John Irving - In One Person

I could only guess how Kittredge might have responded. “Do you mean my stepmother ?” he would have asked, before breaking my arms and legs.

I spoke to my mom and Richard in the privacy of our dormitory apartment. “What is it about Grandpa Harry?” I asked them. “I know that Ariel’s gender is polymorphous—more a matter of habiliment than anything organic, as you say,” I said to Richard. “Okay, so my trappings, my equipment—the wig, the tights—suggest that Ariel’s gender is mutable. But isn’t Caliban a male monster? Isn’t Grandpa Harry playing Caliban like some kind of . . .” I paused. I refused to call my grandfather Queen Lear, because that was Kittredge’s nickname for him. “Like some kind of dyke ?” was how I put it. The dyke word was in vogue at Favorite River—among those students (like Kittredge) who never tired of homo, fag, and queer, which they used viciously.

“Daddy isn’t a dyke !” my mother snapped. Snapping had once seemed so unlike her; now, increasingly, when she snapped, she snapped at me .

“Well, Bill . . .” Richard Abbott started to say; then he stopped. “Don’t get upset, Jewel,” he said to my mom, whose agitation had distracted Richard. “What I really think, Bill,” Richard began again, “is that gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.”

A lame response, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Was I growing disappointed in Richard, or was I just growing up?

“I guess that wasn’t an answer to your question, was it?” Elaine Hadley asked me later, when I confessed to her that the sexual identity of Grandpa Harry as Caliban was confusing to me.

IT WAS FUNNY HOW, when Elaine and I were alone, we didn’t usually hold hands, or anything like that, but when we were out in public, we spontaneously reached for each other’s hands, and we would maintain contact for only as long as we had an audience. (It was another kind of code between us, like the way we would ask each other, “What happens to the duck?”)

Yet, on our initial visit together to the First Sister Public Library, Elaine and I didn’t hold hands. It was my impression that Miss Frost wouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Elaine and I were romantically involved—not for a minute. Elaine and I were just seeking a possible place where we could run our lines for The Tempest . Our dormitory apartments were claustrophobic and very public—unless we ran our lines in her bedroom or mine, with the door closed. We’d been too successful in masquerading as boyfriend and girlfriend. My mom and Richard, or the Hadleys, would have had a cow if we’d closed our bedroom doors when we were together.

As for the yearbook room in the academy library, there was the occasional faculty member at work there, and it wasn’t a room with a door you could close; our voices would have been heard elsewhere in the building. (Elaine and I feared we could be heard throughout the much smaller First Sister Public Library!)

“We wondered if there might be a more private room here,” I explained to Miss Frost.

“More private, ” the librarian repeated.

“Where we wouldn’t be heard,” Elaine said, in her sonic-boom voice. “We want to run our lines for The Tempest, but we don’t want to bother anyone!” Elaine hastily added—lest Miss Frost think we were seeking some soundproof asylum for Elaine’s aforementioned first orgasm.

Miss Frost looked at me. “You want to run lines in a library,” she said, as if this were a well-fitted piece to the puzzle of my earlier wanting to write in a library. But Miss Frost didn’t betray my intentions—namely, becoming a writer. (I had not yet been candid with my good friend Elaine on the writing subject; my desire to be a writer and my other desires were still kept secret from Elaine.)

“We can try to run our lines quietly, ” Elaine said, in an abnormally soft voice—for her.

“No, no, dear—you must feel free to run lines as they should be said, onstage,” Miss Frost told Elaine, patting my friend’s hand with her much bigger hand. “I think I know a place where you could scream and no one would hear you.” As it turned out, the concept that there was a contained space in the First Sister Public Library where one could scream unheard was not as much of a miracle as the room itself.

Miss Frost led Elaine and me down the basement stairs to what, at first glance, appeared to be the furnace room of the old library. It was a red-brick building of the Georgian period, and the building’s first furnace had been coal; the blackened remains of the coal chute were still hanging from a transom window. But the hulking coal burner had been toppled on its side and dragged to an unused corner of the basement; its replacement was a more modern oil furnace. Quite a new-looking propane hot-water heater stood near the oil-burning furnace, and a separate room (with a door) had been assembled in the vicinity of the transom window. A rectangular notch, near the basement ceiling, had been cut in one wall of the room—where the remnants of the coal chute dangled from the lone window. At one time, the coal chute had run from the transom window into the room—formerly, the coal bin. It was now a furnished bedroom and bathroom.

There was an old-fashioned brass bed with a headboard of brass rails, as sturdy-looking as prison bars, to which a reading lamp had been affixed. There was a small sink and mirror in one corner of the room, and in another corner, unconcealed, stood a solitary sentinel—not an actual guard but a toilet with a wooden seat. There was a night table by the bed, where I saw an orderly stack of books and a squat, scented candle. (It smelled like cinnamon in the room; I guessed that the candle concealed the smell of oil fumes from the nearby furnace.)

There was also an open wardrobe closet, where Elaine and I could see some shelves and hangers—with what appeared to be a most minimal assortment of Miss Frost’s clothes. What was unquestionably the centerpiece of the small room—“my converted coal bin,” Miss Frost called it—was a bathtub of Victorian opulence, with very visible plumbing. (The floor of the room was unfinished plywood, and the wiring was very visible, too.)

“When there’s a snowstorm, and I don’t feel like driving or walking home,” Miss Frost said—as if this explained everything that was at once cozy but rudimentary about the basement room. (Neither Elaine nor I knew where Miss Frost lived, but we gathered it must have been within walking distance of the town library.)

Elaine stared at the bathtub; it had lion paws for feet, and lion heads for faucets. I was, I confess, fixated on the brass bed with the prison-bars headboard.

“Unfortunately, there’s nowhere to sit but the bed,” Miss Frost said, “unless you want to run lines in the tub.” She seemed not in the least concerned that Elaine and I might ever do anything on the bed, or take a bath together.

Miss Frost was about to leave us alone, to actually close the door on us—in her makeshift bedroom, her expedient home-away-from-home—when Elaine Hadley exclaimed, “The room is perfect ! Thank you for helping us, Miss Frost.”

“You’re very welcome, Elaine,” Miss Frost said. “I assure you that you and William can scream your heads off in here, and no one will hear you.” But before closing the door, Miss Frost looked at me and smiled. “If you need any help running lines—if there’s a question of emphasis, or a pronunciation problem—well, you know where to find me.” I didn’t know that Miss Frost had noticed my pronunciation problems; I’d actually spoken very little in her company.