Rat Bohemia (20 page)

“You're David's father, aren't you? ” I asked, before I had time to think it over. “I recognized you from the funeral.”

I had wandered over to Carl Schurz Park, past that strange strip of Eighty-sixth Street containing the wealthiest of the wealthy, next to pockets of real poverty, a Latin dance hall, a decrepit movie theater, fast food, yuppie bars, leftover working-class white people really looking for trouble. I ended up looking out past the mayor's mansion over the East River from the cool shady park.

“I was just thinking about that,” he said. “That park is so far from our house.”

What would it have been like to have a father like this one? He seemed so calm and well dressed. Not some stupid slob like my dad. David's father was educated, somewhat genteel. He wore a suit. I hardly ever saw my own father in a suit. Never for the delight of it.

Right away the mechanism of betrayal started up in my brain. Immediately I was burying David, finishing him off, dismissing him, discrediting him. I was blaming him for his family's abandonment. They were upper-class and therefore superior. Why couldn't David have done better with them? I could complete what he had never realized. I had outlived him after all. This was my reward.

And suddenly, it all became clear to me—like one of those moments after years and years of struggle when the thing you've wanted more than anything is sitting safely in your pocket. Suddenly it all seems so easy and right—the order of things.

Now, I lived in a new world, in a new era. The Post-David Era. And, in this world, those of us who remain can move mountains that the dead could never move. I, Rita Mae Weems, could convince his father and therefore own his father. Once I transformed his father, his father would belong to me, and then I would have a father. I could be a daughter. I would finally, because of David's death, get a family. His disappearance had made room for me.

Was this the hidden purpose of AIDS—to give the rest of us a chance to have parents? That was the first explanation I'd come across that could make sense. Maybe these hateful parents would regret the way they abandoned their gay children and would come to other abandoned gay children and love us instead. That way, at least one of us would have love.

“I grew up over my parents' vegetable store,” the old man said. “First they had a vegetable cart and a horse in the backyard. Then they had a vegetable store. This is in Brownsville, East New York. My mother came to America. She didn't know how to read and write. In Russia, she didn't even have her own shoes. I've been sitting here asking myself how I ever got an education when my parents did not know how to read and write. I mean, they could read Yiddish, but not English.”

“How did you do it?” I asked, panting.

“My sister. I had an older sister. She was a woman with a will of steel. She was able to wrestle herself from her destiny, despite complete opposition from my parents. They wanted her to go into the family business, but she wanted to be a lawyer. In the 1930s! And, in the end, she was the first Jewish woman admitted to New York Law School. But she ended up not going. I don't remember why. I think she didn't have the memory for it or something like that. She became a public school teacher instead. Anyway, that's how I became a lawyer.”

Yes, Dad.

“Finished high school, went into the navy and went to City College on the GI Bill. Then I went to New York University Law School and married David's mother during my first year. Believe me, you needed to have a wife to make it through that place. Especially as a Jew. The navy was the first time I really had to live closely with Christians. But law school was an entirely different breed. They had everything going for them. They knew the ropes
before they even got there. My wife was working as a public school teacher, just like my sister, and every Sunday we would go out to the old neighborhood and have dinner with my parents. Fricassee, cabbage soup. My whole family came to my graduation. My mother, father, sister, brother, my brother-in-law, my in-laws. The whole day was for me.”

Tell me, Daddy. Tell me your dreams. And then when you're done, please ask me about mine.

“That night, my wife and I went for a long walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into the city and all around the town. We talked about what kind of life we were going to have, what kind of children. The son that we would have—David, after my grandfather. And how when he went to law school, he was going to know all the ropes before he got there. At one point, we got to the Hudson River. It was about midnight, and that part of town was very rough then. Old sailors' bars. Don't forget, New York was still an active port. Cobblestone streets. We stood looking out over the river and a picture came into my mind.”

And your daughter?

“I imagined a scene, from my own future. I imagined that my wife and I were older, about the age we were ten years ago. My wife and I are attending the theater accompanied by our son. Broadway. My son and I approach a waiting taxicab from either side of the car. Dapper and fit in crisp tuxedos and tails, you know, like Fred Astaire. I am older than he is, grayer, more elegant and in excellent physical condition. He is impetuous, laughing, handsome. We open the doors simultaneously as our ladies step in before us. His mother, contented, elegant. His wife flirtatious and witty. We glance at each other over the top of the cab before stepping in—two
halves of one person. Our unity and similarity are indescribable, unspoken and thoroughly understood. But you see, my dream will never be realized because my son took it away from me the day he decided to be a homosexual.”

I was having an experience I was never meant to have, and it transported me through all kinds of memories and associations, like an Eric Dolphy record—a little bit of this sound and that.

If Dad had asked me what I was feeling I would have told him that these moments leave their mark like a shadow covered in soot. A kind of vain hopefulness rooted in nothing. Like a line of black women in their Sunday best at six a.m. at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Children's new clothes, beaded hair, waiting for visits with incarcerated men. Thighs squealing against tight, tight seams and chitchat about caseworkers.

“They come to your house,” one says, sipping Coke through a straw, butt encased in a white stretch fabric. “Chantelle, you stop that.”

Kids, hopeful. White shoes.

The screaming you hear at home might be from someone else's TV. A live news program feeding your neighbor the original scream, even if the camera's trained on you.

“What did you lose? ” I asked. “What did David take away from
you
? ”

“Normalcy,” he said. Old, stupid man. “I had strange parents, don't forget that. They had accents. They could not read or write. They weren't educated. They didn't understand anything. My sister wanted to be a lawyer, but for her generation, that was not normal. It was not normal for women to stand out that way. I was the son. I was the first one in my entire family to be appropriate. What is so awful about being appropriate? About making something of yourself? David had to be a big shot. He had to be oppositional. And
look where it got him.”

He looked at the ground. I didn't know if he meant
hell
or
six feet under
.

“It is bad enough that he had to be homosexual, that he had to do that to me. But then he had to write about it so everyone in the world would know that our family was not normal. My son went to Columbia University and he spent his life writing pornography. Do you know what he used to call me? David Greenglass! Can you imagine. Calling your own father David Greenglass? ”

“Who is David Greenglass? ”

“Oh, you must not be Jewish. You've heard of the Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius? ”

And for the first time, he asked me a question and waited for the answer, really wanting to know.

“Of course.”

“Ethel was sent to the gas chamber by the testimony of her own brother. Ethel Greenglass. After his sister was executed, he was disappeared into a witness protection program. You know, the FBI changed his name and set him up in a little house somewhere. Actually, you have to pity the man. How he must have paid. This is what my own son calls me—like I am sending him to his death. One day my daughter and son-in-law and I decide to go out to the movies. We go to see Woody Allen's
Crimes and Misdemeanors
. We're standing on line and who else is there waiting to get in? David. My son. He was alone, so of course we invite him to sit with us, and he was sitting next to me just like he used to when he was a little boy. Sitting next to me in the dark. We're watching the film and then Woody Allen makes a joke. He says, ‘I love you like a brother, like David Greenglass.' And David, my son, starts to laugh and laugh. He's laughing too loud and everyone is looking at us. It
was one of those audiences where no one else got the joke. And I knew he was laughing at me. Good for him. He laughed and now he's dead. And I'm not laughing.”

“No.”

“Near my first law office was an old cafeteria called Cohn's Cafeteria. Not Roy Cohn, but another Cohn. And we would sit there in Cohn's watching Roy Cohn drive by in his chauffeur-driven limousine. I knew this attorney, Ernie Kaufman, not like Judge Kaufman, the Rosenbergs' judge, but a different Kaufman. Ernie. We sat with Cohn—the cafeteria Cohn, not Roy Cohn, and Ernie told us that he had to sue Roy Cohn for some client and the guy didn't have a cent. Even with those chauffeurs. Cohn. Kaufman. Greenglass. They were all after something. Something big. But so were Ethel and Julius. Two factions of the same tribe. They wanted influence. All of them. I, personally, never needed to make an impact. I just wanted the best for my children.”

Breeze.

“One time he came to my office.”

“Cohn?”

“No.”

“Kaufman? Rosenberg? Greenglass?”

“No, no. My son. He was demanding to know why I wasn't ecstatic that he was a homosexual. ‘What do you want?' I asked. ‘Some parents don't even let their children into the house. I always let you into the house.' I wasn't the worst.”

“But Dad,” I said. “What about love?”

“Listen,” he said. “I love my son. I have always loved my son. I have always been there for him. Any time he ever needed anything he always knew that he could count on me.”

I spent the next three days going to Killer's house straight from work. Troy and Killer and I would sit around eating spaghetti in front of the television set or having soy milk in our coffee and other healthy stuff. No dairy.

“What's new at work?” I asked Troy.

“It is mob-action on the streets, as usual. Outside, everyone is rollerblading. The whole city. Every time I buzz someone into the bakery, they arrive up the three flights of stairs panting like crazy because they're wearing rollerblades. And those helmets and knee caps. All in shiny black, if you have good taste. Everyone under twenty-five looks like an ad for the Gap or Guess Jeans. And, you know what else?”

“What? ”

“Those people who tattooed and pierced ten years ago to set themselves apart from mainstream society? ”

“Yeah? ”

“They've gotten sucked back in against their will because every slob from the suburbs has a modified body these days, but since it's all permanent, the originators can't distinguish themselves from the conforming mass.”

“What's gonna be next?” I asked.

“Amputation,” Killer said. “It's obvious.”

“I don't know,” Troy speculated. “Probably they'll all become born-again Christians or Goddess worshippers. There's nowhere to go but out of the body.”

“Well, the leather queens and kings have really changed the world,” I said.

“Yeah,” Killer added. “Now every housewife in America can wear her chaps to the mall.”

“Thank God the grunge look is in,” I said. “Now I can look like a seventies lesbian and be totally on the money.”

“Rita,” Killer whined. “You're soooo over. Grunge was out the day it appeared in the Style section of the
New York Times
. The happening thing now are the Crusties.”

“Crusties?”

“Yeah, you know. Those kids on Avenue A encrusted in dirt. They sleep in piles on the corner of Ninth Street.”

“Oh, you mean the ones who say,
‘Could you please spare some change so I can buy drugs?'
”

“Yeah,” Troy said. “The pierced-forehead set.”

“But, honey,” Killer added. “Don't confuse them with Riot Grrrls. They are really sexy. But they don't seem to be interested in older women.”

“Maybe we should start the Woman/Girl Love Association,” Troy suggested.

“Well, if they stay in this neighborhood long enough we'll meet them all eventually.” Killer sighed.

“I don't know why I'm ragging on these kids,” I said. “I mean, I've had a tattoo since 1980.”

“What is it?” Killer asked. “A woman on the moon? ”

“Well, just be glad it's not a women's symbol. Or Mr. Natural.”

“Well,” Troy said. “It's not enough to just have a tattoo. It has to be something like computer bars on your face. You know, something dramatic.”

“Well, dykes are doing heroin again,” Killer announced. “That's pretty dramatic.”

“I guess not dying of AIDS puts a lot of pressure on people.” Troy laughed.

“What do you think is gonna happen?”

“Well,” Troy answered, knowingly. “Everything will be fine and then someone will die and then everyone will go to AA except two people will never go to AA. Something like that.”