I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore Read Online Free PDF

page.”
    Mac shook his head vigorously, pointed at me, deftly suggested writing as he pulled the finger back to stab his heart, made a circle with thumb and forefinger as his eyes appeared to read, raised the circle high in the air, and read more. “No,” said Rolf, “your letters are the wonderful ones. They move me so I must reread them.”
    “I got it,” I murmured, staring at Mac. Rolf was no longer the translation, but an echo. Mac’s sign language was as eloquent as his letters were: his hands gave the message, their speed or angle lent nuance, and his face showed how the message and nuances felt. All you had to do was look. By the time the food appeared, I myself was performing Mac’s “sounding”—his term, a correction of my faux pas, that delightful and exhausting night, in verbalizing the notion that I was “speaking” for him. Fiercely shaking his head, he reached for one of the little pads lying all about the apartment, and with mischievous grace wrote me in those block letters I knew from the mail: “I do speak—without noise.”
    *   *   *
    He was not deaf, only mute, apparently the reverse of the usual condition; even a fluke, for all I could guess, for I never asked. He was proud of his ability to cope with his impairment but, if not ashamed of it, reticent about it. His many friends protected him—crowded him in theatres, blocked and ran passes for him in bars, sat in on his dinners with new friends, sounded for him in banks and restaurants. His family constantly found reasons to come east and check up on him, bring him things, kiss him. I, who was to turn thirty before I dared embrace my father and have never done more than shake hands with my brothers, was dazzled. Still, I wondered how much protection one needs. Mac’s friends insistently set him up with Good Husband Material; their dinner parties looked like the waiting room at Yenta the Matchmaker’s. And Mac’s family had their version, prodding him to Come Home and Settle Down—meaning, translated from the straight, “Give up the rebellious gay phase and do what is done.”
    But Mac loved the city. He loved crowds and dinners and doing eight things every evening. “Do you realize?” he had written in one of his earliest letters, “that there are probably a million gays in New York? Allowing for variables of looks, spirit, vocation, and bad habits, each of us may have a thousand ideal mates within immediate geography. We need but look.”
    What can you project without a voice in this town of the insinuating opener and the whipcrack reply? You might show optimism, hesitation, disappointment, pain—and all too clearly. Speakers grow up learning to develop or hide their emotions; Mac had learned only to display his. Thus did he speak, as he claimed. Better, he charmed. And I mean strangers. Belligerent strangers. Even belligerent, tough strangers on a mean bad day.
    I went walking with him one afternoon when he had just received news about an aunt who had cancer; like a puppy, Mac perked up when you walked him. I’m champion at distracting wounded comrades—when all else fails, I start a fight—but Mac was half in a daze, and blundered into fresh-laid concrete on Forty-ninth Street, east of Park. One of the masons, foully irate, came over to berate him. Before I could intervene with my usual exacerbating ruckus, Mac stopped me, indicating the laborer with the philosopher’s upheld index finger and himself with a down-turned thumb.
    “He’s right and I’m wrong,” I sounded, dubiously, for Mac. He showed us the sidewalk, ran a hand over his eyes, and chided the hand with a look. “I should have been watching where I was going.”
    As the laborer blankly surveyed this latest charade of the Manhattan streets, Mac tore off a message for him.
    “‘I have had bad news,’” the man read out. “‘I’m sorry.’” He looked at Mac. “Family news, huh?”
    Mac nodded.
    “Yeah, well … yeah, sure.” He shifted his