Two Daughters, their Fathers

On October 12, 2022, I was glancing at fiction shelved on the wall of books in our great room when I spotted a novella I had no memory of purchasing, no memory of shelving there. I turned to the first page of Cary and John by Houstoninte Neil Ellis Orts, read a couple of pages, and surprised myself by tearing up. This little book is the story of best friends Gloria and Cathy and the love letters they discover written between their fathers decades in the past.

Cathy has found the letters in one of the boxes left behind by John, her recently deceased father. She brings them to Gloria; her father was Cary, also deceased. Both women are reeling from the discovery of the secret their fathers took to their graves. Gloria, a devout churchgoer, is horrified. Convinced that homosexual behavior is a damning sin, she has refused to allow her gay son to bring his partner into her home.

Short chapters with the two middle-aged friends alternate with the letters in their possession. For me, the first and lasting surprise of Cary and John is Gloria herself. The novella opens with her. It includes her daily ritual of prayer, her deeply felt conviction that her gay son is on the wrong path. Orts steps back and gives this woman space to be herself. As a gay man, I was—and am—convinced that she’s profoundly wrong, but I can see that Gloria is trying to do right—by herself and her beliefs, by her son and her love for him.

And the letters! Cary and John live in these letters. Their love breathes in the words they write to each other. Their individual selves shine. Cary is seriously buttoned down, acutely conflicted, weighing judgments against himself, resisting the word love. John is an extrovert plain and simple. He knows that he’s in love with Cary; he openly expresses joy in the sexual pleasure he and Cary experience together.

John’s letters bubble over. He can’t resist the intensifier Ha! This little tic might have been annoying, but Orts writes John so believably that his ebullience charms. In one letter, he reports on the children who have moved in next door, into the home previously occupied by Cary and his family:

  Yikes, but they’re loud! And the parents either don’t care 
  that they have howling wild animals for children or they’re 
  too overwhelmed. . . . Cathy says she might get a babysitting 
  job out of of them. . . . I said not until she had her rabies shot. Ha!

Daughters who loved their fathers, fathers who loved their daughters. Fathers who loved each other. There is heartbreak in these pages. And the lasting surprise of hope.

About the Author:

Neil Ellis Orts is a native Texan, a farm boy from the south-central part of the state and a city man currently living in Houston. His interests have taken him to study theater and performance and theology as well as to dabble in endeavors that don't fit neatly under those headers. He is a generally curious individual.

Cary and John is available here ⇒