Pierrot never brought up Sister Elo?se. He never told Irving that for the first time in his life he could go to sleep feeling safe. For the first few weeks, he had dreams where Sister Elo?se would be sucking him off. He would have called them nightmares were it not for the fact that he ejaculated in his sleep. The shame he felt afterward sometimes made him cry out in the darkness. But soon he learned to sleep the deepest sleep he had ever slept. He went into the Land of Nod without scattering any bread crumbs to find his way back. The freedom that he had was exquisite and was so joyful that it almost drove him a little mad.
Pierrot thanked Irving every day for the great gift he had given him. Everyone else in Irving’s life had turned against him. It was in part because he had so much money. And when you have that amount of money, then as now, everybody near and dear to you believes that the money should be theirs. His children thought he was greedy for not giving them greater trust funds. His money had made all his children dull and dependent. They lay in bed with their spouses, cursing him. All his children’s spouses hated him passionately. They were convinced that the money was theirs even more, as they had married his children for his money.
Pierrot truly loved Mr. Irving. But then again, Pierrot truly loved just about everyone he came into contact with. When Irving’s children found out about his relationship with Pierrot, they hated that Irving was happy. Their greatest hope was that Irving would grow old alone, miserable and regretful of his stingy actions. But they went over to see Pierrot in a pair of roller skates, pushing Irving in his wheelchair in circles in the middle of the street.
? ? ?
THE DOCTOR CAME BY to check on Pierrot at the daughter-in-law’s suggestion. She said the boy was stark raving mad and might kill her father in his sleep, having mistaken him for a dragon.
She came to visit once and Pierrot had been on the roof. The gray clouds lined up behind him like the aristocrats from Versailles filing up for the guillotine. He had a great big gardenia behind one of his ears. He was brandishing a poker from the fireplace in his hand. He screamed out, “Come hither, all dragons. I do not fear you. I will slay you all in one afternoon. Because I am a knight.”
The neighbors all quite agreed with her diagnosis of insanity. He was spotted doing handstands in the yard every morning. He cycled down the street, his long scarf trailing behind him. He called out “Good day” to everyone. When Pierrot turned sixteen, Irving fired the chauffeur and gave him the keys to the car. Pierrot drove the car recklessly, right up onto the lawn. He honked his horn instead of ringing the doorbell.
But Irving did not choose to scold Pierrot or chastise him. The child had a madness to him, but it was indeed such an incredibly lovely madness. These were the marks of a genius. The boy was eccentric. He reminded Irving of all his own absurd antics. If he were a young man, he too would be brandishing a poker on the rooftop, demanding that the dragons show their ugly faces.
And what was more, Irving adored Pierrot’s piano playing.
When he heard the tunes, he would remember how it felt to be absolutely guilt-free. What it felt like to be a good person. He felt young again. There was no such thing as time when Pierrot played the piano. Irving would close his eyes and he was nine years old, in a striped bathing suit with just the tips of his toes in the freezing water. He had his eyes closed to make a wish on a birthday cake. He was about to wish that he would become prime minister.
No, he would not listen to any doctor condemning his dear friend. He didn’t like that Pierrot wasn’t treated with the respect the doctor would accord to Irving’s other children. So they went to the tailor to get Pierrot new clothes.
“I can’t stand to look at second-rate clothes,” Irving declared from the passenger seat. “I’m purchasing it for me and not for you.”
On the way to the tailor downtown, Pierrot managed to almost run over a line of schoolgirls, a couple of distinguished young ladies and seven cats. At the shop, Pierrot insisted on a roll of checkered multicolored material. The tailor was assigned to making a suit of the highest fashion out of the ridiculous material. He wore a yarmulke on his head and had pins sticking out of his mouth as he scurried about, furtively measuring Pierrot’s skinny dimensions with a piece of chalk. And a week later the suit was delivered to their door.
Irving was sitting in the garden drinking tea. Pierrot came out in his new suit with his arms spread. A swallow passed overhead, its tail feathers as thin as a seamstress’s scissors.
“It makes me very happy to see you walking around in that dapper suit. Who were your parents? I wonder. Surely it was some pretty girl from a very wealthy family, tempted at the Valentine’s Ball. You are obviously an aristocrat. You are my own young prince. You and I are in the same predicament. Nobody knows us for who we truly are. But we won’t be lonely anymore because we have each other. We will enjoy life together. Free from the preposterous names that people have attached to us. What does the past have to do with us? What does the past have to do with any of us?”