by John Irving
I didn't do anything with this information, if you could call it that. But that night was when I got the call from Uncle Bob about Herm Hoyt dying at age ninety-five. "The coach is gone, Billy--you're on your own with the duck-unders," Bob said.
No doubt, that must have distracted me from following up on El's story about Donna. The next morning, Elaine and I had to open all the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke from Raymond burning his frigging toast, and I said to Elaine: "I'm going to Vermont. I have a house there, and I'm going to try living in it."
"Sure, Billy--I understand," Elaine said. "This is too much house for us, anyway--we should sell it."
That clown Raymond just sat there, eating his burned toast. (As Elaine would say later, Raymond was probably wondering where he was going to live next; he must have known it wouldn't be with Elaine.)
I said good-bye to El--either that same day or the next one. She wasn't very understanding about it.
I called Richard Abbott and got Mrs. Hadley on the phone. "Tell Richard I'm going to try it," I told her.
"I've got my fingers crossed for you, Billy--Richard and I would love it if you were living here," Martha Hadley said.
That was why I was living in Grandpa Harry's River Street house, now mine, on the morning Uncle Bob called me from the office of Alumni Affairs at the academy.
"It's about Big Al, Billy," Bob said. "This isn't an obituary I would ever run, unedited, in The River Bulletin, but I gotta run the unedited version by you."
It was February 1990 in First Sister--colder than a witch's tit, as we say in Vermont.
Miss Frost was the same age as the Racquet Man; she'd died from injuries she suffered in a fight in a bar--she was seventy-three. The injuries were mostly head injuries, Uncle Bob told me. Big Al had found herself in a barroom brawl with a bunch of airmen from Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire. The bar had been in Dover, or maybe in Portsmouth--Bob didn't have all the details.
"What's 'a bunch,' Bob--how many airmen were there?" I asked him.
"Uh, well, there was one airman first-class, and one airman basic, and a couple more who were only identified by the airmen word--that's all I can tell you, Billy," Uncle Bob said.
"Young guys, right? Four of them? Were there four of them, Bob?" I asked him.
"Yes, four. I assume they were young, Billy--if they were enlisted men and still in service. But I'm just guessing about their ages," Uncle Bob told me.
Miss Frost had probably received her head injuries after the four of them finally managed to get her down; I imagine it took two or three of them to hold her down, while the fourth man had kicked her in the head.
All four men had been hospitalized, Bob told me; the injuries to two of the four were listed as "serious." But none of the airmen had been charged; at that time, Pease was still a SAC base. According to Uncle Bob, the Strategic Air Command "disciplined" its own, but Bob admitted that he didn't truly understand how the "legal stuff" (when it came to the military) really worked. The four airmen were never identified by name, nor was there any information as to why four young men had a fight with a seventy-three-year-old woman, who--in their eyes--may or may not have been acceptable as a woman.
My guess, and Bob's, was that Miss Frost might have had a past relationship--or just a previous meeting--with one or more of the airmen. Maybe, as Herm Hoyt had speculated to me, one of the fellas had objected to the intercrural sex; he might have found it insufficient. Perhaps, given how young the airmen were, they knew of Miss Frost only "by reputation"; it might have been enough provocation to them that she was, in their minds, not a real woman--it might have been only that. (Or they were frigging homophobes--it might have been only that, too.)
Whatever led to the altercation, it was apparent--as Coach Hoyt had predicted--that Big Al would never back down from a fight.
"I'm sorry, Billy," Uncle Bob said.
Later, Bob and I agreed we were glad that Herm Hoyt hadn't lived to hear about it. I called Elaine in New York that night. She had her own small place in Chelsea, just a little northwest of the West Village and due north of the Meatpacking District. I told Elaine about Miss Frost, and I asked her to sing me that Mendelssohn song--the one she'd said she was saving for me, the same one she'd sung for Larry.
"I promise I won't die on your shift, Elaine. You'll never have to sing that song for me. Besides, I need to hear it now," I told her.
As for the Mendelssohn song, Elaine explained it was a small part of Elijah--Mendelssohn's longest work. It comes near the end of that oratorio, after God arrives (in the voice of a small child), and the angels sing blessings to Elijah, who sings his last aria--"For the Mountains Shall Depart." That's what Elaine sang to me; her alto voice was big and strong, even over the phone, and I said good-bye to Miss Frost, listening to the same music I'd heard when I was saying good-bye to Larry. Miss Frost had been lost to me for almost thirty years, but that night I knew she was gone for good, and all that Uncle Bob would say about her in The River Bulletin wasn't nearly enough.
Sad tidings for the Class of '35! Al Frost: born, First Sister, Vermont, 1917; wrestling team captain, 1935 (undefeated); died, Dover or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1990.
"That's it?" I remember asking Uncle Bob.
"Shit, Billy--what else can we say in an alumni magazine?" the Racquet Man said.
When Richard and Martha were auctioning off the old furniture from Grandpa Harry's River Street house, they told me they'd found thirteen beer bottles under the living-room couch--all Uncle Bob's. (If I had to bet, all from that one party to commemorate Aunt Muriel and my mother.)
"Way to go, Bob!" I'd said to Mrs. Hadley and Richard.
I knew the Racquet Man was right. What can you say in a frigging alumni magazine about a transsexual wrestler who was killed in a bar fight? Not much.
IT WAS A COUPLE of years later--I was slowly adjusting to living in Vermont--when I got a late-night phone call from El. It took me a second or two to recognize her voice; I think she was drunk.
"You know that friend of yours--the girl like me, but she's older?" El asked.
"You mean Donna," I said, after a pause.
"Yeah, Donna," El said. "Well, she is sick now--that's what I heard."
"Thank you for telling me," I was saying, when El hung up the phone. It was too late to call anybody in Toronto; I just slept on the news. I'm guessing this would have been 1992 or '93; it may even have been early in 1994. (After I moved to Vermont, I didn't pay such close attention to time.)
I had a few friends in Toronto; I asked around. I was told about an excellent hospice there--everyone I knew said it was quite a wonderful place, under the circumstances. Casey House, it was called; just recently, someone told me it still exists.
The director of nursing at Casey House, at that time, was a great guy; his first name was John, if I remember correctly, and I think he had an Irish last name. Since I'd moved back to First Sister, I was discovering that I wasn't very good at remembering names. Besides, whenever this was, exactly--when I heard about Donna being sick--I was already fifty, or in my fifties. (It wasn't just names I had trouble remembering!)
John told me that Donna had been admitted to hospice care several months before. But Donna was "Don" to the nurses and other caregivers at Casey House, John had explained to me.
"Estrogen has side effects--in particular, it can affect the liver," John told me. Furthermore, estrogens can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. "The itching that occurs with this condition was driving Don nuts," was how John put it. It was Donna herself who'd told everyone to call her Don; upon stopping the estrogens, her beard came back.
It seemed exceptionally unfair to me that Donna, who had worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS; she was being forced to return to her former male self.
Donna also had cytomegalovirus. "In this case, the blindness may be a blessing," John told me. He meant that Donna was spared seeing her beard, but of cour
se she could feel it--even though one of the nurses shaved her face every day.
"I just want to prepare you," John said to me. "Watch yourself. Don't call him 'Donna.' Just try not to let that name slip." In our phone conversations, I'd noticed that the director of nursing was careful to use the he and him words while discussing "Don." John not once said she or her or Donna.
Thus prepared, I found my way to Huntley Street in downtown Toronto--a small residential-looking street, or so it seemed to me (between Church Street and Sherbourne Street, if you know the city). Casey House itself was like a very large family's home; it had as pleasant and welcoming an atmosphere as was possible, but there's only so much you can do about bedsores and muscular wasting--or the lingering smell, no matter how hard you try to mask it, of fulminant diarrhea. Donna's room had an almost-nice lavender smell. (A bathroom deodorizer, a perfumed disinfectant--not one I would choose.) I must have held my breath.
"Is that you, Billy?" Donna asked; white splotches clouded her eyes, but she could hear okay. I'll bet she'd heard me hold my breath. Of course they'd told her I was coming, and a nurse had very recently shaved her; I was unused to the masculine smell of the shaving cream, or maybe it was an after-shave gel. Yet, when I kissed her, I could feel the beard on Donna's cheek--as I'd not once felt it when we were making love--and I could see the shadow of a beard on her clean-shaven face. She was taking Coumadin; I saw the pills on the bedside table.
I was impressed by what a good job the nurses were doing at Casey House; they were experts at accomplishing all they could to make Donna comfortable, including (of course) the pain control. John had explained to me the subtleties of sublingual morphine versus morphine elixir versus fentanyl patch, but I hadn't really been listening. John also told me that Don was using a special cream that seemed to help control his itching, although the cream was exposing Don to "a lot of steroids."
Suffice it to say, I saw that Donna was in good and caring hands at Casey House--even though she was blind, and she was dying as a man. While I was visiting with Donna, two of her Toronto friends also came to see her--two very passable transsexuals, each of them clearly dedicated to living her life as a woman. When Donna introduced us, I very much had the feeling that she'd forewarned them I would be there; in fact, Donna might have asked her friends to stop by when I was with her. Maybe Donna wanted me to see that she'd found "her people," and that she'd been happy in Toronto.
The two transsexuals were very friendly to me--one of them flirted with me, but it was all for show. "Oh, you're the writer--we know all about you!" the more outgoing but not flirtatious one said.
"Oh, yeah--the bi guy, right?" the one who was coming on to me said. (She definitely wasn't serious about it. The flirting was entirely for Donna's amusement; Donna had always loved flirting.)
"Watch out for her, Billy," Donna told me, and all three of them laughed. Given Atkins, given Delacorte, given Larry--not to mention those airmen who killed Miss Frost--it wasn't a terribly painful visit. At one point, Donna even said to her flirtatious friend, "You know, Lorna--Billy never complained that I had too big a cock. You liked my cock, didn't you, Billy?" Donna asked me.
"I certainly did," I told her, being careful not to say, "I certainly did, Donna."
"Yeah, but you told me Billy was a top," Lorna said to Donna; the other transsexual, whose name was Lilly, laughed. "Try being a bottom and see what too big a cock does to you!"
"You see, Billy?" Donna said. "I told you to watch out for Lorna. She's already found a way to let you know she's a bottom, and that she likes little cocks."
The three friends all laughed at that--I had to laugh, too. I only noticed, when I was saying good-bye to Donna, that her friends and I had not once called her by name--not Donna or Don. The two transsexuals waited for me when I was saying good-bye to John; I would have hated his job.
I walked with Lorna and Lilly to the Sherbourne subway station; they were taking the subway home, they said. By the way they said the home word, and the way they were holding hands, I got the feeling that they lived together. When I asked them where I could catch a taxi to take me back to my hotel, Lilly said, "I'm glad you mentioned what hotel you're staying in--I'll be sure to tell Donna that you and Lorna got in a lot of trouble."
Lorna laughed. "I'll probably tell Donna that you and Lilly got in trouble, too," Lorna told me. "Donna loves it when I say, 'Lilly never knew a cock she didn't like, big or little'--that cracks her up."
Lilly laughed, and I did, too, but the flirting was finished. It had all been for Donna. I kissed Donna's two friends good-bye at the Sherbourne subway station, their cheeks perfectly soft and smooth, with no hint of a beard--absolutely nothing you could feel against your face, and not the slightest shadow on their pretty faces. I still have dreams about those two.
I was thinking, as I kissed them good-bye, of what Elaine told me Mrs. Kittredge had said, when Elaine was traveling in Europe with Kittredge's mother. (This was what Mrs. Kittredge really said--not the story Elaine first told me.)
"I don't know what your son wants," Elaine had told Kittredge's mother. "I just know he always wants something."
"I'll tell you what he wants--even more than he wants to fuck us," Mrs. Kittredge said. "He wants to be one of us, Elaine. He doesn't want to be a boy or a man; it doesn't matter to him that he's finally so good at being a boy or a man. He never wanted to be a boy or a man in the first place!"
But if Kittredge was a woman now--if he was like Donna had been, or like Donna's two very "passable" friends--and if Kittredge had AIDS and was dying somewhere, what if they'd had to stop giving Kittredge the estrogens? Kittredge had a very heavy beard; I could still feel, after more than thirty years, how heavy his beard was. I had so often, and for so long, imagined Kittredge's beard scratching against my face.
Do you remember what he said to me, about transsexuals? "I regret I've never tried one," Kittredge had whispered in my ear, "but I have the impression that if you pick up one, the others will come along." (He'd been talking about the transvestites he'd seen in Paris.) "I think, if I were going to try it, I would try it in Paris," Kittredge had said to me. "But you, Nymph--you've already done it!" Kittredge had cried.
Elaine and I had seen Kittredge's single room at Favorite River Academy, most memorably (to me) the photograph of Kittredge and his mother that was taken after a wrestling match. What Elaine and I had noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand 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.
The truth was, Kittredge's face had worked on a woman's body, with a woman's clothes. Elaine had convinced me that Kittredge must have been the one who switched the faces in the photograph; Mrs. Kittredge couldn't have done it. "That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor," Elaine had said, in her authoritarian way.
I was back home from Toronto, having said good-bye to Donna. Lavender would never smell the same to me again, and you can imagine what an anticlimax it would be when Uncle Bob called me in my River Street house with the latest news of a classmate's death.
"You've lost another classmate, Billy--not your favorite person, if memory serves," the Racquet Man said. As vague as I am concerning when I heard the news about Donna, I can tell you exactly when it was that Uncle Bob called me with the news about Kittredge.
I'd just celebrated my fifty-third birthday. It was March 1995; there was still a lot of snow on the ground in First Sister, with nothing but mud season to look forward to.
Elaine and I had been talking about taking a trip to Mexico; she'd been looking at houses to rent in Playa del Carmen. I would have happily gone to Mexico with her, but she was having a boyfriend problem: Her boyfriend was a tight-assed turd who didn't want Elaine to go anywhere with me.
"Didn't you tell him we don't do it?" I asked her.
"Yes, but I also told
him that we used to do it--or that we tried to," Elaine said, revising herself.
"Why did you tell him that?" I asked her.
"I'm trying out a new honesty policy," Elaine answered. "I'm not making up so many stories, or I'm trying not to."
"How is this policy working out with your fiction writing?" I asked her.
"I don't think I can go to Mexico with you, Billy--not right now," was all she'd said.
I'd had a recent boyfriend problem of my own, but when I dumped the boyfriend, I had rather soon developed a girlfriend problem. She was a first-year faculty member at Favorite River, a young English teacher. Mrs. Hadley and Richard had introduced us; they'd invited me to dinner, and there was Amanda. When I first saw her, I thought she was one of Richard's students--she looked that young to me. But she was an anxious young woman in her late twenties.
"I'm almost thirty," Amanda was always saying, as if she was anxious that she was too young-looking; therefore, saying she would soon be thirty made her seem older.
When we started sleeping together, Amanda was anxious about where we did it. She had a faculty apartment in one of the girls' dorms at Favorite River; when I spent the night with her there, the girls in the dormitory knew about it. But, most nights, Amanda had dorm duty--she couldn't stay with me in my house on River Street. The way it was working out, I wasn't sleeping with Amanda nearly enough--that was the developing problem. And then, of course, there was the bi issue: She'd read all my novels, she said she loved my writing, but that I was a bi guy made her anxious, too.
"I just can't believe you're fifty-three!" Amanda kept saying, which confused me. I couldn't tell if she meant I seemed so much younger than I was, or that she was appalled at herself for dating an old bi guy in his fifties.
Martha Hadley, who was seventy-five, had retired, but she still met with individual students who had "special needs"--pronunciation problems included. Mrs. Hadley had told me that Amanda suffered from pronunciation problems. "That wasn't why you introduced us, was it?" I asked Martha.