My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (21 page)

One Monday he came to dinner, and as sometimes would happen Penny and I drank enough to get tipsy. Our student live-in was out for the evening, so our guest took it upon himself to read to the children and put them to bed. Naturally I felt terribly embarrassed the next day and insisted that he come to dinner again to redeem the previous evening. He laughed at the idea, but came along in any case after we had spent another hour in my office going over his proposal. He was so bright, but so determined to push the limits that getting something acceptable put together was a chore. The evening was delightful, he was in his element, Penny and I were on our best behavior. Then came Wednesday, and as I learned later he drove to San Gregorio Beach on the ocean considerably to the west of Palo Alto, arranged himself on a blanket, took fifty Nebutal pills, and died. From the letters he’d sent out and the arrangements he had made it was clear that he had planned this as early as Monday, so that those two days with him had been when he was already intent on leaving life. That was almost a half century ago, and yet as I write this, my heart skips a beat; somehow my emotion is just as strong as when we were told on the following Thursday.

When his father and brother came out to retrieve his possessions, Penny and I asked them to dinner. It was a strange evening. The father was a widower, by his remarks I would say a relatively devout Catholic, the brother was a crew-cut, blond, eminently no-nonsense butch version of the dead young man, indeed, much as when he first came to Stanford. Penny and I had recently been to a mass that Ted had arranged for the repose of his soul at the student Catholic chapel. It was a normal five o’clock mass attended by anyone in the area, which Ted had arranged to be designated as a special requiem. Penny and I went to this in deepest grief, and, filled with our memories of funerals in Catholic Italy, dressed completely in black, she replete with a black picture hat and veil, both of us with dark glasses; the other congregants, everyday people on their way home from work, looked at this apparition and stood back to let us enter.

The father said the burial in Cleveland had been in consecrated ground, despite his suicide. The father and brother were not prepared to recognize the fact of the suicide in Cleveland, although on another level they acknowledged that their son and brother had killed himself, and on still another level, if the language used was ambiguous enough, they could say that he was also tormented by the fact that he was gay. It seemed to me so important that those two acknowledge the suicide and the gayness; otherwise what would have been the point to the suicide? It seemed to me to be urgent that this be acknowledged, that this was so. No suicide in the closet, that’s what I was thinking, I guess. They were both nice guys; we sat around in our house after dinner and got incredibly drunk—my, they could drink a lot! But then, as my mother would have said, they were Irish. It was just the four of us talking about him, and death, and suicide, and sexuality, and the desperation of it all, and we more or less abandoned for the night any notion of the peace of God which passeth all understanding and all that.

The year before had been hard. Admiral Pendleton died just before Christmas 1964, shortly thereafter the teenage son of Professor Otis died when his car went off the road, then the wife of my British colleague was killed in a head-on collision with him at the wheel. Penny came back from her father’s funeral to attend two more, the first three of her life. No wonder she was ready for an affair with a sexy, loving, insatiable nineteen-year-old—just what my sister Holly had been urging for over a year. “When you are trying to raise four children and keep your family intact, adultery works way better than divorce,” was what she advised. Now, in the summer of 1966, we were going back to where it all began for us two.

FIVE

“BE NICE TO EACH OTHER”

October 14, 1972. We are setting off for a neighbor’s bar mitzvah thinking ourselves to be very European after our year in Rome, myself especially imagining I could pass for Fellini, but at the temple the mother of the bar mitzvah boy will exclaim, “The one goyish family we invite, and they arrive looking like they just walked out of some shtetl!”
(Jon Wagner)

By 1967 we were living in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburban part of greater Boston, in a large Edwardian house (sometimes I like to say mansion), with our children sleeping in four bedrooms on the second floor and we in a suite on the third. At my urging Penny had gone back to work, at first nervously and tentatively part-time. This was an enormous challenge to her, ten years dormant, away from new ideas and techniques while living in the barren, empty lands of suburbia. I had been adamant that she network through her former classmates still in the Boston area, despite their obvious head start on her in the profession. (“Do not be nervous, do not be embarrassed.”) She found some studio work, then got into a much more serious full-time job when I guaranteed to do the housework, shopping, all that sort of thing, with the abundant assistance of a cleaning woman who came in the afternoons and acted as chaperone on days when I could not make it home. In the days before she did so radical a revisionist rethinking of our life together, Penny used to say quite fervently, “I have to thank you for pushing me; I never would have had the nerve to do it myself.”

From our house in Brookline I could walk to work, and the children, we thought, would prosper intellectually because, according to the superintendent of schools, the school in the neighborhood into which we had moved had a student body that was over ninety-five percent Jewish. I was now the chairman of the department, but I kept a very large office on the third floor of our house and directed most of my operations from there, relying on my efficient secretary to hold the fort at the university. (I had discovered that, if you keep your office door closed and appear at only very specific moments, you can function perfectly well from the home, sort of like the performance of the Wizard of Oz behind the screen.) We had a large front hall flanked by a dining room and a living room, small parlors, a butler’s pantry, and a huge kitchen, enough space that I indulged my love of parties by inviting people to dinner as a kind of reflex, strangers, old friends, my children’s friends, always a weird mix, over which I presided, shouting and laughing in my usual manic fashion. It was nothing to me to have a sit-down dinner for twenty people twice a week. Nor, for that matter, to cook up a batch of pastries for the kids when they came home from school. Once for my birthday a group of the children’s friends gave me a book entitled
How to Be a Jewish Mother
with the inscription,
To Mr. Beye who is more of a Jewish mother than our mothers.
The house was a teenage rendezvous after school, and we made a recreation room for the children in a part of the basement. I was hard at work on the third floor, pretty much insulated from the sound but not from the occasional fumes of marijuana floating up through the hot-air venting system, when I would pound downstairs shouting and screaming, and they, the simpletons who never made the connection, would wonder how I knew. Sometimes when we had dinner parties on the weekend the children entertained down below after their group had eaten with us. We turned a blind eye to their drinking and doping, I must admit, as we were busy upstairs having our own party. I can well remember a strange intersection when a lad from belowstairs came up to use the toilet by the kitchen and I collided with him as he emerged to head back downstairs. We caught each other to keep from falling—both somewhat tight, I imagine—and without thinking I took him more firmly in my arms and gave him a long wet kiss from which he did not withdraw. We separated and never said a word.

Penny was often “
en charette
,” as they say in the business (meaning “in the cart”—in nineteenth-century Paris, a cart carried student architectural drawings on their way to be judged, and the students would sometimes jump on to make last-minute alterations; hence, meaning working up to the deadline, pulling an all-nighter). She did not always come home from her office for these parties, since she was not the least bit inclined to small talk, or for that matter much big talk either. I remember once discussing Penny with a woman who had known her from childhood, who replied to my “Still waters run deep” with, “Well, sometimes they run shallow too.” My older boy, when he announced that he would not attend college and I began the typical lament, insisted that the constant dinner party conversation he had heard and participated in for the previous four years had been as all-inclusive and deep as any undergraduate experience in a liberal arts college. Nonsense, of course, but you get the idea of what those dinner parties might have been like. My deepest satisfaction probably came intuitively from knowing that like my father before me, I was a professor, an author, department chair, a father, a man who presided over a splendid table, and who lived in a large house.

The great difference, however, was that I felt forlorn, ignorant of how to get myself any gay sexual experience. It was an embarrassment, but I did not know how to find myself in the gay community. I was a middle-class married man with four children and an imposing title—professor and chairman. Odd that I was somehow so enveloped in that cultural persona that I was afraid that if you took the wrapping off there would be no one there. The Stonewall riots took place in June 1969. At the time I knew nothing of them, immersed as I was in family life and career-building, and scarcely looking at the papers. The news came slowly, when it was no longer news, and I took note of the tough bitches who fought back against the hated police—hated, feared by me. How I envied and admired and was intimidated by them as well, these gay warriors, wimp that I was. Where was I? Who was I? Did I end up being this Brookline burgher because I could never face the police? Mother? I did not want to go down that road. How did I get here from where I once was as a teenager in Iowa? I felt sad, lonely, and desperate for masculine company.

There were gay students at Boston University, men like no one I had encountered before. I was frightened because some were so forward, so obvious, so determined to enfold me in their sexual embrace. One day, while I was walking on the sidewalk toward my office, a student in a parked convertible looked over at me and, when our eyes locked and the gaze held, jumped over the side of the car and followed me into the building where I had darted because I was scared. I went into the nearest men’s room and he followed, and we met in a stall. Another day at the university a student came to my office on a visit. He was a bright, witty, talky kid who was always eccentrically dressed in suits, with a colorful handkerchief in his breast pocket. The motive for his attentions was never clear, since he was not enrolled in any of my classes. He had recently brought me back, from a weekend trip to Paris, a luscious tie from something new in Paris called Le Drugstore, for no reason at all except that it amused him. On this visit he outdid me as usual in manic talking, but once we were seated and the door to the office was closed, he laid his hand on my thigh. Startled, I stared at the hand, not saying a word, and watched as it moved to unzip my fly, and within minutes he had knelt down to take me in his mouth. I stared down at his bobbing head, losing myself to the pleasure he was giving me, thunderstruck to be so out of control, he the student, me the professor, and then surrendered. It had been so long. On another occasion a young fellow threw open the door of my office after a particularly rousing lecture when I was still coming off my high, and shouted laughingly, “Bravo, bravo.” Before I could manage to invite him in or dismiss him, he was standing beside me, pushing the door shut with his foot, and then hugging me with a few muffled bravos still muttered in my ear. The embrace turned into a very long and wet kiss from him, and somehow or another in minutes we were naked on the floor. Then he positioned himself so that I could enter him and all the time I could hear my secretary in the outer office carrying on her work. It was too surreal for me. I played at being hip but I really wasn’t ready for the sixties, and here we were almost upon the seventies! The one constant I noticed then, and it remains with me as a memory now, was that all these young men were the instigators, they approached as friends, wanted nothing, did not haunt me, never introduced the dynamics of our professional relationship—teacher/student—if there was one. But, oh, I did not know to what lengths I could go with these young men, what to do.

Then it was that I discovered hustlers. In the late sixties and early seventies, in addition to the commonplace phenomenon of young working-class males selling themselves near the intercity bus depot, there was that very Bostonian custom of young graduate students for hire on a couple of streets near the public garden. (A
Boston Globe
article on the subject had the figure of 70 percent of these people for hire claiming to be students at one of Boston’s many institutions of higher education; their customers, they claimed, were largely married men from the suburbs.) This all came to an end years before the AIDS epidemic when the complaints of the well-heeled tenants of the adjacent apartment buildings finally moved the police to do enough sweeps to clear the area permanently. It could be hilariously annoying. Friends of mine were told by an elderly professor dinner guest that as he stood on the curb to hail a cab a couple of young men complained that he was trying to take over the space where they customarily stood each evening.