The Brothers Boswell Read online

  James gives a little answering cry of delight. For him, this is the best of all possible worlds: his name has opened the door for him, but he can tell himself his own fictions might yet have done the trick. I have no such option.

  GENTLEMAN HAS HIS arm draped around James’s shoulder, and, as he steers us through the dwarfish entry rooms and then through the gigantic auditorium doors and down through a sea of benches toward the pit, he is talking about everything under the sun. And although I cannot catch all of it, it is clear that he is talking a bit desperately about every thing under the sun.

  Gentleman knows well enough that for James there is only one topic, Sylvia, but he threads his choice new tidbits of Sylvia in and through a jumble of other things not-Sylvia.

  “Shockingly block-headed, this man Thomas,” he says, directing his talk down into James’s ear. “Once overturned a barrow full of nine-pound shot trying to simulate thunder for a production of Lear, which we may yet play this season, by the way, with myself in the lead role. Digges always nips the part for himself, but with him off to parts unknown there’s a chance yet for Francis, never fear. I’ve always wanted to run mad across the stage, beard flying. Rend my garments, you know.

  “Your Sylvia plays Cordelia, not surprisingly, and I want you to imagine, James, the transport into which the audience is thrown by the sight of her, in nothing but a wrapper of sheer green silk, weeping over her dear demented father. Kissing the old man’s hand with those faultless lips.”

  James introduced me to Gentleman and the others of the company last summer, but only after preparing me at the flat beforehand. I could see how important it was for James that I fit in by how methodically we swotted up for that meeting.

  “A likeable rogue,” James had catalogued Gentleman then, “an impecunious Irish army-officer, full of agreeable nonsense. Thirty-one or thirty-two, I would say. He can play a highwayman or a clergyman with equal ease. Written some damned fine plays, and one day may succeed there. Was to buy into the management of the Canongate, but he’s lost that somehow. But he does manage a bit when Digges is away. You’ll love him, John. All the world loves a soldier with poetry in his soul.”

  This afternoon there’s a wheedling edge to Gentleman’s baritone. The Irish army-officer must find himself particularly impecunious this week. He sounds like a peruke-maker with too many heads to peddle.

  His talk has the desired effect, however: James listens raptly to the whole stream of patter, and, by the time we enter the pit and take in the actors rehearsing on the stage, he is all but saucer-eyed in anticipation.

  THE WOMAN LOOKS charmingly, no denying it. The play today is The Careless Husband, Old Cibber’s frothy vehicle, and so rather than simple Mrs. Cowper, second-rate actress exiled from London to the provinces, she is Lady Betty Modish, a turn-of-the-century flirt and a beauty of the highest order. Brownish ringlets loose down the back, emerald gown covered over with lace and gold embroidery. Black plaster mouche at the cheekbone.

  I have seen Mrs. Cowper several times dressed for the street, and she is an agreeable-looking woman in her late twenties. Agreeable— no angel, James’s fixation notwithstanding. Her mouth is a bit big and her eyes a bit small. And she is top-heavy, to my eye. Once married illicitly to her music-master, she has somehow lost him in the workings of the world and now allows herself the freedoms of a widow. But the light of the candles, the revealing fifty-year-old fashions and the unabashed way she wears them as she turns to us—it all comes together in a very pretty picture.

  She breaks off the exchange of lines to shout down to us. “Mr. Boswell! You are as good as your word. Not only in the audience, but in fact the entire audience. Well done. And you’ve brought me roses! I assume they are for me and not Mr. Dexter.”

  James gives a deep bow, saying nothing. As he does so, Gentleman drops me a wink, a smile hovering at his lips.

  “Shall we continue?” she shouts down.

  “With all my heart, Sylvia,” James shouts back, voice also pitched to reach the boxes. I can tell he is half-tempted to vault onto the stage.

  In another moment, the three of us are slouching on a bench, center pit, four rows back. It is James’s bench, his very particular chosen bench. He says that he must be in a constant fixed location, like a star in the heavens, should Sylvia choose to direct a look or a line his way.

  Scratched into this bench with a case-knife are these words: This is the bench of James Boswell, Esq. Any man else sits here at his peril. James, for all his outright possessiveness toward this company, could never have carved the words himself—in most things, in Edinburgh, he is still acutely aware of his social position. And so Gentleman did it for him, near the end of last summer’s run, not long in fact after James confided that he planned to publish a serial review of the company’s next season.

  It is a cozy, half-articulated relationship they have developed over the last year and a half. James desires a thing he cannot name, which thing Gentleman then procures; for his part, Gentleman has need of things James can easily supply while remaining for the most part unaware. For James it is acceptance and access, to the theater, to Mrs. Cowper, to the closed club of players. For Gentleman, it is association, with a coming Laird, with the son of a Justice in a city where plays are still nominally against the law, where players must fake a concert and bill their own show as an odd bit thrown in free.

  And it is money. It is grubby money: James has already agreed to allow Gentleman to dedicate a tricked-up version of Oroonoko to him later this year.

  But of course their desires are partially in conflict. James wants to swim in the illusion that he is a kindred spirit, while Gentleman’s needs are predicated on their essential differences. Hence the half-articulation. Hence the way they often speak to one another while each letting their glance rest somewhere else.

  Such as now. James is confiding, as he searches his waistcoat for threads and stains. “The last time you played The Careless Husband, Gentleman, I told Sylvia that the character of Lady Betty has always made me—how did I put it?—weak in the boots. Lady Betty’s beauty and her cruelty are both unmatched. She treats Lord Morelove like a tomcat, I said, to be stroked and then kicked.

  “And then I looked uncomfortable, as though I had something serious to say, and admitted that it was hard for me to lose myself in the character when played by herself. Why so, she asked, more than a little miffed. Why, madam, says I, because while you come up to Lady Betty in beauty, you are far too kind to touch her in cruelty. And I thought that a sweet bit of flattery.”

  “A little slap and a little tickle,” Gentleman puts in approvingly.

  James gives a mock-bow in his seat, then goes on. “But she swatted it aside almost immediately, and made just to take it as an insult. We play Cibber again next week, Mr. Boswell, she said, and I want you to be present. I want you to sit in your seat, she went on, and avoid chit-chat and fooling with orange girls. I want you to pay strict attention to whether or not I reach both of Lady Betty’s marks. Have I your promise, then? she demanded of me. And John, Francis, what can a man do in such a case but merely acquiesce?” He pulls back, a hand at his cravat, eyelids fluttering for effect.

  “Funny you should say so, James,” Gentleman says. He is sprawled over the far side of the bench, one long leg resting on the arm of the bench in front of us. “Very funny, that. Because as you know, the Canongate makes it one of its unfailing rules to forbid visits to the actors’ tiring rooms.”

  “No one knows it better. No one suffers from it more.”

  “You bear up well under it. I’ve never seen a man return so regularly to suffer. But even you must sympathize with us a bit. Guarding the actresses, and by the way contracting for a year’s wage, which no company in England will do, I can tell you, these are our only means of holding really top talent—a Mrs. Cowper, a West Digges, yes, even a Francis Gentleman—this far north of the Tweed.

  “But something is different today. I have no idea why, but Mrs. Cowper has ask
ed me the favor of allowing you backstage for a few moments before her performance and a few more moments after. This from her, mind you, very much from her, none of my hamfisted meddling.”

  “Don’t toy with me, Gentleman.”

  “Never! On my life, Boswell! She has a plan for the day. I am purely an instrument, a tool.”

  James is running over the mental permutations. “You are serious, then! Lord, it will be charming to see her before the play begins. But seeing her just after she exits is most to my taste. When the assumed character still clings to her, warm from the stage. When she’s still two women at once in her own mind. That will be unbeatable. That will be staggering.”

  Gentleman examines James carefully. James does not realize it, but each time they meet, Gentleman’s knowledge of him grows twice as fast as James’s knowledge of Gentleman. Whatever else one might say of him, Gentleman is a quick study.

  James leans over to pat Gentleman amiably on the shoulder, then suddenly swivels to me. I say very little in most situations, little compared to what I think might be said. But with James in company, I speak less than little, who knows why. Now he wants my confirmation of his triumph. “What say you to that, John? Is she not slashingly bold?”

  I raise and lower my eyebrows, as though to say nothing more.

  But James is waiting, and Gentleman is looking at me with some amusement, so I go on. “What do I think? I think Mrs. Cowper wants you there beforehand to prove to you and herself that she is Lady Betty, and wants you there afterward to prove to you both that she is not. To send you home without so much as a kiss.”

  Gentleman signals to someone downstage that he’ll be there in a moment. He prepares to haul his long body upright. But before standing, he slits his eyes at me. “So you think it’ll come to nothing, then, young John.”

  “Not nothing. James will have what he really wants, she will have what she really wants. And Cibber’s creaky farce will seem full of the intrigue it normally lacks.”

  Gentleman claps his hands and hoots at that and begins to walk down the aisle, strides lengthening as he goes, but he turns back to point at me and call, “A deep one, your little brother, James. Very deep. Give me two minutes, Mr. Boswell, and then make your way backstage. The tiring rooms are yours.”

  James waves a hand by way of assent and then turns to me, and for a moment I think he’s going to say something critical or cutting, something that will spoil the day for me. But instead he gives a gentle bridegroom’s smile and says, “Look at me carefully, John. I will want you to tell me if I look at all different when I come back.” He looks off toward the spikes guarding the stage. “I expect I shall.”

  He brings his face a bit closer to mine for effect. And for an instant I do look: I look at his dark but mild eyes, the soft chin and the lips of a putto, all this thrown somehow into question by the wild, fleshy exclamation point of his nose. It is a cherub’s face with the mark of the goat dead center.

  No wonder the world’s doors either swing wide or slam shut as he approaches.

  5

  I AM SITTING high in a gilded box, last in a short gilded row of such boxes along the left-hand wall of the theater. Beside me sits Gentleman. Ostensibly we have come to the box to make sure that the play carries well to this distance, but neither of us is very concerned with the trickery on the stage. Just below the gold lip of the box, my breeches are open, curling away from my linen like some dull fustian peel. Gentleman’s hand is lost inside that linen, the impecunious Irish fist pumping slowly up and down the length of me. I am confused by this, and I am in an ecstasy of a sort I cannot even begin to understand.

  Ah, now the mystery is solved. This was why all the rush, then, Johnny. This was why you couldn’t be late, not even a second. Not even a tittle.

  So what is this thing happening, then? Is it something real, or is it an acted, an imagined thing?

  Come, now—you know, Johnny, that it’s both. You know that.

  IT HAS HAPPENED the last two times I’ve come to the theater with James, and no doubt would have happened the first time had Gentleman been surer of his reception. It is a thing I am forever meaning to haul out of my memory and pore over and take apart and know, but never do somehow, a thing I’ve been meaning for almost a year to do something about.

  But it is too slippery to catch, because it exists only here in the Canongate, and only in the high or the far or the dark places of the theater. It exists only with James backstage, as now, or out for a short ale with one or another of the actors. It exists only when Gentleman and I are left alone.

  Which is to say it exists only when Gentleman stages it.

  Both of us now have our eyes on the little lighted figures in the distance, but he is speaking to me in a low voice as he strokes, coaxing words that are hard to make out, with the exception of the word Younger. It is his constant joke, to call James the Older and me the Younger Boswell; but when we are like this, he drops the article and calls me just Younger, again and again, low enough so that it becomes almost a simple growl in his throat, indistinguishable from the word hunger. It seems only partially an endearment, and partially a reminder to Gentleman himself of what it is about me that excites him.

  Even before I know that it is time, he bends down—bends down for all the world as though he has dropped his rehearsal schedule or needs to lace his boot—and takes me into his mouth. The timing of it is all but perfect, and he has only to draw in his cheeks softly once or twice or three times before it is done. In the very last moment, I have the volition to reach out my hands and take his head in them, my fingers sliding into the soft black waves of his hair and understanding its quality, understanding the living reality of it, and of this raw, fantastical act, for the space of a few heartbeats.

  But almost immediately, I can feel him preparing to pull away, and I remove my hands from his hair. The wetness from his mouth, the infinitesimal remnant of himself that stays when he retreats, remains with me for only the better part of an instant. Then quickly it cools, becomes nothingness.

  I straighten and sort my clothing. All evidence of the thing has vanished.

  Gentleman straightens in his seat and fixes me with his eye once before smiling and ruffling my hair. “Imagine,” he says to me then, leaning back against the gilding, “what we might find time to do if your brother actually does buy an interest in this theater?”

  It’s not what I expected, although in this strange new play without a name there is never any way for me to know what to expect. So I say nothing.

  “Or imagine if you should someday inherit, Johnnie. Imagine that. We’d have a playhouse built special in Ayrshire. Stranger things have happened.”

  I nod, because he’s right. Stranger things have.

  We make our way downstairs, Gentleman stretching himself and talking loudly about this feature or that of the theater, inching back bit by bit into the Gentleman who is nothing more than he seems when I am with James, Francis Gentleman the impresario, the player.

  As we circle back through the lobby, we pass Thomas, now sorting oranges into two piles just outside the auditorium, culling the fresh from the spoiled. He gives me a look as we pass, a knowing look, and when I glance back, he suddenly pitches me a piece of fruit.

  But for whatever reason, I’m slow to pluck it from the air, and the fruit sails past me, thumping down a dark stair winding to the cellar. Gentleman doesn’t break stride at the noise. I can only follow him, and as a result I have no way of knowing whether it was a ripe or a rotten thing that Thomas was trying to say.

  And of course after all of this, the performance itself is something of an afterthought, an anticlimax.

  EDINBURGH IS A vertical city, an encyclopedia of elevations. Living near the top of it, we have no choice but to rush down whenever we leave the flat, no choice but to climb slowly and deliberatively when we return home. I know where I am in a day by which muscles I’m in the process of exhausting.

  Now James and I trace our way back up the
High Street, past the Nether Bow and then the darkened Tron Church; eventually we pass the Luckenbooths, all shuttered with the exception of a dealer in sweets, a shrewd wild-haired old man who takes our measure from a distance and switches to offering ballads and kid gloves by the time we pass.

  “You seem tired, Johnny,” James offers as we pass the booth without so much as a word to the man. We leave him standing in his tiny wooden box, waving his cheap calfskin.

  “I am,” I tell him. And it is true—my anxiety and anticipation, my pleasures and enchantments and guilts and disenchantments have all combined to register as lethargy. Only a stray ripple of remembered excitement fights the feeling; my legs have no strength, but there’s still a part of me that wants to run back to the Canongate. “Cibber has that effect on me. I watch him, and he makes me almost unbearably tired.”

  “That’s because you’re offended by farce,” James says, chuckling to himself. “Cibber means nothing insulting by it. It is his native language.”

  James himself seems slightly subdued, introspective. He looks about him as he did earlier this afternoon, noting intriguing people and carriages, but conveying less of the impression that he’d like to embrace and consume them one after another. Now he seems serene, content but reflective, searching somehow.

  “You’ve yet to tell me about your audiences backstage,” I prompt.

  James swings to look at me, then faces front again. He smiles, very slowly and luxuriously. “Were you right in your prediction, is what you mean. I think you were. Sylvia was quite chaste, and I do believe that was part of allowing me back after the performance, to demonstrate chastity. Score one for John today.”

  “I wasn’t trying to score points, Jemmie.”

  “Ah, so you say, but I was right too.” He holds a finger in the air. “I did manage to see her fresh from the stage, just as the character of Lady Betty was in the process of melting away. A heart-stopping spectacle. An actress is a miraculous thing, John. I’ve told you before that there are several men trapped inside of me, a hundred men, and to be forced to be only one would be my death. I knew today, watching Betty melt away and Sylvia gather herself up again, that I can only marry an actress. A woman equally many in number. Laugh, but that is the God’s honest truth.”