We have been sitting, chatting over several Pilses in my brother’s cozy living room, as we’ve often done whenever I visit my home country. It’s getting late. Good food, good beer, good catching up.
At some point Gretel, my sister-in-law says, “What your mother said about you all those years ago was so hideous.” She shakes her head, covers her mouth as if she can’t possibly repeat it to me, as if she’s said more than she meant to.
“You’re a tease,” I say, “why then bring it up? Too late to withhold now. What did she say?”
I saw my mom as loving, caring, resourceful, funny and sweet. Feisty, too, when needed. Like on a walk to the store with me, just a toddler, when she hit a nasty, threatening off-leash dachshund over the head with her knirps. It left the umbrella bent and kaput. The rattled wiener dog backed off with a perplexed howl.
Gretel looks at her husband, my older brother, Wolfgang, for clues. He contorts his face madly as if wishing she’d be still and not wade into terrain beyond awkward.
“Come on, tell me,” I implore.
Mom is long gone. The love I still feel clearly after years underground. What does it matter now what she said about me once upon a time? While I’ve never seen myself as a momma’s boy, we were close, no matter the distance. She was my dear confidante, except for the secret I kept from her and the rest of the world.
“You don’t want to know,” says Gretel.
At that moment, I grasp what Mom said. The words she could not have said to my face. “She would have rather seen me dead,” I blurt out. “Mom would have rather seen me dead.”
They both stare, then nod, apprehensively.
Fuck! I look back at them and feel the pull of tears.
Gretel says, “After she told us, all distraught, what she felt, I yelled at her, Have you gone stark raving mad? Next all she did was cry.”
My eyes become moist. How the brain gets the tap going right away.
I’m ten years younger now than Mom was when she died. From age 5 on, I knew my inkling and kept it a secret. Not wanting to disappoint, I guess, is what made me hold back true-me from anyone. Slick, smart evasiveness became second nature to me. My job took me to the US as a young man. It’s where I wound up. Well into my late twenties, I finally gathered the nerve to level with her on the last day of a trip to visit my family. She was shocked and insisted on filling Dad in herself. They dropped me off at Rhein-Main as I headed back to the States. I was told that driving home Dad pulled into a rest stop and sobbed.
There are many routes to better dead than queer, I find myself contemplating.
Fact is, things slowly eased along the road.
When I found a serious boyfriend, we were welcomed.
When we became partners, we felt embraced.
When we invited my parents for an official church ceremony, they gave their regrets over the phone.
When we wanted to become dads, she said: Better not. That’s awfully tough for a child.
When there was a grandson, he was loved unabashedly.
She’s long passed by the time we were allowed to become husbands, legally. On both continents. A revolutionary imponderability that would have blown her mind.
During the war years, she was the youngest of seven kids and lived under a sinister regime. My kind were criminalized, viciously ridiculed, brutalized, ostracized to camps, brandished with pink triangles. Untold thousands were murdered. Many parents stayed quiet about it, disgraced, I can only imagine many others were torn, grieving in silence, devastated.
My home country has come to grips with much of the darkness of those years, yet had long held back its atonement for the evil done to my kind. For decades the survivors and other like-minded were treated less than equal. Our conduct remained punishable under the law. Eventually, freedom prevailed. The path to acceptance was painful, wobbly and sweet.
I remember Mom clinging to her upstairs window, braced by Dad, so she could stand, waving, her hand slowed, shaky, yet undeterred, in the final throes of Parkinson’s. She was looking toward us, me and my family, as we waved back up, before boarding our rental to head for the airport. And I saw her loving smile shine through the hardened grimace dealt by fate and circumstance.
Did I need to know how Mom agonized over me at some point? Yes. This old man’s eyes are dry. Memory weaves a wistful tapestry. I forgive. I love. We grow. We go.
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Hart Vetter switched from longer tales to short stories in 2021. Newly retired. Forever writer. Immigrant. Queer. Divorced. Dad. Picture taker. Devoted dog walker in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley. Recent work appeared or is slated to land in Across The Margin, Cleaver Magazine, Bull, Workers Write, Literary Heist, York Literary Review and elsewhere.
© 2024, Hart Vetter
Halfway Down the Stairs 