John Irving - In One Person

I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!

It suffices to say that the late eighties were a time of transition for Elaine and me, though some people apparently had nothing better to do than update the frigging gender language. It was a trying two years, and the financial effort to own and maintain that house on West Tenth Street—including the killer taxes—put a strain on our relationship.

One evening, Elaine told me the story that she was sure she’d spotted Charles, poor Tom’s nurse, in a room at St. Vincent’s. (I’d stopped hearing from Charles.) Elaine had peered into a doorway—she was looking for someone else—and there was this shriveled former bodybuilder, his wrinkled and ruined tattoos hanging illegibly from the stretched and sagging skin of his once-powerful arms.

“Charles?” Elaine had said from the doorway, but the man had roared like an animal at her; Elaine had been too frightened to go inside the room.

I was pretty sure I knew who it was—not Charles—but I went to St. Vincent’s to see for myself. It was the winter of ’88; I’d not been inside that last-stop hospital since Delacorte had died and Mrs. Delacorte had injected herself with his blood. I went one more time—just to be certain that the roaring animal Elaine had seen wasn’t Charles.

It was that terrifying bouncer from the Mineshaft, of course—the one they called Mephistopheles. He roared at me, too. I never set foot in St. Vincent’s again. (Hello, Charles—if you’re out there. If you’re not, I’m sorry.)

That same winter, one night when I was out with El, I was told another story. “I just heard about this girl—you know, she was like me but a little older,” El said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I think you knew her—she went to Toronto,” El said.

“Oh, you must mean Donna,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s her,” El said.

“What about her?” I asked.

“She’s not doing too well—that’s what I heard,” El told me.

“Oh.”

“I didn’t say she was sick, ” El said. “I just heard she’s not doing too well, whatever that means. I guess she was someone special to you, huh? I heard that, too.”

I didn’t do anything with this information, if you could call it that. But that night was when I got the call from Uncle Bob about Herm Hoyt dying at age ninety-five. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders,” Bob said.

No doubt, that must have distracted me from following up on El’s story about Donna. The next morning, Elaine and I had to open all the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke from Raymond burning his frigging toast, and I said to Elaine: “I’m going to Vermont. I have a house there, and I’m going to try living in it.”

“Sure, Billy—I understand,” Elaine said. “This is too much house for us, anyway—we should sell it.”

That clown Raymond just sat there, eating his burned toast. (As Elaine would say later, Raymond was probably wondering where he was going to live next; he must have known it wouldn’t be with Elaine.)

I said good-bye to El—either that same day or the next one. She wasn’t very understanding about it.

I called Richard Abbott and got Mrs. Hadley on the phone. “Tell Richard I’m going to try it,” I told her.

“I’ve got my fingers crossed for you, Billy—Richard and I would love it if you were living here,” Martha Hadley said.

That was why I was living in Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, now mine, on the morning Uncle Bob called me from the office of Alumni Affairs at the academy.

“It’s about Big Al, Billy,” Bob said. “This isn’t an obituary I would ever run, unedited, in The River Bulletin, but I gotta run the unedited version by you.”

It was February 1990 in First Sister—colder than a witch’s tit, as we say in Vermont.

Miss Frost was the same age as the Racquet Man; she’d died from injuries she suffered in a fight in a bar—she was seventy-three. The injuries were mostly head injuries, Uncle Bob told me. Big Al had found herself in a barroom brawl with a bunch of airmen from Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire. The bar had been in Dover, or maybe in Portsmouth—Bob didn’t have all the details.

“What’s ‘a bunch,’ Bob—how many airmen were there?” I asked him.

“Uh, well, there was one airman first-class, and one airman basic, and a couple more who were only identified by the airmen word—that’s all I can tell you, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

“ Young guys, right? Four of them? Were there four of them, Bob?” I asked him.

“Yes, four. I assume they were young, Billy—if they were enlisted men and still in service. But I’m just guessing about their ages,” Uncle Bob told me.

Miss Frost had probably received her head injuries after the four of them finally managed to get her down; I imagine it took two or three of them to hold her down, while the fourth man had kicked her in the head.

All four men had been hospitalized, Bob told me; the injuries to two of the four were listed as “serious.” But none of the airmen had been charged; at that time, Pease was still a SAC base. According to Uncle Bob, the Strategic Air Command “disciplined” its own, but Bob admitted that he didn’t truly understand how the “legal stuff” (when it came to the military) really worked. The four airmen were never identified by name, nor was there any information as to why four young men had a fight with a seventy-three-year-old woman, who—in their eyes—may or may not have been acceptable as a woman .

My guess, and Bob’s, was that Miss Frost might have had a past relationship—or just a previous meeting—with one or more of the airmen. Maybe, as Herm Hoyt had speculated to me, one of the fellas had objected to the intercrural sex; he might have found it insufficient. Perhaps, given how young the airmen were, they knew of Miss Frost only “by reputation”; it might have been enough provocation to them that she was, in their minds, not a real woman—it might have been only that. (Or they were frigging homophobes—it might have been only that, too.)

Whatever led to the altercation, it was apparent—as Coach Hoyt had predicted—that Big Al would never back down from a fight.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

Later, Bob and I agreed we were glad that Herm Hoyt hadn’t lived to hear about it. I called Elaine in New York that night. She had her own small place in Chelsea, just a little northwest of the West Village and due north of the Meatpacking District. I told Elaine about Miss Frost, and I asked her to sing me that Mendelssohn song—the one she’d said she was saving for me, the same one she’d sung for Larry.

“I promise I won’t die on your shift, Elaine. You’ll never have to sing that song for me. Besides, I need to hear it now,” I told her.

As for the Mendelssohn song, Elaine explained it was a small part of Elijah —Mendelssohn’s longest work. It comes near the end of that oratorio, after God arrives (in the voice of a small child), and the angels sing blessings to Elijah, who sings his last aria—“For the Mountains Shall Depart.” That’s what Elaine sang to me; her alto voice was big and strong, even over the phone, and I said good-bye to Miss Frost, listening to the same music I’d heard when I was saying good-bye to Larry. Miss Frost had been lost to me for almost thirty years, but that night I knew she was gone for good, and all that Uncle Bob would say about her in The River Bulletin wasn’t nearly enough.