My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (14 page)

As Mary and I established ourselves socially in Cambridge I hated the stiff formality of my assumed heterosexual personality. I was habituated to sensing masculine interest in me, whether desire, curiosity, nervous testing, indifference, or repugnance. Suddenly I had a persona denied or at least reduced. What is more, I was often frustrated for male sexual companionship. My fellow students seemed unlikely candidates for my attention, and I had never been much good at cruising. I met males haphazardly. There was the young man doing laundry in the basement of our apartment building who invited me into his rooms following some verbal minuet that had a subtext that excited him (he was not gay and thus immune to the power of the gaze), or the two sailors needing directions who stopped me one dark autumn evening as I was coming home with something for dinner. After pointing them on their way, I asked if they wanted a blow job, to which one said yes, the other no. We went into a nearby alleyway, the one undid his fly, the other stood watch. It was over in seconds, and I was cheerfully on my way with scarcely an interruption of the dinner schedule.

These lighthearted anecdotes do not reflect what became an increasingly urgent search for male partners. The Cambridge bank of the Charles River was a prominent pickup place that I avoided, partly because I lived so near and we often walked there as a couple, partly because I feared meeting Harvard acquaintances, for whom I was masquerading as a standard-issue young married man. When I was sufficiently liquored up to be fearless I went out on the streets at night into Boston, funnily enough more than once getting into bed with a guy who told me of doing it with professors I knew at Harvard. I discovered that prostitutes all knew that when the subway shut down you could usually find a taxi driver who would exchange a good blow job for a free trip home. I discovered the principal gay bar of Boston, built on the site of the infamous Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a place that over a decade before had erupted one night into fire, asphyxiating the hundreds inside who had been pressed and smashed against the exit doors that opened inward. I recoiled at the association, yet, glancing about the tawdry smoke-filled interior filled with men acting out in that campy, self-mocking way that I would describe in retrospect as a kind of defense against low self-esteem, I thought that only a place of such a hideous memory could serve as the site for the sexually charged get-togethers of homosexual men. That such an idea came to me indicates how the charade I was living was taking its toll upon my own self-worth. The men in the bar seemed demented, to me. Better the streets, I thought, although I ran the risk of physical violence or police cruelty, all of which I avoided except for a couple of close calls that sent me home to Mary wracked with tremors of fear and crying. She said nothing, took me in, and comforted me.

Mother died May 28, 1954. The news came in a telephone call while we were eating dinner, and I immediately began to weep despite the fact that we had two friends with us. I had not seen her since the summer of 1952, our only subsequent communication being through the letters she habitually wrote each of her children on Sunday afternoon and my considerably less conscientious replies. There was nothing to say, really; she did not like me married, did not like Mary, had not been at all sympathetic when the department had voted not to renew my scholarship after the first year, indifferent to my having to take a night job to get sufficient money to continue. She had been kind enough to agree to pay $50 a month toward the psychiatrist’s fee I was incurring when I, trendy as usual, joined every other Harvard student in seeking counseling, although the money was sent on with an implied sigh of impatience at my weakness that I could read in the language of the letter that always accompanied the check. I flew back to Iowa City to join my siblings for the funeral, the first meeting since we all had gathered at dinner to send my eldest siblings off to college in 1940. We were to meet only one more time as a group of six, in 1973. Considering the essential indifference and isolation of the six siblings, on these occasions we demonstrated our extraordinary capacity for nonstop animated and witty conversation, which, of course, an observer might describe as a desperate effort to keep the interaction free of substance and psychic pertinence. Because my mother and I had a fractured relationship, never repaired after the revelation of my sexual orientation, her death filled me with the deepest regret: so much could have been said, two really warm and loving people might have united in their regard for one another, a mother could have been proud of a bright and vivacious son out to conquer the world. That I have had to live with the memory of our great divide pained me for many years until finally she faded into the mists of time.

A year and three months later, Mary died, on August 28, 1955. We had moved two days before to Attleboro, Massachusetts, just a short drive from the town of Norton, the site of Wheaton College, where I had been hired as an instructor. The day had started early for me, who was busily churning out lecture notes for classes that were to begin in two weeks. It was broken by the arrival of two guys from graduate school who came to lunch; Mary could not resist starting up our Cambridge social life way down in Attleboro. After they went off, we left the dishes where they were and retired for an afternoon of lovemaking and napping. While Mary continued to sleep, I went to my desk. After an hour Mary came to my study door to complain of feeling sick, returned thirty minutes later to ask me to call a doctor. This was serious. I was rigid with fear as I went to use our neighbor’s phone, since ours was not yet installed. They gave me a doctor’s name, I called, he came, and I ushered him into our bedroom, settling myself outside the door. While he was examining Mary, the cat, which I had shut in the kitchen, let out a yowl, and almost simultaneously I heard Mary groan. The doctor came to the door of the bedroom to say, “I’m afraid she’s done for.” I stared at her body, afraid to go near. She seemed to be sleeping, nothing more. But she was dead, gone, stolen away just like that.

I lived through the next two weeks glazed over, without a conscious sense of the experience, as one so often finds it described by the newly bereaved. State of shock, I guess is what it is. I went back to the neighbor, and in swift succession called my five siblings, whose responses were typical—expressions of concern, mingled with regret that previous obligations would keep them from coming to Iowa to be with me during the days preceding the funeral and interment in the Powers family plot in Ames. At least my brother agreed to come to the service itself. I also called our two luncheon guests, who guaranteed that they would hasten down to take me away back to Cambridge. And then there was the undertaker, nice enough to offer to take our cat off my hands, as he and his assistant loaded Mary’s corpse into their hearse. The next morning I visited the old couple for whom we had house-sat that summer to break the news; they gave me $300 in cash, since this was the days before credit cards, so I could book a flight to Iowa. I went to Attleboro, declined to see Mary laid out in her wedding dress in the coffin, was given the autopsy results—“coronary insufficiency,” whatever that meant—arranged for the cremation, flew to Iowa, waited for the ashes because in Massachusetts in those days there was a legal delay for cremation, a period of “thinking it over” (courtesy of the lobbying of the Roman Catholic Church, which wanted, I guess, a lot of bodies floating about in the afterlife but could not imagine a deity who might re-create bodies from ashes if that was so important to him), sat with Mary’s parents, aunts, and cousins, and, thankfully, Bill Calder, who flew out to be with me.

Dulled and stupid, I was helped through this event by Mary’s parents, who were aware that I was alone, still a very young person without family, in their home and mourning the death of my wife. (I did not notice I was young then; at eighty I cannot imagine how the poor kid went through it all.) As the funeral procession formed in the vestibule of the church where four years earlier we had been married, I stepped back, but they insisted that I precede them down the aisle. “You are the husband,” Mary’s mother whispered to me with a little encouraging smile, as the tears poured down her cheeks. I sobbed loudly as the organist played Mary’s favorite hymn, which began, “Oh, God, our help in ages past, our hope in years to come,” and which to this day makes me choke up, crying for the futility of such an invocation—hope, indeed! Eventually I drove off with my brother and his wife to Sioux City, Iowa, bidding Bill goodbye at the airport there a day later. I sat stupidly for three days, vacantly watching my little nieces and nephew gamboling on the lawn, then returned to Ames, spending another nightmare day with my parents-in-law, stupefied by their grief, who then drove me to the airport in Des Moines, the silence at our last lunch together broken only by their saying, these two old people, who had just lost their only child, “Go back, start dating, Charlie, forget about Mary, get another girl, you’re young.” I arrived in Boston, went to live for a bit with Bill’s family, letting myself be tended to by them, then I moved myself back to an apartment in Cambridge, set up my desk, got my suit and tie ready, drove down to Norton, walked onto a platform, set my notes down on a lectern, looked out at sixty girls, and said, “Good Morning.” It was September 1955 and my teaching career had begun.

THE HARVARD YEARS: A NOTE OF CLARIFICATION

I entered graduate school in September 1952 and was awarded the PhD degree in classical philology in February 1960 (the alternative midyear date for awarding degrees, done without ceremony, as a bookkeeping procedure). My career in classics was unplanned. Excellent faculty and a love of Greek literature kept me in classes where I could study the texts in the original language at the State University of Iowa; it was sheer joy, all of it. Although I had never given my future serious thought, my professors groomed me for graduate school and steered me to Harvard, from which I received a small scholarship. My performance there was spotty, bad enough at first to encourage the faculty not to renew the scholarship in the hopes that I would withdraw. Instead I stayed on and took a night watchman’s job to pay the tuition. In the first semester of this new arrangement (fall 1953) I received A’s in all four seminars in which I was enrolled; as a consequence the department chair found money to ease my way. The courses I took were uniformly uninformative, poorly taught, and a definite waste of time, with each self-obsessed “star” Harvard professor delivering a two-hour monologue either on something canned that required no immediate thought or on random unconnected notions after the manner of stream-of-consciousness writing—with one exception, the seminar in Lucretius offered by Peter Elder, who made it into a tea party in his rooms in Lowell House, where some exceedingly bright graduate students (some of them the real champs of the profession in the next two or three decades) sat about and read each other the papers they were working on, while Elder poured tea and made pointed, illuminating, valuable comments. Such was the stimulation that I later wrote my paper up for a journal. The other moment of real learning came when I was a teaching fellow in the spring of 1955, the pay for which was a measly $400 for three courses. One was an undergraduate senior seminar in Euripides’
Alcestis
, conducted for two of the brightest students imaginable, working with whom inspired me to research the subject well enough to create a second paper for a journal. The tough questions on the
Aeneid
that my Virgil seminar threw at me drove me to so close a study of the poem that I was mining my research for books and articles for years to come. As a graduate student, however, I was pretty much a flop; at the end of the term 1954–55 I had not made an impression on any faculty, nor found any of them sufficiently congenial for us to work together on a dissertation. For that matter, I had not even thought out a topic. William Calder took pity on me and steered me to Sterling Dow, who was always greedy for the glory of being Doktorvater. He was an epigraphist with whom I had nothing in common, but he dreamed up a subject, dull as it was, that I managed to research without any more trouble than fighting off terminal boredom, and which was reduced into a scholarly article a few years later that has, to my amazement, been cited more than anything else I have written. In 1955 I left Harvard to start teaching full-time at Wheaton College. That plus the death of my first wife set back dramatically any progress on the dissertation, which seriously undermined my relationship with Dow, which was conducted from this point on by letter. I finally sat down to the dissertation in June 1958 when I was by that time teaching at Yale, the father of one son, and expecting my second wife’s second delivery in November. Needless to say, I had had serious distractions, but I managed to finish the dissertation one week before my second son was born. Dow and I had a contentious relationship that ended in his examination of me on Greek history in the spring of 1959 as part of a two-hour oral examination divided between a defense of the dissertation and examinations in four fields. I did not do well, which colored the rest of my responses to the other faculty on that occasion, and they voted to ask me to repeat in the subsequent semester, a polite way of saying,
You fail.
My lousy performance at this event was partly inspired by sheer nervousness and partly by too many martinis for lunch; it was not enough that I had failed, but in their post-exam discussion with me on the matter I sat there crying—I must have been really drunk. One of the great anecdotes of the classics profession, I am told. I am inherently vicious enough a raconteur to appreciate its worth. In the fall of 1959 I journeyed once again from New Haven to Cambridge and there found the entire faculty sitting for the examination, which, before it started, the chair assured me I would pass, clearly aligning himself with the majority force in the department who did not take to Dow and his animosities. Pass I did, but the tension left me shaken, and by the following spring I entered the psychiatric ward of Grace–New Haven Hospital for a two-week recuperative stay, suffering from severe depression. I have nothing but grim memories of Harvard University and its Classics Department, but I owe the institution the incomparable glory and status that comes from brandishing a Harvard PhD on my curriculum vitae or in conversation, plus, during the thirty years I spent in Cambridge later on, the chance to swim in the superb Blodgett Pool at the reduced fee offered alumni, and then the crown jewel of my Harvard experience, a yearly pass to the Widener Library, the use of which through the years makes up for any indignity or other horror that I might have sustained.