Between Men

I have written a few decent things recently. My yarn about the Wild West was good: solid. But no, not much else. Most of it blather. Now critics are saying I never knew what I was doing. That the good things—The Red Badge, “The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Blue Hotel”—were just happy hits. Damn them! I took six weeks to write “The Blue Hotel.” I had such a strong feeling that the Swede felt fated to die, that he was shaking in fear in anticipation of his death that very day, though in reality he had nothing or no one to fear, and in the end he was the one who provoked the violence. Even in Cora’s newspaper columns I could always put in a good word or two—something fresh and queer. Most writing is self-dictating: yard goods. I was the only one of my generation to add a beat here and steal a note there. Rubato, it’s called in music; Huneker told me that.

I’d written forty pages of my boy-whore book, Garland read them over and then with all his Wisconsin gravity in that steel-cutting voice he said, “These are the best pages you’ve ever written and if you don’t tear them up, every last word, you’ll never have a career.” He handed the pages back to me and asked, “No copies? This is the one and only version?”

I couldn’t help feeling that Hamlin envied me my pages. He’d never written anything so raw and new, so modern, and urban. No, he has his rolling periods and his yarns about his father playing the defeated pioneer farmer in the Dakotas, but he couldn’t have written my pages. No, Hamlin with his lips so white they looked as if he’d kissed a snowman, all the whiter because wreathed by his wispy pale brown beard and mustaches. His eyes sparkled with flint chips and he seemed so sure of himself. Of course, I was writing about an abomination though Elliott was just a kid, not a mildewed chump like Wilde—though you can find plenty of folks in England who knew him and would still defend him. We all hear them champion Wilde now, though no one stepped forward during the trial. Yeats was the only person who made sense when he talked about Wilde. Wilde’s trial and the publication of The Red Badge occurred in the same year, 1895. But he represented an old Europe, vicious and stinking of putrefaction, whereas the Badge is a solid thing, trim and spare.

I threw my forty pages in the fire. It made me sick. A pearl worth more than all my tribe. And all through the lunch with its oysters and baron of beef I kept thinking the oysters were salty from my tears and the blood gathering in the silver serving dish—I thought that blood was my blood. I could barely eat and I couldn’t follow the conversation with all its New York knowingness, reporter’s shoptalk. Of course Hamlin hated my painted boy; he was even then scribbling his Boy Life on the Prairie in all its banal decency. Not that I’d ever dreamed of defending my little Elliott, but I knew his story was more poignant than scabrous.

God, I’m sounding absurd with my blood and tears and my resentment of old Ham. Hamlin was the one who gave me the fifteen dollars I’d needed to redeem the second half of The Badge from the typist. He was the one who had told me I was doing great things and got Maggie to William Dean Howells, and then Howells launched my career. Despite all the labels flying around in those days—I was supposed to be “an impressionist” and then there was Garland’s “veritism” and Howells’s “realism”—despite the commitment to the gritty truth, my truth, the truth about little Elliott, was too much for them to take on board. Hamlin had been roundly criticized for saying in one of his books that a conductor had stared at a female passenger “like a sex-maniac.” That was enough to win him universal censure in America. No untoward deeds—just the word “sex-maniac,” and next thing you know he was being compared to the sulfurous Zola himself. Oh, he’s considered the devil’s own disciple because his heroes sweat and do not wear socks and eat cold huckleberry pie. . . .

The only one who could cope with my Elliott was that mad, heavy-drinking, fast-talking, know-everything Jim Huneker. Jim would drink seventeen beers in an evening out and feel nothing. He’d teach piano to an all-Negro class at the conservatory off Seventeenth Street and then retire to his boardinghouse where he was in love with a married woman named Josephine.

Her husband, a Polish merchant, never touched her, so Huneker said. He’d just stare enraptured at her V-shaped corsage and succumb to a red-faced paroxysm of secret onanism. Huneker seduced the unhappy lady just by touching her, the first time a man had touched those perfect breasts. But he was a busy one—he once gave a dinner for all three of his ex-wives. He had a long, straight Roman nose he was so proud of that he liked to speak in profile, which could be disconcerting. His very black crinkly hair sat on his white brow like a bad wig, but he made me pull on it once to prove to myself it was real.

Huneker was such a womanizer! I could write about him in a memoir, couldn’t I? As a music critic he’d encouraged aspiring female singers to prejudice his reviews in their favor through what he called “horizontal methods.” Huneker also had a quasiscientific interest in inversion. Usually he’d scorn it. He condemned Leaves of Grass as the “Bible of the third sex.” Initially he was hostile to the eccentric, effeminate pianist Vladimir de Pachmann; he feared that Pachmann’s silly shenanigans onstage might damage the reputation of serious musicians before the usual audience of American philistines. Pachmann would stop a concert to say to a woman in the front row, “Madam, you’re beating your fan in two-thirds time and I’m playing in seven-eighths.” Or, for no good reason, he’d interrupt his playing to pull his hoard of diamonds out of his pocket and sift them from one hand to another. Because of these hijinx Huneker called him “the Chopinzee,” and they traded insults at Luchow’s when they first met and poured steins of beer over each other’s heads. But a year later they mellowed and Pachmann came to dinner and played for Huneker for five hours, till three in the morning.

Tchaikovsky also troubled Huneker for his indifference toward women. Huneker was particularly disturbed by the story that, seconds after Tchaikovsky met Saint-Saëns, the composer of Samson and Delilah, they were both in women’s clothes dancing the tarantella. When Tchaikovsky died, Huneker said he was “the most interesting if not the greatest composer of his day”; Huneker also defended Wilde and said the English were silly to abhor him after they’d courted him for years.

I was with Huneker one wintry day walking up the Bowery. We’d just had lunch at the old Mouquin’s down at Fulton Market and we were strolling along in one of those brisk winds that drive ice needles through your face even in the palisaded fastness of Manhattan. In spite of our sole meunière and red velvet banquette we were suffering from the elements. Sometimes weeks go by in New York and I scarcely notice if it’s hot or cold, fair or cloudy—and then a stinky-hot day floats the reek of the tenements upstream or the gods decide to dump four feet of snow on the nation’s busiest metropolis. And then the snow turns it into a creaking New England village.

The weak sunlight was filtering down through the rail slats of the overhead elevated tracks, and every few minutes another train rumbled slowly past above our heads like a heavy hand on the keyboard. Beside us, horses wearing blinkers were pulling carts down the center of our street between the El tracks. Their shaggy forms and pluming breath were scarcely visible through the blizzard of sideways snow. The dingy white awnings on every building were bulging above the side-walks under the weight of snow. The poor prostitutes in their scanty clothes were tapping with their nails on the windowpanes trying to attract a bit of custom. One sad girl, all ribs and scrawny neck, huddled in a doorway and threw open her coat to show me her frozen wares. Huneker with his three plump wives and horizontal sopranos certainly couldn’t bother even to sniff at these skinny desperadoes through his long Roman nose. We walked and walked until we decided we had had enough of the wind’s icy tattooing of our faces. We were about to step into the Everett House on Fourth Avenue and Seventeenth Street to warm up.

Standing in the doorway was a slight youth with a thin face and dark violet eyes set close together and nearly crossed. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but he already had circles under his eyes. He smiled and revealed small, bad teeth, each sculpted by decay into something individual. He stepped toward us and naturally we thought he was begging but then I saw his face was painted—carmined lips and kohled eyes (the dark circles I’d noticed were just mascara smudged by the snow).

He weighed so little that I wonder if he filled out his jacket and trousers with newspapers to keep warm or to appear less skinny. There was the faint smell of a cheap woman’s perfume about him and, because of the way I was holding him, the stink of dirty, oily hair that had absorbed cigarette smoke the night before.

I was ashamed of myself for feeling embarrassed about carrying this queer little boy tart into a hotel of well-fed, loud-talking men. All of them were illuminated by Mister Edison’s new hundred-bulb chandelier. The doorman took a step toward us, so agitated that the gold fringe of his epaulets was all atremble; he held up a white glove. Idiotically I said, “Don’t worry, he’s with me,” and good old Huneker, who’s a familiar face there, said, “Good God, man, the boy’s fainted and we’re going to get some hot soup down him. That’s what he needs, hot soup. Order us some hot soup!” Huneker went on insisting on the soup as if it answered all questions about propriety.

There was a table free, but the headwaiter glanced at the manager —but he couldn’t stop us. We headed right for the table, which was near Siberia close to the swinging kitchen doors. I placed my frail burden in a chair and, just to bluff my way out of being intimidated, I snapped my fingers and ordered some hot soup and a cup of tea. The headwaiter played with his huge menus like a fan dancer before he finally acquiesced and extended them to us. Slowly the businessmen at the other tables gave up gawking and returned to their conversations. Maybe that is why I was so sympathetic to Elliott, as I soon learned was his name. I’d had to carry him through a sea of disapproval.

Now that I looked at his painted face I feared I might vomit. Huneker was studying me and smiling almost satirically, as if he knew my discomfort might make a good story that very evening, when Josephine, she of the V-shaped corsage, held court. “Stephen pretends to be so worldly,” I imagined he’d soon be saying, “but he is the son of a Methodist minister and a temperance worker mother and he did grow up in darkest New Jersey, and though he’s fraternized with hordes of daughters of joy he’d never seen a little Ganymede butt-boy buggaree before and poor Stephen—you should’ve seen his face, he nearly vomited just as the headwaiter was confiding, ‘The joint won’t be served till five.’”

After Huneker rushed off babbling about his usual cultural schedule, all Huysmans and Wagner, a silence settled over the boy and me. We were between shifts of waiters and diners and the windows were already dark though it was only 5:15 on a cold, rainy Thursday night in November. We breathed deep. The warmth of the hotel’s luxurious heating had finally reached Elliott. He relaxed and let his coat fall open. He was wearing a girl’s silk shirt, dirty pink ruffles under his blue-hued whiskerless chin.

He smiled and closed his coat again. We chitchatted about one thing and another and I told him a few new jokes and he laughed. He even tried to tell me a joke but it was pathetic, a little kid’s joke. It was obvious that he’d been too weak even to talk but now, with some food in his stomach, he became voluble. He told me he hadn’t spoken in his normal boy’s voice for weeks and weeks. “Usually we’re all shrieking and hissing like whores.”

He said the perverse youngsters he knew called themselves Nancy Boys or Mary Anns. Automatically I pulled out my little black reporter’s notebook and moved the elastic to one side and began to take notes. The boys would accost men at a big rowdy saloon on the Bowery they called Paresis Hall and ask, in shrill feminine voices, “Would you like a nice man, my love? I can be rough or I can be bitch. Want a rollantino up your bottom? Is that what you are, a brownie queen? Want me to brown you? Or do you want to be the man? Ooh la la, she thinks she’s a man—well, she could die with the secret!”

As for his health, I divined from all the symptoms he was describing that he had syphilis and the next day I arranged for him to see a specialist and follow a cure (I had to borrow the money—fifty dollars, a minor fortune). I had to convince him that he needed to take care or he’d be dead by thirty. Though that threat frightened him no more than it did me. I expected to be dead by thirty or thirty-two—maybe that was why I was so fearless in battle. He seemed as weary of life as I was; we both imagined we’d been alive for a century already and we laughed over it.

“And then my brothers—well, two of the three—joined in, especially when they’d all been drinking, jumping me not in front of each other but secretly in the barn after their chores or in the room I shared with my next older brother, the one who let me be. My daddy had been the county amateur boxing champion thirty years ago and he was still real rough. Almost anything could make him mad.”

“Well, if the bread box warn’t closed proper and the outer slice had turned hard—don’t you know, he’d start kicking furniture around. We didn’t have two sticks stuck together because the two oldest boys took after him, and they’d flash out and swear something powerful and start kicking and throwing things. The only dishes we kept after Mama died were the tin ones and they were badly dented. Things sorta held together when Mama was around and we sat down to meals, at least to dinner at noon, and she made us boys go to church with her though Daddy would never go. Then when she died, we stopped seeing other folks except at school, but us kids missed two days out of three. Daddy could write enough to sign his name and saw he said no rhyme nor reason in book-larning for a field hand. I liked school and if I coulda went more regular I might’ve made a scholar, but Daddy liked us home, close to him, specially me since I fed the chickens and milked all four cows and tried to keep the house straight and a soup on the boil but Daddy always found fault with me, in particklar late at night when he’d been drinking and then he’d strap my bottom and use me like a girl and some days my ass, begging your pardon, hurt so much I couldn’t sit still at school without crying. The teacher, Miss Stephens, thought something might be wrong, ’cause I had a black eye, sometime, or a split lip, and once she pushed my sleeve back and saw the burns where Daddy had played with me.”

By this point we were walking up Broadway toward Thirtieth Street where I lived with five other male friends in a chaotic but amusing bear’s den of bohemian camaraderie. I hoped none of them would see me with the painted boy. The rain was beginning to freeze and the pavement was treacherous. I steered Elliott into a hat shop and bought him a newspaper boy’s cap, which he held in his hands and looked at so long that I had to order him to put it on.

The more Elliott talked the sadder I felt. His voice, which had at first been either embarrassed or hushed or suddenly strident with a whore’s hard shriek, now had wandered back into something as flat as a farmer’s fields. He was eager to tell me everything, and that I was taking notes, far from making him self-conscious, pleased him. He counted for something and his story as well. I sensed that he’d guessed his young life might make a good story but he hadn’t told it yet. There was nothing rehearsed about his tale, but if he hesitated now he didn’t pause from fear of shocking me but only because till now he’d never turned so many details into a plot. He had to convert all those separate instances and events into habits (“My Daddy would get drunk and beat me”). He had to supply motives (“He never had no way of holding his anger in”) and paradoxes (“I guess I loved him, yeah, I guess I did and still do but I don’t rightly know why”).

He slipped on the ice at one point and he grabbed my arm but after another block I realized he was still clinging to me and walking as a woman would beside her man and I shook him off. As I did it I made a point of saying something especially friendly to him; I wanted him to recognize I was his friend but not his man. I felt he was a wonderful new source of information about the city and its lower depths, but I drew back with a powerful instinct toward health away from his frail, diseased frame. I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that he wasn’t just another boy but somehow a she-male, a member of the third sex, and that he’d never pitch a ball in the open field or with a lazy wave hail a friend fishing on the other shore. The whole sweet insouciance of a natural boy’s mindless summer was irrevocably lost to him.