DIED 2018
HE GREW UP IN the maid’s quarters of a New Jersey estate, and as soon as he was old enough to hoist a golf bag, he became a caddy. He met my mother when he was fourteen and she twenty-six, just starting to play, and they hit it off instantly. But then one muggy August day in 1955, she and my father arrived on the first hole squabbling. A series of shanks, hooks, lost balls, and bizarre mishaps gave my father six points in penalties before he ever started. Those awful Winiks decided it was the caddy’s fault; not only didn’t they tip him, but my mother told the caddymaster never to send that kid out with her again.
Like many stories involving my mother, this one starts on the golf course, then goes to the bridge table, for the latter is where she and The Diplomat were reunited a half century later. My mother remembered her freckle-faced young friend but had completely forgotten their falling-out, and the reason it can be recounted here is that The Diplomat was one of the main speakers at her funeral. In the ten years left to them, the two had become thick as thieves.
In another decade, The Diplomat’s obituary ran in the New York Times. After the club, he had joined the Peace Corps, then the Foreign Service. Between his two stints with State, explained the Times, he spent twenty years in California counseling people with AIDS. Two stints? Yes, because in 1973 he became the first Foreign Service officer ever to come out of the tightly shut and officially bolted closet, then quit before they could fire him. When policies changed in ’94, he rejoined and served ten more years. The obit quoted Hillary Clinton about his daring landmark move, which led to an awards dinner in Washington, DC, that I attended with my daughter, Jane, his old pal’s namesake.
One night in a gay bar in New York, a handsome young Jordanian almost fell off his barstool when the man with the Irish eyes started speaking to him in Arabic. They fell in love, The Diplomat proposed, and he spent the end of his life in conjugal bliss, the perfect reward for his courage. He had seventy-seven years of excellent health until a small thing sent him to the hospital, where the staph infections are.