Because school was easy for me and I had expressed an interest in becoming a lawyer—I’m not sure I can tell you why—my father decided that he wanted to see me go to Harvard Law School, which eventually I did. “You must understand, Steven,” he once told me, “the world is stupid, always judging a man not by his true quality, but by his family connections or wealth or where he went to school. Go to Harvard Law School, which is probably no better than any place else—God knows, some of the worst people in the country seem to have graduated from it—and I promise all sorts of doors will open up for you.”
So I gave up playing on the baseball and track teams in high school and concentrated on my studies with sufficient intensity to get into Harvard. Entry into Harvard Law, after my undergraduate years, when I also devoted myself to my studies, proved no difficulty.
If my father was pleased by my accomplishments, he failed to mention it. He was right, though, about Harvard Law School opening doors. I was on the Review there, graduated in the top tenth of my class, and was offered a job at the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where I have remained all these years, specializing in estate planning; eight years ago, at the age of thirty-six, I was made a partner.
My main point is that I always viewed my father as a bit—maybe more than a bit—of a cold fish. So the news that he was gay, which suggested that all the years of his marriage he was smoldering with a secret passion underneath his cool exterior, raised a good bit the voltage of my shock at Ellie’s announcement.
I have no strong opinions about homosexuality. Although I knew a fair number of gay guys and a few lesbians at Harvard, I have never had a friend who was gay, nor even a gay acquaintance I saw with any regularity. I’m reasonably sure that no one at Sullivan & Cromwell is homosexual, partners or associates, male or female, at least as far as I can determine. But then, let’s face it, I have no reason to be impressed with the efficiency of my gaydar, when I never had the least clue that my own father is gay.
When I called Ellie that evening from home, hoping she could fill me in on more details about her discovery of our father’s homosexuality, she didn’t have all that much to add. She reminded me that our father, after our mother’s death three years ago, moved out of Hyde Park, the university neighborhood, and bought a three-bedroom apartment on Sheridan Road off Glenlake overlooking Lake Michigan. He installed his “catamite,” as Ellie called the man living with him, in one of the bedrooms, kept the master bedroom for himself, and used the third bedroom for his study. He was writing a book on the history of the American press, a project he had long talked about but never had much time for when working at the University of Chicago.
“He seems happy,” Ellie reported. “When I left his apartment, he even hugged me—me, his wretched troublemaking daughter, the wicked witch of the West—if you can visualize that. But why don’t you come see for yourself?”
I decided I would, and booked a flight for the following Friday, planning to return on Sunday. I called my father, telling him that I had some business in Chicago and would like it if we could meet for lunch or dinner on Saturday. The truth was, I hadn’t seen all that much of him since our mother died, and I didn’t want him to think I was coming in as a result of what he would likely suspect was Ellie’s news about his being gay. He told me to come ahead, suggesting that lunch on Saturday was best. He said that he had someone he wanted me to meet. He didn’t invite me to stay over at his place while I was in Chicago.
I suppose I could have stayed at Ellie’s apartment. So far as I knew, at the moment she was living alone. But the prospect of the chaos of my sister’s life, which figured to be reflected in her living arrangements, put me off, so I booked a room at The Drake.
Ellie picked me up at O’Hare in her eleven-year-old Honda. As I threw my bag into her trunk, I noted her several bumper stickers: for the past two Democrat party candidates for president, others that read, If Animals Could Talk, We’d All Be Vegetarians; Yoga Ain’t for Yuppies; If You’re Pro-Choice, Follow Me to The Polls; Save the Earth, We’ll Destroy the Other Planets Later, and a combined white cross, Jewish star and Islamic crescent on a blue background used to spell out the word Co-Exist. I noticed that she also had a peace sign tattooed on the inner wrist of her left hand.
Having had a brief fling as a modern dancer, Ellie was working part-time as a Pilates instructor, filling in her income with work as an office temp. Five years younger than me, she was approaching forty, and, as far as I could see, utterly unsettled in life, though she did not seem particularly concerned about it. Last year I made a shade under three-quarters of a million dollars. I mention this because a few years ago I asked Ellie if I could possibly help her out with a few grand a month. She thanked me but said she was doing fine as it is in a way that made it clear that the subject of accepting money from her older brother wasn’t really open for discussion.
I loved my sister without being especially close to her, if you can understand that. My two kids, Sarah and Aaron, especially loved their Aunt Ellie. Every Jewish kid needs a crazy aunt, and for them Ellie filled the bill nicely. Ellie and I had our own Aunt Sally, my mother’s younger, also unmarried, sister who danced the hora more wildly than anyone else at Jewish weddings and bar-mitzvah parties, and fed us popcorn and Jell-O for dinner when she stayed with us during those times when our parents went out of town by themselves. Our kids didn’t see all that much of their Aunt Ellie, but they didn’t seem to need to see much of her to love her.
Ellie and I stopped on the way to The Drake for an early dinner at a restaurant on Halsted Street called Vinci. We had pasta dishes, and I ordered a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Awaiting our food, we settled into discussing Topic Number One.
“So Steven,” Ellie said, “what’s your take on our old man’s hot new sex life?”
“Truth is,” I said, “I can’t get my mind around it. If you’d called and said Dad had knocked up a woman forty years younger than him, or was running for the United States Senate, this I could have taken in. But our father being gay, that’s something else again.”
“Pretty wild,” Ellie said. “On the other hand, why not? I mean who knows what secret desires people carry around. Most people take these buried desires to their graves, where they get buried for good. Not our father. Give him credit for that.”
“I’m not sure that credit is what is at stake,” I said.
“You didn’t expect him to ask our permission to be gay, did you?” she said. “You’re not thinking of disowning him, I hope.”
Leave it to Ellie to think outside of the box. But, then, in her entire life she had never really been inside the box.
“What kind of homosexual is he, by the way?” I asked. “Flamin’? Swish? Leather? Milquetoasty? I can’t imagine him as any of these basic types. There was never anything the least effeminate about our father. Or did I miss something? Was I asleep at the wheel all the years we grew up with him? Did you ever sense he was gay?”
“I didn’t have a notion. As for the kind of homosexual Dad is, he defies all categories by being absolutely his old self,” Ellie said. “He looks and acts and is the old Dad, except now, in his late sixties, he happens to be sleeping with a man thirty or so years younger than himself.”
“What do you suppose they do?”
“I’ve long ago ceased much to care what people do in bed,” Ellie said, “unless it’s my bed. Still, it’s amusing to think of our dignified papa as amorous, let alone with a man.”
“Why doesn’t it amuse me?”
“Maybe,” Ellie said, “that is a question you need to ask yourself.”
“What I can’t get over is his having lived almost his entire life with so deep a secret at the center of his existence. That can’t have been easy. Who knows, it may also have made him the refrigerator of a father that he was.”
“I find it hard to imagine him any other way, a father with a built-in ice-cube maker.”
&n
bsp; “And yet you find it easy to imagine him gay?”
“I guess I don’t find it a problem,” Ellie said.
“If I ever figure out why I do, I’ll let you know,” I replied.
I was to pick my father up for lunch at his new—to me at least, who hadn’t seen him for nearly a year—apartment at 6101 N. Sheridan Road. When I rang from the desk in the lobby, a voice other than my father’s answered and said that I was expected and to come on up, apartment 38A.
I was met at the door by a slender man in, I estimated, his early thirties, tanned, with coppery-colored hair and almost periwinkle blue eyes. He was wearing chino trousers, a blue button-down shirt under a red V-neck sweater, white tennis shoes. He looked to me like nothing so much as a recently and happily retired surfer.
“Hi. Your dad’ll be out in a minute,” he said. “I’m Randy Thernstrum,” and he put out his hand for me to shake.
As I was shaking his hand, I thought, perversely, my father couldn’t at least find a Jewish gay man, of which I gathered there was no shortage?
“This apartment has spectacular views,” I said.
“Doesn’t it, though,” Randy said. “It practically sits out over the lake. Your dad told me that he always wanted to live looking out at Lake Michigan, the only point of topographical interest in our fair but extremely flat city.”
The east portion of the apartment was all glass, with its southernmost portion opening on to a small balcony on which my father had installed a gas grill and a small ironwork table and two chairs and from which there was a clear view of the skyscrapers in downtown Chicago. Light flooded in; the rich azure of the lake provided, in effect, the eastern wall of the apartment. My father had bought all new furniture for the place; at least I recognized none of the things from our Hyde Park apartment on Kimbark Avenue. Everything was modern, glass and black leather, elegant but a touch severe, nothing like the slightly overstuffed, chintz-covered comfy furniture our mother favored in our old apartment.
“Your dad tells me that you’re a very successful New York lawyer,” Randy said. “Pretty awesome.”
“Not as successful as some,” I said. “But tell me, what do you do?”
“I’m an administrator at a charter school on the west side, in the Austin neighborhood.”
“Done that long?”
“Two years. Before that I taught American history at St. Scholastica High School in Rogers Park.”
“Have you known my dad for long?” I asked, wanting to discover if my father had been seeing him when my mother was still alive.
“Less than a year,” he said, “but we hit it off immediately.”
Just then my father walked into the room, looking very much like, well, as Ellie said, like himself. I’m not sure what I expected him to look like. I assumed a loosened collar maybe, a pair of gym shoes, possibly jeans. But, no, he was in his standard get-up: gray trousers, white shirt, black knit tie, brown tweed jacket, tasseled oxblood loafers, closely shaved, as always. He kept himself slender, his black hair now streaked with gray was only just beginning to thin out slightly at the front.
He is still an attractive man, I thought, and then, good God, wondered if I was regarding my father homosexually.
“I see you and Randy have introduced yourselves. Allow us a couple of hours for lunch,” he said to Randy.
“Take care, Henry,” Randy said to my father. “I’ll hold down the fort. Good to meet you Steven.” We shook hands once again.
In the elevator, my father said, “Randy’s eleven years younger than you, Steven. You realize that if he were a girl of the same age you would have had no choice but to think me an old fool. It occurs to me, though, that an old fool might be preferable to what you might actually think of me.” So he knew that I knew about his homosexuality, and there would be no need for a nervous announcement. Good.
“Let’s wait for lunch to talk about all that, Dad,” I said.
My father chose a Chinese restaurant on Broadway called Mei Shung. Rather a drab place, with ten or eleven tables, only one other of which was currently occupied, by a bald, heavyset man reading the sports section from the Trib while tucking into a large plate of fried rice.
After we ordered—kung-pao for my father, Mongolian beef for me—we talked about beside-the-point things. I asked what he had done with the furniture from the old Hyde Park house. He asked how I found my sister. I asked if he was making any progress with his book. He told me it was going slowly but going. He asked how the shaky economy was affecting my business. I asked about his health. He asked about his grandchildren, in whom he had never taken all that keen an interest.
Finally, more than halfway through the lunch, my father said, “You know, Steven, there’s an old Arab proverb that runs, ‘When your son becomes a man, make him your brother.’ You have long been a man, but I suspect that you may have some doubts just now about whether you want me for a brother. Were you surprised to learn about my—how to put this?—my latent, now manifest, proclivities?”
“Stunned is more like it. How long has this been going on?”
“‘How long has this been going on?’ You’re too young to know it, but that happens to be the title of a June Christie torch song from the 1950s. But to answer your question: it has been going on just about all my conscious life.”
“You always knew you were gay?”
“Small correction: at my age I always knew I was not gay but queer, and I wasn’t at all pleased about it. I thought it a bad card dealt from a stacked deck, though who did the actual stacking I cannot say even now.”
“What did you do about it?”
“What could I do? Two possibilities: give into it or fight it. I chose the latter. Marrying your mother was of course part of the fight. You have to remember, Steven, that in my day, before victimhood was a happy state, being homosexual was thought a major affliction—a thing that could, and if it got out usually did, crush a man, also a boy, in every way. I chose to avoid being crushed.”
“Did mother know?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. We certainly never discussed it.”
“Are you bisexual?”
“I don’t happen to believe there are any bisexuals, at any rate not of a pure kind. Maybe some men are able to make love to men and women with equal passion, but I’ve never met one. I think among homosexual men and women there are some who can tolerate, and with imaginative resources sometimes enjoy, making love with people of the opposite sex. I suppose I was one of these.”
“Forgive my interrogating you like this.”
“No need for apology. You have a right.”
“Did you see other men when you were married to mother?”
“I never did. I don’t know whether because I was afraid of getting caught or because I thought I would be doing her a double injustice. The initial injustice, of course, was marrying her in the first place.”
“Why did you stay with her after Ellie and I were out of the house?”
“Because—and I hope you will believe this—I loved your mother. And because I thought she needed a man’s protection, mine specifically, someone who knew all her weaknesses and could stand between her and the world. My sexual predilection doesn’t eliminate my manly instincts, Steven, please believe that.”
“So you waited until mother died to live an openly homosexual life?”
“That’s right. I felt that at this point I owed it to myself, that I deserved it, if one can be said to deserve anything in this life. I also needed to get out of Hyde Park and away from the professoriat and their gossip, to live the way I had long wanted and was, apparently, intended to live.”
“Are you happy now, Dad?”
“Happy? The older I get the more I think happiness is a concept for morons. The best one can aim for is a mild and always fragile contentment.”
“Are you content with
Randy?”
“Reasonably so. He’s an earnest and serious young man. He looks up to me. But I won’t be shocked if one day I come home to find a note explaining that he has found someone else and cleared out. It’s in the nature of the life. People are always finding someone more suitable. I’ve decided I can live with that.”
The waitress inquired if we wanted anything else. My father shook his head, and asked for the check.
“Since this seems to be confession day, Steven,” said my father, “I need to confess that I realize I wasn’t the best of fathers, at least by contemporary standards. I was, as you now know, under a fair amount of pressure, not only from the quiet but persistent tyranny of hiding my true sexual nature but because I didn’t much like my work, flacking for a great university. I was under, please understand, a double whammy.”
“Why have children in the first place?” I asked.
“Because your mother wanted them. And because in our day it was expected of married couples under a certain age that they have kids. My own upbringing wasn’t all that easy; my parents didn’t much care for each other. I don’t know if you know this or not, but people who themselves have had unhappy childhoods tend to be nervous about having kids of their own. We don’t look upon bringing kids into the world as an unambiguous blessing, and we certainly don’t look upon childhood as a blessed state. But how could I deny your mother? She was a sweet and shockingly normal, if slightly meshuganah, woman.”
“Having kids also provided pretty good camouflage for your homosexuality,” I couldn’t resist inserting.
“I suppose it did,” he said. “But you’ll have to believe that it wasn’t my main motive.”
Frozen in Time Page 6