heart. A heart, it turned out, that beat as regularly as my own. A catalog of American daily life that the rest of us had lived through and my husband had not. I turned the basket over on the bed and made a leaf pile of paper. One by one, I read them and thought of the countless other stories I had clipped throughout our marriage. I was drunk and stunned and wild with revelations, my heart muscling its way through my chest like a panicked man in a crowded room.
1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you’ve chopped one off, another war had begun. With a draft and an enemy just like the one before, only this time there were nuclear weapons; there were veterans’ cemeteries that refused to bury Negro soldiers; there was a government telling you what to look for in a nuclear flash, what kind of structure to hide under should the sirens start wailing—though they must have known that it would have been madness to look or hide or consider anything except lying down and taking your death in with one full breath. There were the subcommittee hearings with Sheedy asking McLain on TV, “Are you a red?” whereupon McLain threw water into his face, and Sheedy threw water back and knocked off his glasses. A world in which TV stations were asked to segregate characters on their shows for Southern viewers, in which all nudes were withdrawn from a San Francisco art show because “local mother Mrs. Hutchins’s sensibilities are shaken to the core”; and beautiful Angel Island became a guided missile station, and a white college student was expelled for proposing to a Negro, and they were rioting against us in Trieste; the Allies freed Trieste not many years ago, and suddenly they hated us … and hovering above all this, every day in the paper, that newsprint visage like the snapshot of a bland Prometheus: Ethel Rosenberg’s face.
When would the all clear come? Didn’t somebody promise us an all clear if we were good, and clean, and nice, and were willing to die for things, and believe in things, and agreed to do everything right? Where was our all clear?
But there was more. An invisible world, now made obvious, like those codes that can only be read with special glasses; it had been there all along: a list of men arrested for sex crimes, a quarter of them for congress with other men, their names right there in the paper; following a directive to “break the back” of an imagined security issue—barely reported, certainly uncriticized—the hundreds of State Department firings for rumors of deviant desire. The white navy doctor set free from his trial for gouging out the eyes of a Negro man who suggested “a vile perverted act.” And young Norman Wong smiling in a neat black suit, saddled with a $14,000 mortgage on his fruit ranch, who coaxed a white air force captain—his lover—to murder his wife for the insurance money, saying, “I loved her too much to shoot her myself.” That photo of plain Silvia Wong—the unkillable wife—in a blouse buttoned to the top to hide the wounds, weeping at the courthouse because she still loved Norman and if he went to jail she would have to wait two years to bear his children.
Later I would face my worst fears in the library, forcing myself to read about acts even the court stenographer found too “repulsive” to be included. Police peering through windows and keyholes, drilling holes in walls, building a false ceiling so they could lie in the rafters and spy on poor unsuspecting men. The maximum sentence for those crimes, I would discover, had just been raised to life in prison. If not prison, then registration as a sex offender; my son’s home would always be recorded in red ink. And I would come across a more chilling alternative: sterilization. Unable to discover whether “perverts” had been exempted by 1953, I would find an astounding figure: the number of California men degraded in this way. Twenty thousand. I
1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you’ve chopped one off, another war had begun. With a draft and an enemy just like the one before, only this time there were nuclear weapons; there were veterans’ cemeteries that refused to bury Negro soldiers; there was a government telling you what to look for in a nuclear flash, what kind of structure to hide under should the sirens start wailing—though they must have known that it would have been madness to look or hide or consider anything except lying down and taking your death in with one full breath. There were the subcommittee hearings with Sheedy asking McLain on TV, “Are you a red?” whereupon McLain threw water into his face, and Sheedy threw water back and knocked off his glasses. A world in which TV stations were asked to segregate characters on their shows for Southern viewers, in which all nudes were withdrawn from a San Francisco art show because “local mother Mrs. Hutchins’s sensibilities are shaken to the core”; and beautiful Angel Island became a guided missile station, and a white college student was expelled for proposing to a Negro, and they were rioting against us in Trieste; the Allies freed Trieste not many years ago, and suddenly they hated us … and hovering above all this, every day in the paper, that newsprint visage like the snapshot of a bland Prometheus: Ethel Rosenberg’s face.
When would the all clear come? Didn’t somebody promise us an all clear if we were good, and clean, and nice, and were willing to die for things, and believe in things, and agreed to do everything right? Where was our all clear?
But there was more. An invisible world, now made obvious, like those codes that can only be read with special glasses; it had been there all along: a list of men arrested for sex crimes, a quarter of them for congress with other men, their names right there in the paper; following a directive to “break the back” of an imagined security issue—barely reported, certainly uncriticized—the hundreds of State Department firings for rumors of deviant desire. The white navy doctor set free from his trial for gouging out the eyes of a Negro man who suggested “a vile perverted act.” And young Norman Wong smiling in a neat black suit, saddled with a $14,000 mortgage on his fruit ranch, who coaxed a white air force captain—his lover—to murder his wife for the insurance money, saying, “I loved her too much to shoot her myself.” That photo of plain Silvia Wong—the unkillable wife—in a blouse buttoned to the top to hide the wounds, weeping at the courthouse because she still loved Norman and if he went to jail she would have to wait two years to bear his children.
Later I would face my worst fears in the library, forcing myself to read about acts even the court stenographer found too “repulsive” to be included. Police peering through windows and keyholes, drilling holes in walls, building a false ceiling so they could lie in the rafters and spy on poor unsuspecting men. The maximum sentence for those crimes, I would discover, had just been raised to life in prison. If not prison, then registration as a sex offender; my son’s home would always be recorded in red ink. And I would come across a more chilling alternative: sterilization. Unable to discover whether “perverts” had been exempted by 1953, I would find an astounding figure: the number of California men degraded in this way. Twenty thousand. I
Similar Books
