Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  One young man got up to read and his words were so angry and in-your-face I was startled. It was like an indictment of all the friends and family who were not homosexuals. Protectively, I looked over at my parents. My mother was looking straight ahead, her expression was completely blank. She wasn’t hearing anything. Dad had his head bent, discreetly crying into his handkerchief.

  Of course the service moved on, through more music, more poems, more prayers. Still, it was the poem of the young man that stayed with me.

  At the cemetery, I shook hand after hand of people I’d known all my life and people I’d never seen before. They all were touched by Mike’s life in some way.

  Under the bright green awning I was claustrophobic. As if he sensed what I was feeling, Sam took my hand. I thought of how many times when I was little and afraid that Mike had done the very same thing.

  The gravesite was so covered in flowers that if I squinted, I could almost imagine that no casket was even there. But I didn’t have the luxury of such a fantasy. Mike was gone. Mom and Dad would be depending upon me.

  When the last prayer was spoken and the final admonition to turn to dust was made, we headed for the long black limo. The funeral director drove us back to Mike’s house, which was immediately filled with flowers.

  The family formed an impromptu reception line as neighbors, visitors and consolers of every sort made a path to the door.

  I shook hand after hand, often of people I didn’t know.

  “Thank you, so much.”

  “You are so kind.”

  “I’m sure Mike would have appreciated you being here.”

  My own responses began to sound automatic and insincere even to my own ears.

  In a long line of men I’d never met, I looked up and saw a familiar face. The sight was as welcome as a life preserver to a drowning victim.

  “Dr. Muldrew,” I said, surprised.

  He ignored my offered hand and wrapped me in a big, generous hug. “Corrie, I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I answered. Then at the risk of being rude to people waiting to talk to me, I asked to speak to him privately.

  We moved away from the front entry, through the house and out the sliding glass door to the little brick patio. The day was as gray and overcast as my mood, but the shoots of green in the lawn and on the trees weren’t quite the dull colorlessness that I felt.

  We sat down across from each other at the picnic table.

  “When I said I wanted to run into you on another occasion, this wasn’t it,” I told him.

  He nodded and gave me a little smile.

  “I’ve been here several times to see Mike,” he told me. “I’ve met your husband. He’s a nice guy. I like him.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I feel mostly numb. It’s strange how you know this is going to happen, you expect it to happen, you’re waiting for it to happen, and when it does, it just feels like a terrible surprise.”

  “I want to reassure you,” he said. “That although I’m sure you’ll quite naturally feel tremendous sadness and grief for a while, don’t worry that you’ll fall back into that dark place you were in before. We’re just beginning to understand the physiological components of psychological distress. But statistically, you’re not a lot more vulnerable than anyone else.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little bit startled. “I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of getting depressed again.”

  “That’s good,” he told me. “It’s very positive to just keep moving forward. But if you begin to feel like you’re relapsing, give me a call. We can get you back into treatment, back on the medication very quickly.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “That wasn’t what you wanted to ask me?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I told him. “I really wanted to find out about the young man who read that poem, the one about our ‘straight’ jacket.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Muldrew said, nodding. “Cliff.” He hesitated as if collecting his thoughts. “Cliff is an angry guy,” he said finally. “I’m sorry if what he said hurt you.”

  “It did hurt,” I admitted. “More than that, I really didn’t understand it. Everybody who was here, everybody who supported Mike during his illness and showed up at his funeral…we all loved Mike…gay or straight, we all loved him.”

  Dr. Muldrew agreed. “But sometimes love itself can be a burden. It can hold us back.”

  I glanced at him skeptically. “I’m not sure I believe that,” I told him.

  “Did you ever wonder why Mike didn’t have a partner?” he asked. “Why he didn’t have one permanent man in his life?”

  “I guess I never thought about it,” I said. “He never mentioned anyone. Whenever I’d asked him about his love life, even before I knew he was gay, he always said that there was nobody special.”

  “Because there wasn’t,” Dr. Muldrew said. “Mike could never commit to anyone because he felt as if it was unfair to do so while he was in the closet. He was in the closet because he loved you and your parents. And he thought that admitting that he was gay would be a terrible disappointment to his family. So he played it straight even if he wasn’t. And he cheated himself out of the kind of intimate relationship that every human being deserves to enjoy.”

  “So it’s our fault, because he loved us?”

  “No, ultimately everyone is responsible for his own life,” Dr. Muldrew said. “If Mike cheated himself out of a life partner because he was afraid to trust his family with the truth about himself, then that was his mistake and his loss.”

  “I honestly don’t know how we would have felt if he’d have told us he was gay, without telling us that he was dying,” I said.

  “From what I’ve seen,” Dr. Muldrew said, “all of you, even your mother, would have done just fine.”

  “Still, Cliff probably does have cause to be mad at us,” I said.

  “In a way, I guess he does,” he said. “Cliff isn’t mad at you specifically. He’s angry because sometimes it seems that even when our heterosexual families and friends love us, they never seem to make much effort to understand us.”

  I was beginning to think I didn’t understand anyone.

  Cherry Dale showed up at the funeral, virtually unrecognizable beneath the bruises. All the rumors that had been whispered around town for years now were suddenly evidenced and it wasn’t pretty. Even the Reverend Shue was aghast at the sight of her.

  “What happened?” I asked her, though in my heart I already knew the answer.

  “Floyd didn’t want me to come to Mike’s funeral,” she told me. “I never go out when I’m beaten up, so he beat me up to keep me from going out.”

  I felt a rush of anger and hatred for Floyd, but they were almost overshadowed by my guilt about Cherry Dale.

  “Mike was a good friend to me,” she told me. “Floyd would have had to break my neck to keep me away from here.”

  The thought of what the woman was going through made me nauseous.

  “What can we do to help you, Cherry Dale?” I asked her.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I know how to handle Floyd. I’ll be fine.”

  She didn’t look as if she was going to be fine.

  “Nate’s not going back to that house,” I whispered to Sam as I passed him in the hallway.

  He nodded agreement.

  “Even seeing it, I can’t believe it,” he said. “Do you think I should call the sheriff?”

  “She says that she can handle it,” I told him. “If she won’t help herself, can anyone else really help her?”

  It was a rhetorical question and Sam didn’t try to answer. I knew he felt as badly as I did. We had both been so busy with our lives and distracted with our situation, we’d tried to ignore what was happening. We could no longer do that. If we couldn’t help Cherry Dale, at least we could take our son away from there.

 
At Mike’s house friends continued to drop by. Mom was so much at her best, dressed in a suit that Mike had picked out for her years ago, she was the elegant caring hostess. As the afternoon dragged on forever, she was still smiling, but I knew that she was emotionally exhausted. I hope that I never know what it is like to bury my own child. My heart went out to her. I wanted to help.

  Lauren and Nate were becoming very bored, so I asked Mom to take them to her house. I whispered in Lauren’s ear that it would be a good idea to get her grandma to take a nap. She gave me a wink to signal her willingness to be a co-conspirator. It was amazing how suddenly my little girl who needed all my attention and protection had turned into a strong young woman that I could depend upon.

  As the circle of people dwindled, the reminiscences became more bittersweet. Ultimately, it was just me and Sam and Doc remembering Mike and laughing about things that may have happened ten years earlier.

  “I always felt bad about losing his money,” Sam said.

  My dad patted him on the knee. “I’m sure he was much happier to give it to you than to the doctors and hospitals and drug companies.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “We’ll have to sell his house to pay off what he owes,” my father continued. “We’ll be lucky if that gets his estate in the black. He left his half of the drugstore to me. It’s not worth much. I don’t think we could even find a buyer if we looked for one.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  A thoughtful silence settled among the three of us. It was Sam who finally broke it.

  “He hung in there a long time,” he said. “I never would have believed that he’d hold on as long as he did.”

  It was true. We’d seen him come back time and time again when the doctors had warned us that he was nearly gone.

  My father nodded. “You never gave him the drugs, did you?”

  Sam seemed surprised.

  “Yes, of course I did,” he said.

  “When?”

  “The day that you gave them to me,” Sam told him.

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much,” Sam replied. “I handed the bottle to him and he looked inside and thanked me and said that it was perfect.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked them.

  My father hesitated for a moment, as if not sure how much to reveal. Then with a sigh he explained it all.

  “Mike asked me to give him something to end it,” my father said. “He said if it got too bad, he wanted to be in control of how and when to go.”

  My heart caught in my throat.

  “Oh, Daddy, that must have been so terrible for you,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Mike told me exactly what he wanted. He’d thought it through completely. He even showed up to sign the schedule, so that if an auditor ever questioned the discrepancy, it wouldn’t put my license in jeopardy.”

  “That’s Mike,” Sam said. “Always looking out for somebody else.”

  “He never took them,” my father said. There was a puzzling question in his tone.

  “Maybe he did,” Sam said.

  “No.” Dad was shaking his head. “Digitalis and morphine in those doses—it was enough to kill a healthy man at twice Mike’s weight. He would have gone very quickly.”

  “The last two days,” Sam said sadly, “he had so much fluid in his lungs it was as if he were drowning in slow motion.”

  “He’d planned it all through so thoroughly,” my father pointed out. “When someone is that focused…well, I was sure he was going through with it.”

  “I guess he just decided to tough it out,” I said.

  Dad didn’t seem as convinced as he did worried.

  “Do you have any idea what he did with the drugs?” he asked Sam.

  “He put them in the drawer of the bedside table. They’re probably still there.”

  Sam got up and went into the bedroom.

  The expression on my father’s face was pained.

  “I don’t know how to feel,” he said to me. “When Mike asked me for the drugs, I tried to talk him out of it. But he was adamant, certain he didn’t even want to discuss it. I’m happy that he didn’t take his life. I’m happy that I had no part in causing his death. But I know how determined he was. He was like the Mike we’d always known, seeing something that had to be done and taking charge to do it. In that way, I was kind of proud.”

  Dad’s eyes welled up with tears and I took him in my arms. We had both cried a lot that day. But not like this, not together. Somehow the connection made the hurt more painful and the release more cleansing.

  We were still clutching each other for support when Sam came back into the room.

  “They’re not there,” he said. “No pills, no bottle, no nothing.”

  Sam

  1993

  After Mike’s death my priority became getting a job and providing for my family. That didn’t seem like it should be an unreasonable expectation. That’s what husbands and fathers did. They worked every day, brought home paychecks, bought houses, saved for a rainy day. I was thirty-five years old. I hadn’t held a regular full-time job for five years. My oldest was getting ready to start high school and I didn’t have one thin dime saved toward a college education.

  The job market was encouraging. Tulsa had really begun to turn the corner on its future, no longer solely dependent upon the oil industry. I was not, however, the ideal candidate for a job in the new economy. I had a high school diploma and a big hole in my résumé. When I’d left the workforce, computers were big machines that office personnel had on their desks. Now even the fast-food restaurants were using them. I had no computer skills. I couldn’t even type.

  I had more than one human resources receptionist look over the top of her glasses at me like I was an idiot. I got into a night class at the vo-tech center. I never could learn to keyboard worth a damn, but if you could click it with a mouse, then I could run a computer.

  Mike’s parents sold his house for a good price and managed to cover his debts. I moved into the Maynards’ along with the rest of my family. It was a large, three-bedroom home, luxurious by Lumkee standards fifty years earlier. But with all of us crowded into it, it was very close quarters. Since Corrie was already sharing a room with Lauren, I was obliged to share with Nate.

  It had been so long since my wife and I had had a room together, I could hardly remember what that was like. As for sex, well I guess when you’re in your thirties, sex just ceases to exist.

  What seemed to me as the logical thing to do was to move the family into a nice, good-size apartment in Tulsa. We could be near Corrie’s work and school and there would be a lot more opportunities for me to find a job.

  Of course, what is logical is not always possible. The kids went ballistic at the mention of a new school. Lauren lay on her bed and cried for half a day. Nate cursed and threw things and threatened to run away. Corrie’s parents didn’t say a word to discourage us, but they looked so old and so fragile. It was hard on them having us underfoot, but it was also a little frightening to be left on their own.

  As it happened, we didn’t have to move out into our own place just yet. Cy Walker, one of my old clients who’d lost his company, was now a contractor for a major oil subsidiary. He offered me a job.

  “I’ve got a CO2 push going in West Texas,” he told me. “And I’m trying to start up a steam flood out near Bakersfield, California. I know you can do the work and I could sure use the help.”

  It was a great opportunity and good money. I couldn’t turn it down. Corrie drove me to the airport. She walked with me down to the gate and waited with me for the plane.

  “It’s kind of crazy,” I told her. “We’ve never really been apart, but lately it seems like we haven’t been together.”

  “What?” she said. Obviously distracted, she hadn’t heard what I’d said.

  “Hey, I love you, Corrie,” I responded.

  She smiled. “You’re a good man, Sam,” she told me. “
Be careful out there and don’t take chances.”

  “I won’t,” I assured her.

  “I don’t know how Lumkee will get along without tamales once a week,” she said.

  “I suspect they’ll manage.”

  They called my flight and Corrie jumped to her feet, almost as if she was eager to see me go.

  “I’ll phone home a lot,” I promised. “If anything happens, don’t hesitate to call me on the cell. I’ll have it with me all the time.”

  She nodded. “We’ll be fine, don’t worry about us.”

  That was, of course, impossible.

  I checked in for an extended stay at a reasonably priced chain motel on the interstate. Nothing there but cable TV and a restaurant, but there was enough work to keep me from getting too bored.

  The oil field we were working was in the middle of a cotton field. It had a number of low-producing wells. Steam flooding, infusing high-pressure steam into the rock, is a technique used to thin the syrupy molecules of oil that are trapped in rifts and crevices. By changing the viscosity, the oil flows from the fissures into the main reservoirs so that it can be pumped out. I’d never done it in Oklahoma, where the crude is graded as light and sweet. But the oil in Bakersfield was heavier and more susceptible to the steam flood. Injection wells had to be drilled, three times as many as those producing. Fortunately, they could be shallow, just a little over 3,000 feet. Once they were completed and attached to the steam generator, the small bits of trapped oil would coalesce into the larger pools that were retrievable with conventional methods.

  It was work that I understood and was good at doing. I didn’t mind working for somebody else and I quickly earned the trust and confidence of the crew. But I was not one of the decision-makers. Neither the problems nor the solutions were mine to stew over. Somehow, that took a lot of the satisfaction out of the job.

  But I was glad to be working, glad to be providing for my family at last. When Corrie told me that she was thinking about going on to graduate school, it felt great to say, “Yeah, honey, I think you should go. And I think you should go full-time.”

  “It just gives me so many more options,” she explained. “I love teaching, but I think you can burn out too quickly. I want to be able to choose my classroom, not be imprisoned by it.”