In One Person (12 page)

I was trying to imagine how I would be costumed and made up as an invisible water nymph; I could never have foreseen the algae-green wig I wore, nor the crimson wrestling tights. (Crimson and silver-gray—“death-gray,” Grandpa Harry had called it—were the Favorite River Academy colors.)

“So Billy’s gender is . . .
mutable,
” Kittredge said, smiling.

“Not Billy’s—
Ariel’s,
” Richard said.

But Kittredge had made his point; the cast of
The Tempest
would not forget the
mutable
word. “Nymph,” Kittredge’s nickname for me, would stick. I had two years to go at Favorite River Academy; a Nymph I would be.

“It doesn’t matter what costume and makeup do to you, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me privately. “You’ll never be as hot as your mother.”

I was aware that my mom was pretty, and—at seventeen—I was increasingly conscious of how the other students at an all-boys’ academy like Favorite River regarded her. But no other boy had told me that my mom was “hot”; as I often found myself with Kittredge, I was at a loss for words. I’m sure that the
hot
word was not yet in use—not the way Kittredge had used it. But Kittredge definitely meant “hot” in that way.

When Kittredge spoke of his own mother, which he rarely did, he usually raised the issue of there being a possible mix-up. “Maybe my real mom died in childbirth,” Kittredge said. “My father found some unwed mother in the same hospital—an unfortunate woman (her child was stillborn, but the woman never knew), a woman who
looked like
my mother. There was a switch. My dad would be capable of such a deception. I’m not saying the woman knows she’s my stepmother. She may even believe my dad is my stepfather! At the time, she might have been taking a lot of drugs—she must have been depressed, maybe suicidal. I have no doubt that she
believes
she’s my mom—she just doesn’t always
act
like a mother. She’s done some contradictory things—contradictory to motherhood. All I’m saying is that my dad has never been answerable for his behavior with women—with
any
woman. My dad just makes deals. This woman may look like me, but she’s not my mom—she’s not
anyone’s
mother.”

“Kittredge is in denial—big time,” Elaine had told me. “That woman looks like his mother
and
his father!”

When I told Elaine Hadley what Kittredge had said about my mom, Elaine suggested that I tell Kittredge our opinion of his mother—based on our shameless staring at her, at one of his wrestling matches. “Tell him his mom looks like him, with
tits,
” Elaine said.

“
You
tell him,” I told her; we both knew I wouldn’t. Elaine wouldn’t talk to Kittredge about his mom, either.

Initially, Elaine was almost as afraid of Kittredge as I was—nor would she ever have used the
tits
word in his company. She was very conscious of having inherited her mom’s flat chest. Elaine was nowhere near as homely as her mother; Elaine was thin and gawky, and she had no boobs, but she had a pretty face—and, unlike her mom, Elaine would never be big-boned. Elaine was delicate-looking, which made her trombone of a voice all the more surprising. Yet, at first, she was so intimidated in Kittredge’s presence that she often croaked or mumbled; at times, she was incoherent. Elaine was so afraid of sounding too loud around him. “Kittredge fogs up my glasses,” was the way she put it.

Their first meeting onstage—as Ferdinand and Miranda—was dazzlingly clear; one never saw two souls so unmistakably drawn to each other. Upon seeing Miranda, Ferdinand calls her a “wonder”; he asks, “If you be maid or no?”

“ ‘No wonder sir, / But certainly a maid,’ ” Elaine (as Miranda) replies in a vibrant, gonglike voice. But offstage, Kittredge had managed to make Elaine self-conscious about her booming voice. After all, she was only sixteen; Kittredge was eighteen, going on thirty.

Elaine and I were walking back to the dorm after rehearsal one night—the Hadleys had a faculty apartment in the same dorm where I lived with Richard Abbott and my mom—when Kittredge magically materialized beside us. (Kittredge was always doing that.) “You two are quite a couple,” he told us.

“We’re not a
couple
!” Elaine blurted out, much louder than she’d meant to. Kittredge pretended to stagger, as if from an unseen blow; he held his ears.

“I must warn you, Nymph—you’re in danger of losing your hearing,” Kittredge said to me. “When this little lady has her first orgasm, you better be wearing earplugs. And I wouldn’t do it in the dormitory, if I were you,” Kittredge warned me. “The whole dorm would hear her.” He then drifted away from us, down a different, darker path; Kittredge lived in the jock dorm, the one nearest the gym.

It was too dark to see if Elaine Hadley had blushed. I touched her face lightly, just enough to ascertain if she was crying; she wasn’t, but her cheek was hot and she brushed my hand away. “No one’s giving me an orgasm anytime soon!” Elaine cried after Kittredge.

We were in a quadrangle of dormitories; in the distance, there were lights in the surrounding dorm windows, and a chorus of voices whooped and cheered—as if a hundred unseen boys had heard her. But Elaine was very agitated when she cried out; I doubted that Kittredge (or anyone but me) had understood her. I was wrong, though what Elaine had cried with police-siren shrillness sounded like, “No nun’s liver goes into spasm for a raccoon!” (Or nonsense of a similar, incomprehensible kind.)

But Kittredge had grasped Elaine’s meaning; his sweetly sarcastic voice reached us from somewhere in the dark quadrangle. Cruelly, it was as the sexy Ferdinand that Kittredge called out of the darkness to my friend Elaine, who was (at that moment) not feeling much like Miranda.

“O, if a virgin, / And your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you / The Queen of Naples,” Ferdinand swears to Miranda—and so Kittredge amorously called. The quad of dorms was eerily quiet; when those Favorite River boys heard Kittredge speak, they were silenced by their own awe and stupefaction. “Good night, Nymph!” I heard Kittredge call. “Good night, Naples!”

Thus Elaine Hadley and I had our nicknames. When Kittredge named you, it may have been a dubious honor, but the designation was both lasting and traumatic.

“Shit,” Elaine said. “It could be worse—Kittredge could be calling me
Maid
or
Virgin
.”

“Elaine?” I said. “You’re my one true friend.”

“ ‘Abhorrèd slave,’ ” she said to me.

This was uttered as sharply as a bark; there was a doglike echo in the quadrangle of dorms. We both knew it is what Miranda says to Caliban—“a savage and deformed slave,” Shakespeare calls him, but Caliban is an unfinished monster.

Prospero berates Caliban: “thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child.”

Caliban doesn’t deny it. Caliban hates Prospero
and
his daughter (“toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”), though the monster once lusted after Miranda and wishes he “had peopled” the island with little Calibans. Caliban is evidently male, but it’s uncertain how human he is.

When Trinculo, the jester, first notices Caliban, Trinculo says, “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive?”

I knew that Elaine Hadley had been kidding—speaking to me as Miranda speaks to Caliban, Elaine was just fooling around—but as we drew near to our dormitory, the lights from the windows illuminated her tear-streaked face. In only a minute or two, Kittredge’s mockery of Ferdinand and Miranda’s romance had taken effect; Elaine was crying. “You’re my
only
friend!” she blubbered to me.

I felt sorry for her, and put my arm around her shoulders; this provoked more whoops and cheers from those unseen boys who’d whooped and cheered before. Did I know that this night was the beginning of my masquerade? Was I conscious of giving those Favorite River boys the impression that Elaine Hadley was my girlfriend? Was I acting, even then? Consciously or not, I was making Elaine Hadley my disguise. For a while, I would fool Richard Abbott and Grandpa Harry—not to mention Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, and (if not for long, and to a lesser extent) my mother.

Yes, I was aware that my mom was changing. She’d been so nice to me when I was little. I used to wonder, when I was a teenager, what had become of the small boy she’d once loved.

I even began an early novel with this tortured and overlong sentence: “According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any fiction, by which she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked—she meant reality, of course.”

My mom’s assessment of “pure imagining” was not flattering. Fiction was frivolous to her; no, it was worse than frivolous.

One Christmas—I believe it was the first Christmas I’d come home to Vermont, for a visit, in several years—I was scribbling away in a notebook, and my mother asked me, “What are you writing
now,
Billy?”

“A novel,” I told her.

“Well, that should make
you
happy,” she suddenly said to Grandpa Harry, who’d begun to lose his hearing—sawmill damage, I suppose.

“Me? Why should it make
me
happy that Bill is writing another novel? Not that I didn’t love the last one, Bill, because I sure-as-shit
did
love it!” Grandpa Harry quickly assured me.

“Of course you loved it,” my mother told him. “Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?”

“Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry had started to say, but then stopped. As Harry got older, he stopped himself from saying what he was going to say—more and more.

I know the feeling. When I was a teenager, when I began to sense that my mom wasn’t as
nice
to me as she’d been before, I got in the habit of stopping myself from saying what I wanted to say. Not anymore.

M
ANY YEARS LATER, LONG
after I’d left Favorite River Academy, at the height of my interest in she-males—I mean dating them, not being one—I was having dinner with Donna one night, and I told her about Grandpa Harry’s onstage life as a female impersonator.

“Was it only onstage?” Donna asked.

“As far as I know,” I answered her, but you couldn’t lie to her. One of a couple of uncomfortable things about Donna was that she always knew when you were holding out on her.

Nana Victoria had been dead for more than a year when I first heard from Richard that no one could persuade Grandpa Harry to part with my late grandmother’s clothes. (At the sawmill, of course, Harry Marshall was sure-as-shit still dressing like a lumberman.)

Eventually, I would come clean to Donna about Grandpa Harry spending his evenings in his late wife’s attire—if only in the privacy of his River Street home. I would leave out the part about Harry’s cross-dressing adventures after he was moved to that assisted-living facility he and Nils Borkman had (years before) generously built for the elderly in First Sister. The other residents had complained about Harry repeatedly surprising them in drag. (As Grandpa Harry would one day tell me, “I think you’ve noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.”)

Fortunately, when Richard Abbott told me what had happened at the assisted-living facility, Grandpa Harry’s River Street home had not yet been sold; it was still on the market. Richard and I quickly moved Harry back into the familiar surroundings of the house he’d lived in with Nana Victoria for so many years. Nana Victoria’s clothes were moved back into the River Street house with him, and the nurse Richard and I hired, for Grandpa Harry’s round-the-clock care, made no objection to Harry’s apparently permanent transformation as a woman. The nurse fondly remembered Harry Marshall’s many female impersonations onstage.

“Did the cross-dressing bug ever bite you, Billy?” Donna asked me one night.

“Not really,” I’d answered her.

My attraction to transsexuals was pretty specific. (I’m sorry, but we didn’t use to say “transgender”—not till the eighties.) Transvestites never did it for me, and the transsexuals had to be what they call “passable”—one of few adjectives I still have trouble with, in the pronunciation department. Furthermore, their breasts had to be natural—hormones were okay, but no surgical implants—and, not surprisingly, I preferred small breasts.

How feminine she was mattered a lot to Donna. She was tall but thin—even her upper arms were slender—and she was flawlessly smooth-skinned. (I’ve known many women who were hairier.) She was always having her hair done; she was very stylish.

Donna was self-conscious about her hands, though they were not as noticeably big and strong-looking as Miss Frost’s. Donna didn’t like to hold hands with me, because my hands were smaller.

She came from Chicago, and she tried living in New York—after we broke up, I heard she’d moved to Toronto—but Donna believed that Europe was the place for someone like her. I used to take her with me on publishing trips, when my novels were translated into various European languages. Donna said that Europe was more accepting of transsexuals—Europe was more sexually accepting
and
sophisticated, generally—but Donna was insecure about learning another language.