ORIGINAL YOUTH:
THE REAL STORY OF EDMUND WHITE'S BOYHOOD ©

by
Keith A. Fleming, 1959-

Edmund White, with his gift for explicating human contradiction, could be called a poet of mixed feelings. As a boy his own contradictions were already so intricate that the interplay in him between guilt and desire, boldness and self-denial, bragging and betrayal requires some real study before properly understood. During the three years I spent writing and researching this very intimate biography of my uncle Edmund White’s boyhood, I came to see his youth as being, at heart, an inner drama: the story of a boy who kept the most compelling aspects of his life secret for the most part.

Even as a child Ed was already wily and complex enough to be misread by the people around him, and by the time he was a teenager the central focus of his life had become his intense existence as an unwilling but nonetheless "possessed" young homosexual. The tremendous internal drama going on within him regarding this forbidden sexuality was something that few suspected and none understood, making him like a spy who impersonated a normal person in daily life but filled his private hours with schemes and activities that would have shocked people (as the young Ed White himself was shocked by what he was doing). These contradictions and habits of mind are all a part of what I consider to be the "originality" of his youth—original not only because of his precociously active homosexuality (a predilection that provides a refreshing variation to the cliches of first kiss, first love, and first rejection) but because his distinctive, overall sensibility consistently came up with a fresh "take" on the life around and within him.

While I myself was growing up in the 1960s and 70s I’d often heard tantalizing bits and pieces about my uncle’s boyhood in the 1940s and 50s. My mother, his older sister, someone who continued to call her brother "Eddie" long after he’d become an adult, loved to tell stories about her and Eddie’s childhood—how, following their parents’ divorce, they and their mother Delilah lived a colorful life at the Georgian, a luxury hotel in suburban Chicago where permanent living quarters were so expensive that they were forced to economize by living in a tiny two-room apartment in which Eddie and my mother took turns sleeping on the only bed (the other making do with the floor), while their mother slept on the sofa. From Delilah, my grandmother, I would often hear how strangely poised and brilliant my uncle had been as a little boy—so much so that, characteristically putting her own self-glorifying spin on things, she told me she’d often been tempted to write a book called How to Raise a Genius.

By the time I knew E.V. and Delilah, my maternal grandparents, in the 1960s they inhabited such utterly separate worlds and had been so long-divorced that it was easy to forget they’d ever been married. They were dramatically different. He was enormous, she was tiny; he always smelled of his nauseating cigars, she of French perfume; he was difficult to be with, she so present and familiar that I saw her as another parent. She prided herself on her enlightened liberalism and the work she did with inner city retarded children and their families, while he was so flagrantly racist that he actually insisted Italians were not truly part of the white race. I remember riding as a passenger in E.V.’s car on Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway, feeling uncomfortable from both the heavy air conditioning and cigar smoke, and listening to him fume about the unfairness of the new rapid transit line that now allowed unemployed black riders to whiz alongside us slightly faster than his Cadillac.

As a grandchild, I got to know E.V. and Delilah to a degree roughly proportionate to how their children had known them in their youth—that is, I knew her almost too well and him hardly at all. In an otherwise sensitive family of afflicted souls who made an effort to be gracious and interesting, E.V. was the 800-pound gorilla—the one who did exactly what he wanted and never seemed to suffer too much. Beyond maintaining his reputation as a competent businessman and respectable citizen, he didn’t care what people thought of him. He was such a severe misanthrope, in fact, that the rest of us often laughed about his having started his own company just so he wouldn’t have to see anybody (he kept a nocturnal schedule that allowed him to work in the office each night while his employees slept). He was someone you visited only occasionally—and when you did, the visit was simply endured. He was an intimidating presence even over the telephone. I remember my mother holding out the phone to me and saying, "Grandpa White wants to talk to you, honey," and approaching that phone with all the slow-footed dread of a doomed man.

My grandmother Delilah loved to hold forth as endlessly as E.V. did, but while her ex-husband liked to lecture on impersonal subjects such as tobacco cultivation and money management, Delilah’s monologues consisted of a handful of family stories she never tired of re-telling. But today I can see that my grandmother’s stories never touched on the most interesting family happenings. But then these much juicier but unmentioned stories—such as my uncle’s having shocked her by telling her, as a fifteen-year-old, that he wanted to marry the son of a man she was dating; or her having feared, the summer he was seventeen, that he might be losing his mind due to his crushing guilt about his homosexuality—were precisely the kind of thing she still felt too troubled by to think about, let alone mention to me or anybody else.

My grandmother wrote her autobiography, Delilah: A Life in Progress, while I was living with her, a book my uncle would eventually pay to have published. She’d always been someone who went to bed early but now that she’d embarked on her first and only book, she started waking up as early as one or two in the morning so that she could enjoy hours of solitary writing "while all the world is still." Again, however, there was little mention of the juicier episodes in the family lore. No mention, for instance, that young Eddie had occasionally slept in her bed until he was twelve, or that when he was seventeen (on the night before she was scheduled to meet his psychoanalyst!) she’d rented a hotel room with a double bed for the two of them.

There’s no escaping the embarrassing precision with which my uncle’s relations with his parents adhere to the old Freudian recipe for making a son gay: take one distant father, one overwhelming mother, one impressionable boy, and bake until gay. In fact, when my uncle published his novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which contained semi-autobiographical sections about him and his parents, one exasperated gay critic charged him with undermining the greater cause of gay liberation by validating the notion that homosexuality is a by-product of warped parenting. And yet for all this I’ve become convinced by the particulars of my uncle’s youth that he was very much born and not bred gay. One of his earliest memories is of sitting in the lap of an Air Force pilot as a four-year-old boy and wanting to stay in this man’s lap because he liked the smell of him, his voice, his warmth—it’s a memory my uncle now recognizes as the first stirrings of his gay destiny.

I would even argue that his having been such a mama’s boy was something that fed off his homosexuality, rather than created it. His most incestuous-seeming acts as a boy with his mother—giving her long backrubs while she lay drunkenly in bed, helping her button up her "Merry Widow" girdle—are precisely the kind of thing a heterosexual son would have found too sexually charged to perform. In other words, to sleep in the same bed with Mom would be quite a loaded experience for a straight boy, but for a boy inherently gay it’s not nearly so big a deal. My mother, who’s been a practicing lesbian for the past quarter century and who recognizes now that she was gay all along, remembers not wanting to help her mother with her girdle because, as a "proto-lesbian" daughter, it would have been too emotionally, sexually overwhelming.

When I was young I learned the least about my uncle’s youth, ironically enough, from my uncle himself, even though I’d lived with him as a teenager in New York for two years in the mid-70s. Instead, my first major revelation about his adolescence came in 1979 when I discovered, in my grandmother’s closet, the manuscript of his first novel, Dark Currents, a book my uncle had written at sixteen about the crisis he’d just passed through. This crisis turned out to be the key episode of his adolescence. As a freshman in high school he’d decided—on the basis of his first proper date with a girl—that a brunette classmate named Sally Gunn held the power to determine his whole future by either saving him with her love or ruining him. She alone could tip the balance of his uncertain sexuality. If she would only consent to be his steady girlfriend, he was convinced she could raise him up beside her into glorious heterosexuality. Instead, when Sally Gunn rejected him and his written declaration of love, he felt doomed to a homosexual fate.

Still unpublished today, Dark Currents remains a fascinating prototype—written when the author was still a boy himself—of my uncle’s A Boy’s Own Story.

As it happens, A Boy’s Own Story, which cemented Edmund White’s literary reputation and is still perhaps his best-known book, is the work of "autofiction," as he calls his autobiographical fiction, in which he departs most from real life (the later installments of his fictional autobiography, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, have grown progressively truer to life). Many of the changes and omissions in A Boy’s Own Story were part of a deliberate (and successful) scheme to make his literary stand-in more "universal" and sympathetic to readers by toning down how actively homosexual he had been as a boy. There is no mention in the novel, for instance, of the blow jobs he regularly began giving as a thirteen-year-old boy to adult men he picked up in a train station toilet.

Nor is there any mention of just how cultivated he was from very early on. For along with censoring most of his teenage sex, Ed also withheld from A Boy’s Own Story his own story as an aspiring writer and there is thus no mention of the two novels he wrote in prep school, Dark Currents and Mrs. Morrigan, or of the key role his poetry had played in winning him his first real friends. A Boy’s Own Story also minimizes the least attractive theme in my uncle’s youth: his betrayals. This impulse to betray, rooted in his parents’ own "double betrayal" of him as a little boy (when his mother told his father to give him a belt-whipping), truly came into play after Ed began to acquire the twisted resentments and self-hatred of a gay teen living in the intensely homophobic middle America of the 1950s.

In this biography fact and fiction have been painstakingly sorted out but, more important, new material has brought to light fascinating aspects of Ed’s actual boyhood that have never been written about or, in some instances, even known. For instance, a small treasure-trove of letters written by Ed’s parents more than forty years ago surfaced shortly after I began work on the project. These rare letters, exchanged between long-divorced parents who hadn’t spoken on the phone much less seen each other since their divorce, were written only because Delilah and E.V. had both become alarmed about their son’s "abnormal development." Most of the letters concern the biggest family emergency of all: seventeen-year-old Ed’s demand that he get immediate (and royally expensive) psychoanalytic treatment.

These precious letters had been gathering dust in my mother Margie’s attic where they’d been stored among Delilah’s many other effects (she seemed to save everything) after her death. They were discovered only in 1995 when my mother started rummaging through Delilah’s things in an effort to help me in my research into Ed’s youth. I’d also begun interviewing my mother about her and Ed’s childhood, interviews that also happened to be a personal reunion for the two of us. For the past nine years I’d refused to speak to her but now, in the glow of my Edmund White project, I’d at last forgiven her for the part she’d played in my own painful adolescence. The thrill of talking to each other again after so many years infected our interviews and Margie, who has always "fetishized" her childhood anyway, was even more enchanted than usual to be summoning up the past. Because Ed had been virtually friendless until puberty, and because he and his family moved so often in the early years following the divorce, Margie is now the only intimate witness besides Ed himself to those years when she, Ed, and Delilah referred to themselves (absurdly, since they were far from brave adventurers) as "the Three Musketeers."

Margie also functioned as the perfect inside counter-source to my uncle himself. Our family has a natural confessional bent, and Margie and Ed each took candor to new heights in their interviews with me, offering up the past in hilarious, shocking, embarrassing detail. But there are limits even to my uncle’s candor (as well as to his memory of the distant past), and Margie was the one who told me about often coming home late in the evening as a high school student to find Ed and Delilah asleep in the same bed. And it was Margie who brought to life for me Ed’s whole "weirdo phase" as a fifth and sixth grader, the years when Ed would hole himself up in his smelly cave of a bedroom overlooking the alley, playing the opera records he checked out from the library, practicing his harp or his tap dancing, and acting like he was "not quite of this world." Margie’s memory for childhood details proved to be astonishingly vivid—be it Delilah’s difficulties in getting in and out of her Merry Widow girdle, or the "whiky" bottle Delilah kept handy in the glove compartment for alcoholic refreshment during the long road trips she, Margie, and Ed always seemed to be on in the late 1940s.

Other relatives as well as boyhood friends of my uncle (who include the novelist Thomas McGuane) provided interesting perspectives and objective confirmations, but in a youth in which so much of the story was secret and interior, I felt it was crucial to get as much as I could from the horse’s mouth. I discovered that the best time to reach Ed for an hour’s interview over the phone was in the morning. He’d be at his best then—fresh, focused, willing—his enthusiasm not yet depleted by his exhausting daily round of socializing. In the morning he’d be deeply relaxed and expansive, and occasionally I’d hear a discreet splash in the background and realize he was talking to me from his bathtub! Of course, reaching my uncle in Paris in the morning meant calling him from New England in the middle of the night, but then—like Ed’s father, E.V.—I too can be something of a night owl.

In retrospect I see that the magic of my interviews with Ed had a lot to do with how unusually available he happened to be during the early months of 1995. His lover Hubert Sorin had died of AIDS the previous spring, he hadn’t yet met his current partner, Michael Carroll, and he’d begun feeling "returned to my lonely adolescence." Live-in lovers are essential for his emotional well-being and Ed would sometimes complain to me that for all the dinner parties he gave and attended, he’d always find himself alone again and lonely at the end of the evening. In early 1995 he also had the feeling he was living out his final days. He’d been diagnosed HIV positive in 1985 and in his new emptiness he’d begun to suspect that his own number must be due to come up soon; worse, he was beset with a sense of "living posthumously," of having outlived his friends and lovers. It was a terrible way to feel, and yet it made him an ideal interviewee. Ed is ordinarily a person who’s always a bit distracted by having his fingers in so many pies, but during the extraordinary time of my interviews with him he became as pensive and fond of probing and coming to grips with the past as someone making a final confession. These days, now that he’s once again living happily with a boyfriend and feeling reasonably confident about his health (he continues to be asymptotic), he’s not nearly so patient and confiding. But of course healthy people are preoccupied with the present, and it would be weird if the past continued to hold a morbid fascination for him.

Years ago Ed told me that his image of ideal intimacy was two souls floating up to heaven side by side, their intimacy all the deeper and purer for having been freed of their bodies and become invisible, cozily confiding voices. This image kept coming to mind during my telephone interviews with him. It was somehow better that we weren’t talking to each other in person because, with us, that would only have made our sessions more self-conscious and distracted. On the phone we could happily, productively explore the past as Ed went about resettling himself in his bath and I reached for another cigarette and noticed the moon was setting outside my window.

Edmund White’s youth, I’ve come to believe, is by far the most accessible part of his life for mainstream American readers. It just seems to be a fact of life at present that in order to break through to a wider readership a gay author must include a healthy helping of straight people among his cast of characters. It’s thus no great mystery that A Boy’s Own Story, centered as it is around family and his earliest, mostly straight, friends, remains his most widely read book. His youth, it turns out, was the one time he lived in a predominantly heterosexual world.

Chapter One: Divided House

Like so many of Edmund White’s reactions to the events of his extraordinary childhood and adolescence, his first reaction at age seven to his parents’ decision to get divorced is startling at first yet makes perfect sense once understood. His parents’ decision to divorce was for him "an accession into self-consciousness." The explanation for this startling reaction is that by having overheard his parents conducting their "divorce conference" in which they discussed "their lives and our lives (‘I cannot lead my life in this way,’ ‘The children have their whole lives before them’)," young Eddie learned "that a life could be changed and that one could enter a brand-new, better world." More fundamentally, it was by learning that a life could be changed that seven-year-old Eddie discovered he had a life at all—as well as an identity and a future.

This feeling that he hadn’t quite started living until after his parents’ divorce is symptomatic of how completely neglected he was as a small child. For the truth is that throughout his first seven years Ed was virtually ignored by his intimidating family and, for someone so sociable by nature (by puberty he would be equating existence itself with social interaction), such extreme isolation had a profound effect. This neglect, together with a sense of "anguish and conflict in the house," led little Eddie to become "very disassociated from other people. I was very withdrawn and self-loathing and rather uninterested in humanity in general."

Edmund White had the misfortune to be born into a family that, while small (there was just one sibling, a sister) and financially well-off, had no room for him emotionally and was beginning to fall apart. His sister Margie, three and a half years older, was a strong-willed girl who resented her little brother’s existence and rarely wanted anything to do with him. His father, called "E.V." (the initials of his first and middle names, Edmund Valentine), an intimidating and misanthropic man who’d never wanted children in the first place, was now more remote than ever from family life after having started up his own business about a year before Ed’s birth. And his mother, Delilah, who later, after the divorce, would both burden and encourage her young son by becoming his "best friend," was at this point so consumed by the slowly crumbling state of her and E.V.’s marriage that she had little time for anything else.

E.V. and Delilah had both been born and raised in Texas, but they’d been living up north all their adult lives. E.V. was a physically strong man over six feet tall who in appearance—lanky, pot-bellied, long-faced, big-eared—somewhat resembled President Lyndon Johnson (a fellow Texan from the same age group). Delilah was quite tiny (just five feet tall), someone Ed would, as a teenager, laugh about with his sister because Delilah so much resembled Amanda Wingfield, the melodramatic, very southern mother in Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie who speaks of "gentlemen callers" and is in the habit of waking her children up by calling out, "Rise and Shine!"

Delilah and E.V. had met at the College of Industrial Arts, a small women’s junior college in Denton, Texas where Delilah was a student and E.V. the son of the school’s dean. E.V. was just sixteen, two years younger than Delilah, when they started dating. Three years later, in 1924, the two got married on the spur of the moment, keeping the marriage a secret both because of E.V.’s youth (he gave his age as twenty-one on the marriage license but was in fact nineteen) and because E.V. rightly feared his parents’ reaction to his marrying a girl clearly a cut below him socially. When E.V.’s parents did find out a short time later, his mother angrily confronted him by saying, "If you had to have sex, why didn’t you go buy it?"

E.V.’s parents threatened at first to have the marriage annulled but then relented and let the marriage stand. Later in life, after his twenty-three-year marriage to Delilah had ended in divorce, E.V. himself dismissed the marriage in the same terms his mother had flung in his face: it was a regrettable act of youthful folly committed out of an impatience to have sex.

After E.V. received a degree in Civil Engineering (with honors) from the University of Colorado, he and Delilah lived briefly in Gary, Indiana, where E.V. worked as an engineer for U.S. Steel, and then in Youngstown, Ohio. By late 1927 they’d moved to Cincinnati where they would live out the final two decades of their marriage. Although E.V. and Delilah were both excessively talkative, upwardly mobile Texans who loved Cadillacs and symphonies and were glad to leave Texas behind for the opportunities of the north, it was the dramatic differences between them that were so apparent. For along with their huge difference in height, they were also polar opposites in temperament and beliefs. He was stoic and cold, while she was warm and impulsive; she had a very personal connection to God, often talking to him "one-on-one," while he declared that he would never set foot "in any goddamned church." He was conservative and frankly racist, while she was liberal and, decades before it became a matter of course for educated white Americans, proud of her enlightened attitude towards black people. He was a misanthrope who preferred things to people and who later in life avoided his own employees by working at night, while she had a tireless interest in and curiosity about people. And while Delilah could be a reckless spendthrift inclined to live beyond her means, E.V., for all the money he accumulated, was always stringent and dully responsible in financial matters. Finally, while E.V.’s travels never took him outside North America, Delilah spent the second half of her long life happily globetrotting. It was because his parents were such a pair of opposites that Eddie felt, long before their divorce, that he lived in a "divided house."

The steady unraveling of E.V. and Delilah’s marriage and Ed’s birth in 1940 came to seem so interrelated that in 1947, soon after the divorce, seven-year-old Eddie broke down and began sobbing uncontrollably. Delilah had taken to implying none too subtly to her young son that his being born had set in motion the events that led to the divorce and Eddie, who personally welcomed the divorce as a "deliverance" from his frightening father, had burst into tears because he felt responsible for his mother’s anguish. This terrible anguish of his mother’s went a long way towards forming the dark side of Edmund White’s underlying character. Years before his troubled feelings about homosexuality would accentuate all this in him still further, the anguish that filled his mother from practically the time he was born created in Ed an enormous, free-floating sense of guilt as well as a fundamental insecurity about his place with people that has led him throughout his life to put an unusual amount of effort into pleasing and winning over everyone around him.

Because Delilah’s anguish had such a devastating effect on both her and Ed, it’s worth looking into what actually broke up her and E.V.’s marriage. Their divorce can be seen now as the consequence not so much of Ed’s birth as of Delilah’s inability to tend simultaneously to two "babies": her infant son and her husband. In 1939 E.V. had decided to found his own company, the White Industrial Sales & Equipment Company, because he’d grown fed up with the Cincinnati chemical company he’d worked for as a salesman for the past several years after they’d failed to extend the promotion he’d both expected and believed he deserved. Ironically, it was Delilah who provided her cautious husband with the final push of encouragement he needed to take the plunge and go into business for himself—ironic, because E.V.’s new business set up a situation in which Delilah would be found unworthy as a wife.

By 1941, when Eddie was a one-year-old toddler, E.V. was struggling to make White Industrial Sales a success and had adopted the nocturnal schedule—rising late in the afternoon and working throughout the night—that was most natural to him and that he would adhere to for the rest of his life. He began to insist that Delilah accompany him to the office each night because he wanted her by his side as he worked. But after several weeks of this Delilah begged off, complaining that sitting up all night with him had so exhausted her that it was threatening her health. It was at this point that E.V. began to turn more and more to his secretary, Kay Beard, who was soon giving him everything he needed from a woman and helpmate. Kay was the third employee E.V. had hired, and the first from outside the family (his younger brother Bill White and wife Helen were on the staff from the beginning). After several years as his mistress, Kay became—just weeks after E.V.’s divorce from Delilah had gone through—his second wife. Kay’s union with E.V. now looks so natural and inevitable, particularly given how poorly matched E.V. and Delilah were, that the only surprise, really, is that they waited six long years before tying the knot. This delay had nothing to do with the quality of their rapport and everything to do with E.V.’s hesitancy to risk scaring off business in conservative Cincinnati by tainting his image with a scandalous divorce.

What won E.V.’s heart was clearly the intense, single-minded, around-the-clock devotion to him that Kay displayed, a devotion that compared so favorably with Delilah’s self-centered grumbling. During these last years of marriage to Delilah, E.V.’s life revolved solely around White Industrial Sales. He spent nearly every waking hour at the office, engrossed in the risky enterprise of making and keeping his company financially viable, and even if he hadn’t been conducting a love affair with Kay he still would have seen infinitely more of her than Delilah back at home. When he did see Delilah, what he saw all too often was a spendthrift wife who had the annoying habit, moreover, of praying aloud each time they were about to have sex.

Then too, when Delilah went back to school to study psychology she took to psychoanalyzing him, something he found both fatuous and irritating. Kay, by contrast, was not only devoted to him but genuinely interested in his business (which was virtually his only interest), throwing herself into managing the books and typing his correspondence. And though Kay was a farm girl from Carey, Ohio with a high school education, she was nonetheless much better at sweet-talking clients at business luncheons than Delilah, who had an egotistical and charmless way of leading nearly every conversation, no matter the topic, back to flattering stories about herself. E.V. may have even had the example of his own father in mind. "Dean White," as E.V.’s father was known, was repeatedly forced to turn down the presidency of his junior college because he felt his eccentric wife—a strong-willed, loose cannon of a woman who refused to cook, among other things, declaring it to be a waste of time—would only embarrass him amidst all the entertaining a college president must do.

Helen White, the wife of E.V.’s brother Bill, knew both Kay and Delilah at this time (she both worked alongside Kay at the office and lived for a time with E.V. and Delilah). Helen observed that E.V. seemed to prefer Kay to Delilah because he himself was quite competitive and disliked Delilah’s strong personality which had a way of "attracting all the attention." One could say that Delilah’s tragedy was that desperate as she was to hold onto E.V., she was at the same time constitutionally incapable of taking a backseat to a man who needed precisely that. Kay, on the other hand, was far more conventional in that her ambitions were limited to her status in Cincinnati’s social world and thus dovetailed neatly and traditionally with E.V.’s business aspirations.

Although Ed had the misfortune to be born into such a turbulent, distracted family, his being born at all can nonetheless be seen as a lucky quirk of fate. Delilah had had to plead with E.V. at length each time she wanted to have a child before winning his reluctant consent (in not wanting children, E.V., oddly enough, was taking after his own mother, Ollie Martin White, who had made a point of telling E.V. while he was growing up that she’d daily tried to abort him by beating her stomach with her fists while pregnant with him). In 1934 Delilah had given birth to a first child, Carolyn, who’d died of a cerebral hemorrhage after only a few hours. Had Carolyn lived, E.V. almost certainly would have drawn the line at two children following the birth of their second daughter, Margie.

As a woman who waited until her thirties to have children, Delilah had complications with all three of her births. Following Margie’s birth there had been a brief scare during which it seemed possible that she too might die. And shortly after Eddie was born he suffered a rather unusual convulsion or seizure while he and Delilah were still in the hospital. Because she was now thirty-six, Delilah was advised by her doctor not to have any more children and to name Eddie "caboose." The infant Eddie quickly recovered and the mysterious seizure was soon forgotten. What Delilah did remember—and never tired of proclaiming throughout the rest of her life—was that Eddie’s specialness had been immediately apparent: he "had the largest head I had ever seen on a newborn. The large head and small body made him look like a tadpole."

E.V. may have never wanted children but Eddie was nonetheless his only son and Eddie’s birth on January 13, 1940 filled E.V. with an "abstract, dynastic" pride; in a rare burst of personal effusiveness, he telephoned everyone he knew to say he had a son. This dynastic pride was also reflected in Eddie’s being named Edmund Valentine White III. In everyday life, however, E.V. was disappointed by how meek and unathletic his little son was turning out to be; in the end, E.V. showed even less interest in Eddie than he did in Margie. It didn’t help matters that Eddie could also be an effeminate little boy, fascinated by "women’s stuff" such as nail polish and perfume and occasionally prone to walking about wearing Delilah’s hats and carrying her purse.

The scant amount of attention Delilah paid her children was unusual even in the upper-middle-class Cincinnati world of the 1940s that E.V. and Delilah inhabited, a world where live-in black "help" allowed wives—as housewives relieved of housework and child care—to attend Friday matinee concerts of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. But though neither E.V. nor Delilah, as deeply preoccupied parents, took much of an active interest in the children, it came to be understood that Margie was "his" child while Eddie was Delilah’s. And interestingly, in a family in which both children would grow up to be gay, it was Margie who became, by default, E.V.’s "true son" in that it was she who was the athlete, who showed competitive fire, and who would play rousing ping pong games with her father. An unexpected, embarrassing spotlight was trained on Eddie and Margie’s gender-bending one summer when an outspoken lifeguard, having watched Eddie and Margie at play on the beach, shouted down to Margie, "You should have been the boy and he should have been the girl!"

Eddie, who had inherited his mother’s warm brown eyes and sociable disposition, came to think of his father and sister, with their fair hair and hard-driving personalities, as "the Aryans" of the family. Early photos and home movies of Margie and Eddie point up the differences between them: Margie "a tall, taut platinum blonde," confident and icy-eyed, and Eddie a sweet and somewhat frail little boy in a sailor suit. But though Delilah had taken to exhibiting her own baby photo side by side with a baby photo of Eddie, proudly declaring that "Everyone who visits says, ‘Oh Delilah, you two look so much alike with your big brown eyes!’," Eddie had in fact inherited many more of his father’s features, from E.V.’s long face and high forehead to his big jug ears, deep-set eyes, and thin-lipped, wobbly mouth.

Yet Eddie was so far from being his father’s son that fear would always be uppermost in his feelings for E.V., even long after Ed had become an adult. Two vivid scenes in Ed’s autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story define his relationship to his father in the years before the divorce. In the first scene the Boy (as I will call the narrator of A Boy’s Own Story), who rarely sees his mysterious father because of the father’s eccentric nocturnal schedule, is prodded by his mother late one afternoon into entering the bedroom of his just-awakened father and giving him a back rub: "On the bed, face down, lay my naked father under sheets, like a sea monster beached and sick in a tide pool of foam. The mingled smells of night sweat and stale cigar smoke awed me. . . ."

Now that the father’s mysterious and intimidating presence has been established, the decisive encounter between father and son is presented. The Boy has been bad and his mother has asked the father to punish the Boy by whipping him with a leather belt. After the father orders his son to drop his pants and lie upon the bed, the Boy finds he

Unmentioned in the novel (but adding to the terror, the torture of the experience) is that, hours before E.V. arrived on the scene, Delilah had already told Eddie that he was going to be beaten—something that condemned him to a "long period of suspense" while waiting for his father to come home and administer the punishment. But what is even more striking than the Boy’s terror in this passage is the perception that the father had suddenly become an enormous child himself, "a heartless boy" whose sadistic relish inflicts upon the Boy’s mind a lasting and poisoned sense of "bitter objectivity." "It’s one thing if your father loves you and it hurts him as much as it hurts you," Ed says of the belt whipping, explaining that because E.V. had instead made him feel he was "in the hands of a tyrant" the effect was to create in him a "deep distrust, a feeling of alienation" towards his parents and, by extension, towards the world at large. For by "bitter objectivity" Ed means a loss of faith in people, a feeling of "me against them" that he would continue to feel even as a gay adult among gay people. This loss of faith made Eddie realize—at the startlingly early age of three—that "currying favor" and "dissembling" were the best means of dealing with people (a habit of mind that became so ingrained in him that by the time he read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, for example, Holden Caulfield’s being "so appalled by the world’s phoniness never made sense to me because I’d never thought the world was anything but phony").

The belt whipping was also Eddie’s introduction to betrayal; and because it had been his mother’s idea in the first place that he be whipped, Eddie viewed the whole experience as a "double betrayal." This sense of having been cruelly betrayed is the origin of another habit of mind Ed has kept for a lifetime: "When I’m betrayed, I’m never surprised." In the life of someone who would go on to betray others himself—for, as will be seen, Ed’s betrayals were to become an important theme with many variations—Delilah and E.V.’s betrayal of their little son can be seen as a kind of original sin. (Alternatively, as some readers may find themselves thinking, it could be said that it was rather Eddie’s extreme reaction to being whipped that led to all these fundamental attitudes and habits of mind in him.)

If Eddie feared his father, he also feared his older sister Margie (indeed, in A Boy’s Own Story the sister also wields a sadistic belt). Moreover, just as E.V. was intimidating yet largely unavailable, so too was Margie someone who both held herself aloof from Eddie and occasionally tormented him. In fact, what usually provoked Margie’s ire was precisely Eddie’s attempts to join her and her circle of friends from Miss Dorhety’s School for Girls in play.

The belt whipping, the confrontations by the empty swimming pool, and all the other events of Ed’s early childhood took place in and around the White family house at 8 Beech Lane in Cincinnati’s East Walnut Hills. The house stood at the end of a shady lane and overlooked a steep, wooded ravine. These woods gave the property a remote feel (as did the gloomy and mysterious Home for the Incurables which stood nearby) and it was easy to forget that Madison Road, a four-lane thoroughfare thronging with cars and trolleys, lay just two blocks away. It was also hard to imagine that Beech Lane, just two blocks long, was in fact an enclave situated in a kind of border zone between the far wealthier homes to the east and the much poorer, and largely black, quarter to the west. This in-between position was mirrored in the family’s financial standing. For the Whites were now "at the lower end of the upper crust" (the Beech Lane house, which they rented for $100 a month, while nice enough was nonetheless much smaller than the houses of Margie’s classmates at the private school she attended, Miss Doherty’s School for Girls; the father of one friend, for instance, was a vice president at Proctor and Gamble).

Margie was sometimes capable of inflicting "really mean things" on her little brother for no reason at all. The middle finger of Ed’s right hand, for example, is still slightly indented near its tip from the time Margie asked him to place it in the hinge of an escritoire she had in her room: when her trusting little brother dutifully did as he was told, Margie promptly closed the hinge on the finger. And yet at other times Margie—to her own surprise—could be her brother’s protector. Once, when Eddie was three, he’d had a nasty run-in with a neighborhood bully named Rodney while riding his tricycle down Beech Lane. When Margie learned what Rodney had done, she "just about killed this kid," telling him, "You leave my little brother alone!" Afterwards, Margie felt "shocked that I was that protective."

Margie and Eddie got along much better during the long summer vacations the family would spend each summer on Mullet Lake in northern Michigan, possibly because at Mullet Lake Margie was without her "tribe of girls"—her circle of friends from Miss Dorhety’s. The family had originally started coming to northern Michigan as a means of providing Margie some relief from her allergies (Mullet Lake being far enough north to be above the "pollen line"), and after staying in rented cottages the first few summers, E.V. eventually bought a seven-bedroom summer house on the lake that was bigger than the Beech Lane house in Cincinnati. In this enormous summer "cottage" Eddie and Margie spent hours entertaining themselves by "dressing up and doing all these ‘shows’" in a separate apartment above the garage.

It was while up at Mullet Lake one summer that Delilah was confronted with some startling news that made it impossible for her to continue to overlook what was going on between her husband and his secretary, Kay Beard. As had become the family’s established routine, Delilah and the two children (along with Anna, the live-in black "help") had gone to Mullet Lake for the summer while E.V. remained at work in Cincinnati, visiting them when he could on weekends. Accompanying them this particular summer was E.V.’s mother, known by Delilah as "Mother White." Mother White had long forgotten her old wish to have E.V. and Delilah’s marriage annulled and over the years had become friends with Delilah, even managing to talk Delilah into converting to Christian Science for a time.

Colorful Mother White was a stylish, formal-looking woman with delicate, porcelain skin and carefully kept hair who nonetheless loved to gamble on horse races as well as perform rough chores such as replacing shingles on the roof. By way of explanation for her "dual personality," she would say, "I was born with an inner war. My mother was a beautiful, refined woman from Ohio, while my father was a cotton-buying, horse-trading rough man from Texas." Mother White not only refused to cook for husband, forcing them to take their meals at the college cafeteria or at a nearby boarding house all their married lives, but also refused to keep house or sleep with him. She could also be quite domineering, never hesitating to meddle in the lives around her. Unasked, she would set about rearranging the furniture in the home of her other daughter-in-law, Helen White, for example, and had once dragged Helen into a department store they happened to be passing because she didn’t like the hat Helen had on. Then too, she had tried but failed to spirit her prettiest granddaughter, Sue White, off to Hollywood where she was convinced she could become the new Shirley Temple.

Soon after arriving at Mullet Lake this particular summer, Mother White dropped a bombshell on Delilah: "You are losing your husband to another woman, and I am returning to Cincinnati, by bus, to look into the whole matter." Sure enough, Mother White discovered upon her return that E.V. had moved Kay Beard into 8 Beech Lane. In the ensuing showdown over E.V.’s adultery, E.V. ended up ordering Mother White to leave the house and never come back. It turned out to be a decisive encounter between him and his mother for, as it happened, Mother White never did return to Cincinnati (she died just a few years later).

Even when it’s taken into account how truly scandalous adultery and divorce were held to be in the middle America of the 1940s, it’s striking that E.V. and his mother never patched up their rift. After all, E.V. had always been crazy about his mother, who like him was a night owl; when the two of them were "visiting with" each other they would sit up and talk all night. As a boy E.V. had faithfully served her, daily brushing out her beautiful hair and doing the laborious work—in those days before washing machines—of washing the family laundry by hand. What is more surprising is that E.V. also admired his difficult, nutty mother more than he did his father, dean of a woman’s college for thirty years, because his mother had gumption, energy, and an independent streak (in a small, informal way she was also a shrewd businesswoman) whereas his father, who "did everything by the clock," merely subsisted on a college salary. Yet Mother White’s favorite son had always been not E.V. but her much less ambitious younger son Bill, whom she had sometimes kept home from school so that he could do the housework she loathed and keep her company.

When Mother White died there was talk of a "family melancholia" and rumors that she had committed suicide. Moreover, on the day she died Eddie happened to peek into his father’s study and "found him standing behind my sister’s chair, brushing her hair and crying."

Now that Delilah had been jolted by this shocking evidence of how serious her husband’s affair with Kay had become, she reacted by making plans to attend graduate school—enrolling that fall in a master’s degree program in psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Delilah had always nursed ambitions of her own. As a teenager she’d struggled with her mother and stepfather to be allowed to go to college at all and several years into her marriage, in 1934, she’d gone back to complete the undergraduate studies she’d left unfinished when she married E.V. At that time her return to school had been motivated by a competitive urge to stay abreast of her husband’s growing professional success in some way.

Now in the fall of 1943 she was motivated by what was quite clearly panic about the uncertainties suddenly on the horizon. But though her instinct proved accurate about the need to prepare herself for what might be the need to make a life for herself in the event of divorce, that divorce was still more than three long years into the future. In the meantime salvaging the marriage still seemed possible, if she could just ride out the storm. Of course, what is so clear now is that by holding out such hopes she only lay herself open to new heights of torment. For the latter months of 1943 marked the beginning of what would be several years of shattering anguish for Delilah as she struggled to live with E.V. and Kay’s affair much as someone slowly going mad might watch her mental state deteriorating with a mixture of helplessness and shame (she never told her parents what was happening until the very end of the marriage).

As it happened, Delilah’s return to school was linked with the beginning of Eddie’s education, for they both entered programs at the University of Cincinnati. Three-year-old Eddie began attending the University’s demonstration nursery school. As Delilah’s self-published autobiography, Delilah: A Life in Progress, would have it, the idea of pursuing a master’s degree happened to occur to her as a means of productively passing the time while waiting to drive her son back from nursery school each day (gas rationing during these war years limiting her to only one trip to the University per day). Yet because this fall was also the beginning of her mounting alarm about E.V. and Kay, it seems far more likely that it was the other way around—that is, that Delilah opted to go to the University herself and then found it convenient to enroll Eddie there as well. This rearrangement of the truth thus seems to be a revealing example of Delilah’s habit of portraying herself (both to herself and to others) as having been far more selfless and devoted to her children than was actually the case.

The demonstration nursery school was overseen by a Dr. Arlitt, a specialist in child psychology who also happened to be Delilah’s teacher and mentor in the psychology department at the University of Cincinnati and whose theories on child psychology Delilah would continue to quote to Eddie and Margie for years to come. Yet (somewhat mysteriously) after attending the demonstration nursery school for a year, Eddie was not invited back for a second year at the school (even though, at age four, he was still a year shy of starting kindergarten). Part of the mystery of Eddie’s "dismissal" lies in his having been, at least in some respects, a model student. As Delilah saw it:

Ed’s own recollections confirm this: "I was considered very unusual as a child because I was very altruistic. Apparently I was not only concerned about the other children but also about the teachers. I would say things like, ‘You look very tired today. Do you take a nap?’ And that was considered astounding and weird."

When Dr. Arlitt told Delilah that Eddie would not be invited back for a second year, all that she offered by way of explanation was that in his need to continually "administer" to the other children Eddie "wasn’t one of them"—that is, didn’t fit in with his classmates—and that for a young boy to display such an acute sense of responsibility must mean that the situation was putting him under too great a strain. (Overhearing Ed’s discussing, in 1996, his year at nursery school, Ed’s lover, Michael Carroll, said to him: "You mean, you were running around making sure everyone was all right even then? You’re still doing that today.") While Dr. Arlitt was probably putting the best possible face on the situation (after all, Delilah was her student in the psychology department), this notion of Eddie’s having been a little boy who in his constant fussing over everyone wasn’t one of the gang likely contains the essence of the real explanation. For the reasons for Eddie’s dismissal almost certainly involved his being a disruption to the natural order of the classroom. Dr. Arlitt, who had set up the demonstration nursery school as a kind of laboratory in which to study young children’s behavior in general, would not have been interested in any individual child, especially one so unusual as Eddie. Then too, Eddie was "undersocialized" and "probably didn’t know how to play with other kids," and thus was probably perceived by the nursery school staff as being "too neurotic" and "overwrought" and more trouble than he was worth.

What is fascinating about this early glimpse into Eddie’s behavior is how many fundamental elements of his personality, along with some major themes of his boyhood, were already in place. For if Delilah and Dr. Arlitt had found Eddie’s precocious compassion for others astounding, they would have been still more astonished had they known that this compassion was something that Eddie was consciously affecting. For each time he was praised by the nursery school staff, young Eddie would feel guilty because he knew he had won the praise through deviousness.

At the remarkably early age of three Eddie had come to feel that it was not enough to act "naturally"; people had to be courted—an outlook that originated partly in his having discovered that his distracted mother "responded so well when you babied her." Of course, Eddie’s courting of people also had its roots in the "double betrayal" of the belt whipping and his consequent loss of faith in people. But the very idea of a three-year-old boy’s having to "baby" his mother suggests that the erratic and provisional nature of Delilah’s love and attention gave Eddie such an enfeebled sense of his own self-worth that he’d concluded that people would not take an interest in him unless he courted them. Moreover, these early feelings of insecurity would seem to be the origin of what some people have seen as the "almost crazy" need Ed has had nearly all his life to win the affection of hundreds, if not thousands of people (people such as Ed’s former editor Michael Denneny, for example, have been bewildered by his seemingly bottomless appetite for meeting and winning over new people). Finally, Eddie’s having been a three-year-old who felt forced to pretend he cared about and sympathized with his mother’s problems would appear to do much to explain the sometimes ambiguous nature of his kindness—an ambiguity that people who know Ed today can’t help but sense lies behind the artful solicitousness of his personal charm.

Doubting himself and his instincts, acting deviously, and feeling guilty about his deviousness were feelings and habits of mind that would stay with Ed all through his youth and into adulthood. His experience at the demonstration nursery school also introduced him to what would become two more themes of his youth: his involvement in the world of psychological evaluation, and his being an adult-oriented boy who was not completely at ease with other children. For an irony that can’t be ignored is that of Delilah’s studying child psychology at the very time she was helping to make her own child so neurotic that he was unable to integrate himself properly into his first real encounter with children his own age (after all, Delilah had enrolled Eddie in nursery school specifically because she felt "he needed children his own age with whom to play"). Still more oddly (or sadly), Delilah had become "so totally self-absorbed" that she gave no thought to enrolling Eddie in a new nursery school the following year, a decision that left him to languish at home by himself throughout the 1944/45 school year. It was to be the loneliest time in his life.

During this lonely year Eddie spent at home alone as a four- and five-year-old, he cried every morning as Margie and Delilah left the house. Eddie was not technically alone in the house, however, for Anna, the "live-in help" Delilah had engaged after Eddie’s birth and who stayed with the family until the divorce, was on hand.^[1] Anna was in fact someone Eddie had seen far more of than his own mother—indeed, when Eddie had been an infant it was Anna who had slept each night beside his crib. Even when Eddie was two and three, Anna would often sleep on a cot in his bedroom, allowing him to sleep in her "governing shade and disturbingly intimate smell." In part because he was afraid of the dark, Eddie had become so attached to having Anna sleeping beside him that E.V. was led to declare, in one of his more awful and memorable statements, that "That boy can’t go to sleep without the smell of nigger in his nostrils."

The demeaning racism prevalent in the white Cincinnati of the 1940s is also reflected in Anna’s having been privately referred to at times within the family as "Black Anna." For her part, the true nature of Anna’s feelings for the family likely had much to do with being a black woman trapped in an overtly racist world where she was exploited as cheap labor by whites—by the Whites, in her case. For far from having been a second or true mother to Eddie, Anna was actually a "cold fish" who never talked or played with him and merely endured his presence. "She had the housework to do, of course; she wasn’t a nanny, she was a maid, really. She was always sweeping and looking kind of gruff and saying, ‘Get in here and eat your lunch.’ I don’t think there was any love wasted. I think Mother probably hired her thinking she’d be this nice warm black woman who would be this sort of Aunt Jemima type."

But if Delilah found it convenient to sentimentalize Anna and her relationship with Eddie, Ed’s psychiatrist in the 1970s, Dr. Charles Silverstein (with whom Ed co-wrote The Joy of Gay Sex), tried to make Anna into a sexual abuser. "I remember Dr. Silverstein used to speculate that there had been some sexual abuse of me by her. He thought my fear of her was way out of line and must be explained by some other problem." But this never rang true for Ed; his own explanation for his fear of Anna is simply that he was responding to the considerable "anger and pride in Anna. I feel like I’ve always been very sensitive to black anger against white people and I think it shows up in Blue Boy in Black"—a play Ed wrote in college about a black maid and gardener who set out to destroy the white family they work for.

Nevertheless, it was Eddie’s unwitting racial insensitivity that led to his once thoughtlessly insulting Anna—something that constituted another great trauma of his early childhood. "There was a rhyme that I’d learned from the other kids, maybe my sister: ‘Eenie meenie mainnie moe, catch a nigger by the toe . . . .’ I was sitting idly saying that to myself in an armchair in the living room, and the maid heard me and she was furious. I felt so bad—I hadn’t even thought what the words meant." When Anna, deeply offended, reproached him, Eddie "went racing up to the attic and hid myself there. My mother finally came home and found me up in the attic and said, ‘Well, you have to go down and apologize.’ To me, that was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever done."

It was during this lonely year at home that Eddie invented three imaginary playmates: Cottage Cheese, Georgie-Porgie, and Tom-Thumb-Thumb (which the four-year-old Eddie pronounced "Tom-Shum-Shum").

Ed today finds it interesting that there’s only one girl but two boys—as though he needed two characters to express his feelings about being a boy and about boys in general. Moreover, that both invented boys were not, in practice, playmates at all (since Tom didn’t want to play with Eddie—or anyone—and Eddie didn’t want to play with Georgie) would seem to be an illustration of Freud’s concept of the repetition compulsion, as laid out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which holds that children in play will re-create painful experiences in order to gain mastery over their fears.

For Georgie-Porgie can be seen as a kid brother who allowed Eddie to play an older sibling who treated his kid brother not with the cruel contempt Eddie’s real sister, Margie, treated him to, but with a tolerance that, while condescending, included real concern. Tom-Thumb-Thumb, on the other hand, was almost certainly inspired by the "bad boys" who played down in the thickly wooded ravine behind the White home on Beech Lane. Eddie himself often spent whole days exploring the two acres of woods at the bottom of the ravine, following the little stream that flowed from an open sewer, accompanied by the family dog, Timmy. At night these older boys, whom Eddie envied and feared and found fascinating, could be heard "hollooing to one another" down in the darkness. "There was this menacing feeling that the waifs of the city were going through this otherwise idyllic wood." Eddie’s fascination with Tom-Thumb-Thumb and the bad boys was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with wild boys—a theme that would go on to encompass everything from the first boy Ed had sex with (a kind of retarded wild boy) to explaining some of his attraction, as an adult, to the life of Jean Genet.

Cottage Cheese, of course, is clearly an example of simple wish fulfillment: she’s the older sister he wished he’d had, as bossy as he’d seen his real sister be with her friends but otherwise appealingly different—a friendly companion as well as an ally and advisor.

Most important of all, these imaginary playmates constitute an early example of the theme of "the exaggerated consolations of the imagination" in Ed’s youth. Eddie initially had been drawn into the world of the imagination when—on his third birthday, during a performance of Sleeping Beauty given at the Beech Lane house by a marionette troupe—he found the puppet characters easier to understand and thus more real than the "opaque" people around him in real life. When Eddie turned to inventing characters of his own (his imaginary playmates), however, he discovered two unexpectedly unpleasant aspects of the imagination: that its creations are more real to the observer than to the creator, and that the act of creative imagination is itself an "admission of some sort of failure."

Eddie had first noticed that creations are more real to the observer than the creator by observing that the puppets in the performance of Sleeping Beauty, while "stronger than life" to him, the observer, were "feeble" creations to the puppeteers themselves; conversely, while he himself "didn’t really like my imaginary friends precisely because they were so irritatingly vague and unreal," these creatures were "almost, at times, less real to me than to my indulgent mother . . . ." As for creative imagination being an admission of failure, this truth was self-evident from the time he invented Cottage Cheese, Georgie, and Tom; after all, he’d been forced to resort to these unsatisfying playmates in the first place only because no real children, such as his sister, would play with him. The theme of the exaggerated consolations of the imagination can thus be more precisely defined as the disappointing level of reality offered by one’s own imaginative creations (for as Ed would discover as an adult author, it was only books written by others that he could find satisfying).

Not surprisingly, learning to read was something Eddie experienced as a dramatic breakthrough, for books provided easy access to the more convincing creations of other people. Reading liberated him from himself and his immediate surroundings. For such an isolated boy learning to read was as important as a prisoner at last being permitted to receive books in his cell. Ed would later compare the experience to a door swinging open in a stuffy room, for soon after learning to read he happened to walk into his mother’s bathroom one day and as the two of them talked while she lay in the bath it suddenly dawned on him that, in books, he had discovered he possessed "this incredible escape hatch any time I wanted it" and could thus be "free of her and everybody else." By having learned to read he was no longer completely dependent on the whims of his often indifferent family and no longer limited to the world of his own creative imagination.

Anyone who knows the brilliantly fluent speaker Edmund White has been throughout his adult life might be surprised to learn that he had a rather serious stuttering problem as a little boy. One possible cause for this stuttering may have been Eddie’s odd isolation and lack of real—that is, human—playmates. There may also have been a genetic component, for Delilah’s brother, Jack Teddlie, had stuttered so terribly as a child that, like Demosthenes, he took to stuffing pebbles in his mouth. Then too, by the time he was three or four Eddie had become very high strung (as he would remain all through his youth and into early adulthood). Whatever the cause of his stuttering, when Eddie was about five Delilah grew concerned enough about the problem to send him to a psychologist whose treatment centered around getting him to relax. "I would go to this woman often and I would lie down and she would sit beside me and lift my arms and let them drop. Then lift my feet up and down. And lift my head and let it gently fall back. It must have been hypnosis because she kept saying, ‘You’re a rag doll, you’re a rag doll.’ And then: ‘You’re falling, falling. Your body’s very heavy, it’s going through the bed. You’re falling through the clouds,’ and so on."

In this deeply relaxed (even hypnotic) state, Eddie was eventually able, when prompted by the psychologist, to speak whole sentences without stuttering. The psychologist’s eventual diagnosis was that his stuttering had been caused by the family’s habit of consistently silencing him. Nearly every night at the dinner table, for instance, Eddie would throw a temper tantrum and knock over his glass of milk after being told to be quiet. For all this, given what we know of Eddie’s fear of his father, the ultimate cure for his stuttering may simply have been getting away, after the divorce, from E.V.

For all the growing tensions underlying their marriage, E.V. and Delilah still threw occasional cocktail parties. It was their habit, once the liquor and good cheer had started flowing, to rouse their children from their beds and have them come down to perform for guests in the large living room overlooking the woods. Eddie, who could be "very affable and social" in the company of adults even as a small boy, would play the piano in an untrained, tinkling sort of way, improvising on a theme that he’d worked out and named "The Brook." This composition, which can be seen as Eddie’s first artistic creation, took its name from the brook that ran behind the summer house at Mullet Lake. Margie and Eddie both "had this tremendous fascination with the brook," and after Eddie had created "The Brook" he would improvise on it both alone and in four-handed versions with Margie. But while Margie remembers it as "sounding pretty good," Ed himself believes that "it was probably just god-awful noise but Mother thought it was brilliant." In any event, over the next few years Eddie (who’d started taking proper lessons) occasionally indulged himself in fantasies of becoming a concert pianist until one fateful evening, a few years after the divorce, when he gave a performance of "The Brook" to some of Delilah’s friends and they "just put their hands over their ears and screamed: ‘Stop it, it’s horrible!’" Eddie realized at that moment that "I was no longer a child prodigy of three but a boy of eight who was just annoying everybody. And I remember that was a big shock for me because I thought it actually was brilliant." Although he now had been shamed into giving up public performances on the piano, Eddie nonetheless continued to take lessons, "but only because I was forced to by my mother. I never liked it, and I was never good at it, and I never practiced."

Margie, for her part, would entertain her parents’ guests by curtsying and singing songs in French—the courtesan skills she’d acquired at Miss Doherty’s School for Girls. Showing off their children seems to have been both a very Texan practice on Delilah and E.V.’s part (Texas being a place where people will announce at a gathering: "Now Mary Jane is really good in spelling. Now come out here and spell . . . ."), as well as a reflection of their both being so "narcissistic" that providing their guests with an amusing diversion took precedence over their children’s sleep.

It was probably not entirely coincidental that once Delilah had received her master’s degree in June of 1946 (her thesis was "The Development of Religious Concepts in the Young Child"), E.V. and Delilah’s marriage became even more strained. For it seems very possible that—now that Delilah was armed with a means of making her way in the world—Kay began to press E.V. more urgently to leave Delilah. In any event, there is a sense of the affair with Kay inexorably deepening over what turned out to be the last year of E.V. and Delilah’s marriage. For after years of discreet adultery with Kay, E.V.—soon after Delilah had received her master’s degree—suddenly became careless enough to allow Delilah to find lipstick on the collar of one of his shirts.

Angered by such classic, trite evidence having been thrown in her face, Delilah "drove to the office and blew the horn of my car (we had a special horn signal). When he came down to the street, I screamed at him accusingly and held the shirt up for him to see. He never said a word but went back to the office." By New Year’s Eve things were coming to a head. Delilah and E.V. were invited to a New Year’s Eve party and, after initially refusing to attend it, E.V. reluctantly agreed to go on the condition that he be allowed to work at his office first before returning home to take Delilah to the party later in the evening. Yet as the hour grew later and later there was no sign of him and, strangely, no answer when Delilah telephoned his office. At last Delilah drove to the office. "The doorman at the building announced me; as I entered the office there seemed to be an unusual tension. I was to learn later that [Kay] was with him and had hidden herself in the closet."

A few days later (early January being a time of new resolutions), Kay forced a showdown with Delilah. E.V. and Delilah had tickets to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Saturday night series and on the evening of January 4^th, 1947 Kay actually appeared at the concert hall and sat herself directly behind Delilah and E.V. Afterwards, E.V. took both women out for a tense meal before dropping Kay off and driving back home with Delilah. As they were preparing for bed, however, the phone rang and it was Kay. At her wit’s end, Delilah grabbed the phone from E.V. and shouted at Kay to come on over because "we are going to have this over with." (Interestingly, what most incensed Kay about Delilah when it was published in 1981 had nothing to do with its revelations of her long affair with E.V. nor with her having provoked a showdown that led to E.V. and Delilah’s divorce, but rather had to do with Delilah’s mentioning in passing that E.V. had given Delilah a venereal disease in the early years of the marriage while they were living in Youngstown, Ohio.)

When Kay rushed over to Beech Lane in a cab, the three adults sat themselves in the large living room overlooking the woods and got down to business: "sometimes we were controlled, sometimes emotional," as Delilah records. At last the moment of truth arrived: "The hour was approaching two in the morning when we women decided my husband should choose between us; neither of us wanted to continue sharing him. I always thought that when the chips were down he would not leave his family; but he did. Slowly my husband strode across the living room, shook my hand, then went to her side."

What Delilah never knew was that her children had secretly witnessed from the darkness at the top of the stairs the whole unfolding drama going on in the living room among the three adults. Having been "aroused by the declamatory tone of the grown-ups downstairs," Margie and Eddie sat on the top step of the stairs, holding hands, and listening to their mother announce to E.V. and Kay that she and the children would go to live in a "little house in Texas" near her family. "This will be great!" Margie whispered to her brother, hoping that E.V. really would leave them because moving to Texas "sounded like fun." As the children looked on they saw their mother, now that E.V. had done the unthinkable and chosen Kay, walk over to the couple and with "eerie calm" give them each a kiss on the cheek. Graciously continuing to accept her defeat, Delilah asked of E.V. and Kay only that they "be sure to close the garage doors" as they drove off.

At this point, as Kay and E.V. made their leave, Delilah’s account would have it that she experienced merely a "great sense of relief and calm" when they left. In reality, however, Delilah behaved quite differently. As soon as Kay and E.V. had departed for the Cadillac in the garage, Delilah went into hysterics. She rushed upstairs, found Margie, and frantically told her, "Margaret Anne, he’s always loved you the most.

You run out and stand in the driveway and our Daddy won’t leave us if you do it." With Delilah now weeping and wailing in the doorway, Margie (who was in her nightgown) ran out into the snow and stood at the top of the driveway. "I can remember very clearly the headlights swinging around as he came out of the garage and headed up the driveway. And of course he stopped. I think he was swearing at Mother about what a cheap trick it was."

But after a moment E.V. drove off into the night with Kay. He would not be coming back.

Chapter Two: The Three Musketeers

Children love great occasions, including emergencies, and during the exciting night their father left them for Kay both Margie and Eddie were thrilled by the prospect of change and a move to a new city. After their father had driven off with Kay, Margie and Eddie joined Delilah on their parents’ bed: "It seemed weird to sleep in their bed, but we all three huddled together," Margie remembers. It didn’t take long for the darker side to their new life to set in, however, as the two children watched their mother struggling not to go to pieces. That Sunday the three of them sat in a pew in their Christian Science church and Margie felt "mortified that Mother was crying in church. She was just a wreck for years—she started calling us ‘the Three Musketeers.’"

By dubbing them the Three Musketeers ("All for one and one for all") Delilah was no doubt trying to put an uplifting, even heroic, face on their new life together (for Delilah preferred to see herself "not only as a victim, but as a very noble victim"). In their life as it was actually lived, however, what Delilah ended up imparting to her children was her shame and despair as well as the sense that they all had a share in the blame for the divorce. "It was never her problems with my father," Margie recalls, "it was always ‘Daddy left us.’" Delilah inculcated this sense of shared blame so thoroughly that even today Ed will say "after we got divorced when I was seven," and Margie "When Daddy divorced us." And so while Delilah had officially declared that from this point on the Three Musketeers would "re-group and become this threesome that can conquer the world," what actually ended up happening is that this was when her heavy drinking began.

Delilah began to feel so "lonely and afraid in the house on Beech Lane" that, just weeks after E.V. had moved out early in 1947, she decided she too would pick up stakes, installing herself and the children in "the charming Mariemont Inn," a mock-Tudor hotel in the leafy, deserted-looking Cincinnati suburb of Mariemont. It was the beginning of a pattern Delilah would hold to for the rest of her life: in times of trouble she would seek refuge in hotels. In fact, in these early years following the divorce Delilah and the children would live, with the exception of a year in a rented house in Texas near Delilah’s family, in a succession of expensive hotels.

To help pick up her spirits Delilah had gone out and bought herself a fur coat, a diamond ring, and a Packard convertible that she named "Gertrude." Moreover, one exciting spring day while the divorce was still pending Delilah decided that she and the children could all benefit from an impromptu vacation. Pulling up in Gertrude outside Hyde Park School and honking the special family signal (honk! honk! honk-honk-honk!), Delilah called out to her surprised children as they came running out, "Kids, I’ve got the car all packed and we’re going to Florida!" An additional thrill was that they weren’t even on spring vacation—she’d pulled them out in the middle of the school week. For seven-year-old Eddie it was a miraculous example of adult power that the homework assignment he’d been worrying about only moments before had been rendered suddenly meaningless.

Eddie did his part to pick up his mother’s spirits after the divorce. One day he said to Delilah, "This is the X-A, Mother." "Whatever do you mean, dear?" she asked. "Well," he replied, "‘X’ is near the end of something and ‘A’ is the beginning of something new." Delilah was so delighted by this tag for what they were going through that she wrote it down and the name stuck; for years afterwards the Three Musketeers would refer to these early years following the divorce as the X-A. For all this, Delilah somehow managed to get the meaning of the X-A backwards, thinking that "X" stood for "the approaching end" and "A" for "earlier, more happy times"—a quite different and gloomy interpretation. Perhaps in her self-engrossment Delilah unwittingly refashioned the meaning of her son’s words into a definition better suited to her own dark frame of mind.

For Margie, too, the X-A represented more an end than a beginning. In fact, what she would later see as the "good" part of her childhood had already come to a close the previous year when she’d been pulled out of Miss Dorhety’s (the school for girls where she’d been a student, beginning at age three, for seven years) because E.V. declared that private school was making her "too uppity." She was enrolled (along with Eddie, who had entered kindergarten) at Hyde Park School, the local elementary school. Her fall from a golden childhood world was completed a year later when the divorce stripped her of her father, "the only parent I thought I had." The rest of her childhood and adolescence would be lived in relative misery.

If to no one else in the family, the original definition of the X-A clearly did apply to Eddie’s own situation: the divorce brought an end to his isolation within the family and began a new and intense relationship with his mother. But while it was clear to Eddie’s cousin Jean White, for example, that it was Margie, not Eddie, who was bitterly upset about the divorce, Delilah failed to grasp this. In fact, her giving the X-A her own altogether different meaning can be seen as symptomatic of her shocking and fundamental misreading of what was truly going on in her son at this time. For in Delilah’s mind Eddie was hit hardest of all by the divorce because, unlike Margie, he had never "received a lot of good basic fathering."

In Delilah’s view, the key to understanding Eddie’s mental state was the "wounds" she felt had been inflicted on him by the "loss" of E.V. (in Delilah the young Eddie is portrayed as sharing in the family mood exemplified by Margie’s cry of "I want my daddy"). As Delilah saw it, underlying both Eddie’s seeking out new father figures and his tormented feeling of having had a hand in causing the divorce was his grief over losing his father. It’s not clear whether Delilah came to this belief through her training in child psychology, or simply because she herself was in mourning over E.V.’s departure and assumed Eddie felt the same way, but the truth is that Eddie felt only relief at being rid of his father and his "scary, volcanic presence." Furthermore, Eddie’s guilt about having set in motion his father’s affair with Kay Beard was not a conclusion he’d reached on his own, but rather one that Delilah herself had started drumming into him by pointing out the direct apparent connection between his birth and E.V.’s taking up with Kay.

What Eddie found disturbing about the divorce was simply that his mother was going to pieces over it. Since the night E.V. had left them, Delilah had taken to telling her little son: "If I could only meet a man like you I would marry him," and "You alone understand me"—something Eddie found to be "a very big burden." Indeed, his mother’s frequent crying spells and her voracious need to be comforted by him had imposed the "tremendous pressure" of trying to be a "parenting figure" himself. It was the need for "some sort of absolution" from the terrible strain of feeling responsible for his mother’s anguish yet powerless to help her that drove Eddie to see the Mariemont minister (and it was just one visit, not several). Unfortunately, the well-meaning minister jumped to the pat conclusion that for Eddie the burning issue must be a desire to bring his parents back together (a supposition that Eddie was too shy to contradict) and Eddie left the church unsatisfied.

It was these feelings that provoked Eddie’s fit of hysteria back at the Mariemont Inn when, as Delilah recounts, "It took two hotel porters to help me hold that writhing, jumping little boy. As we held him tightly against the mattress of the bed, he began to relax and to cry out, ‘I did it; I did it; it started because I was born!’" Ed remembers that he’d originally locked himself into the public toilet down the hall from their room—"I think they had to get the door taken off."