There’s a man on the street carrying a large and heavy trunk. He makes it a few feet, puts the trunk down, mops the moisture from his face. Picks it up again and staggers a dozen steps forward. Puts it down. Once when Edwin was out with Father, they’d seen a man trying unsuccessfully to roll a barrel uphill. “Sisyphus,” Father had said. “Sisyphus in a cutaway coat.” The man steps out of Edwin’s sight. Edwin turns back to the parlor.
Johnny has, very wisely, refused the game. Asia throws a domino at him, close to his head. If she’d wanted to hit him, she would have. He’s not that far away. “Go to your room, Asia,” Mother says. “Right now.”
But Asia is only getting started. She rises from the floor—her scowling face, her angry eyes, her wild, black hair. “I will not,” she says.
Mother’s tone remains patient. “It’s time you started learning to be the young woman you’re becoming. Look at Rose. She never pouts and sulks.”
“Who wants to be like Rose?” Asia says. “Nobody.” Asked and answered.
Edwin looks anxiously at Rosalie, but she seems intent on her sewing. Still, of course, she heard. Poor Rose! And Mean Asia for saying out loud what all of them think. Rosalie’s spine has developed a kink so she’s begun to stoop, a little like Richard III. She has to work now not to limp when she walks, a limp being something Father will not abide. Asia would have said more, but Johnny has cut her off, deftly, before further damage can be done. “Edwin daydreams too much,” he is saying. “Asia must learn to control her temper. What about me needs fixing?”
This is interesting enough to silence even Asia. What will Mother say about her favorite, her perfect shining boy? The log in the fireplace collapses with a crack and a fountain of red sparks.
“You need to work harder at school,” Mother tells him.
“I work like the devil,” Johnny says. “I’m just no good at it.”
“You’re as smart as they come,” Mother says firmly.
Shortly after this conversation, Johnny will tell Edwin that he’s hit on a method of improving his schoolwork by envisioning columns of spelling words and problems in arithmetic as enemy soldiers. He does better thinking of them as foes to be fought rather than things to be learned. Edwin will think this a very clever way to get around not being clever.
“Me next,” says Joe. “Now me.”
Rosalie puts her sewing down, pulls him into her lap, rests her cheek on top of his head.
“Joe must learn to be more cheerful,” Mother says, “and save his moping for when something is really wrong.”
“I’d be happy if I was a seagull,” Joe says. He’s been flying about the house for several days now, flapping his arms and calling out, “Scree, scree, scree.” This is the first time he’s tried to explain why. Edwin would laugh if he were sure Joe was trying to be funny, but he might not be. Joe is a strange, morose little boy.
The tempest has passed. Asia does not go to her room. Johnny does not play dominoes. Only at bedtime does Edwin realize he never did find out what it was Mother said three times to him.
ii
Enter Edwin.
He’s walking alone, carrying, in secret rebellion, a set of foils that belong to his father. June has been giving him and Johnny both lessons in fencing when he visits, not real fencing, but stage fencing, and Edwin is desperate to be better at this than his athletic little brother. He has a ways to go. The last time he and June fenced, Edwin missed his parry and took a foil right in the eye. The point had been blunted. Still, for days his mother feared he’d lose it, or if not the eye itself, then the use of it. The sclera turned red as a ruby, not merely veined with red, but a solid bloody mass encasing the iris. No more fencing for Edwin, Mother declared, while leaving open the question of whether Johnny was still allowed.
Johnny is enormously popular. He runs with a gang of young toughs who call themselves the Baltimore Bully Boys. He’s good with his fists. Edwin, by contrast, studies the violin. He excels at his dancing lessons. He has in his mind the person he wants to be, artistic, sensitive, and maybe a touch eccentric. He creates this person daily with costumes and props, voice and posture.
He wears a short cape like Romeo. He wears his hair mussed and curly like Byron. He’s been seen on the streets with a pet lamb. His teacher, Susan Hyde, a marmish woman with spectacles and corkscrew curls, adores him. Miss Hyde is renowned both for her gentle manner and for her firm hand on the rattan cane. Edwin has experienced both, the latter in no way eclipsing the former. In fact, in later years, Edwin will say it was the caning that made him love her.
If he meant to make himself a target, then he’s bagged it. The Bully Boys would beat him up themselves except that he’s Wilkes’ brother, and they are forced to protect him instead.
His hair blows into his eyes and he swipes it back with his free hand. In the window of the house he’s passing, a little white dog barks angrily at him. The factory whistle sounds. Trees rattle their branches and the wind carries the smell of pigs.
A boy, probably younger than Edwin, but definitely bigger, falls in beside him as he walks. This boy is wearing a flat sea cap and hasn’t yet grown into his front teeth. They protrude slightly, the tips of them exposed by his lip. His face is a mass of freckles. Edwin doesn’t recognize him. “I know you,” the boy says.
People often recognize Father on the street. They stop to say hello and Father always says hello back, so at first Edwin thought his father knew them all. But Father soon put him straight. Everyone knows Tom Fool, Father had said.
Two more boys appear. They land on the ground, dropping from the branches of a tree like rotten apples. They’re not large like the first boy; clearly brothers as they have the same blond hair, the same blunt nose. “Here’s Ned Booth,” the freckled boy tells them, “strolling down the street like he’s the biggest toad in the puddle.”
“I don’t think that. I’m just going home,” Edwin says.
“This won’t take long.” The boy indicates the foils he’s carrying. “Let me see those.”
“They’re not mine.”
“Maybe they’re mine,” the boy tells him. He takes Father’s foils from Edwin’s unresisting hands, looks them over. “What are they? Toy swords? Toy swords for toy soldiers? I don’t want them, after all.” He drops them into the mud. He steps on them a few times, snapping them sharply. “Now you have twice as many. You should thank me.”
Edwin didn’t ask Mother’s permission to take his father’s foils, because she would have said no.
“You should thank him,” the boy on his right says. He has a fading bruise along his flat cheekbone, a peeling scab on his chin. This is not his first fight.
Nor is it Edwin’s. He knows what comes next. He hasn’t yet found a role he can play that carries him through this. If he runs, they’ll catch him and beat him. If he stands his ground, they’ll take it as provocation and beat him. If he surrenders, they’ll see it as weakness and beat him. The large boy takes hold of the back of his jacket and twists the collar so that it tightens around Edwin’s neck.