To Paradise

XVIII

There was more, but he could not bear to read it. Already, he was trembling so much—and the room was so silent—that he could hear the dry, rattling noise the paper made in his hands, his short, broken gasps. He felt as if he had been walloped about the head with something dense but yielding, a cushion perhaps, and it had left him breathless and confused. He was aware of his fingers releasing the page, and of rising, unsteadily, to his feet, and then tipping forward, and then of someone—his grandfather, whose presence he had almost forgotten—catching him and lowering him onto the settee, repeating his name. As if from far away, he heard his grandfather call out for Adams, and when he returned to himself, he was once again sitting upright, and his grandfather was holding a teacup to his lips.

“There’s some ginger in this, and honey,” Grandfather said. “Sip it slowly. There’s a good boy. Yes, very good. And there’s a molasses cookie—can you hold it? Very good.”

He closed his eyes and leaned back his head. Once again, he was David Bingham, and he was weak, and his grandfather was soothing him, and it was as if he had never read the investigator’s report, as if he had never learned what was within its pages, as if he had never met Edward. He was in too much of a muddle. It was dangerous. And yet, no matter how much he tried, no matter how he tried to separate one strand of the story from the next, he could not. It was as if he had experienced the story rather than read it, and at the same time, he did not feel that it had anything to do with him, or with the Edward he knew, who was, after all, the only version of Edward that mattered. There was the story he had just consumed, and it was an anchor falling rapidly through the water many thousands of leagues, falling and falling until it was swallowed by the sand at the bottom of the sea. And above this was Edward’s face and Edward’s eyes, Edward turning to him and smiling, asking, “Do you love me?,” his body skimming above the water like a bird, his voice made whispery by the wind. “Do you trust me, David?” asked the voice, Edward’s voice, “Do you believe me?” He thought of Edward’s skin on his, the delight in his face when he saw David in his doorway, how he had stroked the tip of David’s nose and had told him that in a year’s time it would be freckled, each speck the color of caramel, a gift from the California sun.

He opened his eyes and looked into his grandfather’s stern, handsome face, his flint-gray eyes, and knew he had to speak, though when he did, his words surprised them both: David because he knew it was what he really felt, Grandfather because—although he would like to pretend otherwise—he knew as well.

“I do not believe it,” he said.

He watched his grandfather’s worried expression become incredulous. “Do not believe it? Do not believe it? David—I hardly know what to say. You know this comes from Gunnar Wesley, the best private investigator in the city, perhaps in the Free States?”

“But he has made mistakes in the past. Did he not miss the fact of Mister Griffith’s time in the West?” Though even as he spoke, he knew he should not have mentioned Charles’s name.

“Oh, come, David. That is a minor matter. And that was not a period Mister Griffith sought to conceal—Wesley’s oversight was simply that, and of no harm to anyone. But the information he did gather was all correct.

“David. David. I am not angry. I assure you, I am not. I was, when I received this. But not at you, but at this—this confidence man, who has taken advantage of you. Or has tried to, at least. David. My child. I know this is difficult for you to read. But is it not better to know now, before serious harm is done, before it jeopardizes your relationship with Mister Griffith? If he were to discover that this was the sort of person with whom you were associating—”

“This is of no concern to Mister Griffith,” he heard his voice say, a voice he did not recognize, it was so cold and clipped.

“Of no concern! David, he is making great allowances for you—unusually large ones, I should say. But not even a man as devoted as Mister Griffith could overlook this. Of course this would matter to him!”

“But it does not, and it will not, for I have declined his offer,” David said, and he felt, deep within him, a hard kernel of triumph at his grandfather’s mute astonishment, and at the way he drew back as if he had been singed.

“You have declined! David, when did you do this? And why?”

“Recently. And before you ask, no, there is no reconsidering, on my part or his, for it was ended badly. As for why, it is simple: I do not love him.”

“You do not—!” At this, his grandfather suddenly stood, and walked to the opposite corner of the room, before turning to face David once again. “With all respect, David—you are not one to judge that.”

He heard himself laugh, a loud, ugly bark. “And so who is? You? Frances? Mister Griffith? I am an adult. In June I will be twenty-nine. I am the only one to judge. I am in love with Edward Bishop, and I will be with him, no matter what you or Wesley or anyone says.”

He thought his grandfather would erupt, but instead he grew very still, and before he spoke next, he gripped the back of his chair with both hands. “David, I promised myself I would never speak of this again. I vowed. But now I must, and for the second time tonight, because it is relevant to your current situation. Forgive me, my child, but: You had thought yourself in love before. And you were proven incorrect, in the most horrible way.

“You think I am lying. You think I am mistaken. I assure you, I am not. And I assure you as well that I would give all my fortune to be wrong about Mister Bishop. And all yours to stop you from getting hurt by him.

“He doesn’t love you, my child. He is already in love, with another. What he loves is your money, the idea of its being his. It pains me, as someone who does love you, to tell you this, to have to speak it aloud. But I must, for I will not see your heart broken again, not when I could have kept it whole.

“You asked me earlier why I wanted Mister Griffith for you, and I answered you honestly: because I sensed from Frances’s report of him that he was someone who would not harm you, who would want nothing from you but your company, who would never abandon you. You are intelligent, David; you are perceptive. But in this matter, you are unwise, and long have been, have been since you were a boy. I cannot take credit for your gifts—but I can protect you from your deficiencies. I can no longer send you away, though if you would, if you cared to, I would gladly do it. But I can warn you, with everything I have, to not make the same mistake again.”

He had not thought, despite his grandfather’s earlier allusion, that he would mention the events of seven years ago, the events that, he sometimes thought, had changed him forever. (And yet he knew that was wrong: It was almost as if what had happened was preordained.) He had been twenty-one, just out of college, taking a year of art school before joining Bingham Brothers. And then, one day early in the term, he had been walking out of class and had dropped his supplies, and when he knelt to retrieve them, there was someone by his side, a classmate of his named Andrew who was so sunlit, so effortless in his charm, that David, upon registering his existence the first day of class, had not spent any further time observing him—he was so far beyond the kind of person who might ever want to know him. Instead, he had talked to and made efforts to befriend the men like him: the quiet, sober, mouselike ones, the ones who, in recent weeks, he had succeeded in meeting for a cup of tea or a lunch, where they would together talk about books they’d read, or works of art they were hoping to copy as they became more skilled. These were the people to whom he belonged—usually the younger siblings of more dynamic elder sisters or brothers; competent students but not distinguished; pleasing in looks but not exceptional; able but not memorable conversationalists. They were, all of them, heirs to fortunes that ranged from good to extraordinary; they had, all of them, moved from their parents’ houses to their boarding schools to their colleges and then back to their parents’, where they would remain until a marriage could be arranged for them with a suitable man or woman—some would even marry one another. There was a group of them, artistic-minded and sensitive boys, granted a year of indulgence by their parents before they would be sent back to school or join their parents’ companies, as bankers, as shippers, as traders, as lawyers. He knew this, and he accepted it: He was one of them. Even then, John was first in his class at college, studying law and banking—though he was only twenty, his marriage to Peter, also his classmate, had already been arranged—and Eden the head girl at her school. His grandfather’s annual midsummer party was crammed with their friends, rafts of them, all shouting and laughing beneath the net of candles that the servants had hung earlier across the garden.

But that had never been David, and he knew it never would be. He was, for most of his life, left alone: His name had protected him from abuse and harassment, but he was largely ignored, never sought, and never missed. And so, when Andrew had, that afternoon, first spoken to him and then, over the successive days and weeks, talked to him more and more, David had felt himself becoming unrecognizable. Here he was, laughing out loud, in the street, like Eden; here he was, arguing petulantly and being thought adorable for it, as John did when he was with Peter. He had always enjoyed being intimate with others, though he long had been too shy to pursue it—preferring to visit the brothel he had been patronizing since he was sixteen, where he knew he would never be rejected—but with Andrew, he asked for what he wanted and received it; he was emboldened, elated with his new understanding of what it meant to be a man, a person in the world, young, rich. Ah, he remembered thinking, so this is it! This is what John felt, what Peter felt, what Eden felt, what all his classmates with their merry voices, their echoing laughter, felt!

It was as if he had been seized by a madness. He introduced Andrew—the son of doctors from Connecticut—to Grandfather, and when, afterward, Grandfather, who had remained mostly silent during their dinner, a dinner through which Andrew had been at his sparkling best and David had smiled at everything he said, wondering at his grandfather’s silence, had told him he thought Andrew “too studied and pert,” he had dismissed him, coldly. And when, six months later, Andrew became vague in his presence, and then stopped calling on him, and then began avoiding him altogether, and David began sending him bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates—excessive, embarrassing declarations of love—only to receive no messages at all, and then, later yet, the chocolate boxes returned with their ribbons uncut, his letters still sealed, his packages of rare books unopened, he ignored his grandfather still, his kind inquiries, his efforts to distract him with offers of the theater, the symphony, a trip abroad. And then, one day, he had been desultorily pacing around the perimeter of Washington Square when he saw, their arms linked, Andrew with another man he knew from their class, the class David had stopped attending. He knew the man by face but not by name, but he knew that he was from the kind of people to whom Andrew belonged, and from which people he had strayed to spend time—from curiosity, perhaps—with David. They were alike, two spirited young people, walking together and chatting, their faces bright with happiness, and David found himself first walking and then sprinting toward them, falling upon Andrew and crying out his love and yearning and hurt, while Andrew, at first agog and then alarmed, tried initially to appease him and then to push him away, his friend swatting about David’s head with his gloves in a scene made more ghastly by the passersby who had gathered to watch and point and laugh. And then Andrew gave him a mighty shove, and David fell backward, and the two ran away, and David, still desperate, found himself in Adams’s arms, Adams, who shouted at the gawkers to get away as he half carried, half dragged David back to the house.

For days, he did not leave: not his bed, not his room. He was tormented by thoughts of Andrew, and of his degradation, and if he was not thinking of one, he was thinking of the other. It seemed that if he stopped engaging with the world, then it too might stop engaging with him, and as days turned into weeks, he lay in his bed and tried to think of nothing, certainly not of himself within the world’s dizzying vastness, and finally, after many weeks, the world did indeed shrink to something manageable—his bed, his room, his grandfather’s undemanding daily and nightly visits. Finally, after nearly three months, something broke, as if he had been encased in a shell and someone—not him—had tapped it open, and he emerged feeble and pale and hardened, he thought, against Andrew and his own mortification. He swore, then, that he would never again let himself feel so passionately, never let himself be so full of adoration, so replete with happiness, a vow that he would extend not just to people but to art as well, so that when Grandfather sent him to Europe for a year under the guise of a Grand Tour (but really, they both knew, as a way to avoid Andrew, who was still living in the city, still with his beau, who was now his fiancé), he moved lightly among the frescoes and paintings that loomed down from every ceiling, from every wall: He looked up and at them and felt nothing.

When he returned home to Washington Square fourteen months later, he was cooler, more distant, but also more alone. His friends, those quiet boys he had neglected and then discarded once he had begun seeing Andrew, had found their own lives—he rarely saw them. John and Eden too seemed to have become more capable than ever before: John was soon to be married; Eden was in college. Something had been gained, a sense of remoteness, a greater strength, but something had also been lost: He tired quickly, he craved solitude, and his first month at Bingham Brothers—where he began as a clerk, as his father and grandfather had both done upon their entry into the company—was so taxing as to be almost debilitating, especially when compared with John, who was training alongside him and yet whose numerical dexterity and general ambition distinguished him from the beginning. It was Grandfather who suggested that David might have contracted an illness, something unknown and depleting, on the Continent, and might do with a few weeks’ rest, but they both knew that this was a fiction, and that he was giving David a way to excuse himself without having to actually admit failure. Weary, David accepted, and then those weeks became months, and then years, and he never returned to the bank.

He did his best to forget the wildness of emotion, the passion, that he had felt around Andrew, but sometimes he was gripped with the memory of that time, and its humiliation, and he would retreat once more to his room and take to his bed. These episodes, what he and his grandfather would come to call his confinements—and what his grandfather characterized, delicately, to Adams and his siblings as his “nervous trouble”—would usually be preceded or succeeded by a period of mania, frenzied days he would spend feverishly shopping, or painting, or walking, or at the bordello: all things he did in his normal life, but intensified and excessively writ. They were, he knew, ways for him to escape himself, and yet he had not invented these methods; they had been invented for him, and he was at their mercy, they made his body move either too quickly or not at all. Two years after his return from Europe, he had received a card from Andrew announcing the adoption of his and his husband’s first child, a girl, and he had written a congratulatory note back. But then, that night, he had begun to wonder: What was the purpose of Andrew’s note? Had it truly been sent intentionally, or was it an oversight? Was it a gesture of friendship, or was it meant to ridicule? He sent a longer letter to Andrew, inquiring about him and confessing how he missed him.

And then it was as if something had been undammed in him, and he began to write letter after letter, by turns accusing Andrew and pleading with him, condemning him and imploring him. After dinner, he would sit with Grandfather in his drawing room, trying to stop his fingers from twitching with impatience, looking at the chessboard but seeing in his mind his desk with its paper and blotter, and as soon as he was able, he would leave, running up the final steps, and write Andrew again, ringing for Matthew late into the night to post his most recent missive. His disgrace, when it came—as even he knew it would—was great: An attorney who represented Andrew’s husband’s family asked for a meeting with Frances Holson and gravely drew from his case a stack of David’s letters to Andrew, dozens of them, the last twenty or so not even opened, and told Frances that David must stop bothering his client. Frances spoke to his grandfather, and his grandfather spoke to him, and though he had been gentle, David’s anguish had been so intense that this time it had been his grandfather who had confined him to his room, with one of the maids to watch over him day or night, so worried was he that David might harm himself. This, David could see, was when his siblings had lost their final residue of respect for him, was when he became, truly, an invalid; someone whose normal state went from being one of health to one of illness, so that wellness was something to be measured in interludes, a respite before he was returned to his native lunacy. He knew he had become a problem for his grandfather, and although his grandfather never mentioned it, he feared he would soon graduate from being a difficulty into being a burden. He did not go out, he knew no one; a marriage would clearly have to be found for him, for he was incapable of finding his own. And yet he rejected all of Frances’s candidates, unable to contemplate the energy and deception it would take to trick someone into marrying him. Gradually, the offers had thinned, and then stopped, until, at some point, Frances and Grandfather must have talked about finding a different caliber of man—that is how Frances would have stated it: A different caliber, perhaps someone slightly more mature, what did Nathaniel think?—and Charles Griffith had been contacted by the marriage broker, and David’s dossier presented to him as a possible candidate.

This was the end for him. This year, he would be twenty-nine. If Charles knew of his confinements, others did as well—he must not delude himself about that. With each year, his money meant less, for the world was growing wealthier: Not now, but within the next few decades, there would emerge a family richer than the Binghams, and he would have rejected all his opportunities, and still be living in Washington Square, his hair gone white, his skin lined, spending his money on amusements—books and drawing paper and paints and men—as a child does on candy and toys. He did not only want to believe Edward, he had to believe him; if he went to California, he would be leaving behind his home and his grandfather, but might he not also be leaving behind his sickness, his past, his mortifications? His history, so entangled with New York itself that every block he walked was the scene of some past embarrassment?: Could it not be draped in a sheet and hung in the back of his closet like his winter coat? What was life worth if he might not have his chance, slim as it might be, of feeling that it was truly his, his to make or destroy, his to mold like clay or shatter like china?

Grandfather was waiting for his reply, he realized. “He loves me,” he whispered to his grandfather. “And I know this.”

“My child—”

“I have asked him to marry me,” he continued, helplessly. “And he has accepted. And we are going to California together.”

At this, his grandfather sank into his chair, and rotated his body to look into the fire, and when he turned around once more, David was amazed to see that his eyes were shining. “David,” he began, quietly, “if you marry this man, I will have to cut you off—you know that, don’t you? I will do it because I must, because it is my only way to protect you.”

He knew this, and yet, hearing it, he felt as if the floor had sunk from beneath him. “I will still have my parents’ trust,” he said, at last.

“Yes, you will. I cannot stop that—as much as I wish I could. But my allowance to you, David, my bestowment: That will end. Washington Square will no longer be yours, not unless you promise me you will not go with this person.”

“I cannot promise you,” he said, and now he too was beginning to feel himself on the verge of tears. “Grandfather—please. Don’t you want me to be happy?”

His grandfather inhaled, and then exhaled. “I want you to be safe, David.” He sighed again. “David, child—what is the hurry? Why can you not wait? If he truly loves you, he will wait for you. And what about this Aubrey fellow? What if Wesley is indeed correct, and you go with your Edward all the way to California—a dangerous place for us, may I remind you, a potentially fatal one, indeed—only to discover that you have been hoodwinked, that they are a couple and you their stooge?”

“It is not true. It cannot be true. Grandfather, if you could see the way he is with me, how much he loves me, how good he is to me—”

“Of course he is being good to you, David! He needs you! They need you—Edward and his beloved. Don’t you see?”

He was angry then, an anger that had been building inside him but that he dared not voice because he did not want to make it true by saying it aloud. “I was unaware you thought so little of me, Grandfather—is it so difficult, so impossible, to believe that someone might actually love me for the fact of me? Someone young and beautiful and self-made?

“I see now that you have never thought me worth someone like Edward—you have been ashamed of me, and I understand that, I understand why. But is it not possible that I am someone else, someone you do not see, someone who has been loved twice, by two different men, in the space of a year? Is it not possible that, for as well as you know me, you have known only one aspect of me, that you have been blinded to who I might be, because of your familiarity with me? Is it not possible that, in your protectiveness, you have discounted me, that you have lost any ability to see me in any other way?

“I must go, Grandfather—I must. You say I will be throwing my life to the winds if I leave, but I think I will be burying it if I stay. Can you not grant me this right to my own life? Can you not forgive me for what I will do?”

He was begging, but his grandfather again stood: not angrily, not declaratively, but with a great weariness, as if he were experiencing a terrible pain. And suddenly, and with great violence, he turned his head sharply to the right and brought his right hand up to shield his face, and David realized that his grandfather was crying. It was an amazing sight, but for a moment, he was unable to comprehend the feeling of devastation that swiftly descended upon him.

But then he knew. It was not just the fact of his grandfather’s tears; it was because he knew that, with them, his grandfather was acknowledging that he understood that David would, finally, disobey him. And with that, David knew as well that his grandfather would not yield, and that when he left Washington Square, he would be leaving it behind forever. He sat, immobile, understanding that this would be the last time he would sit in this drawing room, before this fire, the last time this would be his home. He understood that now his life was not here. Now his life was with Edward.