Stories for Boys: A Memoir (27 page)

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Authors: Gregory Martin

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir
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Christine gave me a look and shook her head.
Why are we doing this?
Oliver said, “Did Grandpa have affairs?”
“Yes,” I said. “He did. He had affairs with men. He was unfaithful to Granny, and that’s another reason why they divorced.”
Oliver nodded. I had never seen him so serious.
Evan shouted, “Why didn’t you tell us? I’m so angry at you for not telling us!”
I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think you were old enough.”
Evan shouted, “I’m gay! I know it! I’m going to be gay now! Oh no! This is the gay part of me, right here.” He started rubbing his left forearm with his right hand. “I knew it. This is the part that’s gay.”
Christine said, “Sweetheart, just because Grandpa is gay doesn’t mean that you will be gay. Daddy’s not gay. But if you are gay, that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being gay. Remember, your aunt Momo is gay.”
Evan smiled. “And Anne is gay.”
“Mom, they’re lesbians,” Oliver said.
“Yes, they are. That’s right. But it’s also okay to say that they’re gay. And listen, Evan. Joey and Nora, your cousins, their moms are gay. Megan and Mary, they’re lesbians. They’re gay, too. And Randall, Momo’s friend from the bakery. He’s gay.”
Evan took a deep breath. He wiped his tears from his face with the back of his arm. “I’m mad at Grandpa.”
“I’m mad at him, too,” I said. “Even now, I’m mad at him. Not all the time. But I’m still mad. You get to be mad at him. You can even tell him that you’re mad. He’ll understand.”
Evan didn’t say anything. We were all quiet for a moment. I took a deep breath myself. I tried to meet Christine’s eyes, but she wouldn’t take her eyes off the boys. She was studying them. Oliver’s lips were pressed together in a line, his brow was furrowed. Later that day he’d tell Christine how often he heard boys at school call other boys “gay,” and he didn’t like it, but he didn’t know what to do. Evan had left my lap and was now sprawled on his back on the futon, his arms and legs in every direction. He was looking at the ceiling.
Christine stood up. She said, “Do you boys want to say anything? Do you have any questions?”
Evan said, “I feel sad for Granny.”
“I do, too,” I said.
“Does Granny know?” Evan asked.
“She does now,” Christine said.
“That’s why they got a divorce,” Oliver said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“You should have told us, Dad,” Evan said.
I didn’t say anything. Christine kissed both boys on the forehead and left the room.
Hay Ride
 
MY FATHER CAME TO VISIT FOR A LONG WEEKEND, DRIVING seven hours to see us from his home in Arizona. He’d found a three bedroom house fifteen miles north of Kingman. His house was literally at the end of the road. The asphalt ended ten feet beyond his driveway. Across a barbed wire fence was the Mojave desert.
He knocked softly on the front door close to midnight. The boys were asleep. Christine and I were in bed. I invited him inside and hugged him. Then we held each other at arm’s length, and took each other in. All my life, my father had been six feet tall. I stand five feet ten inches in my basketball shoes. But now my father was shorter than me. He’d gained a little weight, but not much. He looked good. I carried his bag into the guest bedroom, told him I was glad he’d come, and said I’d see him in the morning. He coughed most of the night, hacking and wheezing.
The next morning, Christine made waffles, cut up bananas and strawberries, and we all sat around the kitchen table eating and talking. Oliver and Evan took turns sitting in their Grandpa’s lap. They held his hand. Christine and my father talked easily, as they have always done. My father regularly told Christine things he didn’t tell me. He’d recently told Christine that the physical therapist he was seeing for back pain, a twenty-four-year-old man, was a “dreamboat.”
This morning, Christine and my father talked about their work, about the days when there are just too many patients. They talked about all the time they spend on their feet and the need for good orthotics. They talked about medication errors. My father told the story of the time when my brother was only ten months old, before I was born. My brother had such a high fever that he kept having febrile seizures and the doctors packed him in ice. My father talked about how helpless he felt, how worried he was. Christine talked about the time when Evan was a baby and was breathing way too fast. He was in and out of the pediatric ER for almost ten weeks.
“I think my greatest fear during that time,” Christine said, “was that I’d never get to know him. I was never carefree. I only saw the problem. I didn’t enjoy Evan as a baby, not nearly enough.”
Evan was staring at Christine, his eyes wide. I was staring at my father.
My father said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Then he and Christine talked about the shopping trip the two of them had planned for the afternoon. My father wanted to find drapes for his new house and wanted Christine’s advice and her company. I didn’t say anything about him vying to become Christine’s trendy, token sitcom gay best friend. I could recognize my petulant, sarcastic thoughts, even if I couldn’t stop them from registering. Then I recognized what I was really feeling. Jealousy. My father was at ease with Christine in a way that he never was with me.
I cleared the table and washed dishes. The kitchen was spotless.
The morning passed and no one mentioned suicide attempts. No one mentioned sexual orientation. There was no mention of divorce or loneliness. No one mentioned that it seemed as if, with this move to Arizona, my father had gone right back in the closet. No one at his work, at the grocery store, in his neighborhood, knows that he is gay.
But it came to me that morning that the most difficult truths I’d had to accept were not related to my father’s homosexuality or what had been done to him as a child. It was far more difficult to accept his loneliness and isolation. And my mother’s loneliness and isolation. I had always thought of them together; I had always thought of them comforting one another into their old age. Then, when one of them died, the other would be comforted by the memories of their life together. But those memories were no comfort now.
My father’s cell phone rang and he stepped outside on the back porch and took the call. When he came back, he said, “Edna has terminal lung cancer. They’re going to put her on hospice.” He looked stunned. Christine went over and hugged him. He sat down at the table. Since his divorce, his sister Edna had been his confidant, his best friend. After his suicide attempt, he called and told her everything. She’d known him since the day he was born, but now she knew that he was gay. Now she knew that their father had molested him for years. She loved and accepted him unconditionally, despite her conservative, Southern worldview. He had been to visit her many times in the past two years.
My father talked about the minor back surgery Edna had gone in for. How she had no idea at all about the cancer. But now it had spread all through her body. She didn’t have much time left. My father said that he hoped that she would go quickly. He hoped that she wouldn’t suffer long.
He said, “It just isn’t fair.”
I was making another pot of coffee. I said, “You smoke all your life, you’re going to get lung cancer.”
My father did not look up, but he said, “That’s not nice.”
Christine shot me a look and shook her head.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
 
WE DROVE FORTY-FIVE minutes across the high desert east of Albuquerque to McCall’s Pumpkin Patch. My father drove. He had XM Satellite Radio in his car, and we listened to Bill Staines sing “Roseville Fair.” We listened to Joan Baez and also Suzanne Vega and Robert Earl Keen, Jr. Sometimes my father sang along. We listened to the Chad Mitchell Trio sing “Which Hat Shall I Wear.” My father said, “These guys are still touring, after all these years.”
We pulled off the interstate and stopped at the stop sign at the top of the ramp. A semi was about thirty yards away, barreling down the lane we needed to cross before turning left onto a rural highway.
I said, “You’re going to want to wait. Precious cargo, you know.” I meant Oliver and Evan, strapped in the back seat.
My father looked over at me, his head tilted down slightly, taking me in through the top lenses of his bifocals. He said, “I know. My son is in the car.”
It was a clear, sunny New Mexico fall day. McCall’s Pumpkin Patch is a lot like the Roseville Fair in Bill Staines’s song. Wholesome fun. The boys ran through the Corn Maze, a sixteen-acre labyrinth of corn stalks. They shot corn cobs from long rubber slingshots. They jumped on the jumping pillow. They did repeats down the dark, cavernous tunnel slide. They fed goats. They watched as pumpkins exploded from a cannon. The man in the cowboy hat pulled the lever, the cannon fired, and out its long barrel the pumpkin flew so high in the air, and so far, that it landed nearly out of sight. You could see the little puff of dust rise when the pumpkin hit the ground, but you couldn’t hear the sound of the impact or see the orange fragments scatter. It was too far away.
We ate chili cheese dogs and french fries. The boys wanted to stay past dark and enter the Haunted Farm, but we told them they weren’t old enough, and they didn’t argue. The sun was going down. We took a hay ride out to the pumpkin patch, and we each wandered the field searching for the best one. We rode the wagon back, our pumpkins in our lap. My father pulled a huge bag of popcorn out of his backpack and we all took turns plunging our hand inside the bag. I felt uncautiously, unguardedly happy.
We drove back to Albuquerque, listening to more folk music. Patty Griffin sang “Useless Desires.” Bob Dylan sang, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
 
LATER THAT NIGHT, after the boys were in their pajamas and had brushed their teeth, Oliver and I read
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
on the couch in the living room, and Evan got to read with Grandpa back in the guest bedroom, on the futon, which was folded out to make a bed. They propped up pillows, and Evan read
See Pip Point
to my father, and then my father read to Evan
Henry and Mudge and The Big Test
, a chapter book about Henry and his big dog Mudge’s adventures at obedience school.
When I turned off the lamp beside my bed that night, light was still shining out beneath the crack of the closed door of the guest bedroom. My father was awake, reading. He would be up for hours. I did not hold this against him. Two days later he would fly to Georgia to be with Edna, to tell her that he loved her and to say goodbye. A week later, he’d fly back to Georgia again to attend her funeral.
 
THOSE FOUR DAYS of my father’s visit to my home, I didn’t know what else there was that I wanted from him, or for him. But I know better now. I want to free him from the burden of my judgment. He has had enough burdens for one lifetime.
A New Commercial
 
THE BOYS AND I WERE WATCHING THE NBA PLAYOFFS when a commercial came on. (The boys like the commercials way more than the games, and so I’m forbidden to mute them or change the channel.) The commercial was for Google Chrome, but it was also about the It Gets Better Project, the internet video project started by Dan Savage, which provides a forum for gay, lesbian and transgendered people, young and old, to tell their stories, and to urge gay and lesbian teenagers that, however compelled they are to turn to suicide, they need to get through it; they need to choose to live. We’d never seen this commercial before. We thought we had all the NBA Playoffs commercials memorized. I’d never seen a commercial like this in my life. Evan stood up on the couch and started pointing at the TV and shouting “Hey! Look!” I didn’t tell him to sit down. Then he was jumping up and down. He was eight years old. Four years had passed since my father had tried to take his life – though Evan still didn’t know about that. Or maybe he did. Maybe he knew more than his parents had told him. But he knew his grandfather was gay. And he knew that it was hard to be gay, and this commercial was about how hard it was. This commercial was about his grandfather and for his grandfather. Evan got it. I could see it in his eyes. They were shining. Evan shouted at the screen, “Grandpa needs to see this. We need to call him.”

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