Most of my energy toward friendship at the time was taken up by Ana — of the electrophoresis experiment and the heroine of Scavengers.
She had dropped out of Science and was now a patient at Hillside Hospital, whose adolescent pavilions housed a number of personable youngsters with more or less serious emotional disturbances. Ana had a clear and lovely singing voice. I reconvened the folksinging group, this time with Ana, Dave, and a young black woman who’d lived next door to me when we’d lived over the funeral parlor, Laura. We even got so far as to make a demonstration record of The House of the Rising Sun (found in the pages of some Lomax anthology) after about three months of rehearsal in the early summer of ’60. Ana’s and my friendship was indeed fraught enough to fill novels. At that time I tended to form close friendships with any number of young women (Frances, a fine pianist sharing her time between Science and the Julliard School of Music; Ana; and Judy, one of Marilyn’s closest friends at college), friendships in which there was sometimes sexual interest on the part of the girls, which I generally tried to discourage.
6.63. Somewhere in her first two years at NYU, Marilyn wrote her verse play, Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices, which changed our relationship mightily. When, at fifteen, Marilyn had entered NYU, a young man named Bartolomé had been in her calculus class. Then, in her second term, he’d disappeared. Sometime in her third, she encountered him again in the school hallway. “What happened to you?” she asked.
Bartolomé answered coolly, “I had a nervous breakdown. I spent seven months looking at the wall in a mental hospital.”
The incident struck her (“… Why did he look at the wall? Why did he look at the wall so long …?”), and over the next weeks she began to write her play:
Bartolomé
She would phone to read me sections (“… the second month he waited in a guise / of stone with strange words chipped into his eyes …”), or we would meet on various subway platforms between Morningside Heights and the Village and she would show me another section:
6.64. When I was seventeen, Uncle Myles and Aunt Dorothy came over one winter evening. My uncle’s laughter and enthusiasm dwarfed everything and everybody in our house. “You’ve got to see this, Margaret! You’re not going to believe it. Sam — ” he meant my father — “it’s right over there, at the Apollo! They’re female impersonators! But really, it’s the cleverest thing you’ll ever see!”
My mother’s brother-in-law Myles, another judge, was just not usually so boisterous about such things — at least not when I’d seen him before.
“That’s the Jewel Box Review,” my mother said. “Yes, I read about it.”
“Men dressed up like women?” one or another of my cousins commented. “I think it sounds nasty. They’re probably all fairies, anyway!”
My aunt was saying, her voice undercutting her loud husband’s: “You know, Margaret, the show in the first ten rows of the theater was even stranger than what was going on on stage.”
“I can believe it,” Mother said to her older sister.
“Well — ” Uncle Myles shrugged — “I don’t know about that. But it’s certainly entertaining. Everybody sings and dances in it. At the beginning, the master of ceremonies, this nice-looking young fellow named Stormy — he’s colored too, I think; and with a real, fine tenor voice — tells you that the company is made up of twenty-five men and one real woman. Then the impersonators come out and sing and dance and do their numbers — some of them are good, too! Not just because they look like women, either — though some, I swear, nobody could tell. Then you’re supposed to see if you can figure out which one is real. Oh, I thought it was the cleverest thing!” He turned again to my father. “And then of course, at the end, it turns out — ”
“Now don’t tell,” Aunt Dorothy said. “They might go see it.”
“Oh!” Uncle Myles laughed. “Sam and Margaret aren’t going to see anything like that! But at the end, Stormy, the master of ceremonies, comes out and asks the audience which of the performers do you think is the real girl. And while people are calling up this name or that — ” he laughed again — “and everybody thinks they know it’s this one or that one, Stormy pulls this thing that’s been holding his hair back and shakes it out — and you realize that he’s been the … I mean, she’s been the real woman all along! And it’s right over there at the Apollo.”
“Now that’s not the usual sort of thing they have there, is it?” my father asked. “Is that what they’re doing there now?”
“I don’t like to go there,” Aunt Dorothy said. “The jokes the comedians tell are always so dirty!”
“The company travels around, I guess,” Uncle Myles said. “That’s just where they’re playing while they’re in New York.”
My father said: “Now why would they bring something like that there?”
“No!” my uncle protested, again laughing. “It’s really good!”
I stood in the living room, like someone grown invisible, listening, wondering, puzzling that Uncle Myles, usually so staid, could grant his approval, even his enthusiastic approbation, to something so anarchic. At the same time I yearned to see this transvestial extravaganza with a desire approaching the electric. Perhaps I would notice something, meet someone, recognize something in one of those strange people who’d clearly been marked as foreign and alien to everything I knew, that would, in some way, enlighten me about my own sexuality.
I committed myself to seeing the show with the same desperation with which I had sought out Gide’s Corydon and The Immoralist (coming across me reading it behind a book at my desk back in my freshman English class, Mr. Kotter had begun to thunder, “And what is it that’s so important that you’re reading it in here. … Oh — ” and, on recognizing the title and the Nobel Prize-winning author, returned to his normal conversational tone — “well, that probably is more important than anything I’m saying right now. You go on.”), Tellier’s The Twilight Men, Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
The next Saturday, I strolled over to 125th Street and the fabled Harlem theater, where regular movies alternated through the day and evening with live entertainment. This month’s show, proclaimed the marquee, was, indeed, the Jewel Box Review. I paid the five dollars for my ticket (half my month’s allowance), went in, and sat as close to the front of the orchestra as I dared, watching the last half hour of an unremarkable western. The audience was mostly black — but a few white people had come, as though somehow this particular show transcended parochial racial interests.
8
The lines in this section are from