My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (3 page)

Once when friends asked my second wife and me why we did not let our children come down the front stairs or enter the living room in our baronial house in Brookline, we discovered to our amusement that we both had instinctively and tacitly (one of those ça va sans dire things) thought that this was the way of the world between parents and children; even in our modern glass box of a house in California, where many of the dividing walls did not go to the ceiling, where there was what they used to call “flow,” we just did not encourage the little tots to go into the living room. I notice that to this day my instinct upon entering our living room is to make sure that the pillows are all plumped up and in their proper place, that the books and magazines are properly arranged, as well as the photographs in their framed stands on any coffee table or end table. In my childhood home, while the adults were eating in the dining room, someone was in the living room rearranging the pillows and emptying the ashtrays so that the room was more or less pristine when anyone entered it. Because I was crippled I was allowed to sit reading in the living room during the day; my reading chair was next to a large mahogany library table, upon the highly polished surface of which all the current magazines were neatly arranged. Always neatly arranged; I don’t remember seeing them scattered.

When my father died, Mother decided to eat meals with the children, and thus I left the easy comfort of the nursery and descended into the formal dining room. Breakfast especially was meant to be a family occasion. We had always to be punctual. (“Be considerate of the servants, Charles.”) About six-thirty in the morning a maid went through the corridors awakening us with chimes, so there was no excuse for tardiness. At breakfast time we stood behind our chairs until Mother entered, then my brother held her chair for her, and when she was seated the rest of us sat down, she unfolded her napkin, and she rang a small silver bell to indicate to the kitchen help that they could bring out the meal. We were required to make conversation, and if we brought up unsuitable subjects—the tedious retelling of something we had read or a joke we had heard, the whiny account of an argument with a sibling—Mother remonstrated with us and insisted upon stimulating or genuinely amusing talk. Wit and rapid delivery were key. It is a marvel that we children did not all end up stuttering, but, instead, all six of us were wonderful conversationalists in adulthood, witty, informative, and fun to talk with. My second wife, an unusually taciturn lady, whose family gatherings were a torture of stammering, silences, and meandering lines of thought, used to marvel at my siblings on display. Her family hid behind silence and impassivity. Mother taught us to hide behind brilliance. It was a godsend to me in the ordeal that was to begin in my sixteenth year.

What I have just described is life lived as theater: the living rooms continually returned to the state in which they must be when the curtain goes up, the gathering at the table required to “make conversation” rather than simply speak. There was a kind of audience, the help who glided silently in and out of the rooms, before whom we were enjoined never to say anything embarrassing or revealing. Mother also taught us that creating whatever reality we wanted meant ignoring what didn’t fit. The most dramatic demonstration of this came in a horrible and unforgettable incident at breakfast when our aged serving woman was suddenly struck with a seizure of some sort while passing toast on a silver salver. She shuddered slightly and staggered, emitting a kind of groaning noise, as the toast fell from the tipped platter. I was terrified, but such was my mother’s insistent pleasant conversation, holding us all in her gaze, that I did not turn around to face the woman. None of us rose to assist her and she finally made her exit. For the briefest moment Mother’s voice slowed, then she resumed what she had to say as though there had been nothing unusual to witness in the room.

Born in 1892, Mother was an Edwardian belle, who came out in Chicago in 1910. She had an exaggerated notion of what it meant to be a doctor, even so distinguished a surgeon as my father, as one could tell when she would remind us children that the husbands of our Oak Park aunts were “in business.” The tone of her voice made you know that this was a terrible taint, although in fact they were all heirs to family fortunes, and what was odder still, her own father had been, as I have been told, a businessman. One has to imagine that she was moving up, which might account for her extraordinary acuity when it came to categorizing people socially and culturally, as well as the wit with which she laced her anecdotes. I was surprised to be told at one of my high school reunions by at least three members of my class that they had the strongest memories from the time they were small children of my mother as the funniest person they had ever known.

Equally surprising was the observation by several classmates that one of the truly outstanding events of the years they spent in the lower grades was “the annual picnic at Charlie’s house.” This was my mother’s doing. Once a year she had me invite the entire class of twenty-five children, and various teachers as chaperones, to walk through the streets of Iowa City from the school to our house up into the backyards to the formal lawn, where servants had laid out tables of all kinds of food, drink, and sweets. There were always a clown, jugglers, a magician, pony rides, balloons. In small-town Iowa in the economic depression of the thirties this was an extraordinary event, and I can see why it stayed in the memories of so many youngsters. It was my day; I was required to play host, it was my responsibility to see that everyone had a good time, that events and the dispersing of food went smoothly. Mother was “good with people,” even if her manner could sometimes be frosty, and I have to believe that she wanted her children early on to learn that form of social command.

The society of Iowa City in the thirties and forties had the businessmen, bankers, and lawyers as the pinnacle of the “town” and the professors and university administrators as the pinnacle of the “gown.” Doctors bridged whatever social gap existed because they were sometimes part of the faculty of the State University of Iowa Medical School but also served the townspeople. In the late thirties my mother had been approached by some of the town worthies, who asked her to run for the school board—from on high, one might say; that is to say, as the widow of the great surgeon, with an independent income, the big house on the hill, and no connection to the town’s business interests, she was free of the suspicions that had attached to recent candidates or members of the board. Although she was very short and always reminded me of Elsa Maxwell, she had an air of invincible rectitude not unlike that of Queen Mary. I imagine that she campaigned standing still, upright, a wax figure, a small smile and nothing more indicating that she was in communication. When her opponents were quick to point out that not all of her six children went to public school, one would think that her campaign was doomed. But never underestimate the Queen Mary factor. She did win, and her older daughters were soon to be joined in the public schools by my little sister and myself, while my brother stayed in the local private school to realize his dream of being a football star.

Mother was elected president of the board and remained in that position for many years until, again at the request of various factions, she stepped down to run for mayor of Iowa City, a doomed proposition for a Republican in so liberal a university town. In all those years she was a font of amusing anecdotes about the workings of the school system. She took the matter very seriously, worked closely with the superintendent, and was constantly well informed, but she could be funny about it all. Her descriptions of board meetings delivered at our dining table the next day were often cruel, but there was no question that she knew her subject. Her conversation displayed all the ugly tribal prejudices of her era, as everyone in her stories was identified as “Irish,” or “Italian,” or “a Jew,” or “Catholic” or “lower class,” with the frequent use of “you know” (as in, “He’s Irish, you know”), which presumed a commonplace understanding of this category of person. Only the upper-middle-class WASPs were left unidentified; they were the norm, the standard by which everyone else was implicitly judged, from which all others had fallen short. She was never angry, never sneering, she was only concerned that I understood that there was a vast chasm of behavior and understanding between the Americans who could claim English descent and Anglican religion and the other groups, who were dubious in one way or another. Their probity, their drinking habits, or their religious beliefs were often the object of her notice. Germans in the United States were, like the English, “the backbone of the nation,” my father’s favorite phrase as quoted by Mother, whereas those in Europe who were fighting us in the war were inherently evil for being German. In the same way, when our Jewish orthopedic surgeon friend secured the safe exit of his entire family from Vienna after the Anschluss, my mother immediately offered to house some of them until they got themselves established in this country. Mother was breathless in her admiration of their upper-class, elegant manners, although dismayed and annoyed by what she sensed was their condescension to her overly relaxed manner in dealing with the help.

I have gone on at some length here because I was deeply influenced by her. As I became sexually aware it became increasingly obvious that I was deviating from a standard, failing to fit into any category or type I had heard my mother enumerate, and thus fell prey to a growing concern with my own identity. In the dilemma of my life as a sixteen-year-old in danger of becoming a complete social pariah, I was saved by her idea of staged living, by her high standard for conversation and her great wit, by her insistent artificiality in social situations, by her constant dissecting of the social scene and her acute distinctions between people.

Mother’s breakfast-time practice of polite conversation was augmented by a daily review of the latest developments of the major campaigns of World War II. To this day I remember most of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942. After the invasion of Italy, the prosaic analysis that she took from nighttime radio broadcasts was often punctuated by emotional eruptions of anguish over the treasures of art and architecture that were being threatened in the fight up the Italian peninsula. In June 1944 she awakened us all from our beds to shout out exuberantly the news of the Normandy invasion.

In the fall of 1942 when I was twelve I enrolled in the public junior high school, a giant brick Victorian pile that had formerly held the high school, now relocated in a dazzling new building, thanks to the WPA, on the very eastern edge of town. At first junior high seemed exotic. Instead of walking silently on beige cork floors, our feet drummed on the old wood darkened by fifty years of varnish that creaked as we walked. Instead of sitting at round tables with movable chairs, we sat at desks mounted on ornate wrought-iron stands bolted to the floor; the wooden writing surfaces, also darkened with varnish like the floorboards, were carved with the initials of generations of students. In my naïveté I assumed this represented the last word in educational chic.

My previous school was a research lab, so to speak, for the State University of Iowa School of Education where young people engaged in research and development were the teachers, but here I encountered older, more maternal or paternal figures, whose years at their calling had carved them into distinctive personalities. Their individuality made them unpredictable and more interesting. Needless to say, they were overwhelmingly welcoming to me, the son of the president of the school board.

Equally welcoming was a small band of boys with whom I proceeded to walk to school each day. Remarkably enough, there was none of the new-boy negotiation one reads about as an almost universal experience. I have to think that this was due to the fact that I was so unlikely a figure in their daily lives that they did not have to consider assimilating me as one of them. To begin with, I was physically handicapped and did not play sports, and in fact had only the dimmest idea of any of the games that engage the hearts and souls of boys. Then I had a kind of glamour. I was the son of the great doctor, we had lots more money than most people, I lived in a large house up on a hill, and because I had spent most of my life sitting in a chair reading, I spoke with a vocabulary and manner that was entirely unlike their own. If I believe what everybody used to tell me at school reunions, I was even at this age flamboyant and witty; luckily this amused rather than repelled the young fellows with whom I walked; luckily too the daily walking and bonding more or less neutered us all, at least as far as I was concerned.

One boy, Bob, became my particular friend. He was a lean, quiet boy, tall and muscular, too thin, really, who struggled hard to be a first-rate athlete—indeed, he became a high school baseball coach. We spent hours together talking, me doing most of it, while he listened. I remember him scratching behind his ear just before he would begin to speak, I remember his soft and low chuckling at some of my crazier pronouncements. I never watched him play; we never talked of sports. He accepted that. It never occurred to me that it should have been otherwise. He was the first real friend I made away from the set of youngsters who were my classmates from the private school.

My first experience of dinner at Bob’s house was so exotic that I was atingle for hours. We ate in the kitchen, out-of-bounds for me at home. Bob’s father sat at the table in his undershirt. I was relatively unfamiliar with the behavior of adult males, but I was quite sure that underclothing of any kind was not the garment of choice in most places, certainly not in my mother’s house. Bob’s mother stood at the stove cooking and serving the food, never really sitting down at the table with us, more or less taking bites and tastes from the plates she passed on. Everything set on the table, such as milk, remained in the bottle or carton in which it had entered the house instead of being transferred to pitchers or salvers for the presentation. There was an overhead light instead of candles. These were the Depression years and several of Bob’s relatives lived in the small house with them and sat at their table. I remember the silent men, somewhat beaten, their drab women, Bob eating quietly while his mother and I made the conversation, cracked the jokes, laughing loudly, inspiring a wan smile in some of the others from time to time. Occasionally Bob and his sister got into a fight. Their shouts and shrieks filled the room; no one stopped them and so they continued until they grew tired.