Free A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White Page A

to slip past him? And would that man be on the corner? The boardinghouse room, yes, Negro music on the radio next door, the coquette's shriek... As I walked down the drive I felt conspicuous under the blank windows of my father's house and half expected him to open the never-used front door to call me back.
    I stood on the appointed corner. It began to drizzle but a water truck crept past anyway, spraying the street a darker, slicker gray. No birds were in sight but I could hear them testing the day. A dog without a collar or master trotted past. Two fat maids were climbing the hill, stopping every few steps to catch their breath. One, a shiny, blue-black fat woman wearing a flowered turban and holding a purple umbrella with a white plastic handle, was scowling and talking fast but obviously to humorous effect, for her companion couldn't stop laughing.
    The bells of the Catholic school behind the dripping trees across the street marked the quarter hour, the half hour. More and more cars were passing me. I studied every driver— had my friend overslept? The milkman. The bread truck.
    Damn hillbilly. A bus went by, carrying just one passenger. A quarter to seven. He wasn't coming.
    When I saw him the next evening on the square he waved at me and came over to talk. From his relaxed manner I instantaneously saw that he'd duped me and I was powerless. To whom could I report him? Like a heroin addict or a Communist, I was outside the law—outside it but with him, this man.
    We sat side by side on the same bench. A bad muffler exploded in a volley and the cooing starlings perched on the fountain figure's arm flew up and away leaving behind only the metal dove. I took off my tie, rolled it up and slipped it inside my pocket. Because I didn't complain about being betrayed, my friend said, "See those men yonder?"
    "Yes."
    "I could git you one for eight bucks." He let that sink in; yes, I thought, I could take someone to one of those little fleabag hotels. "Which one do you want?" he said.
    I handed him the money and said, "The blond."
     

 

     
    Until I was seven my parents, my sister and I lived in a Tudor-style house at the end of a lane in the city where my father remained after the divorce. Our house and three others formed a wooded, almost rural enclave set down in the midst of an old, poor section of the city. I could never quite situate our enclave in the world outside; I remember my astonishment the day I roamed through the hollow behind our place, climbed up the far hill, pushed aside branches—and stared out at a major four-lane thoroughfare I'd been driven downcountless times but had never suspected ran so close to our property. Certainly not behind it, of all things. To me the city lay entirely in front of our gates in a dirty, busy antechamber. I consulted with my sister. She was four years older, could read, went to school and knew everything. "Sure, dumbbell," she said. "Of course it's behind the house. Where'd you think it was?" She screwed her fingertip into her temple and said, "Duh."
    She began to chant a colorless litany of "Dumbbells." I stopped my ears with my hands and ran, crying, back into the house.
    My sister had friends she'd met at Miss Laughton's School for Girls who came home to play with her some afternoons. They all belonged to a club my sister had started. She was the captain. Her success as a leader could be attributed to the methodical way she worked out her ideas: her approach lent an adult, step-by-step orderliness to projects that otherwise might have seemed wild and incomprehensible.
    One afternoon she ordered each of her team members to steal a belt from her father that night and bring it with her tomorrow. Of course every girl must be clever in stealing and hiding the belt; if caught, she must be even more resourceful in denying the real reason for filching it. The next afternoon the girls gathered in the hollow and presented their booty to my sister, who lashed each girl with her own