We know there is no justice on earth. I won’t even mention our so-called criminal justice system. That’s too obvious. But some of us are born to unearned privilege, while others are born weighted down by undeserved burdens that will never be lifted. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more temperamentally suited for success. And so it goes.
There is no justice in heaven. In heaven there is only mercy. Everyone there has been admitted because of God’s redemptive love that finds its highest expression in His mercy.
Only hell is just. In hell, everyone is given exactly what he or she deserves. (See Dante.) Only there is justice readily enforced. It’s my suggestion, therefore, that those same lawgivers (and those who implemented those laws) so insistent in their demand for justice repair at the earliest opportunity to the one and only place where it is readily available: hell. I am sure they will be warmly received.
As part of this examination of my religion and my homosexuality, let me note the following: it has been a long-held belief of mine that a good argument is a form of intimacy. How ironic in a way that my passionate opposition to my Church’s hierarchy has bound me with hoops of steel to the Church that has tried with equal passion to get rid of me.
An incident: At the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where I was, at the time, working on my first novel, In Such Dark Places, a fellow-writer, Norma Rosen, confronted me when she saw me heading out to Sunday Mass in Peterborough. “How can you be a Catholic?” she asked. “How can you still be a Catholic?”
“Norma,” I answered, “if I weren’t, I’d miss the tension.”
4.
There were brief episodes during this middle period when Gale and I saw each other. Shortly after the first New Year since our farewells, he stopped by, unannounced, at Hague Street. Our talk was inconsequential catch-up conversation. I’d finished my play and it was with my agent. He was considering a series of photographs that would capture the vitality of Myrtle Avenue. There may already have been rumors that the dilapidated El was marked for demise—just as New York’s Third Avenue El disappeared during my two years at Yale.
It was expected that Myrtle Avenue would be transformed. Why it needed transformation could best be explained by the real estate speculators ready to pounce at any moment. Myrtle Avenue at that time seemed a thriving, bustling, diverse community. It was a self-sufficient village. That this was made possible by low rents, both residential and commercial, was hardly a secret. Does that hint at the reasoning behind the piously proposed “transformation”? No comment.
Anyway, there was Gale, back at Hague Street—and he did stay the night. If he had come to confirm that our separation was not to his liking, no real evidence presented itself. He was, at best, a perfunctory guest and I sensed that the least effective stimulant that I could offer would be pleas for his immediate return. The next morning, at parting, he spoke of a possible repeat engagement. I was to call him later. I called him. We’d get together another time. Yeah.
Once I ran into him on a misty night on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where offerings of availability were made with little pretense of being there for the view. It was a brief encounter. I mentioned that I was seeing a psychiatrist. He said he’d been considering asking me home, but this had changed his mind. He walked away. I mentioned the Promenade meeting to Dr. Gould. I speculated that the mention of psychiatric treatment inspired, in Gale, a fear that I might have a fit on the floor. Uncharacteristically, the doctor rewarded my alliteration with a quick guffaw. Where that came from, I’ll never know.
By the time or, actually, immediately after my final leave-taking with its key exchange, it became only too apparent that what had long been operative during the time of diminishing affection was now undeniable. I was desperate.
I felt I’d been expelled from the Garden without ever being aware that I’d bitten into the offered apple. Of course, I had not only taken a luscious bite, I’d chewed and swallowed a sizable chunk. If my Edenic ancestors had partaken of the forbidden fruit, convinced that it qualified them to be like God, worshipped and adored, I was no less guilty of highest pride than they had been. How readily had I subscribed to the notion that I was worthy of abject adulation, that I was perfection itself and was finally being recognized as the superior being I’d often suspected myself to be. With Gale, the long-awaited votary had finally appeared. I had come to the deserved and destined apotheosis and had only to accept and revel in it.
That the tasted apple might inflict an incurable malady, that the incessant longing I was experiencing would never be appeased, came slowly and inexorably as something of a surprise. This reversal seemed to contradict nature itself. How could I be revealed as an obvious marvel and then informed that a terrible mistake had been made? And not only must I now survive the expulsion but be forced to remember my former estate and, worst of all, yearn with an exile’s yearning for a return that would never be allowed.
5.
Dr. Gould’s office was on Gramercy Park in a building of medieval pretensions, typified by the two more-than-life-size statues in knightly armor that guarded the entryway. Our sessions took place in the unimpressive living room of an apartment on the first floor, to the right after I had come into the building. Near windows that looked out onto the park, he sat in one chair, facing me, and I, in another across the room, facing him. The chairs were comfortable but designed more for support than for relaxation.
Dr. Gould, I would say, was in his late thirties, slender, not muscular. His hair was medium brown, close to a crewcut. His features were well defined and seemed to feel no need to be imposing. His was a reasonably good-looking face, his expressions professionally noncommittal, his demeanor attentive without seeming intensely engaged.
I remember mostly short-sleeved shirts, slacks, brown sandals and tan socks—this latter easily remembered since I spent a considerable amount of time staring at them while struggling to get out what I was trying to uncover. During moments of uncertain articulation, I would stare at a tree across the street. Not infrequently, I looked directly at my analyst—for the simple reason that he was the person I was talking to, and he was right there across from me.
At our first session I told him of the breakup with Gale, of the episode on the bridge where I had realized that my mind was being threatened, and of my continuing fear that the assault might be repeated. I remember no questions that he may have asked. He required that I do the talking—and very rarely would he either question or comment. At the start I decided: I would never lie to him. This was prompted not by a preference for the truth and nothing but the truth, but for two reasons: What was the point of therapy if I was going to lie my way out of difficult admissions or untenable discoveries? A more active motive: I believed (accurately or not) that he would know when I was lying and, like all liars, I didn’t want to be caught in the act.
Strangely enough, the episode on the bridge, the terror that had forced me to seek the help I was supposedly there to receive, was not to be allotted the pride of place during our early sessions. Gale, homosexuality, desperation, loss, and my feelings and understandings regarding them were obviously more important. (It is a measure of my inability to understand myself that I would realize much later that my separation from Gale in no way caused the assault. But the good doctor required me for the most part to set the agenda and also the course we would travel together.)
Early on I told Dr. Gould about my stint with The Catholic Worker, and he asked me why I felt so drawn to Miss Day and the organization. I told him it possibly had to do with having been poor for a time during childhood. I explained how, one day on my way to school (I was a fifth grader at the time), I said to myself with quiet surprise, “I’m hungry.” I don’t remember what I’d been given for lunch, but it hadn’t been enough. Also, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any fresh fruit. It was borne home to me at that moment that we, my family and I, were poor, which, at an earlier time, w
as a designation reserved for others, a class that existed at a safe remove even when they lived in close proximity—like the Millers down the block or fellow students at school whose families were on “relief”—an inadequate sustenance that humiliated as much as it helped.
My family was made poor not by the debilitating Depression but by a bureaucratic fiat that decreed my father’s retirement from his job at the Post Office at the age of sixty-five. For many employees this would be a well-earned reward for years of faithful service. For many, but not for my father. He had been the youngest of nine children and, in the memory implanted during my early years, had been, as the youngest, the designated caregiver and possibly the main support for his aging parents. (His father lived to ninety-two.) My father was able to marry for the first and only time at the age of forty-four, which in itself, for a first-generation American of Irish descent, was not all that unusual. What created a category distinctive to himself was his unimpeded procreation of eight children within the next eleven years. Which means that at age sixty-five he still had a young family to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate—all with a pension: one half of his previous salary. We were provided with enough, if not to live on, to make us ineligible for any public assistance.
A further difficulty contributed to our predicament. My father, humiliated by his failure to adequately provide for his family, became a drunk for almost two years. My tattered clothes, shoes with detaching soles that flapped when I walked, provided humiliations of my own. I remember especially my winter coat, the ends of the sleeves with the worn-away threads hanging loose, like two straggly beards dangling down from my wrists.
I had one short-lived hope for rescue from this particular shame. In the fourth grade I had begun to write what it pleased me to call “poems”—doggerel of rhymed couplets that I’d scribble on whatever scraps of paper I could get my hands on. More than several times I’d come up with what’s now called an “occasional” poem. Here’s a sample from my mother’s Mother’s Day tribute: “When in disaster/No one could get there any faster.” All evidence to the contrary, I had not yet become acquainted with the work of Ogden Nash.
But this was my hope: There were two middle-aged women of our acquaintance who, for reasons all their own, found me entertaining, and I would recite my poems for them. Their response was all that could have been desired. They were amazed at the depth and breadth of my gift. They had also, on one occasion, commented on the decorative nature of my coat sleeves. An idea was instantaneous: I would copy out all my poems, make of them an approximation of a book, present it to the (to me) affluent ladies, and they would buy me a new coat.
I copied out the poems. I put them together with yarn threaded through holes made by a paring knife. I gave them to the ladies. Great cries of praise. Repeated expressions of gratitude. The visit progressed. I was, as always, entertaining. They were pleased. They had a good time. The visit ended, as did my expectation.
Less than three weeks into my therapy a phone call came just after I got home from work. My older sister, Helen Margaret, said, “Franny died.” Franny was my younger sister, the last of my parents’ eight children. A suicide at the age of twenty-eight, the divorced mother of three children (ages nine to five). Pills. Franny was found on her kitchen floor that morning by our sister Sally. Franny’s third attempt, each more determined than the last. Institutionalized for a time after the second.
I had visited her there. I made a trip to Wisconsin for that express purpose, a rare event. I did visit the family from time to time; sometimes more than a few years passed between trips. Financial considerations to some degree, but even more, a reluctance to descend into the maelstrom that had gathered at the depth of my family’s life.
It was Franny’s situation. Court-approved rescue from a disastrous marriage, with no financial support from her ex-husband, and three children in need of a structured life, understandably hungry for attention and affection. These needs were present in even greater measure in Franny herself, intensified no doubt by the absence of sexual fulfillment and the loving help of a supportive mate, which her husband definitely had not been. (For their honeymoon, according to my mother, Franny was taken—already pregnant—to Chicago, deposited in a hotel room and left pretty much to herself for the weeklong adjustment to married life.)
It was a problem with no solution. As a Catholic, she could not marry again, even if she’d wanted to, without renouncing a strong familial allegiance to the Catholic Church. The apparatus for an annulment, in the intervening years between the divorce and the suicide, was in the hands of a Jesuit at Gesu Church in Milwaukee who was presumably her advocate. He interviewed me and I gave him what I am certain were the proofs needed to justify an annulment.
Jim, the husband, had been a friend of mine; we’d met when we worked together at Walgreen’s, I as a soda jerk, he as a clerk on what was referred to as “the drug side,” where prescriptions were filled and clerks sold over-the-counter medicines and all the other products shelved in drugstores at the time: cosmetics, candy, cigarettes, Kleenex, etc. Our most prominent activity together was ice skating, mostly at Washington Park, where the boating lagoon froze over each and every winter. From time to time he came over to my house. He met my family.
One evening when he was there, sitting on the couch, Franny brought him a cup of steaming tea. She knelt in front of him and held it up as if it were an offering. She looked directly into his eyes. He looked directly into hers. What followed needs no elaboration.
At this same time the Cold War was intensifying and there were calls for bringing back the draft. I didn’t want to be drafted into the army so I voluntarily enlisted in the Air Force. Franny and Jim became engaged. I was to be the best man at the elaborate church wedding.
The night before, possibly to make sure Jim would show up the next morning, I stayed at his place. His unreliability when it came to honoring dates to arriving at the agreed-upon hour, or coming at all, was well established. Possibly, because Franny was already pregnant (unknown to any of the family), she ignored or accepted these “idiosyncrasies” and went ahead with the marriage. More likely, however, was that she was passionately and helplessly attached to Jim and willing to endure whatever might be necessary to secure and make permanent the promised bond.
During the evening of the night I spent at his house, he, without any prompting or questioning on my part, acknowledged that his conversion to Catholicism and his agreement to a Catholic ceremony had no meaning for him. He believed none of it; he accepted none of it. This was all said casually, without the least note of scorn. He was not admitting to any hypocrisy or deception. Whether this alone would invalidate the marriage according to the Church’s Canon Law, I do not know, but as part of the larger pattern of Jim’s inability or refusal to make and honor a commitment, this surely deserves consideration. Then, too, there was Franny’s decision to tell no one about the pregnancy. Fear? Shame? That she had isolated herself so completely from our mother and our sisters does more than merely suggest an emotional state that disqualified her from making and implementing the most important decision of her life.
The known truths are beyond contradiction, sufficient evidence not to just make the marriage eligible for annulment but to require that the judgment be expedited and Franny made free to marry without the threat of sacramental refusal or diminished status in the Catholic community. Whether there were additional reasons supportive of her cause, I do not know. What I do know is that either clerical indifference, bureaucratic sloth, hierarchical opposition, or whatever other power involved delay to the point of criminality, a promulgation was never made.
This is not an idle accusation. In effect, Franny was condemned to a life of loneliness with no hope of a fulfilled love, but she was also forbidden to even go in search of such a possibility. How contributory this was to her suicide, no one can truly know, since the complexities of her nature—of anyone’s—can never be untangled and expertly w
oven into a meaningful pattern. But surely these were needless and monstrous burdens added to those she was already being forced to bear. Her children, fortunately, were adopted by Helen Margaret and her Brooklyn-born husband, Tom Smith, who lovingly raised and nurtured them. The tragedy, however, must always have been for them, as for all of us, a hovering presence that could never be completely exorcised.
What I experienced when I came back to New York after Franny’s funeral was predictable. I went through the motions of living. I went to work. I went to Dr. Gould. I said my prayers—ostensibly for Franny, and I think they were—but on occasion I couldn’t be sure that my De profundis didn’t include an unarticulated plea that Gale and I would be together again, that I could lie down by his side and be comforted. The fervor of my plea was determined by the hopelessness of my cause. For Franny, however, my prayer was closer to a demand than a petition. In no way would I accept that my sister, in her suffering, could be judged guilty of the claim that a suicide was beyond the reach of God’s love and of God’s mercy. Can one suffer what Franny had suffered and then be punished?
6.
I had finally finished the play I was working on while volunteering for The Catholic Worker. It was called Seen from a Cockeyed Kite, inspired by an anecdote told to me by a Yale undergraduate, Brandon Stoddard, who’d performed in a play of mine produced by the Drama School. He’d gone to a prestigious prep school, Deerfield Academy, in Massachusetts. In his class was a boy, Johnny Gunther, who, in their senior year, was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. There were treatments and surgeries. Johnny wanted desperately, Brandon told me, to experience some meaningful achievement before his death. He became determined to graduate. And graduate he did; his head bandaged, his step faltering as he mounted the stage and was awarded his diploma.
In the Shadow of the Bridge Page 6
