The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (26 page)

Shortly after
I hung up with my mother, my father called me. His voice was muffled, as if he
had a hand against the receiver.

“Ollie, Jesus,
think twice about all this. This isn’t your history to be fucking with here.”

“How is Mom?”

“Well she’s
been crying, Ollie.” His voice had gotten too loud and he brought it back down
to a whisper again. “When Oliver died— You don’t remember how it was for
her. She worshipped him.”

“You’re saying
she can’t worship him anymore now that he was like me?”

“You know damn
well that’s not what I mean. It hurts her to know he was different from the
Oliver she knew. You can’t keep
taking
things from her, Ollie. Her granddaughter, now her brother. You just— I
have to go.”

***

It was a
long drive from Boston to Harwich. Several times I thought about turning
around, but never seriously. I hadn’t talked to either of my parents since just
after Anders’ call but my father’s words were still clanking around in my
brain. Half of them I understood: I get that it hurt my mom to learn that
Oliver was different from what she knew. But half of them were wrong: This
was
my history. And Anders had reached
out to
me
.

I found the
house. He lived in a little ranch house shingled with sun-bleached wood. Snow
from a recent storm was piled high on both sides of his seashell driveway and
lay in drifts against the shrubs around the house. It had navy-blue shutters
and a yellow front door that opened when my Jeep crunched over the seashells. I
shut off the motor and waved.

“Oliver?”
Anders said as I got out of my Jeep. He shielded his eyes from the
snow-blinding sun and peered at me.

“It’s me,” I
said. “You look just the same!” But of course it was a fib; he looked older. He
looked like a grandfather, though I knew now that in a different, better world
he would’ve been my uncle.

He had
snow-white hair, thin but not balding, styled with
Brylcreem
or whatever type of stuff men of his generation put in their hair. He had on a
pale blue cardigan over a green polo; pants that would be called slacks. Orange
Crocs.

He laughed and
said, “Look at your
hair
, Ollie!”

“I know!” I
brushed my hand over the bristly crest of my mohawk.

 
Holding the yellow door wide open, he told me
to come inside.

After I’d
kicked off my shoes he showed me into the living room. We sat on little sofas
facing one another across a coffee table covered with crystal dishes filled
with M&Ms and jelly beans. Antiques all over, lots of photos on the walls.
I glanced over the photos really without looking at them—I was nervous to
look. “Throw that pillow on the floor if it’s in your way,” he told me, and
although it was, I didn’t.

“Does the
house look familiar?” he said.

“I don’t think
so? Was I ever here before?”

“Sure you
were, sure, we had all of you down one summer. You were probably yay high.” He
placed his hand three feet from the floor.

“Cool, no, I
don’t remember.”

Nervously I
pulled some photos out of my shirt pocket and handed them to him. They were of
an anniversary party for my parents, of all of us at my UMass graduation, of me
holding Abbey the day she was born. Anders looked at them with polite interest
but asked few questions. It was becoming clear to me that he’d invited me here
so he could do the talking, and that was fine with me. I leaned against the
uncomfortable pillow and listened.

For a while
he talked about the snow, and how his last Social Security check got delayed by
the storm, and how he almost missed a recent episode of
Law & Order
because they changed the time. His voice was
soothing and continued to remind me of my grandmother, and I was content
because banalities like these held no secrets and threatened no one’s memories.

Then, with all
this as the strange prologue, he was into it.

He told me he
and Oliver met in the mid-1950s outside a gay bar in downtown Worcester. (So
not high school, college, or the military, I observed with a twinge. One
sentence in and he’d already diverged from the story I knew.) Anders had been
standing on the sidewalk waiting for friends; my uncle walked over and introduced
himself. It was a brief chat and nothing came of it, Anders said, and they went
their separate ways that night.

A few days
later Anders was in a drugstore buying shoe polish and Oliver, who happened to
be there too, walked over and said hi again. “I thought he was quite handsome,”
Anders told me. “And that was it.” He leaned back in the sofa, remembering. “We
moved in together. Which was pretty rare in those days.”

Those were the
days when, among other things, the owners of gay bars would make sure everyone
knew where the escape routes were, for when the police raided.

“We were
always running from the police,” Anders told me with a laugh, and with a
glimmer of nostalgia I couldn’t relate to in the slightest. I thought, but didn’t
dare say,
I attended an LGBT prom in City
Hall.
It made me want to cry—out of guilt, out of luck. He said he
and Oliver sometimes went to a particular bar where the drinks were expensive
because the bar owner bribed the cops to stay away, a tax they paid to be left
alone.

“Would
ya
like some tea?” Anders asked suddenly.

I nearly
slipped off the edge of the sofa, where I’d been perched during his stories of
running from cops.

“Sure, yeah.
Please.”

“Coming right
up!”

He got up
slowly and I heard his knees crackle and pop, and he ambled into the kitchen,
holding on to each nearby chair, table, and appliance for balance as he passed
it. I got up and followed him, padding across the hardwood floor in my socks. I
stood awkwardly with my hands on the back of a kitchen chair.

“Oh, my cardinal
is back,” Anders said, looking out the frosty window over the sink while water
glugged into the silver kettle. A dot of red was hopping around on the snow. “He’s
pretty, but mean.” He laughed. “Isn’t that always the way!”

He put the
kettle on the stove and took a few steps away from it before remembering to
turn on the burner. “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on,” he smirked.
He sunk his hands into the pockets of his sweater and sighed contentedly. “So.
Since you don’t remember
—
shall I give you a tour while the water boils? See if anything jogs?”

He took me
around the little house, dragging his hand along the wall wherever we went,
partly, it seemed, for balance, and partly, I thought, out of love. He
obviously was proud of the house. There wasn’t much to it but each room seemed
of a different era of renovation, as if he’d been tending the same garden for,
what, fifty years? Twenty of it alone since Oliver had been gone.

In his bedroom
(there were two, and I guessed one had been for show) Anders opened the top
drawer of his dresser and withdrew a small framed photo of—me? No, not
me, my Uncle Oliver around my age. It felt funny to see this near doppelganger.
He would’ve been just back from Korea around then. His dark hair was slicked
back like a greaser. No, not
like
a
greaser—
a greaser
.

“This,” Anders
said, tapping the glass, “this is Oliver for me, this is how I still think of
him.” He paused. “I’d give you this picture but I need it. I talk to him. He
keeps me out of trouble.” He put the photo back in the drawer.

There were
more photos in the hallway, including a couple of famous ones of Oliver my
mother had copies of. And of Anders with kids at various stages of their lives,
from infanthood to my own age—his nephew and nieces.

“We had a lot
of fun in this house,” Anders said, leaning in the doorway of a small,
cluttered room he used as a library, “and we always had someone staying with
us!” There were friends from Argentina, a couple from Quebec who visited often,
and “for a while George Murphy, who we buried.” The last one gave me chills. I
assumed George was an AIDS victim and it renewed my fears of uncovering
secrets.

The kettle
whistled.

Anders was
telling me about Atlantic City—had been for a while without yet coming to
a point. He wasn’t easy to follow sometimes. His stories rambled and twisted
and he often left out key information that only surfaced five minutes in. I
spent a lot of time confused. Sometimes I was afraid of asking for details that
might uncover something I didn’t want to know.

He was telling
me how he and Oliver would go down to Atlantic City, and my uncle would leave
him sitting on the boardwalk for hours at a time while he—what? Anders
went on and on about the boardwalk without revealing why he was there alone.
The weather on the boardwalk, how he would sometimes get ice cream cones on the
boardwalk—all while I was wondering what my uncle was busy doing while
Anders waited on the boardwalk. I thought,
He
was visiting male prostitutes, buying drugs, playing in sex clubs, being scary.

Eventually
Anders revealed that Oliver was playing the dollar slot machines in the casinos
while Anders, who didn’t like the smoke, hung out on the boardwalk. My breath
escaped in a puff of nervous relief.
Gambling,
thank god, just gambling.
I’m sure my worries would seem silly to anyone
who actually knew my uncle, but since I never really did, I had no way to
judge. So all I could do was judge.

The crux of
all my nervousness was my own internalized homophobia, baggage from a time way
before mine: the suspicion that men who lived closeted lives must have,
had to have
, spent those lives doing
unsavory things. Coming out for me had not been the easiest experience but
still, at twenty-six, it was hard for me to imagine that simply being gay, simply
being a man in a relationship with a man, could ever have been any man’s
biggest secret. There had to have been other secrets. It was silly of me, and
ignorant both of history and of too many places and families in the present (I
had, after all, been with Johnny), but I couldn’t help feeling it. I was afraid
there was more to it. I was afraid something Anders told me would topple my
uncle’s pedestal.

“He was a
gambler?” I said, still giddy with relief that it was gambling and nothing
else.

“Oh, he loved
it,” Anders said. “He never really won. But he never really lost, either.”

“I didn’t
know.”

He smiled. “Oliver
Donaldson had many sides,” he said. “All of them were good.”

Of course they
all had been, I told myself. Of course.

“I don’t know
how he got it,” Anders said sadly, and though it caught me off-guard it didn’t
feel like another of his non-sequiturs. His stories had been confusing, yet I
knew this thought had come from his thinking of Oliver’s good sides—a
direct line from love to loss. “I don’t know how he got it,” he said again.

And I thought,
with a crushing regret as though I were lingering on the boardwalk again,
No one talks about cancer that way, which
means it wasn’t really cancer, it was AIDS like I’ve always secretly feared, it
was AIDS because he was a gay man who died young in the 1980s, and oh my god I
don’t want to know if it was AIDS.

I was shaking—and
why? Would it have been such a terrible thing to know, that my uncle had been
one of the countless, history-moving losses my generation owed so much to? It
was terrible because it was not what I had known and been told. And now I could
see why my mother could be so hurt to find out Oliver was gay—because it
meant she’d never been able to participate in the truth.

But still I
couldn’t say it. “How he got
it?
”

Anders tapped
his head. “The brain cancer.”

“Brain cancer,”
I breathed.

He told me how
it had started in the stem of Oliver’s brain, rooted up and in and then bloomed
like a weed behind Oliver’s eyes. All of what Anders said, all the terrible
symptoms, lined up with what my family had always told me.

Sometimes the
truth is just the truth.

***

After I’d
been there two hours and I was thinking it might be getting time to head home,
Anders asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. I said yes. I thought maybe he’d
want me to drive, but after wrangling into his boots and his coat he led me
through the kitchen into the garage. A big
boaty
Cadillac sat under the glow of a single yellow light bulb.

“I don’t get
to drive much anymore,” he said, fumbling with the keys. “My niece won’t let
me.”

I whispered, “I
won’t tell.”

With minor
reservations about being chauffeured by an eighty-something with whatever he
had—what could happen to me in a car this sturdy, anyway?—I climbed
into the passenger seat. My jeans glided across the well-worn leather.

Anders pressed
a button on a keyfob and then watched in the rearview as the garage door
lumbered upward. He kept his eyes on it until it was fully open, with the focus
of someone who maybe once backed through it halfway and was determined not to
repeat the mistake.