A Report from Winter Review

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A Report from Winter ReviewWhen I finished Wayne Courtois' very well-written A REPORT FROM WINTER-- a beautiful title with at least two meanings--his memoir about returning to Portland, Maine, after an absence of ten years, to the beside of his dying mother Jennie, I was astonished at his brutal honesty and wondered if his brother Bruce and his Aunt Louise will read it for he takes no prisoners. If this were fiction, he could always say these characters were composites; but he doesn't have that defense here. Mr. Courtois describes his brother Bruce-- since both men are gay, it must have had something to do with the long cold Maine winters-- as a "fifty-year-old man trying to look thirty. As they say in show business, it was time to retire the act." Even Aunt Louise, portrayed as a great complainer, says that Bruce "doesn't want anything." I was strangely moved, however, when she lied to the funeral home director and gave her sister Jennie a high school diploma when she only finished the sixth grade.
Mr. Courtois holds the mirror up to himself as well, recalling his basically miserable childhood, pretty much because of his mother's hatred of him so that he grew up filled with self-loathing to the point that he attempted suicide in his twenties. (He is forty-three when he mother dies.) On the other hand, it is difficult to completely despise his mother since her father, wearing steel-toed shoes, once kicked her, when she was just a young girl, up a flight of stairs, one step at a time.
The good news is that Mr. Courtois miraculously turned out to be a decent and apparently normal person in spite of his childhood-- although we, according to Freud, never completely outgrow our parents-- and has been in an enviable, relationship of nine years with his partner Ralph when his mother dies. "We are one." The writer contrasts time after time his warm, loving relationship with Ralph with his cold, dysfunctional family in Maine.
The parallels between this writer's experience and mine are eerie. I too a couple of Januarys ago in a nursing home sat at the bedside of my comatose, dying mother. She also had been uncomfortable discussing my sexual orientation although she, unlike Mr. Courtois' mother, loved me madly every day of my life and always told me so. The guilt of not doing enough and not visiting your mother often sounded all too familiar. There was also an attendant in the nursing home who had all the kindness that the nurse April showed to Courtois in his time of great need. His description of the visit to his mother's home after she died and his going through her personal effects-- he finds that she has kept every piece of paper that she ever got her hands on-- almost made my eyes burn. Finally I have spent enough time around Portland to understand what a Maine winter feels like that Mr. Courtois decribes in such bone-chilling detail.
Two scenes stand out for me in this well-crafted memoir that is so lacking in self-pity and that goes straight to the heart. Mr. Courtois recalls delicously what both his mother and aunt always really meant when asked if they had a preference for a restaurant. They always responded that they didn't care; but just as soon as they were seated in the restaurant that he had chosen, they of course started complaining about everything: the food, the service, the draft in the room, their seats (too close to the kitchen) the dirty silverware, etc. (And I had thought that this was uniquely a Southern character trait.)
The second scene is Courtois' telling of his first date with Ralph, whose fine manners make him sexier than a centerfold. The uncertainty, the testing of the water by two men who are real people, not particularly tall with a few extra inches each around their waists, remind us that the world is full of gay people who are not lantern-jawed, tall and with bulging muscles-- a spendid dose of reality.
This really first class memoir, so honest and so rich in detail, reminded me of my favorite gay memoir ever, the Australian writer Timothy Conigrave's poignant HOLDING THE MAN, no small compliment.
A Report from Winter OverviewA Report from Winter is a death-in-the-family story, a love story, and a meditation on the meaning of ''winter''--as a season and as a metaphor for family relationships.
It's January 1998, and southern Maine is recovering from one of the worst ice storms in history. Into this unforgiving environment comes the author, flying home from Kansas City after a ten-year absence. His mother, Jennie, is dying of cancer. Though receiving excellent care in a nursing home, she has lost the ability to communicate. Needing support, Wayne makes an SOS call to Ralph, his longtime partner. Ralph boards a plane to Portland for his first exposure to a Maine winter, and to Wayne's family as well, including a feisty aunt and an emotionally distant brother. The contrast between a nurturing gay relationship and dysfunctional family bonds is as sharp as the wind sweeping in from the sea.
Stubbornly unsentimental, A Report from Winter weaves childhood memories of winter with the harsh realities of living in a family where there's not enough love to go around. The memoir is a tribute to hard-won relationships built on mutual trust and understanding, defying an uncaring world.

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