My Husband and My Wives Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1. 1930–1945

  2. Sex, Lies, and Humiliation

  3. “Let’s Get Married”

  4. Falling in Love with Love

  5. “Be Nice to Each Other”

  6. And Then I Was Gay

  7. Someday My Prince Will Come

  Also by Charles Rowan Beye

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  I am grateful to Richard Barsam and Jane Scovell for separately bringing this memoir to the attention of Jonathan Galassi, and to that gentleman for his acute and sympathetic editing. Several friends who read the manuscript gave me suggestions for the prose or reminded me when my memory had gone awry; I must thank Mort Berman, Lindley Boegehold, Casey Cameron, Henry Chalfant, Nick Dubrule, my cousins Jane and Jeremy Hamilton, Chris Holownia, Sally McElroy, Scott Perry, Bill and Judy Plott, Willard Spiegelman, Ann Rosener, and James Tatum. My friend Stephen Pascal and my daughter Helen Tomilson did close reading and provided commentary that was miraculous. My husband, Richard, who has heard during the past twenty-two years every anecdote of my life more often than he could possibly want, provided a very useful corrective.

  This book is dedicated to the many people named or described in its pages who are no longer with us to tell their versions of what I describe herein. To them and to those who still walk this earth, I give my devoted thanks for making me the person I am.

  Introduction

  In May 2005, the woman I had married on the sixteenth of June, 1956, lay dying in an assisted living facility about ten blocks from my home. We had been divorced since 1976, and after some years of embarrassed, frosty encounters, we were once again able to speak with honesty and affection to one another, at least when discussing our four children and their progeny. The children were in town, staying with me, going over to talk with their mother, who went in and out of consciousness as the pain, and the opiates, and her disinclination to eat or drink dictated. I should have written “with us,” since the household included Richard, my partner of fifteen years, whom I was to marry in a church ceremony three years later in 2008. He had long since become a kind of stepfather in the family. At the time he was coming home from teaching to do a lot of the housework so I could tend to whatever the children needed.

  Whenever any one of them came home from visiting their mother to get some rest, the inevitable was, “Dad, you really should go to see Mom, to say goodbye, or something.”

  And I would resist, arguing that she was lying helpless in bed with no control over those who came to her, that she and I had too many bad memories, that the deathbed setting would be a temptation to try to “make things right,” and that would be too lopsided, wrong, if not cruel. Better to stay away. But they persisted. On the night of May 8 they stood together in the doorway to her bedroom, where she lay between oblivion and consciousness, themselves going back and forth about the impending visit that some of them were determined to force me to make the following day. Finally it was agreed that they would argue me down when they returned home that evening.

  Two hours later she died, and when they reported to me the scene of that evening, I knew in a flash that she had said to herself, I want out of here. No visit from Charlie.

  What would I have said to her? Or, she, poor thing, to me? The kaleidoscope of emotions that color any recollection—hurt, pride, joy, sorrow, embarrassment, shame, passion, one could go on and on—render any seemingly assured remark highly suspect. One wants to sort out the details of the past, but often it is like going through yesterday’s wardrobe, surprised by the irremediable damage and wastage of so much lying in those drawers next to undeniable treasures. It is not what one had suspected.

  That scene comes to mind maybe because I am writing a memoir that is in one way or another addressed to her. It is the story of a male who grows up to be gay, complicated by the fact that at age twenty-one he got married—yes, to a woman, and yes, it was a highly pleasurable relationship and the sex was good. She was my wife for five years until her tragic, premature death. Almost immediately I went on to marry a second woman, with whom I had what I remember as a delirious sexual relationship and who bore me four wonderful children, two boys and two girls. Throughout all the years of this surprising turn in sexual affections I never stopped having the strongest possible desire for males of almost any age, a desire I tried to realize whenever I could. Now that the whole thing is nearly over—I’m more than eighty—I ask myself, What was that all about?

  The burden of parenting eventually killed the marriage. At least that’s how I think of it; she would have said it was because I was gay. Obviously I was, as they say, sexually conflicted. Heterosexuality did eventually lose its charm for me, true. My wife and I grew estranged. I tried sex with a third woman, in an odd little inn in Arles, of all places. We were traveling with my children, all in their early teens, which more or less killed the chance for the passion to grow into what might have made for a real affair. That brief episode stifled the impulse with women for me, except for those every-now-and-then grim attempts to “make our marriage work,” and at the end, as we moved to the final stages of divorce, some bizarre couplings, ferocious, really.

  After twenty years we were divorced, and I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of eternal youth. Thereafter I had four young male lovers in succession, real affairs of the heart, the first real relationships with males I had ever known. All this practice in carnality and connubiality culminated in a long-term relationship and subsequent marriage to a male, a fellow student of the classics, almost my coeval, who I hope will be there to close my eyes in death.

  It all seemed so easy when I first contemplated a memoir. Some of my young gay friends have urged me to write about my high school years, since I grew up in a world they can only imagine. Some older gays, however, are not so sympathetic. You had it too easy in high school, they declare. Where’s the pain? Have you repressed it? Or they ask: What were your real motives in marrying? Once for the lark of it, yes. But twice? The boys you had sex with in high school were straight? Weren’t you just a teeny bit predatory? Aren’t we almost talking a kind of rape, maybe? Or what kind of a sex life were you having, giving satisfaction and getting none in return? What does that say about your mentality? I have a woman friend who calls those high school blow jobs abuse. (“Those boys were abusing you. Did they care about your satisfaction? No. That’s clear sexual abuse.”) But she’s a professor and in the academy sex is all about power. And, of course, there is always the question: What about you and those students you were involved with, Professor? An old friend of mine, with whom I had a brief affair when he was just about to graduate from college, has always told me that he considered our relationship to be the foundation of his adult happiness, the key to understanding human intimacy and sustaining a good marriage. He was surprised recently to be told by a therapist that he must consider my overtures and his yielding as the sexual abuse of a youth by an older male. I was thirty-five to his twenty-three.

  I could be writing another kind of memoir. The WASP story, for instance. There is a lot of talk about the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage in this memoir that my name does not suggest. I am named after my father’s mentor, Charles James Rowan, the chief of staff in the Department of Surgery at the Sta
te University of Iowa, a kindly old Roman Catholic of Irish descent who agreed to stand sponsor at my Episcopalian christening when he didn’t find anything in the language of The Book of Common Prayer that was theologically offensive. Beye was the surname of Wilhelm Friedrich Beye, who came to the United States from Halle an der Weser in the 1850s as a fifteen-year-old boy, enlisted in the Union Army from Illinois when he was nineteen, and several years later met and married a Bostonian, Nellie Christabel Lombard. She was descended from people who came on the first and second ships to Massachusetts, principally Thomas Lombard, who settled in Dorchester in 1630. The Beyes raised their family in Oak Park, Illinois. Their son, Howard Lombard Beye, my father, married Ruth Elizabeth Ketcham, also of Oak Park, a woman who could claim a genealogy also studded with dates and place-names that resonate with the earliest history of the English settlers in the New World. That was why, I suppose, my mother made such a thing about the WASP ethnicity; old Wilhelm, even if he changed his name to William and had a school in Oak Park named after him, the William Beye Elementary School, must have spoken with an accent. Sad that she never lived to meet my second wife. This was a woman who could trace her ancestry back to the ship that arrived just after the one bearing Thomas. Her parents lived in a farmhouse in New Hampshire that her forebears had occupied for seven generations. She herself couldn’t have cared less, nor could my children, for whom the business of “background” and “heritage” is meaningless.

  Mine was a midwestern upbringing in the world of manners that Mother must have taken from Edith Wharton novels; perhaps she took her cue from fantasies she had about her Bostonian mother-in-law. There was a touch of Chekhov, too, the “Cherry Orchard” years when the money and servants went and we sold the big house, where we also led a kind of “Three Sisters” existence except that at least three of us escaped the boredom of Iowa for the excitements of Manhattan. My youngest sister, who lived all her seventy-five years in Iowa City, used to intone grimly, “You crossed the river.” I suppose she meant the Mississippi, but it felt more like a sinister threat. The River Styx, maybe?

  The current popularity of physical or mental trauma in memoirs might have led me to concentrate on the four-year-old Charlie who fell off a balcony onto some stairs, damaging his lower back so thoroughly that he first wore a corset and then a brace until he was eighteen, by which time his posture had developed correctly. The pain, however, continued intermittently well into my thirties, when finally new advances in therapeutic techniques of exercise radically reduced it. This could have been balanced by a focus on the six-year-old Charlie whose father died in an automobile accident, and who then experienced what Russell Baker, whose fate was the same, has declared was having the rug permanently pulled out from under him. The loss of physical agility, the loss of father, compounded by the loss of material wealth, made me overreact to betrayal. Paradoxically, despite my refusal to trust, I want to believe.

  No, the real story is being gay. I always remember that Arthur Ashe used to say that every day when he woke up his first thought was: I am black. When I was sixteen I discovered that I was the Other. Pretentious academic claptrap, of course, although there is an instructive truth to it. Cocksucker, fairy, queer, homosexual—what was it I discovered? These terms come loaded with perspectives; I can’t bring myself to use any one of them to describe this, my primal scene, as it were. I will try to be neutral and say that I discovered that I was a male who had a sexual interest in other males situated in a society, a world of people, who felt differently. I had to learn codes, identities, relationships, modes of behavior that had never been part of my instruction. I had to confront the world absolutely alone. I think of the black youngster who comes home sobbing to tell his mother that some other little children kicked him and called him “nigger,” and his mother puts her arms around the boy to comfort him and explain how monstrous white people so often are. I can see that same scenario played out in Germany in the 1930s when the race laws went into effect. But these youngsters had adults who helped them understand hatred and prejudice and condemnation. The gay child walks into his home, the only place where the human race can expect sanctuary, to find that the larger societal prejudices are just as vivid there. He is alone.

  Who was I? The first time I heard “cocksucker” shouted at me, I was shocked. It was so dramatic and reckless a word, the idea of defining me somehow by the use I made of my mouth on someone else’s penis. It was something I did, not somebody I was. It lacked the distance, using the French sense of the word, that “queer” or “fairy,” for instance, possessed. Were we talking about the act, or a depraved person? It was never clear to me or to those who used the term. They tried to define me with the words, and I resisted. Then we graduated to “homosexual.” That made the matter much clearer; my sexual orientation (not that I understood the term in 1946) was a condition like my damaged back. There were two sets of name-callers, those who were heterosexual and defining me, and those who were homosexual and defining me. And then I became “gay”; this was in the seventies, as I remember. It was a relief not to have an affliction any longer and not to be described by acts that carried the speaker’s condemnation in the definition, but “gay” was not exactly right for me either. I didn’t think I could live up to it, nor was I sure that I wanted to. It was what they used to call a “lifestyle,” and made me feel just as much the country rube that coming from Iowa had branded me in Manhattan. It wasn’t quite clear what “gay” implied and what were my responsibilities to the title. I’d never been to Fire Island; Provincetown bored me; San Francisco’s Castro overwhelmed and alienated me. The bar scene for someone over twenty, well, it was not for me, at least. I loved opera off and on, but rarely noticed vocal technique. Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand—could not stand either one of them. True enough, once I had my own house, I took to decorating it nonstop, and if push comes to shove I can talk about hairstyling with at least a semblance of enthusiasm—lucky too, because one of my sons married a stylist at Vidal Sassoon.

  When I used to find myself in a gay ghetto I always felt like one of those women in a Helen Hokinson cartoon—the heavyset body, bad hairdo, shapeless dress, bulky thick purse, sensible shoes with thick legs thrust into them; in short, a matron from the Midwest. Just not enough chic for a gay ghetto, that’s my problem. I don’t see myself in Lycra on Rollerblades flashing through South Beach; I have been there, seen the gorgeous young men wheeling down Collins Avenue, and I always say to myself, I just can’t do gay.

  I may not wake up every morning to the thought that I am gay, but I know that I am something else than the other guys on the block. Straight men I pass on the street, straight men with whom I talk at work or at the gym, every day, everywhere, seem to me to be different; I may not be able to define it, but I know it, always. Or is it that I have accepted the verdict leveled at me from my early teens, that I am different? On the other hand, because I have tried so hard to resist gayness, to refuse a category, I have alienated myself from a lot of the gay population. Well, where am I, then? If I were to talk like the academic I once was, I might say this is about negotiating difference.

  This is a personal memoir, but much of what I describe is commonplace experience for homosexual males. I have written for a general audience because everyone has gay people in their lives even if they do not know this. There are gay friends, relatives, students, employees, even spouses whom the straight world does not identify as such, though now, of course, less so than a half century ago. I would be gratified if the reader took from this book a better understanding of the obstacles and shoals the gay male must navigate just to grow up and assume the responsibilities of adulthood.

  Readers must know that I mention the sex act frequently and perhaps with more detail than they would like. Sexual activity per se usually doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and is not worth talking about, but when it happens in a repressive, hostile, and dangerous environment, then it becomes worth mentioning, not for the act itself but for what it means, lik
e two people exchanging eye contact, or maybe a crust of bread, maybe just a murmured phrase beneath the cruel gaze of their Nazi captors as one has seen so often in those decades-old gritty black-and-white films. The act, whatever it is, becomes worth noting. Sexual acts that I describe are here to show me coming to understand myself as a sexual person, but more than that they demonstrate the chance to exist for a moment, express oneself, know that life is worth living, that there is hope and freedom and dignity perhaps in some world where the Church, where evil homophobic do-gooders, where desperate cruel and empty people with no real life or dreams or hope for themselves find their pleasure in inflicting cruelties on defenseless victims, are momentarily silenced. That is why in this memoir when I often record encounters between myself and some other man, it is not to titillate my reader, nor for the erotics of the memory, but to remind myself of the many wonderful males, straight and gay, I met this way, and to keep alive the fact that even in the darkest hours of my youth and later in other repressed times, there were extraordinary moments of self-expression, joy, and happiness. I mention a sex act only because it reflects in some way on the psychology or life circumstances of one of the two people involved. When old King Nestor in the Iliad calls out to the Achaean troops to “go to bed with the wife of a Trojan in revenge for Helen and to make them cry,” he is talking about violence, destruction of property, assault on manliness, he is not really talking about sex at all. If he cared the least bit about women he would know he was talking about rape as well.

  I was not cruelly used as a teenager, and only once driven to contemplate suicide, and that was by something my mother said to me, not by a bullying classmate. I never stifled my desire for other males, I never deceived a woman about who I was, never used marriage as a cover. There were plenty of miseries that came my way, but where do they not? As it says in Ecclesiastes, “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” I would hate to be other than I am, that is, gay, even though it has caused me conflict and misery, because fundamentally I like being me. I value the perspective on life that gayness affords me, the interactions it creates for me with both men and women. Experts deride as simpleminded the slogan “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” and maybe it is nothing more than acculturation, but I do sense it in my relations with men and women from the peculiar perspective of my gender sensitivity. I am a male, of course, but though I sense the commonality of that line of guys at the urinals in the interstate rest stops, I sense that I am not one of them, no way.