At Home With a Ghost - 49

Grandpa in the kiddie kavalry, 1889

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

The clairvoyant medium seemed a little disconcerted by my blunt question.

In truth, I was a little ashamed to ask. It was merely reductive stereotyping that made me wonder if Grandpa had been gay. I added up what I knew: he’d lived contentedly with his mother until he was 38, and only married when she pressured him to. He loved opera, concerts, theater, photography. He loved clothes. He wrote songs. And then there were all those private men’s clubs….

It had taken Grandpa a scant nine months to woo and wed Carrie. Most of those months they were only in contact through letters. (Both had gone to France to serve in the war effort, but were separated by their jobs or by her persistent ill health.) In total, they saw each other face-to-face for a few weeks before Carrie accepted him. How well did she really know this wealthy bachelor?

Once the newlyweds returned to the U.S., leaving the heady excitement of their wartime adventures behind, my grandfather led his bride over the threshold of his manse in Tuxedo Park. In fact he delivered her into boredom. She soon found herself alone, except for an army of servants. Every day he would leave for some men-only powwow – golf, tennis, poker; booze and badinage – at one of the several clubs to which he belonged; or at highly secretive meetings with the Freemasons, where he was already a lodge master.

Carrie was expected to fill her time socializing with the other wives, but she didn’t care so much for female company. (In her youth she’d enrolled in Bryn Mawr College and left after one day, complaining, “There were too many women.”) After giving excruciating birth to my father, Carrie demanded that their future winters be spent in New York City, where she could consort with “lively minds” to make up for her husband’s constant clubbing.

The son grew up wondering about his father’s thing for male cliques. Dad wrote in his memoir, “It seemed as though he urgently needed constant reassurance of his own masculinity provided by the company of men and their ongoing acceptance of him as one of them.”

Why did he doubt his masculinity? Unless he knew that, secretly, he came up short. I arrived once again at my suspicion, which had seemed unanswerable – until here, now, when I had his spirit in the room and a medium paid to translate.

So I asked him: “Were you gay?” And held my breath.

“Yes,” came the answer.

The medium paused, apparently listening to him. “But he didn’t act on it. There were flirtations, but he kept it way underground. There was no possibility of going further, except maybe when he went abroad. France, Italy, Germany…” Yes, those were all the countries where I knew he traveled. Paris, Rome, Berlin, libertine-friendly places where he would have felt freer to leave the closet.

The medium added, “His wife came to know about it. She decided to keep quiet.”

So Carrie knew.

Another puzzle piece plopped into place. This one would have answered one of my father’s most pressing questions.

All his life Dad pondered why, growing up in his parents’ house, there was such an obsessive concern to “make a man of me, as they put it. This theme, harped on for years, often dictated their attitude toward me in childhood.” Carrie seemed especially paranoid that their son would become a mama’s boy. After all, her husband had grown up inseparable from his own mother, and look at the result. His feminine side became overnourished, producing the girlie man she’d gone and married.

And so Carrie guarded my father from a like fate. “To be sure I would not be ‘coddled’ or tied to my mother’s apron strings or dominated by her, my mother purposely absented herself when I came home from school. She was always on guard to avoid being demonstrative. Hugging, kissing, or other expressions of warmth were rare.” Even his father joined the project to butch up the son. “In those days I was called ‘Jackie,’ but if I wept or whined my father would call me ‘Jacqueline.’”  

To drive the point further, his parents enrolled Jackie-Jacqueline in the Knickerbocker Greys, a paramilitary cadre of boy soldiers that drilled and paraded up and down Park Avenue to their parents’ satisfaction.  (Grandpa himself had belonged to the Greys when he was a lad. Always fond of dress-up, he must have loved the uniform, though Dad always thought he looked more like a bellhop with a musket.)

Next came the boys’ boarding school (St. Mark’s), where Jackie’s lessons in manhood entered realms of boy-on-boy cruelty whose memory embittered and disgusted him for the rest of his days.

Still, in the end, Carrie got what she wanted: a man’s man for a son, and her husband’s wretched gay gene stomped into dust.

Meanwhile Grandpa kept to his ways, pursuing fraternal camaraderie anywhere he could find it. In the masonic lodges were men he could call Brother. (A fervent follower, he eventually became Most Wise Master, Grand Marshall, Sovereign of the Red Cross of Constantine Chapter and New York Court of Jesters.) (Really.)

Grandpa in full Masonic gear

The last males-only club he was headed to, when he died, was the dockside Edgartown Reading Room in Martha’s Vineyard. A club he helped found and bankroll, this was no literary gathering. The only book in the building was the telephone directory. But the bartender could reach down any bottle you wanted from the shelf. It wasn’t easy to become a member. You had to be wealthy, and you had to get with the program: booze and badinage and secrets. Their climactic annual rite was a nude clambake.

The Edgartown Reading Room annual moonfest

Even now, on the summer nights when I walk by the Reading Room, I will hear the good old rich guys within, eruptions of laughter booming over the water: masculinity certified and embalmed.

He had long ago given up composing songs. This was the music he’d wanted to hear, the night he died.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked Grandpa’s ghost.

The medium reported, “He says he didn’t put into his marriage what he could have. He was ambivalent about it. He harmed her emotionally by his lack of attention.”

Suddenly I wanted to hear Carrie’s side. But our session was up, and I had a train to catch.

My grandmother’s mysteries would come clear another time – and through another medium.

(To be continued.)

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