by John Irving
"It wasn't my idea, Billy," Mrs. Hadley said. "It was Richard's idea to introduce you to Amanda, because she is such a fan of your writing. I never thought it was a good idea--she's way too young for you, and she's anxious about everything. I can only imagine that, because you are bi--well, that's got to keep Amanda awake at night. She can't pronounce the word bisexual!"
"Oh."
That's what was going on in my life when Uncle Bob called me about Kittredge. That's why I said, half seriously, I had "nothing but mud season to look forward to"--nothing except my writing. (Moving to Vermont had been good for my writing.)
The account of Kittredge's death had been submitted to the Office of Alumni Affairs by Mrs. Kittredge.
"Do you mean he had a wife, or do you mean his mother?" I asked Uncle Bob.
"Kittredge had a wife, Billy, but we heard from the mother."
"Jesus--how old would Mrs. Kittredge be?" I asked Bob.
"She's only seventy-two," my uncle answered; Uncle Bob was seventy-eight, and he sounded a little insulted by my question. Elaine had told me that Mrs. Kittredge had only been eighteen when Kittredge was born.
According to Bob--that is, according to Mrs. Kittredge--my former heartthrob and tormentor had died in Zurich, Switzerland, "of natural causes."
"Bullshit, Bob," I said. "Kittredge was only a year older than I am--he was fifty-four. What 'natural causes' can kill you when you're fifty-fucking-four?"
"My thoughts exactly, Billy--but that's what his mom said," the Racquet Man replied.
"From what I've heard, I'll bet Kittredge died of AIDS," I said.
"What mother of Mrs. Kittredge's generation would be likely to tell her son's old school that?" Uncle Bob asked me. (Indeed, Sue Atkins had reported only that Tom Atkins had died "after a long illness.")
"You said Kittredge had a wife," I replied to my uncle.
"He is survived by his wife and his son--an only child--and by his mother, of course," the Racquet Man told me. "The boy is named after his father--another Jacques. The wife has a German-sounding name. You studied German, didn't you, Billy? What kind of name is Irmgard?" Uncle Bob asked.
"Definitely German-sounding," I said.
If Kittredge had wasted away in Zurich--even if he'd died in Switzerland "of natural causes"--possibly his wife was Swiss, but Irmgard was a German name. Boy, was that ever a tough Christian name to carry around! It was terribly old-fashioned; one immediately felt the stiffness of the person wearing that heavy name. I thought it was a suitable name for an elderly schoolmistress, a strict disciplinarian.
I was guessing that the only child, the son named Jacques, would have been born sometime in the early seventies; that would have been right on schedule for the kind of career-oriented young man I imagined Kittredge was, in those early years--given the MFA from Yale, given his first few steps along a no doubt bright and shining career path in the world of drama. Only at the appropriate time would Kittredge have paused, and found a wife. And then what? How had things unraveled after that?
"That fucker--God damn him!" Elaine cried, when I told her Kittredge had died. She was furious--it was as if Kittredge had escaped, somehow. She couldn't speak about the "of natural causes" bullshit, not to mention the wife. "He can't get away with this!" Elaine cried.
"Elaine--he died. He didn't get away with anything," I said, but Elaine cried and cried.
Unfortunately, it was one of the few nights when Amanda didn't have dorm duty; she was staying with me in the River Street house, and so I had to tell her about Kittredge, and Elaine, and all the rest.
No doubt, this history was more bi--and gay, and "transgender" (as Amanda would say)--in nature than anything Amanda had been forced to imagine, although she kept saying how much she loved my writing, where she'd no doubt encountered a world of sexual "differences" (as Richard would say).
I blame myself for not saying anything to Amanda about the frigging ghosts in that River Street house; only other people saw them--they never bothered me! But Amanda got up to go to the bathroom--it was the middle of the night--and her screaming woke me. It was a brand-new bathtub in that bathroom--it was not the same tub Grandpa Harry had pulled the trigger in, just the same bathroom--but, when Amanda finally calmed down enough to tell me what happened (when she was sitting on the toilet), it had no doubt been Harry she'd seen in that brand-new bathtub.
"He was curled up like a little boy in the bathtub--he smiled at me when I was peeing!" Amanda, who was still sobbing, explained.
"I'm really sorry," I said.
"But he was no little boy!" Amanda moaned.
"No, he wasn't--that was my grandfather," I tried to tell her calmly. Oh, that Harry--he certainly loved a new audience, even as a ghost! (Even as a man!)
"At first, I didn't see the rifle--but he wanted me to see it, Billy. He showed me the gun, and then he shot himself in the head--his head went all over the place!" Amanda wailed.
Naturally, I had some explaining to do; I had to tell her everything about Grandpa Harry. We were up all night. Amanda would not go to the bathroom by herself in the morning--she wouldn't even be alone in one of the other bathrooms, which I'd suggested. I understood; I was very understanding. I've never seen a frigging ghost--I'm sure they're frightening.
I guess the last straw, as I would later explain to Mrs. Hadley and Richard, was that Amanda was so rattled in the morning--after all, the anxious young woman hadn't had a good night's sleep--she opened the door to my bedroom closet, thinking she was opening the door to the upstairs hall. And there was Grandpa Harry's .30-30 Mossberg; I keep that old carbine in my closet, where it just leans against a wall.
Amanda screamed and screamed--Christ, she wouldn't stop screaming. "You kept the actual gun--you keep it in your bedroom closet! Who would ever keep the very same gun his grandfather used to blow himself all over the bathroom, Billy?" Amanda yelled at me.
"Amanda has a point about the gun, Bill," Richard would say to me, when I told him that Amanda and I were no longer seeing each other.
"Nobody wants you to have that gun, Billy," Martha Hadley said.
"If you get rid of the gun, maybe the ghosts will leave, Billy," Elaine told me.
But those ghosts have never appeared to me; I think you have to be receptive to see ghosts like that, and I guess I'm not "receptive" in that way. I have my own ghosts--my own "terrifying angels," as I (more than once) have thought of them--but my ghosts don't live in that River Street house in First Sister, Vermont.
I would go to Mexico, alone, that mud season of 1995. I rented a house Elaine told me about in Playa del Carmen. I drank a lot of cerveza, and I picked up a handsome, swashbuckling-looking guy with a pencil-thin mustache and dark sideburns; honestly, he looked like one of the actors who played Zorro--one of the old black-and-white versions. We had fun, we drank a lot more cerveza, and when I came back to Vermont, it was almost looking like spring.
Not much would happen to me--not for fifteen years--except that I became a teacher. The private schools--you're supposed to call them "independent" schools, but I still let the private word slip out--aren't so strict about the retirement age. Richard Abbott wouldn't retire from Favorite River Academy until he was in his early seventies, and even after he retired, Richard went to all the productions of the school's Drama Club.
Richard wasn't very happy about his various replacements--well, nobody was happy about that lackluster bunch of buffoons. There wasn't anyone in the English Department who had Richard's feelings for Shakespeare, and there was no one who knew shit about theater. Martha Hadley and Richard were all over me to get involved at the academy.
"The kids read your novels, Billy," Richard kept telling me.
"Especially--you know--the kids who are sexually different, Billy," Mrs. Hadley said; she was still working with individual "cases" (as she called them) in her eighties.
It was from Elaine that I first heard there were groups for lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender kids on college campuses. It was Richard A
bbott--in his late seventies--who told me there was even such a group of kids at Favorite River Academy. It was hard for a bi guy of my generation to imagine such organized and recognized groups. (They were becoming so common, these groups were known by their initials. When I first heard about this, I couldn't believe it.)
When Elaine was teaching at NYU, she invited me to come give a reading from a new novel to the LGBT group on campus. (I was so out of it; it took me days of reciting those initials before I could keep them in the correct order.)
It would have been the fall term of 2007 at Favorite River Academy when Mrs. Hadley told me there was someone special she and Richard wanted me to meet. I immediately thought it was a new teacher at the academy--someone in the English Department, either a pretty woman or a cute guy, I guessed, or possibly this "special" person had just been hired to breathe a hope of new life into the failing, all-but-expired Drama Club at Favorite River.
I was remembering Amanda--that's where I thought this match-making enterprise of Martha Hadley's (and Richard's) was headed. But, no--not at my age. I was sixty-five in the fall of 2007. Mrs. Hadley and Richard weren't trying to fix me up. Martha Hadley was a spry eighty-seven, but one slip on the ice or in the snow--one bad fall, a broken hip--and she would be checking into the Facility. (Mrs. Hadley would soon be checking in there, anyway.) And Richard Abbott was no longer leading-man material; at seventy-seven, Richard had come partway out of retirement to teach a Shakespeare course at Favorite River, but he didn't have the stamina to put Shakespeare onstage anymore. Richard was just reading the plays with some first-year kids at the academy; all of them were starting freshmen at the school. (Kids in the Class of 2011! I couldn't imagine being that young again!)
"We want to introduce you to a new student, Bill," Richard said; he was rather indignant at the very idea of him (or Martha) finding me a likely date.
"A new freshman, Billy--someone special," Mrs. Hadley said.
"Someone with pronunciation problems, you mean?" I asked Martha Hadley.
"We're not trying to fix you up with a teacher, Bill. We think you should be a teacher," Richard said.
"We want you to meet one of the new LGBT kids, Billy," Mrs. Hadley told me.
"Sure--why not?" I said. "I don't know about being a teacher, but I'll meet the kid. Boy or girl?" I remember asking Martha Hadley and Richard. They just looked at each other.
"Ah, well--" Richard started to say, but Mrs. Hadley interrupted him.
Martha Hadley took my hands in hers, and squeezed them. "Boy or girl, Billy," she said. "Well, that's the question. That's why we want you to meet him, or her--that's the question."
"Oh," I said. That was how and why I became a teacher.
THE RACQUET MAN WAS ninety when he checked into the Facility; this followed two hip-replacement surgeries, and a fall downstairs when he was supposed to be healing from the second surgery. "I'm starting to feel like an old fella, Billy," Bob told me when I went to visit him in the Facility in the autumn of 2007--the same September Mrs. Hadley and Richard introduced me to the LGBT kid, the one who would change my life.
Uncle Bob was recovering from pneumonia--the result of being bedridden for a period of time after he fell. From the AIDS epidemic, I still had a vivid memory of that pneumonia--the one so many people never recovered from. I was happy to see Bob up and about, but he'd decided he was staying at the Facility.
"I gotta let these folks look after me, Billy," the Racquet Man said. I understood how he felt; Muriel had been gone for almost thirty years, and Gerry, who was sixty-eight, had just started living with a new girlfriend in California.
"Vagina Lady," which had been Elaine's name for Helena, was long gone. No one had met Gerry's new girlfriend, but Gerry had written me about her. She was "only" my age, Gerry told me--as if the girl were under the age of consent.
"The next thing you know, Billy," Uncle Bob told me, "they'll start legalizing same-sex marriage all over the place, and Gerry will be marrying her next new girlfriend. If I stay put in the Facility, Gerry will have to get married in Vermont!" the Racquet Man exclaimed, as if the very idea of that ever happening was beyond credibility.
Thus assured that my ninety-year-old uncle Bob was safe at the Facility, I made my way to Noah Adams Hall, which was the building for English and foreign-language studies at Favorite River; I was meeting the "special" new student in Richard's ground-floor office, which was adjacent to Richard's classroom. Mrs. Hadley was also meeting us there.
To my horror, Richard's office hadn't changed; it was awful. There was a fake-leather couch that smelled worse than any dog bed you've ever smelled; there were three or four straight-backed wooden chairs, of the kind with those arms that have a flat mini-desk for writing. There was Richard's desk, which was always a mountain of upheaval; a pile of opened books and loose papers obscured the writing surface. Richard's desk chair was on casters, so that Richard could slide all around his office in a seated position--which, to the students' general amusement, Richard did.
What had changed at Favorite River, since my days at the formerly all-boys' school, was not only the girls--it was the dress code. If there was one in 2007, I couldn't tell you what it was; coats and ties were no longer required. There was some vague rule against "torn" jeans--this meant jeans that were tattered or slashed. There was a rule that you couldn't come to the dining hall in your pajamas, and another one, which was always being protested, that concerned the girls' bare midriffs--how much midriff could be bare was the issue. Oh, and so-called plumbers' cracks were deemed offensive--this was most offensive, I was told, when the "cracks" belonged to the boys. Both the girls' bare midriffs and the boys' plumbers' cracks were hotly debated rules, which were constantly under revision in infinitesimal ways. They were sexually discriminatory rules, the students said; girls' midriffs and boys' cracks were being singled out as "bad."
Here I'd been expecting Martha and Richard's "special" student to be some cutting-edge hermaphrodite--a kind of alluring-to-everyone melange of reproductive organs, a he or a she as sexually beguiling as the mythological combination of a nymph and a satyr in a Fellini film--but there in Richard's office, slouched on that dog bed of a couch, was a sloppily dressed, slightly overweight boy with a brightly inflamed pimple on his neck and only the spottiest evidence of a prepubescent beard. That zit was almost as angry-looking as the boy himself. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed--either in resentment or due to the effort he was making to scrutinize me more closely.
"Hi, I'm Bill Abbott," I said to the boy.
"This is George--" Mrs. Hadley started to say.
"Georgia," the boy quickly corrected her. "I'm Georgia Montgomery--the kids call me Gee."
"Gee," I repeated.
"Gee will do for now," the boy said, "but I'm going to be Georgia. This isn't my body," he said angrily. "I'm not what you see. I'm becoming someone else."
"Okay," I said.
"I came to this school because you went here," the boy told me.
"Gee was in school in California," Richard started to explain.
"I thought there might be other transgender kids here," Gee told me, "but there aren't--nobody who's out, anyway."
"His parents--" Mrs. Hadley tried to tell me.
"Her parents," Gee corrected Martha.
"Gee's parents are very liberal," Martha said to me. "They support you, don't they?" Mrs. Hadley asked the boy--or the girl-in-progress, if that's who he or she was.
"My parents are liberal, and they do support me," Gee said, "but my parents are also afraid of me--they say 'yes' to everything, like my coming all the way to Vermont."
"I see," I said.
"I've read all your books," Gee told me. "You're pretty angry, aren't you? You're pretty pessimistic, anyway. You don't see all the sexual intolerance ending anytime soon, do you?" the boy asked me.
"I write fiction," I cautioned him. "I'm not necessarily as pessimistic about real life as I am when I make up a story."
"You seem pretty a
ngry," the boy insisted.
"We should leave these two alone, Richard," Mrs. Hadley said.
"Yes, yes--you're on your own, Bill," Richard said, patting me on the back. "Ask Bill to tell you about a transsexual he knew, Gee," Richard said to the girl-in-progress, as he was leaving.
"Transgender," Gee corrected Richard.
"Not to me," I told the kid. "I know the language changes; I know I'm an old man, and out of date. But the person I knew was a transsexual to me. At that time, that's who she was. I say 'transsexual.' If you want to hear the story, you'll just have to get used to that. Don't correct my language," I told the kid. He just sat there on that smelly couch, staring at me. "I'm a liberal, too," I told him, "but I don't say 'yes' to everything."
"We're reading The Tempest in Richard's class," Gee said--apropos of nothing, or so I thought. "It's too bad we can't put it onstage," the boy added, "but Richard has assigned us parts to read in class. I'm Caliban--I'm the monster, naturally."
"I was Ariel once," I told him. "I saw my grandfather do Caliban onstage; he played Caliban as a woman," I said to the girl-in-progress.
"Really?" the kid asked me; he smiled for the first time, and I could suddenly see it. He had a pretty girl's smile; it was hidden in the boy's unformed face, and further concealed by his sloppy boy's body, but I could see the her in him. "Tell me about the transgender you knew," the kid told me.
"Transsexual," I said.
"Okay--please tell me about her," Gee asked me.
"It's a long story, Gee--I was in love with her," I told him--I told her, I should say.
"Okay," she repeated.
Later that day, we went together to the dining hall. The kid was only fourteen, and she was famished. "You see that jock over there?" Gee asked me; I couldn't see which jock Gee meant, because there was a whole table of them--football players, from the look of them. I just nodded.
"He calls me Tampon, or sometimes just George--not Gee. Needless to say, never Georgia," the kid said, smiling.
"Tampon is pretty terrible," I told the girl.
"Actually, I prefer it to George," Gee told me. "You know, Mr. A., you could probably direct The Tempest, couldn't you--if you wanted to? That way, we could put Shakespeare onstage."
No one had ever called me Mr. A.; I must have liked it. I'd already decided that if Gee wanted to be a girl this badly, she had to be one. I wanted to direct The Tempest, too.
