When I saw Robert again in school, I was a little scared for the first minutes, wondering if his having a dead father would make him any different. But he looked just the same as before. And soon — almost — I’d forgotten it.
That spring vacation, for the first time, Robert invited me to come up to his summer house. (April’s cruelties, as Chaucer knew, have a certain thread of generosity woven through them.) His family had a farm outside New Paltz, and his mother — who’d gone back to work as a nurse in a hospital — would drive us up there.
Our own family’s summer place in Hopewell Junction was a small affair. But it was sort of a farm — at least for several years my father had grown a field of corn behind it. We had a dozen acres of woods. And one summer Dad had raised a matte-black coop of chickens and, another, stilted up five feet from the guano-splatted ground and walled with octagonal wire, a house full of turkeys.
But what Robert’s mother (us in the back seat of the station wagon) finally pulled up to was, after our two-hour drive, a sprawling three-story farmhouse, with an even more sizable barn set off from it. There were several fields, a forest, a sloping lawn, and even a pond on the property. There were a number of cows, some ducks, and a rambunctious dog, who lolloped out of the barn to leap on and lick all over us as we got out of the car. His name was King, after the dog on the Sargeant Preston of the Yukon radio show, Robert explained. Robert and I both listened to it each week at home (a booming, slightly anglicized baritone, which meant Canada in the 1950s: “On, King! On, you huskies…!”), along with Superman, The Green Hornet, and The Lone Ranger — television was still, at that time, an expensive novelty more than anything else.
How the farm was managed when Robert and his mother weren’t there, I don’t recall. But the system of live-in hands and visiting caretakers was explained to me satisfactorily enough at the time.
That first afternoon, Robert’s mother had to drive into town. A little later, the hand who was about had to go off in his own car. Being left alone fit in perfectly with a plan I’d had in mind for some time now.
Though Robert was my friend, he was not a part of the pre-adolescent afternoon sexual carryings-on I engaged in in the showers of our school basement after swimming. That circle of initiates included Raymond, Wally, Vladdy, and — sometimes — Jonathan. There was another tall boy in our class, Arthur, another bully, who knew something was happening and, when Jonathan wasn’t there to tell him to get lost, would occasionally barge naked into our gray marble changing booth and threaten to telclass="underline" the menace from Arthur far outweighed any threat from the Phys. Ed. teacher or his assistant — who simply wanted to stay as far as possible from the wet, naked, screaming, towel-snapping Sixth and Seventh Graders.
But I couldn’t see why Robert wouldn’t like it as much as the rest of us. Awkward as he was, though, I decided it would probably be better if I broke him in myself before I brought him to the others. These sexual explorations were carried on almost wholly without words — only partially because of Arthur. So you had to know what to do, or at least be able to figure it out without making noise.
When, once, Arthur finally did confront our regular Phys. Ed. teacher with an accusation, the t-shirted man put his hands on his hips, looked at the tall, belligerent boy, and, with a contemptuous jerk of his head, asked, “How come you’re so interested in stuff like that? Nobody likes squealers — about anything. But you keep on talking about this kind of stuff, somebody’s going to start wondering why you’re so curious and concerned about it all…” which left the boy surprised, silent, and probably confused.
But the rest of us were miraculously off the hook.
Today I suspect this was just our gym teacher’s (wholly homophobic) way of dealing with a situation he’d probably encountered many times in ten or fifteen years of teaching athletics.
But more recently, a male history teacher had been temporarily assigned to supervise the afternoon swim activities, and, wandering through the labyrinth of marble-walled shower and changing stalls, he must have overheard something, so waited outside ours for a good five or ten minutes, listening. Finally, still in his bathing suit, he stepped around, where three of the five of us had completely abandoned ours, and announced nervously: “What you’re doing is sick!” He was a tall, sunken-chested man, who never looked very happy. “You know, that’s very sick, now. I should report this. You just don’t understand how dangerous what you’re doing is. This is much more serious than you think — you don’t understand it. What you’re doing is very sick…!”
We froze in naked guilt. Then Wally, the most aggressive of us, suddenly declared, mockingly: “Well, I think you’re sick!” Then he let an ululating hoot, that ended in a kind of grunting, idiot laugh. Was he returning the intimidation to the teacher the way our gym coach had done with Arthur? Wally was the class clown anyway and, probably from nervousness, had simply blurted the most outrageous thing he could think of. Still, maybe he had some notion that moving our actions from the simply sinful into the truly insane — certainly the effect his words, wail and cackle had on me — might, somehow, save us. The history teacher blinked, said nothing, then — suddenly — walked away. And for the next anxious week, I wondered if we were to be punished. But in the end there was no more fall-out from his discovery than from Arthur’s. And so, after a hiatus of three or four days, we resumed.
But this was why you had to be on your toes to join in. And had to be quiet. On your toes was not the place Robert ordinarily stood — unless he had some coaching. But he was a smart kid and learned quickly. This country visit, now we were alone on the farm, seemed as good a time as any for me to start him out.
Our shoes and socks off, we were wandering around the grass. We’d been told we weren’t supposed to go into the livestock part of the barn barefoot. So we didn’t. But I started horsing around with Robert. Wrestling together on the hem of a haystack, I made a couple of grabs for his crotch. Once I got my hand down his baggy corduroys and made tickling motions between his legs.
“Don’t do that!” Robert protested.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “That doesn’t feel good?” I grinned.
He frowned. “It doesn’t feel anything,” he said. “It’s just silly.”
So much for my attempt, positioned (as are pretty much all early acts of desire, however clumsy) so ambiguously between the selfish and the compassionate, to introduce Robert to our puerile pleasures. But he was not very physically developed anyway. That seemed to be the end of it. So I didn’t try again.
Now we threw sticks for lolloping, golden King. And got tired of it.
Then Robert brought me over to show me his ducks. With King nosing up at his elbow, Robert leaned over the half door in the barn’s side, pointing around in the indoor duck pen. He told me that the fat, white, waddling birds had been given him that summer. During their stays on the farm, they were his responsibility. When they were sold, in a few months, Robert was going to get a third of the money. They had to be kept very calm and quiet, he explained, or they’d get all tough, and you wouldn’t be able to eat them.