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.