My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

the long subway ride from our solidly middle-class, Upper West Side neighborhood to the rundown brownstone on a Chelsea side street where she lives. Growing up in a large apartment building, I am fascinated by having to take several steps down from street level to enter her tiny garden flat and, once inside, to find all the cooking appliances built into the back wall, an arrangement that my mother knowingly refers to as a “Pullman” kitchen. And indeed, the Pullman cars in which we travel to visit relatives in distant cities are compact, contain everything within arm’s reach, and seem completely modern in the same 1950s sort of way as this abbreviated kitchen. My mother’s words summon up the glamour and excitement of those overnight train trips when we always wake up in just enough time to have breakfast in the dining car before arriving at our destination. The ethnic fabrics that are used to cover the well-worn furniture in the apartment and the handmade pottery from far-off countries that sits atop the tables and bookshelves expand the potential excitement that travel already held for me.

When I enter high school and spend time in Greenwich Village, I might label an apartment such as this “bohemian,” signaling a much-romanticized way of life. But when I am six, this slightly shabby room, the bed disguised as a sofa during our daytime visits, the guitar resting against the wall, and the artifacts from other cultures, has an air of strange places, of a life that is unsettled and, for me, unsettling. Living as I do, surrounded by family—in addition to my parents and my brother we frequently have one or another of my father’s unmarried sisters in residence for prolonged periods of time—I cannot make sense of an adult woman on her own. Besides, my aunts seem unmarried in a way that is different from the way that Marguerite Estrallow was unmarried. For there are no visible signs that I can now remember of family life in her environment, of the context of her singleness.

Where does she come from and where does she really belong? Why does she live alone? Is she someone else’s maiden aunt?

My own sixth-and-seventh-grade teacher is exotic in quite another way, but one that also suggests alternative, less middle-class, m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 119

ways of living. A pipe-smoking Harvard graduate with a serious Boston twang, always dressed in tweed sport jacket, graying hair pressed back against his temples, Dick—in our progressive school first names are de rigueur—is the scion of a large New England family. Generally soft-spoken, when he loses his temper, he commands a booming voice that sends darts into your stomach. But I mostly remember him as a gentle man who loves to read aloud to us after lunch even when we are too old for such an indulgence. Dick is given to mounting semester-long theatrical productions that are the cause of many half-hearted reminders about returning to the formal curriculum and to taking us on weeklong study trips to Civil War battlefields, fading Amish communities, and factories with strong labor unions.

We are aware that Dick is a renegade simply because he is a Harvard-educated male teaching grade school. But we also sense more. The only thing we know for sure is that Dick lives “uptown”

and that he is married to Gwen, an African American poet. At first blush, an interracial marriage seems unremarkable in this educational setting that welcomes refugees from McCarthy’s purges and focuses on issues of social justice in the curriculum. The theme of my brother’s 1958 high school yearbook is “free expression,” the Bill of Rights proudly superimposed on its end pages. In reality, Black and white students still live in different worlds. We learn about each other in oblique ways. Race is framed abstractly as a civil-rights issue rather than as a matter of individual social identity. An interracial marriage is accepted but not discussed, a mystery that touches the heart of my own particular unspoken anxieties about race and sexuality. In this liberal enclave of the 1950s, we acquire the politically correct stance toward many subjects but not necessarily the courage to pursue the deeper personal questions and concerns they raise for us.

As we get older, Dick becomes our high school English teacher and we also know that Gwen complains about the frequent play rehearsals that keep her husband in school so late. We do see her once a year when she attends the opening night performance. Short and heavy set, Gwen seems older than Dick, an inappropriate partner, I 120 n jonathan g. silin

think, for someone of his intense energy. In retrospect, I understand that while I am intrigued by their interracial marriage I also do not want to believe that Dick has any partner other than us, the students whom he obviously cares so much about. The existence of a spouse suggests that we might not always assume primacy in his life, that adults might manage deep emotional ties to several people at once.

Dick and Gwen’s relationship poses a further complication for me because they do not appear to have any children in their immediate life. Although many of my classmates come from divorced homes—

stepparents, weekend visits, if not joint custody, are an integral part of their world—the complete absence of children challenges my concept of family. Gwen and Dick’s marriage hints that there might be alternative models that I haven’t yet been exposed to. If their life does not focus on raising children, what brings them together? Why do they stay married?

I now realize that Bob and I may have served a similar function for Anne when she was growing up. Knowing us in even the limited way that occurred in her formative years might have enabled Anne to entertain new possibilities for imagining the future, perhaps even a queer future. Queer not necessarily in an explicitly sexual way, although there is