John Irving - In One Person

Mrs. Poggio was curiously less appreciative of Grandpa Harry’s female impersonations; she frowned when she first saw him and bit her lower lip. She also did not seem to enjoy how happy her husband was with Grandpa Harry as a woman.

And there was Mr. Ripton—Ralph Ripton, the sawyer. He operated the main blade at Grandpa Harry’s sawmill and lumberyard; it was a highly skilled (and dangerous) position in the mill, to be the main-blade operator. Ralph Ripton was missing the thumb and first two joints of his index finger on his left hand. I’d heard the story of the accident many times; both Grandpa Harry and his partner, Nils Borkman, liked to tell the blood-spattered tale.

I’d always believed that Grandpa Harry and Mr. Ripton were friends —they were more than fellow workers, surely. Yet Ralph didn’t like Grandpa Harry as a woman; Mr. Ripton had an angry, condemning expression whenever he saw Grandpa Harry onstage in a female role. Mr. Ripton’s wife—she was completely expressionless—sat beside her overcritical husband as if she’d been brain-damaged by the very idea of Harry Marshall performing as a woman.

Ralph Ripton skillfully managed to pack his pipe with fresh tobacco; at the same time, he never took his hard eyes from the stage. I guessed, at first, that Mr. Ripton was loading up his pipe for a smoke at the intermission—he always used the stump of his severed left index finger to tamp the tobacco tightly into the bowl of his pipe—but I later noticed that the Riptons never returned after the intermission. They came to the theater for the devout purpose of hating what they saw and leaving early.

Grandpa Harry had told me that Ralph Ripton had to sit in the first or second row in order to hear; the main blade in the sawmill made such a high-pitched whine that the saw had deafened him. But I could see for myself that there was more wrong with the sawyer than his deafness.

There were other faces in the collective audiences—many regular customers in those front-row seats—and while I didn’t know most of their names or their professions, I had no difficulty (even as a child) recognizing their obdurate dislike of Grandpa Harry as a woman. To be fair: When Harry Marshall kissed as a woman—I mean when he kissed another man onstage—most of the audience laughed or cheered or applauded. But I had a knack for finding the unfriendly faces—there were always a few. I saw people cringe, or angrily look away; I saw their eyes narrow with disgust at Grandpa Harry kissing as a woman.

Harry Marshall played all kinds of women—he was a crazy lady who repeatedly bit her own hands, he was a sobbing bride who was ditched at the altar, he was a serial killer (a hairstylist) who poisoned her boyfriends, he was a policewoman with a limp. My grandfather loved the theater, and I loved watching him perform, but perhaps there were folks in First Sister, Vermont, who had rather limited imaginations; they knew Harry Marshall was a lumberman—they couldn’t accept him as a woman.

Indeed, I saw more than obvious displeasure and condemnation in the faces of our townsfolk—I saw more than derision, worse than meanness. I saw hatred in a few of those faces.

One such face I wouldn’t know by name until I saw him in my first morning meeting as a Favorite River Academy student. This was Dr. Harlow, our school’s physician—he who, when he spoke to us boys, was usually so hearty and cajoling. On Dr. Harlow’s face was the conviction that Harry Marshall’s love of performing as a woman was an affliction; in Dr. Harlow’s expression was the hardened belief that Grandpa Harry’s cross-dressing was treatable . Thus I feared and hated Dr. Harlow before I knew who he was.

And, even as a backstage child, I used to think: Come on! Don’t you get it? This is make-believe! Yet those hard-eyed faces in the audience weren’t buying it. Those faces said: “You can’t make-believe this; you can’t make-believe that .”

As a child, I was frightened by what I saw in those faces in the audience from my unseen, backstage position. I never forgot some of their expressions. When I was seventeen, and I told my grandfather about my crushes on boys and men, and my contradictory attraction to a made-up version of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model, I was still frightened by what I’d seen in those faces in the audience at the First Sister Players.

I told Grandpa Harry about watching some of our fellow townspeople, who were caught in the act of watching him. “They didn’t care that it was make-believe,” I told him. “They just knew they didn’t like it. They hated you—Ralph Ripton and his wife, even Mrs. Poggio, no question about Dr. Harlow. They hated you pretending to be a woman.”

“You know what I say, Bill?” Grandpa Harry asked me. “I say, you can make-believe what you want.” There were tears in my eyes then, because I was afraid for myself—not unlike the way, as a child, I had been afraid backstage for Grandpa Harry.

“I stole Elaine Hadley’s bra, because I wanted to wear it!” I blurted out.

“Ah, well—that’s a good fella’s failin’, Bill. I wouldn’t worry about that,” Grandpa Harry said.

It was strange what a relief it was—to see that I couldn’t shock him. Harry Marshall was only worried about my safety, as I’d once been afraid for his.

“Did Richard tell you?” Grandpa Harry suddenly asked me. “Some morons have banned Twelfth Night —I mean, over the years, total imbeciles have actually banned Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, many times!”

“Why?” I asked him. “That’s crazy ! It’s a comedy, it’s a romantic comedy! What could possibly be the reason for banning it?” I cried.

“Ah, well—I can only guess why,” Grandpa Harry said. “Sebastian’s twin sister, Viola—she looks a lot like her brother; that’s the story, isn’t it? That’s why people mistake Sebastian for Viola—after Viola has disguised herself as a man, and she’s goin’ around callin’ herself Cesario. Don’t you see, Bill? Viola is a cross-dresser! That’s what got Shakespeare in trouble! From everythin’ you told me, I think you’ve noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said.

But it was what I had failed to notice that would haunt me. All those years when I was backstage, when I had the prompter’s perspective of those front-row faces in the audience, I had neglected to look at the prompter herself. I had not once noticed my mother’s expression, when she saw and heard her father onstage as a woman.

That winter Sunday night, when I walked back to Bancroft, after my little talk with Grandpa Harry, I vowed I would watch my mom’s face when Harry was performing as Maria in Twelfth Night .

I knew there would be opportunities—when Sebastian was not onstage but Maria was—when I could spy on my mother backstage and observe her expression. I was frightened of what I might see in her pretty face; I doubted she would be smiling.

I had a bad feeling about Twelfth Night from the start. Kittredge had talked a bunch of his wrestling teammates into auditioning. Richard had given four of them what he’d called “some smaller parts.”

But Malvolio isn’t a small part; the wrestling team’s heavyweight, a sullen complainer, was cast in the role of Olivia’s steward—an arrogant pretender who is tricked into thinking that Olivia desires him. I must say that Madden, the heavyweight who thought of himself as a perpetual victim, was well cast; Kittredge had told Elaine and me that Madden suffered from “going-last syndrome.”