Spirit’s Tether

THE BOOK: Spirit’s Tether.

PUBLISHED IN: November 2020.

THE AUTHOR: John C. McLucas.

THE EDITOR: Clarinda Harriss.

THE PUBLISHER: BrickHouse Books, Stonewall imprint. Founded in 1970, BrickHouse is Maryland’s oldest continuously operating small press; Clarinda Harriss has been Editor in Chief since 1973. The Stonewall imprint is dedicated to publishing fiction and poetry from an LBGTQIA+ perspective.

SUMMARY: In 2015, the narrator Jim and his husband Joe prepare to welcome godson J.J. to their home in Baltimore’s historic brownstone Bolton Hill neighborhood. J.J.is starting a graduate program in music composition at Peabody Conservatory. Jim is a professor of Italian, a liberal Christian, and a passionate opera lover; Joe is a successful actor and model. For J.J., a very gifted and very odd young man, they are surrogate family. Death, bereavement, mourning, friendship, love and sex in youth and maturity, and the joys and challenges of life in a close-knit neighborhood, all mark the thirteen chapters which, month by month, chart a year of loss and renewal.

THE BACK STORY: Spirit’s Tether is the sequel to my début novel, Dialogues on the Beach (BrickHouse Books, 2017). Dialogues is a story of gay love in the age of AIDS, complicated by gay-straight friendship and bromance. I wanted to explore the same relationships decades later, as a child has grown and marriages have been tested. Coming out, mourning, and mortality present new challenges to old friends.

WHY THIS TITLE? “Draw Us in the Spirit’s Tether” is the title of a sacred anthem and hymn by Harold Friedell, with words by Percy Dearmer. The novel’s plot involves music school and church life, and this piece is mentioned by the narrator and other characters. The title suggests the survival of love and communication across distance and time.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? It is, among other things, a love letter to Baltimore; a story of gay men’s sexuality from coming out through bereavement and beyond; and a meditation on aging and mourning.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“…a wonderful story about the redemptive nature of profound grief and all the mystery of the new order it creates. These were very real characters to me, and so was the heartbreak and the healing.” Jan-Mitchell Sherrill, author of Friends of the Groom.

“… layered with sophisticated insight into flirty and sometimes sexual interactions between the protagonist and a range of men and women besides his godson, as he searches for ‘a twilight romance of muted fondness and tapering passions,’ not replicating the life with Joe. His writing is worldly and, often, elegant.” Bill Hamilton, The Bolton Hill Bulletin, Volume XLIX, Number 1; January 2021.

AUTHOR PROFILE: John C. McLucas, a Yankee by birth and a Baltimorean by adoption, grew up in Pennsylvania, Washington, and Paris, and was educated in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rome, and New York. Trained as an opera singer, he is also a long-time AIDS and LGBTQ activist, an elder in a progressive Presbyterian church, and a committed Italophile. He is a professor emeritus at Towson University, where he taught Italian, Latin, and – in a pinch – French for thirty-six years. For twenty years, he also taught Italian diction and repertoire to voice students at Peabody Conservatory. His favorite Italian authors are Ariosto and Calvino; his favorite English language novelist is Henry James. The sound track of his life is dominated by Mozart. His cats and dogs always have Italian names.

AUTHOR COMMENTS:  “The death of my beloved brother in 2013 moved me to write a novel exploring grief, while I also wanted to continue the story of Jim, Joe, Tony, and Rachel (and the possible child of Tony and Rachel) left hanging at the end of Dialogues on the Beach. I also wanted to wrestle with a structure in which the plot moved forward month by month through a year of mourning, while flashbacks at the end of each chapter reached further and further into the past. This fixed structure was in part a tip of the hat to Italo Calvino, my favorite 20th century Italian author.

SAMPLE CHAPTER

(from Chapter 6)

… One night soon after we moved to Bolton Hill, Joe and I were watching TV together, and unexpectedly an ad for the Red Cross came on which he had filmed a few months earlier and which I hadn’t seen yet. He recognized it immediately, and I heard a tiny hum of surprised satisfaction from him.

“Oh, hey,” he said modestly. I recognized his tone, stopped whatever gabbling I had launched into when the commercial break began, and turned my attention to the screen. Joe had talked about this commercial during the filming; it had been physically strenuous and emotionally challenging. I instantly knew this was it, released and aired at last, and I reached to take his hand. It was only half a minute long. Joe was a father whose house was flooded, and the ad began with him swimming out through an attic window with one of his small children in the crook of an arm. He passed the child to his wife, who was huddling safe in a rescue boat with the rest of their young family. The emergency workers were pulling him onto the boat, when they all heard a cry. A small, dark child was screaming, alone on the roof of a house a hundred yards away, with a torrent rushing between it and the boat. Another boat could now be seen, bearing the appalled immigrant family of this child implacably downstream. Joe and his wife exchanged a quick look. He released the gunwale of the rescue boat and hurled himself back into the cataract.

The look on his face as he took this plunge lasted barely a second. It was a look of pure heroic courage. For that instant, this man didn’t care about his own gene pool; he cared only for the child of strangers, people with no claim on him but their shared undefended humanity. He flailed through the raging water until he was close enough for the terrorized child to jump into his arms; then, holding the child above the water, he let the current sweep them back to the waiting boats. The rescuers fished the child first, and then him from the stream, and he collapsed, exhausted, onto the floor of the boat where the new Americans embraced their rescued toddler and reached beseeching hands to their spent savior. His wife in the other boat, her face streaming with the rain and with tears of pride, mouthed a silent prayer and cradled their children as the two boats raced for high ground. The slogan which flashed on the screen at the end, “We’re all heroes,” was completely unnecessary.

That one fleeting look on Joe’s face… no, on the brave father’s face… completely undid me. Nature’s rage could not quench the goodness of that man. He turned and saw a need, and from the depths of his heart, unsummoned, rose an unvanquishable, self-forgetting strength and generosity. For a moment, it seemed possible that humanity was good and kind and true. I was exalted by a surge of optimism and trust coursing through me. And Joe, the actor who had done this, was my lover, was next to me, was the sustaining force and presence in my life, someone whose daily kindness I ran the daily risk of taking for granted.

I intended to bestow some deep, heartfelt praise that would make up for my years of reticence. I turned to him with my eyes brimming, meaning to say, ‘Divo, how beautiful,’ and I burst out crying. He looked at me amazed. He laughed and caught me in his arms, and I cried into his neck and hugged him. “Thank you,” I finally was able to choke out. “Thank you.”

He cradled me as if I were a child he’d rescued from a flood, his own child or another’s; it didn’t matter to the vastness of his goodness and kindness. He hummed a little, as he often did when he didn’t have the words yet. I could tell how deeply gratified he was, how he savored this one moment when his acting had landed an effect far beyond any of my critical criteria. One of the most spontaneous and unrehearsed prayers of my life went up: a prayer of thanks that he existed, that I knew him, that he loved me, and that he finally knew I could, false as I was, and at least sometimes, admire and adore him without reservation.

“No,” he whispered, suddenly shy, “thank you.”

LOCAL OUTLETS: Ivy Bookshop, Baltimore.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & Noble (or ask local independent bookstores if they can order).

PRICE: $20 paper; $7.99 eBook (eBook forthcoming, January 2021).

CONTACT THE AUTHOR

E-mail: JCMcL1532@aol.com

Facebook: John C. McLucas

Twitter: @JohnCMcLucas1.