Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Edna was a marvel of entrepreneurship, leaving no stone unturned in the cottage industry of her life. She sold mail-order dresses from catalogues, as well as a most obscure line of perfume and beauty products. My brother says he doesn't recall a single customer in the gift shop, whose curios sat beneath decades of dust, and in any case the stench of uncollected dogshit lay over the whole place like a miasma. Bobby would sometimes escape the chaos by ducking into one of the boarders' rooms, where he'd watch the Red Sox with Mr. Milnes, who stank a little hit less than the rest of the Marland emporium.

  Well-meaning was written all over it. The public schools were wholly undesigned for the handicapped, and everyone decided my brother needed the special care of Miss Marland. I think the town of Andover even paid the tuition. Nobody saw, in the segregation of the disabled, anything wrong, that it was a guilty attempt to put out of mind and sight the savagery of fate. And indeed Miss Marland couldn't have been more fiercely deducted to her brood, those stalwart morning hymns proof, if anyone needed proof, of her zeal. The problem was, most of the other students were retarded to one degree or another. Year after year they all read at the second-grade level, while my brother, his brain untapped, whiled away the time trading ball scores with Mr. Milnes.

  I remember the yearly Christmas pageants of the Marland School, presented on the stage in the parish house of Christ Episcopal. The Marland sisters were pillars of the church, the last surviving members of one of Andover's textile dynasties. The Marland Mill was long since shuttered, its boisterous looms grown quiet in the brick factory on the Shawsheen River. I don't know where all the money went, but the aging sisters stood their ground—their name resonating still in the town's collective memory and on a prominent hillside in the Christ Church graveyard, shaded by ancient firs.

  My brother was always the star of the pageant, mainly because he was the only student who could think in sequence and remember lines. So he'd stand center stage, hanging on his crutches, reciting some god-awful uplifting poem—Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase—then lead his slower classmates in the carol singing.

  It was no education at all in the formal sense, but a sort of survival test, to see if the mind could triumph over a total lack of matter. Somehow Bobby made it through eight years of hymns and dogshit, on to high school and college, but he's always spoken about the Marlands with toxic irony—day care in a madhouse. It was nobody's fault but the times', I suppose, that "special education" lumped together the crippled and the retarded, apples and oranges, teaching nothing. But he's not a bitter man, my brother. Last winter, when our mother was buried in the churchyard, Bobby noticed the Marland headstone listed only two of the sisters. When Charlotte died, the last of the line, there had been no one left to remember her and cut her name in stone. So my brother had it done, completing the trio.

  Somewhere in there, between seventh and eighth grade, I finished confirmation class and took my first communion. The assistant to the rector—the aforementioned Moses who boomed the good news of Jesus like a trumpet—was a mild-spoken curate named Wolfe. Though he did an energetic job of ushering us kids into the mysteries of faith, I couldn't help but feel a certain impatience in him as he rattled off the dogma—virgin mother, God and man in one, rose from the dead. Or was it I who'd grown impatient with the string of miracles that followed Our Lord across Judea? He threw down his crutch and walked; the Master touched his eyes and he saw. Not in our house, pal. The lame stayed lame.

  This despite the growing passion of my mother's faith. She'd begun to read Scripture with a Christian Science lady from up the street, a kindly blue-haired type whose roses were flower-show perfect, and who always brought a couple of riotous blooms when she came to call. All morning Sunday, the hi-fi swayed to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing gospel. We also had a subscription to Guideposts, a monthly magazine of "little miracles"—strength through prayer and heart-tugging tales of pious children who wondered why they couldn't say grace in a coffee shop. Why not indeed? When everyone at the counter put down their forks and folded their callused hands, I flung the magazine aside with a grimace of disgust.

  This is all just a fairy tale, I remember thinking when Mr. Wolfe explained the transubstantiation of bread and wine. The whole thing was a made-up story, Jesus and his miracles—though the story was nice enough, and harmless. I don't think I would have dared at that point not to believe in big-G God the Father, but the whole Christian pageant was just that, pomp and pretty allegory. I didn't feel especially jaded or empty about my unbelief, and managed to shrug my shoulders philosophically and go along for the ride. I liked the grownup drama of communion, the sense of initiation. Sometimes Wolfe would choose me to douse the candles at the end of a service, and I'd swagger up proudly with the pole snuffer, putting them out one by one as the congregation watched.

  I hadn't yet come into contact with anyone "born again," or the ranting ministries of evangelism. Nobody really talked God in the infinitely discreet world of a small New England town. Cod was a given, like the Puritan moral code, but it would have been just as vulgar to speak of Jesus outside church as to speak of sex in any form. Mostly they taught us to live and let live, that we all believed in the same God. I wouldn't have dreamed of revealing my agnosticism. That would've been like asking to be thrown out of the country club, in a world where golf was the only way a civilized man walked outdoors.

  I don't know what drew me back to the woods. Perhaps my break with Jesus took the guts out of that nightly prayer of mine: Forgive me for what I did with Kite. But all through the summer of '58—after my confirmation in June, and the Prom King's menacing visit—the neighborhood play on Stratford Road felt tepid and unoriginal. "There's nothing to do," I'd whine as I moped around the house, then dutifully set off for another armload of library books or a muggy game of hide-and-seek. But I'd already read the whole four-foot shelf of the Hardy Boys, and there was no place new to hide.

  Then one afternoon, I pedaled my English bike to the end of Summer Street, barely a quarter mile from home but still unbuilt and thick with trees. A big white house with a sprawling verandah stood at the top of the rise, surrounded by an orchard. This was the Denning house, whose shades were always drawn tight and whose apples fell unharvested, rotting in the soft unmown grass. The Denning place was the closest we had to a haunted house, and nobody trespassed—except in the dead of winter. Then, by some unspoken agreement, the children from miles around were allowed to cross the orchard into the wooded vale beyond, when Denning's pond was frozen solid.

  I'd skated there for a couple of winters, toasting marshmallows at the crackling fires that the big kids lit on the mossy shore. Nobody ever went to Denning's pond in the summer—too many mosquitoes, and far too brackish for swimming, let alone the toes you'd lose to the snapping turtles. Nevertheless I made my way through the orchard and poked about on the spongy banks, stirring up the polliwogs with a stick. Already I liked the feel of wildness, the disconnect from suburban life—free to imagine myself on a desert island, living off the land. And yes, falling in love with my rippling image in the black water, more Narcissus than Crusoe.

  A branch snapped, and I turned. Another boy was trolling the shallows nearby. We stared at each other like a pair of startled deer. I knew him vaguely from school, a year behind me, Richie something. He said he was looking for arrowheads; I said I was looking for frogs. We made our way back through the orchard to the road. I wasn't aware of any sixth sense of the carnal in our meeting, but as I retrieved my bike, he tossed out where he lived, beyond the woods, and said he had a clubhouse where he and his friends had meetings. I should come some time.

  Oh, I knew right away that my second occasion of sin had arrived. I don't recall how we put it together, whether by phone or radar, but I found my way to Richie's house a few days later to meet the guys in the club. I don't even remember feeling threatened that Richie had pegged me for a fellow queer—a paranoid terror that would come to define me later, whenever another man came on to me, howev
er vaguely. The fear that I had ceased to pass. For the boys in Richie's club, it had nothing to do with queer. There were five of them, including a pair of twin brothers, and all were Little League jocks. They'd waggle their dicks at each other, yet always under the guise of talking about girls.

  The clubhouse was more a lean-to huddled against a split-rail fence. The game they played was called "I dare you," each of us taking a turn to dare the boy beside him. I dare you to go take a leak in the mailbox. To lay a turd on the Dennings' doorstep. To take Richie's dick in your mouth. By keeping it kinky and slapstick, they somehow avoided perceiving it as sex. We all had boners, but nobody ever came. It was mostly raunchy talk, all very tough-guy, an indoor sport that only lacked a ball.

  I went there three or four times, trying to sound exactly like the rest, talking butch and doing my dares with the proper swagger. Then one time I showed up for a meeting, and Richie was there alone. He invited me into his house, because his parents both worked—unheard of on Stratford Road, where the mothers all stayed home, sainted as Jane Wyatt on Father Knows Best. The illicit feel of the empty house was heady as we stripped naked and chased each other around the doily-covered tables, the Barcaloungers and Ethan Allen repro of a staid white-collar ranch.

  My erotic technique, I fear, hadn't improved much since the hurricane days with Kite. We took turns lying on the floor, the one on top poking his dick between the bottom one's legs and getting some friction going. That and a lot of sucking. I think I was probably old enough to shoot, if I'd only known how, but Richie was still a few paces behind, not quite to the border of adolescence. Thus he was fascinated by the wispy bush of hair that had started in my crotch, as well as by the veiny straight-up member I was sporting, three times the size of his, in my thirteenth summer. Barely twelve, Richie's own equipment was still a little boy's, poking straight out with its gumdrop head, not yet able to lift and flare like a cobra.

  Richie would grill me about the glandular changes of the previous year, all the while squeezing and milking me, studying the pre-cum as it drooled out. "Lookit all your juice," he'd murmur in awe, so that a weird rooster pride warred with the awkwardness I felt, leaking this substance that had no name.

  The animal hunger was the same I felt with Kite, except for one thing. I wanted to kiss Richie. I never came close to verbalizing that, let alone acting on it, because I understood that all romance was forbidden. We could dick around as much as we liked, but a kiss would have bordered on love. And yet I was aware of feeling tender as well as carnal. I would summon up Richie's face in my mind when I wasn't with him. The one crooked tooth in his lopsided grin, the porcupine brush of his waxed crewcut. He was a couple of inches shorter than I, bursting with energy and a raucous smutty laugh. Half Armenian, half black Irish, a mongrel just like me.

  We kept up our sporadic meetings all through the next school year—I in the eighth grade, he in the seventh. I enjoyed our wrestling bad-boy sex throughout, but now I see I was only half there. For the sense of being "different" was all on my side. To this day I think he was queer too, and our sessions together never required a smokescreen of pretending we were getting ready to put it to women. But Richie kept me at a distance all the same, no intimacy of any sort, substituting instead a comrade's heartiness. I'd arrive at his house, and we'd get right down to it, no preliminaries. I guess I was learning the difference between a boyfriend and a "fuck buddy," though the latter term wouldn't come into vogue for another twenty years. Half my generation of gay men would go after that kind only, willing to try almost anything once—but no kissing.

  Because it was very confusing, I tried not to think about it. I went on my courtier's rounds with redoubled frantic energy, working to keep everyone happy. A larger change was brewing all that year, as various forces decided I should pool my A's and run for daylight. I filled out an application to Phillips Academy, supported by letters from Mrs. DeCesare, my English teacher, and the prophet Moses of Christ Episcopal. I was given to understand throughout this process that here was my chance to make it into lawyering or dentistry, a class jump that no one in the family had had a shot at since Grandpa Joe at Harvard Law.

  I did as I was told, though I was frightened as much as anything by that brick utopia on the hill, with its lofty porticoes and endless carpets of lawn. Phillips, as the townspeople called it—unable to nickname it "Andover" the way its boarding students did, as if the town at the foot of the hill had given up all rights to die name. The school reeked of privilege and separateness. In the years to come, I would learn the code of the ruling class, how a man with the proper credentials went to Andover but didn't come from there. For a local boy to pass through its wrought-iron portals—emblazoned with the beehive crest and motto in Latin, NON SIBI, Not for himself—meant that ever afterwards he would lose his citizen status in the village.

  I took the entrance exams. I applied for a scholarship. I labored over the mandatory essay—"What I Expect to Get from My Four Years at the Academy," five hundred words or less—tossing off the requisite bull, unable to articulate the short answer, "Out of here." Because what was really left for me in the town, as my courtier's dance grew more frenetic, the boys and girls increasingly distinct from each other, no whisper of androgyny allowed? How long could I pass for straight among these kids who'd known me since first grade?

  Assuming I passed at all anymore. My brother tells an excruciating story from this era. He was pumping his cart up Chestnut Street and suddenly found himself surrounded by a pack of thugs, probably from the housing project across the way. "His brother's a queer," announced their leader, the rest baring their teeth as they grunted in disgust. Bobby quaked in fear that he was about to be pulverized. Then the whole thing turned around. "We know you're okay," said the leader. "And if anyone tries to hurt you, you just tell us. 'Cause we'll wipe the street with 'em."

  The circle of wolves parted, and Bobby wheeled away in relief. He didn't understand the curious way in which he had become a sort of mascot for the town, bringing out the protective best, even in wolves. But more important than that to him was the savage slur on his brother's name, which he understood not at all. As soon as he got home, he gave my mother a broken account, asking in earnest anguish what the boys had meant.

  "Nothing," she told him—the same nothing that Kite and I had been guilty of on High Street. Then the kicker. "Bobby, why don't we let this be just between you and me."

  Secrets upon secrets. Thus by inexorable degrees does the love that dares not speak its name build walls instead, till a house is nothing but closets.

  I was oblivious. With three years gone since the crisis over Kite, I figured it was long forgotten between my mother and me. She seemed happy enough. I remember her laughing at Christmas, excited as a girl from Thanksgiving on, baking and wrapping, a blizzard of cards to everyone we knew. In addition, she had lately attained a place of high fashion and chic—at least in my eyes—by becoming an Avon lady. She covered the whole neighborhood for two or three years, new colors and perfumes every spring and fall. Bobby remembers her sample case as vividly as I do, fat as a weekend valise and with a hundred pockets. Late at night, while the rest were in bed, I'd come downstairs and unpack it, studying all the Siena blushes. My favorite scent was Topaze. Then I'd carefully pack it all back together, leaving no trace.

  Except I guess she knew my secret anyway, no matter how well I'd hidden my tracks to Richie's house. And my father? He seemed happy too in those middle-school years on Stratford Road. He'd managed to buy an apartment house at Elm and Florence, six units in an old Queen Anne that bristled with porches and cornices. I used to help him paint and wallpaper whenever a place was between tenants. I liked laboring beside him, and eventually got very adept at doing trim—a steady hand with mullions and the intricate rosettes and scrolls along the moldings.

  Did we three have a good relationship? I think so. Really, I had no expectations, and wouldn't have answered truthfully if either my mother or father had asked me how I was or wh
at went on in my head. Had I let them get any closer, they might have seen the carnal truth, so I was the one who maintained the fences. When I received the news in the spring that I'd been accepted at the Academy, I was glad for them because they seemed so proud. Myself, I felt sick, not knowing if I had the right mask to wear in such an unknown world, or whether my courtier's moves would work. I was practically hoarse from ventriloquism already.

  In fact, what stuns me the most about my brother's story of the thugs is the pang it still gives me today. To think that my elaborate show of obsequious patter didn't hide a thing. They all knew. And isn't that pang another name for the hollow stab of shame—the realization, this many years later, that I failed to pass after all? As if some unaccepting part of me still wants to go back and work at it harder, till no one will ever guess. Something that still can't laugh at the budding queen poring over the makeup case, whose hobby for the next four years will be his Liz Taylor scrapbook. Something that still winces that I wasn't enough of a man.

  You think you've put all the self-hatred behind you, the long reach of sick religions, and then some memory cuts you down, reducing you once again to the only different boy in the world. But it isn't just my brother's recollection coming back to haunt me. I have a memory all my own which mocks the puny camouflage of the courtier/jester, searing me with the certainty that nobody can be trusted with the truth. That betrayal is the way of things, and always the end of love.

  It was late in the spring, close to the finish of school. I was heading home by cutting across the playing fields, where every summer a carnival pitched its tents and filled the town with tawdry lights. Instinctively I'd stay away from the bleachers, beneath which the ninth-grade hoods usually gathered after school for a smoke. But the fields were so marshy from heavy spring rain that I had to skirt them, and pass close to the green-painted tiers of seats.