John Irving - In One Person

“Harry appears to be confused, as if he’s lost his toothbrush,” was all Richard ever said about Grandpa Harry’s ghost.

The bathtub Harry had blown his brains out in was gone. If Grandpa Harry was actually going to repeat blowing his brains out in a bathroom, it would be the master bathroom—the one I now used—and that inviting new bathtub (the way Harry had repeated himself for Amanda).

But, as I’ve told you, I never saw the ghosts in that River Street house. There was the one morning when I woke up and found my clothes—neatly arranged, in the order I would put them on—at the foot of my bed. These were clean clothes, my jeans on the bottom of the pile; the shirt was perfectly folded, with my socks and underwear on top. It was precisely the way my mother used to prepare my clothes for me when I was a little boy. She must have done this every night, after I’d fallen asleep. (She’d stopped doing this around the time when I became a teenager or shortly before.) I had completely forgotten how she’d once loved me. My guess is that her ghost wanted to remind me.

It happened only that one morning, but it was enough to make me remember when I had loved her—without reservation. Now, after those many years when I had lost her affection and believed I no longer loved her, I was able to mourn her—the way we are supposed to mourn our parents when they’re gone.

WHEN I FIRST MOVED into the River Street house, I found Uncle Bob standing beside a box of books in the downstairs hall. Aunt Muriel had wanted me to have these “monuments of world literature,” Bob had struggled to explain, but Muriel’s ghost hadn’t delivered the books—Uncle Bob had brought the box. He’d belatedly discovered that Muriel had intended to give me the books, but that fatal car crash must have interrupted her plans. Uncle Bob hadn’t noticed that the books were for me; there was a note inside the box, but some years had passed before Bob read it.

“These books are by your forebears, Billy,” Aunt Muriel had written, in her unmistakably assertive longhand. “You’re the writer in the family—you should have them.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know when she was intending to give them to you, Billy,” Bob sheepishly said.

The forebears word is worth noting. At first, I was flattered by the company of the esteemed writers Muriel had selected for me; it was a highly literary collection of works. There were two plays by García Lorca— Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba . (I hadn’t known that Muriel knew I loved Lorca—his poems, too.) There were three plays by Tennessee Williams; maybe Nils Borkman had given these plays to Muriel, I’d first thought. There was a book of poems by W. H. Auden, and poems by Walt Whitman and Lord Byron. There were those unsurpassed novels by Herman Melville and E. M. Forster—I mean Moby-Dick and Howards End . There was Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. Yet I still didn’t understand why my aunt Muriel had gathered these particular writers together and called them my “forebears”—not until I unearthed, from the bottom of the box, two little books that lay touching each other: Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room .

“Oh,” I said to Uncle Bob. My gay forebears, Aunt Muriel must have thought—my not-so-straight brethren, I could only guess.

“I think your aunt meant this in a positive way, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.

“You think so?” I asked the Racquet Man. We both stood there in the downstairs hall, trying to imagine Muriel putting these books in a box for me in a positive way.

I never told Gerry about her mother’s gift to me—fearing that Muriel might have left nothing, or worse, for Gerry. I didn’t ask Elaine if she thought Muriel had intended these books for me in a positive way. (Elaine’s opinion of Muriel was that my aunt had been born a menacing ghost.)

It was the phone call from Elaine—late one night, in my River Street house—that reminded me of Esmeralda, gone from my life (but not from my mind) these many years. Elaine was crying into the phone; yet another bad boyfriend had dumped her, but this one had made cruel comments about my dear friend’s vagina. (I’d never told Elaine my unfortunate, not-a-ballroom appraisal of Esmeralda’s vagina—boy, was this ever not the night to tell Elaine that story!)

“You’re always telling me how you love my little breasts, Billy,” Elaine was saying, between sobs, “but you’ve never said anything about my vagina.”

“I love your vagina!” I assured her.

“You’re not just saying that, are you, Billy?”

“No! I think your vagina is perfect !” I told her.

“Why?” Elaine asked; she’d stopped crying.

I was determined not to make the Esmeralda mistake with my dearest friend. “Ah, well—” I began, and then paused. “I’ll be absolutely honest with you, Elaine. Some vaginas feel as big as ballrooms, whereas your vagina feels just right. It’s the perfect size—perfect for me, anyway,” I said, as casually as I could.

“Not a ballroom—is that what you’re saying, Billy?”

How did I end up here again? I was thinking. “Not a ballroom, in a positive way!” I cried.

Elaine’s nearsightedness was a thing of the past; she’d had that Lasik surgery—it was as if she were seeing for the first time. Before the surgery, when she’d had sex, she always took her glasses off—she’d never had a really good look at a penis. Now she could actually see penises; she didn’t like the looks of some of them—“of most of them,” Elaine had said. She’d told me that, the next time we were together, she wanted to take a good look at my penis. I thought it was a little tragic that Elaine didn’t know another guy well enough to feel comfortable about staring at his penis, but what are friends for?

“So my vagina is ‘not a ballroom’ in a positive way?” Elaine now said on the phone. “Well, that sounds okay. I can’t wait to get a good look at your penis, Billy—I know you’ll take my staring at your penis in a positive way.”

“I can’t wait, too,” I told her.

“Just remember who’s the perfect size for you, Billy,” Elaine said.

“I love you, Elaine,” I told her.

“I love you, too, Billy,” Elaine said.

Thus was my not-a-ballroom faux pas put to rest—thus that ghost departed. Thus did my worst memory of Esmeralda ( that terrifying angel) take flight.

IT WAS THE THIRD week of November 2010—for as long as I live, I won’t forget this. I had my hands full with Romeo and Juliet; I had a terrific cast of kids, and (as you know) a Juliet with all the balls a director could ever ask for.

The stage mice chiefly bothered the few females in that cast—namely, my Lady Montague and my Lady Capulet, and my Nurse. As for my Juliet, Gee didn’t shriek when the stage mice were scurrying around; Gee tried to stomp on the disruptive little rodents. Gee and my bloodthirsty Tybalt had killed some stage mice by stomping on them, but my Mercutio and my Romeo were the experts in my cast at setting the mousetraps. I was constantly reminding them that they had to disarm the mousetraps when our Romeo and Juliet was in performance. I didn’t want that grisly snapping sound—or the occasional death squeal of a stage mouse—to interrupt the show.

My Romeo was a cow-eyed boy of strictly conventional handsomeness, but he had exceptionally good diction. He could say that act 1, scene 1 line (of utmost importance) so that the audience could really hear it. “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love”—that one.