In One Person

Chapter 8 BIG AL

“It is Kittredge’s cruelty that I chiefly dislike,” I wrote to Elaine that fall.

“He came by it genetically,” she wrote me back. Of course I couldn’t dispute Elaine’s superior knowledge of Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and “that awful woman” had been intimate enough for Elaine to become assertive on the matter of those mother-to-son genes that were passed. “Kittredge can deny she’s his mom till the cows come home, Billy, but I’m telling you she’s one of those moms who breast-fed the fucker till he was shaving!”

“Okay,” I wrote to Elaine, “but what makes you so sure cruelty is genetic?”

“What about kissing?” Elaine wrote me back. “Those two kiss the same way, Billy. Kissing is definitely genetic.”

Elaine’s genetic dissertation on Kittredge was in the same letter where she announced her intention to be a writer; even in the area of that most sacred ambition, Elaine had been more candid with me than I’d managed to be with her. Here I was embarking on my long-desired adventure with Miss Frost, yet I still hadn’t told Elaine about that!

I’d not told anyone about that, naturally. I had also resisted reading more of Giovanni’s Room, until I realized that I wanted to see Miss Frost again—as soon as I could—and I believed that I shouldn’t show up at the First Sister Public Library without being prepared to discuss the writing of James Baldwin with Miss Frost. Thus I plunged ahead in the novel—not very far ahead, in fact, before I was stopped cold by another sentence. This one was just after the beginning of the second chapter, and it rendered me incapable of reading further for an entire day.

“I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” I read. I immediately thought of Kittredge—how my dislike of him was completely entangled with my dislike of myself for being attracted to him. I thought that James Baldwin’s writing was a little too true for me to handle, but I forced myself to try again the very next night.

There is that description, still in the second chapter, of “the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys,” from which I inwardly recoiled; I would soon model myself on those boys, and seek their company, and the thought of an abundance of “knife-blade boys” in my future frightened me.

Then, in spite of my fear, I was suddenly halfway into the novel, and I couldn’t stop reading. Even that part where the narrator’s hatred for his male lover is as powerful as his love for him, and is “nourished by the same roots”; or the part where Giovanni is described as somehow always desirable, while at the same time his breath makes the narrator “want to vomit”—I truly detested those passages, but only because of how much I loathed and feared those feelings in myself.

Yes, having these disturbing attractions to other boys and men also made me afraid of what Baldwin calls “the dreadful whiplash of public morality,” but I was much more frightened by the passage that describes the narrator’s reaction to having sex with a woman—“I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive.”

Why hadn’t that happened to me? I wondered. Was it only because Miss Frost had small breasts? If she’d had big ones, would I have felt “intimidated”—instead of so amazingly aroused? And, once again, there came the unbidden thought: Had I really “entered” her? If I had not, and I did enter her the next time, would I subsequently feel disgusted—instead of so completely satisfied?

You must understand that, until I read Giovanni’s Room, I’d never read a novel that had shocked me, and I’d already (at eighteen) read a lot of novels—many of them excellent. James Baldwin wrote excellent stuff, and he shocked me—most of all when Giovanni cries to his lover, “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love.” That phrase, “the stink of love,” shocked me, and it made me feel so awfully naïve. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man might smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of shit, because wouldn’t that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or a boy?

I was terribly agitated to read this; I wanted to talk to someone about it, and I almost went and woke up Richard to talk to him.

But I remembered what Miss Frost had said. I wasn’t prepared to talk to Richard Abbott about my crush on Kittredge. I just stayed in bed; I was wearing Elaine’s bra, as usual, and I read on and on in Giovanni’s Room—on into the night.

I remembered the perfumy smell on my fingers, after I’d touched my penis and before I stepped into the bath Miss Frost had drawn for me; that almond- or avocado-oil scent wasn’t at all like the smell of shit. But, of course, Miss Frost was a woman, and if I had penetrated her, surely I had not penetrated her there!

MRS. HADLEY WAS SUITABLY impressed that I had conquered the shadow word, but because I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell Martha Hadley about Miss Frost, I had some difficulty describing how I’d mastered one of my unpronounceables.

“Whatever made you think of saying ‘shad roe’ without the r, Billy?”

“Ah, well . . .” I started to say, and then stopped—in the manner of Grandpa Harry.

It was a mystery to Mrs. Hadley, and to me, how “the shad-roe technique” (as Martha Hadley called it) could be applied to my other pronunciation problems.

Naturally, upon leaving Mrs. Hadley’s office—once again, on the stairs in the music building—I ran into Atkins.

“Oh, it’s you, Tom,” I said, as casually as I could.

“So now it’s ‘Tom,’ is it?” Atkins asked me.

“I’m just sick of the last-name culture of this awful school—aren’t you?” I asked him.

“Now that you mention it,” Atkins said bitterly; I could tell that poor Tom’s feathers were still ruffled from our run-in at the First Sister Public Library.

“Look, I’m sorry about the other night,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to add to whatever misery Kittredge had caused you by calling you his ‘messenger boy.’ I apologize.”

Atkins had a way of often seeming on the verge of tears. If Dr. Harlow had ever wanted to summon before us a quaking example of what our school physician meant by “excessive crying in boys,” I imagined that he needed only to snap his fingers and ask Tom Atkins to burst into tears at morning meeting.

“It seemed that I probably interrupted you and Miss Frost,” Atkins said searchingly.

“Miss Frost and I talk a lot about writing,” I told him. “She tells me what books I should read. I tell her what I’m interested in, and she gives me a novel.”

“What novel did she give you the other night?” Tom asked. “What are you interested in, Bill?”

“Crushes on the wrong people,” I told Atkins. It was astonishing how quickly my first sexual relationship, with anyone, had emboldened me. I felt encouraged—even compelled—to say things I’d heretofore been reluctant to say, not only to a timid soul like Tom Atkins but even to such a powerful nemesis and forbidden love as Jacques Kittredge.

Granted, it was a lot easier to be brave with Kittredge in German. I didn’t feel sufficiently “emboldened” to tell Kittredge my true feelings and actual thoughts; I wouldn’t have dared to say “crushes on the wrong people” to Kittredge, not even in German. (Not unless I pretended it was something Goethe or Rilke had written.)

I saw that Atkins was struggling to say something—maybe about what time it was, or something with the time word in it. But I was wrong; it was “crushes” that poor Tom couldn’t say.

Atkins suddenly blurted: “Thrushes on the wrong people—that’s a subject that interests me, too!”

“I said ‘crushes,’ Tom.”

“I can’t say that word,” Atkins admitted. “But I am very interested in that subject. Perhaps, when you’re finished reading whatever novel Miss Frost gave you on that subject, you could give it to me. I like to read novels, you know.”

“It’s a novel by James Baldwin,” I told Atkins.

“It’s about being in love with a black person?” Atkins asked.

“No. What gave you that idea, Tom?”

“James Baldwin is black, isn’t he, Bill? Or am I thinking of another Baldwin?”

James Baldwin was black, of course, but I didn’t know that. I’d not read any of his other books; I had never heard of him. And Giovanni’s Room was a library book—as such, it didn’t have a dust jacket. I’d not seen an author photo of James Baldwin.

“It’s a novel about a man who’s in love with another man,” I told Tom quietly.

“Yes,” Atkins whispered. “That’s what I thought it would be about, when you first mentioned the ‘wrong people.’”

“I’ll let you read it when I’m finished,” I said. I had finished Giovanni’s Room, of course, but I wanted to read it again, and talk to Miss Frost about it, before I let Atkins read it, though I was certain there was nothing about the narrator being black—and poor Giovanni, I knew, was Italian.

In fact, I even remembered that line near the end of the novel when the narrator is looking at himself in a mirror—“my body is dull and white and dry.” But I simply wanted to reread Giovanni’s Room right away; it had had that profound an effect on me. It was the first novel I’d wanted to reread since Great Expectations.

Now, when I’m nearly seventy, there are few novels I can reread and still love—I mean among those novels I first read and loved when I was a teenager—but I recently reread Great Expectations and Giovanni’s Room, and I admired those novels no less than I ever had.

Oh, all right, there are passages in Dickens that go on too long, but so what? And who the trannies were in Paris, in Mr. Baldwin’s time there—well, they were probably not very passable transvestites. The narrator of Giovanni’s Room doesn’t like them. “I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them,” Baldwin wrote.

Okay, I’m guessing that Mr. Baldwin never met one of the very passable transsexuals one can meet today. He didn’t know a Donna, one of those she-males with breasts and not a trace of facial hair—one of those totally convincing females. You would swear that there wasn’t an iota of anything masculine in the kind of transsexual I’m talking about, except for that fully functioning penith between her legs!

I’m also guessing that Mr. Baldwin never wanted a lover with breasts and a cock. But, believe me, I don’t fault James Baldwin for failing to be attracted to the trannies of his time—“les folles,” he called them.

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them—don’t put them down.

In rereading Giovanni’s Room just recently, I not only found the novel to be as perfect as I’d remembered it; I also discovered something I had missed, or I’d read without noticing, when I was eighteen. I mean the part where Baldwin writes that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

Yes, that’s true. Naturally, when I was eighteen, I was still inventing myself nonstop; I don’t only mean sexually. And I was unaware that I needed “mooring posts”—not to mention how many I would need, or who my mooring posts would be.

Poor Tom Atkins needed a mooring post, in the worst way. That much was evident to me, as Atkins and I conversed, or we tried to, on the subject of crushes (or thrushes!) on the wrong people. For a moment it seemed we would never progress from where we stood on the stairs of the music building, and that what passed for our conversation had permanently lagged.

“Have you had any breakthroughs with your pronunciation problems, Bill?” Atkins awkwardly asked me.

“Just one, actually,” I told him. “I seem to have conquered the shadow word.”

“Good for you,” Atkins said sincerely. “I’ve not conquered any of mine—not in a while, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Tom,” I told him. “It must be tough having trouble with one of those words that comes up all the time. Like the time word,” I said.

“Yes, that’s a tough one,” Atkins admitted. “What’s one of your worst ones?”

“The word for your whatchamacallit,” I told him. “You know—dong, schlong, dick, dork, willy, dipstick, dipping wick, quim-stuffer,” I said.

“You can’t say penis?” Atkins whispered.

“It comes out penith,” I told him.

“Well, at least it’s comprehensible, Bill,” Atkins said encouragingly.

“Do you have one that’s worse than the time word?” I asked him.

“The female equivalent of your penis,” Atkins answered. “I can’t come close to saying it—it just kills me to try it.”

“You mean ‘vagina,’ Tom?”

Atkins nodded vigorously; I thought poor Tom had that verge-of-tears aspect, in the way he wouldn’t stop nodding his head, but Mrs. Hadley saved him from crying—albeit only momentarily.

“Tom Atkins!” Martha Hadley called down the stairwell. “I can hear your voice, but you are late for your appointment! I am waiting for you!”

Atkins started to run up the stairs, without thinking. He gave me a friendly but vaguely embarrassed look, over his shoulder; I distinctly heard him call to Mrs. Hadley as he continued up the stairs. “I’m sorry! I’m coming!” Atkins shouted. “I just lost track of the time!” Both Martha Hadley and I had clearly heard him.

“That sounds like a breakthrough to me, Tom!” I hollered up the stairs.

“What did you just say, Tom Atkins? Say it again!” I heard Mrs. Hadley call down to him.

“Time! Time! Time!” I heard Atkins crying, before his tears engulfed him.

“Oh, don’t cry, you silly boy!” Martha Hadley was saying. “Tom, Tom—please stop crying. You should be happy!” But I heard Atkins blubbering on and on; once the tears started, he couldn’t stop them. (I knew the feeling.)

“Listen to me, Tom!” I called up the stairwell. “You’re on a roll, man. Now’s the time to try ‘vagina.’ I know you can do it! If you can conquer ‘time,’ trust me—‘vagina’ is easy! Let me hear you say the vagina word, Tom! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!”

“Watch your language, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley called down the stairwell. I would have kept up the encouragements to poor Tom, but I didn’t want Martha Hadley—or another faculty person in the music building—to give me a restriction.

I had a date—a fucking date!—with Miss Frost, so I didn’t repeat the vagina word. I just went on my way down the stairs; all the way out of the music building, I could hear Tom Atkins crying.

IT’S EASY TO SEE, with hindsight, how I gave myself away. I wasn’t in the habit of showering and shaving before I went out in the evening to the library. While I was in the habit of not saying to Richard or my mom which library I was going to, I suppose I should have been smart enough to take Giovanni’s Room with me. (I left the novel under my pillow, with Elaine’s bra, but that was because I wasn’t intending to return the book to the library. I wanted to lend it to Tom Atkins, but only after I’d asked Miss Frost if she thought that was a good idea.)

“You look nice, Billy,” my mother commented, as I was leaving our dormitory apartment. She almost never complimented me on my appearance; while she’d more than once said I was “going to be good-looking,” she hadn’t said that in a couple of years. I’m guessing that I was already too good-looking, in my mom’s opinion, because the way she said the nice word wasn’t very nice.

“Going to the library, Bill?” Richard asked me.

“That’s right,” I said. It was stupid of me not to take my German homework with me. Because of Kittredge, I was almost never without my Goethe and my Rilke. But that night my book bag was practically empty. I had one of my writing notebooks with me—that was all.

“You look too nice for the library, Billy,” my mom said.

“I suppose I can’t go around looking like Lear’s shadow, can I?” I asked the two of them. I was just showing off, but, in retrospect, it was inadvisable to give my mother and Richard Abbott a taste of my newfound confidence.

It was only a little later that same evening—I’m sure I was still in the yearbook room of the academy library—when Kittredge showed up at Bancroft Hall, looking for me. My mother answered the door to our apartment, but when she saw who it was, I’m certain she wouldn’t have invited Kittredge in. “Richard!” she no doubt called. “Jacques Kittredge is here!”

“I was hoping for a word with the German scholar,” Kittredge said charmingly.

“Richard!” my mom would have called again.

“I’m coming, Jewel!” Richard would have answered. It was a small apartment; while my mother wanted nothing to do with talking to Kittredge, I’m sure she overheard every word of Kittredge’s conversation with Richard.

“If it’s the German scholar you’re looking for, Jacques, I’m afraid he’s gone to the library,” Richard told Kittredge.

“Which library?” Kittredge asked. “He’s a two-library student, that German scholar. The other night, he was hanging out in the town library—you know, the public one.”

“What’s Billy doing in the public library, Richard?” my mom might have asked. (She would have thought this, anyway; she would have asked Richard later, if not while Kittredge was still there.)

“I guess Miss Frost is continuing to advise him about what to read,” Richard Abbott may have answered—either then or later.

“I gotta be going,” Kittredge probably said. “Just tell the German scholar that I did pretty well on the quiz—my best grade ever. Tell him he was dead-on about the ‘passion brings pain’ part. Tell him he even guessed right about the ‘terrifying angel’—I nailed that part,” Kittredge told Richard.

“I’ll tell him,” Richard would have said to Kittredge. “You got the ‘passion brings pain’ part—you nailed the ‘terrifying angel,’ too. I’ll be sure to tell him.”

By then, my mother would already have found the library book in my bedroom. She knew that I kept Elaine’s bra under my pillow; I’ll bet that’s the first place she looked.

Richard Abbott was a well-informed guy; he may have already heard what Giovanni’s Room was about. Of course, my German homework—the ever-present Goethe and Rilke—would have been visible in my bedroom, too. Whatever was preoccupying me, in which library, it didn’t appear to be my German homework. And folded in the pages of Mr. Baldwin’s superb novel would have been my handwritten notes—quotations from Giovanni’s Room included, of course. Naturally, “stink of love” would have been among my jottings, and that sentence I thought of whenever I thought of Kittredge: “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”

Kittredge would have been long gone from Bancroft by the time Richard and my mom drew their conclusions and called the others. Maybe not Mrs. Hadley—that is, not at first—but certainly my meddlesome aunt Muriel and my much-abused uncle Bob, and of course Nana Victoria and First Sister’s most famous female impersonator, Grandpa Harry. They must have all drawn their conclusions, and even come up with a rudimentary plan, while I was still in the process of leaving the old yearbook room; by the time their plan of attack took its final form, I’m sure I was already en route to the First Sister Public Library, where I arrived shortly before closing time.

I HAD A LOT on my mind about Miss Frost—especially after seeing the 1935 Owl. I did my best not to linger over that heartthrob of a boy on the ’31 wrestling team; there wasn’t anyone who arrested my attention in the Favorite River Academy yearbook of 1932, not even among the wrestlers. In the Drama Club photos from ’33 and ’34, there were some boys-as-girls who looked convincingly feminine—at least onstage—but I didn’t pay very close attention to those photographs, and I completely missed Miss Frost in the wrestling-team pictures of the ’33 and ’34 teams, when she was in the back row.

It was the ’35 Owl that was the shocker—what would have been Miss Frost’s senior year at Favorite River Academy. In that year, Miss Frost—even as a boy—was unmistakable. She was seated front-row center, because “A. Frost” was noted as the wrestling captain in ’35; just the initial “A.” was used in the captions under the team photo. Even sitting down, her long torso made her a head taller than any of the other boys in the front row, and I spotted her broad shoulders and big hands as easily as I doubtless would have if she’d been dressed and made up as a girl.

Her long, pretty face had not changed, though her thick hair was cut unfamiliarly short. I quickly flipped to the head shots of the graduating seniors. To my surprise, Albert Frost was from the town of First Sister, Vermont—a day student, not a boarder—and while the eighteen-year-old Albert’s choice of college or university was cited as “undecided,” the young man’s chosen career was revealing. Albert had designated “fiction”—most fitting for a future librarian and a handsome boy on his way to becoming a passable (albeit small-breasted) woman.

I guessed that Aunt Muriel must have remembered Albert Frost, the handsome wrestling-team captain—Class of ’35—and that it was as a boy that Muriel meant Miss Frost “used to be very good-looking.” (Albert certainly was.)

I was not surprised to see Albert Frost’s nickname at Favorite River Academy. It was “Big Al.”

Miss Frost hadn’t been kidding when she’d told me that “everyone used to” call her Al—including, very probably, my aunt Muriel.

I was surprised that I recognized another face among the head shots of the graduating seniors in the Class of 1935. Robert Fremont—my uncle Bob—had graduated in Miss Frost’s class. Bob, whose nickname was “Racquet Man,” must have known Miss Frost when she was Big Al. (It was one of life’s little coincidences that, in the ’35 Owl, Robert Fremont was on the page opposite Albert Frost.)

I realized, on that short walk from the yearbook room to the First Sister Public Library, that everyone in my family, which for a few years now included Richard Abbott, had to have known that Miss Frost had been born—and, in all likelihood, still was—a man. Naturally, no one had told me that Miss Frost was a man; after all, a lack of candor was endemic in my family.

It occurred to me, as I stood looking at my frightened face in that mirror in the dimly lit foyer of the town library, where Tom Atkins had so recently startled himself, that almost anyone of a certain age in First Sister, Vermont, would have known that Miss Frost was a man; this surely included everyone over the age of forty who had seen Miss Frost onstage as an Ibsen woman in those amateur productions of the First Sister Players.

I had subsequently found Miss Frost in the wrestling-team photos in the ’33 and ’34 yearbooks, where A. Frost was not quite so big and broad-shouldered; in fact, she’d stood so unsure of herself in the back row of those team photos that I had overlooked her.

I’d overlooked her, too, in the Drama Club photographs. A. Frost was always cast as a woman; she’d been onstage in a variety of female roles, but wearing such absurd wigs, and with breasts so unsuitably big, that I had failed to recognize her. What a lark that must have been for the boys—to see their wrestling-team captain, Big Al, flouncing around onstage, pretending to be a girl! Yet, when Richard had asked Miss Frost if she’d ever been onstage—if she’d ever acted—she’d answered, “Only in my mind.”

What a lot of lies! I was thinking, as I saw myself shaking in the mirror.

“Is someone here?” I heard Miss Frost call. “Is that you, William?” she called, loudly enough that I knew we were alone in the library.

“Yes, it’s me, Big Al,” I answered.

“Oh, dear,” I heard Miss Frost say, with an exaggerated sigh. “I told you we didn’t have much time.”

“There’s quite a lot you didn’t tell me!” I called to her.

I saw that, in anticipation of my arrival, Miss Frost had already killed the lights in the main library. The light that glowed upward, from the bottom of the basement stairs—the basement door was open—bathed Miss Frost in a soft, flattering light. She sat at the checkout desk with her big hands folded in her lap. (I say the light was “flattering” because it made her look younger; of course that also might have been the influence of my seeing her in those old yearbooks.)

“Come kiss me, William,” Miss Frost said. “There’s no reason for you not to kiss me, is there?”

“You’re a man, aren’t you?” I asked her.

“Goodness me, what makes a man?” she asked. “Isn’t Kittredge a man? You want to kiss him. Don’t you still want to kiss me, William?”

I did want to kiss her; I wanted to do everything with her, but I was angry and upset, and I knew by the way I was shaking that I was very close to crying, which I didn’t want to do.

“You’re a transsexual!” I told her.

“My dear boy,” Miss Frost said sharply. “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!”

When she stood up from her desk, she seemed to tower over me; when she opened her arms to me, I didn’t hesitate—I ran to her strong embrace, and kissed her. Miss Frost kissed me back, very hard. I couldn’t cry, because she took my breath away.

“My, my—what a busy boy you’ve been, William,” she said, leading me to the basement stairs. “You’ve read Giovanni’s Room, haven’t you?”

“Twice!” I managed to say.

“Twice, already! And you’ve found the time to read those old yearbooks, haven’t you, William? I knew it wouldn’t take you long to get from 1931 to 1935. Was it that wrestling-team photo in ’35—was that the one that caught your eye, William?”

“Yes!” I scarcely managed to tell her. Miss Frost was lighting the cinnamon-scented candle in her bedroom; then she turned off the reading lamp that was fastened to the headboard of her brass bed, where the covers were already turned down.

“I couldn’t very well have kept you from seeing those old yearbooks—could I, William?” she went on saying. “I’m not welcome in the academy library. And if you hadn’t seen that picture of me in my wrestling days, surely somebody would have told you about me—eventually. I’m frankly astonished that someone didn’t tell you,” Miss Frost said.

“My family doesn’t tell me much,” I told her. I was undressing as quickly as I could, and Miss Frost had already unbuttoned her blouse and taken off her skirt. This time, when she used the toilet, she didn’t mention the matter of her privacy.

“Yes, I know about that family of yours!” she said, laughing. She hiked up her half-slip, and—first lifting the wooden toilet seat—she peed standing up, rather loudly, but with her back to me. I didn’t see her penis, but there was no doubt, from the forceful way she was pissing, that she had one.

I lay naked on the brass bed and watched her washing her hands and face, and brushing her teeth, in that little sink. I saw her wink at me in the mirror. “I guess you must have been a pretty good wrestler,” I said to her, “if they made you captain of the team.”

“I didn’t ask to be captain,” she told me. “I just kept beating everybody—I beat everyone, so they made me captain. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could refuse.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, the wrestling kept them all from questioning me,” Miss Frost said. She was hanging up her skirt and blouse in the wardrobe closet; this time, she took her bra off, too. “They don’t question you—I mean sexually—if you’re a wrestler. It kind of keeps them off the track—if you know what I mean, William.”

“I know what you mean,” I told her. I thought that her breasts were wonderful—so small, and with such perfect nipples, but her breasts were bigger than poor Elaine’s. Miss Frost had a fourteen-year-old’s breasts, and they looked small on her only because she was so big and strong.

“I love your breasts,” I said to her.

“Thank you, William. They won’t get any bigger, but it’s a wonder what hormones can induce. I guess I don’t really need to have bigger ones,” Miss Frost said, smiling at me.

“I think they’re the perfect size,” I told her.

“I assure you, I didn’t have them when I wrestled—that wouldn’t have worked out very well,” Miss Frost said. “I kept wrestling—thus, I kept the questions at bay, all through college,” she told me. “No breasts—no living as a woman, William—until after I was out of college.”

“Where’d you go to college?” I asked her.

“Someplace in Pennsylvania,” she told me. “It’s no place you’ve ever heard of.”

“Were you as good a wrestler as Kittredge?” I asked her. She lay down beside me on the bed, but this time when she took my penis in her big hand, I was facing her.

“Kittredge isn’t that good,” Miss Frost said. “He just hasn’t had any competition. New England isn’t exactly a hotbed for wrestling. It’s nothing like Pennsylvania.”

“Oh.”

I touched her half-slip, in the area where I thought her penis was; she let me touch her. I didn’t try to reach under the half-slip. I just touched her penis through the slinky material of her half-slip; this one was a pearl-gray color, almost the same color as Elaine’s bra. When I thought of Elaine’s bra, I remembered Giovanni’s Room, which was under the same pillow.

The James Baldwin novel was so unbearably sad that I suddenly didn’t want to talk about it with Miss Frost; instead, I asked her, “Wasn’t it difficult being a wrestler, when you wanted to be a girl and you were attracted to other boys?”

“It wasn’t that difficult when I was winning. I like to be on top,” she told me. “When you’re winning in wrestling, you’re on top. It was more difficult in Pennsylvania, because I wasn’t winning all the time there. I was on the bottom more than I liked,” she said, “but I was older then—I could handle losing. I hated being pinned, but I was pinned only twice—by the same fucking guy. Wrestling was my cover, William. Back then, boys like us needed a cover. Wasn’t Elaine a cover, William? She looked like your cover to me,” Miss Frost said. “Nowadays, don’t boys like us still need a little cover?”

“Yes, we do,” I whispered.

“Oh, now we’re whispering again!” Miss Frost whispered. “Whispering is a kind of cover, too, I guess.”

“You must have studied something in that college in Pennsylvania—not just wrestling,” I said to her. “The yearbook said your choice of career was ‘fiction’—kind of a funny career path, isn’t it?” I asked her. (I believe I was just babbling, as a way to distract myself from Miss Frost’s penis.)

“In college, I studied library science,” Miss Frost was saying, while we went on holding each other’s penises. Hers wasn’t as hard as mine—not yet, anyway. I thought that, even not hard, her penis was bigger than mine, but if you’re not experienced, you can’t really estimate the size of someone’s penis—not if you can’t see it. “I thought that a library would be a fairly safe and forgiving place for a man who was on his way to becoming a woman,” Miss Frost continued. “I even knew which library I wanted to work in—the very same academy library where those old yearbooks are, William. I thought: What other library would appreciate me as much as my old school library? I’d been a good student at Favorite River, and I’d been a very good wrestler—not so good by Pennsylvania standards, maybe, but I’d been very good in New England. Of course, when I came back to First Sister as a woman, Favorite River Academy wanted nothing to do with someone like me—not around all those impressionable boys! Everyone is naïve about something, William, and I was naïve about that. I knew my old school had liked me when I was Big Al; I was naïve enough to be unprepared for them not liking me as Miss Frost. It was only because your grandpa Harry was on the board of the town library—this funny old public library, where I was way overqualified to be the librarian—that they gave me the job here.”

“But why did you want to stay here in First Sister—or be at Favorite River Academy, which you say yourself is an awful school?” I asked her.

I was only eighteen, but I already never wanted to come back to Favorite River Academy or the Podunk town of First Sister, Vermont. I couldn’t wait to get away, to be somewhere—to be anywhere—where I could have sex with whomever I wanted to, without being stared at and judged by all these overly familiar people who presumed they knew me!

“I have an ailing parent, William,” Miss Frost explained. “My father died the year I started at Favorite River Academy; if he hadn’t passed away, my becoming a woman probably would have killed him. But my mother hasn’t been healthy for quite some time; I barely got through college because of my mother’s health problems. She’s one of those people who’s been sick so long that if she ever got well, she wouldn’t know she was cured. She’s sick in her mind, William; she doesn’t even notice that I’m a woman, or maybe she doesn’t remember that her little boy was ever a man. I’m sure she doesn’t remember that she used to have a little boy.”

“Oh.”

“Your grandpa Harry used to employ my dad. Harry knew I was the one who took care of my mom. That’s the only reason I had to come back to First Sister—whether Favorite River Academy would have me or not, William.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Miss Frost replied, in that acting way. “Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you—they can’t turn you away. And I got to meet you, William. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll be remembered as the crazy cross-dressing librarian who got you started as a writer. You have started, haven’t you?” she asked me.

But the story of her life, so far, seemed extraordinarily unhappy to me. While I went on touching her penis through that pearl-gray half-slip, I thought about Giovanni’s Room, which was all wrapped up in Elaine’s bra, under my pillow, and I said, “I loved the James Baldwin novel. I didn’t bring it back to the library because I wanted to lend it to Tom Atkins. He and I have talked about it—I think he would love Giovanni’s Room, too. Is it all right with you if I lend it to him?”

“Is Giovanni’s Room in your book bag, William?” Miss Frost asked me suddenly. “Where is the actual book right now?”

“It’s at home,” I told her. I was suddenly afraid to say it was under my pillow—not to mention that the novel was in contact with Elaine Hadley’s padded pearl-gray bra.

“You mustn’t leave that novel at home,” Miss Frost told me. “Of course you can lend it to Tom. But tell Tom not to let his roommate see it.”

“I don’t know who Atkins has for a roommate,” I told her.

“It doesn’t matter who Tom’s roommate is—just don’t let the roommate see that novel. I told you not to let your mother—or Richard Abbott—see it. If I were you, I wouldn’t even let your grandpa Harry know you have it.”

“Grandpa knows I have a crush on Kittredge,” I said to Miss Frost. “Nobody but you knows I have a crush on you,” I told her.

“I hope you’re right about that, William,” she whispered. She bent over me and put my penis in her mouth—in less time than it took me to write this sentence. Yet, when I reached under her half-slip for her penis, she stopped me. “No—we’re not doing that,” she said.

“I want to do everything,” I told her.

“Of course you do, William, but you’ll have to do everything with someone else. It is not appropriate for a young man your age to do everything with someone my age,” Miss Frost told me. “I will not be responsible for your first time at trying everything.”

With that, she put my penis back in her mouth; for the time being, she would not explain herself further. When she was still sucking me, I said: “I don’t think we had actual sex the last time—I mean the penetration part. We did something else, didn’t we?”

“Talking is not very easily accomplished during a blow job, William,” Miss Frost said, sighing in such a way—while she lay down next to me, face-to-face—that I got the feeling this was probably curtains for the blow job, and it was. “You seemed to enjoy the ‘something else’ we did last time, William,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I did!” I cried. “I was just wondering about the penetration part.”

“You can wonder about it all you want, William, but there will be no ‘penetration part’ with me. Don’t you see?” she asked me suddenly. “I am trying to protect you from ‘actual sex.’ At least a little,” Miss Frost added, smiling.

“But I don’t want to be protected!” I cried.

“I will not have ‘actual sex’ with an eighteen-year-old on my conscience, William. As for who you will become, I’ve probably been of too much influence already!” Miss Frost declared. She was certainly right about that, though she must have imagined she was being more theatrical than prophetic—and I didn’t yet know just how much of an “influence” (on the rest of my life!) Miss Frost would be.

This time, she showed me the lotion she used—she let me smell it on her fingers. It had an almond fragrance. She didn’t straddle me, or sit on me; we lay sideways with our penises touching. I still didn’t see her penis, but Miss Frost rubbed her penis and mine together. When she rolled over, she took my penis between her thighs and pushed her buttocks against my stomach. Her half-slip was hiked up to her waist; I held one of her bare breasts in one hand, and her penis in the other. Miss Frost slid my penis between her thighs until I ejaculated into the palm of her hand.

We seemed to lie in each other’s arms for the longest time afterward, but I realize that we couldn’t have been alone like that for nearly as long as I imagined; we truly didn’t have much time together. I think it was because I loved listening to her talk, and the sound of her voice, that I imagined the time as passing more slowly than it actually did.

She drew me a bath, like the first time, but she still wouldn’t completely undress, and when I suggested that she climb into the big bathtub with me, she laughed and said: “I’m still trying to protect you, William. I wouldn’t want to risk drowning you!”

I was happy enough that her breasts were bare, and that she’d let me hold her penis, which I still hadn’t seen. She’d gotten harder and bigger in my hand, but I had the feeling that even her penis was holding back—a little. I can’t explain this, but I felt certain that Miss Frost was simply not allowing her penis to get any harder or bigger; perhaps this was, in her mind, another way in which she was protecting me.

“Does it have a name—having sex the way we did it?” I asked.

“It does, William. Can you say the word intercrural?” she asked me.

“Intercrural,” I replied, without hesitating. “What does it mean?”

“I’m sure you’re familiar with the prefix inter, in this sense meaning ‘between,’ William,” Miss Frost answered. “As for crural, it means ‘of or pertaining to the leg’—between the thighs, in other words.”

“I see,” I said.

“It was favored by homosexual men in ancient Greece, or so I’ve read,” Miss Frost explained. “Not a part of my library-science studies, but I did get to spend a lot of free time in a library!”

“What did the ancient Greeks like about it?” I asked her.

“I read this long ago—I may have forgotten all the reasons,” Miss Frost said. “The from-behind part, maybe.”

“But we don’t live in ancient Greece,” I reminded Miss Frost.

“Trust me, William: It’s possible to have sex intercrurally without exactly imitating the Greeks,” Miss Frost explained. “One doesn’t always have to do it from behind. Between the thighs will work sideways, or in other positions—even in the missionary position.”

“The what?” I asked her.

“We’ll try it next time, William,” she whispered. It might have been in the midst of her quiet whisper when I thought I heard the first creak on the basement stairs. Either Miss Frost heard it, too, or it was merely a coincidence that she took that moment to glance at her watch.

“You told Richard and me that you’d been onstage—that you had acted—only in your mind. But I saw you in those Drama Club photos. You’d been onstage—you had acted before,” I said to her.

“Poetic license, William,” Miss Frost replied, with one of her theatrical sighs. “Besides, that wasn’t acting. That was merely dressing up—that was overacting! Those boys were clowns—they were just fooling around! There was no Richard Abbott at Favorite River Academy in those days. There was no one in charge of the Drama Club who knew half as much as Nils knows, and Nils Borkman is a dramaturgical pedant!”

There was a second creak on the basement stairs, which both Miss Frost and I heard; there was no mistaking it this time. I was mainly surprised that Miss Frost seemed so unsurprised. “In our haste, William, did we forget to lock the library door?” she whispered to me. “Oh, dear—I think we did.”

We had so little time—as Miss Frost knew, from the beginning.

UPON THE THIRD CREAK on those basement stairs, on that most memorable night in the clearly unlocked First Sister Public Library, Miss Frost—who’d been kneeling beside her big bathtub while she thoughtfully attended to my penis and we talked about all sorts of interesting things—stood up and said in a clarion voice, which would have impressed my friend Elaine and her voice-teacher mother, Mrs. Hadley: “Is that you, Harry? I’ve been thinking that those cowards would send you. It is you, isn’t it?”

“Ah, well—yes, it’s me,” I heard Grandpa Harry say sheepishly, from the basement stairs. I sat up straight in the bathtub. Miss Frost stood very erect, with her shoulders back and her small but pointy breasts aimed at her open bedroom door. Miss Frost’s nipples were rather long, and her unpronounceable areolae were the intimidating size of silver dollars.

When my grandfather stepped tentatively into Miss Frost’s basement room, he was not the confident character I’d so often seen onstage; he was not a woman with a commanding presence, but just a man—bald and small. Grandpa Harry had clearly not volunteered to be the one to come and rescue me.

“I’m disappointed that Richard didn’t have the balls to come,” Miss Frost said to my embarrassed grandfather.

“Richard asked to be the one, but Mary wouldn’t let him,” my grandfather said.

“Richard is pussy-whipped, like all of you men married to those Winthrop women,” Miss Frost told him. My grandfather couldn’t look at her, with her bare breasts showing, but she would not turn away from him—nor did she seek her clothes. She wore just the pearl-gray half-slip in front of him, as if it were a formal gown and she had overdressed for the occasion.

“I don’t imagine Muriel was willing to let Bob come,” Miss Frost continued. Grandpa Harry just shook his head.

“That Bobby is a sweetheart, but he was always a pussy—even before he was pussy-whipped,” Miss Frost went on. I’d never heard Uncle Bob called “Bobby,” but I now knew that Robert Fremont had been Albert Frost’s classmate at Favorite River Academy, and when you’re in a boarding school in those formative years, you call one another names you never hear or use again. (No one calls me Nymph anymore, for example.)

I was attempting to get out of the bathtub without showing all of myself to my grandpa, when Miss Frost handed me a towel. Even with the towel, it was awkward getting out of the tub, and drying myself, and trying to put on my clothes.

“Let me tell you something about your aunt Muriel, William,” Miss Frost said, standing as a barrier between my grandfather and me. “Muriel actually had a crush on me—before she started hanging out with her ‘first and only beau,’ your uncle Bob. Imagine if I had taken Muriel up—I mean on her offering herself to me!” Miss Frost cried, in her best Ibsen-woman fashion.

“Al, please don’t be crude,” Grandpa Harry said. “Muriel is my daughter, after all.”

“Muriel is a bossy bitch, Harry. It might have made her nicer if she’d ever gotten to know me,” Miss Frost said. “There’s no pussy-whipping me, William,” she said, looking at how I was managing to get myself dressed—badly.

“No, there isn’t, Al—I daresay!” Grandpa Harry exclaimed. “There’s no pussy-whippin’ you!”

“Your grandpa is a good guy, William,” Miss Frost told me. “He built this room for me. When I first moved back to town, my mother thought I was still a man. I needed a place to change before I went to work as a woman—and before I went home every night, to my mother, as a man. You might say it’s a blessing—at least it’s easier for me—that my poor mom doesn’t appear to notice what gender I am, or should be, anymore.”

“I wish you had let me finish this place properly, Al,” Grandpa Harry was saying. “Jeez—there should have been a wall around that toilet, anyway!” he observed.

“It’s too small a room to have more walls,” Miss Frost said. This time, when she stood at the toilet and flipped up the wooden seat, Miss Frost didn’t turn her back on me, or on Grandpa Harry. Her penis was not even a little hard, but she had a pretty big one—like the rest of her, except for her breasts.

“Come on, Al—you’re a decent fella. I’ve always stood up for you,” Grandpa Harry said. “But this isn’t right—you and Bill, I mean.”

“She was protecting me!” I blurted out. “We never had sex. No penetration,” I added.

“Jeez, Bill—I don’t want to hear about you doin’ it!” Grandpa Harry cried; he cupped his hands over his ears.

“But we didn’t do it!” I told him.

“That night when Richard first brought you here, William—when you got your library card, and Richard offered me those roles in the Ibsen plays—do you remember?” Miss Frost asked me.

“Yes, of course I remember!” I whispered.

“Richard thought he was offering the part of Nora, and the part of Hedda, to a woman. It was when he took you home, and he must have talked to your mom—who talked to Muriel, I’m sure—well, that was when they all told him about me. But Richard still wanted to cast me! Those Winthrop women had to accept me, at least onstage—as they’ve had to accept you, Harry, when you were just acting. Isn’t that the way it happened?” she asked my grandfather.

“Ah, well—onstage is one thing, isn’t it, Al?” Grandpa Harry asked Miss Frost.

“You’re pussy-whipped, too, Harry,” Miss Frost told him. “Aren’t you sick of it?”

“Come on, Bill,” my grandfather said to me. “We should be goin’.”

“I always respected you, Harry,” Miss Frost told him.

“I always respected you, Al!” my grandfather declared.

“I know you did—that’s why the craven fuckers sent you,” Miss Frost said to him. “Come here, William,” she suddenly commanded me. I went to her, and she pulled my head to her bare breasts and held me there; I knew she could feel me shaking. “If you want to cry, do it in your room—but don’t let them hear you,” she told me. “If you want to cry, close your door and pull your pillow over your head. Cry with your good friend Elaine, if you want to, William—just don’t cry in front of them. Promise me!”

“I promise you!” I told her.

“So long, Harry—I did protect him, you know,” Miss Frost said.

“I believe you did, Big Al. I’ve always protected you, you know!” Grandpa Harry exclaimed.

“I know you have, Harry,” she told him. “It might not be possible for you to protect me now. Don’t kill yourself trying,” she added.

“I’ll do the best I can, Al.”

“I know you will, Harry. Good-bye, William—or, ‘till we meet again,’ as they say,” Miss Frost said.

I was shaking more, but I didn’t cry; Grandpa Harry took my hand, and we went up those dark basement stairs together.

“I’m guessin’ that must have been some book Miss Frost gave you, Bill—on that subject we were discussin’,” Grandpa Harry said, as we walked along River Street in the direction of Bancroft Hall.

“Yes, it is an awfully good novel,” I told him.

“I’m thinkin’ I might like to read it myself—if Al will let me,” Grandpa Harry said.

“I promised to lend it to a friend,” I told him. “Then I could give it to you.”

“I’m thinkin’ I better get it from Miss Frost, Bill—I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for givin’ it to me! I believe you’re in enough trouble, for the time bein’,” Grandpa Harry whispered.

“I see,” I said, still holding his hand. But I didn’t see; I was merely scratching the surface of all of them. I was just getting started with the seeing part.

When we got to Bancroft, the idolatrous boys in the butt room seemed disappointed to see us. I suppose they now expected the occasional sighting of the idolized Kittredge in my company, and here I was with my grandfather—bald and small, and dressed in the working clothes of a lumberman. Grandpa Harry was clearly not a faculty type, and he’d not attended Favorite River Academy; he’d gone to the high school in Ezra Falls, and had not gone to college. The butt-room boys paid no attention to my grandfather and me; I’m sure Grandpa Harry didn’t care. How would those boys have recognized Harry, anyway? Those who’d ever seen him before had seen Harry Marshall onstage, when he’d been a woman.

“You don’t have to come up to the third floor with me,” I told my grandpa.

“If I don’t come up with you, Bill, you’ll be doin’ the explainin’,” Grandpa Harry said. “You’ve had quite a night already—why don’t you leave the explainin’ to me?”

“I love you—” I began, but Harry wouldn’t let me continue.

“Of course you do, and I love you, too,” he told me. “You trust me to say all the right things, don’t you, Bill?”

“Of course I do,” I told him. I did trust him, and I was tired; I just wanted to go to bed. I needed to hold Elaine’s bra to my face, and cry in such a way that none of them would hear me.

But when Grandpa Harry and I entered that third-floor apartment, the assembled family gathering—which had included Mrs. Hadley, I only later learned—had dispersed. My mother was in her bedroom, with the door meaningfully closed; maybe there would be no further prompting from my mom tonight. Only Richard Abbott was there to greet us, and he looked about as comfortable as a dog with fleas.

I went straight to my bedroom, without saying a word to Richard—that pussy-whipped coward!—and there was Giovanni’s Room on top of my pillow, not under it. They’d had no right to poke around my bedroom, pawing over my stuff, I was thinking; then I looked under my pillow. Elaine Hadley’s pearl-gray bra was gone.

I went back into the living room of our small apartment, where I could tell that Grandpa Harry had not yet started “doin’ the explainin’,” as he’d put it to me.

“Where’s Elaine’s bra, Richard?” I asked my stepfather. “Did my mom take it?”

“Actually, Bill, your mother was not herself,” Richard told me. “She destroyed that bra, Bill, I’m sorry to say—she cut it up in small pieces.”

“Jeez—” Grandpa Harry began, but I interrupted him.

“No, Richard,” I said. “That was Mom being herself, wasn’t it? That wasn’t Mom being ‘not herself.’ That’s who Mom is.”

“Ah, well—Bill,” Grandpa Harry chimed in. “There are more discreet places to put your women’s clothes than under your pillow—speakin’ from experience.”

“I’m disgusted with both of you,” I said to Richard Abbott, not looking at Grandpa Harry; I didn’t mean him, and my grandfather knew it.

“I’m pretty disgusted with all of us, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Now why don’t you be goin’ to bed, and let me do the explainin’.”

Before I could leave them, I heard my mother crying in her bedroom; she was crying loudly enough for us all to hear her. That was the point of her crying loudly, of course—so that we would all hear her, and Richard would go into her bedroom to attend to her, which Richard did. My mom wasn’t done prompting.

“I know my Mary,” Grandpa Harry whispered to me. “She wants to be in on the explainin’ part.”

“I know her, too,” I told my grandfather, but I had much more to learn about my mother—more than I knew.

I kissed Grandpa Harry on top of his bald head, only then realizing that I’d grown taller than my diminutive grandfather. I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I could hear my mom; she was still sobbing. That was when I resolved that I truly would never cry loudly enough for them to hear me, as I’d promised Miss Frost.

There was a bible of knowledge and compassion on the subject of gay love on my pillow, but I was too tired and too angry to consult James Baldwin any further.

I would have been better informed if I’d reread the passage near the end of that slender novel—I mean the one about “the heart growing cold with the death of love.” As Baldwin writes: “It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.”

If I’d reread that passage on this terrible night, I might have realized Miss Frost had been saying good-bye to me, and what she’d meant by the curious “till we meet again” business was that we would never meet again as lovers.

Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t reread the passage then, or know all this then. I had enough on my mind when I went to bed that night—hearing, through my walls, my mother manipulatively crying.

I could vaguely hear Grandpa Harry’s preternaturally high voice, too, though not what he was saying. I knew only that he had begun “doin’ the explainin’,” a process that I also knew had just been seriously jump-started inside me.

From here on, I thought—at the age of eighteen, as I lay in bed, seething—I’m the one who’ll be “doin’ the explainin’!”