The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition)

by Sixsmith, Martin

  ‘Sure. I know a little motel over the bridge in Gulfport if you’re interested . . .’

  They smiled at each other in mute understanding and stood up in unison. Mike reached out a hand with an unembarrassed smile.

  ‘I’m Mike, by the way,’ he said, and the man laughed.

  ‘I’m Paul. Glad to meet you.’

  Mike left while the guy was still asleep. He felt groggy and unsteady – they’d shared a bottle of Jack Daniel’s – and he’d suddenly thought he must get home before his parents woke. But as the taxi drew up at a quarter before six, Doc was already prowling the terrace sucking on a cigar.

  ‘And what hour do you call this, young man?’ he demanded as Mike lurched up the drive. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  Mike forced himself to meet his father’s gaze and prayed that the reek of the cigar would disguise the booze on his breath.

  ‘I met up with a few guys to watch the ball game. You know how it is.’

  But Doc was unconvinced. He smelt the whisky on Mike’s breath and saw the flush in his cheeks. His questions were insistent, stiffened by the threat of retribution if Mike didn’t tell the truth.

  ‘So tell me: what guys are these that you know down here, Mike? Where is it that you spent the whole night out? What have you been doing?’

  Mike’s instinctual deference, his innate fear of alienating people, spurred him to politeness, but he was certainly not going to confess the truth.

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry for getting home so late. I knew you and Mom would be worried, so I tried to get back before you woke up, that’s all. I’m sorry. I just want to take a shower and go back to bed for a couple hours, OK?’

  He pulled the blinds in his room and lay in the darkness, gripped by the inescapable fear that Doc knew exactly where he had been and exactly what he had been doing.

  Things calmed down towards the end of the vacation. Marge played the peacemaker, as usual, and it was she who broached the subject of Mike’s future: if he was going to graduate early, he needed to decide what to do next. Mike said he wanted to study law – he’d been taking pre-law courses at Notre Dame – but the question of which school he would go to still had to be resolved. Doc was categorical.

  ‘To study law you must go to the University of Iowa,’ he declared, as if announcing a universally acknowledged truth. ‘Many Hess luminaries have been through their law school and with the Hess name you will be well received by the top men in the faculty, which is a big factor in getting the sort of degree you’re gonna need in that business.’

  Mike bristled. Doc was always telling him what he should do, trying to run his life for him.

  ‘I don’t want to go back to the Midwest,’ he said in as calm a tone as he could manage. ‘I want to go to one of the big schools out East – I’ve already been in touch with a few of them.’

  ‘What?’ Doc boomed.

  Marge cut in with a pleading smile: ‘Come on, you guys – time out, time out. I’ll put on some coffee. We can all cool down and discuss this like—’

  ‘You’ve already gotten in touch with them? Without telling us? Without asking our permission?’ Doc was up and pacing the room. ‘It’d be crazy to go all that way out East, where no one knows you and no one cares about you! And all you’ll do is end up with a worse education than you’d have gotten in Iowa!’

  The two men stared at each other. Both were simmering with resentment from their earlier skirmishes, and a conversation that might otherwise have ended with a sensible compromise degenerated into ferocious argument.

  ‘I want to go out East,’ Mike repeated, and Doc snapped.

  ‘Dammit, boy!’ he yelled, sweeping the pewter ashtray off the table with a swipe of his arm. ‘You listen to me, and you listen good. When I say you go to Iowa, you go to Iowa. You go where I say or you don’t go anywhere!’

  Mike was shocked, but the momentum of the quarrel was sweeping him onwards and he could no longer put the brakes on.

  ‘What do you mean, Doc? You mean you won’t finance me to go anywhere except your precious Iowa?’ Mike stood up and scowled. ‘Well, fine! If that’s the case, screw you! I’ll do it myself!’

  FIVE

  1973

  Back at Notre Dame for his final semester, Mike was beginning to regret his bravado. He had been shocked by the tuition costs at the East Coast law schools and had begun to despair of getting to one without help from his family. But part of him revelled in the challenge: if Doc thought he was so hopeless he could never pay his own way through law school, he would show him he was wrong; and, come what may, he would now be entering a new era of independence that would liberate him from the old debilitating reliance on his parents’ goodwill.

  For the next three months Mike worked hard and excelled in his studies. He no longer tormented himself over his night-time adventures in Chicago and South Bend and rarely paid for sex any more; on several occasions had even accepted money from men who approached him thinking that he was hustling. His confidence in his own powers of attraction had grown: he’d noticed that men looked enviously at his body; he had started taking extra care with his hair and skin; and his face was slender with a wide mouth that curled easily into a dazzling smile.

  There was no question of ‘coming out’, of course – it was 1973, the tough-guy environment of Notre Dame made it virtually impossible to be openly gay, and anyway he did not want to be seen as some effeminate queen. He had abandoned the flares and flowers of his freshman year and dressed conservatively now, favouring the preppy Brooks Brothers look with casual jackets, buttoned Oxford collars, cable-knit sweaters, chinos and loafers, and he spoke in a deep mellifluous voice that announced him as a serious, thoughtful guy – not a jock, but not overtly queer either. I may be gay, he told himself, but there’s a lot more to me than that.

  The casual sex excited him, but he had emotional needs too, and in the course of that final winter in South Bend he began to feel increasingly they were not being met. When he asked himself what was missing, it dawned on him that, in spite of the countless men who came and went in his life, he was lonely.

  Kurt Rockley couldn’t have been more surprised when he opened his door to see Mike standing there with a bunch of flowers. He looked so taken aback that Mike laughed out loud.

  ‘Sorry, ’ he said, getting control of himself. ‘This isn’t how I wanted to start.’

  Kurt raised an eyebrow with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘And how did you want to start?’

  ‘I wanted to . . . apologize for the way I’ve treated you. I didn’t mean to block you out. I’ve had a lot going on.’ He tapped his forehead and shrugged. ‘I guess I had to come to terms with . . . who I am.’

  Kurt stood aside.

  ‘Well, you better come in – or are you so comfortable with who you are that you want to talk about it here in the corridor?’

  Over a pot of coffee they went over everything that had happened to them since their stolen kiss in Florida. Mike admitted to the countless hours he’d spent replaying the moment in his mind, to the guilt Father Adrian had made him feel about it, and to his more recent exploits on Rush Street.

  ‘You?’ Kurt laughed. ‘You, on Rush Street?’

  Mike laughed too.

  ‘Yeah, I know. But really it’s been good for me. I understand things now: I know I’m not the only gay man in the world.’

  Kurt cocked his head to one side. ‘You’re not the only gay man in the room, honey.’ And they both cracked up again.

  ‘Really though, I’m sorry for how I acted,’ said Mike, putting a tentative hand on Kurt’s knee.

  Kurt looked at him, serious now . ‘Mike, I can’t do this if it’s going to be like before. You know how I feel about you, but . . . those few months weren’t easy for me.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Mike said after a moment, ‘I still don’t know if I can do relationships. And you and I . . . we could never just be lovers.’

  He paused, realizing he was puttin
g things badly, wishing he’d clarified things in his own mind. The idea of a relationship scared him. He pictured the commitment, the demands, the emotional ties and the ever-present threat of rejection, and then he thought of the hustlers and casual Johns he was used to. They may despise you, but they can’t hurt you.

  He took Kurt’s face between his hands and brushed the blond hair out of his boyish eyes. ‘You’re pretty hard to resist,’ he said softly, ‘but it’s got to be only this once, OK? When we leave this room, we leave us behind . . .’

  Kurt smiled a little sadly and shrugged. ‘I guess I don’t have a choice.’ And his lips met Mike’s.

  The pre-law tutor had told Mike that George Washington University was his best bet. It wasn’t one of the top ten law schools but it was well regarded and the fees were not the highest. Its location, just a few blocks from the White House and virtually next to the State Department, meant you couldn’t get much closer to the heart of power, and for Mike that was a powerful incentive.

  At his interview he’d found the place buzzy and attractive and the faculty welcoming. GWU got over twenty applicants for every place, but they had been impressed by his grades from Notre Dame – he was about to graduate magna cum laude six months ahead of schedule – and were prepared to accept him for a doctor of law degree beginning September 1974. When Mike told them he’d be financing his studies himself, they had been dubious: tuition was over $4,000 and with living costs on top of that, he would have to work hard to pay his way. Mike had already planned to find a job between January and September, and the admissions office suggested that, once at GWU, he become a resident assistant in one of the undergraduate dorms. This would provide him with free accommodation and part of his tuition would be paid. Mike said the idea of looking after a couple of hundred undergraduates filled him with terror, but he was in no position to refuse and he signed the RA application along with his enrolment papers.

  At Christmas Mike told Doc and Marge they wouldn’t be seeing him for a while. He had landed a job as a salesman for Procter and Gamble based out of Atlanta, and he would be travelling the southern states selling cleaning products to hotels and restaurants. Marge looked sad that Mike would be away for so long, but Doc just turned his back and left the room. Later, he tried talking to Mike about politics, the oil crisis and baseball and the slump the White Sox were in. Mike sensed he was feeling bad about refusing to fund him through law school, but Doc said nothing that could be taken as an apology or an attempt to bridge the gap between them, and Mike felt no inclination to take the first step. He was sorry Marge had to suffer, but he wasn’t unhappy with how things stood: from now on he would feel no obligation towards his adoptive father, and if their relationship was cold and distant he had no desire to warm it up. The years had stored up such complex emotions between him and Doc that it was a relief not to have to deal with him any more.

  Mike spent a lot of time with his sister over Christmas; he saw Nathan’s delight as he tore the wrapping paper from his presents and congratulated Mary on her beautiful son. Thoughts of his own childhood were in his mind.

  ‘You know, Mary, I’ve been thinking,’ he said as they watched Nathan play.

  Mary laughed. ‘Oh? That makes a change.’

  But Mike was serious. ‘I’ve been thinking about trying to go back to Ireland sometime, to see where we grew up . . . You ever think about that?’

  Mary looked at him frankly. ‘Not really, Mike. I’ve got my hands full with Nathan. And anyway, you couldn’t go until after GWU – how would you afford it?’

  Mike frowned. ‘That’s true. It’s just . . . it’s been on my mind. But you’re right, it can wait. I guess my first priority is to get through the next eight months selling soap powder. ’

  ‘Yeah, and you know what they say about travelling salesmen – lots of bored housewives!’ Mary said with a smile.

  Neither Mike nor Mary knew it, but on the other side of the Atlantic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, the man whose insistence on controlling the fate of Ireland’s orphans had changed the course of their lives, was on his deathbed. According to witnesses, the prelate became agitated as death approached, saying he was frightened of dying and feared the judgement that awaited him.

  SIX

  1974–5

  When Mike arrived in Washington DC in September 1974 he had money in his bank account and a spring in his step. He had not been in the capital since his internship with Senator Dirksen and he remembered the place with a surge of excitement and renewed anticipation. His BA in government had given him a taste for politics and he was becoming more and more convinced a political career was where his future lay. He knew homophobia – particularly within the Republican Party – might make things hard for him, but he put that out of his mind. For the moment his goal was a good law degree that would open doors for him to the political establishment.

  His first impressions of Thurston Hall were not good. The 1930s red-brick on the corner of 19th and F towered above the sidewalk like a fortress. It had been an apartment block before George Washington University took it over, and its nine storeys housed a thousand or more undergraduates. Mike had been assigned residential assistant on the top floor, and as he stepped out of the elevator the noise that greeted him was overwhelming. The students lived in double rooms along a central corridor; stereos were blasting out rock music and voices seemed to be yelling from all of them at once. Mike had his own apartment with a kitchen and bathroom, and he dragged his suitcases along the corridor until he found it.

  Inside, he locked the door and slumped onto the battered sofa wondering how he was going to survive a year, or two, or three, of this pandemonium. He pulled out his RA contract and read the list of duties: ‘Providing supervision, behaviour modification and mentoring; ensuring students wake on time for class; ensuring students are dressed appropriately; monitoring personal hygiene and room/chore assignments; providing informal counselling related to stress management and personal problems; serving as a channel between students and staff . . .’ The list went on and on.

  Mike decided he needed a beer. He attached the name badge he had been given to the lapel of his jacket and ventured to the elevator. He was accosted en route by a group of freshmen demanding to know how come the refrigerator wasn’t working and how come they pay their rent and don’t get no proper service here . . . Mike looked at them, pondered briefly and told them to put it all in triplicate and send it to the dean.

  In the weeks that followed he heard plenty of horror stories about Thurston – about the sit-ins and love-ins, the protests and riots, the all-night parties and the vomit constantly on the staircases, and about its reputation as the most sexually active dorm in the university if not the whole country. In practice, things weren’t so bad: he got used to the noise and chaos, and after a couple of months no longer noticed it. The students he had care of were all freshmen, aged seventeen or eighteen, and most were well behaved. He found he didn’t have to worry about most of the duties in his contract and struck up a good rapport with a dozen students who acted as his eyes and ears on the floor. The few troublemakers he couldn’t get through to just carried on doing their thing. Mike figured it wasn’t worth trying any ‘behaviour modification’ so he let them get on with it.

  At the same time he was finding his feet in law school. After the relaxed atmosphere of Notre Dame, GW’s students seemed driven and serious. Mike had learned the basics of the legal system in his pre-law classes and now opted to major in constitutional law. He was fascinated by the way legal issues influenced the country’s political life and he decided to write his thesis about electoral redistricting – gerrymandering. The topic had been a hot one since the 1970 census had resulted in changes to the number of representatives each state sent to Congress. States whose populations had risen were apportioned more seats in Washington and those where voting numbers had declined were given fewer. Controversy had arisen over the way some states had redrawn their electoral districts to reflect their revised n
umbers of seats. In several cases there had been allegations that the party controlling the state legislature had fixed the new boundaries to group voters in the way most likely to get its own candidates elected. Some ludicrously shaped districts had been created and the most blatant cases of gerrymandering were being challenged in the courts.

  While Mike admired the others in his class, he didn’t warm to them as friends. He wanted a life outside the lecture hall and his talents as a DJ opened doors for him. In the middle of his first year at GW he landed a job at the university radio station WRGW filling in for one of the regular presenters who was off sick. He played a mix of music that spanned current chart hits from Bowie, Lou Reed and the Stones to 1960s Motown classics, Bob Dylan and sentimental ballads by Barbra Streisand and Dolly Parton. The management liked his eclectic tastes and his rich, moody voice. After his first show he got enough good feedback from listeners to be offered more work, and by the end of his first year at GW he was pretty much established as the station’s number-one late-night DJ. In his second year he got his own show, Mike at Nite, which ran from 10 p.m. to midnight and was the station’s most popular slot.

  Afterwards, he would plunge into the gay clubs and cruise bars. Many were located in the worst parts of Washington, in the rough streets of South-East DC between South Capitol Street and the freeway, but Mike didn’t mind; he liked the fact that it put some distance between his diurnal existence in the cosseted prosperity of comfortable NW and his other, nocturnal life. He was adept at compartmentalizing his world, and it was a kind of insurance policy to have the compartments far removed.

  Most times he preferred understated bars where the clientele submerged their daytime identities in a uniform dress code that made a company president indistinguishable from a penniless hustler, a painter in oils from a house painter, a published author from a trash collector. All forsook their Armani suits, dungarees and military fatigues to don the gay uniform of tight T-shirt and jeans. They forgot their constraints in a warmth and solidarity that led to remarkable trust. Mike met guys who worked for senators and congressmen, for public figures and big law firms, and even a CIA operative who revealed his profession despite the security risk.