Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“You probably feel you’ve been mistreated by me, denied a birthright. You—”

“No,” David protested. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“Jesus,” Margaret said, “the man abandoned you, sonny.”

“I didn’t abandon David, Margaret.”

Margaret laughed.

“I didn’t,” I said again.

“It’s all right,” David said. “I don’t—”

“You don’t mind, I know,” I said angrily. “Look, maybe all I’m saying is that men can take care of themselves. Certainly that’s what I did. The thing is to forget grief, David. If I’ve harmed you by not providing you with myself, then I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken to be harmed.”

“I see,” David said.

“We want you to live with us. I’ve talked this over with Margaret and she agrees,” I said. “You wouldn’t be putting us to any trouble,” I added hastily. Suddenly I foresaw all the objections he would raise, the soft demurs and small effacements that would have to be answered one by one, point by point, until it was obvious to anyone that David did in fact put people to trouble. He surprised me, however.

“I don’t think I could come until June,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to be in school until then,” he said apologetically.

I began to see that my son had the beggar’s trick of spurious withdrawal so that all you finally saw was the hand. His very grammar was deceptively soft. He didn’t think he could come, he was supposed to be in school, as though the world were always arranging itself independently of his will. There was toughness in his style too, I saw, and if I didn’t approve of his methods I did begin to like him a little more. It has always been reassuring to me to have it confirmed that others are as selfish as myself.

“Well, if you can’t come till June you can’t come till June,” I said. “The fact is, David, that your grandmother was never very committal with us where you were concerned. I didn’t even know you were going to school.”

“I go to hairdresser’s school,” David said very softly.

“Hairdresser’s school? You’re a beautician?”

“Yes, sir,” David said sadly. For a moment he allowed us to see his hands.

“Is that what you want?”

“In high school the placement counselor thought it might be something I would be able to do.”

“Cut that out,” I said impatiently.

I saw him grin briefly despite himself. “It might be better if I stayed just where I am,” he said.

“Why?”

“You might change your mind about me. Then where would I be?”

“We could give you a check right now,” I said. “That would protect you.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” David said.

“Suit yourself.”

“My teachers think I ought to come to New York after I graduate.”

“Don’t you ever say you want anything?”

“I’m sorry,” David said. He shifted slightly in his seat, somehow giving the impression that his back was to us.

“David,” I said. “You won’t be any trouble to us, and if your business forces you to be in New York I see no reason why you shouldn’t stay with us. As you see, there’s plenty of room here. I have a great deal to make up to you for, of course, so I would consider it a favor to me if you would stay with us and allow me to force certain advantages on you that I am now in a better position to give.”

“That’s very nice of you both,” David said slyly. “If you’re absolutely sure I won’t be in the way.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Will he, Margaret?”

Margaret laughed.

Then I made a test. I said something under my breath so that David couldn’t quite hear it.

“I beg your pardon?” David said.

“Don’t you ever just say ‘what,’ David?” I asked.

Despite what I may have told David about there being too much talk of fathers and sons, I find that in one respect I was mistaken. Relationship — blood — is a peculiar business. I don’t care how close a friendship is, you can always pull back at the last moment. There’s the possibility of betrayal. The same thing in a family is a higher treason. Somehow one is closer to a first cousin than he is to a wife, for it isn’t merely an alliance of choice, of the will. I’ve spoken to Morty about this and he says I’ve stumbled on an anthropological truth. He points out that all tribes, no matter how primitive, have ceremonies of divorce, but that no ceremony exists anywhere for the undoing of a relationship between kinsmen. My first cousin is my first cousin, no matter how much we may come to hate each other. It’s nature, a fact the way a stone is a fact. How much more interesting, then, is the bond between a father and a son. I never imagined it. I wouldn’t look at him twice in the street perhaps, but he is my son and that makes the difference.

Because David is mine I try to change him. I come into a room where he is deferentially dematerialized against a wall (his old habit of blending with furniture of any style is still unbroken; indeed, I suspect he deliberately dresses for rooms he knows he will inhabit), and I call in a loud voice, “David, where are you, son?” It embarrasses him to be flushed out this way, but he does not yield: next time it is the same. The boy’s will is like iron.

Margaret is left out of this; she understands that David is not her son. We have been trying to have children together. She wants them badly, but mine is the more urgent need. I must have them! We are neither of us ardent but we have used no devices since David came to live with us. We make love with an extraordinary frequency and there is a sense of emergency about our throes. In a way that I do not understand, I see that if I have a destiny at all it is to be a father. It’s not that I am putting aside for that rainy day when there will be no more Boswells. I am not concerned with perpetuating my name; that kind of immortality has nothing to do with me. But were I a king whose succession depended upon getting sons I could not be more concerned. (I perceive that as I grow older I become more obsessive rather than less. If one day this leads me into a park where I will sit, my fingers inside my corrupt overcoat fondling my erection, waiting for the lunchtime passage of one particular small schoolgirl, that’s just too bad. There are only two kinds of intelligences, the obsessive and the perspectual. All dirty old men come from the former and all happy men from the latter, but I wouldn’t trade places. In this life frustration is the Promethean symbol of effort.) Fatherhood, I think, fatherhood! I lust for sons and daughters, but nothing happens. The more I pump Margaret the less good it seems to do. I asked her if there was something wrong.

“Wrong, what do you mean wrong?”

“In the old days in Italy, did you ever have an abortion?”

She was very angry and for several days wouldn’t allow me in her bed. My God, how those days were torture. I had never felt so strong, my seed so ripe, never experienced greater impatience, the sense of time so uselessly destroyed. I realized that I could not risk offending her that way again and I became conciliatory, fatuous in the pains I took with her. Yet the question, which I had not meant to ask, had implications. I had never really minded Margaret’s promiscuity, nor had I any reason to suspect that after we were married she was unfaithful. Before David came I might have forgiven an infidelity with a wave of the hand, but now I had a horror of raising another man’s son. After I had apologized, I immediately re-risked everything by telling Margaret that if I ever discovered she had gone to bed with another man I would kill them both.