Second Son

By Robert Ferro

Mark Valerian, the second son in the Valerian family, is ill, but determined to live life to the fullest – and live forever if he can. When he discovers Bill Mackey, a young theatrical designer who is also suffering from this disease neither wants to name, he also finds the lover of his dreams. 

 

Together they develop an incredible plan to survive that will take them to Europe, to rustic Maine, and finally to the wonderful seaside summer mansion of the Valerian family, where father and son confront the painful ties of kinship ... and the joyous bonds of love.

 

Originally published in 1988, it was Ferro's final novel, completed in the months leading to his death from AIDS as he cared for his lover Michael Grumley. This new edition contains a foreword by Tom Cardamone (Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book).

 

"Second Son is transcendently beautiful; exquisitely written, exquisitely restrained. The accomplishment of Second Son reminds us of what literature has always been about – the deep examination of the soul. Rich, poignant, unforgettable, it leaves one with a rare feeling of having been in touch for a little while with the things that really matter" – Anne Rice

 

"In a purity of language met by purity of feeling, Robert Ferro's Second Son illuminates a tragedy of our time – the fusion of love and grieving, devotion and sorrowing – that is as venerable as the human heart itself. Earlier novels that center around sickness have turned out to be life-giving – Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain comes first to mind – and Robert Ferro enters this tradition with touching artistry, in his own robust yet tranquil voice, and with the lucent and simple clarity of hope." – Cynthia Ozick

 

"I admired The Family of Max Desir. I love Second Son. The surprising story of the love between two men threatened by illness is full of fine authentic details and broader realizations about the human condition." – Doris Grumbach

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReQueered Tales
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781951092429

Book preview

SECOND SON

by Robert Ferro

Foreword by Tom Cardamone

RQT_Logo

ReQueered Tales

Los Angeles  •  Toronto

2022

Second Son

by Robert Ferro

Copyright © 1988 by Robert Ferro.

Foreword: copyright © 2022 by Tom Cardamone.

Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.

Photo of Robert Ferro: © Robert Giard, 1985.

First US edition: January 1988

This edition: ReQueered Tales, March 2022

ReQueered Tales version 1.32

Kindle edition ASIN: B09MQXGT1Y

Epub edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-42-9

Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-43-6

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Novels by ROBERT FERRO

Second Son (1988)

The Blue Star (1985)

The Family of Max Desir (1983)

The Others (1977)

Non-Fiction

Atlantis, The Autobiography of a Search (1970)

with Michael Grumley

robert ferro - nytimes - 300

ROBERT FERRO

Robert Ferro was born in Cranford, N.J., in 1941. He graduated from Rutgers University and earned a master’s degree from the University of Iowa. In late 1965 Ferro met Andrew Holleran at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He later lectured at Adelphi University.

With Michael Grumley, in 1970 he co-authored Atlantis: the Autobiography of a Search. It is for his fiction, and four novels, that he was most influential. The semi-autobiographical The Family of Max Desir brought him to wide notice and acclaim.

He was a member of The Violet Quill, a group of influential post-Stonewall openly gay writers in New York which included Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Christopher Cox, George Whitmore, Ferro and Grumley.

He died of AIDS a few months after his partner, Michael Grumley, in 1988.

Praise for SECOND SON

"In a purity of language met by purity of feeling, Robert Ferro’s Second Son illuminates a tragedy of our time – the fusion of love and grieving, devotion and sorrowing – that is as venerable as the human heart itself. Earlier novels that center around sickness have turned out to be life-giving – Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain comes first to mind – and Robert Ferro enters this tradition with touching artistry, in his own robust yet tranquil voice, and with the lucent and simple clarity of hope."

— Cynthia Ozick

"Second Son is transcendently beautiful; exquisitely written, exquisitely restrained. Its skillfully drawn characters come alive with an incandescent power as they struggle to preserve the romance, the passion, the tenderness that is vital to body and spirit. We come to know these people and to cherish them, and to wish the novel wouldn’t end so we wouldn’t have to leave them. The accomplishment of Second Son reminds us of what literature has always been about – the deep examination of the soul. Rich, poignant, unforgettable, it leaves one with a rare feeling of having been in touch for a little while with the things that really matter."

— Anne Rice

"I admired The Family of Max Desir. I love Second Son. The surprising story of the love between two men threatened by illness is full of fine authentic details and broader realizations about the human condition. Almost from the first page we face, with Mark Valerian, the fact of his mortality. Once again, as in Max Desir the relation between hero and family is central to the story, and again the tone of the narrative is simple and direct. Ferro’s new work is entirely original, affecting, and yet strangely upbeat and heartening."

— Doris Grumbach

SECOND SON

by Robert Ferro

Second Son: An Introduction

Robert Ferro’s fourth novel, Second Son, was published in 1988, the year of the author’s death from AIDS, and is dedicated to his partner, the writer Michael Grumley, who predeceased him by just two months. Robert died at his father’s place in New Jersey, not far from the beach house where much of Second Son is set – a sprawling home that overlooks an ocean of undersea cities, familial drama, and the hopes of countless men stolen by a vast, cruel tide.

Mark Valerian, the second son in question, part of a large, complicated family, enters an affair exacerbated by AIDS while conversely elevated through the best that love has to offer: vibrant connection. Our lovers were introduced by Mark’s friend Matthew Black via letters to Rome, the eternal city, where Mark works and resides and Bill Macky is visiting. Matthew is sequestered in the balmy purgatory that is Florida to take care of his invalid mother – a story so reminiscent of the main character’s circumstances in Andrew Holleran’s 1996 novel The Beauty of Men as to more than hint at Matthew Black’s real-life inspiration. This is pure speculation on my part, however both authors were members of the storied yet short-lived gay writers group the Violet Quill.

Ten years after Second Son was published, I moved to New York City at the age of 28 to belatedly come out of the closet. I entered a wondrous and frightening maze of bookstores and nightclubs. As a ravenous reader, an entirely new world of gay books awaited me; as I read, lived and loved, I also started to write, and to meet other gay authors. I would ask these writers for recommendations and often hear the same refrain, If you can find it, it’s out of print. Flummoxed that so many of the books I found so fascinating were only available as dusty, used or remaindered copies, I set about editing The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, inviting gay writers I knew or had recently read to contribute an essay about a favorite novel or short story collection that had slipped out of print. Each in turn was asked to invite another writer to the project, which is how I met Stephen Greco and was introduced to the stellar, literary feat that is Robert Ferro’s third novel, The Blue Star. Stephen was friends with Robert and Michael, and a frequent guest at the aforementioned beach house. (In his essay, he regales readers with a magical treasure hunt he left behind for the couple after a weekend stay; this is doubly fantastic as it replicates the secret, otherworldly voyages that exist in both The Blue Star and Second Son and their jointly authored nonfiction book Atlantis: Autobiography of a Search.) Years later, Stephen invited me to serve as a judge for the Ferro-Grumley Award, a much-coveted annual prize he directs, that not only honors their namesake but expands our literary heritage by celebrating the new and noteworthy.

I invite readers here who are curious about Robert Ferro to not only explore these magnificent reprints, but to dip into the powerful tribute, edited by Edmund White, Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS, wherein contributors honor the lives and works of a devastating array of creative souls taken by this plague. In his essay on Robert Ferro, Felice Picano – whose own historic work has also been resurrected into the ReQueered Tales pantheon – adds much personal depth and truly delicious literary gossip to the Ferro story, complete with a supposed haunting by Robert: when his family considered selling the beach house after his passing, Felice and Stephen helped reassure his restless spirit with a graveside picnic with both authors, who are laid to rest side-by-side.

*     *     *  

The return of this indisputable gay classic allows new generations to marvel at Ferro’s virtuosity as a writer:

In the morning light they showed each other the spots on their bodies. Except for two in his neck, Bill’s were confined to his left arm and leg. All that remained on Mark were small scars from six or seven lesions that had been removed, and others on the bottom of his right foot that he intended to take care of at home.

"Why did you have them removed? Bill asked, touching Mark’s foot the way Dr. Thompson did, fearlessly, with tactile interest.

They seemed like little factories to me. I shut them down. No one agrees.

With sheets around their shoulders and cups of coffee, they went up to the terrace and sat where they had made love the night before, watching the birds dart in and out of a milky blue mist. Farther reaches of the city slowly came into focus. A single bell rang out with a clarity lacking in everything else ... eight, nine, ten, eleven. You could see in the sound a little man in robes with a hammer ... twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

This is it, Bill said. Perfection, two thousand years later.

After reading this passage, among the most poignant in AIDS literature, I found it was time to put down the book: seven o’clock, New York City, April 2020. I moved off my bed and into the kitchen. Moving from one of the early great works of literature concerning an epidemic that is far from over to a new ritual during a pandemic that had just begun, I leaned out my open window in downtown Brooklyn and joined the multitudes clapping and hooting and hollering in honor of the first responders as COVID-19 ravaged my city. My formerly pristine hard back copy of Second Son lay open on gray sheets, open like brave tales told regardless the outcome, open like the joy of a song sung at dusk in spite of how dark the coming night, open like the thousands of palms striking one another out of New York City windows, open like the pair of hands holding this new copy of Second Son, decades later.

Oh, how we persist.

— Tom Cardamone

New York, May 2020

Tom Cardamone is the editor of Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book and The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning speculative novella Green Thumb as well as the erotic fantasy The Lurid Sea and other works of fiction, including two short story collections.

For Michael Grumley

To the Memory of

Bill Whitehead

You are looking very well.

Weren’t you clever, dear, to survive?

I’ve a sorry tale to tell.

I escaped more dead than alive.

Candide

PART ONE

After some time he realized the house was speaking to whomever might be listening: this was Mark. He heard it in the wind through the porch, in the boom at the end when a door slammed, in the whine of the furnace when first engaged; sounds that held images the house reminded him not to forget, images of moments fractured in air as when, turning at the banister at the top of the stairs, he saw his young niece tilt her head to listen to her vanity and adjust a gypsy earring – a languorous, emblematic moment of her magic childhood, in an older safer world. The house made this possible. He could see it still in the air.

Images also, besides his family, of the two strangers who long ago had built the house and lived in it and died upstairs: the Birds. Captain Bird, it appeared. The childless Birds had never struck such chords, while the numerous Valerians, occupying every room, adding others, had changed the house into something alive and hovering, a huge pet that loved them, vitally interested in the goings-on. Captain Bird however had seen to it that everything about the place was nautically and astronomically sound. It faced exactly east, on a line drawn up the middle, like a keel, that passed through the center of the hearth and out the bay window into the heart of the sea with the sudden precision of the speed of light. The sea, visible from every room, was in some rooms a wall; in others a picture on the wall. From the upper windows it seemed you were on a riverboat, and in winter, with the furnace, as if the whole place was under way, moving through a delta; approximately. From the long deck over the porch, leaning into the wind, he could see the sharp edge of the planet he was on.

Mark was ill, dying perhaps. He stood at the window downstairs – the window toward the pond, as opposed to the one toward the ocean, or toward the lighthouse. Its view contained a wedge of sea on the right, high after a storm and figuratively rushing across a bight of beach as if to flood the house. A man with a metal detector was weaving an invisible herringbone pattern across the sand, feathering back and forth along the beach, now and then scooping up small amounts of sand with a long-armed basket. Within the ranging intimacy of his binoculars Mark could almost hear the electronic ping of the metal detector as the man suddenly stopped.

This small drama: the man drops to a crouch. After two or three diggings in the sand, the little metal scoop proves inadequate. Only the human hand will do. The man is young, distantly handsome. Through his binoculars Mark can see the cold, downlike glow on his cheek. Fingers touch something that then is held up. It glints. Again the young man takes up the scoop and detector, glances for an instant up at the house, perhaps sees Mark in the window, and resumes the inferred pattern along the beach.

Mark’s heart is thumping. What had he seen? Someone searching for valuables on the beach. His beach. Taking a deep breath he calmed himself. His sister Vita, had she been present, would have an explanation. An obvious metaphor, she would say, considering his illness, but useful. Mark might feel that much of his life lay buried on the beach – to be found and pocketed indifferently. This could be it, he thought. Or was it that the man with the metal detector was handsome? Perhaps Mark, being alone and frightened, merely wanted company – to talk – but wanted it as a pale vestige, in all its dimmer configurations, of desire.

LIKE THE BIRDS BEFORE HER, Mark’s mother had died upstairs, eclipsing those two earlier, less-felt deaths, and claiming the house at last and utterly from its builders. Their two transparent shades faded further and Mrs Valerian’s presence took over, as had been her intention. Her dying one year before, from a series of hemorrhagic strokes, had overlapped in an ironic but intentional way with an extensive restoration of the house – two processes sharing themes and schedules along similar though reversed lines: an Egyptian way of death, in which a place for the abiding comfort of the spirit is prepared. Mrs Valerian had theorized that the house would bind its occupants – her family – to her after she was gone. She had concluded that she herself would also be bound, an intention to be evoked with her name and memory by whoever entered the house.

Restoration had required a lot of money, thousands every week for months. This was regarded as a medical expense by Mr Valerian, who on the surface appeared to be rich, and who on the surface was, and he willingly gave whatever was needed because doing so assuaged his helplessness and grief. You could do nothing about a stroke, but the roof could be changed, and even the roof-line. On the ocean side windows could be cut to improve the views and lighten the interiors, with the immediate effect of liberation, as if something trapped inside the house, the Birds themselves, were at last released. Ten rooms of curtains, a dozen new rugs, every stick of furniture restored – the house emptied into a huge van and hauled to a penitentiary in Pennsylvania for refinishing. This had been arranged by Mr Valerian, a person not averse to pursuing a bargain across state lines. Mark had asked if this meant their furniture would be stripped by convicts with guns held at their backs – the sort of question his father found surprising. Outside, the garden was reconsidered, with spaces around the house pushed back so that new sweeps of lawn were created where sea rose and masses of creeper and honeysuckle had stolen up over the years nearly to the porch. A different curve was cut for the drive, as if Margaret Valerian, in her imagination, had flown up above the house and looked down to select the ideal line. These improvements went on all at once with a number of different crews and loud machines. After the broad measures came the smaller, meaningful ones – with outside the new garden, a dozen trees, a fence – all corresponding to the different phases of Mrs Valerian’s decline, in which every day some new deficiency appeared or matured. As she deteriorated she rested her ruined mind on the new stability of the house, its lovely air of completion and bounty. Each day she went in a wheelchair room to room to see everything in its place, fixed by rules of association and design. Beyond regular use of the wheelchair, she lay propped on pillows, regarding the sea through the big window in her room. On the best and dwindling days Mark read to her from a pile of cookbooks – recipes like short plotted stories, with twists, nuance, surprises and uncertain endings, success by no means assured. To these details she listened closely, as to a chronicle of mysterious events. And when finally she died, it was with everyone around her, after a long and decorous farewell commensurate with the many months of the other sort of preparation. Light played over her face. Mark kissed her cheek and felt her spirit swirl into an angle of the ceiling, like perfume seeping through the house, a faintness of scent relative to its distance from her room – all of it lingering behind as planned.

HE COULD NOT THEN AGREE, precipitously, to a plan to sell the house. Odd that all her labors and intentions, her clearly expressed wishes, should now be used against her. For no one could bear the accomplishment: that she permeated the place. For months everyone but Mark avoided it. And the upkeep, coupled with an obvious enhancement of the site, made its sale an ongoing temptation that grew. Why keep it when no one but Mark cared to use it? Someone had approached Mr Valerian with a blank check, willing to pay anything, anything at all. Here would be life’s financial truncation of the dilemma. To discuss the matter, and since Margaret had left the house in their names, Mr Valerian invited the children to his house in a Philadelphia suburb.

None of them had been there in a year. Not a thing, not a stick, had been changed since the onset of Margaret’s illness three years before. In his grief Mr Valerian was reassured by the certainty of things as they were, like a blind person who has memorized the layout. In a state of only slightly diminished mourning, now ritualized, he relied on the illusion of permanence, of repetition and changelessness. The legs of chairs sat in invariable indentations in the thick rugs, so that if moved they could be put back exactly, with the precision of landmarks. They were landmarks. Everything in the house referred to something else – something absent.

The fact that it was their first gathering in this house since the funeral brought back all the same feelings, so that Mark at first sat in a daze in the huge den while Mr Valerian outlined the situation.

This came in the mail, he said, holding up the check. Some people have too much money, and rocks in their head. He handed the check to his older son George, who held it with both hands, a live delicate thing, and shook his head in wonder. George handed it over to Vita, sitting on the couch beside Mark. Together they examined it for clues to such extravagant behavior.

George said, We could get as much as a million dollars …

It’s worth much more than that, Mark dropped in. He knew something about real estate since he had chosen to spend his time landscaping gardens professionally; with some success, since there were so many gardens, and people with so much money they mailed out blank checks to buy whatever caught their eye. Mark thought he overvalued the beach house because of its associations and his outright love for it; but its location directly on the sea, surrounded by empty buildable lots, the last in the area, had made the place more valuable than even he imagined. His younger sister Tessa came over and took the check from Vita. Oh my god. She covered her mouth.

So let’s write in two million, her husband Neil said.

Two million dollars? Tessa exclaimed. Are you kidding?

Four lots at five hundred thousand each, Neil said calmly. Forget the house. They could bulldoze it and put up condominiums.

Mr Valerian’s eyes, and those of his son George, glittered. Is it zoned for that? George asked. And Mr Valerian said Find out.

What is this? Mark demanded. Aren’t you all rushing things? I want you to know I will never agree to sell. You know Mom never would have … That house is neutral ground, for all of us. We’re supposed to be together there.

Mark. George turned to his brother from between the wings of a tall chair, the mate to

Reviews for Second Son

[ocgreg34 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Second Son" follows Mark Valerian, the third of four children and, as the title suggests, the second son. Unlike his older siblings, he doesn't follow along with his parents' wishes and instead becomes a landscape architect. A very prosperous one. He also lives openly as a gay man with HIV. At the onset of the story, the matriarch of the Valerian family has passed away, and the family tries to decide what to do with their second home in Cape May: the house in which their mother died and in which Mark currently lives. His father and older brother want to sell the home in order to aid the failing family business. But Mark is adamant about not selling, further widening the rift between him and his father.Mark also must deal with his HIV status and his own self-perceptions of what it is to be a gay man living with HIV. He doesn't feel deserving of love, not from his family and certainly not from another gay man, and the seclusion of the house in Cape May allows him some form of escape. But he still must live and work so he travels to Italy to work on a commission and there, through letters from his closest friend Matthew, is introduced to a theatrical designer named Brian. The connection is almost immediate and once they discover that they're both positive, a barrier crumbles between them. They grow more intimate and fall in love.Much of the novel deals with the struggles that all families go through when someone is sick, especially during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and panic in the 80s. Mark separates himself from his family, for the most part because he feels that he needs to but also because he picks up on subtle hints from his family that steer him in that direction, such as when his brother George and his wife don't allow him to touch their granddaughter, not so much by words but by their actions and reactions to him. These feelings come to a head when he learns that the family has already mortgaged the house in the Cape without telling him, and he blurts out in anger that his father had already written him off as dead.Another strong scene that counters this and fights against Mark's own feelings of sadness comes when his niece -- George's daughter -- goes to answer a ringing phone and sets her baby daughter in Mark's lap. Instead of playing with his great-niece, he cries sad yet happy tears that someone in his family sees him as Mark instead of as someone with HIV/AIDS. Until that point, he really didn't believe his family could see the difference.Instead of proselytizing that having HIV/AIDS means not being able to love or being quarantined from the world, Ferro's novel teaches that everyone is deserving of love and respect, no matter what hardships or problems arise