John Irving - In One Person

“We heard about you beating up some boy,” my father said.

“Say this later, Franny,” Mr. Bovary pleaded with him.

“You beat up a kid at school—rather recently, wasn’t it?” my dad asked me. “Bob told me about it. The Racquet Man was quite proud of you for it, but I found it upsetting. You didn’t get violence from me—you didn’t get aggression . I wonder if all that anger doesn’t come from those Winthrop women, ” he told me.

“He was a big kid,” I said. “He was nineteen, a football player—a fucking bully.”

But my father and Señor Bovary looked as though they were ashamed of me. I was on the verge of explaining Gee to them—how she’d been only fourteen, a boy becoming a girl, and the nineteen-year-old thug had hit her in the face, bloodying her nose—but I suddenly thought that I didn’t owe these disapproving old queens an explanation. I didn’t give a shit about that football player.

“He called me a fag, ” I told them. I guessed that would make them sniffy.

“Oh, did you hear that?” my dad asked the love of his life. “Not the fag word! Can you imagine being called a fag and not beating the shit out of someone?” my father asked his lover.

“Nicer—try being nicer, Franny,” Bovary said, but I saw that he was smiling. They were a cute couple, but prissy—made for each other, as they say.

My dad stood up and hooked his thumbs into the tight waistband of his girdle. “If you gentlemen would be so kind as to give me a little privacy, ” he said. “This ridiculous undergarment is killing me.”

I went back to the bar with Bovary, but there would be no hope of further conversation there; the skinny gay boys had multiplied, in part because there were more older men by themselves at the bar. There was an all-boys’ band playing in a pink strobe light, and men and boys were dancing together out on the dance floor; some of the T-girls were dancing, too, either with a boy or with one another.

When my father joined us at the bar, he was the picture of masculine conformity; in addition to those athletic-looking sandals (like Bovary’s), my dad was wearing a tan-colored sports jacket with a dark-brown handkerchief in the breast pocket of the jacket. The murmur of “Franny!” passed through the crowd as we were leaving the club.

We were walking on Hortaleza, just past the Plaza de Chueca, when a gang of young men recognized my father; even as a man, Franny must have been famous in that district. “Vómito!” one of the young men cheerfully greeted him.

“Vómito!” my dad happily said back to him; I could see he was pleased that they knew who he was, even not as a woman.

I was struck that, well after midnight, there were throngs of people in the streets of Chueca. But Bovary told me there was a good chance of a smoking ban making Chueca even noisier and more crowded at night. “All the men will be standing outside the clubs and bars, on these narrow streets—all of them drinking and smoking, and shouting to be heard,” Señor Bovary said.

“Think of all the bears !” my father said, wrinkling his nose.

“William has nothing against bears, Franny,” Bovary gently said. I saw that they were holding hands, partners in propriety.

They walked me all the way back to the Santo Mauro, my hotel on the Zurbano.

“I think you should admit to your son, Franny, that you’re a little proud of him for beating up that bully,” Bovary said to my father in the courtyard of the Santo Mauro.

“It is appealing to know I have a son who can beat the shit out of somebody,” my father said.

“I didn’t beat the shit out of him. It was one move—he just fell awkwardly, on a hard surface,” I tried to explain.

“That’s not what the Racquet Man said,” my dad told me. “Bob made me believe you wiped the floor with the fucker.”

“Good old Bob,” I said.

I offered to call them a taxi; I didn’t know that they lived in the neighborhood. “We’re right around the corner from the Santo Mauro,” Señor Bovary explained. This time, when he offered me his hand, palm down, I took his hand and kissed it.

“Thank you for making this happen,” I said to Bovary. My father stepped forward and gave me a sudden hug; he also gave me a quick, dry kiss on both my cheeks—he was so very European.

“Maybe, when I come back to Spain—for my next Spanish translation—maybe I can come see you again, or you can come to Barcelona,” I said to my father. But, somehow, this seemed to make my dad uncomfortable.

“Maybe,” was all my father said.

“Perhaps nearer that time would be a good time to talk about it,” Mr. Bovary suggested.

“My manager, ” my dad said, smiling at me but pointing to Señor Bovary.

“ And the love of your life!” Bovary cried happily. “Don’t you ever forget it, Franny!”

“How could I?” my father said to us. “I keep telling the story, don’t I?”

I sensed that this was good-bye; it seemed unlikely that I would see them again. (As my father had said: “We already are who we are, aren’t we?”)

But the good-bye word felt too final; I couldn’t say it.

“ Adiós, young William,” Señor Bovary said.

“Adiós,” I said to him. They were walking away—holding hands, of course—when I called after my father. “ Adiós, Dad!”

“Did he call me ‘Dad’—is that what he said?” my father asked Mr. Bovary.

“He did—he distinctly did,” Bovary told him.

“ Adiós, my son!” my father said.

“Adiós!” I kept calling to my dad and the love of his life, until I could no longer see them.

AT FAVORITE RIVER ACADEMY, the black-box theater in the Webster Center for the Performing Arts was not the main stage in that relatively new but brainless building—well intentioned, to be kind, but stupidly built.

Times have changed: Students today don’t study Shakespeare the way I did. Nowadays, I could not fill the seats for a main-stage performance of any Shakespeare play, not even Romeo and Juliet —not even with a former boy playing Juliet! The black box was a better teaching tool for my actors, anyway, and it was great for smaller audiences. The students were much more relaxed in our black-box productions, but we all complained about the mice. It may have been a relatively new building, but—due to either faulty design or misguided contracting—the crawl space under the Webster Center was poorly insulated and had not been mouse-proofed.

When it starts to get cold, any stupidly built building in Vermont will have mice. The kids working with me in our black-box production of Romeo and Juliet called them “stage mice”; I can’t tell you why, except that the mice had occasionally been spotted onstage.

It was cold that November. The Thanksgiving break was only a week away, and we already had snow on the ground—it was even cold, for that time of year, for Vermont . (No wonder the mice had moved indoors.)

I’d just persuaded Richard Abbott to move into the River Street house with me; at eighty, Richard hardly needed to spend another winter in Vermont in a house by himself—he was on his own now that Martha was in the Facility. I gave Richard what had been my bedroom as a child, and that bathroom I’d once shared with Grandpa Harry.

Richard didn’t complain about the ghosts. Maybe he would have, if he’d ever encountered Nana Victoria’s ghost, or Aunt Muriel’s—or even my mother’s—but the only ghost Richard ever saw was Grandpa Harry’s. Naturally, Harry’s ghost showed up a few times in that bathroom he’d once shared with me—thankfully, not in that bathtub.