Nor as bossy or opinionated—and he will take that statement as a compliment.
“I hope you’re going to a lot of trouble,” he has been known to warble feebly from the living room when my father is preparing dinner in the kitchen. And his terse response to learning of my plans to travel to Ecuador after university was delivered with a roll of the eyes: “Why would you want to go there? They don’t even have an opera house!”
That said, during all the years that I travelled from one country-without-opera-house to another, whenever I found myself resurfacing from a remote adventure and stumbling to the poste restante address I had sent to people as my next destination, I could always count on at least one (and often several) long, newsy and hilarious letters from Lance.
While he has never felt like a parent to me, Lance does feel like family, and is. His relationship with my father has always been loyal, lively and loving (if bossy), fascinating (if fastidious), endlessly social, and laced with travel, food, (too much) opera, inspiration, stories and laughter.
I cannot think of anything objectionable about their relationship. It was always difficult to understand why anyone would.
WEEKENDS ON WALMSLEY BOULEVARD
While my dad had managed to come out of the closet completely, in my own life I kept him firmly inside it, still hiding his life from everyone except Jessica Bell. Which meant that I began leading a version of the double life from which my dad had finally liberated himself.
In Toronto, I would dress up and play the princess, attending ballets and dinner parties with Dad and Lance’s friends, whom I adored. It was all still a bit strange, I suppose, but once my internal compass settled around Dad’s new orientation, my Toronto weekends took on a relaxed quality: pleasantly predictable and predictably pleasant. I even began to like “real” Chinese food.
At the end of the weekend, I would hang that life in a closet on Walmsley Boulevard and take the Greyhound bus back to Peterborough, already scripting what I would say to my friends when we compared whad’ya do this weekend? stories.
What actually happened:
Friday night: Lance and I went to the ballet with free tickets that he got because his ex-boyfriend is in the company. Saturday: went silk-shirt shopping with my dad, then to the new gay cult film, My Beautiful Laundrette, after which I adjusted to an odd father–daughter moment that found us agreeing on who was cuter. Sunday: enjoyed a picnic with some friends from Gay Fathers.
What I would say happened:
My dad’s neighbour (invent plausible name: maybe Jeremy Lipton) had tickets to the ballet that he couldn’t use, so he suggested that his son (named … um … Alastair: he’s gorgeous and goes to Upper Canada College) take me. Afterwards, the two of us went to a little French bistro (the likes of which you can only find in Toronto), where we shared champagne and a chocolate mousse, and the next day the doorbell rang and there was a box tied with a ribbon sitting on my dad’s front step. In it was this silk shirt. (Gasps all around.) Et cetera.
I don’t know how my brothers coped, as we spoke very little in those days, Paul having entered into that Neanderthal phase of male adolescence—uh? yuh. wuh? uh-huh—and Flip being so blasé about the whole thing that he saw no point in doing anything so boring as talking about our lives when we could be flinging ourselves around the room à la Chinese circus.
While Paul and I had both needed to have The Conversation with one of our parents, Flip was young enough—nine years old when Dad came out—that he simply grew up with things as they were. Santa Claus parade in December, Gay Pride Day parade in July, summer camp with other boys, canoe trips with men and boys. Of the three of us, he probably had the easiest time of it, because there was never any “it”; there was just life as it was, changing and evolving. As life does.
I don’t believe that either of my brothers felt the need to brazenly fabricate to the extent that I did. No doubt they chose the simpler, more honourable route of going about their lives normally and just not mentioning the bit about my dad and Lance being a couple. I have no idea why I didn’t choose that route for myself; the lying was as exhausting as it was distracting. But my father once said that I always enjoyed telling stories with a lot of “Byzantine ornamentation” and that his mother was very much the same. So perhaps it was partly my personality, partly the fact that I was a girl (boys, even when they grow up, don’t seem to feel the same need to self-expose), and partly that I had inherited the Byzantine ornamentation gene. Whatever the cause, I was constantly creating for myself a life that wasn’t actually happening.
Call it fictional freedom.
BORDERS AND CREAM PUFFS
Children of parents who live separately have no trouble understanding what a border crossing is between countries, for we contain a similar cleft within ourselves: between mother and father, varying styles of homes and comforts, rules and expectations. It’s not a bad thing, and it might even make us more adaptable, more understanding of diversity and respectful of different ways of being in the world. Those of us who trundle between parents are seasoned travellers before we ever leave our home country.
In some cases, the border is virtually non-existent, a sort of Switzerland-to-Austria arrangement that sees mild differences in culture and codes of law, a shared language and respectful communication (peppered with private eye-rolling). In other families, the border is more Middle Eastern in feeling, rife with suspicions (real or imagined), accusations (real or imagined), and so thoroughly saturated with hatred and mistrust that the children’s internal landscape grows up around emotional landmines and barbed fences that they might well spend their adult lives untangling or detonating.
In our case, the border was definitely more peaceful in nature, a variation on the modern English–French relationship perhaps, with the latter seeing the former as a nation of tiresome pricks who would one day, with any luck, piss off and get over themselves, and the former in the middle of a grand tea party with puffy little scones and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, wondering what all the fuss was about.
Well, that’s unfair to both of them; but that was the basic picture.
While my father dreamed of friendship with my mother, Christmases together and general bonhomie, relations soured over the course of the drawn-out divorce, and by the time my mother and Mel were married (a few months after the divorce was official), a clear border had been established and my brothers and I travelled the concrete equivalent of the English Channel between our parents.
Contrary to the Sturm und Drang I enacted before Mel’s establishment in our lives, there was no great kabang when Lance moved in, as there might have been if we had lived with my dad full-time or been used to his constant attention. When they did live together, Dad and Lance continued to enjoy separate lives and social circles, and while some overlapped, there weren’t the sort of spousal arrangements and expectations I saw in the rest of the world. To this day, Lance has never had a particular role or label in our lives (although I teasingly call him my fairy stepmother), and in the early days he was just friendly and endlessly humorous, never tried to be a parental figure (clever, because two of us were teenagers), and he effortlessly gave our relationship with our father a lot of space.
Something none of us really noticed, but all appreciated.
Within his and my father’s relationship, there were no set roles or precedents. And the freedom of that registered with me even in my desperate-to-be-normal teenage state. Like many gay couples, Dad and Lance had separate bedrooms, and that felt so instinctively healthy to me that I vowed to carry the practice into my own adult life. That they were attracted to each other and had a sex life was the least interesting thing about their relationship, as far as I was concerned, and while the idea of it did undoubtedly gross me out, it did so no more than contemplating the same details of my mother and Mel’s bedroom life.
The thing about having a gay parent is that so long as the rest of society can get over it, the “gay” part isn’t nearly as important as
the “parent” part; in fact, it’s incidental. Constancy of love, truthfulness of heart, and joyfulness of life count infinitely more than who is doing what with which gender in the bedroom. Being in the presence of love is being in the presence of love; ultimately, it is the only thing that truly matters.
I must admit to growing weary of certain things, however. The perennial Playgirl calendar in the bathroom. Being taken to any film, play or reading that so much as hinted at having gay content. The opera that greeted me the moment I opened the door to the house on Friday afternoons; the opera that blared during the hours it would take my dad to make dinner, gourmet meals being the order of the day, daily; the opera that blared Saturday mornings, and all the rest of the weekend.
But somewhere around the age of sixteen, at one of Dad and Lance’s innumerable all-male-but-me dinner parties, I had an epiphany.
I was helping whip the cream that Dad would spoon into his homemade pastry puffs, which were baking in the oven. A couple of guys were in the dining room with Lance singing a very dramatic version of “How About You?” and out on the back patio, an extremely cute Asian guy was doing mock ballet moves to an appreciative, hooting audience of three or four. My dad’s friend Scott, meanwhile, was melting chocolate on the stove and regaling us with an animated description of a family reunion complete with impersonations of eccentric aunts that had us literally doubled over and choking with laughter, and in that ridiculous, très gai moment, I wanted to step onto the nearest skyscraper and scream to the whole world that I would far rather hang out with these crazy fairies than most of the boring oafs my friends had for dads.
WEST SIDE (OF PETERBOROUGH) STORY
Eighteen years separated my dad from his brother, an age difference so great that it almost kept them from being siblings, Dick having already moved out of the family home by the time my dad was old enough to play. Dick married Millie, a petite woman who reminded me of a paper doll whose perfectly matched clothing seemed to fold to her curveless frame like cut-out attachments. Her hair was short and done. No wisps or strands out of place. Likewise for their house, which was so clean and orderly it looked as though no one actually lived there. Aunt Millie was famous for not being able to sleep with anything dirty in the house, so nightly loads of laundry were compulsory, as was washing, drying and putting away every dish used that day. No late-night scoop of ice cream and spoon tossed nonchalantly into the sink in that household.
One of the few times we visited them in their home in London, Ontario, our car had not even fully backed down the driveway before Aunt Millie began sweeping up some dirt that Paul, Flip and I had tracked onto their walkway while playing after lunch.
“Millie’s always liked a tidy house,” my dad explained, waving at Millie one last time before we pulled away. Millie raised one hand from the broom just long enough to wave back, then continued sweeping. “I remember one Sunday dinner shortly after Dick and Millie were married. Our whole family was around the table and out of the blue my grandmother, who was rather outspoken, told everyone, ‘When we were children, we used to ask, Which would you rather have: a messy, happy wife or a tidy, grumpy one?’ ”
“Did everyone vote for the happy, messy one?” Paul asked.
My mother raised her fists and cheered. “Yes, here’s to the happy, messy one!”
“Now, now,” Dad said, a bit reproachfully. “Millie’s very sweet. I don’t think anyone voted for anyone, but I remember my mother scolding Grandmother afterwards: ‘Mother, just because you’re eighty-five doesn’t mean you can just say anything you please!’ But Grandmother just ignored her.”
Uncle Dick was an obstetrician, and in one of the most coveted (but perhaps apocryphal) chapters of family lore, he and Millie were having dinner at the local golf club—pardon me, The Club—when the woman seated opposite Millie asked if Dick had always adored babies and was that why he chose to specialize in the happy field of obstetrics.
“No,” Millie answered. “Dick had planned to go into dentistry, but he decided he didn’t want to spend all of his days sticking his fingers into other people’s mouths.” She dabbed the sides of her mouth with her napkin. “So he went into obstetrics.”
My dad and Dick had one sister, Dot, and she was as different from Millie as a woman could get without becoming another species. Dot was bold. Opinionated. Had humour up the wazoo. Laughed so hard her shoulders actually moved up and down. A lot. Believed that life was meant to be enjoyed. Had a sign in her kitchen that proudly proclaimed: A clean house is the sign of a wasted life. And an invisible one that read: Here’s the kitchen. I’ll be in the den.
Dot married young and had three children spaced fairly evenly apart followed by a fourth ten years later. Her youngest child, Amy, was Paul’s age, so we were playmate-cousins from the get-go. Dot’s husband, Oscar, was in the insurance business, but mostly I remember him lying in the den watching television, singing strange wandering tunes as he walked around the house, or calling Dot from a long distance off. “Daaaaaaawwwt?” he’d bellow from the kitchen, even if she was upstairs. “Why would you buy these carrots? They’re so small, they only last for one bite. Now, why in the world would you go and buy carrots that are so small they aren’t even real carrots? The next time you go out, just get real carrots …”
Dot rarely replied. If she was in the den, she’d grab the TV remote and turn up the volume, and if she was on the front porch, she would lift her newspaper so that it covered her face, as if the paper might shield some of the noise.
After fifty years of marriage, Oscar developed dementia and lived his last years in a nursing home. At eighty-nine, Dot still lives at home.
The last time I went to visit Aunt Dot, I let myself in the front door (everyone lets themselves in the front door at her place) and was greeted by the words, “Oh, hi, you made it! I’m in the middle of watching a golf game, so get yourself a beer from the fridge.”
In fairness, she did turn off the television a few minutes after I sat down, and we chatted and laughed until dinnertime, at which point she announced, “It’s Thursday, so I’m going to have pork and beans from a can, but you probably won’t like that, so why don’t we each just do our own damn thing?”
We did. And not long after the dinner hour, people began letting themselves in the front door and settling on the front porch with a beer from Dot’s fridge: a neighbour freshly back from a sailing trip and full of stories, a friend from across town who needed to get out of the house because her grandchildren were visiting and pushing her patience to the brink, one of Dot’s sons-in-law who was driving home and saw people on the porch so thought he’d join us, and a friend of one of Dot’s daughters, a woman my age who confessed that since her divorce, she came over all the time, because when she was around Aunt Dot she always felt good.
When my father’s brother, Dick, first learned that my dad was exploring “a homosexual lifestyle,” Dick consulted with a psychiatrist, who told him, “Once that happens, there’s nothing that can be done to change them.” Dick decided the doctor was wrong, arranging for my dad to have ten sessions with a different psychiatrist. To placate his brother, Dad agreed.
The psychiatrist walked my dad back through his life in the expected fashion: relationship with father, a hard-working man who had started out a lumberjack and ended up a judge and who died when my dad was ten (all sorts of potential paternal issues here); relationship with mother, an early feminist (more potential issues here) who died shortly after my dad and mom were married; relationship with wife, good, although my dad had found himself attracted to men throughout his life, but hadn’t acted on the desire until age forty. He had begun to explore the gay scene in Toronto and felt a welcome certainty about his sexual orientation, but he felt very conflicted about his marriage and family responsibilities. And so on.
At the end of the tenth appointment, the psychiatrist told my dad that if there was anything else he wanted to “work on,” they could continue their sessions.
“I’d like to
work on getting a man,” Dad answered. “But I don’t suppose you can help me with that.”
The psychiatrist agreed that he could not.
From that point on, Dick chose not to have any further contact with his brother.
It was not an uncommon reaction, particularly in those days, and I believe my dad expected that after some time Dick might change his mind. He did. But only on his deathbed, twenty years later, when he requested that my dad visit him in the hospital. Dick gave Dad some of their father’s papers, the two brothers had a few bedside conversations, and then Dick died.
Millie and her children invited my dad to speak at the funeral, which he did, talking about Dick in glowing terms and saying only that at one point the two of them had had different views about life and how it should be lived, but that in the end they had managed to put differences aside. “Our parents would have been proud.”
Dick’s children had never broken contact with my dad in the first place and they continue to be in touch. Millie kept up with my dad until she died.
While my dad had never been close to Dick, he and his sister Dot were two peas in a pod. Or no, that’s too sedate. They were more like two balls in a racketball court. My dad’s shoulders don’t shake up and down when he laughs, but his laughter is equally expressive in its own way (and extremely embarrassing, when you are a teenager and are taken to see a comic play, and people in the rows ahead of you turn around to see who is going whoo-hoo-hoo!). So when Dad and Dot were laughing together, the hullabaloo was enough to drive away birds perched in nearby trees. Before Dad came out, we would spend time with Dot and her family every summer in the beautiful lakeside town of Goderich, Ontario, and she and Dad always made merry, whether it was at the beach or around the dinner table, in the kitchen or on the front porch. The two of them told stories and laughed until it was late and they were exhausted and there was nothing else to do but go to bed.
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