My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (20 page)

This was the gift of a woman named Olivia James, who originally donated the money to the Smithsonian for the noble purpose I mentioned. The trustees of that institution, not thinking they had the competence to choose, handed it off to the Archaeological Institute. Of course, the archaeology establishment managed to convert it to their own purposes. The first holder of the fellowship was a man closely connected with the archaeological establishment, a resident at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, who got it from the AIA without competition so he could complete his architectural drawings of the Parthenon. So much for travel in Greek lands for poets, musicians, and that ilk! I was the second holder of the fellowship, and certainly its least likely, not being an archaeologist, historian, epigraphist, or practitioner of any of the hard-nosed disciplines the AIA loves. Who knows how my improbable appointment came about? My old boss at Wheaton speculated that since I had asked Sterling Dow, my dissertation director, who also happened to be a major figure in epigraphical circles, and Frank Brown, my old boss at Yale, a leading archaeologist, to write recommendations, I was shoo-in. Who could compete with those names?

My trip in the previous summer prejudiced me in favor of Rome as a place to settle my family while I was traveling around Greek lands. I had not counted on the rivalry between the American Academy in Rome and the American School in Athens; it is like the Red Sox and the Yankees, only more so, with trustees drawn from the Social Register. The clique around the American School insisted that I should live in Athens. But I had an argument when the American School establishment made their displeasure known. After all, in addition to the Greek mainland the Greeks had also settled the peninsula of Italy south of Rome and Sicily, as well as the area of Turkey. Were we to live in Istanbul?

Rome it was. We sailed for Genoa on Cunard’s
Mauretania
, a nine-day crossing. With the help of a friend I found an improbably grand apartment: ten large rooms with very high ceilings, furnished in pieces of real or fake eighteenth-century provenance, Persian carpets on the floor, a large children’s nursery, a maid’s room, pantry, kitchen, two terraces giving out to a view of gardens and fountains in the grounds on the floor below. If ever you see Bertolucci’s
Il Conformista
, watch for the scene where the protagonist goes to see his heroin-addicted mother in her grand Fascist villa. The camera pans along a street notorious during the Fascist era and one of the palaces on the street was where we lived on the second floor. A genuine marchesa was subletting the place while her husband pursued his diplomatic career. We hired a live-in cook from friends who were returning to the United States; engaged a capable, no-nonsense English girl who came out from London as au pair; and took on the gatekeeper’s sister, who did the cleaning when she wasn’t washing our mountains of dirty clothes in the bathroom tub. We had the travel grant, my parents-in-law gave us some money, I took some money from a small inheritance, and somehow it all worked in a thoroughly enchanted way. I traveled through Greece, Turkey, Sicily, and southern Italy, just as I promised. Sometimes I traveled with a Greek American student of mine who could talk to the people of Greece, sometimes Penny joined me, as when I went through Turkey, sometimes I went alone, as when I traveled through Sicily. We traveled together on small trips to see the art and architecture of Italy, then on a longer one later to France and England. My years of yearning and dreams were realized.

It took an enormous toll on our marriage. Traveling by ship with four very small children, establishing a family in a large apartment with live-in help—these are not idyllic adventures for everyone, especially when it requires some fluency in the Italian language. It was only much later I learned, in couples therapy when she finally felt free to speak her mind, how much Penny, who had been forcibly resettled every two years as a Navy child, truly disliked traveling. She hated our year in Rome because she had little talent for foreign languages, so managing our cook and cleaning help was a double nightmare of administration and translation. All the free time that having the help bestowed upon her was gone in her frustration at not being able to practice architecture with it; she did not want to walk the streets of Rome looking at pretty buildings and sit for espresso in piazzas and watch the people. Watching her husband move farther away in his manic enthusiasm for living abroad was already too much for her. At the beginning in the fall when I went off to Greece and Turkey I summoned her to join me and my traveling companion (completely platonic) in Izmir. She arrived, thinking, I imagine, that now was our chance to become the young lovers we had been at the start. At her arrival she handed on to me the heavy baggage of my guilt for my failure at lovemaking in recent years, my depression at seeing her sad, and yet gamely trying to pretend she was having a good time. All the joy of the experience of discovery and adventure that had filled me utterly in the previous weeks evaporated at seeing her grimly try to enjoy the party.

While we were living in Rome, Professor Otis wrote to inform me that he would not support me for tenure when the time came. I was in the first year of my second three-year contract at Stanford while on this leave. So I had two years to work out my immediate future. I immediately wrote to a friend at Boston University, the very same friend who had found us the wonderful Roman apartment, asking her to keep a lookout for anything coming up in the Boston area. After our migrations to unfamiliar locales, where we had had the usual agitation of integration, my instinct was to return to a place we knew. So far I had gotten jobs through personal intervention (Dow at Wheaton), luck combined with charm (Yale), and friendly persuasion (my friend Ted working on Otis). My friend wrote back to tell me that coincidentally she was leaving Boston University in two years’ time to move with her husband to Princeton (this time it was lucky coincidence). When we returned to California after the months of letters, I made a flight to Boston to talk with the administration at Boston University, and they invited me to join the faculty in September 1966 with the prospect of becoming the department head in the academic year 1967–68.

Did I discuss this move with Penny? Not really, but she agreed in the sense that she never said no. Perhaps, as an unwilling wanderer most of her life, she thought of Boston as home. She had attended Abbott Academy, a prep school north of the city, for three years, after which she had gone to college and graduate school on the north side of the Charles River. Our year together in Rome, 1963–64, changed me forever; I fell in love with Rome hard. For those who do, they say when they are away from the city that they are “Romesick.” The year in Rome changed Penny as well. Because there was so much help with us in Rome, she as well as myself was free from the quotidian distraction of child care and housework, free to take long solitary walks through that incredibly beautiful city and think. I doubt that for Penny, frustrated in so many ways, those thoughts were pleasant, but the experience of being free of domestic chores made her more than ever determined to get outside the home. How could Boston not beckon to her, the city where she had first begun to have a career?

Once we were back in Palo Alto a depression set in for both of us; it was hard to live together again in a small house when we had lost so much to connect us. It was hard to come back to the reality of suburban California after a year in so glamorous a city as Rome, especially from so splendid an apartment. After driving our family across the country in a little under a week, we bedded down in our house, home sweet home, only to have my four-year-old daughter declare at breakfast, “I don’t like this motel. When are we leaving?”

We encountered a remarkable change in the student body, particularly the new graduate students in classics, which forecasted a general shift in the culture of American youth. In the fall term of the academic year 1964–65, as I approached the spot where my Homer seminar was scheduled, I saw the students unaccountably standing outside the building as though waiting, and moreover they all seemed to be smoking the same cigarette, which they were passing around among themselves. Once we had reassembled and I began, I quickly sensed an undertone of hilarity, which in the course of the two hours occasionally broke into giggles and even laughter at what I had to think was only minimally humorous. They were stoned, of course, but I had no understanding of this. At least not then, but it rapidly became an obvious feature of more events than I would like. I began to recognize a new kind of insouciance, a marvelous disconnect, sometimes adding a wonderful long-distance focus on the material at hand, sometimes just descending into a vague pit where any understanding was threatening to be demolished. Ironically enough, it resembled what I now encounter all the time in my dotage as my friends and I carry on conversations in which we often forget the thread in the middle of speaking. The only things missing are the giggles and the munchies. In connection with the Homer seminar I began to organize my lecture notes on Homer, which resulted in writing a specimen chapter through the winter months. In January 1965 I sent it off to Doubleday, and—miracle of miracles—got a contract with them, so I had to sit down and turn out a manuscript. The writing usually took place back at my office in late inebriated evenings when I had done my duty by the kiddies, and could escape the silence that filled the space between Penny and me once we were alone. It was so like backstage at the theater once the curtain comes down. The resolutely manufactured good cheer had ended; there was no ill will, really, just nothing more to say.

The increasingly obvious emptiness of our relationship naturally troubled me. I was tormented by a sense of failure that I assigned pure and simple to my being gay, without a thought to the commonplace truth that marriage over a time often produces profound ennui in the partners. I was not intimate enough with enough people in Palo Alto to get a sense of this. I learned much later from my older sister that she and Penny had had long discussions about the marriage when she was spending a couple of months with us, and that she had urged Penny to take a lover. Easier said than done in the kind of antiseptic suburban world in which we lived.

By August my manuscript was finished, and I sent it off to a former student and close friend in New York. Shortly thereafter I flew to New York to discuss it with him. While I was away Penny got into some kind of relationship—hard to determine their emotional seriousness—with a young man who did work for us at the time, a nineteen-year-old student at a college in San Francisco. Poor fellow, he must have been damaged goods. I remember watching the film
Days of Wine and Roses
with him, a very sad story of a young couple and their destructive alcoholism, and his saying with a sigh at the end that that was the story of his parents all over again. One night he and I went to walk the dog, and in the dark of the Stanford grounds as we sat watching the dog run off the leash, I made a serious pass at him, which I guess at first he was too startled to resist, but then recovered himself and made me stop. In the thunder and lightning of the aftermath of their affair I remember one or the other of them telling me that the next morning he had come to Penny with the story of my attack, and she had taken him straightaway to bed. This was a matter of the moment because he was scheduled to move away at the end of the summer.

It was months later, when he moved back for a longer stretch, that I sensed the two of them becoming more and more moody and weird, and then one morning as I was getting the children ready for school I happened to notice them playing footsie under the dining room table as I was at the stove. My reaction was a disgrace. At first controlled, of course, I singled out the boy for a lunch date to force him to confess to me. My confrontation with Penny was muted by the fact that her recently widowed mother had just flown in from Honolulu, leis around her neck and all, making the evening meal something Neil Simon could have rendered hilarious. Still, I managed to act out after the old lady had gone to bed. There was even yelling and screaming, difficult to cover over in an open-flow modern house. How I could have behaved so haunts me to this day, I, the veteran of such flagrant adultery, I, the sensitive barometer of the waning affections between us two. It was the triumph of male chauvinistic piggery, the atavistic belief in wife as property, the pompous control mechanisms of a professor with his student, and of course deep and dangerous and, oh, so sad, the desperate flailings of a man called fag and fairy too many times. And, oh, I shudder to think it, but there must have been the insane jealousy, insane anger at coming up the loser, insane because I somehow had imagined that she and I were equals in the running for this young man’s affections. Pathetic delusions, gross misjudgments, distortions of view, all of these elements were in the mix of a suburban nightmare in our beautiful glass box in Palo Alto. In the face of my howling, real or repressed depending upon those present, the people in my household were all so nice to me. I remember sitting about at a grand Easter dinner, Penny, the sad, sad young man who had begun boarding with friends of ours, the friends themselves, their children, our children, chocolate bunnies, Easter eggs, the whole of us putting on good cheer. How long, O, Lord, how long? The most ridiculous moment must have been when I was alone with the two and manically, merrily urging them to take the summer off and go to Europe together to have a proper time together, while I stayed with the children. They stared at me as though I were a mad dog who might break loose from the leash at any moment.

Weeks before this our entire lives had been darkened by the tragic suicide of a graduate student who had joined the department in the fall of the previous year—in fact, one of those merry lads puffing away on the marijuana cigarette. I had become his dissertation adviser, friend, and great admirer as I watched in fascination his public unveiling of his homosexuality at a time when this was still a very delicate maneuver, particularly for someone who advertised himself as interested in a teaching career. He was perhaps twenty-six, tall, blond, very Irish, with a tough-guy mouth. He had a kind of mean, aggressive way of presenting himself. He had just resigned from the Navy, where he had served on the staff of the admiral of the Sixth Fleet, carried himself like a military officer, and was so much of a no-nonsense guy when I first met him that I quailed. The first thing to go was the crew cut as he let his hair down—in more ways than one. In the next eight months he turned himself into a wise-ass, loudmouthed, entirely funny, campy, gay alternate version of that original persona. It was fabulous, since he kept the person he was intact but absolutely different. His intelligence promised me that I was in for a treat as we worked on his dissertation. Our discussions often took place at the end of the afternoon, and just as often I would invite him home to dinner. Penny adored him, the children adored him, he was so much fun, every time a new and delightful experience.