Once we were back in Palo Alto a depression set in for both of us; it was hard to live together again in a small house when we had lost so much to connect us. It was hard to come back to the reality of suburban California after a year in so glamorous a city as Rome, especially from so splendid an apartment. After driving our family across the country in a little under a week, we bedded down in our house, home sweet home, only to have my four-year-old daughter declare at breakfast, “I don’t like this motel. When are we leaving?”
We encountered a remarkable change in the student body, particularly the new graduate students in classics, which forecasted a general shift in the culture of American youth. In the fall term of the academic year 1964–65, as I approached the spot where my Homer seminar was scheduled, I saw the students unaccountably standing outside the building as though waiting, and moreover they all seemed to be smoking the same cigarette, which they were passing around among themselves. Once we had reassembled and I began, I quickly sensed an undertone of hilarity, which in the course of the two hours occasionally broke into giggles and even laughter at what I had to think was only minimally humorous. They were stoned, of course, but I had no understanding of this. At least not then, but it rapidly became an obvious feature of more events than I would like. I began to recognize a new kind of insouciance, a marvelous disconnect, sometimes adding a wonderful long-distance focus on the material at hand, sometimes just descending into a vague pit where any understanding was threatening to be demolished. Ironically enough, it resembled what I now encounter all the time in my dotage as my friends and I carry on conversations in which we often forget the thread in the middle of speaking. The only things missing are the giggles and the munchies. In connection with the Homer seminar I began to organize my lecture notes on Homer, which resulted in writing a specimen chapter through the winter months. In January 1965 I sent it off to Doubleday, and—miracle of miracles—got a contract with them, so I had to sit down and turn out a manuscript. The writing usually took place back at my office in late inebriated evenings when I had done my duty by the kiddies, and could escape the silence that filled the space between Penny and me once we were alone. It was so like backstage at the theater once the curtain comes down. The resolutely manufactured good cheer had ended; there was no ill will, really, just nothing more to say.
The increasingly obvious emptiness of our relationship naturally troubled me. I was tormented by a sense of failure that I assigned pure and simple to my being gay, without a thought to the commonplace truth that marriage over a time often produces profound ennui in the partners. I was not intimate enough with enough people in Palo Alto to get a sense of this. I learned much later from my older sister that she and Penny had had long discussions about the marriage when she was spending a couple of months with us, and that she had urged Penny to take a lover. Easier said than done in the kind of antiseptic suburban world in which we lived.
By August my manuscript was finished, and I sent it off to a former student and close friend in New York. Shortly thereafter I flew to New York to discuss it with him. While I was away Penny got into some kind of relationship—hard to determine their emotional seriousness—with a young man who did work for us at the time, a nineteen-year-old student at a college in San Francisco. Poor fellow, he must have been damaged goods. I remember watching the film Days of Wine and Roses with him, a very sad story of a young couple and their destructive alcoholism, and his saying with a sigh at the end that that was the story of his parents all over again. One night he and I went to walk the dog, and in the dark of the Stanford grounds as we sat watching the dog run off the leash, I made a serious pass at him, which I guess at first he was too startled to resist, but then recovered himself and made me stop. In the thunder and lightning of the aftermath of their affair I remember one or the other of them telling me that the next morning he had come to Penny with the story of my attack, and she had taken him straightaway to bed. This was a matter of the moment because he was scheduled to move away at the end of the summer.
It was months later, when he moved back for a longer stretch, that I sensed the two of them becoming more and more moody and weird, and then one morning as I was getting the children ready for school I happened to notice them playing footsie under the dining room table as I was at the stove. My reaction was a disgrace. At first controlled, of course, I singled out the boy for a lunch date to force him to confess to me. My confrontation with Penny was muted by the fact that her recently widowed mother had just flown in from Honolulu, leis around her neck and all, making the evening meal something Neil Simon could have rendered hilarious. Still, I managed to act out after the old lady had gone to bed. There was even yelling and screaming, difficult to cover over in an open-flow modern house. How I could have behaved so haunts me to this day, I, the veteran of such flagrant adultery, I, the sensitive barometer of the waning affections between us two. It was the triumph of male chauvinistic piggery, the atavistic belief in wife as property, the pompous control mechanisms of a professor with his student, and of course deep and dangerous and, oh, so sad, the desperate flailings of a man called fag and fairy too many times. And, oh, I shudder to think it, but there must have been the insane jealousy, insane anger at coming up the loser, insane because I somehow had imagined that she and I were equals in the running for this young man’s affections. Pathetic delusions, gross misjudgments, distortions of view, all of these elements were in the mix of a suburban nightmare in our beautiful glass box in Palo Alto. In the face of my howling, real or repressed depending upon those present, the people in my household were all so nice to me. I remember sitting about at a grand Easter dinner, Penny, the sad, sad young man who had begun boarding with friends of ours, the friends themselves, their children, our children, chocolate bunnies, Easter eggs, the whole of us putting on good cheer. How long, O, Lord, how long? The most ridiculous moment must have been when I was alone with the two and manically, merrily urging them to take the summer off and go to Europe together to have a proper time together, while I stayed with the children. They stared at me as though I were a mad dog who might break loose from the leash at any moment.
Weeks before this our entire lives had been darkened by the tragic suicide of a graduate student who had joined the department in the fall of the previous year—in fact, one of those merry lads puffing away on the marijuana cigarette. I had become his dissertation adviser, friend, and great admirer as I watched in fascination his public unveiling of his homosexuality at a time when this was still a very delicate maneuver, particularly for someone who advertised himself as interested in a teaching career. He was perhaps twenty-six, tall, blond, very Irish, with a tough-guy mouth. He had a kind of mean, aggressive way of presenting himself. He had just resigned from the Navy, where he had served on the staff of the admiral of the Sixth Fleet, carried himself like a military officer, and was so much of a no-nonsense guy when I first met him that I quailed. The first thing to go was the crew cut as he let his hair down—in more ways than one. In the next eight months he turned himself into a wise-ass, loudmouthed, entirely funny, campy, gay alternate version of that original persona. It was fabulous, since he kept the person he was intact but absolutely different. His intelligence promised me that I was in for a treat as we worked on his dissertation. Our discussions often took place at the end of the afternoon, and just as often I would invite him home to dinner. Penny adored him, the children adored him, he was so much fun, every time a new and delightful experience.
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 tog
ether 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.
My Husband and My Wives Page 16