John Irving - In One Person

I kissed Grandpa Harry on top of his bald head, only then realizing that I’d grown taller than my diminutive grandfather. I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I could hear my mom; she was still sobbing. That was when I resolved that I truly would never cry loudly enough for them to hear me, as I’d promised Miss Frost.

There was a bible of knowledge and compassion on the subject of gay love on my pillow, but I was too tired and too angry to consult James Baldwin any further.

I would have been better informed if I’d reread the passage near the end of that slender novel—I mean the one about “the heart growing cold with the death of love.” As Baldwin writes: “It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.”

If I’d reread that passage on this terrible night, I might have realized Miss Frost had been saying good-bye to me, and what she’d meant by the curious “till we meet again” business was that we would never meet again as lovers.

Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t reread the passage then, or know all this then. I had enough on my mind when I went to bed that night—hearing, through my walls, my mother manipulatively crying.

I could vaguely hear Grandpa Harry’s preternaturally high voice, too, though not what he was saying. I knew only that he had begun “doin’ the explainin’,” a process that I also knew had just been seriously jump-started inside me.

From here on, I thought—at the age of eighteen, as I lay in bed, seething— I’m the one who’ll be “doin’ the explainin’!”

I don’t want to overuse the away word, and I’ve already told you how Elaine Hadley was sent away “in stages.” As in any small town or village, where the public coexists with a private school, there were town-gown matters of disagreement between the townsfolk of First Sister, Vermont, and the faculty and administrators of Favorite River Academy—yet not in the case of Miss Frost, who was fired by the board of trustees of the First Sister Public Library.

Grandpa Harry was no longer a member of that board; had Harry even been the board chair, it is unlikely that he could have persuaded his fellow citizens to keep Miss Frost. In the transsexual librarian’s case, the higher-ups at Favorite River Academy were in agreement with the town: The very pillars of the private school, and their counterparts in the public community, believed they had demonstrated the most commendable tolerance toward Miss Frost. It was Miss Frost who had “gone too far”; it was Miss Frost who’d “overstepped her bounds.”

Moral outrage and righteous indignation aren’t unique to small towns and backward schools, and Miss Frost was not without her champions. Though it caused him to suffer my mother’s “silent treatment” for several weeks, Richard Abbott took up Miss Frost’s cause. Richard argued that, when faced with an earnest young man’s determined infatuation, Miss Frost had actually shielded the young man from the full array of sexual possibilities.

Grandpa Harry, though it caused him the unbridled scorn of Nana Victoria, also spoke up for Miss Frost. She’d shown admirable restraint and sensitivity, Harry had said—not to mention the fact that Miss Frost was a source of inspiration to the readers of First Sister.

Even Uncle Bob, risking more vigorous derision from my most indignant aunt Muriel, said that Big Al deserved a break. Martha Hadley, who continued to counsel me in the aftermath of my forcibly aborted relationship with Miss Frost, said that the transsexual librarian had been a boost to my chronically weak self-confidence. Miss Frost had even managed to help me overcome a pronunciation problem, which Mrs. Hadley claimed was caused by my psychological and sexual insecurity.

If anyone had ever listened to Tom Atkins, poor Tom might have had a good word to say for Miss Frost, but Atkins—as Miss Frost had understood—was jealous of the alluring librarian, and when she was persecuted, Tom Atkins was true to his timid nature and remained silent.

Tom did say to me, when he’d finished reading Giovanni’s Room, that the James Baldwin novel had both moved and disturbed him, though I later learned that Atkins had developed a few more pronunciation problems as a result of his stimulating reading. (Not surprisingly, the stink word was chief among the culprits.)

Perhaps it was counterproductive that the most outspoken of Miss Frost’s defenders was a known eccentric who was foreign-born. The grim forester, that lunatic logger, the Norwegian dramaturge with a suicidal streak—none other than Nils Borkman—presented himself at a First Sister town meeting by declaring he was Miss Frost’s “biggest fan.” (It may have undermined Borkman’s defense of Miss Frost that Nils had been known to beat up various sawmill men and loggers who’d made unkind comments about Grandpa Harry’s onstage appearances as a woman—especially those offenders who’d objected to Harry kissing as a woman.)

In Borkman’s opinion, not only was Miss Frost an Ibsen woman—to Nils, this meant that Miss Frost was both the best and most complicated kind of woman imaginable—but the obsessed Norwegian went so far as to say that Miss Frost was more of a woman than any woman Nils had met in the state of Vermont. Quite possibly, the only woman who was not offended by Borkman’s outrageous assertion had been Mrs. Borkman, because Nils had met his wife in Norway; she was not from the Green Mountain State.

Borkman’s wife was little seen, and she’d been more rarely heard. Almost no one in First Sister could remember what Mrs. Borkman looked like, nor could anyone recall if she—like her husband, Nils—spoke with a Norwegian accent.

Yet the damage done by Nils was instantaneous. Hearts were hardened against Miss Frost; she encountered a more entrenched resistance because Nils Borkman had boasted that she was more of a woman than any woman he’d met in Vermont.

“Not good, Nils—not good, not good,” Harry Marshall had muttered to his old friend at that First Sister town meeting, but the damage had been done.

A GOOD-HEARTED BULLY IS still a bully, but Nils Borkman was resented for other reasons. A former biathlete, Nils had introduced southern Vermont to his love of the biathlon—the curious sporting event that entails cross-country skiing and shooting. This was at a time before cross-country skiing had gained the popularity in the northeastern United States that the sport enjoys now. In Vermont, there already existed a few informed and determined zealots who were cross-country skiers in those days, but no one I knew skied with a loaded rifle on his (or her) back.

Nils had introduced his business partner, Harry Marshall, to hunting deer on cross-country skis. A kind of deer-hunting biathlon ensued; Nils and Harry silently skied down (and shot) a lot of deer. There was nothing illegal about it, although the local game warden—an unimaginative soul—had complained.

What the game warden should have complained about simply filled him with a complacent sullenness. His name was Chuck Beebe, and he ran a deer-checking station—a so-called biology station, where he compiled deer ages and measurements.

The first Saturday of deer season, the checking station was overrun with women, many of whom, if the weather was nice, were wearing open-toed shoes. The women displayed other signs that they had not been deer-hunting, but there they were—lipstick and halter tops, and all—presenting Chuck Beebe with a stiffened deer, caked with congealed blood. The women had hunting licenses, and they’d been issued deer tags, but they had not, Chuck knew, shot these deer. Their husbands or fathers or brothers, or their boyfriends, had shot these deer on opening day, and those men were now out shooting more deer. (One deer tag, per licensed hunter, entitled you to shoot one deer.)