Photographs

Really should just let Sleeping Beauty rest and work on something else for a while, and I am trying, but the idea of Russell POV has caught me by the throat and just wouldn't let me go...

Here, Russell is recuperating from strep throat. To cheer him up, Caleb has given him a photograph of his fiancee Julia and his best friend Owen.

***

After Caleb left, Russell tucked the photographs in a drawer. The sight of the dear dead faces pierced his soul, and he could not look at them anymore; but once they were out of sight, and he rested back against his pillows, he gloated over the fact that he had them, that Caleb had given the photographs to him, that Caleb had taken the trouble to go to the archive and hunt them out for Russell. Wicked of course to steal the photographs from the archive; but that only made Russell love him more.

He would have given a great deal to know if Caleb loved him a quarter as much as he loved Caleb. He was glad, anyway, to have this proof that Caleb loved him at least a little, for it had shaken Russell badly that Caleb had seemed so unconcerned when Russell fell ill.

Of course it was because Caleb had known there was no reason to be worried: that penicillin would make Russell well. Russell could see that now. But at the time Caleb had seemed heartless, cruelly indifferent, and Russell felt even now an echo of the panicked choking in his throat when he realized that Caleb meant to leave him alone in the night. He had stayed only when Russell begged him.

And yet he had stayed. He saw that Russell was frightened, and took Russell in his arms and kissed his brow three times, and sat by his side until the fever broke.

Sheer Christian charity, perhaps. It was the pity of an angel that moved him to stay, just as the pity of an angel had moved him to hold Russell hand when Russell wept after visiting Julia’s grave.

In Russell’s own time, he could with confidence have read Caleb’s behavior this way. It was a reasonable, measured kind of friendship that Caleb felt for him: steady, even, affectionate, and cool. There were no signs of warmer friendship. They did not walk arm in arm, or contrive to share a pillow, or press sweet kisses to each other’s faces as they told secrets in the night.

But here, the fact that Caleb did not do these things said nothing about his feelings, because they were all forbidden. Probably it had been a transgression, even, for Caleb to comfort Russell in his grief and succor him in his sickness.

Certainly it was against the rules for Caleb to take Russell in his arms and kiss his fevered brow. Men in the future didn’t kiss each other unless they were drunk. Apparently if you were drunk enough it wasn’t homosexual.

Was it sheer obstinacy to resist these rules? After all people in the future knew so much more than he did, so much more than anyone in his own time. Here the streets were clean and well-lighted, and the people clean and well-fed. They had conquered distance with cars and airplanes, and night with electric lights, and disease with modern medicine…

“Lots of people think homosexuality is a sin, but it’s a disease, a mental illness,” Professor Stotz had explained to Russell. “The sin lies in society, which has no compassion for homosexuals even though they have no choice about being ill.”

Of course Russell thought it must be true: they knew so much about medicine now. (And he hadn’t even known about penicillin yet when Professor Stotz said it!) But then Don said his father, who was a doctor, didn’t think homosexuality was a disease after all, and presumably a doctor would know more about it than an English professor.

It was all so confusing.

Of course it was true, as Russell well knew, that when boys shared beds they did sometimes get up to mischief. Perhaps it was right to remove the opportunity for vice.

(He ought to have stricken that perhaps from the beginning of the sentence. Surely it was right to remove an opportunity for vice. But he loved the dear old custom; he would have given his right hand to sleep with Caleb in his arms.)

But it couldn’t be right for a whole society to have become as suspicious as a crabbed old preacher who sees a Jezebel in every pretty girl with a ribbon in her bonnet. They saw homosexuality in everything: crossed legs, a too-long smile, a friendship that wouldn’t fall to pieces at the lightest touch. The college boys were all young men, older in fact than most college boys in Russell’s time. But when they were sober they acted like little boys of eight, who can only express their affections by throwing rocks at each other.

It came out when they were drunk, though. Then they fell on each other’s necks and slurred out, “I love you, man.” But they would have been ashamed to say it sober. Someone had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and they didn’t even know it.

Russell had been sitting all this time propped up against his pillows, gazing vaguely out the window at the empty campus. Now he leaned over and opened the drawer again, and drew out the photograph of Owen, and held it on his lap.

In the photograph, Russell perched on Owen’s knee, with Owen’s hand at Russell’s waist. The photographer had suggested the pose, and very pretty Russell thought it when the photographs came back. He had passed it round among his messmates, and kept a copy in his wallet so he should never lose it, and sent a print to Julia, pleased and proud that his dear girl should see his friend.

He had cried over the photograph after Owen died. He felt tears rising now, not only because Owen was dead, but because he couldn’t even frame this photograph and hang in on the wall.

Did it really matter if Caleb loved him? Even if the warmest possible friendship burned in his breast, Caleb could not act otherwise than he was acting now. He had already reached the limit of what was allowed: had indeed surpassed it, in kissing Russell’s brow. The custom of the country was inimical to true friendship, and Russell had better let it go.

But nonetheless he would have liked to know.