My father was quieter, an introvert who would speak to one person for hours—if he was forced to speak to anyone at all. He spent most of his time out in his rose garden—one hundred bushes of more than twenty-five species of roses—or in his two-story greenhouse, full of ferns, birds-of-paradise, jasmine, camellias, gardenias, and orchids. When I wanted to find him, I followed the long garden hose to the puddles of water that collected around the drains on the greenhouse’s redbrick floor.
I never realized how much work his flowers required, because they made him so happy. Even before a ten-hour day of cutting hair, he spent the wee hours of dawn in his greenhouse, tending to his plants as if each one were a small child. When I watched him, I tried to understand what about these plants captivated his attention. He would lead me through the labyrinth of gigantic pots and show me the mini mandarin tree that always bore succulent fruits, or the orchids that blossomed from seedlings he had ordered from Asia and South America. He grew them off slabs of bark, as they grew in their native rain forests.
“This is a Strelitzia reginae, also known as a bird-of-paradise,” he’d say. “And this is a Gelsemium sempervirens, a Carolina jasmine, and a Paphiopedilum fairrieanum, a lady’s slipper orchid.”
The names were long, an endless stream of vowels and consonants that I didn’t understand. But I was in awe of his knowledge of something so foreign, curious why this exhausting work brought him such mysterious joy.
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ON SEPTEMBER 27,1982—when I was eight years old—my mother piled my three sisters and me into our station wagon, drove us to the parking lot of the hair salon, and turned off the engine. She must have chosen the parking lot of the salon because it was her second home, and neutral ground for her and my dad. “Your father went to New York with Bruce,” she said. “He is not coming back.”
He was coming out.
Bruce, a manager in the design department at Bloomingdale’s, was one of the many men who hung around our house when I was growing up. One afternoon my mother went to Bloomingdale’s in search of someone to design shades for my father’s greenhouse. Bruce went home with her in her two-seater Mercedes to see the greenhouse and walked in on a typical afternoon at the Addario house: several pots of food on the stove, and family and friends lounging about, talking and laughing loudly. He felt the warmth of our house immediately. “Oh, my God!” he cried. “What a beautiful house!”
Bruce grew up in an icy family in Terre Haute, Indiana, and he was enthralled by the Italian-style camaraderie of ours. He was 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.