A Self-Made Man

I

They’d met on the estate, then very much his father’s, the boy making his way up the long, pebbled front path on foot, despite the slanting rain of the storm. Stern stood with the men, cocktails in hand, at the bank of tall windows in the dim study, and together they all watched his progress; behind the boy’s small, blond figure (head bowed against the sky), the curve of the bay, the inscrutable face of the water, the furrows of heavy cloud illumed from within by the afternoon light. Stern was suddenly very conscious of the other men’s bodies, their age. He glanced around the room, the moment of unexpected desire making it seem as if the group was about to be presented to the boy, instead of the other way around.

“That’ll be Foster’s son, I’m afraid,” said Wells with a tragic little sigh. Wells, a slightly pudgy man in his fifties with an austere haircut, turned and looked at Stern, full of sadness at the boy’s beauty, apparent even at that distance.

Later that evening, when the boy had settled in his room (somewhat distant from his father’s, in a happy little coincidence Stern quietly confirmed with the maid) and showered, he joined the men at their pre-prandial cocktail hour. Watching him, Stern wondered for the first time what he’d been told, exactly, about the nature of this gathering.

“Grim, isn’t it, bringing a boy here,” Wells had said as the blond figure curved out of sight on the path around the front of the house. Though now he stepped forward in his apologetic, officious way and said to the boy, “It’s all very ‘Masque of the Red Death,’ I’m afraid, but this isn’t such a bad abbey—or castle, or whatever it was, I can never remember.” Wells gave an embarrassed chuckle at himself. The boy smiled humanely.

Wells was Henry Wells, British, gray-faced, with delicate, silver wire-rimmed glasses that were a poor match for the round angles of his full cheeks but a perfect prop for his fussy mien and unconscious, melancholic sighs. He seemed resigned to the boy’s taunting grace, now so physical in his proximity that Stern himself shifted a bit where he stood.

“It has been a brutal season, at least in the city,” the boy said now, and the men let the density of the comment sit there in the air for a moment, Stern thinking involuntarily of the faces of the young-men-turned-caretakers appearing of late at the doors of certain Upper East Side penthouses—those beautiful young men themselves wasting away, financing their own last months, surely not so distant now, by serving as final desperate company for the Giacomettian personages Stern was there to call on—as the rain beat the window glass and they swirled their drinks.

The boy’s name was Julian and he was, startlingly, sixteen. Stern didn’t know what had made him think the boy was somehow older: his height, maybe, or the intelligent, nervy way he’d spoken to them—to Wells, some thirty years his elder, but also to Stern, only sixteen years older, though that was the boy’s whole age over again. Julian was extremely well studied (over dinner that night Wells sheepishly quizzed him, mostly, Stern thought, just to watch the boy’s pale lips move). He was much more game at any rate than Foster, his father, who was a terse, sour presence at the table. In the middle of dinner, Stern’s own father, Bertram Stern, burst in dramatically, though he knew no other way to enter a room. He’d been sailing around in the storm all day waiting for the men to arrive. Now they were all here and Stern’s father—the very portrait of the bored, rich adventurer, all flowing white hair and disconcertingly tan skin—paused at the head of the table, as if to say something...