And Albert Cohn, he wasn’t with another man. He was alone, in his underwear, at Bea’s writing table. He was a large man, and the table was very small, with fussy legs that knobbed into his calves and a sliding leaf—stuck for years in its fully extended position—that was slowly but steadily purpling his elbow. Albert could have chosen somewhere else to write his letter; the house on Acorn Street was full of horizontal surfaces. But the table helped solidify his resolve. It was like a perpetual pinch, urging him on.
He was writing to Bea, to tell her that he wanted to live alone. This was his first problem: his basic purpose was undermined by the fact that he already was living alone. He’d been living alone for months and could continue living alone, doing whatever in hell he wanted, until Uncle Ira died, or—if Bea decided to stay on in Gloucester, which she might, for all sorts of reasons, some known to her, some not—maybe forever.
So what was it he wanted to tell her? He didn’t even know what he meant: living alone. Everyone was always living alone, if you wanted to get depressing about it. If he didn’t live here alone, he would live somewhere else alone. If he lived with another man, as he allowed himself to imagine in the narrow crawl spaces that intersected rational thought, he would: (a) still be alone, because everyone was; (b) perhaps cease to exist, because he didn’t know any men who lived in this way; and (c) be miserable, because the man he wanted to live with had just last week told Albert he didn’t want to see him ever again.
Dear Bea, I’m so sorry
Dear Bea, I’m not sure exactly what I’m writing to say
Dear Bea, I’m not even sure that this will upset you, what I have to say, which makes it all the more confusing—to know how to say it, or even to know why I should bother saying it
Albert was hungry. This was another problem; he hadn’t left the house all week and was very, very hungry. He rubbed his calf. He traced the ridges the table leg had left in his skin. He was asking for a divorce, he supposed. But the word was so dramatic, and final; it seemed to belong to another marriage than theirs. He could imagine Bea reading it and bursting into laughter.
He released his calf, winced, took up another piece of stationery, made for Bea’s confirmation ceremony fourteen years ago. Lillian had chosen the shade of pink, and the embossed initials: BTH. Beatrice Theodosia Haven, Theodosia for Feigel, who had been Lillian’s or Henry’s grandmother, Albert couldn’t remember which. He also couldn’t remember how they’d gotten Theodosia out of Feigel (they had drawn the T from the Hebrew equivalent of Feigel, Tsipporah) but the distance between the words represented for him part of the problem. Bea was so attached, on the one hand, and so utterly unattached, on the other.
Even when they met, at Congregation Adath Israel’s Purim Ball, where Albert played one of Vashti’s handmaidens with such gusto and so much chest hair that he found himself attacked afterward by a herd of young women, Bea was not among them. It wasn’t until the party was winding down and Albert, having extracted himself, was walking toward the men’s room, that he felt a hand on his elbow and found himself being steered toward an out-of-the-way window by Beatrice Haven, who wasn’t known to bat her eyelashes at a man, let alone touch him. She started to introduce herself, but Albert smiled and said, “I know who you are. No Booze Beatrice. I’m Albert Cohn, who likes to drink.”
Bea did not blink. “But do you like women, Mr. Cohn?”
He unhooked himself from her arm. “Excuse me?”
“Do you prefer us?”
“That depends on the context.”
“In the context of marriage, Mr. Cohn.”
“I don’t prefer to be married.”
“And what if the woman, hypothetically, didn’t want to be married either?”
Albert, looking around the room, lowered his voice. “And why wouldn’t this hypothetical woman want to be married?”
“Let’s say she was strange. Or lonely.”
“If she were lonely, wouldn’t she want to marry?”
“That would depend on the nature of her loneliness.”
“I see.” Albert nodded, trying to look sober, but he’d drunk a lot of whiskey and the conversation was so far from anything he’d ever participated in. A kind of giddiness swept through him.
“Forget loneliness,” Bea said. “Let’s say she’d simply had enough of men.”
“She’s a man hater.”
“If we must call her that.”
“She hates men. Except for a man like me.”
Bea didn’t answer.
“But her mother wants her to marry,” he said. “Her mother has wanted her to marry since she could walk.”
“Her mother must be like his mother,” she said.
Albert took off his wig. He’d forgotten he had it on. “Is this a proposal?”
“I’ve never known a woman to propose.”
“And I’ve never heard of a woman who wanted to marry a fairy. Not knowingly, anyway.”
“Well, then.” Bea flushed. “Consider me down on one knee.”
He scratched behind one ear, then the other. The wig had made him itchy, and the scratching was straightforward and satisfying. He kept at it, needing more as he went. “I barely know you.”
“You know of me.”
“I know you spend a great deal of time trying to rid the world of my second-favorite vice.”
“That’s only politics.”
“If that’s only politics, you’re quite an actress.”
He watched her watching him, her eyes taking in his tutu and his woman’s shoes.
Nothing more had been said that night. Albert took her hand as if he’d done it a hundred times before, and turned them to face the room.
Dear Bea,
Out the window, just visible through the budding tree that flanked the opposite townhouse, was Lillian and Henry’s house one block over on Chestnut Street, their windows turning purple as they caught the sun. Albert guessed Henry would hate him, and Lillian would act as if she hated him, too, while secretly she would soften toward him, relieved. Albert didn’t think he should care what his in-laws thought, and yet he did, which was yet another problem, not what they thought but his caring, or it was emblematic of his largest problem, which was, he supposed, if he was going to be honest—he took out a fresh piece of paper—what he really wanted to tell Bea.
There was a secret court
Albert’s senior year at Harvard, there had been a secret court. It was convened after the suicide of a student named Cyril Wilcox, who had been involved—according to his brother—in homosexual activities. (Cyril’s brother informed Harvard’s acting dean of this only after he’d gone and beat up Cyril’s lover.) Thus the court, consisting of the dean, a professor of hygiene, and several others, began interviewing reputedly homosexual students about their practices of masturbation, habits of cross-dressing, uses of slang, parties attended and with whom, etc. After thirty such interviews, the court reported its findings to President Abbott Lawrence Lowell and, based on the evidence, expelled eight students, one of whom, Eugene Cummings, killed himself in Stillman Infirmary a few days later.
I was not called in
It could be said—it would be said—that no one knew what had gone on. But the court knew. President Lowell (the same man Governor Fuller had just appointed to sit on the Sacco and Vanzetti commission) knew. And the boys knew: the ones who were refused positive references by Harvard and therefore rejected by other colleges; the ones who had perjured themselves before the court and denied all kissing, mutual masturbation, fondling, and dancing; and the ones like Albert, who had stayed so far away, kept his head so low, and pretended so earnestly to himself that he was nothing like Wilcox or Cummings that he never got called in.
I watched
A wretchedness had flattened Albert when he heard about Cummings, a spine-wracking fever had forced him to bed for a day. But then he’d stood up, moved on, watched his back, gotten his job at the bank, accepted and framed and hung his indecipherable diploma, married Bea a year later, and so on and so forth. Then last year he’d run into one of the boys who’d been expelled, Tederick Whitlock III, onetime champion sailor and heir, tending bar at the Green Lamp (an underground coupling of the establishments formerly known as the Lighted Lamp and Green Shutters). Albert didn’t recognize Teddy at first, changed as he was, fluid and toothy where he’d been stiff and grim, his shirt open to his bony, aristocratic chest. Older. But Teddy recognized Albert. He took Albert’s money, rose on his toes to lean across the bar, and said, You fuck.
They’d taken up together. Teddy beat on Albert, screwed him, bit him, called him names, and Albert, so much bigger than Teddy, took it as his punishment. For months this went on and Albert thought it would continue going on, a mutual convenience. But then Teddy had questions. He wanted to talk. He wanted Albert to say why he’d lied and when Albert said he hadn’t lied, Teddy said of course he had, and when Albert said he’d had to, Teddy refused to hit him—he said calmly, We all had to. Albert said Teddy’s breeding afforded him leniency in the world, that he didn’t know what it was to be a Jew, and Teddy reminded him that he’d been disowned. He hadn’t seen his siblings in years. Albert said, At least you’re free, and Teddy laughed a quiet, mean laugh and Albert realized he’d fallen in love with Teddy, which had never happened to him before in such an appalling, unfixable way. But Teddy was done. Teddy said he’d met a boy, and I really mean a boy, and then he said it wasn’t the boy at all, actually, it was Albert he didn’t want any more to do with because Albert was despicable and Albert shouldn’t go to the Green Lamp anymore either, because that was Teddy’s livelihood. Albert worked at First National and Teddy worked at the Green Lamp, because I’m so fucking free, and Albert should at least respect that.
So. Albert hadn’t bathed. He’d barely eaten. The whiskey was long gone. And now he’d been sitting at Bea’s awful writing desk for hours without managing to finish a single sentence because Teddy was right, Albert was despicable, and stupid, too, not only in the sense that he’d never learned Latin but in the sense that he couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to figure out what it was that he wanted to say to Bea. The city was coming to life outside, Saturday picnics and paddleboats, children’s balls pounding the paving bricks. People had to know about Albert, of course, but they wouldn’t know unless he did something. What would he do, stick his head out the window, holler? Telling Bea about the court would accomplish nothing, he admitted. She, too, was very good at keeping secrets—she would allow it to slide in between them, another piece of furniture in the sham house of their marriage. And even if people knew, say the boys at the bank, what good would it do now? Teddy was gone and the Green Lamp, too, buried along with Cyril and Cummings beneath the paving bricks and the cobblestone walks and the granite curbs of the city, the fusty air and old trees, all of it pressing down on Albert, all of it propping him up.
His stomach whimpered. He was aware of it as an organ, gaunt walled and angry, requiring his attention. He wondered if this was what drew Bea to eat so little, if she stayed hungry because hunger helped one stop thinking of other things, its hard lump like a ballast, steadying you. He thought he could almost cry from hunger. He thought, I don’t want Bea to stay in Gloucester forever. I would like her to come back. “What are you waiting for?!” shouted one of the boys down in the street. “Throw the fucking ball!” Hunger, thought Albert. My stomach is crying. On Monday he would go into work, say he had recovered from his illness, make it so. He fisted the sheets of paper into a ball, retrieved himself from the table, dressed, and walked toward Charles Street, to find something to eat.