Graceful As Mars

Chapter 1

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

When Adrian Veidt is twelve years old, he discovers Homer’s Iliad.

By this time, his preference for the culture of the Egyptians, fascination rather, had already begun taking shape somewhere in the dim chambers of his mind. Borrowing strangers’ books untouched from the family and public library was his usual practice, and if asked, class project or just curious, the cover looked interesting or, if the book was big enough, shyly closing the covers like one might find a back issue of National Geographic tucked against the spine. Just indulging the normal young boy’s urge to catch a glimpse of a little bared Polynesian breast, certainly not reading. He did that too much. Teaching himself hieroglyphics and putting off learning Greek a few more summers, in case it spoiled the mysteries.

By the time he was twelve, his mother and father no longer came into his room to say good night to him, or say a prayer, or kiss his forehead, which he never cared for. They were more concerned with what might be in their spouse’s bed than what was in their son’s, which was books. He ended up playing baseball with a crick in his neck more than a couple of times due to some carefully treasured library book hugged to his chest under the blankets. It’s all on the sly, because he isn’t supposed to be some academic freak, it isn’t normal.

With this book, he takes his time.

The story is vaguely familiar from what he knows of Calvert and Schliemann, reckless archaeologists in pursuit of some fictional Troy. (He’s seen the pictures of Schliemann’s wife draped in the jewels of Helen and it looks like his mother’s wedding photograph, the one on the mantel, not the one in the album. In the album picture, she stands between her husband and her brother, who is in Wehrmacht uniform. That one isn’t shown very much.) And in the beginning his hopes are not high; from the first it has no magic in it, not properly. Animals scavenging bodies, the stilted style of someone trying to translate poetry as if it were prose. But the more he reads, this book slyly tucked in among his textbooks like contraband, the more it pulls him in. Dishonor and deities of uncertain temperament. (These gods aren’t as interesting as the Egyptian gods and goddesses, upon which Adrian has very distinct and vocal opinions, but they are an indelible mark on the Classical landscape and cannot be discounted.)

And so he begins…

Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles Peleus’ son, the ruinous wrath that
brought on the Achaians woes innumerable, and hurled down into Hades
many strong souls of heroes, and gave their bodies to be a prey to dogs
and all winged fowls; and so the counsel of Zeus wrought out its
accomplishment from the day when first strife parted Atreides king of
men and noble Achilles.

At breakfast, the subject first comes up of his nighttime reading. (He strains to think of what she must be implying, because grown-ups never say what they mean, not to him, and not to each other.)

“You must be the last of your classmates to sleep with a light on, Adrian.”

It is his mother, and she’s trying to be delicate about it, without outright calling it babyish. Just like it’s babyish to read storybooks instead of creeping around committing petty crimes or chasing girls. If he’s the last in his classroom to develop an interest in the opposite sex, if it’s atrophied from all of this reading, he doesn’t care. Adrian has never felt young. But he must play this very, very carefully.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he knows that his mother doesn’t actually care overmuch. But it would mean more trips to the child psychologist or to Aunt Ada’s.

The face he’s making, caught mid-spoonful of his breakfast cereal, is one he’s practiced in the mirror as being hard to read, easy to tell lies with. And his classmates and teammates believe him; he startles a little and then sudden, schooled blankness comes over him. It isn’t a passable imitation of innocence, it’s eerie.

“I like to know where things are in the night.”

“Adrian…”

Mother reaches to stroke his hair back behind his ears.

---

 

“I read this in school, you know, and I wasn’t much older than you are. It’s a fine work of literature, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

 

Adrian doesn’t like his father very much; he smells like tobacco and looks like a scout leader, heavy and slow in a way that seems deliberate rather than sluggardly. (Some of his friends have worse dads, but he wouldn’t let them meet Father anyway. Everyone else’s fathers fought in the war, for the proper side. His still speak German in the home.) He sits opposite his father at a narrow desk, hands folded on the desktop, but it’s all he can do to keep from reaching for the pale green book his father’s holding.

“It was from the library. I didn’t want to lose it, that’s all–”

It had found its way to the bottom of his bookbag, which in itself wouldn’t have been objectionable if he hadn’t gotten so worked up about a little light-hearted teasing. Red-faced and too quick to snatch it back.

 

The book is taken away from him before he has reached what the title headers promise (how Menelaos and Paris fought in single combat; and Aphrodite rescued Paris. And how Helen and Priam beheld the Achaian host from the walls of Troy) and Mother promises to replace it with a very nice Boy’s Iliad, something with all the adventure and none of the redeeming literary or historical value. The book itself has ceased to be just its story in his mind (which he was rather interested in, and everyone knows it, after all) and an emblem of a self-created obstacle. He will read it again.

Chapter 2

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

When Adrian is thirteen, he’s long-forgotten his old green-gray copy of the Iliad and moved on to more interesting things. He might pick it up again, hide away in a corner of the library and bolt it all in one go, but now he is mature and absolutely certain he’s the last in his classroom to like girls. It wouldn’t be very difficult to feign that he does, at least where his classmates are concerned, but he doesn’t bother. He’s the best at baseball, and there are plenty of other hobbies to pursue, like making friends. But when summer comes, he leaves all these friends he’s made behind.

When he’s thirteen and one quarter (this making him far more advanced than his peers) the Veidt family goes upstate to visit what family they have on vacation.If this were like any other summer holiday they could go to the beach, and he doesn’t see why they don’t do that; it’d be marginally more tolerable.

 

Aunt Lydia is Mother’s sister, and they have a debt to her; there was no hearing the end of this on the trip over, and the lack of specifics just make it more painfully obvious what everyone means. She’s been in the States longer than they have, and she’s very urbane, dusting the house in pearls and all of that. If there’s an uncle corresponding with this aunt to explain where the children came from, he isn’t in the family’s good graces; there is, however, a stepfather and two grown sons. The three youngest children are meant to be his playmates; it’s an odd weight off his mind that they all have normal American names, not German ones. Diana is 11, and a girl, which almost ensures they won’t have a thing in common to talk about; Mark is his age (approximately, everyone forgets the and one-quarter no matter how much he emphasizes it) and they’re sure to get along; Blake is sixteen and so on, forever; the listing of relatives he can’t remember meeting continues.

 

There aren’t exactly neighbors, except the one family and they only have one little boy with them. He’s really a very little boy, but Adrian sees him sometimes, when their parents are exchanging words and borrowing gasoline, and instantly envies him. Danny’s father is an investment banker, comfortingly reasonable and ordinary. (Adrian won’t know where his father’s money came from until he’s older.) So on the very first day of their trip, Adrian is carefully plotting out how the rest of his summer will go.

All these plans are immediately derailed once he actually meets his cousins.

Diana (the name raises obvious associations of aloof, stoical huntresses) runs to greet them at their car in the driveway, the evening light fading behind her, and she hugs him. If this wasn’t affront to his dignity enough, she’s already taller than he is and won’t let go of him.

“You’re here! We were about ready to send out a search party!”

Because Adrian is prematurely middle-aged on the inside, he sputters, and his parents laugh.

Chapter 3

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

\It turns out he has no need to give much mind to his new uncle (step-uncle?); he’s barely there except for a few spare days on each weekend. Diana takes giddy pleasure in being shocking and referring to the man by his first name. William did this and William’s coming by in a way that would have gotten anyone else paddled with a hairbrush.

And from his very first impression he can’t stand Mark. Not that he was prepared to, but that question where’s your accent from, huh? from someone who ought to damn well know immediately made his hackles rise. It’s just teasing, and he can’t stand teasing. All Blake wants to talk about is the war on in Korea. And yet somehow all of them are still having a good time; it’s Adrian who’s the dour little intruder. Fastidiously avoiding meat on picnics where his father wasn’t present and vigilantly making sure nobody drowned in the pool. After the first two weeks, he feels like he’s suffocating.

---

How mature this was, hiding under a big tree.
“What on earth are you doing out here?”

The smaller boy clutches his pad of paper defensively, and it draws Adrian’s attention to the binoculars dangling around his neck. Oh, well, very well then. If people wanted to run around in the woods looking for ospreys and owls and things until it got dark, fine for them.

“Looking for my pencil!”

“I mean what in general.”

“We’re looking at birds. What are you doing out here?”

Adrian crosses his arms, expression slightly soured. The sensation of having his hair plastered to his forehead makes his nose wrinkle in a momentary imitation sneer, but Danny is too busy trying to blot the rain from his notepad on his sweater to notice.

“Looking for interesting plants, until the storm broke. Hiding under trees.”

“D’you find any?” His little round face lights up, and Adrian is a little relieved; he nods. “My dad’s got an umbrella, we could walk you back to the house until the rain stops.”

(He’d rather be wet in the woods than spend an hour more in Aunt Lydia’s summer house, but something about how the other boy says “the house”, and just how far he is from the cottage by his reckoning, says he won’t even have to.)

---

Forty-five minutes later, he’s sitting on the floor of the Dreiberg’s little library, leaves and stems laid out on the carpet. Daniel is sprawled out on his stomach, recopying his brief and clumsy notes onto fresh paper. It’s nice of Mr. Dreiberg to give a damn about his son’s hobbies; Mr. Veidt was only interested in borrowing Adrian’s radio set and in being disappointed that he couldn’t bear to hunt or fish. For a while Adrian stops laying out leaves and stems on paper, and just watches Danny write.

“So you’re in fourth grade?”

“Mhmm. I skipped one.”

He pauses, while the other boy continues writing. Is this babyish too? Terribly immature, and still second-best to having actual adult company to spend time with, but Danny seems lonely without an older sibling to share his pursuits, and it’s painless for Adrian to oblige him.

Chapter 4

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Warnings on this chapter for the suggestion of molestation; though nothing is carried out, the insinuation would be enough to trigger me on some days, so it’s better to warn. Also, while I’ve tried to do this piece with a less brutally horrible take on Adrian’s parents than tends to be gone for, they’re still unpleasant people who’ve left their mark on their son.

Whether it’s a telephone call from his father that sparks the question or his own unpleasant, bitter little trace of accent, Adrian doesn’t know, but none of his friends can resist asking it. When Danny does, for reasons he can’t understand himself, it makes his angry, frighteningly angry.

“My mother was pregnant with me and thought it was no place to raise a child. They packed their bags and they left.”

Danny regards him with solemn innocence. “Are you Jewish?”

“What? No! Of course not!”

Now he thinks he might have misspoken, or had the wrong tone of voice (practically outraged) and for a moment his narrow, childish line of sight widens and he realizes Daniel’s father is right there and wearing an expression of surprise identical to his own. Adrian isn’t like his father, not even then; he’s dimly aware that he has this to fear and this horror will only get worse as he grows up, growing with him. There is a hand on his shoulder and a very soothing voice.

“It’s late, buddy, maybe we should take you home.”

But Adrian’s posture already has sharpened, telegraphing loud and clear; mortified he’s planted to the spot.

I don’t want to go! “No one minds if I stay out past dark. I’m responsible for myself.” As his own mouth shapes the words he could not sound more tartly smug.

And then those saving words: “There’s always tomorrow..”

---

When Adrian is woken from his reverie of books and his new playmate’s company, quite a bit of time has passed. His collected plant life (Danny struggles a little to say “specimens”) ends up swaddled between two sheets of paper and stuffed inside a combined volume of Homer, the way girls press flowers.

It’s a dazy kind of tedium for the next few days, lying about by the pool without a lot of interest in doing anything. Even his well-meaning recommendations that his cousins hold off on swimming after eating (lest they get a cramp and die, which seems unlikely, but you must be careful about these things) just get his sunburn slapped. Parental supervision is suspiciously absent, mostly because Mother doesn’t like to be outdoors when she could be having a drink inside and catching up.

At last Uncle William has a week properly off, to spend with his wholesomely complete borrowed family. It soon becomes evident why Diana speaks of him so freely, with a laugh in her voice; the older boys have no especial regard for him, but she sees him as entertainment, a curious intruder she can’t yet see as part of her family.
His company is something Adrian seeks for a few days, tagging along on drives and long conversations in the evening out on the lawn. William is intelligent enough to carry on a good discussion with, and if he can’t be that much younger than Adrian’s own father, he neither looks nor acts like it, with no gray in his glossy dark hair and an accent from nowhere further afield than New England. He’s rather handsome, even, in the rather blunted way Adrian can recognize that Lydia is beautiful or that his mother was once beautiful. But he always seems to be laughing, amused by serious questions, and teases him for looking too grave, who died? His manner is like that of a favorite schoolteacher.

It only happens when they’re alone together, lying on the grass after the girls have gone home in the evening, that Will places himself too close. His hand slides under Adrian’s sweater again, his belt, not on accident; Adrian blinks. The hazy glow has vanished from the air, burned up in a second, and his mind snaps back into rigid attention. Of course he doesn’t say anything, because that would be rude, but his throat is jammed anyway, refusing to work. But the rest of him does what it seems to find prudent and recoils. The point is taken.

The man never tries anything else, but he doesn’t need to; the offense was too grave. And he can try to read meaning into it, but it shows only his own dizzy worries and deep, deep discomforts. It feels unsafe and unpleasant.

---

 

Diana invites him horseback riding with her the next day, which he might have enjoyed, but his head is still spinning. In the evening he takes the heavy edition from the Dreiberg’s house and hides under the covers with it. Not with the necessity of a flashlight, just on his belly with the book on his pillow shedding bits of pressed fern. He picks up where he left off, and it’s like being home again for a little while.

It’s stupid, this whole historical affair over a woman– two women, counting Briseis– but lonely Helen is more interesting than people seemed to think. She deserved better than Paris, certainly, ill Paris, most fair in semblance, deceiver, woman-mad. He breathes each line out loud at first, voice trembling like his hands are trembling, but the rhythm of each line soon worms its way into his thoughts and he has no need to. He could have tore through the book at an unhindered pace, the sort of voracious reading that got him into trouble in class, but each line and book has to be taken very deliberately, word by word.

And when when rosy-fingered Dawn appears, he’s significantly improved.

Chapter 5

Chapter Summary

(Mad props on this chapter to inabathrobe, who pointed out that yes, it’s “Aristotelian”.)

Chapter Notes

Brilliant Achilles, noble but reckless, holds no interest for him without his better half. He’s an incomplete man, and what he’s missing comes in the shape of another human being; only forcefully deprived of Patroklos (and what it took to kill him!) does he develop these faculties for himself. And not for long, the poem ends with a foregone conclusion. No wooden horses, no tendons. It ends with a focus on Hector, tamer of horses. Hector suits Adrian well as well, but he’s a family man, you’re meant to shed a tear for him. Adrian sheds a non-literal tear for the minor characters, who appear only to die. And if he can’t cry, he chokes back a distressed noise at Achilles’ grief.

But the book is only a detour on the way to his real interests. (Heaven knows other authors saw parallels to the story in the life of Alexander, but Alexander has no parallel, not in another reckless storybook hero with an enduring companion. Hints and insinuations register on him, even when he is small.)

(He will encounter better translations, and superior original editions, but Adrian still prefers “spake” as the simple past tense of “speak”.)

---

When Adrian Veidt is seventeen, he puts books aside. He leaves to find the real Alexander, not the one in a textbook, to roam the middle east like a pagan wanderer and grow his hair long, he takes little with him. Nothing his parents’ money has touched, because he must make this voyage standing on his own feet; he’s willing to work any job he’s given rather than feel parasitic, an extra appendage of the family. (And wouldn’t you, if you knew where the money came from already, your father’s guilt and your mother’s numb disinterest.) He hesitates before packing Lang’s Iliad away, thinking achingly sentimental thoughts of Aristotelian annotations, but the risk that he might lose it is too great.

Adrian has the company of other travelers, an odd fraternity; he has the hospitality of strangers, who afford more kindness to a soft-spoken sunburned American with cropped blond hair and wide green eyes. He has the uncanny ability to make friends, if not to have them or keep them. Most of all he has his own will, that drives him across oceans to strange lands. He will beg and borrow, even steal, to make this trip (as soon as he has established himself as a man of business he meticulously retraces his steps to pay back what he’s taken) and while it would be nice to have a permanent travelling partner, someone whose wits might complement his own, no such person exists. Or if he does, Adrian’s never met him.

Chapter 6: Epilogue

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

When Adrian Veidt is seventeen, he puts books aside. He leaves to find the real Alexander, not the one in a textbook, to roam the middle east like a pagan wanderer and grow his hair long, he takes little with him. Nothing his parents’ money has touched, because he must make this voyage standing on his own feet; he’s willing to work any job he’s given rather than feel parasitic, an extra appendage of the family. (And wouldn’t you, if you knew where the money came from already, your father’s guilt and your mother’s numb disinterest.) He hesitates before packing Lang’s Iliad away, thinking achingly sentimental thoughts of Aristotlean annotations, but the risk that he might lose it is too great.

Adrian has the company of other travelers, an odd fraternity; he has the hospitality of strangers, who afford more kindness to a soft-spoken sunburned American with cropped blond hair and wide green eyes. He has the uncanny ability to make friends, if not to have them or keep them. Most of all he has his own will, that drives him across oceans to strange lands. He will beg and borrow, even steal, to make this trip (as soon as he has established himself as a man of business he meticulously retraces his steps to pay back what he’s taken) and while it would be nice to have a permanent travelling partner, someone whose wits might complement his own, no such person exists. Or if he does, Adrian’s never met him.

---

When Adrian Veidt is a grown man (fully-grown, and well-preserved at an age most men would already look past their prime) he owns many books. But he’s a busy man, and can’t afford to read for pleasure, not that the written word affords him much of it in the first place. The words fly by, each one registering like a raindrop in a storm unless he’s very deliberate about his reading, and it isn’t that his reading comprehension has suffered, but that there’s no puzzle in putting it all together. Even as a child the obstacle was mostly in his mind, and he knows better than to approach something so ordinary with that kind of reverence. Books are written by men, after all. There’s a coffee-table in one of his many residences with an exhibit of books on it; most are, even by his own standards, pretentious, Old Norse Eddas and very modern poetry. But the green-covered book is a permanent fixture there, with its soft endpapers and its title embossed in bronze on a darker green rectangular field. (He did return the Dreibergs’ copy, eventually, he wasn’t a negligent child. He keeps the ferns under glass somewhere.) Most people know better than to touch it– ostensibly educational as they are, these books are for show only– but from time to time one of his guests will pick it up and earn one of Adrian’s more genuine smiles.