My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey
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Authors: Charles Rowan Beye
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Contents
7. Someday My Prince Will Come
Author’s Note
I am grateful to Richard Barsam and Jane Scovell for separately bringing this memoir to the attention of Jonathan Galassi, and to that gentleman for his acute and sympathetic editing. Several friends who read the manuscript gave me suggestions for the prose or reminded me when my memory had gone awry; I must thank Mort Berman, Lindley Boegehold, Casey Cameron, Henry Chalfant, Nick Dubrule, my cousins Jane and Jeremy Hamilton, Chris Holownia, Sally McElroy, Scott Perry, Bill and Judy Plott, Willard Spiegelman, Ann Rosener, and James Tatum. My friend Stephen Pascal and my daughter Helen Tomilson did close reading and provided commentary that was miraculous. My husband, Richard, who has heard during the past twenty-two years every anecdote of my life more often than he could possibly want, provided a very useful corrective.
This book is dedicated to the many people named or described in its pages who are no longer with us to tell their versions of what I describe herein. To them and to those who still walk this earth, I give my devoted thanks for making me the person I am.
Introduction
In May 2005, the woman I had married on the sixteenth of June, 1956, lay dying in an assisted living facility about ten blocks from my home. We had been divorced since 1976, and after some years of embarrassed, frosty encounters, we were once again able to speak with honesty and affection to one another, at least when discussing our four children and their progeny. The children were in town, staying with me, going over to talk with their mother, who went in and out of consciousness as the pain, and the opiates, and her disinclination to eat or drink dictated. I should have written “with us,” since the household included Richard, my partner of fifteen years, whom I was to marry in a church ceremony three years later in 2008. He had long since become a kind of stepfather in the family. At the time he was coming home from teaching to do a lot of the housework so I could tend to whatever the children needed.
Whenever any one of them came home from visiting their mother to get some rest, the inevitable was, “Dad, you really should go to see Mom, to say goodbye, or something.”
And I would resist, arguing that she was lying helpless in bed with no control over those who came to her, that she and I had too many bad memories, that the deathbed setting would be a temptation to try to “make things right,” and that would be too lopsided, wrong, if not cruel. Better to stay away. But they persisted. On the night of May 8 they stood together in the doorway to her bedroom, where she lay between oblivion and consciousness, themselves going back and forth about the impending visit that some of them were determined to force me to make the following day. Finally it was agreed that they would argue me down when they returned home that evening.
Two hours later she died, and when they reported to me the scene of that evening, I knew in a flash that she had said to herself,
I want out of here. No visit from Charlie.
What would I have said to her? Or, she, poor thing, to me? The kaleidoscope of emotions that color any recollection—hurt, pride, joy, sorrow, embarrassment, shame, passion, one could go on and on—render any seemingly assured remark highly suspect. One wants to sort out the details of the past, but often it is like going through yesterday’s wardrobe, surprised by the irremediable damage and wastage of so much lying in those drawers next to undeniable treasures. It is not what one had suspected.
That scene comes to mind maybe because I am writing a memoir that is in one way or another addressed to her. It is the story of a male who grows up to be gay, complicated by the fact that at age twenty-one he got married—yes, to a woman, and yes, it was a highly pleasurable relationship and the sex was good. She was my wife for five years until her tragic, premature death. Almost immediately I went on to marry a second woman, with whom I had what I remember as a delirious sexual relationship and who bore me four wonderful children, two boys and two girls. Throughout all the years of this surprising turn in sexual affections I never stopped having the strongest possible desire for males of almost any age, a desire I tried to realize whenever I could. Now that the whole thing is nearly over—I’m more than eighty—I ask myself,
What was that all about?
The burden of parenting eventually killed the marriage. At least that’s how I think of it; she would have said it was because I was gay. Obviously I was, as they say, sexually conflicted. Heterosexuality did eventually lose its charm for me, true. My wife and I grew estranged. I tried sex with a third woman, in an odd little inn in Arles, of all places. We were traveling with my children, all in their early teens, which more or less killed the chance for the passion to grow into what might have made for a real affair. That brief episode stifled the impulse with women for me, except for those every-now-and-then grim attempts to “make our marriage work,” and at the end, as we moved to the final stages of divorce, some bizarre couplings, ferocious, really.
After twenty years we were divorced, and I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of eternal youth. Thereafter I had four young male lovers in succession, real affairs of the heart, the first real relationships with males I had ever known. All this practice in carnality and connubiality culminated in a long-term relationship and subsequent marriage to a male, a fellow student of the classics, almost my coeval, who I hope will be there to close my eyes in death.
It all seemed so easy when I first contemplated a memoir. Some of my young gay friends have urged me to write about my high school years, since I grew up in a world they can only imagine. Some older gays, however, are not so sympathetic. You had it too easy in high school, they declare. Where’s the pain? Have you repressed it? Or they ask: What were your real motives in marrying? Once for the lark of it, yes. But twice? The boys you had sex with in high school were straight? Weren’t you just a teeny bit predatory? Aren’t we almost talking a kind of rape, maybe? Or what kind of a sex life were you having, giving satisfaction and getting none in return? What does that say about your mentality? I have a woman friend who calls those high school blow jobs abuse. (“Those boys were abusing you. Did they care about your satisfaction? No. That’s clear sexual abuse.”) But she’s a professor and in the academy sex is all about power. And, of course, there is always the question: What about you and those students you were involved with, Professor? An old friend of mine, with whom I had a brief affair when he was just about to graduate from college, has always told me that he considered our relationship to be the foundation of his adult happiness, the key to understanding human intimacy and sustaining a good marriage. He was surprised recently to be told by a therapist that he must consider my overtures and his yielding as the sexual abuse of a youth by an older male. I was thirty-five to his twenty-three.
I could be writing another kind of memoir. The WASP story, for instance. There is a lot of talk about the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage in this memoir that my name does not suggest. I am named after my father’s mentor, Charles James Rowan, the chief of staff in the Department of Surgery at the State University of Iowa, a kindly old Roman Catholic of Irish descent who agreed to stand sponsor at my Episcopalian christening when he didn’t find anything in the language of
The Book of Common Prayer
that was theologically offensive. Beye was the surname of Wilhelm Friedrich Beye, who came to the United States from Halle an der Weser in the 1850s as a fifteen-year-old boy, enlisted in the Union Army from Illinois when he was nineteen, and several years later met and married a Bostonian, Nellie Christabel Lombard. She was descended from people who came on the first and second ships to Massachusetts, principally Thomas Lombard, who settled in Dorchester in 1630. The Beyes raised their family in Oak Park, Illinois. Their son, Howard Lombard Beye, my father, married Ruth Elizabeth Ketcham, also of Oak Park, a woman who could claim a genealogy also studded with dates and place-names that resonate with the earliest history of the English settlers in the New World. That was why, I suppose, my mother made such a thing about the WASP ethnicity; old Wilhelm, even if he changed his name to William and had a school in Oak Park named after him, the William Beye Elementary School, must have spoken with an accent. Sad that she never lived to meet my second wife. This was a woman who could trace her ancestry back to the ship that arrived just after the one bearing Thomas. Her parents lived in a farmhouse in New Hampshire that her forebears had occupied for seven generations. She herself couldn’t have cared less, nor could my children, for whom the business of “background” and “heritage” is meaningless.
Mine was a midwestern upbringing in the world of manners that Mother must have taken from Edith Wharton novels; perhaps she took her cue from fantasies she had about her Bostonian mother-in-law. There was a touch of Chekhov, too, the “Cherry Orchard” years when the money and servants went and we sold the big house, where we also led a kind of “Three Sisters” existence except that at least three of us escaped the boredom of Iowa for the excitements of Manhattan. My youngest sister, who lived all her seventy-five years in Iowa City, used to intone grimly, “You crossed the river.” I suppose she meant the Mississippi, but it felt more like a sinister threat. The River Styx, maybe?
The current popularity of physical or mental trauma in memoirs might have led me to concentrate on the four-year-old Charlie who fell off a balcony onto some stairs, damaging his lower back so thoroughly that he first wore a corset and then a brace until he was eighteen, by which time his posture had developed correctly. The pain, however, continued intermittently well into my thirties, when finally new advances in therapeutic techniques of exercise radically reduced it. This could have been balanced by a focus on the six-year-old Charlie whose father died in an automobile accident, and who then experienced what Russell Baker, whose fate was the same, has declared was having the rug permanently pulled out from under him. The loss of physical agility, the loss of father, compounded by the loss of material wealth, made me overreact to betrayal. Paradoxically, despite my refusal to trust, I want to believe.
No, the real story is being gay. I always remember that Arthur Ashe used to say that every day when he woke up his first thought was:
I am black
. When I was sixteen I discovered that I was the Other. Pretentious academic claptrap, of course, although there is an instructive truth to it. Cocksucker, fairy, queer, homosexual—what was it I discovered? These terms come loaded with perspectives; I can’t bring myself to use any one of them to describe this, my primal scene, as it were. I will try to be neutral and say that I discovered that I was a male who had a sexual interest in other males situated in a society, a world of people, who felt differently. I had to learn codes, identities, relationships, modes of behavior that had never been part of my instruction. I had to confront the world absolutely alone. I think of the black youngster who comes home sobbing to tell his mother that some other little children kicked him and called him “nigger,” and his mother puts her arms around the boy to comfort him and explain how monstrous white people so often are. I can see that same scenario played out in Germany in the 1930s when the race laws went into effect. But these youngsters had adults who helped them understand hatred and prejudice and condemnation. The gay child walks into his home, the only place where the human race can expect sanctuary, to find that the larger societal prejudices are just as vivid there. He is alone.
