The Brothers Boswell Read online

  Now he begins to understand.

  I point to the secondary stair again, no question whatsoever in my voice. “I will expect you to wait there until I return, or near enough to that spot. Do not make me hunt for you. We may need to draw away on very short notice. And about our journey today, I will expect you to say nothing, ever, to anyone. You promised earlier to keep close as the grave. If you keep that promise then today will be the last we see of one another, Higgs. We understand one another, then.”

  He wishes to say something, no doubt more than one thing, but I step out of the boat and then take the steps up to the public walkway at a dogtrot. From the upper railing, I see him sitting stunned in his little green boat, scalp shining in the midday sun, still holding out the crown and the doll-sized book before him.

  On another day and from another source, these would be river booty—unexpected and odd, but booty all the same. He’d have spent the rest of the afternoon slumped in a dram shop, then swaggered home with these objects to his flat in the St. Giles slum, home to his battered-looking wife and ill-nourished six-year-old.

  But it is today, and they are from me, and although Gil Higgs now finds that he keenly does not want these things, he really has very little choice in the matter.

  * * *

  IN THE EVENT, I realize, much of my design for this afternoon has come to rest on the slender backs of birds. The mudlark who brought back the tale of the Argonauts was the first. Only a quick afterthought, yet he turned out to be a bold little stroke: that particle of conversation—passing between two inveterate talkers determined to cram an entire, lovely July day with nonstop talk—that snippet would otherwise have evanesced, passed off into nothingness.

  Of course, if I were in my right mind, I would have let it pass off. The world needs many things, but Johnson’s thoughts on the centrality of his own labors and preoccupations are not among them.

  Still, I am sentimental, and what I can capture of their day, I will keep.

  And so the lark was only the first of his kind. More time and preparation by far has gone into finding and training my venerable old Greenwich canary, and from him I expect a great deal more. That is who I seek as I stroll past the Hospital’s marble statue of George II, who oversees the slow stream of tired and maimed sailors as it empties off the river, year after long year.

  It is a Saturday, sun-kissed, and Greenwich is a popular place for a frolic, especially the Park and the grassy slopes of One Tree Hill. The Grand Square pulses with Londoners, rich and poor, but their gowns and frocks are never quite gay enough to overcome the dull blue omnipresence of the pensioners themselves.

  They are all about you in Greenwich, these superannuated sailors, no matter where on the extensive grounds you stand, slow-moving beings still got up in their naval uniforms, empty pant legs and shirtsleeves pinned up smartly, some with large chunks of skull left behind on the floors of distant oceans, reiteration after blue reiteration of the same banal, horrific theme. Some few of these, their wounds disturbingly fresh, shuffle along in an opium haze.

  Every so often, though, in the palette of Greenwich color, there comes a dab of sharp mustard-yellow. Military discipline is maintained at the Hospital, everything but the lash, and the old sailors meekly obey, by and large. They couldn’t be more grateful for their care, after all. But there are exceptions: the occasional instigators and malingerers, the sneak thieves and the rheumy drunks. By way of punishment, these men are forced into yellow regimentals, solid yellow from the corners of their hats to the piping of their breeches. Canaries, in the pensioners’ lexicon.

  The idea is to shame the man in question, as if there were not already more than enough shame in these grounded sailors to go round. The idea is to make the guilty man contagious in the eyes of his fellows, as if they were not all of them already shunned as untouchable by the world outside the Hospital. In this way, even the lowliest pensioner can pass on to a canary some portion of the abuse heaped on him by Fate. Each man spits upon a man lower still. Therapeutic, so the thinking runs, for all concerned.

  But the yellow uniform has at least one unintended benefit: if one comes to Greenwich looking specifically to suborn a man, it is helpful to know at a glance which souls are the most spectacularly corrupt.

  When I visited this past Wednesday, I chatted with several of the canaries I spied in the Park and along the riverfront. They are in general pathetically eager for talk, much put-upon and eager to demonstrate their innocence. Eventually, I found a man precisely to my needs.

  And it is this man who rises abruptly from his bunk when I come to the end of a wide, paneled dormitory passage and knock on the wall of his cubicle. All in yellow, but with his hat apparently stripped off and tossed down upon the floor before the wardrobe, so that his white hair rides up in a fright. Face deeply lined, and eyes the troubled red of a man who has been so drunk for so many years that at best he can now be parched, but never sober. A vast tuber of a nose. He limps toward me on a long peg, stretching to the floor from mid-thigh. “One leg or no,” he told me Wednesday by the river, winking slyly as we shook hands for the first time, “I am part of me a very devil, sir.” Now he does not stop a pace away, but comes stumping to just within two or three inches of my face. There is about him the reek of pipe tobacco and decay. He peers up at me, and his voice is all but indistinguishable, the whisper of a well-trained conspirator: “You’ve brought what you promised?”

  I lower my own voice to nothing: “I have, Grandfather, never fear.”

  He nods once vehemently, tugs at my sleeve, and draws me after him down the passage. We pass cubicle after doorless cubicle, most empty because of the sunny day, with rugs on the floors and mementoes decorating the walls, each a shipshape little still-life of unwanted retirement. Then the old man opens a door off to the left, and we pass suddenly into a dank little brick hallway, unlit, and from the sharp smell of soap and wet I can only imagine that at the end of the connector lies a washing room and some of the small army of washerwomen who provide the pensioners their two clean shirts weekly.

  But the women’s voices are distant and come no nearer; the old man, for his part, clearly doesn’t expect them to do so. No doubt this is only one of several bolt-holes he has stumbled upon in his stretch at Greenwich.

  He reaches up and pats the buttons of my coat, impatiently, like a child.

  I reach inside my coat, down into the long, flat bottom pocket. He watches my hand, and then the tin flask in it, with a pathetic mixture of avidity and suspicion. I place the flask in his outstretched hands, but as he traces the smooth shiny surface, he narrows one blood-streaked eye. “Swear to me now, gentle friend,” he whispers, “swear ’tis good red claret. Swear ’tis true French red you have here. None of your slag port.”

  With a finger under the base of the flask, I urge it to his lips. “French as the Queen’s under-breeches, Grandfather.”

  And then he has it pressed tight to his lips, the eyes squeezed desperately shut, one gulp after another rolling down his gullet. He pulls away at four swallows, runs a hand over his mouth, then smiles dreamily and suddenly stamps his peg. No doubt it has been a year or more since he’s drunk anything but the heaviest, sweetest port, or faux Bordeaux, cheap English wine mixed with spirits at best, boiled turnip at worst. For a man accustomed to proper French red—and my old canary was Master of Accounts on a trader plying the Channel for years before being pressed into the Navy—there are few fates worse than a steady diet of Methuen portugal. And even that he has been ordered to quit.

  “Oh, Christ, but that’s lovely, sir.” He smacks his lips, meditatively. “And best of all, you know, it don’t give you the headache. There’s the magic of the French.”

  “And I may assume you have your notebook and pen, as we discussed?”

  He pats his own pocket, before stowing the flask carefully beneath his coat. He gives me the sly wink again, something of a trademark gesture, I begin to see. “That I do. Three good short turkey quills. Nibs I’v
e slit myself, just so, just as I like them.”

  He seems buoyed suddenly, sharper, more competent. The wine has quickly settled his nerves, and the promise of another flask when he is finished today must be comforting as well. Yet it is not merely the wine, present and future, that has him squaring his rickety shoulders and smoothing back his wild hair like a strolling player. It is the fact that today is palpably different from other days.

  Today he is not a cripple and an outcast, but a part of something, and something just a wee bit murky as well. He believes, from a hint dropped here or there, that I am pursuing advantage in a lawsuit through extraordinary means. It has been a good long while since he has had a hand in something murky, after a lifetime of smuggling and cooking a ship’s books, and I can see that he relishes the return of the thrill.

  More, it is a job that requires his talents with pen and ink, his mind. He may not have penned the dictionary, but my old man can read and write quite capably, and that is more than even most able-bodied men can say. Watching him navigate the broad dormitory hall, perched a bit taller now atop his peg, I have a sense of my own good works today. Not at every moment, and not in every way, of course, but it is a comforting thought just the same.

  WE ARE STANDING just within sight of the landing, in the shade of the Chapel pillars, when James and Johnson come puffing up the slippery landing stairs. It is foolishness, really, to stand out in the open, next to a man dressed all in mustard-yellow, but we are far enough removed—and the crowds sizeable enough—that I take the risk. I must see what James is about to do, has planned for days to do upon lighting at Greenwich, the performance he has already proleptically described in several letters to friends.

  When he and Johnson have stepped off the stair and onto the public walk, James goes one pace farther to the well-cropped grass. From his pocket he draws a crisply folded piece of paper. It is a copy of Johnson’s “London,” a gloomy meditation on English glory, a poem that James adores and knows by heart. He does not need that show copy, believe me. I cannot hear the words now issuing from my brother’s mouth, but I know them well enough:

  On Thames’s banks in silent thought we stood,

  Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood;

  Struck with the seat which gave Eliza birth,

  We kneel, and kiss the consecrated earth.

  Then, so help me God, James actually gets down on one stout knee, and from there to his hands, among the grass and the mucky dirt. And he lowers himself still further, abases himself still further, face even with the muddy feet of passersby, and kisses the very clods of the earth themselves.

  Even knowing James as I do, I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes.

  Pedestrian traffic does not stop—after all, these are many of them Londoners and used to the odd spectacle—but heads turn, up and down the walk. James finally gets to his feet with obvious glee. Johnson, somehow, looks not embarrassed but modestly approving. This wonderfully spontaneous tribute accomplished, they turn together toward the city, and their first thought—before the Observatory, before a tour of the Hospital—will be of food and drink, generous portions of both.

  Altogether predictable, as I say.

  And while they are packing their bellies tight again, an amanuensis will be seated neither too close nor too far from them, and he will take down the most minute details of their meal-time banter. James likes to speak of the accuracy of his journal. I intend to show him accuracy, in the representation of this day above all others.

  “Go now, Grandfather. Fly to them,” I urge my one-legged canary. And after he has done so, while he is making his way with admirable subtlety behind the slow-moving pair, I whistle a snatch of Dibdin’s “Ballad of Greenwich.” Livelier than Johnson, Dibdin, and nearer the mark:

  My precious limb was lopped off—

  I, when they’d eased my pain,

  Thanked God I was not popped off,

  And went to Sea again.

  MY DAY is meticulously ordered by the workings of other people’s stomachs, and so I have a comfortable slice of time before James and Johnson will leave The Old Ship, the dank little restaurant in Fisher Alley that they have chosen. In that time, there are two places I must go, and the first is the interior of the Chapel itself. Unfortunately, it is far from empty, but the visitors are at least suitably hushed, and by sitting in the pew nearest the pulpit I am able to imagine myself more or less alone with the Lord.

  Afternoon light streams in from the twin banks of windows, one atop the other, giving the impression that the Lord is in fact at home. The cinnamon smell I took in at the riverbank is here as well, somehow, as though exhaled by the candles lighting the altar.

  I bow my head, and after a moment I thank Him for his most recent gifts.

  I thank him for restoring my health, when the doctors at Plymouth had given it up for lost. I thank him for making me whole again, or nearly so. My eyes are shut tightly, and out of nowhere I feel the lids stinging, the hot threat of tears. But I clear my mind for a moment or two, and the sting gradually eases.

  Without wishing to take up a great deal of either His time or my own, I detail once again my grudges, and the injuries these two men—one my own brother—have done me. I apologize for threatening to take a kind of violence, a kind of punishment into my own hands. And I swear to use these only as a true last resort, should the two of them persist in what has become their two-man conspiracy to deny my place in their lives.

  And I couldn’t mean all of this any more deeply and sincerely, I promise you: if they will but acknowledge me to one another—and that seems truly a crumb to insist upon—then I will be worthy of their acknowledgment.

  I place my hand on the Book of Common Prayer, and I swear it. And the Lord knows my heart, and I feel distinctly that He approves this means of resolution.

  For the Lord God knows that almost never in our two short lives has there been a moment when James and I have not struggled over this precious abstraction, this odd English thing, Samuel Johnson.

  I bring the Book to my lips and press them to it tightly.

  THE FIRST EDITION of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was made up of two oversized folio volumes, which our father ordered bound in discreet black calf. It was a monster, the book. For most of my young life I had to ferry the matched volumes about our Edinburgh flat cradled in both my arms, terrified that I would drop them and that a significant number of the things in the world would wink out of existence.

  The title page was struck off in black and crimson, I remember, a stirring and weighty sight. The full title was one of the first short poems I ever got by heart: A Dictionary of the English Language, In Which The Words are deduced from their Originals, And Illustrated in their Different Significations, By Examples from the best Writers, To Which Are Prefixed, A History of the Language, And An English Grammar. Johnson’s own name was stamped beneath in what looked like bright red blood.

  The book was shelved, always, never lying out and to hand, as one might expect; my father held Johnson’s politics in contempt, and would not give the book the satisfaction. And while James and I were free to consult the two volumes, we understood without being told that my father would be displeased if we were to seem to study them.

  How displeased would he have been, had he known that for his sons it quickly became far and away the most crucial and frequently consulted book in the entire library, our common secular bible, our linguistic grimoire?

  James was already determined to find his fortune in England, even as a boy, and the Dictionary was the earliest means of systematically refashioning himself, into a man of learning rather than of mere precocity, into an Englishman rather than an unclubbable Scot. From the age of fourteen, he and the great book were never far apart, and introducing a Scotticism into his speech became unthinkable, unless directly prodded to it by our father. Most desirable was the acquisition of purely English locutions and slang, sly native bits that might be dropped ca
sually to me in our walks about Edinburgh.

  Given that primacy, and given that it was James who nearly always dictated our games, it was inevitable that we would come to play with the Dictionary, to compete with the Dictionary, and ultimately to beat out one another’s brains—if at all possible—with the Dictionary. More than swordsmanship, with which we were infatuated, more even than lawn bowls, proficiency in Johnsonian English became the competition sine qua non between us.

  Between these word matches we watched for quiet moments, when the two volumes were sitting alone in the library, and then we would each shut ourselves up with them, squirreling away strange or impressive or incomprehensibly Latinate words, stocking up on Johnson’s own quibbles and qualifications, so that our challenges to one another’s choices might bear his stamp. The words marched in two long columns down each page, and our small fingers traced these columns reverently, up and down, stroking the book like a familiar.

  Over the years, the word competition evolved and complicated, but the name was always simplicity itself: the Dictionary Game. Sets of unwritten rules crystallized, the first and most important of which was that the game only ever properly began with an insult. An English insult, of course.

  We played the Dictionary Game hundreds of times, not including hundreds of fragments of games, but one afternoon I remember more sharply than any other. James was seventeen, I fourteen. I was in our shared bedroom, meandering through a volume of Sir Charles Grandison, not the first novel I’d read but the first I had read with my father’s active consent. It was near dusk, a trace of late autumn light still floating through the window, my mother and youngest brother off on a visit somewhere, my father still hearing pleas at the Court of Session.