In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  Whoever knocked on the door to her office surely had heard the wrong word. “Come in!” Mrs. Hadley called, in such a strident way that I realized where Elaine’s stop-you-in-your-tracks voice came from.

  It was Atkins—an acknowledged loser, but I’d not known he was a music student. Maybe Atkins had a voice issue; perhaps there were words he couldn’t pronounce. “I can come back,” Atkins said to Martha Hadley, but he wouldn’t stop staring at me, or he couldn’t look at her—one or the other. Any idiot would have known I’d been crying.

  “Come back in half an hour,” Mrs. Hadley told Atkins.

  “Okay, but I don’t have a watch,” he said, still staring at me.

  “Take mine,” she told him. It was when she took her watch off and handed it to him that I saw what it was that attracted me to her. Martha Hadley not only had a masculine appearance—she was dominant, like a man, in everything she did. I could only imagine, sexually, that she was dominant, too—that she would impose what she wanted on anyone, and that it would be difficult to resist what she wanted you to do. But why would that appeal to me? (Naturally, I wouldn’t make these thoughts part of my selective confession to Mrs. Hadley.)

  Atkins was mutely staring at the watch. It made me wonder if he was such a loser and an idiot that he couldn’t tell time.

  “In half an hour,” Martha Hadley reminded him.

  “The numbers are Roman numerals,” Atkins said despondently.

  “Just keep your eye on the minute hand. Count to thirty minutes. Come back then,” Mrs. Hadley said to him. Atkins walked off, still staring at the watch; he left the office door open. Mrs. Hadley got up from the couch and closed the door. “Billy, Billy,” she said, turning to me. “It’s all right to feel what you’re feeling—it’s okay.”

  “I thought of talking to Richard about it,” I told her.

  “That’s a good idea. You can talk to Richard about anything—I’m sure of that,” Martha Hadley said.

  “But not my mother,” I said.

  “Your mother, Mary. My dear friend Mary . . .” Mrs. Hadley began; then she stopped. “No, not your mother—don’t tell her yet,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. I thought I knew why, but I wanted to hear Mrs. Hadley say it. “Because she’s a little damaged?” I asked. “Or because she seems angry at me—I’m not sure why.”

  “I don’t know about the damaged part,” Martha Hadley said. “Your mother does seem angry at you—I’m not sure why, either. I was mainly thinking that she becomes rather easily unhinged—in some areas, given certain subjects.”

  “What areas?” I asked. “What subjects?”

  “Certain sexual matters upset her,” Mrs. Hadley said. “Billy, I know there are things she’s kept from you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Secrecy isn’t my favorite thing about New England!” Mrs. Hadley suddenly cried; she looked at her wrist, where her watch had been, and then laughed at herself. “I wonder how Atkins is managing the Roman numerals,” she said, and we both laughed. “You can tell Elaine, too, you know,” Martha Hadley said. “You can tell Elaine anything, Billy. Besides, I think she already knows.”

  I thought so, too, but I didn’t say it. I was thinking about my mother becoming rather easily unhinged. I was regretting that I hadn’t consulted Dr. Grau before he died—if only because I could have familiarized myself with his doctrine of how curable homosexuality was. (It might have made me less angry in the coming years, when I would be exposed to more of that punitive, dumber-than-dog-shit doctrine.)

  “It’s really helped me to talk to you,” I told Mrs. Hadley; she moved away from her office door to let me pass. I was afraid she was going to grasp my hands or my shoulders, or even pull my head to her hard chest again, and that I would be unable to stop myself from hugging her—or kissing her, though I would have had to stand on my toes to do that. But Martha Hadley didn’t touch me; she just stood aside.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your voice, Billy—there’s nothing physically the matter with your tongue, or with the roof of your mouth,” she said. I’d forgotten that she had looked in my mouth at our very first appointment.

  She’d asked me to touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue, and she’d held the tip of my tongue with a gauze pad, and—with another gauze pad—she’d poked around on the floor of my mouth, apparently feeling for something that wasn’t there. (I’d been embarrassed that her playing around in my mouth had given me an erection—more evidence of what old Grau had called “infantile sexual tendencies.”)

  “Not to defame the dead,” Mrs. Hadley said, as I was leaving, “but I hope you’re aware, Billy, that the late Dr. Grau and our sole surviving faculty member in the medical sciences—I mean Dr. Harlow—are both imbeciles.”

  “That’s what Richard says,” I told her.

  “Listen to Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said. “He’s a sweet man.”

  It would be years later, when I had this thought: In a small, less-than-first-rate boarding school, there were various indications of the adult world—some truly sensitive and good-hearted grown-ups who were trying to make the adult world more comprehensible and more bearable for young people, while there were also those dinosaurs of an inflexible rectitude (the Dr. Graus and the Dr. Harlows) and the tirelessly intractable homophobes men of their ilk and generation have spawned.

  “How did Dr. Grau really die?” I asked Mrs. Hadley.

  The story they’d told us boys—Dr. Harlow had told us, in morning meeting—was that Grau had slipped and fallen in the quadrangle one winter night. The paths were icy; the old Austrian must have hit his head. Dr. Harlow did not say that Herr Doktor Grau actually froze to death—I believe that “hypothermia” was the term Dr. Harlow used.

  The boys who were on the kitchen crew found the body in the morning. One of them said that Grau’s face was as white as the snow, and another boy told us that the old Austrian’s eyes were open, but a third boy said the dead man’s eyes were closed; there was agreement among the kitchen boys that Dr. Grau’s Tyrolean hat (with a greasy-looking pheasant feather) was discovered at some distance from the body.

  “Grau was drunk,” Martha Hadley told me. “There’d been a faculty dinner party in one of the dorms. Grau probably did slip and fall—he may have hit his head, but he was definitely drunk. He was passed out in the snow all night! He froze.”

  Dr. Grau, like no small number of the faculty at Favorite River, had applied for a job at the academy because of the nearby skiing, but old Grau hadn’t skied for years. Dr. Grau was terribly fat; he said he could still ski very well, but he admitted that, when he fell down, he couldn’t get up—not without taking his skis off first. (I used to imagine Grau fallen on the slope, flailing to release his bindings, shouting “infantile sexual tendencies” in English and German.)

  I’d chosen German for my language requirement at Favorite River, but only because I’d been assured that there were three other German teachers at the academy; I never had to be taught by Herr Doktor Grau. The other German teachers were also Austrians—two of them skiers. My favorite, Fräulein Bauer, was the only nonskier.

  As I was leaving Mrs. Hadley’s office, I suddenly remembered what Fräulein Bauer had told me; I made many grammatical mistakes in German, and the word-order business gave me fits, but my pronunciation was perfect. There was no German word I couldn’t pronounce. Yet when I told Martha Hadley this news, she seemed barely interested—if at all. “It’s psychological, Billy. You can say anything, in the sense that you’re able to say it. But you either won’t say a word, because it triggers something, or—”

  I interrupted her. “It triggers something sexual, you mean,” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Mrs. Hadley; she shrugged. She seemed barely interested in the sexual part of my pronunciation problems, as if sexual speculation (of any kind) was in a category as uninteresting to her as my excellent pronunciation in German. I had an Austrian accent, naturally.

  “I think you’re as angry at your moth
er as she is at you,” Martha Hadley told me. “At times, Billy, I think you’re too angry to speak.”

  “Oh.”

  I heard someone coming up the stairs. It was Atkins, still staring at Mrs. Hadley’s watch; I was surprised he didn’t trip on the stairs. “It hasn’t been thirty minutes yet,” Atkins reported.

  “I’m leaving—you can go in,” I told him, but Atkins had paused on the stairs, one step away from the third floor. I passed him as I headed down the stairs.

  The stairwell was wide; I must have been close to the ground floor when I heard Mrs. Hadley say, “Please come in.”

  “But it hasn’t been thirty minutes. It’s not . . .” Atkins didn’t (or couldn’t) finish his thought.

  “It’s not what?” I heard Martha Hadley ask him. I remember pausing on the stairs. “I know you can say it,” she said gently to him. “You’re wearing a tie—you can say tie, can’t you?”

  “It’s not . . . tie,” Atkins managed.

  “Now say mmm—like when you eat something good,” Mrs. Hadley told him.

  “I can’t!” Atkins blurted out.

  “Please come in,” Mrs. Hadley said again.

  “It’s not tie—mmm!” Atkins struggled to say.

  “That’s good—that’s better, anyway. Please come in now,” Martha Hadley told him, and I continued down the stairs and out of the music building, where I’d also heard snippets of songs, choral voices, and a second-floor segment of stringed instruments, and (on the ground floor) another in-progress piano practice. But my thoughts were entirely on what a loser and an idiot Atkins was—he couldn’t pronounce the time word! What a fool!

  I was halfway across the quad, where Grau had died, when I thought that the hatred of homosexuals was perfectly in tune with my thinking. I couldn’t pronounce penises, yet here I was feeling utterly superior to a boy who couldn’t manage to say time.

  I remember thinking that, for the rest of my life, I would need to find more people like Martha Hadley, and surround myself with them, but that there would always be other people who would hate and revile me—or even try to cause me physical harm. This thought was as bracing as the winter air that killed Dr. Grau. It was a lot to absorb from one appointment with a sympathetic voice-and-singing teacher—this in addition to my disturbing awareness of Mrs. Hadley as a dominant personality, and that something to do with her dominance appealed to me sexually. Or was there something about her dominance that didn’t appeal to me? (It only then occurred to me that maybe I wanted to be like Mrs. Hadley—that is, sexually—not be with her.)

  Maybe Martha Hadley was a hippie ahead of her time; the hippie word was not in use in 1960. At that time, I’d heard next to no mention of the gay word; it was a little-used word in the Favorite River Academy community. Maybe “gay” was too friendly a word for Favorite River—at least it was too neutral a word for all those homo-hating boys. I did know what “gay” meant, of course—it just wasn’t said much, in my limited circles—but, as sexually inexperienced as I was, I’d given scant consideration to what was meant by “dominant” and “submissive” in the seemingly unattainable world of gay sex.

  NOT THAT MANY YEARS later, when I was living with Larry—of the men and women I’ve tried to live with, I lasted with Larry the longest—he liked to make fun of me by telling everyone how “shocked” I was at the way he picked me up in that gay coffeehouse, which was such a mysterious place, in Vienna.

  This was my junior year abroad. Two years of college German—not to mention my studying the language at Favorite River Academy—had prepared me for a year in a German-speaking country. These same two college years of living in New York City had both prepared me and not prepared me for how underground a gay coffeehouse in Vienna would be in that academic year of 1963–64. At that time, the gay bars in New York were being shut down; the New York World’s Fair was in ’64, and it was the mayor’s intention to clean up the city for the tourists. One New York bar, Julius’, remained open the whole time—there may have been others—but even at Julius’, the men at the bar weren’t permitted to touch one another.

  I’m not saying Vienna was more underground than New York at that time; the situation was similar. But in that place where Larry picked me up, there was some touching among the men—permitted or not. I just remember it was Larry who shocked me, not Vienna.

  “Are you a top or a bottom, beautiful Bill?” Larry had asked me. (I was shocked, but not by the question.)

  “A top,” I answered, without hesitation.

  “Really!” Larry said, either genuinely surprised or feigning surprise; with Larry, this was often hard to tell. “You look like a bottom to me,” he said, and after a pause—such a long pause that I’d thought he was going to ask someone else to go home with him—he added, “Come on, Bill, let’s leave now.”

  I was shocked, all right, but only because I was a college student, and Larry was my professor. This was the Institut für Europäische Studien in Vienna—das Institut, the students called it. We were Americans, from all over, but our faculty was a mixed bag: some Americans (Larry was by far the best-known among them), one wonderful and eccentric Englishman, and various Austrians from the faculty at the University of Vienna.

  In those days, the Institute for European Studies was on that end of the Wollzeile nearest the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz and the Stubenring. The students complained about how far das Institut was from the university; many of our students (the ones with better German) took additional courses at the University of Vienna. Not me; I wasn’t interested in more courses. I’d gone to college in New York because I wanted to be in New York; I was studying abroad in Vienna to be in Vienna. I didn’t care how near to or far from the university I was.

  My German was good enough to get me hired at an excellent restaurant on the Weihburggasse—near the opposite end of the Kärntnerstrasse from the opera. It was called Zufall (“Coincidence”), and I got the job both because I had worked as a waiter in New York and because, shortly after I arrived in Vienna, I learned that the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall had been fired.

  I’d heard the story in that mysterious gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse—one of those side streets off the Graben. The Kaffee Käfig, it was called—the “Coffee Cage.” During the day, it appeared to be mostly a student hangout; there were girls there, too—in fact, it was daytime when a girl told me that the waiter at Zufall had been fired. But after dark, the older men showed up at the Kaffee Käfig, and there weren’t any girls around. That was how it was the night I ran into Larry, and he popped the top-or-bottom question.

  That first fall term at the Institute, I was not one of Larry’s students. He was teaching the plays of Sophocles. Larry was a poet, and I wanted to be a novelist—I thought I was done with theater, and I didn’t write poems. But I knew that Larry was a respected writer, and I’d asked him if he would consider offering a writing course—in either the winter or the spring term, in ’64.

  “Oh, God—not a creative writing class!” Larry said. “I know—don’t tell me. One day, creative writing will be taught everywhere!”

  “I just wanted to be able to show my writing to another writer,” I told him. “I’m not a poet,” I admitted. “I’m a fiction writer. I understand if you’re not interested.” I was walking away—I was trying to look hurt—when he stopped me.

  “Wait, wait—what is your name, young fiction writer?” Larry asked. “I do read fiction,” he told me.

  I told him my name—I said “Bill,” because Miss Frost owned the William name. (I would publish my novels under the name William Abbott, but I let no one else call me William.)

  “Well, Bill—let me think about it,” Larry said. I knew then that he was gay, and everything else he was thinking, but I wouldn’t become his student until January 1964, when he offered a creative writing course at the Institute in the winter term.

  Larry was the already-distinguished poet—Lawrence Upton, to his colleagues and students, but his gay friends (and a cote
rie of lady admirers) called him Larry. By then, I’d been with a few older men—I’d not lived with them, but they’d been my lovers—and I knew who I was when it came to the top-or-bottom business.

  It was not the crudeness of Larry’s top-or-bottom question that shocked me; even his first-time students knew that Lawrence Upton was a famous snob who could also be notoriously crass. It was simply that my teacher, who was such a renowned literary figure, had hit on me—that shocked me. But that was never how Larry told the story, and there was no contradicting him.

  According to Larry, he hadn’t asked me if I was a top or a bottom. “In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’—we said ‘pitcher’ and ‘catcher,’ though of course you Vermonters might have been prescient,” Larry said, “or so far ahead of the rest of us that you were already asking, ‘Plus or minus?’ while we less-progressive types were still stuck with the pitcher-or-catcher question, which soon would become the top-or-bottom question. Just not in the sixties, dear Bill. In Vienna, when I picked you up, I know I asked you if you were a pitcher or a catcher.”

  Then, turning from me to our friends—his friends, for the most part; both in Vienna and later, back in New York, most of Larry’s friends were older than I was—Larry would say, “Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.”

  Then, turning back to me—just me, as if we were alone—Larry would say, “Yet you insist on anachronisms, dear Bill—in the sixties, the top and bottom words are anachronisms.”

  That was Larry; that was how he talked—he was always right. I learned not to argue about the smaller stuff. I would say, “Yes, Professor,” because if I’d said he was mistaken, that he had absolutely used the top and bottom words, Larry would have made another crack about my being from Vermont, or he would have shot the breeze about my saying I was a pitcher when, all along, I’d looked like a catcher to him. (Didn’t everyone think I looked like a catcher? Larry would usually ask his friends.)