The Farewell Symphony (26 page)

For Joshua the woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It were a charmed precinct in which young lovers would try out new (even androgynous) roles before returning, wiser and more humanly gendered, to the city or court. Perhaps that's why Joshua loved the New York City Ballet, since it, too, showed us a Utopian society in which a man and a woman wordlessly moved through the enchainements of other couples under the charged regard of spectators, symbolized by the lateral lights raking them from out of the wings. Joshua admired the ballet criticism of Edwin Denby, who had a Shakespearean vision of dance as both urban and Utopian.

And Joshua adored "cruising" the main lobby of the newly opened State Theater, although his prowling and looking were more social than sexual and even under the bright lights he could scarcely make out who anyone was. As I squired him about the lobby from the bar onto the vast outdoor balcony he'd make funny remarks about all the celebrities we were passing; he'd give me their pedigrees, tell me how they were related to each other—and then realize he'd conjured up the wrong person. Perhaps his blindness stimulated his imagination and permitted him to construct better plots, nobler lineages, more amusing social conjunctions.

Like so many people I'd been taught from the very beginning that society was entirely negative: a hypocritical, gossipy artifice from which sincerity was necessarily banished and intimacy absent. But Joshua taught me (though only because I wanted to imitate his example, not because he ever tried to convert me to his beliefs)—Joshua taught me that society provides the necessary amplification of our private thoughts and acts. We gay guys had gotten things exacdy the wrong way—we made love in public (in trucks and baths and backrooms) but shared our thoughts only in the confessional of the tete-a-tete, preferably over the phone in which the spirit was entirely disembodied and all that remained of communication was a crackling silence or a tinny, transmitted voice. Of course even so we were better attuned to urban possibilities than heterosexuals, since at least we were always cruising the streets.

Joshua's Utopian expectations of society never occluded his awareness of its more usual grotesqueries. "It's simply past belief," he'd tell me during our morning phone call, recounting some new outrage that on my

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ouTi I would have accepted as normal behavior. "He's gone too far this time," he'd say, and then the suppressed laughter in Joshua's voice vv'ould bubble over or he'd start munching his rye crisp or he'd tell me what was going on in the street below—usually pure invention, since Joshua saw only what he imagined.

My mother called me to tell me that she was going to be operated on for breast cancer. "Honey," she said, "I'm afraid this may be it."

"Really?" I asked. "But millions of women have survived a mastectomy."

"It's spread. It's in my lymph nodes all up and down my left arm. It's the left breast." "Have you had a second opinion?" "What for?" she asked, offended. "I can read X-rays and medical reports for myself After all, I'm a professional woman." She had a job as a psychologist in a medical clinic for mentally retarded children and she never corrected anyone who called her "Doctor." If truth be told, she had spent so many years studying the then-new field of mental retardation that her judgment and diagnoses were usually sounder than those of any medical doctor.

My question about the "second opinion" was the only canned response I had to this emergency and I knew for sure now that I'd never have been able to write for daytime television.

My mother would have been equally ineffectual; she'd been schooled by radio soaps and didn't have the jaunty, self-deprecatory manner of television characters. She was portentous, not "cute," in talking about her worries. I could almost hear the sustained organ chord underlining her tragic utterances. I admired her style, although I found it unbearable.

The Farewell Symphony

"Son," she said, "I need you."

"Maybe it would be better if I came out while you're recuperating. During the operation you'll have all your friends around. Later, when you're feeling better—"

"No," she said, with a force teetering on the edge of anger, "there may not be a recovery period. I need my kids near me now. I'm not being melodramatic. I could recover and have many more productive years" (Mother always spoke of productivity not happiness), "but stastically, sta-/zjtiscally" (like Dad she always stumbled on this word and this word alone), "the statistics also suggest my life could be much shorter. And a mastectomy is not minor surgery."

"Okay," I said. We discussed what plane I should take. I'd arrive on Friday, the night before her operation, see her Saturday and Sunday in recovery. "Then if I'm out of the woods you can fly home. You can stay in my apartment while you're here. The doorman, George, will give you my keys. Your sister wants you to have dinner with her when you arrive." She went into all the details; I noticed how she'd planned to the last moment how long we'd visit her and when, as though she knew she couldn't otherwise be assured of our doing things properly.

On the plane to Chicago I felt a powerful anger against my mother filling me. I wrestled with her in my mind as though she were sitting beside me. "I won't let you drag me into the grave," I whispered soundlessly as New York tilted and shrank below me. I was shocked to see how almost unidentifiably small was the part of Manhattan I cared about; Greenwich Village was just a pimple on the backside of the five boroughs and the sprawl beyond—and then I came back to this inexplicable anger, so unfair. Already here on the plane the crafty faces and sinewy dark litde bodies of New York had been replaced with Midwestern prize pigs—fat, pink, guileless. Years ago I'd said good-bye to the possibility of a steady job, early nights, mashed potatoes, porcine love, knee-slapping jokes.

But who was I kidding? It wasn't the Midwest I'd escaped but my mother; I'd fought free of her gravitational pull but now, like a dark lodestone, she was drawing me back to her. If I was cold and incapable of love it was because I'd given all my love to her so long ago. When I was fourteen I'd said, "If you die I'll throw myself in the grave with you—I couldn't go on living."

In Rome and New York I'd fashioned a new personality for myself All the things I did in the holds of parked trucks and all the books I read and all the masterful men and books I discussed with Joshua, Tom, Max or

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Butk-r—these were all the ways I had of convincing myself" that I had nothing more to do with that woman, who was almost illiterate and who always said the predictable thing except when her idiocy surpassed even my predictions.

When I was a child she'd seldom held me though she'd sung to me in the dark before I went to sleep, sung "I'll be with you in apple-blossom time" in her frail voice, a plaintive war-ballad addressed by a soldier to his girl. Together we'd listen to FDR's "Fireside Chats" and the teenage Frank Sinatra singing on the radio during the war years. At our rambling Michigan summer house I remember the smell of my mother's wool •swimsuit when it was wet; I'd run to her and bury my face in it. Her features, thrown into relief by the sculptural white swimming cap, frightened me with their boldness, free of mascara and makeup. I remember the wasps that haunted the artesian well and that would sting the backs of our necks until my father bagged and burned them. I remember the smell of trapped heat and dust in the empty servants' quarters over the garage, a smell that to my mind seemed to emanate from the clear glass tear-shaped sphere of red liquid (fire-extinguishing fluid) resting in a rusting metal hoop projecting from the pine board wall.

When my mother and father divorced I'd become my mother's best friend, her confidant and, somehow, her older brother. She'd say, "You're so much more mature than your father," or, "If I could find a man like you I'd marry him right away," or, "You were already wise when you were born. There's something almost . . . Christ-like about you." This sacred, consoling spirit that inhabited me when my mother was drunk or lonely had nothing to do with the whining, sniveling brat who wouldn't get up in the morning, on one of those winter mornings when it was still night outside and the world had died and gone mortuary cold under a sheet of snow. Nor did this Christ-like .spirit have anything to do with the ugly, embarrassing nerd my sister despised; I had believed her when she told me I smelled. Nor did this holy spirit cohabit my body with the queer I was in danger of becoming, head ready to be shaved for some eventual lobot-omy, skin potentiaOy white and veins putatively blue because when I grew up I would never go outside or if so only by night, a monster whimpering for compassion but incapable of keeping his big, clammy hands off boys' cool thighs, so like girls' thighs except the knees were knobbier, the pores microscopically larger, the skin pierced by the first dusting of sperm-smelling fuzz.

No, what my mother loved in me was the wise child in the temple,

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consternating the rabbis, the compassionate listener who seemed all-knowing only because I parroted back the advice she'd already offered to herself just the day before during an inebriated monologue. She loved me when I said to her, "You're a wonderful intelligent woman who possesses a very deep, wise soul; you're pre-eminent in your field, you're surrounded by friends who idolize you, and if most men are frightened off because you're such a fine person then that is their loss. You must hold to your own high principles and never cheapen yourself" No matter that if her friends "idolized" her it was only because they were the sort of people so pitiful that they had no other friends. No matter that she made me spend my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays in a nightclub with her while she cruised men at the bar; her principles lurched ever lower with every highball and she wondered if she had cheapened herself only on subsequent nights when her phone refused to ring. Cheapness became a vice only after it had proved to be a bad amatory move; as good Americans our morality was almost entirely pragmatic.

If God had taken away her husband and failed to give her a rich, constant new lover, at least He'd provided her with a son she could engulf entirely. With this son—her hobby, her lapdog, her portable altar—she could enter into a soothing trance induced by exchanged compliments. He was a genius, sensitive, kind, insightful; and she was a hard-working, dedicated humanitarian making a great contribution to science and the community.

We weren't alike. No, she told me, I was a dreamer, poetic, like her father Jim, an Irishman who'd died young. I would never be able to handle money, drive a car, land a job, according to her mythology. That's where she came in. She was the practical one and I was dependent on her. All that was obvious from the psychological tests she gave me—my high score on the verbal part of the Stanford-Binet, my mediocre one on the Wechsler, which was oriented toward problem-solution.

Although O'Reilly, the psychiatrist I'd had as an adolescent, was an amphetamine-popping, booze-swUling crackpot, constantly dozing off during my hours when he wasn't picking at a scab on his nose and murmuring how much he loved me (avoiding my name, which oiten eluded him), nevertheless his one big theory about human neuroses blamed Mom, and he'd drilled me in it until I broke my dependence on her. When I was seventeen and eighteen I'd heaped abuse on her, accusing her of having turned me into a homosexual, attacking her for spoiling my childhood by forcing me to play her husband. Even her habit of calling

me a "genius" had made it impossible for me to fail at things, to experiment, to grope. If I'd learned to drive, to work, to manage my money it had been in defiance of her behavior-shaping and her pseudo-scientific test results.

Her eyes would fill with tears and her mouth would tremble as I shouted at her, but more from the anger in my voice than from the power of my argument. She was always very sure she was right. Each time after I challenged her she'd begin chanting to herself a mantra of self-justification as she turned a prayer-wheel of self-praise.

Once I moved to New York weeks would go by without my calling or writing her, but when we were in contact everything was calm and kindly. I developed a new tactic for dealing with her, a sort of Confucian filial piety. I decided to be scrupulously respectful of her, patient, attentive, laudatory. I never told her anything about myself and with some bitterness I noticed that she seldom asked me questions. The summer before going to Rome (1969—the summer of Stonewall) I'd joined her for a week in what she called her "summer cottage," although it was a sordid suburban house in a small Michigan town an hour north of Chicago.

After three days my Confucian filial piety eroded away and I became irritable again. My anger as a teenager had been inflamed by my psychiatrist, just as my later piety was more a pose than a conviction: since all my friends routinely treated their parents with hostility ("Never trust anyone over thirty" was their slogan), when I turned thirty I decided to treat my mother with elaborate deference—an aesthetic, not an ethical decision. The only genuine, unmediated way to deal with her I'd ever known had been the rapt devotion of my childhood, expressed by that cry I'd shouted, "If you die I'll throw myself in the grave with you."