In One Person

Chapter 13 NOT NATURAL CAUSES

It still staggers me when I remember the impossible expectations Tom Atkins had for our oh-so-youthful romance those many summers ago. Poor Tom was no less guilty of wishful thinking in the desperation of his dying days. Tom hoped I might make a suitable substitute father for his son, Peter—a far-fetched notion, which even that darling fifteen-year-old boy knew would never happen.

I maintained contact with Charles, the Atkins family nurse, for only five or six years—not more. It was Charles who told me Peter Atkins was accepted at Lawrenceville, which—until 1987, a year or two after Peter had graduated—was an all-boys’ school. Compared to many New England prep schools—Favorite River Academy included—Lawrenceville was late in becoming coeducational.

Boy, did I ever hope Peter Atkins was not—to use poor Tom’s words—“like us.”

Peter went to Princeton, about five miles northeast of Lawrenceville. When my misadventure of cohabiting with Elaine ended in San Francisco, she and I moved back to New York. Elaine was teaching at Princeton in the academic year of 1987–88, when Peter Atkins was a student there. He showed up in her writing class in the spring of ’88, when the fifteen-year-old we’d both met was in his early twenties. Elaine thought Peter was an economics major, but Elaine never paid any attention to what her writing students were majoring in.

“He wasn’t much of a writer,” she told me, “yet he had no illusions about it.”

Peter’s stories were all about the suicide—when she was seventeen or eighteen—of his younger sister, Emily.

I’d heard about the suicide from Charles, at the time it happened; she’d always been a “deeply troubled” girl, Charles had written. As for Tom’s wife, Sue, she died a long eighteen months after Atkins was gone; she’d had Charles replaced as a nurse almost immediately after Tom’s death.

“I can understand why Sue didn’t want a gay man looking after her,” was all Charles said about it.

I’d asked Elaine if she thought Peter Atkins was gay. “No,” she’d said. “Definitely not.” Indeed, it was sometime in the late nineties—a couple of years after the worst of the AIDS epidemic—when I was giving a reading in New York, and a ruddy-faced, red-haired young man (with an attractive young woman) approached me at the book signing that followed the event. Peter Atkins must have been in his early thirties then, but I had no trouble recognizing him. He still looked like Tom.

“We got a babysitter for this—that’s pretty rare for us,” his wife said, smiling at me.

“How are you, Peter?” I asked him.

“I’ve read all your books,” the young man earnestly told me. “Your novels were kind of in loco parentis for me.” He said the Latin slowly. “You know, ‘in the place of a parent’—kind of,” young Atkins said.

We just smiled at each other; there was nothing more to say. He’d said it well, I thought. His father would have been happy how his son turned out—or as happy as poor Tom ever was, about anything. Tom Atkins and I had grown up at a time when we were full of self-hatred for our sexual differences, because we’d had it drummed into our heads that those differences were wrong. In retrospect, I’m ashamed that my expressed hope for Peter Atkins was that he wouldn’t be like Tom—or like me. Maybe, for Peter’s generation, what I should have hoped for him was that he would be “like us”—only proud of it. Yet, given what happened to Peter’s father and mother—well, it suffices to say that I thought Peter Atkins had been burdened enough.

I SHOULD PEN A brief obituary for the First Sister Players, my hometown’s obdurately amateur theatrical society. With Nils Borkman dead, and with the equally violent passing of that little theater’s prompter (my mother, Mary Marshall Abbott)—not to mention my late aunt, Muriel Marshall Fremont, who had wowed our town in various strident and big-bosomed roles—the First Sister Players simply slipped away. By the eighties, even in small towns, the old theaters were becoming movie houses; movies were what people wanted to see.

“More folks stayin’ home and watchin’ television, too, I suppose,” Grandpa Harry commented. Harry Marshall himself was “stayin’ home”; his days onstage as a woman were long gone.

It was Richard who called me, after Elmira found Grandpa Harry’s body.

“No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira,” Harry had said, when he’d earlier seen the nurse hanging Nana Victoria’s clean clothes in his closet.

“I musta misheard him,” Elmira would later explain to Richard. “I thought he said, ‘Not more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he was teasin’ me, ya know? But now I’m pretty sure he said, ‘No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he knew then what he was gonna do.”

As a favor to his nurse, Grandpa Harry had dressed himself as the old lumberman he was—jeans, a flannel shirt, “nothin’ fancy,” as Elmira would say—and when he’d curled up on his side in the bathtub, the way a child goes to sleep, Harry had somehow managed to shoot himself in the temple with the Mossberg .30-30, so that most of the blood was in the bathtub, and what there was of it that spattered the tile in other parts of the bathroom had presented no insurmountable difficulty for Elmira to clean.

The message on my answering machine, the night before, had been business as usual for Grandpa Harry. “No need to call me back, Bill—I’m turnin’ in a bit early. I was just checkin’ to be sure you were all right.”

That same night—it was November 1984, a little before Thanksgiving—the message on Richard Abbott’s answering machine was similar, at least in regard to Grandpa Harry “turnin’ in a bit early.” Richard had taken Martha Hadley to a movie in town, in what was the former theater for the First Sister Players. But the end of the message Grandpa Harry had left for Richard was a little different from the one Harry left for me. “I miss my girls, Richard,” Grandpa Harry had said. (Then he’d curled up in the bathtub and pulled the trigger.) Harold Marshall was ninety, soon to be ninety-one—just a bit early to be turning in.

Richard Abbott and Uncle Bob decided to turn that Thanksgiving into what would serve as a remembrance of Grandpa Harry, but Harry’s contemporaries—the ones who were still alive—were all in residence at the Facility. (They wouldn’t be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner in Grandpa Harry’s River Street home.)

Elaine and I drove up from New York together; we’d invited Larry to come with us. Larry was sixty-six; he was without a boyfriend at the moment, and Elaine and I were worried about him. Larry wasn’t sick. He didn’t have the disease, but he was worn out; Elaine and I had talked about it. Elaine had even said that the AIDS virus was killing Larry—“in another way.”

I was happy to have Larry along for the ride. This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.

Richard had invited some foreign students from Favorite River Academy for our Thanksgiving dinner; it was too far for them to go home for such a short school vacation—therefore, we were joined by two Korean girls and a lonely-looking boy from Japan. The rest of us all knew one another—not counting Larry, who’d never been to Vermont before.

Even though Grandpa Harry’s River Street house was practically in the middle of town—and a short walk to the Favorite River Academy campus—First Sister itself struck Larry as a “wilderness.” God knows what Larry thought of the surrounding woods and fields; the regular firearm season for deer had started, so the sound of shooting was all around. (A “barbaric wilderness” was what Larry called Vermont.)

Mrs. Hadley and Richard handled the kitchen chores, with help from Gerry and Helena; the latter was Gerry’s new girlfriend—a vivacious, chatty woman who’d just dumped her husband and was coming out, though she was Gerry’s age (forty-five) and had two grown children. Helena’s “kids” were in their early twenties; they were spending the holiday with her ex-husband.

Larry and Uncle Bob had perplexingly hit it off—possibly because Larry was the exact same age Aunt Muriel would have been if Muriel hadn’t been in the head-on collision that also killed my mom. And Larry loved talking to Richard Abbott about Shakespeare. I liked listening to the two of them; in a way, it was like overhearing my adolescence in the Favorite River Academy Drama Club—it was like watching a phase of my childhood pass by.

Since there were now female students at Favorite River, Richard Abbott was explaining to Larry, the casting of the Drama Club plays was very different than it had been when the academy was an all-boys’ school. He’d hated having to cast those boys in the female roles, Richard said; Grandpa Harry, who was no “boy,” and who’d been outstanding as a woman, was an exception (as were Elaine and a handful of other faculty daughters). But now that there were boys and girls at his disposal, Richard bemoaned what many theater directors in schools—even in colleges—are often telling me today. More girls like theater; there are always more girls. There aren’t enough boys to cast in all the male parts; you have to look for plays with more female parts for all the girls, because there are almost always more girls than there are female roles to play.

“Shakespeare was very comfortable about switching sexes, Richard,” Larry said provocatively. “Why don’t you tell your theater kids that in those plays where there are an overabundant number of male parts, you’re going to cast all the male roles with girls, and that you’ll cast the female roles with boys? I think Shakespeare would have loved that!” (There was little doubt that Larry would have loved that. Larry had a gender-lens view of the world, Shakespeare included.)

“That’s a very interesting idea, Larry,” Richard Abbott said. “But this is Romeo and Juliet.” (That would be Richard’s next Shakespeare play, I was guessing; I hadn’t been paying that close attention to the school-calendar part of the conversation.) “There are only four female roles in the play, and only two of them really matter,” Richard continued.

“Yes, yes—I know,” Larry said; he was showing off. “There’s Lady Montague and Lady Capulet—they’re of no importance, as you say. There’s really just Juliet and her Nurse, and there must be twenty or more men!”

“It’s tempting to cast the boys as women, and the other way around,” Richard admitted, “but these are just teenagers, Larry. Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?”

“Ah . . .” Larry said, and stopped. (Even Larry had no answer for that.) I remember thinking how this wasn’t, and never would be, my problem. Let it be Richard’s problem, I thought; I had other things on my mind.

Grandpa Harry had left his River Street house to me. What was I going to do with a five-bedroom, six-bathroom house in Vermont?

Richard had told me to hang on to it. “You’ll get more for it if you sell it later, Bill,” he said. (Grandpa Harry had left me a little money, too; I didn’t need the additional money I could have gotten by selling that River Street house—at least, not yet.)

Martha Hadley vowed to organize an auction to get rid of the unwanted furniture. Harry had left some money for Uncle Bob, and for Richard Abbott; Grandpa Harry had left the largest sum for Gerry—in lieu of leaving her a share of the house.

It was the house I’d been born in—the house I’d grown up in, until my mom married Richard. Grandpa Harry had said to Richard: “This house should be Bill’s. I guess a writer will be okay livin’ with the ghosts—Bill can use ’em, can’t he?”

I didn’t know the ghosts, or if I could use them. That Thanksgiving, what I couldn’t quite imagine were the circumstances that would ever make me want to live in First Sister, Vermont. But I decided there was no hurry to make a decision about the house; I would hang on to it.

The ghosts sent Elaine from her bedroom to mine—the very first night we slept in that River Street house. I was in my old childhood bedroom when Elaine burst in and crawled into my bed with me. “I don’t know who those women think they are,” Elaine said, “but I know they’re dead, and they’re pissed off about it.”

“Okay,” I told her. I liked sleeping with Elaine, but the next night we moved into one of the bedrooms that had a bigger bed. I saw no ghosts that Thanksgiving holiday—actually, I never saw ghosts in that house.

I’d put Larry in the biggest bedroom; it had been Grandpa Harry’s bedroom—the closet was still full of Nana Victoria’s clothes. (Mrs. Hadley had promised me she would get rid of them when she and Richard auctioned off the unwanted furniture.) But Larry saw no ghosts; he just had a complaint about the bathtub in that bathroom.

“Uh, Bill—is this the tub where your grandfather—”

“Yes, it is,” I quickly told him. “Why?”

Larry had looked for bloodstains, but the bathroom and the tub were spotlessly clean. (Elmira must have scrubbed her ass off in there!) Yet Larry had found something he wanted to show me. There was a chip in the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.

“Was that chip always there?” Larry asked me.

“Yes, always—this bathtub was chipped when I was a small child,” I lied.

“So you say, Bill—so you say,” Larry said suspiciously.

We both knew how the bathtub had been chipped. The bullet from the .30-30 must have passed through Grandpa Harry’s head while he had been curled up on his side. The bullet had chipped the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.

“When you’re auctioning off the old furniture,” I told Richard and Martha privately, “please get rid of that bathtub.”

I didn’t have to specify which bathtub.

“You’ll never live in this terrible town, Billy. You’re crazy even to imagine you might,” Elaine said. It was the night after our Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps we were lying awake in bed because we’d eaten too much, and we couldn’t fall asleep, or maybe we were listening for ghosts.

“When we used to live here, in this terrible town—when we were in those Shakespeare plays—was there ever, in that time at Favorite River, a boy with the balls to play Juliet?” I asked Elaine. I could feel her imagining him, as I was, in the darkness—talk about listening for ghosts!

“There was only one boy who had the balls for it, Billy,” Elaine answered me, “but he wouldn’t have been right for the part.”

“Why not?” I asked her. I knew she meant Kittredge; he was pretty enough—he had the balls, all right.

“Juliet is nothing if she’s not sincere,” Elaine said. “Kittredge would have looked the part, of course, but he would have hammed it up, somehow—Kittredge didn’t do sincere, Billy,” Elaine said.

No, he didn’t, I thought. Kittredge could have been anyone—he could look the part in any role. But Kittredge was never sincere; he was forever concealed—he was always just playing a part.

AT THAT THANKSGIVING DINNER, there was both awkwardness and comedy. In the latter category, the two Korean girls managed to give the Japanese boy the idea that we were eating a peacock. (I don’t know how the girls conveyed the peacock idea to the lonely-looking boy, or why Fumi—the boy—was so stricken at the thought of eating a peacock.)

“No, no—it’s a turkey,” Mrs. Hadley said to Fumi, as if he were having a pronunciation problem.

Since I’d grown up in that River Street house, I found the encyclopedia and showed Fumi what a turkey looked like. “Not a peacock,” I said. The Korean girls, Su Min and Dong Hee, were whispering in Korean; they were also giggling.

Later, after a lot of wine, it was the vivacious, chatty mother of two—now Gerry’s girlfriend—who gave a toast to our extended family for welcoming her to such an “intimate” holiday occasion. It was doubtless the wine, in combination with the intimate word, that compelled Helena to deliver an impromptu address on the subject of her vagina—or perhaps she’d meant for her remarks to praise all vaginas. “I want to thank you for having me,” Helena had begun. Then she got sidetracked. “I used to be someone who hated my vagina, but now I love it,” she said. She seemed, almost immediately, to think better of her comments, because she quickly said, “Of course, I love Gerry’s vagina—that goes without saying, I guess!—but it’s because of Gerry that I also love my vagina, and I used to just hate it”; she was standing, a bit unsteadily, with her glass raised. “Thank you for having me,” she repeated, sitting down.

I’m guessing that Uncle Bob had probably heard more toasts than anyone else at the dinner table—given all the glad-handing he did for Alumni Affairs, those back-slapping dinner parties with drunken Favorite River alums—but even Uncle Bob was rendered speechless by Helena’s toast to at least two vaginas.

I looked at Larry, who I know was bursting with something to say; in an entirely different way from Tom Atkins—who had routinely overreacted to the vagina word, or to even the passing thought of a vagina—Larry could be counted on for a vagina reaction. “Don’t,” I said quietly to him, across the dinner table, because I could always tell when Larry was struggling to restrain himself; his eyes opened very wide and his nostrils flared.

But now it was the Korean girls who’d failed to understand. “A what?” Dong Hee had said.

“She hates, now loves, her what?” Su Min asked.

It was Fumi’s turn to snicker; the Japanese boy had put the peacock-turkey misunderstanding behind him—the lonely-looking young man obviously knew what a vagina was.

“You know, a vagina,” Elaine said softly to the Korean girls, but Su Min and Dong Hee had never heard the word—and no one at the dinner table knew the Korean for it.

“My goodness—it’s where babies come from,” Mrs. Hadley tried to explain, but she looked suddenly stricken (perhaps recalling Elaine’s abortions).

“It’s where everything happens—you know, down there,” Elaine said to the Korean girls, but Elaine didn’t do anything when she said “down there”; she didn’t point or gesture, or indicate anything specifically.

“Well, it’s not where everything happens—I beg to differ,” Larry said, smiling; I knew he was just getting started.

“Oh, I’m so sorry—I’ve had too much to drink, and I forgot there were young people here!” Helena blurted out.

“Don’t you worry, dear,” Uncle Bob told Gerry’s new girlfriend; I could tell Bob liked Helena, who was not at all similar to a long list of Gerry’s previous girlfriends. “These kids are from another country, another culture; the things we talk about in this country are not necessarily topics for conversation in Korea,” the Racquet Man painfully explained.

“Oh, crap!” Gerry cried. “Just try another fucking word!” Gerry turned to Su Min and Dong Hee, who were still very much in the dark as far as the vagina word was concerned. “It’s a twat, a snatch, a quim, a pussy, a muff, a honeypot—it’s a cunt, for Christ’s sake!” Gerry cried, the cunt word making Elaine (and even Larry) flinch.

“They get it, Gerry—please,” Uncle Bob said.

Indeed, the Korean girls had turned the color of a clean sheet of unlined paper; the Japanese kid had kept up, for the most part, although both “muff” and “honeypot” had surprised him.

“Is there a picture of it somewhere, Bill—if not in the encyclopedia?” Larry asked mischievously.

“Before I forget it, Bill,” Richard Abbott interjected—I could tell Richard was tactfully trying to drop the vagina subject—“what about the Mossberg?”

“The what?” Fumi asked, in a frightened voice; if the muff and honeypot vulgarisms for vagina had thrown him, the Japanese boy had never heard the Mossberg word before.

“What about it?” I asked Richard.

“Shall we auction it off with the furniture, Bill? You don’t want to keep that old carbine, do you?”

“I’ll hang on to the Mossberg, Richard,” I told him. “I’ll keep the ammunition, too—if I ever live here, it makes sense to have a varmint gun around.”

“You’re in town, Billy,” Uncle Bob pointed out, about the River Street house. “You’re not supposed to shoot in town—not even varmints.”

“Grandpa Harry loved that gun,” I said.

“He loved his wife’s clothes, too, Billy,” Elaine said. “Are you going to keep her clothes around?”

“I don’t see you becoming a deer hunter, Bill,” Richard Abbott said. “Even if you do decide to live here.” But I wanted that Mossberg .30-30—they could all see that.

“What do you want a gun for, Bill?” Larry asked me.

“I know you’re not opposed to trying to keep a secret, Billy,” Elaine told me. “You’re just not any good at keeping secrets.”

Elaine had not kept many secrets from me, but if she had a secret, she knew how to keep it; I could never very successfully keep a secret, even when I wanted to keep one.

I could see that Elaine knew why I wanted to hang on to that Mossberg .30-30. Larry knew, too; he was looking at me with a hurt expression—as if he were saying (without actually saying it), “How can you conceive of not letting me take care of you—how can you not die in my arms, if you’re ever dying? How can you even imagine sneaking off and shooting yourself, if you get sick?” (That’s what Larry’s look said, without the words.)

Elaine was giving me the same hurt look as Larry.

“Whatever you want, Bill,” Richard Abbott said; Richard looked hurt, too—even Mrs. Hadley seemed disappointed in me.

Only Gerry and Helena had stopped paying attention; they were touching each other under the table. The vagina conversation seemed to have distracted them from what remained of our Thanksgiving dinner. The Korean girls were once more whispering in Korean; the lonely-looking Fumi was writing something down in a notebook not much bigger than the palm of his hand. (Maybe the Mossberg word, so he could use it in the next all-male dormitory conversation—such as, “I would really like to get into her Mossberg.”)

“Don’t,” Larry said quietly to me, as I’d earlier said across the table to him.

“You should see Herm Hoyt while you’re in town, Billy,” Uncle Bob was saying—a welcome change of subject, or so I first imagined. “I know the coach would love to have a word with you.”

“What about?” I asked Bob, with badly faked indifference, but the Racquet Man was busy; he was pouring himself another beer.

Robert Fremont, my uncle Bob, was sixty-seven. He was retiring next year, but he’d told me that he would continue to volunteer his services to Alumni Affairs, and particularly continue to contribute to the academy’s alumni magazine, The River Bulletin. Whatever one thought of Uncle Bob’s “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”—well, what can I say?—his enthusiasm for tracking down the school’s most elusive alums made him very popular with folks in Alumni Affairs.

“What would Coach Hoyt like to have a word with me about?” I tried asking Uncle Bob again.

“I think you gotta ask him yourself, Billy,” the ever-genial Racquet Man said. “You know Herm—he can be a kind of protective fella when it comes to talking about his wrestlers.”

“Oh.”

Maybe not a welcome change of subject, I thought.

IN ANOTHER TOWN, AT a later time, the Facility—“for assisted living, and beyond”—would probably have been named the Pines, or (in Vermont) the Maples. But you have to remember the place was conceived and constructed by Harry Marshall and Nils Borkman; ironically, neither of them would die there.

Someone had just died there, on that Thanksgiving weekend when I went to visit Herm Hoyt. A shrouded body was bound to a gurney, which an elderly, severe-looking nurse was standing guard over in the parking lot. “You’re neither the person nor the vehicle I’m waitin’ for,” she told me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s gonna snow, too,” the old nurse said. “Then I’ll have to wheel him back inside.”

I tried to change the subject from the deceased to the reason for my visit, but—First Sister being the small town it was—the nurse already knew who I was visiting. “The coach is expectin’ ya,” she said. When she’d told me how to find Herm’s room, she added: “You don’t look much like a wrestler.” When I told her who I was, she said: “Oh, I knew your mother and your aunt—and your grandfather, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“You’re the writer,” she added, with her eyes focused on the ash-end of her cigarette. I realized that she’d wheeled the body outside because she was a smoker.

I was forty-two that year; I judged the nurse to be at least as old as my aunt Muriel would have been—in the latter half of her sixties. I agreed that I was “the writer,” but before I could leave her in the parking lot, the nurse said: “You were a Favorite River boy, weren’t ya?”

“Yes, I was—’61,” I said. I could see her scrutinizing me now; of course she would have heard everything about me and Miss Frost—everyone of a certain age had heard all about that.

“Then I guess ya knew this fella,” the old nurse said; she passed her hand over the body bound to the gurney, but she touched nothing. “I’m guessin’ he’s waitin’ in more ways than one!” the nurse said, exhaling an astonishing plume of cigarette smoke. She was wearing a ski parka and an old ski hat, but no gloves—the gloves would have interfered with her cigarette. It was just starting to snow—some scattered flakes were falling, not nearly enough to have accumulated on the body on the gurney.

“He’s waitin’ for that idiot kid from the funeral home, and he’s waitin’ in whatchamacallit!” the nurse exclaimed.

“Do you mean purgatory?” I asked her.

“Yes, I do—what is that, anyway?” she asked me. “You’re the writer.”

“But I don’t believe in purgatory, or all the rest of it—” I started to say.

“I’m not askin’ ya to believe in it,” she said. “I’m askin’ ya what it is!”

“An intermediate state, after death—” I started to answer her, but she wouldn’t let me finish.

“Like Almighty God is decidin’ whether to send this fella to the Underworld or the Great Upstairs—isn’t that supposed to be what’s goin’ on there?” the nurse asked me.

“Kind of,” I said. I had a limited recollection of what purgatory was for—for some kind of expiatory purification, if I remembered correctly. The soul, in that aforementioned intermediate state after death, was expected to atone for something—or so I guessed, without ever saying it. “Who is it?” I asked the old nurse; as she had done, I moved my hand safely above the body on the gurney. The nurse narrowed her eyes as she looked at me; it might have been the smoke.

“Dr. Harlow—you remember him, don’tcha? I’m guessin’ it won’t take the Almighty too long to decide about him!” the old nurse said.

I just smiled and left her to wait for the hearse in the parking lot. I didn’t believe that Dr. Harlow could ever atone enough; I believed he was already in the Underworld, where he belonged. I hoped that the Great Upstairs had no room for Dr. Harlow—he who had been so absolute about my affliction.

Herm Hoyt told me that Dr. Harlow had moved to Florida after he’d retired. But when he got sick—he’d had prostate cancer; it had metastasized, as that cancer does, to bone—Dr. Harlow had asked to come back to First Sister. He’d wanted to spend his last days in the Facility. “I can’t figure out why, Billy,” Coach Hoyt said. “Nobody here ever liked him.” (Dr. Harlow had died at age seventy-nine; I hadn’t seen the bald-headed owl-fucker since he’d been a man in his fifties.)

But Herm Hoyt hadn’t asked to see me because he’d wanted to tell me about Dr. Harlow.

“I’m guessing you’ve heard from Miss Frost,” I said to her old wrestling coach. “Is she all right?”

“Funny—that’s what she wanted to know about you, Billy,” Herm said.

“You can tell her I’m all right,” I said quickly.

“I never asked her to tell me the sexual details—in fact, I would just as soon know nothin’ about that stuff, Billy,” the coach continued. “But she said there’s somethin’ you should know—so you won’t worry about her.”

“You should tell Miss Frost I’m a top,” I told him, “and I’ve been wearing condoms since ’68. Maybe she won’t worry too much about me, if she knows that,” I added.

“Jeez—I’m too old for more sexual details, Billy. Just let me finish what I started to say!” Herm said. He was ninety-one, not quite a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Herm had Parkinson’s, and Uncle Bob had told me that the coach was having difficulty with one of his medications; it was something Herm was supposed to take for his heart, or so Bob had thought. (The Parkinson’s was why Coach Hoyt had moved into the Facility in the first place.)

“I’m not even pretendin’ that I understand this, Billy, but here’s what Al wanted you to know—forgive me, what she wanted you to know. She doesn’t actually have sex,” Herm Hoyt told me. “She means not with anybody, Billy—she just doesn’t ever do it. She’s gone to a world of trouble to make herself a woman, but she doesn’t ever have sex—not with men or women, I’m tellin’ you, not ever. There’s somethin’ Greek about what she does—she said you knew all about it, Billy.”

“Intercrural,” I said to the old wrestling coach.

“That’s it—that’s what she called it!” Herm cried. “It’s nothin’ but rubbin’ your thing between the other fella’s thighs—it’s just rubbin’, isn’t it?” the wrestling coach asked me.

“I’m pretty sure you can’t get AIDS that way,” I told him.

“But she was always this way, Billy—that’s what she wants you to know,” Herm said. “She became a woman, but she could never pull the trigger.”

“Pull the trigger,” I repeated. For twenty-three years, I had thought of Miss Frost as protecting me; I’d not once imagined that—for whatever reasons, even unwillingly, or unconsciously—she was also protecting herself.

“No penetratin’, no bein’ penetrated—just rubbin’,” Coach Hoyt repeated. “Al said—she said; I’m sorry, Billy—‘That’s as far as I can go, Herm. That’s all I can do, and all I ever will do. I just like to look the part, Herm, but I can’t ever pull the trigger.’ That’s what she told me to tell you, Billy.”

“So she’s safe,” I said. “She really is all right, and she’s going to stay all right.”

“She’s sixty-seven, Billy. What do you mean, ‘she’s safe’—what do you mean, ‘she’s gonna stay all right’? Nobody stays all right, Billy! Gettin’ old isn’t safe!” Coach Hoyt exclaimed. “I’m just tellin’ you she doesn’t have AIDS. She didn’t want you worryin’ about her havin’ AIDS, Billy.”

“Oh.”

“Al Frost—sorry, Miss Frost to you—never did anything safe, Billy. Shit,” the old coach said, “she may look like a woman—I know she’s got the moves down pat—but she still thinks, if you can call it that, like a fuckin’ wrestler. It’s just not safe to look and act like a woman, when you still believe you could be wrestlin’, Billy—that’s not safe at all.”

Fucking wrestlers! I thought. They were all like Herm: Just when you imagined they were finally talking about other things, they kept coming back to the frigging wrestling; they were all like that! It didn’t make me miss the New York Athletic Club, I can tell you. But Miss Frost wasn’t like other wrestlers; she’d put the wrestling behind her—at least that had been my impression.

“What are you saying, Herm?” I asked the old coach. “Is Miss Frost going to pick up some guy and try to wrestle him? Is she going to pick a fight?”

“Some guys aren’t gonna be satisfied with the rubbin’ part, are they?” Herm asked me. “She won’t pick a fight—she doesn’t pick fights, Billy—but I know Al. She’s not gonna back down from a fight—not if some dickhead who wanted more than a rubbin’ picks a fight with her.”

I didn’t want to think about it. I was still trying to adjust to the intercrural part; I was frankly relieved that Miss Frost didn’t—that she truly couldn’t—have AIDS. At the time, that was more than enough to think about.

Yes, it crossed my mind to wonder if Miss Frost was happy. Was she disappointed in herself that she could never pull the trigger? “I just like to look the part,” Miss Frost had told her old coach. Didn’t that sound theatrical, perhaps to put Herm at ease? Didn’t that sound like she was satisfied with intercrural sex? That was more than enough to think about, too.

“How’s that duck-under, Billy?” Coach Hoyt asked me.

“Oh, I’ve been practicing,” I told him—kind of a white lie, wasn’t it? Herm Hoyt looked frail; he was trembling. Maybe it was the Parkinson’s, or one of the medications he was taking—the one for his heart, if Uncle Bob was right.

We hugged each other good-bye; it was the last time I would see him. Herm Hoyt would die of a heart attack at the Facility; Uncle Bob would be the one to break the news to me. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders.” (It would be just a few years down the road; Herm Hoyt would be ninety-five, if I remember correctly.)

When I left the Facility, the old nurse was still standing outside smoking, and Dr. Harlow’s shrouded body was still lying there, bound to the gurney. “Still waitin’,” she said, when she saw me. The snow was now starting to accumulate on the body. “I’ve decided not to wheel him back inside,” the nurse informed me. “He can’t feel the snow fallin’ on him.”

“I’ll tell you something about him,” I said to the old nurse. “He’s exactly the same now as he always was—dead certain.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke over Dr. Harlow’s body. “I’m not quarrelin’ with you over language,” she told me. “You’re the writer.”

ONE SNOWY DECEMBER NIGHT after that Thanksgiving, I stood on Seventh Avenue in the West Village, looking uptown. I was outside that last stop of a hospital, St. Vincent’s, and I was trying to force myself to go inside. Where Seventh Avenue ran into Central Park—exactly at that distant intersection—was the coat-and-tie, all-male bastion of the New York Athletic Club, but the club was too far north from where I stood for me to see it.

My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t have crawled as far as West Twelfth Street, or to West Eleventh; if a speeding taxi had collided with another taxi at the nearby intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh, I couldn’t have saved myself from the flying debris.

The falling snow made me miss Vermont, but I was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of moving “home”—so to speak—and Elaine had suggested we try living together, but not in New York. I was further paralyzed by the idea of trying to live anywhere with Elaine; I both wanted to try it and was afraid to do it. (I unfortunately suspected that Elaine was motivated to live with me because she mistakenly believed this would “save” me from having sex with men—and I would therefore be “safe” from ever getting AIDS—but I knew that no one person could rescue me from wanting to have sex with men and women.)

And if the abovementioned thoughts weren’t paralyzing enough, I was also rooted like a tree to that Seventh Avenue sidewalk because I was utterly ashamed of myself. I was—once again—poised to cruise those mournful corridors of St. Vincent’s, not because I’d come to visit and comfort a dying friend or a former lover, but because I was, absurdly, looking for Kittredge.

It was almost Christmas, 1984, and Elaine and I were still searching that sacred hospital—and various hospices—for a cruel boy who had abused us when we were all oh-so-young.

Elaine and I had been looking for Kittredge for three years. “Let him go,” Larry had told us both. “If you find him, he’ll only disappoint you—or hurt you again. You’re both in your forties. Aren’t you a little old to be exorcising a demon from your unhappy lives as teenagers?” (There was no way Lawrence Upton could say the teenagers word nicely.)

These factors must have contributed to my paralysis on Seventh Avenue in the West Village this snowy December night, but the fact that Elaine and I were behaving as if we were teenagers—that is, as far as Kittredge was concerned—doubtless contributed to my tears. (As a teenager, I had cried a lot.) Thus I was standing outside St. Vincent’s crying, when the older woman in the fur coat came up to me. She was an expensive-looking little woman in her sixties, but she was notably pretty; I might have recognized her if she’d still been attired in the sleeveless dress and straw hat she was wearing on the occasion of my first meeting her, when she’d declined to shake my hand. When Delacorte had introduced me to his mom at our graduation from Favorite River, he’d told her: “This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool.”

No doubt Delacorte had also told his mother the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian, which had prompted Mrs. Delacorte to say—as she said again to me that wintry night on Seventh Avenue—“I’m so sorry for your troubles.”

I couldn’t speak. I knew that I knew her, but it had been twenty-three years; I didn’t remember how I knew her, or when and where. But now she was not opposed to touching me; she grasped both my hands and said, “I know it’s hard to go in there, but it means so much to the one you’re visiting. I’ll go with you, I’ll help you do this—if you help me. It’s even hard for me, you know. It’s my son who’s dying,” Mrs. Delacorte told me, “and I wish I could be him. I want him to be the one who’s going to go on living. I don’t want to go on living without him!” she cried.

“Mrs. Delacorte?” I guessed—only because I saw something in her tormented face that reminded me of Delacorte’s near-death expressions as a wrestler.

“Oh, it’s you!” she cried. “You’re that writer now—Carlton talks about you. You’re Carlton’s friend from school. You’ve come to see Carlton, haven’t you? Oh, he’ll be so glad to see you—you must come inside!”

Thus I was dragged to Delacorte’s deathbed in that hospital where so many ill and wasting-away young men were lying in their beds, dying.

“Oh, Carlton—look who’s here, look who’s come to see you!” Mrs. Delacorte announced in that doorway, which was like so many hopeless doorways in St. Vincent’s. I hadn’t even known Delacorte’s first name; at Favorite River, no one had ever called him Carlton. He was just plain Delacorte there. (Once Kittredge had called him Two Cups, because of the paper cups that so often accompanied him—due to the insane weight-cutting, and the constant rinsing and spitting, which Delacorte had been briefly famous for.)

Of course, I’d seen Delacorte when he was cutting weight for wrestling—when he looked like he was starving—but he was really starving now. (It suffices to say that I knew what the Hickman catheter in Delacorte’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for.) They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mrs. Delacorte had told me when we were en route to his room, but he was off it for now. They’d been experimenting with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Mrs. Delacorte had also explained; Delacorte was on morphine, either way.

“At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” Mrs. Delacorte had said.

“At this point, yes,” I’d lamely repeated. I was numb; I felt frozen on my feet, as if I were still standing paralyzed on Seventh Avenue in the falling snow.

“This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool,” Delacorte was struggling to say to his mother.

“Yes, yes—I know, dear, I know,” the little woman was telling him.

“Did you bring more cups?” he asked her. I saw he was holding two paper cups; they were absolutely empty cups, his mother would later tell me. She was always bringing more cups, but there was no need for rinsing and spitting now; in fact, when they were trying the morphine under his tongue, Delacorte wasn’t supposed to rinse or spit—or so Mrs. Delacorte thought. He just wanted to hold the paper cups for some foolish reason, she said.

Delacorte also had cryptococcal meningitis; his brain was affected—he had headaches, his mom told me, and he was often delirious. “This guy was Ariel in The Tempest,” Delacorte said to his mother, upon my first visit to his room—and on the occasion of every later visit. “He was Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Delacorte told his mom repeatedly. “It was the shadow word that prevented him from being Lear’s Fool, which was why I got the part,” Delacorte raved.

Later, when I visited him with Elaine, Delacorte even reiterated my onstage history to her. “He didn’t come to see me die, when I was Lear’s Fool—of course I understand,” Delacorte said in a most heartfelt way to Elaine. “I do appreciate that he’s come to see me die now—you’ve both come now, and I truly appreciate it!” he told us.

Delacorte not once called me by name, and I truly can’t remember if he ever did; I don’t recall him once addressing me as either Bill or Billy when we were Favorite River students. But what does that matter? I didn’t even know what his first name was! Since I’d not seen him onstage as Lear’s Fool, I have a more permanent picture of Delacorte from Twelfth Night; he played Sir Andrew Aguecheek—declaring to Sir Toby Belch (Uncle Bob), “O, had I but followed the arts!”

Delacorte died after several days of near-total silence, with the two clean paper cups held shakily in his hands. Elaine was there that day, with Mrs. Delacorte and me, and—coincidentally—so was Larry. He’d spotted Elaine and me from the doorway of Delacorte’s room, and had poked his head inside. “Not the one you were looking for, or is it?” Larry had asked.

Elaine and I both shook our heads. A very tired Mrs. Delacorte was dozing while her son slipped away. There was no point in introducing Delacorte to Larry; Delacorte, by his silence, seemed to have already slipped away, or else he was headed in that direction—nor did Elaine and I disturb Mrs. Delacorte to introduce her to Larry. (The little woman hadn’t slept a wink for God knows how long.)

Naturally, Larry was the AIDS authority in the room. “Your friend hasn’t got long,” he whispered to Elaine and me; then he left us there. Elaine took Mrs. Delacorte to the women’s room, because the exhausted mother was so worn out she looked as if she might fall or become lost if she went by herself.

I was alone with Delacorte only a moment. I’d grown so accustomed to his silence, I first thought that someone else had spoken. “Have you seen him?” came the faintest whisper. “Leave it to him—he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!” Delacorte breathlessly cried.

“Who?” I whispered in the dying man’s ear, but I knew who. Who else would Delacorte have had on his demented mind at that instant, or almost the instant, of his death? Delacorte died minutes later, with his mother’s small hands on his wasted face. Mrs. Delacorte asked Elaine and me if she could have a moment alone with her son’s body; of course we complied.

Bullshit or not, it was Larry who later told us that we shouldn’t have left Mrs. Delacorte alone in the room with her son’s body. “A single mom, right—an only child, I’m guessing?” Larry said. “And when there’s a Hickman catheter, Bill, you don’t want to leave any loved one alone with the body.”

“I didn’t know, Larry—I’ve never heard of such a thing!” I told him.

“Of course you haven’t heard of such a thing, Bill—you’re not involved! How would you have heard? You’re exactly like him, Elaine,” Larry told her. “The two of you are keeping such a distance from this disease—you’re barely bystanders!”

“Don’t pull rank on us, Larry,” Elaine said.

“Larry is always pulling rank, one way or another,” I said.

“You know, you’re not just bisexual, Bill. You’re bi-everything!” Larry told me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

“You’re a solo pilot, aren’t you, Bill?” Larry asked me. “You’re cruising solo—no copilot has any clout with you.” (I still have no idea what Larry meant.)

“Don’t pull rank on us, Mr. Florence Fucking Nightingale,” Elaine said to Larry.

Elaine and I had been standing in the corridor outside Delacorte’s room, when one of the nurses passed by and paused to speak to us. “Is Carlton—” the nurse started to say.

“Yes, he’s gone—his mother is with him,” Elaine said.

“Oh, dear,” the nurse said, stepping quickly into Delacorte’s room, but she got there too late. Mrs. Delacorte had done what she wanted to do—what she’d probably planned to do, once she knew her son was going to die. She must have had the needle and a syringe in her purse. She’d stuck the needle into the end of the Hickman catheter; she’d drawn some blood out of the Hickman, but she emptied that first syringe into the wastebasket. The first syringe was mostly full of heparin. Mrs. Delacorte had done her homework; she knew that the second syringe would be almost entirely Carlton’s blood, teeming with the virus. Then she’d injected herself, deep into her gluteus, with about five milliliters of her son’s blood. (Mrs. Delacorte would die of AIDS in 1989; she died in hospice care in her apartment, in New York.)

At Elaine’s insistence, I took Mrs. Delacorte uptown in a taxi—after she’d given herself a lethal dose of her beloved Carlton’s blood. She had a tenth-floor apartment in one of those innocuously perfect buildings with an awning and a doorman on Park Avenue and East Seventy- or Eighty-something.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have a drink,” she told me. “Please come in.” I did.

It was hard to fathom why Delacorte had died at St. Vincent’s, when Mrs. Delacorte could clearly have provided more comfortable hospice care for him in her own Park Avenue apartment. “Carlton always objected to feeling privileged,” Mrs. Delacorte explained. “He wanted to die like Everyman—that’s what he said. He wouldn’t let me provide him with hospice care here, even though they could probably have used the extra room at St. Vincent’s—as I told him, many times,” she said.

They no doubt did need the extra room at St. Vincent’s, or they soon would. (Some people waited to die in the corridors there.)

“Would you like to see Carlton’s room?” Mrs. Delacorte asked me, when we both had a drink in hand, and I don’t drink—nothing but beer. I had a whiskey with Mrs. Delacorte; maybe it was bourbon. I would have done anything that little woman wanted. I even went with her to Delacorte’s childhood room.

I found myself in a museum of what had been Carlton Delacorte’s privileged life in New York, before he’d been sent “away” to Favorite River Academy; it was a fairly common story that Delacorte’s leaving home had coincided with his parents getting a divorce, about which Mrs. Delacorte was candid with me.

More surprising, Mrs. Delacorte was no less candid about the prevailing cause of her separation and divorce from young Carlton’s father; her husband had been a raving homo-hater. The man had called Carlton a fairy and a little fag; he’d berated Mrs. Delacorte for allowing the effeminate boy to dress up in his mother’s clothes and paint his lips with her lipstick.

“Of course I knew—probably long before Carlton did,” Mrs. Delacorte told me. She seemed to be favoring her right buttock; such a deep intramuscular injection had to hurt. “Mothers know,” she said, unconsciously limping a little. “You can’t force children to become something they’re not. You can’t simply tell a boy not to play with dolls.”

“No, you can’t,” I said; I was looking at all the photographs in the room—pictures of the unguarded Delacorte, before I knew him. He’d been just a little boy once—one who’d like nothing better than to dress and make himself up as a little girl.

“Oh, look at this—just look,” the little woman suddenly said; the ice cubes were clicking together in her near-empty glass as she reached and untacked a photo from a bulletin board of photographs in her departed son’s bedroom. “Look at how happy he was!” Mrs. Delacorte cried, handing me the photo.

I’m guessing that Delacorte was eleven or twelve in the picture; I had no difficulty recognizing his impish little face. Certainly, the lipstick had accentuated his grin. The cheap mauve wig—with a pink streak—was ridiculous; it was one of those wigs you can find in a Halloween-type costume shop. And of course Mrs. Delacorte’s dress was too big for the boy, but the overall effect was hilarious and endearing—well, not if you were Mr. Delacorte, I guess. There was a taller, slightly older-looking girl in the photograph with Delacorte—a very pretty girl, but with short hair (as closely cut as a boy’s) and an arrestingly confident but tight-lipped smile.

“This day didn’t end well. Carlton’s father came home and was furious to see Carlton like this,” Mrs. Delacorte was saying as I looked more closely at the photo. “The boys had been having such a wonderful time, and that tyrant of a man ruined it!”

“The boys,” I repeated. The very pretty girl in the photograph was Jacques Kittredge.

“Oh, you know him—I know you do!” Mrs. Delacorte said, pointing at the oh-so-perfectly cross-dressed Kittredge. He’d applied his lipstick far more expertly than Delacorte had applied his, and one of Mrs. Delacorte’s beautiful but old-fashioned dresses was an exquisite fit. “The Kittredge boy,” the little woman said. “He went to Favorite River—he was a wrestler, too. Carlton was always in awe of him, I think, but he was a devil—that boy. He could be charming, but he was a devil.”

“How was Kittredge a devil?” I asked Mrs. Delacorte.

“I know he stole my clothes,” she said. “Oh, I gave him some old things I didn’t want—he was always asking me if he could have my clothes! ‘Oh, please, Mrs. Delacorte,’ he would say, ‘my mother’s clothes are huge, and she doesn’t let me try them on—she says I always mess them up!’ He just went on, and on, like that. And then my clothes started disappearing—I mean things I know perfectly well I would never have given him.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know about you,” Mrs. Delacorte said, “but I’m going to have another drink.” She left me to fix herself a second whiskey; I looked at all the other photos on the bulletin board in Delacorte’s childhood bedroom. There were three or four photographs with Kittredge in the picture—always as a girl. When Mrs. Delacorte came back to her dead son’s room, I was still holding the photo she’d handed me.

“Please take it,” she told me. “I don’t like remembering how that day ended.”

“Okay,” I said. I still have that photograph, though I don’t like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.

DID I TELL ELAINE about Kittredge and Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes? Did I show Elaine that photo of Kittredge as a girl? No, of course not—Elaine was holding out on me, wasn’t she?

Some guy Elaine knew got a Guggenheim; he was a fellow writer, and he told Elaine that his seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street was the perfect place for two writers.

“Where’s Post Street?” I asked Elaine.

“Near Union Square, he said—it’s in San Francisco, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I didn’t know San Francisco at all; I only knew there were a lot of gays there. Of course I knew there were gay men dying in big numbers in San Francisco, but I didn’t have any close friends or former lovers there, and Larry wouldn’t be there to bully me about getting more involved. There was another incentive: Elaine and I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep looking for Kittredge—not in San Francisco, or so we’d thought.

“Where’s your friend going on his Guggenheim?” I asked Elaine.

“Somewhere in Europe,” Elaine said.

“Maybe we should try living together in Europe,” I suggested.

“The apartment in San Francisco is available now, Billy,” Elaine told me. “And, for a place that will accommodate two writers, it’s so cheap.”

When Elaine and I got a look at our view from the eighth floor of that rat’s-ass apartment—those uninspiring rooftops on Geary Street, and that bloodred vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio (the neon for HOTEL was burned out before we arrived in San Francisco)—we could understand why that two-writer apartment was so cheap. It should have been free!

But if Tom and Sue Atkins dying of AIDS struck Elaine and me as too much, we couldn’t stand what Mrs. Delacorte had done to herself, nor have I ever heard that such a drawn-out death was a common suicide plan of the loved ones of AIDS victims, particularly (as Larry had so knowingly told Elaine and me) among single moms who were losing their only children. But, as Larry also said, how would I have heard about anything like that? (It was true, as he’d said, that I wasn’t involved.)

“You’re going to try living together in San Francisco,” Larry said to Elaine and me, as if we were runaway children. “Oh, my—a little late to be lovebirds, isn’t it?” (I thought Elaine was going to hit him.) “And, pray tell, what made you choose San Francisco? Have you heard there are no gay men dying there? Maybe we all should move to San Francisco!”

“Fuck you, Larry,” Elaine said.

“Dear Bill,” Larry said, ignoring her, “you can’t run away from a plague—not if it’s your plague. And don’t tell me that AIDS is too Grand Guignol for your taste! Just look at what you write, Bill—overkill is your middle name!”

“You’ve taught me a lot,” was all I could tell him. “I didn’t stop loving you, Larry, just because I stopped being your lover. I still love you.”

“More overkill, Bill,” was all Larry said; he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even look at Elaine, and I knew how fond he was of her—and of her writing.

“I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman,” Elaine had told me about Mrs. Kittredge. “I will never be as close to anyone again.”

“How intimate?” I’d asked her; she’d not answered me.

“It’s his mother who marked me!” Elaine had cried, about that aforementioned awful woman. “It’s her I’ll never forget!”

“Marked you how?” I’d asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and we had done our adagio thing; we’d just held each other, saying nothing—doing our slowly, softly, gently routine. That was how we’d lived together in San Francisco, for what amounted to almost all of 1985.

A lot of people left where they were living in the middle of the AIDS crisis; many of us moved somewhere else, hoping it would be better—but it wasn’t. There was no harm in trying; at least living together didn’t harm Elaine and me—it just didn’t work out for us to be lovers. “If that part were ever going to work,” Martha Hadley would tell us, but only after we’d ended the experiment, “I think it would have clicked when you were kids—not in your forties.”

Mrs. Hadley had a point, as always, but Elaine and I didn’t entirely have a bad year together. I kept the photograph of Kittredge and Delacorte in dresses and lipstick as a bookmark in whatever book I was reading, and I left the particular book lying around in the usual places—on the night table on my side of the bed; on the kitchen countertop, next to the coffeemaker; in the small, crowded bathroom, where it would be in Elaine’s way. Well, Elaine’s eyesight was awful.

It took almost a year for Elaine to see that photo; she came out of the bathroom, naked—she was holding the picture in one hand, and the book I’d been reading in the other. She had her glasses on, and she threw the book at me!

“Why didn’t you just show it to me, Billy? I knew it was Delacorte, months ago,” Elaine told me. “As for the other kid, I just thought he was a girl!”

“Quid pro quo,” I said to my dearest friend. “You’ve got something to tell me, too—don’t you?”

It’s easy to see, with hindsight, how it might have gone better for us in San Francisco if we’d just told each other what we knew about Kittredge when we’d first heard about it, but you live your life at the time you live it—you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.

The photograph of Kittredge as a girl did not make him look—as his mother had allegedly described him to Elaine—like a “sickly little boy”; he (or that pretty girl in the picture) didn’t look like a child who had “no confidence,” as Mrs. Kittredge had supposedly told Elaine. Kittredge didn’t look like a kid who was “picked on by the other children, especially by the boys,” or so (I’d been told) that awful woman had said.

“Mrs. Kittredge said that to you, right?” I asked Elaine.

“Not exactly,” Elaine mumbled.

It had been even harder for me to believe that Kittredge “was once intimidated by girls,” not to mention that Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son so that he would gain confidence—not that I’d ever completely believed this had happened, as I reminded Elaine.

“It happened, Billy,” Elaine said softly. “I just didn’t like the reason—I changed the reason it happened.”

I told Elaine about Kittredge stealing Mrs. Delacorte’s clothes; I told her what Delacorte had breathlessly cried, just before he died. Delacorte had clearly meant Kittredge—“he was never the one to be satisfied with just fitting in!”

“I didn’t want you to like him or forgive him, Billy,” Elaine told me. “I hated him for the way he just handed me over to his mother; I didn’t want you to pity him, or have sympathy for him. I wanted you to hate him, too.”

“I do hate him, Elaine,” I told her.

“Yes, but that’s not all you feel for him—I know,” she told me.

Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her son, but no real or imagined lack of confidence on the young Kittredge’s part was ever the reason. Kittredge had always been very confident—even (indeed, most of all) about wanting to be a girl. His vain and misguided mother had seduced him for the most familiar and stupefying reasoning that many gay or bi young men commonly encounter—if not usually from their own mothers. Mrs. Kittredge believed that all her little boy needed was a positive sexual experience with a woman—that would surely bring him to his senses!

How many of us gay or bi men have heard this bullshit before? Someone who ardently believes that all we need is to get laid—that is, the “right” way—and we’ll never so much as imagine having sex with another man!

“You should have told me,” I said to Elaine.

“You should have shown me the photograph, Billy.”

“Yes, I should have—we both ‘should have.’”

Tom Atkins and Carlton Delacorte had seen Kittredge, but how recently had they seen him—and where? What was clear to Elaine and me was that Atkins and Delacorte had seen Kittredge as a woman.

“A pretty one, too, I’ll bet,” Elaine said to me. Atkins had used the beautiful word.

It had been hard enough for Elaine and me, just living together in San Francisco. With Kittredge back on our minds—not to mention the as a woman part—staying together in San Francisco seemed no longer tenable.

“Just don’t call Larry—not yet,” Elaine said.

But I did call Larry; for one thing, I wanted to hear his voice. And Larry knew everything and everyone; if there was an apartment to rent in New York, Larry would know where it was and who owned it. “I’ll find you a place to stay in New York,” I told Elaine. “If I can’t find two places in New York, I’ll try living in Vermont—you know, I’ll just try it.”

“Your house has no furniture in it, Billy,” Elaine pointed out.

“Ah, well . . .”

That was when I called Larry.

“I just have a cold—it’s nothing, Bill,” Larry said, but I could hear his cough, and that he was struggling to suppress it. There was no pain with that dry PCP cough; it wasn’t a cough like the one you get with pleurisy, and there was no phlegm. It was the shortness of breath that was worrisome about Pneumocystis pneumonia, and the fever.

“What’s your T-cell count?” I asked him. “When were you going to tell me? Don’t bullshit me, Larry!”

“Please come home, Bill—you and Elaine. Please, both of you, come home,” Larry said. (Just that—not a long speech—and he was out of breath.)

Where Larry lived, and where he would die, was on a pretty, tree-lined part of West Tenth Street—just a block north of Christopher Street, and an easy walk to Hudson Street or Sheridan Square. It was a narrow, three-story town house, generally not affordable to a poet—or to most other writers, Elaine and me included. But an iron-jawed heiress and grande dame among Larry’s poetry patrons—the patroness, as I thought of her—had left the house to Larry, who would leave it to Elaine and me. (Not that Elaine and I could afford to keep it—we would eventually be forced to sell that lovely house.)

When Elaine and I moved in—to help the live-in nurse look after Larry—it was not the same as living “together”; we were done with that experiment. Larry’s house had five bedrooms; Elaine and I had our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. We took turns doing the night shift with Larry, so the sleep-in nurse could actually sleep; the nurse, whose name was Eddie, was a calm young man who tended to Larry all day—in theory, so that Elaine and I could write. But Elaine and I didn’t write very much, or very well, in those many months when Larry was wasting away.

Larry was a good patient, perhaps because he’d been an excellent nurse to so many patients before he got sick. Thus my mentor, and my old friend and former lover, became (when he was dying) the same man I’d admired when I first met him—in Vienna, more than twenty years before. Larry would be spared the worst progression of the esophageal candidiasis; he had no Hickman catheter. He wouldn’t hear of a ventilator. He did suffer from the spinal-cord disease vacuolar myelopathy; Larry grew progressively weak, he couldn’t walk or even stand, and he was incontinent—about which he was, but only at first, vain and embarrassed. (Truly not for long.) “It’s my penis, again, Bill,” Larry would soon say with a smile, whenever there was an incontinence issue.

“Ask Billy to say the plural, Larry,” Elaine would chime in.

“Oh, I know—have you ever heard anything quite like it?” Larry would exclaim. “Please say it, Bill—give us the plural!”

For Larry, I would do it—well, for Elaine, too. They just loved to hear that frigging plural. “Penith-zizzes,” I said—always quietly, at first.

“What? I can’t hear you,” Larry would say.

“Louder, Billy,” Elaine said.

“Penith-zizzes!” I would shout, and then Larry and Elaine would join in—all of us crying out, as loudly as we could. “Penith-zizzes!”

One night, our exclamations woke poor Eddie, who was trying to sleep. “What’s wrong?” the young nurse asked. (There he was, in his pajamas.)

“We’re saying ‘penises’ in another language,” Larry explained. “Bill is teaching us.” But it was Larry who taught me.

As I said once to Elaine: “I’ll tell you who my teachers were—the ones who meant the most to me. Larry, of course, but also Richard Abbott, and—maybe the most important of all, or at the most important time—your mother.”

Lawrence Upton died in December of ’86; he was sixty-eight. (It’s hard to believe, but Larry was almost the same age I am now!) He lived for a year in hospice care, in that house on West Tenth Street. He died on Elaine’s shift, but she came and woke me up; that was the deal Elaine and I had made with each other, because we’d both wanted to be there when Larry died. As Larry had said about Russell, the night Russell died in Larry’s arms: “He weighed nothing.”

The night Larry died, both Elaine and I lay beside him and cradled him in our arms. The morphine was playing tricks on Larry; who knows how consciously (or not) Larry said what he said to Elaine and me? “It’s my penis again,” Larry told us. “And again, and again, and again—it’s always my penis, isn’t it?”

Elaine sang him a song, and he died when she was still singing.

“That’s a beautiful song,” I told her. “Who wrote it? What’s it called?”

“Felix Mendelssohn wrote it,” Elaine said. “Never mind what it’s called. If you ever die on me, Billy, you’ll hear it again. I’ll tell you then what it’s called.”

THERE WERE A COUPLE of years when Elaine and I rattled around in that too-grand town house Larry had left us. Elaine had a vapid, nondescript boyfriend, whom I disliked for the sole reason that he wasn’t substantial enough for her. His name was Raymond, and he burned his toast almost every morning, setting off the frigging smoke detector.

I was on Elaine’s shit list for much of that time, because I was seeing a transsexual who kept urging Elaine to wear sexier-looking clothes; Elaine wasn’t inclined to “sexier-looking.”

“Elwood has bigger boobs than I have—everybody has,” Elaine said to me. Elaine purposely called my transsexual friend Elwood, or Woody. My transsexual friend called herself El. Soon everyone would be using the transgender word; my friends told me I should use it, too—not to mention those terribly correct young people giving me the hairy eyeball because I continued to say “transsexual” when I was supposed to say “transgender.”

I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!

It suffices to say that the late eighties were a time of transition for Elaine and me, though some people apparently had nothing better to do than update the frigging gender language. It was a trying two years, and the financial effort to own and maintain that house on West Tenth Street—including the killer taxes—put a strain on our relationship.

One evening, Elaine told me the story that she was sure she’d spotted Charles, poor Tom’s nurse, in a room at St. Vincent’s. (I’d stopped hearing from Charles.) Elaine had peered into a doorway—she was looking for someone else—and there was this shriveled former bodybuilder, his wrinkled and ruined tattoos hanging illegibly from the stretched and sagging skin of his once-powerful arms.

“Charles?” Elaine had said from the doorway, but the man had roared like an animal at her; Elaine had been too frightened to go inside the room.

I was pretty sure I knew who it was—not Charles—but I went to St. Vincent’s to see for myself. It was the winter of ’88; I’d not been inside that last-stop hospital since Delacorte had died and Mrs. Delacorte had injected herself with his blood. I went one more time—just to be certain that the roaring animal Elaine had seen wasn’t Charles.

It was that terrifying bouncer from the Mineshaft, of course—the one they called Mephistopheles. He roared at me, too. I never set foot in St. Vincent’s again. (Hello, Charles—if you’re out there. If you’re not, I’m sorry.)

That same winter, one night when I was out with El, I was told another story. “I just heard about this girl—you know, she was like me but a little older,” El said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I think you knew her—she went to Toronto,” El said.

“Oh, you must mean Donna,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s her,” El said.

“What about her?” I asked.

“She’s not doing too well—that’s what I heard,” El told me.

“Oh.”

“I didn’t say she was sick,” El said. “I just heard she’s not doing too well, whatever that means. I guess she was someone special to you, huh? I heard that, too.”

I didn’t do anything with this information, if you could call it that. But that night was when I got the call from Uncle Bob about Herm Hoyt dying at age ninety-five. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders,” Bob said.

No doubt, that must have distracted me from following up on El’s story about Donna. The next morning, Elaine and I had to open all the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke from Raymond burning his frigging toast, and I said to Elaine: “I’m going to Vermont. I have a house there, and I’m going to try living in it.”

“Sure, Billy—I understand,” Elaine said. “This is too much house for us, anyway—we should sell it.”

That clown Raymond just sat there, eating his burned toast. (As Elaine would say later, Raymond was probably wondering where he was going to live next; he must have known it wouldn’t be with Elaine.)

I said good-bye to El—either that same day or the next one. She wasn’t very understanding about it.

I called Richard Abbott and got Mrs. Hadley on the phone. “Tell Richard I’m going to try it,” I told her.

“I’ve got my fingers crossed for you, Billy—Richard and I would love it if you were living here,” Martha Hadley said.

That was why I was living in Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, now mine, on the morning Uncle Bob called me from the office of Alumni Affairs at the academy.

“It’s about Big Al, Billy,” Bob said. “This isn’t an obituary I would ever run, unedited, in The River Bulletin, but I gotta run the unedited version by you.”

It was February 1990 in First Sister—colder than a witch’s tit, as we say in Vermont.

Miss Frost was the same age as the Racquet Man; she’d died from injuries she suffered in a fight in a bar—she was seventy-three. The injuries were mostly head injuries, Uncle Bob told me. Big Al had found herself in a barroom brawl with a bunch of airmen from Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire. The bar had been in Dover, or maybe in Portsmouth—Bob didn’t have all the details.

“What’s ‘a bunch,’ Bob—how many airmen were there?” I asked him.

“Uh, well, there was one airman first-class, and one airman basic, and a couple more who were only identified by the airmen word—that’s all I can tell you, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

“Young guys, right? Four of them? Were there four of them, Bob?” I asked him.

“Yes, four. I assume they were young, Billy—if they were enlisted men and still in service. But I’m just guessing about their ages,” Uncle Bob told me.

Miss Frost had probably received her head injuries after the four of them finally managed to get her down; I imagine it took two or three of them to hold her down, while the fourth man had kicked her in the head.

All four men had been hospitalized, Bob told me; the injuries to two of the four were listed as “serious.” But none of the airmen had been charged; at that time, Pease was still a SAC base. According to Uncle Bob, the Strategic Air Command “disciplined” its own, but Bob admitted that he didn’t truly understand how the “legal stuff” (when it came to the military) really worked. The four airmen were never identified by name, nor was there any information as to why four young men had a fight with a seventy-three-year-old woman, who—in their eyes—may or may not have been acceptable as a woman.

My guess, and Bob’s, was that Miss Frost might have had a past relationship—or just a previous meeting—with one or more of the airmen. Maybe, as Herm Hoyt had speculated to me, one of the fellas had objected to the intercrural sex; he might have found it insufficient. Perhaps, given how young the airmen were, they knew of Miss Frost only “by reputation”; it might have been enough provocation to them that she was, in their minds, not a real woman—it might have been only that. (Or they were frigging homophobes—it might have been only that, too.)

Whatever led to the altercation, it was apparent—as Coach Hoyt had predicted—that Big Al would never back down from a fight.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

Later, Bob and I agreed we were glad that Herm Hoyt hadn’t lived to hear about it. I called Elaine in New York that night. She had her own small place in Chelsea, just a little northwest of the West Village and due north of the Meatpacking District. I told Elaine about Miss Frost, and I asked her to sing me that Mendelssohn song—the one she’d said she was saving for me, the same one she’d sung for Larry.

“I promise I won’t die on your shift, Elaine. You’ll never have to sing that song for me. Besides, I need to hear it now,” I told her.

As for the Mendelssohn song, Elaine explained it was a small part of Elijah—Mendelssohn’s longest work. It comes near the end of that oratorio, after God arrives (in the voice of a small child), and the angels sing blessings to Elijah, who sings his last aria—“For the Mountains Shall Depart.” That’s what Elaine sang to me; her alto voice was big and strong, even over the phone, and I said good-bye to Miss Frost, listening to the same music I’d heard when I was saying good-bye to Larry. Miss Frost had been lost to me for almost thirty years, but that night I knew she was gone for good, and all that Uncle Bob would say about her in The River Bulletin wasn’t nearly enough.

Sad tidings for the Class of ’35! Al Frost: born, First Sister, Vermont, 1917; wrestling team captain, 1935 (undefeated); died, Dover or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1990.

“That’s it?” I remember asking Uncle Bob.

“Shit, Billy—what else can we say in an alumni magazine?” the Racquet Man said.

When Richard and Martha were auctioning off the old furniture from Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, they told me they’d found thirteen beer bottles under the living-room couch—all Uncle Bob’s. (If I had to bet, all from that one party to commemorate Aunt Muriel and my mother.)

“Way to go, Bob!” I’d said to Mrs. Hadley and Richard.

I knew the Racquet Man was right. What can you say in a frigging alumni magazine about a transsexual wrestler who was killed in a bar fight? Not much.

IT WAS A COUPLE of years later—I was slowly adjusting to living in Vermont—when I got a late-night phone call from El. It took me a second or two to recognize her voice; I think she was drunk.

“You know that friend of yours—the girl like me, but she’s older?” El asked.

“You mean Donna,” I said, after a pause.

“Yeah, Donna,” El said. “Well, she is sick now—that’s what I heard.”

“Thank you for telling me,” I was saying, when El hung up the phone. It was too late to call anybody in Toronto; I just slept on the news. I’m guessing this would have been 1992 or ’93; it may even have been early in 1994. (After I moved to Vermont, I didn’t pay such close attention to time.)

I had a few friends in Toronto; I asked around. I was told about an excellent hospice there—everyone I knew said it was quite a wonderful place, under the circumstances. Casey House, it was called; just recently, someone told me it still exists.

The director of nursing at Casey House, at that time, was a great guy; his first name was John, if I remember correctly, and I think he had an Irish last name. Since I’d moved back to First Sister, I was discovering that I wasn’t very good at remembering names. Besides, whenever this was, exactly—when I heard about Donna being sick—I was already fifty, or in my fifties. (It wasn’t just names I had trouble remembering!)

John told me that Donna had been admitted to hospice care several months before. But Donna was “Don” to the nurses and other caregivers at Casey House, John had explained to me.

“Estrogen has side effects—in particular, it can affect the liver,” John told me. Furthermore, estrogens can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. “The itching that occurs with this condition was driving Don nuts,” was how John put it. It was Donna herself who’d told everyone to call her Don; upon stopping the estrogens, her beard came back.

It seemed exceptionally unfair to me that Donna, who had worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS; she was being forced to return to her former male self.

Donna also had cytomegalovirus. “In this case, the blindness may be a blessing,” John told me. He meant that Donna was spared seeing her beard, but of course she could feel it—even though one of the nurses shaved her face every day.

“I just want to prepare you,” John said to me. “Watch yourself. Don’t call him ‘Donna.’ Just try not to let that name slip.” In our phone conversations, I’d noticed that the director of nursing was careful to use the he and him words while discussing “Don.” John not once said she or her or Donna.

Thus prepared, I found my way to Huntley Street in downtown Toronto—a small residential-looking street, or so it seemed to me (between Church Street and Sherbourne Street, if you know the city). Casey House itself was like a very large family’s home; it had as pleasant and welcoming an atmosphere as was possible, but there’s only so much you can do about bedsores and muscular wasting—or the lingering smell, no matter how hard you try to mask it, of fulminant diarrhea. Donna’s room had an almost-nice lavender smell. (A bathroom deodorizer, a perfumed disinfectant—not one I would choose.) I must have held my breath.

“Is that you, Billy?” Donna asked; white splotches clouded her eyes, but she could hear okay. I’ll bet she’d heard me hold my breath. Of course they’d told her I was coming, and a nurse had very recently shaved her; I was unused to the masculine smell of the shaving cream, or maybe it was an after-shave gel. Yet, when I kissed her, I could feel the beard on Donna’s cheek—as I’d not once felt it when we were making love—and I could see the shadow of a beard on her clean-shaven face. She was taking Coumadin; I saw the pills on the bedside table.

I was impressed by what a good job the nurses were doing at Casey House; they were experts at accomplishing all they could to make Donna comfortable, including (of course) the pain control. John had explained to me the subtleties of sublingual morphine versus morphine elixir versus fentanyl patch, but I hadn’t really been listening. John also told me that Don was using a special cream that seemed to help control his itching, although the cream was exposing Don to “a lot of steroids.”

Suffice it to say, I saw that Donna was in good and caring hands at Casey House—even though she was blind, and she was dying as a man. While I was visiting with Donna, two of her Toronto friends also came to see her—two very passable transsexuals, each of them clearly dedicated to living her life as a woman. When Donna introduced us, I very much had the feeling that she’d forewarned them I would be there; in fact, Donna might have asked her friends to stop by when I was with her. Maybe Donna wanted me to see that she’d found “her people,” and that she’d been happy in Toronto.

The two transsexuals were very friendly to me—one of them flirted with me, but it was all for show. “Oh, you’re the writer—we know all about you!” the more outgoing but not flirtatious one said.

“Oh, yeah—the bi guy, right?” the one who was coming on to me said. (She definitely wasn’t serious about it. The flirting was entirely for Donna’s amusement; Donna had always loved flirting.)

“Watch out for her, Billy,” Donna told me, and all three of them laughed. Given Atkins, given Delacorte, given Larry—not to mention those airmen who killed Miss Frost—it wasn’t a terribly painful visit. At one point, Donna even said to her flirtatious friend, “You know, Lorna—Billy never complained that I had too big a cock. You liked my cock, didn’t you, Billy?” Donna asked me.

“I certainly did,” I told her, being careful not to say, “I certainly did, Donna.”

“Yeah, but you told me Billy was a top,” Lorna said to Donna; the other transsexual, whose name was Lilly, laughed. “Try being a bottom and see what too big a cock does to you!”

“You see, Billy?” Donna said. “I told you to watch out for Lorna. She’s already found a way to let you know she’s a bottom, and that she likes little cocks.”

The three friends all laughed at that—I had to laugh, too. I only noticed, when I was saying good-bye to Donna, that her friends and I had not once called her by name—not Donna or Don. The two transsexuals waited for me when I was saying good-bye to John; I would have hated his job.

I walked with Lorna and Lilly to the Sherbourne subway station; they were taking the subway home, they said. By the way they said the home word, and the way they were holding hands, I got the feeling that they lived together. When I asked them where I could catch a taxi to take me back to my hotel, Lilly said, “I’m glad you mentioned what hotel you’re staying in—I’ll be sure to tell Donna that you and Lorna got in a lot of trouble.”

Lorna laughed. “I’ll probably tell Donna that you and Lilly got in trouble, too,” Lorna told me. “Donna loves it when I say, ‘Lilly never knew a cock she didn’t like, big or little’—that cracks her up.”

Lilly laughed, and I did, too, but the flirting was finished. It had all been for Donna. I kissed Donna’s two friends good-bye at the Sherbourne subway station, their cheeks perfectly soft and smooth, with no hint of a beard—absolutely nothing you could feel against your face, and not the slightest shadow on their pretty faces. I still have dreams about those two.

I was thinking, as I kissed them good-bye, of what Elaine told me Mrs. Kittredge had said, when Elaine was traveling in Europe with Kittredge’s mother. (This was what Mrs. Kittredge really said—not the story Elaine first told me.)

“I don’t know what your son wants,” Elaine had told Kittredge’s mother. “I just know he always wants something.”

“I’ll tell you what he wants—even more than he wants to fuck us,” Mrs. Kittredge said. “He wants to be one of us, Elaine. He doesn’t want to be a boy or a man; it doesn’t matter to him that he’s finally so good at being a boy or a man. He never wanted to be a boy or a man in the first place!”

But if Kittredge was a woman now—if he was like Donna had been, or like Donna’s two very “passable” friends—and if Kittredge had AIDS and was dying somewhere, what if they’d had to stop giving Kittredge the estrogens? Kittredge had a very heavy beard; I could still feel, after more than thirty years, how heavy his beard was. I had so often, and for so long, imagined Kittredge’s beard scratching against my face.

Do you remember what he said to me, about transsexuals? “I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge had whispered in my ear, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along.” (He’d been talking about the transvestites he’d seen in Paris.) “I think, if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris,” Kittredge had said to me. “But you, Nymph—you’ve already done it!” Kittredge had cried.

Elaine and I had seen Kittredge’s single room at Favorite River Academy, most memorably (to me) the photograph of Kittredge and his mother that was taken after a wrestling match. What Elaine and I had noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand had cut off Mrs. Kittredge’s face and glued it to Kittredge’s body. There was Kittredge’s mother in Kittredge’s wrestling tights and singlet. And there was Kittredge’s handsome face glued to his mother’s beautiful and exquisitely tailored body.

The truth was, Kittredge’s face had worked on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes. Elaine had convinced me that Kittredge must have been the one who switched the faces in the photograph; Mrs. Kittredge couldn’t have done it. “That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor,” Elaine had said, in her authoritarian way.

I was back home from Toronto, having said good-bye to Donna. Lavender would never smell the same to me again, and you can imagine what an anticlimax it would be when Uncle Bob called me in my River Street house with the latest news of a classmate’s death.

“You’ve lost another classmate, Billy—not your favorite person, if memory serves,” the Racquet Man said. As vague as I am concerning when I heard the news about Donna, I can tell you exactly when it was that Uncle Bob called me with the news about Kittredge.

I’d just celebrated my fifty-third birthday. It was March 1995; there was still a lot of snow on the ground in First Sister, with nothing but mud season to look forward to.

Elaine and I had been talking about taking a trip to Mexico; she’d been looking at houses to rent in Playa del Carmen. I would have happily gone to Mexico with her, but she was having a boyfriend problem: Her boyfriend was a tight-assed turd who didn’t want Elaine to go anywhere with me.

“Didn’t you tell him we don’t do it?” I asked her.

“Yes, but I also told him that we used to do it—or that we tried to,” Elaine said, revising herself.

“Why did you tell him that?” I asked her.

“I’m trying out a new honesty policy,” Elaine answered. “I’m not making up so many stories, or I’m trying not to.”

“How is this policy working out with your fiction writing?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I can go to Mexico with you, Billy—not right now,” was all she’d said.

I’d had a recent boyfriend problem of my own, but when I dumped the boyfriend, I had rather soon developed a girlfriend problem. She was a first-year faculty member at Favorite River, a young English teacher. Mrs. Hadley and Richard had introduced us; they’d invited me to dinner, and there was Amanda. When I first saw her, I thought she was one of Richard’s students—she looked that young to me. But she was an anxious young woman in her late twenties.

“I’m almost thirty,” Amanda was always saying, as if she was anxious that she was too young-looking; therefore, saying she would soon be thirty made her seem older.

When we started sleeping together, Amanda was anxious about where we did it. She had a faculty apartment in one of the girls’ dorms at Favorite River; when I spent the night with her there, the girls in the dormitory knew about it. But, most nights, Amanda had dorm duty—she couldn’t stay with me in my house on River Street. The way it was working out, I wasn’t sleeping with Amanda nearly enough—that was the developing problem. And then, of course, there was the bi issue: She’d read all my novels, she said she loved my writing, but that I was a bi guy made her anxious, too.

“I just can’t believe you’re fifty-three!” Amanda kept saying, which confused me. I couldn’t tell if she meant I seemed so much younger than I was, or that she was appalled at herself for dating an old bi guy in his fifties.

Martha Hadley, who was seventy-five, had retired, but she still met with individual students who had “special needs”—pronunciation problems included. Mrs. Hadley had told me that Amanda suffered from pronunciation problems. “That wasn’t why you introduced us, was it?” I asked Martha.

“It wasn’t my idea, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “It was Richard’s idea to introduce you to Amanda, because she is such a fan of your writing. I never thought it was a good idea—she’s way too young for you, and she’s anxious about everything. I can only imagine that, because you are bi—well, that’s got to keep Amanda awake at night. She can’t pronounce the word bisexual!”

“Oh.”

That’s what was going on in my life when Uncle Bob called me about Kittredge. That’s why I said, half seriously, I had “nothing but mud season to look forward to”—nothing except my writing. (Moving to Vermont had been good for my writing.)

The account of Kittredge’s death had been submitted to the Office of Alumni Affairs by Mrs. Kittredge.

“Do you mean he had a wife, or do you mean his mother?” I asked Uncle Bob.

“Kittredge had a wife, Billy, but we heard from the mother.”

“Jesus—how old would Mrs. Kittredge be?” I asked Bob.

“She’s only seventy-two,” my uncle answered; Uncle Bob was seventy-eight, and he sounded a little insulted by my question. Elaine had told me that Mrs. Kittredge had only been eighteen when Kittredge was born.

According to Bob—that is, according to Mrs. Kittredge—my former heartthrob and tormentor had died in Zurich, Switzerland, “of natural causes.”

“Bullshit, Bob,” I said. “Kittredge was only a year older than I am—he was fifty-four. What ‘natural causes’ can kill you when you’re fifty-fucking-four?”

“My thoughts exactly, Billy—but that’s what his mom said,” the Racquet Man replied.

“From what I’ve heard, I’ll bet Kittredge died of AIDS,” I said.

“What mother of Mrs. Kittredge’s generation would be likely to tell her son’s old school that?” Uncle Bob asked me. (Indeed, Sue Atkins had reported only that Tom Atkins had died “after a long illness.”)

“You said Kittredge had a wife,” I replied to my uncle.

“He is survived by his wife and his son—an only child—and by his mother, of course,” the Racquet Man told me. “The boy is named after his father—another Jacques. The wife has a German-sounding name. You studied German, didn’t you, Billy? What kind of name is Irmgard?” Uncle Bob asked.

“Definitely German-sounding,” I said.

If Kittredge had wasted away in Zurich—even if he’d died in Switzerland “of natural causes”—possibly his wife was Swiss, but Irmgard was a German name. Boy, was that ever a tough Christian name to carry around! It was terribly old-fashioned; one immediately felt the stiffness of the person wearing that heavy name. I thought it was a suitable name for an elderly schoolmistress, a strict disciplinarian.

I was guessing that the only child, the son named Jacques, would have been born sometime in the early seventies; that would have been right on schedule for the kind of career-oriented young man I imagined Kittredge was, in those early years—given the MFA from Yale, given his first few steps along a no doubt bright and shining career path in the world of drama. Only at the appropriate time would Kittredge have paused, and found a wife. And then what? How had things unraveled after that?

“That fucker—God damn him!” Elaine cried, when I told her Kittredge had died. She was furious—it was as if Kittredge had escaped, somehow. She couldn’t speak about the “of natural causes” bullshit, not to mention the wife. “He can’t get away with this!” Elaine cried.

“Elaine—he died. He didn’t get away with anything,” I said, but Elaine cried and cried.

Unfortunately, it was one of the few nights when Amanda didn’t have dorm duty; she was staying with me in the River Street house, and so I had to tell her about Kittredge, and Elaine, and all the rest.

No doubt, this history was more bi—and gay, and “transgender” (as Amanda would say)—in nature than anything Amanda had been forced to imagine, although she kept saying how much she loved my writing, where she’d no doubt encountered a world of sexual “differences” (as Richard would say).

I blame myself for not saying anything to Amanda about the frigging ghosts in that River Street house; only other people saw them—they never bothered me! But Amanda got up to go to the bathroom—it was the middle of the night—and her screaming woke me. It was a brand-new bathtub in that bathroom—it was not the same tub Grandpa Harry had pulled the trigger in, just the same bathroom—but, when Amanda finally calmed down enough to tell me what happened (when she was sitting on the toilet), it had no doubt been Harry she’d seen in that brand-new bathtub.

“He was curled up like a little boy in the bathtub—he smiled at me when I was peeing!” Amanda, who was still sobbing, explained.

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“But he was no little boy!” Amanda moaned.

“No, he wasn’t—that was my grandfather,” I tried to tell her calmly. Oh, that Harry—he certainly loved a new audience, even as a ghost! (Even as a man!)

“At first, I didn’t see the rifle—but he wanted me to see it, Billy. He showed me the gun, and then he shot himself in the head—his head went all over the place!” Amanda wailed.

Naturally, I had some explaining to do; I had to tell her everything about Grandpa Harry. We were up all night. Amanda would not go to the bathroom by herself in the morning—she wouldn’t even be alone in one of the other bathrooms, which I’d suggested. I understood; I was very understanding. I’ve never seen a frigging ghost—I’m sure they’re frightening.

I guess the last straw, as I would later explain to Mrs. Hadley and Richard, was that Amanda was so rattled in the morning—after all, the anxious young woman hadn’t had a good night’s sleep—she opened the door to my bedroom closet, thinking she was opening the door to the upstairs hall. And there was Grandpa Harry’s .30-30 Mossberg; I keep that old carbine in my closet, where it just leans against a wall.

Amanda screamed and screamed—Christ, she wouldn’t stop screaming. “You kept the actual gun—you keep it in your bedroom closet! Who would ever keep the very same gun his grandfather used to blow himself all over the bathroom, Billy?” Amanda yelled at me.

“Amanda has a point about the gun, Bill,” Richard would say to me, when I told him that Amanda and I were no longer seeing each other.

“Nobody wants you to have that gun, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

“If you get rid of the gun, maybe the ghosts will leave, Billy,” Elaine told me.

But those ghosts have never appeared to me; I think you have to be receptive to see ghosts like that, and I guess I’m not “receptive” in that way. I have my own ghosts—my own “terrifying angels,” as I (more than once) have thought of them—but my ghosts don’t live in that River Street house in First Sister, Vermont.

I would go to Mexico, alone, that mud season of 1995. I rented a house Elaine told me about in Playa del Carmen. I drank a lot of cerveza, and I picked up a handsome, swashbuckling-looking guy with a pencil-thin mustache and dark sideburns; honestly, he looked like one of the actors who played Zorro—one of the old black-and-white versions. We had fun, we drank a lot more cerveza, and when I came back to Vermont, it was almost looking like spring.

Not much would happen to me—not for fifteen years—except that I became a teacher. The private schools—you’re supposed to call them “independent” schools, but I still let the private word slip out—aren’t so strict about the retirement age. Richard Abbott wouldn’t retire from Favorite River Academy until he was in his early seventies, and even after he retired, Richard went to all the productions of the school’s Drama Club.

Richard wasn’t very happy about his various replacements—well, nobody was happy about that lackluster bunch of buffoons. There wasn’t anyone in the English Department who had Richard’s feelings for Shakespeare, and there was no one who knew shit about theater. Martha Hadley and Richard were all over me to get involved at the academy.

“The kids read your novels, Billy,” Richard kept telling me.

“Especially—you know—the kids who are sexually different, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said; she was still working with individual “cases” (as she called them) in her eighties.

It was from Elaine that I first heard there were groups for lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender kids on college campuses. It was Richard Abbott—in his late seventies—who told me there was even such a group of kids at Favorite River Academy. It was hard for a bi guy of my generation to imagine such organized and recognized groups. (They were becoming so common, these groups were known by their initials. When I first heard about this, I couldn’t believe it.)

When Elaine was teaching at NYU, she invited me to come give a reading from a new novel to the LGBT group on campus. (I was so out of it; it took me days of reciting those initials before I could keep them in the correct order.)

It would have been the fall term of 2007 at Favorite River Academy when Mrs. Hadley told me there was someone special she and Richard wanted me to meet. I immediately thought it was a new teacher at the academy—someone in the English Department, either a pretty woman or a cute guy, I guessed, or possibly this “special” person had just been hired to breathe a hope of new life into the failing, all-but-expired Drama Club at Favorite River.

I was remembering Amanda—that’s where I thought this match-making enterprise of Martha Hadley’s (and Richard’s) was headed. But, no—not at my age. I was sixty-five in the fall of 2007. Mrs. Hadley and Richard weren’t trying to fix me up. Martha Hadley was a spry eighty-seven, but one slip on the ice or in the snow—one bad fall, a broken hip—and she would be checking into the Facility. (Mrs. Hadley would soon be checking in there, anyway.) And Richard Abbott was no longer leading-man material; at seventy-seven, Richard had come partway out of retirement to teach a Shakespeare course at Favorite River, but he didn’t have the stamina to put Shakespeare onstage anymore. Richard was just reading the plays with some first-year kids at the academy; all of them were starting freshmen at the school. (Kids in the Class of 2011! I couldn’t imagine being that young again!)

“We want to introduce you to a new student, Bill,” Richard said; he was rather indignant at the very idea of him (or Martha) finding me a likely date.

“A new freshman, Billy—someone special,” Mrs. Hadley said.

“Someone with pronunciation problems, you mean?” I asked Martha Hadley.

“We’re not trying to fix you up with a teacher, Bill. We think you should be a teacher,” Richard said.

“We want you to meet one of the new LGBT kids, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley told me.

“Sure—why not?” I said. “I don’t know about being a teacher, but I’ll meet the kid. Boy or girl?” I remember asking Martha Hadley and Richard. They just looked at each other.

“Ah, well—” Richard started to say, but Mrs. Hadley interrupted him.

Martha Hadley took my hands in hers, and squeezed them. “Boy or girl, Billy,” she said. “Well, that’s the question. That’s why we want you to meet him, or her—that’s the question.”

“Oh,” I said. That was how and why I became a teacher.

THE RACQUET MAN WAS ninety when he checked into the Facility; this followed two hip-replacement surgeries, and a fall downstairs when he was supposed to be healing from the second surgery. “I’m starting to feel like an old fella, Billy,” Bob told me when I went to visit him in the Facility in the autumn of 2007—the same September Mrs. Hadley and Richard introduced me to the LGBT kid, the one who would change my life.

Uncle Bob was recovering from pneumonia—the result of being bedridden for a period of time after he fell. From the AIDS epidemic, I still had a vivid memory of that pneumonia—the one so many people never recovered from. I was happy to see Bob up and about, but he’d decided he was staying at the Facility.

“I gotta let these folks look after me, Billy,” the Racquet Man said. I understood how he felt; Muriel had been gone for almost thirty years, and Gerry, who was sixty-eight, had just started living with a new girlfriend in California.

“Vagina Lady,” which had been Elaine’s name for Helena, was long gone. No one had met Gerry’s new girlfriend, but Gerry had written me about her. She was “only” my age, Gerry told me—as if the girl were under the age of consent.

“The next thing you know, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me, “they’ll start legalizing same-sex marriage all over the place, and Gerry will be marrying her next new girlfriend. If I stay put in the Facility, Gerry will have to get married in Vermont!” the Racquet Man exclaimed, as if the very idea of that ever happening was beyond credibility.

Thus assured that my ninety-year-old uncle Bob was safe at the Facility, I made my way to Noah Adams Hall, which was the building for English and foreign-language studies at Favorite River; I was meeting the “special” new student in Richard’s ground-floor office, which was adjacent to Richard’s classroom. Mrs. Hadley was also meeting us there.

To my horror, Richard’s office hadn’t changed; it was awful. There was a fake-leather couch that smelled worse than any dog bed you’ve ever smelled; there were three or four straight-backed wooden chairs, of the kind with those arms that have a flat mini-desk for writing. There was Richard’s desk, which was always a mountain of upheaval; a pile of opened books and loose papers obscured the writing surface. Richard’s desk chair was on casters, so that Richard could slide all around his office in a seated position—which, to the students’ general amusement, Richard did.

What had changed at Favorite River, since my days at the formerly all-boys’ school, was not only the girls—it was the dress code. If there was one in 2007, I couldn’t tell you what it was; coats and ties were no longer required. There was some vague rule against “torn” jeans—this meant jeans that were tattered or slashed. There was a rule that you couldn’t come to the dining hall in your pajamas, and another one, which was always being protested, that concerned the girls’ bare midriffs—how much midriff could be bare was the issue. Oh, and so-called plumbers’ cracks were deemed offensive—this was most offensive, I was told, when the “cracks” belonged to the boys. Both the girls’ bare midriffs and the boys’ plumbers’ cracks were hotly debated rules, which were constantly under revision in infinitesimal ways. They were sexually discriminatory rules, the students said; girls’ midriffs and boys’ cracks were being singled out as “bad.”

Here I’d been expecting Martha and Richard’s “special” student to be some cutting-edge hermaphrodite—a kind of alluring-to-everyone mélange of reproductive organs, a he or a she as sexually beguiling as the mythological combination of a nymph and a satyr in a Fellini film—but there in Richard’s office, slouched on that dog bed of a couch, was a sloppily dressed, slightly overweight boy with a brightly inflamed pimple on his neck and only the spottiest evidence of a prepubescent beard. That zit was almost as angry-looking as the boy himself. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed—either in resentment or due to the effort he was making to scrutinize me more closely.

“Hi, I’m Bill Abbott,” I said to the boy.

“This is George—” Mrs. Hadley started to say.

“Georgia,” the boy quickly corrected her. “I’m Georgia Montgomery—the kids call me Gee.”

“Gee,” I repeated.

“Gee will do for now,” the boy said, “but I’m going to be Georgia. This isn’t my body,” he said angrily. “I’m not what you see. I’m becoming someone else.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I came to this school because you went here,” the boy told me.

“Gee was in school in California,” Richard started to explain.

“I thought there might be other transgender kids here,” Gee told me, “but there aren’t—nobody who’s out, anyway.”

“His parents—” Mrs. Hadley tried to tell me.

“Her parents,” Gee corrected Martha.

“Gee’s parents are very liberal,” Martha said to me. “They support you, don’t they?” Mrs. Hadley asked the boy—or the girl-in-progress, if that’s who he or she was.

“My parents are liberal, and they do support me,” Gee said, “but my parents are also afraid of me—they say ‘yes’ to everything, like my coming all the way to Vermont.”

“I see,” I said.

“I’ve read all your books,” Gee told me. “You’re pretty angry, aren’t you? You’re pretty pessimistic, anyway. You don’t see all the sexual intolerance ending anytime soon, do you?” the boy asked me.

“I write fiction,” I cautioned him. “I’m not necessarily as pessimistic about real life as I am when I make up a story.”

“You seem pretty angry,” the boy insisted.

“We should leave these two alone, Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said.

“Yes, yes—you’re on your own, Bill,” Richard said, patting me on the back. “Ask Bill to tell you about a transsexual he knew, Gee,” Richard said to the girl-in-progress, as he was leaving.

“Transgender,” Gee corrected Richard.

“Not to me,” I told the kid. “I know the language changes; I know I’m an old man, and out of date. But the person I knew was a transsexual to me. At that time, that’s who she was. I say ‘transsexual.’ If you want to hear the story, you’ll just have to get used to that. Don’t correct my language,” I told the kid. He just sat there on that smelly couch, staring at me. “I’m a liberal, too,” I told him, “but I don’t say ‘yes’ to everything.”

“We’re reading The Tempest in Richard’s class,” Gee said—apropos of nothing, or so I thought. “It’s too bad we can’t put it onstage,” the boy added, “but Richard has assigned us parts to read in class. I’m Caliban—I’m the monster, naturally.”

“I was Ariel once,” I told him. “I saw my grandfather do Caliban onstage; he played Caliban as a woman,” I said to the girl-in-progress.

“Really?” the kid asked me; he smiled for the first time, and I could suddenly see it. He had a pretty girl’s smile; it was hidden in the boy’s unformed face, and further concealed by his sloppy boy’s body, but I could see the her in him. “Tell me about the transgender you knew,” the kid told me.

“Transsexual,” I said.

“Okay—please tell me about her,” Gee asked me.

“It’s a long story, Gee—I was in love with her,” I told him—I told her, I should say.

“Okay,” she repeated.

Later that day, we went together to the dining hall. The kid was only fourteen, and she was famished. “You see that jock over there?” Gee asked me; I couldn’t see which jock Gee meant, because there was a whole table of them—football players, from the look of them. I just nodded.

“He calls me Tampon, or sometimes just George—not Gee. Needless to say, never Georgia,” the kid said, smiling.

“Tampon is pretty terrible,” I told the girl.

“Actually, I prefer it to George,” Gee told me. “You know, Mr. A., you could probably direct The Tempest, couldn’t you—if you wanted to? That way, we could put Shakespeare onstage.”

No one had ever called me Mr. A.; I must have liked it. I’d already decided that if Gee wanted to be a girl this badly, she had to be one. I wanted to direct The Tempest, too.

“Hey, Tampon!” someone called.

“Let’s have a word with the football players,” I told Gee. We went over to their table; they instantly stopped eating. They saw the tragic-looking mess of a boy—the transgender wannabe, as they probably thought of him—and they saw me, a sixty-five-year-old man, whom they might have mistaken for a faculty member (I soon would be). After all, I looked way too old to be Gee’s father.

“This is Gee—that’s her name. Remember it,” I said to them. They didn’t respond. “Which of you called Gee ‘Tampon’?” I asked them; there was no response to my question, either. (Fucking bullies; most of them are cowards.)

“If someone mistakes you for a tampon, Gee—whose fault is it, if you don’t speak up about it?” I asked the girl, who still looked like a boy.

“That would be my fault,” Gee said.

“What’s her name?” I asked the football players.

All but one of them called out, “Gee!” The one who hadn’t spoken, the biggest one, was eating again; he was looking at his food, not at me, when I spoke to him.

“What’s her name?” I asked again; he pointed to his mouth, which was full.

“I’ll wait,” I told him.

“He’s not on the faculty,” the big football player said to his teammates, when he’d swallowed his food. “He’s just a writer who lives in town. He’s some old gay guy who lives here, and he went to school here. He can’t tell us what to do—he’s not on the faculty.”

“What’s her name?” I asked him.

“Douche Bag?” the football player asked me; he was smiling now—so were the other football players.

“You see why I’m ‘pretty angry,’ as you say, Gee?” I asked the fourteen-year-old. “Is this the guy who calls you Tampon?”

“Yes—that’s him,” Gee said.

The football player, the one who knew who I was, had stood up from the table; he was a very big kid, maybe four inches taller than I am, and easily twenty or thirty pounds heavier.

“Get lost, you old fag,” the big kid said to me. I thought it would be better if I could get him to say the fag word to Gee. I knew I would have the fucker then; the dress code may have relaxed at Favorite River, but there were other rules in place—rules that didn’t exist when I’d been a student. You couldn’t get thrown out of Favorite River for saying tampon or douche bag, but the fag word was in the category of hate. (Like the nigger word and the kike word, the fag word could get you in trouble.)

“Fucking football players,” I heard Gee say; it was something Herm Hoyt used to say. (Wrestlers are rather contemptuous about how tough football players think they are.) That young transgender-in-progress must have been reading my mind!

“What did you say, you little fag?” the big kid said. He took a cheap shot at Gee—he smacked the heel of his hand into the fourteen-year-old’s face. It must have hurt her, but I saw that Gee wasn’t going to back down; her nose was starting to bleed when I stepped between them.

“That’s enough,” I said to the big kid, but he bumped me with his chest. I saw the right hook coming, and took the punch on my left forearm—the way Jim Somebody had shown me, down that fourth-floor hall in the boxing room at the NYAC. The football player was a little surprised when I reached up and caught the back of his neck in a collar-tie. He pushed back against me, hard; he was a heavy kid, and he leaned all his weight on me—just what you want your opponent to do, if you have a halfway-decent duck-under.

The dining-hall floor was a lot harder than a wrestling mat, and the big kid landed awkwardly, with all his weight (and most of mine) on one shoulder. I was pretty sure he’d separated that shoulder, or he had broken his collarbone—or both. At the time, he was just lying on the floor, trying not to move that shoulder or his upper arm.

“Fucking football players,” Gee repeated, this time to the whole table of them. They could see her nose was bleeding more.

“For the fourth time, what’s her name?” I asked the big kid lying on the floor.

“Gee,” the douche-bag, tampon guy said. It turned out that he was a PG—a nineteen-year-old postgraduate who’d been admitted to Favorite River to play football. Either the separated shoulder or the broken collarbone would cause him to miss the rest of the football season. The academy didn’t expel him for the fag word, but he was put on probation. (Both Gee and I had hoped that her nose was broken, but it wasn’t.) The PG would be thrown out of school the following spring for using the dyke word, in reference to a girl who wouldn’t sleep with him.

When I agreed to teach part-time at Favorite River, I said I would do so only on the condition that the academy make an effort to educate new students, especially the older PGs, on the subject of the liberal culture at Favorite River—I meant, of course, in regard to our acceptance of sexual diversity.

But there in the dining hall, on that September day in 2007, I didn’t have anything more of an educative nature to say to the football players.

My new protégée, Gee, however, had more to say to those jocks, who were still sitting at their table. “I’m going to become a girl,” she told them bravely. “One day, I’ll be Georgia. But, for now, I’m just Gee, and you can see me as Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”

“Perhaps it will be a winter-term play,” I cautioned the football players, not that I expected any of them to come see it. I just thought that I might need that long to get the kids ready; all the students in Richard’s Shakespeare class were freshmen. I would open auditions to the entire school, but I feared that the kids who would be most interested in the play were (like Gee) only freshmen.

“There’s one more thing,” my protégée said to the football players. Her nose was streaming blood, but I could tell Gee was happy about that. “Mr. A. is not an old gay guy—he’s an old bi guy. You got that?”

I was impressed that the football players nodded. Well, okay, not the big one on the dining-hall floor; he was just lying there, not moving. I only regret that Miss Frost and Coach Hoyt didn’t see me hit that duck-under. If I do say so myself, it was a pretty good duck-under—my one move.