Consenting Adult (26 page)

“Oh, Mark.”

“I’m oversimplifying. One New York analyst coined the word homophobia’ and says many analysts are homophobic themselves and simply cannot accept the concept that it’s possible to be a healthy, well-adjusted homosexual, as happy or as unhappy as any healthy, well-adjusted heterosexual, no more, no less.”

“I can’t take all this in. I’ve never come across anything like this, not in all my reading. Nothing by Dr. Richards, nothing by Dr. Marmor.”

“What you’ve seen is mostly by the establishment. The traditionalists, let’s say, like Dudley and Isaacs.”

“I took them for gospel. Except for that talk of twenty-five percent—you’ve heard me on that. Is Dr. Richards writing anything? Or Dr. Marmor? And the others who think the way they do?”

“Of course, and it’s already getting a major hearing in the profession. In the next year or two you’ll be reading their papers for yourself, and maybe their books.”

“Mark, do they mean that a boy or girl who’s homosexual should stay out of analysis?”

“In some cases no, in some yes. If they’re miserable, if
they
feel something is wrong with them, treatment may free them of guilt, depression, let them function more fully in life. But remember, most analysts are heterosexuals, after all, and many of them, despite their own analyses while they were students, still carry a pretty hefty bias about homosexuals. ‘Homophobic’—and still that way right through student days into practice.”

“It flabbergasts me, all this. It’s like a sudden turn in the road.”

“You’ll need time to explore it, and so will I. It’s actually astonishing to me, with a life spent in medicine, to be told that this form of sex choice not only isn’t a mental illness—we knew that all along—but that it needn’t be tragic or terrible either, unless the world we live in makes it seem tragic and terrible. Richards says it’s a variation of the sexual impulse, that if s found in all societies, averaging out at about ten percent, as we found out from Kinsey long ago. ‘Variation of the sexual impulse.’ “

She heard his slight stressing of the phrase. “Does he call it a neurosis?”

“Many homosexuals are neurotic, he says, and many are not. So are many heterosexuals, neurotic or not Most patients on the couches this very hour—they’re heterosexuals, aren’t they?”

“Of course they are. I never thought of that either.”

“Screaming heterosexuals, with psychosexual problems, with guilt, with insecurity, and lots of them people who had aggressive mothers and weak or drunken fathers in their babyhood.”

A shout of laughter burst from Tessa, and she slapped his desk with the palm of her hand. Mark Waldo laughed with her.

“So that’s your own little guilt,” he said sternly.

“This is all so tremendous, Mark. Could you possibly get me anything to read, by Dr. Richards or Dr. Marmor?”

“Dr. Richards is sending me one or two of his papers. I’ll send them along, of course.”

“I wish Ken had been here with me today.”

“I thought you’d rather tell him yourself.”

“If he will let me.” She looked suddenly tentative. “He really has made himself over, year by year he has, but he still seems to go half mute in any talk or discussion about Jeff.”

“He was never a voluble man.”

“And Jeff—is there any way you could tell him? He really ought to know about this, and he’d never let me. It took me years to learn that, but I finally did.”

He shook his head. “I have to accept the reality Jeff presents, just the way you do. I’ve seen him—what?—twice in the past four years. Once for that mono scare and the other time the strep throat. Both times he volunteered exactly zero about his private self. Silence is a symptom, Tessa, as much as an outburst is.”

“But you— But nothing. I know you can’t.”

“Jeff will find it out for himself. Sooner or later. And so will a great many other people. Richards predicts a major split down the middle of psychiatry and analysis about homosexuals before the decade’s out.”

“If it could be soon.”

“Look how much medicine has learned in the last ten years. The last five. In every branch of it.”

“Oh, Mark, thanks for calling me today.”

When she began to tell Ken that evening, he did not stop her, but three hours had elapsed between her departure from Mark’s office and in that time the impact of Mark’s news seemed to have eroded, and as she tried to put it into words for Ken, it seemed to slip through her fingers, seemed diaphanous and misty. What had Mark said that had made it seem so important in the moment of his saying it? How had he put it? That there were a few psychiatrists who believed that treatment itself could be wrong, damaging, that the run-of-the-mill psychiatrist might well be unconsciously biased toward homosexuals, or ambivalent in his judgments, a prisoner of his own heterosexual view of sex. She put it as well as she could, but the feeling persisted, that it was sounding unconvincing and hollow.

Then does Mark imply,” Ken asked, “that all Jeff’s years in treatment were wasted? Or damaging?”

“That wasn’t the primary point. He made it clear he was thinking ahead.”

“He did name Dr. Dudley and Dr. Isaacs.”

“Because we knew them. He didn’t single them out as any worse than the rest of the analysts, far from it. Just as examples of the state of analysis now, the ‘establishment,’ as he put it”

“Well, if he sends you anything by this Dr. Richards or by Dr. Marmor, let me have a look at it too.”

The full impact of Mark’s revelations returned later when she was alone, and with it a burst of anger, a sudden fury at Dr. James Dudley and Dr. David Isaacs, who must have had some inkling all through these last years of the Judd Marmors and the Halston Richardses and their work, and yet had never said a word about it to their patients or to the parents of those patients.

How was it possible for any reputable psychiatrist or analyst to withhold the news that some of their colleagues felt that the usual approach might be wrong, even harmful? She thought of a pediatrician withholding from an infant’s mother all news of the Salk or Sabin vaccines against polio. She distrusted analogies, but this one aroused an anguish in her that seemed to fit the lunatic rage she was just now feeling at the Dudleys and Isaacses of the world. They
must
know. Whether they agreed or disagreed, they certainly ought to tell the wildly seeking parents on the very first visit that there were other hypotheses they might consider before launching their beloved sons or daughters into four or five years of typical treatment

Averaging out at ten percent, Mark had said. Eighteen years had passed since the Kinsey report had astounded the world, yet that figure remained a constant in study after study. One out of every ten people, in every society, ten out of every hundred. How often had she read that figure herself, how often had she thought of those tens, those hundreds. At Jeff’s graduation last summer …

This time Ken had not stayed away. This time they were there together, like all the parents. This time it was a different universe they were inhabiting—the commencement exercises had been held outdoors, and in the evening, so that working people could come to see their children at last in that cap and gown that for so many years had been the secret aim, the private vision. It was at Lewisohn Stadium, uptown there in that overlapping of the Bronx and Harlem, nothing like the propertied domain of Placquette Preparatory School for Boys, yet in its own way beautiful and moving.

Ken too seemed aware of the thronging crowds, the parents of some four thousand graduates, mostly men, mostly white; he kept looking out into the lighted arena, open to the sky, where they had so often gone to hear symphonies when they were young, and once he said to her, “He’s the only one of us to do it, Tessa, and yet we all believe in public education.”

She knew what he meant but she only nodded and said nothing. She had just remembered that earlier June when she had watched the young faces and thought of Jeff as isolated from all his classmates. Tonight she knew he was not isolated, that among those four thousand young people, there would be some four hundred who were homosexual like Jeff, who had faced and would face the same hazards and the same prejudice Jeff had faced and still would face as he and they went forth to begin life out there beyond the university.

And if there were four hundred, then there were eight hundred mothers and fathers in this surging crowd tonight, and if there were 15 or 20 million homosexuals throughout the nation, then there were 30 or 40 million mothers and fathers out there too, many of whom already knew, many of whom did not know, many who would go frantic with the attempt to help, many who would yell and shout the classic Never Darken My Door Again.

It has to change, she had thought then, it is already changing. We are learning. So slowly, but we are learning.

And now Mark had told her that psychiatry was changing in more ways than were yet known. Analysis would change; society itself would change, would begin to lose its own phobias about people whose sexual needs were different from the majority’s. Would begin to lose the cruelties that go with fear.

That was what Mark had told her, that was what had made her heart race. She had lost it for a moment when she tried to put it into calm words for Ken, but now she had it back again, the full meaning, the full projection.

There was another telephone call within the week that set her guessing, this one from Jeff. Her first thought was that he had seen Mark Waldo.

“Is this a busy week for you?” he began. “I thought I might come and have a talk.”

“Not particularly busy. Come on.”

“Or busy for Dad? I thought it might be with you and Dad.”

“Why sure, Jeff. Lunch, is that what you mean?”

“No, as a matter of fact. What I meant was, in the evening, right there at home.”

“Why, that would be fine, and a nice surprise.”

“It’s pretty important.”

“Whenever you say, we’ll make it any time.”

“How about tomorrow night?”

“Fine. Want to come for dinner?”

“About eight, I thought, afterwards. It’s—” He hesitated. “Do you still want to give me that old graduation gift?”

“Of course.”

“Dad too?”

“We’ve just been waiting for a signal from you, remember?”

“This is going to be some kind of signal.” He laughed, a mysterious undertone in his voice. “Then eight, tomorrow. Get set for a surprise.” Again he laughed a little.

“I’m set.”

She was filled with a presentiment that this was to be a turning point in his life, perhaps in theirs, but she was aware that this time it was a pleasant feeling, not the old apprehension that used to be so ready to strike. She sat holding the telephone close to her, as if she liked it, feeling expectant, with a small certainty that was new. Nothing had changed, except in herself, and she was unclear about what that change was, or how to rate its importance or predict its tenure. But here was an event that had not happened for five years, a call from Jeff, proposing that he see them at home.

Not a call from her asking him to a neutral place for lunch, a neutral corner as it were, not a general family arrangement over at Margie and Nate’s or, much more rarely, at Don and Jenny’s, not a ritualistic gathering like Thanksgiving or Christmas or somebody’s birthday. The motivation this time came from Jeff. The place for it was chosen by Jeff, and the place he had chosen was that same old-fashioned big apartment that he used to call home.

Her throat tightened a little, not with the ache of pain, but with an excited sense that this was going to be a major step into the future for Jeff. Let it be a good one, she thought. A reminiscence of days lived through brushed her memory but she banished it. Enough, she thought, it has been enough.

The next evening when Jeff arrived, he looked around the living room with astonishment “It looks bigger,” he said. “Just the saine except lots larger.”

“The old story,” Ken said. “Every summer, while you kids were growing up, when we’d come home from a summer in the country, you all used to insist it was either larger or smaller, but always different. It’s nice you’re here.”

“Yes, it is,” Tessa said. “You used to hate me for saying this, but you look taller.”

Jeff guffawed. “Come on. Eventually people do stop growing, even me.”

“But that Bermuda tan—I’m not imagining that”

“You forget the night shift, and it’s a Central Park tennis tan, just as brown as Bermuda tans.”

“Want a drink?” Ken asked.

“I’ll have a beer if there is any.”

“Or scotch, rather?”

“Beer’s my speed.”

‘Tessa?”

“Just soda, thanks.” She was looking at Jeff with unconcealed approval. He was in the usual white shirt open at the throat, no tie, no jacket, and the usual chinos. He might have lost some weight, but the general look of him was of perfect fitness, the kind he used to have, the athlete’s trained fitness, hard-muscled, coordinated and free-moving. The look of the college man was gone; a stranger might have guessed him twenty-five or -six instead of twenty-three, but that deepening maturity sat well on him; he had never looked better.

“Do you still like your night life?” she asked as Ken brought the drinks. “I take it, you’re still sold on the job.”

“‘Sold’ isn’t quite the word.” He leaned forward in the deep chair, looking from one to the other. “There’s something about this job that gets
to
you in the damnedest way. To me anyhow.” He took a long gulp of his beer. “After the first few days, when I got the hang of it, it began working me over. It’s hard to explain.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Ken said.

“There’s something about working in a hospital,” Jeff continued. “I’d never even been in a hospital before, except that one time when you were sick.” He turned briefly to his father. “I was so scared, I guess I got fixed in the idea that hospitals were horrible places that smelled of disinfectants and drugs.”

“You were fourteen then,” Tessa said. “No, fifteen.”

“And I didn’t even think of it from the other side, the doctors there, and the nurses and surgeons.
And
the nurses’ aides and orderlies.”