by Honor Moore
But no one did invite me, and so, instead of going to the prom, I spent the evening at a slumber party with the other dateless girls, filing and polishing our nails, watching television, and speculating as to what would happen with the prom-queen elections. Our class had been the first to nominate a Negro prom-queen candidate, Gwen Solomon, and at the prom I missed, she won the crown in a landslide—while the white students were choosing between Cynthia Mauck and Hilary Stout, the Negro students voted as a block. It was 1962, and the civil rights movement was having an influence at the school. A club called the Human Rights Committee had been formed and earlier that spring had organized a panel to discuss integration. Asked about love between people of different races, John Allerdice, one of the most popular boys in the school, said that if he fell in love with a Negro woman, he would marry her.
“It’s what I really felt,” he said in 2006 when I talked to him on the telephone. But, he said, he was not sure he would have said it if he’d known there would be consequences for his family. The Allerdices, who lived just blocks from us, were shunned by their next-door neighbors and harassed by hate calls; cherry bombs were tossed from cars that roared past their house in the middle of the night, and a cross was burned in the front yard. “It was a small one,” Mrs. Allerdice said with a laugh, recounting the story of her own revelation; she had come to agree with her son, and with her husband, who had returned from World War II with a hatred for bigotry of any kind. When John ran for senior-class president, he pledged to do something about civil rights at Shortridge, and when he was elected, he and Gwen and Steve Hopper, who had been junior-class president, and Obie McKenzie, who was black and a track and basketball star, decided to gather some Negro and white students at John’s house to talk.
There was a feeling of new recognition as each of us arrived that afternoon. I didn’t know then about the hate calls, but I had a sense it was a risk for the Allerdices to have the gathering at their house, and that coming to the meeting was something none of us would have done without the leadership of John and Steve and Obie and Gwen. By signing on, we exposed ourselves in a way no one at Shortridge ever had before. Suddenly I was able to look at Obie and Gwen as I had my Negro friends in Jersey City, without fear. And Steve Hopper was not just the nice-guy junior-class president, but someone who had thought in silence about race, just as I had. John and Steve had been converted by the civil rights movement, but also by knowing Negro kids in music groups and on sports teams. The year before, Shortridge’s basketball team, which had just two white starting players, had nearly won the sectionals, the first stage in the statewide basketball tournament, and the all-white cheerleading squad had urged on the black players, flinging their arms around them in the ecstatic moments after a game was won.
Kennedy was president, and two years before, black students in the South had intensified the civil rights struggle by sitting in at lunch counters. John Allerdice was still a boy, short with sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes; he had a way of disarming you by making a funny face or a silly noise, which he did before he started to talk that afternoon, so that when he got serious, we were all still laughing. I don’t think he mentioned the sit-ins or Kennedy, but he talked about Gwen’s election and how absurd he’d found the reaction to what he’d said on the Human Rights Committee panel. He thought something good might happen if our class divided up into committees of both races and did some real things. Sitting next to Martha, one of my friends from eighth grade, I fought tears. John was saying that if we all just got to know one another, people’s way of thinking might change, and then the school could change. We went around the room, each of us talking about how we felt about race. We decided to keep meeting, to bring in new people each time we met, and, as time went on, the numbers grew.
John and I had been chosen to be American Field Service Exchange Students, and at the end of June he left for the Philippines, and I for Lahore, in what was then West Pakistan. By the time I got back in September, although I didn’t know it, Mrs. Allerdice had been forced out of her partnership in Mrs. Gates’s dancing school; they’d lost business because of her position on integration. And the week school started, Martha and I each received the blank note card from Euvola that signified we’d been blackballed. No reason was given, but we had gone to John Allerdice’s meetings and, because Martha had been away at a language program in France and I in Pakistan, we had not been in town to work on the club’s yearly dance, a requirement for pledges. I was crying in bed when my father knocked and came into my room. He was in a fury. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” he said. “How dare they punish you for bringing distinction to the school!” “I wasn’t here to work on the dance,” I whimpered. “To hell with the dance,” he shouted. “They’re not worth half of what you are!”
That fall, the school did The Pajama Game, and I was the producer. Standing up in “auditorium,” I asked everyone to bring in used oatmeal cartons. We needed them for the pajama factory scene—with large ones and small ones, we could make the sewing machines. We’d paint them brick red. Anyone who wants to help build and paint them would be welcome. Cassandra played the vampish Gladys Hotchkiss, wearing her own fake-leopard capris and matching vest. Having thrown myself into the theater, I felt only a slight pang when I saw my former Euvola “sisters” wearing their tiny oblong pins. By the time spring came, none of that mattered anymore. John and Steve were going to Kenyon College, Martha was going to Vassar, Christine to Smith, and Marie Roberts and I had been accepted at Radcliffe. We sent a press release to the Indianapolis Times, and they printed the list—fifteen of us were going East for college. Graduation was at the state fairgrounds, and I went to the Club 30 Dance—the senior prom—with John Allerdice, and Stan Kenton’s band played.
The dance was at the Indiana Roof, where the Ziegfeld Follies had once performed, and in a darkness illuminated only by the revolving splashes of a faceted, mirrored ball, we demonstrated our expertise in the fox-trot and waltz, the tango and lindy, which we’d learned so well from Mrs. McMurtrie, dances on the brink of becoming, at least for us, hopelessly out of date, a fact Stan Kenton acknowledged with a jazzy, too-slow version of “Let’s Twist Again.” The hula hoop craze had prepared our hips, but we hadn’t expected old-fashioned Kenton to measure up to what went on at the Peppermint Lounge, the pictures in every magazine of Chubby Checker in his big-shouldered suit, of Jackie Kennedy crouched and twisting. Most of my friends and I stayed in touch, but I lost track of Cassandra until, five years later, a Shortridge friend sent me a copy of the Indianapolis Star Sunday magazine: there she was in full color on the cover. The model known as “Cassandra” was in town for a few days at the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Diehl. She was visiting from Paris, where she’d lived for several years and where she was pursuing a career as a fashion model.
After graduation, I had a job at Elko Lake, an Episcopal camp in the Catskills. There were eight girls in my bunk, all from Harlem, the Bronx, or Brooklyn, all but one Negro or Puerto Rican. Mornings I took them to the lake, which was a hundred yards from the cabins; there they boated or swam. I made sure they got to meals, to afternoon activities, evening performances and marshmallow roasts, the dances where they taught me “the Pony” and “the Mashed Potato.” Also, I was the counselor in charge of directing extravagant productions of musical comedies in the barn, a shortened Music Man and My Fair Lady for which I wrote scripts from memory and whose songs a counselor named Charlie Wyatt pounded out on an upright. But when night came, I forgot about my charges. I had fallen in love with Chris, who took care of the boats.
In the almost-dark, I could see a man walking toward the small cabin at the edge of the lake where Chris lived. I had put my campers to bed, and through the quiet I could hear their giggles. Although he took care of the boats, Chris never put on a bathing suit—he just sat on his cabin steps, watching as we swam with the kids, but jumping up to help if anyone wanted to take out a canoe or a rowboat. I must have en
ded up at his table at supper, or next to him at an evening event, and gotten him to talk. He was very quiet, different from all the boys at Shortridge, except maybe John Fenstermaker. He wore sandals and tattered jeans and T-shirts, and he was not eager to please. He was very tall—more than six feet—and a hank of sandy hair fell across his forehead; he had hazel, almost green eyes. I first smoked hashish with Chris Fleming that summer, and we both drank red wine from a jug, as we (mostly he) talked about Camus, Karl Marx, Beethoven, and Stokely Carmichael.
Among the few black counselors was Randolph Revere, older than we were—perhaps in his late twenties, even his thirties. He was an artist, and, he told me months later, homosexual. (At the time I hadn’t yet known anyone who was homosexual, though, with some sixth sense, I knew that my teacher Mr. Walker and some of my parents’ male friends, like Freddie Bradlee, would probably never get married.) I used to look at Randolph, scrutinizing his buoyant smile, never sure it was entirely revealing. He smoked a pipe and had gone to Howard University in Washington. When he responded to the ordinary jokes we told, his laughter had a gravity ours lacked, emerging, it seemed, from a worldliness we younger counselors—mostly white and heterosexual—had no way of understanding. I think Randolph had told Chris to read Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and that Chris had then told me to read it; unable to find Giovanni’s Room, I read Another Country, all the time imagining Randolph in that world with Rufus and Leona. Like a Baldwin narrator, Randolph had an attitude toward being black that fed an intellectual exploration of what it meant to be a Negro in America. I had encountered that cultivation only in the few Negro college students who came to Jersey City to work on the summer staff—thoughtful about changes they might help bring about—but, unlike them, Randolph seemed cautious around white people, and that made me shy.
It was after supper, or after whatever camp event took up the evening, that I would see Randolph heading for Chris’s cabin near the lake. I began to imagine that Randolph was in love with Chris, and that Chris considered their relationship important—in other words, there was no running across the field to join them. I have come to know that feeling. Even with gay men I’m close to, there have been times I’ve been present at the beginnings of a seduction, at first a participant in joking and repartee, only slowly realizing, as the heat between the men intensified, that a ritual was in play from which I was shut out. At seventeen, I viscerally recognized this, everything slowing down, everything quiet except my own heartbeat, my too-loud breathing; it also happened when my father was with other priests or men in the church. And so, when Chris and Randolph walked toward the cabin on the lake and I stood there watching, what I felt was not new but it was also unnamed and unnameable. I turned away, perhaps lighting a Marlboro and smoking it as I crossed the field to the women’s washroom, turned on the light, looked in the mirror at my face, and, taking off my glasses and adjusting my mouth, burst into tears. After I saw Randolph the following autumn in New York, I reported the visit to my father. Randolph, I wrote, “is (confidentially) a homosexual and has had a great many slumps out of guilt feelings because of this . . . It depresses me to see him . . . because his situation and way of life, e.g. periodic slumps etc. are so inevitable it seems to me, in his position. I really want to say all the time that everything will be all right—but somehow I can’t believe that it will—at least not for a long time.”
But at Elko Lake, I did not yet have that clarity, and so I kept my complicated feelings to myself, looking forward to the nights that I would be the one to walk with Chris toward the cabin, to sit with him, both of us smoking Marlboros, talking, listening to the latest Charlie Parker, lent to him by Randolph, perhaps taking a puff or two of hashish as I tried to imagine how I might get this big quiet man—he seemed a man, not a boy—to take me in his arms. Sometimes, though, Randolph would be with us, or Maria. Maria was Chilean, but she had no accent, and though she was barely older than I was, she was taller and seemed “sophisticated”—she went to Hunter College, in New York. I was anything but sophisticated. In the one tiny black-and-white I have of myself and Chris, my badly cut hair in angular almost-curls stops halfway to my shoulders, I am wearing Bermuda shorts and the color of my white shirt peaks out from the crew neck of my sweater. I have on my glasses and am standing at a tilt, a cigarette between my fingers, my smile garish with need.
Those evenings when we were all there, Maria would move across the cabin and greet Chris with a little smile, her short black hair perfectly brushed back, small gold earrings in her pierced ears, capri pants fitted to perfect buttocks that sloped up to a narrow waist. If her blouse had a low neck, it looked like an accidental departure from modesty. Narrow wrists. Espadrilles on long slender feet. I gazed down at my sneakers. Chris bent toward her and smiled, and I put my attention elsewhere. Or walked toward them, overhearing Maria, who talked, if not with more intelligence than I did, certainly with greater seriousness about who she was and wanted to become. What book were they talking about? What music? At seventeen, in spite of having necked, Danny’s hands deliciously sliding up my stockinged thighs, there was something I didn’t understand. As I watched Maria, I saw that she understood that thing.
I can’t remember any particular conversation Chris and I had, or what I said or asked. We must have talked about the civil rights movement, about what I had seen the previous summer in Pakistan, the beggars with amputated limbs, young men crowded into un-air-conditioned theaters to watch Rock Hudson and Doris Day with Urdu subtitles, balconies of the same theaters filled only with women in saris or salwar kameezes, a veil pulled across their faces so you could see only their eyes. I might have tried to describe Lahore, the wide boulevards, the almost translucent dome of the Badshahi Mosque, the reflecting pools of the Shalimar Gardens, the strangeness at the border with Afghanistan where bearded tribesmen strode the dusty road carrying rifles, their eyes glittering, women in black chadors visible on the battlements if you looked up. Or we’d talk about poetry—Pound and Eliot, or Neruda, whom he had read and I had never heard of. That summer of 1963, we must also have talked about the importance of the coming March on Washington, and after it happened, marveled at what Martin Luther King Jr. said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or the fact, stunning in light of the brutal attacks on civil rights workers and demonstrators all that year in the South, that there had been no violence. I would have boasted that my father had marched, explained that he’d thought it too dangerous for a girl, so had taken my brother Paul and not invited me.
When I was away, my mother always wrote, once, maybe twice a week—usually reporting on the activities of the family, which then seemed a vigorous, energetic conveyance that slid easily along, carrying all of us. Rereading her letters I saved, I see that they are rarely intimate or confiding and that the pronoun is usually “we,” as in “We’re so proud of you.” But my battles with her continued. I struggle with acne and she writes a friend in Cambridge to recommend “a skin man.” “I know it irritates you to go to doctors but it does seem to make sense,” followed by, “Paul & Dee & Rosie & I are going to hear the Beatles tomorrow night!” She complains I’m not a good enough correspondent: “I’m going to be very cross if you don’t write me this month,” or “The only thing to remember when life is such fun and so full is the other people—Gami, Gagy, Grandma Kean, etc. I never say this kind of thing to you, but do keep older people who do need attention in mind . . .” Didn’t she understand that I had homework, work at the theater, a new world of friends? Coming as they did, in her declarative handwriting, two or three times a week, many of her letters went unread.
But my father, when he managed to write, often reflected. In the slim packet of his letters that I still have, I find a handful written to me in 1963 at Elko Lake; in each, he acknowledged the tardiness of his reply and promised he’d try to improve as a correspondent. That summer, while campaigns for integration were in progress all over the South, my father, in the thick of the struggle in Indian
apolis, watched clergy friends like Kim Myers and Malcolm Boyd become politically active, often joining demonstrations in the South. In Indianapolis at the cathedral, he was host to “the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights” in its meeting with “the Indianapolis Social Action Committee,” a newly formed Negro civil rights group. Two weeks later, he wrote that at a later small gathering with Negro leaders, the mayor had granted all their demands: “Round #1 for our side!” At the beginning of July, he visited me at Elko, en route to the Adirondacks with Gami and a raft of kids, and afterward wrote again:
I just loved seeing you at Elko and meant to write you right off. I was so full of it—but! Never seen you better or more “fulfilled” than you seemed that day. Your enthusiasm was infectious . . . I could sense that you had a “pastoral” concern for your girls and that you were having a ball with the other counselors. I left feeling, again, very very proud of you and all you have done and especially pleased at the kind of things you find pleasure in. That is the secret to happiness—if there is one—“to love the things that Thou commandest” . . . This is pretty much God-given, but if you get involved in this sort of thing early in your life, you can form and develop your tastes along that direction & it does deepen and last. I know. I remember going to the St. Paul’s School Camp at your age & loving it . . . the seeds of what later was life at Jersey City were planted then . . .