Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [71]
In fact, Wally was wonderful at returning things to something resembling normalcy; he’d go watch TV, or eat a bag of the cheap grocery store cookies he liked, or putter with his photographs or his collection of fashion pictures as if things were all right, and somehow then they were almost all right. We each begin to feel, in part because of the support groups, in part because of the benevolent agency of time—which makes almost all things begin to seem familiar—a sort of stability. Highly provisional, that stability, but no one can live in endless uncertainty, in full consciousness of it, especially in the face of a diagnosis which the body does not demonstrate. Day after day, whether we were aware of it or not, we were circling the same questions: how can this knowledge be used? Can it be used? The way Bob employed his knowledge seemed wrongheaded to me, or at least not helpful. Later, I’d wonder if his difference from Wally was partly a matter of being further along in the process of the disease; was what seemed then a cynical matter-of-factness actually a gesture toward letting go of his life? Or was it a matter of a difference of temperament, each man refined—the way say, oils or perfumes are refined, reduced to essences—by illness to become more clearly himself?
If Bob, marking the date of his anticipated death in black marker on the calendar, thought the virus an insurmountable force which would, in eighteen months, erase his life, then Wally’s brother Jim provided almost an opposite perspective. Jim viewed the virus as entirely in our control; a tie-dyed-in-the-wool new-ager, he saw disease as something entirely subject to the will of the individual, since, as he understands the world, we create our own realities.
Wally came from a family of eight kids, from a southern suburb of Boston. His father—also named Wally—and mother met when they were adolescents, and married as teenagers when Wally’s dad, lying about his age, joined the Navy. He became a career sailor, away much of the time while Wally was growing up. “Marriage,” the poet David Wojahn has written, “is a pact with someone else’s memory.” (David was Lynda’s husband, and he was, of course, referring to her memories.) Wally always loved to talk about his childhood, a realm whose texture and details seemed immediately available to him. Now sometimes I feel as if his memories are mine; when one loses a lover, the pact becomes intensified, in a way: who else will keep these stories? It’s as if I remember a summer evening, 1957 or 1958, Wally Senior handsome in his uniform, Betty in her bright flowered dress, red lipstick, her hair done, leaning over the bed in a little intimate cloud of cologne—Tabu?—to kiss me good night because they’re going out for the evening, dancing. Even now, Wally Senior’s embroidered jacket from Korea is hanging in my attic, thin black wool embroidered with a dragon twining around a map of Korea which floats above the silky stitches of his name. It seems so small; neither Wally nor I could ever wear it, but it’s hung in the closet of every house we ever lived in.
The family has the distinction of being perfectly balanced in terms of the distribution of sexual orientation; there are two heterosexual daughters and two lesbians, two straight men and—until Wally’s death—two gay. Wally and Jimmy, his younger gay brother, used to want Betty to march in the Boston Gay Pride Parade with a sign reading, “MOTHER OF EIGHT, FOUR GAY, FOUR STRAIGHT.” She was far too shy, though she loved the joke.
She—and Wally’s father, who died in the seventies—must have provided a climate of real acceptance for all their children; she certainly provided such a feeling for their girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, partners, wives. From the first time I met Betty, my sense was that she loved her children so fiercely that whomever they were, whatever contributed to their happiness, was fine with her. And Wally’s father, who I never met, must have been