In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I see,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “The what?” I asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But we didn’t do it!” I told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I promise you!” I told her.

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

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

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

  “I’ll do the best I can, Al.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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.”