1972 to 1992, Columbus, Ohio

By Lauren Morgan

Dee Dee, my mother, married Stevie on a Sunday night in January of 1972 during a record blizzard. She floated down the aisle in a homemade gown, her long train trailing a fine line of glittering white snow.

Aunt Mary sobbed the whole way through. No one knew whether it was the nuptials that set her off or the sheer embarrassment of having had her wig fly off in the parking lot when she’d slipped on a patch of black ice. My mother’s father – a stern and burly dye sinker at an auto manufacturing plant – was crying so hard that he’d holed himself up in the church restroom and refused to come out. But the wedding carried on.

My mother and Stevie had grown up together along the banks of the Wabash River in a nowhere town. After high school, they’d both drifted to Columbus and enrolled at Ohio State University, where my mother had been a wispy, old-time sorority queen, and Stevie had been both the football mascot - the legendary buckeye – and Gold Digger’s King, an honor bestowed by the sorority girls upon the handsomest man in school.

And he was. Stevie was a beautiful man, gracefully husky with skin the color of burnt sugar. His hair would whiten when he was 29 - a pure, shocking white as striking as a single ghost orchid glimmering in a dark tree.

My favorite photograph of the two was snapped several months after their wedding. The newlyweds are standing outside the cinema, squinting and holding hands, the marquee in the background headlining Butterflies are Free, starring Goldie Hawn in large block letters.

In the photo, my mother’s auburn bundle of hair is wrapped in a headscarf, and Stevie is wearing a striped tee, the muscles of his upper arms taut and glowing like the flanks of a galloping horse. My mother’s parents stand there too. My grandfather is scowling typically, his eyes broodful and his droopy jowls aquiver. My grandmother, the laundress, stands at his side, prim in a traditional pink suit.

From this picture, you’d never guess that Stevie was gay.

“How could you not have known, Mom?” I often ask.

“Oh, honey, it was a different time,” she says. “The only gay man we knew was Maurice, the local hairdresser. He wore lots of gaudy bangles and used to sit out on the front porch in a pink tutu.”

The first thing that happened was this: The summer of the year of their marriage, they drove cross-country in a 1964 green Mustang to Arizona, to see the Grand Canyon. Stevie was an Air Force lieutenant – he’d had to join the Reserve Officers Training Corps to pay for his education – and that fall, they were to be stationed at a base in Guam, where Stevie, who had majored in French, would teach the language to Vietnam-bound soldiers.

At sunset, they stood somewhere along the north rim of the gorge, Stevie pulling a tarnished quarter from his jangling pocket of change so that my mother could peer through the clunky tourist binoculars. As she scanned the burnished, terraced walls of the canyon, she spotted something unusual: a burro’s carcass splayed out on a deep ledge, the ribs opened like wings, like monstrous petals. Predatory birds were already circling, swooping in with grating screeches, their talons curled. Suddenly, out of the blue, Stevie let out a bloodcurdling scream, a sound that made my mother’s skin crawl.

She was scared silent on the ride back. Stevie veered off at a gas station, where he closed himself in a phone booth, called his commanding officer and requested an early out. My mother sat in the car, sweating, her wet skin sticking to the vinyl seats, tumbleweeds whirling around her, sand blowing in her eyes.

Was he afraid of rousing a sleeping dragon? Afraid that he couldn’t handle himself among all those rock-bodied men? That he would slip, be ousted, be beaten to death?

Several months later, Stevie went to Florida alone to care for his father, a conservative former Marine and a raging alcoholic who was dying from cancer of the gut. Stevie had spent his whole life trying to please the despicable man.

The night after his father’s burial, both grieving and finally free, Stevie went cruising for men. There was an overlook where men of his kind could go, a midnight borderland of lonely strangers. It was his first time.

“I knew right away,” my mother tells me. “He was different. The moment he stepped off the plane, the moment he touched me, the brine and marshy air still in his clothes, I knew he was different.”

Other times, she claims that the knowledge came to her in fragments, like shards of colored glass that made up some kind of horrific mosaic when you arranged them all together and stood back. “We see what we want to see,” she said. “We see what we can bear to see. Even my memory of it is lopsided and jagged.”

He never wanted to be alone with her. She found a man’s cold watch pressed under the mat of the car, discovered steaks and champagne stashed in the trunk. Stevie would disappear. He would go for the dry cleaning and return two days later. He was going to the Toledo baths, my mother suspected.

They’d bought a house seven blocks away from the Wonder Bread factory, and my mother would sit by the open living-room window, strangely soothed by the sweet, distinct smell of its rising loaves as she gazed down the drab, empty street, numbingly lonely. Afraid to have her worst fears confirmed, she spoke with no one.

Then Stevie began slipping sleeping tablets in her nightly glass of wine. She caught him one night, creeping up behind him in the kitchen just in time to see the little white pill plop and fizz. She pretended as though she had seen nothing out of the ordinary, pretended to sip, to nod off groggily. She followed him in a moonlit gold Buick and watched him step into the arms of another man.

The illusion burst suddenly into a million tiny pieces – her heart with it. She went home and sat in the dark, listening to Bread’s “It Don’t Matter to Me” on an old hi-fi record player, her quivering hand moving the needle back every few minutes. When he came through the door at 4 a.m., she confronted him. He denied it all and hurled his left shoe at her head. She stormed out.

Five days later, she returned. After some time, she let Stevie have his lover, even entertained him as a guest in their home. The lover was a completely unremarkable furniture salesman, but Stevie simply glowed when he was around, so enamored with this man that he couldn’t conceal it.

After watching them playing footsy under the dinner table one night, Taylor’s somber, beautiful young wife silently jabbing at the soft bones of her chicken, my mother went upstairs and swigged a bottle of pills. She thought they were benzodiazpenes, or sedatives.

“You idiot!” Stevie screamed as they sailed to the hospital. She’d taken 64 Antabuse, pills for deterring alcohol abuse.

Stevie lingered in the stairwell and watched my mother pack, unsettlingly quiet, almost childlike. She will always remember that - the way he looked standing there.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said. But neither could live the way they had been living any longer. For the second time, she left Stevie, this time for good.

Stevie always said he owed my mother a debt in another life, a debt he could never repay, no matter how many lifetimes he lived. I imagined them finding each other over and over again in different forms for the rest of eternity. Sometimes, they were black swans or rugged desert blooms braced low together against the wind. Other times, they existed through a more sinisterly fragile bond – an autumnal flower drawing life from a tree it had trussed and entangled itself around, a flower that loved this noble tree, though, by its very nature, was a thing which flourished and grew more beautiful as it strangled the other.

My mother and Stevie never lost touch. He was there when she gave birth to her twins, bequeathing them a stuffed teddy and pup, the only objects they later refused to throw out, no matter how tattered they became. She didn’t know it then, but Stevie had AIDS.

The last time she saw him, she climbed the same dark stairs where he had let her go 20 years before. She entered a room with uncurtained windows, a room of blinding light. Stevie was unrecognizable - curled up in a fetal position on the bed, covered in lesions. He was a spectral, 75-pound old man.

He died on a Sunday. My mother carried his ashes to a secret lake, and she scattered them - smoky, flickering wisps of white-silver in the sun – in the place she, too, will rest.

Lauren Morgan graduated from Dartmouth with a bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing. She lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 | Email This Post

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