“Sam, I think you’re wrong about him,” and Frederick launched into a litany of the charming, heart-warming, touching moments that filled his days—waking up with Curt in his arms, making breakfast for the two of them first thing in the morning, having someone to come home to, “just knowing he’s there next to me when I’m working at home, we don’t have to say a word. And he’s unpredictable. He’s fun and funny. We take road trips, we go to the theater, to the movies. We go for walks at ten o’clock at night. We ignite each other in bed. I’m sorry if it shocks you.”
“It doesn’t shock me. I just…I guess I can only say what I’ve been saying from the beginning, which is—”
“I know, but if I had been careful, he wouldn’t be in my life.”
“You’re right.”
It was inevitable they would learn new things about each other, their families and backgrounds. The story of the events leading up to Curt’s dramatic decision to run away from home and come to New York, not knowing a soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back and a wad of cash in his pocket, grew longer and oddly entangled. Turned out it wasn’t just his irresponsible mother and hated stepfather he was trying to escape. There had been, or so he said, another series of incidents. He was out one evening with Frank, a man in his thirties he’d been dating for a few weeks. Curt was sixteen at the time.
“Wait just a minute. How did a sixteen-year-old boy meet a—how old did you say he was?”
Curt got up from his side of the table, put his arms around Frederick’s shoulders, and kissed the freckles on the back of his neck. “I don’t know exactly. Thirty-five or something.”
“A thirty-five-or-something-year-old man.”
There was a diner, he explained, frequented by queers in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, and Curt and some of his friends used to go there after school. They would sit in the booths while the older men walked the aisle, supposedly on their way to and from the rest room, cruising the boys in the booths. Curt caught the eye of one such man—Frank was his name—and they left the diner together and went driving in Frank’s yellow convertible.
“It was the most amazing car I’d ever been in. God! And with the top down! We drove to Evanston and then out of the city, and we ended up in this farm area. We must have driven two hours. I didn’t know where he was taking me.”
“And you weren’t scared?”
“Nothing scares me, you must know that by now.”
They made love in the back seat of the car. Curt was usually the one to get fucked, but something about this guy—his good looks, his attentiveness—he was almost like a gentleman from another era—“it just made me want to flip him over on his belly and fuck the bejesus out of him,” which was exactly what he did, and he came inside of him, and it was the first time that ever happened. He fell in love right then and there. They started seeing a lot of each other, and one evening they were walking in downtown Chicago. There was a curfew for anyone under seventeen, and suddenly a couple of cops pulled up, got out of the car, and started asking questions. They accused Curt of soliciting sex for money and Frank of child molestation. They arrested Frank, tried him, and put him in jail on a five-year sentence, but Curt’s mother pleaded with the judge to let Curt off if he promised to see a psychiatrist for six months.
“And brother, did I ever! Actually he wasn’t so bad. He told me I needed to start dating guys my own age and learn how not to get caught. I think he was queer too. Actually, I think he wanted to fuck me. He was the first person who ever told me about the Mattachine Society. He said I should channel my anger and energy into activism. That’s when I started saving up to move to New York.”
Sometimes when telling this story, Curt mentioned the romantic letters he received from Frank and indicated, had Frank not gone to jail, he might never have left Chicago. Along the same lines he spoke of New York as a place he came to eagerly at first but then stayed in reluctantly, a place that disappointed him and made life ten times more difficult—and more expensive—than it should be. Frederick wanted to say, but if you’d never come to New York you’d never have met me, but he couldn’t, for it implied they were “together,” a “couple” in a way they clearly were not.
And yet Curt seemed content as the days and weeks went by, and this came as a relief to Frederick, who’d grown weary of the constant drama of their life together. More and more he wanted normalcy, tranquility—mainly so he could do his work—with Curt, if not quite in the background of the picture, then at most one stable element of the composition. He did, however, want to be known by Curt, which meant sometimes telling him about his own life, his past, his family. Curt was particularly curious about the war and what kind of men he knew in the army, whether he’d “had something” with any of them. Eventually Frederick told him about Jonathan, though he didn’t mention his name (something sacred about that, Frederick felt, best kept to himself). Curt could sense this was someone important, though Frederick was careful not to reveal too much. He was twenty-eight, his friend several years younger, they met during basic training in January of ’43. They remained close after the war. They never lived together but saw each other weekends in New York or Boston. They spoke on the telephone regularly, spent holidays together—well, as many as possible—“until Christmas of 1959. I was in Reading, he couldn’t make it. And he announced he was engaged.”
“Good for him!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what a motherfucker! He gets to have a wife and kids and respectability, and he has you for the good stuff. He doesn’t give up a thing.”
“I told him I couldn’t see him anymore.”
“Why?” Curt asked, as if it were the last thing Frederick should have done.
Why? Frederick had never analyzed his decision to cut off contact with Jon. It had always seemed the obvious thing to do. He’d been so wounded by his announcement, so humiliated by the thought of his being intimate with another person—worse, with a woman, as if his choice to marry Rachel was an implicit rejection of Frederick’s nature—of the nature of their love—and Frederick had always thought it was love, real, true love, the one thing in his life that redeemed the sorry, sordid truth about who, about what he was. Jon’s love made him clean, made him beautiful. Now he was taking it all away. He had no choice but to turn away from him forever.
Frederick changed the subject—it obviously wasn’t the sort of thing he could discuss with Curt, not yet, perhaps not ever—and felt mildly offended that Curt didn’t object to his doing so, as if “the love of Frederick’s life” (though he deliberately didn’t characterize it that way) was a topic of only middling interest to him. Tell me or don’t tell me, Curt seemed to say, it’s not something I really need to know. It certainly lacked the flair of Curt’s story about Frank.
“Oh, and I forgot the best part. When we were out in the cornfield, after we’d had sex, Frank started the car to drive back to town, and we got stuck in the mud. So he walked about a mile to the nearest gas station, and he came back in a truck with these two gas station attendants, and they looked at me and—you should have seen their faces. Oh god, it was crazy. It’s like we were Martians. But they pulled us out of the mud and we got back to Chicago around midnight and my stepfather was waiting up for me and we had another one of our shouting matches.”
But Frederick resented that Curt had so blithely moved on from the subject of Jon. It was something he grew more and more to dislike about the boy. He didn’t seem to know how to listen. His attention was so easily diverted. Sometimes Frederick would be talking and Curt, in a surreal shift of frame, would interrupt to say something completely unrelated.
“And so I came up with the idea to incorporate one of the porticos from the Rhinelander Houses into the façade of the new building, and—”
“Fuck, I was supposed to call Kay tonight! We’re supposed to meet some people from the Mattachine Society. We want to get out and do something, we’re sick of just sitting at these meetings and listenin
g to people pour out their hearts about how difficult it was to be a fairy back in the old days—”
“Excuse me, you just changed the subject as if you weren’t paying attention or didn’t give a shit about anything I said.”
“I was listening,” he said and went on to recount nearly verbatim Frederick’s description of the buildings on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square North and how his firm got the commission to do an apartment tower on the site and his idea to take one of the doorways from the old building and use it in the new one. “There, see? I heard every word you said.”
“Then why did you interrupt?”
“Sometimes I don’t want to hear a lecture.”
“You asked me about the New York Landmarks book and how I became interested in historic preservation and I was answering your question. I thought we were having a conversation.”
“Well, it doesn’t always feel like a conversation. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but it’s the truth.”
“There are plenty of people for whom this kind of conversation would be perfectly normal, perfectly pleasant.” He said it as much to reassure himself as he did to inform Curt.
“Good for them. I’m only talking about myself.”
“Well that’s nothing new,” he said, and walked out of the room.
Sex often settled disagreements, but only temporarily. Sooner or later conflict would flare up again. Increasingly it revolved around what Frederick perceived as Curt’s general disregard for the feelings of other people. One night he overheard Curt say something over the telephone about “the old man.” After Curt hung up, Frederick said, “Is that what I am?”
“I wasn’t referring to your age, Frederick. It was a term of endearment. I meant my sweetheart, my honey. You always suspect the worst about me. You are older than me, you can’t deny it.”
“I’m not denying it. But it feels disrespectful if you’re calling me ‘the old man’ to your friends.”
“I just told you it’s a term of endearment, it’s not disrespect.”
But Frederick couldn’t be sure. It seemed as if, ever since the March on Washington, something in Curt had come undone. The day had electrified him, but for most of September he didn’t know what to do with his energy. Some nights when he felt restless, he and his friends would ride the subway and cause trouble. Wearing tight pants, costume jewelry, eyeliner and mascara (Curt became an expert at painting “doe eyes”), they would go “wrecking,” as they called it, on the subway. For the price of a fifteen-cent token, they could have a long night of dangerous fun. They did chorus-line kicks and sang songs and made outrageous passes at well-dressed, buttoned-down men.
“Hey, pussycat, buy me a cup of coffee?”
When the object of their desire made a threatening move, they would run wildly through the car, jump off the first opportunity, laugh, howl, scream how they made a fool of that asshole and wasn’t it funny to see his face, “I almost thought I was gonna pee in my pants!” Sometimes they would acquire an extra teammate—a young kid or a stray adolescent—who was dazzled by the older boys’ bravado and sense of style. Curt always felt especially protective of these waifs. He was good at making people notice him, even of being afraid of him, and he liked the rare feeling of being older and wiser, of having someone look up to him.
One night they were out wrecking and started singing irreverent lyrics to the tune of “Howdy Doody”: “We are the Village queens, we always wear blue jeans, we wear our hair in curls, because we think we’re girls!” Curt wore a boa he’d picked up at a Salvation Army shop, and as they exited the train he dragged the boa around the neck of one grimacing old lady. To his surprise, she followed him off the train and proceeded to reprimand him and his friends, telling them they were a disgrace, they should be ashamed, “Why don’t you act like young men instead of a bunch of fairies? What do you accomplish…” But they couldn’t hear the rest of her tirade because they were already above ground at Sheridan Square. After another hour of dancing and carrying on in the Village, Curt decided he’d had enough and would just go home.
The next morning, Frederick was riding the elevator when his downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Bradshaw, got on. She lit up with tightly controlled anger. “Last night I was taking the subway, and that young man I see you with came onto the car with several other hoodlums and they terrorized the passengers with their insulting songs and gestures. He humiliated me in front of everyone on the car by tying a scarf around my neck! I don’t know what your relationship to him is and, frankly, I don’t want to know. But if I ever see him act that way again or if he ever shows me so much as an ounce of disrespect, I tell you, Mr. Bailey, I’ll report the two of you to the board and you’ll be kicked out of this building so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
They had exited the elevator midway through her speech and she concluded it as Frederick stood with his back up against the mail chute. Even as other residents came by to drop envelopes in the slot, she kept on with her accusations, not lowering her voice, not caring who heard her incriminating words.
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but if you have something to say you should speak to the young man himself. I am not his father.”
“Then may I ask, what are you to him?” Frederick turned to stone. “You have nothing to say to that, do you? People like you disgust me. Good day.”
That night after work, Frederick confronted Curt. He reiterated Mrs. Bradshaw’s words and added his own stern warning.
“Why are you speaking to me this way? You sound like my stepfather!” He headed for the door, but Frederick grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back.
“Are you mad?” he shouted.
Curt pushed him away with force. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Listen to me! You live with me. People know me at the grocer and the shoe shine, at the newsstand and the dry cleaner and the restaurants. The staff of this building and all the neighbors know me. And they see you with me.”
“So? What do you expect me to do about it?”
“I expect you to act with decorum, for God’s sake. She threatened to report me to the board and have me kicked out—both of us kicked out. Do I need to start laying down rules of conduct with you?”
“Oh, fuck your rules of conduct. And fuck that old lady. Yes, I go out occasionally and have fun with my friends, and if some people can’t take a joke, screw them. Screw all of them.”
“But I have a reputation.”
“You knew what you were getting yourself into when you met me.”
“What are you talking about, ‘getting myself into’?”
“You can’t control what I do and say.”
“I’m not trying to control you, but there are other people’s feelings to consider. You don’t change society by just willing it. You’ll never change people’s minds by being disrespectful and vulgar and—”
“I’m not gonna listen to this crap anymore. You live your life from one lie to the next.” Again he headed for the door.
“Don’t you dare walk out on me.”
“Or what? What are you gonna do? You nellie, cocktail-sipping fruit.”
Ah yes, Frederick thought. You think so, too. It was almost cleansing to hear him say the words. “Is that how you see me?”
“When you get all prissy about what other people think, yes.” He turned and opened the door.
“Where are you going?” The question was both a threat and a plea.
“Out.”
Curt let the door slam shut behind him.
Frederick went into the living room, poured himself a drink, and lit a cigarette. He had to think. Think. What indeed had he gotten himself into? Discretion wasn’t the same thing as dishonesty. His life was not, as Curt had said, a series of lies. Perhaps he was too young to understand. What would it take to get it through his head? The obvious solution would be to get rid of him. Especially if he thought of him with such contempt. Kick him out, notify the front desk, change the phone number
. He took a long drag on his cigarette. But could he seriously imagine doing it? He never liked Mrs. Bradshaw anyway. What right did the old battle-ax have to speak to him like that? It was one thing for Curt to hurl insults, he was a kid, and he was speaking in the heat of the moment. He almost admired him for what he’d done to the old woman. There was something powerful about his lawlessness. But did he really think of him as a…what did he say? A disgusting old piece of fruit? Again, he was a kid, and kids nowadays were vulgar and outspoken. They hardly knew any better. And Curt had missed out on the kind of love and guidance—the proper parenting—that would have softened his edges. No, the thing to do would be to sit down with him and have a rational discussion about what it meant to be homosexual in a world hostile to homosexuals. He would have that conversation with Curt when he came back.
But when would he come back?
Here he was again, in his old, familiar place. Waiting.
The West Side Discussion Group meetings of the New York Mattachine
Society were held once a month in the basement of Freedom House across the street from the New York Public Library. It was, ironically, Frederick’s idea to accompany Curt to the October meeting. For when Curt came back the next day—all he said was he’d been to Collin’s and Collin was an asshole—Frederick was so relieved to have him back, and, frankly, so relieved to hear him speak ill of Collin in the bargain, he decided to hold off on that serious conversation about being homosexual in a hostile world, decided not to push for ground rules about what to say and what not to say to others about their relationship, including what terms to use when referring to each other (he still didn’t like hearing Curt refer to him as “the old man,” and he didn’t believe Curt’s line that it was a term of endearment, but all of that could wait). So eager was he, in fact, to set things right between them, he actually admitted he probably had some things to learn about the homophile movement, and though he wasn’t saying he wanted to make any drastic personal changes, he admitted he was curious and, more importantly, it was a group and a movement important to Curt. For his part, Curt was on his best behavior the night of the meeting, for he hoped it would make Frederick see things differently, make him understand that times were changing and he could change with them, a little bit, a lot maybe, and it would be all right.
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