He was twenty-three, five years younger than David, and had attended, for two years, a conservatory in Worcester, Massachusetts. But although he had had a scholarship, he hadn’t the money to earn his degree, and so had moved to New York four years ago to find work.
“What did you do?” David had asked him.
“Oh, a bit of everything,” had been the reply, and this had turned out not to be untrue, or at least not completely: Edward had been, for brief periods, a cook’s assistant (“Ghastly. I can scarcely boil water, as you’ve seen for yourself”), a nanny (“Terrible. I neglected my charges’ education entirely and just let them eat sweets”), a coal-man’s apprentice (“I’m simply not sure why I even thought it might be work for which I’d be the least suited”), and an artist’s model (“Much duller than you’d imagine. One perches in an impossible position until one’s aching and cold while a class of simpering dowagers and leering codgers make attempts to sketch you”). Finally, though (through means which remained unexplained), he found work as a pianist in a small nightclub.
(“A nightclub!” David was unable to stop himself from exclaiming.
“Yes, yes, a nightclub! Where else would I have learned all those inappropriate songs that so offend the Bingham ears?” But this last was said teasingly, and they smiled at each other.)
From the nightclub, he had received an offer to teach at the institute (this too was left unexplained, and David entertained a brief and satisfying fantasy of Matron marching down into a dark room, grabbing Edward by the back of his collar, and yanking him up a flight of stairs, down the street, and into the school); lately, he had been trying to supplement his income by giving private lessons, though he knew that finding such work would be difficult, if not near-impossible.
(“But you are qualified,” David had protested.
“But there are many others more qualified and better credentialed than I. Come—you have nieces and nephews, do you not? Would your brother or sister ever hire someone like me? Or would they hire—be truthful, now—tutors trained at the National Conservatory, or professional musicians, to teach their darlings? Oh, no, don’t feel bad, you needn’t apologize; I know it to be true, and it is simply how things are. A poor and unestablished young man without a degree even from a third-rate seminary is not much in demand, and never shall be.”)
He enjoyed teaching. His friends (he offered no details of them) teased him for his job, modest as it was in all ways, but he was fond of it, fond of the children themselves. “They remind me of what I was,” he said, though, again, he did not explain how. He, like David, knew that his charges would never be able to become musicians, might never even have the luxury of attending a musical performance, but he thought that he would at least be able to give them a spot of delight, of joy, in their lives, something they might carry with them, a source of pleasure they might always be able to call their own.
“That is how I feel, too,” he’d cried, excited that someone should see the children’s education as he did. “They may never play music themselves—none of them will, most likely—but it will give them a certain refinement of the spirit, won’t it? And isn’t that worthwhile?”
At this, something, some cloud, had moved quickly and briefly across Edward’s face, and for a moment, David wondered if he had said something to offend. But “You are very right” was all his new friend said, and then the conversation had turned to a different subject.
All this he had recorded, along with the details Edward told him of his neighbors, which made him laugh and marvel, too: an elderly bachelor who never left his room, and yet whom Edward had seen lower his shoes in a bucket to a waiting bootblack on the sidewalk below; the longshoreman, whose snores they could occasionally hear purring through the thin wall; the boy in the room above his, who Edward swore spent his days giving dancing lessons to elderly ladies, the evidence the noise of their heels clopping across the wood. He was aware that Edward thought him naïve, and also of his delight in astonishing him, of trying, often, to shock him. And he was happy to comply: He was naïve. He enjoyed being astonished. In Edward’s presence he felt both older and younger, and weightless, too—he was being given the opportunity to relive his youth, to finally experience that sense of abandon that young people felt, except he was now old enough to know to treasure it. “My innocent,” Edward had begun calling him, and although he might have felt patronized by the affection—for it was patronizing, was it not?—he did not. To Edward, he was not ignorant after all but innocent, something small and precious, something to be protected and cherished from everything that existed outside the boardinghouse walls.
But it was what Edward had told him on their third meeting that had since come to occupy much of his time and many of his thoughts. They had been intimate for the first time that day, Edward standing, mid-sentence (he had been speaking of a friend of his who was a math tutor for a purportedly rich family of whom David had never heard), and drawing the curtains, and then matter-of-factly joining him on the bed, and although this was of course not his first encounter—he, like every man in the city, rich or poor, would from time to time take a hansom to the eastern mouth of Gansevoort Street, a few blocks north of the boardinghouse, where men like him would head to the southern row of houses, and men who wanted women to the northern row, and the ones who wanted something else altogether would go to the western end of the street, where there were a few parlors that fulfilled more specific desires, including a single, tidy house that was meant only for female customers—it felt extraordinary, as if he were relearning how to walk, or eat, or breathe: a physical sensation that he had for so long accepted as feeling one way but that had been revealed to be something entirely different.
Afterward, they had lain together, and so narrow was Edward’s bed that they had both had to turn on their sides, else David would have tumbled out altogether. They laughed about this, too.
“Do you know,” he had begun, moving his arm from beneath the wool blanket, which he found almost unbearably scratchy, like being covered with a skein woven from nettles—I shall have to get him another one, he thought—and placing it atop Edward’s soft skin, beneath which he could feel the ridges of his rib cage, “you have told me so much of yourself, but you have still not told me where you are from, or who your people are.” This reticence had initially intrigued him, but now he found it slightly troubling—he feared that Edward was ashamed of his origins, that he might think David would be disapproving. And yet he was not that sort of person: Edward had nothing to fear from him. “Where are you from?” he asked, into Edward’s silence. “Not from New York,” he continued. “Connecticut? Massachusetts?”
Finally, Edward spoke. “The Colonies,” he said, quietly, and at this, David was speechless.
He had never known someone from the Colonies. Oh, he had seen them: Every year, Eliza and Eden hosted a salon in their home to raise money for the refugees, and there was always an escapee, usually recent, to speak tremblingly about his or her experience in the lovely, honeyed voice that the Colonists had. Increasingly, they came not for religious reasons, or to escape persecution, but because, in the decades since it had been defeated (though its citizens would never use this term) in the War of Rebellion, the Colonies had become steadily more impoverished—not entirely, of course, and not ruinously so, but it would never again have the sort of wealth it once did, much less the sort that the Free States had accumulated in the century-odd period since its founding. But it was not these kinds of migrants that his sister and her wife hosted but the rebels, the ones who came north because to remain where they had been born and raised would have been to court danger, because they wanted to live freely. The war was over but the fighting continued; there were many for whom the Colonies remained a miserable place, full of skirmishes and late-night raids.