by Janis Owens
He just shook his head at me, wiping his face with his hands, and I kept it going: “Hey, I can support you, I got a job. We can move to Virginia, buy a farmhouse, raise a family. Kind of a perverse Waltons—”
So I was laughing as loudly as I had cried as I got in the car, rolling down the window to call, “The only problem’ll be Mama. I mean, listen, Michael, it’d be fun, but how would it look?”
I started the car and was pulling out when Michael pounded on the hood, and I rolled down the window. “If they get me, Gabe, promise you’ll come back. For Myra and the children. Promise.”
“They won’t—” I began.
But he was insistent. “If they do—”
I nodded, and as I backed out, my headlights followed him to the French doors, where he paused to watch me go, barefoot on the cold marble, his arms folded against the night air. I could see he was crying again and thought that, yes, they will have to deal with me if they touch him. Then I pulled around the drive, past the house that looked like an old Spanish mission in the moonlight, the moss lazy, gently whipping in the light breeze, the yard dotted with yellow pine that stood pencil-straight, like Grecian pillars beneath the hard, clean Florida sky.
The peace of the place followed me back to town, filling me with a rare certainty that I was doing the right thing at last: the hard road, the one Daddy took when he stood from the supper table that night and knew he was beaten, but went anyway It was a curious sensation, one I could not place till later, in bed, I realized it was pride—that I was proud of myself. I was carrying on a family tradition, and the next morning when I kissed Mama and put my suitcase in the trunk, I went to the fence and spat at the jagged windows and broken back of the nasty old house next door.
It was a childish gesture, and Mama laughed at me, but I only smiled and waved and thought in triumph that I looked like an angel and she named me for an angel. And I never looked back.
Chapter
12
So another Gap ensued. Not such a bitter one, not say, 1865 to ‘72, but much longer in duration, comparable to 1872 to 1942, so maybe one thing offset the other. Now, I can’t properly explain everything I did in these years but will try to recall some of the highlights as they come to me in memory, congealed and softened, selected and dissected by the satin glove of passing time: teaching class after class of freshmen, so that I mumbled significant dates in my sleep (1492, 1607, 1754, ad nauseum), moving on to Virginia State when Georgetown didn’t pan out, where I taught slightly more interesting Southern history (different dates, same repetition) until 1981, when I finally settled on a job I actually enjoyed, not in the classroom, but as a fact-gatherer for a statewide oral history project at Indiana University There I spent a majority of my days sitting in frame houses in factory towns, interviewing slow-talking refugees from the mills of Arkansas and the coal mines of Kentucky, who’d crossed the river for the cash and spoke of their homes with such a mosaic of love and hate and relief and regret that I fell in love with them. When they heard the not-so-distant strain of Appalachia in my voice, they’d always ask where I was from, and when I’d say Florida, they’d ask about the beaches and I’d tell them, no, I wasn’t from beach-Florida, I was from hick-Florida, and they’d know exactly what I meant.
“When we tell people we’re from Indiana, they think we’re Yankees—” they’d say, and when I asked them if they considered themselves Yankees, they’d be insulted. “No, no, we just come for the jobs. We’ll be going back. My aint still lives in Trumann—”
Their fierce hunger for identity was so touching that I worked with near missionary zeal to document their heritage, so if things didn’t work out and they never went home, their children would remember who they were and why they’d come north in the first place.
Which is all to say that I had some satisfaction in those years. It was not the grind I sometimes imagine—nor was it actually living. Once, sitting in an airport in Indianapolis, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a glass door, and there was something very close, very familiar in my slumped shoulders, my patient eyes. Then I remembered Myra as she sat on the steps of the pool that summer, her face blank with the expectancy of someone waiting on a phone call.
But it was not really that bad. I had a close friend who died of cirrhosis during these years, and his very real suffering kept my small undulations in perspective, and for a while, I still had Mama’s Thursday night calls to enlighten and sustain me.
So I was there, albeit, long distance, when Clayton took his first step at sixteen months (lazy, Mama was already calling him), when Missy broke her arm on the slide at school, when Simon began pitching in little league. And in bits and shadowy pieces, I knew Myra: Myra who joined a fitness center, who went to Barbados on her tenth anniversary, who became Mama’s assistant in the primaries and bucked the WMUs and the deacon board to give a baby shower for an unwed teenage mother; Myra who had survived. And her husband, who had succeeded where better men than he had failed by spitting in the face of small-town racism and not only surviving, but going on to buy out a failing plant in South Georgia, where Sam McRae was not only general manager, but part-owner.
Any day I expected to hear he’d bought the Braves and turned them around to win the pennant, till abruptly one afternoon, with no warning at all, my supply line was cut when I answered the phone during an early supper to a hysterical rush of venom, not inhumanly vicious like the call to Michael’s had been, but close and personal and peppered with searing maternal regret, “—never raised you to do such a thing. I’m glad your daddy never lived to see it. You shamed him, you shamed us all—” The overall effect was something like innocently answering the phone and getting a spray of machine gun fire in your ear, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t reply at all, but only stood there and let Mama’s righteous anger burn up the lines a little longer. “—treated her like trash. Her mind wadn’t right and you knew it. You knew it. You ain’t no son a mine. Michael should a killed you for it—”
When it’d get too bad, I’d quietly hang up and breathe for a moment, but the phone always rang again immediately, and I’d answer it with my eyes closed.
‘And how will he explain it to Clayton, tell me thet? It ain’t even bothered you to just up and leave your boy for your brother to raise. You never should a come back in the first place. You stay up there with your Yankee friends. You never been a friend to nobody down here—”
With that, she broke it off herself with a colossal slam of the phone and a dead white silence that lasted the better part of seven years.
Her tenacity was baffling to me at the time, and for the first few Christmases, I’d looked for a conciliatory letter or a tentative phone call, but they never came. Finally, I reconstructed an explanatory scenario and could imagine how something—porch talk on Magnolia Hill or gossip at Welcome—had made her suspicious, and knowing Mama, she’d taken Michael aside after Sunday dinner and asked him point-blank: “Michael Catts? Didjure brother and Myra have a love affair? Is Clayton yours?”
And Michael, with his seemingly boundless capacity for shock, probably just stood there and picked his teeth, saying yes, but not to let it worry her, it wasn’t keeping him up nights.
In the face of such incomprehensible passivity, Mama must have been outraged, furious at both of us, for she could not turn on Myra, dear Myra, whom she loved like a daughter. Mama is a wee bit eccentric, kind of a nut in the Aunt Pitty-Pat tradition, but she understands women (she had five sisters), and Myra’s fight for control was probably realer to her than it’d ever be to Michael or me either one. After all, she’d thrown herself against Old Man Sims and opened her arms to her when she was a wounded child, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d have found out Myra was involved with half the men at Sanger. It’d be those sorry, good-for-nothing men’s fault. Not Myra, never Myra, who held her hand at Daddy’s funeral and took her to the doctor twice a month and worried over Michael’s blood pressure and kept Lori in clothes. Never Myra.
/> It was an odd sensation, really, knowing that a nonsibling had taken your place in your mother’s affections, but I never called her back, never made any excuses on my own behelf. I had an inkling that Mama’s hard-headed, loud-mouthed defense was one of the pillars that supported Myra’s remarkable recovery, and if it were shaken, even Michael would be hard pressed to repair it.
So I maintained my silence and my distance and was cut off, stranded at last, in Year Three of the Great Gap, and it was about two years later, while I was still in Indiana, that another incident occurred that I remember very clearly. It was in the spring, just as the term was ending, when one of my students dropped by my office to say good-bye before she left for Purdue to begin work on her master’s.
She was very young, twenty-one or-two, very bright and aggressive, with an Arkansas drawl and a flat, country honesty that reminded me of Mama, and after thanking me for all the help I’d given her with my letters of recommendation and phone calls, she looked me straight in the eye and told me I drank too much. “I mean, I know it’s none of my business, Dr. Catts, but I could tell you drink in the morning before class and that’s bad. My mother was an alcoholic, and you don’t want that kind of life for yourself.”
Then she smiled and promised to write and was gone, leaving me to scratch my head and wonder if I was to spend my entire life with these children who thought nothing at all of saying something like that to your face, then smiling and telling you to have a nice day. However, her words had more than a little truth to them, though I honestly couldn’t tell if my alcohol consumption was unreasonable or not. I mean, sure I drank early, but I never got drunk, and after a few weeks of bouncing it back and forth, I grew curious enough to call an AA hotline and describe my drinking habits to a counselor who informed me that I was indeed an alcoholic.
“How can you tell?”
“You’re dependent. You drink every day, all day. It’s your life. I know, I’m one too.”
I was not inclined to agree, for I was a professional, a man of letters. I paid an incredible amount of money every month in rent. But he was not impressed and suggested I give sobriety a try, then took my home number and promised to check up on me in a few days and see how I was doing with it. I told him sure, no problem, and for two days was stone cold sober, then felt a touch of a cold coming on, and when he called back, was still nursing it with my God-fearing, teetotaling mother’s patented remedy, honey and lemon and eighty-proof whiskey.
“You’re only fooling yourself,” he said. “You’re an alcoholic. Come to a meeting. You can quit.”
Again, I demurred, explaining my cold and how I was not yet acclimated to the Indiana winter, that I was no longer Baptist, but Episcopalian, and could drink till I dropped and never see hell for it. But he would not be budged and told me I was an alcoholic so many times in two minutes that I promised to leave it alone until he called back.
“Sure you will,” he said, and his needling doubt was so insulting that I went on a temperance binge, pouring out wine and pitching bottles, then sitting back with a good book and a glass of iced tea.
“There, now,” I thought, looking around my living room and finding it very dry and safe and Baptist. “That will show him.”
But the damn phone wouldn’t ring. Every night I waited, I sweated blood, but the son of a bitch lay there dead and still and since it was between semesters, there was nothing to do but read or watch television, and since I usually read with a glass in my hand, I opted for television and, for the first time in my life, bought a TV Guide.
When Thursday night rolled around, I found myself watching The Waltons for a quick hit of nostalgia and could picture Mama, a thousand miles away on Magnolia Hill, looking at John-boy and wondering where she went wrong with me, and it was not a pleasant thought. In fact, I was sitting there thinking what a mess I’d made of my life, what a boring, endless mess, and began to imagine ways I could kill myself and cover it up so the insurance company would not suspect. Run a car over an icy curb. Take up gun collecting and shoot myself. Slip in the tub. Something relatively victimless. I’d leave my money to Mama (not a big item), my stuff to Michael. Maybe I’d leave Clayton my watch. It wouldn’t mean anything to him, though. He’d probably show it to people, tell them his uncle left it to him. His Uncle Gabe, the fag professor who died in the car wreck—
The phone rang suddenly, a few inches from my head, and I snatched if off the cradle, shouting, “Where the hell have you been? I been waiting all week!”
“You’re an alcoholic,” he said quietly, and I sat there very still, gently pressing my eyelids with my fingertips, thinking, well, it was just one more step in my relentless quest to become as sleazy as Old Man Sims. Two for two. Molester and drunk. Given the chance, I’d probably be breaking children’s wrists, locking students in closets.
“We’re having a meeting at the Catholic Student Center. Come now, right now, don’t think about it. Just put on your coat and pretend you’re going to a movie, but come here instead.”
Something in the quiet urgency in his voice spurred me to action and for about ten months, my Thursday nights were spent in the basement of the Catholic Student Union, making Protestant-like stabs at the informal confessional, and I think that I can say with all honestly that leaving the liquor behind was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. My loss of Myra was eclipsed by it, my separation from Clayton; even Michael and Mama paled in comparison.
Looking back, I can’t say how I made it, for I was a cyclic drinker who could go for weeks without a drop, but once I took that drop, I was right back in the belly of the beast. When I was actually drinking, I’d be contrite and humble, but during the dry spells, I wasn’t an alcoholic, no, not me, I was a bone-dry Baptist, never drank a drop till I was nineteen. So they could never get me to admit I was an alcoholic on anything approaching a consistent basis, but I was so charmingly ingenious in avoiding it that my lapses seemed forgivable. Only Bill, the counselor who first spoke with me on the phone (a Catholic priest, I later learned, suffering from advanced cirrhosis) refused to laugh and would occasionally remind me of my fallen state: “You’re an alcoholic, Gabe. You can forget it, but it won’t forget you.”
I’d smile. “I think that’s what my mother used to tell me about Jesus.”
He’d only shake his head, and I’d reassure him. “Listen, Bill, I haven’t touched a thing in two months, I’m dry, I’m good—”
“Yeah. And my skin’s yellow because I’m an Irish priest of Chinese descent.”
Back and forth we went, till he died a fairly hideous death of liver failure, sending the rest of us screaming for Antabuse, which always worked well for me, since I’d developed an ulcer and vomiting was like gargling with Drano. So in fits and starts, I learned the fine art of maintained reality, and like Myra, dear Myra, whose face I could sometimes not recall, I survived: survived Mama’s excommunication and the Whiskey Rebellion, and even the end of the oral history project when the money ran out and I was forced back into the classroom in New York, teaching urbanites at NYU because it was the only university in America that had never heard of the Civil War, which suited me just fine, because lost causes didn’t move me anymore. I’d survived on my own with the aid of Antabuse and Tagamet, and digging up all the old losses was so dull and flat that I could almost agree with a student of mine who’d gone to Fort Lauderdale for spring break, and asked me what was with all the rebel flags down there.
I explained there was a war down there once, a hundred and twenty years ago, and that they still hadn’t quite gotten over it, but his ancestors were Polish farmers in 1865, and he only looked at me. “Well, who the hell cares anymore?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Don’t look at me.”
One last incident occurs to me as the final, most perfect illustration of my life at the end of the Great Gap. I went to a party, I can’t remember where, somewhere in Brooklyn, and sat around all evening sipping seltzer (which I detest), socializing with a congenial mix o
f colleagues. It was spring again, the city finally warming up to temperatures conducive to human hope, everyone laughing and easy, talking of jobs and projects and weddings, and sometime in the course of the evening, we fell to discussing restaurants. Now I am a nonstarter when it comes to cooking anything but barbeque, so it was a subject near and dear to my heart, and I fairly took the floor, waxing long and lovingly on the Italian cafes where I’d eaten pasta, the bistros where I’d consumed croissants. Then I remember getting really excited over this Cuban place in Little Havana where I’d once eaten paella in an iron pot with a lobster on top.
“A whole lobster!” I exclaimed, with an echo of the passion that I’d once used to defame generals. “Right there on the rice. It was incredible.”
Later that evening, as I undressed for bed, I thought about what a nice time I’d had, that maybe it was a sign of personal growth, my seeking out human companionship. But later, in bed, I tried to recall the highlights of the evening and could remember nothing but talking about that lobster. I mean, everyone else was talking about flying to Israel for Passover or their daughter’s marriage in June or how well their son was doing at Cornell, and the only thing I could contribute was a fanatical review of a dead shellfish. I mean, I talked about that damn lobster like it was the wife of my youth. (“Right there in the rice it was, I ate it with rendered butter served in these little cups—”).
I lay there thinking I was worse than a fag. Fags were human; I was a nonenity. An amoeba. I lived to eat and ate to live. A small voice in my head had begun its relentless circling, reasoning that who cared if amoebas had problems with substance abuse? Everyone had their little weaknesses. Thorns in the flesh, the Apostle called them. I was beginning to stir beneath the covers when the phone on my bedstand rang, and it was a light, young voice.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said, and I thought it must be one of my students from Indiana, for the accent was definitely country.
