My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (10 page)

My grandmother lives only a few blocks away, and I have the run of her apartment. I know every corner but most especially the kitchen with its icebox, upright telephone, and wooden counters. Here she produces cheese and rye bread sandwiches, carefully wrapped in waxed paper and rubber bands, for our daily picnics in Riverside Park.

Here too she mixes Coca Cola with milk at meal times to lessen its pernicious impact on my growing body but otherwise indulges all my 58 n jonathan g. silin

gustatory whims. My grandmother does her best to entertain me and I am appreciative of her efforts. But by the end of the week I am homesick and feeling my own kind of sadness. At home my father is clearly back in control of his emotions, and I do not hear him cry again.

It is only the following summer that I myself experience the difficulties of a return to once-familiar surroundings. Whereas my father’s hospital stay was involuntary, I had eagerly chosen to go away to summer camp. It is the first afternoon back at home, and I am seated in my regular place at the kitchen table with its slightly sticky-to-the-touch oilcloth covering bearing a pattern of clustered, just-ripe cherries. Although it is August, my mother is preparing hot cocoa at the stove, a transitional food to recall the cold mornings I have just spent in the Adirondacks. She is gently quizzing me about the summer. As she knows only too well, I’ve had a bad time of it. At seven, I was woefully unprepared for the long separation, cried myself to sleep every night, and could barely read her letters or open the carefully wrapped packages without becoming tearful. I forbade either of my parents to call me. The sound of their voices filled me with sadness and longing. Now that I am safely home, looking out of the window past the one tall building that partially obstructs our otherwise dramatic view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades, my emotions are a complete jumble. And much to everyone’s surprise when my mother places the hot cocoa in front of me, I burst into uncontrollable sobs. I don’t want hot cocoa after all, nor do I want the cold soda offered in its place. Oddly enough, I don’t want to be home nor do I want to be back at camp. For the first time in my life, I have become a displaced person.

In retrospect, I understand my tears as tears of ambivalence. They express anger at my parents for having succumbed to my premature demand for sleepaway camp as well as my happiness at being home again. Although I have returned, my trust in their decision-making powers has been shaken. Something has been inexplicably lost at camp that summer, a bond irreparably damaged.

m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 59

•

•

•

These memories of childhood separations, of my father’s sadness and my own, call me away from the current crisis. They allow me to place some distance between the immediate moment and myself. At the same time, they allow me to place my father’s tears in context and to know that they will be managed. Although the 1997 throat surgery saved his life, it left him with a greatly diminished capacity to swallow. The unanticipated insertion of a feeding tube to insure sufficient liquids and sustenance that he has just undergone is a permanent acknowledgment of defeat. My father will not recover the ability to eat or drink as we had all hoped. He has, indeed, experienced a terrible loss. In the hospital he focused on recovery, on coping with the minute-to-minute exigencies of institutional life—the two hours on a gurney in the hall awaiting an x-ray, the stream of unknown doctors and nurses who all insist on asking the same questions about the day of the week and the president of the United States, the new medications and intravenous fluids that must be monitored for fear of error.

At home, and with time, my father lets down his guard and experiences emotions that he previously kept at bay, including his deep ambivalence about living with such diminished capacities.

My father, who sits directly across the table, still does not look at me. His head is collapsed into his chest as he continues to randomly shuffle papers. I am aware, however, that our conversation isn’t over.

Suddenly I find myself asking about the death of my grandfather, and I don’t know why. Perhaps I am really asking my father to have sympathy for me, to remember himself as a loving son, and to imagine that I too might have feelings of sadness and rage. Perhaps I want to distract him as well, to help him find comfort in the memory of someone whom he revered and idolized. He tells me that his father died quickly, six months after cancer was diagnosed at the age of seventy-three. At that time my father was only forty-five, nine years younger than I am now. He starts to sob again.

When he first began to cry I wanted to reach across the table and 60 n jonathan g. silin

take his hand, but I was afraid he would strike out at me with his terrible anger. Now, newly determined not to be intimidated, I place my hand on top of his tightly clenched fist. It is unyielding to my touch.

I am sorry that he rejects a human connection that might offer some comfort. More selfishly, I feel helpless in the face of his despair and disappointed that he does not recognize my own efforts on his behalf, but he has nothing left to give anyone else.

Finally, my mother, who has been silently watching this scene, gets up from the sofa with great difficulty and walks over to my father just as she had done six weeks before. Now she does not plead or seek to persuade. Instead, she simply stands behind him and puts her arms around his shoulders. She runs her hands along the back of his neck and across his chest without saying anything. I fear that he will push her away too. Miraculously, he accepts her reconciling touch, slowly stops crying, and begins to collect himself. He looks exhausted but calmer. I am taken aback by this receptiveness to her ministrations and pleased that something other than his bitterness and recriminations can still pass between them.

The next day my mother begins our phone conversation by uncharacteristically crowing, “I bet you were surprised, didn’t think he had it in him.” She expresses pride in my father’s honest display of emotions but will take no credit for her ability to comfort him. As I continue to remark on her quiet but starring role in the drama, she says modestly,

“Well, there’s a lot of history there. It ought to be worth something.”

And yet, from my perspective, it is that very history that makes my mother’s ability to offer succor, not my father’s display of emotion, the most remarkable part of the story.

Despite its modern trappings, my parents had a traditional marriage. First cousins who grew up in different cities, they only came to know each other as young adults. A certain kind of snobbery made marriages among close relatives in Jewish families (my grandmothers were sisters) not uncommon in those days. Who else would be good enough? While both my parents attended Ivy League colleges before m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 61

dating each other, it was my mother who earned an advanced degree.

A photograph taken circa 1936 for my mother’s official identification card as a “New York City Social Service Provider,” shows a slender, delicate woman of twenty-six whose long hair is pulled back softly and knotted at the nape of the neck. She wears a plain blouse, wool skirt, and suede jacket left open. The appearance is neat yet informal, serious yet relaxed. It is easy to imagine her as the good student she was, someone who studied the new, Freud and Franz Boaz, as well the old, German and Yiddish. It is also easy to imagine her as the kindly and sympathetic listener who pursued a career in social work until the birth of my brother in 1941. My mother maintained her membership in the official social work association until the end of her life. She often explained with great pride that, despite her father’s distant and traditionally patriarchal demeanor, he insisted that both his daughters attend college, by no means a given in the early 1930s, and even graduate school to prepare for independent careers.

Dedicated to raising her children, my mother returned to work outside the home only when I was eleven and my father’s business was in difficulty. This was the 1950s and I believe that my father, like many men of his generation, felt his wife’s second career in commerce rather than social work as a blow to his self-esteem. In deference to his pride, my mother never admitted to liking her work. Of course, since she was also expected to keep the domestic world running smoothly despite the demands of a job that often brought her home well after my father, she may simply have resented holding two positions at once. For myself, I was both proud that my mother worked and angry when the work made her unavailable to fulfill traditional maternal functions.

From an early age, I was keenly attuned to gender-based role expectations. Growing up a sissy, I had endured many spoken and unspoken accusations about possessing the physical and social characteristics of the opposite sex. My feelings told me, however, that I was physically and emotionally attracted to other boys, not that I wanted to be a girl. I was certain of this despite the fact that I was 62 n jonathan g. silin

clearly more interested in the satisfactions of the domestic world than the rewards of competitive sports and other stereotypically male activities. At home I enjoyed nothing better than purchasing and preparing the special foods required for holiday meals. At school I was the nascent artist, my most enjoyable hours spent painting and drawing, crafting jewelry, and editing the literary magazine.

While being homosexual—in those days the word itself evoked illicit excitement—meant accepting parts of myself that are usually valued only in women, I did not question my gender identity. In retrospect, this seems all the more surprising given that my peers, re-gardless of their socially progressive parents, reinforced the confusion between gender and sexual orientation. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the concept of gender identity, as separate from sexual orientation, first began to take shape.

When I was growing up the primary stereotype—all male homosexuals desire to be women—informed the “scientific” literature which described gay men as undeveloped and incomplete because of their feminine characteristics. Inevitably, science is embedded in culture, its practitioners human beings who sometimes rise above and more often reflect the prevalent ideas of the time. Despite the theoretical twists and turns of psychoanalytic theory, Magnus Hirschfeld’s dictum—homosexuals are women trapped in men’s bodies and therefore an intermediary sex—was emblematic of more advanced, dare I say humane, thought. Worse still for me, the only visible homosexuals were the extremely effeminate men I encountered during my adolescence while cruising down Third Avenue and across Forty-second Street with its panoply of enticing pornography shops. Notwithstanding the complete absence of role models, I insisted on imagining a “normal life” in which two men were sexually and emotionally bonded forever, a relationship of absolute equality, devoid of the gendered roles I saw among heterosexuals.

During college I developed an interpretation of our family dynamics that remained unchanged for many years and that cut across the stereotype of distant, inexpressive fathers and close, emotionally m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 63

attuned mothers. This interpretation defined my father as someone who was deeply connected to his feelings. I read the toxic quality of our relationship during my adolescence, the frequent clashes and smaller misunderstandings, as confirmation of the directness with which he made his demands, stated his case, and knew his own desires. Much to my father’s chagrin, I also read his “honesty” as support for pursuing my homosexuality and for not conforming to social pressures.

As a young adult, I continued to be drawn to my father because he represented authenticity and clarity. His sadness and anger, his depression and elation, were always easy to see. In contrast, I felt alien-ated from my mother’s more complex and hidden emotional life. She seemed to make no claims for herself, always the facilitator and peace-keeper; she was quick to test for other people’s moods without revealing her own. If no direct reading could be ascertained, my mother did not hesitate to rely on secondary sources—phone calls to a teacher, notes to a tutor, or interviews with a psychotherapist. My mother’s concerns were always filtered through an intellectual scrim that concealed her own feelings. She was present but absent all at the same moment.

Although I was aware of their personality differences, I experienced my parents as a team. I don’t remember them fighting or even disagreeing, a perception that has been confirmed by many cousins who all recall my parents as loving, protective adults. Dedicated and self-sacrificing, they appeared to have few interests outside of family life. They did very little entertaining and never took vacations without us. Their work lives were spent purchasing education and therapy for their children, something that I found increasingly unsettling as I got older and began to think about my own career prospects. How could two obviously intelligent, well-educated people wind up in jobs that offered so little direct satisfaction? Eschewing conflict, their noses to the grindstone, it was hard to imagine my parents as separate individuals with unique desires or to see the fault lines in their tightly knit relationship.

64 n jonathan g. silin

Over the last decade I have been forced to rethink this image of my parents’ lives as going against the gendered grain of our society, my father as deeply emotionally attuned and my mother as more distant and intellectual. Perhaps because I was more focused on what I felt they had done to me than on how they may have inadvertently harmed each other, I looked at their interactions solely in terms of roles. I saw them as having separate if mutually interdependent spheres of activity. When my mother returned to work in order to sup-plement my father’s income, I was completely blind to the fact that, like most other women, she was doing double shifts—one in the domestic world and another in the public. Even though they employed a housekeeper, if anything went wrong it was inevitably my mother’s fault. I did not grasp the domestic dynamics that might have been equally well described in the more politically charged terms of op-pressor and oppressed. I failed to understand the ways in which their relationship replicated traditional distributions of power and emotion in society.