Birthdays and funerals

1.

The ice cream cake was watery.

The hot summer sun split the blame with my father, who insisted on crying into the Baskin Robbins dessert he mutilated with a knife and his salty tears.

In a few hours we would have to at least give a statement to the media. The fact that we held off on a press conference or a press release. Now that my brother Jay officially had his 16th birthday party and blew out his candles, we could properly bury my grandfather. Poor Jay. He’s got to share his birthday with a death date. Everyone in this stupid family will be thinking of William Griffin instead of Jay Griffin on this day, even in the unlikely scenario in which Jay inherits the empire. Mom will make a stupid post on Facebook or whatever social media platform eventually replaces it in a lousy attempt to ram two major life milestones together.

When William finally croaked and people started soap opera-style sobbing, our other brother Cypress leaned in close to Jay’s ear.

“Bummer,” he in a sincere-yet-sarcastic way. “I think this present was made for Sydney.”

Let’s be clear: I didn’t want him to die. But I wish he wouldn’t have kept his on-air commentary job until the month before he croaked.

One of his coworkers at a dinner once told me that everyone involved in a talk show host gig dies early of cancer. Since good ole’ Will was always near or at the top of the chain, he was likely spared the same fate that befelled people who were producers, writers, yadda yadda. Even after the allegations came out over William being gross to women, people still worked for him. Now it’s Jay’s birthday and we’re fawning over the bastard who turned millions of people against their neighbors over the soft-spoken teenager.

All for that rat bastard. I’d rather celebrate my teenage pain-in-the-ass brother than pretend we lost a real one and eat a cookie monster cake that’s been made umami against my will.

My dad handed Jay the first slice. Jay, ever the peacekeeper, said thank you and carefully ate around the shimmering spots where tears moistened the sponge. I declined a piece as my dad searched for words. His brother, who would be taking over the estate, spoke up.

“I find it heartening that William waited as long as he could so that everyone could be here,” Warner said. “You know, older folks with family who do not visit often tend to pass on major holidays.”

I fought my eyes from rolling to the back of my head. “I’m sure it meant a lot that you decided to visit, Uncle Warner.” I pretended not to notice Warner’s tilted head and narrowed gaze. He cleared his throat and continued as the least appropriate person to ring in a person’s new year of life.

“Pretty soon we’re going to have to go public with this news. For now, I’d like us to focus on the man he was when he was alive: Inspiring, larger than life and tough as hell,” Warner said, drawing a laugh from my dad. Warner walked to the armoire on the other side of the room and pulled out and old projector-looking item, along with a few manilla boxes. He began hooking up the device. “He has a few slides from his photo album that I would like to go through, as a family.”

“Did you ask Jay if that’s how he’d like to spend his 16th birthday?” I asked as I turned to my little brother. He grimaced and put down the salty cake.

“I mean, sure,” Jay said. “If that’s what the family wants to do. I have a birthday every year.”

“That’s the spirit,” Warner said. After a half-hearted try to hook up the ancient Nokia projector, he had one of the house employees finish the job. The device, despite its age, sputtered onto the screen in faint color – just enough pigments to show a young William, maybe in his 30s, his arms outstretched in front of Machu Picchu in Peru. The pictures must have been taken when he was a correspondent for the same station where he had spent the majority of his career.

“This was the trip where he produced a segment on the Shining Path, or the Sendero Luminoso. They were a massive gang in the country at the time,” Warner said. I held in a snort. Clearly Warner has read up on his dad. I wondered if the Peru trip was when he learned to profile people. The smiling young man in the picture did not look capable of half the things he said in his primetime, then late night segments.

Mercifully, Warner did not talk through every single slide. He clicked through hikes in the mountains, dinners in poorly lit restaurants, glamor shots of pisco sours that Instagram girlies would have killed to place on their grid. Warner’s next click gave way to a picture of him in front of an alpaca, a hairy, strong pair of arms around his waist. A man a head taller than him beamed down at William, who put his hands on his partner’s wrists homecoming photo style.

Around the couch, my brothers and father’s mouths were wide open as if they all recognized they needed to say something but didn’t know what would be appropriate. Warner laughed nervously. “OK then,” he said as he clicked to the next photo, which was the same setting, only this time the two men were kissing.

I button mashed my phone out of lock mode and snapped a picture, then again when the slides displayed a photo of the two of them in bed, shirtless. The screen flickered off. Warner stood up from the ground, appearing flushed. The rest of my family looked like less sweaty versions of the same feeling.

“Well, this is… shocking,” Warner said. I laughed.

“Who was that in the pictures with him? He’s hot,” I said.

“Sydney,” my dad said with an accompanying elbow into my side.

“What? That could be our biological grandpa. Looks like they were trying hard to get pregnant.”

“That’s enough!” Warner said, almost shouted. “This doesn’t change who he was.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I like him a little bit more now,” I said. “It sounds like we need to review more of these old fashioned photos. You know, to make sure the museum for him and other old blowhards doesn’t let out the secret.”

Warner thinks for a second before shaking his head. “We should just throw away the rest of his collections.”

“And throw out the things that make him more than just a head behind a desk?” I asked. “You can remove the gayness of it all–”

“Sydney–”

“But you can’t take out the full picture of who this man was. I kind of almost don’t think he’s an asshole now that I’ve seen him happy.”

2.

To be clear, my grandpa was an asshole. His fireman-like fling doesn’t change the horrible things he said over the airwaves and across the dinner table. But his slides gave him nuance, and it begs the question: Why and how did he turn out terrible?

Eventually I wore him down: My dad and Warner would review the tapes while the boys and I waited in our grandpa’s study. There was a brief period of quiet while we all processed. I started leafing through his books.

Cypress cleared his throat. “Well, I was wrong. I think this is Sydney’s present. Sorry, Jay.”

“Whatever,” Jay said, running his hand through his chestnut brown, floppy hair. “My real party isn’t until this weekend anyway.”

The two chatted about who was and wasn’t going out to the club as I pulled out old tomes caked in dust. There were volumes of Bill O’Reilly’s books of celebrities he would like to kill, like Abraham Lincoln and Jesus. The fifth book I pulled out was unmarked. When I cracked it open, I saw rows of lining that framed someone’s sloppy cursive. Several of the pages were topped by the opener “Dear journal.”

After its formal greeting, William launched into a missive about his partner in Cedar Rapids, IA, in one of his early anchor jobs. “Today my father met Perry, though he didn’t know that Perry was the sweet romantic interest I met on assignment. I tried to tell him, but I lost my nerve,” one of the first entries read. I leafed through pages – they were stories mostly about assignments but they had the occasional interlude of a weekend trip with Perry, Perry busting his ass to save up and travel while William was on the clock.

“If this were another time we would not have to run around in secret,” William wrote. “I long for a time, for a world where we can embrace without the world watching.” There was a photo of the two holding up hands with rings on their fingers.

“Perry told me he would have been just as happy with a washer ring, and god knows I don’t make enough money to do what this industry puts me through,” William wrote. “But I hope we can hold onto them when I’m able to buy the real thing and propose the big one.”

The last entry was short.

“Father’s friend found out. He told him. I can no longer see Perry,” the final entry read.

I put the book down and sighed. My brothers were busy leafing through copies of old classics.

“This man wanted to marry a guy named Perry. How does a guy go from wanting to push the gay rights movement forward then call for mass incarceration?”

“I don’t know, Syd,” Cypress said. “How does anyone do anything in this family?”

“Don’t get fatalist on me.”

“No, really. If you haven’t noticed, people like you don’t get to be themselves in this family.”

“But you get to be what you are – a prick,” I fired back.

“Yeah, but if it were up to me, I’d be a prick who had a pollinator garden, not set to inherit the new state media,” Cypress said.

I turned over to Jay, who was picking at a cuticle. “What about you, Jay?” Jay slowly looked up. “What would you be?”

I felt Jay thinking before he spoke. “I don’t know. I just know that I wasn’t the only guy like me in the family.” I moved over to hug him to find that I was racing Cypress to do the same. We both wrapped our arms around him.

“Well technically you are the only one,” Cypress said. I pushed him, which sent us all flying onto a couch. We disentangled ourselves, and I studied both of their faces. I felt like a bad sister because I felt like I missed the part where their jawlines got more defined, when their voices started falling. My brothers had become real people right before my eyes and I took it for granted.

“You all can do whatever in this family, but I want no part of what our family has created,” I said. The other two nodded because I’ve only made it obvious every single day. “I don’t want you two to have to hide from yourselves. Warner is probably going to do his best to suppress this story, but it doesn’t make it any less worth telling.”

“Isn’t that outing him?” Jay asked.

“Normally, yes,” Sydney said. “And you say the word and I won’t mention this anywhere. But whatever made William a blistering homophobe destroyed countless families. It helped cultivate rhetoric that made people feel like they were better off dead and closeted than alive and out. We owe it to families who have suffered to disclose the whole picture of the person who told them they were less than dirt.”

Jay nodded. Cypress bit his lip. “So you’re going to try to convince the family to share the story?”

I paused. “It would surely help us to have their backing, but I don’t think Warner’s going to see it from our side.” I pulled out my phone, which had pictures of the slides. “I could post these right now – it’s quick, dirty and start the press tour before we have to sign non-disclosure agreements. I can literally feel Warner drafting them up right now.”

“I’d like to give Warner a chance,” Jay said, his voice quieter. “Because if he doesn’t accept William, I’m not sure he’s going to accept me.”

I put my arm around Jay. “I don’t think that’s going to be a fair comparison, but we can definitely see how Warner reacts.”

Our father interrupted our planning, his head stuck through the door. “Kids? Family meeting.”

3.

Warner looked a little less flummoxed and a lot more lawyered up. The room was lousy with people in impossibly crisp suits. There were enough empty seats left for our immediate family of four to take a seat. When we settled, Warner cleared his throat.

“It truly is unfortunate that we looked through a larger-than-life man’s moment of lapsed judgment,” he said. “This goes against everything that this family stands for, and it’s in all of our best interests that this fact about our founder never gets out. I’ve brought in representation from our family’s partner law firm, and we’re going to go through family expectations moving forward.”

I looked over to my dad, who sat close enough for me to not have to raise my voice. “And you’re OK with this?”

He grimaced. “It’s what your grandfather would have wanted.”

“I disagree,” I said, now looking at Warner in the middle of the room.

“You don’t think the man who built this had strong enough conviction to want to quash this?” Warner said.

“I didn’t know grandpa,” I admitted. “I didn’t tune into who he was on TV and I surely didn’t get brought around here enough to have a solid opinion about the guy, but I do know the man who blew through most of his early career salary to buy his man a ring.” I opened the journal. “If this were another time we would not have to run around in secret. I long for a time, for a world where we can embrace without the world watching.”

Warner’s face dropped. “Where did you get that?”

“Does it matter? This home is lousy with gay yearning,” I said. “It’s important to preserve a man’s legacy, sure, but what he built and who he was is not the same. At least, not entirely. We owe it to the public to disclose this information.”

Warner sighed. “This family does not value hate. But we aren’t going to start flying rainbow flags and expect our empire to continue supporting us.”

“We can’t say we don’t value hate when that’s all that grandpa talked about on television. It was, ‘Oh no, I hate people who aren’t white. Oh no, gays are ruining America.’ Well, this queen in a coffin definitely didn’t help America, that’s for sure.”

“Sydney,” her father said.

“And that’s exactly why no one can know,” Warner said. “It’s simple as this: as dad’s power of attorney, I am not executing this will until all of you sign NDAs. That’s that.”

We walked out of the lavish estate for what was likely going to be the last time if Warner had his way in the secession of property. I wrapped an arm around Jay as we headed towards our father’s Bentley.

As we stormed out of the impossibly ornate home, the lawyers took my journal and deleted the pictures from my phone. I thought I could outrun people whose outfits looked like they had never experienced gravity. Somehow, those scumbags didn’t seem susceptible to the laws of nature.

Cypress hopped in the car first without looking at anyone. When I sat down, I immediately started drafting a Reddit thread. I didn’t get too far when Jay tapped my shoulder. He jerked his thumb to William’s neighbor’s house, where a mailbox had a familiar name: Perry Jenkins. Inside, past the eccentric purple door and large windows, a man held a handkerchief to his eyes.

By the time I registered what was happening, I was out of the car with Jay, and we both headed to that unexpected lavender entryway.