The Road Taken (7 page)

They got married rather quickly because Ben needed to start work in New York and he wanted her to help him complete furnishing the house. They decided to do that first and take a delayed honeymoon at Christmas, when he would have time off. Rose had expected that they would spend their wedding night at the Hotel Belvedere and then go to New York the next day, but Ben said they should spend it in New York in their own home. She wondered if he was nervous, and if he knew what to do. But of course he
had
to know; he had been in the Army, he was nearer thirty than twenty.

She gave her notice to the school. At least the school year was over so she wouldn’t be deserting her children. The new class would have a new teacher. She would miss the children, but she would have children of her own . . . when she was ready, when she and Ben were settled, when they knew each other better in this new way.

Maude was her matron of honor, and her two teenage sisters, Daisy and Harriette, were her bridesmaids. Ben’s brother-in-law was his best man.

“Poor me,” Hugh said merrily, “an usher again.”

“Then you’d better find a girlfriend so you can get married yourself,” Celia said, not kindly. Hugh had never been seen with a girl, except for his few childhood friends, which meant nothing.

“I’m only twenty,” Hugh said. “Much too young.” It was true, of course. He had recently been eating live goldfish at college with his friends, the new silly fad, and one could hardly see him as a family man.

After the ceremony, at the reception, everyone started hugging Rose and saying how much they would miss her when she went to live in New York. Now that her departure was real, Maude wept a few tears.

“You must all come visit us,” Rose said. “We’ll have a guest room.”

The immediate family went with her and Ben to the railroad station, to see them off. They were Mr. and Mrs. Carson now, with a great deal of luggage. On a whim, she had waited to throw her wedding bouquet from the steps of the train. Daisy, shrieking, caught it.

And so, without ever having expected or even wanted it, Rose exchanged her middle-class small town life for a town house in Greenwich Village, in New York City, and a different life about which she knew nothing except what she had seen in the movies.

Chapter Eight

From the moment she saw New York, Rose was stunned and enamored. In the fresh and crystalline air the tall buildings rose, sharply etched in the pure light; their streets were shadowed canyons. A block or two away, in this city of progress and contrasts, were small, old, and gracious homes, many like the town house where she lived with Ben. Farther downtown, beyond the Arch in Washington Square, were twisting little streets, crowded slums, immigrants, life and noise. There were Italians, Germans, Irish, and Jews, making a lively old-world street life, but it didn’t seem strange to her because the town where she had grown up had also been home to many different nationalities.

And the noise in this city! Something new was always being built, and the sounds of jackhammers and trucks and the honking horns of cars and taxis in traffic jams were sometimes unbearable. The new El had just been put up on Sixth Avenue, linking the Village to the rest of the city, and there was another train line under construction, farther east, opening her formerly quiet little enclave to tourists who wanted to see the Bohemian life a few blocks from where Rose lived her normal one.

There were almost seventy theaters in New York, showing over two hundred plays a year. She begged Ben, who was sometimes more old-fashioned than she wanted him to be, to take her to see Mae West in
Sex,
the hit show on Broadway, and he finally did. “Is that a pistol in your pocket?” Mae West asked a man, “or are you just glad to see me?” Ben looked over to see if Rose was blushing, but she wasn’t.

Clara Bow was the “It” girl, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote proudly of burning her candle at both ends, Woodbury Soap advertised “the skin you love to touch.” This new world, it seemed to Rose, who had recently discovered sex, was obsessed with the pleasures of the body, and she refused to be embarrassed. When she read in the newspaper that a doctor they called Goat Gland Brinkley was implanting goat’s sex glands into men to make them more virile she only shook her head and smiled.

She was glad to entertain Ben’s clients in their new home, as he had requested in his marriage proposal, and sometimes they went out—to restaurants, or to tea rooms, which were only a disguised way of saying speakeasies, where bootleg liquor or wine could be had, served in coffee cups. Rose herself had never much liked alcohol, particularly that disgusting bathtub gin, but she liked discovering this new city. Uptown in Harlem, where most of the black people lived, was the Cotton Club, where a client of Ben’s took them to hear jazz and blues. The exotic part of Greenwich Village, only two blocks below their house, was full of winding little streets, and the ubiquitous tea rooms, and nightclubs. There were strange people in plain view in the clubs and even on the streets: long-haired men who looked like women, and short-haired women who looked like men. That made her a little uncomfortable, but she didn’t dwell on it. She learned to dance: the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, and the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Fox Trot, and the Monkey Glide. “Is this a club or a zoo?” she asked Ben, laughing. There was such a spirit of fun in New York.

Women smoked here. Everyone wanted a tan. They discussed weight, calories, and vitamins. After Rose and Ben returned from their belated honeymoon, to humid and exotically scented Florida, where they spent all day lying on the beach, she bought the recently patented Detecto home scale, and weighed herself every day like everybody else did, glad that food was not very important to her even now when she was happy, and so she was as slim as any flapper wanted to be. She couldn’t think of herself as a matron, even though she was married and settled. Perhaps when she had a child she would, but not now. She felt she had wasted a great part of her youth in mourning, and now she had regained it. In New York a woman in her mid-twenties was not considered old.

Margaret Sanger, whom Maude had mentioned when she told Rose the facts of life, had opened a birth control clinic not far from where Rose lived, where poor immigrant married women with too many children could obtain information and contraceptives. Birth control was still illegal, birth control information branded “obscene,” and the police were still giving Mrs. Sanger great trouble. Rose’s own private doctor, while grudgingly giving her the messy, gooey, and not very trustworthy supplies she needed, told her, “The diaphragm that woman is trying to have imported from Europe will give a woman cancer.”

Was this true? It seemed, now that she was a sexually functioning woman, that everything either went in or went out. It had been bad enough when she only had the curse to bother her. All those secretions, those potions, what Ben put into her and she tried to get rid of, the worry, the counting. When the Bohemian women in the Village bragged in public about the pleasures of free love, Rose thought they must have a lot more energy than she did.

Ben was affectionate, sometimes even passionate, but there was still a sort of formality about him that had never changed. Marriage and sex had not changed it, their honeymoon had not changed it, and Rose wondered if it was because he knew she was not “in love” with him. But she couldn’t imagine another companion, or one she would prefer. They were lucky they got along so well. She knew couples who were very unhappy, some of whom didn’t even know they were unhappy. The Bohemians got divorced as often as they wished, but people of her background did not. If it didn’t work, you put up with it.

She had made a new best friend here in New York, the sweet-faced young woman who lived next door with her businessman husband and two small children. Her friend’s name was Elsie, the same as that of her long-dead friend from childhood. The moment Rose met this new Elsie, Elsie Wilder, she had exclaimed, “This is destiny!” If they had not been the same age and of similar background they would have been friends anyway. As it was, they visited each other every day, just dropping in, and sometimes, even though she had no children of her own, Rose went to the park with Elsie when she took her children there.

They sat on benches with the other young matrons, in the shadow of the Arch, and talked. Right now the hot topic under discussion was the Monkey Trial, where a teacher named Scopes had been trying to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution to his schoolchildren in Dayton, Tennessee, and had been arrested. It was the first trial ever to be broadcast live on the radio, and Rose and Elsie were fascinated.

“Of course men are descended from monkeys,” Elsie said. “Just look at my husband.”

“Oh, how could you!” Rose said, and they both laughed, because her husband, if truth be told, did look like a very clean, well-dressed, member of that under species.

“I can’t wait until he’s older and his hairline recedes,” Elsie mused. “Of course, it might not! Now, you mustn’t tell him what I said.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Was Elsie “in love” with her husband? Or was she like Rose? They never discussed it.

Every Sunday Rose telephoned her family. She worried about her father, who sometimes complained of aches and pains and shortness of breath; but that had been going on for a long time and the doctor said he was strong as an ox, Celia reassured her. “I’ll tell you if anything happens,” Celia said. “Don’t worry. Enjoy your new life.” If Rose didn’t know better she would think that Celia was trying to get rid of her.

Celia, of course, was well. Daisy and Harriette had recently become boy crazy. Poor Maude had suffered a miscarriage and was very upset. Too many children too quickly, Rose thought, but said nothing. Why couldn’t Maude just enjoy the children she had? Large families were so old-fashioned.

Hugh had refused to apply to law school, which had greatly disappointed Papa and given Celia new ammunition to use against him. His marks were not good enough for him to have been accepted anyway. He had not yet decided on a career. Rose could sense the tension when she spoke to any of them. In his family’s eyes he was a disappointment, but never in hers. She loved him, she wanted to protect him, and she worried about him.

He had completed his final year at college. His exams were over, and he announced that he was finally coming to visit Rose in New York during the free time he had before graduation. He would be the first member of the family to come. She was overjoyed, because, for one thing, since she and Ben had missed Christmas in Bristol because of their honeymoon, and Easter because Ben had insisted she see the famous Easter Parade, she had been feeling a little nostalgic and neglected.

“I’ll stay for a week,” Hugh said. “Can you stand me for a week?”

“For longer,” Rose said. “Stay forever.”

“Don’t say that so lightly, because I might.”

When he came she took him everywhere, showing him this city she loved. He loved it too. He looked like someone who had awakened from a bad dream and was relieved to find he was safe in his own bed again. He was a tireless tourist, and wore her out. At night, after he had eaten dinner with her and Ben at home, he would go out alone to explore, and even if they had all been to a restaurant or a club, Hugh was too restless to go back home with them.

“I’ll just take a walk,” he would say. “Don’t wait up for me.”

“Oh, to be young,” Ben said. They both knew Hugh sometimes stayed out all night.

The day he was to leave Rose decided it was time to have a talk with her brother about his life. She took him to Washington Square Park and they sat on a bench in the sun. “If you could do anything you wanted, anything that suited you,” she said, “not what suited other people, but just you, what would it be?”

His eyes filled with tears, and then he composed himself and smiled. “Anything I want?”

“Yes.”

“I would move to New York the moment I graduated, and live with you if you’ll let me, and I would work in Greenwich Village in an antique store.”

An antique store? “All right,” Rose said, trying not to seem surprised. “Is there a living in that?”

“Of course. I’ve already found the place. They said they would hire me as soon as I get back here. And I’d contribute to the household expenses, of course. Rose, I can’t live with Celia and Papa anymore. She hates me. She always has.”

“Oh no, she doesn’t hate you.”

“She does,” Hugh said. “She can’t wait to get me out of there so she can redecorate again.”

When Rose thought about Hugh living here with them she realized how happy it made her. It was customary for an unmarried sibling to live with a married one if it was not possible to live with one’s parents, and she knew Ben wouldn’t object. They would have a real family again, the family of her childhood. And their house was large enough so that Hugh could live in the guest suite on the first floor, away from them, enabling everyone to have enough privacy.

“I’ve changed my life,” she said. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the same chance.”

How his face lit up when she said that! It was almost as if she had rescued him, although she could not imagine from what.

Chapter Nine

For most of his adult life now, although he seemed to fit in more at college than he ever had before, Hugh felt he was probably the loneliest person on earth. His family, of course, did not,
could not,
be allowed to know his tumultuous inner thoughts, and neither, of course, could the few new friends he had finally made at Brown. His first year he had been secretly and miserably in love with his roommate, George, a brilliant premed student, athlete, and dark-haired Adonis, who went out with girls and didn’t know that every night the young man in the next bed was listening to his breathing and timing it to his own. Whatever his roommate did Hugh copied; he wanted to dress like him, talk like him, have that practiced ease with people. But he knew he never would. And in sophomore year, George went off to share a suite with three other young men, all of whom were normal, and left Hugh behind. He didn’t even ask Hugh if he wanted to join them. From then on Hugh roomed alone.

He was invisible . . . or perhaps too visible. He knew what he was. Sometimes he thought Celia knew, or at least suspected, because she had a cruel tongue where he was concerned. He was afraid she would tell his father and turn his father against him, although his father seemed endlessly forgiving and oblivious. His father didn’t want to know, and perhaps he wouldn’t have understood what being a “fairy” meant even if he did know. His father came from another world, where things were ordered and simple. If Hugh could have forced himself to go to law school to please his father he would have, but he could barely stay at college because he felt like such a misfit.

Having his own room in the dorm had two advantages. He could cry secretly when the feeling that his life wasn’t worth living came over him, and he could buy and wear women’s clothes. He had makeup too; rouge, lipstick, powder, and a black liner for his eyes. At night when everyone else was having a good time doing all the things that normal college students did, having a social life, studying together, going out, Hugh would be in his room with the door locked, engulfed in fantasies.

He had no idea who he was or what he was, but he knew that the makeup and the tea gowns made him float off into that invented world where he was lovely and everyone liked him. He even had a secret name for himself, Camille. The lady of the camellias, the tragic one who coughed herself to death. His style of clothing was eclectic. He did well as a flapper because he was lean and without breasts (real girls had to bind their breasts to look right in those dresses), and he also favored an old-fashioned look. For a while he had thought of calling himself Lillian Russell, but discarded that. He tried different hair styles, and let his hair grow a little longer than was usual for a man, so that he could have more latitude. It was not that he wanted to be a woman, because he knew he was a man. It was the clothes he liked, the masquerade. It made him feel free, even while it chained him more and more to guilt and self-hatred, because he knew it was wrong.

No one would ever understand, because he could hardly understand it himself.

Freud was hot; people talked about complexes even when they didn’t have any. It was all too easy to be an armchair psychiatrist. But they didn’t talk about Hugh’s predilection, and he suspected it would only appear in much more ominous books; the works of Kraft-Ebbing or Havelock Ellis, which the psychology majors read. He found these books in the university library, but after reading a few pages he was so upset at the pain and torment people inflicted on innocent little children that he had to give them back, feeling nauseated. Who knew there were so many evil people in the world? There were words people had for him and his kind—pervert, invert, and androgyne were the more civil ones—but he was an angel compared to some of those parents and governesses in the textbooks. Yes, he knew it would hurt his family terribly to know how strange he was, but he wasn’t really
hurting
anyone. I am kind, Hugh told himself. I am good. I am lost. I am doomed. What will become of me?

And then came the miracle. When he went to see his sister Rose in Greenwich Village, everything fell into place. He went from damned to saved in a few short days. There were people here like him, who would accept him. It was not hard to seek them out. When he went out on his own at night he discovered a world so magical, so outrageous, so comforting, that it seemed not only an alternate reality but the only real one. Men wore makeup—they called it paint—and styled their long hair. They shrieked and giggled and joked, and they were so funny. They were open about everything: They talked about their dates, their boyfriends, the sexy and sometimes available men from the Brooklyn Fire Department, their engagements and broken hearts. For the first time in his life Hugh made friends immediately.

His friends had women’s names as he did: Lady Clifford, Nazimova, Zazu. It was all in the spirit of high camp. He found a private gay club on Christopher Street, where the admission fee was a steep five dollars, but well worth it, and his new friends took him to another gay club, more a restaurant, not private—but who else but a fairy would want to go there?—called Paul and Joe’s. These clubs were small and always packed. Gus, the “hostess” at Paul and Joe’s, was friendly to him. Hugh brought his makeup with him from home, and put it on in the bathroom. He always wore a man’s suit, but he carried a compact for touchups. His friends told him there would be a costume ball soon at Webster Hall, the huge old meeting hall, and told him not to miss it; they were all going to be in drag, and there would be half-naked men in togas, made of bedsheets, to swoon over.

There was the Everard Baths if you wanted willing, anonymous sex, even orgies, or perhaps to find love. He learned what a glory hole was. Fairyland, as he thought of it, even had its own language.

“Dearie,” the rouged and lipsticked men in the gay clubs called each other. “Dearie, people who live in glass houses should undress in the dark!” “Dearie, if you associate with garbage you’ll get flies!” “Dearie, just look at that pathetic old queen!”

In the clubs after eleven o’clock the Broadway chorus dancers would arrive from their shows at the Winter Garden, or from Vanities, or the Music Box Revue, flouncing, effeminate, and happy. Some of them had sugar daddies, just like girls did. And then after midnight everyone would go uptown to 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, to Childs restaurant, the largest of the famous chain, for coffee and breakfast. In the small hours of the morning, here in New York, Bristol seemed as far away as if Hugh had never lived there.

As soon as he graduated from Brown, Hugh packed up all his things and took the train to New York. His father looked bewildered, and Celia, fixing him with her gimlet eyes, looked smug. His job at the antique store, Montezuma, was waiting for him. His friend Zazu, from the clubs, an older man who looked better without makeup, was the proprietor. Hugh settled into his comfortable bedroom, with adjoining bath, on the ground floor of Rose’s house. His brother-in-law Ben, who was a generous man, made him feel welcome because he knew how much it meant to Rose. Hugh thought again, as he often did lately, that Rose was lucky to have such a nice husband.

Hugh unpacked his women’s clothes, and his lingerie, and his makeup, and put them away. He knew no one would spy on him. When he went out he would dress at a friend’s house so Rose and Ben would never know. Lots of drag queens who lived with their families did that.

Greenwich Village was full of small single rooms to rent, for bachelors, gays and lesbians, and Bohemians, people who had left the stultifying forbidding life of their small towns to gravitate to New York; but he wouldn’t dream of living in a rooming house when he had a family. He was safe here, as happy as he had been when he was a child, when the world was good and he had a place in it, before he knew anything.