by John Irving
"That's a very interesting idea, Larry," Richard Abbott said. "But this is Romeo and Juliet." (That would be Richard's next Shakespeare play, I was guessing; I hadn't been paying that close attention to the school-calendar part of the conversation.) "There are only four female roles in the play, and only two of them really matter," Richard continued.
"Yes, yes--I know," Larry said; he was showing off. "There's Lady Montague and Lady Capulet--they're of no importance, as you say. There's really just Juliet and her Nurse, and there must be twenty or more men!"
"It's tempting to cast the boys as women, and the other way around," Richard admitted, "but these are just teenagers, Larry. Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?"
"Ah . . ." Larry said, and stopped. (Even Larry had no answer for that.) I remember thinking how this wasn't, and never would be, my problem. Let it be Richard's problem, I thought; I had other things on my mind.
Grandpa Harry had left his River Street house to me. What was I going to do with a five-bedroom, six-bathroom house in Vermont?
Richard had told me to hang on to it. "You'll get more for it if you sell it later, Bill," he said. (Grandpa Harry had left me a little money, too; I didn't need the additional money I could have gotten by selling that River Street house--at least, not yet.)
Martha Hadley vowed to organize an auction to get rid of the unwanted furniture. Harry had left some money for Uncle Bob, and for Richard Abbott; Grandpa Harry had left the largest sum for Gerry--in lieu of leaving her a share of the house.
It was the house I'd been born in--the house I'd grown up in, until my mom married Richard. Grandpa Harry had said to Richard: "This house should be Bill's. I guess a writer will be okay livin' with the ghosts--Bill can use 'em, can't he?"
I didn't know the ghosts, or if I could use them. That Thanksgiving, what I couldn't quite imagine were the circumstances that would ever make me want to live in First Sister, Vermont. But I decided there was no hurry to make a decision about the house; I would hang on to it.
The ghosts sent Elaine from her bedroom to mine--the very first night we slept in that River Street house. I was in my old childhood bedroom when Elaine burst in and crawled into my bed with me. "I don't know who those women think they are," Elaine said, "but I know they're dead, and they're pissed off about it."
"Okay," I told her. I liked sleeping with Elaine, but the next night we moved into one of the bedrooms that had a bigger bed. I saw no ghosts that Thanksgiving holiday--actually, I never saw ghosts in that house.
I'd put Larry in the biggest bedroom; it had been Grandpa Harry's bedroom--the closet was still full of Nana Victoria's clothes. (Mrs. Hadley had promised me she would get rid of them when she and Richard auctioned off the unwanted furniture.) But Larry saw no ghosts; he just had a complaint about the bathtub in that bathroom.
"Uh, Bill--is this the tub where your grandfather--"
"Yes, it is," I quickly told him. "Why?"
Larry had looked for bloodstains, but the bathroom and the tub were spotlessly clean. (Elmira must have scrubbed her ass off in there!) Yet Larry had found something he wanted to show me. There was a chip in the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.
"Was that chip always there?" Larry asked me.
"Yes, always--this bathtub was chipped when I was a small child," I lied.
"So you say, Bill--so you say," Larry said suspiciously.
We both knew how the bathtub had been chipped. The bullet from the .30-30 must have passed through Grandpa Harry's head while he had been curled up on his side. The bullet had chipped the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.
"When you're auctioning off the old furniture," I told Richard and Martha privately, "please get rid of that bathtub."
I didn't have to specify which bathtub.
"You'll never live in this terrible town, Billy. You're crazy even to imagine you might," Elaine said. It was the night after our Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps we were lying awake in bed because we'd eaten too much, and we couldn't fall asleep, or maybe we were listening for ghosts.
"When we used to live here, in this terrible town--when we were in those Shakespeare plays--was there ever, in that time at Favorite River, a boy with the balls to play Juliet?" I asked Elaine. I could feel her imagining him, as I was, in the darkness--talk about listening for ghosts!
"There was only one boy who had the balls for it, Billy," Elaine answered me, "but he wouldn't have been right for the part."
"Why not?" I asked her. I knew she meant Kittredge; he was pretty enough--he had the balls, all right.
"Juliet is nothing if she's not sincere," Elaine said. "Kittredge would have looked the part, of course, but he would have hammed it up, somehow--Kittredge didn't do sincere, Billy," Elaine said.
No, he didn't, I thought. Kittredge could have been anyone--he could look the part in any role. But Kittredge was never sincere; he was forever concealed--he was always just playing a part.
AT THAT THANKSGIVING DINNER, there was both awkwardness and comedy. In the latter category, the two Korean girls managed to give the Japanese boy the idea that we were eating a peacock. (I don't know how the girls conveyed the peacock idea to the lonely-looking boy, or why Fumi--the boy--was so stricken at the thought of eating a peacock.)
"No, no--it's a turkey," Mrs. Hadley said to Fumi, as if he were having a pronunciation problem.
Since I'd grown up in that River Street house, I found the encyclopedia and showed Fumi what a turkey looked like. "Not a peacock," I said. The Korean girls, Su Min and Dong Hee, were whispering in Korean; they were also giggling.
Later, after a lot of wine, it was the vivacious, chatty mother of two--now Gerry's girlfriend--who gave a toast to our extended family for welcoming her to such an "intimate" holiday occasion. It was doubtless the wine, in combination with the intimate word, that compelled Helena to deliver an impromptu address on the subject of her vagina--or perhaps she'd meant for her remarks to praise all vaginas. "I want to thank you for having me," Helena had begun. Then she got sidetracked. "I used to be someone who hated my vagina, but now I love it," she said. She seemed, almost immediately, to think better of her comments, because she quickly said, "Of course, I love Gerry's vagina--that goes without saying, I guess!--but it's because of Gerry that I also love my vagina, and I used to just hate it"; she was standing, a bit unsteadily, with her glass raised. "Thank you for having me," she repeated, sitting down.
I'm guessing that Uncle Bob had probably heard more toasts than anyone else at the dinner table--given all the glad-handing he did for Alumni Affairs, those back-slapping dinner parties with drunken Favorite River alums--but even Uncle Bob was rendered speechless by Helena's toast to at least two vaginas.
I looked at Larry, who I know was bursting with something to say; in an entirely different way from Tom Atkins--who had routinely overreacted to the vagina word, or to even the passing thought of a vagina--Larry could be counted on for a vagina reaction. "Don't," I said quietly to him, across the dinner table, because I could always tell when Larry was struggling to restrain himself; his eyes opened very wide and his nostrils flared.
But now it was the Korean girls who'd failed to understand. "A what?" Dong Hee had said.
"She hates, now loves, her what?" Su Min asked.
It was Fumi's turn to snicker; the Japanese boy had put the peacock-turkey misunderstanding behind him--the lonely-looking young man obviously knew what a vagina was.
"You know, a vagina," Elaine said softly to the Korean girls, but Su Min and Dong Hee had never heard the word--and no one at the dinner table knew the Korean for it.
"My goodness--it's where babies come from," Mrs. Hadley tried to explain, but she looked suddenly stricken (perhaps recalling Elaine's abortions).
"It's where everything happens--you know, down there," Elaine said to the Korean girls, but Elaine didn't do anything when she said "down there"; she didn't point or gesture, or indicate anything specifically.
"Well, it's not where everyt
hing happens--I beg to differ," Larry said, smiling; I knew he was just getting started.
"Oh, I'm so sorry--I've had too much to drink, and I forgot there were young people here!" Helena blurted out.
"Don't you worry, dear," Uncle Bob told Gerry's new girlfriend; I could tell Bob liked Helena, who was not at all similar to a long list of Gerry's previous girlfriends. "These kids are from another country, another culture; the things we talk about in this country are not necessarily topics for conversation in Korea," the Racquet Man painfully explained.
"Oh, crap!" Gerry cried. "Just try another fucking word!" Gerry turned to Su Min and Dong Hee, who were still very much in the dark as far as the vagina word was concerned. "It's a twat, a snatch, a quim, a pussy, a muff, a honeypot--it's a cunt, for Christ's sake!" Gerry cried, the cunt word making Elaine (and even Larry) flinch.
"They get it, Gerry--please," Uncle Bob said.
Indeed, the Korean girls had turned the color of a clean sheet of unlined paper; the Japanese kid had kept up, for the most part, although both "muff" and "honeypot" had surprised him.
"Is there a picture of it somewhere, Bill--if not in the encyclopedia?" Larry asked mischievously.
"Before I forget it, Bill," Richard Abbott interjected--I could tell Richard was tactfully trying to drop the vagina subject--"what about the Mossberg?"
"The what?" Fumi asked, in a frightened voice; if the muff and honeypot vulgarisms for vagina had thrown him, the Japanese boy had never heard the Mossberg word before.
"What about it?" I asked Richard.
"Shall we auction it off with the furniture, Bill? You don't want to keep that old carbine, do you?"
"I'll hang on to the Mossberg, Richard," I told him. "I'll keep the ammunition, too--if I ever live here, it makes sense to have a varmint gun around."
"You're in town, Billy," Uncle Bob pointed out, about the River Street house. "You're not supposed to shoot in town--not even varmints."
"Grandpa Harry loved that gun," I said.
"He loved his wife's clothes, too, Billy," Elaine said. "Are you going to keep her clothes around?"
"I don't see you becoming a deer hunter, Bill," Richard Abbott said. "Even if you do decide to live here." But I wanted that Mossberg .30-30--they could all see that.
"What do you want a gun for, Bill?" Larry asked me.
"I know you're not opposed to trying to keep a secret, Billy," Elaine told me. "You're just not any good at keeping secrets."
Elaine had not kept many secrets from me, but if she had a secret, she knew how to keep it; I could never very successfully keep a secret, even when I wanted to keep one.
I could see that Elaine knew why I wanted to hang on to that Mossberg .30-30. Larry knew, too; he was looking at me with a hurt expression--as if he were saying (without actually saying it), "How can you conceive of not letting me take care of you--how can you not die in my arms, if you're ever dying? How can you even imagine sneaking off and shooting yourself, if you get sick?" (That's what Larry's look said, without the words.)
Elaine was giving me the same hurt look as Larry.
"Whatever you want, Bill," Richard Abbott said; Richard looked hurt, too--even Mrs. Hadley seemed disappointed in me.
Only Gerry and Helena had stopped paying attention; they were touching each other under the table. The vagina conversation seemed to have distracted them from what remained of our Thanksgiving dinner. The Korean girls were once more whispering in Korean; the lonely-looking Fumi was writing something down in a notebook not much bigger than the palm of his hand. (Maybe the Mossberg word, so he could use it in the next all-male dormitory conversation--such as, "I would really like to get into her Mossberg.")
"Don't," Larry said quietly to me, as I'd earlier said across the table to him.
"You should see Herm Hoyt while you're in town, Billy," Uncle Bob was saying--a welcome change of subject, or so I first imagined. "I know the coach would love to have a word with you."
"What about?" I asked Bob, with badly faked indifference, but the Racquet Man was busy; he was pouring himself another beer.
Robert Fremont, my uncle Bob, was sixty-seven. He was retiring next year, but he'd told me that he would continue to volunteer his services to Alumni Affairs, and particularly continue to contribute to the academy's alumni magazine, The River Bulletin. Whatever one thought of Uncle Bob's "Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept."--well, what can I say?--his enthusiasm for tracking down the school's most elusive alums made him very popular with folks in Alumni Affairs.
"What would Coach Hoyt like to have a word with me about?" I tried asking Uncle Bob again.
"I think you gotta ask him yourself, Billy," the ever-genial Racquet Man said. "You know Herm--he can be a kind of protective fella when it comes to talking about his wrestlers."
"Oh."
Maybe not a welcome change of subject, I thought.
IN ANOTHER TOWN, AT a later time, the Facility--"for assisted living, and beyond"--would probably have been named the Pines, or (in Vermont) the Maples. But you have to remember the place was conceived and constructed by Harry Marshall and Nils Borkman; ironically, neither of them would die there.
Someone had just died there, on that Thanksgiving weekend when I went to visit Herm Hoyt. A shrouded body was bound to a gurney, which an elderly, severe-looking nurse was standing guard over in the parking lot. "You're neither the person nor the vehicle I'm waitin' for," she told me.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"It's gonna snow, too," the old nurse said. "Then I'll have to wheel him back inside."
I tried to change the subject from the deceased to the reason for my visit, but--First Sister being the small town it was--the nurse already knew who I was visiting. "The coach is expectin' ya," she said. When she'd told me how to find Herm's room, she added: "You don't look much like a wrestler." When I told her who I was, she said: "Oh, I knew your mother and your aunt--and your grandfather, of course."
"Of course," I said.
"You're the writer," she added, with her eyes focused on the ash-end of her cigarette. I realized that she'd wheeled the body outside because she was a smoker.
I was forty-two that year; I judged the nurse to be at least as old as my aunt Muriel would have been--in the latter half of her sixties. I agreed that I was "the writer," but before I could leave her in the parking lot, the nurse said: "You were a Favorite River boy, weren't ya?"
"Yes, I was--'61," I said. I could see her scrutinizing me now; of course she would have heard everything about me and Miss Frost--everyone of a certain age had heard all about that.
"Then I guess ya knew this fella," the old nurse said; she passed her hand over the body bound to the gurney, but she touched nothing. "I'm guessin' he's waitin' in more ways than one!" the nurse said, exhaling an astonishing plume of cigarette smoke. She was wearing a ski parka and an old ski hat, but no gloves--the gloves would have interfered with her cigarette. It was just starting to snow--some scattered flakes were falling, not nearly enough to have accumulated on the body on the gurney.
"He's waitin' for that idiot kid from the funeral home, and he's waitin' in whatchamacallit!" the nurse exclaimed.
"Do you mean purgatory?" I asked her.
"Yes, I do--what is that, anyway?" she asked me. "You're the writer."
"But I don't believe in purgatory, or all the rest of it--" I started to say.
"I'm not askin' ya to believe in it," she said. "I'm askin' ya what it is!"
"An intermediate state, after death--" I started to answer her, but she wouldn't let me finish.
"Like Almighty God is decidin' whether to send this fella to the Underworld or the Great Upstairs--isn't that supposed to be what's goin' on there?" the nurse asked me.
"Kind of," I said. I had a limited recollection of what purgatory was for--for some kind of expiatory purification, if I remembered correctly. The soul, in that aforementioned intermediate state after death, was expected to atone for something--or so I guessed, w
ithout ever saying it. "Who is it?" I asked the old nurse; as she had done, I moved my hand safely above the body on the gurney. The nurse narrowed her eyes as she looked at me; it might have been the smoke.
"Dr. Harlow--you remember him, don'tcha? I'm guessin' it won't take the Almighty too long to decide about him!" the old nurse said.
I just smiled and left her to wait for the hearse in the parking lot. I didn't believe that Dr. Harlow could ever atone enough; I believed he was already in the Underworld, where he belonged. I hoped that the Great Upstairs had no room for Dr. Harlow--he who had been so absolute about my affliction.
Herm Hoyt told me that Dr. Harlow had moved to Florida after he'd retired. But when he got sick--he'd had prostate cancer; it had metastasized, as that cancer does, to bone--Dr. Harlow had asked to come back to First Sister. He'd wanted to spend his last days in the Facility. "I can't figure out why, Billy," Coach Hoyt said. "Nobody here ever liked him." (Dr. Harlow had died at age seventy-nine; I hadn't seen the bald-headed owl-fucker since he'd been a man in his fifties.)
But Herm Hoyt hadn't asked to see me because he'd wanted to tell me about Dr. Harlow.
"I'm guessing you've heard from Miss Frost," I said to her old wrestling coach. "Is she all right?"
"Funny--that's what she wanted to know about you, Billy," Herm said.
"You can tell her I'm all right," I said quickly.
"I never asked her to tell me the sexual details--in fact, I would just as soon know nothin' about that stuff, Billy," the coach continued. "But she said there's somethin' you should know--so you won't worry about her."
"You should tell Miss Frost I'm a top," I told him, "and I've been wearing condoms since '68. Maybe she won't worry too much about me, if she knows that," I added.
"Jeez--I'm too old for more sexual details, Billy. Just let me finish what I started to say!" Herm said. He was ninety-one, not quite a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Herm had Parkinson's, and Uncle Bob had told me that the coach was having difficulty with one of his medications; it was something Herm was supposed to take for his heart, or so Bob had thought. (The Parkinson's was why Coach Hoyt had moved into the Facility in the first place.)
"I'm not even pretendin' that I understand this, Billy, but here's what Al wanted you to know--forgive me, what she wanted you to know. She doesn't actually have sex," Herm Hoyt told me. "She means not with anybody, Billy--she just doesn't ever do it. She's gone to a world of trouble to make herself a woman, but she doesn't ever have sex--not with men or women, I'm tellin' you, not ever. There's somethin' Greek about what she does--she said you knew all about it, Billy."