Free The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth Page B

cheap calfskin.
    “I am,” I tell him. And it is true—my anxiety and anticipation, my pleasures and enchantments and guilts and disenchantments have all combined to register as lethargy. Only a stray ripple of remembered excitement fights the feeling; my legs have no strength, but there’s still a part of me that wants to run back to the Canongate. “Cibber has that effect on me. I watch him, and he makes me almost unbearably tired.”
    “That’s because you’re offended by farce,” James says, chuckling to himself. “Cibber means nothing insulting by it. It is his native language.”
    James himself seems slightly subdued, introspective. He looks about him as he did earlier this afternoon, noting intriguing people and carriages, but conveying less of the impression that he’d like to embrace and consume them one after another. Now he seems serene, content but reflective, searching somehow.
    “You’ve yet to tell me about your audiences backstage,” I prompt.
    James swings to look at me, then faces front again. He smiles, very slowly and luxuriously. “Were you right in your prediction, is what you mean. I think you were. Sylvia was quite chaste, and I do believe that was part of allowing me back after the performance, to demonstrate chastity. Score one for John today.”
    “I wasn’t trying to score points, Jemmie.”
    “Ah, so you say, but I was right too.” He holds a finger in the air. “I did manage to see her fresh from the stage, just as the characterof Lady Betty was in the process of melting away. A
heart-stopping
spectacle. An actress is a miraculous thing, John. I’ve told you before that there are several men trapped inside of me, a hundred men, and to be forced to be only one would be my death. I knew today, watching Betty melt away and Sylvia gather herself up again, that I can only marry an actress. A woman equally many in number. Laugh, but that is the God’s honest truth.”
    “I am
not
laughing. You insist that I’m laughing and scoring points. I am not. I’m rooting for you, Jemmie. Because I have a feeling you’ve passed a point of no return. And I would help you, now that you’re helpless.”
    He draws in a long lungful of evening air, sorting his thoughts before speaking. Our two pairs of boots make a comforting clacking on the stones, occasionally portioning out into something that resembles the sound of a single horse being led along. Then the sounds diverge, become again the differentiated walks of two Boswells, dragging their way home.
    “But, Johnny,” he says after a pause, hand buffing his sword hilt absently, “there is something else. Another reason for asking me to her dressing rooms, it turns out. Something she wanted to tell me. To confess. She is a Catholic.”
    I have to reorder my expectations, and even then I can do nothing but repeat his words. “A Catholic.”
    “Yes. Devout. Very earnest about the doctrine. Very well read in it.”
    We begin to walk again. It takes only a moment for me to rework the day’s half-joking calculations in my mind and come up with a new bottom line.
    “But then she cannot be mistress at Auchinleck. Even supposing you were serious about marrying her. Even supposing father would allow it. You must give that fantasy up.”
    But James, of course, has come to his own new bottom line.
    “Ay, give that up, or give up Auchinleck itself,” he says.
    I should have expected it, but I didn’t, and I swing my head tosee how serious he seems to be. If he were joking, he’d meet my eye and wink, but he doesn’t meet my eye. He’s scanning the lighted windows in the Tolbooth, and at some level this contemplation of the incarcerated he intends as a sign of the gravity of his thoughts.
    “James, don’t let your mind play down that road. I know you. You’ll get lost and not be able to find your way back.”
    “Suppose it weren’t play. Suppose I told you that I’ve read the doctrine and found much there to like. And, of course, the