by John Irving
"Motherfucking Christ," Gerry said to me on that Christmas Day, 1960. "Isn't it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depresses the shit out of me, and I'm neither suicidal nor Norwegian!"
On that warmhearted note, I decided to introduce Gerry to the mysterious subject of the missing 1940 Owl, which--according to Mr. Lockley's records--Uncle Bob had checked out of the academy library and had not returned.
"I don't know what your dad is doing with that yearbook," I told Gerry, "but I want it."
"What's in it?" Gerry asked me.
"Some members of our illustrious family don't want me to see what's in it," I said to Gerry.
"Don't sweat it. I'll find the fucking yearbook--I'm dying to see what's in it myself," Gerry told me.
"It's probably something of a delicate nature," I said to her.
"Ha!" Gerry cried. "Nothing I get my hands on is 'of a delicate nature' for very long!"
When I repeated what she'd said to Elaine, my dear friend remarked: "The very idea of having sex with Gerry is nauseating to me."
To me, too, I almost told Elaine. But that's not what I said. I thought my sexual forecast was cloudy; I wasn't at all sure about my sexual future. "Sexual desire is pretty specific," I said to Elaine, "and it's usually pretty decisive, isn't it?"
"I guess so," Elaine answered. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that, in the past, my sexual desire has been very specific--my attraction to someone very decisive," I said to Elaine. "But all that seems to be changing. Your breasts, for example--I love them specifically, because they're yours, not just because they're small. Those dark parts," I tried to tell her.
"The areolae," Elaine said.
"Yes, I love those parts. And kissing you--I love kissing you," I told her.
"Jesus--now you tell me, Billy!" Elaine said.
"I only know it now--I'm changing, Elaine, but I'm not at all sure how," I told her. "By the way, I wonder if you would give me one of your bras--my mother cut up the old one."
"She did?" Elaine cried.
"Maybe there's one you've outgrown, or you're just tired of it," I said to her.
"My stupid breasts grew only a little, even when I was pregnant," she told me. "Now I think I've stopped growing. You can have as many of my bras as you want, Billy," Elaine said.
One night, after Christmas, we were in my bedroom--with the door open, of course. Our parents were seeing a movie together in Ezra Falls; we'd been invited to join them, but we hadn't wanted to go. Elaine had just started kissing me, and I was fondling her breasts--I'd managed to get one of her breasts out of her bra--when there was a pounding on the apartment door.
"Open the fucking door, Billy!" my cousin Gerry was shouting. "I know your parents and the Hadleys are at a movie--my asshole parents went with them!"
"Jesus--it's that awful girl!" Elaine whispered. "She's got the yearbook, I'll bet you."
It hadn't taken Gerry long to find the '40 Owl. Uncle Bob may have been the one to check it out of the academy library, but Gerry found the yearbook under her mother's side of the bed. It had doubtless been my aunt Muriel's idea to keep the yearbook of that graduating class away from me, or maybe Muriel and my mom had cooked up the idea together. Uncle Bob was just doing what those Winthrop women had told him to do; according to Miss Frost, Uncle Bob had been a pussy before he was pussy-whipped.
"I don't know what the big deal is," Gerry said, handing me the yearbook. "So it's your runaway father's graduating class--so fucking what!"
"My dad went to Favorite River?" I asked Gerry. I'd known that William Francis Dean was a Harvard-boy at fifteen, but no one had told me he'd gone to Favorite River before that. "He must have met my mother here, in First Sister!" I said.
"So fucking what!" Gerry said. "What's it matter where they met?"
But my mom was older than my dad; this meant that William Francis Dean had been even younger than I thought when they first met. If he'd graduated from Favorite River in 1940--and he'd been only fifteen when he started his freshman year at Harvard in the fall of that same year--he might have been only twelve or thirteen when they met. He could have been a prepubescent boy.
"So fucking what!" Gerry kept saying. She'd obviously not looked over the yearbook in close detail, nor had she seen those earlier yearbooks ('37, '38, '39), where there might have been photographs of William Francis Dean when he was only twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. How had I overlooked him? If he'd been a four-year senior in '40, he could have started at Favorite River in the fall of 1936--when William Francis Dean would have been only eleven!
What if my mom had known him then, when he'd been an eleven-year-old? Their "romance," such as it was, might have been vastly different from the one I'd imagined.
"Did you see anything of the alleged womanizer in him?" I asked Gerry, as Elaine and I quickly searched through the head shots of the graduating seniors in the Class of 1940.
"Who said he was a womanizer?" Gerry asked me.
"I thought you did," I said, "or maybe it was something you heard your mother say about him."
"I don't remember the womanizer word," Gerry told me. "All I heard about him was that he was kind of a pansy."
"A pansy," I repeated.
"Jesus--the repetition, Billy. It's got to stop," Elaine said.
"He wasn't a pansy!" I said indignantly. "He was a womanizer--my mom caught him kissing someone else!"
"Yeah--some other boy, maybe," my cousin Gerry said. "That's what I heard, anyway, and he sure looks like a poofter to me."
"Like a poofter!" I cried.
"My dad said your dad was as flaming a fag as he ever saw," Gerry said.
"As flaming a fag," I repeated.
"Dear God, Billy--please stop it!" Elaine said.
There he was: William Francis Dean, as pretty a boy as I'd ever seen; he could have passed for a girl, with a whole lot less effort than Miss Frost had put into her transformation. It was easy to see why I might have missed him in those earlier yearbooks. William Francis Dean looked like me; his features were so familiar to me that I must have skipped over him without really seeing him. His choice of college or university: "Harvard." His career path: "performer."
"Performer," I repeated. (This was before Elaine and I had seen any other photographs; we'd seen only the requisite head shot.) William Francis Dean's nickname was "Franny."
"Franny," I repeated.
"Look, Billy--I thought you knew," Gerry was saying. "My dad always said it was a double whammy."
"What was?" I asked her.
"It was a double whammy that you would be queer," Gerry told me. "You had Grandpa Harry's homo genes on the maternal side of your family, and on the paternal side--well, shit, just look at him!" Gerry said, pointing to the picture of the pretty boy in the Class of '40. "On the paternal side of your frigging gene pool, you had flaming Franny Dean! That's a double fucking whammy," Gerry said. "No wonder Grandpa Harry adored the guy."
"Flaming Franny," I repeated.
I was reading William Francis Dean's abbreviated bio in the '40 Owl. Drama Club (4). I had little doubt that Franny would have had strictly women's roles--I couldn't wait to see those photos. Wrestling team, manager (4). Naturally, he'd not been a wrestler--just the manager, the guy who made sure the wrestlers had water and oranges, and a bucket to spit in, and all the handing out and picking up of towels that a wrestling-team manager has to do.
"Genetically speaking, Billy, you were up against a stacked deck," Gerry was saying. "My dad's not the sharpest saw in the mill, but you were dealt the double-whammy card, for sure."
"Jesus, Gerry--that's enough for now," Elaine said. "Would you just leave us, please?"
"Anyone would know you've been making out, Elaine," Gerry told her. "Your tits are so small--one of them's fallen out of your bra, and you don't even know."
"I love Elaine's breasts," I said to my cousin. "Fuck you, Gerry, for not telling me what I never knew.
"
"I thought you did know, asshole!" Gerry shouted at me. "Shit, Billy--how could you not know? It's so fucking obvious! How could you be as queer as you are and not know?"
"That's not fair, Gerry!" Elaine was shouting, but Gerry was gone. She left the door to the dormitory hall wide open when she went. That was okay with Elaine and me; we left the apartment shortly after Gerry. We wanted to get to the academy library while it was still open; we wanted to see all the photos we could find of William Francis Dean in those earlier yearbooks, where I had missed him.
Now I knew where to look: Franny Dean would be the prettiest girl in the Drama Club pictures, in the '37, '38, and '39 Owl; he would be the most effeminate-looking boy in the wrestling-team photos, where he would not be bare-chested and wearing wrestling tights. (He would be wearing a jacket and a tie, the standard dress code in those years for the wrestling-team manager.) Before Elaine and I went to the old yearbook room in the academy library, we took the '40 Owl up to the fifth floor of Bancroft Hall, where we hid it in Elaine's bedroom. Her parents didn't search through her things, Elaine had told me. She had caught them at it, shortly after she'd returned from her trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine suspected them of trying to discover if she was having sex with anyone else.
After that, Elaine put condoms everywhere in her room. Naturally, Mrs. Kittredge had given her the condoms. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Hadley took the condoms as a sign that Elaine was being sexually active with an army of boys; more likely, I knew, Mrs. Hadley was smarter than that. Martha Hadley probably knew what the plethora of condoms meant: Stay the fuck out of my room! (After that one time, Mr. and Mrs. Hadley did.) The '40 Owl was safe in Elaine Hadley's bedroom, if not in mine. Elaine and I could look at all the photos of flaming Franny Dean in that yearbook, but we both wanted to see the pictures of the younger William Francis Dean first. We would have the rest of our Christmas vacation to learn everything we could about the Favorite River Class of 1940.
OVER THAT SAME CHRISTMAS dinner of 1960, when I'd asked Gerry to get me the '40 Owl, Nils Borkman had managed a moment--when we were briefly alone--to confide in me.
"Your librarian friend--they are roadrailing her, Bill!" Borkman whispered harshly to me.
"Railroading her--yes," I said.
"They are stereo sex-types!" Borkman exclaimed.
"Sexual stereotypes?" I asked.
"Yes--that's what I said!" the Norwegian dramaturge declared. "It's a pity--I had the perfect parts for you two," the director whispered. "But of course I cannot put Miss Frost onstage--the Puritan sex-types would stone her, or something!"
"The perfect parts in what?" I asked.
"He is the American Ibsen!" Nils Borkman cried. "He is the new Ibsen, from your backward American South!"
"Who is?" I asked.
"Tennessee Williams--the most important playwright since Ibsen," Borkman reverentially intoned.
"What play is it?" I asked.
"Summer and Smoke," Nils answered, trembling. "The repressed female character has another woman smoldering inside her."
"I see," I said. "That would be the Miss Frost character?"
"Miss Frost would have been a perfect Alma!" Nils cried.
"But now--" I started to say; Borkman wouldn't let me finish.
"Now I have no choice--it's Mrs. Fremont as Alma, or nobody," Nils muttered darkly. I knew "Mrs. Fremont" as Aunt Muriel.
"I think Muriel can do repressed," I told Nils encouragingly.
"But Muriel doesn't smolder, Bill," Nils whispered.
"No, she doesn't," I agreed. "What was my part going to be?" I asked him.
"It's still yours, if you want it," Nils told me. "It's a small role--it won't interfere with your work-home."
"My homework," I corrected him.
"Yes--that's what I said!" the Norwegian dramaturge declared again. "You play a traveling salesman, a young one. You make a pass at the Alma character in the last scene of the play."
"I make a pass at my aunt Muriel, you mean," I said to the ardent director.
"But not onstage--don't worry!" Borkman cried. "The hanky-panky is all imagined; the repetitious sexual activity happens later, offstage."
I was pretty sure that Nils Borkman didn't mean the sexual activity was "repetitious"--not even offstage.
"Surreptitious sexual activity?" I asked the director.
"Yes, but there's no hanky-panky with your auntie onstage!" Borkman assured me, excitedly. "It just would have been so symbolic if Alma could have been Miss Frost."
"So suggestive, you mean?" I asked him.
"Suggestive and symbolic!" Borkman exclaimed. "But with Muriel, we stick to the suggestive--if you know what I mean."
"Maybe I could read the play first--I don't even know my character's name," I said to Nils.
"I have a copy for you," Borkman whispered. The paperback was badly beaten up--the pages had come unglued from the binding, as if the excitable director had read the little book to death. "Your name is Archie Kramer, Bill," Borkman informed me. "The young salesman is supposed to wear a derby hat, but in your case we can piss-dense with the derby!"
"Dispense with the derby," I repeated. "As a salesman, what do I sell?"
"Shoes," Nils told me. "In the end, you're taking Alma on a date to a casino--you have the last line in the play, Bill!"
"Which is?" I asked the director.
" 'Taxi!' " Borkman shouted.
Suddenly, we were no longer alone. The Christmas-dinner crowd was startled by Nils Borkman shouting for a taxi. My mother and Richard Abbott were staring at the paperback copy of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, which I held in my hands; no doubt they feared it was a sequel to Giovanni's Room.
"You want a taxi, Nils?" Grandpa Harry asked his old friend. "Didn't you come in your own car?"
"It's all right, Harry--Bill and I were just shop-talking," Nils explained to his colleague.
"That would be 'talkin' shop,' Nils," Grandpa Harry said.
"What part does Grandpa Harry have?" I asked the Norwegian dramaturge.
"You haven't offered me a part in anything, Nils," Grandpa Harry said.
"Well, I was about to!" Borkman cried. "Your grandfather would be a brilliant Mrs. Winemiller--Alma's mother," the wily director said to me.
"If you do it, I'll do it," I said to Grandpa Harry. It would be the spring production for the First Sister Players, the premiere of a serious drama in the spring--my last onstage performance before my departure from First Sister and that summer in Europe with Tom Atkins. It would not be for Richard Abbott and the Drama Club, but I would sing my swan song for Nils Borkman and the First Sister Players--the last time my mother would have the occasion to prompt me.
I liked the idea of it already--even before I read the play. I'd only glanced at the title page, where Tennessee Williams had included an epigraph from Rilke. The Rilke was good enough for me. "Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?" It seemed that, everywhere I looked, I just kept happening upon Rilke's terrifying angels. I wondered if Kittredge knew the German.
"Okay, Bill--if you do it, I'll do it," Grandpa Harry said; we shook on it.
Later, I found a discreet way to ask Nils if he'd already signed up Aunt Muriel and Richard Abbott in the Alma and John roles. "Don't worry, Bill," Borkman told me. "I have Muriel and Richard in my pocket-back!"
"In your back pocket--yes," I said to the crafty deerstalker on skis.
That Christmastime night when Elaine and I ran across the deserted Favorite River campus to the academy library--on our eager way to the old yearbook room--we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course, and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.) It being Christmas break, I did not necessarily expect to see Mr. Lockley at the check-out desk of the academy library, but there he was--as if it were a working night, or perhaps the alleged "nonpracticing homosex
ual" (as Mr. Lockley was called, behind his back) had nothing else to do.
"No luck with Uncle Bob finding the '40 Owl, huh?" I asked him.
"Mr. Fremont believes he returned it, but he did not--that is, not to my knowledge," Mr. Lockley stiffly replied.
"I'll just keep bugging him about it," I said.
"You do that, Billy," Mr. Lockley said sternly. "Mr. Fremont does not often frequent the library."
"I'll bet he doesn't," I said, smiling.
Mr. Lockley did not smile--certainly not at Elaine, anyway. He was one of those older men who lived alone; he would not take kindly to the coming two decades--by which time most (if not all) of the all-boys' boarding schools in New England would finally become coeducational.
In my estimation, coeducation would have a humanizing effect on those boarding schools; Elaine and I could testify that boys treat other boys better when there are girls around, and the girls are not as mean to one another in the presence of boys.
I know, I know--there are those diehards who maintain that single-sex education was more rigorous, or less distracting, and that coeducation came with a cost--a loss of "purity," I've heard the Mr. Lockleys of the boarding-school world argue. (Less concentration on "academics," they usually mean.) That Christmastime night, all Mr. Lockley could manage to direct to Elaine was a minimally cordial bow--as if he were saying the unutterable, "Good evening, knocked-up faculty daughter. How are you managing now, you smelly little slut?"
But Elaine and I went about our business, paying no attention to Mr. Lockley. We were alone in the yearbook room--and more alone than usual in the otherwise abandoned academy library. Those old Owls from '37, '38, and '39 beckoned us, and we soon found much to marvel about in their revealing pages.
WILLIAM FRANCIS DEAN WAS a smiling little boy in the 1937 Owl, when he would have been twelve. He seemed a charmingly elfin manager of the 1936-37 wrestling team, and the only other evidence Elaine and I could find of him was as the prettiest little girl in the Drama Club photos of that long-ago academic year--a scant five years before I would be born.
