546
SUSAN SONTAG
the High School of Industrial Trades, Hyde already seemed grown–
up, though he was only stealing cars then, and was just getting
':0-
gether his lucrative stable of thirteen-year-old boy and girl prostitutes.
Growing up in an impoverished family (his father is a janitor) with
many children, he had
to
learn early
to
fight for whatever he wanted.
Jekyll comes from a prosperous home (his father still commutes every
day from Darien to Wall Street) and has one sister, who is an eminent
biochemist, and no brothers. Utterson, who long ago had changed his
name to Gabriel Utterson from Gavril Uniades, claims to
be
a found–
ling. He denies indignantly that he could have had any sisters or
brothers (other than his spiritual brethren in far away Tibet, where he
studied Transcendental Medicine forty years ago) but is given to
boasting on almost any occasion about the swarm of illegitimate chil–
dren he's fathered in the State of New York and its environs. Jekyll
assumes that Poole, the very young pupil trembling on the brink of
puberty, who sleeps on a cot in the hall outside Utterson's door and
acts as his valet, is actually one of these bastards.
Cleaning up after Utterson occupies most of Poole's day, which
starts when, each morning, Utterson shouts for him
to
enter, and
Poole does, to find the bed in violent wet disarray. There are acrid
heavy stains on the other furniture and on the carpet. There is ex–
crement on the walls of his dressing-room. As for the bathroom!
Poole has visions of great, involuntary physiological epics enacted
nightly in the dressing-room and bathroom. Or Utterson may be aim–
ing consciously
to
destroy these rooms-perhaps to test the develop–
ment of Poole's will, his "true will," as Utterson would put it, as the
boy labors in his service. But either way, there would be no point in
beginning the actual cleaning until Utterson has finished his break–
fast, which is always taken in bed. For merely drinking coffee can
produce a holocaust: coffee spattered all over the room as well as in
the bed. When, as he sometimes does, Utterson takes his late after–
noon coffee in his room, in the presence of members of his staff and a
few pupils, the bed must be re-made with fresh sheets a second time
that day. Though he is often questioned by the irreverent and the
curious, Poole, conscious of the great honor of serving Utterson, re–
fuses to describe the exact state of Utterson's quarters. And it is doubt–
ful whether the details would give much precision to the persistent
rumors that much more goes on there than the consumption of coffee
