John Irving - In One Person

“I wish you had let me finish this place properly, Al,” Grandpa Harry was saying. “Jeez—there should have been a wall around that toilet, anyway!” he observed.

“It’s too small a room to have more walls,” Miss Frost said. This time, when she stood at the toilet and flipped up the wooden seat, Miss Frost didn’t turn her back on me, or on Grandpa Harry. Her penis was not even a little hard, but she had a pretty big one—like the rest of her, except for her breasts.

“Come on, Al—you’re a decent fella. I’ve always stood up for you,” Grandpa Harry said. “But this isn’t right—you and Bill, I mean.”

“She was protecting me!” I blurted out. “We never had sex. No penetration,” I added.

“Jeez, Bill—I don’t want to hear about you doin’ it!” Grandpa Harry cried; he cupped his hands over his ears.

“But we didn’t do it!” I told him.

“That night when Richard first brought you here, William—when you got your library card, and Richard offered me those roles in the Ibsen plays—do you remember?” Miss Frost asked me.

“Yes, of course I remember !” I whispered.

“Richard thought he was offering the part of Nora, and the part of Hedda, to a woman. It was when he took you home, and he must have talked to your mom—who talked to Muriel, I’m sure—well, that was when they all told him about me. But Richard still wanted to cast me! Those Winthrop women had to accept me, at least onstage —as they’ve had to accept you, Harry, when you were just acting . Isn’t that the way it happened?” she asked my grandfather.

“Ah, well— onstage is one thing, isn’t it, Al?” Grandpa Harry asked Miss Frost.

“You’re pussy-whipped, too, Harry,” Miss Frost told him. “Aren’t you sick of it?”

“Come on, Bill,” my grandfather said to me. “We should be goin’.”

“I always respected you, Harry,” Miss Frost told him.

“I always respected you, Al!” my grandfather declared.

“I know you did—that’s why the craven fuckers sent you,” Miss Frost said to him. “Come here, William,” she suddenly commanded me. I went to her, and she pulled my head to her bare breasts and held me there; I knew she could feel me shaking. “If you want to cry, do it in your room—but don’t let them hear you,” she told me. “If you want to cry, close your door and pull your pillow over your head. Cry with your good friend Elaine, if you want to, William—just don’t cry in front of them . Promise me!”

“I promise you!” I told her.

“So long, Harry—I did protect him, you know,” Miss Frost said.

“I believe you did, Big Al. I’ve always protected you, you know!” Grandpa Harry exclaimed.

“I know you have, Harry,” she told him. “It might not be possible for you to protect me now. Don’t kill yourself trying,” she added.

“I’ll do the best I can, Al.”

“I know you will, Harry. Good-bye, William—or, ‘till we meet again,’ as they say,” Miss Frost said.

I was shaking more, but I didn’t cry; Grandpa Harry took my hand, and we went up those dark basement stairs together.

“I’m guessin’ that must have been some book Miss Frost gave you, Bill—on that subject we were discussin’,” Grandpa Harry said, as we walked along River Street in the direction of Bancroft Hall.

“Yes, it is an awfully good novel,” I told him.

“I’m thinkin’ I might like to read it myself—if Al will let me,” Grandpa Harry said.

“I promised to lend it to a friend,” I told him. “Then I could give it to you.”

“I’m thinkin’ I better get it from Miss Frost, Bill—I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for givin’ it to me! I believe you’re in enough trouble, for the time bein’,” Grandpa Harry whispered.

“I see,” I said, still holding his hand. But I didn’t see; I was merely scratching the surface of all of them. I was just getting started with the seeing part.

When we got to Bancroft, the idolatrous boys in the butt room seemed disappointed to see us. I suppose they now expected the occasional sighting of the idolized Kittredge in my company, and here I was with my grandfather—bald and small, and dressed in the working clothes of a lumberman. Grandpa Harry was clearly not a faculty type, and he’d not attended Favorite River Academy; he’d gone to the high school in Ezra Falls, and had not gone to college. The butt-room boys paid no attention to my grandfather and me; I’m sure Grandpa Harry didn’t care. How would those boys have recognized Harry, anyway? Those who’d ever seen him before had seen Harry Marshall onstage, when he’d been a woman.

“You don’t have to come up to the third floor with me,” I told my grandpa.

“If I don’t come up with you, Bill, you’ll be doin’ the explainin’,” Grandpa Harry said. “You’ve had quite a night already—why don’t you leave the explainin’ to me?”

“I love you—” I began, but Harry wouldn’t let me continue.

“Of course you do, and I love you, too,” he told me. “You trust me to say all the right things, don’t you, Bill?”

“Of course I do,” I told him. I did trust him, and I was tired; I just wanted to go to bed. I needed to hold Elaine’s bra to my face, and cry in such a way that none of them would hear me.

But when Grandpa Harry and I entered that third-floor apartment, the assembled family gathering—which had included Mrs. Hadley, I only later learned—had dispersed. My mother was in her bedroom, with the door meaningfully closed; maybe there would be no further prompting from my mom tonight. Only Richard Abbott was there to greet us, and he looked about as comfortable as a dog with fleas.

I went straight to my bedroom, without saying a word to Richard—that pussy-whipped coward!—and there was Giovanni’s Room on top of my pillow, not under it. They’d had no right to poke around my bedroom, pawing over my stuff, I was thinking; then I looked under my pillow. Elaine Hadley’s pearl-gray bra was gone.

I went back into the living room of our small apartment, where I could tell that Grandpa Harry had not yet started “doin’ the explainin’,” as he’d put it to me.

“Where’s Elaine’s bra, Richard?” I asked my stepfather. “Did my mom take it?”

“Actually, Bill, your mother was not herself,” Richard told me. “She destroyed that bra, Bill, I’m sorry to say—she cut it up in small pieces.”

“Jeez—” Grandpa Harry began, but I interrupted him.

“No, Richard,” I said. “That was Mom being herself, wasn’t it? That wasn’t Mom being ‘not herself.’ That’s who Mom is .”

“Ah, well—Bill,” Grandpa Harry chimed in. “There are more discreet places to put your women’s clothes than under your pillow—speakin’ from experience.”

“I’m disgusted with both of you,” I said to Richard Abbott, not looking at Grandpa Harry; I didn’t mean him, and my grandfather knew it.

“I’m pretty disgusted with all of us, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Now why don’t you be goin’ to bed, and let me do the explainin’.”

Before I could leave them, I heard my mother crying in her bedroom; she was crying loudly enough for us all to hear her. That was the point of her crying loudly, of course—so that we would all hear her, and Richard would go into her bedroom to attend to her, which Richard did. My mom wasn’t done prompting .

“I know my Mary,” Grandpa Harry whispered to me. “She wants to be in on the explainin’ part.”

“I know her, too,” I told my grandfather, but I had much more to learn about my mother—more than I knew.