by John Irving
"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 to 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."
Moral outrage and righteous indignation aren't unique to small towns and backward schools, and Miss Frost was not without her champions. Though it caused him to suffer my mother's "silent treatment" for several weeks, Richard Abbott took up Miss Frost's cause. Richard argued that, when faced with an earnest young man's determined infatuation, Miss Frost had actually shielded the young man from the full array of sexual possibilities.
Grandpa Harry, though it caused him the unbridled scorn of Nana Victoria, also spoke up for Miss Frost. She'd shown admirable restraint and sensitivity, Harry had said--not to mention the fact that Miss Frost was a source of inspiration to the readers of First Sister.
Even Uncle Bob, risking more vigorous derision from my most indignant aunt Muriel, said that Big Al deserved a break. Martha Hadley, who continued to counsel me in the aftermath of my forcibly aborted relationship with Miss Frost, said that the transsexual librarian had been a boost to my chronically weak self-confidence. Miss Frost had even managed to help me overcome a pronunciation problem, which Mrs. Hadley claimed was caused by my psychological and sexual insecurity.
If anyone had ever listened to Tom Atkins, poor Tom might have had a good word to say for Miss Frost, but Atkins--as Miss Frost had understood--was jealous of the alluring librarian, and when she was persecuted, Tom Atkins was true to his timid nature and remained silent.
Tom did say to me, when he'd finished reading Giovanni's Room, that the James Baldwin novel had both moved and disturbed him, though I later learned that Atkins had developed a few more pronunciation problems as a result of his stimulating reading. (Not surprisingly, the stink word was chief among the culprits.) Perhaps it was counterproductive that the most outspoken of Miss Frost's defenders was a known eccentric who was foreign-born. The grim forester, that lunatic logger, the Norwegian dramaturge with a suicidal streak--none other than Nils Borkman--presented himself at a First Sister town meeting by declaring he was Miss Frost's "biggest fan." (It may have undermined Borkman's defense of Miss Frost that Nils had been known to beat up various sawmill men and loggers who'd made unkind comments about Grandpa Harry's onstage appearances as a woman--especially those offenders who'd objected to Harry kissing as a woman.) In Borkman's opinion, not only was Miss Frost an Ibsen woman--to Nils, this meant that Miss Frost was both the best and most complicated kind of woman imaginable--but the obsessed Norwegian went so far as to say that Miss Frost was more of a woman than any woman Nils had met in the state of Vermont. Quite possibly, the only woman who was not offended by Borkman's outrageous assertion had been Mrs. Borkman, because Nils had met his wife in Norway; she was not from the Green Mountain State.
Borkman's wife was little seen, and she'd been more rarely heard. Almost no one in First Sister could remember what Mrs. Borkman looked like, nor could anyone recall if she--like her husband, Nils--spoke with a Norwegian accent.
Yet the damage done by Nils was instantaneous. Hearts were hardened against Miss Frost; she encountered a more entrenched resistance because Nils Borkman had boasted that she was more of a woman than any woman he'd met in Vermont.
"Not good, Nils--not good, not good," Harry Marshall had muttered to his old friend at that First Sister town meeting, but the damage had been done.
A GOOD-HEARTED BULLY IS still a bully, but Nils Borkman was resented for other reasons. A former biathlete, Nils had introduced southern Vermont to his love of the biathlon--the curious sporting event that entails cross-country skiing and shooting. This was at a time before cross-country skiing had gained the popularity in the northeastern United States that the sport enjoys now. In Vermont, there already existed a few informed and determined zealots who were cross-country skiers in those days, but no one I knew skied with a loaded rifle on his (or her) back.
Nils had introduced his business partner, Harry Marshall, to hunting deer on cross-country skis. A kind of deer-hunting biathlon ensued; Nils and Harry silently skied down (and shot) a lot of deer. There was nothing illegal about it, although the local game warden--an unimaginative soul--had complained.
What the game warden should have complained about simply filled him with a complacent sullenness. His name was Chuck Beebe, and he ran a deer-checking station--a so-called biology station, where he compiled deer ages and measurements.
The first Saturday of deer season, the checking station was overrun with women, many of whom, if the weather was nice, were wearing open-toed shoes. The
women displayed other signs that they had not been deer-hunting, but there they were--lipstick and halter tops, and all--presenting Chuck Beebe with a stiffened deer, caked with congealed blood. The women had hunting licenses, and they'd been issued deer tags, but they had not, Chuck knew, shot these deer. Their husbands or fathers or brothers, or their boyfriends, had shot these deer on opening day, and those men were now out shooting more deer. (One deer tag, per licensed hunter, entitled you to shoot one deer.) "Where'd you shoot this here buck?" Chuck would ask one woman after another.
The women would say something like, "On the mountain." Or: "In the woods." Or: "In a field."
Grandpa Harry made Muriel and Mary do this--that is, claim that they had killed Harry's first two deer of the season. (Nana Victoria refused.) Uncle Bob had made my cousin Gerry do it--until Gerry was old enough to say she wouldn't. I had done it for Nils Borkman, on occasion--as had the elusive Mrs. Borkman.
Chuck Beebe had long accepted this perpetual fiction, but that Nils Borkman and Harry Marshall hunted deer on skis--well, that just struck the game warden as unfair.
Deer-hunting regulations were pretty primitive in Vermont--they still are. Shooting deer from a motorized vehicle is not permitted; almost anything else goes. There is a bow season, a rifle season, a black-powder season. "Why not a knife season?" Nils Borkman had asked, in an earlier, now-famous town meeting. "Why not a slingshot season? There are too many deers, right? We should kill more of them, yes?"
Nowadays, there are also too few hunters; their numbers decline each year. Over the years, deer-hunting regulations have attempted to address the deer-population problem, but the overpopulation has endured; nevertheless, there are townspeople in First Sister, Vermont, who remember Nils Borkman as a raving asshole for proposing a knife season and a slingshot season for "deers"--even though Nils was just kidding, of course.
I remember when you could shoot only buck, then buck and doe, then buck and just one doe--that is, if you had a special permit, and the buck couldn't be a spike-horn.
"How about we shoot out-of-staters, no limit?" Nils Borkman had once asked. (Limitless shooting of out-of-staters might have been a pretty popular proposal in Vermont, but Borkman was just kidding about the out-of-staters, too.) "Nils has a European sense of humor," Grandpa Harry had said, in defense of his old friend.
"European!" Nana Victoria had exclaimed with scorn--no, with more than scorn. My grandmother spoke of Borkman being European in a similar manner to how she might have expressed her disgust at Nils having dog shit on his shoes. But the way Nana Victoria said the European word was mild in comparison to how derisively she spat out the she word, the spittle foaming on her lips, whenever she spoke of Miss Frost.
You might say that, as a result of her not having actual sex with me, Miss Frost was banished from First Sister, Vermont; she would, like Elaine, be sent away "in stages," and the first stage of Miss Frost's removal from First Sister began with her being fired from the library.
After she'd lost her job, Miss Frost could not long afford to maintain her ailing mother in what had been their family home; the house would be sold, but this took a little time, and Miss Frost made the necessary arrangements to move her mom to that assisted-living facility Harry Marshall and Nils Borkman had built for the town.
It seems likely that Grandpa Harry and Nils probably gave Miss Frost a special deal, but it would not have been a deal of the magnitude of the one that Favorite River Academy made with Mrs. Kittredge--the deal that permitted Kittredge to stay in school and graduate, even though he had knocked up a faculty daughter who was underage. No one would offer Miss Frost a deal of that kind.
WHEN I HAPPENED UPON Aunt Muriel, she greeted me in her usual insincere fashion: "Oh, hi, Billy--how's everything? I hope all the normal pursuits of a young man your age are as gratifying to you as they should be!"
To which I would unfailingly respond, as follows: "There was no penetration--no what most people call sex, in other words. The way I look at it, Aunt Muriel, I'm still a virgin."
This must have sent Muriel running to my mother to complain about my reprehensible behavior.
As for my mom, she was subjecting both Richard and me to the "silent treatment"--not realizing, in my case, that I liked it when she didn't speak to me. In fact, I vastly preferred her not speaking to me to her constant and conventional disapproval; furthermore, that my mother now had nothing to say to me didn't prevent me from speaking to her first.
"Oh, hi, Mom--how's it going? I should tell you that, contrary to feeling violated, I feel that Miss Frost was protecting me--she truly prevented me from penetrating her, and I hope it goes without saying that she didn't penetrate me!"
I usually didn't get to say more than that before my mother would run into her bedroom and close the door. "Richard!" she would call, forgetting that she was giving Richard the "silent treatment" because he'd taken up Miss Frost's lost cause.
"No what most people call sex, Mom--that's what I'm telling you," I would continue saying to her, on the other side of her closed bedroom door. "What Miss Frost truly did to me amounted to nothing more than a fancy kind of masturbation. There's a special name for it and everything, but I'll spare you the details!"
"Stop it, Billy--stop it, stop it, stop it!" my mom would cry. (I guess she forgot that she was giving me the "silent treatment," too.) "Take it easy, Bill," Richard Abbott would caution me. "I think your mom is feeling pretty fragile these days."
"Pretty fragile these days," I repeated, looking straight at him--until Richard looked away.
"Trust me on this one, William," Miss Frost had said to me, when we were holding each other's penises. "Once you start repeating what people say to you, it's a hard habit to break."
But I didn't want to break that habit; it had been her habit, and I decided to embrace it.
"I'm not judging you, Billy," Mrs. Hadley said. "I can see for myself, without you belaboring the details, that your experience with Miss Frost has affected you in certain positive ways."
"Belaboring the details," I repeated. "Positive ways."
"However, Billy, I feel it is my duty to inform you that in a sexual situation of this awkward kind, there is an expectation, in the minds of many adults." Here Martha Hadley paused; so did I. I was considering repeating that bit about "in a sexual situation of this awkward kind," but Mrs. Hadley suddenly continued her arduous train of thought. "What many adults hope to hear you express, Billy, is something you have not, as yet, expressed."
"There is an expectation that I will express what?" I asked her.
"Remorse," Martha Hadley said.
"Remorse," I repeated, looking straight at her, until Mrs. Hadley looked away.
"The repetition thing is annoying, Billy," Martha Hadley said.
"Yes, isn't it?" I asked her.
"I'm sorry that they're making you see Dr. Harlow," she told me.
"Do you think Dr. Harlow is hoping to hear me express remorse?" I asked Mrs. Hadley.
"That would be my guess, Billy," she said.
"Thank you for telling me," I told her.
Atkins was on the music-building stairs again. "It's so very tragic," he started. "Last night, when I was thinking about it, I threw up."
"You were thinking about what?" I asked him.
"Giovanni's Room!" he cried; we'd already discussed the novel, but I gathered that poor Tom wasn't done. "That part about the smell of love--"
"The stink of love," I corrected him.
"The reek of it," Atkins said, gagging.
"It's stink, Tom."
"The stench," Atkins said, vomiting on the stairs.
"Jesus, Tom--"
"And that awful woman with the cavernous cunt!" Atkins cried.
"The what?" I asked him.
"The terrible girlfriend--you know who I mean, Bill."
"I guess that was the point of it, Tom--how someone he once desired now turns him off," I said.
"They smell like fish, you know," Atkins told m
e.
"Do you mean women?" I asked him.
He gagged again, then recovered himself. "I mean their things," Atkins said.
"Their vaginas, Tom?"
"Don't say that word!" poor Tom cried, retching.
"I have to go, Tom," I told him. "I have to prepare myself for a little chat with Dr. Harlow."
"Talk to Kittredge, Bill. They're always making Kittredge have a talk with Dr. Harlow. Kittredge knows how to handle Dr. Harlow," Atkins told me. I didn't doubt it; I just didn't want to talk to Kittredge about anything.
But, of course, Kittredge had heard about Miss Frost. Nothing of a sexual nature escaped him. If you were a boy at Favorite River and you received a restriction, Kittredge not only knew your crime; he knew who had caught you, and the terms of confinement your restriction entailed.
Not only was the public library off limits to me; I was told not to see Miss Frost--not that I knew where to find her. The whereabouts of the family home she'd shared with her mental-case mother were unknown to me. Besides, that house was for sale; for all I knew, Miss Frost (and her mom) had already moved out.
I did my homework, and what writing I could manage, in the yearbook room of the academy library. It was always a little before checkin when I passed, as quickly as I could, through the Bancroft Hall butt room, where both the smoking and the nonsmoking boys seemed uncharacteristically disturbed to see me. I suppose that my sexual reputation troubled them; whatever convenient pigeonhole they'd put me in might not be the right fit for me now.
If those boys had heretofore thought of me as a miserable faggot, what were they to make of my apparent friendship with Kittredge? And now there was this story about the transsexual town librarian. Okay, so she was some guy in drag; she wasn't a real woman, but she presented as a woman. Maybe more to the point, I had acquired an undeniable mystique--if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don't forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys--even if the older woman has a penis!
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true. The truth was, I hadn't had what most people call sex--there'd been no penetration! But those butt-room boys didn't know that, nor would they have believed it. In the minds of my fellow students at Favorite River Academy, Miss Frost and I had done everything.
