Archive of Our Own

These are the stories people--our kind of people--do not talk about.

Stories about a child brought up by a woman who knew how to poison things. A woman who gathered together her bitterness and insecurity and turned them into a venom that she used to poison her husband's dog. No one remains alive now to say whether the man called David Kent, amidst his fury, was able to wholly suppress his fear. If a woman will kill a dog out of jealousy, what else would she be able to kill? Or who else? Did Eileen Kent remember the glint of fear in his eyes? After he died, did she ever feel remorse for anything but her own loveless state?

Of course she did, you will say. We have stories of her in the Tansy Patch, tending lovingly, if possessively, her one and only son. And he turned out all right. Surely that proves...

Proves what? That he did not learn, early on, that his mother liked to have him crawl into her bed with her, far after the age when any young boy is supposed to want to do so? That he did not grow up with his mother's hands running down his young, male body, caressing him in the old wooden tub that stood in the corner of the kitchen? One would assume that by the time a child is old enough to remember events, he is ready to bathe himself, but Teddy distinctly remembers bath times, with his mother's focused, attentive scrutiny on his body, as she rubbed him down with a towel. How old was he when he finally asked her to step out of the room before he started undressing at night? Nine? Ten? He only did it out of a sense of shame that was taught to him by the boys at school, who sniggered when he talked about his mother. He learned very quickly that his relationship with his mother was different from other boys' and he learned to shield that difference with silence.

There are many stories that Teddy Kent never talked about.

Our kind of people also do not talk about the stories that a young boy sailing a merchant ship with his father does not tell.

Stories of watching seamen in hammocks strain against each other, when they have been at sea for two months and the night provides a pretence of privacy. Stories of how whorehouses by the docksides of ports on three different continents all look surprisingly the same when you are six years old and tired and hungry and waiting for your father to be done so that you can get some supper. Stories of being viciously seasick during a storm, tied to a mast so that you do not vomit all over the captain's cabin. Stories of learning far too early on that friendly men are often more dangerous than surly ones, and that your body is more visible to them than you are.

Emily and Ilse were always content with hearing the other kind of stories, the glittering ones about candles in far off lands and four legged ducks. Perry learned very quickly that there was a difference in the silence of people who chose to avoid talking about certain things, and people who did not even know the things implied by silence. He worked very hard to master their language, to treat humility and self-deprecation as more useful values than confidence and the self-assuredness required to talk your way out of any situation. And by any, what do we really mean?

Well, think about it. What can make a boy of eleven fear nothing? What must have happened to him that he can take on the wrath of a society ferociously protecting its echelons, earn his living before puberty and aspire through more than a decade of snubs to marry the one friendly face symbolizing all the safety of the innocent homestead he has never had? What drives a child raised on the sea, privy to all the world's wonders, to so determinedly turn his back on it in order to root himself so thoroughly to the respectable nation-state?

There are stories that Perry Miller has never told, not even to the most interested biographer. Not even to Ilse.

Emily of New Moon will never write these stories.

In her stories, old maids receive second chances at love, or find joy through the youth of some foster child. When they get left a fortune by Old Great Aunt Nancy, it is solely out of spite, not as meager recompense for a lifetime of love shared in the shadows.

In her stories, a 36-year-old man could want a 12-year-old girl and wait for her to grow up while discussing literature with her.

Perry did not talk about the other kind of stories because he assumed Emily did not want to be reminded of them. When he met Dean Priest he knew what the look in the man's green eyes as he watched Emily meant, but he also knew by that time that `decent people' didn't speak of such things. Dean Priest would go off traveling every winter, and bring back stories of gardens for Emily. When Perry sat beside them, he knew that his boasts about escaping from a man with a knife on the London quayside would seem less real than Dean's stories of seeing Shakespeare performed in a fancy theatre. When Dean talked about swaying palm trees, Perry remembered seeing sweating black men being paid a paltry copper coin for their day's efforts unloading the ship's cargo, while their white overseer watched from a shady verandah.
Perry knew a girl in Stovepipe Ttown who had had a baby when she was fifteen. When Dean Priest took some interest in Teddy Kent's drawings, wrote him a letter or two about art, and sent him some books, Perry wondered whether to warn Teddy. He decided not to. Teddy Kent's silence did not come from ignorance. Perry had seen too many pretty, sensitive boys to not know what went into the shaping of them. He wondered why Dr. Burnley did not care more about how Mrs. Kent dealt with Teddy, even if the girls knew no better. Surely a doctor would know more about the things everyone refused to talk about?

But Perry learned to keep his silence since that was what brought him entry into Emily's world, a world of prosaic safety that he would never tire of. Teddy kept his silence because, after all, who was Perry but a wild upstart boy from Stovepipe Town who looked as though he knew about all the secrets anyone wanted to keep and didn't respect their solemn tragedy, didn't seem to even care about them.

Here is a story Teddy will never tell Emily.

It concerns his two years in Paris, when he was living off of a meager scholarship, sharing a cheap boarding house with three other students, only one of whom spoke English. They were heady years, nonetheless, spent sneaking past the guards to enter the Louvre and sit worshipfully before the Rembrandts, and discovering that it was possible for good, God-fearing people to drink wine at a mid-day riverside picnic and not be thought of as depraved and degenerate. There were two common languages in the artists' quarters in Paris, and if one was Art--the shared passion for vivid pigments and chiaroscuro, the other was Sex--the tawdry, tempestuous sensations of flesh that could always be immortalized as the inspiration for the first.

Teddy never dared to talk to the girl who modeled nude for his art class in Montreal, but in Paris, after a sitting, the girls would chatter gaily and drag him out to a café afterwards and make up for their lack of linguistic compatibility with wide, open smiles that required no effort to elicit.

There were boys too--young, sharp-boned males who had little of the rounder languor of the marble gods in the museums, whose eyes were as anxious as their wrists were limp.

The story that Teddy will not tell is about an evening when he saw one of those boys walking home with the burly German artist who lived in the rooms below him. He kept an unobtrusive distance, but there was little conversation to overhear--an occasional pleasantry in German being met by an `Oui' or a `Non'. As they reached the door of their building, the German man steered the boy in with a hand on his elbow, a hand he did not remove as they mounted the stairs. When Teddy walked past their doorway, he saw that the men were kissing, very simply, matter-of-factly; the French boy's fingers tangled in the German's beard, the German's hand cupping the French boy's neck.

When Teddy went down early in the morning to buy a bottle of milk and a freshly baked baguette, he saw the French boy shutting the German man's door carefully behind him. The boy glanced at him and smiled coquettishly. Teddy could not help but smile back. The boy started down the stairs, brushing deliberately against his hips. When Teddy inhaled, the boy glanced back, turned around, and then lent in, pressing his lips to Teddy's with a playful ease. The kiss was over almost before it was begun; an aperitif that would not get followed by an entrée because Teddy did not know the rules of the transaction. The boy went down the stairs, and Teddy, after a while, followed his route, and bought his baguette and milk and returned to his rooms.

Here is a question that never gets asked--why does Teddy only permit himself to draw males in caricatures, or commercial illustrations bound by specifications? Why do all his paintings have Emily's eyes, and Emily's wrists, and Emily's soul, but never Emily's breasts, or naked curved hips, or rounded stomach? Why, even in a self-portrait assignment, is there more of Emily in his pictures than himself?

There are many stories that Perry thinks Ilse doesn't tell him.

He knows she enjoys talking about Europe with Ted Kent. He listens to her reminisce with diplomatic guests, drawing them out with her witty, sophisticated tales of touring in their cities. He never hears her mentioning the men that she must have come across in her travels, the stories that go along with being young, and beautiful, and an entertainer. When she turns to him, at night, after he enters their bedroom with his hands still full of the papers he has stayed up late reading, she does not talk about the stories that inform her urgent hands, her questing, grasping fingers. She does not talk about the demons that drive her to claw his back, sometimes drawing blood, that look for savagery from him, of a kind that he is often too tired and too disinterested in to give.

She talks openly about his admiration for Emily, she laughs at her own brazen marriage proposal to him; she never talks about why she threw marriageable young men at Emily those early years in Charlottetown. She is anxiously protective of him when news of Ted and Emily's engagement comes, but she does not talk about her own, brief liaison with Ted.

Emily writes books for a living, and Ilse has made a living reciting tales, but this is not the kind of story either of them cares to talk about. Perhaps they do not know about it, for how do you talk about certain unnamed things, that like shadows, exist only in the absences of words?

Perry and Teddy do not tell stories for a livelihood, and they are not in the habit of talking at all, about many things.

They did not talk the first time that Perry saw Teddy Kent with his mother, and Teddy responded to the knowing silence with an arrogant, defensive walled-up silence of his own.

They did not talk when Dean Priest looked at Emily, and then turned those knowing eyes on Teddy.

They did not talk when they met after years of silence, when Perry saw that Paris had finally taught Teddy something about himself that he hadn't known before.

They did not talk as Emily married Teddy in the old-world New Moon garden, no bridesmaids or groomsman in attendance because Ilse was married, and Perry was... unthinkable.

And even the first time that it happened, they did not talk.

It was Teddy who leaned in first, Teddy whose tongue licked at the edge of Perry's mouth. It was Perry who unbuttoned the trousers first, both his and Teddy's. It was Teddy who came first, with a breathless shudder that left him limp and sweaty. It was Perry who knew how to use spit and be gentle.

Depending on who is telling the tale, Perry's is either the meteoric ascent from poverty of a Canadian Premier, or the distinguished childhood friend of writer Emily Byrd Starr. Teddy's is the romantic story of being jilted by the Premier's wife to end up marrying his artistic equal.

Perhaps the more discerning of biographers might trace a link between two boys who grew up in Blair Water and never fully belonged to it. Perhaps they could even speculate about the nature of their meetings, in Montreal, in Paris, in Blair Water. They were husbands of two women who were close friends, true, and they were men of the world, also true.

You might wonder about how and when and why it began. Is Emily dead? you might ask. Is Ilse? Do they know? Is it a regular occurrence, or did it only happen just the once? What is it that the two men feel for each other, is it lust, is it love, is it indifference?

But that is not the kind of story we tell, is it? We do not talk about sex like a pigsty--warm and pungent and mucky and too visceral to be poetic about. We do not talk about why a man who has loved a woman since childhood must feel the need to stay away from her for so long. We do not talk about why another man might consent to a marriage he has never really thought about before. We do not talk about the secrets shared in a marriage bed, and in what proportion reserve, tolerance, and discomfort are present in them. We do not talk about the silent screams of childhood that shape us.