Chapter 6

It’s a Man’s World

“What’s going on with you?” Lia Bromely asked her son the morning after the six boys picked up Phillip Drexel and went for a ride.

“Your brother was late getting the car home last night and I don’t like it that you were with him and the Lambert boys.” Lia had a special affection for her youngest child, her beautiful little boy as she continued to call him even if he was almost fourteen. She felt so close to him maybe because he was her ‘baby’, her last child, but there was something more she just couldn’t explain and didn’t try to. She just enjoyed their closeness and loved how affectionate he was, how sweet he was, unlike the rough and tumble Gary.

“Did something happen?” She instinctively asked knowing that Gary had a knack for doing things he shouldn’t.

“No mom.” Rich answered quickly. “We just rode around. It was so boring.” He lied trying to avoid talking to his mom.

“Then what’s wrong? You’re just not yourself this morning.” She paused waiting for an answer but none came. “Gary seems pretty happy this morning. Did those boys tease you again?” She prodded.

Lia was not stupid. She knew her Richie was not just the youngest in the group of boys that always hung around her older son, but she was keenly tuned in to how this boy was different, with his delicate features and long eyelashes. He also had what she considered a ‘delicate personality’. Lia had also found things, things that scared her, bothered her but that she chose not to bring up to the boy. A mother sees things and worries, and must make a conscious choice when to confront, and when to ignore. Amelia Bromely, the 39 year old mother of three, chose not to talk about the panties and bra she found hidden in the bottom of Richie’s dresser. She chose not to talk to him about wearing Mary’s dresses in the attic of her mother-in-law. She knew about the attic for years, since her son was seven or eight. She was elated when he seemed to stop going there. It had been almost two years and Lia felt her silence had paid off. Richie’s little girl phase seemed to have passed. She was right not to say anything.

Lia Bromely’s choice to ignore what her third child was doing was not just calculated as the best for him, she felt it was best for her. There were times she wanted to talk to him, ask him what he was feeling, but she really didn’t want to know why her Richie was going to Gramma’s attic and wearing Mary’s dresses. She saw him and his behavior as a blessing to some degree. Rich wasn’t like his older brother; she thanked God for that, and he wasn’t a Mary, a girl who challenged her mother on everything. No, Lia saw Richie as a more perfect child from a gender perspective, neither an unruly and problematic boy nor a moody and hostile girl. The mother in Lia told her to talk to him and tell him he should not be doing what he was doing; the woman in her said let him be, let him experience whatever it was that pulled him toward a girl’s world. He would be a much better man for it, she reasoned.

And that is what scared Lia the most. Not that he was doing things that would make life hard for him but that she believed she may have caused it. She had heard stories about boys who were sissies; read the reports where the professionals thought that the mother often influenced such behavior. No she didn’t see little Richie as a sissy, not like a couple of the other boys in town, but he was different and she knew he was doing things that would clearly be in the sissy category, wearing dresses most prominent among them. After all, her own father said it about the Drexel boy. “Tilly probably put him in dresses when he was just a tike.” He said of Phillip’s mom. “Bet she buys panties for him now.” He added.

Lia never put little Richie in dresses. God knows she had enough of the dress thing with Mary who always insisted on wearing a dress her mom did not pick out to wear that day. And she never encouraged any sissy behavior. Richie did that on his own, but who would believe her if the boy in the dress in the attic was caught by someone other than her. Fortunately that had stopped.

Lia worried that her own issues with men, strong ones and weak ones, coupled with Rich’s gentle and sweet personality, led her to assign a confused gender to her son. Lia and Winn got married the week after they both graduated from Pitt in 1939 and Mary was born within the year. Lia, an English major, wanted a career. She wanted to teach, at the college level, and write. But she quickly found herself with two young kids and a husband off to the South Pacific in the Navy. There would be no career and as her father told her, “your job is to stay home and have babies. You have to help replenish the boys we’re losing.” It was part of the war effort, as he saw it, like rationing gas and saving tin foil.

When Rich was born she told her father she was doing just that, but told herself she would be damned if this little boy would be like her father, or like men in general. Now she wondered if somehow she had encouraged him when at three she found him in a dress. She didn’t instigate it but she didn’t stop it either.

“Mom, they always tease me. I’m used to it. It’s no big deal.” Rich protested.

“Well, you should just stay away from them. You have other friends.” Lia counseled.

“No I don’t.” Rich responded quickly.

“Well, there’s Bobby and Buzz. I know Buzz is a year older but you’ve always got along.”

“Mom, I don’t want to talk about it.” Rich not only didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to remember. After they had dropped Phillip and the other boys off Gary told Richie how fantastic the experience was. He bragged about planning it and pulling it off. He told Richie that now he, Richie, was now a man. For Richie’s part he said nothing on the ride home. It was all he could do not to cry.

“You don’t have to talk about it, sweetie.”

Lia sat down next to her son who had barely taken a bite of his breakfast and looked into his eyes. She kissed his forehead. She could see that something was different with him. A mother knows when their child is hurting and she just knew her Richie was hurting. Lia waited hoping her son would say something, hoping he would open up.

“It’s not a girl is it? You’re too young to be upset over a girl.” Lia didn’t know what was bothering Richie but she hoped to trigger some response.

“Mom, nothing’s wrong. And I don’t want to talk about girls.” He said clearly agitated.

“O.K. but if you do I’m the person you can talk to.” She offered. As she started to stand the boy grabbed her and hugged her, hugged her so tight. Now she was sure something was going on. She hoped her son had not started wearing dresses again. She had accepted it for all those years when he was just a boy, it was innocent and harmless then, but as a developing teen boy, that would be something that would be serious, something she would have to deal with. Lia didn’t know if other boys did what her son had done as a child, probably some did. But she did know that if her teenage Richie was doing that he would not survive with his friends; he wouldn’t fit it and he wouldn’t like girls. That thought was not acceptable to Amelia Bromely.

For his part telling his mother about what Gary did, and what happed was not acceptable to Rich. He did want to talk to his mom about other things and he almost did. He wanted to ask her what it was like being a girl. He wanted to tell her he felt different and that he didn’t understand it. He wanted to just hold on to her and cry. Most of all he wanted to ask her about Gary and other boys. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t like them and that he didn’t want to be a man if that is the way they were. He wanted to tell her he wanted to be like his friend Barb but he just couldn’t. Not now, not ever.

Rich Bromely knew he couldn’t cry in front of his mother. He knew he had to do his crying alone, like he did the night before.

The crying the previous night didn’t start until the thirteen year old boy was in bed, wearing the panties, with the covers tightly pulled around him. He tried not to think about what happened, tried to put it out of his mind and the only way he could do that was think about girls, about how maybe there was a reason he felt like he did. He wasn’t like the other boys. What happened wasn’t fun. And well, if Gary liked it so much, it just proved that Richie wasn’t like Gary. Gary was a boy; a rough stupid crazy boy who did things he shouldn’t. Gary liked to fight. Gary had lots of friends who seemed to follow him. Gary was mean to girls and said terrible things about them. Richie wasn’t anything like his older brother.

Rich’s crying had almost stopped late into the night thinking about Gary and what he did, what he was like and how different the two Bromely boys were. He could see being different than his brother was a good thing and he felt better. But then when he thought about Vickie, the girl he sometimes pretended to be, and how she was who this thirteen year old really was, or should have been, Rich finally cried himself to sleep.