Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “For God’s sake, Gleason!”

  “Neil and my mother, who was also there, tried to break up the fracas. They almost succeeded. But my father, in his fury at a son in high heels, took one last swing at Gerard, who ducked, tripped and fell, knocking against a table. That stupid vase you saw at the house fell and hit Gerard on the back of the head. It was enough to kill him.”

  I hoped I would make a better lawyer than a detective. “Gleason,” I said, “how long did you know about Gerard? Did you know on the night we went to the morgue? Did you deceive me?”

  “Ellis,” he answered, “Gerard disappeared four years ago. I really believed my father when he gave me the tragic news about the skiing accident. There might even have actually been such an accident. Gerard did ski. He did like to ski in Switzerland. But he was a quiet, private person. We lived in a big house. I had my own problems. I just wasn’t close to him.”

  “But you had to suspect something.”

  I could feel that old con again, feel Gleason’s eyes on my face, preparing to give me some slippery quasi-facts. I didn’t turn toward him. I could read him like a book. How safe is it to go further, he was thinking.

  “In this life,” he said with more than an echo of that old sanctimony, “you have to learn what to expect from other people and to protect yourself against them. Being charming, being flippant and careless—it’s like a mask. People are always off-guard when you tease them, when you dazzle them. They fail to notice things they might otherwise clearly see. But Gerard was shy. He didn’t know how to hide what he was except by keeping to himself. I didn’t even know, would never have guessed, what was going on with him until he told me one day when he was seventeen and I was twelve. My initiation into the love that dares not speak its name.”

  He paused as if to gather strength to go on. “But my father wouldn’t abide the idea that he had a homosexual son. He was cruel to Gerard, putting him down, threatening to have him institutionalized, calling him ‘sissy.’” Gleason paused and I liked to believe he was remembering how many times he had used the same epithet to me. “So Gerard left. I know now he went underground. I don’t know what he did for money. I don’t want to know. His name was never mentioned in our house again. I believed it when my parents said he was dead. I didn’t see him for years—until the night we went to the morgue.”

  Ahead of us, the traffic stalled. It was Friday afternoon. The weekend rush hour was in full swing. I knew Gleason must be anxious to get to the hospital, but there was nothing I could do to speed up our trip. I knew, too, that the time had come for some answers.

  “I’ve spent all these weeks trying to discover as much as I could about my brother,” Gleason said. “Our family isn’t like yours. We don’t live on top of one another. For years I thought my brother was dead. Then, in that dreadful moment at the morgue when I recognized the broken Timex that Gerard always called his good luck charm, I realized he had died only that day, perhaps had even been murdered. Later, my parents told me they had been at the morgue making arrangements to go to Switzerland to pick up my brother’s body. Lies, of course, but I had to know the truth, stay out of my father’s way and satisfy Kavin, too. That’s where you came in.”

  He smiled, half teasing, half sad. Then he went on. “Remember, you asked me what day I had made the appointment at the morgue. There was no appointment. I had gotten a call from a Dr. John Slater, who said he knew me from the clubs.”

  “Which means?”

  “Oh God, don’t be obtuse. He meant that he and I and my brother shared a bond. Anyway, in that phone call he said someone I knew was in trouble and he thought I should come in that evening. I thought that a bit strange, but when I called the morgue back, it turned out he was legit. It was at that point that I decided to ask you to come with me.”

  And I had been reluctant to help him with his project.

  “It’s taken me a long time to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. I had no idea about Neil Dennison. The rings were the only clues I had to a probable murder and lies all around. I took the package by instinct, but I’m glad I did. I think Slater wanted me to take them, and wanted to help us out on the case, but couldn’t compromise himself professionally. He remembered what had happened to Neil. And before he could be really forthcoming, he was hauled away by Rosen at my father’s behest. I can’t tell you how hard we’ve worked to find Neil. He just disappeared after the death.”

  Gleason’s erratic behavior suddenly began to make a lot of sense, but there were still some holes in his story. “If Neil got caught that night on Philosophers’ Walk and subsequently lost his job, why didn’t Gerard get called in, too?”

  “Luck and fast reflexes, maybe. He had no job to lose, anyway.”

  He laughed and poked me in the ribs. “You’re not afraid of fags, now, are you? That night in the Nile Room at Letros was the turning point. Every man there treated me as if I were the one who had caused Gerard’s tragedy. Still, I learned enough to find Neil. I had to give him back his ring. The other one I’m keeping to shove down my father’s throat.”

  It was a while before he spoke again. When he did, he was calmer and so was I.

  He turned again to me, his eyes red. “Let me explain a few things to you, Ellis. Neil has become my friend because of his relationship with my brother, and after he recovers and has some counseling, I’m sure he can apply to be readmitted to the bar. Of course, he helped my father make Gerard’s death look like suicide, but he also called Rosen and told the coroner everything. And Rosen was able to arrange a private autopsy with a ruling of accidental death. The coroner said the faked suicide was irrelevant, the act of a grieving and frightened family. So he authorized my parents to take Gerard’s body out of the country and to bury him in a place where none of their Whitney Square friends will ever go.”

  “Why is Neil so devastated?”

  “Neil loved Gerard and felt he had betrayed him.” Gleason paused. “Honestly,” he said, “this whole sad thing could have been avoided if those two had just talked. Instead Gerard is dead and Neil has nearly killed himself with guilt and mourning.”

  “What about you, Gleason?”

  “I mourned the loss of Gerard a long time ago. But that’s not what you mean, is it, Portal?”

  “No.”

  “Look, all I’ve done is skip a few weeks of school in order to find Neil and get him some help. All I’ve done is mess up Kavin’s stupid project assignment and miss a couple of useless exams. I figure you’re going to get me out of trouble there.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure.” His voice was picking up, as if the horror was already behind him. “You probably aced those exams. You always ace exams. Besides that, you’re Kavin’s little darling, his favorite.”

  “Now what are you going to spring on me?”

  “Portal, you’ve been my only friend in all this. Help me one last time. Go to Kavin for me. Explain all this in a way old Smokey can understand. Break it down for him. That’s all you need to do. Then you can forget everything else.”

  We were both silent for a few moments. But forgetting was the last thing I was going to do. “Gleason,” I said, “this whole affair happened because of a few lines in the Criminal Code. Do you realize that?” I thought about my brother, my beloved Michele with his Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Billy Johnson, his Negroes and his draft dodgers, his bed on the pavement of the street that runs in front of the American Consulate. “We can fight this.”

  “What? Fight what?”

  “We can fight Sections 147–150, sub b, inclusive. We can take the position that what happened to Neil is contrary to his rights as an individual, as a citizen. If we start right now, we can take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to. By then, we’ll be admitted to the bar. Neil himself will be our client. No person should be discriminated against by the law because of personal choices he makes in his private life.”

  Gleason reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. It was the only t
ime in our years of friendship that I ever remember him touching me. “Portal,” he said softly, “forget about this. It’s not your fight.”

  “Injustice against anybody is my fight,” I responded passionately.

  “No. You need the kind of clients that will get you where you belong. You’re not Kavin’s favorite and Tuppin’s new little friend for nothing. You shouldn’t be wasting your time with the Neil Dennisons and the Billy Johnsons of this world, Portal. You’ve got what it takes. You’re headed for the top. You can look back down on me when you get there!”

  I HANDED THE BAG with the cheese bun in it to Aunt Fay. She took it between her thumb and index finger as though it were a bomb and set it down on a reproduction Chippendale table.

  “Sammy’s real busy today, Angelo,” she said. “He can’t see you. He told me just to give you this. He said don’t open it until you get home.”

  She handed me a long white envelope, sealed tight. I had no choice but to take it, thank her and leave.

  When I got home, everybody was in the kitchen. All the groceries from the morning shopping were put away, but Arletta and my mother were still busy with food, chopping tomatoes and eggplant for caponata. My father sat in the corner reading the paper. Michele had his nose buried in a book, a cup of steaming coffee in front of him.

  “What’s that?” Arletta said, eyeing the envelope the second I walked in the door.

  “It’s a letter from Uncle Salvatore,” I said.

  “Open it,” everybody but my father commanded.

  It was Arletta who was the first to see what the envelope contained. She grabbed the contents and waved them over her head, whooping and hollering until my father told her to shut up.

  “He did it!” She yelled anyway. “Uncle Sammy did it!”

  She danced over to me and planted a kiss on my astonished face. “You’re the best brother on the whole planet,” she said. “Look at this! Four tickets to the Beatles concert. In the very front row!”

  WITHIN A WEEK, Uncle Salvatore did see me. He told me his friend Sheldrake Tuppin needed a helper and I was it.

  Within a month, Gleason Adams was declared exempt from his exams ex post facto. Given the excellence of his presentation on proposed civil liberty changes to the Criminal Code, the Law Faculty decided that his unexplained absence would not be held against him or noted on his academic record, since the absence was due to research. Snow job completed.

  Within four years, Neil Dennison was fully reinstated in the prosecutor’s office and the Criminal Code of Canada was amended to allow private acts between consenting adults.

  Within five years Billy Johnson returned from Vietnam with a Purple Heart. Eventually he married Kee Kee. They had a daughter and lived happily for a short time before he died at the age of thirty-six, but that’s a different story.

  Within ten years, the House of Detention was razed to the ground, and later a community garden rose on the spot. The garden blooms there today.

  Within thirty years Ronald Reagan asked Lee Iacocca to restore Ellis Island. He did. It became a national monument to the people who passed through it and to the fulfillment of their immigrant hopes.

  I STILL HAVE, it seems, hopes of my own. When I tired of watching my son and his wife from my window, I sat down at the computer and drafted my response to the Fellowship of Barristers and Solicitors. Will I return to being a member of the bar? Of course I will.