Early Warning

Janet was sure that Tim’s ghost was right there with her, practically touchable, a figure in the crowd, maybe standing behind the Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s placard. Tim had written her only one postcard from Vietnam, postmarked Nha Trang, and all it said on the back was “Hey, kiddo! Everything is fine here! Send me some more Hershey bars! Love you, Tim. xxx.” Aunt Lillian had let her read his last letter after she asked three times. Both she and Aunt Lillian knew that she would cry for days afterward, but that was good, according to her mom. As Phil Ochs sang “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Janet closed her eyes and mouthed the words, and imagined that it was Tim singing. Just as he had sung all those songs with the Colts.

—

THE APARTMENT WHERE Henry was staying for a long weekend, at Eighty-fourth Street and Broadway, had one window that faced east, and maybe Henry and Basil Skipworth heard the noise of shouting wafting on the breeze from the park, and maybe they didn’t. As the crow might fly, they were only a mile or so from where the protesters were gathering. They had talked about joining the march but had indulged themselves in not doing so. Thinking of Tim, Henry felt a little guilty. But when he came to New York, he’d somehow not put two and two together about the protest; he had been thinking of this weekend as a break from everything about Tim that was putting his mother and Claire and Paul and Lillian — and himself, for that matter — at loggerheads. Basil taught German at Yale. Even though he often said “my dear boy,” he was two years younger than Henry and about six times more sophisticated, if by that you meant that he read Balzac in French and Boccaccio in Italian as well as Goethe in German (and Kafka, too). On the other hand, he had only the most rudimentary grasp of the etymology of “foot” (fot, föt, pes (Latin), pod (Greek), pada (Sanskrit), — ped (Indo-European), much less that of “penis,” which meant “tail” in Latin and was almost unchanged from earlier forms. Basil, who had gone to Cambridge, was much more sophisticated than Henry in many ways, but, they both knew, not nearly as good-looking. He had started subtly pursuing Henry at the Modern Language Association meeting in December. Henry had allowed capture in March, intrigued by Basil’s courage, since he himself had never been bold enough to push any pursuit to its logical end. They were using an apartment belonging to some friend of Basil’s, who was back in England for a month.

Basil was completely up to date on sodomy laws: In England, still illegal, penalty, no longer death, but imprisonment, as for Oscar Wilde. Wilde, according to Basil, had been convicted under the same law that made the age of consent for females twelve; “however, my dear boy, for us, no consent is possible. I guess it is a sign of progress that, as of a hundred years ago, a man could be jailed for fucking a girl who wasn’t quite ten yet, but the wheel of progress moveth exceeding slow.” Nor could they meet in Connecticut, where homosexuality meant prison if the judge felt like it. Illinois — didn’t Henry know this? — was the most progressive. As for New York, well, buggery was only a misdemeanor, and with all of these draft dodgers in town, the police had their hands full.

“Buggery,” “balls-up,” “bollocks,” “git,” “ponce,” “poofter,” “rodger,” “wanker,” “stiffy,” “todger,” “stonker.” Listening to the words Basil enunciated in his layered accent (West Country underneath Received Pronunciation — he almost always pronounced his “r”s, for example, and sometimes joked around, saying, “Where ye be goin’ to?”), Henry got used to them as if they were jokes, as if what Basil was showing him wasn’t a little scary (“Oh, my dear boy, we’ve not got to that part yet”). Henry knew that Basil sometimes put on the West Country pretty thick just for him, because that was where the purest Anglo-Saxon still resided. Basil laughed at him for caring about such elementary linguistic motes and crumbs, compared with Death in Venice, or at least Doktor Faustus, which had universal appeal. Henry’s standard riposte was, had Doktor Faustus, finished only twenty years ago, really stood the test of time? He was willing to admit that Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus had features of interest that might prove lasting, but…

And then they started laughing. Basil said, “My God, you are a stuffy fellow, for all that length of leg.”