John Irving - In One Person

Thus Elaine Hadley and I had our nicknames. When Kittredge named you, it may have been a dubious honor, but the designation was both lasting and traumatic.

“Shit,” Elaine said. “It could be worse—Kittredge could be calling me Maid or Virgin .”

“Elaine?” I said. “You’re my one true friend.”

“‘Abhorrèd slave,’” she said to me.

This was uttered as sharply as a bark; there was a doglike echo in the quadrangle of dorms. We both knew it is what Miranda says to Caliban—“a savage and deformed slave,” Shakespeare calls him, but Caliban is an unfinished monster.

Prospero berates Caliban: “thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child.”

Caliban doesn’t deny it. Caliban hates Prospero and his daughter (“toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”), though the monster once lusted after Miranda and wishes he “had peopled” the island with little Calibans. Caliban is evidently male, but it’s uncertain how human he is.

When Trinculo, the jester, first notices Caliban, Trinculo says, “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive?”

I knew that Elaine Hadley had been kidding—speaking to me as Miranda speaks to Caliban, Elaine was just fooling around—but as we drew near to our dormitory, the lights from the windows illuminated her tear-streaked face. In only a minute or two, Kittredge’s mockery of Ferdinand and Miranda’s romance had taken effect; Elaine was crying. “You’re my only friend!” she blubbered to me.

I felt sorry for her, and put my arm around her shoulders; this provoked more whoops and cheers from those unseen boys who’d whooped and cheered before. Did I know that this night was the beginning of my masquerade? Was I conscious of giving those Favorite River boys the impression that Elaine Hadley was my girlfriend? Was I acting, even then? Consciously or not, I was making Elaine Hadley my disguise. For a while, I would fool Richard Abbott and Grandpa Harry—not to mention Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, and (if not for long, and to a lesser extent) my mother.

Yes, I was aware that my mom was changing. She’d been so nice to me when I was little. I used to wonder, when I was a teenager, what had become of the small boy she’d once loved.

I even began an early novel with this tortured and overlong sentence: “According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any fiction, by which she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked—she meant reality, of course.”

My mom’s assessment of “pure imagining” was not flattering. Fiction was frivolous to her; no, it was worse than frivolous.

One Christmas—I believe it was the first Christmas I’d come home to Vermont, for a visit, in several years—I was scribbling away in a notebook, and my mother asked me, “What are you writing now, Billy?”

“A novel,” I told her.

“Well, that should make you happy,” she suddenly said to Grandpa Harry, who’d begun to lose his hearing—sawmill damage, I suppose.

“Me? Why should it make me happy that Bill is writing another novel? Not that I didn’t love the last one, Bill, because I sure-as-shit did love it!” Grandpa Harry quickly assured me.

“Of course you loved it,” my mother told him. “Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?”

“Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry had started to say, but then stopped. As Harry got older, he stopped himself from saying what he was going to say—more and more.

I know the feeling. When I was a teenager, when I began to sense that my mom wasn’t as nice to me as she’d been before, I got in the habit of stopping myself from saying what I wanted to say. Not anymore.

MANY YEARS LATER, LONG after I’d left Favorite River Academy, at the height of my interest in she-males—I mean dating them, not being one—I was having dinner with Donna one night, and I told her about Grandpa Harry’s onstage life as a female impersonator.

“Was it only onstage?” Donna asked.

“As far as I know,” I answered her, but you couldn’t lie to her. One of a couple of uncomfortable things about Donna was that she always knew when you were holding out on her.

Nana Victoria had been dead for more than a year when I first heard from Richard that no one could persuade Grandpa Harry to part with my late grandmother’s clothes. (At the sawmill, of course, Harry Marshall was sure-as-shit still dressing like a lumberman.)

Eventually, I would come clean to Donna about Grandpa Harry spending his evenings in his late wife’s attire—if only in the privacy of his River Street home. I would leave out the part about Harry’s cross-dressing adventures after he was moved to that assisted-living facility he and Nils Borkman had (years before) generously built for the elderly in First Sister. The other residents had complained about Harry repeatedly surprising them in drag. (As Grandpa Harry would one day tell me, “I think you’ve noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.”)

Fortunately, when Richard Abbott told me what had happened at the assisted-living facility, Grandpa Harry’s River Street home had not yet been sold; it was still on the market. Richard and I quickly moved Harry back into the familiar surroundings of the house he’d lived in with Nana Victoria for so many years. Nana Victoria’s clothes were moved back into the River Street house with him, and the nurse Richard and I hired, for Grandpa Harry’s round-the-clock care, made no objection to Harry’s apparently permanent transformation as a woman. The nurse fondly remembered Harry Marshall’s many female impersonations onstage.

“Did the cross-dressing bug ever bite you, Billy?” Donna asked me one night.

“Not really,” I’d answered her.

My attraction to transsexuals was pretty specific. (I’m sorry, but we didn’t use to say “transgender”—not till the eighties.) Transvestites never did it for me, and the transsexuals had to be what they call “passable”—one of few adjectives I still have trouble with, in the pronunciation department. Furthermore, their breasts had to be natural—hormones were okay, but no surgical implants—and, not surprisingly, I preferred small breasts.

How feminine she was mattered a lot to Donna. She was tall but thin—even her upper arms were slender—and she was flawlessly smooth-skinned. (I’ve known many women who were hairier.) She was always having her hair done; she was very stylish.

Donna was self-conscious about her hands, though they were not as noticeably big and strong-looking as Miss Frost’s. Donna didn’t like to hold hands with me, because my hands were smaller.

She came from Chicago, and she tried living in New York—after we broke up, I heard she’d moved to Toronto—but Donna believed that Europe was the place for someone like her. I used to take her with me on publishing trips, when my novels were translated into various European languages. Donna said that Europe was more accepting of transsexuals—Europe was more sexually accepting and sophisticated, generally—but Donna was insecure about learning another language.

She’d dropped out of college, because her college years coincided with what she called her “sexual-identity crisis,” and she had little confidence in herself intellectually. This was crazy, because she read all the time—she was very smart—but there are those years when we’re supposed to feed and grow our minds, and Donna felt that she’d lost those years to her difficult decision to live as a woman.

Especially when we were in Germany, where I could speak the language, Donna was at her happiest—that is, when we were together on those German-language translation trips, not only in Germany but also in Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. Donna loved Zurich; I know it struck her, as Zurich does everyone, as a very well-to-do city. She loved Vienna, too—from my student days in Vienna, I still knew my way around (a little). Most of all, Donna was delighted with Hamburg—to her, I think, Hamburg was the most elegant-seeming German city.