My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (12 page)

My father’s message is teasing and seductive, a side of his personality that only becomes visible to me late in his life. He tells me what the call is
not
about while refusing to reveal the actual reason of the call. At the same time, he heightens the drama by reminding me of all the potential sources of apprehension. He provokes my curiosity and tries to lure me into a speedy response. He is a master strategist, determined to get my attention.

There will be no record of my parents’ success at coming to terms with modern telecommunications. My phone machine has a promi-72 n jonathan g. silin

nent blue delete button but no hard drive on which to transfer their messages. No mere recordings, however, could capture the way their brief dispatches resonate with the past, when pen and paper provided a simpler and more fluid, if less rapid, mode of connection. Nor could they capture the feelings of potential loss and vulnerability that this last stage in my parents’ life has elicited in me. At the time, I savored their mastery of a new technology, glad that it hadn’t obliterated the familiar style that permeated our interactions. I even wondered if I wouldn’t turn on my computer one morning and find an e-mail from
[email protected]
.

Now that my father has no voice at all, the juxtaposition of my days in classrooms with young children and evenings at my parents’ apartment makes me all the more attuned to the power of written language.

My father would be all but helpless without his yellow pad and pen, which allow him both practical communications as well as moments of playfulness and pleasure. Because of the pressures on measurable performance in schools I see too little fostering of authentic appreciation for the written word. Both experiences send me back to childhood, to wonder about my own early struggles with reading and writing.

I was what euphemistically has been called a “late bloomer,” although not as late as my older brother, who did not begin to read until seventh grade. My own emergence as an independent reader occurred somewhere around fourth grade. Prior to that that time, I have memories of hushed, concerned conferences between my mother and my elementary school teachers.

One moment stands out. I am seated at a table pretending to read a new book that my second-grade teacher had enthusiastically given me a few days earlier. It is illustrated with gaudy pastel colors and has the toxic smell of fresh ink. The story involves some popular cartoon characters of the day that I have absolutely no interest in. Not even the active commerce in comics among my brother’s friends—and I do eye their collections with envy—has seduced me into reading about m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 73

imaginary animals or people. My own overactive fantasy life, crowded with figures from the real world, has no space for these intruders created by the pens of Walt Disney and the like. I turn the pages every few minutes hoping to appear gainfully employed.

Lucy Pringle, a tall, thin woman in her twenties, circulates through the room that contains just a handful of students. She is a new, well-meaning teacher, as my mother explains to me on several occasions, trying to secure my fuller cooperation in Lucy’s attempts to teach me to read. But good intentions aren’t enough to win my confidence or that of the small band of defiant second graders who I hang out with. We never miss an opportunity to take advantage of her in-experience.

Now Lucy leans over me with her prominent nose, receding chin, and black-framed eyeglasses, and asks me to read aloud. I stumble over every word with more than three letters and cannot answer the questions that she poses about the story. This encounter, in which the novice teacher who cannot control the class meets the novice reader unable to decipher the words on the page, is indelibly etched in my mind. It is a painful moment of truth in which my ignorance, as well as an abiding sense of shame, is unmasked. I am far too young to understand that it is also the failure of the school—to meet my needs as a learner—that is revealed.

As an adult I carry this moment with me as I visit classrooms today and imagine myself a “classified” child. Here I see many children who have been tested prior to entering kindergarten and found to have learning difficulties. Early in the year teachers must design an IEP (individual education plan) for them, which is then filed with the vice principal. A list of the classified children is posted at the entrance to the classroom for anyone to read. There are three to seven such children in each of the kindergartens that I regularly visit, and it is expected that the teachers will implement the plans without additional help.

Fortunately, my confrontation with Lucy Pringle took place long ago, in a small school where teachers had the time to bolster the 74 n jonathan g. silin

strengths of their students as well as to attend to their weaknesses. Despite my reading deficiencies, there were many other arenas in which I could experience success. I recall the pride we took in the rabbit cage we constructed from an old table and some chicken wire in first grade, the feel of the saw dust compound from which we modeled the con-tours of our second-grade map of New Amsterdam, and the smell of the paint that I carefully applied to the upper reaches of the cinder block wall just outside our fourth-grade classroom. That mural of the westward expansion remained long after I became a teacher in the very same school.

Miraculously, I acquire a few more reading skills by fifth grade, even though I seldom have the desire to open a book. My continuing lack of interest is now revealed during our Thursday morning trips to the school library. I am always anxious and at loose ends during these sessions. A short, gray-haired woman with a quick temper, bad teeth, and smoker’s breath, the librarian is a ten-year-old’s idea of the perfect witch. Each week she impatiently questions me about my interests to hasten the selection of a book. But I have no ability to name my interests and therefore assume that I have none. “How can you not have any interests?” she demands incredulously. A person of no interests, an uninteresting person, I am mortified by this inquisition.

Never doing well under pressure, I settle on a Hardy Boys mystery, consciously attracted by the cover drawing of the two friends and unconsciously drawn by the promise of scenes depicting illicit intimacy between them. Will they have a sleepover and be forced to share the same bed? Will they unexpectedly end up at the town swimming hole without their bathing suits? When a quick scouting foray into the text yields none of the desired moments, I disappointedly check it out anyway. During the week, I read so slowly and unenthusiastically that I cannot remember the plot, let alone finish the book.

Until I enter high school and begin to receive letter grades, I think I am very stupid, at least when it comes to academic matters. Then writing rather than reading becomes the terrain of interpersonal m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 75

struggle and the one on which I feel most inadequate. My grammar and syntax are awkward, my paragraphs filled with non sequiturs and my spelling unrecognizable. Nightly responsibility for editing my papers alternates between my mother and my father, the former far more patient and the latter always insistent that I understand the principles underlying his corrections. I am impatient, easily frustrated, and unwilling to internalize the lessons they struggle to teach me. In the end, I am never quite sure who is the real author of these anguished collaborations. They reflect my deep ambivalence about being held accountable for my own words, my own life.

This reluctance to claim my ideas on paper, I now believe, was connected in some complicated and still incomprehensible way to my recalcitrant and unacceptable sexuality. The written word was both the medium that tied me to my parents in endless battles over periods, commas, and paragraphs, and the medium that eventually allowed me to see myself as an independent agent with a unique story to tell.

Initially seeking confirmation of my burgeoning homosexuality in the words of others, I consider the pseudoscientific tomes of Edmund Bergler and Alfred Kinsey, but the former’s case studies of tortured, unhappy lives and the latter’s statistics have nothing to do with the desires that course through my body. I am forced to look for more arresting representations to guide my future. Abandoning the public library and inconvenient bookstore for the corner newsstand, I discover the modest physique magazines of the 1950s. Filled with well-oiled, fig-leaf-clad torsos—no match for today’s perfected, unveiled gym bodies—the Grecian Guild models are all the more human because of their imperfections. Mostly they are posed alone, however, which is both a disappointment for a teenager desperately seeking images of men together in any format and an incitement to imagining their lives as lived both on the page and off. What does the jauntily worn sailor cap or beach towel casually placed on the ground suggest about what has occurred before or will follow after the photograph is snapped? I carry on silent dialogues with all my favorites and try to enter the photographed scenario so as to have my way with these 76 n jonathan g. silin

mysterious icons even as I create new stories for after the shoot has ended.

Despite these efforts, I am still dissatisfied. Unable to see myself reflected in the protoclones of that era, I draw on immediate experience as the source of my first literary efforts. Electrified by the touch of Marc’s hand on my shoulder as we walked home from the museum, unnerved by Roger’s invitation for a sleepover date that New Year’s Eve, mesmerized by the folds in Donald’s electric-blue bathing suit—

I begin to authorize my own life.

Now, like Jean Genet, I turn the act of writing itself into an erotic moment. Seeing my words provides an illicit pleasure that I hardly understand. Hiding nothing from myself, I spend hours secreting away my desires from others even as I hope they will be discovered. These brief, furtively written narratives are the precursors to a more formal statement, a homoerotic short story deeply indebted to my first reading of James Baldwin. Undertaken as a senior English project, this personal declaration of independence, no parental editing required, is ultimately returned by the teacher without a single comment—so much for coming out in 1960. Although I am ready and able to put my desires onto paper, albeit transformed into the lives of fictionalized characters, I speak to no one about the essay. The one person who reads it is herself left wordless. This move to represent what is inside undoubtedly functions as an effective distancing mechanism through which I can better see myself, part of the drive to get on with the inevitable. Emboldened by my imminent graduation, I use the assignment to prepare for the real coming out that will take place only weeks after I arrive at my freshman dorm at college.

As I become a writer, I also become a reader. In his short but memorable essay “On Reading,” Proust describes the places and days in which he first became absorbed by books. What remains most vivid about childhood reading, he claims, is not the text itself but the call to an early lunch when the chapter is not quite finished, the summer outing during which our only desire is to return to the book left hastily aside on the dining room table, or the secret pleasure of reading in bed m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 77

long after all the adults have gone to sleep. While particular phrases titillate our curiosity and provoke our desire, Proust assures us that there is no truth to be found in words themselves, just the keys that help us to unlock interior rooms of our own design. Only in adolescence does the solitude required of the engaged reader become tolerable, dare I say attractive, to me. And only then am I able to set aside my own immediate interests to lend the book my larger life.

Although I favor long family narratives and bildungsromans with lots of character development and psychological complications, my tastes are eclectic. I am especially given to perusing my parents’ bookshelves, which contain everything from Kafka’s
Metamorphosis,
for-bidden to my best friend by his more protective parents, to Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead
and Oscar Wilde’s
Ballad of Reading Gaol
. I have no interest in lightweight subjects such as the thirty-five-cent Signet edition mysteries that my father reads on the train to work each day and then jams into his raincoat pocket. Once stacked high in separate piles around the house—my father is a fast reader—they eventually begin to disappear, replaced by my mother’s ever-growing library of hardcover fiction.

Now, on the very same shelves, wedged in between books on Jewish history and biographies of Zionist leaders (my father’s) and piled hap-hazardly atop an assortment of art books (my mother’s) are the volumes containing my own essays on education. I have never become used to seeing them mixed in with the volumes of my childhood; they seem oddly out of context, misplaced fragments from the academic world. And what do these carefully proffered “gifts” mean to my parents?

They are proud of my scholarly achievements, clearly unimagined when I announced my intention of working with young children thirty years ago. Then my parents were convinced that I had thrown away my chances at a career that would bring significant financial re-muneration or public recognition. My mother always reads my essays, careful to comment on how well written they are and to acknowledge 78 n jonathan g. silin

how difficult it is to follow the details of the arguments. My father is less interested in what they say about education than in what they signify about my career. Of course, the books on early childhood find a more prominent place on their coffee table than those on queer theory. So I am surprised to learn how eager my father is to send a journal article on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay community to my cousin’s daughter who has recently come out. Needless to say, he doesn’t read it himself, but the mere fact that he will traffic in once contraband matter is an indication of how far he has come in acknowledging the existence of gay and lesbian lives.

When I was thirty-four, just ten years before this request to send on my article, my father evidenced a very different attitude. We, Bob and I and my parents, have just eaten in a favorite Chinese restaurant and are walking across Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan. It’s a broad thoroughfare, bustling with pedestrian traffic and lined with clothing shops, electronics-cum-Oriental-rug outlets, and discount drug stores.