Left Bank on the Bayou - Lorin's Revelation

A Queer Houston Story of the 1930s

(Note: This is the next part of a serial novella. To catch up on earlier parts, look at the section titled Left Bank on the Bayou.)

Yes, I  was love besotted.  Or was it only lust? Sometimes it's so hard to be sure which it is. And sometimes they go hand in hand. But I  came to my senses soon enough. It happened like this:

After that first night, Lorin and I continued to see each other at Margo’s Community Players – we both joined the large cast of her production of Macbeth in February, and Lorin designed sets for Moliere’s Learned Ladies, scheduled to open in March.

But in the small world of Houston’s art bohemia, we found ourselves brought together not just at the theatre, but everywhere. In January, only days after that first night together, we both joined others of the Houston “avant-garde” art group (very avant-garde indeed for a little Southern city on the Gulf Coast) for the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts: International Exhibition of Abstract Painting and Sculpture – Maholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, Jean Hélion, and an American living in Paris, Alexander Calder. Could he be that strange, delightful young man I’d encountered there so many years ago, who made circus figures out of twisted wire?

I went to the exhibition with McNeill Davidson (her husband, fine man that he may have been, had no interest in such things), and several of her students – Gene Charlton and Cardy Bailey, of course, with whom she’d traveled to Paris and Venice and more through the fall of 1937, returning only weeks before – and with her very young student, Robert Preusser – said to be a genius – said by McNeill to be one. As it happened, Robert invited Lorin, his collaborator in designing the sets for one of Margo’s fall productions (Nude With Pineapple – according to the papers, they’d devised “expressionistic sets” that “set the tone” for the “unusual” play, partially set in a “highly extraordinary insane asylum.” I did agree that they’d come up with something quite “unusual”).

And then it happened that Lorin joined his window-dresser mentor, Ed, in helping fashion the paper mache marionettes devised by my dear friend, Jan Olmsted – her dramatic “stringed instruments,” as she called them, 120 so far, including the cast of her tour-de-force, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, starring Willie, her first and still her favorite paper mache personage, who wore a checked suit and combed his hair forward.

Often, after these events and adventures, Lorin did return with me to my house, even a time or two to wear the pajamas, though when the weather warmed sufficiently he refused them, as any self-respecting young man of 1938 would. We never voiced anything explicit, not between ourselves, and certainly not to others of our circle. Though we both understood that something “understood” existed between us – and so did that circle. That became clear as phrases such as “would the two of you” and “are you both” began to enter conversations. It had been such a long time since I’d been one of the two referred to by such phrases. Not since Santa Fe last summer, with Russell (Oh, Russell, why were you being so long finishing your New Mexico business and joining me in Houston?), and I found I rather liked it.

And then one night, after we’d shared physical intimacy, as we lay together in my bed, in my childhood bedroom, listening to the night sounds drifting in through the screened open window – the nights had become warm enough to leave the windows open; the pajamas were long forgotten – Lorin began to share the real intimacy, the intimacy of self, that he had, till then, been unwilling or unable to share. He talked about the weight of being oldest in a family now headed by an abandoned mother – a mother who poured on him the loves, hopes, dreams that might have gone to the now-gone husband had he stayed to be engulfed by them.

Perhaps the danger of being drowned by such loves, hopes, dreams might be partial reason for that husband’s fleeing? Lorin had no way of knowing, since the fleeing father had abandoned him too. There’d been no contact for years. So many years that his mother, now divorced, had stopped mentioning his name, had reverted in her mind to her maiden name (how quaint to think of “maiden” in relation to his mother, mother also of several others) as though still the virgin, all those children fatherless miracles of immaculate conception. Perhaps she even thought, at times, it might be so.

I asked him what he knew of his father. “Not much,” he said. And I asked how he felt about him. “Not sure,” he said. He’d gone off to Beaumont with a new wife, and now, another family. More brothers and sisters of his own, Lorin supposed, though how could there be sibling feeling with the only connection half-blood through a father by now almost no longer believable as real?

And then he spoke his name. And I was thunderstruck. He spoke a name I had not heard for years – since my mother’s death, and even long before. A name I knew well; a name I thought of often, with sadness and regret. He spoke the name of my childhood friend! Two boys one body! He spoke the name that had been the other half of me those years and years ago. The name that was still some part of me, even though time and distance had scarred over the wound ripped when he’d abandoned me. Abandoned me for marriage to Lorin’s mother, as I now realized. Abandoned me to make the grandchildren that made his mother so happy, no doubt, for a while anyway; the grandchildren that made my own mother so envious. The first of them, this Lorin, lying beside me in my childhood room, in my childhood bed this spring night.

How could I not have realized the connection already. It was not such a common name, not Jones or Smith. A reasonable observer might justly think that only some willful determination not to acknowledge the truth could account for my not seeing. How like Lorin’s mother I must appear in that. Even I now had to think that I had not seen because I had not wanted to. How readily we can deceive ourselves when we are determined to.

As the shock of it sank in, I gasped for shallow breaths. I thought my head might burst. Of course this explained why I’d thought, why I knew I’d known Lorin all my life. Lorin, a separate man, but enough of his father to pluck strings deep within me that had not vibrated with such force even when grazed by Clem and My Cellist and all the others who’d come after them.

It was a workday morning – not a matter of concern for me since I fully commanded my work and my time doing it – but as a young man still punching a clock, Lorin would be leaving soon. When I regained my control sufficiently to think at least somewhat clearly, I knew I had things to tell him. I knew that I could not conceal from him what I now knew; I didn’t even want to conceal it.

And so I told him that, long ago, I had known his father – had known him well – thought I had known him thoroughly, as only the very young can think they know another.

Lorin lay beside me in my childhood bed, in my childhood bedroom, silent for a while – what seemed like a long while. He looked up at the ceiling, thinking thoughts which I could imagine, though could not confidently believe I really knew.

“What kind of person was he then?” he asked at last.

“Much like you must have been at the age I knew him,” I said. I feared this might not be the answer he hoped to hear. But it was true.

“And you knew him well?”

“As well as I have known anyone in the whole world, my whole life.” And then I told him about the deep connection I had felt (we had felt, so I thought then), and the countless days, weeks, months we had spent together – and how I thought then it would be the two of us together forever. I told him about the intimacy of spirit we’d shared; I didn’t hint at an intimacy such as Lorin and I had shared, because there had been no such intimacy between his father and me. Not that intimacy of that sort could not, or would not, have grown between us, if the circumstances of the world, and of our own paths in it, had not torn us apart so early. But in fact, intimacy of that sort had not happened, though perhaps Lorin, in his youth, and knowing me as he now did, did not believe such a connection could have been chaste. Those such as Lorin, in their early rush of manhood, know only one destination for intimacy of the sort that seems to them, at that stage, to really matter.

We lay in bed so long, mostly in silence, that no time remained, when we got up, for breakfast or even coffee. He must rush to dress and leave for work. No time even for him to bathe, so unlike his usual fastidiousness in such personal things. Not even a goodbye kiss this time (peck on the cheek, that is; departure was not the time for kisses in Lorin’s world); few words; no talk of getting together again. A different departure altogether than all the departures that had come before.

We continued to see each other at the playhouse, the art events, the cafes and parties that we both continued to frequent as we had before. We continued to greet each other cordially and to chat about meaningless things of the day, if chat seemed called for. But Lorin never came to my house again. I never suggested that he should; neither did he. We both knew, without putting it in words, that something so fundamental had shifted between us, something so insurmountable had thrust up between us, that whatever we’d had before, we could never have again. I think that neither of us even wanted to have it again.

As to the true nature of Lorin’s thoughts, I had no knowledge. Perhaps I had simply entered the generation, and the painful, tangled realm of his father – the father he didn’t know, had been abandoned by – and so he couldn’t risk himself going on into that darkness.

For me too the risk seemed too great, remembering in my deepest being the pain, sadness, loneliness of that early sundering. No matter all the things I thought I’d learned by living, loving and losing through the years. In a macabre twist, both Lorin and I had been abandoned by his father – and we both knew, each in his own way, that we might not be strong enough to take the chance that we could survive, should abandonment come again. With the specter of the same man looming inexorably around us, that fear would be always there.