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“Father, don’t.”
And before he could protest, Mr. Edwards coaxed Bron into taking another step toward his son, and brought their hands together, insisting they step their feet this way, then that way.
Darcy stuffed his hands into his pockets, his eyes darting around in search of escape. After a few forced movements, he patted his father’s back and walked away, leaving Bron to look intently at the floor. Rejected. He didn’t want to dance either, but still the tears pricked at his eyes, and he looked over to Mr. Edwards, whose hands, now linked with Ada’s, had formed a ring. Ada pulled him into their circle. It was hard to muster the liveliness and joy they experienced, dancing in a ring-around-the-rosy to a song he didn’t recognize. He broke away before excusing himself.
Wading into the crowd, he crossed Darcy’s path again, who was now surrounded by a group of women whose voices Bron could hear above the music.
“You’ve never been a dancing man, have you, Theodore?” said the woman in the jumpsuit, holding a glass high with one arm and patting Darcy’s shoulder with the other.Theodore?“Do you remember all those years ago when I asked you to dance at the Trinity Formal, and you shut me down? Claimed you had a sprained ankle.” She then linked arms with the other man who stood beside her. “Did you make that same claim now before running off like a little schoolboy?”
“I need do no such thing this time, Magda.” Darcy laughed. He was sipping his flute when he caught Bron’s eye.
“You’ve always been preoccupied with the way things appear. Why not be more carefree, like your father? He seems quite a changed man nowadays.”
“Yes, quite. And yet here we are, still repressed.”
“You repress yourself, dear. We can be anything we want to be. Our privilege sees to that,” she laughed, and made to cheers the rest of the party. “And that poor boy in the sweet headband? I would have danced with him myself were I not already smitten.” She pulled on her man, who stood rigid as a pillar.
Bron noticed Darcy’s eyes flitting between him and the woman. “I’m glad you’ve finally found happiness, Maggie.”
“Oh, you would be happier yourself if you just let loose. Tell me what was wrong with that boy?”
“Well, he is here to care for Ada.”
“Is that all?”
“It is also rather strange, is it not, the way he lurks about like—”
Bron didn’t catch the end of the sentence, for someone had walked past and broken his concentration. It was Maggie who was speaking now.
“—in any case, I think you’re wrong. Times are changing. Are you saying you’d have been more open to the idea of his being Ada’s tutor had he been a woman?”
“Definitely not. Ada seems to like him, and that’s all that counts,” Darcy said. “Ah, there I go again, assuming one’s pronouns. Don’t go telling me off.”
“Announcing one’s preferences will become normal etiquette soon enough.”
The other man piped in. “People identify as ‘queer’, now, I do believe. Which I’ll never get my head around. In my day it was something of an insult.”
Despite the noise surrounding them, the words hung in Bron’s ear like a curse, stinging like a needle. This mocking ofa word he took pride in, as though they were being cast back to the 1980s. Queer was everything he had. Queer was specific, ambiguous, powerful.
“Hmm.” Darcy nodded.
Bron hurried away through the dining room and up the staircase, unexpected shame encircling him like a ruff. People barred his way, standing in packs. He could no longer hear voices, only warped music and cackled laughter, and his bedroom stood too far out of reach, lest he push them out of his way. He doubled back to a corner of this mazelike house, feeling the rush-hour moments of St. Mary’s in his legs, when all the boys on campus would hurry on the stairwell, running through the hallways and into their respective classrooms. He hurried into the last available room at the end of the landing, which was vacant. It was the library, and the music and screeching of voices diminished instantly, taken over by a heated silence. His arms pressed against the wooden door as if to hold out the intruders, and he hoped to lean there, feeling the warmth of the room on his back engulf him, press into him, and him into the walls—a furnaced refuge to the airiness of the hallway, where opinions flowed like a feather in the wind, landing wherever they may.
He had so hoped that things would be different here, that he wouldn’t be subjected to the embarrassment he’d endured as a child. He’d been naive to think it was possible, that being an adult would fix things. His pain was as real as ever, a buildup that stretched the ribs and had his heart beating at the forefront of his chest. For now, though, he settled his breathing, took great gulps of it. Felt the strain in his neck as he lifted off the door, the weight of his head again his to carry. One suffering walk back through the crowd and to his bedroom, and he could sleep the night away and forget everything that had happened. But the knock of wood, or sound like the drop of a pencil, made him suddenly aware of the presence of another in the room.
A man stood behind the large mahogany desk, arms splayed out and bent over a mess of papers that, in the glow of thelamplight, made each individual paper look like a country in one large map of the world. He wore a dark turtleneck and even darker blazer, and emerging from behind the desk, silver-white trousers that stuck to his legs like paint. Oily, curling hair slicked back. He could have been missing a feather, this captain of the sea.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said, shutting off his phone and tucking it into his jacket. “I did not mean to scare you.”
Several words rushed to his throat but did not leave his mouth:What are you doing in here? Why can’t I get a moment alone? There are always people in this large fucking house.He reassembled himself.
“Who are you?” He remembered this man, whom Mr. Edwards had abandoned him for atop the stairs. “What are you doing in here?”
“I am Giovanni,” he said. “I would ask who you are, but I think I already know. Bran, no?”
He wasn’t expecting the question to be turned back on him. Perhaps he was the one trespassing into a room when he shouldn’t have.
“Bron,” he corrected.
