in my form. His name was Jeff Talbot, and like myself (I later learned) he had been taught only by tutors. But he was fourteen, a year younger.
It would have been kind of me, I know, to have taken the new boy in hand, for no one else did, but I continued to hug and treasure my loneliness. I made no gesture towards him.
Two days later, on the athletic field, our form was playing soccer (a ridiculous game I disliked on sight). One of the other boys was trying to reach the newcomer how to kick. He and the others were nearly convulsed at Jeff's miserable efforts.
He's even prettier than your daddy, a voice said in my ear. I didn't have to turn to know who it was.
For the first time in my life I had a feeling of insecurity. People speak of moments that change their whole lives. You'd think in my case it would necessarily have been the moment my father spontaneously bashed in my mother's head with Jack Foster's brass candlestick. My God, the symbolism of that!
But actually it was the moment Jack Foster not only revealed that he knew who I was, but that he had been acutely aware of my father's good looks, though in a pejorative way. I suppose he enjoyed them without approving of them. I am certain he didn't envy them, that he considered God's gift of his heavy genitals quite sufficient. More than that, he felt the need to let me know all this.
For the first time in my life I actively hated a person. My mother's death forced an immediate physical change upon me, in that I'd had to move from one enormous, heavily-guarded estate to another; but curiously it caused no significant mental change. My parents had been taken from me, but they'd been my playthings from the beginning; I enjoyed them but I had not needed them materially. So my memory of them could remain warm.
Jack Foster's cruelly-intended remark did more than reveal him to me. It also revealed Jeff Talbot to me. I suppose my own misery had blinded me not only to Jeff's miseryfar greater than mine, I am sure, for he lacked my inner resourcesbut also revealed his remarkable beauty. It was false to call him even prettier than my father. My father had had black curly hair; Jeff's was very blond, very straight. And my father was handsome, not pretty.
Jeff Talbot
was
pretty. About his beauty was an air of absolute purity, absolute innocencean appearance, I have since discovered, that is far more of a goad to a man's lusts than the most overt appearance of sensuality in a remarkably good-looking boy.
He's even prettier than your daddy, Jack Foster had whispered in my ear. It seemed as if it took forever to pull myself together, yet I know it took no longer than the turning of my head to look at him. It was in my heart to cut him hard, and I could have done it. But for some reason that wasn't yet clear I felt an acute need to dissemble.
I thought I remembered you, I said brightly. And my daddywasn't his hair dark?
I could see I puzzled him. His mind was in high gear. Had he remembered me as brighter, more articulate than I appeared now? I couldn't resist a stiletto dig to his vanity. Aren't you fatter?
No.
Exactly the same weight. I take care of myself.
It might seem odd, but from indifference to Jeff Talbot I suddenly, because of one cruel phrase, became intensely involved. At the moment of Jack Foster's speaking, his beauty, the beauty of his whole person struck me with a physical force. It was, in every sense of the word, an infatuation. With it came the knowledge of the form that infatuation must take. I felt a need to have him need me. I would protect him from the world. I had long felt strong enough to face the whole world myself, for myself. Now I knew I had the strength to face it for the both of us.
I mentioned before my absolute contempt for organized athletic activities. With many the contempt is born out of inability, from ineptness. Mine was an intellectual contempt.
Now, hardly a minute after Foster's remark, I did exactly what
he
should have been doing. I jogged over to where Jeff was nearly in tears at his inability to kick a soccer ball, and I showed him exactly how it should be done. That I could do it at all surprised the others. That I could do it superbly well and teach it quickly and effectively disconcerted Jack Foster. He blew his whistle to indicate that the athletic period was over, though it still lacked fifteen minutes by the clock. I felt a heady triumph. And I played it carefully. I must not reveal my hand too soon. See you around, I said to Jeff, and I went to the shower room.
Jeff seemed sensitive to the moment and I was glad. It would have been natural for him to come stand next to his benefactor in the shower had he been less mature, less astute. He stood by himself.
For the first time I took a good look at Jeff Talbot. His whole body was as exquisite as his face. I had watched him jogging to the shower. His carriage was nearly perfect. He had a natural grace of movement that accented his good looks. If there had been anything even slightly effeminate about his movements I know the others would have been quick to seize upon it.
His genitals were as beautiful as the rest of him, would have tempted me unbearably had I not been so strong-minded. He was circumcised, but lovingly, with a sufficient flap to give his penis character and definition. His testicles were large-average, blended magnificently with the rest, hung free exactly to the length of his penis, which was ample and flawless. It was such a beautiful and rightful part of him that I didn't feel that unreasoning lust I'd once felt at the sight of Jack Foster's overwhelming genitals.
Ironically, Foster showered with us, as though to offer me a comparison. I heard a low whistle at the sight of him unselfconsciously soaping his genitals, getting them far cleaner than absolutely necessary. There was a half-smile on his face. I am certain he was enjoying the reaction of the boys. I felt almost pity for him that it was necessary for him to make such a display of his one distinction.
Where did you learn to kick like that? asked Jamie Crawford, who was in his final year at Cornhill, captain of the soccer team. Ah! So even my small talent took precedence over the display of the great man's genitals! But even he seemed to consider it a pertinent question. He listened for my answer.