Consenting Adult (36 page)

“So this
Girl on the Moon,”
Margie had said, “is all about the little six-year-old girl being the first one out of the lunar module, but then later it’s the little girl astronaut who prepares the gucky dehydrated food for the little six-year-old boy astronaut.”

When she came on the line Tessa made her voice sound casual. “Can you and Nate come for dinner one of these nights? It’s rather special.”

“Good special or bad special? You sound happy.”

“Am I always that transparent?”

“Only when it’s something about the family.”

“This is about Jeff.”

“And you like it. That’s great. Let’s see—not tonight, Nate’s on assignment tonight. And tomorrow’s out too. What about Saturday?”

They decided on time and Tessa began to search in her mind, as she hung up, for a substitute arrangement for this evening. She who spent so many evenings alone, peacefully and willingly alone, did not feel that she could manage it alone tonight. There was Helena Ludwig—they had become good friends by now, no longer restricted to the author-editor relationship, but friends. And there were the Prentices; she had become friends with Scott and Elena too, and they were both closer to her in age, so that she had the comfortable feeling that came from being with contemporaries.

My own contemporaries. It’s really Ken I want, she thought, and for the first time she looked at Jeff’s letter through the blur and sting of tears. Ken would see this now as she saw it—by now he would have completed his own process of growth and acceptance. Not tolerance but acceptance; the idea of tolerance was insulting, like the body’s tolerance of minute doses of arsenic. In any case, tolerance was too easy an aim; the indifferent could achieve tolerance by not caring one way or the other.

But to accept other humans fully for the humans they happened to be, just as they happened to be, in all their manifold needs and desires and practices, to accept them as one accepts one’s own self—that was a goal worth reaching, and by now Ken would have reached it fully.

It was then that she thought of Mark Waldo. Mark, of course, Mark. Let this not be one of the nights, she thought in sudden entreaty, when he’s off on some emergency, nor one of the rarer nights when he and his wife Nell are at the theater or having people in. Mark’s been in on every major step all the way; he will know how enormous this one really is. She pulled the telephone toward her and dialed.

For a while they talked as if they were indeed in the same family. On the phone she had told him it was “something good about Jeff,” but nothing more, and it was past eleven in the evening before Mark could finish his rounds and get up to the old apartment She did not mind the lateness, and as she watched him read the letter, she knew that he did not mind either.

“I don’t think I could ever have predicted it,” he said at last. “It’s so impossible in medicine.”

“As impossible as it used to be?”

“Officially yes. Of course there are homosexual doctors on every hospital staff—the usual Kinsey ten percent—but they still live their lives out hiding it.”

“Maybe the young ones are starting to change all that now.”

“I
have
heard,” he said, as if he doubted his own words, “of two young interns right here in New York getting set to do the same thing.”

“There must be a few everywhere.” She straightened her back, lifted her head, not knowing she was doing either. “There must be, Mark. Sort of spontaneous combustion.”

“Among other ideas whose time has come?” He drew out a filing card from his pocket, scrawled over with notes, and for a moment kept her waiting while he consulted it. “I made a couple of calls today after you said this was about Jeff.”

“To Dr. Richards?”

He nodded. “There’s to be a closed meeting up at Columbia’s Psychiatric Institute this week—you’ll keep this off the record, won’t you, until the papers print it?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a special committee of the A.P.A., the Nomenclature Committee. They propose to eliminate homosexuality as a diagnostic category—knock it right out of the official
Manual of Mental Disorders.”
He was reading from his card, not looking to see her reaction.

“Oh, Mark.”

“They are drawing up a statement of their proposal, to present it officially, later on, to the whole A.P.A. membership.”

“I don’t think I understand what it means—knocking it out of the official manual.”

“It won’t be classified as a mental disorder needing treatment any more.” He consulted his card once more. “There are twenty thousand members of the A.P.A.”

“And a majority will vote in favor?”

“Richards says yes. He says Marmor says yes, and that their whole wing in the profession says yes. The opposition will be ferocious—there are plenty of analysts in the old-line, stand-pat group—but Richards says it will pass.”

“What makes him so sure?”

“This general shift in psychiatry has been building for a long time, remember.” Without transition he added, “Dr. Marmor, by the way, is now vice-president of the A.P.A. and also president elect of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. That’s quite impressive to me.”

“Oh, Mark, it
will
pass. Dudley will vote against it, and Isaacs, and all the others who talk about twenty-five percent cures, but it will pass sooner or later.”

“So it seems.”

“It all seems to be happening at once.” She repeated, “At once,” mocking herself. “Oh, Mark, how long it’s been.”

Nate said, “I felt in my bones that he’d come around to it sooner or later, but I thought he’d wait until his residency was over and he was set up in his own office.”

“I don’t know what I thought exactly,” Margie said. “A girl at the office started telling everybody she was lesbian and I had a terrible fight with her.”

“For heaven’s sake, why?” demanded Tessa.

“I called her on the word ‘lesbian.’ I said it’s a sex-role word and she got sore.” Margie looked irritated. “If anybody called her an editress, she’d yell, but she hangs on to that sexist label just the same. Did a male gay ever call himself a non-lesbian gay?”

Tessa looked mollified. “I never thought about that, but I think you have a point.”

“Sex labels always bug me,” Margie said. “They’re demeaning, that’s what. My Gawd, if we don’t want to be stipulated ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ what makes ‘lesbian’ okay?” She suddenly laughed. “But I’m sorry I got so worked up about it. As for old Jeff and his letter, let’s call him.”

“You do, if you want to,” Tessa said. “I wired him yesterday, and that’s it for a while. I’m not going to let myself carry on about it.”

“You’re right,” said Margie. “He’s such a half-wit.”

They all laughed and Tessa thought, I wish he could be here for just ten minutes and see for himself. She told them she had guessed from Jeff’s letter about the Stonewall, and Nate told the entire story once more, putting Jeff into it for the first time, she seeing it with a new vision, hearing it direct from him. Then they talked of Mark Waldo’s news; the
Times
had already reported the nomenclature meeting, but now, as if in a reversal of roles, they seemed to find a new meaning in it, hearing it directly from her.

“That annual session of the A.P.A. will be in Honolulu in May,” Nate said. “I wish I could get my paper to let me cover it”

“Please, me too,” Margie said. “Let’s go anyway.”

They launched into a great discussion of the idea, and Tessa sat back listening, saying little. For the rest of the evening she seemed almost passive, somehow feeling none of the old compulsive need to talk to their sympathy, to reach for their closeness. And later, after they were gone, the quiet within her persisted, an ease, an absence of listening for the telephone, a knowledge that it would ring in due time.

It was not until the next night that Jeff called to thank her for her wire. She knew he could hear the faint tremor in her voice, knew he would diagnose it correctly and that there was no need for her to say she was happy. He talked as he always talked, about his work, about his belief that his permanent appointment to the staff would come through on schedule.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “just this morning, Dr. Syms rather made a point of telling me so.”

“Good. Jeff, I just feel good about everything.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The idea came to her one day in early spring, when the morning was so inviting she decided to walk to her office through Central Park. The blossoming shrubs and trees all about her filled the air with a composite scent of earth and bark and bud and leaf, and there was a sparkle in the air, a tonic briskness in the capricious wind that lifted her spirit as if it were a light and palpable thing.

She felt alive, with her old aliveness. It takes a long time, she thought. She wondered what Jeff thought of the proposed change in nomenclature, wondered whether it seemed important to him as it did to her, indeed whether he even knew about it in full detail. At last these parlous matters were receiving the same fullness of reporting from the good old
Times
as other news did, but that was not necessarily true in the papers out on the Coast. She did not know either, of course, what he felt as he read and heard and saw more and more about this great new force of rebellious young men and women of the gay movement, this army appearing in the light of day, an army growing all the time, recruited, God knew how and God knew by whom, from the secret places that had been their West Points and St. Cyrs and Sandhursts.

“You probably know as much as I do about the gay movement,” he had written, “or maybe more, you being you, and … about two months ago I became part of it.” He was not a political beast and never had been, but he was part of it. In his own way he was
of
it. And it was now
of
him, of his substance, of his destiny from now onward.

Illogically the idea came at her then, rushing at her, through no train of thought that she could trace. She would ask for an appointment with Halston Richards, now, before he left for that May meeting in Honolulu, would drive up to Poughkeepsie to see him as she had once driven up to see James Dudley, but this time for her own purposes, on her own behalf, to try to persuade him to write not another paper for a medical journal, not another speech for a psychiatric symposium, but a book for her to publish, a book for the layman, for the boys and girls stricken in their first discovery that they were gay, for the men and women who had tried analysis and were still gay, and a book too she had seen no authority do at all, a book also for the parents of the gay people, for the mothers and the fathers, for all the Tessas and all the Kens everywhere—

The idea sang in her heart like a bright light; she felt uplifted and lissome and young. A light can’t sing, idiot, she thought sternly, and laughed aloud. Ever the editor! Each year had made her more of an editor, but this was not being an editor, thinking of a book like this one she wanted from Halston Richards—this was being one of the rebels too, one of the ones fighting back, young, creative, whatever her biological age. She laughed again and then saw with astonishment that she was already at Fifty-ninth Street, the southernmost limit of the park. She had raced along, she was out of breath, her face was warm with exertion and excitement.

It was good to be alive. She would have to talk this over first with Tom Quales and Jim Park, but now she could.
Once you’re out, you’re out forever.
She was out too.

I
T WAS MID-
D
ECEMBER
when she phoned Jeff about Christmas. Again she was answered by the voice that was not his.

“Dr. Gerson speaking,” it said crisply.

“Is Jeff there? It’s his mother, in New York.”

“No, but he should be home by nine. Shall I have him call back then?”

“Would you? Thanks a lot.”

She hung up, conscious of the thudding of her heart. Dr. Gerson. Stuart Gerson, the young man Ken had liked the look of. A fine young man, he had said, maybe a little older than Jeff. And then those words. She could hear them again, as if Ken were right there, but in a moment she turned away from them. That undisclosed legacy would probably remain forever undisclosed.

She had called Jeff only twice in the past six months, and once or twice he had called her. She wrote him brief notes, always bearing news, a vacation for her with Will and Amy in Rome, a new author or troublesome manuscript, anecdotes of Lynnie and Jeffie, news of Nate and Margie. She felt closer to him than ever and thought of him less, and sometimes thought, The gay movement has made me over, too. She found herself, somewhat to her own astonishment, never worrying about what might lie ahead in Jeff’s career. If disaster were still to strike, he would weather it in his own way, and make something of it.

She was contented, often lonely, often wishing for Ken or somebody to replace Ken, but she knew that she would not easily again be able to make a major new relationship. But her life was full, her mind active and yet lazily at ease. If only, she thought at times, if only there had been some short cut. These thirteen years. If only they could have been condensed.

Now there will not have to be thirteen endless years for other mothers and fathers, she thought, unless they seek them out in the old rigid pattern, clinging to them, needing them. Now there need not be that initial shock and grief, those years of trying everything, of hoping and failing, of that fiercely burning self-blame, of “getting over it.” She remembered that first night so long ago, that blind seeking of hers for Absalom, my son, my son, and abhorred the memory. Then she marveled at the distance they had all traversed since then, Jeff, Margie, Nate, Will and Amy, herself. And beyond them an enlarging part of the world, certainly the youth of the world, the suppler younger minds in the universities and the professions …

Just this week in Washington, the results of that Honolulu meeting were formalized. The Board of Trustees of the A.P.A. had voted—unanimously voted—to abolish homosexuality from the category of mental disorders. The
Times,
in its page-one story, quietly remarked that it was “altering a position it had held for almost a century,” but there was nothing quiet in Tessa’s mind as she read the words. This was only one victory, yes; it did not mean an overnight end to scorn and discrimination against gay people, there would still be much to endure as they fought on, much to struggle for. But what a victory it was.