by Edmund White
Then my mother had flown to Texas and was staying with my Baptist cousins. One of them phoned to say, “Honey, I just don’t know what to do with her. She never stops talking, she’s either excited as a flea or she’s desperate and scared, bless her heart. She won’t eat, the weight is just dripping off her, she’s giving her money away to everyone she meets, why, she gave the waitress a ten-dollar tip yesterday and all she’d had was a dollar cup of coffee. Then last night, oh, it must have been four or five in the morning, she woke me up and said her room was invaded by thousands and thousands of bugs swirling around her. Well, honey, you remember how we get these little millers down here in Texas, I think you Yankees call them no-see-ums, anyway, there were just three or four millers flying around the ceiling light, but she said, ‘See! There are thousands! They’re from outer space and they’re going to destroy us.’ Now, you know I keep a nice house, don’t you? I just can’t go on. My husband’s been real sweet to her because he respects all the good she’s done throughout her life although we’re both sad that she hasn’t found Jesus as her savior. She keeps saying He’s a good wise man … like the Buddha, I declare! And she says she’s going right to the top, to God, she likes the big guy, the chief executive, no Mr. In-Between for her, but I reminded her that Jesus said, ‘I am the Way’ ”
I hopped on the next plane out of Miami for Dallas and Amarillo. When I arrived in the terminal my mother was in a short pleated skirt and she had a pom-pom shaker she’d made out of clipped crêpe paper. “She thinks she’s a cheerleader,” my cousin said with a rueful smile. “She’s cheering your arrival.”
My mother and I left on the very next plane for Chicago. During the flight my mother chattered constantly. She stroked the stewardess’s hand and told her, “You’re a lovely woman and a very fine person. I can tell. I’m a psychologist. This is my son, a famous author, who’s a chip off the old block, because I’m no slouch, I was the executive director of a medical clinic for mental retardation at Cook County Hospital, a pioneer in my field.” Like an excited little girl she whispered to me, “Do you see this sad, sad old lady behind us?” I looked back and saw a nice tranquil farm woman in a flowered dress she’d probably run up herself. Her forearms and face were sunburned. She was leafing through a Woman’s Day with the stagy off-handedness of an extra; she must have known we were discussing her. She was clearly at least ten years younger than my mother.
“Do you think I should offer her some money? Just a few thousand dollars? That way she could buy some stylish new outfits at Neiman-Marcus, have that old grey washed out of her hair, have a complete make-over—and feel like a million dollars! I’m sure she’s a fine woman….” Tears stung my mother’s eyes. “She reminds me of my mother!”
When we arrived in Chicago I took my mother directly to St. Luke’s Hospital, where her doctor had arranged for her to be admitted to the psychiatric floor. I’d assured my mother that her doctor just wanted to check her heart medicine and make sure she wasn’t being over-stimulated, given how excited she was.
But when she realized my perfidy (her doctor wasn’t even there and she recognized the psychiatric floor), she let out a sob and crawled across the floor to me: “Darling, I beg you, I’m your mother, you can’t do this….”
And she clutched at my trousers and gripped my calf through the fabric with her surprisingly strong hands.
“Mother,” I said, “it’s just for a few days. You have delusions, you’re losing weight, you’re in a manic phase.”
She said nothing but lay on the floor, sobbing.
I was appalled by what was happening. My mother was no longer a kindly little grandmother but a weeping madwoman abject at my feet. I’d tricked her into accompanying me to the hospital and now I was locking her up against her will—in the very hospital where she had many colleagues and had worked over the years. She had staked her whole life on being a psychologist, a diagnostician of other people’s ills, and now I’d turned the tables on her. As her child and her friend I had no right to say that I knew she’d gone too far, that she was now a danger to herself. My nephew, I felt, had been harmed the day he’d been classified as mentally ill, a definition like the crack in a bell that would mute its timbre for the rest of his life. Now I was the one declaring my mother mad and committing her. Had I no conscience?
A day later she’d checked herself out of the hospital and simply disappeared. I was icily angry with her doctor who said, “Look, that’s the law. Unless we have a psychiatric hearing before a judge with several expert witnesses and a whole dossier of evaluations, our hands are tied. She’s smart, your mother, she knows the law, she’s used it often enough in committing crazy kids she was working with.”
A week later my mother phoned. She was calmer, she said, but pleased because she was writing her memoirs day and night. “I’m in a hotel, dear, but I won’t tell you where. I can’t trust you now. But don’t worry I’ve found the very best cure for insanity: room service. I’m very worried about your smoking. It will kill you sure as rain.”
I encouraged her to write. “That will help you to integrate all the traumas you’ve sustained recently. Writing is a way of re-asserting the mastery of the ego.” We actually talked to each other that way, in psychological jargon, though we scarcely knew what we were saying. It was our funny way of saying very tender things to each other while sounding scientific.
She finished her book and, as she said, discovered in room service the exact degree of social contact and above all one-way control essential to mental recovery. She moved home. In the meantime she’d managed to give away most of her money. I began to send her five hundred dollars a month and eventually a thousand, which, with her Social Security, allowed her to live decently. Although my sister was in AA and now that she’d finished graduate school was working as a psychotherapist with drunks, neither she nor I had figured out that since our mother had so abruptly stopped drinking she was having DT’s of the pink-elephant variety.
Now she calmed down and, at last, in her seventies, said farewell to love and sexual adventure, which had brought her nothing but suffering all her life, although her chapter about Randy was titled “Love at Last.”
I paid for her book to be published by a small vanity press and Mother sold A Life in Progress to her lady friends at the church, who must have been surprised by the passages about my father giving her the clap soon after their marriage in the 1930s, or about my mother’s last lover kissing with resigned acceptance the place where she’d lost her breast through the mastectomy, not to mention the parts about the binge drinking, the stalled stoma “Rosie” and the miracle of the flowing shit.
MY SISTER, who was now living with a new lover, a woman teacher, came with her to Key West for the New Year. Eddie had the first of his many annual parties and we were invited, along with many famous writers. Tennessee Williams came, so did James Kirkwood, but in those days there were not so many writers living in Key West as there would be later. Peter Taylor was visiting with an old school friend of his from Nashville, a fine old Southern lawyer, white haired, dressed in a blue and white seersucker suit.
My sister seemed happy, but I knew she was as restless as I, that she craved intimacy and couldn’t endure it and that despite feminine sentimentality (the exchange of vows beside the campfire when, as an adolescent, she had been Captain of the Blues, and now the exchange of friendship rings with her partner), nevertheless she was as disabused and suspicious as I, quick to spot the ludicrous, never surprised when things didn’t work out.
Since Gabriel had flunked his final exams in high school, he’d left his teenage commune and gone to live with my mother. Now he was staying in “the crow’s nest,” my mother’s “office,” where she stored all those thousands of diagnostic tests she’d administered over thirty years to sad, squalling children. Gabriel and my mother were thick. They had an intensely active mutual-admiration club. He was preparing for university amidst all these records of retardation.
I seldom thought abo
ut my family, but it kept encroaching on me. My stepmother called me when I got back to New York and told me my father was dead. He’d been sitting watching TV and, as he was lighting his cigar, he’d suddenly stood up and said, “I can’t feel anything in my feet. My God, it’s moving up my legs. It’s all over me.” She said he should sit down. He did and he was dead, the lit match falling from his hand.
It seemed wrong that he should die before me. He was the law-giver, I the criminal, and it was as though the warden had gone and the prisoners were now allowed to creep away, one after another, without reprisals. Yet his absence made me nervous, as though he’d always been the lowering cloud cover above me and now a cold winter wind had blown it away and there was nothing between me and the stars except space. The closed, snivelling, resentful world of childhood had at last ended, the smouldering sense of rebellion against authority, the petty urge to wound, the cringing fear of reprisals. It had been replaced by—well, by space. Empty, untenanted night. I felt grown up now and experienced the gain in maturity as a loss.
My sister and I agreed to meet two days later at a certain time in Toledo; she’d be flying in from Chicago, I from New York. There we’d rent a car and drive to Findlay, Ohio, where the service would be held.
I was staying with Fox. He held me all night and got me up at six a.m., plenty of time to catch my nine o’clock flight from Kennedy Airport. I hailed the first taxi (it was still dark outside) and only when we were beyond the city limits did I notice that the driver was a Haitian who didn’t know the route—didn’t, indeed, know where we were or who he was, since he was completely incoherent on drugs or drink and incapable of driving. Nor did he speak English. I kept looking for another taxi I could hail, but the dawn streets were deserted. I couldn’t believe my bad luck—on the day of my father’s funeral I was in the hands of a drug addict who didn’t know how to find Kennedy Airport. He seemed to me like one of those symbols of death in a movie by Cocteau.
At last we stumbled by chance on La Guardia, not the airport I wanted but good enough. At least here I would find other taxis.
But I missed my plane. I called my sister from the airport and told her that I’d be on the next flight. She was understanding, as was the airline, which even had a special bereavement fare. I was so used to having all the occasions of my life ignored by society that I was astonished to have my grief shared, as it were, by a company.
As soon as my sister and I arrived at the funeral home and walked into the viewing room I realized that the coffin was open and that my father’s head—small, waxen, painted—was propped up on a pillow in order to be visible to everyone. I was horrified by the sight and turned my back on it. No matter where I walked in the room for the next hour and a half I kept that horrible little spoiled fruit out of sight. I was sure that he was rotting in his box—it smelled of meat that had gone off. I understood why there were so many flowers needed, in order to disguise the shocking odor.
My stepmother’s family came from a little town near Findlay and a few of her friends and relatives dropped in to offer their condolences. When my stepmother introduced me to them I could see their eyes going from my face to my father’s effigy behind me to verify whether there was a resemblance. Since no one except my stepmother’s brother and his wife had actually known my father they were deprived of anything to say beyond, “I’ve heard he was a fine man. I know your stepmother is going to miss him.” They patted my hand and hers. I glittered with a huge smile as though I were at a wedding, not a funeral.
And then my sister went up to the coffin. My stepmother whispered in my ear, “Oh, God, she’s taking his hand. Now she’s sobbing and kissing him on the lips and saying things to him.”
I didn’t dare look, since that would entail seeing the head, that waxed thing. Later I sidled over to my sister, put an arm around her and gave her a cup of coffee. She said, “I told him that I thought he was a bastard. He’d never given me what I wanted. He’d always preferred other girls to me—remember that Miss Toledo he met and liked so much?—he always threw her up to me, especially when I was so roly-poly at fourteen or fifteen. He used to walk around nude when we were alone and once he touched my breasts and told me seductive things and I cried and said, ‘No, Daddy, it’s wrong, you know it’s wrong,’ but of course I liked the attention and felt guilty that I liked it and I was half-attracted to him. After all, he was the only man who’d ever shown any interest in me.”
“I always wanted to have sex with him,” I said.
“You say that because you know it was impossible. But incest, real incest, especially between members of the opposite sex, is very upsetting. I think it’s why I was frigid with Dick and I still have trouble getting close to women.”
“Did you take his hand?”
My sister blushed and started to cry. “Yes. I put a ring on his finger. I wanted him to be buried with something of mine.”
“Which finger?”
“The wedding-ring finger.”
I hugged her. I had to sign my name as a chief pallbearer under my father’s name. We had the same name, separated only by a Roman numeral.
On the plane back to New York the next day I kept smelling the odor of rotting human flesh. I looked at the rowdy businessmen around me who were drinking and laughing and showing their bare fleshy calves when they crossed their legs (how my father would have disapproved of their short, ankle-length socks, he who wore garters just below the knee). I thought they were dying, they smelled of the rot, it was in their clothes, all this dead or dying meat was propped up in chairs and twitching with galvanic energy, but their conversation was profanely petty, full of joking greed and jockeying for position that showed they weren’t aware of death. They kept marinating their meat in beer. I thought of the meat-packing district in New York where the carcasses—peeled, legless, branded with a purple mark—swung out of the trucks into refrigerated rooms.
Somebody at my gym became ill. He’d been a big guy, always snapping towels at buttocks in the dressing room, and he’d had a real mouth on him, but then he came down with something the doctors couldn’t diagnose. Slightly raised brownish-purple spots appeared on his skin. One doctor said they resembled a disease that only old Italian and Jewish men got. The poor guy at the gym just seemed to deflate in front of our eyes. All the steroids and food that had made his body so immense melted away, as though a butcher were rendering fat from a prize pig. He stopped joking, then he stopped talking, then he stopped coming. Someone said he had “gay-related immunodeficiency” (GRID). That was in 1981. It seemed too horrible to be true, a disease aimed specifically at gay men and contracted through gay sex.
As a gay writer I had received my share of hate mail, including an anonymous letter that had told me I would end up wearing a sack on my side since I was putting my anus to unnatural uses condemned by God. This new disease seemed all of a piece with the hate promulgated by know-nothing American fundamentalists.
I didn’t know anyone other than the guy at the gym who had the new disease but I’d heard of a whole household on Fire Island coming down with it, five guys who’d shared the same cottage for several summers. They weren’t friends of mine but friends of friends and, in the spirit of scientific skepticism, I kept asking, “What else have they shared? Needles? Polluted well water? A bad shipment of poppers?”
A writer I’d known for five or six years invited eighty or so gay men to hear Dr. Friedman-Kien, a doctor at New York University, discuss the new disease. Then, a few months later, the same writer asked me and a handful of other gay men over to his luxurious apartment at the foot of Fifth Avenue to set up an organization to fight gay cancer. I felt flattered to be included at such a statesman-like event but I was frightened by it, as though thinking too much about it might lead to my becoming infected.
We decided we should have three goals—to raise money for research; to visit the ill and perform chores for them; and to pamphlet the bars with safe-sex information. Unfortunately, our biggest idea for raising m
oney was to give a dance at the Paradise Garage. No one thought of approaching the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. We’d spent so many years huddling in the ghetto that it never occurred to us to turn to the federal government. And as for safe sex, all we could advise was, “Know the names of your partners” and “Limit their numbers.” In moralistic America we thought that promiscuity and anonymity must somehow be to blame. No one was prepared to believe that gay cancer could be contracted through a single exposure. Anyway, could you be “exposed” to cancer and contract it like the measles?
I had long had my doubts about our goals and values. In an article I’d written, which had come out one year before the first rumors about AIDS, I’d aired my problems about reconciling my “socialism” (which amounted to little more than a belief in sharing wealth and providing social services to the needy) with the well heeled hedonism of the urban gay men I was studying. I’d also predicted that gay men, who were now perceived as the most promiscuous element in society, would someday go “beyond” sexuality to find newer, richer forms of association.
I had just begun to read Michel Foucault and I interpreted his writing to mean that since we had a word, homosexuality (or, for that matter, the word sexuality itself), we assumed that those words must refer to real things, to a unified and constant phenomenon, whereas in fact this very act of nomination was only an arbitrary way of creating entities by naming them.
But if I had my doubts about gay clone sexuality and consumerism (which seemed to be two systems for creating an elite hierarchy that excluded me and most other gay men—those who weren’t white as well as the old, the poor, the ugly), I was equally afraid of seeming puritanical. I thought that if I was unhappy on Fire Island it was because I was past forty. Certainly in preceding years I’d relished my romantic sexual encounters with strangers under the moon in the pine forest—the most poetic moments of my life—and if they’d brought me no happiness I felt, as an artist, that my only concern should be beauty, so often twinned with melancholy. And to the extent I thought about politics at all I believed in campaigning for life and liberty but not the pursuit of happiness, too elusive, surely, ever to serve as the basis for policy.