I hadn't seen Cousin Miles for nearly twenty years, and he looked more like it had been thirty. He looked so defeated and withdrawn into himself. And my memories were of a vibrant athlete. He wasn't really a cousin in the blood-relative sense. Uncle John and Aunt Frieda had adopted both him and his sister, Mandy, because they couldn't have any of their own. You could have told he wasn't really related to us. We are Mediterranean, not so tall, with olive skin and dark hair and eyes, and Miles was a Nordic blond giant. Mandy was Korean, so that was another slice altogether.
We were at a family reunion in a small town in Missouri southwest of Springfield—where my mother's ancestors somehow landed from "the old country" right before the Civil War. We'd picked this time and place to meet in the first real reunion of one aging generation and my not-so-young cousins and all of our children because the family house—where Uncle John and Aunt Frieda had lived—was soon to be knocked down in favor of an access road to a new elementary school. No one in my family had lived in the old white, boxy Victorian house for a couple of decades. It had been a B&B most of that time. But being a B&B now made it an ideal place for us to meet and steep ourselves in fleeting family nostalgia.
Uncle John was nearly ten years older than my mother. Both of them were gone now. Frieda was still with us; she handled logistics because she had just moved across town, whereas the rest of her generation had moved away as quickly as possible. My family had bounced from West Coast to East Coast, without a stop in between in Missouri. My father didn't think there was much worth seeing other than tornadoes in the middle of the country.
That doesn't mean we never stopped in Missouri on our moves between the coasts, however. Before I was twelve, we probably stopped there three or four times. And after the first time, I always looked forward to a weekend or week in that old white Victorian house. It wasn't because of the house or even that I was that tired of driving by the time we hit Missouri. It was because of Miles.
Miles was eight years older than I was, but he was always home when we visited his parents, even the last time when he was close to graduating college. And to me he was a god. He was always smiling and willing to play with my brother and sisters and me—active games like volleyball and kickball and touch football out on the extensive, green-grass side yard of my uncle's house. He was tall and athletic, and when I was introduced to Greek mythology, I equated him with Apollo. He could play football and basketball and did so for his high school team—and then basketball for the University of Missouri, where he studied music and trained to become a high school band director himself.
Sometime during the second visit, I discovered that I was in love with him. I was only about ten, so I had no idea what that meant. I just knew that there was no one else in the world who made me more happy than he did and that I wanted to somehow zip up in height and dye my hair blond—which I did in high school—and not just be with Miles, but to
be
Miles.
On the third visit, when I was twelve and he was in college, I got the obsession that he loved me too. Not like he loved the other cousins—simply because they were related to him, but because I was someone special to him. Later in life when I overheard my parents talking about Miles—and seeming to be worried about something—I heard my mother say that he treated each and every one of his students like they were special. My father had snorted and said something under his breath, which led to a chill between my parents that lasted two days. But I was affronted by that remark. I didn't want a Miles who treated all of his students like they were special. I wanted a Miles who treated just me as special. And that last summer we visited Missouri while Miles was still there he did, indeed, make me feel special.
In volleyball or kickball he was always there, backing me up, making sure I was in place to return the ball. He didn't show that he could outshine me—which of course he could—but it was more like he was enabling me. I'd feel the touch of his hand on my arm, guiding me toward where he instinctively knew the ball was coming, and I'd move there. But I would be more thrilled that he touched me than that I got the ball returned.
Once while we were playing kickball, the ball went off into a copse of trees at the edge of the lot, where a town-owned wooded area started, and we found ourselves facing each other, panting, around behind a tree, where the ball had rolled. We were both hidden from the field, and just standing there, breathing hard, and looking at each other. And just for a second, I thought that something was going to happen. I didn't know at the time what that was, but I built on that in my dreams. And as I became older, I began to make something sexual out of—something I intellectually accepted wasn't there but something that, emotionally, I wanted to have been there.
I think that's why when I myself was in college, I permitted myself to be seduced by Sam Strickler. He was a tall, Nordic blond football player. I was smaller and more wiry, swifter of foot really, so my sport was soccer. But we'd often be in the locker room together, showering, after practice, and Sam showed special interest in me. I was attracted to him too. Not because I thought of myself as gay at the time or even that there was any special attraction to Sam himself. He was really the arrogant type, and I was to find that it was all about the hunt with him. I was just what he wanted as long as he didn't yet have me. But not long after I'd let him seduce me, he was looking beyond me to his next conquest. I'm convinced that I went with him because he was a substitute for my memories of Miles. He was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and well built.
I didn't have any serious gay experiences after that, not counting a bit of groping, and an unfortunate spring break weekend in Florida that I blame on alcohol, but I always kept in the back of my mind what experience I'd had—which I always tagged with an image of Miles—and I intellectually accepted that everyone probably was basically bisexual and that I just chose for now not to practice anything but the heterosexual element of it.
I married Barbara out of college, and we had our allotted older boy and younger girl and drifted into normal suburban existence.
And then we started to get e-mails about the old family home in Missouri being taken down and wouldn't it be nice if the whole family could convene there in the summer for a reunion? I didn't think we could get away or that it would be a good vacation for the kids, just sitting in an old house in a nowhere town and listening to old folks reminisce. Barbara, however, said it was a great opportunity for the kids to meet family members they'd never known before and that I'd always regret not having been there to see the old homestead for a last time. So we went.
I didn't recognize who Miles was for the first two days. There simply were too many people there and he had simply changed too much. The group was too large to all stay in the B&B. This situation was partially addressed by tents erected in the side yard—Frieda's idea—where the kids of the family camped out, most of them loving the idea, and the adults taking turns staying out there with them. And then some of the adults, those without children, stayed in one of two motels nearby. Barbara and I had a room in the B&B. Since Frieda declared that men and women would stay in the tents with the kids on alternate nights, though, Barbara and I didn't occupy our B&B room together when either of us had kiddie patrol duty.
During the day we all just sort of milled around the old Victorian house or went off on excursions in small groups. The family had originally lived outside the town, so there was an excursion to the acreage that had been the original family farm. And to the old schoolhouse, the walls of which were still there, even if the roof had caved in. And, of course to the graveyard. There even were feints toward the town's old, dying center, for tours on what once was open and what building was what a hundred years ago. Barbara and the kids went on some of these jaunts. I didn't go on many. The town had been robust when I had visited here as a child. The roof had still been on the old two-room schoolhouse my great grandfather and his ten siblings had all sat in, together, in an amalgamation of class years. I didn't really want to see the town in decline. I think I had dragged my feet about coming to the reunion at all because I didn't want to know the old Victorian house was coming down.
A gaggle of older generation women took up squatters rights in the B&B front room and chattered incessantly about family lore, and I found it comforting to go in there occasionally, sit on the periphery, and let anecdotes that I had usually only half remembered roll over me.
One afternoon, with my family off with some others from the younger generation in search of a McDonalds—they had to go all the way into Springfield to find one—I wandered into the parlor. I'd been upstairs taking a nap to recover from tent duty the previous night and the impossibility of getting one tent quiet before another one erupted. I had been dumb to think the kids would be bored coming to this reunion; they were having a ball with their second cousins. The nap was the reason I wasn't on the McDonald's search. I could have used a Big Mac right about then myself.
As I sat in the corner of the parlor, looking through an old, yellowed
Saturday Evening Post
, I noticed that the chatter between my aunts Peggy and Helen and a couple of older women cousins and a few in-laws and out-laws I'd have trouble dredging up names for had become quite hushed. Only Helen's fleeting looks beyond the parlor door and the front hall toward the dining room drew my attention there too.
A sad-looking man who appeared to be in his forties, gaunt and trembly of hands, was sitting at one of the tables in the dining room, playing solitaire. I'd seen him a couple of times earlier in the two days we'd been there, but he always seemed to be detached from the group, standing a bit aside, eyes cast down, and a bit hunched over. He was tall, but he looked like his clothes were a couple of sizes too big for him.
"It's such a pity," I heard Peggy said in hushed tones. "He really does look ill. Frieda had mentioned something about it—but you know how she just brushes by the subject."
"I'm surprised he came." That was Helen speaking, again in a stage whisper that reached me but probably not across the hall into the dining room.
