My name is Jacques-Louis Ellis March. As I have come to understand it, I was born in 1943 in the back room of a New York nightclub. For my head, my mother was paid in gold and cigarettes. At ten days old, Dasius put me in the arms of Ellis Quentin March, also known as Quinn by those too French to pronounce his name properly. I am playing. It's an affectionate name, as Jackie is an affectionate name used by those still mad about the French Revolution and Jacques-Louis David's defection to the proletariat.

You have caught me at a good time, Mini, I must say. Leis put that down and stop fidgeting. It's going to be all right. Here's my hand.

My first memories are of course here in South Carolina. The first memory that I know happened for sure, I fell out of a giant angel oak tree on the property. It being evening, I was forbidden from climbing trees in daylight, but at four years old I was not interested in rules seemingly for their own sake. I clearly recollect lying on the ground and this one appearing silently beside me, my Leis, and who picked me up. I made to scream from the pain of broken limbs and he pressed his lips to mine and sucked my air out so that I couldn't. He brought me in to the house and laid me on the big walnut kitchen table.

I said, "Daddy," so that he wouldn't leave me, and he said, "Don't ever call me that again." After a long time, my father, his Quinn, came down and drove me to the hospital. He punished me by not letting me have any sweeties at all while I healed. That fall, they sent me to school.

They fought a lot, so it was a relief to me to get away to school, really. At first. I didn't do well there. I found myself enrolled at a local school where most children had been playing together since crawling. I had never played with any other children and didn't know how to speak up for myself since I had been discouraged from speaking at home. I knew how to be adored, because of Father, who called me handsome and brushed my hair, and treated nice food as a reward. How to deal with food given to me without expectation or classmates who expected me to carry a conversation with them? or to run and to play? My classmates found me effeminate, watchful, sleepy from being up most nights to be with Father, and half-starved from confusion over something as basic as freely flowing chocolate milk. So the older children beat me bloody on a regular basis.

I had been raised to think delicacy something praiseworthy. Elegant refinement and manners were rewarded at home. My teachers liked the manners but found the delicacy troublesome. They let the other children beat me because they were wary of doing it themselves. After one year at the regular school, Leis decided that I should go north to a quality Catholic school in Boston. I don't know why Father didn't protest.

(Leis: "Oh he argued tooth and claw. Quinny had been reduced to a pale shadow by the headaches by then. He refused to speak to me. I'm sorry, little cabbage.")

Do you have that? Now I'm learning things. The nuns in Boston had no qualms over beating children as young as five, which is the age that I was, and they beat me with wooden rods in order to encourage a more masculine constitution. Sometimes Dasius, who lived in Boston then and still does, would take me out for a weekend to Cape Cod, and I knew that we were rich because he had a Buick and a driver. He would buy me a sandwich and help me feed french fries to the seagulls. I was smart enough to know that if Dasius liked elegance and manners I ought to ignore the nuns and endure the rod, because it was from him that we had money. In 1948, he leaned down and told me, at the carnival fairway on Coney Island on my birthday, that someday I would be one of them, and to regard my father in all things if for no other reason. At that age I knew that we were different from other people, but I did not know what it meant.

I wondered if we had a monopoly on love, my father and me. It didn't seem to me that other people knew how to be kind or good to each other. The more I learned about the world, the more I thought it true. I lasted a semester in the North, and Dasius sent me back at Christmas with a note pinned to my shirt that I was under no circumstances allowed back in Boston, and that if my father had sense he would use the money sewn into my jacket to hire a tutor. It was decided instead, however, that I would finish the year back in the public school, where the daily thrashings by the other children resumed.

It was then, waiting on Leis to finish washing blood out of my good school shirt, I first met Laurent. He confirmed it to me not long before he died. I remember wandering into the wash room, an old servant's room half open to the elements out back, wiping my nose and sniveling. A large boy named Tanner had hit me hard enough in the face to worry my father that my nose was broken, but it wasn't. It was bad enough that I was effeminate and quiet, but now that I had been North the fights came for putting on airs I didn't have. I took the beating without remark, because I was used to it, and knew that if I could endure I might be allowed a tutor and to stay home all the time.

I had learned long before not to call Leis "Daddy", but I still did not know really what to call him. It confused me utterly to know about other children's families. I was not allowed to go over their houses, even for birthday parties, but I had learned in school about the nuclear family, and we weren't that in any sense at all. I thought my teachers really didn't know very much about families, but I wasn't allowed to talk about us, and so I didn't. That day my father was too upset to talk to me, but I felt terribly lonely after the beating, so I walked around back to get my shirt and didn't see Laurent sitting there talking to Leis. I tugged on the untucked tail of Leis's shirt at the farm sink.

"Come here, little one, and we will see you," I heard.

"Laurent, leave him be, will you?" Leis said.

I had turned to see who spoke, used to following directions, and there was a petite young man sitting on the bench under a tall walnut tree. The sunlight filtered down to him through the branches, lighting his wild platinum blond hair like a fairy's from a story. His pointed face seemed kind to me, and lips smiling. I liked his buttoned shirt and nicely pressed capri pants, laced-up espadrilles, which I had only ever seen women wear. I liked his bare forearms and his bare throat. The sight of him stirred something deep within me. I think I fell in love with him then, instantly. I swallowed and turned back around to Leis, who snapped his fingers for me to come back. It made me think Laurent was dangerous in some way, which was worse. How I wanted him then.

That night my father said, "Come sleep with me," and I obeyed him as I had been told to do. He fell asleep stroking my hair, and I escaped, running down the hall in stockinged feet so that I wouldn't be heard. I found the fairy in the guest room, sitting up and waiting for me. He was as beautiful and delicate by moonlight as he had been under the tree. He was in white silk with a single ruby on silver chain at his throat. I said, "How did you know I would come?"

And he said, "Because now you are mine, aren't you?"