John Irving - In One Person

It was Atkins—an acknowledged loser, but I’d not known he was a music student. Maybe Atkins had a voice issue; perhaps there were words he couldn’t pronounce. “I can come back,” Atkins said to Martha Hadley, but he wouldn’t stop staring at me, or he couldn’t look at her—one or the other. Any idiot would have known I’d been crying.

“Come back in half an hour,” Mrs. Hadley told Atkins.

“Okay, but I don’t have a watch,” he said, still staring at me.

“Take mine,” she told him. It was when she took her watch off and handed it to him that I saw what it was that attracted me to her. Martha Hadley not only had a masculine appearance—she was dominant, like a man, in everything she did. I could only imagine, sexually, that she was dominant, too—that she would impose what she wanted on anyone, and that it would be difficult to resist what she wanted you to do. But why would that appeal to me? (Naturally, I wouldn’t make these thoughts part of my selective confession to Mrs. Hadley.)

Atkins was mutely staring at the watch. It made me wonder if he was such a loser and an idiot that he couldn’t tell time.

“In half an hour,” Martha Hadley reminded him.

“The numbers are Roman numerals,” Atkins said despondently.

“Just keep your eye on the minute hand. Count to thirty minutes. Come back then,” Mrs. Hadley said to him. Atkins walked off, still staring at the watch; he left the office door open. Mrs. Hadley got up from the couch and closed the door. “Billy, Billy,” she said, turning to me. “It’s all right to feel what you’re feeling—it’s okay.”

“I thought of talking to Richard about it,” I told her.

“That’s a good idea. You can talk to Richard about anything—I’m sure of that,” Martha Hadley said.

“But not my mother,” I said.

“Your mother, Mary. My dear friend Mary . . .” Mrs. Hadley began; then she stopped. “No, not your mother—don’t tell her yet,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. I thought I knew why, but I wanted to hear Mrs. Hadley say it. “Because she’s a little damaged ?” I asked. “Or because she seems angry at me—I’m not sure why.”

“I don’t know about the damaged part,” Martha Hadley said. “Your mother does seem angry at you—I’m not sure why, either. I was mainly thinking that she becomes rather easily unhinged —in some areas, given certain subjects.”

“What areas?” I asked. “What subjects?”

“Certain sexual matters upset her,” Mrs. Hadley said. “Billy, I know there are things she’s kept from you.”

“Oh.”

“Secrecy isn’t my favorite thing about New England!” Mrs. Hadley suddenly cried; she looked at her wrist, where her watch had been, and then laughed at herself. “I wonder how Atkins is managing the Roman numerals,” she said, and we both laughed. “You can tell Elaine, too, you know,” Martha Hadley said. “You can tell Elaine anything, Billy. Besides, I think she already knows.”

I thought so, too, but I didn’t say it. I was thinking about my mother becoming rather easily unhinged . I was regretting that I hadn’t consulted Dr. Grau before he died—if only because I could have familiarized myself with his doctrine of how curable homosexuality was. (It might have made me less angry in the coming years, when I would be exposed to more of that punitive, dumber-than-dog-shit doctrine.)

“It’s really helped me to talk to you,” I told Mrs. Hadley; she moved away from her office door to let me pass. I was afraid she was going to grasp my hands or my shoulders, or even pull my head to her hard chest again, and that I would be unable to stop myself from hugging her—or kissing her, though I would have had to stand on my toes to do that. But Martha Hadley didn’t touch me; she just stood aside.

“There’s nothing wrong with your voice, Billy—there’s nothing physically the matter with your tongue, or with the roof of your mouth,” she said. I’d forgotten that she had looked in my mouth at our very first appointment.

She’d asked me to touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue, and she’d held the tip of my tongue with a gauze pad, and—with another gauze pad—she’d poked around on the floor of my mouth, apparently feeling for something that wasn’t there. (I’d been embarrassed that her playing around in my mouth had given me an erection—more evidence of what old Grau had called “infantile sexual tendencies.”)

“Not to defame the dead,” Mrs. Hadley said, as I was leaving, “but I hope you’re aware, Billy, that the late Dr. Grau and our sole surviving faculty member in the medical sciences—I mean Dr. Harlow—are both imbeciles.”

“That’s what Richard says,” I told her.

“Listen to Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said. “He’s a sweet man.”

It would be years later, when I had this thought: In a small, less-than-first-rate boarding school, there were various indications of the adult world—some truly sensitive and good-hearted grown-ups who were trying to make the adult world more comprehensible and more bearable for young people, while there were also those dinosaurs of an inflexible rectitude (the Dr. Graus and the Dr. Harlows) and the tirelessly intractable homophobes men of their ilk and generation have spawned.

“How did Dr. Grau really die?” I asked Mrs. Hadley.

The story they’d told us boys—Dr. Harlow had told us, in morning meeting—was that Grau had slipped and fallen in the quadrangle one winter night. The paths were icy; the old Austrian must have hit his head. Dr. Harlow did not say that Herr Doktor Grau actually froze to death—I believe that “hypothermia” was the term Dr. Harlow used.

The boys who were on the kitchen crew found the body in the morning. One of them said that Grau’s face was as white as the snow, and another boy told us that the old Austrian’s eyes were open, but a third boy said the dead man’s eyes were closed; there was agreement among the kitchen boys that Dr. Grau’s Tyrolean hat (with a greasy-looking pheasant feather) was discovered at some distance from the body.

“Grau was drunk,” Martha Hadley told me. “There’d been a faculty dinner party in one of the dorms. Grau probably did slip and fall—he may have hit his head, but he was definitely drunk. He was passed out in the snow all night! He froze.”

Dr. Grau, like no small number of the faculty at Favorite River, had applied for a job at the academy because of the nearby skiing, but old Grau hadn’t skied for years. Dr. Grau was terribly fat; he said he could still ski very well, but he admitted that, when he fell down, he couldn’t get up—not without taking his skis off first. (I used to imagine Grau fallen on the slope, flailing to release his bindings, shouting “infantile sexual tendencies” in English and German.)

I’d chosen German for my language requirement at Favorite River, but only because I’d been assured that there were three other German teachers at the academy; I never had to be taught by Herr Doktor Grau. The other German teachers were also Austrians—two of them skiers. My favorite, Fräulein Bauer, was the only nonskier.

As I was leaving Mrs. Hadley’s office, I suddenly remembered what Fräulein Bauer had told me; I made many grammatical mistakes in German, and the word-order business gave me fits, but my pronunciation was perfect. There was no German word I couldn’t pronounce. Yet when I told Martha Hadley this news, she seemed barely interested—if at all. “It’s psychological, Billy. You can say anything, in the sense that you’re able to say it. But you either won’t say a word, because it triggers something, or—”

I interrupted her. “It triggers something sexual, you mean,” I said.