The Night Listener : A Novel

do with being married and sixty. Maybe it had struck him—out there in the warmth of that sunlit meadow—that he would never again be young enough to live in a teepee with a couple of braless girls.
    Mummie may well have sensed all this, but she was helpless to prevent our collision. She watched her men do battle with a look of mounting horror, as if we were about to brandish pistols. She was used to my father raising his voice, but the sight of her eldest yelling back must have rattled her to the core. When Pap wasn’t looking, she would catch my eye tenderly and mouth the word don’t , as if to say that I alone had the power to stop this madness, that I was the one who knew how to be reasonable. But I didn’t want to be reasonable; I wanted to be the loose cannon for once, to bluster and bully like my old man. And I was doing this for her, I felt, for all the times she had bitten her lip to preserve the peace.
    It was no one’s victory, of course, but I knew it was over when Pap invoked his imminent death—his personal version of “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” I cut short the trip after that, heading back to the city by way of the freeway. There was a fatal silence in the car that my mother tried valiantly to break by gushing about the scenery or reading aloud from billboards. Something collapsed that day, and I knew we’d never be the same again, though by the time we’d reached the bridge we were hungry enough to discuss dinner. I proposed a place on the waterfront, a sailing ship outfitted as a restaurant. The old man just grunted, but once we’d arrived and our gin-and-tonics were firmly in hand, we found it easy as always to retreat to our mutual amnesia. Pap looked out at the rusty freighters and the little red tugboats and the gulls making loops above the darkening bay and pronounced them the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.
    I didn’t tell them until three years later—and didn’t really tell them then; I had one of my characters do it. Will Devereaux wrote a letter to his parents that was plainly intended for mine. My radio stories weren’t broadcast nationally then, but I was mailing tapes to my folks every week, so even a blind man could read the semaphore.
    And Will was as forthcoming as I’d always wanted to be. He wrote of the relief he felt upon finally being himself. He wrote of his love for his parents and how he refused to dishonor it with secrets. He told them not to worry who had “made him this way” because it was what he was meant to be, and because, above all, he was happy.

    Such declarations weren’t commonplace on the radio a quarter of a century ago, so the letter attracted attention. Newsweek did its first piece on Noone at Night , identifying me as a “gay storyteller” in the process. Passive as ever, I waited for the mushroom cloud to appear over Charleston—or at least an anxious phone call from my mother when the old man was at work—but there was nothing for almost a month. Then a letter arrived, a single paragraph scribbled on a sheet of bank stationery:

    Dear Gabriel,
    As you know, your mother is very ill. Any additional stress can only cause her condition to deteriorate. Please try to remember that and act accordingly .
    Pap

    For all its stiffness, the message was clear enough: I was killing my mother with my selfish exhibitionism. I could only guess about the scene at home, the ranting and raving my mother must have endured, i.e., the “additional stress” for which I alone was responsible. Had I known then how long she had protected me I would have gone home and faced the consequences. I should have done that anyway, I know, but I just didn’t have the strength. And I told myself that my father, beneath all that sound and fury, wasn’t strong enough to handle it either.
    So I turned my attention elsewhere. It was fun, after all, to be young and randy with only a reputation for outrageousness to up-hold. I could swing from the radio station to the glory holes and back again on my lunch hour, sharing my exploits with flabbergasted co-workers—and feel righteously political in the process. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell the truth about; I am faggot, hear me roar. If my family didn’t want me, I would build a family of my friends and lovers, and to hell with anyone who couldn’t cope. I puffed myself up the way I’d seen my father do when railing against the communist menace or the scourge of integration. And