Free To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara Page A

afraid; only dried chamomile buds”—David felt less uncomfortable, and for a moment, there was a companionable silence, as the two of them drank.
    “I’ve biscuits, if you want them?”
    “No, no thank you.”
    They both sipped. “We shall have to go back to the café again—earlier in the day, perhaps.”
    “Yes, I should like that.”
    For a moment, it seemed they both struggled to speak. “Do you think we should allow the Negroes in?” asked Edward, teasingly, and David, smiling back, shook his head. “I feel for the Negroes, of course,” he said, staunchly, echoing his grandfather’s opinion, “but it is best that they find their own places to live—in the West, perhaps.” It was not, his grandfather said, that the Negroes were uneducable—in fact, the opposite was true, and that was the trouble, for once the Negro became learned, would he not want to enjoy the opportunities of the Free States himself? He thought of how his grandfather would only refer to the Negro question as “the Negro issue,” never the Negro dilemma or the Negro problem, for “once we call it that, it becomes ours to solve.” “The Negro issue is the sin at America’s heart,” he often said. “But we are not America, and it is not our sin.” On this matter, as on many others, David knew his grandfather to be wise, and it had never occurred to him to believe differently.
    Another silence, broken by only the sound of the china cups tapping against their teeth, and Edward smiled at him. “You are shocked by how I live.”
    “No,” he said, “not shocked,” though he was. He was so stunned, indeed, that his conversational abilities, his manners, had deserted him altogether. When he had been a shy schoolboy, slow to make friends and often ignored by his classmates, Grandfather had once told him that all one had to do to seem interesting was to ask questions of others. “People adore nothing more than to speak of themselves,” Grandfather had said. “And if you ever find yourself in a circumstance in which you fear your place or standing—though you should not: You are a Bingham, remember, and the best child I know—then all you must do is ask the other person something about him- or herself, and they will forever after be convinced that you are the most fascinating individual they have ever encountered.” This was an exaggeration, naturally, but his grandfather had not been incorrect, and this advice, once followed, had, if not transformed his place among his peers, then certainly prevented what would have promised to be a lifetime of ignominy, and he had relied upon it on countless occasions since.
    Even now, he was aware that, of the two of them, Edward was by far the more mysterious, the more compelling figure. He was David Bingham, and everything about him was known. What would it be like to be someone anonymous, someone whose name meant nothing, who was able to move through life as a shadow, who was able to sing a music-hall ditty in a classroom without word of it traveling among everyone one knew, to live in a frigid room in a boardinghouse with a neighbor who woke when others were settling in their parlors for drinks and conversation, to be someone who was beholden to no one? He was not so romantic as to desire this, necessarily; he would not much like to live in this cold little cell so near the river, to have to fetch water every time one wanted to have a drink instead of merely giving a single sharp yank to a bell pull—he was not even convinced he would be capable of it. Yet to be so known was to trade adventure for certainty, and therefore to be exiled to an unsurprising life. Even in Europe, he had beenpassed from acquaintance to acquaintance of his grandfather’s: His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not.
    So it was with genuine longing that he began asking Edward about himself,