Once the gazpacho and green salad were served, and a few mildly racy Georgetown stories retold, Murano said, “I guess you want to hear about my cousin.”
What was this? “Your cousin?”
“Jim Sturdivant was a distant relative of mine. Though I hardly knew him. He was older, and anyway he left Pittsfield when he went to college, and he was really pretty much a South County second-homer until he retired. And even then he didn’t set foot in Pittsfield a whole lot, I don’t think.”
Morley added, “Miss Jimmy apparently would not have been welcomed by the other Sturdivants, who suspected that he was maybe a little bit that way.”
“Not that Jim’s that-way-ness was ever spoken of in the family,” Murano said.
I said, “It sounds as if Jim didn’t even speak of it himself, his being gay.”
“Within his circle of gay friends, yes. Outside that circle, never. I met a Whitney Defense Systems gay guy one time when I knew Jim was their company spokesman, and I asked the guy if he knew Jim. He did, and he was surprised to hear that Jim was gay. And he didn’t know anything about Steven, even though Jim and Steven had been together since college. It’s really sad, but I understand it because I grew up in Pittsfield too.”
Morley said, “ Pittsfield is the Paris of the Berkshires. Too bad it’s Paris, Illinois.”
Timmy said, “It’s a very pretty old city. I can see that part of its beauty, however, is its many fine Catholic churches. I know too well what that can mean.”
“It’s a priest-ridden old blue-collar city,” Murano said. “I still love the Catholic church for its esthetics and the decent parts of its morality and its history. And in some parts of the world the church is actually a force for social justice. But the church’s ideas on sexuality are soul-destroying, and Pittsfield is a poisonous place to grow up if you’re gay. Jim Sturdivant got out when he could, but not before he became so terrified and ashamed of his sexuality that it made him kind of bonkers – schizoid and twisted and with some kind of need to control and humiliate other gay men.”
Morley said, “I told David about Jim’s unusual lending practices.”
“How come you survived Pittsfield?” Timmy asked Murano. “I saw the rainbow sticker on your car, and I take it you two were licensed to be married at Pittsfield City Hall.”
“Let me explain,” Morley said, “just how unusual my husband is. David was the first teacher in a Pittsfield public school to come out, and that was twenty years ago. He was hugely popular and indispensible, so that helped. But this was before there were any serious legal protections, so it was a brave and gutsy thing to do. Not many gay teachers here are out. Either they’re afraid a bigoted parent will complain, and the school committee will be too gutless to back them up. Or they’re infected with the same shame and embarrassment Jim Sturdivant lived with. But far more are casually out now than was the case when David came out, and I just admire the hell out of them. The bravest people I know are gay men and women who stay in hometowns like Pittsfield where they grew up and simply refuse to live lives of secret shame and humiliation.”
Timmy said, “I never came out in Poughkeepsie. I snuck around until I got out of town.”
“I barely managed to come out in college,” I said. “Never mind back home.”
“I could never have done it back in West Gum Stump,” Morley said. “My Little League coach would have called me queer.”
Timmy said, “I didn’t know you played Little League, Preston. You never told me that. It’s not how I ever thought of you.”
“I’d go to ball practice and then go home and play my Ethel Merman records. This was known about me.”
Timmy said, “Ah, there’s my Preston.”
“In Pittsfield,” Murano said, “you would have kept your Ethel Merman habit carefully concealed. Or paid a heavy price. Or been afraid you would.”
Timmy raised a glass of limeade, and the rest joined in when he said, “To Pittsfield’s bravest!”
“Hear! Hear! To Pittsfield ’s bravest!”
“And then,” Murano said, setting his glass down, “in Jim Sturdivant’s case, there was this other problem.”
“It being?” I asked eagerly.
“Some of his family were criminals.”
“Uh huh.”
“Not just criminals, but the organized crime type. The old mainly Italian mob is pretty much out of the county now. It’s black gangs from New York that deal drugs. But when I was growing up – and especially when Jim was young – there was the numbers racket, card games, protection, some prostitution, and the big one, racetrack betting. There’s still some of that that goes on, a lot of sports betting especially.”
Timmy said, “Not to be too careless with an ethnic stereotype, but Sturdivant doesn’t sound to me like much of a Mafia family name.”
Murano said, “No, but Murano does.”
“Jim changed his name?”
“Phil Murano, Anne Marie’s first husband, was Jim’s father. The guy was a low-level mob goon. He was convicted in a loan-sharking crackdown in the late forties and was sent to Walpole, where he was stabbed to death in a brawl in 1951. Anne Marie married Mel Sturdivant a couple of years later, and she changed her name and the kids’ names to Sturdivant.”
Timmy said, “Loan-sharking. Hmm.”
“Jim had a hard time growing up,” Murano went on, “because people in Lakewood – the neighborhood over near the GE plant where we all lived then – knew his real dad was a mobster. Some people held it against him and Michael and even Rose, and other people took the other tack and expected Jim to be a tough, mean guy too. Which very definitely was not in the cards. Jim was choir and drama club material and a disappointment to both the Muranos and Sturdivants who were into sports and heavy betting. Luckily, Michael turned out to be ‘all boy,’ as I remember my mother’s aunts calling him, so that took some of the pressure off Jim. But Jim went off to UMass right after high school, and he never really came back to Pittsfield to live. Also, he met Steven in college, and back then neither the Muranos nor the Sturdivants would have put up with that.”
I said, “None of this is mentioned in the newspaper obit. I don’t mean the mob stuff or the gay thing. But the omission of the legal father seems odd.”
Murano laughed. “The family provides that type of information to the funeral home, which gives it to the paper. Anne Marie, Michael and Rose apparently chose to leave it out. And since the Eagle was bought by a penny-pinching chain, turnover has been so high that the paper has no institutional memory. You could list Ma Joad as one of somebody’s survivors on an obit form, or Buffalo Bill Cody, and some hapless kid working for minimum wage over there would just type it up.”
I said, “David, tell me more about the brother, Michael. The one who was ‘all boy.’”
“I don’t know that much about Michael. He’s five or six years younger than Jim was – Rose is in between – and he left
Pittsfield a long time ago. The paper said he lives in Rhode Island. That’s all I know, really.”
“Apparently Barry Fields once threw him and Anne Marie Sturdivant out of the Triplex movie house for bothering other patrons, and Michael threatened to break Fields’ legs. Do you know this story?”