Miss Virginia, Mammy’s neighbor, drove me to Wray’s in the red Chevrolet that she acquired after she retired. Like Bertha Cox, she wore wigs and kept a row of them on Styrofoam heads on the top of the piano in her living room. Her favorite resembled a thatched roof in an African village. In emergency mode, she did not even put one on, but added a loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages to my deliveries. Upon arrival at Wray’s, I found myself more and more nervous. I balanced everything as I walked up the sidewalk to Wray’s new apartment in the Senior Housing Complex. Tentatively, I opened the aluminum screen door. It was unlocked, as was the main door with the little knocker.
Wray was on the couch in a robe and nothing else, sick and queasy with eyes so glazed over that they could barely be distinguished from his gray face. The robe was untied and I tried not to glance below his pale chest with its swirls of hair. But I did; I could not stop myself. I left the food on a table near the door and picked up Wray’s glasses from the floor. As I had worn glasses for so long and was nearly blind without them, I was especially sympathetic. I had inherited the Bakers’ weak eyes.
When Wray glanced at me, a flood of blood was set loose under the skin of his face. It spread. His hands were shaking too bad for him to eat.
Back in the car, I told Miss Virginia what had happened as a small tear made its way down her rouged cheek.
. . .
As the years passed, I learned more about Wray, and whenever his name was mentioned, I got worried. The secrets around him were frightening to me. Often, Betty and I traveled to Moberly to visit her uncle Oscar at the Maple Lawn Lodge for elders. To Oscar we had delivered jelly rolls, prune juice, cottage cheese containers filled with ambrosia, and jars of ink in which he soaked his used typewriter ribbons. He kept a typewritten journal of his bowel movements (June 24: COMPLETE EVACUATION), which I pored over when Oscar and Betty left the room.
After we left Oscar, while Betty shopped for groceries, I always went to the library, where it seemed there was something I felt driven to find hidden in the books. There were three floors, thousands of books. On a shelf, in a pile, in a newspaper or magazine: I had to be there somewhere. There had to be someone whose inside felt like mine. “What are you looking for?” a librarian asked me one day. “You always look like you are looking for something. Can I help you?”
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t know.”
Hiding back, far into the shelves, I read the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, books about movie stars, and occasionally, when there was nothing else to riffle through, stories about the war, where I hoped to find some mention of Saipan. I loved the name of that place where my father had been stationed, out there somewhere by the ocean: Saipan, Saipan, Saipan. Often in one of my scariest dreams I saw the Japanese pilot flying in the plane, his yellow scarf blowing in the wind, my father running on the beach for his life.
In one volume of photographs, there was a shot of a naked soldier working in the tropical heat, taken from the back. I looked it up again and again. When a librarian approached, I slammed the book closed, but the picture was imprinted in my brain.
Something had told me, from the first time I heard the word “homosexual,” that it applied to me. Absolutely unknowing about anything concerning the subject, I located a book called The Gay Mystique at the Moberly library that I camouflaged by placing it inside another, larger volume. Turning the pages, I scanned the room, more seriously on guard than ever before. I thought of stealing the book. No one else within hundreds of miles would want to read it; no one would care if it went missing. Finally, in what I considered a show of courage, I ripped out the back pages, the “Resource Guide.” Included was the address of a gay newspaper, The Advocate.
Because I was truly desperate for something, and as it was summer and I could be at home to intercept the mail, I sent five dollars to San Francisco, asking to be mailed as many issues as that might buy. I waited, checking the mailbox every day. When they finally appeared, just as I was about to give up, the papers were a confusing revelation. Taking them in, I was filled with many questions. I read one sex ad with shaking hands, then quickly rolled up the papers in a rubber band and hid them.
Five minutes later, I was dragging them out again to look at another ad. Then I put them back and then I got them out again. Then I put them back again and then I got them out again. A few days later, my mother, who has a homing device for anything below board or off-kilter, discovered them under my mattress.
All during the day she found the newspapers, my mother turned her face away when I approached. She looked stricken. I would try never to inflict this hurt again. In an instant, a thousand choices were made. This was the beginning of many silences to follow, our struggle with words. At the time, I thought the silences, the secrets, did not matter. As it happened, they did. This is what I have learned. To build a life on secrets is to risk falling through the cracks. “Shame is inventive.” I read this in a book somewhere awhile back and it has haunted me for years. Shame can make a joke. It can reach for a bottle. It can trip you up when you don’t even know it is there. It can seep into everything without you ever knowing.
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