The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition)

by Sixsmith, Martin

  One morning in March Roger Allan Moore knocked on Mike’s door and said he had had a message from Gerry Hauer.

  ‘What he wants, it seems, is, ahm, a copy of the District’s anti-sodomy legislation. I know you’re busy with Davis v. Bandemer, of course, but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind . . .’

  Mike looked up at the tall figure prowling round his office and felt a surge of affection. Roger could have located the legislation himself, but this was his tactful way of alerting Mike that something was afoot that he should be aware of.

  ‘Ahm, yes,’ Roger continued. ‘Seems the White House have been talking to Reverend Falwell and his, ahm, Moral Majority people about this and, you know—’

  ‘I do, Roger. Thank you for giving me—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Roger cut in. There was evidently something he wanted to convey and he was having difficulty expressing it. ‘It’s to do with the repeal campaign, of course. The legislation’s a nonsense – leftover from the puritans in the seventeenth century; been a godsend for blackmailers and the police wanting to coerce gay men for far too long; bosses using sodomy charges to fire people. Quite despicable. It darn well should be repealed, but I don’t think it’s going to be . . .’

  Mike looked up at Roger and tried to read the meaning in his eyes.

  ‘No. Ahm, unlikely to be repealed, because the Reverend has been agitating against it and it looks like the administration are going to go along with him.’

  Mike nodded and this time Roger let him speak.

  ‘Thank you, Roger. That’s useful to know. I’ll get the legislation out and send it to Mr Hauer.’

  Roger was about to leave when a spasm of violent coughing gripped him. Mike rushed to help and saw blood in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘My God, Roger, are you OK? What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Nothing at all.’ Roger stifled his coughing. ‘But I just wonder, you know, are we all a little guilty – you and I included – of blindly devoting ourselves to keeping the party in power, and never pausing to think exactly what we’re keeping in power? Remind me to talk to you about Chaim Rumkowski one day, will you.’

  And with that he disappeared through the door.

  In the summer of 1982 Pete Nilsson was offered a job in the marketing department of the National Restaurants Association. His contract with his former employers obliged him to take two months’ time out before beginning his new position, and he decided to spend it with his family on the West Coast. It would be the longest period Pete and Mike had been apart for many months’ and it came at a moment when they were both thinking seriously about their relationship. Just before Pete left, Mike asked if he would like to move in with him at the apartment in the Wyoming Building when he came back. Pete tried to contain his excitement.

  ‘That’s a possibility, Mike. Definitely a possibility. But, you know, I’d be kind of sad to give up my place on the Hill. You know what? We both loved Shepherdstown, didn’t we? If you go find us a cottage out there in West Virginia, then how about I give up my place in DC and we split our lives between weekdays in your apartment and weekends in the country?’ The pretence at playing it cool had gone now. ‘It would be so great, Mike. I could get some horses and we can have dogs . . . and think of all the parties we could have out there. We’d be like local squires inviting people to our country estate.’

  Pete sounded so much like an excited little boy that Mike couldn’t help laughing. He resolved to find the most beautiful cottage in West Virginia, with roses round the door.

  While Pete was away Mike travelled out to Shepherdstown and met with Sally Shepherd. In the coffee shop on German Street he explained, cautiously, that he and Pete were a couple.

  Sally laughed. ‘Don’t you think I know that? We’re not all country bumpkins out here – or not all as naive as my dear old father, anyway.’

  ‘Well, it’s not something we really want to broadcast, you know.’ Mike fell silent as the waitress appeared with a refill for their coffee. ‘It can be difficult in the world I work in. But anyway, we really loved the time we spent here and we’re thinking of looking for a little place to buy. I don’t suppose you happen to—’

  Sally didn’t even let him finish his sentence. ‘The perfect place! I know the perfect place for you. There’s a cottage near the estate that’s vacant and you can have it for a song – or half a song! How does that sound?’

  ‘That . . . sounds . . . marvellous.’

  Bellevue, the big house where Sally lived with her parents a mile out of town, was an old colonial-style mansion sitting atop an escarpment surrounded by tall trees, with a beautiful southern portico and wrought-iron balconies. The whole estate was thickly wooded and lay in a bend of the Potomac. The cottage was much more modest, but it had four rooms and breathtaking views down to the water. It was far enough away from Bellevue to be private, but close enough not to feel cut off.

  Mike loved it at once and gave Sally a delighted hug.

  ‘Behave yourself, Mr Hess!’ she giggled, hugging him back. ‘Or my father will be hiring the church and the hotel for the wedding reception before you can say, “I do.”’

  That evening they had supper with Sally’s parents, who were enchanted by the idea of the boys moving into the cottage.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ declared Henry; ‘I know everyone in Shepherdstown. I’ll get you the best bargain you ever had in your life!’

  A week later Mike flew out to California to spend a weekend with Pete and his sister Diane at the Nilsson family cabin in the mountains near Lake Tahoe. He brought photos of the Shepherdstown cottage, and the three of them spent the evening marvelling at the good fortune of finding such a wonderful place to live and at how fabulous life would be once Pete and Mike were settled there. The cottage came with a range of outbuildings – a hayloft and a silo and enough space to stable horses – and it was fifty minutes by train from DC to Harper’s Ferry, followed by an easy twelve-mile drive.

  ‘. . . so we can keep the old Fiat at the Harper’s Ferry train station, go out to the cottage every Friday after work and get the early train back on Monday morning,’ Mike announced.

  They chatted for hours that night.

  ‘So, Mr Michael Hess, tell us about this Irish ancestry you mentioned,’ Diane said.

  Mike stretched back on the sofa and put his hands behind his head. Pete poured them all some whisky and Mike told the tale of Marge and Doc, how they had wanted a little girl back in the 1950s and how Marge had come to Ireland for Mary.

  ‘. . . but when Marge came to see her in the orphanage, Mary only talked to this little boy named Anthony. Whenever Mary was around, Anthony was around; if Anthony wasn’t there, Mary would withdraw into herself. So Marge got to know Anthony as well, without ever really thinking about it. Then the night Marge was leaving she went into the nursery to say goodbye to Mary and Mary was sleeping, but little Anthony was standing in his crib and she said goodbye to him and started walking out. And he’s saying to her the whole time, “Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.” She turned around and looked at him waving in his crib and went right to the telephone in the convent and said, “Doc, can I bring back two of them?”’

  Pete looked at his sister and saw she had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Do you remember anything about the place?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I once went back, actually, and there were places I definitely remembered. I remember the nursery; I remember this hall or that staircase . . . but nothing about my mother, and that’s pretty tough.’

  At the end of the evening, Pete asked his sister what she thought of Mike.

  ‘He’s lovely, Pete, and I like him a lot, but that’s some sad story about Ireland, isn’t it? He’s . . . He seems like a pretty complicated guy.’

  Pete nodded. ‘Yeah, he’s cut up about not being able to find his mother, so I think he pictures Ireland as some kind of lost paradise he’s been expelled from. I think it torments him but it gives him his security too. He’s never really
felt like a Hess, so Ireland is this unattainable, wonderful thing out there that he can wrap around him like a warm blanket . . .’

  Two days later, Mike and Pete agreed they would buy the cottage. It was an unspoken confirmation that now they were partners and committed for the long term. At the airport in San Francisco they hugged and kissed and cried.

  ‘I love you, Mike,’ Pete whispered. ‘I don’t think I ever said that to anyone before.’

  ‘I love you, too, Pete. I want to be with you and live with you and grow old with you.’

  In the airport terminal Mike bought a copy of the Bay Area Reporter, a San Francisco gay newspaper. He opened it on the plane but the man sitting next to him in the business suit that reeked of cigars kept looking over his shoulder, so he put it away until the guy fell asleep. The front page carried an article that Mike read from start to finish with a growing sense of alarm.

  A baffling and often deadly sickness is claiming hundreds of lives in the gay community. Young, otherwise healthy gay men are dying of diseases their immune systems would normally see off. But something is allowing these innocuous infections to overwhelm them.

  The new disease has a nightmarish quality – fungi grow round its victims’ fingernails, once handsome faces sag with lesions – and it has no name: physicians in San Francisco sign death certificates with FUO (fever of unknown origin), but elsewhere they speak of KSOI (Kaposi’s sarcoma and opportunistic infections) or GRID (gay related immune deficiency); the latest issue of the New York Magazine has called it The Gay Plague.

  As Larry Kramer says, those who have been stricken do not appear to have done anything that many gay men haven’t done at one time or another. We’re appalled this is happening to them and terrified it could happen to us.

  It’s easy to become frightened that one of the many things we’ve done or taken over the past years may be all it takes for a cancer to grow inside of us.

  But this is our disease and we must take care of each other and ourselves.

  Mike caught the Washington Flyer from Dulles Airport to downtown DC and the Metro up to Dupont. On the table in the living room Bob McMullen had left Mike’s mail in a neat pile. Inside a large envelope with the logo of a New York law firm he found another envelope labelled in Harry Chapman’s distinctive handwriting: ‘To Michael Hess – to be mailed only after my death.’

  SIX

  1982

  The house-warming party Mike and Pete threw at the cottage made a stir in Washington’s gay community. It was the end of August 1982 and the weather was welcoming – a stroke of good fortune for the 300 young men who arrived in Shepherdstown by car, bus, bike and cab because the hotels for miles around had been booked up weeks before and most of them would be sleeping in tents. The party started on a Friday night and lasted until Sunday. They hired a DJ from New York and set up two walls of speakers in a field, with hay bales marking out an impromptu dance floor that stayed floodlit throughout the night. Mike and Pete agreed to invite only gay buddies – the presence of work colleagues or straight friends would have been inhibiting – so the atmosphere was one of relaxed sexual indulgence. Those who had hotel rooms shuttled back and forth with various different partners, and those who did not would disappear into the surrounding woods or the tents which stood in the adjoining meadow.

  An observer might have thought the legion of America’s gilded youth had pitched its camp here, striking boys wandering in skimpy shorts and Speedos through the feather grass down to the water. On Sunday a dozen of them remained, lying on the hay bales in the warm evening air. As night came Mike sang ‘Danny Boy’, quietly at first, then letting his voice rise clear and loud into the darkness. Pete said the night made him think of Baudelaire’s sensuous traveller embarking on his voyage to the realm of luxury and love: ‘How sweet it is to live in the land of love, love until death, where the world falls asleep in a warm glow of light and ships sail the oceans to satisfy your slightest desires. Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté.’

  Pete’s French was good, but another voice rose from the shadows, a voice both familiar and unidentified.

  ‘Baudelaire also wrote, “The island of Venus is no more,”’ said the voice.

  The sweet fair isle of secrets and flowers which filled our minds with love and languor is become a barren rock, where on a three-armed gibbet ferocious birds peck open the ripening corpse of a hangèd man whose heavy intestines fall down along his thighs and sharp beaks castrate him like razors. Ridiculous hanged man, your sufferings are mine! At the sight of your dangling limbs I feel the bitter river of my sorrows rise up like vomit to my teeth. O Lord, give me the courage to contemplate without disgust my lacerated body and poor infected soul!

  A week later the nameless dread was given a name: a bulletin from the Centers for Disease Control in September 1982 contained the first reference to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and shortly afterwards the Wall Street Journal reported that non-homosexuals were also among the sick: NEW, OFTEN-FATAL ILLNESS IN HOMOSEXUALS TURNS UP IN WOMEN, HETEROSEXUAL MALES.

  The plague was no longer confined to a community the straight world could isolate and condemn, and gay men were blamed for endangering all of society with ‘their’ deadly disease. The stigma of AIDS opened the floodgates of poison: Patrick Buchanan of the Moral Majority said homosexuals had declared war on nature and nature was exacting awful retribution; Jerry Falwell said AIDS was God’s judgement on a society that did not live by His rules.

  In December 1982 the CDC reported that three heterosexual haemophiliacs had died from AIDS-related infections. They had had no homosexual contact but all had received Factor VIII concentrates, a transfusion product made by pooling blood from hundreds of donors. The realization that AIDS could be transmitted through the transfer of contaminated blood spread panic. Falwell seized on people’s fears by telling a Moral Majority rally, ‘gay men are going out of their way to donate blood three times as often as ordinary folks because they know they’re going to die and they want to take as many people with them as they can’.

  The White House remained silent, and its silence was taken as a go-ahead to the preachers of hate. In the anti-gay hysteria the campaign to repeal the DC sodomy laws fell at the first hurdle and Republican Party conventions in several states added another plank to their platforms – that homosexuals should be denied the social, political and economic rights guaranteed to others.

  SEVEN

  1983

  On a Saturday afternoon in May 1983 Mike and Pete were in Shepherdstown when Mary called, sounding alarmed. Marge had been having back trouble on and off since her first operation in 1966 and the doctors had recommended she go in again to have some spurs of bone removed. It was a routine procedure and Doc had consulted his colleagues to see which hospital had the best record, eventually deciding on Mayo Clinic up in Rochester, Minnesota, not far from the Hesses’ summer vacation cottage.

  Marge had been admitted on Mother’s Day, 8 May, but Mary was ringing to say there was some bad news: routine pre-operation tests had revealed a spot on her left lung that the doctors thought might be cancerous, and they had decided to operate on that instead of the bone spurs. Doc was in Minnesota on his own, and since it now looked like Marge’s treatment would be more complicated and last longer than expected, he had asked if any of the children could go up and help him out. Mary wanted to go, but she was having trouble finding someone to look after Nathan.

  ‘Don’t worry, ’ Mike said at once. ‘You stay where you are; I’ll go on the next flight I can get onto. Do you know when they’re planning to operate?’

  ‘Well, tomorrow,’ Mary replied glumly. ‘And Mom’ll probably be in for two weeks or more.’

  At Mayo Clinic Mike found Doc in the waiting room smoking a cigar. He steeled himself.

  ‘Hey, Pop.’

  Doc shook his son’s hand.

  ‘Michael,’ he grunted.

  ‘How is she?’ Mike asked.

  ‘We
ll . . . the operation went OK, it seems. She’s in bed now, resting. She seems pretty well, all things considered. You know your mother. She won’t complain to nobody.’

  They visited her that afternoon and found her in remarkably good spirits. The nurses said she was a model patient, calm and focused on making a full recovery. The X-rays showed the surgery had removed the tumour, so the goal of the coming weeks would be recuperation and physiotherapy to get her fit and mobile.

  Relieved, Mike returned the same evening to sit with Marge as she drifted in and out of sedated sleep. Alone at her bedside in the quiet half-light, he gazed at the woman who had changed his life, reliving the events of the childhood she had given him. Without her he would never have known America, never have risen to the position he held at the heart of the world’s most powerful nation; above all, he would never have met the man who had brought him happiness and with whom he planned to spend the rest of his days. He squeezed Marge’s sleeping hand.

  ‘Thank you, Mom,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you for everything.’

  Pete was pleased to hear from Mike that Tom and Stevie Hess were on their way to relieve him at their mother’s bedside. If all went well, Mike said, he could be back home in a few days.

  ‘The main thing is it looks like she’s going to be fine. But you know, Pete, it’s amazing how it makes you think. I just sit there at her bedside and I remember everything. She’s been a good mom to me and Mary, but’ – he hesitated – ‘there are so many things I need to ask her, you know? Just in case something happens to her.’

  Four days went by and the doctors said Marge was making excellent progress. The nurses were getting her back on her feet, walking her slowly up and down the ward. Mike, Doc, Tom and Stevie felt confident enough to go out for lunch, but when they returned Marge’s bed was empty and unmade, and when Doc asked at the nurses’ station no one seemed to know where she was.