The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  Terry had argued from my uncle and aunt’s point of view. ‘You’ve torn away their privacy and revealed the truth in your book. Your uncle and aunt grew up in small towns in Ireland, and you’ve revealed the truth to their doctor friends, businesspeople, solicitors, what they felt was unnecessary to reveal about their background, about your father, and you expect them to be delighted about that?’

  ‘But you’d have imagined they’d all have been horrified by what I described,’ I said. ‘It merits an apology from somebody, anybody; one of them, whoever “them” could be …’ trailing off, feeling dejected. ‘Well, that just confirms that they can’t be present, seated in the middle of the room like some baleful, simmering presence, and while all around them people are celebrating us: it’d be dreadful, for all of our sakes.’

  I looked at Terry seated in his armchair, tired from a day’s work, the strain from battling the pain of his polio holding his face in a mask. He made an appeal to me. ‘I’m finding it very difficult to deal with you these past few days. I wish it was different with your family, but it’s not. They’re very undeveloped,’ he suggested.

  ‘You don’t want them to be there.’

  Terry shook his head. ‘It’s your decision, and it has to be your decision, but for my part I’d be relieved if they weren’t there.’ So my partner had made up his mind that he didn’t want my uncle and aunt there on his special day, and his welfare is my priority, as mine is his. I too didn’t want to be worried about anybody’s responses on the day: I didn’t want to have to limit myself through minding the susceptibilities of others when I’ve already revealed the truth in my book. When I’d publically say to Terry, ‘I give you this ring as a token of my love,’ I didn’t want to feel that there were people looking on who were cringing inside with embarrassment at the openness of our affection for each other, whose heads hung lower as they shrank back into their seats, or who were in two minds about any aspect of our lives together, or worse, were so crippled with shame about us, that they felt they had to maintain ‘a dignified silence’ which excluded me.

  ‘Imagine!’ was my mother’s injunction. Imagine for a moment that these hostile and disagreeable people weren’t related to me. Would I want to have them present on the occasion of our civil partnership? Would I even regard them as friends in the first place? The answer to both questions comes winging through the air to present loud and clear before me like the apparition of a ten-foot archangel rolling open a scroll of parchment. Inscribed there in large golden lettering is the phrase ‘under no circumstances!’ And yet, I catch myself ambling about at the edges of my thinking, seeking a way in for them unbeknownst to myself, in order to wangle for them yet another invitation to come and participate joyfully. The archangel with the scroll metamorphoses into an elegant matador holding his cape, who shifts position slightly on the sand, moving his weight from one leg to the other. But he holds steadfast, and raises the open cape so that it directly crosses my line of my sight: ‘under no circumstances!’ is writ there large, waving in the wind, portending the eruption of danger.

  ‘I’m finding it very hard,’ I said. ‘There’s the strongest pull deep in my guts to overlook all of the mess and to just invite them once again!’

  ‘Well, you love your family,’ proffered Terry, clear-eyed, matter-of-factly. It was a concept that I hadn’t considered, until it was named. ‘You always said that if you won the lottery, you’d share your millions with them!’

  That was the truth: I love the members of my family, and I always have. ‘Love and aggressivity both: they seem to be interdependent. And the conflict is tearing me in two.’

  ‘If you plump for one side over the other, the conflict will disappear,’ he said airily. ‘But what I don’t understand is why you constantly reference them, why they matter so much to you?’

  ‘I love them,’ I said, ‘and love matters!’

  I still feel guilty over the sadness of an incident that occurred, when for some reason I’d spent one night in the family home. My brother and I were seated around the dining table at breakfast eating our porridge, when my grandmother came around the back way, carrying a small jug with the top of the milk for me. I was happily triumphant in telling her that I’d almost finished my porridge, so I didn’t need the cream. Instinctively I knew that by rejecting her kindness, I was demonstrating that there was no differentiation between me and my brother, and that I was where I wanted to belong. Granny turned away without saying anything further and went back home carrying her jug. As I swallowed the final spoonfuls, I felt desolate in the knowledge that I was displaced, yet unable to comprehend a truth which my parents had in their possession, perhaps locked away even from them. Today, I still feel like an only child longing for playmates, perplexed by the intricacies of negotiating friendships. I want my two remaining relatives in Ireland to be there to witness and lend familial importance to a major event in my life, and to be happy for me. Declan Dunne, the Chief Sub Editor on the radio desk in the RTÉ newsroom, sent me an email entitled ‘joyous day’ accepting his invitation. He wrote, ‘I would be delighted to attend and celebrate a great day with you, your other friends, and family,’ so he takes for granted that my family will be there. But any appeal to my family for validation has always been marked by insecurity, because it never has had the desired outcome. I should look for the guarantor elsewhere.

  I’m hoping that by signing the register, the defining relationship will shift from that with my family to the relationship I’ve forged with my partner. To validate means to have the force of law, and to be legally binding, which will be one of the effects of entering into a civil partnership. After the ceremony, a new phenomenon in Ireland, we were invited to come onto the Saturday Night with Miriam show on RTÉ television, and she asked me how Terry and I met. I explained that I was producing and directing a programme for RTÉ on an outside-broadcast unit at the Rutland Centre, Ireland’s premier addiction treatment centre, where Terry was working as a psychotherapist at the time. Since we couldn’t film the clients, staff-members role-played those in treatment, and Terry played himself running a group therapy session. I told her I’d the opportunity to see him in action over the three long, twelve-hour days that the taping took. I explained that a producer/director is trained to make an instant judgement about everything and everyone that appears in shot. I could see Terry’s integrity, and the truth that guided his explorer’s soul: Terry was somebody I could entrust my life to. Over those three days, my conviction about him grew. When we held a celebratory dinner at the end of the recording, I made sure that I was sitting beside him.

  There was a phone call to the Sandyford consulting rooms from a producer on the John Murray Show. The fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great Swiss analyst, Carl Jung, was coming up on the following Tuesday, and she wondered whether I’d be in a position to come on the show and talk about his life, his achievements, and what effect his legacy has had on people.

  ‘I’d be honoured to talk about one of my psychoanalytic heroes!’

  Terry drove me in to the radio studio, and he sat in the control room while I talked about Jung’s achievements with John Murray, after the nine o’clock morning news. At the end of what was a long interview in radio terms – twenty minutes – John asked, ‘What’s this I hear about a big event in your life coming up soon?’

  ‘This day week I’ll be undergoing a civil partnership ceremony with Terry, my partner of twenty-six years.’

  ‘We’ll talk some more about this after the break,’ said John. ‘And maybe Terry, who’s out there in the darkness, will come in and join us on air.’

  During the break, a shocked Terry joined us reluctantly in the studio, and he talked about the ceremony. ‘Being gay is a legal way of being. For me that’s what it means … The state requires a solemn moment when you have to make a vow in the company of a registrar and two witnesses.’ And he went on, ‘I’m remembering about my father who fought in the War of Independence. He fought for an egalitarian
republic. He was a fine man, troubled: Ireland hurt him, and we were hurt as well. One thing I can say about him – I can never speak for him, but my experience of him – he would be standing proud beside me today, proud of this era in our history. He taught me to have allegiance to a republic …’

  ‘… that all of us are to be cherished equally,’ I added, quoting the 1916 proclamation.

  There’s no word for it: there’s as yet no designation for two men who’ve signed the register at a registry office. A card from my cousin Mary in Chiswick was printed on the front ‘MR & MR’ which was the first of its type that I’d seen. It formed a satisfying graphic. Taragh sent an email in which she referred to ‘You and your partner, now husband Terry are an inspiration …’ which sounded an incongruous further step, with ambivalently disparaging echoes about who’s the wife which weren’t intended, even though husband means master of the house, male spouse, married man, developed from hus, house, and bondi, householder. My lawyer in Spain wrote, ‘I think the positive coverage will be a cause of great hope and pride for many who may have had apprehensions about taking the CP step,’ his legal training confining him within the civil partnership context, but which remained abbreviated, as if awaiting formal ratification, a secret yet to be spoken about. It showed hesitancy appropriate to the newness of the situation. Ultimately, from my experience of living in a relationship with Terry, I feel most comfortable with the word partner, one that shares or has a part with another, a companion or ally, even though the word never before passed into my speech, and certainly never was acknowledged publicly by us up to now. The word partner encompasses both the state of affairs prior to signing the register, and one who’s become part of a contractual relationship, which a civil partnership is. Partner can also mean being a member of a married couple, without straining the understanding of the word. Nevertheless, a specific word for same-sex couples who’ve signed the register is absent from the vocabulary.

  Our progression towards a public civil partnership ceremony has been part of a deeper process that has burgeoned since the publication of my first book, and I have cancer to thank for it. Over a quarter of a century, Terry and I have lived a private life together within the safe and constant parameters of friends who’ve supported us, and of family, who had seemed to regard our living arrangements with forbearance. But when my memoir appeared in print, those boundaries disappeared. Strangers would stop me in the street to say how much they enjoyed reading my book. On the Publishing Ireland stand at the Craft Fair in Dublin’s RDS, I was signing my book for a middle-aged woman, when she turned aside towards Terry, who was seated behind and to my left. ‘Is this your partner?’ she asked. ‘Hello – my name is Mary,’ and she held out her hand to him.

  He looked astonished.

  ‘I’ve seen your photograph in the book,’ she explained.

  I reflected that so much has changed in Ireland, where a person in a greeting can indicate recognition of a same-sex partner. In the hospital before the prostatectomy operation, I was asked, ‘Who is your next of kin?’

  ‘Terry O’Sullivan, I suppose.’

  ‘And what is her mobile number?’

  ‘Terry is a he. His mobile number is …’ A programme of education has since been rolled out in the major teaching hospitals to bring their personnel up to speed on the legal changes that have been put in place. The simple question, ‘Who is your next of kin?’ is not a legal question that I’m used to answering. It’s all bewilderingly new.

  We were driving back to Dublin from Castlebar, having undergone, yet again, the grief-filled trial of visiting my mother in the nursing home. She’d been sleepy, and had mostly kept her eyes closed, and said nothing during the visit, hadn’t really acknowledged our presence. It was spitting with rain, and there was a double rainbow arcing across the threatening skies. Terry was doing the driving. I turned down the music on the radio.

  ‘When I was little,’ I said to him, ‘I earnestly believed there was a pot of gold in the field at the end of the rainbow.’

  He looked over at me. ‘There is, Michael,’ he said simply, and he took hold of my hand. His loving gesture bound us together.

  The magic of poetry returns to the world when fear disappears. As the former president, Mary Robinson, said in her preface to the first book, ‘I wanted to shine a light in the darkness, a darkness of ignorance, of prejudice, violence, fear and hopelessness, all of whose spreading cancers assault us as human beings, and which attack at the roots the free flowering of the human spirit.’ It takes special people who are graced with the gift of love to remind us of that: they merit being held dear in a loose embrace. And my partner, Terry, is one of those special people.

  Anna came up from Spain to attend the not-a-wedding. The night before the ceremony, Terry and I sat with her on the floor of the bedroom surrounded by several different ties and bow ties, and she helped us choose the ones which looked the best: a light blue bow tie with white spots to go with Terry’s white shirt and dark navy suit, and a pink tie with white spots for my blue shirt, and the dark navy suit. In the subsequent laughter-filled photographs, they worked well together.

  Tuesday, the fourteenth of June, dawned clear and calm. The sun shone out of a cloudless blue sky. It warmed our backs as we stood outside the gates of our apartment in Stillorgan, waiting for Tiernan and Barbara to arrive in the Land Rover, and the beginning of our progress towards the Registry Office on Grand Canal Street, and the start of an exuberant, emotional day that was to carry us shoulder high on the palpable goodwill and well-wishing from everyone that we were to meet.

  The Registrar began by asking Terry and me to reaffirm that there was still no impediment to a civil partnership, and then she led each of us in turn into the declaration of the three vows. It was an intense, emotionally charged experience. For over a quarter of a century we’ve had to wait for this moment, with no expectation that it would come to pass in our lifetime. We realised that we were undergoing a definitive ritual in formally committing ourselves to each other, and blocking off the possibility that we could simply walk away from the relationship when it no longer suited, a possibility that we’d never seriously entertained. Our future path was to be together until death parted us. Because of the newness of the legislation in Ireland, we knew that we were also making a little bit of history.

  ‘I declare my intention to love and support you, and I declare that I accept you as a civil partner in accordance with the law.’

  The legal basis which grounded our relationship was not only welcome, it was a relief. We always operated a joint bank account without reckoning who was earning the most money at any particular time, and the joint assessment of income tax would make sense of the notional reality by which we operated in any case. We were of the opinion that this public declaration in front of my family of friends put beyond reach any potential challenge to the wills that we’d drawn up, a real fear of interference after my death that Terry had expressed to me on more than one occasion.

  ‘I pledge to share my life with you. I promise to love, honour and support you. I will respect you and be true to you, through good times and bad. To these promises, I give my word.’

  These promises were easy for me to make where Terry was concerned. I have respect for who he is. He carries an ideal which makes it easy for me to love, honour and support him. Over the years we’ve forged an alliance which has been tested through the good times and bad. We’ve grown closer in our likes and dislikes in music and in art, and we understand how we like to spend our time, and enjoy our holidays.

  ‘I give you this ring as a token of my love, a symbol of all that we have promised, and all that we now share.’

  When I suggested to Terry that we buy rings for the ceremony, he pointed out that he loves the Cartier ring he wears, as it happens, a lanières wedding band in yellow gold that I’d bought for him previously. He likes the fact that it’s chunky, and has bevelled sides. ‘What d’you take me for?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘I’d never we
ar a second ring at the same time!’ For my fiftieth birthday that we’d celebrated in Spain, Terry had bought me a Cartier trinity ring in pink, yellow and white gold. The day beforehand he’d made sangria with oranges, red wine and loads of sugar. The almost instantaneous migraine was so incapacitating that he had to call the doctor, who merely injected me for the death-inducing pain, when what I craved was a beheading. The following day I can remember swaying in a fugue outside Cohen’s jeweller’s shop in Gibraltar, when Terry went inside to buy the ring, trying to grip the cobbles with the toes in my shoes in order to continue to stand upright, and not to collapse in the street. I love the simple slimness of the trinity ring, because it embodies the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept called the borromean knot: the three orders of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real are interdependent like the three rings, which are linked in such a way that if one of them is severed, all three of them separate. In psychoanalytic terms, this unravelling results in psychosis, but the three working in tandem signify sanity. When I wear the ring, or touch it, rolling it around on my finger, I’m invoking this healthy, psychological position. Since we both appreciate the beauty of the Cartier rings we already possessed, we decided to consecrate them during the civil partnership ceremony, and set them apart as sacred symbols of our love for each other. That expression of love passed into language is still so new for me, that I hesitate after writing the sentence down.

  My gift to Terry on the day of entering our formal partnership was a special poem I wrote for him, which I’d perfected over the previous weeks. I’d recited it over and over in my mind like a mantra, rearranging and refining the words so that eventually on the day, it was those words which were speaking me. The rhythm of the poetry became the heartbeat of the whole world, which characterised the extraordinariness of the day as a day of duende. The poem was both a prayer and an invocation, and it grew into a sacred text that we included in the civil partnership ceremony as an epithalamion, a song or a poem traditionally composed to celebrate a wedding. Perhaps it was the first epithalamion ever to be given on the occasion of a Civil Partnership Ceremony. Henceforth, it will be known simply as ‘A Poem for Terry’: