My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (15 page)

FOUR

FALLING IN LOVE WITH LOVE

The new Penelope Pendleton Beye and her husband, lost in the swoon of it all at the reception following their wedding in Deerfield, New Hampshire, June 16, 1956
(Courtesy of the author)

In the months after Mary’s death, I, like almost everyone else in such a situation, went through the motions of living mechanically. Feelings of intense loneliness and an emotional vertigo brought on by dislocation were half the time blocked by the anxieties arising from my new job. No sooner had I settled into an apartment (although “settled” does not describe the frantic flailing that marked the move) than I found myself five days a week on the highway making the hour journey between Cambridge and Norton, scarcely noticing the road as my brain was furiously reviewing the material I was en route to offer or wearily parsing afterward to determine whether I had made sense.

I was appointed an instructor in classics at Wheaton for the academic year 1955–56. I was too shy even to ask about my salary in the interview, and no one, neither the retiring chair nor the dean, thought to bring it up. We were all WASPs; no one mentioned money, plus we were college professors, in those days really too high-minded to talk about salary. It was not uncommon for faculty in the more prestigious New England institutions to have what used to be called “old money.” Well, I did not, so I was pleased to figure out from my first salary check that I was making about $3,000 a year. Bottom of the heap, no PhD yet, I was barely one step above a teaching fellow, the title Harvard used for graduate student slaveys such as myself, who the preceding year haltingly and ineptly taught three two-hour undergraduate seminars for what I love to call bupkis.

Once Wheaton would have been called a girls’ college, until “girl” became considered almost as abusive as the infamous “n-word.” At some level the students were being trained to become “ladies.” I was startled to discover that the girls were not allowed to smoke outdoors going from class to class on campus, whereas the male faculty were—habituating the girls, I suppose, to the social fact that “decent” women—that is, “ladies”—did not smoke on a public street. One still heard talk of an education that would make the girls “well rounded,” whatever that could mean, probably able to hold their own when the highlights of middle-class culture—Wagner’s Ring, for instance, a trip to Paris,
The New Yorker
—might happen to come up for discussion. This presumably ensured that they were attractive women, and thus suitable helpmates for whatever man might bring them to the altar. Getting a man was a major undertaking. Christmas vacation in the senior year was a now-or-never moment from which fortunate girls returned sporting engagement rings, and wedding plans were the big talk of the final semester.

I was lucky to have a job. This was entirely due to Sterling Dow, who had agreed to be my dissertation adviser, although not a page of that document had yet been written. He was proud of the network of positions where he tried to control the staffing. Unlike some of his colleagues who had no notion of the bread-and-butter realities of the profession, Dow kept in touch with students past and present, shuffling them around in the job market as though it were a chessboard and at the same time shoring up his national reputation. Wheaton College, it must be said, was an entirely unimportant institution, as I myself was a very minor figure in Professor Dow’s machinations. Still, despite my dismal graduate school record, and my never having even studied with him, Dow’s overweening ego had a place even for me; I was his student, like it or not, so a job must be found.

As it was, I was going to replace another Dow student who was going on to Yale, a fellow known to all as Ted Doyle, whom at the time I scarcely knew although he was destined to become one of my closest, most important friends. Edwin Joseph Doyle certainly was much more to Dow’s liking, being an epigraphist, his mentor’s own hard-nosed specialty, and a habitué of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Dow’s home away from home. He had been slotted into Wheaton by Dow, however, because he was otherwise a dubious candidate for advancement. An Irish Catholic from Boston whom, as he himself often remarked, the classics faculty would immediately associate with every police officer and tavern owner in the city, not to mention the men of Harvard’s Buildings and Grounds, he was also notoriously slow at finishing his graduate work; some called him lazy. Still, he was off to Yale for the academic year 1955–56 as yet without the degree because Frank Brown, the chair at Yale, told Dow he needed an epigraphist; Doyle was the right man at the right time, dissertation or no. I think it could be said that his war record, which included the landing at Salerno in 1943 and the fight up through the Italian peninsula into Germany, made up for a lot.

I was contracted to teach five courses a term, a schedule not uncommon in the forties and fifties, but a workload at which present-day academics would faint (and we are not even talking about preparation and grading). My main effort was a lecture course in classical civilization, Greece in the fall, Rome in the spring. For decades the department had traditionally emphasized history and archaeology, and far more students enrolled in classical civilization than in courses in Greek or Latin. On paper that may sound like a high-minded academic decision, but the reality was that ancient language courses were difficult (despite the fact that before Vatican II every Catholic boy of whatever intellect was forced to master one or both), and the girls shunned them. A lecture course, however, which emphasized art, literature, and archaeology, along with the history, would be easy enough for most anybody, and, if taught in a fashion that was amusing and colorful (read: lots of slides), would prove popular as well, and thus a breadwinner for the department. By the mid-fifties as the classics profession nationwide was beginning to look nervously at declining enrollments, the more realistic department chairs knew enough to move away from language instruction with schemes to ward off administrators pushing budget cuts. The Wheaton tradition of archaeology and history put them well ahead of the curve.

It was
essential
, therefore, that the successful candidate for the job be able to teach this course, and Dow, the historian, was the natural guarantor of this credential. As it was, I knew next to nothing about ancient history; I had not studied it much as an undergraduate and never as a graduate student. Since I had done no work with Dow (beyond hemming and hawing on the ridiculous subject of the putative dissertation that he had dreamed up for me), he had no experience of my complete ignorance of the subject. As he was intent upon keeping the Wheaton College position in his control, and with no other more likely candidate on the horizon, he prudently did not investigate, or perhaps he didn’t care. Needless to say, I did next to no preparation over the summer months beyond checking some serious tomes out of Widener Library and occasionally inspecting their titles as they sat on my desk. Consequently, the first few months of my teaching career were extraordinary for the effort at preparation.

Every night I read the requisite pages of J. B. Bury’s
A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great
, turned them into an outline or script, took advantage of the many times I had acted in plays to memorize my spiel more or less, and did the same with H. J. Rose’s
A Handbook of Greek Literature
. I’d like to say, continuing the actor/theater metaphor, that I went out there as just another hoofer and came back a star, or whatever it was that Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler. The fact of the matter is that I bombed; in the enrollment for the second term over half the students elected
not
to continue. It was a stunning rejection and well deserved. I was just reciting the “facts” of Greek civilization. My predecessor Ted had built that course up from nothing in three years to the popularity that I in three months had annihilated. I knew from hearing him that his anecdotes and gossip from the professional world of classics were both amusing and charming. He brought that raconteur’s skill into the classroom and combined it with a seasoned teacher’s disinclination to grade hard in a general education lecture course. I was too rigid, far too serious. As he said to me years later, when discussing the matter, I was a Protestant and he was a Catholic; there was no hint of absolution either for me or for my students in my classes. I am sure that my personal tragedy did not loosen me up either. Luckily my chair was sympathetic to the neophyte’s dilemma, and the administration renewed my contract, so I had the chance to learn from my mistakes.

While I was involved in this disaster, my life in Cambridge took on pleasing complications. This came about through the machinations of another Harvard graduate student named Mark whom I had met a year earlier and with whom I had had a desultory sexual relationship all the previous summer. After Mary’s death most people my age avoided me. Only ten years after the war, and they seemed to have forgotten that young people can die too, that men can lose spouses. I was lucky to have Bill’s family out in Concord to visit. Even better, his younger brother Freddy came to live with me in Cambridge to avoid having to live in his Harvard dorm or to commute; it was ideal for me having someone never home but always a psychic presence. But Mark was forever urging me to marry again. “You were so happy married,” he would remind me. He himself was planning to marry, so the subject was never far from his mind, although one might think that two men lying naked in bed together would not be onto that topic. He brought up his classmate in the school of architecture, a woman named Penny Pendleton, who as a matter of fact had introduced him to Mary and me, since she lived in our old building. We had met her at a sherry party in the apartment of our neighbor Joan, no doubt making one of our over-the-top flamboyant entrances. At least Penny had been suitably dazzled, for I know that she wrote her mother after that night—I saw the letter years later—confessing that she had “met the man I want to marry, but he is already taken.” Now I was free again, but I had no interest, not even in making it with a man.

But Mark was persistent. It became October, and he organized a potluck supper mostly with architecture students. This would be easy, since almost none of them knew me and my sad story. Penny, of course, was there; she flashed me a deeply sympathetic look as she entered but said nothing. After dinner I offered to drive her home. She asked me in for a drink, and somehow we were disrobing within half an hour. I cannot believe that we had expressed ourselves at the dinner table; how did we move so rapidly into the erotics? I do know that a few weeks before Mary died, we had all been at Joan’s wedding, in fact we had all helped out, since it was a small affair that Joan herself arranged. In the car coming back I was sufficiently drunk to give Penny, who was sitting next to me, a kiss or two, but I cannot believe that this was any invitation then or later. True enough, Penny nursed a great crush on me. And I? Well, for someone who had found so much of his definition in sexual intercourse, perhaps I responded to the message of availability with a deep yearning for the security “doing it” would bring. This night I looked down at her as she lay in bed to announce—rather sternly, as I recall—that I had been having homosexual relationships since I was fourteen or fifteen, that I had always been attracted to men. It was important to me that this was clear. Penny did not seem to register any great emotion at this revelation, but then she was usually a mask. We did not make love, however, because I turned out to be impotent. She reacted as though this were a natural consequence of my emotional state, but I was horrified and shocked. The hyper-virility of teenage sex does not prepare one for the sexual miscues, inadequacies, and failures of the adult male. The next night I went over to Mark’s and astonished us both by throwing myself on him, not stopping until I had satisfied myself into exhaustion. By rights that should have finished me off for a bit, but the very next night I returned to Penny’s bed. Was I there for more than to demonstrate that everything was in working order?

Nevertheless, that evening established us as a couple. I had known Penny as a neighbor and friendly face at parties. Suddenly we were lovers. We were certainly perfectly matched for hours of intercourse, just as we were able to match each other martini for martini, a drink to which Penny introduced me. It is amazing to me in retrospect that I, who am in essence a male who lusts after other males, could not get enough of our coupling together, nights, afternoons, mornings, whenever we had a chance moment, wherever. The bedroom is the obvious place, but I remember on a weekend with friends our taking a canoe out on a lake and bringing it ashore on a small island, where we suddenly lay down on the grass and I pumped away into her, and at the end muffling our orgasmic groans and shouts. Sound carries so well across a lake, and we did not want our picnicking friends to think that murder was being committed. The intensity of our sexual relationship provoked me simplemindedly to tell, not ask, Penny that we should marry. And, she, ever the mask, always silent, did not disagree. But did she ever agree? Well, I guess at the altar she gave a positive response to the question posed by the minister.