My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (18 page)

longer trading, has little patience for this apparent indifference. Irritated, he tells me that he will quickly terminate his visit if my father continues to read. In contrast, I understand that my father is free to fill the time of my stay, never more than an hour, in whatever way he chooses. I make no claims on his attention. I am lending him my life for this brief bit of the week. Experience also teaches me that if I wait him out—five, ten, or twenty minutes, depending on the day—he will eventually look up and engage in a short conversation, with his voice when it still remained or with pad and paper when it was completely gone. Then, just as suddenly, he will return to the newspaper or drift off and I will continue to sit silently. I am satisfied simply to be in his presence and to appreciate his continuing interest in something other than his own health, which he is preoccupied with for most of his waking hours. I do not expect chatter or meaningful exchanges but am confident that all our time together matters deeply to both of us and happy for him to do with it as he wishes.

There are other days when, seriously depressed or raging with anger, my father says little or nothing. Then the silence is filled with a different set of emotions. The sullen withdrawal bespeaks despair.

The silent rage is wielded like a sword to stab anyone he sees as responsible for his imprisonment within a body and institutions that he cannot control. Trying to break through such silence is often a thankless task, so mostly I choose to quietly observe. I am saddened by what I see yet hopeful that my father might eventually be made more comfortable. Working with children and caring for people with HIV/

AIDS makes clear that at times all we can do is bear witness to another’s life. I can only offer my presence and now these pages as testimony to what occurs in those rooms.

I know that silence makes many people uncomfortable. Enmeshed in a culture that values verbal communication, it is often difficult for us to imagine different ways of being with and relating to others.

Some of my graduate students are upset by a forty-five-minute video-tape of a woman bathing her sister’s baby in an Ivory Coast village.

During this highly ritualized, twice-a-day practice, no words are spo-114 n jonathan g. silin

ken, nor are there any of the verbalizations deemed by our culture to be a “normal” part of infant-adult interactions. Instead we see rigor-ous physical caring in a hot, dusty, and severe environment. Similarly, viewing a film of a preschool in Japan, where teacher-student contacts are formal and spare, raises questions for my students about the role of adults in promoting language development. In Japan, instruction is delivered to relatively large groups of young children, and there is little opportunity for expressive language. Traditional culture rewards adults who are able to intuit the needs of others rather than articulate their own feelings. Teachers see intelligence reflected in a child’s ability to fit into the group. Problematic children are those who stand out for any reason, who make their individual voices heard. The homo-geneous societies of Japan and Africa place an ultimate value on membership in the collective, on empathy and action. In contrast, our heterogeneous society values the isolated individual, separation from others, and talk.

How do we come to read silence? How do we learn to remain still?

My brother’s own daughter describes one way this may happen. She and I are on one of those long Thanksgiving Day walks that can only occur if others are cooking and we are allowed to prepare for the indulgences to follow. Since my brother has lived most of his adult life in the Far East and I have really only known my niece through brief summer visits, she properly assumes that I am not in possession of the details of her family history.

I don’t remember exactly what we talk about on the brief stretch of road leading down to the ocean. But I do recall that as we step onto the wintry beach, Anne, bundled against the cold Atlantic winds of late November, tells me how her parents first met.

“And how did you meet Bob?” she finally asks me. As I share this part of my own history, we laugh at the similarities. Like her parents, we were introduced by a mutual friend at a party. Similarly, we were too preoccupied with other people and projects to be immediately interested in one another.

On leaving the beach, our conversation takes an unexpected turn.

m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 115

“You know when I realized you were gay, Uncle Jonathan?” Anne asks. I am unnerved, my stomach is unsettled even as my intellect is sparked. In truth, I’m not sure I want to know, but am unwilling to reject an offering that is so gently and hopefully proffered.

Ironically, Anne’s knowing comes through a denial. It is an ordinary dinner table conversation that reveals an exceptional fact. Anne is nine or ten and has no memory of the prior topic but is clear about the moment when her mother turned to her father, saying, “Don’t you think it’s time we tell Anne about Jonathan?” My brother’s response is crisp and declarative, paternal and paternalistic: “Absolutely not.”

Unwittingly, his negative reply reveals everything he wished to keep hidden. My brother’s denial is the exact moment Anne understands that I am gay. Now she understands the visit to our house several years before in a new way: the domestic routines that she participated in—the shopping, cooking and cleaning-up, the bedroom and double bed, the rituals of rainy-day card games, and trips to the summer beach that filled the sunny days. Bob was an elementary school teacher before becoming a photographer and had all the instincts to make such a potentially awkward family visit relaxing and fun. Although he taught slightly older children, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, his sense of humor, so right for early adolescents, is appreciated by everyone.

None of the meaning of the events that Anne had participated in does she discuss with her mother; there are no difficult questions nor fumbled replies. Since she lives in a culture where sex is a private matter, and public displays of affection in bad taste, this is not surprising.

Now, however, her mother’s question functions as a statement. There is indeed
something
to tell. My brother’s response affirms the need to hide that something, that family scandal.

For my part, I don’t believe that the naming of sexual orientation, just like a declaration of marital status, reveals anything of a private, let alone scandalous, nature. What is private is how we choose to live out our identities. In this instance, the scandal is constituted by the silence of Anne’s parents, not my sexual orientation. They behave as 116 n jonathan g. silin

if they can protect her from experiences she has already had, from truths she already knows. It is their own passion for ignorance that provokes my niece’s recognition.

As we draw close to home that Thanksgiving afternoon, I wonder aloud about the kind of knowing that led to Anne’s untroubled dinner table insight. She tells me that she did not have negative attitudes about homosexuality. It is simply never discussed in Chinese culture.

I believe it was the ongoing experience of hearing Bob and me spoken about, of seeing us do the things that people do as they live together, when the word “roommate” did not suffice to name the history, caring, and desire that bound our two lives together that laid the groundwork for Anne’s understanding.

At first blush, remaining silent, holding a secret, may appear to be, indeed may feel like, an isolating act, something that we do alone. Yet in reality, secrets are always relational. When we keep ideas to ourselves, we often keep others at a distance. When we decide to share secrets, they connect us to particular people in a more intimate manner. Nor do secrets occur in a social vacuum. Their existence is predicated on a social system that defines private and public, shame and honor. Secrets structure the boundaries between self and other, between individual and society. Learning to keep secrets is part of healthy development, a sign that children understand how their particular social world works.

The poet J. D. McClatchy, in his essay “My Fountain Pen,”

describes the complexity and creative potential of the in-between spaces where queer people like me so often find ourselves. Aware of his homosexuality from a very early age, he learns, through writing, to make a distinction between hiding something, keeping a secret from others, and disguising it so as to make it difficult but not impossible for others to see.

Long before I was given the fountain pen, of course, I had learned to hide things. Childhood’s true polymorphous perversity, its constant source of both pleasure and power, is lying. But that pen helped me to discover m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 117

something better than the lie. Almost as soon as it was given to me, I learned to hide inside the pen. Or rather, the pen allowed me to learn the difference between
hiding
and
disguising
something—that is to say, making it difficult but not impossible to see. Even when I knew the difference, I couldn’t always keep myself from confusing them.

McClatchy tells us that children are exquisitely attuned to the adult social world. My niece, for one, is an insightful reader of her parents’ silence. McClatchy also tells us that early in life we develop identity by remaining silent. When we begin to withhold information or feelings from others, we begin to experience ourselves as separate from rather than merged with those around us. As interior dialogue develops, we are aware of ourselves in a new way. McClatchy knows himself as someone who struggles with the difference between hiding and disguising his feelings. I know myself as someone filled with desires for other boys and men. Anne knows herself as someone with a gay uncle. We are all busy on the inside coming to understand ourselves and quiet on the outside, allowing our self-knowledge to seep into the silences, to be read between the lines by those we trust to contain the secrets that help to shape our identities.

I do not remember any dramatic moments from my own childhood when an explicit silencing leads to a more articulated knowing about the world. What I do remember, however, is my ongoing interest in people who have differently organized lives from the one I know and my suspicions that there are meaningful worlds beyond our family that I might be connected to and implicated in. During the post–

World War II years of conformity and celebration of the nuclear family, I value every opportunity to encounter people who live outside the mainstream. Developmentally appropriate curiosity, or protogay stir-rings about nontraditional families?

The same year during which my father was mourning the death of his mother, my brother, then nine, receives special instruction from his third-grade teacher for a reading problem that would now probably be called dyslexia. Every Saturday morning I accompany him and 118 n jonathan g. silin

my mother on 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.