When Owen Gilroy sets out to help his adolescent grandson, Sam, come to terms with his sexuality, he is forced to examine his own life by exploring that of-and solving a mystery about-their ancestor, Hiram Milhouse, a leading 19th-century scientist. Owen's discoveries are triggered when he and his partner Brock buy an old house in Philadelphia which once was Hiram's. Owen is soon tested by an affair that threatens his household and nearly destroys his effort to help Sam. His journey into the past, like his struggle to guide, then rescue, his grandson, reveals much about the changing shape of gay life in America today. The story of Owen and Sam unfolds against the backdrop of 9/11, terrorism, creationism, the Iraq War, and human cloning. Hiram's 19th-century world features a runaway slave, Darwinism, the Civil War, religion, and Republicans. In the end, the secrets of the past will have a profound impact on the lives of Owen and Sam.
Crossing the Line
A NOVELBy Lynn MillerAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Lynn Miller
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-4368-1Chapter One
"... The moral sense follows ... from the enduring and everpresent nature of the social instincts ..., from man's appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of his fellows, and ... from the high activity of his mental faculties, with past impressions extremely vivid.... Owing to this condition of mind, man cannot avoid looking both backwards and forwards, and comparing past impressions."
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
The ax fell on Owen Gilroy in the dying days of 2002, one week after the news that his venerable Philadelphia bank would undergo a shotgun marriage with a more strapping one in Pittsburgh. Decapitation came in the announcement that the merged institution's new Vice President for Public Affairs would be, not Owen Gilroy, but his counterpart in the other city. The bank's new chiefs suggested that Vice President Gilroy should accept "early retirement" and what Brock called "maybe not a golden parachute, but one anyway with a gilded edge." Yet, for dazed Owen this unexpected ending made not just his career but his very life feel redundant.
By the beginning of March, 2003, nothing much was left for him at his high ceilinged office far above Broad Street except to clean out his mahogany desk. His remaining days at the bank had become as empty for him as they were teeming for Middle Eastern nations now coming into the crosshair sights of America's questionably instated leaders.
One evening at the dinner table, Owen's mind wandered to his last visit to a community center where the need for philanthropy was painfully clear. There and in other such places across the city, his presence and what it stood for had seemed to wash him with a halo. Now that aureole was lost forever. His thin lips became a taut line, fork clacking in his plate, when he recalled how more than a thousand employees had been sacked in the obsession of the merged bank's new bosses to prune costs and wreck lives in the sacred name of greater profit. He failed to hear whatever his partner was saying.
The other man broke off, then waggled his long fingers in front of Owen's face. "You're not with me, are you, O?"
"Uh ... Sorry, Brock. I'm just tired is all."
"Babe, you been tired since New Year's." Brock Rosenstein's tone was impatient; the dark eyes showed concern.
"Tired of banks," Owen sighed, "and their gospel of gluttony." It was a thought that had played in his mind a thousand times through the years; now it no longer surprised him to hear the words fall from his lips.
"Then be happy you're leaving all that behind."
"I know." But the idea of happiness still felt like a lie. "Tell me again, Brock."
"Well, it's ..." Brock watched while Owen picked up his fork again, the rippling cheek relaxing when he unclenched his square jaw. "What I said was that house on Parry Street's for sale again. I saw the sign out front today."
"What house?"
"You know the one. We talked about it when we bought this condo. The Victorian queen, I called it, with the living room in back, and a center staircase made for grand entrances."
"Oh, that house. Sure."
"We liked it a lot at the time." It seemed a bland reminder, but Brock's eyes watched the other man carefully.
Owen chewed while the memory of the house came more clearly into focus. "Except the living room was dark. Needed a nice big window onto the garden."
"Well, it's on the market again."
"So, why are you telling me?"
Brock shrugged, picked a walnut meat from the tangle of spiky greens on his salad plate and popped it into his mouth. "I just thought you might be interested." Now he dropped his long lashes so that Owen couldn't see into his eyes.
"Why? Are you?" Owen looked more intently into the lean face of the younger man across the table, but Brock's gaze shifted to the view of nothing but a battleship-gray sky shading upwards into surly darkness beyond their wall of windows. He stared out in silence for a moment, then turned back and let his eyes roam over Owen's searching face.
"I might be," he said, uncharacteristically solemn, and brought an index finger to the dimple in his chin. "Maybe this is when we ought to make a move like that."
Owen started to protest, but broke off once he understood that for his partner to have raised this possibility meant that it was no mere whim, so of course he had to learn what Brock was thinking. He said, "I never would've thought of that."
Now, when Brock reminded him of what he could remember about the house, Owen joined the game, as if this were only a test of both their memories. But, while he tried to assess the depth of Brock's interest, his own began to grow. When they had finished their meal, he pushed his chair back, restrained Brock with a hand to his shoulder, and cleared away the remains of their risotto. "I guess I might be interested in having a look at it anyway," he concluded while he got out coffee cups and saucers, "if you are."
Brock watched his lover carefully before he released a small conspiratorial smile. "You could use a new project," he said.
"I thought that was it. A new house to keep me out of trouble now that I'm on the dole with nothing to do." He felt oddly warmed by Brock's effort to protect him, an impulse that usually flowed the other way.
"I think it'd be good for both of us, O. But, yes, it would be good for you." He slowly stirred his coffee. "You love making new nests-frustrated fag decorator that you are. And now looks to me like a perfect time for a new nest. We said when we moved here we didn't plan on living in a high-rise till the end of time. We got this pad mostly so you'd have a place to entertain your high roller clients, show 'em the view over Rittenhouse Square. Live like you thought a banker oughtta."
"Brock, I never-"
"I think you'd love being back down on the street again, where you could troll for tricks" -he allowed Owen his expected "ha!" before he gave him his familiar wink and grin- "and we'd have a garden and I'd have a real garret for a studio. Live a teeny bit more humbly." Effervescence was Brock's middle name, but now what came through it was the sound of something already considered.
"Hey, we didn't buy this place so I could live like a banker." But Owen knew that must have mattered to him then, when he'd still been determined to look the part he didn't always feel, the story of his life.
"I know. I wanted it, too. We both did. But now, why don't we at least think about moving somewhere that's a little less-I dunno-glitzy?" Brock waved all his wriggling fingers at the imagined shimmer of the ceiling. "Less Republican."
"Republican? Sweetheart, you forget that I'm a banker."
"Were a banker. Past tense."
Owen reflected and with a thin smile, a tiny bow, and a flash of regret-less for the loss of his career than for having entered it so many years ago-intoned "Ah, so." He thought of the house and said "it did have that nice high room on the top floor, didn't it? We thought it would make great studio space for you."
"It did. We liked the house a lot. I think we still would." Brock seemed to read Owen's thought when he added, "and you know we could get a good price for this place."
"I'm pretty sure." Owen considered it and felt the ebbing of his qualms for what he had been forced to leave behind. By bedtime, they decided to make an appointment with the realtor to see the house on Parry Street.
They were led through it on a blustery late afternoon, winter still snarling at their heels, after Brock got home from his high school and Owen had spent much of the day trying to be-sometimes, to his surprise, actually being-ruthless about what had to be disposed of from his office.
"Some of the rooms are smaller than I remembered," Owen said after they'd wandered over all three floors.
"That's because you're used to our pissy living room and our bowling alley of a gallery," Brock insisted. "You'll do your usual number on it anyway. New kitchen, combine the two back bedrooms for us. Open up this living room wall so you can bring the garden in. It'll be great." They peered out into a brick-walled yard where last year's oak leaves danced across the bluestone terrace like frantic dervishes torn from brown paper left out in the trash.
Owen noted how his partner had dropped the subjunctive for the future tense and had sudden qualms. "I don't know," he said. "I'm probably too old to take on another house."
"Bullshit." Brock's retort was quick. "That is nothing but crapola and bullshit. God help me get it up like you do when I'm fifty-three!" He reached over to chuck the other man lightly beneath his broad jaw, then draped one sinewy arm across Owen's shoulder. "C'mon. Let's see if we can't get a copy of the floor plans from this puss, take 'em home, and get you figuring how to tart the place up. That'll get your juices going."
Owen Gilroy grinned at their mutual understanding that he, the banker, and not his partner, the artist, should be the designated designer and decorator. He grinned, too, at how thoroughly this man knew him, knew, at least, that part of him that was the most anyone could know of another. "You're some piece of work, Brocky-boy," he said gangster-style, through the side of his mouth, ruffling his lover's curly hair.
"Listen to little ole Miss Pisspot call this kettle black!" Brock gave the older man a pinch above his belt.
Owen retorted with the leer and roiling eyebrows he reserved for Brock. "Pots need love handles," he said, pulling in his stomach. "Something to hang onto when you ride with me."
They made an offer on the house the next morning. A three-day minuet of offers and counteroffers took place against what the Pentagon described as the "shock and awe" of thousands of its bombs bursting over Baghdad, while American forces scuttled across the Iraqi desert toward the capital. Owen was unsettlingly reminded of the inwardness-selfishness, even-of his and Brock's preoccupations, especially because they fell so perfectly within the Zeitgeist of a nation that seemed to view the war as a test of patriotism. Even so, whatever remained in him of the banker rose with little effort to the surface: a price was agreed to and the house was theirs. His mother seemed to find his news difficult to grasp when he told her about their unexpected plan to move again.
"I don't understand," she said when he came to the end of his report in the middle of his usual Sunday evening phone call. "Does it mean you can't afford to stay in that lovely penthouse now that you're out of a job? I thought they gave you a good severance thing."
"They did, Ma. That's not the reason. We just wanted a change after all this time. Something a little cozier, with a garden and a real studio for Brock." He knew not to say how it was meant to fill up the emptiness that otherwise lay all about him now.
"Ah, so this was Brock's idea." The familiar insinuation hinted that her son was forever too infatuated to see how he was manipulated by the man who, in her view, never gave back as much as he got.
"No, both of us. I'd like to do a little gardening, now that I have time, and see if I can improve my pathetic cooking skills-we'll probably redo the kitchen." He in fact saw the remodeled kitchen as mostly his gift to Brock, the principal cook in their household.
"Your cooking skills are perfectly acceptable." She was still the mother pushing her little one to do his best in school. "But I thought Brock did most of the cooking." Rowena Gilroy's dry voice crackled slightly at the end as it only seemed to do when it came to him over the telephone lately. She added, to make her irritation absolutely clear, "I never know exactly how it is you divide up your household duties."
"Didn't know you were confused-I could draw you a chart." He pretended to make it sound light, forcing a chuckle at the end.
"Really, Owen!" A long moment of silence passed across the line while mother and son each nursed a private irritation.
"Where did you say this house is?" It seemed Rowena's maternal duty, more than real interest, which made her ask.
"On Parry Street. The 1900 block, just a couple of streets down from the Square." He reached for something further to justify what they had decided. "It's nice and quiet. Almost too narrow for cars."
"Parry Street. I didn't realize. That's where we all came from, you know."
"Who, we?" He knew his mother had been born in Chestnut Hill, where she lived still, nearly eighty-seven years later.
"We did. The Milhouses. Father was born in a house on Parry Street. My grandfather's house, the rector. You know. St. Mark's."
"I guess I thought they lived in the rectory."
"No, not then. Not when father was born. At least, what he always told me was that he was born on Parry Street. They lived at the time just a few doors away from his uncle, the great man who did all that work at the Academy of Natural Sciences and everywhere else."
"Oh, yes. Old Uncle Hiram, who did us all so proud. They were all on Parry Street?"
"Of course. You really should take more interest, Owen," she said, detecting flippancy in her son's response. "He was one of America's most distinguished scientists."
"I know that, Ma." Why did she still at her age need to bask in this man's distant glory? "So, I guess that makes it all the more fitting that we're going back to the family's old neighborhood."
Her response was swift. "Fitting? I wouldn't have thought to put it that way."
He should have expected her thrust. It meant that, whatever the fitness for a Milhouse, there was none she could see in having him accompanied there by his longtime partner who, by virtue of being both male and Jewish, surely had no place on the family tree. While he fumbled with his annoyance, she relented just slightly. "Well," she said, "if little Parry Street is still as nice as I remember, I can imagine why you like it. What's the address?"
"Number 1928. About halfway down the block."
"1928? That should be the block. Oh, I can't imagine that it's grandfather's house, but I'm sure it's possible."
* * *
Two days after they signed their agreement on the house, Owen switched on the TV to stop the silence after Brock left for work. He was watching the Secretary of Defense gloat and glower at the cameras while asserting that the invasion of Iraq was going almost perfectly when his daughter phoned. Julia said she wanted to come by after work, which made his antennae go up. Ever since her shack-up with the cop had turned surprisingly into a marriage, she had mostly hurried from Elkins Park straight home to Burholme after locking up the shop, so that erratic communications with her father were by phone or e-mail, seldom face to face. But today she said that she would take the train into center city and come to his apartment. She had sounded worried when she said she had something she wanted to talk to him about.
He feared instantly that Collucci was knocking her around, just like the Arab, now that they'd been together long enough for the bloom maybe to be off the rose, and she was getting her fill of what Brock had rather embarrassingly guessed was the cop's impressive equipment. Then he remembered that this was already the longest she'd stuck with any man, and since she'd had so little practice with the dailyness of prolonged partnering, he worried next that, if the guy wasn't beating her up, her problem was boredom.
He tried to study the floor plan of the new house, but found himself wondering again about Julia. When he looked to see where load-bearing posts on the back wall of the living room might allow for new French doors, he reflected instead on his daughter's attachment to a man whose conversational monologues made Owen's eyes glaze over. Is it really my fault, he asked himself for the hundredth time, that she always seems to lose her way where men are concerned? He fiddled with his pen and decided that, though she couldn't have learned that from him, losing her way in general was a trait she must have inherited from the man he once was, years ago. If he wasn't that man still.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crossing the Lineby Lynn Miller Copyright © 2010 by Lynn Miller. Excerpted by permission.
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