It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Read Online Free Page B

charismatic, talented, and very flamboyant, and he and my mother became fast friends. They ran around together, shopping and socializing, as if my father didn’t exist. My parents sent Bruce to hairdressing school to become a colorist and gave him a place to stay in our house when he didn’t want to commute back to his apartment in New York. For four years Bruce was part of the family.
    It wasn’t until 1978 that my father made a pass while he and Bruce were running an errand for my mother. The affair went on for a few years before my dad was able to admit to himself that he had fallen in love. My father had suppressed his homosexuality since his teenage years. His mother, Nina, had come to Ellis Island in 1921 along with thousands of other Italian immigrants. They brought their prejudices and conservative Catholic views with them. In the 1950s and 1960s homosexuality was considered a mental illness and was against the law. To this day my father thinks his mother would have committed him to an asylum had he come out back then. When he finally mustered the courage to tell her he was in love with Bruce, she said, “Can’t you just make believe you’re straight?”
    I was too young to fully understand why my father was leaving. It was something we deduced on our own or learned at school. “Phillip Coiffures . . . gay . . . their dad is gay” we heard kids whispering in the halls. I don’t remember the women in our family ever having a conversation about my father being homosexual. We only seemed to talk about everyone else’s lives.
    We visited Dad and Bruce on weekends in their new home at the end of a half-mile path by the beach in Connecticut. Lauren, the oldest of us girls, was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal. Two years later she finished high school and left to study abroad in England. Lisa, Lesley, and I bonded together. For the next fifteen years my father seemed to vanish from our everyday life. I reached most early milestones without him.
    My mother filled in the gaps: Between clients, she came to all my high school softball games, rewarded me with admiration when I brought home A’s from school, and counseled me on my first love. My mother was infinitely resilient—a trait she learned from her own mother, Nonnie, who’d raised five children on her own—and she tried to stay strong and positive about my father. She kept repeating the mantra they had always told us—“Do what makes you happy, and you will be successful in life”—as if to discourage any negative feelings about him, as if nothing had changed. Perhaps it was the way my mother portrayed their separation, or perhaps it was because I’d grown up my whole life witnessing the sorrow of outcasts, but I accepted that my father had found the happiness he’d longed for. I even found solace in the idea that my dad left my mother for a man rather than a woman.
    The weekend parties came to an end. My father stayed in business with my mother for moral and financial support for years after he left to be with Bruce, but the strain of remaining in business together was difficult for everyone. Six years after my father left, he and Bruce opened a new salon; most of my mother’s stylists and clients followed them. She struggled to keep the shop going. Managing money was never my mother’s strength, and without my father she could no longer maintain our expensive lifestyle. The first casualty was the two-seater Mercedes. She was unable to pay the bills on our house and our cars. Almost every month either the electricity or the water was cut off, or the repo man came in the middle of the night to take our car away. In middle school I often looked out the window at daybreak to see if our car was still in the driveway.
    We moved out of the house with so many memories on North Ridge Road and moved into a smaller house a few miles away. There was no swimming pool and no big backyard. My three sisters had all moved on to start their lives, and my mom