He saw the entrance and the pediment of such a school and imagined the curriculum. There would have been classes on the moment of recognition; lectures on the mortal error of confusing worship with tenderness; there would have been symposiums on indiscriminate erotic impulses and man’s complex and demoniac nature and there would have been descriptions of the powers of anxiety to light the world with morbid and lovely colors. Representations of Venus would be paraded before them and they would be marked on their reactions. Those pitiful men who counted upon women to assure them of their sexual nature would confess to their sins and miseries, and libertines who had abused women would also testify. Those nights when he had lain in bed, listening to trains and rains and feeling under his hip bread crumbs and the cold stains of love—those nights when his joy overshot his understanding—would be explained in detail and he would be taught to put an exact and practical interpretation on the figure of a lovely woman bringing in her flowers at dusk before the frost. He would learn to estimate sensibly all such tender and lovely figures—women sewing, their laps heaped with blue cloth—women singing in the early dark to their children the ballads of that lost cause, Charles Stuart—women walking out of the sea or sitting on rocks. There would be special courses for Coverly on the matriarchy and its subtle influence—he would have to do make-up work here—courses in the hazards of uxoriousness that, masquerading as love, expressed skepticism and bitterness. There would be scientific lectures on homosexuality and its fluctuating place in society and the truth or the falsity of its relationship to the will to die. That hair-line where lovers cease to nourish and begin to devour one another; that fine point where tenderness corrodes self-esteem and the spirit seems to flake like rust would be put under a microscope and magnified until it was as large and recognizable as a steel girder. There would be graphs on love and graphs on melancholy and the black looks that we are entitled to give the hopelessly libidinous would be measured to a millimeter. It would be a hard course for Coverly, he knew, and he would be on probation most of the time, but he would graduate. An upright piano would play “Pomp and Circumstance” and he would march across a platform and be given a diploma and then he would go down the stairs and under the pediment in full possession of his powers of love and he would regard the earth with candor and with relish, world without end.
But there was no such school, and when he got into New York, late that night, it was raining and the streets around the station seemed to exhale an atmosphere of erotic misdemeanor. He got a hotel room and, looking for the truth, decided that what he was was a homosexual virgin in a cheap hotel. He would never see the resemblance he bore to Cousin Honora, but, as he cracked his knuckles and stretched his neck, his train of thought was like the old lady’s. If he was a pederast he would be one openly. He would wear bracelets and pin a rose in his bottonhole. He would be an organizer of pederasts, a spokesman and prophet. He would force society, government and the law to admit their existence. They would have clubs—not hole-in-the-wall meeting places, but straight-forward organizations like the English-Speaking Union. What bothered him most was his inability to discharge his responsibilities to his parents, and he sat down and wrote Leander a letter.
A morning train took Coverly out to Clear Haven and when he saw his brother he thought how solid this friendship was. They embraced—they swatted one another—they got into the old Rolls and in a second Coverly had dropped from the anguish of anxiety to a level of life that seemed healthy and simple and reminded him only of good things. Could it be wrong, he wondered, that he seemed, in spirit, to have returned to his father’s house? Could it be wrong that he felt as if he were back at the farm, making some simple journey down to Travertine to race the Tern? They passed the gates and went up through the park while Moses explained that he was living at Clear Haven only until autumn; that it had been Melissa’s home. Coverly was impressed with the towers and battlements, but not surprised since it was a part of his sense of the world that Moses would always have better luck than he. Melissa was still in bed, but she would be down soon. They would have a picnic at the pool. “This is the library,” Moses said. “This is the ballroom, this is the state dining room, this is what they call the rotunda.” Then Melissa came down the stairs.
She took Coverly’s breath away; her golden skin and her dark-blond hair. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, and while her voice was pleasant enough it could never be compared to the power of her appearance. She seemed a triumphant beauty to Coverly—an army with banners—and he couldn’t take his eyes off her until Moses pushed him toward a bathroom where they put on their bathing trunks. “I think we’d better wear hats,” Melissa said. “The sun’s terribly bright.” Moses opened a coat closet, passed Melissa a hat and, rummaging around for one himself, brought down a green Tyrolean hat with a brush in the band. “Is this D’Alba’s?” he asked. “Lord, no,” Melissa said. “Pansies never wear hats.” It was all that Coverly needed. He plunged into the coat closet and grabbed the first hat he saw—an old Panama that must have belonged to the late Mr. Scaddon. It was much too big for him—it drooped down over his ears—but with at least this one symbol of his male virility intact he walked behind Moses and Melissa down toward the pool.
Melissa didn’t swim that day. She sat at the edge of the marble curb, spreading the cloth for lunch and pouring the drinks. There was nothing she did or said that did not charm and delight poor Coverly and incline him to foolishness. He dived. He swam the length of the pool four times. He tried to do a back dive and failed, splashing water all over Melissa. They drank martinis and talked about the farm, and Coverly, who was not used to liquor, got tipsy. Starting to talk about the Fourth of July parade he was side-tracked by a memory of Cousin Adelaide and ended up with describing the rocket launchings on Saturday afternoons. He didn’t mention Betsey’s departure and when Moses asked for her he spoke as if they were still living happily together. When lunch was finished he swam the length of the pool once more and then lay down in the shade of a boxwood tree and fell asleep.
He was tired and didn’t know, for a moment, when he woke where he was, seeing the water gush out of the green lions’ heads and the towers and battlements of Clear Haven at the head of the lawn. He splashed some water on his face. The picnic cloth was still spread on the curb. No one had removed the cocktail glasses or the plates and chicken bones. Moses and Melissa were gone and the shadow of a hemlock tree fell across the pool. Then he saw them coming down the garden path from the greenhouse where they had spent some pleasant time and there was such grace and gentleness between them that he thought his heart would break in two; for her beauty could arouse in him only sadness, only feelings of parting and forsakenness, and thinking of Pancras it seemed that Pancras had offered him much more than friendship—that he had offered him the subtle means by which we deface and diminish the loveliness of a woman. Oh, she was lovely, and he had betrayed her! He had sent spies into her kingdom on rainy nights and encouraged the usurper.
“I’m sorry we left you alone, Coverly,” she said, “but you were sleeping, you were snoring. …” It was late, it was time for Coverly to dress and catch his train.
Any railroad station on Sunday afternoon seems to lie close to the heart of time. Even in midsummer the shadows seem autumnal and the people who are gathered there—the soldier, the sailor, the old lady with flowers wrapped in a paper—seemed picked so arbitrarily from the community, seem so like those visited by illness or death, that we are reminded of those solemn plays in which it appears, toward the end of the first act, that all the characters are dead. “Do your soft shoe, Coverly,” Moses asked. “Do your buck and wing.” “I’m rusty, brother,” Coverly said. “I can’t do it any more.” “Oh, try, Coverly,” Moses said. “Oh, try …” Cloppety, cloppety, cloppety went Coverly up and down the platform, ending with a clumsy shuffle-off, a bow and a blush. “We’re a very talented family,” he told Melissa. Then the train came down the track and their feelings, like the scraps of paper on the platform, were thrown up pellmell in a hopeless turbulence. Coverly embraced them both—he seemed to be crying—and boarded the train.