The Fancy Dancer

of my head. After a while I felt very mellow, and lay down on the sofa for a nap.
    When my father came home at around five-thirty, we sat in the parlor with glasses of sherry and talked about it. I should have felt more eased at telling my parents, but I didn’t.
    “You are accepting the Bishop’s offer, aren’t you?” my father asked.
    “Well, I told him yes, but . . . The whole thing 221
    scares me. I’ve been through so much already. It’d mean more pressure of a different kind. I don’t know if I can hack it.”
    My father had a businessman’s disdain for shillyshallying about promotions.
    “You’d be a fool if you didn’t take the job,” he said brusquely. “Any man who turns down an offer like that is out of his mind. Especially a man in your position.”
    “If you did leave the Church now,” said my mother hesitantly, “would you, uh . . . would you . . . well, I read in the papers that homosexuals try to get married now. There was that famous case of the county clerk in Utah—wasn’t it?—who started giving marriage licenses to them, until the DA stopped her . .
    I laughed drily.
    “Don’t worry. Vidal isn’t the marrying kind. But I might live with somebody. Would that shock you?”
    “Well,” said my father, “I guess not. We’d hope that you were as happy living with . . . that person as your mother and I have been. We always felt that if you could have been straight, you would have ..
    They both looked at me from where they sat together on the sofa—a tenderer kind of American Gothic. I was awed, and thanked God for their understanding.
    They listened with interest to my account of the trip to Denver, and asked intelligent questions about gay lifestyles. I tried to make them see and feel that other world as Vidal had done for me. When I told them about Doric, my father said, “We always thought there was something between you two. When you were in the seminary, all you talked about was Doric and God—in that order.”
    I blushed.
    After dinner, I called Cottonwood.
    “Everything is straightened out,” I said. ‘You’ll be hearing from the Bishop.”
    “I already have,” barked Father Vance.- “He called me this afternoon. What I want to know is, why do they always pick me to break in these pilgrim kids?”
    The drive back to Cottonwood was less scary than the drive that morning. I stopped at Vidal’s house for a few minutes and told him the news. He was still sorry he’d hung up on me the other night, and he hugged me.
    “It wasn’t as bad as you thought, huh?” he said.
    “I still haven’t decided,” I said.
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    That night, an early frost hit. When morning came, I saw that the lilac leaves outside my cubbyhole window had turned a purple-bronzy color. The seed sprays were dried up and spent.
    The ninety-five-day Rocky Mountain growing season was over. Fall had come.
    Bishop Camey had told me I could postpone the move until after the Labor Day rodeo weekend, since I was involved in a number of the Bicentennial things. I had already made arrangements for a week in a quiet retreat house on Flathead Lake. But my mind had shut off, postponing the real decision of whether or not I would join the diocesan commission.
    Between the muscle relaxants and the shampoo, my condition was better, though sometimes my head burned so much that I got up in the middle of night to wash it.
    Meanwhile, in those last days before the fair, Vidal and I made one last trip together. He wanted to show me his own home town and introduced me to his parents.
    “I really miss my dad,” he said. “We didn’t fight when he found out I was gay. He laughed at me. That was even worse.”
    ‘What do you think he’ll do if you go back?”
    “Laugh some more,” said Vidal.
    It’s a 250-mile drive from Cottonwood north to
    Browning. We made it in four hours, both of us at the wheel. Most of the drive is through the dry-land wheat country that lies just east of the mountains. We could look across the great stripes of wheat and fallow, things that man hath wrought, and check out the far-off peaks, already dusted with early snow. The wheat harvest was on, and the great combines went spinning slowly along the fields.
    It is Browning’s fate to be the gateway to Glacier Park. The town is garish with motels and Indian curio shops.
    You are also made forcibly aware that it is a reservation town. There were Indians everywhere, going in and out of stores, driving along the street in old cars