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"I'm strong and I'm quick."

"Are you sober?"' asked the owner of the Wasp.

"I do my work," said Stuart, crisply."

Like that first highly encoded meeting of Glenn Ford and George Macready in "Gilda," or Paul Cadmus' paintings of shore leave, there's an almost pornographic quality to this waterside transaction; the young matelote brusque cataloging of his physical prowess to the older gentleman. Even the clipped manner of the exchange, the grudging half-disclosure, has something of the Genet rough trade encounter about it: Stuart of Brest.

White does give Stuart a love interest. A small, wren-like bird named Margalo who stops briefly in the Little household. And Stuart's devotion is ardent to be sure, but not precisely romantic. It is closer in nature to Janet Reno's self-admitted "abiding fondness for men": somewhat theoretical and confusing. I'm not advocating that Stuart prove himself by engaging in a little hetero-normative trans-species loving; it is, after all, still a children's book. But even within that chaste context, Stuart is only playing at lover, as he plays at everything.

He is unable to resist stepping back in commentary, even as he is saving Margalo from the jaws of Snowbell, the Littles' cat. He grooves on the theatrics of the situation, casting himself in the Sidney Carton role: "'This is the finest thing I have ever done,' thought Stuart." But feelings of devotion and protective nobility are not love. Almost every gay boy I know had that awkward adolescent moment when he made his very close female friend doubt her own desirability because he displayed no interest in jumping her bones, even as he himself was thinking, "Well, lip-synching into hairbrushes to the Supremes in her bedroom ... this is really romantic ... right?"

Margalo eventually flies from the Little home, possibly tired of waiting around fruitlessly for a little action (the official White version being that the feline peril in the house has become too great). Stuart takes to the open road, ostensibly to find her and make her his own, although he doesn't entirely commit to the he(te)roism of that romantic quest, either. "While I'm about it, I might as well seek my fortune, too," he muses. It's a little bit like resignedly hoping that there might be some cute guys at your engagement party.

It is during these travels that Stuart volunteers to substitute teach at the one-room schoolhouse in a small town. It is perhaps his finest drag performance. As proof of his qualifications for the job, Stuart disappears into the bushes and emerges in striped trousers, a tweed jacket with waistcoat, and a pince-nez. There would be no epithets hurled by the schoolyard boys at his current incarnation.

Stuart has transformed himself into a forbidding yet ultimately kind, highly cultivated pedagogue. The children are rapt by his cunning size, his stern air of authority and his common touch in talking to them on their own level about deep ethical questions. The subject turns to stealing and he has one of the boys steal a small sachet pillow from one of the girls. When the discussion is over, Stuart turns his attention to the pillow, which attracts him; it might make a lovely, fragrant bed.

"That's a very pretty thing," said Stuart, trying to hide his eagerness. "You don't want to sell it, do you?"

"Oh, no," replied Katherine. "It was a present to me."

"I suppose it was given you by some boy you met at Lake Hopatcong last summer and it reminds you of him," he said to her, dreamily.

"Yes, it was," said Katherine, blushing.

"Ah," said Stuart. "Summers are wonderful, aren't they, Katherine?"

Everything but breaking out into a rendition of "September Song" by Kurt Weill. Who is this old queen, suffused with nostalgic yearning? Stuart is still only about 7 and a half years old at this point, but here he is, suddenly transformed into Mann's Aschenbach, an aging roué, his summers of love and beauty all far behind him now, watching the epiceine young Tadzio on the Venice Lido as the plague creeps in.

White gives Stuart one last crack at romance. As he passes through yet another town, a shopkeeper tells Stuart there is someone he should meet -- a human girl just his size. Like Edward Everett Horton the ur-Confirmed Bachelor, Stuart doesn't even feign interest anymore. "What's she like ... Fair, fat, and forty?" he cracks.

But he does agree to meet the tiny Miss Harriet Ames. He purchases a small birch bark canoe, he prepares a picnic. He runs over and over again the details of their assignation, how they will paddle to a lily pad, what swim trunks he will wear, etc. At almost no point in his fantasy does Harriet make much of an appearance. When their date finally arrives and some large, rude boys have lain waste to his toy canoe, he is disconsolate and cannot continue with the charade. Design Queen Stuart has taken control.

Harriet suggests they try to have a nice time just the same. "We could pretend we're fishing." she gamely suggests. "'I don't want to pretend I'm fishing,' cried Stuart, desperately. 'Besides, look at that mud! Look at it!' He was screaming now." The aesthetics of the date -- the true locus of his fixation -- have been ruined, the amorous simulacrum has been destroyed. I don't speak with anything resembling personal experience, but surely a damaged canoe should not be enough to ruin a lovely summer night by a river with a willing young woman by one's side. If anything, it sounds like the aquatic equivalent of that old saw, "Looks like we're out of gas (heh heh)."

Stuart once more lights out for the territories, again putatively to find Margalo. Even White understands by now that this is probably not a phase. Certain things might just not be in the tiny cards for some. And it was Stuart who taught me, in no small part, that this would be fine, too. Sitting on that classroom floor, legs crossed, I realized that I, like Stuart, might one day hope to walk down a big city street, a little mouse among many, "full of the joy of life and the fear of dogs."
salon.com | Dec. 21, 1999

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