Tom Houghton Read online

  At two a.m. I texted Arthur, an old fuck buddy of mine and as luck would have it he was on his way home and drunk enough to agree to watching porn on the couch together accompanied by a hand job. He crept out before dawn and I got up to finish myself off watching the outdoor scene he’d skipped to on the DVD, a little fetish of his that kind of turned me on, but I knew we’d never do it outside my four walls, let alone in public.

  Just before I drifted off to sleep, I took out my phone to text Victor but my mind chose its own path and before long I found myself doing an internet search for Thomas Houghton Hepburn. The usual images of him surfaced, the haunting one of him as a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, so familiar to me it might have been one of my own school portraits. I cried free tears, assisted by a bottle of cooking sherry I found at the back of my cupboard.

   Eight

  Mum came home alone from the pub on Saturday night, despite preparing me for a possible visit from Steve. I noticed on my alarm clock that it was past three when she came in and, after a quick shower, she cried herself to sleep. I should have gone in to her, willed myself to be her saviour once again, but I couldn’t do it that night, couldn’t put on a brave face given the day’s discovery. I’d been reading the Hepburn biography all day. But more than that – I’d started to form a plan. I slept restlessly but got up at my usual hour to make Mum’s breakfast.

  ‘I’m not hungry . . .’ she mumbled, still half asleep.

  ‘It’s after nine,’ I urged. ‘You have to get up for the movies.’

  ‘I said I’m not hungry!’ she snapped. ‘I’ve got a stinker of a headache, Tom, a migraine coming on, go to the movies without me today, would you? Just get out of the house and let me be quiet and still?’

  What choice did I have but to leave her? I chose not to take myself to the movies. Instead, I went to the public library, catching the train to Blacktown, hoping to avoid anyone from school. In the library I found the biographies and made my way down to H – they had three on Hepburn, and the librarian said a handful of others on Spencer Tracy, Howard Hughes and George Cukor also contained information on her. But I wasn’t there to learn about Katharine, I was there to immerse myself in any piece of information I could find about Thomas.

  I spent the entire day in the library, staying until closing time at five, when the librarian sweetly ushered me to the door. Mum was still in bed when I got home, so I slipped through the house as ghost-like as I could.

  ‘Tom?’ she said, barely above a whisper. ‘Tom get in here, now.’

  I expected to be taken to task for catching the train on my own, for going to Blacktown when news had started spreading of its crime and dangerous reputation. But when I approached her room the curtains were still drawn and my mother looked sickly and foreign, void of spark. I made a peace offering.

  ‘Can I get you something to eat?’

  ‘No. I need you to call Roger for me. I need you to call in sick for me.’

  ‘Mum, I . . . I can’t –’

  ‘Stop with the whining and just do it for once, goddamn it, Tom. Can’t you see I’m desperate?’ And it was the way she said this that made me realise I was in for something more than fetching pills for a migraine.

  • • •

  That night as I lay in bed, all of the Hepburn information whirred. It was unlike any other topic I’d researched. The tenuous link via a shared name and birthday had exploded into something much more. I was obsessed with Thomas Houghton Hepburn. The biography I’d read had told me so much, had brought me to tears even as I consumed the details of his brief existence. No one had tried to save him from hanging, just as no one was trying to save me.

  It wasn’t just his young death that struck me so, but the way it was handled, the lies and deception of the adults, and Katharine’s immense grief and strange behaviour in its aftermath. So in love had she been with her brother, she couldn’t fathom life without him. She changed her birthday to his, cut her hair in the same style and started wearing clothing more suitable on a fifteen-year-old boy. Katharine the Great had become her brother, her first and most convincing act. Living in his skin allowed her to become one of the greatest actors the world had ever known. I wept at her dedication, longed to sit with her and talk about Tom, give some iota of purpose to his horrible death.

  Though I was stuck in Seven Hills, it finally struck me: I was no longer restrained by my paltry existence. I’d been there. As absurd as that sounded even to me, I knew the events that led to Tom’s death as if the research I had done was simply a case of reading my own words over. Just from staring into his eyes in that one black-and-white photo all the publishers used, I knew he was more than a namesake. He was crying out to me, pulling me into his world, so that I could save both of us.

  Thomas Houghton Hepburn and I were one and the same.

  • • •

  ‘Not here, not out,’ Kathy protested and moved herself a foot away from me as we strolled the sidewalk. ‘We really oughtn’t.’

  It was the first time we’d been allowed to walk the New York streets without a chaperone, without Mother fussing over our every move or fretting over timetables or supposed shady characters. Auntie Towle had brought us up on the train from Hartford that morning, another first without Mother. When we’d arrived at Grand Central, a hive of mania, Auntie had bustled us straight into a taxicab, muttering away about running late for one of her meetings. Back at the house on Charlton Street, as the meeting was about to begin, she suggested it would be no fun for children and sent my little sister and me out to explore the neighbourhood. It was a trial of sorts, Auntie had declared, a test of maturity.

  Kathy was trying to smack that frown from my face with one of her cutting witticisms but it wasn’t working. Her antics usually wore me down and she knew if she persisted, I would find myself smiling, despite my best intentions.

  ‘Just like a real couple,’ I explained, ‘just holding hands was all.’ But she ignored me and made a comment about a woman’s felt hat instead. It looked like a dead bird so she mimicked pain-filled squawks as the woman passed by. We were both chuckling finally but I turned the mood serious once more.

  ‘Tell me you’re my girl, Kathy, that’s all I want to hear. Can you do that? Say you’ll always be my girl.’

  ‘I’m your girl,’ she repeated. There was no meaning in her mere repetition.

  Things were beginning to change. No, she was beginning to change, forcing things to a head. I could tell she hated what her body was turning into, knew exactly what it meant because I’d read enough of Dad’s books. She felt she wasn’t ready for womanhood, wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a woman at all! Far happier running about dirty with scabbed knees, thank you all the same, hormones, she’d once said. And if I were to lose my girl to adulthood, the one soul capable of connecting with mine, then my abandonment would be complete. In her naivety lay my salvation, the way she idolised me gave hope that I was something remarkable when all Dad saw in me was disappointment. If Kathy was to morph from tomboy to young woman, would this new Kathy accept the man I was to become?

  ‘Shall we have a bite? Just a nibble perhaps so we’re not too hungry later?’

  Mother had packed us a basket of egg salad sandwiches, fruit and slices of Tilly’s delicious lemon pie. We were meant to eat them on the train but Auntie had insisted she treat us to the dining car instead. Now we were on the streets with a picnic unsuited to our environment. As she strode to keep pace with me, she took a slice of the pie from its waxed paper wrapping and held it beneath my nose.

  I turned my face away from her. ‘Not hungry, won’t eat.’

  ‘All to myself,’ she said before taking two large bites. ‘Absolutely delicious!’

  This shorthand way of speaking drove our parents wild.

  She tried so hard to please me, wanted to do everything I did. She said I had a sophistication she found mesmerising, the way I stood up to Dad, how I excelled at every thing to which I tried my hand. I prayed to any god who’d lis
ten to please keep her on my side. If only I could be more like you, could arouse such delight in Mother, she said.

  Failing that, what else did she have? Kathy was neither child nor grown-up, the other siblings were young and clinging, our parents’ acquaintances too consumed with bigger ideas to spend time with Kathy and me. Without her, I become nothing.

  ‘Really should eat something,’ she encouraged. ‘All that effort wasted. Poor Tilly. Might be hours till Bertha does the dinner.’

  And this was enough, as she knew it would be, because I let out a loud resigned sigh, stopped my steady march and reached into the basket to retrieve a slice of the pie for myself.

  ‘Lemon is so tangy. Mother would murder for eating on the street.’

  Kathy nodded happily; she liked it when we broke the rules together.

  ‘Have you ever thought of running away?’ I asked, brushing crumbs from the corner of my mouth. ‘Maybe not forever, I mean, but just . . . I suppose just to see what it feels like to be on your own, free of them all.’

  ‘Why on earth would any child in our position think running away – to nothing – could ever be better than what our parents have built for us?’

  This response was pure Mother, no sign of Kathy’s usual imagination. I was such a dream-farer, that’s what Mother always said, wandering around in fantasies inside my head. Really, I came to life when I put on one of my shows for the neighbourhood. I was director, writer and star, with poor Kathy forever being relegated to being one of the thieves, not even allowed to play the leading female roles, which were inevitably awarded to Robert from two doors down. So square-jawed and sinewy he will never pull it off, she complained. If anyone thought to ask my opinion . . .

  ‘Hadn’t the slightest notion to run away,’ she continued dismissively. She smoothed out an imaginary crease in her dress and brought me back to the here and now. ‘Nor should you.’

  ‘Not to be rebellious or disrespectful, just to be a grown-up, make all the decisions for myself.’

  ‘Like where to sleep, what to eat, how to stay warm? Prefer these are answered by our parents thank you very much.’

  ‘But you’re still a baby,’ I said hurtfully. It had the desired effect, because she turned away from me and gazed out towards the hum of the traffic. ‘You’ll never understand,’ I said, regardless of whether she could hear. I stood facing a poster of a beautiful woman advertising the latest show at Trilby’s. Kathy waited behind me, stubbornly refusing to turn around or talk to me, but I knew if I stood long enough she would join me and soon that’s what she did.

  ‘How very queer,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Is it? No different to one of our plays.’

  ‘Yes but, Tom, to make it as one’s living, in an establishment such as this . . . it’s altogether ghastly.’

  ‘To each his own,’ I said very quietly. ‘I think she looks breathtaking. A masterful trick of the eye and the senses.’

  ‘Not right! Dad would have you round the yard for uttering such nonsense.’

  ‘Do you think she . . . he . . . do you think he still has . . . ? Well, do you say he or she, I wonder?’

  ‘Tiresome, frankly. Beginning to irritate.’

  In true Kathy style, she did not speak to me for much of the remainder of the walk. Oh, she wasn’t rude to me, could never be, but she chose to drink the atmosphere in silence rather than join me in conversation. I hated it when she behaved like this, making me feel the outcast, my own flesh and blood. To pay her back I stopped more frequently, eyeing the posters at the Red Mask just the same, causing an even more palpable frustrated silence from my sister.

  We turned a corner and came across the infamous Tramp Poet. His eyes wandered and his gait was a muted shuffle but as we stood still to listen, his voice rose above the noise of the street as he delivered a long and word-perfect scene from Henry V.

  ‘Isn’t he a marvel?’ Kathy asked as soon as the man was out of earshot, forgetting that she was practising silence. ‘Couldn’t you just listen for hours?’

  I released a small chuckle. ‘You’re not such a baby,’ I said as if we hadn’t quarrelled. ‘You’ll always be my girl, Kathy. No matter what happens, you need to know that.’

  I’d grown increasingly restless down in Connecticut, the debates with Dad had grown too numerous and too heated. Perhaps this was why my childhood tic was slowly creeping its way back. What was it niggling just beneath the surface of the relationship between Dad and me? I suppose I just wasn’t interested in privilege. I longed for exploration, foraging through the great unknown. All I ever read were books about explorers, men founding civilisations where no white man had been before. Most days now I was off on my own and only occasionally would I remember to include Kathy in one of my escapes from the family. My most recent play had been set in Africa and Kathy had been smeared with boot polish, playing a savage who longed to leave his village and return to England with his conqueror (played by me). In New York I knew so little and this lack of understanding thrilled me, physically goose-pimpled my flesh.

  That afternoon the whole street was abuzz with news of the robbery of the jewellery store on Bleecker Street. Four men had held up the proprietor and shot him in the arm and face, escaping on foot and running right past Auntie’s dear friend Bertha’s front door. Kids from all about the neighbourhood were ignited with excitement and I was desperate to see a piece of the action for myself. We missed seeing the police corner the bandits on Greenwich Avenue by minutes and I complained bitterly to Kathy that we’d done so.

  As we sat on the sidewalk talking about life in New York compared with life back home, my leg jiggled with a mind of its own and the movement vibrated through Kathy’s whole body, she said, causing a poison of annoyance to course through her veins.

  ‘The life of a criminal,’ I said, ‘would sure be a darn sight more exciting than the one we have.’

  ‘Why don’t you just run away then?’ Kathy said in a huff. ‘You may as well ask to die.’

  • • •

  That evening, Auntie took us to see a movie. It was all for me as I was clearly her favourite, not the spider-like Kathy. It was a filmed version of one of Mark Twain’s lesser-known books but it was Twain nevertheless and I had long regarded the author as a personal hero. Kathy came along happily enough as there was no real alternative to going though I bet she would have preferred to stay home reading one of her books.

  The movie was a farce, really, with its time-travelling hero and the almost embarrassing sight of knights in armour atop motorcycles that detracted from the lavish competition scene. But there was a scene in the dark and morbid dungeon where the queen has her slaves beaten. It really got to me, that scene, forcing me to shut my eyes, and on the way home I kept imagining that darkened shadows were demons out to get me.

  Clearly, I wasn’t acting myself, as Kathy asked if I was feeling peachy.

  ‘A little spooked,’ was all I said so as not to let her too far into my mind.

  I really cannot say why this movie affected me so. Kathy and I had acted out violence and murders in our own plays from time to time; we’d heard all about Dad’s boyhood trickery in pretending to lynch Negroes. I knew none of it was real and yet I didn’t want to be alone up there in the attic that night, couldn’t stand the thought of those shadows out to get me.

  But I did make it through the night – a fraught voyage between waking and drifting that never made its way to slumber; every noise a malice, every movement not my own. In the morning I refused to let Kathy see me so shaken. She idolised me – how could I shatter that image of hers and admit to being scared and vulnerable when she thought of me as her knight? I did my best to hide my exhaustion and the day passed with more sightseeing chaperoned by our Uncle Lloyd. Lloyd took us to the Battery, where we explored the parklands and enjoyed the aquarium and while Kathy begged to spend more time in the gardens, I got my way and drifted off, reading the various memorials and monuments.

  Over lunch at a discreet underground
restaurant on Broadway, we shared our enthusiasm for the next landmark on our itinerary – the tallest building in the world. It was the first time all day that I’d begun to feel like myself again and I could barely contain my excitement, even refusing to order pie, but Kathy never turned down an opportunity for New York baked treats. On the street we could not comprehend that we were unable to see the apex of the Woolworth Building and would be riding an elevator some fifty-seven storeys to the observation deck. As the small car rose ever higher inside the bowels of the structure, I felt giddy at the thought that one rope held us safe from doom and again my damn leg shook uncontrollably. We were all just so minuscule. Instinctively, Kathy reached out to hold my hand and our fingers brushed for a moment but a glance from Lloyd sent my own hand firmly inside my trouser pocket.

  The view from so high up was, quite simply, unimaginable. Kathy could not venture too close to the edge but I fought through my nerves and showed her I was strong enough to do so.

  It was an awe-inspiring day altogether and we thanked our uncle with hugs and kisses and incessant chatter as we chose to walk the mile or so back to Charlton Street. Lloyd saw us to the door of Auntie’s house but did not enter, choosing to leave his charges to the noise of the house filled with people. Auntie’s mother and sister were home, Bertha had come for a visit, and a whole raft of their friends were enjoying laughter and chatter.

  I said hello to the small crowd, raced upstairs and hurriedly packed my suitcase and laid out my travelling clothes for our trip to Connecticut the following day, before returning back downstairs to the group of women and their one or two syrupy male guests. Ignited by the atmosphere of Auntie’s gathering, I was coaxed into playing them some tunes on my banjo as they sat around the open fire.

  ‘Oh, you’re such a romantic,’ a few of the women cooed.

  ‘He’s rather deft with those hands,’ one of the men said and winked at me. Again my damn leg began to tremble.