Page 87 of We Could Be So Good
“Not yet,” Andy says.
“I wondered if you needed help finding a new place to live.”
“I don’t,” Andy says, feeling churlish for not offering any more information than that. His father is trying.
His father takes off his glasses and polishes them. “There’s always room at my apartment.”
“Thank you,” Andy says, “but I’m happy where I am.”
His father puts his glasses back on, regards Andy, then apparently thinks better of it and resumes polishing his glasses. “During the war I knew men who...” He sighs, polishing his glasses some more. “I know that ‘enlightened minds’ would have us think of it as an affliction, and before that it was just garden-variety sexual perversion, but...” He trails off again, and Andy thinks he’ll never recover from hearing his father say the wordsexual. “But I never thought so,” he says now, looking Andy squarely in the eye.
The fact that Andy can follow his father’s thoughts through sentence fragments and lacunae—and that his father knows he can—reveals any secrets Andy might have wanted to keep. Andy can hardly believe he isn’t blushing, and is pretty sure that’s only because he’s gone pale. “I see,” he manages.
“During all that... unpleasantness with the senator, homosexuals had a bad time of it as well.” The senator, of course, was McCarthy. “Still do. I’ve never figured out how homosexuals are supposed to be especially vulnerable to communism. It does make one wonder what they all thought went on at IWW meetings.”
Andy laughs, just one startled involuntary cough of a laugh. His father joking is rare enough. His father joking about communist orgies is something else altogether.
“My point is that there are other homosexuals in this business, of course. Even at theChronicle. Some are discreet. Some are lucky. And it doesn’t matter to me, except insofar as I’ll do my best to protect them from the vagaries of law and public opinion.”
It takes a moment for Andy to understand that his father is offering acceptance—not a silent sort of acceptance or a tacit agreement that neither of them would mention Andy’s love life, but something overt and undeniable. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise—his father has made a career out of disagreeing with conventional wisdom. And more than that, his father, for all his failings as a parent, is a good man and a broad-minded one. But it’s a surprise anyway, and Andy doesn’t know how to respond.
He remembers that Nick was distressed when Andy mentioned that his father had more or less guessed that they were together. Andy could probably still deny that anything’s going on, and hisfather might even believe him. But that would cheapen what his father is offering, put distance between him and his father, and relegate Nick to a dirty little secret. And more than that, it means something to Andy—something he can hardly put into words—that his father is speaking up when he could have remained silent.
“What did my mother think?” Andy blurts out.
If his father is dismayed to hear his ex-wife mentioned, he doesn’t show it. “Your mother was always ready to champion anyone whose rights were trampled upon,” his father says carefully, coming close enough to paying a compliment to Andy’s mother that Andy’s a bit taken aback. “You know that.”
It’s pitiful, probably, to crave his mother’s posthumous approval, but he does, and he’s grateful his father managed to give it to him.
“Thank you,” he says. Nick would probably pay any price to hear his mother say half of what Andy’s father has told him.
He realizes that his father is trying very, very hard to be a parent—or maybe a mentor, or maybe just a decent person. He thinks of all the ways his father has tried to reach out to him in the past few months: the repeated offers of a place to stay, the fact that he didn’t even blink at the idea that his son might be queer, and—maybe most of all—his conviction that Andy can, in fact, successfully run the paper. His father is trying.
In the spirit of honesty and disclosure or whatever is happening right now, Andy almost tells his father everything—that he doesn’t know what to do, that he’s fallen in love with a man who won’t keep himself safe. That he’s afraid he’s going to make himself miserable and ruin theChronicle.
But before he can formulate a sentence, his father puts his glasses down.
“Oh! That reminds me. I heard from David Hollenbeck—managing editor of theJournal-American—that we’re going to be losing Mr.Russo. Give him my congratulations, will you?”
Andy only stares. He must have heard that wrong. “I— What?”
His father is silent for a moment, looking as if he’d like to crawl into a hole and polish his glasses in peace for an eternity. “Perhaps Dave and I got our wires crossed.”
“Dad.”
“I wouldn’t have said anything if I thought you didn’t know.”
“Dad.”
“They offered Mr.Russo a column and a salary that we wouldn’t have been able to match.”
Andy is reeling. He’s in free fall. “Thanks for telling me.”
“I didn’t mean to tell you,” his father laments.
“But thanks anyway,” Andy says, already at the door.
“Talk to him!” his father calls, and Andy hardly even notices that this is the first advice his father’s ever given him.
