Advocate

by Darren Greer

  At eight o’clock, fourteen hours after we had first discovered him swollen and near death, his vitals and blood pressure dropped dramatically. He vomited once more, again mostly dark blood. The redness of his skin faded suddenly, and the swelling began to go down. He began to suffocate in his sleep. Dr. Fred tried to open his airways again but to no avail. He took one more heaving breath, coughed, and more blood came up. Finally he lay still, his head fallen to one side. His heart stopped. His brain, finally, had shut down.

  It was a horrible, painful death.

  There was no dignity or nobility in it at all.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  one of the most delightful things about my uncle when he was a boy, my mother says, was his capacity for learning. He started speaking when he was a little over a year. It surprised everyone, and even shocked a few, that such a little child could string together sentences with an almost mature eloquence. My grandfather, who in his practice saw many children and was aware of patterns of their development, knew there was something unusual about his son. He put him through a number of tests, with words and symbols printed on cards. When David was older, he administered psychological and intelligence tests. The results of this testing, he pronounced to my grandmother, was that he believed they might be raising a genius.

  I saw no evidence of this in my uncle when I knew him. He was intelligent, yes. And articulate. But I detected no stratospheric iq. My mother says this was for two reasons: David hid it, and actually denied it. He was a precocious child, he said, but he had grown into his abilities, which were barely higher than normal. He pointed out that he had actually achieved little in his life, and as much as he loved being a teacher, it was hardly the place where geniuses ended up.

  My grandmother didn’t argue with him. Granddad asked him to read books at the age of seven and eight that most people don’t tackle until adults, if they ever do. They discussed them, and my uncle made cogent arguments for and against points my grand-father raised. Everyone was delighted. My grandmother insisted he would become a doctor or a lawyer or a politician. But by the time my uncle entered the disappointing profession of teaching, she no longer cared where his star rose and how high. My grandfather was dead and my grandmother no longer spoke to him.

  My mother and Jeanette continued to idolize David. It was he who had read to them each night before bed, and he who had chosen the books.

  “He spent half of one year,” my mother tells me, “when he was sixteen and we were still in elementary, reading us David Copperfield.” She laughed. “Jeanette and I were usually asleep in minutes.”

  David had few friends in school. It had bothered my grandmother that he wasn’t as interested in people as he was in books. When he was small and she took him to play with other children, he stood off to the side and refused to get involved in their games. He wasn’t arrogant. There was a natural timidity in him that bothered my grandmother. She complained to my grandfather that he was antisocial, but my grandfather said she should give David time, that he had to grow into himself.

  My mother is telling me all this as she sits on one side of me on the sofa, Jeanette in the wingchair across. I tell her I don’t see the point. I had gathered all of this anyway, if not in detail.

  “Of course you do,” says my mother. “But don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “How much she loved him.”

  “She had an awfully strange way of showing it.”

  “I’m not finished yet,” says my mother.

  “Gay,” my mother says, “was not a common word in those days. And homosexuality was never spoken about. Your uncle David told me once he knew about himself by the time he was thirteen. This was when he began to withdraw into himself. He became absorbed in books and his school work. It bothered your grandmother. She was becoming surer by the minute that David was a misfit. Dad began asking David to spend more time in his study to talk things out, and he did, though I don’t think they resolved anything. David knew what he was. He knew how the news would be taken if he decided to tell. It was much more difficult in those days than it is in your generation.”

  “It’s a wonder he came out at all,” I say.

  “But he did,” my mother says. “David got a certain thoughtfulness from Dad, but he could be stubborn like your grandmother. The fights the two of them had over small things when David was a teenager. The angrier your grandmother got the more your uncle dug his heels in. Your grandfather rarely interfered, and if he did attempt to intercede, it was almost always on the part of your uncle. I think he knew David was struggling with something, though I’m sure he didn’t know what. The only book he could find on his condition, David told me later, was a book from the library. He stole it rather than be seen checking it out. It was called Being Homosexual. The book described homosexuality as a disease. No wonder David’s teenage years were a misery.”

  Listening to my mother, I have a visual image of my young uncle, an angst-ridden teenager, lying on his bed, the same bed on which he would later die, reading Wilde’s Epidemics of Ireland or Lucretius’s The Nature of Things from my grandfather’s collection in his study. My own pangs about my sexuality when growing up were less about what people would think of me than contracting the plague my uncle had. I denied my sexuality because I was fearful of it, not of people. My mother would accept me, I knew. As would Aunt Jeanette. My grandmother would hate that I wasn’t normal, but she would be kept at bay because of her daughters. The world, however, could not be kept at bay. The sickness that was killing gay men by the thousands, and that we heard about on the news nightly through most of my teens, could not be ignored. It was this that would force me into myself and, unlike my uncle, I would not recover.

  I listen as my mother continues her story. I am impatient, and I can’t imagine what she has to tell me would change my mind about much. But she is my mother, and I can’t deny her.

  At eighteen, when he finished high school, my uncle announced he was not going to university. He wanted to travel the world. My grandfather asked him where he wanted to go. David answered that he wanted to see everywhere — the US, Europe, maybe Asia. My uncle was ahead of his time. The mass migrations of young people from west to east in search of spiritual enlightenment would not begin for another five or six years. He anticipated it.

  My grandmother scoffed. She asked him if he intended to pay for these voyages with buttons and wishes. He had a college fund, but my grandmother would not let him have the money to pay for travel. On this my grandfather agreed, pointing out that David would need something when he came back. He gave his son money to start out with, on the understanding that David would have to earn the rest.

  My uncle took a job for a year as a sawyer at the mill. He saved every penny. His mood, according to my mother, improved. He came from work at night tired but satisfied. He was going away. He had long talks with my grandfather in the den on the weekends. My grandmother complained that he did not go out, that he knew no one his own age. He told my grandfather that the things other teenagers cared about — cars and women and alcohol — didn’t interest him. He found them puerile, he said. My mother remembers the word specifically because my grandmother had to look it up.

  No one questioned why my uncle said he was not interested in women. Later, my grandmother would say this was their first clear indication, and that something should have been done about it right then. She remained convinced she could have saved him. This made my uncle wonder later if maybe Grandnan hadn’t also read Being Homosexual.

  David’s work at the mill didn’t diminish his brilliance one whit. He read voraciously. He talked to his sisters, told them that one day he would send them postcards from all over the world. He kept this promise. My mother still has those cards, and has shown them to me. She guards them as jealously as my grandmother did the wartime letters of my grandfather.

  My grandmother, a few weeks after he had been working, began demanding he pay room and board. She didn’t need the money. She was, s
he said, teaching him life lessons. David believed she was attempting to sabotage his trip. My grandfather put his foot down, informing my grandmother and everyone else in the house that no son of his would pay to live under his roof. He was the provider and it was up to him to say who paid what.

  My grandmother retracted, and David got to keep all his money. He barely spent a penny of what he made, and after a year and a half, he had saved up almost four thousand dollars. In the early nineteen sixties that was a lot of money. In July of that year David bought a ticket to New York City. He’d always wanted to see it. From there, he was going to work his way across the US.

  The night before he left, David and my grandfather spent all night in the den with the door closed. When my grandmother got up the next morning grandfather was not in bed with her. He was still with David. She scolded them both, informing them that they were sure to get sick, staying up all night without sleep, behaving like children.

  David smiled, according to my mother. That day, he was free.

  He would end up in Paris, teaching for a few months at a language school. He lived in Montparnasse, rubbing shoulders with ex-pat Americans and Spanish novelists. On one of many postcards he sent, he wrote: I feel as if I’m living in a literary dream. The home of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Parker and Joyce and Stein. You should see the Pont Alexander at night! A golden-lighted vision!

  The romantic in my uncle came out. Advocate could not contain him, and not just because of his sexuality. For years he had been reading about the world, but unlike my grandmother and grandfather, he wanted to see it. My aunt Jeanette had also dreamed of seeing the world, but for all her bravado at home, she was, in the end, too timid. Some people grow out into the world, and some grow down into it. Jeanette is one of the latter.

  But David’s true liberation did not result from his having left Advocate. He began mentioning in his letters from Europe a young French man he was travelling with. Gaëtan figured more and more in his stories and my mother realized later he was in a relationship. He never said as much, but some of the postcards he sent home from Europe only talked about his companion. My grandmother was suspicious, believing he would be robbed because the French couldn’t be trusted.

  My grandmother had never met a French person in her life.

  My grandfather responded to these letters and postcards, saying he was glad David had a travelling companion. My mother tells me she thought Granddad might have been troubled by it as well, though not to the extent Grandnan was. It was around this time that he started to need more rest and quiet. He had always had a weak heart, and he was feeling ill or tired more frequently.

  My grandmother claimed he began sneaking away for these breaks after postcards from David more than any other time. The postcards, according to my grandmother, were too enthusiastic. They did not remind her of a nineteen-year-old boy and his travel buddy. There was too much yearning. Too much romance. From the beginning she smelled a rat.

  In the end, my mother tells me, David stayed away nearly five years. My grandfather, according to my mother, started to feel hurt. My grandmother, as usual, was only angry. “There’s finding yourself and there’s losing yourself.” She thought David had done the latter.

  Not once, after those few thousand dollars he took from my grandfather to add to his own meagre pile, did David write home and ask for more. He worked his way through Europe, as a farm hand, or teaching English, and once at a turnip pickling factory. That could be done more easily in those days, when work visas were not required or if they were no one worried about them. After Europe, he went to Turkey, then to India, and then to Japan. He wrote a postcard from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The picture was of the A-bomb Dome. He scrawled, The evil that men do on the back. My grandmother got tired of the postcards and refused to look at them any longer, but my grandfather, mother, and aunt enjoyed them.

  Eventually, grandfather stopped saying what a good thing David’s trip was. Perhaps it was because he missed his son, or perhaps because he’d begun to wonder what world David was actually exploring.

  The last postcard David sent was from Hong Kong, and it informed them that he was coming home. I’m flying into Toronto, he wrote, where I’ll set up an apartment and then come back for a visit. My mother and Jeanette had practically forgotten what their brother looked like, and were excited. They jumped up and down like the schoolgirls they were when they were given the news.

  But not everyone was pleased. My grandmother harrumphed when shown the card. She had developed a fierce resentment against her oldest child in the time he was gone. Partially, my mother figured, because of what she believed David’s absence had been doing to her husband. His heart seemed to bother him more and more. He missed David, and may have wondered what he had done wrong to keep his son away so long.

  They had to wait two months for David’s arrival, while he set himself up in Toronto. This, too, bothered my grandfather. He wanted David to go to medical school, so that he could take over his practice. David, for his part, had made no mention of wanting to be a doctor. He told my mother later that teaching English as a second language in Japan had convinced him that he would be a good teacher. And since he loved books, it seemed natural to him to be an English teacher. I sometimes wonder if his homecoming that summer was anything like his final homecoming in 1984. My mother tells me that the entire family was there to meet the train. Then too they had been shocked by David’s appearance — not because he was thin, but because he had filled out and become a man. He was heavier, though still fit, and he had a beard and long hair.

  My grandmother told him that he looked just like the wild man of Borneo. My uncle responded that he had been to Borneo and that it was a nice place. My mother and aunt laughed. Grandnan did not. She still thought David “looked a fright.”

  Far from being put out by my uncle’s looks, my grandfather swelled with pride. His son was his own man, and actually looked it. All my grandfather’s worries about school and medicine went out the window, my mother said. He was plain happy to have his son back.

  David seemed to have changed completely. The unhappy, insecure, withdrawn boy that they had known was gone, replaced by this confident, self-assured young man. Unlike most people who travel looking for answers only to discover that their problems follow them, my uncle really had found himself.

  My grandfather hugged him, then David hugged his mother and sisters. Once home, he gave gifts from his travels: a carved wooden Buddha for Jeanette, a pair of amber earrings made in Germany for my mother, some books for my grandfather — one of them Lucretius in the original Latin bought in Rome — and a Turkish carpet for my grandmother.

  One of the first things my grandfather did was to pull David into his den. My uncle laughed and said “Christ, Dad. More Lucretius?” My grandmother heard and informed her son that he may have spent time in godless places, but hers was still a house of the Lord. David apologized to her, but before entering his father’s den he leaned over to my mother on the rumpus room sofa and whispered, “She hasn’t changed.”

  Perhaps she hadn’t, but my mother says Grandnan was still happy to have him home. She hung the Turkish carpet in a place of honour on the wall in the living room, and prepared a meal. David and my grandfather spent two hours in the den, until my grandmother called them out for supper. It was a joyous occasion. Uncle David recounted his adventures, and my grandmother ran down every place he had been as dirty, uncivilized, and godless. David baited her. He talked about Hindus and Moslems. He described using pit toilets in India. He told about a murder he had witnessed in New York.

  My grandmother pointed out to her daughters that they should be grateful to live in a civilized country.

  Apparently New York, to my grandmother, was “uncivilized.”

  David stayed one week. He told his parents he’d been accepted at University of Toronto in Education. He wanted to be a teacher. This was no doctor’s position, and Grandnan, my mother says, wanted to dissuade him of the choice
, but could not. It’s hard to argue with a man who wants to be a teacher. My grandfather was delighted. If he was disappointed, he never said.

  It was partially to get his college fund that David came back to Advocate. His father and mother had been proved right; the day he would need that money had arrived. They agreed to give David his college fund.

  My mother says that was the best day of her youth. Even my grandmother was caught up in the atmosphere of celebration. A young life had been nurtured and brought to fruition and the boy was now a man, about to embark on his own life. It was apparent, my mother says, how proud my grandfather was of the man my uncle had become.

  My uncle, of course, asked after my grandfather’s health. Was he still taking his nitro? Did he still get his heart checked regularly? All was well there, my uncle was told. My mother still wonders, she says now, if my uncle was testing the waters, seeing how much his father could take. Because it was true he had found himself. He knew who he was, and he knew that he could never fully be that person if he kept it from his parents, whom he loved. He planned on telling them.

  The morning his train was scheduled to leave, he asked if he could have some time alone with both of them in the den. My grandmother was instantly wary. She was never invited to den discussions.

  “I made a promise to your grandmother,” my mother says at this point, “that we would never talk about what I’m about to tell you. Jeanette and I were never allowed to bring it up. Even between ourselves. I guess we got so used to it that we never did. We should have told you sooner.”

  We have been in the living room for an hour, and the time of my grandmother’s funeral is bearing down upon us. My mother and Jeanette seem no closer to the point of this story.

  I got to know my uncle backwards instead of forward, like most relationships. Our association before he became sick was brief, and I saw him as someone who had interrupted my life. I did not have enough time to develop a lasting relationship. David was, more than anything, a symbol to me — of injustice, of disease, of small-town narrow-mindedness and fear. He made me an advocate for the cause, much as the Protestants had been urged to be advocates for their faith. Our brief association had determined the entire course of my life. His insistence on being his own man despite the opposition impressed me, though I have never been quite able to manage this myself. And of course he was the first gay man I knew. Hearing about his youth, and my grandmother’s relationship to him, is interesting, but not a game changer. I tell my mother this.