In 1955 I visited my father a couple of times in New York, where he had an apartment. He had changed jobs again. He'd lost one in the early fifties in an explosion with his boss that ended up with us moving from Long Island to Connecticut. Not sure how the next one ended. My visits in New York inevitably included a lot of time in his local bar. Never spending any time in bars myself, I'm not sure how that worked but it seems to have been his only social outlet as an adult.
From 1956 to 1958, when I was sent to live with him, I saw him once. He had moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for a job. It was said at least once that the move had something to do with being closer to where we lived with Mother in Kentucky, but I think it was just where he could get a job. The visit he made to us occurred after my mother had broken her leg driving her car into a building during a blackout which later on proved to have been caused by a brain tumor. He arrived with his roommate, whom I later learned to be his lover.
As near as I can piece together, he began the relationship shortly after moving to Ohio, and it probably was to his good fortune as he became quite ill with some obscure and supposedly incurable pulmonary disease and Don supported him for the better part of that time. After treatment in a drug trial that was successful he could not find work and was unemployed when I came to live with him in 1958. He pieced together some things like getting their rent covered by being the building superintendant and handyman for their apartment building. He had always been good with tools and his hands. He also worked as a waiter in a bar I later came to understand was a gay bar.
I have letters from that period that he wrote to my mother. Her brother, George, gave them to me during a visit in the 1980s. The letters are disturbing to read knowing the context. There is a yearning in the earlier ones to get back together with excuses about why no child support was forthcoming regarding the battles going on in his family about their father's will. [Frank ended up with pretty much everything.] Until the last one, they are addressed to "Mrs. Edgar D. W---."
In Cincinnati Edgar lived in the heart of the "Bohemian" community. Translate that to "Gay." The building we were in had at least two other gay couples in the eight apartments. Among his "best friends" were a lesbian couple who lived a block away and bred Dachshunds. The people he and Don had over for parties in our two room space were mostly gay. Many were teachers and all were very straight behaving and appearing. There were some who could see the damage being done to me who reached out and helped or encouraged me. You reading this should not make assumptions that anything inappropriate happened. More decent and caring adults never lived than a couple of these people.
Keep in mind that none of this was ever talked about to me. There was no mention of it. Not mentioned, it was supposedly unknown, but I knew.
When, after my mother's death he remarried for a very short time, it was as if the other side of him didn't exist again. I have no idea what it must have been like for him, nor what his sexuality actually was. He has to have been somewhere toward the same sex orientation end of the Kinsey scale, but at some level was bisexual. It is almost as if he wanted to have relationships with women (his mother???) but found them problematical and when there was no woman in his life it was easier with men.
He had two fairly long-term relationships with men that I knew about. The first was Don from sometime in 1956 to 1960 and then again from 1961-62. The time in the middle was for the six months or so he was with the woman who was his second wife. Sometime in the mid sixties, probably 1964, he started living with the man who he stayed with until he died in the early seventies. It was a symbiotic relationship. Edgar was severely disabled at this point and got disability payments. He provided the support and the money for booze, and his partner-lover-roommate-parasite took care of him most of the time.
Life in secret has to have been brutal. As nasty as it can get for homosexual people now, the days of the deep closet must have taken a regular toll. The alcohol must have served as both a kind of numbing self-medication and a loosener of inhibition to allow dealing with the internal mental conflicts. The social venue for most minorities in our society from the Irish and Italian immigrants of the 1800s and early 1900s was the saloon. No accident that the gay bar is the same kind of venue.
Edgar got a job in Boston in early 1959. He and Don moved in February and I followed at the end of the school year, thanks to the generosity of a (probably gay) teacher. My mother died after a long decline in May of 1960, and my sister and brother came to live with my father sometime in the fall, presumably after Don had moved out. I had left home that summer.
The marriage followed in January of 1961 and by February my father was in a VA Hospital being treated for nerve damage in his wrists and the new ex was foster parent to my siblings. I was engaged in surviving, having lost a job, so I was pretty out of touch.
He was in and out of the hospital several times in the next couple of years. He had surgery to fuse his spine. His left hand curled up uselessly. At my wedding in November 1963 he was in a wheelchair. I visited him a few times, at one point in 1962 suggesting that we get an apartment together, but what I found was not to his liking because he'd have to leave "his" bar. [BTW, many of "his" bars had not been gay bars.] Probably just as well.
In the long decline over the next eight years or so I avoided contacts as much as I could. His "roommate" left him drunk and helpless once and we had had to take Edgar in. The second time it happened we refused and his sister had to step in. The last time I saw him was in 1965 or 1966 when we had put him in a care facility after the first meltdown. He checked himself out and was back to the "roommate" after a couple of weeks. The next time I found a lawyer who did a pro bono conservatorship. The lawyer was the one who called me to tell me he was dying. I'm thinking it was 1972, but it could have been 73 or 74.
So that's a life. I certainly wouldn't exchange mine for it, as tough as mine has been at times. A therapist once suggested to me that someone in my life had to teach me about love and it was not likely my mother. I think she was right. And I think the way it came out in his life was a yearning to be loved, to have what he never could seem to get from his family or from the women in his life. Sad.
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