Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

by Anthony Rapp

  “Rachel, honey,” Mom said, “calm down. We’re going to go inside now, and I need you to behave, okay?”

  “Okay,” Rachel sighed, and forced herself to stop. I squeezed her hand and ruffled her hair.

  “Come on, Rach,” I said, “let’s go say goodbye to Grandpa.”

  As we walked across the windswept parking lot, my sister, Anne, and her fiancé, Ken, emerged from their car and joined us. Anne had never been much of a hugger, so we just waved and muttered hello to each other and walked on in silence. Anne was so much not a hugger, in fact, that there was a time, not that long before, when Mom would ask Anne for a hug goodbye at the end of a visit, and Anne would simply extend her finger and poke it into the flesh of Mom’s shoulder, giggling impishly. “Oh, Annie,” Mom would say. “Give me a real hug.” But Anne would just shake her head, still giggling, and turn to go. She’d gotten a little better at hugging since then, but not by much, and not with me—not yet, anyway.

  We joined the procession of silent family members in the funeral home, no one meeting anyone else’s gaze for longer than a second. I nodded to Grandma, who solemnly nodded back, and to Diana, Mom’s oldest sister, who seemed to be always at Grandma’s side. Adam and I glanced at each other, silently sharing our amusement at seeing her. Adam always sent Mom and Anne and me into hysterics when he joked about Mom’s family, so I could guess what he was thinking now. In Diana’s case, he loved to point out the fact that she looked way older than Mom, even though she was younger; in fact, she looked like she was way older than Grandma, with her frazzled gray hair and taut, deeply lined face. “And not only that,” he’d say, “but she looks like she’s got a dead Christmas tree plopped on top of her head.” We’d all crack up at this, knowing that it was cruel, but at the same time so true, and Mom would laugh the hardest of all of us. Even though Mom had often advised us that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” when Adam joked like this, her face would screw up, her mouth open wide, and through her infectious, cathartic, almost silent guffaws, she’d start rubbing her eyes ferociously and sigh, “Oh, Adam, stop. You’re going to give me a stomachache.” Adam was brilliant at making Mom lose herself in laughter like that.

  Soft, indistinct organ music droned in the background in the funeral home. Still holding Rachel’s hand, I regarded Grandpa’s coffin from where I stood, too far away to see inside it. I wondered what this whole event must seem like to Rachel; I had never been to a funeral home or a wake, only to my friend Bill Henry’s memorial service on the day of my Rent audition, so this was strange for me, and I was almost twenty years older than Rachel. The only dead body I’d ever seen was at a distance: while walking along the Seine on a trip to Paris, I’d watched as several policemen recovered a bloated, pasty corpse from the river. But I’d turned away when they flipped over his body to reveal his face.

  I wasn’t sure what I should be feeling now. Death had visited me so little in my life: several pets had died since I was a young child, and a couple of actors I’d worked with had passed away, but they were only memories of people I’d once known when news of their deaths reached me. I had shed many chest-heaving tears over the passing of my pets, but my former coworkers’ deaths were abstract, and I’d only felt a brief sadness for them.

  When Bill died, I was for the first time faced with the loss of a friend, and what I initially felt when I read the news of his death in the New York Times—he had died suddenly of a heart attack—was numbness and shock. I kept thinking I should have felt more pain or sadness or grief or something. I kept trying to figure out how to grieve properly. While I was trying to sort out my response to Bill’s death, I had a conversation over lunch with my ex-boyfriend Keith, who had remained a good friend after we’d split up. He’d always been a great sounding board and an uncommonly clearheaded source of wisdom and advice.

  “I don’t know what to do about all this,” I told him. “I don’t know how to process it.”

  “Well,” he said, leaning forward intensely, as he always did when he talked, his right hand chopping the air, his boyish face bobbing up and down, “the thing is, the thing is, when you have someone you know who’s died, you have to grieve, of course, but really, there are different things you have to grieve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know, you have to grieve the loss of the person, you know, the fact that the actual person won’t be there anymore to talk to, to laugh with, to share memories with, that sort of thing.”

  “Right.”

  “And then you have to, you have to mourn the loss of who that person held you to be. Because that dies with them. Their vision of you no longer exists. And a whole world of who you are is gone. So you have to mourn that, too.”

  I sat there and took that in, an electric current of recognition coursing through my body.

  “That…makes sense,” I said.

  Keith nodded vigorously. “Yeah, it does. It does.”

  I shook my head. “How do you know all this stuff?” It was a question I often asked Keith; he and I were the same age, but his insight into profound human matters often outshined my own.

  He laughed a high-pitched giggle. “I don’t know.” That was always his answer.

  Standing in the funeral home at Grandpa’s wake, I let go of Rachel’s hand and swallowed—not out of horror or dread, but simply to prepare myself for this new, exotic experience of looking at a dead body—and approached the coffin. I peered in. There Grandpa lay, stiff as a wax figure and looking not at all how I remembered him; in life, his cheeks were not covered in blush, his hair was not so carefully combed and feathered back, and his face was not so gaunt or so smoothly shaven.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” I heard myself murmur, and felt foolish for saying it out loud. I considered reaching down and touching one of his hands that were laid across his chest, but then thought no, that was morbid. I didn’t want to feel their cold stillness. So I just stood there and looked at him and waited for something transcendent to occur, for anything at all unusual or meaningful or unforgettable to happen. I breathed and I waited and I stared down at him lying there. I thought of what Keith had told me, that it was important when someone died to mourn different kinds of losses. But after a few long moments of standing and staring down at my grandfather, I started to feel absurd. And false. I hardly knew him. And he hardly knew me; he had even thought I was sweet to him when all I’d wanted to do was ditch him. Looking down at his inert, unfamiliar, costumed body touched nothing in me.

  Finally, ashamed at myself for feeling so little, I stepped away from the coffin and sat down, talking to and looking at no one, until it was time to go on to the funeral.

  Adam and I had been asked to join Nathaniel and a couple of other male cousins as pallbearers, so we all rode to the church together and then hoisted Grandpa’s coffin out of the hearse. It was surprisingly heavy, and the smaller boys strained and stumbled under its weight, but fortunately we only had to carry it a couple of feet to deposit it onto a kind of gurney, which the grim, silent funeral directors used to transport Grandpa into the old stone cathedral.

  Clenching my jaw, I entered the church and took my appointed seat in a pew near the front, next to Adam and Anne and Rachel. I couldn’t remember the last church I’d entered or the last Catholic Mass I’d attended. I had never gone to church regularly, and I’d stopped going for good right after my confirmation; I’d designated that event as the last opportunity Catholicism had to reach inside my soul and truly mean something to me. When the priest of my confirmation had leaned over and anointed my forehead with sacred oil, intoning, “Do you accept the Holy Spirit?” I’d tried with everything I had to experience the Holy Spirit entering my body, to imagine a shimmering being floating in from above, enveloping me in light and warmth. But as much as I’d tried, nothing had happened. I’d said, “I do,” anyway, and as I took my seat, I knew from that moment on I was no longer a Catholic. And since that time, I began to take major exception to m
any of the teachings of the Catholic Church, most significantly its stance on queer lifestyles. So entering its places of worship had begun to feel like blatant acts of hypocrisy. But this day was not about me, I reminded myself, it was about Grandpa, and I wasn’t about to make a scene at his funeral. As much as part of me wanted to.

  During the service, I wrestled with whether I should participate; whether I should mumble the familiar prayers with the rest of my family or sing the hymns or kneel and stand and sit at the appropriate moments. I wound up joining in a little bit of the droning, lifeless mumbling, a little less of the off-pitch, thin, shrill singing, and all of the kneeling and standing and sitting, feeling silly and conflicted the whole time.

  The priest was a remotely genial, slightly batty older Irishman, with a bulbous nose, thick, black-framed glasses, and silver hair. As all priests did when they performed a Mass, he resembled an extra from the set of an old Hollywood costume epic like Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments, dressed as he was in his full regalia of blazingly white, gold-embroidered, floor-length vestments. He presided over the Mass as if by rote, absently muttering the prayers and shuffling around the altar. When the time came for his homily, the point in a Mass when priests extemporize on their chosen theme of the day—such as forgiveness or charity or rebirth—he ambled to the steps leading up to the altar and squinted down at all of us.

  “Robert Baird,” he said. “We are here to honor the life of Robert Baird.” He folded his hands in front of his belly. “What can you say about Robert Baird?” I felt myself frowning. This wasn’t going to be at all poetic, that was certain. “Well, Robert Baird was a very dear man to all of us in this room. He had a very large family, and he was a devoted father and lover of his wife.” A devoted father? That was doubtful, if you asked my mom, but I guess it had to be said. “He loved music.” He did? “In fact, Robert sang with the choir here.” I was pretty sure that wasn’t true. I began to get the uncomfortable impression that this priest didn’t even know which member of his parish Grandpa was. “He had a beautiful voice.” Nope. Definitely not true.

  “Robert accomplished much over the years he was on earth,” the priest went on, “but I think the highlight of his life had to have been at the end. At the end, when he was so ill and unconscious and his devoted wife and so many of his loving children were there at his side, ushering him into heaven. Surrounded by so much love, Robert must have felt it was most certainly the highlight of his life.” The highlight of his life occurred when he was unconscious? Shaking my head, deeply embarrassed for Grandpa, I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.

  The priest rambled on for a little while longer, gesticulating expansively, intoning clichés about heaven and redemption and what lies in store for all of us on the other side. At last, when he was finished with that, he looked down at all of us sitting there and said, “Would anyone like to add any remarks?”

  My body clenched up underneath the weight of the terrible silence that ensued. No one had prepared themselves to speak; it wasn’t supposed to be part of the funeral’s program. I frantically searched my brain for something that I might say, but then the thought of my getting up in front of everyone in the family to speak about a man I hardly knew struck me as ridiculous. I bowed my head and stared at my hands and waited for someone, anyone, to say something. But no one made a sound. I began to realize that everyone else was waiting for Grandma to be the first one to speak; that was the way things were done in this family. She called the shots. I resisted an urge to turn around and glance at her, to try to compel her to break the ice. Instead, I sat in my seat and stared at my hands and listened as the heavy silence stretched on and on.

  Finally, Grandma’s voice rang out from her seat, echoing against the stone walls of the cathedral. “No, Father, that’s all right,” she said.

  My heart sank. That was it, then. No one else would have the guts to speak now, not after that. And as I and all of his children and grandchildren and friends sat mute in our seats, I shook my head and took in a deep, mournful breath. It was the first sorrow I’d felt all day.

  Wild

  Bill

  For as long as I could remember, my mom had always adored the esthetics, ideals, and mores of country life. Or at least what she perceived country life to be. Even though she’d settled down in suburban, mostly blue-collar Joliet, Illinois, she often expressed to me her wish to live out her years in New England, especially Vermont, in an old Victorian farmhouse with a huge, open porch. “I’d just love that,” she’d say, and I’d fantasize about the day I would be able to buy her that house.

  She collected large, impeccably framed prints by Charles Wysocki, a folk artist famed for his paintings of old-fashioned New England life; their prominence in her house was one of the only extravagances she afforded herself, and a modest one at that. Wysocki’s primitive, autumnal-hued, cartoonish depictions of rosy-cheeked, bundled-up children playing in the snow; a village’s frivolous Halloween festivities replete with white-sheeted ghost-children and snaggletoothed jack-o’-lanterns; or an immense, lazy, orange tabby cat perched smiling on a desk full of papers struck me as quaint and silly, but they seemed to inspire nostalgia in my mother for a life she’d never lived, except perhaps in her imagination. She loved his work so much that every Christmas, someone in the family made absolutely sure to buy her that year’s edition of the Wysocki wall calendar; in fact, some Christmases she’d received more than one.

  Her passion for country life was so renowned in her family that for Christmas 1994, right after Grandpa died, her brother Chris dreamed up a perfect gift for her: a week’s vacation in a bona fide log cabin, situated in the middle of the woods in northern Wisconsin. Chris told her she could invite anyone from the family to join her, so Mom invited Chris and his wife, Bonnie; Mom’s favorite sister, Roberta, and her husband, Bob (and their two mammoth English sheepdogs, Panda and Ollie); Rachel; and me. Anne and Adam were invited, too, but Anne was spending Christmas with her fiancé, Ken, and his family, and Adam couldn’t afford the time off from work (even though he was a published author, he still had to hold down a day job to pay the bills). Mom was thrilled; she hardly ever took trips of any kind, and she had never stayed in a log cabin.

  “You have to come,” she said when she called to invite me, the excitement in her voice a rare treat. “It’ll be so beautiful.”

  I was performing in a new off-Broadway play in New York—I hadn’t stopped working since the Rent workshop, a complete turnaround from the year before—and had only Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, so my trip was going to be extremely brief. But I figured it was worth it.

  “Okay,” I said. Even though I couldn’t imagine myself sleeping in a log cabin in the middle of the Wisconsin woods.

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  With all the usual holiday delays and the early winter sunset, it was pitch-black out by the time I landed in Wisconsin. Chris picked me up at the airport. Long stretches of silence passed on our way to the cabin, as I stared out the window, straining to distinguish trees and houses and fields blurring past in the faint moonlight.

  “So how are things going for you in New York, then?” he asked after a while in his soft, homey, midwestern twang, his eyes on the road.

  “It’s going well,” I said. I thought about saying more, but didn’t know how much I wanted to get into talking about the shows I’d been doing, since they all involved homosexuality. I wasn’t sure what his opinion was on the subject, so I just said, “I love it there.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  Another silent moment passed. I searched for something else to say, my throat tightening. I really liked Chris, but I didn’t know where to begin; we had spent so little time alone together. Finally, I asked feebly, “How about you? How’s your work?”

  “Oh, fine. Keeping busy.”

  I wasn’t sure what he did for a living, just that he was powerful and influential in the field of reforming the juvenile criminal justice system. According to Mom, he was
always flying to and from Washington, as well as giving lectures and presentations to governments and institutions all over the rest of the country. He was so soft-spoken around me that I had a hard time imagining him doing anything like that at all. On the other hand, he and his wife Bonnie often jetted around the globe to join various outdoors excursions—hundred-mile bicycle treks through the French countryside and white-water rafting expeditions down the Colorado River among them—that I knew there was a side to Chris that he didn’t reveal to me.

  Chris and Adam seemed to talk more freely than Chris and I did, bonding, as straight men so often do, on the subject of sports, especially basketball. Adam had been a star of his high school team, and had gone on to play in college on a partial basketball scholarship, and it seemed that Chris saw in Adam some of Chris’s own missed opportunities. Chris had also played in high school, and very well apparently, until his senior year, when his mother forbade him to join the team. Defiantly, he’d tried out anyway and made it, and then lied to her about where he was after school. My mom and his other siblings covered for him, but Grandma eventually found out and, in a fit of rage, she immediately stormed over to his school, blasted into the gymnasium during the half-time of a game, and headed for the locker room, where she yanked out a stunned and deeply mortified Chris by the arm, all of his teammates watching the whole time. I figured that Chris’s extreme shyness was a result of incidents like that.

  Finally, we were driving through the thick of the woods, and before long, the log cabin loomed in our headlights. Its appearance surprised me; I’d expected a structure right out of Little House on the Prairie, all brown, rustic, and ramshackle, but this log cabin looked like a luxury condominium in comparison. Its walls were built of planks, not logs—although branches and small logs served as both the support beams for the front porch and its banisters—and the whole cabin was painted canary yellow.