Page 43 of Upstate

Billy never mentioned Mai in his letters to Mother and Daddy. I want to keep this between you and me and Evelyn for now, he wrote. His secrecy fueled your suspicion that the relationship wasn’t all that serious. “Billy’s having a fling,” is what you said. “Best to leave your parents out of it.”

Things changed, though, after Billy proposed to Mai. You were still skeptical, but he seemed set on matrimony. I’ll need your help, Hazel, he wrote, to get Mom and Dad used to the idea. Maybe you could break the news and let me know how they take it?

It was one thing to keep my brother’s foreign fling hush-hush. It was another to broker his bride into the family. It seemed to me if he was man enough for marriage, he ought to be man enough to share that news himself. On the other hand, if he announced his engagement in a letter to our parents, that would backfire on me, too. I’d be the one stuck listening to Mother’s rants and dealing with Daddy’s reaction while Billy and Mai were a world away.

The whole thing got me so riled up, I didn’t write back for a month. “Give it time, Hazel,” you said. “After all, they might break up before he comes home.” I wasn’t sure why you doubted their relationship, but your advice allowed me to avoid my true feelings a few weeks longer.

Because what I felt wasn’t joy but resentment. Billy was asking me to help him get what I could never have. You and I had been a couple since the summer of 1956, but never once had my parents toasted us. There were no wedding presents when I moved in with you, no anniversary cards commemorating our first decade together. Whenever a girl I knew from school or church got married, Mother would look at me with a withering mixture of pity and disappointment. I rebuffed her attempts at matchmaking, of course, remained mute when she referred to me as a spinster. In so many ways, you were the answer to my heart’s desire, but I paid the price for our love in silence and lies.

I’m always telling you how grateful I am for everything you gave up for me, but what about what I gave up? If it weren’t for Billy, I’d have moved to Greenwich Village, taught in city schools, danced with you in dark cafés—the shadow life I never had because of my brother. I spent my whole life upstate for his sake. I loved him, sure, but I was tired of selling myself short to keep the peace in my family.

When I finally wrote back, I told Billy it wasn’t right for me to break the news to our parents. He’d have to do that himself, but my advice was to keep quiet about Mai until he could introduce her in person. You know how prejudiced Daddy can be, I wrote. As soon as they meet her, they’ll see for themselves what a lovely young woman she is. In the meantime, I assured him, his secret was safe with us. Okay, Hazel, he replied, that’s what I’ll do if you think it’s best.

Deciding how to deal with our parents turned out to be the easy part. It took my brother months to persuade Mai’s upstanding family to let their precious daughter marry a penniless American. After they consulted an astrologer, a date was finally set for close to Tet, when Mai’s extended family would already be gathered for the holiday. At Billy’s suggestion, I arranged for a crate of French wine to be delivered to the wedding party as our family’s gift. The day after the ceremony, though, the Vietcong launched their surprise offensive, scuttling Billy and Mai’s honeymoon trip to the Imperial Citadel in Hue. Billy ran himself ragged arranging medical treatment for war orphans while gathering the paperwork required by the American embassy to bring his wife to America. When he asked if we could loan him the two thousand dollars he needed to secure Mai’s visa, you and I wired him the money from our savings account that very same day.

Before they left Vietnam, Billy shared their itinerary so I could follow along on a map as he and Mai took a Pan Am plane from Saigon to San Francisco via Honolulu before flying to New York City, where they enjoyed a belated honeymoon. To preserve the surprise of his marriage, Billy told Mother and Daddy he’d be home on a Sunday even though they’d be taking the train up to Albany the day before. When he telephoned from their hotel in Manhattan, I tipped him off that our parents were planning a welcome-home party after church. Billy said it would be fine, that we’d simply turn the party into a wedding reception.

“See you tomorrow, Hazel,” he said.

“And Evelyn, too,” I said, correcting him.

“Oh, sure, Evelyn too.”

On the drive down to Albany the next day, I found myself getting more and more anxious the closer we got to the station. “I hope my parents will be as happy for Billy as we are.”

You took a hand off the wheel to push in the cigarette lighter without responding. I’d learned by now that your silences were often more meaningful than your words.

“Aren’t you happy for him, Evelyn?”

“You know I am.” The lighter popped out. You plucked a cigarette from the pack in your shirt pocket, put it between your lips, and sizzled it with the red-hot coil until it smoked. “I guess I’m still a little surprised, is all. I always thought Billy would grow up to be like us.”

Were you talking about living in the country, or running a bookshop, or shepherding sheep? “Like us how?”

“You know.” Twin plumes of smoke streamed from your nostrils. “Gay.”

I recoiled. “You thought my brother was homosexual?”

You shot me a sideways glance. “He never took any interest in girls before he met Mai, and he’s always been so smart and thoughtful and sensitive. I just assumed, I guess. Why, would that have been so bad?”

“How can you even ask such a thing, Evelyn?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Here I am worried what Daddy’s going to think about Billy having a Vietnamese wife. Can you imagine how he’d react to having a homosexual son?”

“He’s already got a lesbian daughter.”

“That’s different.”

“How?” You tapped your ash angrily into the tray.

I coughed and waved smoke out of my face. “Billy’s a man, Evelyn. It’s up to him to carry on the family name. How could you want him to sacrifice having a wife and children?”

You rolled down your window and flicked your unfinished cigarette outside. “I didn’t realize how much of a sacrifice it’s been for you to be with me, Hazel.”

“I’m not talking about us.” I put a hand on your arm to calm you down. You shook it off. “Listen, you idiot, I love you, you know that, don’t you? There’s no one else in the world I’d rather be with. But you have to admit there’s a lot we miss out on, living the way we do.”

“We have a home, and our careers, and each other. Tell me, Hazel, what have you missed?”

My voice dropped to a whisper. “Motherhood, obviously.”

“Since when have you wanted children?”