In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, it’s me, Big Al,” I answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re a transsexual!” I told her.

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

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

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

  “Twice!” I managed to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh.”

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

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

  “I love your breasts,” I said to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh.”

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

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

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

  “Yes, we do,” I whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh.”

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

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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