1972

Manhattan

In retrospect, I very much regret returning one of my mother’s very rare letters to my father. Nancy had informed me that she was filing for divorce.

I asked him to return it. He didn’t.

It was a Xerox copy of a letter that she had written to her father about why she was getting a divorce. (She never got one.)

She said, among other unusual and hateful things, that she spent her wedding night with my father and his blond boyfriend, Joe, an Episcopal priest, who had been a longtime lover, and, according to Nancy, the love of his life.

Joe married them! She wrote about the times she got Robert out of jail or the psychiatric hospital.

His offense: picking up men for sex.

Memphians in the 1950s were not tolerant of homosexuality. The only thing worse than being black was being gay.

My egregious mistake was sending the letter to Robert. It was an awful thing for me to do. I had enclosed it with an epistle from me explaining, lovingly, I thought, that I loved him very much anyway and that homosexuality was neither a crime nor a sin. Men were just born that way. I loved him as much as ever.

I got the usual response from my unreachable father:

NO RESPONSE AT ALL.