In One Person

Chapter 9 DOUBLE WHAMMY

I don’t want to overuse the away word, and I’ve already told you how Elaine Hadley was sent away “in stages.” As in any small town or village, where the public coexists with a private school, there were town-gown matters of disagreement between the townsfolk of First Sister, Vermont, and the faculty and administrators of Favorite River Academy—yet not in the case of Miss Frost, who was fired by the board of trustees of the First Sister Public Library.

Grandpa Harry was no longer a member of that board; had Harry even been the board chair, it is unlikely that he could have persuaded his fellow citizens to keep Miss Frost. In the transsexual librarian’s case, the higher-ups at Favorite River Academy were in agreement with the town: The very pillars of the private school, and their counterparts in the public community, believed they had demonstrated the most commendable tolerance toward Miss Frost. It was Miss Frost who had “gone too far”; it was Miss Frost who’d “overstepped her bounds.”

Moral outrage and righteous indignation aren’t unique to small towns and backward schools, and Miss Frost was not without her champions. Though it caused him to suffer my mother’s “silent treatment” for several weeks, Richard Abbott took up Miss Frost’s cause. Richard argued that, when faced with an earnest young man’s determined infatuation, Miss Frost had actually shielded the young man from the full array of sexual possibilities.

Grandpa Harry, though it caused him the unbridled scorn of Nana Victoria, also spoke up for Miss Frost. She’d shown admirable restraint and sensitivity, Harry had said—not to mention the fact that Miss Frost was a source of inspiration to the readers of First Sister.

Even Uncle Bob, risking more vigorous derision from my most indignant aunt Muriel, said that Big Al deserved a break. Martha Hadley, who continued to counsel me in the aftermath of my forcibly aborted relationship with Miss Frost, said that the transsexual librarian had been a boost to my chronically weak self-confidence. Miss Frost had even managed to help me overcome a pronunciation problem, which Mrs. Hadley claimed was caused by my psychological and sexual insecurity.

If anyone had ever listened to Tom Atkins, poor Tom might have had a good word to say for Miss Frost, but Atkins—as Miss Frost had understood—was jealous of the alluring librarian, and when she was persecuted, Tom Atkins was true to his timid nature and remained silent.

Tom did say to me, when he’d finished reading Giovanni’s Room, that the James Baldwin novel had both moved and disturbed him, though I later learned that Atkins had developed a few more pronunciation problems as a result of his stimulating reading. (Not surprisingly, the stink word was chief among the culprits.)

Perhaps it was counterproductive that the most outspoken of Miss Frost’s defenders was a known eccentric who was foreign-born. The grim forester, that lunatic logger, the Norwegian dramaturge with a suicidal streak—none other than Nils Borkman—presented himself at a First Sister town meeting by declaring he was Miss Frost’s “biggest fan.” (It may have undermined Borkman’s defense of Miss Frost that Nils had been known to beat up various sawmill men and loggers who’d made unkind comments about Grandpa Harry’s onstage appearances as a woman—especially those offenders who’d objected to Harry kissing as a woman.)

In Borkman’s opinion, not only was Miss Frost an Ibsen woman—to Nils, this meant that Miss Frost was both the best and most complicated kind of woman imaginable—but the obsessed Norwegian went so far as to say that Miss Frost was more of a woman than any woman Nils had met in the state of Vermont. Quite possibly, the only woman who was not offended by Borkman’s outrageous assertion had been Mrs. Borkman, because Nils had met his wife in Norway; she was not from the Green Mountain State.

Borkman’s wife was little seen, and she’d been more rarely heard. Almost no one in First Sister could remember what Mrs. Borkman looked like, nor could anyone recall if she—like her husband, Nils—spoke with a Norwegian accent.

Yet the damage done by Nils was instantaneous. Hearts were hardened against Miss Frost; she encountered a more entrenched resistance because Nils Borkman had boasted that she was more of a woman than any woman he’d met in Vermont.

“Not good, Nils—not good, not good,” Harry Marshall had muttered to his old friend at that First Sister town meeting, but the damage had been done.

A GOOD-HEARTED BULLY IS still a bully, but Nils Borkman was resented for other reasons. A former biathlete, Nils had introduced southern Vermont to his love of the biathlon—the curious sporting event that entails cross-country skiing and shooting. This was at a time before cross-country skiing had gained the popularity in the northeastern United States that the sport enjoys now. In Vermont, there already existed a few informed and determined zealots who were cross-country skiers in those days, but no one I knew skied with a loaded rifle on his (or her) back.

Nils had introduced his business partner, Harry Marshall, to hunting deer on cross-country skis. A kind of deer-hunting biathlon ensued; Nils and Harry silently skied down (and shot) a lot of deer. There was nothing illegal about it, although the local game warden—an unimaginative soul—had complained.

What the game warden should have complained about simply filled him with a complacent sullenness. His name was Chuck Beebe, and he ran a deer-checking station—a so-called biology station, where he compiled deer ages and measurements.

The first Saturday of deer season, the checking station was overrun with women, many of whom, if the weather was nice, were wearing open-toed shoes. The women displayed other signs that they had not been deer-hunting, but there they were—lipstick and halter tops, and all—presenting Chuck Beebe with a stiffened deer, caked with congealed blood. The women had hunting licenses, and they’d been issued deer tags, but they had not, Chuck knew, shot these deer. Their husbands or fathers or brothers, or their boyfriends, had shot these deer on opening day, and those men were now out shooting more deer. (One deer tag, per licensed hunter, entitled you to shoot one deer.)

“Where’d you shoot this here buck?” Chuck would ask one woman after another.

The women would say something like, “On the mountain.” Or: “In the woods.” Or: “In a field.”

Grandpa Harry made Muriel and Mary do this—that is, claim that they had killed Harry’s first two deer of the season. (Nana Victoria refused.) Uncle Bob had made my cousin Gerry do it—until Gerry was old enough to say she wouldn’t. I had done it for Nils Borkman, on occasion—as had the elusive Mrs. Borkman.

Chuck Beebe had long accepted this perpetual fiction, but that Nils Borkman and Harry Marshall hunted deer on skis—well, that just struck the game warden as unfair.

Deer-hunting regulations were pretty primitive in Vermont—they still are. Shooting deer from a motorized vehicle is not permitted; almost anything else goes. There is a bow season, a rifle season, a black-powder season. “Why not a knife season?” Nils Borkman had asked, in an earlier, now-famous town meeting. “Why not a slingshot season? There are too many deers, right? We should kill more of them, yes?”

Nowadays, there are also too few hunters; their numbers decline each year. Over the years, deer-hunting regulations have attempted to address the deer-population problem, but the overpopulation has endured; nevertheless, there are townspeople in First Sister, Vermont, who remember Nils Borkman as a raving asshole for proposing a knife season and a slingshot season for “deers”—even though Nils was just kidding, of course.

I remember when you could shoot only buck, then buck and doe, then buck and just one doe—that is, if you had a special permit, and the buck couldn’t be a spike-horn.

“How about we shoot out-of-staters, no limit?” Nils Borkman had once asked. (Limitless shooting of out-of-staters might have been a pretty popular proposal in Vermont, but Borkman was just kidding about the out-of-staters, too.)

“Nils has a European sense of humor,” Grandpa Harry had said, in defense of his old friend.

“European!” Nana Victoria had exclaimed with scorn—no, with more than scorn. My grandmother spoke of Borkman being European in a similar manner to how she might have expressed her disgust at Nils having dog shit on his shoes. But the way Nana Victoria said the European word was mild in comparison to how derisively she spat out the she word, the spittle foaming on her lips, whenever she spoke of Miss Frost.

You might say that, as a result of her not having actual sex with me, Miss Frost was banished from First Sister, Vermont; she would, like Elaine, be sent away “in stages,” and the first stage of Miss Frost’s removal from First Sister began with her being fired from the library.

After she’d lost her job, Miss Frost could not long afford to maintain her ailing mother in what had been their family home; the house would be sold, but this took a little time, and Miss Frost made the necessary arrangements to move her mom to that assisted-living facility Harry Marshall and Nils Borkman had built for the town.

It seems likely that Grandpa Harry and Nils probably gave Miss Frost a special deal, but it would not have been a deal of the magnitude of the one that Favorite River Academy made with Mrs. Kittredge—the deal that permitted Kittredge to stay in school and graduate, even though he had knocked up a faculty daughter who was underage. No one would offer Miss Frost a deal of that kind.

WHEN I HAPPENED UPON Aunt Muriel, she greeted me in her usual insincere fashion: “Oh, hi, Billy—how’s everything? I hope all the normal pursuits of a young man your age are as gratifying to you as they should be!”

To which I would unfailingly respond, as follows: “There was no penetration—no what most people call sex, in other words. The way I look at it, Aunt Muriel, I’m still a virgin.”

This must have sent Muriel running to my mother to complain about my reprehensible behavior.

As for my mom, she was subjecting both Richard and me to the “silent treatment”—not realizing, in my case, that I liked it when she didn’t speak to me. In fact, I vastly preferred her not speaking to me to her constant and conventional disapproval; furthermore, that my mother now had nothing to say to me didn’t prevent me from speaking to her first.

“Oh, hi, Mom—how’s it going? I should tell you that, contrary to feeling violated, I feel that Miss Frost was protecting me—she truly prevented me from penetrating her, and I hope it goes without saying that she didn’t penetrate me!”

I usually didn’t get to say more than that before my mother would run into her bedroom and close the door. “Richard!” she would call, forgetting that she was giving Richard the “silent treatment” because he’d taken up Miss Frost’s lost cause.

“No what most people call sex, Mom—that’s what I’m telling you,” I would continue saying to her, on the other side of her closed bedroom door. “What Miss Frost truly did to me amounted to nothing more than a fancy kind of masturbation. There’s a special name for it and everything, but I’ll spare you the details!”

“Stop it, Billy—stop it, stop it, stop it!” my mom would cry. (I guess she forgot that she was giving me the “silent treatment,” too.)

“Take it easy, Bill,” Richard Abbott would caution me. “I think your mom is feeling pretty fragile these days.”

“Pretty fragile these days,” I repeated, looking straight at him—until Richard looked away.

“Trust me on this one, William,” Miss Frost had said to me, when we were holding each other’s penises. “Once you start repeating what people say to you, it’s a hard habit to break.”

But I didn’t want to break that habit; it had been her habit, and I decided to embrace it.

“I’m not judging you, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “I can see for myself, without you belaboring the details, that your experience with Miss Frost has affected you in certain positive ways.”

“Belaboring the details,” I repeated. “Positive ways.”

“However, Billy, I feel it is my duty to inform you that in a sexual situation of this awkward kind, there is an expectation, in the minds of many adults.” Here Martha Hadley paused; so did I. I was considering repeating that bit about “in a sexual situation of this awkward kind,” but Mrs. Hadley suddenly continued her arduous train of thought. “What many adults hope to hear you express, Billy, is something you have not, as yet, expressed.”

“There is an expectation that I will express what?” I asked her.

“Remorse,” Martha Hadley said.

“Remorse,” I repeated, looking straight at her, until Mrs. Hadley looked away.

“The repetition thing is annoying, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry that they’re making you see Dr. Harlow,” she told me.

“Do you think Dr. Harlow is hoping to hear me express remorse?” I asked Mrs. Hadley.

“That would be my guess, Billy,” she said.

“Thank you for telling me,” I told her.

Atkins was on the music-building stairs again. “It’s so very tragic,” he started. “Last night, when I was thinking about it, I threw up.”

“You were thinking about what?” I asked him.

“Giovanni’s Room!” he cried; we’d already discussed the novel, but I gathered that poor Tom wasn’t done. “That part about the smell of love—”

“The stink of love,” I corrected him.

“The reek of it,” Atkins said, gagging.

“It’s stink, Tom.”

“The stench,” Atkins said, vomiting on the stairs.

“Jesus, Tom—”

“And that awful woman with the cavernous cunt!” Atkins cried.

“The what?” I asked him.

“The terrible girlfriend—you know who I mean, Bill.”

“I guess that was the point of it, Tom—how someone he once desired now turns him off,” I said.

“They smell like fish, you know,” Atkins told me.

“Do you mean women?” I asked him.

He gagged again, then recovered himself. “I mean their things,” Atkins said.

“Their vaginas, Tom?”

“Don’t say that word!” poor Tom cried, retching.

“I have to go, Tom,” I told him. “I have to prepare myself for a little chat with Dr. Harlow.”

“Talk to Kittredge, Bill. They’re always making Kittredge have a talk with Dr. Harlow. Kittredge knows how to handle Dr. Harlow,” Atkins told me. I didn’t doubt it; I just didn’t want to talk to Kittredge about anything.

But, of course, Kittredge had heard about Miss Frost. Nothing of a sexual nature escaped him. If you were a boy at Favorite River and you received a restriction, Kittredge not only knew your crime; he knew who had caught you, and the terms of confinement your restriction entailed.

Not only was the public library off limits to me; I was told not to see Miss Frost—not that I knew where to find her. The whereabouts of the family home she’d shared with her mental-case mother were unknown to me. Besides, that house was for sale; for all I knew, Miss Frost (and her mom) had already moved out.

I did my homework, and what writing I could manage, in the yearbook room of the academy library. It was always a little before check-in when I passed, as quickly as I could, through the Bancroft Hall butt room, where both the smoking and the nonsmoking boys seemed uncharacteristically disturbed to see me. I suppose that my sexual reputation troubled them; whatever convenient pigeonhole they’d put me in might not be the right fit for me now.

If those boys had heretofore thought of me as a miserable faggot, what were they to make of my apparent friendship with Kittredge? And now there was this story about the transsexual town librarian. Okay, so she was some guy in drag; she wasn’t a real woman, but she presented as a woman. Maybe more to the point, I had acquired an undeniable mystique—if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don’t forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys—even if the older woman has a penis!

Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true. The truth was, I hadn’t had what most people call sex—there’d been no penetration! But those butt-room boys didn’t know that, nor would they have believed it. In the minds of my fellow students at Favorite River Academy, Miss Frost and I had done everything.

I’d climbed the stairs to the second floor of Bancroft when Kittredge suddenly swept me into his arms; at a dead run, Kittredge carried me up the third flight of stairs and into the hall of the dormitory. Worshipful boys gaped at us from the open doorways to their rooms; I could feel their sad envy, a familiar and pathetic longing.

“Holy shit, Nymph—you are the nooky master!” Kittredge whispered in my ear. “You are the poontang man! Way to go, Nymph! I am so impressed with you—you are my new hero! Listen up!” Kittredge called to the gawking boys in the third-floor hall, and in their doorways. “While you jerk-offs are beating your meat, and only dreaming about getting laid, this guy is really doing it. You there,” Kittredge suddenly said to a round-faced underclassman who stood terror-frozen in the hall; his name was Trowbridge, he was wearing pajamas, and he held his toothbrush (with a gob of toothpaste already on it) as if he hoped the toothbrush were a magic wand.

“I’m Trowbridge,” the starstruck boy said.

“Where are you going, Trowbridge?” Kittredge asked him.

“I’m going to brush my teeth,” Trowbridge said in a trembling voice.

“And after that, Trowbridge?” Kittredge asked the boy. “No doubt you’ll soon be pulling your pud, imagining your face pressed between a couple of enormous knockers.” But by his aghast expression, I thought it unlikely that Trowbridge had yet dared to jerk off in the dormitory; he surely had a roommate—Trowbridge was probably afraid to beat off in Bancroft. “Whereas this young man, Trowbridge,” Kittredge continued, still holding me in his strong arms, “this young man has not only challenged the public image of gender roles. This nooky master, this poontang man,” Kittredge cried, jouncing me up and down, “this stud has actually porked a transsexual! Do you have any idea, Trowbridge, what transsexual snatch even is?”

“No,” Trowbridge said in a small voice.

Even holding me in his arms, Kittredge managed his signature shrug; it was his mother’s insouciant shrug, the one Elaine had learned. “My dear Nymph,” Kittredge whispered, as he continued to carry me down the hall. “I am so impressed with you!” he said again. “An actual transsexual—in Vermont, of all places! I’ve seen some, of course, but in Paris—and in New York. The transvestites in Paris tend to hang out with one another; they’re quite a colorful crowd, but you get the feeling that they do everything together. I regret I’ve never tried one,” Kittredge whispered, “but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along. That must be different!”

“Do you mean les folles?” I asked him.

I couldn’t stop thinking about les folles—“screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs,” as Baldwin describes them. But either Kittredge hadn’t heard me, or my French accent was so off the mark that he ignored me.

“Naturally, the transsexuals are another story in New York,” Kittredge continued. “They strike me as loners—a lot of them are hookers, maybe. There’s one who hangs out on Seventh Avenue—I’m pretty sure she’s a hooker. She is really tall! I hear there’s a club they all go to—I don’t know where. Nowhere you want to go by yourself, I’ll bet. I think if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris. But you, Nymph—you’ve already done it! How was it?” he asked me—seemingly with the utmost sincerity, but I knew enough to be careful. With Kittredge, you were never sure where the conversation was headed.

“It was absolutely wonderful,” I told him. “I don’t imagine I’ll ever have a sexual experience exactly like it again.”

“Really,” Kittredge said flatly. We’d stopped in front of the door to the faculty apartment I shared with my mom and Richard Abbott, but Kittredge didn’t look the least tired from carrying me, and he gave me no indication that he ever intended to put me down. “I suppose she had a penis,” Kittredge said then, “and you saw it, touched it, and did all those things one does with a penis—right, Nymph?”

Something in his voice had changed, and I was afraid of it. “To be honest with you, I was so caught up in the moment that I kind of lose track of the details,” I told him.

“Do you?” Kittredge softly asked, but he didn’t seem to care. It was as if the details of any sexual adventure were already known to him, and he was bored by them. For a moment, Kittredge looked surprised that he was holding me—or perhaps repulsed. He suddenly put me down. “You know, Nymph, they’re going to make you talk to Harlow—you know that, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I was wondering what I should say to him.”

“I’m glad you asked me,” Kittredge said. “Here’s how to handle Harlow,” Kittredge began. There was something oddly soothing and (at the same time) indifferent in his voice; in the way Kittredge coached me, I felt that our roles had been reversed. I’d been the Goethe and Rilke expert, tutoring him through the tricky parts. Now here was Kittredge, tutoring me.

At Favorite River Academy, when you were caught committing an act of carnal folly, you were interrogated by Dr. Harlow; Kittredge, who (I presumed) had a wealth of experience with carnal acts, was an expert at dealing with Dr. Harlow.

I listened intently to Kittredge’s advice; I hung (as they say) on his every word. It was painful to hear, at times, because Kittredge insisted on spelling out for me the details of his sexual misadventure with Elaine. “Forgive the specific example, Nymph, but just so you know how Harlow operates,” Kittredge would say, before launching into his short-term hearing loss—the result of how loud Elaine Hadley’s orgasms were.

“What Harlow wants to hear from you is how sorry you are, Nymph. He’s expecting you to repent. What you give him, instead, is nonstop titillation. Harlow will try to make you feel guilty,” Kittredge told me. “Don’t buy into that shit, Nymph—just pretend you’re reciting a pornographic novel.”

“I see,” I said. “No remorse, right?”

“No remorse, Nymph—that’s exactly right. Mind you,” Kittredge said, in that eerily changed voice—the one I was afraid of. “Mind you, Nymph—I think what you’ve done is disgusting. But I applaud you for having the courage to do it, and you absolutely have a right to do it!”

Then, as suddenly as he’d swept me into his arms on the dormitory stairs, he was gone—he was disappearing down the third-floor hall, with those admiring boys in the doorways all watching him run. It had been classic Kittredge. You could be careful, but you could never be careful enough with him; only Kittredge knew where the conversation would end. I often had the feeling with him that he knew the end of our conversation before he started.

It was then that the door to our faculty apartment opened; both Richard Abbott and my mother were standing there, as if they’d been standing on the other side of the door for quite a while.

“We heard voices, Bill,” Richard said.

“I heard Kittredge’s voice—I would know his voice anywhere,” my mother said.

I looked all around me in the suddenly deserted hall.

“Then you must be hearing things,” I told my mom.

“I heard Kittredge’s voice, too, Bill—he sounded rather passionate,” Richard said.

“You should both get your ears checked—have your hearing tested or something,” I told them. I walked past them into the living room of our apartment.

“I know you’re seeing Dr. Harlow tomorrow, Bill,” Richard said. “Perhaps we should talk about that.”

“I know everything I’m going to say to Dr. Harlow, Richard—in fact, the details are pretty fresh,” I told him.

“You should be careful what you say to Dr. Harlow, Billy!” my mother exclaimed.

“What do I have to be careful about?” I asked her. “I don’t have anything to hide—not anymore.”

“Just take it easy, Bill—” Richard started to say, but I wouldn’t let him finish.

“They didn’t kick out Kittredge for having sex, did they?” I asked Richard. “Are you afraid they’re going to kick me out for not having sex?” I asked my mother.

“Don’t be silly—” my mom started to say.

“Then what are you afraid of?” I asked her. “One day I’m going to have all the sex I want—the way I want it. Are you afraid of that?”

She didn’t answer me, but I could see that she was afraid of my having all the sex I wanted, the way I wanted it. This time, Richard didn’t jump into the conversation; he didn’t try to help her out. As I went to my bedroom and closed the door, I was thinking that Richard Abbott probably knew something I didn’t know.

I lay down on my bed and tried to imagine everything that I might not know. It must have been something my mother had kept from me, I thought, and maybe Richard had disapproved of her not telling me. That would explain why Richard hadn’t rushed in to help my mom out of whatever mess she’d made for herself. (Richard hadn’t even managed to say his usual “Take it easy, Bill” bullshit!)

Later, as I was trying to fall asleep, I was thinking that, if I ever had children, I would tell them everything. But the everything word only led me to remember the details of my sexual experience with Miss Frost. Those details, which I would impart—in as titillating (even in as pornographic) a fashion as I could manage—to Dr. Harlow in the morning, led me next to imagine the sex that I hadn’t had with Miss Frost. Naturally, with all there was to imagine, I was awake rather late into the night.

KITTREDGE HAD PREPARED ME SO well for my meeting with Dr. Harlow that the meeting itself was anticlimactic. I simply told the truth; I left no detail out. I even included the part about my not knowing, at first, if I’d had what most people call sex with Miss Frost—if there’d been any penetration. The penetration word seized Dr. Harlow’s attention to such a degree that he stopped writing on his pad of lined paper; he flat out asked me.

“Well, was there any penetration?” the doctor said impatiently.

“In due time,” I told him. “You can’t rush that part of the story.”

“I want to know exactly what happened, Bill!” Dr. Harlow exclaimed.

“Oh, you will!” I cried excitedly. “The not-knowing is part of the story.”

“I don’t care about the not-knowing part!” Dr. Harlow declared, pointing his pencil at me. But I was not about to be rushed. The longer I talked, the more the bald-headed owl-fucker had to listen.

At Favorite River Academy, we called the faculty and staff we intensely disliked “bald-headed owl-fuckers.” The origin of this is obscure. If the Favorite River yearbook was called The Owl, I’m guessing that this hinted at an owl’s presumed wisdom—as expressed in the questionable claim “wise as an owl,” or the equally unprovable “wise old owl.” (Our stupid sports teams were called the Bald Eagles, which was additionally confusing—eagles were not owls.)

“The ‘bald-headed’ reference may indicate the physical appearance of a circumcised penis,” Mr. Hadley had said once—when all the Hadleys were having dinner with Richard and my mom and me.

“What on earth makes you think so?” Mrs. Hadley asked her husband. I remember that Elaine and I were riveted by this conversation—my mother’s obvious discomfort with the penis word being part of our enthrallment.

“You see, Martha, the ‘owl-fucker’ part is indicative of the homo-hating culture of an all-boys’ school,” Mr. Hadley continued, in his history-teacher way. “The boys call those of us they most detest ‘bald-headed owl-fuckers’ because they are presuming that the very worst of us are homosexual men who diddle—or dream of diddling—young boys.”

Elaine and I howled; we thought this was so funny. We’d never imagined that the expression “bald-headed owl-fucker” actually meant anything!

But my mother suddenly spoke up. “It’s just one of those vulgar things the boys say, because they’re always saying vulgar things—it’s how they think,” my mom said, bitterly.

“But it originally meant something, Mary,” Mr. Hadley had insisted. “It surely originated for a reason,” the history teacher had intoned.

In my deliberate and detailed recounting to Dr. Harlow of my sexual experience with Miss Frost, I very much enjoyed remembering Mr. Hadley’s historical speculations concerning what a bald-headed owl-fucker actually was. Dr. Harlow clearly was one, and—as I prolonged my discovery that Miss Frost and I had had an intercrural sexual experience—I admit that I borrowed a few of James Baldwin’s well-chosen words. “There was no penetration,” I told Dr. Harlow, in due time, “therefore no ‘stink of love,’ but I so wanted there to be!”

“Stink of love!” Dr. Harlow repeated; I could see he was writing this down, and that he suddenly didn’t look well.

“I may never have a better orgasm,” I told Dr. Harlow, “but I still want to do everything—all those things Miss Frost was protecting me from, I mean. She made me want to do all those things—in fact, I can’t wait to do them!”

“Those homosexual things, Bill?” Dr. Harlow asked me. Through his thinning, lusterless hair, I could see him sweating.

“Yes, of course ‘homosexual things’—but also other things, to both men and women!” I said eagerly.

“Both, Bill?” Dr. Harlow asked.

“Why not?” I said to the bald-headed owl-fucker. “I was attracted to Miss Frost when I believed she was a woman. When I realized she was a man, I was no less attracted to her.”

“And are there other people, of both sexes—at this school, and in this town—who also attract you, Bill?” Dr. Harlow asked.

“Sure. Why not?” I said again. Dr. Harlow had stopped writing; perhaps the task of the opus ahead of him seemed unending.

“Students, Bill?” the bald-headed owl-fucker asked.

“Sure,” I said. I closed my eyes for dramatic effect, but this had more of an effect on me than I’d anticipated. I suddenly saw myself in Kittredge’s powerful embrace; he had me in the arm-bar, but of course there was more to it than that.

“Faculty wives?” Dr. Harlow suggested, less than spontaneously.

I needed only to think of Mrs. Hadley’s homely face, superimposed again and again on those training-bra models in my mother’s mail-order catalogs.

“Why not?” I asked, a third time. “One faculty wife, anyway,” I added.

“Just one?” Dr. Harlow asked, but I could tell that the bald-headed owl-fucker wanted to ask me which one.

At that instant, it occurred to me how Kittredge would have answered Dr. Harlow’s insinuating question. First of all, I looked bored—as if I had much more to say, but just couldn’t be bothered.

My acting career was almost over. (I didn’t know this at the time, when I was the center of attention in Dr. Harlow’s office, but I had only one, extremely minor, role remaining.) Yet I was able to summon my best imitation of Kittredge’s shrug and Grandpa Harry’s evasions.

“Ah, well . . .” I started to say; then I stopped talking. Instead of speaking, I mastered that insouciant shrug—the one Kittredge had inherited from his mother, the one Elaine had learned from Mrs. Kittredge.

“I see, Bill,” Dr. Harlow said.

“I doubt that you do,” I told him. I saw the old homo-hater stiffen.

“You doubt that I do!” the doctor cried indignantly. Dr. Harlow was furiously writing down what I’d told him.

“Trust me on this one, Dr. Harlow,” I said, remembering every word that Miss Frost had spoken to me. “Once you start repeating what people say to you, it’s a hard habit to break.”

That was my meeting with Dr. Harlow, who sent a curt note to my mother and Richard Abbott, describing me as “a poor prospect for rehabilitation”; Dr. Harlow didn’t elaborate on his evaluation, except to say that, in his professional estimation, my sexual problems were “more a matter of attitude than action.”

All I said to my mother was that, in my professional estimation, the talk with Dr. Harlow had been a great success.

Poor, well-meaning Richard Abbott attempted to have a friendly tête-à-tête with me about the meeting. “What do you think Dr. Harlow meant by your attitude, Bill?” dear Richard asked me.

“Ah, well . . .” I said to Richard, pausing only long enough to meaningfully shrug. “I suppose a visible lack of remorse lies at the heart of it.”

“A visible lack of remorse,” Richard repeated.

“Trust me on this one, Richard,” I began, confident that I had Miss Frost’s domineering intonation exactly right. “Once you start repeating what people say to you, it’s a hard habit to break.”

I SAW MISS FROST only two more times; on both occasions, I was completely unprepared—I’d not been expecting to see her.

The sequence of events that led to my graduation from Favorite River Academy, and my departure from First Sister, Vermont, unfolded fairly quickly.

King Lear was performed by the Drama Club before our Thanksgiving vacation. For a period of time, not longer than a week or two, Richard Abbott joined my mother in giving me the “silent treatment”; I’d clearly hurt Richard’s feelings by not seeing the fall Shakespeare play. I’m sure I would have enjoyed Grandpa Harry’s performance in the Goneril role—more than I would have liked seeing Kittredge in the dual roles of Edgar and Poor Tom.

The other “poor Tom”—namely, Atkins—told me that Kittredge had pulled off both parts with a noble-seeming indifference, and that Grandpa Harry had luxuriously indulged in the sheer awfulness of Lear’s eldest daughter.

“How was Delacorte?” I asked Atkins.

“Delacorte gives me the creeps,” Atkins answered.

“I meant, how was he as Lear’s Fool, Tom.”

“Delacorte wasn’t bad, Bill,” Atkins admitted. “I just don’t know why he always looks like he needs to spit!”

“Because Delacorte does need to spit, Tom,” I told Atkins.

It was after Thanksgiving—hence the winter-sports teams had commenced their first practices—when I ran into Delacorte, who was on his way to wrestling practice. He had an oozing mat burn on one cheek and a deeply split lower lip; he was carrying the oft-seen paper cup. (I noted that Delacorte had just one cup, which I hoped was not a multipurpose cup—that is, for both rinsing and spitting.)

“How come you didn’t see the play?” Delacorte asked me. “Kittredge said you didn’t see it.”

“I’m sorry I missed it,” I told him. “I’ve had a lot of other stuff going on.”

“Yeah, I know,” Delacorte said. “Kittredge told me about it.” Delacorte took a sip of water from the paper cup; he rinsed his mouth, then spit the water into a dirty snowbank alongside the footpath.

“I heard you were a very good Lear’s Fool,” I told him.

“Really?” Delacorte asked; he sounded surprised. “Who told you that?”

“Everybody said so,” I lied.

“I tried to do all my scenes with the awareness that I was dying,” Delacorte said seriously. “I see each scene that Lear’s Fool is in as a kind of death-in-progress,” he added.

“That’s very interesting. I’m sorry I missed it,” I told him again.

“Oh, that’s all right—you probably would have done it better,” Delacorte told me; he took another sip of water, then spit the water in the snow. Before he hurried on his way to wrestling practice, Delacorte suddenly asked me: “Was she pretty? I mean the transsexual librarian.”

“Yes, very pretty,” I answered.

“I have a hard time imagining it,” Delacorte admitted worriedly; then he ran on.

Years later, when I knew that Delacorte was dying, I often thought of him playing Lear’s Fool as a death-in-progress. I really am sorry I missed it. Oh, Delacorte, how I misjudged you—you were more of a death-in-progress than I ever imagined!

It was Tom Atkins who told me, that December of 1960, how Kittredge was telling everyone I was “a sexual hero.”

“Kittredge said that to you, Tom?” I asked.

“He says it to everyone,” Atkins told me.

“Who knows what Kittredge really thinks?” I said to Atkins. (I was still suffering from the way Kittredge had delivered the disgusting word when I’d least expected it.)

That December, the wrestling team had no home matches—their earliest matches were away, at other schools—but Atkins had expressed his interest in seeing the home wrestling matches with me. I’d earlier resolved to see no more wrestling matches—in part because Elaine wasn’t around to see the matches with me, but also because I was bullshitting myself about trying to boycott Kittredge. Yet Atkins was interested in watching the wrestling, and his interest had rekindled mine.

Then, that Christmas of 1960, Elaine came home; the Favorite River dormitories had emptied for the Christmas break, and Elaine and I had the deserted campus largely to ourselves. I told Elaine absolutely everything about Miss Frost; my session with Dr. Harlow had provided me with sufficient storytelling practice, and I was eager to make up for those years when I’d been less than candid with my dear friend Elaine. She was a good listener, and not once did she try to make me feel guilty for not telling her about my various sexual infatuations sooner.

We were able to speak frankly about Kittredge, too, and I even told Elaine that I “had once had” a crush on her mother. (That Mrs. Hadley no longer attracted me in that way made it easier for me to tell Elaine about it.)

Elaine was such a good friend to me that she actually volunteered to be the go-between—that is, should I want to try to arrange a meeting with Miss Frost. I thought about such a meeting all the time, of course, but Miss Frost had so clearly indicated to me her unwavering intentions to say good-bye—her “till we meet again” had such a businesslike sound to it. I couldn’t imagine that Miss Frost had meant anything clandestine or suggestive about how we might manage to “meet again.”

I appreciated Elaine’s willingness to be the go-between, but I didn’t for a moment delude myself by imagining that Miss Frost would ever make herself available to me again. “You have to understand,” I said to Elaine. “I think Miss Frost is pretty serious about protecting me.”

“As first experiences go, Billy, I think you’ve had a pretty good one,” Elaine told me.

“Except for the interference of my whole fucking family!” I cried.

“That’s just weird,” Elaine said. “It can’t be Miss Frost they’re all so afraid of. Surely they didn’t believe that Miss Frost would ever hurt you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“There’s something about you they’re afraid of, Billy,” Elaine told me.

“That I’m a homosexual, or that I’m bisexual—is that what you mean?” I asked her. “Because I think they’ve already figured that out, or at least they suspect it.”

“They’re afraid of something you don’t know yet, Billy,” Elaine told me.

“I’m sick of everybody trying to protect me!” I shouted.

“That may indeed be Miss Frost’s motive, Billy,” Elaine said. “I’m not so sure about what’s motivating your whole fucking family, as you say.”

MY CRUDE COUSIN GERRY came home from college that same Christmas break. In Gerry’s case, I use the crude word affectionately. Please don’t dismiss Gerry as a stridently angry lesbian who hated her parents and all heterosexuals; she had always loathed boys, but I’d foolishly imagined that she might like me a little bit, because I knew she would have heard about my scandalous relationship with Miss Frost. Yet, at least for a few more years, Gerry wouldn’t like gay or bisexual boys any better than she liked straight ones.

Nowadays, I hear my friends say that our society tends to be more accepting of gay and bi women than we are of gay and bi men. In our family’s case, there was little apparent reaction to Gerry being a lesbian, at least compared to almost everyone having a cow about my relationship with Miss Frost—not to mention my mom’s horror at how I was “turning out,” sexually. Yes, I know, it’s true that many people treat lesbians and bi women differently than they treat gay and bi men, but Gerry wasn’t accepted by our family as much as she was simply ignored by them.

Uncle Bob loved Gerry, but Bob was a coward; he loved his daughter, in part, because she was more courageous than he was. I think Gerry deliberately misbehaved, and not only to build a barrier around herself; I think she was aggressive and “crude” because this forced our family to notice her.

I had always liked Gerry, but I kept my fondness for her a secret. I wish I’d told her that I liked her—I mean, sooner than I did.

We would become better friends when we were older; nowadays, we’re quite close. I’m truly fond of Gerry—okay, in an odd way—but Gerry was not very likable when she was a young woman. All I’m saying is that Gerry purposely made herself unlikable. Elaine detested her, and would never like her—not even a little.

That Christmas, Elaine and I were up to our usual but separate pursuits in the yearbook room of the academy library. The library was open over the Christmas break—except for Christmas Day. Many of the faculty liked to work there, and Christmastime was when a lot of prospective students and their parents visited Favorite River Academy. My summer job, for the past three years, had been as a tour guide; I showed prospective students and their parents my awful school. I got a part-time job as a tour guide over the Christmas break, too; the boys among the faculty brats frequently did this. Uncle Bob, the admissions man, was our overly permissive boss.

Elaine and I were in the yearbook room when my cousin Gerry found us. “I hear you’re queer,” Gerry said to me, ignoring Elaine.

“I guess so,” I said, “but I’m attracted to some women, too.”

“I don’t want to know,” Gerry told me. “No one’s sticking anything up my ass, or anywhere else.”

“You never know till you try it,” Elaine said. “You might like it, Gerry.”

“I see you’re not pregnant,” Gerry said to her, “unless you’re already pregnant again, Elaine, and you’re not yet showing.”

“You got a girlfriend?” Elaine asked her.

“She could beat the shit out of you, Elaine,” Gerry said. “You, too—probably,” Gerry told me.

I could be forgiving of Gerry, knowing that Muriel was her mother; that couldn’t have been easy, especially for a lesbian. I was less inclined to forgive Gerry for how harsh she was with her father, because I had always liked Uncle Bob. But Elaine felt no forgiveness for Gerry at all. There must have been some history between them; maybe Gerry had hit on her, or when Elaine had been pregnant with Kittredge’s child, it’s entirely possible that Gerry had said or written something cruel to her.

“My dad’s looking for you, Billy,” Gerry said. “There’s a family he wants you to show the school to. The kid looks like a bed-wetter to me, but maybe he’s a homo, and you can suck each other off in one of the empty dorm rooms.”

“Jesus, you’re crass!” Elaine said to Gerry. “I was naïve enough to imagine that college would have civilized you—at least to some small degree. But I think whatever tasteless culture you acquired from your Ezra Falls high school experience is the only culture you’re capable of acquiring.”

“I guess the culture you acquired didn’t teach you to keep your thighs together, Elaine,” Gerry told her. “Why not ask my dad to give you the master key to Tilley, when you’re showing the bed-wetter and his parents around?” Gerry asked me. “That way, you and Elaine can sneak a look at Kittredge’s room. Maybe you two jerk-offs can masturbate each other on Kittredge’s bed,” Gerry told us. “What I mean, Billy, is that you have to have a master key to show someone a dorm room, don’t you? Why not get the key to Tilley?” With that, Gerry left Elaine and me in the yearbook room. Like her mother, Muriel, Gerry could be an insensitive bitch, but—unlike her mother—Gerry wasn’t conventional. (Maybe I admired how angry Gerry was.)

“I guess your whole fucking family—as you say, Billy—talks about you,” Elaine said. “They just don’t talk to you.”

“I guess so,” I said, but I was thinking that Aunt Muriel and my mother were probably the chief culprits—that is, when it came to talking about me but not to me.

“Do you want to see Kittredge’s room in Tilley?” Elaine asked me.

“If you do,” I told her. Of course I wanted to see Kittredge’s room—and Elaine did, too.

I HAD LOST A little of my enthusiasm for perusing the old yearbooks, following my discovery that Miss Frost had been the Favorite River wrestling-team captain in 1935. Since then, I hadn’t made much progress—nor had Elaine.

Elaine was still stuck in the contemporary yearbooks; specifically, she was held in thrall by what she called “the Kittredge years.” She devoted herself to finding photos of the younger, more innocent-seeming Kittredge. Now that Kittredge was in his fifth and final year at Favorite River, Elaine sought out those photographs of him in his freshman and sophomore years. Yes, he’d looked younger then; the innocent-seeming part, however, was hard to see.

If one could believe Mrs. Kittredge’s story—if Kittredge’s own mother had really had sex with him when she said she did—Kittredge had not been innocent for very long, and he’d definitely not been innocent by the time he attended Favorite River. Even as a freshman—on the very day Kittredge had shown up in First Sister, Vermont—Kittredge hadn’t been innocent. (It was almost impossible for me to imagine that he’d ever been innocent.) Yet Elaine kept looking through those earliest photographs for some evidence of Kittredge’s innocence.

I don’t remember the boy Gerry had called the bed-wetter. He was (in all likelihood) a prepubescent boy, probably on his way to becoming straight or gay—but not on his way to becoming bi, or so I imagine. I don’t recall the alleged bed-wetter’s parents, either. My exchange with Uncle Bob, about the master key to Tilley, is more memorable.

“Sure, show ’em Tilley—why not?” my easygoing uncle said to me. “Just don’t show ’em Kittredge’s room—it’s not typical.”

“Not typical,” I repeated.

“See for yourself, Billy—just show ’em another room,” Uncle Bob told me.

I don’t recall whose room I showed to the bed-wetter and his parents; it was the standard double, with two of everything—two beds, two desks, two chests of drawers.

“Everyone has a roommate?” the bed-wetter’s mom asked; it was usually the mothers who asked the roommate question.

“Yes, everyone—no exceptions,” I said; those were the rules.

“What’s ‘not typical’ about Kittredge’s room?” Elaine asked, after the visiting family was through their tour.

“We’ll soon see,” I said. “Uncle Bob didn’t tell me.”

“Jesus, no one in your family tells you anything, Billy!” Elaine exclaimed.

I’d been thinking the same thing. In the yearbook room, I was up only to the Class of ’40. I had twenty years to go before I got to my own graduating class, and I’d just discovered that the yearbook for 1940 was missing. I’d skipped from the ’39 Owl to ’41 and ’42, before I realized that ’40 was gone.

When I asked the academy librarian about it, I said: “Nobody can check out a yearbook. The Owl for 1940 must have been stolen.”

The academy librarian was one of Favorite River’s fussy old bachelors; everyone thought that such older, unmarried males on the Favorite River faculty were what we called at that time “nonpracticing homosexuals.” Who knew if they were or weren’t “practicing,” or if they were or were not homosexuals? All we’d observed was that they lived alone, and there was a particular fastidiousness about the way they dressed, and the way they ate and spoke—hence we imagined that they were unnaturally effeminate.

“Students may not check out a yearbook, Billy—the faculty can,” the academy librarian said primly; his name was Mr. Lockley.

“The faculty can,” I repeated.

“Yes, of course they can,” Mr. Lockley told me; he was looking through some filing cards. “Mr. Fremont has checked out the 1940 Owl, Billy.”

“Oh.”

Mr. Fremont—Robert Fremont, Class of ’35, Miss Frost’s classmate—was my uncle Bob, of course. But when I asked Bob if he was finished with the ’40 Owl, because I was waiting to have a look at it, good old easygoing Bob wasn’t so easygoing about it.

“I’m pretty sure I returned that yearbook to the library, Billy,” my uncle said; he was a good guy, basically, but a bad liar. Uncle Bob was a fairly forthright fella, but I knew he was hanging on to the ’40 Owl, for some unknown reason.

“Mr. Lockley thinks you still have it, Uncle Bob,” I told him.

“Well, I’ll look all around for it, Billy, but I swear I took it back to the library,” Bob said.

“What did you need it for?” I asked him.

“A member of that class is newly deceased,” Uncle Bob replied. “I wanted to say some nice things about him, when I wrote to his family.”

“Oh.”

Poor Uncle Bob would never be a writer, I knew; he couldn’t make up a story to save his ass.

“What was his name?” I asked.

“Whose name, Billy?” Bob said in a half-strangled voice.

“The deceased, Uncle Bob.”

“Gosh, Billy—I can’t for the life of me remember the fella’s name!”

“Oh.”

“More fucking secrets,” Elaine said, when I told her the story. “Ask Gerry to find the yearbook and give it to you. Gerry hates her parents—she’ll do it for you.”

“I think Gerry hates me, too,” I told Elaine.

“Gerry hates her parents more,” Elaine said.

We’d located the door to Kittredge’s room in Tilley, and I let us in with the master key Uncle Bob had given me. At first, the only “not typical” thing about the dorm room was how neat it was, but neither Elaine nor I was surprised to see that Kittredge was tidy.

The one bookshelf had very few books on it; there was a lot of room for more books. The one desk had very little on it; the one chair had no clothes draped over it. There were just a couple of framed photographs on top of the lone chest of drawers, and the wardrobe closet, which typically had no door—not even a curtain—revealed Kittredge’s familiar (and expensive-looking) clothes. Not even the solitary single bed had any stray clothes on it, and the bed was perfectly made—the sheets and blanket uncreased, the pillowcase unwrinkled.

“Jesus,” Elaine suddenly said. “How did the bastard swing a single?”

It was a single room; Kittredge had no roommate—that’s what was “not typical” about it. Elaine and I speculated that the single room might have been part of the deal Mrs. Kittredge made with the academy when she’d told them—and Mr. and Mrs. Hadley—that she would take Elaine to Europe and get the unfortunate girl a safe abortion. It was also possible that Kittredge had been an overpowering and abusive roommate; perhaps no one had wanted to be Kittredge’s roommate, but this struck both Elaine and me as unlikely. At Favorite River Academy, it would have been prestigious to be Kittredge’s roommate; even if he abused you, you wouldn’t want to give up the honor. The single room, in combination with Kittredge’s evidently compulsive neatness, smacked of privilege. Kittredge exuded privilege, as if he’d managed (even in utero) to create his own sense of entitlement.

What was most upsetting to Elaine about Kittredge’s room was that there was absolutely no evidence in it that he’d ever known her; maybe she’d expected to see a photograph of herself. (She admitted to me that she’d given him several.) I didn’t ask her if she’d given Kittredge one of her bras, but that was because I was hoping to ask her if she would give me another one.

There were some school-newspaper photographs, and yearbook photos, of Kittredge wrestling. There were no pictures of girlfriends (or ex-girlfriends). There were no photographs of Kittredge as a child; if he’d ever had a dog, there were no pictures of the dog. There were no photos of anyone who could have been his father. The only picture of Mrs. Kittredge had been taken the one time she’d come to Favorite River to see her son wrestle. The photo must have been taken after the match; Elaine and I had been at that match—it was the only time I saw Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and I didn’t remember seeing anyone take a picture of Kittredge and his mom at the match, but someone had.

What Elaine and I noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand—it must have been Kittredge’s—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. It was a funny photograph, but Elaine and I didn’t laugh about it.

The truth is, Kittredge’s face worked on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes, and Mrs. Kittredge’s face went very well with Kittredge’s wrestler’s body (in tights and a singlet).

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said to Elaine, “that Mrs. Kittredge could have switched the faces in the photograph.” (I didn’t really think so, but I said it.)

“No,” Elaine flatly said. “Only Kittredge could have done it. That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor.”

“If you say so,” I told my dear friend. (As I’ve already told you, I wouldn’t question Elaine’s authority on the subject of Mrs. Kittredge. How could I?)

“YOU’D BETTER GO TO work on Gerry and find that 1940 yearbook, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I did this at our family dinner on Christmas Day—when Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bob and Gerry joined my mom and me, and Richard Abbott, at Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. Nana Victoria always made a big to-do about the essential and necessary “old-fashionedness” of Christmas dinner.

It was also a tradition in our family that the Borkmans joined us for Christmas dinner. In my memory, Christmas was one of the few days of the year I saw Mrs. Borkman. At Nana Victoria’s insistence, we all called her “Mrs.” Borkman; I never knew her first name. When I say “all,” I don’t mean only the children. Surprisingly, that is how Aunt Muriel and my mother addressed Mrs. Borkman—and Uncle Bob and Richard Abbott, when they spoke to the presumed “Ibsen woman” Nils had married. (She had not left Nils, nor had she shot herself in the temple, but we assumed that Nils Borkman would never have married a woman who wasn’t an Ibsen woman, and we therefore wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. Borkman had done something dire.)

The Borkmans did not have children, which indicated to my aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria that there was something amiss (or indeed dire) in their relationship.

“Motherfucking Christ,” Gerry said to me on that Christmas Day, 1960. “Isn’t it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depresses the shit out of me, and I’m neither suicidal nor Norwegian!”

On that warmhearted note, I decided to introduce Gerry to the mysterious subject of the missing 1940 Owl, which—according to Mr. Lockley’s records—Uncle Bob had checked out of the academy library and had not returned.

“I don’t know what your dad is doing with that yearbook,” I told Gerry, “but I want it.”

“What’s in it?” Gerry asked me.

“Some members of our illustrious family don’t want me to see what’s in it,” I said to Gerry.

“Don’t sweat it. I’ll find the fucking yearbook—I’m dying to see what’s in it myself,” Gerry told me.

“It’s probably something of a delicate nature,” I said to her.

“Ha!” Gerry cried. “Nothing I get my hands on is ‘of a delicate nature’ for very long!”

When I repeated what she’d said to Elaine, my dear friend remarked: “The very idea of having sex with Gerry is nauseating to me.”

To me, too, I almost told Elaine. But that’s not what I said. I thought my sexual forecast was cloudy; I wasn’t at all sure about my sexual future. “Sexual desire is pretty specific,” I said to Elaine, “and it’s usually pretty decisive, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Elaine answered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that, in the past, my sexual desire has been very specific—my attraction to someone very decisive,” I said to Elaine. “But all that seems to be changing. Your breasts, for example—I love them specifically, because they’re yours, not just because they’re small. Those dark parts,” I tried to tell her.

“The areolae,” Elaine said.

“Yes, I love those parts. And kissing you—I love kissing you,” I told her.

“Jesus—now you tell me, Billy!” Elaine said.

“I only know it now—I’m changing, Elaine, but I’m not at all sure how,” I told her. “By the way, I wonder if you would give me one of your bras—my mother cut up the old one.”

“She did?” Elaine cried.

“Maybe there’s one you’ve outgrown, or you’re just tired of it,” I said to her.

“My stupid breasts grew only a little, even when I was pregnant,” she told me. “Now I think I’ve stopped growing. You can have as many of my bras as you want, Billy,” Elaine said.

One night, after Christmas, we were in my bedroom—with the door open, of course. Our parents were seeing a movie together in Ezra Falls; we’d been invited to join them, but we hadn’t wanted to go. Elaine had just started kissing me, and I was fondling her breasts—I’d managed to get one of her breasts out of her bra—when there was a pounding on the apartment door.

“Open the fucking door, Billy!” my cousin Gerry was shouting. “I know your parents and the Hadleys are at a movie—my asshole parents went with them!”

“Jesus—it’s that awful girl!” Elaine whispered. “She’s got the yearbook, I’ll bet you.”

It hadn’t taken Gerry long to find the ’40 Owl. Uncle Bob may have been the one to check it out of the academy library, but Gerry found the yearbook under her mother’s side of the bed. It had doubtless been my aunt Muriel’s idea to keep the yearbook of that graduating class away from me, or maybe Muriel and my mom had cooked up the idea together. Uncle Bob was just doing what those Winthrop women had told him to do; according to Miss Frost, Uncle Bob had been a pussy before he was pussy-whipped.

“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Gerry said, handing me the yearbook. “So it’s your runaway father’s graduating class—so fucking what!”

“My dad went to Favorite River?” I asked Gerry. I’d known that William Francis Dean was a Harvard-boy at fifteen, but no one had told me he’d gone to Favorite River before that. “He must have met my mother here, in First Sister!” I said.

“So fucking what!” Gerry said. “What’s it matter where they met?”

But my mom was older than my dad; this meant that William Francis Dean had been even younger than I thought when they first met. If he’d graduated from Favorite River in 1940—and he’d been only fifteen when he started his freshman year at Harvard in the fall of that same year—he might have been only twelve or thirteen when they met. He could have been a prepubescent boy.

“So fucking what!” Gerry kept saying. She’d obviously not looked over the yearbook in close detail, nor had she seen those earlier yearbooks (’37, ’38, ’39), where there might have been photographs of William Francis Dean when he was only twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. How had I overlooked him? If he’d been a four-year senior in ’40, he could have started at Favorite River in the fall of 1936—when William Francis Dean would have been only eleven!

What if my mom had known him then, when he’d been an eleven-year-old? Their “romance,” such as it was, might have been vastly different from the one I’d imagined.

“Did you see anything of the alleged womanizer in him?” I asked Gerry, as Elaine and I quickly searched through the head shots of the graduating seniors in the Class of 1940.

“Who said he was a womanizer?” Gerry asked me.

“I thought you did,” I said, “or maybe it was something you heard your mother say about him.”

“I don’t remember the womanizer word,” Gerry told me. “All I heard about him was that he was kind of a pansy.”

“A pansy,” I repeated.

“Jesus—the repetition, Billy. It’s got to stop,” Elaine said.

“He wasn’t a pansy!” I said indignantly. “He was a womanizer—my mom caught him kissing someone else!”

“Yeah—some other boy, maybe,” my cousin Gerry said. “That’s what I heard, anyway, and he sure looks like a poofter to me.”

“Like a poofter!” I cried.

“My dad said your dad was as flaming a fag as he ever saw,” Gerry said.

“As flaming a fag,” I repeated.

“Dear God, Billy—please stop it!” Elaine said.

There he was: William Francis Dean, as pretty a boy as I’d ever seen; he could have passed for a girl, with a whole lot less effort than Miss Frost had put into her transformation. It was easy to see why I might have missed him in those earlier yearbooks. William Francis Dean looked like me; his features were so familiar to me that I must have skipped over him without really seeing him. His choice of college or university: “Harvard.” His career path: “performer.”

“Performer,” I repeated. (This was before Elaine and I had seen any other photographs; we’d seen only the requisite head shot.)

William Francis Dean’s nickname was “Franny.”

“Franny,” I repeated.

“Look, Billy—I thought you knew,” Gerry was saying. “My dad always said it was a double whammy.”

“What was?” I asked her.

“It was a double whammy that you would be queer,” Gerry told me. “You had Grandpa Harry’s homo genes on the maternal side of your family, and on the paternal side—well, shit, just look at him!” Gerry said, pointing to the picture of the pretty boy in the Class of ’40. “On the paternal side of your frigging gene pool, you had flaming Franny Dean! That’s a double fucking whammy,” Gerry said. “No wonder Grandpa Harry adored the guy.”

“Flaming Franny,” I repeated.

I was reading William Francis Dean’s abbreviated bio in the ’40 Owl. Drama Club (4). I had little doubt that Franny would have had strictly women’s roles—I couldn’t wait to see those photos. Wrestling team, manager (4). Naturally, he’d not been a wrestler—just the manager, the guy who made sure the wrestlers had water and oranges, and a bucket to spit in, and all the handing out and picking up of towels that a wrestling-team manager has to do.

“Genetically speaking, Billy, you were up against a stacked deck,” Gerry was saying. “My dad’s not the sharpest saw in the mill, but you were dealt the double-whammy card, for sure.”

“Jesus, Gerry—that’s enough for now,” Elaine said. “Would you just leave us, please?”

“Anyone would know you’ve been making out, Elaine,” Gerry told her. “Your tits are so small—one of them’s fallen out of your bra, and you don’t even know.”

“I love Elaine’s breasts,” I said to my cousin. “Fuck you, Gerry, for not telling me what I never knew.”

“I thought you did know, asshole!” Gerry shouted at me. “Shit, Billy—how could you not know? It’s so fucking obvious! How could you be as queer as you are and not know?”

“That’s not fair, Gerry!” Elaine was shouting, but Gerry was gone. She left the door to the dormitory hall wide open when she went. That was okay with Elaine and me; we left the apartment shortly after Gerry. We wanted to get to the academy library while it was still open; we wanted to see all the photos we could find of William Francis Dean in those earlier yearbooks, where I had missed him.

Now I knew where to look: Franny Dean would be the prettiest girl in the Drama Club pictures, in the ’37, ’38, and ’39 Owl; he would be the most effeminate-looking boy in the wrestling-team photos, where he would not be bare-chested and wearing wrestling tights. (He would be wearing a jacket and a tie, the standard dress code in those years for the wrestling-team manager.)

Before Elaine and I went to the old yearbook room in the academy library, we took the ’40 Owl up to the fifth floor of Bancroft Hall, where we hid it in Elaine’s bedroom. Her parents didn’t search through her things, Elaine had told me. She had caught them at it, shortly after she’d returned from her trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine suspected them of trying to discover if she was having sex with anyone else.

After that, Elaine put condoms everywhere in her room. Naturally, Mrs. Kittredge had given her the condoms. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Hadley took the condoms as a sign that Elaine was being sexually active with an army of boys; more likely, I knew, Mrs. Hadley was smarter than that. Martha Hadley probably knew what the plethora of condoms meant: Stay the fuck out of my room! (After that one time, Mr. and Mrs. Hadley did.)

The ’40 Owl was safe in Elaine Hadley’s bedroom, if not in mine. Elaine and I could look at all the photos of flaming Franny Dean in that yearbook, but we both wanted to see the pictures of the younger William Francis Dean first. We would have the rest of our Christmas vacation to learn everything we could about the Favorite River Class of 1940.

OVER THAT SAME CHRISTMAS dinner of 1960, when I’d asked Gerry to get me the ’40 Owl, Nils Borkman had managed a moment—when we were briefly alone—to confide in me.

“Your librarian friend—they are roadrailing her, Bill!” Borkman whispered harshly to me.

“Railroading her—yes,” I said.

“They are stereo sex-types!” Borkman exclaimed.

“Sexual stereotypes?” I asked.

“Yes—that’s what I said!” the Norwegian dramaturge declared. “It’s a pity—I had the perfect parts for you two,” the director whispered. “But of course I cannot put Miss Frost onstage—the Puritan sex-types would stone her, or something!”

“The perfect parts in what?” I asked.

“He is the American Ibsen!” Nils Borkman cried. “He is the new Ibsen, from your backward American South!”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Tennessee Williams—the most important playwright since Ibsen,” Borkman reverentially intoned.

“What play is it?” I asked.

“Summer and Smoke,” Nils answered, trembling. “The repressed female character has another woman smoldering inside her.”

“I see,” I said. “That would be the Miss Frost character?”

“Miss Frost would have been a perfect Alma!” Nils cried.

“But now—” I started to say; Borkman wouldn’t let me finish.

“Now I have no choice—it’s Mrs. Fremont as Alma, or nobody,” Nils muttered darkly. I knew “Mrs. Fremont” as Aunt Muriel.

“I think Muriel can do repressed,” I told Nils encouragingly.

“But Muriel doesn’t smolder, Bill,” Nils whispered.

“No, she doesn’t,” I agreed. “What was my part going to be?” I asked him.

“It’s still yours, if you want it,” Nils told me. “It’s a small role—it won’t interfere with your work-home.”

“My homework,” I corrected him.

“Yes—that’s what I said!” the Norwegian dramaturge declared again. “You play a traveling salesman, a young one. You make a pass at the Alma character in the last scene of the play.”

“I make a pass at my aunt Muriel, you mean,” I said to the ardent director.

“But not onstage—don’t worry!” Borkman cried. “The hanky-panky is all imagined; the repetitious sexual activity happens later, offstage.”

I was pretty sure that Nils Borkman didn’t mean the sexual activity was “repetitious”—not even offstage.

“Surreptitious sexual activity?” I asked the director.

“Yes, but there’s no hanky-panky with your auntie onstage!” Borkman assured me, excitedly. “It just would have been so symbolic if Alma could have been Miss Frost.”

“So suggestive, you mean?” I asked him.

“Suggestive and symbolic!” Borkman exclaimed. “But with Muriel, we stick to the suggestive—if you know what I mean.”

“Maybe I could read the play first—I don’t even know my character’s name,” I said to Nils.

“I have a copy for you,” Borkman whispered. The paperback was badly beaten up—the pages had come unglued from the binding, as if the excitable director had read the little book to death. “Your name is Archie Kramer, Bill,” Borkman informed me. “The young salesman is supposed to wear a derby hat, but in your case we can piss-dense with the derby!”

“Dispense with the derby,” I repeated. “As a salesman, what do I sell?”

“Shoes,” Nils told me. “In the end, you’re taking Alma on a date to a casino—you have the last line in the play, Bill!”

“Which is?” I asked the director.

“‘Taxi!’” Borkman shouted.

Suddenly, we were no longer alone. The Christmas-dinner crowd was startled by Nils Borkman shouting for a taxi. My mother and Richard Abbott were staring at the paperback copy of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which I held in my hands; no doubt they feared it was a sequel to Giovanni’s Room.

“You want a taxi, Nils?” Grandpa Harry asked his old friend. “Didn’t you come in your own car?”

“It’s all right, Harry—Bill and I were just shop-talking,” Nils explained to his colleague.

“That would be ‘talkin’ shop,’ Nils,” Grandpa Harry said.

“What part does Grandpa Harry have?” I asked the Norwegian dramaturge.

“You haven’t offered me a part in anything, Nils,” Grandpa Harry said.

“Well, I was about to!” Borkman cried. “Your grandfather would be a brilliant Mrs. Winemiller—Alma’s mother,” the wily director said to me.

“If you do it, I’ll do it,” I said to Grandpa Harry. It would be the spring production for the First Sister Players, the premiere of a serious drama in the spring—my last onstage performance before my departure from First Sister and that summer in Europe with Tom Atkins. It would not be for Richard Abbott and the Drama Club, but I would sing my swan song for Nils Borkman and the First Sister Players—the last time my mother would have the occasion to prompt me.

I liked the idea of it already—even before I read the play. I’d only glanced at the title page, where Tennessee Williams had included an epigraph from Rilke. The Rilke was good enough for me. “Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” It seemed that, everywhere I looked, I just kept happening upon Rilke’s terrifying angels. I wondered if Kittredge knew the German.

“Okay, Bill—if you do it, I’ll do it,” Grandpa Harry said; we shook on it.

Later, I found a discreet way to ask Nils if he’d already signed up Aunt Muriel and Richard Abbott in the Alma and John roles. “Don’t worry, Bill,” Borkman told me. “I have Muriel and Richard in my pocket-back!”

“In your back pocket—yes,” I said to the crafty deerstalker on skis.

That Christmastime night when Elaine and I ran across the deserted Favorite River campus to the academy library—on our eager way to the old yearbook room—we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course, and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.)

It being Christmas break, I did not necessarily expect to see Mr. Lockley at the check-out desk of the academy library, but there he was—as if it were a working night, or perhaps the alleged “nonpracticing homosexual” (as Mr. Lockley was called, behind his back) had nothing else to do.

“No luck with Uncle Bob finding the ’40 Owl, huh?” I asked him.

“Mr. Fremont believes he returned it, but he did not—that is, not to my knowledge,” Mr. Lockley stiffly replied.

“I’ll just keep bugging him about it,” I said.

“You do that, Billy,” Mr. Lockley said sternly. “Mr. Fremont does not often frequent the library.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t,” I said, smiling.

Mr. Lockley did not smile—certainly not at Elaine, anyway. He was one of those older men who lived alone; he would not take kindly to the coming two decades—by which time most (if not all) of the all-boys’ boarding schools in New England would finally become coeducational.

In my estimation, coeducation would have a humanizing effect on those boarding schools; Elaine and I could testify that boys treat other boys better when there are girls around, and the girls are not as mean to one another in the presence of boys.

I know, I know—there are those diehards who maintain that single-sex education was more rigorous, or less distracting, and that coeducation came with a cost—a loss of “purity,” I’ve heard the Mr. Lockleys of the boarding-school world argue. (Less concentration on “academics,” they usually mean.)

That Christmastime night, all Mr. Lockley could manage to direct to Elaine was a minimally cordial bow—as if he were saying the unutterable, “Good evening, knocked-up faculty daughter. How are you managing now, you smelly little slut?”

But Elaine and I went about our business, paying no attention to Mr. Lockley. We were alone in the yearbook room—and more alone than usual in the otherwise abandoned academy library. Those old Owls from ’37, ’38, and ’39 beckoned us, and we soon found much to marvel about in their revealing pages.

WILLIAM FRANCIS DEAN WAS a smiling little boy in the 1937 Owl, when he would have been twelve. He seemed a charmingly elfin manager of the 1936–37 wrestling team, and the only other evidence Elaine and I could find of him was as the prettiest little girl in the Drama Club photos of that long-ago academic year—a scant five years before I would be born.

If Franny Dean had met the older Mary Marshall in ’37, there was no record of it in the Owl of that year—nor was there any record of their meeting in the ’38 and ’39 Owls, wherein the wrestling-team manager grew only a little in stature but seemingly a lot in self-assurance.

Onstage, for the Drama Club, in those ’38 and ’39 yearbooks, Elaine and I could tell that the future Harvard-boy, who’d chosen “performer” as his career path, had developed into a most fetching femme fatale—he was a nymphlike presence.

“He was good-looking, wasn’t he?” I asked Elaine.

“He looks like you, Billy—he’s handsome but different,” Elaine said.

“He already must have been dating my mother,” I said, when we’d finished with the ’39 Owl and were hurrying back to Bancroft Hall. (My dad was fifteen when my mom was nineteen!)

“If ‘dating’ is the right word, Billy,” Elaine said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You have to talk to your grandpa, Billy—if you can get him alone,” Elaine told me.

“I could try talking to Uncle Bob first, if I can get Bob alone. Bob isn’t as smart as Grandpa Harry,” I said.

“I’ve got it!” Elaine suddenly said. “You talk to the admissions man first, but you tell him you’ve already talked to Grandpa Harry—and that Harry has told you everything he knows.”

“Bob’s not that dumb,” I told Elaine.

“Yes, he is,” Elaine said.

We had about an hour alone in Elaine’s fifth-floor bedroom before Mr. and Mrs. Hadley came home from the movie in Ezra Falls. It being the Christmas holiday, we figured that the Hadleys and my mother and Richard—together with Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bob—would have stopped for a drink somewhere after the movie, and they had.

We’d had more than enough time to peruse the ’40 Owl and look at all the photos of flaming Franny Dean—the prettiest boy in the class. William Francis Dean was a cross-dressing knockout in the photos from the Drama Club of that year, and there—at last, at the Senior Dance—was the missing picture Elaine and I had so fervently sought. There was little Franny holding my mom, Mary Marshall, in a slow-dancing embrace. Watching them, with evident disapproval, was big-sister Muriel. Oh, those Winthrop girls, “those Winthrop women,” as Miss Frost had labeled my mother and my aunt Muriel—giving them Nana Victoria’s maiden name of Winthrop. (When it came to who had the balls in the Marshall family, the Winthrop genes were definitely the ball-carriers.)

I wouldn’t wait long to trap Uncle Bob. The very next day, a prospective student and his parents were visiting Favorite River Academy; Uncle Bob gave me a call and asked if I felt like being a tour guide.

When I’d finished the tour, I found Uncle Bob alone in the Admissions Office; it being Christmas break, the secretaries weren’t necessarily working.

“What’s up, Billy?” Uncle Bob asked me.

“I guess you forgot that you actually did take the ’40 Owl back to the library,” I began.

“I did?” Uncle Bob asked. I could see he was wondering how he would ever explain this to Muriel.

“It didn’t show up in the yearbook room by itself,” I said. “Besides, Grandpa Harry has told me all about ‘flaming Franny’ Dean, and what a pretty boy he was. What I don’t get is how it all began with my mom—I mean why and when. I mean, how did it start in the first place?”

“Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Billy,” Uncle Bob quickly said. “He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean.”

I’d heard the expression—from Kittredge, of course—but all I said was, “Why did my mom ever fall for him in the first place? How did it start?”

“He was an awfully young boy when he met your mother—she was four years older, which is a big difference at that age, Billy,” Uncle Bob said. “Your mom saw him in a play—as a girl, of course. Afterward, he complimented her clothes.”

“Her clothes,” I repeated.

“It seems he liked girls’ clothes—he liked trying them on, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

“Oh.”

“Your grandmother found them in your mom’s bedroom—one day, after your mother had come home from the high school in Ezra Falls. Your mom and Franny Dean were trying on your mom’s clothes. It was just a childish game, but your aunt Muriel told me Franny had tried on her clothes, too. The next thing we knew, Mary had a crush on him, but by then Franny must have known he liked boys better. He was genuinely fond of your mom, Billy, but he mainly liked her clothes.”

“She still managed to get pregnant,” I pointed out. “You don’t get a girl pregnant by fucking her clothes!”

“Think about it, Billy—there was all this dressing and undressing going on,” Uncle Bob said. “They must have been in their underwear a lot—you know.”

“I have trouble imagining it,” I told him.

“Your grandpa thought the world of Franny Dean, Billy—I think Harry believed it could work,” Uncle Bob said. “Don’t forget, your mother was always a little immature—”

“A little simpleminded, do you mean?” I interrupted him.

“When Franny was a young boy, I think your mom sort of managed him—you know, Billy, she could kind of boss him around a little.”

“But then Franny grew up,” I said.

“There was also the guy—the one Franny met in the war, and they reconnected later,” Uncle Bob began.

“It was you who told me that story—wasn’t it, Uncle Bob?” I asked. “You know, the toilet-seat skipper, the man on the ship—he lost control of Madame Bovary; he went sliding over the toilet seats. Later, they met on the MTA. The guy got on at the Kendall Square station—he got off at Central Square—and he said to my dad, ‘Hi. I’m Bovary. Remember me?’ I mean that guy. You told me that story—didn’t you, Uncle Bob?”

“No, I didn’t, Billy,” Uncle Bob said. “Your dad himself told you that story, and that guy didn’t get off at the Central Square station—that guy stayed on the train, Billy. Your father and that guy were a couple. They may still be a couple, for all I know,” Uncle Bob told me. “I thought your grandfather told you everything,” he added suspiciously.

“It looks like there’s more to ask Grandpa Harry about,” I told Uncle Bob.

The admissions man was staring sadly at the floor of his office. “Did you have a good tour, Billy?” he asked me, a little absently. “Did that boy strike you as a promising candidate?”

Of course I had no memory of the prospective student or his parents.

“Thanks for everything, Uncle Bob,” I said to him; I really did like him, and I felt sorry for him. “I think you’re a good fella!” I called to him, as I ran out of the Admissions Office.

I knew where Grandpa Harry was; it was a workday, so he wouldn’t be at home, under Nana Victoria’s thumb. Harry Marshall didn’t get a schoolteacher’s Christmas break. I knew that Grandpa Harry was at the sawmill and the lumberyard, where I soon found him.

I told him I’d seen my father in the Favorite River Academy yearbooks; I said that Uncle Bob had confessed everything he knew about flaming Franny Dean, the effeminate cross-dressing boy who’d once tried on my mother’s clothes—even, I’d heard, my aunt Muriel’s clothes!

But what was this I’d heard about my dad actually visiting me—when I was sick with scarlet fever, wasn’t it? And how was it possible that my father had actually told me that story of the soldier he met in the head of the Liberty ship during an Atlantic winter storm? The transport ship had just hit the open seas—the convoy was on its way to Italy from Hampton Roads, Virginia, Port of Embarkation—when my dad made the acquaintance of a toilet-seat skipper who was reading Madame Bovary.

“Who the hell was that fella?” I asked Grandpa Harry.

“That would be the someone else your mom saw Franny kissin’, Bill,” Grandpa Harry told me. “You had scarlet fever, Bill. Your dad heard you were sick, and he wanted to see you. I suspect, knowin’ Franny, he wanted to get a look at Richard Abbott, too,” Grandpa Harry said. “Franny just wanted to know you were in good hands, I guess. Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Bill—he just wasn’t really a guy!”

“And nobody told me,” I said.

“Ah, well—I don’t think any of us is proud of that, Bill!” Grandpa Harry exclaimed. “That’s just how such things work out, I think. Your mom was hurt. Poor Mary just never understood the dressin’-up part—she thought it was somethin’ Franny would outgrow, I guess.”

“And what about the Madame Bovary guy?” I asked my grandfather.

“Ah, well—there’s people you meet, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Some of ’em are merely encounters, nothin’ more, but occasionally there’s a love-of-your-life meetin’, and that’s different—you know?”

I had only two times left when I would see Miss Frost. I didn’t know about the long-lasting effects of a “love-of-your-life meetin’”—not yet.