My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (18 page)

Grace–New Haven was not a diagnostic ward, necessarily, but a holding pit, if one can call it that, for people who had lost it for the moment and needed a controlled place where they could figure out what they were going to do next. It was like a vacation, being with nice middle-class people my age, housewives who had taken too many tranquilizers and driven into the guardrail, junior executives who had stood on the platform all day somehow unable to board any of the trains heading to Manhattan, faculty who started thinking of suicide as something more than a literary symbol or motif. It was like a vacation, I say, because the people there did not have to maintain the pretense of the happy home and family in suburbia any longer. For me personally it suggested what a toll being the paterfamilias was taking. It was decided that Penny and the children would go to her parents’ at the farm and I would stay and consult a psychiatrist over the summer months. The three months were relatively worthless; his attempt at a Freudian guided tour of my childhood in that abbreviated time went nowhere. He might have considered various calamities—that my mother died in 1954, my first wife died in 1955, that I moved house three times in the previous three years, I had remarried in 1956, become a father twice since, finished a dissertation, failed my orals in humiliation, accepted my PhD as an ironic and meaningless triumph. He fastened on my groping that kid, and could not get beyond it. For him it was all about homosexuality, whereas I saw that moment of rejection as one thing too many, the last straw, as it were. He encouraged me to abstain, and the depression would go away. Abstention was not difficult, since almost no prospects crossed my path, which made the groping all the more laughably grotesque.

At the end of the summer I was so immersed in our move that there was room for only the very occasional erotic thought in my calculations. I drove a station wagon–load of stuff to Palo Alto, giving a ride to three of Freddy’s younger brother’s friends to share the expenses, a grueling ride lightened only by the diversion of spending one night in a crummy motel with three boys in their underpants, one of whom with the cutest ass imaginable sharing the bed with me. Another night, when we stayed in that boy’s parents’ home, we refreshed ourselves after the long day’s drive in the cellar shower, where I had the pleasure of watching the boys splashing about in their nakedness, talking together, as well as sensing my disinclination for aesthetic reasons to introduce my tubby self into the mix, seeing them as a male version of the traditional ancient Greek Three Graces. Once arrived, I had houses to inspect, then the very pregnant Penny and the two boys to greet at the airport, and needed to consult with the housekeeper we had engaged for four months to help with the transition, do the real estate deal, notify movers, arrange the furniture, arrange for schooling, find an obstetrician, note the due date of early October, get an office set up, look over the teaching material. It was not a life for casual sexual engagement with males, even if in this so aggressively heterosexual suburban community of what gays call “breeders” one might spot a man with invitation in his eyes on the streets where no one ever, ever walked. We were in California.

I never would have gone to Stanford if it had not been for Ted Doyle. Ted left such an empty space in Connecticut. He and I had struggled to grow the enrollments in Greek at Yale, and the results were finally having an effect on the entire undergraduate classics program. Suddenly he wasn’t there to share, to give advice, to pull the oar. Out in Woodbridge Uncle Teddy Boo had been such a fixture of family meals and family walks in the woods that suddenly the gap was palpable. We were on the phone all the time. He wanted to hear the gossip of the Yale department, I was enchanted by his stories of sunny California, the glamour of it all, as well as his humorous takes on the business of settling in at a university that was definitely no “Ivy.” He was as amusing on the vulgar rich of California as he had been on the repressed stuffy Brahmins of New England. As time went by he began encouraging me to think of moving there myself, telling me that he was sure that he could arrange an appointment with Brooks Otis, the recently appointed chair of the Stanford Classics Department.

Penny thought it was a great idea; it would be warm like the Hawaii in which she had spent her youth. Frank Brown thought it was a silly idea, insisting that, while there was no chance for junior faculty to advance at Yale, he would personally put me in line for a superior appointment elsewhere, and that he did not at all think Stanford was worth it. (He rolled his eyes at the mention of Otis—I should have paid closer attention.) Stanford in those days had recently been for the country club set, the jeunesse dorée of California. (I could never understand in
Double Indemnity
how Phyllis Dietrichson’s gross husband was an alumnus.) But major changes were taking place: the trustees were determined to transform Stanford into the “Harvard of the West.” A new dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the aristocratic Philip Rhinelander (yes,
those
Rhinelanders), was charged with making a set of academically glamorous hires. That meant raiding the Ivies, and to get the maximum bang for the buck, he went after very junior people. I was the perfect candidate, although how I personally came to be hired was bizarre. It was through Ted’s manipulation of Stanford’s new chair, Brooks Otis. Otis, a serious Christian, the son of a clergyman and scion of several grand old Boston families, was Rhinelander’s friend and Harvard classmate. His previous academic life had been spent in a small liberal arts college. With no experience in building up a department in a major university of vast pretensions, he relied on Ted, who was infinitely political and deeply, cynically subversive, ready to play the Boston Irish servant to the Boston Brahmin grandee. (Ted could never resist saying that Brooks, who came from an impecunious branch of the Otis Elevator family, “was born on the wrong side of the shaft.”) At a certain point in the cold of the winter Ted called to say that Otis had been promised another appointment by the dean. Otis did not want to go to the national meetings to do the hiring, Ted claimed, and was quite ready to consider me for the position. It was to be an interview by telephone.

It was another instance of the impulsive, capricious streak in my decision making. To move my family across the continent on the strength of a brief telephone call with a man whose WASP background would guarantee that he would be as repressed as I in the course of it, and to trust in the blandishments of Ted, who I knew perfectly well was the master of blarney, in retrospect seems crazy. The telephone interview went off well enough, as obviously it would when the communicants were on their best behavior. My one stipulation was that Otis provide me with an adequate office, since I had a large library. To this he agreed. That slight morsel was the only matter of substance in our negotiation.

Otis and I disliked each other the instant we met. Since I know people who admire him, I have to believe it was chemistry on my part. Very shortly I understood how I repelled him. It was me waving my hands, and my loud laugh. He was always asking people if I was Jewish; he must have seen me as the masculine equivalent of Bella Abzug. Very shortly I hated him for betraying me. When I walked into his office to introduce myself, his first words were to announce the unexpected death of a senior colleague, which would necessitate my taking on his graduate seminar in comparative grammar. I understood that few would be prepared on such short notice to offer so complicated a subject on the graduate level. Still, his request for me to start out in a new teaching situation with an overload of that magnitude seemed particularly ungenerous. Worse, the large office he had promised turned out to be a smallish room that I was to share with some nonentity named William. When I remonstrated, he replied with what I came to understand as his standard evasion: “We must do the Christian thing by William.” A couple weeks brooding among my books in a makeshift office at home amid the screams and cries of three little ones brought me to the breaking point. Fueled by martinis, flooded with rage, I went to its source. There at his home in the presence of his wife, I flat-out lied, saying Penny could no longer endure me having an office at home and was packing to go back East with the children. The silence was broken by Mrs. Otis saying in a steely voice, “Brooks, get him an office tomorrow.” Within days I was ensconced in a grand space that Dean Rhinelander found for me in his decanal suite. Oh, how Otis must have hated me! I always felt his determination to rid himself of me began in that moment.

I did not get along with the other two senior faculty members much better. The psychiatrist in New Haven had observed more than once that since I did not do sports as a child I lacked an understanding of competition and cooperation; on the one hand, I was not aggressive enough, on the other, I could not get along easily. Maybe it was because I was armed with this new self-knowledge that I pushed to get that bigger office. Other efforts were not so successful. Another senior colleague, a Brit, of the type who thought all us “natives” were simpletons, would offer me his uncomprehending stare whenever I advanced some literary critical notion, a “take” on some text or other. I remember giving him an offprint of my second article, after the fashion of junior colleagues attempting to secure their position, and his remarking that my thesis was obvious and scarcely worth the effort. My other senior colleague was a large elderly lady whose smile in retrospect I now see was exactly like that menacing little-girl smile on the face of Janice Soprano, sister to Tony in
The Sopranos
, revealing reservoirs of malice, resentment, and rage that made the onlooker tremble. She could reduce the Englishman to rubble. At one departmental meeting when he was using that bleating voice and those elocutionary hesitations that mark the English upper classes, she slapped her fat fist down on the conference table and shouted out, “Stop stammering and spitting, get it out!” which reduced him to tears. She was, I hasten to say, impartial in her brutalities. When I first ventured to speak at a departmental meeting she shouted at me, “Shut up, you mutt, you’re new here.” So much for team spirit.

In forty-two years of college teaching I have had four periods in which fate has given me students of such caliber that the classroom hours were sheer joy. My years at Stanford were the first of these. Students who presented themselves for instruction in ancient Greek or Latin for lectures in the ancient literatures and cultures were not only intelligent enough to master the subject easily, they wrote well, they asked seriously good questions, they treasured their instructor; as he, them. I think of some of the alumni of those classes: the poet Sharon Olds, the theologian Elaine Pagels, the actress Kathleen Chalfant, the ancient historian Michael Gagarin, the documentary filmmaker Henry Chalfant, are just a few whom my failing memory has retained. Students like these inspired me to make every classroom hour worthy of their intelligence, and after a few years I was able to begin work on
Ancient Greek Literature and Society
, my second book for Doubleday. The “Society” in the title reflected what I had learned from Yale University, where the archaeological historical approach to antiquity anchored the literature, art, and ideas in a context, something that was keenly missing from Harvard’s Germanic emphasis on zeitgeist.

After the gray and gritty landscape of New England, Palo Alto and the Stanford campus seemed to us to resemble a resort; everyone was blond and athletic, their clothing casual and scanty, the constant sunshine glittered on the giant green fronds of palm trees as they swayed in the breezes. I was amused that Stanford had a prohibition against boys wearing shorts to class in those days. It was probably an extension of the age-old masculine insistence that in displays of power a male will be fully clothed, while a woman will bare her legs; one thinks of the Wall Street law firms that even today require women to wear dresses. I initially thought the prohibition of shorts was to cover over the intensely erotic thighs of the boys—well, erotic to me, who can find nothing more alluring than the gentle cover of golden hairs on the perfectly muscled golden brown leg of a soccer player, although it is doubtful that the front office was thinking this way. Still, one thinks of the Yale Admissions Office, which from the invention of photography up to the beginning of the seventies photographed every entering freshman in the nude for the files. Think how Yale could grow their endowment if they put those photos on the auction block at Sotheby’s! The physical presence of the Stanford boys affected me as no other group of students had. Partly it was the growing self-conscious sensuality of American youngsters, especially in California, culminating in the Monterey Pop Festival of June 1967, which ushered in a celebratory atmosphere among the youth of the American bourgeoisie that had a run of about a decade. The boys just advertised their sensual, physical selves more, whether aware or not.

Two anecdotes will establish the delight that I felt. Stanford recreational swimming was segregated by gender, which was more or less universal fifty years ago. Males swam nude, ostensibly because the original swimsuits were made of wool, which shed lint into the filter system and was thus to be avoided, and Stanford continued the custom. I swam at noon almost every day, then climbed onto the permanent spectator bleachers to lie down and nap or eat my lunch. Over time a number of my students got in the habit of joining me on the bleachers, where we had some pretty high-class bull sessions. They were not only bright young men, they were very earnest. So it was a kind of Socratic moment for me, lounging about talking into the face and crotch at the same time of any number of lovely naked lads. One fellow used to arrive, flop down in front of my body stretched out on a bleacher, straddle the bleacher, and present his delicious penis and testicles on the level of my head about two feet away, open his sandwich bag, and munch away. We once discussed it years later, and decided that it was an unconscious response on his part to an instinctive feeling that I was attracted to him, and subconsciously he wanted to gain the support and favor of the alpha male.