scott free

by Unknown Author

  “No, I’m afraid he won’t come to you.”

  “I’ll catch him.”

  Myrna House scooped up the bag and her keys, calling out futilely, “Baba! Don’t run in the road!”

  Baba ran the other way, up toward the newly dug grave, with the redheaded young man in pursuit, and yes, he caught him by the back leg and Baba screamed.

  “Don’t hurt my baby!” Mrs. House cried out.

  “I won’t, ma’am.” He came walking toward her with an angry Baba in his arms. Baba was wiggling and nipping at the air while the big redhead told him, “No, you don’t, Baba! I’ve got you!”

  Mrs. House had managed to put everything back inside the hated Coach bag. Near to tears from all the aggravation, Mrs. House told the stranger, “Be careful of him!”

  “He’s all right. I have him.”

  “It’s the fault of this wretched pocketbook! I always like an outside pocket but my daughter didn’t think and for Christmas got me—”

  “A very nice bag,” said the young man.

  “But not what I wanted.”

  He gave her Baba’s leash.

  “Put him down, please,” she said. “He wants to do his second duty. His first was so scant!”

  “Got everything you dropped, ma’am?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Baba, on the ground and reattached to her, hobbled over to do his business near the tall, black Stuart Davis gravestone, a favorite stopping place of his.

  Mrs. House sighed and put a cigarette between her lips, no matches naturally because they had always been kept in the missing outside pocket, too.

  “I have a light,” the young man said. “I have a Ronson. I don’t smoke but I’ve started carrying it for those who do.”

  “There are less and less of us,” Mrs. House grumbled. “But how thoughtful of you!” She inhaled, exhaled, and let her shoulders relax. “I remember you. You’re the one making all the arrangement for the new grave. More arrangements?”

  “No, ma’am. I was taking my new bike for a ride so I swung over this way. I like to walk around here. It’s so peaceful.”

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  “It’s the only way I get to mingle with the famous,” he said.

  Mrs. House said, “They’re all here. Most of them artists.” She watched with satisfaction as Baba delivered a long, well-colored stool. “My name is Delroy Davenport, ma’am.”

  “I’m Mrs. Bolton House.”

  “Are you any relation to Scotti? From the library?”

  “I’m her mother. Do you know Scotti?”

  “Not well. I knew she lived up near Tulip Path.”

  “We live right down there.” Mrs. House pointed to the small, white brick house with the Christmas wreaths on the windows.

  “It looks very cozy.”

  “My husband and I moved here from Brooklyn Heights in 1990. Then he died on me.”

  “I’m sorry. But you have your daughter, anyway.”

  “She wasn’t around for years. She only moved here a year and a half ago.”

  “I lived in Sag Harbor, first,” said Delroy Davenport. “Then I moved to East Hampton. Shall I carry that bag for you? You seem to be having trouble with it.”

  “It’s too heavy.”

  His Mercedes bicycle was in front of Ad Reinhardt’s small stone. He picked it up and put her bag on the handlebars.

  “Aren’t you sweet!” Mrs. House smiled at him, his hair as red as the sunset beginning in the sky.

  She asked Baba, “Isn’t this something, Baba? We’ve met someone with manners! That’s a good omen for the new year. Baba, say how do you do, Mr. Davenport!”

  “You can call me Delroy,” said the redhead. “How do you do, Baba?”

  There was a time, after Len’s diagnosis, when Jack Burlingame let himself play with the idea of helping Lara through the grieving, and then . . . who knows? He would do anything (obviously, if he would think of such a thing where his best friend was concerned)—anything to pull himself out of the lonely pit left by Delia’s absence.

  But now Burlingame realized Lara had a whole layer he never would have suspected. This vast behind-the-scenes production—a setup for Len’s suicide—was so elaborate and calculated. Lara had gone about it so carefully, playing the game to the hilt, even embellishing it with discussions of how they could move Len south if the winter was harsh—that sort of thing—when all the while she had supervised the proceedings at Green River Cemetery as efficiently as only Len himself might have done, and was probably partner to via his voice synthesizer.

  Jack watched Lara that evening with new eyes and new feelings, trying to catch a glimpse of this side of her, trying to fit it in with the elegant and sexy vision in the white cashmere dress smiling at him and asking him if he wanted more shrimp and com pie.

  “This is an old recipe The Duchess of Windsor brought from Baltimore,” Lara said.

  “It’s very good. I’d forgotten you have this thing for Wallis Windsor.” “It’s not a thing. She had great style. I admire that.”

  A week ago, after he’d dropped off Mario Rome and Deanie, Jack had sped out to Green River to verify what Mario had told him. It was true, all right.

  What was not true was that Jack would make a closure by visiting Delia’s grave.

  For the first time in so long the ache for Delia returned to his heart. He’d taken ten steps back to when he’d wake at night wanting her, remembering the poem Edna St. Vincent Millay had written about waking up a month, two months from the death, a year from it, two years, with your knuckles in your mouth weeping, saying “Oh, God, oh, God” . . . Jack had moved on to the grave that was waiting for Len and he’d thought what a life with Lara would be like.

  Lara was able to plan large-scale things without him, not depending on him for any little part of it, looking straight into his eyes and saying, “It’s good to have you here, Jack, it means a lot” . . . but never saying “I need you to help me,” never even trusting him to know about it.

  “Are you listening to me, Jack? Where are you tonight?” Lara asked. “I’m sorry.”

  Deanie spoke up then, her mouth full of pie. “He’s playing nun, Mummy. He’s taken a wow of silence.”

  “ Vow!” Jack suddenly snapped, “and you know how to pronounce it!” “Jack!” Lara exclaimed. “Where did that come from?”

  “Sorry,” Jack muttered. “She purposely mispronounces words, though. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “No, I haven’t. And a Happy New Year to you, too,” Lara said bitterly. He looked across at her and saw behind her eyes this busy woman phoning landscape people, gravediggers, going down the list, erect, autonomous, the kind of woman he could never imagine reading his chapters to every night, as he had with Delia, waiting for her kindness, her understanding, soft-centered candy compared to hard caramel.

  Deanie said, “When my daddy wakes up, I’ll tell him Uncle Jack is cruel.”

  “Uncle Jack didn’t mean it, dearest.”

  “He meant it, and he gave Daddy’s Christmas gift away, too. He gave the bicycle to Delroy!”

  “He might have just lent it to Delroy, dear. Is that what you did, Jack?”

  “He gave it to Delroy because Delroy told me so and Delroy doesn’t lie,” said Deanie.

  “Jack?” Lara looked across at him.

  “I’m not a bike rider. Delroy admired it and I thought, what the hell!” “That was a very expensive gift to give away on a whim,” said Lara. “You could have donated it to the Ladies’ Village Improvement Society and taken a tax deduction.”

  Silence while Jack controlled the urge to say that never would have occurred to him . . . and what was wrong with giving Delroy something after all he’d done for Len?

  Lara made it clear what was wrong with it. She said, “We don’t indulge the help. They take advantage when you do. After I gave Delroy his Christmas gift, he began just taking off. He never did it before. He disappears for hours sometimes, just leaves. He’s
gone right now.”

  “He went on the bike late this afternoon,” Deanie said.

  Jack said, “Len’s asleep. He’s sedated. Right? Doesn’t Delroy deserve some time off? He’s been here day and night.”

  “Don’t interfere with the help, Jack.”

  “It’s our help, not yours,” said Deanie.

  Lara looked sternly at Jack and said, “I don’t need you to tell me when Delroy should be here and when he shouldn’t.”

  “You don’t need me to tell you anything.”

  “Jack, what does that mean?”

  “It means I’m proud of you. I really am. You know how to manage. That’s all it means, Duchess.”

  “Don’t call me Duchess.”

  “Doesn’t Len call you that?”

  “Len means it in a nice way. You always criticized the Windsors.” “Me? Criticize sybaritic anti-Semites?”

  “End of discussion,” Lara said angrily.

  Deanie said, “Will you wake me up at the stroke of midnight to watch the ball drop on TV?”

  The question was addressed to her mother, of course.

  But Jack felt guilty because of his sarcasm and orneriness. Maybe the visit to Delia’s grave had soured him. He said, “We’ll wake you up, kiddo! Don’t worry.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Deanie said.

  Her mother said, “We’ve got horns to blow and funny hats to celebrate. I’ll wake you up, honey, you bet I will!”

  “When is Uncle Jack going home?” she asked.

  Scotti was celebrating New Year’s Eve at Jessica’s new house in Bay Shore. It was not far from their old one, but it was far enough from the neighbors who’d known Scott and admired his hedge-bordered front garden with curving grass paths swirling around islands of cherry and apple tr ees. Summers, they’d grown accustomed to seeing him working in his yard— blue-jeaned and bare-chested, a Gauloise hanging from his mouth, tanned and handsome.

  Once he’d begun changing, and the rumors began spreading, they’d found all sorts of excuses to pass by and strike up conversations with him, or Jessica. With her or Jessica, as time went by and her hair became longer, tied in a ponytail, frilly blouses above tapered pants, oh, it was a change all right. They couldn’t stop talking about it.

  Even after Scott moved out, Jessica was never on the same footing with them. Her last attempt at reestablishing the old rapport was when she printed out an article she’d found on Google. It was from a back issue of Harper’s magazine, called “An Economist Drops a Bomb.” It was written by a distinguished professor of economics, Donald McCloskey. Quite matter-of-factly, he announced that at age fifty-three, married thirty years with two grown children, he was “cross-gendered.” To remedy this situation, which he had tolerated for four decades, he was becoming a female.

  Comparing the cost to the purchase of a Mercedes, he was not planning to hide his condition or change his occupation. Henceforth he would be known as Deirdre McCloskey.

  Jessica sent copies to those neighbors she truly cared about. But this borrowed glory got her nowhere. She could drop all the names she wanted: McCloskey, Jan Morris, Renee Richards—nothing would change anyone’s view of transsexuality.

  Jessica had told Scotti that she couldn’t blame their neighbors. She admitted that if it weren’t happening in her own life, she’d have the same reactions: disgust, bewilderment. At worst, the idea of a middle-aged man, in McClosky’s own words, turning himself into a “tall, ugly, indubitably female economist,” was somehow revolting. And at best, as one old friend of Jessica’s had put it, it was “a hoot!”

  So Jessica had moved.

  The new house was near the bay where the ferries went back and forth to Fire Island. Summers you could see them carrying their loads of renters to and from Ocean Beach.

  In the old days, Scott would take the ferry that left Sayville, bound to Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines, where the gay crowd flocked.

  Now Scotti sat with Emma on the plump banquette that curved along the wall in the small living room, the windows facing the dark waters beyond. Jessica had turned on the outside lights so they could watch the snow, which had begun falling as Scotti drove there from East Hampton.

  Jessica was clearing the table in the dining room, carrying dishes to the kitchen, leaving them time together before Emma went to bed.

  “You’ve been very quiet, Em,” Scotti said.

  “I’m not used to you this way. It’s too gross and I don’t know what to call you.”

  “What do you want to call me?”

  “You’re my daddy but remember the last time I called you that? At the florist. You were mad at me. You said not to call you that!”

  “What I said that day was that it would be easier for you to call me ‘Daddy’ when we’re alone. People don’t understand if you call me ‘Daddy’ when we’re out doing tilings. I think we confused the lady we were buying flowers from. That was two years ago, Em!”

  “I never forgot it.”

  “I tell you what, Em. Let’s think of something else to call me. You could just call me Scotti. That’s my name now.”

  “Mommy doesn’t let me call her by her first name.”

  “But I don’t mind.”

  “Then you won’t be my daddy anymore.”

  “I’ll always be your parent, Emma.”

  Emma frowned and jiggled one knee. “I told Janice Atwater my daddy was coming tonight for New Year’s.”

  “All right. You don’t have to take it back. Janice doesn’t have to know anything you don’t want to tell her.”

  “She might come to see me tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Oh, I’ll be gone by then, sweetie.”

  “Good! ... I don’t mean good that you’ll be gone.”

  “I know what you mean, love. You mean good that you don’t have to do a lot of explaining.”

  “Yes. Because I don’t know how to explain you.”

  “It’s all right. I won’t meet your friends until you want me to.” “Thanks, Daddy. Scotti. I bet I know what Mommy’s doing in the kitchen.”

  “She’s putting dishes in the dishwasher.”

  “She’s going off her diet, too, I bet. She bought a box of Mallomars this morning.”

  Scotti put her arm around her daughter and hugged her. She felt so sorry for the child: worrying that one parent would embarrass her because he had become she, and worried that the other parent would become fat again. Jessica was beginning to gain back some of the weight she’d lost at the spa.

  Until Scotti began taking hormones, she had never felt overwhelmingly maternal. She had been prepared for the physical change. As Scott that had been her whole focus: to feel herself in a new body. At first when she began experiencing the wish to nurture Emma, and protect her, she imagined it was mostly guilt at what she was putting their daughter through. But other MTFs who had no chilciren often spoke about their wishes to adopt them, suddenly welcoming the idea of becoming stereotypical females: mothers and housewives.

  Some FTMs found themselves drawn to more manly pursuits, too. Max was one. He developed an interest in automotive woodworking, restoring old “Woodies”—1940s station wagons. His backyard was filled with ones he worked on in his spare time.

  Emma said, “Can we make a snowman tonight, Daddy?”

  “I don’t think the snow’s going to stick, honey.”

  “Are there snowwomen, too?”

  “It’s funny, isn’t it, Em. No one ever calls one a snowwoman.”

  “We could make a snowman, and then change it to a snowwoman.” “We could.” Scotti felt her eyes fill. That was new, too, the sentimental reactions, the quick tears.

  Emma said excitedly, “First we’ll put a man’s hat on it, and then we’ll take it off and tie Mommy’s scarf around its head!”

  In the doorway, Jessica stood munching on a cookie, holding the other half in one hand. “You’re not going to put one of my designer scarves on a snowman’s head, I hope.”

  “The
snowman wants to turn into a snowwoman, like Daddy did.” “Then the snowman has to buy his own scarf,” Jessica said. “Bedtime, sugar.”

  While Jessica put Emma to bed, Scotti built a fire and opened her mother’s gift of the ’92 Vosne-Romanee burgundy.

  In a few weeks she had an appointment with Ernest Leogrande to discuss her surgery. She was still $20,000 short of his fee. She remembered Jan Morris’s description of herself before her own surgery, going for a swim, naked, in a small lake high in the mountains called the Glyders, in North Wales. A woman above the waist, a man below. She’d named herself a “chimera,” and wrote that she was an object of wonder even to herself.

  Times Scotti saw herself in the mirror, coming from the shower, she thought: how bizarre! . . . But then she would remember seeing her naked reflection when she was a pubescent boy. Young Scott had thought how odd it was to be a female and see a male in the mirror.

  When Jessica came back downstairs she slipped an old Peter Allen CD on the player. One Step over the Borderline.

  She said, “I wish he was still alive.” She flopped on the couch. “I wish I wasn’t fat. I wish you weren’t always in a skirt. You wear a skirt more than I do.”

  “I like wearing them. You never did.”

  “It was almost like old times tonight, wasn’t it? Except for the snowman/snowwoman bit. She said to tell you good-bye.”

  “Doesn’t she know I’ll be here for breakfast?”

  “I think she’s afraid you’ll be here when her friend, Janice, drops in.” “She said Janice was coming in the afternoon.”

  Jessica sighed. “It weighs on her mind, I think. . . . Speaking of weighing, I don’t even dare step on the scale. I’ve become a recidivist, I fear. The holidays always do me in.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jess. You can get it off again.”

  “I think of that poem that begins ‘O fat white woman whom nobody loves . . .’ Was that your Charlotte Mew?”

  Scotti chuckled. “No, it wasn’t. When did she become my Charlotte Mew?”

  “I don’t know anyone else who reads her. I never heard of her until you gave me a book of her poems. Remember that one from her French period that ended, ‘But, oh! Ma Doue! The nights of hell!’ ... It was called ‘Pecheresse.’”