“Tell them he’s shy.” I was elated and ready to be angry. “Tell me what she said.”
“She called it true to life. Called it an important book.”
“What did she say about the writing?”
“She said it was magnificently raw and honest. She said it’s the kind of book that they will be reading in high schools thirty years from now.”
I said nothing.
“Monk?”
I looked out the window.
“Monk? This is what you wanted, right?”
“Random House.”
“Yep.”
“This is really fucked up, you know that.”
“You don’t want the deal.”
“Of course I want the deal,” I said. “Just tell them that Stagg Leigh is painfully, pathologically shy and that he’ll communicate with them through you.”
“I don’t know if that will cut it.”
“It’ll cut it.”
I never before felt so stranded. Alone in that house with Mother and Lorraine. But with the new bit of change I would be collecting for that awful little book, I could hire someone to come in and care for both of them. Perhaps for dramatic effect, I should have had to wait longer for my windfall, given my brother’s newfound flakiness and my sister’s debt (both what she owed and what I owed her), but it didn’t happen that way. The news of the money came and I breathed an ironic and bitter sigh of relief. Maybe I felt a bit of vindication somewhere inside me. Certainly, I felt a great deal of hostility toward an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.
“Monk?”
“Bill? What time is it? Jesus, Bill, it’s three in the morning.”
“Sorry, it’s only one here.”
“Is something wrong? Are you okay?”
“How long have you known I was gay?”
“Come on, Bill, it’s too early to talk about this. I mean, it’s too late. Too late in a couple of ways. You’re gay. Deal with it.”
“How long have you known?”
I sat up and switched on my bedside lamp. “I don’t know. For a while, I guess.”
“Did you know when I was in high school?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“I didn’t know then, but I must have been, right?”
“I don’t know how these things work. Are you all right?”
“Have you ever had any gay feelings?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You know that I love my children.”
“I know you do, Bill. Is there anything I can do?”
“Can you imagine if Father knew I was gay?”
“He wouldn’t take it well, that’s for sure.”
“How do you think Mother will take it?”
“I don’t know. Why tell her?”
“Why not tell her? Do you think I should be ashamed of what I am?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“Tell her if you want to. But first, she’s not going to understand what you are telling her and second, she’s going to forget two seconds after you’re done. So, tell her if you want to. It’s not going to make much difference to anybody but you.”
“So, you think I’m only concerned with myself.”
“I didn’t say that either. But, basically, that’s true of all of us.”
“I don’t need your platitudes.”
“Did you call looking for a fight?”
“No, I didn’t. I just thought I’d get a little more support from my little brother.”
“Support. You don’t need me to be gay. How’s your new—”
“Partner, it’s called a partner. Or boyfriend. You can say boyfriend. His name is Tad and he’s fine. I don’t know where he is right now, but he’s fine. Are you seeing anyone?”
“No.”
“Sell any books lately?”
“No. Listen, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Click.
Often humans will seek to improve the habitat of trout in a stream by providing some kind of structure under the water. People will sometimes dump anything in the stream, think that the fish will want to take shelter in it. Car bumpers, shopping carts, dog houses. Generally fish prefer the smooth curves of nature to the hard edges of humans. But more importantly, if the structure is not proper and is not put in the right place in the stream, the flow of the current might find an erodible bank and so cause more harm than good.
I walked in the morning, all the way to McPherson Square where I took the Metro to the mall. I walked around the National Gallery for a couple of hours, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria and imagined that I had a life. I contemplated also that suddenly I was slightly well off and that I really didn’t have to teach for a while. This was good, as I couldn’t bring myself to accept the slave wages over at American to teach a survey course to kids who didn’t care a hill of beans about Melville, Twain or Hurston.
Having come into what I considered a lot of money, I decided to go see something worth more than money. Granted, not all of it was worth more than money, in fact much of it was not worth the canvas or linen it was slathered upon, but some was and that was enough to put my new gain, rightly and sadly, into place. I thought of Cocteau and his saying that everything can be solved except being, this while staring at a Motherwell that both seduced and offended me. I stopped at a late Rothko, the feathery working of the brush, the dark colors, the white edges and I thought of death, my own death, my making my own death. I could not think like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that death was a thing of grandeur. Death was frighteningly as simple as life, instead of waking everyday and just doing it, one didn’t wake everyday and just did it. In the painting, whether the colors were there or not, I saw the cream of my mother’s skin and the brown of mine. My self-murder would not be an act of rage and despair, but of only despair and my artistic sensibility could not stand that. Throughout my teens and twenties I had killed myself many times, even made some of the preparations, stopping always at the writing of the note. I knew that I could manage nothing more that a perfunctory scribble and I didn’t want to see that, have my silly romantic notions shattered by a lack of imagination.
I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-à-vis my art. It was not exactly the case that I had sold out, but I was not, apparently, going to turn away the check. I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words. The wood was so simple. Damnit, a table was a table was a table.
The stream of humanity pouring down the tunnel into the Red Line was too much for me. I walked for a while, watching the sky darken, then a light rain began to fall. At first it was a pleasant relief to the heat, then it fell harder. I had walked as far as New York Avenue and decided to hail a taxi. Three or four empty ones passed me and I thought of the old joke: What do you call two black men trying to get a cab in Washington, D.C.? Pedestrians. I raised my arm again and this time a car stopped, no doubt because the Ethiopian driver had a male companion with him and he felt safe enough. They looked back at me after I gave them my address, one saying, “Are you Ethiopian?” and the other, “You look Ethiopian.” I said, “No, I’m just Washingtonian.” I closed my eyes and drifted.
Mother’s bridge club was meeting at our house. Mrs. Johnson, widow of the mortuary owner Lionel Johnson, greeted me as she entered as if I were ten. “Oh, little Monksie, you’re looking so fit.” She was with her daughter, about my age, who carried her bag and wore on her face an expression of fatigue like the one I imagined I wore. “This is my daughter, Eloise,” Mrs. Johnson said. Then she saw my mother and told us to run on and play.
The others arrived. And soon there were eight old ladies seated
at two card tables, all of them too arthritic to shuffle and too senile to remember to whom the last card was dealt. While in the living room, eight children, around the age of forty, sat holding purses, stoles and umbrellas. We looked at each other and all regarded that as adequate and eloquent enough commiseration, then closed our eyes for naps.
“Hey, Washingtonian,” the cab driver said. “This your house?”
I paid and made my groggy way up the walk to find Lorraine sitting on the porch. “Enjoying the rain?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked at the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s the Mrs.”
“Is Mother all right?” At that moment I heard a noise at the narrow window by the door and turned to see Mother holding aside the curtain and staring out, somewhat wild-eyed, then she disappeared. “What’s going on?”
“She’s locked and bolted the doors,” Lorraine said.
If it was true, that the doors were bolted from the inside, then my keys wouldn’t help. “Why won’t she let you in?” I asked.
“She doesn’t recognize me.”
I went to the window and knocked. Mother’s face, at least it resembled her face, flashed wild again behind the glass. I spoke to her. “Mother, it’s me, Monk.”
“Go away,” she hissed. “We don’t want any.”
I looked back at the shrugging Lorraine.
“Mother,” I said. “Please, unlock the door.”
She dropped the curtain and was gone again.
I stepped out into the yard into the rain, away from the house, and looked up at the roof covering the porch and the windows of the second floor. I recalled the window behind the desk in Father’s study had a broken latch.
I climbed while Lorraine watched from the porch, having never moved from her seat. The bark of the crepe myrtle was slick and I felt my age as I hauled my weight onto the roof. I got the window open and crawled in, knocking over a stack of books on the sill. Then I looked up to see Mother.
She said, “Monksie, there’s a man at the door who won’t go away.” In her hand was the thirty-two-calibre pistol Father had kept in his nightstand. She pointed the gun at me and said, “You might need this.”
I walked slowly to her, watching her shaking hands on the dry metal of the gun. I pushed the muzzle away from me as I took it from her. “I’ll take care of the man, Mother. You just go to your bedroom and take your nap.”
I watched her turn the corner into her room, then checked the pistol to find it loaded.
I took Mother to the doctor. He x-rayed her chest and told me that she did not have any kind of lung infection. He did a CAT scan and told me that she had not had a stroke and that he could see no brain shrinkage. She did not have a vitamin B-12 deficiency. He did say there was a presence of tangled nerve fibers. He talked to her, waited and then had the same conversation with her a second time, to which she responded, “Why are we going over this again?”
When we were alone, the doctor stared at me.
“Yes?”
“You’re probably seeing the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It could be due to a hardening of her arteries, poor circulation, any number of things. We just don’t know. But all that is really beside the point, because there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it if that’s what it is.”
“What about slowing it down?”
He shook his head.
“So, what do you recommend?”
“Right now things are not so bad. But everything could change overnight. The fact that she didn’t recognize you suggests that the disease is progressing somewhat rapidly. Finally, you’ll have to institutionalize her.”
“I can’t care for her at home?”
“It’s going to be awfully difficult. She really shouldn’t be left alone. She might wander away. She could hurt herself. Falls or other accidents. She could hurt somebody else. Fires, unlocked doors.”
The memory of her holding the pistol flashed in my mind.
“In the later stages, moving will be difficult for her. Her personality will disappear. She’ll lose her abilities to think, perceive and speak. At the very least you’ll have to hire a full-time nurse then.” He stared at me again, then said, “I’m telling you what will eventually come. This might be several years away. I can’t say.”
“Or it might be next week?”
“Unlikely, but possible.” I thanked the doctor, collected Mother and left.
Lorraine was putting Mother to bed. I was in the garage, staring at the nearly finished bedside stand. I looked at the edges and imagined Mother’s thigh bruising upon walking into one. I began to take off the point of one of the corners, finding that as I sawed the wood away I was making two points. I shaved and cut and tore away wood until the top of the table was nearly round and now too small to be practical. The rectangular, tapered legs were not only wrong for the round top but were stuck out beyond the area of the surface. I haphazardly fastened three of the legs to the top, then sat on it. It wobbled a bit, but I didn’t care. It was something to feel in my hollow stupor.
I was about twelve. Father was down to the beach for the weekend as usual. We had gone as a family in the boat to the city dock in Annapolis and bought sandwiches at the open air market. I had my favorite, soft-shelled crab on a hard roll. The day was not too hot. There was a breeze. Everything felt perfect.
Bill waved to a couple of buddies near the shops and seemed to want to go with them, but stayed. Father became cool when he saw the wave.
Lisa was sitting on the long seat in the back of the boat, reading, and I was sitting on the dock, my feet on our boat, eating my sandwich and telling her how I was going to be a writer some day.
“But I’m not going to write stuff like that,” I said. “I’m going to write serious things.”
Lisa laughed. “Yeah, like what?”
“I don’t know yet, but it won’t be crap like that,” I said.
“Monksie, your language,” Mother said.
“All I said was crap,” I said.
“That’s enough, Monk,” from Father.
“This is not crap,” my sister said.
Mother sighed.
“Is too. I want to write books like Crime and Punishment.”
Lisa laughed. “He reads one book and he thinks he’s literary.”
“If Monk says he’ll do it, he’ll do it,” Father said. Then he made one of his pronouncements, the one that did come true. “Lisa, you and Bill will be doctors. But Monk will be an artist. He’s not like us.”
I felt both celebrated and ostracized at the same time. The looks from my siblings were both resentful and mocking. But Lisa loved hearing that she would be a doctor and she turned the attention to herself.
“What kind of doctor will I be, Father?”
“A good one,” he said, as he had every other time she’d asked and it satisfied her.
“And what about Bill?” I asked.
To which Father replied, “I don’t know.”
We ate on in silence.
I was sitting in the study, contemplating the notion of a public and its relationship to the health of art when I looked across the room at the gray box. The box, the contents of which my father deemed so private he’d asked my mother to burn it. But also the contents must have been important enough to him that he failed to burn it all the years he had the chance. My father’s private papers. Somehow I had never imagined any existing beyond deeds and contracts and standard legal documents, but I knew that box contained none of those.
“Father?” I was ten. I had walked into my father’s study on a cold night near Christmas.
“Yes, Monk?” He turned to face me in his swiveling chair, the one he had requested that I not spin around on “like a top.” “It’s late.”
“Sorry.”
“Say, I’m sorry, not sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry about what?”
“About it being so late,” I said.
Then I realized he was having fun with me and I laughed.
“What is it, Monk?”
“I have a question. If somebody tells you something and they tell you it’s a secret, can you ever tell?”
“You can, but I take it your question is should one tell.” He turned his head and looked briefly out the window. “No, you should not betray a confidence.”
“But what if it’s—”
He stopped me. “Never betray a confidence.” When I tried again to speak, he said, “I can tell you’re troubled, but I can also tell that soon you’re going to tell me the secret you’re carrying. If you don’t want a secret, don’t accept it.”
“Okay.” I started out of the room.
“Monk?” When I turned to him, he asked without looking at me, “Does this have anything to do with Bill?”
“No, Father,” I said, telling the truth, but also realizing with him that no could be my only answer to his question. Years later I would wonder if I had unknowingly and accidentally shaded my father’s perception of my older brother.
The box was not large, not terribly deep, and not very full, but these were in it:
2 February 1955
Dr. Benjamin Ellison
1329 T Street NW
Washington, D.C., USA
Dear Benjamin,
I cannot begin to tell you how surprised and of course thrilled I was to find your letter, however brief, in the box this morning. When you told me that you would write, I had my doubts. Not about the sincerity of your feelings certainly, but about your being able to collect time in the midst of your busy professional and family lives.
I have just now returned from Southampton. My mother is very ill. It seems she has suffered a stroke. The doctors say it was a minor stroke and that we should see little or no physical manifestation of it. To my perception she appears greatly altered, however subtly. Perhaps it is merely age. She is of course less sharp as we must all become less sharp.
What has it been, darling? Six months since we said goodbye? I hope you returned to find your family well and in good shape. I say again, to assure you, that I harbor no ill will toward your wife. She must be a wonderful woman to have you. Are your boy and girl big and rambunctious?
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