THE THREE OF US
have settled well in our respective fields, in part because of money. Our grandfather had a small publishing empire, but his frugality and capitalist foresight were the key to his wealth (another cliché made flesh, considering he was a Scot). When he died, he left each of his grandchildren a chunk of that ore, to be mined when each of us reached age thirty-one, the same age our grandfather was when he bought out his partner at the
Yeoman
and married the man’s daughter (oh what a logical world
that
was). David, three years out of veterinary college and working for some burnt-out practitioner in a dreary old surgery reeking of cat piss, knew immediately that the money could spare him that same fate. Dennis had been drifting from one throwaway job to another since not quite finishing university and, less wisely at first glance, blew a good deal of his share just gallivanting around the Continent. But his extravagance landed him in Paris, pastry school, and, for good or ill, the arms of a woman whose vigilance over his future kept the rest of the inheritance socked away in bonds.
I was the first to achieve this windfall, and at first I treated it as you might a lovely light that’s just too bright to look at directly, half-squinting instead through a lattice of fingers. I’d glance quickly at the regular statements I received of the balance (nicely compounding away in the hands of Edinburgh’s finest investors), then file them in my least accessible drawer. What was my fear? That this hundred thousand pounds or so—admittedly, a laughable sum to even the mezzo-rich of the city where I now lived—would dislodge me from the small-world groove I enjoyed not brilliantly but well enough. Further threatening to dislodge me was my parents’ hope that this inheritance would draw me back to my native soil.
I had passed my orals at Columbia and was well into my dissertation. I worked more slowly than I might have, however, lingering on in New York for the wild life I constantly imagined myself about to embark on. But in the realm of imagination was where this wild life stayed, for the baths were closing, the clubs growing maudlin, an angry celibacy rearing its gargoyle head. Still, there were plenty of niches for frenzied denial; the bottom line was, politics and epidemiology aside, I never could seem to shake an innate sexual modesty that sabotaged my alter-egotistical longings and may, in the end, have saved my life.
The thought of going back overseas, even to London or some Oxbridgian polonaise of an existence, depressed me. The proximity of my family would have been fine, even desirable (especially had I known my mother would be dead in five years), but my very Britishness—aside from my educated burr, which gave me an alluring edge at the Boy Bar and the Saint—was the part of myself I wanted to uproot and burn like a field of dead thistle. While I’d been busy, as a student, lauding the genius of Dickinson over Keats, of Wharton over Woolf, what I celebrated with far greater awe were the chrome-smooth chests of the Puerto Rican boys in Times Square, the Fourth of July smiles on the sweet blue-eyed queens who visited Mom and Pop twice a year back home, in places with breathy names like Omaha, Tallahassee, Tuskegee Falls. These irrationally contradictory objects of my craving—men who wore chains or, on the other hand, did wholesome, contrivedly daring things like ice-camp and windsurf—were not to be found in my homeland.
So as I salivated reverently over all these visceral pleasures, waiting like some semivirginal debutante for exactly the right moment to
plunge,
I came of age—fiscally speaking. I had hinted to my parents that I’d be staying on in the States after getting my degree because I felt I could snare a more glamorous teaching post than I might have back home. But the truth was that even if my dissertation was published to the acclaim my mentors assured me it would receive, even if I parlayed my upper-crusty Ivanhoe aura, the best first job I’d be able to hope for would be in a place like Pittsburgh or Oxford (Mississippi—the lynch-mob overtones made me shudder) or Portland (Maine or Oregon, take your pick; equally dull prospects).
My libido had me by the cranial balls; I was in thrall to this city and would rather, at that moment, have washed dishes in a Cuban-Chinese bodega—elbow to sweaty elbow with supple tattoos—than declaim my only slightly less passionate love for Nathaniel Hawthorne in a classroom overlooking the willow-kissed waters of the Concord River itself.
I was rescued from washing dishes by the congruent generosities of my grandfather and a professor who understood my reluctance to leave the center of my chosen cosmos. Ralph Quayle was an author-ity on Melville but lived a most un-Melvillian life. Along with two springer spaniels named Mavis and Druid, amidst flounced hummingbird chintzes, he occupied the attic floor of a narrow brick house on Bank Street. I knew this early on, because he liked to invite seminar students for Sunday teas. I think the custom made him feel like a don at Cambridge, the same yearning reflected, I’m sure, in the special attention he gave me.
Typically, twelve students would show up for an hour or so of academic debate, by the end of which we’d have abandoned Bartleby the Scrivener to talk instead about the bewildering reign of Ronald Reagan, the state of AIDS research, the terrorist threat (all of it discussed with cool-headed, high-minded dispassion). Soon, a predictable attrition would set in. First, the three female students would depart; by twilight, the four straight men would make their excuses—leaving four or five of us to head out for cheap burritos or sesame noodles. Ralph would slum along with us. After dinner, still more of us would split off until, often, only Ralph and I remained. We’d head across Seventh Avenue to Uncle Charlie’s, a bar that welcomed gay society into a setting so civil as to seem, at times, like a tea dance. Unlike the clubs, it was a place where you could meet people without having to gyrate shirtless in a strobe light and shout to be heard. You could, refreshingly,
talk
.
This was the only place where Ralph spoke of his personal life; where, toward the end of the school year, he told me he owned the building in which he lived. He didn’t like many people to know this, because knowledge of wealth—especially in an older man without heirs—complicated relationships. Since he wasn’t handsome, he said, and since he didn’t have a country place, he could feel confident that all the people who acted as if they liked him really did. But if people knew he had money, how could he tell opportunists from friends?
He chose to tell me this after I told him, in the midst of some rambling solipsistic monologue, about my inheritance and the mixture of comfort and paralysis I felt whenever I thought of it. Like a forest sage from some urban fairy tale (emphasis on
fairy
), he gave me three admonitions: Don’t spend the money on frivolous travel (at least for another ten years); don’t spend it to captivate a lover (not even if the lover has more money); and, above all, don’t tell anyone about it (as I was now doing).
Ralph was in his midfifties and planned to retire ten years later in style. His building was the least stately on its block—without its cheek-to-cheek neighbors, I imagined, it would lean like the Tower of Pisa—but it made him a killing on rent, since he let the two floors below him as separate flats and, below them, the ground floor and basement as a commercial establishment. His tenant there was a talented young baker whose challahs and tortes sent their tempting, affectionate odors up the stairwell beginning at six every morning. Any remotely classy business in that location, Ralph said, was bound to do well because it was passed at least twice a day by his many extremely affluent, high-living neighbors (by which he meant homosexual professionals with money to spend on puff pastry, orchids, and eau-de-vie in lieu of nursery school, ballet, and braces).
Bleary-eyed by this point in his lecture, I was finding my mentor tedious; why would I care about this trivia? He’d been going on and on about the baker, Armand—how promptly he paid the rent, how thoughtfully quiet he was in the predawn hours, how nicely he’d fixed up the basement for his ovens, how equally splendid his
prune
tatin
and his plain-as-a-penny shortcake. . . . At first I thought Ralph was about to confess an unrequited yen for Armand—worse, I dreaded, ask my advice. For the baker was well beyond Ralph’s reach. He was a tall, Italianate dark-haired young man whom I had glimpsed through the window several times on my way upstairs; of course, the scones and little sandwiches for our Sunday teas came from below, and once I’d stopped in to order a cake for a party of my own. Across the counter, I’d seen how solidly slim those hips seemed under that apron, how stunningly green those eyes. Armand was beyond my reach as well.
“He’s already been in Saint Anthony’s twice for transfusions,” Ralph was saying when my attention lurched back, “and the drugs are demolishing his liver. There are times I wish I didn’t know so much, it’s so impossible knowing what to say, but I suspect he’ll be pulling out soon, that he’ll be too weak to do business and I’ll have to find another tenant.” Ralph looked genuinely heartsick—and I felt sick in my own, more generalized way. This was 1984, when everyone knew someone who was sick but you could still believe the wave would subside, the tide ebb, before your shoes were wet, before anyone who really mattered to you (like you) became ill and, worse, asphyxiated by fear. Back then, I’d known only two people who died of this plague, both just acquaintances, grad students with whom I’d shared nothing more intimate than a library carrel.
I mumbled to Ralph, “That’s awful, how tragic,” or something equally inane. How could I change the subject without seeming callous (which I was) or disrespectful? Just wait for a suitable pause, I decided, and tuned out again until I heard my name: “So you, Fenno, maybe that’s something you’d like to take a gamble on. I’d go in with you on the initial inventory—we’d look for a seller going out of business—and you could probably have the apartment under mine within a few years, they’re a couple bound to progenate any minute and they’ll have to have more space . . . that is, if you wanted to live there as well, and I’d give you a decent rent. Imagine rolling out of bed and there you are at work! . . . Though I will tell you, nice as it is, we all suffer one thing together: the critic across the street and the personal dramas he thinks we should share—drunken flute sonatas and a parrot that likes to sing scales when it rains. Charming the first two or three times you hear it, but then . . .”
Critic? Parrot? The health and reproductive vitality of Ralph’s tenants? I was hopelessly lost. “What inventory?” I said, groping.
Ralph burst out laughing. “Well, sweetheart, I’ve found out one thing tonight: being suddenly rich doesn’t make you any more riveting.”
“
. . .
COMPASSIONATE, EXACTIN
G . . .
so incredibly decent—decency raised to an artform! . . . so smart and so, so
upright
in everything he did . . .” Through his raised wineglass, the candlelight casts droplets of wavering pink light onto Dennis’s face as he toasts our father’s virtues. His eyes blur as he struggles for only the most sincere of sentiments. “He loved us so . . . well, without demands—or at least, if he had any, he hid them awfully well. If each of his granddaughters could have just a third of his good nature, oh, well, we’d have a household of little angels.” Dennis offers a sidelong smile to his wife; his free hand rests on her back.
Véronique returns his smile, but I read a touch of boredom there—though, to be fair, this could be the invention of my immovable spite. I’d known her only a few days before she heard or deduced I was gay, and though she did not treat me unkindly, I will never forget what she said to me that New Year’s, happening upon me in the dining room as I looked for a platter. She was copiously pregnant with Laurie, their first, and as she stopped she spread one hand languidly across her anatomical trophy (Mal called it that). She leaned toward me and said quietly, “I am as mo-dairn as zee next citizen, Fenno, but you weel never, please, day-monstrate your preferred intimacies before my children. Can we agree on thees?” Her dainty eyebrows were raised, like little swallows in flight, her pursed Parisian mouth faintly smiling, as if she’d just asked for extra milk in her tea. I raised my eyebrows theatrically in return and said, “I can’t imagine our agreeing on much, but I’ll gladly comply with your papal issues.
Ça va
?
”
“Ça va,”
she said, not the least bit unnerved, damn her, and even broadened her smile. When I told Mal about this encounter, upstairs later that evening, he dubbed my sister-in-law the Cuntesse. Of three visits he made with me to Tealing, he met her only that one, last time; if he had seen her much more often, there might have been fireworks.
David actually stands. “To Dad, I owe my very sense of self, my sense of having a weight in the world, the capacity for true impact on my fellow creatures . . . and the sense of familial continuity, the legacy not just of this wonderful house and countryside but all the wits and smarts we’ve been passed down from branch to branch of the McLeod family tree . . .” He acknowledges each of us with a thrust of his glass; we are an intimate five, since the three little girls are in bed. I feel as if what he’s saying belongs in a larger setting, a larger clan, as if the formality of his words is just a few sizes too grand for our gathering. Perhaps his toast was planned, and he’d have aimed this “legacy” bit at our nieces—generous, I admit. Some people who long for children of their own hold back with other people’s children, too fearful that they might actually grow to love them—and to painfully envy their parents. Others dive right in to partake of the pleasure they still hope will one day be theirs; and if not, they’ll take whatever morsels they’re thrown of someone else’s share. David, I am happy (and sheepishly surprised) to say, falls in the latter camp. As brusque as he can be with the rest of us, he knows how to play with the girls, to honestly amuse them: he’s taken them for jostling cross-country rides in the bed of his pickup, helped them sit astride their first pony, milk their first cow, listen to a kitten’s heartbeat through the stethoscope he carries everywhere as if it safeguarded his own vital signs.