It occurred to me that the ring technically belonged to his mother anyway. And yet, the way Essie told it, it was an act of incredible generosity that typified Gordon. If there was something selfish about the way he had cut his family out for four years, Essie could not or would not see it.
I couldn’t resist asking, “Weren’t you curious about what had happened all those years? Why he had never called? Why—”
“—Of course, I was curious. Why, I was dying to know. But I didn’t want to press him. I knew it must have been something horrible. From what Gordon has hinted recently I think it might have had something to do with drugs. He might have got tangled in something really bad.” After a pause, she added. “And you know what? Now I really don’t want to know. What good would it do him? We’ve got a totally different problem on our hands now, don’t we?”
She was nodding at me significantly and I had to reciprocate.
The spring following their visit, Gordon called his mother to tell her he was going to hairdressing school because it was something he knew he would be good at and he didn’t think he could go on doing restaurant work forever. “Not that he needed to go to hairdressing school,” Essie said. As long as Gordon had been around, Essie had never visited a hairdresser. He had even fixed Essie’s hair for the prom, “though he was flat against my having a beehive. And I wouldn’t have anything else.” Essie’s mother encouraged Gordon to get his hairdresser’s license and lent him money for tuition.
Essie recalled the day her mother came over, clapping her hands and doing a little jig in Essie’s kitchen: “Guess what, honey? Gordo’s coming back home. For good!”
Essie had just returned after a double shift and had taken off her shoes and was nursing her feet. She listened numbly to what her mother was saying and watched her mother prance around the kitchen. “I had this expression on my face of happiness,” Essie said. “But inside, my mind was spinning. It didn’t make sense to me. Why would Gordo come back? I knew—perhaps better than anyone else in the family—just how much Gordon had wanted to escape from Blackwood. And I’d seen how comfortable he was in Jacksonville. It wasn’t quite the same as in Atlanta, but it was getting there—he was even talking about moving to another apartment building where they’d let him keep a cocker spaniel. Something about this coming back wasn’t right.”
They all went down to the Tri-City Airport in Tennessee, to pick Gordon up. His appearance shocked them: it had been barely a year since they saw him, yet his face looked deflated, the flesh of his cheeks seemed to have collapsed onto the bone.
“I had seen more meat on a Krystal Burger than I saw on him,” Essie said.
The thick bushy hair now revealed scalp and was streaked throughout with gray. He brought with him two suitcases and a steamer trunk: these were his entire worldly belongings.
In the photograph Essie showed me that was taken a week after his return, Gordon looked like a wax figure next to his rosy-cheeked sister. The smile on his face, in startling contrast to that from Christmas, was stiff and strained. It was the smile I had seen in the emergency room.
If the thought of AIDS occurred to Essie, it occurred to no one else. “I mean we had heard about AIDS—sure! But AIDS in Wise County? In this little holler? I thought about it and said, ‘No! No way Gordo has AIDS.’ ”
Soon they were back to the evening ritual where they all sat on their mother’s bed and chattered away, poked fun at each other, told outrageous tales, caught up on the local gossip—it made them forget how tired and thin Gordon looked.
Gordon’s father, a brooding, taciturn man, now clung to the house with the same diligence with which he had avoided it when the children were growing up. He was an immovable presence during these soirees, leaning against the windowsill or sitting on the quilting chair—never on the bed—observing the rituals of play of his children, laughing at times, tears occasionally coming to his eyes. He was determined to make up for the long period that he had been away. It was to Gordon that he felt he owed the greatest debt.
If there was a discordant note to these evenings it was that Gordon, wrapped in a caftan (“he just stayed cold all the time”), leaning against the headboard, would nod off in the midst of the hilarity and hysterics. It would happen suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped: His eyelids would sag, his chin and head would follow and then, as if to erase all doubt, his breathing would become stertorous.
The family sat on the bed, studying the sleeping Gordon.
They studied the face in repose, studied it without the brave smile plastered on. Conversation ceased.
A STONE’S THROW BEHIND the family house was a duplex that Gordon’s mother had inherited. She and her husband went to work fixing up half of the duplex for Gordon. They labored night and day to put in wallpaper, a new dry wall in the kitchen, a new gas range. They furnished it from their own house. They drove to Johnson City and bought a brand new waterbed from California Waterbeds for Gordon’s birthday—one to match what he had both in Atlanta and then in Jacksonville. A sharp exchange between Herman—Essie’s brother—and her mother over the money being lavished on the prodigal was brought to an abrupt halt by the appearance of the wan figure of Gordon standing in the doorway.
Soon, Gordon was settled in his new home. The parents’ dream had come true: God had returned their lost child to them and now he and the rest of their children were living around them, gathering most nights in their house for supper.
Essie visited Gordon’s flat almost every evening after work. “Once, I happened to look in his bedroom and I saw on his chest of drawers a stack of medications. They all seemed to be bowel or stomach medications. All I said to him is, ‘Are you all right? Do you need a doctor or something?’ He just smiled and shook his head.
“I knew, I just knew that Gordo wasn’t right. I asked him right out: ‘Gordo, are you all right?’ I gave him every opportunity to tell me what was going on. But he wouldn’t tell me a thing. He had closed off that side of him that used to confide in me.”
Gordon began to work in a hairdressing salon in a nearby town. He seemed very content with this even if he was exhausted at the end of the day.
The owner liked Gordon, as did the high school kids who began to patronize him. Gordon was able to create trendy styles, a look more chic than even the malls in Johnson City or Knoxville were able to offer.
But Gordon was limited by fatigue. By afternoon his arms were heavy and his legs could no longer hold him up. The owner eventually had to let him go with the understanding that when Gordo felt up to it, felt up to a whole day’s work, he would have a job waiting for him.
“By then it seemed like I was the only one who could see Gordon was sick. Pa saw nothing unusual in his son having to give up a job for tiredness! ‘He’ll be all right,’ Pa would say if he said anything at all. Mama just worked harder to feed him and put some flesh on him. Lord, all of us were a-baking and a-cooking and bringing it to him, but it would just sit there until we took it back or throwed it away.”
His father took to driving Gordon wherever he wanted to go: up to Wise to see his friend, Bruce, who had also recently moved back home, from Atlanta. Sometimes Gordon would want to drive up behind the house, past the brooding, ugly coal tipple, up the road to the mining camps and to the lookout point at the top that white couples had favored for years. From there Gordon could look down into three counties and two states.
Gordon would sit there for an hour or more, turning his head first this way and that, as if beyond the blue mountains he could see city lights. His father sat silent next to him. When Gordon was done looking, his father would drive him back home.
“They could not bring themselves to see what was now plain to me: Gordon was very sick. And I could not begin to help Gordon as long as he kept insisting he was all right. It was almost a relief when he finally told me. I used to wake up and thank God for bringing him back and then worry exactly what it was he had come back with.”
The day Gordon’s facade of wel
l-being crumbled happened to be the day when her children and their devilment had so occupied Essie’s mind that she had forgotten about Gordon.
Essie came home to find that Sabatha had been suspended from school—“but it wasn’t my fault, Mama!” The boys in her twelfth-grade class had decided to blow up a commode. They had miscalculated on the amount of explosive needed and the bomb had blown up not just the commode but the adjacent three stalls and nearly collapsed the roof. The police had arrived in short order and hauled three boys away in handcuffs.
Sabatha’s troubles had begun the next period in A.C. McCaffey’s geography class. A.C. had taught geography for so many years that he had even taught Essie. He was an oddity, even for Wise County, with his toupee, his pants belted almost at the nipple, and a labored manner of speaking that took every syllable of each word and spat it out like a prune pip. Whenever he said, as he often did, “The fine bitumen and bauxite found in our very own Piston Production Plants,” the front row was apt to be showered with a spray of saliva.
The blowing up of the toilet had outraged A.C. He was determined to extract a moral lesson from it, to make absolutely sure that no one thought it funny. “Now take little Ruby, here,” said A.C., walking up to spectacled little Ruby Presnell who always sat in the front row and had a crush on A.C., impossible as that seemed to Sabatha. “Now if Roo-bee had been in the double-you-see, what would have happened?”
The whole class was picturing Ruby in the boys’ toilet.
“Well,” A.C. said after a long pause, glancing around significantly, “if Roo-bee had been in the double-you-see, there would have been no more Roo-bee!”
Sabatha, unfortunately for her, had been the first one to break, a squeak erupting from her like a warning signal, followed by a low rumble that could not be contained by her pursed lips and burst through with the whole force of her considerable chest and reverberated in the classroom and down the hall. The rest of the class—all but Ruby and A.C.—were by now also convulsed, both by what A.C. had said and by the sound of Sabatha’s infectious laughter.
Even as Sabatha told the story to Essie, she and Essie and Joy were reduced to hysterics.
Essie was wondering how she could begin to discipline her daughter when she found herself reacting just like the kids?
Just then Gordon walked through the door.
One look at his face and all thoughts of telling him about A.C.’s latest uttering vanished. Gordon was paler than ever. The act of standing up was making him tremulous and she could hear the to-and-fro of his breath across the room.
From behind the brave smile, what he said was, “Essie, I’m sick. Can you help me?”
MY CONVERSATION WITH Gordon’s parents did not take place till the next day. I had stayed so long at Essie’s home that I had to hustle to get to Norton to give my talk. We fixed a time for me to meet with the entire family at the hospital the following evening. We gathered in a “quiet” room designed just for these kinds of conversations.
Essie, her brother, her mother, and her daughters were piled on the sofa beneath the picture windows overlooking the adjacent VA campus. Gordon’s mother was thin and tall and wore glasses. When she smiled or spoke she tended to cover her mouth. She seemed still unused to her dentures.
Gordon’s father, his cap glued to his head—a cap I never saw off his head—stood to the side of the sofa, leaning against the window, his hands in his pockets. Gordon’s sister-in-law and cousins were seated on chairs on the other side of the sofa.
Essie had told me that I could speak freely since all assembled family members had a right to know. I pulled up a chair in front of the sofa.
“Gordon has been infected with the virus that causes AIDS,” I began. “It appears that he has AIDS.”
Gordon’s father dug his hands deeper into his pockets and examined his shoes. I waited for him to look up, but he did not. Essie sank back into the sofa, partly watching me, partly seeing what effect my words had on her family.
“I don’t know how much you know about AIDS. You have perhaps read about it or seen reports of it on TV.”
Essie, who would normally have responded for the family, kept quiet. She was my ally in this dialogue. When nobody answered, Essie nudged her mother as if to make her speak.
“I’d say we heard of it,” Gordon’s mother said.
Nothing more was forthcoming from her or anyone else.
I went on. “This virus, when it gets in the body, attacks one of the white corpuscles—called a CD4 cell, part of the immune system. Our immune system is very important to us: why, right this minute, the bacteria and fungi in this room, the mold behind those ceiling tiles, would be threatening our lives were it not for the way the immune system defends us.”
All but Gordon’s father looked at the ceiling and around them. Gordon’s father continued to gaze at the floor.
“Think of the immune system as an orchestra; it has many instruments, each of which is specialized to do certain things and do them well. When they all work together the body can resist most infections. The CD4 cell is like the conductor of the immune orchestra. Unfortunately, it is this very cell—the conductor for the immune orchestra—that is attacked by the AIDS virus. When that happens, the orchestra is without a leader. There is total confusion, mayhem, noise, cacophony. Now the body becomes vulnerable to infections caused by the simplest organisms.
“This is what has happened to Gordon. His CD4 cells have been attacked and he has fewer and fewer CD4 cells left. His CD4 cell count is so low—six instead of over a thousand—that he has thrush or yeast infection in his mouth. In addition he has pneumonia in his lungs. The antibiotics have to fight the infections that his body cannot.”
Gordon’s mother was watching my lips, hanging onto my every word. When she saw that I had said my piece, she sat back in the sofa.
“Well, how in the world did he get it?” she asked.
I held my breath.
“You know how he got it, Mama,” Essie said at once.
I sensed that Essie was irritated with the denial her parents had expressed for so long. She wanted, in her practical way, for all the cards to be on the table. She wanted the family to accept instantly—as she had—that Gordo had AIDS. She wanted them to gather together, much in the way they had done when they drove down to Jacksonville to see Gordo. She wanted no time wasted in posturing.
Essie said once again, clearly throwing down the gauntlet: “You do know how he got it, don’t you, Mama?”
“Lord, lord,” her mother said. “How do they get that way?”
I told them what to expect in the next few days. How I would be asking a pulmonary specialist to do a bronchoscopy to diagnose the pneumonia. We would do a spinal tap to see if Gordon had any infection in the brain. Did they have any questions?
“Well, do you have anything to say?” Gordon’s mother asked, turning to her husband. She had taken the heat from Essie. Now she was tossing it his way.
Like a pillar of salt, he stood there, his arms folded, studying the carpet, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that anyone had spoken or that he had heard what I knew he had heard. The tension in the room was mounting. I sensed that Essie would not have approached her father so directly.
After a long while the father lifted his head up. He headed for the door. When he reached it he turned back to address his family, ignoring me completely.
“All I know,” he said, “is that the good Lord did not bring him back just to take him away. I don’t believe he has this AIDS or nothing like it. He’s going to get better, I just know it.” He exited the room and disappeared down the hallway.
That night, I was chatting with Eleanor, Gordon’s nurse. I said, “I’m amazed at how well Gordon is being treated. You know there are people throwing rocks at AIDS patients elsewhere in the country. Schoolkids are being driven out of school because they have AIDS. I had good reason to have been prepared for a more negative reaction in rural Tennessee. In this hospital.”
Elean
or looked me up and down and said, “You do know that this was not our first AIDS case?”
“You mean the young man who came from New York?”
“I don’t mean him,” she said. Eleanor was a taciturn brunette. At first glance it was easy to misread her deadpan expression and her businesslike manner. But I had come to know, even before Gordon, that she was one of the finest nurses in the hospital, capable of going to great lengths for a patient. Eleanor sighed now, almost as if she was wondering whether to tell me or not. “Do you remember Rodney Tester—the hemophiliac who was Dr. K’s patient? I bet you took care of him when you were a resident.”
I recalled a tall, thin man with a shock of red curly hair and a limp. I had taken care of him several times for hemarthrosis—bleeding into a joint—following some strenuous activity. Rodney had been indomitable. He hunted and fished and whenever he sensed a bleed starting, he administered factor VIII to himself. It was only when this failed that he came in for more intensive treatment.
“Well,” Eleanor continued, “I was real close to Rodney. He was the very first patient I took care of when I came out of nursing school. You know how he was. So brave. Never letting the disease get in the way of his social life. Dating, sports, you name it. And the first day I was taking care of him—this was 1980 or so—I was hunting for a vein, having no luck, and getting really agitated. I was nervous. I was thinking, what will this patient think of me? He’ll wonder if I am really a trained nurse. Well, Rodney says, ‘Here, let me help you.’ And he helped me find the vein, he gave me a few tips. He never made me feel bad. I was so grateful.
“One time when he came in—I think it was in ‘84—Dr. K said something strange to all of us: ‘I want you all to be careful with his blood.’ That’s all she said. When he was admitted, he was almost always on this floor. She said it to all his nurses: ‘Careful when you draw his blood. Wear gloves. Especially when you start his IVs.’ It took me a while to figure out what she was hinting at and, in any case, he wasn’t in for anything to do with HIV infection. In fact, Rodney had developed another problem. He had become a drug abuser.”