by Joel Derfner
I assume that French enthusiasm for the civil solidarity pact is at least in part a reaction against the country’s heavily Catholic history, but America, without that history, is beginning to have some statistics of its own, and if you’re of the marriage-is-in-danger school you won’t find them reassuring. Between June 1 of 2011 and May 31 of 2012, the first year civil-union licenses were available in Cook County, Illinois, for example, 212 of the 2,504 issued were for straight couples. How many tens or hundreds of thousands of potential heterosexual American marriages will Illinois’s civil union law destroy in the next ten years?
In Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan, a pastoral letter issued in 2009 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the ecclesiasts of the largest religion in the world tell us they are “troubled that far too many people do not understand what it means to say that marriage . . . is a blessing and a gift from God. . . . Young people esteem marriage as an ideal but can be reluctant to make the actual commitment necessary to enter and sustain it. Some choose instead to live in cohabiting relationships that may or may not lead to marriage and can be detrimental to the well-being of their children and themselves.”
Can the members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops be pleased that, as more and more states create alternatives to marriage, trying desperately to keep same-sex couples from full equality, young people reluctant to make the commitment have more and more legally sanctioned options to forgo the hassle of the vows and the solemnity and the till-death-do-us-part and skip right to the tax benefits?
It’s been a while since I slept with a Catholic bishop, but I have to believe the answer is no.
Notice, by the way, that with the exception of the subtitle of this book I am avoiding the phrase “gay marriage.” This is because I think, along with Evan Wolfson, founder of the marriage-equality organization Freedom to Marry and author of Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry, that the sooner we’re rid of it, the better. As I see it, any adjectival qualification can only limit the idea of marriage, can only make it less than just plain marriage. In 1967, Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple who took Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute to the Supreme Court and watched it topple into oblivion, didn’t want to get interracial married; they wanted to get married. In ancient Rome, low-ranking soldiers were for a time forbidden to marry; those who found this burdensome didn’t want, one presumes, to get military married; they wanted to get married.
I didn’t want to get gay married.
I wanted to get married.
(Of course, comedienne Liz Feldman said all this much more succinctly: “It’s very dear to me, the issue of gay marriage. Or, as I like to call it, ‘marriage.’ You know, because I had lunch this afternoon, not gay lunch. I parked my car, I didn’t gay park it.”)
The practical result for me of all these arguments about marriage was that, since I was unwilling to accept any store-brand knockoffs, Mike’s proposal in 2007 was in a way completely theoretical: there was nowhere in the United States he and I could wed. (Same-sexers could marry in Massachusetts, true, but, except in rare cases, only if they lived there.)
And then the California Supreme Court ruled that the law banning marriage equality in that state was unconstitutional. And since California had no problem granting marriage licenses to out-of-staters, this meant that Mike and I could now marry each other legally in the United States.
When I read about the decision, on May 15, 2008, at 3:30 in the afternoon (it had been issued at 2:00 but I had a deadline for an article at 3:00 and then I had to spend half an hour looking at pictures of naked men online), I burst into uncontrollable sobs, because I had just been released from a cage I hadn’t known I was in.
I have a tendency, my friends have been unkind enough to note on occasion, to hyperbole. But in this case I mean exactly what I say; I really couldn’t control the sobs. I sobbed and wept and wailed for an hour and a half, and every time I tried to stop I just got louder. I started worrying that I was alarming my neighbors, and since my neighbors were crack dealers (on the right) and a really judgmental schoolteacher (on the left, and much more frightening) I didn’t see how bothering them would do me any good.
Finally I thought, All right, this is getting ridiculous. If I don’t do something soon I’ll dehydrate myself. . . . I know, I’ll go shopping! I tried to work up the motivation to walk to the Key Foods three blocks away, but it always seems so far and I’d already exhausted most of my energy in bawling, so I went to the more expensive Met Foods around the corner.
And the thing is: shopping felt different.
As I picked up a pint of chocolate peanut butter truffle ice cream, I thought, I am buying this ice cream as somebody with the right to be married.
As I put the grasshopper cookies into my cart, I thought, I am buying these cookies as somebody who very well may, at some point in the foreseeable future, be married.
As I dropped the pound of M&Ms onto the conveyor at the checkout, I thought, On the other hand maybe I should put these back, or I might not end up getting married after all.
I don’t know how to explain it. I was no different than I’d been at noon. Federal law was no different. New York State law was no different. But I was living in a world that felt like it had just become a little fairer.
Naturally, Mike and I started making plans to go out to California to stay with my relatives and get legally married there—we’d do the actual ceremony with guests and flowers and stuff back east, since all my friends were writers and actors and therefore too poor to travel to the west coast for an event at which I could guarantee them neither the possibility of publication/production nor sex—and, naturally, I immediately ruined those plans, by going to Los Angeles to give a reading for Swish and not telling my aunt Suzie I was there.
Suzie has been my surrogate mother for twenty years, ever since my biological mother died; an actual fairy godmother could not have supported me more devotedly. My only excuse for not calling her was that I found the whole trip overwhelming and I really wanted nothing more than just to stay in my hotel room watching TV and eating candy from the mini-bar. Karma charged me dearly for my neglect; the reading, in a cavernous room, was attended by a humiliating five people, which pulled me right back to my senior year of high school, when I invited the whole class to my birthday party and three people came. This time around I tried for like forty-five seconds to give a reading and then gave up and sat down and had a conversation with the people who had shown up, which ended up being a slightly mind-blowing exploration of same-sexer history, since the oldest person there was seventy and the youngest was twenty. When the seventy-year-old said he still couldn’t fathom the idea that gay people could get married, the twenty-year-old said, “Oh, God, all it means to me is that my mother has started calling me all the time, asking me when my boyfriend and I are going to tie the knot already, and it’s driving me crazy.”
But I hadn’t paid enough in shame; a few weeks later one of my cousins learned that I’d been there and enough of the Los Angeles branch of my family got (rightly) upset enough that going out to Los Angeles to stay with them and get married became a tricky proposition. Mike and I decided therefore to delay.
This delay turned out to be costly, but it might very well have been for the best. “We construct marriage and its meaning,” writes Julia Sullivan in Conversations With My Friends, “out of the examples that our families put before us.” And if that was true, then Mike and I had some pretty complex building materials to figure out.
2
Researching Family Marriage Traditions
In the meantime, while I figured out a way to apologize to my family in Los Angeles, I figured I ought to get Mike an engagement ring, if only so that if he went to a bar he would now be forced to expend a modicum of effort to appear available, though since his bar visits coincide with the appearances of Halley’s Comet I didn’t have much to worry about. The problem was that the ring
Mike had given me was Cartier, and the oceans of money that publishing a book and writing musicals had brought me left me just shy of a position to buy him a ring made by Mattel. I was absolutely certain I could afford one of those lollipop rings, but at the age of thirty-seven I felt I ought to aim higher. Eventually I hit upon a brilliant idea, which was to give Mike the ring my father had worn while married to my mother. My father assented to this plan and said he’d send me the ring as soon as he could find it.
The thing is, the plan to use my dad’s wedding ring was not unproblematic. My parents had an unusual courtship, and I wasn’t sure that adding its echo to our ceremony was the right idea.
In 1967, my father, who was married to a woman named Marcy, worked at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, where he had the worst secretary in the world. I have tried and tried to get him to tell me what made her so awful, but evidently she so traumatized him that he’s repressed all specific memories of her; in any case, one day she told him she’d been offered a job with one of Covington & Burling’s clients, a railroad company, and that the job was so good it would be hard for her to turn down. “Amy, as much as it pains me,” said my father with a straight face, “I cannot stand in your way.” Then he went home and threw a party.
The next day he went to the head of the steno pool and said, “Barbara, I need a new secretary, and I’d like Mrs. Ward.” Mary Frances Ward had worked for him a few times, when Amy was out sick or when he needed additional help with a project, and he had found her both skilled and amiable.
“That’s too bad,” said Barbara, “because you can’t have her.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“She doesn’t know shorthand. And we don’t assign secretaries who don’t know shorthand to individual lawyers. They have to stay in the steno pool.”
“Well, then, that’s perfect,” said my father, “because I don’t do dictation.”
“You still can’t have her,” said Barbara.
“Why not?”
“She’s too valuable in the pool. I’m not willing to give her up.”
“Well, I want her.”
“That’s nice. You can’t have her.”
A day or two later my father passed Mrs. Ward in the hall and she took the opportunity to tell him how much she appreciated his request. “But they won’t let me. I don’t know shorthand.”
“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” said my father with what I like to imagine was an impish grin. And a few days later Mrs. Ward was assigned to be his secretary.
“She was terrific,” he said, sipping Coke in my kitchen when I finally got him to tell me this story a few years ago. “She typed 100 words a minute, in those old days, before computers, was brilliant, knew everything—in fact, for the first time, and probably almost the last time, I was able to tell a secretary, ‘Write him a letter saying such-and-so,’ and then I’d get back a letter saying it better than I could have written it myself.”
Mrs. Ward was not without her own inner imp. When my father’s typewriter stopped working, for example, she came over to his desk, took a look at it, and said, “Oh, you just need to replace the fan belt.”
“A typewriter has a fan belt?” my father asked.
“Sure. It’s just like a car,” she assured him. “The moving parts break down.” So my father called the office manager and asked for a replacement fan belt.
“Typewriters don’t have fan belts,” said the office manager. “Your secretary must be Mrs. Ward.”
Employees of Covington & Burling worked a half-day every weekend, so when one Saturday my father finished early he asked Mrs. Ward whether she wanted to get a sandwich for lunch with him. I must be very, very clear that this was not a date. Not only were they both married, my father was at the time even more socially imperceptive than he is now, and two years ago the rent boy was actually taking his clothes off in my father’s hotel room before he realized what was happening.
“Sure,” said Mrs. Ward. “I’ll just call my husband when we’re done.” (She didn’t drive, which meant that her husband, Freddy, brought her to work and picked her up at the end of the day.) So she and my father took a walk and sat outside in the park, eating sandwiches and talking about things that had nothing to do with work. Three hours later, they got back to the office and she called Freddy to come pick her up.
On Monday, when my dad came in, her first words to him were, “I’m sorry, Mr. Derfner, but I can’t work for you anymore.”
“What?” my father said.
“My husband was really mad on Saturday that I took so long at lunch and came home so late, and he says I can’t work for you anymore.”
“What?” repeated my father. “I don’t get it. Let’s get some sandwiches at lunch and talk about this.” And when lunchtime came they walked down to the grassy area behind the White House, where the story came out.
“Freddy called a bunch of times to pick me up on Saturday afternoon,” she said, “and the girl who answered the phone said, ‘She went out to have a sandwich with her boss.’ The first couple of times that wasn’t a problem, but he kept calling and he kept getting the same answer, and when he finally came to pick me up, he said, ‘Okay, there’s still time.’ And I said to him, ‘Time for what?’ He said, ‘Time to go to confession.’ I said, ‘Wha—? Freddy, nothing happened. We didn’t—we had lunch, we had sandwiches, we talked.’”
So Mrs. Ward and my father continued trying to figure out what to do about the situation, and at some point she said, “The problem is, I could be veering in that direction.”
“And that,” my father told me, “hit me like a punch in the side of the head. And I said the immortal, classic, Shakespearean words: ‘You’d be pretty easy to veer toward too.’”
Iacta alea est.
“Well, look,” said my father finally, “I still want you to work for me.”
“I still want to work for you.”
“Maybe you can talk some sense into him? Change his mind?”
“Well,” she said, “I’ll try, but I’m not sure it’ll do any good.” And indeed, when she came in the next morning, it was to report that her efforts had yielded no fruit; Freddy was still insistent that she have nothing more to do with her boss.
“Okay,” said my dad. “Uh . . . let’s get a sandwich and talk about it again.”
“When I got married the first time,” he explained to me, “Marcy and I were just kids, you know, and sort of inexperienced—not so much inexperienced at anything in particular, but just inexperienced in life. The marriage was okay while we were at Yale, while I was in law school, which was the first two years. It was a hothouse, and we could flourish. After we moved to Washington, it just didn’t work, for a whole bunch of reasons. You grow, you become different people, whatever it was. And the way I measured it was in terms of my disposition. I like to think that I’m basically not a grouchy guy, I’m a sunny guy. But I had just become a grouch. For example, two years in a row at Covington & Burling I was voted Sunshine Man of the Year. I was so dumb I thought it was a compliment. But that day in the park I just felt so light, so good.”
They began an affair.
She told Freddy about it almost immediately, and within the week he had moved out, so my father spent a lot of time at her apartment, doing what people having affairs usually do and listening to music in between. “The song we played most often,” my father told me, “was Glen Campbell’s ‘Gentle on My Mind.’ It talks about leaving somebody, and leaving her crying, but we were so happy.”
Then, one weekend, my father’s wife went to Pennsylvania to visit her parents, and he spent the entire weekend with Mrs. Ward, agonizing. “I knew what my mind and my heart were telling me,” he said to me, “but it was an alien process. When I was growing up, we had this one distant cousin, we called him ‘Stanley, the divorced one.’ I’m serious. I never heard of anybody who got divorced. When I was in Washington I’d heard of a few more, but it was still something very strange.” By the end of
the weekend he had yet to come to a decision.
Fast forward to Monday morning. (“You can’t do that!” I screamed at him in my kitchen. “Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?” he said, and I shut my mouth.) My dad came in to work and on his desk was Glen Campbell’s album Gentle on My Mind. And Mrs. Ward had left him a note that said, “I know you couldn’t leave Marcy. I will treasure forever the moments we’ve had. I don’t blame you for anything, because it’s been wonderful for me. And this record is just a symbol of my love.”
So he went into the secretaries’ office and asked the other secretaries to give him and Mrs. Ward a few minutes. “Mary Frances,” he said, “I left Marcy last night.” And the rest of the moment was, he vows, like a Hollywood movie.
By this time, he had already gotten a call from the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee about whether he would move to Mississippi to do civil rights work; after mulling it over for a while, he decided he would go. When the news transpired, Mrs. Ward was called into the office of Mr. Burling, one of the firm’s founding partners. “Mrs. Ward,” he said, looking stern, “I understand that you and Armand are thinking of leaving.” And she said nervously, yes, that’s right, but I’ve had a wonderful time working here, it’s been such a rewarding experience. “Armand Derfner is a brilliant young lawyer,” he said, “with a bright future here.” Burling was apparently an imposing man, and the longer he looked at her the more frightened she grew. “But,” he said finally, “there are a lot of brilliant young lawyers with bright futures here, so losing him won’t be a problem. Would you be willing to stay?”