Consenting Adult (35 page)

She could still feel the electric jolt that hit her when she had come to a line in Nate’s piece, “As my taxi reached Sheridan Square, I knew this was no routine raid of a gay bar.”

“Your taxi?” she had asked.

“I was right there. I sure lucked into something.”

“When was this, Nate? Which of the three nights?”

“Friday. After Jeff and I split, I got fretting about my piece, wanting a better lead or news peg, thinking about a tip somebody on the paper had given me. And then around one A.M., I grabbed me a cab and went downtown.”

All his pieces seemed superb to her there had been four in all—but that second one had held a special impact, that feel of participation, as though Nate were speaking aloud to her, with his own turn of phrase, his own excitement sounding. In the intervening year she had read that one piece several times and she was still affected by it. Nate had made of it a ligature between what had gone before and what was surely about to begin, what had already begun, that sudden outburst in the streets, of defiance and forthrightness to replace the silence and shame of decades, perhaps of centuries. His later pieces followed through on that widening movement, told of gay marches in major cities, gay protests to city councils, to colleges, to churches, to annual meetings of psychiatrists, an increasing surge of self-identification and revolt against discrimination, not only in New York but in the Middle West, out on the Coast, in the South.

She had waited a while before she asked whether he had sent his pieces to Jeff. Of course, but not until each was in print. Jeff himself had specified that he did not want to see them in typescript, lest he say something that might look like an effort to influence or even censor.

“He’s a hell of a guy, that one,” Nate had said by way of summary, and she had not pressed for more.

Perhaps she had finally adapted to that condition of life, that there were gaps she could never hope to fill, chasms she could never bridge. Her longing that Ken were still alive to see this new onslaught on the tight-closed laws and the tight-closed minds, this she did not speak of even to Margie and Nate, beyond a phrase in passing that was like a headline in a newspaper, summarizing, leaving the fullness of the matter down below.

She also kept to herself her ambivalence about the phrase “Gay Is Proud.” She did not really like it, any more than she would have liked a phrase that proclaimed, “Straight Is Proud.” She had, however, long understood deeply that the private phrases of the oppressed, “Black Is Beautiful,” were more than simple antonyms for the phrases the oppressors might have used, “Black Is Ugly,” and that there was, within those private phrases, not a counter-superiority, not a counter-hate, but only a corrective new strength, an antidote to an old and buried pain. A racist inferiority, a sexist inferiority, a sexual inferiority—there were threads stitching them all together, ligaments, sinews, veins carrying the lifeblood of assertion, of new evaluation, arteries carrying the same throb of one great pulse.

Arteries. She looked down at the prescription slip she was still holding in her hand. What did Jeff feel about gay liberation? Did it make him feel any easier, just knowing it was out there, a new current, generating new attitudes, new strength? Did he ever see any of the TV programs where gay people began to appear under their own names, right on the screens of the nation, usually on the late talk shows, the few where the audience was assumed to have some education, some interest in subjects other than the ceaseless ego talk of movie stars and comics and “personalities”? Long ago these better programs had included people who talked of what it meant to be black, to be women, people who opposed the draft and the war in Vietnam.

And now there were homosexuals, men and women, young for the most part, unabashed, free of apology, another minority at last ready to fight persecution and demand their rights.

“Guilt?” one young woman asked the world at large on one such program. “That was society’s old trick, to make us feel guilt, so guilty that we hid in that old closet, which is where society still wants us to stay, because it’s not just a private closet but a big political closet, away from political action. If you’re hiding in dat ole debbil closet, you ain’t about to zap City Hall about ending discrimination against gay people in jobs or housing or anything else.”

She was a marine biologist, she said, and might lose her job for appearing on this show, giving her right name, saying she was gay and quite content to be gay, but she had tried the other kind of thing long enough, shrinking her life away in that closet, and now at last she was out for good and feeling a whole person again.

Tessa wanted to write her a word of praise, but even more she wanted to call the TV station, ask whether the show would run in Los Angeles and then flag Jeff to be sure and watch it.

As always she did not call the station, did not tell Jeff about it, did not even write the marine biologist. One of the side effects, she thought, is the sort of shy paralysis you yourself feel, about showing too clearly how much you care, how much you applaud, how much you love.

But maybe even that will change. Once she had thought only, If Jeff could change. Now she saw that it was she who had had to change, she and Ken and the world who had changed.

Another year passed and then another. Jeff had finished his interning and was in his second year of residency, as always doing well, as always working indefatigably. And then one winter morning early in 1973, Tessa stooped to the scatter of mail at her front door and found a letter from him that once again, as the next seconds of her life ticked off, was to alter it forever.

Dear Mama,

You probably know as much as I do about the gay movement, or maybe more, you being you, and I think I should tell you now that about two months ago I became part of it.

Not in any big dramatic way—you know I’ve never been a political beast, marching on picket lines or parades, and I can’t become a gay activist now. But I
have
come out, and once you are out, you are out forever.

I told my chief at the hospital back in December, Dr. Syms, and he gazed at me a while and then said, “So?” He’s a tremendous guy. I also told some other doctors and all my friends. It is a risk for anybody in medicine and could lead to disaster, but it is a risk for anybody in anything, and I finally got to the point where it had to be this. It’s been growing in me for I don’t know how long, and especially a night just after Dad died—a night I asked Nate to leave me out of when he wrote about it. Ask him—tell him I said yes.

Well, that’s it. I guess it’s never easy to talk to parents about this sort of thing, but I hope you approve and I have a hunch you will.

Love,

Jeff

She read it twice and thought, The courage, the young courage. Long ago she had thought of his young courage, but that was for a letter that was a cry for help when he was seventeen; now he was nearly thirty and she was filled with that same admiration once more, but now for a man’s statement of a position he had come to through years of an agonizing development.

No more evasions for him, she thought, no more hiding, no more fear. Nobody can threaten him, nobody blackmail him. He is free. I have never loved him so much.

She reached for the telephone to call him, but her hand stopped. Once before she had stopped lest she be overheard by some idle boy at the school switchboard. Now there would be no such risk; she would call him at home and it would be either he who answered or the new voice she had first heard a few months ago, after so long a time of hearing no voice but Jeff’s.

She thought of writing, but abandoned the idea as too slow. It was then that she thought, Actually I’m not as surprised as you’d expect me to be. I think I have been getting ready for this for a long time, I must have been, without letting myself think of it. And Jeff must have been getting ready for it too for a long time, maybe long before Dad died, maybe as far back as when he quit analysis and all that dogged attempt to “get cured.”

She began to print out a telegram, remembering that other wire to Placquette when she had tested each word for possible significance to a hostile eye. She could still recall that wire in its entirety, and in a spin of emotion, began to write it once again. But then she struck it out, displeased. This was no time for artifice.

I AM PROUDER OF YOU THAN EVER STOP I LOVE YOU AND ALWAYS WILL STOP THANKS STOP MAMA

She stared at the word
THANKS.
There was an enigmatic quality in it now that she had not felt as she wrote it. Thanks for what? For doing this that you have done? For telling me? For voluntarily sharing this with me when you have always made it so clear that you would permit no communication between us in this area of your life? Or am I thanking you for being what you are?

She made a gesture of dismissal, as if she could send away her own confusions, then she phoned the wire unchanged to Western Union, saying, “Fast rate, please, it’s important.” It was only six in the morning out there; she had forgotten that when she considered telephoning him; now she hoped he would receive it before he left for the hospital. Then again he might not see it today at all, since he was finishing out his residency; in either case an imperative within her demanded that it be dispatched without delay.

Ask Nate, he had said. A night just after Dad died—a night I asked him to leave me out of when he wrote about it.

An exploding star seemed to go off in her mind, a shower of sparks, a celebration. The Stonewall—he had been there with Nate, He had seen it. They had got there after it started but he had seen it while it was happening. The Boston Tea Party of the Gay Movement—he had played a part in it, whatever part, he had been right there.

And ever since it had played a part in his own life. It had triggered some new force for him, or activated some dormant one, building it, strengthening it until, months later, three years later, it had become powerful enough to let him do this.

It was a risk, as he had said, that could end in disaster. The words chilled her. He could be thrown out of medicine. No, not out of medicine. He could be thrown off the hospital staff, but never out of medicine. There would always be the sick, and they would always need doctors. There could be disaster too for the other gays who had created the movement before him. There were the old cruelties still, in a large part of society, and there would be for years to come. But when you lived in a hostile environment, you could knuckle under to it or refuse finally to yield any more. It was what you did with your life that made it.

Ask Nate—tell him I said yes. Again her hand moved toward the phone, and again it stopped. She could not talk now even to Nate or Margie. Her voice would quaver; she would feel that swoop of embarrassment when she lost control. Instead she went to the bookcase where the four issues of
Orbit
lay flat, atop some large art portfolios, and drew out the second piece in the series. Standing there, oblivious of the time, forgetting to call the office and tell Gail she would be arriving late, she reread the entire article. But this time when she read, “As my taxi reached Sheridan Square, I knew this was no routine raid of a gay bar”—this time she visualized not Nate alone in that taxi, straining forward, wondering what all the shouting and upheaval was, but also Jeff beside him, Jeff getting out of the cab, Jeff hearing the police sirens keening, Jeff pushing forward into that crowd.

Then she came to Nate’s words about a tall young man near him suddenly straight-arming an abusive policeman, suddenly hurtling into the scythe-like sweep of his nightstick—

It might have been Jeff, she thought It must have been Jeff. I know it. I should have known it long ago—there was something vague, something she could not quite remember, that had seemed odd at the time. That pub crawl, that was it. Nate had said something about some pub crawl and then seemed to take it back, with some sort of white lie as if he were covering up a slip he had made. Suddenly she sat down at the table and poured another cup of coffee. She felt limp and yet her body seemed to vibrate with a fine young lightness, as though she could play ten sets of tennis or swim three miles. She tried to visualize Jeff hurling himself at that cop and his nightstick,
felt
the impact, knew it was what had actually taken place. She tried to visualize him telling Dr. Syms at the hospital. Dr. Syms was, she gathered, the idol of all the younger doctors on the staff, a man of fifty whose wife was a doctor too and whose two sons were already in medical school. Dr. Syms could have meant disaster in that very moment, but Jeff had gone ahead. And so far at least no disaster.

It would be a day-to-day wondering for a while, but Jeff was ready to undertake it and so too would she have to be. He would not be sending her daily bulletins, not be making verbose reports. She might never hear one more word about Dr. Syms, she might have to live with that day-to-day tension for a long time, but compared to what had once been and had now ended, it seemed like an easy assignment.

Again she thought of calling Margie and Nate, and for the first time added, And Don. Immediately she thought, No, not Don. Don will resist the news, not welcome it. He no longer “forgot” and told jokes in her presence, but he saw only the extremists in the gay movement, the ones he called “the show-offs and freaks and TV grabbers.” Once or twice she had pointed out that every new movement had its extremists, but in the main she stayed aloof from the entire subject whenever she saw Don.

Now the battle lines will be clearer, she thought, not only in this family, but all over. The good old barricades, she said in a half whisper, and smiled.

Then she felt ready to call Margie and did. Margie was now a junior editor at Brannick and Lynn, in the Juvenile Department, experimenting with a new approach to children’s books, free of the old predestined sex roles for little boys and little girls. She was devoted to her new job, full of wisecracks about the prehistoric clichés that crept into the most liberated stories by the most ardent feminists. “Would-be feminists,” Margie called them, a hoot of derision in her voice. As Tessa waited for her call to go through, she heard the small merry hoot again and a fond approval arose in her.