John Irving - In One Person

It was my gay Benvolio who whispered in my ear, while all of us were still waiting for Manfred (my trouble-making Tybalt) to get back to campus from his wrestling match. “Mr. A.—I see him,” my Benvolio whispered. “That guy who’s looking for you—he’s in the audience.” With the houselights dimmed, I could not make out the man’s face; he was sitting in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped seats, about four or five rows back—just out of reach of the spotlights illuminating our stage.

“Should we call Security, Mr. A.?” Gee asked me.

“No, no—I’ll just see what he wants,” I told her. “If I appear to be stuck in an unwelcome conversation, just come interrupt us—pretend you have to ask me something about the play. Make up anything that comes to mind,” I said.

“You want me to come with you?” my bold Nurse, the field-hockey player, asked me.

“No, no,” I told the fearless girl, who was spoiling for a fight. “Just be sure I know when Manfred gets here.”

We were at that point in our rehearsals where I like to have the kids run their lines consecutively; I didn’t want to be rehearsing either piecemeal or out of sequence. My ever-ready Tybalt is an inciting presence in act 1, scene 1. ( Enter Tybalt, drawing his sword, as the stage directions say.) The only rehearsing I wanted to do without Manfred was that small set piece the Chorus says, the prologue to the play.

“Listen up, Chorus,” I said. “Run through the prologue a couple of times. Take note that the most important line ends not with a comma, but a semicolon; pay attention to that semicolon. ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’; please pause after the semicolon.”

“We’re here, if you need us, Mr. A.,” I heard Gee say—as I went up an aisle to the fourth or fifth row of seats, into the dimly lit audience.

“Hey, Teacher, ” I heard the man say, maybe a split second before I could clearly see him. He might as well have said, “Hey, Nymph ”—that’s how familiar his voice was to me, almost fifty years after I’d last heard it. His handsome face, his wrestler’s build, his slyly confident smile—they were all familiar to me.

But you’re supposed to be dead ! I was thinking—the “of natural causes” was the only doubtful part. Yet this Kittredge, of course, couldn’t have been my Kittredge. This Kittredge was only slightly more than half my age; if he’d been born in the early seventies, when I’d imagined Kittredge’s son had been born, he would have been in his late thirties—thirty-seven or thirty-eight, I would have guessed, upon meeting Kittredge’s only child.

“It’s truly striking how much you look like your father,” I said to young Kittredge, holding out my hand; he declined to shake it. “Well, of course, I mean if I had seen your father at your age—you look as I imagine he must have looked in his late thirties.”

“My father didn’t look at all like me when he was my age,” the young man said. “He was already in his early thirties when I was born; by the time I was old enough to remember what he looked like, he already looked like a woman. He hadn’t had the surgical reassignment yet, but he was very passable as a woman. I didn’t have a father. I had two mothers—one of them was hysterical most of the time, and the other one had a penis. After the surgery, as I understand it, he had some kind of vagina. He died of AIDS—I’m surprised you haven’t . I’ve read all your novels,” young Kittredge added, as if everything in my writing had indicated to him that I easily could have died of AIDS—or that I should have.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say to him; as Gee had said, he was upset. As I could see for myself, he was angry. I tried to make small talk. I asked him what his dad had done for a living, and how Kittredge had met Irmgard, the wife—this angry young man’s mother.

They’d met skiing—Davos, or maybe Klosters. Kittredge’s wife was Swiss, but she’d had a German grandmother; that’s where the Irmgard came from. Kittredge and Irmgard had homes in the ski town and in Zurich, where they’d both worked at the Schauspielhaus. (It was quite a famous theater.) I imagined that Kittredge had liked living in Europe; no doubt, he was used to Europe, because of his mother. And maybe a sex-change surgery was more easily arranged in Europe—I had no idea, really.

Mrs. Kittredge—the mom, I mean, not the wife—had killed herself soon after Kittredge’s death. (There was no doubt she’d been his real mother.) “Pills,” was all the grandson would say about it; he clearly wasn’t interested in talking to me about anything except the fact that his father became a woman. I began to get the feeling that young Kittredge believed I had something to do with what he saw as a despicable alteration.

“How was his German?” I asked Kittredge’s son, but that was of no concern to the angry young man.

“His German was passable—not as passable as he was as a woman. He didn’t make any effort to improve his German,” Kittredge’s son told me. “My father never worked as hard at anything as he worked at becoming a woman.”

“Oh.”

“When he was dying, he told me that something happened here—when you knew him,” Kittredge’s son said to me. “Something started here. He admired you—he said you had balls. You did something ‘inspiring,’ or so he told me. There was a transsexual involved—someone older, I think. Maybe you both knew her. Maybe my father admired her, too—maybe she inspired him.”

“I saw a photo of your father when he was younger—before he came here,” I told young Kittredge. “He was dressed and made up as a very pretty girl. I think something started, as you say, before he met me—and all the rest of it. I could show you that photo, if you—”

“I’ve seen those photographs—I don’t need to see another one!” Kittredge’s son said angrily. “What about the transsexual? How did you two inspire my father?”

“I’m surprised to hear he ‘admired’ me—I can’t imagine that I did anything he would have found ‘inspiring.’ I never thought he even liked me. In fact, your father was always rather cruel to me,” I told Kittredge’s son.

“What about the transsexual?” young Kittredge asked me again.

“I knew the transsexual—your father met her only once. I was in love with the transsexual. What happened with the transsexual happened to me !” I cried. “I don’t know what happened to your father.”

“ Something happened here—that’s all I know,” the son said bitterly. “My father read all your books, obsessively. What was he looking for in your novels? I’ve read them—I never found my father there, not that I would necessarily have recognized him in your pages.”

I thought of my father, then, and I said—as gently as I could manage—to Kittredge’s angry son, “We already are who we are, aren’t we? I can’t make your father comprehensible to you, but surely you can have some sympathy for him, can’t you?” (I’d never imagined myself asking anyone to have sympathy for Kittredge!)

I had once believed that if Kittredge was gay, he sure looked like a top to me. Now I wasn’t so sure. When Kittredge had met Miss Frost, I’d seen him change from dominant to submissive—in about ten seconds.

Just then Gee was there, in the row of seats beside us. My cast for Romeo and Juliet had surely heard the raised voices; they must have been worried about me. No doubt, they could hear how angry young Kittredge was. To me, he seemed just a callow, disappointing reflection of his father.