Faggots (8 page)

In the hospital room, he re-arranged into their nighttime array, at Algonqua’s request, the twenty-three vases of flowers. Ben’s office had certainly sent flowers. They didn’t know her but they sent flowers. Ben was important to them, senior partner in Washington’s top firm of accountants. Where were the flowers to her from his friends in New York, who didn’t know her either but to whom he was important?

There was a strange closeness coming upon them, something Fred had not allowed for on this visit, nor allowed, indeed, since he’d gone into that Outside World, nor allowed, come to think of it, since those couplings with his fellow eighth-grader, Fred. If he’d inherited her determination that “my boy can do anything!” (“as long as she’s Jewish”), he had also inherited Lester’s fears and tremblings. Drs. Isaiah Cult, Clive Nerdley, Tracy Fallinger, M. R. Dridge—these had been his substitute nutrition, the Metrecal of his life. He’d told them everything, his system, he hoped, now purged, the colonic irrigations of his mind, psyche, brain, id, ego, superego, unconscious, subconscious kishkas (where did one become another, or were they each the same, and how connected were they with the heart, and how did any of them become the Staff of Life, that crooked crutch with which to creak along?). No, he had not planned to tell her this evening. After such radical surgery.

He was helping her to walk, up and down long corridors, past other wards and wings and basket cases, her arm through his, leaning on him, getting her exercise. Yes, he felt close to her for a change, and she felt it, and it was this closeness, for the nonce overcoming his temerity in the presence of her usual Tower-of-Power routine, which encouraged his voiding of the beans, true confessional, tonight the night, Susan Hayward letting it all hang out, radical surgery indeed.

How to phrase it?
Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella.
Beat step step kick kick over out jump fall down dead.
Please tell me it’s all right to fall in love. With a fellow fellow.
whyamisoafraid? Ah, yes, Lester had been right. Lester had always called him a sissy.

“Ma, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. Did you know that I’m a homosexual?”

Thirty-ninth floor, Fred! JUMP!

She did not take it well. Was he expecting a trumpet voluntary, a huge welcoming round of applause, kisses to the balcony, and grateful recognition from the star? Well, the old lady looked sad. Yes, she did.

And this made Fred, growing so fast his pants were getting shorter by the second, miffed. He wanted more courage and support from this woman of gargantuan strength. Madam, if you thus elect to choose weakness, hurt, injury, frosted with self-pity, then I, at this belated bar mitzvah of growth, do not approve, he thought, being careful not to consider that he’d been choosing similar weak-necked stratagems for years, like some overgrown pansy in the garden that can’t quite keep its head from bending low. No, he did not think this. But he did think: You can’t make the rules forever.

Finally the sibyl spoke. “I always knew there was something.”

“What do you mean, you always knew?”

“That professor of yours at Harvard, I always suspected there was something. He invited you to Europe and you wouldn’t go. You paced all night in your room…” She was referring to a night over twenty years ago.

“You remember?”

“A mother remembers.”

“He was in love with me and I was frightened.” Brave as a Green Beret today, are you, Fred?

St. Joan on the Cross looked around for some words. “I only want you to be happy,” she finally said.

“I’m happy! I’m happy! I want you to know I’m happy. I wouldn’t have it any other way. If I had a choice today, I would choose to stay the way I am.” Good for you, Fred! Good courage! Stout lad! (Stop calling yourself stout! You’re thin, now. You’re thin!) What did it take for you to get all this out to her? Twenty-one years of Shrinkery for you to get it up guiltlessly?

“You promise me you’re happy?”

“Yes. I’m happy. I’m happy.”

“You promise me?”

He took her hand, which was through his arm anyway, and held it. “Yes.”

“Well, anything that makes you happy makes me happy.”

Lies on both sides were gratefully accepted. He walked her back to her room and helped her into her bed.

Six months later, same hospital, after her other tit had been biopsied and reprieved, she lowered her voice to ask him: “What do you want me to do with that book?”

“What book?”

“You know the book,” she lowered even lower.

“The one about homosexuality you asked me to get you so you could read and learn and try to understand?”

She nervously looked to see if her roommate was listening and had heard. “Yes,” she said, clearing her throat.

“What do you mean, do with it?”

“I’m finished reading it.” Her voice still remained much too confidential.

“It’s yours to keep,” Fred chirpily answered, full-throated, fortissimo,
molto voce,
bravo. “It’s not something you have to tuck away in a bottom drawer. Where is it?”

A reply was not forthcoming.

“You haven’t? In the bottom drawer?”

She busied herself with smoothing blanket and coverlet and quilt.

“I’m ashamed of you,” he said. “What did you think of it?”

“It made me sick,” escaped her lips.

Well, that’s just wonderful. Thanks a heap. That really makes me feel just swell. Thirty-nine floors up and Fred once more wanted to jump.

“What do you write about, young man? Your mother tells me you’re a writer.”

Algonqua’s eyes blinked rapidly, avoided Fred’s, ran around the room and walls and ceiling.

“My life,” Fred said to the neighboring bed, a gall bladder tomorrow morning, “Jewish,” Algonqua had identified her, “despite her name,” which was Lincoln.

“How interesting,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “What about your life?”

Algonqua coughed and looked toward heaven. Perhaps, like Clare Boothe Luce in the Holy City, some plaster would fall and change the subject.

“And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it?” Mrs. Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.

A crossroads. He was torn. Should he be strong and honest, what care?, the bold, brave pioneer? Was this not what he was trying to stand for, The Hero in Action, since he had, a lifetime ago, dealt with his now ex-Mother?

Or was it Mature to Avoid the Issue, hiding under that rug any iota of opportunity for either Mrs. Lincoln to sympathize with Algonqua or Algonqua to feel sorry for herself?

Or should he give the old Ma one more stab of the scalpel? Take that! you old switchboard operator with your connections still plugged in! Take that! Take that! you Gobbling Turkey who’s not giving me Thanksgiving! Take that…It was quite obvious that Algonqua the Altruistic was shitting in her hospital gown that this son she no longer recognized might peel off (for the camouflage it was) her prideful labeling of “My son, the successful writer.”

Yes, Fred, anxiously desiring either a jump or a number of Greenberg’s brownies, had to decide at this moment whether to add another helpful label to her list.

Finally he answered Mrs. Lincoln: “You’ll read the reviews.”

While we’re at it, and with so many of our leading faggots yet to introduce, dare we pause a moment to tarry over the likes of kvetchy, schleppy, nasty Lester Lemish? Yes, he passed through his lifetime a sissy and a coward, a doormat with nary a star of love to guide him, though he would have named himself a true man through and through. Dare we offer a requiem moment to the ghost of Lester Lemish?

He certainly was a screamer.
“Go out and play with the boys! Stop playing with the girls!”
he’d helpfully bombard the younger son who wouldn’t listen to the Yankees or the Redskins, little knowing that such an impressionable lad would choose to obey both dicta to the lifetime letter. “You sissy!” he’d then helpfully append, chomping on his fat cigar, and adding further traumatic damage, as such a word delivered from father unto son and indicating a tidge of lovelessness could possibly so intidge.

But wasn’t it Lester who backed away from challenge and risks? Wasn’t it Lester who was terrified of life and sex and life and family and life and Algonqua? Lester, downed by the Depression, defeated into second-rate accountancy positions, never paying much, thus freeing up Algonqua to ply her oh so many active employments and deployments, more lucrative, and in so doing taking his ball games and his balls away. Oh, Lester Lemish, with a degree from Harvard and one from Harvard Law School, Phi Beta Kappa from the first,
Law Review
from the second, why did you lie down and die, in so doing, almost,
almost,
bringing down your younger son, you idolized your elder, he played ball.

Yes, Lester Lemish, your totally poor record in Fatherhood included an inability to kiss and hug, keep bargains and promises, call and say Hello, inquire after studies and well-being, offer love, do anything but pull the Disappearing Act, with its constant curtain line: You Are Unwanted! I Reject You Through and Through!, delivered unto Fred, and truly bringing down the house. Yes, Lester Lemish, you were the first in the long line of danglers who held out the lollipop but who wouldn’t let Fred lick.

So, Lester Lemish, ye who hated your son and whom your son hated right back, ye whom he blamed for making him go out and suck cock to find one of his own—and if we are going to get pyrotechnical on the matter, and evidently we are, let it be said that Fred had strong feelings on The Subject: It was men and their insecurities that made him queer and bent and faggot (were women the worse of the two evils?, and hence by the bye, with more demanding strings attached for payments on demand?, Algonqua would eat him alive!) (and he did not know that Dinky’s situation was just the reverse: it was his Poppa who sang to him “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” and his Momma who was the weak and rejecting, and needful, one), and he’d found nothing in all his comings and goings to make him feel otherwise, nothing but gropings for cocks to make his own seem real (is this any different, Fred, from the millions of straight men looking for the tit their mamas once gave them, or didn’t?) and while there’s a current trend afoot attempting to indicate that homosexuality might be caused by genetic intrusions or embryonic hormonal imbalances, and there may be truth or succor found in this, or anything else the genes boys might come up with, and wouldn’t it be nicer, easier, neater, cleaner, certainly more convenient, if homosexuals were born just like everybody else?, there is also that other school of thought, established by S. Freud and his dishy disciples (including the Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge), which posits that a dumb dodo of a daddy and a whiz bang whammerino of a Ma (who made Algonqua be so fucking strong, Lester, who?) can turn the trick as well (though what about Lester’s own eviscerated childhood, his own tyrant of a Mamma, she who single-handedly ran her own grocery store in a neighborhood of polacks and schvartzas and put two sons through Harvard without aid from any husband in sight, he having been evacuated when she sensed aroma of pussy not her own?)—yes, Lester Lemish, Fred thinks IT WAS YOU who drove him thusly, thus wishing your ending in hell, not for making him a cock sucker, because Fred has come, finally, to quite like that, but for thinking him a coward when in fact it was you who did not give him the image of a Man who could kiss and love and hold someone close, someone to look up to and emulate and be.

Lester Lemish died a couple of years ago today. Algonqua, in a sadness for his memory, had called both of her sons this morning. She spoke to Ben’s secretary and Fred’s answering machine.

The funeral had been held at the Washington Hebrew Congregation. The rabbi, Earl Chesterfield, Oxford-educated, plummy-toned, and a nose job, had not known Lester, and since the Lemish name was not a graven image on the donors’ tablets, the services were short.

Ben and Fred had escorted Algonqua down the center aisle. She was in her moment of some sort of triumph, bawling enormous heaving Whats and Whys, wearing the black-and-violet Garfinkel shantung and tulle she’d bought years ago for Fred’s Harvard graduation, since altered, who would notice?, as she passed the many friends she’d spent a lifetime being nice to, hoping they would be nice back to her.

Fred, not an easy loser, was enormously, tenaciously gratified that he was not allowing a tidge of remorse to graph his heart. The day was sunny and so evidently was his interior. Thank you, Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge. The bastard, the prick, the old fat fart has finally fled this earth. Had not Fred waited a good many years for this, his own moment of some sort of peculiar vengeful triumph? Hadn’t he wanted it, dreamed of it, fantasized it, since he was three? And could he now not find love at last? For had not one of his new clairvoyants prophesied that love would come “with the death of a white-haired man?”

Lester had requested burial among the war dead at Arlington, not because of any patriotic gesture, or comradeship for any remembered brothers-in-arms, but because, as a veteran of the First World War—the Great War as the English know it—he was entitled to free interment. So in he went, for nothing. Fred, ever ready for a dramatic moment with a dramatic moment, had even fantasized a funeral oration, should anyone ask him to speak, which they did not, that would begin: “I shall now speak ill of the dead.”

One of these days he will finally realize: What a wasted life! What fine potential down the tubes!

Dr. Irving Slough had placed the following ad in the
Avocado,
which had been answered by Dinky Adams: