The Young Apollo and Other Stories (5 page)

The one I am now about to write does not concern a famous patient, but someone who was almost totally obscure and whose obscurity was largely the result of his own volition. Marvin Daly chose to remain obscure because he was homosexual, and it was this aspect of his personality that caused the nervous breakdown that brought him to my office. Obviously his trouble emanated from the era and the society in which he grew up, neither of which was favorable to diversity in sexual tastes, but there may still be profit to be gleaned from his story, as the Christian church derives edification from the plight of its early martyrs.

In my own not-so-humble opinion, we still have much to learn about homosexuality. The modern theory that it is a natural physical trait which cannot—and should not—be altered in any person in which it appears can be carried too far. It fails to take into account the prevalence of sexual duality in perhaps a majority of humans, of which every analyst has ample evidence, and that the percentages of male and female elements are different in each individual. In some men the predominance of the female marks them as homosexuals who will always be consistently that. But in others the balance may be so close as to offer them a choice, and that choice should not be dictated by arbitrary definitions or prejudices, pro or con.

I suspect that Marvin Daly, the subject of this report, might have been one of those who made the choice involuntarily at too early a date. I must state, however, that he always disagreed with me about this; he was convinced that he was fated to be what he became from birth and that nothing could have changed him. And he may have been right; one can never be sure. "Do you really and truly believe," he asked me once, "that if you had got hold of me when I was still in my teens, you could have molded me into a suburban commuter whose loving wife meets him on the evening train in a station wagon complete with three kids and an Airedale?" "Possibly" was my reply. He laughed scornfully, as if he was glad to have escaped such a fate, yet it was at least a better one than his own.

***

Marvin Daly was born in 1918, at the very end of the Great War, the fourth child and only son of Ezra and Lila Daly, who lived, when they didn't occupy their Italianate palazzo on Park Avenue, in a red brick Georgian manor house of surpassing beauty that dominated Meadowview, an estate of a thousand acres in Wheatley Hills, Long Island. The little boy, whose birth was joyfully greeted after a succession of three girls, was named for his late paternal grandfather, who had made his fortune in Pittsburgh steel with Andrew Carnegie. From the beginning the child was made much of, arrayed in velvet suits with lace collars, given sumptuous children's parties where real little silver cups were awarded to the winners of potato races, and painted or sketched by illustrious artists. But above all, certainly at least to him, he was the darling of his adoring and radiantly beautiful mother.

Lila Daly might have started the Trojan War had she lived in ancient Mycenae. Her finely chiseled features and heavenly blue eyes, her wavy gold locks and slender graceful figure were matched by a disposition so gentle and outgiving that the harshest Marxist of her day would have spared her in the extermination of her class. Yet she would have exasperated him in her complete acceptance of the privileged conditions of her life. She was perfectly happy to be the lovely center of the picturesque and elaborate setting that her devoted slave of a husband was always intent on creating around her. Lila Daly, smiling at the camera as she posed with basket and shears in her fabulous garden in Meadowview or receiving in her gold and yellow parlor on Park Avenue, seemed to justify the grossest social inequalities of the age of the robber barons.

But all the dryness of a mercantile era seemed concentrated in her husband. It was as if the beauty in which he enveloped his spouse, with lavish orders and commissions, had somehow drained every last bit of color out of his own personality, leaving him a balding, fussy little man, rigidly attentive to details and oblivious of the verdant forests whose trees he so accurately counted. Yet he was a good man, conscientious and charitable, whose large donations to schools and hospitals were usually anonymous and who saw little use in himself other than as the producer of the show that his wife exhibited to the world. Except with Lila, he found it hard, almost impossible, to express his affections, and his love for his children went largely untold, with the result that they neither recognized nor returned it. Marvin and his sisters respected their father and credited him with financial generosity, but that was all. After his death they were dismayed to find in his secret diary how intensely he had concerned himself with their problems and futures, but they could only try to love him in retrospect.

Marvin copied his father in one instance: he adulated his mother. As a small boy, he was allowed the privileged place on the divan, cuddled up against her soft silk-clad side, as one of her hands played idly with his curly hair, when she read aloud to him and his older sisters from Robert Louis Stevenson or Howard Pyle. The hero of the story became himself and his mother's knight. And as he grew older, he waxed more actively protective. He would show horror at her fondness for candy and sweet desserts and warn her about their baneful effect on her lovely figure; he would demonstrate deep concern about the wear and tear of her busy social life and its toll on her hours of sleep; he would urge her to take at least some daily exercise. Lila was touched by his caring but always laughed it off, kissing him or patting his shoulder while she went serenely about her business. "Marvin, my darling," she would sometimes protest, "if you insist on being my guide and mentor, what am I to do when you go off to boarding school? I shall become a worn-out fat old lady!"

It was indeed a good question, but not so much for her as for him. What would become of
him
? For Marvin received a rude shock when he arrived at St. Luke's, a meticulously regulated boys' academy, as strict and knobbly as the surrounding New England countryside was inconsistently soft and welcoming. As a "new kid," he was subject to months of verbal and physical hazing from boys who were not in the least impressed by the wealth of the Dalys, except to sneer at it, and for a time he felt that he was being singled out for particular abuse because of the "privileges" of which his father had always warned him not to be too proud. But he came to see that his treatment was no worse than that meted out to other new kids. In time it stopped, and his moderate good looks, his moderate competence in sports, and his moderate good nature caused him to be moderately accepted. And he always had Meadowview, of which the lovely land around the school nostalgically reminded him, to dream about, and the vacations to look forward to.

Meadowview, I must here point out, occupied a central position in the mind, or perhaps I should say the imagination, of my patient. Marvin adored the place and knew every one of its thousand acres. On vacations from school, and later from Yale, he would insist on staying there even when his parents and sisters were residing in the city, happily living alone in the great empty house, deserted by all but the silent old caretaker and his silent spouse. He would wander over the fields and through the woods, across meadows where the herd of Black Angus grazed or over the flagstoned paths of his mother's wonderful gardens, or he would sit and muse in the little porticoed Greek temple that she had had constructed on top of a small hill commanding four views down grass paths lined with statues of gods and goddesses. From there he could see the long soft-red brick façade of the two-story mansion, which seemed to melt into the countryside, the work of an expert landscape gardener who had blended to perfection the things of man—house, farm, stable, outbuildings, even the ancient windmill in the distance—with the things of nature.

However much it was his life, Meadowview, of course, was a shrine to his mother's beauty. It seemed to him that her spirit permanently inhabited the Greek temple, silently and benignly present, worshipped by all who approached. Her actual appearance at Meadowview struck him at times as faintly out of key, for she moved briskly about the grounds, checking efficiently but smilingly on this and that, uttering her gendy phrased but perceptive criticisms to gardeners or farm workers who obviously adored her. And she was always adequately terrestrial with her adoring son.

"Sometimes, child, I think you're a little too fond of this place," she would tell him. "You're missing out on the subscription dances in town I've signed you up for. You must learn to pay more attention to social life."

To some extent, however, he was doing that. At least in school. He was finding friends there. He had now attracted the attention of some of the leaders of his class. Few of the boys had as yet become worldly or socially snobbish, but there were those who had been impressed by the long yellow rattling Hispano-Suiza town car and its scarlet liveried chauffeur when it had borne Lila Daly on one of her weekend visits to the school. By the time Marvin was fifteen, the gray Gothic buildings of St. Luke's and the heavy rounded arches of its Romanesque chapel had begun to lose some of their grimness, and the red and golden glory of a New England autumn had bathed the campus in a new and softer light. He had begun to relish Keats and Shelley and was learning "La cathédrale engloutie" in his piano lessons.

It was at this time that he first fell in love. Billy Lansdorf was a seemingly shy and reticent boy with dark, rather sultry good looks. Actually, as Marvin was later to discover, Billy was anxious to join the popular group of the class leaders, but he didn't know how best to put himself forward. He had noted the Hispano-Suiza and learned that Marvin's grandfather had been one of the "lords of Pittsburgh," and as he was a scholarship student whose family had lost everything in the great market crash, he had begun to regard Marvin as possibly just the social asset that he needed. Finding that his overtures of friendship were readily, even gladly, received, he was soon Marvin's daily companion, taking long walks with him in the countryside and patiently listening to his enthusiastic chatter about music and poetry. It was particularly agreeable to Billy to find that his new pal was eager to have him visit in the approaching summer at the Dalys' famous estate on Long Island, a welcome alternative to the exiguous Lansdorf family flat in Brooklyn.

To Marvin the friendship was a very different affair. It simply illuminated his life. His attraction to Billy, which had preceded the latter's interest in himself and consisted originally of moodily casting covert glances at Billy's handsome profile, now burgeoned into a flame that seemed to consume his whole being. He chose to deem their now more intimate relationship a high and noble union of souls; they were Damon and Pythias, or Orestes and Pylades, and he did not hesitate to fill his weekly letter to his mother with glowing accounts of his new idol. Lila wrote back to urge him to invite Billy to stay with them at Meadowview.

That July the two boys ranged over the whole of the Dalys' vast estate. They fished in the ponds; they climbed to the top of the old windmill; they ran away from the angry Black Angus bull, whose field they had invaded; they captured and killed snapping turtles. And then one afternoon, finding themselves alone at the swimming pool, Marvin suggested that they dispense with bathing suits. Stripped and lying on their bellies in the sun after a swim, Marvin felt the swelling in his groin and rose boldly to expose himself to his friend. Billy, grinning lewdly and not in the least surprised, jumped up to reveal himself in the same condition, and the two embraced.

For Marvin what ensued was a supreme moment, a kind of near sacred ritual appropriate to the Greek temple on the little hill above them. It even seemed to fit in with Meadowview, even with his mother's beauty. For Billy it was simply the dirty nocturnal game that he had played with others in his dormitory at St. Luke's.

Let me put my patient's reaction to what happened when the boys went back to school in Marvin's own words. I had a tape recorder in my office which I could switch on at particularly revealing moments of a patient's free association—always, of course, with the patient's permission.

That September I found that Billy had considerably changed toward me in the month that had elapsed between his visit to Meadowview and the reopening of school. He had been invited in August to visit Dicky Brown, one of the more popular and outstanding leaders of our class, in nearby Oyster Bay. Dicky was not a particular friend of Billy's; his bid had really come from Mrs. Brown, Dicky's mother, who was some sort of cousin of Billy's father. She had been reminded of Billy's existence seeing him at a lunch party at Meadowview and had insisted that Dicky ask him to stay with them, as the poor boy would otherwise be stuck in the hot city when his visit with me was over. So I had, after all, proved of some social use to Billy.

Billy had succeeded in worming his way into Dicky's affections as he had into mine, and back at school he was taken into Dicky's set, of which I was only a fringe member. We continued to be on outwardly amicable terms, but our intimacy was over, and there was certainly no idea of any repetition of the incident by the swimming pool. Such an incident did take place, however, between Billy and one of his new pals, and so indiscreetly that they were caught in the act by a snooping master, who reported it to the rector of the school. It might have been grounds for expulsion but for the extremely unpleasant publicity that such an action would inevitably evoke, and our whole class was summoned before the headmaster for a severe lecture. He excoriated the guilty pair in violent terms and thundered against what he called depravity and decadence and unmanly conduct. I was appalled.

To me it was as if the big dirty paw of some huge brute dipped in shit had smeared my mental vision of Meadowview, of the Greek temple, of love. But it was not any brute who had done it; it was I who had done it! I had defiled my home, my haven, my ideal, my mother! And I had had the ultimate gall to see beauty in what I had dared to call love! I was awash with guilt.

That Christmas vacation something happened that made me feel even worse. My family had decided to spend the holidays at Meadowview, and one evening before dinner, when my sisters happened to be all out of the room, Father availed himself of the moment to tell Mother and me something not fit for young girls to hear. As in many Long Island estates, we had a night watchman who circled the house in the dark hours armed with a revolver. Ours was a dear old boy who couldn't have hurt a fly, whom Father, in his kindly way, had employed because he was on relief, saying that his mere presence might act as a scarecrow. But the poor old fellow had been arrested in the village on a morals charge, having approached a young man in a public washroom with an indecent suggestion. Father had appeared as a character witness for the unhappy defendant and persuaded the local magistrate to be as lenient as possible, but of course he had had to discharge him as a watchman.

I can never forget how Mother raised her clasped hands in a gesture of fervent gratitude to a benignant deity and exclaimed, "To think all these years we've been at the mercy of an armed pervert!"

Father simply chuckled at an emphasis so undue, but I was far from doing so.