My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (12 page)

had killed his mother, Pauline, Hemingway’s second wife. Finally, as

Gigi’s life spiraled downward, he underwent a sex change— which

solved nothing. He, now she, wound up dead in a Miami jail, wearing

women’s clothes.

Father and son were both heterosexual, passionate lovers of

women, and yet both had a strong female side that Hemingway père

was at least able to ventriloquize in his novels. Hemingway’s theatri-

cally hypermale image and legend can be seen as a defense against

fear— fear not just of the woman in himself, but of the women in his

life, the Others whom he so needed and depended on. (There were

four wives and no gap: each wife- to- be supplanted her predecessor be-

fore the marriage was over.)

One reason Hemingway endures, like his rival, enemy, and friend

F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the palpable sense of vulnerability, a nakedness he exposes to the world. Hemingway’s brave and edgy flirtation with

the darkness of transvestism speaks to the longing and fear in all of us of losing the self in the other, of merging until we disappear.

I think of Chevey and me as children, both trying to kiss our el-

bows. Then I think of us as teenagers, each standing alone before a

mirror. (Which of us is the “real” girl?) We have as yet but the dim-

mest idea of sex or “sexual identity.” We’ve read books, watched mov-

ies, memorized certain images, and are gradually assembling the bits

and pieces of imaginary adult selves. We kiss the mirror (my lover/my

self), pose, apply makeup, try on different dresses (the same ones?),

practicing for the lovers we hope will come to tell us who we are.

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“T
he worst thing about it,” says my analyst friend Ethel Person, “is you discover you don’t know the person you thought you knew.” Later,

others will express a similar opinion. One man in his fifties tells me

that if his brother suddenly came to him one day with the revelation

that he was transsexual or homosexual, he’d be furious, wondering

why his sibling hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him before?

Such feelings are understandable, possibly even typical, but they

are not mine. I was perfectly content— to my shame, I guess— not to

have known of this until now. More important, I never thought I
knew
Chevey. In general, I’m rarely surprised when a person behaves in a

way considered “out of character.” We are a rotating cast of aspects of self that are shown to one person, or in one setting, and hidden in another. Memorial services are often jarring in this regard: friends and

relatives eulogize the deceased in such conflicting terms they might be talking of different people.

The nice boy next door turns out to be a serial killer, yet there are

usually clues which we’ve chosen to ignore. And my ruling assumption

is we can never know another person,
especially
if that person is close to us. It’s why I love detective stories: the revelation that the murderer was the patient secretary, the charming brother- in- law! In
Law & Order
wives and husbands kill each other; parents think they know their children (our daughter
couldn’t
be a lap dancer!) but don’t. We’re simply blinkered by proximity, and, in families, by the roles that have be-

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come hopelessly ingrained through some witches brew of choice, need,

collusion, and coercion. We go away, spend thousands on therapy,

think we’ve escaped; then we come back for the holidays and the old

wounds open like bivalves in steam. All it takes is one drop of alcohol, one skeptical glance, and the hard- won insights of years on the

couch— the illusion of mastery of one’s life— evaporate in a flurry of

insults and recriminations!

One day, when we were adults, Chevey, Mother, and I were talking

about our perceptions of each other. Chevey, with barely concealed

anger, told us we didn’t know him at all. “My friends think I’m very

funny,” he said, and Mother and I looked at each other with barely

concealed surprise. Chevey, funny? And yet it turns out to be true: he

is. Or rather, should I say
she
is? It is only in recent years that I’ve realized how funny my sibling can be. Was he always, and I just didn’t

know it? Friends often know us better than our families, and casual

friends— more detached, less sensitive— may actually see us more

clearly than close friends. Intense friendships almost by definition re-produce the distorted patterns of family ties, whereas we all know the

relief of spilling our guts to a stranger on a plane. In any case, our later years have been filled with laughter, distilled reminiscences of the

past, rippling onward to the absurdities and vexations of the present,

not least of which is his migration from male to female. But if Chevey

hid his sense of humor from his family, how much else? And what, re-

ciprocally, did I hide? Do we not learn in the terrible scrutinizing intimacy of family how to become artists of disguise? Sometimes, as

children, as teenagers and beyond, we don’t know each other because

we are not there to be known.

In childhood, he was simply the much younger brother, parachut-

ing into my only- child paradise. For a full two years, in 1943 and ’44, Mother and I enacted a nightly ritual. Kneeling together on the floor

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beside my bed, we prayed for a brother or sister for me. This was to

encourage God to provide, of course, but also to forestall jealousy.

When he appeared in 1945 I naturally took some credit for the miracle

birth, but the novelty soon wore off. As a doll- averse, nonmaternal

type, I couldn’t take a motherly interest, and as a pal, he showed no

promise whatsoever. He was always so much younger, displaying what

I took to be boyish traits: ornery, cute, irritating, smart- alecky, with childhood handicaps I was meant to feel sorry for (bad ears, bad eyes).

He was stubbornly oppositional and got the nickname “Vice- a- Versa”

for contradicting everything anyone said. He claims it sprang from a

need to consider both sides to a question, now a virtue but then an ir-

ritant, like a gnat always biting back.

When I look at snapshots in a family photograph album, the little boy

who’s Chevey is utterly mysterious to me— but then so is the older sis-

ter Molly standing beside him. He’s about six, she eleven, they’re living at the farm, ten miles outside of Richmond in Goochland County. In

1948, when I was eight and Chevey three, we moved into “Ashley,” an

1890s white frame farmhouse on the crest of a hill. It sat atop 230 acres of what had until recently been a working tenant farm. There was a

tenant house, barn (with sleepover hayloft), pigs and chickens, dogs,

and also Uncle Charlie, the grizzled old black retainer who came with

the property and lived in a cabin at the bottom of the hill. Our par-

ents, amateur architects, had the façade covered in brick and added a

wing. Molly and Chevey are playing or posing in the yard that extends

from the flagstone terrace and overlooks grazing pasture and woods.

In a few years, that yard will give way to a swimming pool, created for the pleasure of family and friends, but especially in the hope of attract-ing boys (armed with new driver’s licenses) who might otherwise not

court the teenage girl who lives so far from the city.

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Moving to this farm was a long- standing dream of my father’s. He

had married late, worked in various jobs relating to mortgage and real

estate. He loved land, the sight and feel of it, but hated working for

other people (a phobia Chevey and I would inherit), and had finally

found himself professionally when he started his own realty mortgage

business. He worked hard; there were lean years, but the farm was a

sanctuary. We rented out several acres of pasture land for grazing, and Daddy loved nothing better than to come home, put on his old clothes,

mount the green John Deere tractor with one of us in tow, and survey

his green realm, dotted with beautiful Black Angus. In the photographs, Chevey is squatting over the new puppy and grinning adorably, while

Molly cradles a kitten in her arms and looks sullen with preadolescent

self- consciousness. He has his hand on the puppy’s head, and draws un-

diluted pleasure from the contact, while she is torn between the urge to nuzzle the kitten and the social imperative of arranging herself for the camera’s eye. In separate snapshots taken at the same time, he is standing in shorts and shirt, his belly thrust forward and a look of mutinous defiance on his face. She simply looks awkward, inhabiting some limbo

of not- yet- formed identity (now called “middle childhood”), both resisting and slyly acknowledging the self- display that will soon become her vocation. If you had to pick one for a bumpy passage into adulthood, it would be the girl. But that’s deceiving, too. They’re waiting for the important things to happen, not knowing that so much of their road map

has been laid out in advance, and the invisible tentacles of history have already begun closing in on them.

But what makes photographs disturbing is they challenge our illu-

sion of a continuous, known self. They’re often all we have of our

younger selves, and yet what do they tell us? They conceal more than

they reveal and become a kind of embalming that serves not so much

as a trigger to the memory as an unreliable image, frozen in time.

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It’s not that I don’t “recognize them”— I’ve seen the photographs

often enough to know they’re of my brother and me. Still, the children

in these photographs are as inscrutable as my grandmother and grand-

father, posed formally in Victorian dress in the yellowing, dignified,

standard family portrait of its time. Or Mother and my father, in a

candid shot from 1940 or ’41, standing under a huge magnolia tree at

Winterlaken, the family home in Fayetteville. While he is stationed in

Alabama, Mother and I (recently born) are living in this grand old

mansion (once a boys’ school) that was her childhood home and is now

occupied by Granny and other relatives. Daddy is on leave from his

army post in Gadsden, Alabama, immaculately handsome in uniform;

she’s a picture of composed reserve in tailored suit and white blouse I can conjure up Winterlaken in an instant by the smell: the magnolia

trees, pine needles, a rubbery scent that might be the turpentine being extracted from trees by a process my grandfather invented. But who

are these parents of mine, younger than I could ever have imagined? A

happily reunited young married couple, or one already vexed by the

war, a new child, tension between the young husband and his in- laws?

How can I know them when they can hardly know themselves? Or

rather, when such a concept has not yet acquired currency. Their no-

tions of identity are quite different from ours, more attached to role

and class, family and society, imposed at birth. Individual fulfillment?

Not a term in my mother’s vocabulary, though something gnaws away

at her, a yearning antithetical to marriage and motherhood, a yearning

that has no name. They live in a world of obligations and duty rather

than rights and autonomy, of parceling themselves into inherited roles: father, army major, young husband, new father, uncertain as to what

will he do when the war is over. Mother, the dancing girl and artist,

saddled overnight with the frightening new job of “parenting,” and

worried, too, about the future.

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As a child, Chevey was somewhat sickly, with one bad eye and a

persistent sinus infection in the ear, preventing him from participating in sports. But he loved the farm, exploring in the woods. Separately or together, we would go down to the tricklet of a stream beside which

nested Uncle Charlie’s cabin, where the door was always ajar. Both

ancient and ageless (he could have been seventy or ninety), he by now

just puttered about doing odd jobs, cleaning out the pigpen, gathering

eggs and vegetables, grabbing or hunting an occasional bird, cooking

and sustaining himself. He was also our storytelling Uncle Remus.

We’d sit on the floor of his cabin, an airless box, cozy and rank, the

woodstove lit summer and winter. It stank most wonderfully of fumes,

tobacco, wet denim— his overalls so stiff with grease and the occa-

sional hosing down, they could have stood upright in the corner. And

he would spin stories of other times, scare us with tall tales of animals and monsters, both real and imaginary. The escaped convicts from the

“state farm,” a penitentiary a few miles away, were real enough, and