My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (16 page)

What a strange courtship. I was so clearly manic, and I am sure Mary’s death had put me over the top. In retrospect I wonder if Penny was clinically depressed; as a personality she could be so wan, so quiet. In the beginning it was restful, she seemed so easy to dominate after my experience of Mary’s powerful presence. But behind the mask I uncovered a fierceness. She had a twin brother with whom she was in constant competition, and by extension with all males. He studied engineering; she would be an architect—engineering, so to speak, with style, flair, and imagination, and yet a profession that is to this day notoriously dominated by males. She was determined to break through the conventions of polite female behavior that her proper mother and a succession of boarding schools had tried to instill in her; it was from her lips that I heard for the second time in my life the word “fuck.” She had lost her virginity young, as she was quick to tell me. For a college student of the fifties she was very promiscuous. She told our daughters, as I learned later, that she much resented the sexual freedom of males. Completely comfortable with one-night stands, she could have been a gay male. It seemed that she had worked her way through all the grad students in the architecture studios, but when I met them I noticed that they did not give her lingering looks, which made me believe that there had never been much of a relationship with any of them. But sleeping with everyone in your circle is a great way to exert a kind of control and establish a presence through the group. I always thought her sex drive was partly fueled by her insecurity about speaking. Sex was her means of establishing contact; the quiet person came alive. I responded with all the pent-up frustration that grief and sexual denial fueled in me. She could not have been more different from Mary. Slightly dark when tan, sallow otherwise, she was tall, lean, had the body of an adolescent boy, slim-hipped, with breasts that needed no support until motherhood and breast-feeding changed her shape. She was like Mary, I imagine, in that she thought she was the perfect match in sexual freedom with a man who had been sleeping with males since he was fourteen.

She was delighted that I had no parents with whom she would have to deal. The previous summer she had in fact met Mary’s parents when they visited Mary and me in Cambridge, so that difficult hurdle had already been passed. In our inchoate fantasies of our impending wedding and honeymoon, I had in mind a visit to Iowa to show her off to friends, and that would necessarily involve the difficult visit to Ames. But in the immediate future I had to meet her parents, about whom she had told me very little. On almost any personal subject she believed in the motto “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” As so many of the more affluent preppy Harvardians of the time, Penny affected the style of dressing shabby; she seemed always to be in her oldest clothes, drab skirts threadbare from years of wear, frayed tennis sneakers. Since she drove an old Buick, which she used, she said, for visiting her parents on “the farm” in New Hampshire, we two Iowans, who were familiar with a farming population that drove Buicks because they rode high and were less likely to be damaged in the ruts on farm roads, assumed that Penny was a poor scholarship student from a family scratching out a living on the hard New England soil. Thus, when I was prepared to be gracious and not condescend, I was surprised to be ushered into the presence of a magnificently dressed, handsome, commanding white-haired gentleman with a cane whom she introduced as her father, the Admiral. And there beside him with all the appropriate diamonds and strands of pearls was her elegant white-haired mother. So this was the dear old farm couple down from the country, where, as I learned later, they lived in a restored eighteenth-century farmhouse on several hundred acres that had been in Penny’s mother’s family for six generations.

Penny was my introduction into modernity and the imperatives of style. The one subject on which she was articulate was architecture; she did not simply talk, she lectured. Having taken Sigfried Giedion’s course at the School of Design and almost memorized his
Space, Time & Architecture,
she was ready to comment on any architectural feature she came upon. It made for the most exhilarating strolls through cities. Walter Gropius was her teacher and god; I discovered the Bauhaus and everything it implied. The affectionate tour she gave me of Gropius’s Graduate Center dorm and dining hall at Harvard and the Saarinen buildings at MIT completely shook up my aesthetic assumptions. I, who prided myself on the professional association of one of my uncles in Oak Park with Frank Lloyd Wright, discovered that I knew nothing about anything. I will never forget our first visits to New York together as she took me through the architecture galleries at MoMA, then out on the town to see the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Bank on Forty-third and Fifth Avenue, the Seagram Building, Lever House, and the other gems of the time. My allegiance to classical antiquity and its restatement in the Italian Renaissance had to be rethought in Penny’s observations about the inherent classical aesthetics of modernism and minimalism. Talking art and architecture with Penny was an explosive expansion of my aesthetic sensibility that was another side to all the sex and the martinis. It was a delirium from which we never thought to wake up, but somehow through it all Penny finished the term and got her degree, and I read my students’ exams and turned in the grades.

And then we were married, June 16, 1955, a scant nine and a half months after Mary’s death. No one mentioned the fact, except Mary’s parents, who sent what I read as genuine love and encouragement in their congratulations. Penny’s parents were not at all enthusiastic, first that I was a widower—they were horrified that Penny chose to wear something relatively somber with a black belt to the rehearsal dinner in memory of Mary—and then I have to think that the Admiral, who had a lot of experience with males in close proximity, scented the perfume in the underwear, so to speak; the more manic I became, the more fruitcake was my performance, and the mounting stresses of the buildup to the wedding had me dancing in the air. The historic church in Deerfield, New Hampshire, followed by a reception under a large tent on the farm, would have satisfied my mother’s every snobbish yearning. As we left the church, Penny caught her heel in the threshold, breaking it off, and so had to hobble on my arm to the car waiting to take us away. After the reception we drove to nearby Concord to change clothes, and in getting into the apartment where they were laid out, she tripped on a sharp object, cutting herself deeply enough to require emergency suturing and an anti-tetanus shot at the local ER. A week later in Minneapolis, after I fainted on the dance floor, they diagnosed me sick enough with mononucleosis that Penny was encouraged to do all the driving back to Massachusetts. Those are the scenes that an Ingmar Bergman would have foregrounded in his film of a doomed marriage. If not that, then a shot of our friend Joan’s jaw dropping in shock when she cried out, “You’re kidding!” after we proudly informed her that we were getting married.

But did I love her? Looking back, at eighty, I would say that this was the deepest, most complicated relationship of my life. Years after our divorce, whenever we met I was always agitated and troubled; there was something deeply moving there. Love? Guilt? Frustration? Yearning? Annoyance? At the outset we were more engaged with each other than I have ever been with anyone before or since. We were drunk on the sex, drunk on the martinis, of a mind that you cannot have ecstasy without two people like us, just as there is no martini without gin and vermouth. It is odd that Penny, who was reared on upper-middle-class notions of married life, who had bought a trousseau (at her mother’s insistence), who had bridesmaids, who wrote thank-you notes on specially prepared stationery, who had struggled to finish her degree work before the wedding so that she could go out to get an architectural job after we married, was utterly indifferent to the wedding, went through the paces because of her mother, whom she despised for her attitude; but what is worse, she recognized that I, supposedly the man from the bohemian life who was going to rescue her from her mediocrity, was just as hung up on the wedding as anyone. In fact, while Penny had slaved to finish her coursework, she had delegated me to negotiate with her mother on the wedding details. It was odd, and so gay, and I am sure Admiral Pendleton in the background marked it all the time, that the prospective mother-in-law and son-in-law sat together by the hour in the Cambridge apartment I still shared with Freddy talking of which champagne, what kinds of hors d’oeuvres, flowers, caterers, what car to use driving away from the church, on and on and on. It was a Martha Stewart moment
avant la lettre.

I began my second year of teaching as a married man again. Penny and I took over the apartment where I had been living with Freddy, and she proceeded to give a more minimalist line to the interiors. There was a racket of sawing and hammering, but not much she could do in the rented ground floor of an old Victorian. More important, she got a job, and then discovered she was pregnant when she missed her period two months in a row. We were frightened; this was unexpected—more than that, not even imagined. In 1956 nobody we knew was having babies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It must be said: not at all wanted. And yet Penny’s pregnancy gave me a glow of pride, such a sense of accomplishment that it was hard to remember that my part in all this was simply a split-second orgasm. Did this demonstrate that underneath it all I did not think myself a man? But that now, if I were to stand in the great shower of life among all those naked fellows with the water coursing down their torsos and dripping off their extended penises, I would finally be one of them, because I would have fathered a child?

A month later she was in Mount Auburn Hospital following a miscarriage. “Some bum sperm met up with the egg,” explained the burly doctor, looking down at me as he leaned on the corridor wall after he had performed a D&C. I suddenly felt inadequate, forlorn. Thank you, Doctor! I suppose that is one way to describe a miscarriage. Our lives subsided into the comfortable routine where once again we worked, we drank, and we made love. And by November Penny missed her period again. In the seven years from 1956 to 1962 she became pregnant six times and brought to term four babies. It turns out that we did not know anything about birth control. The diaphragm was the device for birth control before the invention of the pill. This was the woman’s department, as I thought of it. Mary used it, as she did everything else, absentmindedly, intermittently, but she never became pregnant. She was diabetic, and doctors have told me that diabetics have a hard time conceiving. Mary and I started out our sexual career with me using a condom. It was all part of the crazy fun of doing it with a woman. Penny, who was a much more organized person, had a diaphragm to put on when we first went to bed. But our use of it was a calamity. My eureka moment came years later when I took my daughters to a gynecologist for their first prescription for some kind of birth control device. As I sat in the waiting room leafing through her reading material, I encountered a brochure titled “The Use of the Diaphragm.” I read that if you are going to indulge in marathon sex—not that the writer of the brochure phrased it quite like that—the diaphragm must be removed between orgasms and treated with more of the spermicide that one spreads on the rim. Or something like that. I can’t really remember. Penny had never bothered learning about the fine art of the diaphragm. She had just been lucky. Well, in our orgies of wine and roses, her luck had run out. What is appalling is that we never figured it out, never asked a doctor, never did anything but meekly submit to our fate.

I knew nothing about the diaphragm, nor the orifice in which it was inserted. “Cunnilingus” is a word I had never heard until well into my thirties, I believe. It is odd that a man whose sexual experience from the beginning was so focused upon his mouth did not think to employ it when he began to have sex with a woman. It is commonplace that every high school girl nowadays goes down on her boyfriend, but neither of my two wives ever wanted to do the same with me. That was the proper 1950s with two somewhat improper females. When I saw
The Vagina Monologues
in my early seventies, I was interested in the women quoted who knew nothing of their vaginas, who had never thought to take a look with a mirror at their vaginas. My wives never talked about their vaginas. I never went near that orifice except with my penis, which otherwise bobbed around as a focus of our attention whenever I was nude. Even stranger is that when Penny and I were in the last stages of marital breakup, long since retired to separate bedrooms, engulfed in rage and resentment, we sometimes fell down into my bed as a drunken spill-over from angry quarreling in a standing position, where we would have angry sex dominated by my ferocious cunnilingus.

Penny and I moved into a house outside of New Haven in the summer of 1957, and she bore our first son a month later; I struggled to finish my dissertation way, way late and finished in a rush of despair and exhaustion in November 1958, one week before our second son was born. We moved to Palo Alto in 1960, one month before our older daughter was born on October 10. In November 1961, at the birth of our second daughter, we were so drunk when we presented ourselves to the emergency room that we were both wheeled to the delivery room for the labor. The attending obstetrician, a devout Roman Catholic, told us in all seriousness a month later that it was in our best interests to foreclose the chance of any further pregnancies.

It is difficult to describe the combination of despair, entrapment, loneliness, and betrayal that these unwanted pregnancies produced, especially in a woman who so desperately wanted to make her mark in a man’s world, and found herself alone at home being a mother. It is more difficult because at the very same time we both deeply loved all four of our children, took great pride in them, and wanted to give them the affectionate care that neither one of us felt we had received. They were darling, darling little children, and grew up into utterly enchanting adults, not to mention witty, caring human beings who love each other as much as their own families. I can say that in so many moments of my life when I happened to catch sight of one or another of them I was filled with a rush of love, a love in kind and intensity that no other person has ever inspired in me. It is also true that as time went by this paternal passion was sometimes tempered by pangs of the terrible guilt I have felt at the resentment they habitually inspired in me as I and Penny struggled to “do the right thing” by them. My adult children and I skirt the subject of their growing up unless we are remembering funny anecdotes of their early years. They will be better off, I imagine, once I am dead as their mother is, and they will not have to deal with memories actualized in a living presence.