“There’s no fool like an old fool!” my grandmother shouted at him in front of all the salesgirls and customers. He had just told her was going to Miami Beach for a week, and she knew he was taking Carmela. “What does that kurve want with an old man except your bank account?” she shouted. Then she backhanded a dozen boxes of pastel-colored angora sweaters off the counter onto the floor.
Carmela knew what was in his bank account, because she worked at Merchants Marine Bank on 86th Street, where he did all his banking. Almost every day he found an excuse to see her, waiting on her line to make a deposit, trying to screw up the courage to engage her in conversation. Yet when he got up to the window he was so shy that he couldn’t even hold her gaze. One afternoon he waited for her outside the bank, leaning on his cherry red fuel-injected Corvette to shore up his confidence. When she came out the front door he smiled and asked, “Miss Carbone, may I have the pleasure of your company for a cup of coffee?”
When my grandfather came home from Miami Beach tanned and sated, my grandmother could stand it no longer. First she had her hair done, a necessity of any self-respecting Jewish woman’s commando tactics, and then she asked Fat Anna and her husband, Angelo, to drive her to Carmela’s bank. Angelo double-parked outside in his beat-up Oldsmobile with the motor running, like a getaway car, while my grandmother and Fat Anna went inside. It was a big, old-fashioned bank with a high ceiling and chandelier, hushed, with long lines of customers. Rose spotted Carmela behind a teller’s cage and marched up to her with Fat Anna hovering nearby protectively. “Kurve! Kurve! Kurve!” Rose shouted at Carmela. My grandmother’s little voice bounced off the marble walls and the whole bank froze, like she had pulled out a gun. “You leave my husband alone!” she shouted. “He’s old enough to be your grandfather!”
With that Carmela slammed down the gate of her teller’s cage and came running out from behind the counter, heading toward my grandmother with her head down like a charging rhino. Just as she was about to reach her, Fat Anna hip-checked Carmela like a linebacker with all her 260 pounds. Carmela went down on the polished floor with the sound of flesh slapping marble. There were shouts and a scream and a guard came running. Anna took my grandmother’s hand and together they hightailed it out of the bank and into the waiting car and sped off.
By the time they got back to the store, the police were there. It was a mess. Fat Anna and her husband and my grandmother had to go to the police station, where they were questioned for hours, until it was determined they had not tried to rob the bank. The bank agreed not to press charges, but they closed all of my grandfather’s accounts and made him take his business to another bank. They didn’t fire Carmela, but they transferred her to a different branch all the way in Queens, and she had to commute an hour to work every day. Of course, Gog was very angry with my grandmother. He said she had no right to bring her problems to Carmela’s place of business and that he was disappointed in her. He sold the house in Freeport and my grandmother and Katherine were forced to move into the dreary apartment above the store where I had once lived. He moved in full-time with Carmela, but he still showed up at the store every morning to run the business as if nothing had changed.
Katherine died at age sixty-four, a suicide-by-cancer. She never gave up waging war against Carmela, holding out hope that one day Gog would return to her and my grandmother, and they would be whole again one last time. Then one day she came up with an ultimatum to get him back that she believed was foolproof. She found a lump in her left breast. She made my grandfather feel it and he pulled his hand away. He said she needed to go to a doctor at once, but Katherine said that she was going to let the disease take its course—unless he left Carmela and came back to her and Rose.
Gog teared up. He took Katherine’s hand and promised her that he would stand by her if she was ill, come what may, and that he would pay for her medical care. But he would never abandon Carmela, because she was six months pregnant with his baby.
“Hah!” Rose laughed when she heard. “You don’t have it left in you, old man, to make your kurve pregnant,” she told him. “She probably got pregnant by a boyfriend that you don’t know about. Wait until you see the baby comes out and it’s black.”
But it wasn’t black. It was white and it looked just like Gog. They named the baby Anthony.
It was a bitter time. By the time Katherine agreed to have radiation, it didn’t do much good. All her hair fell out and instead of buying a wig she wore a red wire wig from one of the store window mannequins. The night she passed away, in my old bedroom above the store, she was running a high fever, and the last thing she said was, “Harry, I’m burning up.”
Perhaps the saddest thing about Katherine’s death was that as important as she had been to our family—a mother superior to the children, my grandfather’s paramour, my grandmother’s best friend, the backbone of the retail business, a paragon of hard work—she wasn’t Jewish and couldn’t be buried with the family. She was laid to rest without ceremony in a Ukrainian cemetery somewhere in New Jersey, and no one ever went to visit her grave.
Rose hung in with Harry until the bitter end. When Gog and Carmela argued, and Carmela would throw the old man out, he’d temporarily go back to my grandmother, who always took him in. He was her man. She would wash his laundry in the kitchen sink, and make him baked apples, until a few days later he would abandon her again and go back to Carmela.
Every day for years, even in the winter, my grandmother sat on a folding chair in the street in front of the closed and bankrupt store. She chatted with former customers who passed by, and told the same jokes she had been telling since she opened the knitting store. She behaved as if she didn’t realize the store behind her had closed. It was like the movie The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster, based on a John Cheever story, about a man who swims home one Sunday using his neighbors’ pools, not realizing … oh, never mind. My grandmother had always been happy with very little. She died at age eighty-four from a fall down the stairs, the same stairs I had counted up and down so many times. Maybe only a dozen people came to her funeral.
Gog died a year later, also eighty-four, of kidney failure. By then he was nearly broke trying to take care of Carmela and Anthony, who turned out to be a troubled kid. I called them once, after Gog died, to ask how they were doing, and when I told Anthony who I was, he screamed at me, “He was my father, not yours,” and slammed the phone down. Anthony died in a police chase, driving a stolen car, when he was fifteen. Carmela still lives in Queens at the same address, all these years later, single. Maybe it was for real, Gog.
When my parents eventually left the flat above the store, they moved to a one-bedroom apartment at the Sutton, a spanking new, fourteen-story, white-tiled apartment building on Ocean Parkway. The Sutton was posh for Brooklyn; it had doormen and a swimming pool out back. It was built on the crest of a terminal moraine, a hill of rock left by glaciers millions of years ago. It was one of the highest points in Brooklyn, and if the night was clear, on the horizon you could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan, to which I had fled.
The Sutton was built directly next to Washington Cemetery, a sprawling graveyard of mausoleums and headstones, a village of the dead that stretched out for miles, until it was cut off by the elevated line. My parents’ kitchen and living room windows were directly over the cemetery, and they got to know the names on the tombstones like neighbors. The closest gravestone to their windows belonged to Marie Pollock, a person unknown to us except that she lived to be fifty-six years old, and the once brightly colored plastic flowers that someone had placed on her grave decades ago had turned brittle and white. When someone once asked my mother why anyone would want to live in an apartment overlooking the cemetery, she answered, “Because it’s better to be living in the building looking down on the cemetery, than it is to be in the cemetery looking up at the building.”
But not for her. I know you can’t give anybody Lou Gehrig’s disease, but the press
ure of living with my father could have triggered it. Gog even told him so: “You made her sick.” That was the end of it between them, him and Gog. Of their hundreds of bitter arguments, after “You made her sick” they never spoke again. She stopped speaking too, soon after. Her tongue went dead in her mouth and stopped moving, so she couldn’t speak or swallow, a sensation that alone would have driven me mad, and then the muscles that inflated her lungs slowly stopped moving, and soon she was able only to blink. Every muscle in her body went flaccid. It was horrifying to watch. She turned into a human floppy doll, a pipe in her neck, a tube in her stomach, her bowels evacuated by a nurse in the mornings. My father emptied the dining room of their apartment in Brooklyn and turned it into an intensive care unit. Her care consumed him. Once she was on a respirator she needed twenty-four-hours-a-day nursing, and he hired a team to work in shifts. His insurance policy capped at $1 million, which was used up in about eighteen months, and my parents were forced into near destitution so my mother could qualify for Medicaid. The neighbors stopped coming by for visits; it was too disturbing for them to see her that way, and the nurses became my mother’s only friends. They dressed her and cleaned her and took care of her and my dad as best they could. My father sat in the kitchen smoking cigarettes, a shell of himself, petrified of losing her. It went on like that for years.
On August 28, 1991, the day before their forty-ninth wedding anniversary, I went to see my parents in Brooklyn. I gave my mom a foot massage, I read to her from the paper, and we watched the news on TV together. I was as cheerful as I could muster, but I could see in her eyes she wanted me to go. I could see in her eyes that she wanted to go.
By the time I got back home, she was dead. My father had stepped out to mail a letter and when he returned five minutes later, she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, not unusual for people on a respirator. Yet I had a hunch. One of my mother’s favorite nurses was with her, and it was possible to have accidentally jiggled the setting on the respirator so my mother would have had a painless, instantaneous death. I saw the nurse at the funeral. I looked her in the eye and thanked her, and called her an “angel,” and we held hands and cried.
My dad was as mean as ever into his late seventies, but his heart was weak, and he was confused. I couldn’t stand to see him that way, so no matter how much trouble he was going to be, I moved him in with me. After all, he was my father. We made peace, at least in my mind, the last few weeks of his life. There was one small moment. He had just finished breakfast, and he stood up from his chair too quickly and fell into a heap on the floor. He asked me to let him be for a minute, and I covered him with a blanket and sat next to him on the floor. We talked about the family and all the people who had died. When he got his breath back I lifted him off the floor in my arms—he only weighed 130 pounds by then—and as I carried him into his bedroom he surprised me by kissing me on the cheek. “Thank you for taking such good care of me,” he said. Later that night he told me his sister had come to look for him.
The next day a health care aide and I tried to get him to take a bath, but he wasn’t interested. “If you make me take a bath, you’ll give me a heart attack, and then you’ll be sorry,” he warned. Those were his last words to me. Sure enough, as the aide and I lowered him into the bathtub, his heart stopped beating, he closed his eyes, and he slipped away.
Home, 4315 18th Avenue, was cleansed by fire. Literally. On September 11, 2013, a suspicious fire started in the hallway just outside the door to our old apartment, and the building burned to a charred shell. The police believe it was arson, but I knew better. It was bashert.
Expiation
For nearly ten years after I left Payne Whitney I was in psychoanalysis with Wayne Myers, trying to cure my homosexuality. I slept with women regularly, as prescribed, but took little joy in it. Since I approached the whole sexual thing as more of a tourist than a native, I became a connoisseur of the female body the way a Jew appreciates the Vatican. It was a matter of responsibility to be a satisfying partner, so I performed all the obligatory sexual acts, but without essential lust. And although I enjoyed the intimacy of sex with women, diligently pleasing a partner is not the same as making love. And making love is not the same as lust. Even psychiatry didn’t claim to know how to make people lust. And lust is the glue of love. Oh yes it is. At least at first.
In my pursuit of love through sex, as the writer J. R. Ackerly put it, I would bed a woman for three or four months, and then wander off when things got too serious. Many of the women I dated were in search of a lifetime companion and progenitor and I felt like a cad; I was pretending to be earnest in my affections, when it was really a science project. There were women I loved, but not completely. No matter how wonderful the women I romanced were, I was driven by nature and design to love a man more.
It was of no help when in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was no longer an illness. It infuriated me. I had a financial and emotional investment in being sick, even though I had come to the realization that it was foolish to go on trying to change it. I made an uneasy peace with myself. I understood that I had to stop trying to love women, and I had to stop trying to figure out why I couldn’t, and I had to stop being ashamed of it. I realized that I had to get on with life, or I’d be left on the sidelines. I decided that my homosexuality might be a complication, but it didn’t have to define my life, and I didn’t have to be a professional homosexual. If I just let it be, I would be. I came out publicly at age twenty-six, when I published my first book, the biography of a child evangelist, Marjoe Gortner.
The gay world in the 1970s was shallow and unforgiving. Since we were outlaws, we had outlaw sex. Gay men were dissolute beyond belief. When I whined to my peers that liberation wasn’t the same thing as promiscuity, I was told that I was a “bad homosexual.” I was indeed. In any event, the intensely hedonistic world in New York had its appeal, and I tried to embrace that world, thinking it was all that was left me. How I missed getting the plague is a miracle.
I still do not feel entirely comfortable inside the gay world, despite its enormous strides toward equality. When I told a therapist that I didn’t think gay men on the whole liked me, he said that was because on the whole, I didn’t like gay men. I have none of the stereotypical talents ascribed to gay people. I can’t arrange flowers, decorate houses, or cut hair, and I don’t know or care what the best hotel is in Positano. And yet, if you asked me my blessings, chief among them was that I was born gay. And a Jew.
As for Wayne Myers, my analysis with him simply drifted off as I moved into my late twenties and we lost touch. Thirty years went by before I saw Dr. Myers again. I was depressed, my worst depression ever, and my general practitioner suggested I pay Wayne Myers a visit for a catch-up. At first I resisted the idea, but he insisted I go see him. At the time Dr. Myers’s office was on Sutton Place South, a share in a busy professional complex. One of the other psychiatrists ran group therapy sessions with recovering addicts, and it was a busy, noisy waiting room, not the chic, calm waiting room of Dr. Myers’s office on East 75th Street.
When he opened the door, I was surprised to see the vibrant young psychiatrist gone, and an aging grandfather in his stead. He was, after all, in his seventies. Yet he had been such a powerful influence in my life, I remembered him only as a robust young man. He still had a crinkly smile and a wry sense of humor, and his eyes were still blue and kind. I was surprised because on the bookshelf behind him there were framed pictures of his wife and grown children, which would have been verboten by the hard-core Freudian analyst he had been four decades before. He even shared with me some thoughts about his own life, the pleasure he took in his hobby, photography, his pride in his career, his love for his family, and about growing old.
We caught up on my life. I was a successful author and journalist by then, with several national bestsellers under my belt. I split my time between the townhouse I had bought on West 11th Street in
Greenwich Village, just like Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke, and a home near the beach in East Hampton, where I escaped to write. I had a few serious relationships, but I was single at the time. I told Dr. Myers that I was at peace with being gay, and it was no longer a consideration to me. He asked if I ever thought about the boy with the lawnmower and we laughed. I told him that I looked for the lawnmower boy all the time, and it’s true. I know he’s just around the corner, still a fresh-faced kid with his tee shirt stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans.
Toward the end of the session there was a long, clumsy silence while Dr. Myers tried to compose something in his head, and then, his voice full of emotion, he said, “I want to apologize.”
“For what?” I asked nervously.
“I’m sorry I tried to change you. I’m afraid that, in retrospect, I caused you more pain.”
I was breathless. I didn’t want him to be sorry. To be sorry meant that all that effort was wrong. At the time we started therapy, being straight was the better of two worlds, and even if it failed, we tried. “Dr. Myers, there’s no need to apologize,” I assured him. “We were collaborators, trying to do what we thought would bring me happiness. It was about my happiness, ultimately. Wasn’t it?”
He shook his head. “Part of the Hippocratic Oath is ‘do no harm,’” he said.
“But I wanted it,” I insisted. “Don’t you see? Look, my analysis wasn’t just about a cure. I had nothing when I met you in Payne Whitney. I had no way of being in this world. You were a father to me. You helped shape me into a human being. You taught me that integrity has its own rewards. About having an organized life. And you made me believe that if I really wanted to make something happen, I could. I never would have tried to write a book if it wasn’t for you.”
“I’m still sorry,” he said.
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