Logical Family: A Memoir

by Armistead Maupin

  Grannie had kept busy in her twenties with magazine writing and dramatic recitals and a passionate new political life as a suffragist. (“A suffragist, not a suffragette,” she had insisted. “I didn’t pour acid in postboxes or chain myself to the prime minister’s carriage.”) Marguerite Norma-Smith made speeches all over England—rousing, charming, often very funny speeches—on the subject of “Why Women Want Votes.” She was said to be one of the three women in England whom men would pay to hear speak. Once, when the issue came before Parliament, she made six speeches in a single day in London. She reveled in telling me about the time she had spoken on a village green in direct competition with a scheduled event. She ended up hijacking the audience of a livestock auctioneer, whose effort at selling rams proved no match for her elocution. Or so said the local newspaper. “I projected from the diaphragm,” she told me more than once, pressing her fingers to her tummy. “And that’s what you must do, Teddy.” Then her fingers would trail up her torso to her mouth. “Stand up straight and project from the diaphragm.”

  When the Great War came, Grannie took a crash course in nursing and volunteered to care for critically wounded soldiers returning from the front. It traumatized her to witness so much mangled youth— “All those beautiful young men, some of them my own friends”—and for years I (and many others in the family) took that as the reason that she and my grandfather emigrated to America for the solace of the Blue Ridge Mountains. According to lore, she had met Albert Edward Barton at one of her lectures, and he had been instantly taken with her charm. Which lecture could that possibly have been? “The Poets”? “Eastern Philosophies”? “Physical Culture for Women”? Certainly not a suffragist meeting, considering what I eventually learned about my grandfather. He was over twenty years Grannie’s senior, a Victorian man in every sense of the word, but he was charismatic and craggily handsome and had built a successful career in the steel industry. He had also suffered a wartime trauma of his own: his beloved airman son, Robin, offspring of a previous marriage, had been shot down in a dogfight over France. It wasn’t hard to imagine how Grannie and this heartsick titan might have found comfort in each other, might have wanted to leave everything behind and build a whole new life somewhere else.

  Their original plan had been to settle in Miami, but their motor trip from New York ended in Asheville, where the beauty of the mountains stopped them in their tracks. After my mother was born, they built a grand mountaintop house that my grandfather named Birkland Brae in a proud nod to his Scottish ancestry. (Claiming kinship to Bonnie Prince Charlie, he wore a kilt when he strode about his property with his Great Danes.) Despite his insistence that “children should be seen and not heard,” that ideal must have been hard to enforce since Grannie bore five more children over the course of a decade. When, at seventy-one, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, Grannie bore the burden of supporting that brood in the midst of the Depression.

  For a while she tried running a roadside sandwich stand she had named The Scarecrow after the whimsical straw man that an architect friend had crafted for the roof. Business was brisk in the beginning, if not especially profitable. Grannie’s sons habitually raided the Pepsi-Colas, and Grannie herself was too softhearted to charge penniless drifters for her lavish turkey-and-chutney sandwiches. It became clear that something more was required, so Grannie summoned her lady steel and moved her six children to Alexandria, Virginia, where they could be closer to colleges and she could be paid for teaching speech to Episcopal seminarians. She left her husband behind in Asheville, buried on a knoll not far from their second home, which they’d named Pine Burr Lodge to render it more ancestral, though it was a much humbler place than Birkland Brae.

  When I first saw Pine Burr, forty years ago, its cinderblock walls and adjacent tourist cottages did not jibe with the childhood idyll of the 1920s that my mother recalled with such fondness. There was now a flaking sign that said “Sanders Court and Cafe,” because Harland Sanders—yes, that Harland Sanders—had opened a business there at some point after Grannie had left for Virginia. That was almost too farcical to process immediately: the family seat of my immigrant British grandparents had become the second restaurant in the world (after the one in Corbin, Kentucky) to serve the colonel’s secret recipe for fried chicken. Sanders had fared better in Asheville than Grannie had done with her sandwiches, but even his enterprise failed after a few years, when a new highway redirected tourist traffic.

  When I was young, it didn’t occur to me to wonder why the widow of a successful British steel magnate would have to sell sandwiches by the roadside. I would not know until the late eighties that my grandparents had never been married. They had left England under delicate circumstances. The “previous marriage” that had produced the airman son who had died in the war was still very much intact when they boarded a steamship bound for America. There was still a wife and three daughters, who, in the absence of a divorce, would naturally receive any inheritance after my grandfather died. My grandmother had been left high and dry.

  I can’t begin to speculate about anyone’s morals or motives a century after the fact. What I feel mostly is even greater admiration for my grandmother, who raised a large and interesting family under great hardship and somehow kept her dignity intact. That can’t have been easy, since my grandfather’s philandering continued even after he and Grannie arrived in the States. In Asheville, when a ballerina touring with the Bolshoi Ballet was injured in a car wreck, my grandfather invited her to recuperate at Birkland Brae. There, under the same roof as Grannie and her children, he sired yet another child, a son who would be born elsewhere but eventually take his last name. I tracked down Martin Barton last year at his home in Plano, Texas. We talked for over an hour on the phone. He was ninety-three years old, and I was touched by his desire to meet his never-before-seen half siblings. I might very well have tried to help with that introduction had he not told me in a moment of sharing that he thought Pat Robertson, the Christian media mogul who attributes catastrophic weather to the “gay agenda,” was the greatest political thinker of our era. After that, I lost interest in helping.

  We’ve already had enough men like that in the family.

  I KNEW NONE of these things during my last audience with my grandmother—not her inescapably unmarried state, not the Colonel Sanders connection, not the injured ballerina or the son she raised. My memories of her were of that sharp-edged aluminum suitcase and hot Virginia nights and periodic palmistry. As I stood there in her room, preparing to say goodbye for the last time, I dwelt on something my aunt had just told me: my grandmother had not been informed of my mother’s death—that is to say, her eldest daughter’s death. The general consensus was that Grannie was too far gone for the knowledge, so I was not to mention it to her, please. It would only upset her fragile equilibrium.

  Once my aunt was gone I took a seat across from Grannie. The politeness she had already marshaled in her watery blue eyes told me not to hug her right away.

  “It’s Teddy, Grannie.”

  “How do you do,” she said.

  Her white hair was just as unsettling as advertised. It seemed to me that Grannie’s hair had always been beige—“champagne beige,” according to my sister, Jane, who had actually seen the dye box. Grannie had been very big on beige. Her suits, her gloves, her floppy feathered picture hats. She was not in the least vain, but she must have known how well that color complemented her eyes.

  I leaned forward slightly, trying to come into focus. “Wren told you I was coming, didn’t she?” I was hoping the mention of my aunt might jar something.

  “Oh, yes?” It was clearly more of a question than an affirmation.

  “You look very elegant.”

  “Thank you, kind sir.”

  I was too rattled to reaffirm my identity, so I just continued with a recital of the facts:

  “I have a new apartment in San Francisco. On Telegraph Hill.”

  “Ahh.”

  “There are wild parrots outside my
window. I can hear them flying over in the morning.”

  “In Asheville? Imagine that!”

  “No, Grannie. San Francisco.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The parrots are in San Francisco. Where I live. I’ve never lived in Asheville.” She was obviously back on her beloved mountainside with her husband and her six children and her thundering herd of Great Danes.

  “That’s a pity,” she said. “Asheville is lovely.”

  I soldiered on. “I had a novel published last fall.”

  No response.

  “It got a good review in the Washington Star.”

  This was pretty much the only review the book had received, but I was desperate for Grannie to know what I’d accomplished in my thirty-five years. I wondered if anyone in the family had sent her a copy of the book or if they had deemed it unfit for elderly eyes. My father’s response, scribbled on yellow legal paper, had camouflaged his displeasure with ornery wit. “Your mother and I read Tales of the City today. Moving to Zanzibar tomorrow. Love, Daddy.”

  Grannie blinked at me graciously. “Well . . . good for you.”

  She might as well have been talking to some boastful stranger.

  “Grannie . . . it’s Teddy.”

  Her eyes registered nothing, though they were the same eyes that had gazed at me across a Ouija board when I was a boy. I could remember them dancing with glee as the planchette scooted beneath our fingertips past curlicue numbers and letters, predicting the future in gibberish. Even then I suspected that a piece of heart-shaped plywood from Parker Brothers was unlikely to be magical, and I’m pretty sure Grannie did, too, but there was something beyond that to keep me intrigued. Is she steering this thing or am I? Are we doing this together? It was a delicate dance of sorts, a gavotte between generations, and it was all about the eyes.

  No more. The eyes were blinking at me but not in recognition.

  Tell her, dammit. Fuck these fucking family secrets. Tell her you’re Diana’s eldest son. Tell her we have both lost the best person we have ever known.

  But I couldn’t. There had been a continent between Grannie and me for almost four years, so I had more or less forfeited the right to be remembered. I had been consumed with my new life in San Francisco, tethered to the golden shore by carnal self-discovery and a never-ending story in the newspaper that demanded my attention on a daily basis. Or so I had always assured myself.

  “How lovely to meet you,” she said at last, looking lost and mortified.

  I felt the same way. I knew I had already tumbled from Grannie’s mental family tree and was heartsick about it. She had been the first member of my logical family, the first person who had taken me as is. Why had I not visited more often? The easy excuse was my mother’s recent decline and death, but not even that had brought me back to the South as often as it should have. I was done with the place for good. I had found a home out West that would love me for myself.

  I was making a gloomy retreat from Grannie’s apartment when I had an idea. Returning to her chair, I thrust out my hand with the palm turned upward for her perusal. She seized it immediately and began reading the lines in rapt silence, like a book she’d laid down the night before and couldn’t wait to return to.

  Then, without even looking up, she said, very softly, “Teddy.”

  “Yes!” I said, laughing. “Yes!”

  “You’re in your thirties now.”

  “I am indeed.”

  When her eyes finally moved up to my own, they were as open and lively as the sea. “And you’ve written a novel, you say?”

  “Yes. And you’re in it.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  I laughed again. “Not literally, but your spirit is there. Your loving, accepting spirit. She’s a landlady in San Francisco, and she’s a little . . . spooky about things.”

  Grannie took that in for a while. “I’ll be coming back to visit you, you know.”

  Shortly before I moved to San Francisco, I had taken Grannie to see On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, knowing she would appreciate its reincarnation theme. We had both been charmed by the moment at the end when Barbra Streisand says, “See you later,” to Yves Montand just before the elevator door closes, indicating she will join him in the next life. “See you later” had been our private joke for days.

  Now, it seemed, Grannie was actually saying it.

  “How will I know you?” I asked.

  “You’ll feel a little breeze in the room,” she said.

  The Madwoman’s eyes were dancing as she built the drama.

  “And when you turn around . . . there will be no one there.”

  TWENTY

  MY FATHER’S ARCH-CONSERVATISM DEEPENED AS THE years wore on, even after his party climbed into bed with the fundamentalist “Holy Rollers” he had once openly disparaged. The platforms of the candidates he supported—including, of course, Jesse Helms—were growing more virulently antigay. He claimed—as my brother, Tony, would later claim—that his political beliefs were independent of his love for me. To me that meant that his love for me simply wasn’t important enough to make him challenge the relentless fag-bashing of his party. I should be grateful for his tolerance, he seemed to be saying, since I was the one who wasn’t playing by the rules. So I withdrew.

  My brother, Tony, had begun to march in lockstep with my father’s politics when he reached middle age, much as I had done in my youth. It must have been a bonding experience for them—and a relief for the old man to have a son on his side again. According to Tony’s Facebook page, he embraced the Tea Party after Pap died, and once drove out to Oakwood Cemetery, where he listened to Rush Limbaugh with the car door open, so the old man could enjoy the broadcast from his grave.

  In 2008, when Chris and I were married, Tony and his wife, Jean, flew to San Francisco for the wedding, where my little brother treated the other guests to the sort of almost-charming blunt talk for which the old man had been known. (“Y’all are mighty pretty for lesbians.”) But any hope that Tony had finally understood that love was love went south when he voted for Amendment 1, the measure that would alter the North Carolina constitution to ensure that marriage in that state would always be between one man and one woman. “It’s a matter of states’ rights,” he told me on the phone, using the argument my father had used to oppose integration. “What’s right for California might not be right for North Carolina.”

  In 2014, when the University of North Carolina awarded me an honorary doctor of letters degree, I invited Tony to attend the hooding ceremony at the football stadium in Chapel Hill. He’s a big fan of Carolina sports, and I thought he might enjoy seeing me honored in such a setting, but he declined with a painfully inept excuse about a Mother’s Day luncheon. When, a year later, I finally confronted him about his absence, he apologized in an email: “I should have listened to my heart and not my head.” His head, I suppose, had told him it wouldn’t do to be seen celebrating the work of a liberal gay activist from California.

  As of this writing, Tony is celebrating the ascendancy of Donald Trump and what I regard as a new fascist regime in Washington that has left our country more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

  Brother against brother, then and now.

  IN 2001, I published a novel called The Night Listener, which revolves around a San Francisco writer who drifts away from his aging conservative father because too much has been left unspoken over the years: a family suicide, the son’s resentment of the old man’s homophobia, et cetera. Four years later the book was made into a film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. We shot on location in New York City. It was there, as my snake-eating-its-tail life would have it, that I got word that my father was close to death. My sister was urging me to come home. Chris, my husband-to-be, thought we should go.

  “What would be the point in that?” I asked him.

  “He’s your father,” he said.

  Great, I thought. The love of my life sounds just like my mother.
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br />   I nurtured no hopes of a deathbed epiphany with the old man. To me this was just one last chance to be hurt, probably with Fox News droning in the background. And my stepmother, who was roughly my age, always avoided intimacy with empty chatter about shopping and cocktails. For a while that had made her perfect for Pap. They didn’t have to talk about anything real.

  We went to Raleigh, of course, in the end. Robin Williams, who was playing “me” in the film (and whose beard I was mimicking to make him look like he was playing me) approached us as we were leaving the set for the airport. “Give my love to Pap,” he said, looking directly into my eyes. As fellow San Franciscans, Robin and I had known each other for almost thirty years. He called me Armo sometimes, and had a habit of breaking into Tennessee Williams when he saw me. But he had never met my father beyond reading the novel and the screenplay. He had his own version of Pap, however, another gruff patriarch who was petrified of being close to his sensitive son, so I think he knew what I was about to face.

  Chris, in fact, had never met my father either, since we’d only been together for a few years. When I consider that he might never have done so, I’m even more grateful that he had insisted on this last chapter.

  In Raleigh, in that green-shuttered ranch house with the Howard Johnson’s cupola and the muddy creek still trickling down below, I introduced my husband-to-be to my father. When we moved about the house, Pap was wobbly on his feet, so we ended up settling in the Chimney Room, where, beneath his Confederate flag, he told tales of our selectively abridged family history. His illness had made him more docile than I had ever known him to be. He seemed swallowed up by his chair. There were ugly bruises on his arms from various falls. Skin cancer surgery, a legacy of his South Pacific days, had left a shiny pink patchwork on his nose. He looked small and frightened, not like himself at all. I hated this meek version of him. I wanted him to rise up and bark like an old elephant seal. Just once. So Chris could see it.