John Irving - In One Person

“Jesus, you’re crass!” Elaine said to Gerry. “I was naïve enough to imagine that college would have civilized you—at least to some small degree. But I think whatever tasteless culture you acquired from your Ezra Falls high school experience is the only culture you’re capable of acquiring.”

“I guess the culture you acquired didn’t teach you to keep your thighs together, Elaine,” Gerry told her. “Why not ask my dad to give you the master key to Tilley, when you’re showing the bed-wetter and his parents around?” Gerry asked me. “That way, you and Elaine can sneak a look at Kittredge’s room. Maybe you two jerk-offs can masturbate each other on Kittredge’s bed,” Gerry told us. “What I mean, Billy, is that you have to have a master key to show someone a dorm room, don’t you? Why not get the key to Tilley?” With that, Gerry left Elaine and me in the yearbook room. Like her mother, Muriel, Gerry could be an insensitive bitch, but—unlike her mother—Gerry wasn’t conventional. (Maybe I admired how angry Gerry was.)

“I guess your whole fucking family—as you say, Billy—talks about you,” Elaine said. “They just don’t talk to you.”

“I guess so,” I said, but I was thinking that Aunt Muriel and my mother were probably the chief culprits—that is, when it came to talking about me but not to me.

“Do you want to see Kittredge’s room in Tilley?” Elaine asked me.

“If you do,” I told her. Of course I wanted to see Kittredge’s room—and Elaine did, too.

I HAD LOST A little of my enthusiasm for perusing the old yearbooks, following my discovery that Miss Frost had been the Favorite River wrestling-team captain in 1935. Since then, I hadn’t made much progress—nor had Elaine.

Elaine was still stuck in the contemporary yearbooks; specifically, she was held in thrall by what she called “the Kittredge years.” She devoted herself to finding photos of the younger, more innocent-seeming Kittredge. Now that Kittredge was in his fifth and final year at Favorite River, Elaine sought out those photographs of him in his freshman and sophomore years. Yes, he’d looked younger then; the innocent-seeming part, however, was hard to see.

If one could believe Mrs. Kittredge’s story—if Kittredge’s own mother had really had sex with him when she said she did—Kittredge had not been innocent for very long, and he’d definitely not been innocent by the time he attended Favorite River. Even as a freshman—on the very day Kittredge had shown up in First Sister, Vermont—Kittredge hadn’t been innocent. (It was almost impossible for me to imagine that he’d ever been innocent.) Yet Elaine kept looking through those earliest photographs for some evidence of Kittredge’s innocence.

I don’t remember the boy Gerry had called the bed-wetter. He was (in all likelihood) a prepubescent boy, probably on his way to becoming straight or gay—but not on his way to becoming bi, or so I imagine. I don’t recall the alleged bed-wetter’s parents, either. My exchange with Uncle Bob, about the master key to Tilley, is more memorable.

“Sure, show ’em Tilley—why not?” my easygoing uncle said to me. “Just don’t show ’em Kittredge’s room—it’s not typical.”

“Not typical,” I repeated.

“See for yourself, Billy—just show ’em another room,” Uncle Bob told me.

I don’t recall whose room I showed to the bed-wetter and his parents; it was the standard double, with two of everything—two beds, two desks, two chests of drawers.

“Everyone has a roommate?” the bed-wetter’s mom asked; it was usually the mothers who asked the roommate question.

“Yes, everyone—no exceptions,” I said; those were the rules.

“What’s ‘not typical’ about Kittredge’s room?” Elaine asked, after the visiting family was through their tour.

“We’ll soon see,” I said. “Uncle Bob didn’t tell me.”

“Jesus, no one in your family tells you anything, Billy!” Elaine exclaimed.

I’d been thinking the same thing. In the yearbook room, I was up only to the Class of ’40. I had twenty years to go before I got to my own graduating class, and I’d just discovered that the yearbook for 1940 was missing. I’d skipped from the ’39 Owl to ’41 and ’42, before I realized that ’40 was gone.

When I asked the academy librarian about it, I said: “Nobody can check out a yearbook. The Owl for 1940 must have been stolen.”

The academy librarian was one of Favorite River’s fussy old bachelors; everyone thought that such older, unmarried males on the Favorite River faculty were what we called at that time “nonpracticing homosexuals.” Who knew if they were or weren’t “practicing,” or if they were or were not homosexuals? All we’d observed was that they lived alone, and there was a particular fastidiousness about the way they dressed, and the way they ate and spoke—hence we imagined that they were unnaturally effeminate.

“ Students may not check out a yearbook, Billy—the faculty can,” the academy librarian said primly; his name was Mr. Lockley.

“The faculty can,” I repeated.

“Yes, of course they can,” Mr. Lockley told me; he was looking through some filing cards. “Mr. Fremont has checked out the 1940 Owl, Billy.”

“Oh.”

Mr. Fremont—Robert Fremont, Class of ’35, Miss Frost’s classmate—was my uncle Bob, of course. But when I asked Bob if he was finished with the ’40 Owl, because I was waiting to have a look at it, good old easygoing Bob wasn’t so easygoing about it.

“I’m pretty sure I returned that yearbook to the library, Billy,” my uncle said; he was a good guy, basically, but a bad liar. Uncle Bob was a fairly forthright fella, but I knew he was hanging on to the ’40 Owl, for some unknown reason.

“Mr. Lockley thinks you still have it, Uncle Bob,” I told him.

“Well, I’ll look all around for it, Billy, but I swear I took it back to the library,” Bob said.

“What did you need it for?” I asked him.

“A member of that class is newly deceased,” Uncle Bob replied. “I wanted to say some nice things about him, when I wrote to his family.”

“Oh.”

Poor Uncle Bob would never be a writer, I knew; he couldn’t make up a story to save his ass.

“What was his name?” I asked.

“ Whose name, Billy?” Bob said in a half-strangled voice.

“The deceased, Uncle Bob.”

“Gosh, Billy—I can’t for the life of me remember the fella’s name!”

“Oh.”

“More fucking secrets,” Elaine said, when I told her the story. “Ask Gerry to find the yearbook and give it to you. Gerry hates her parents—she’ll do it for you.”

“I think Gerry hates me, too,” I told Elaine.

“Gerry hates her parents more, ” Elaine said.

We’d located the door to Kittredge’s room in Tilley, and I let us in with the master key Uncle Bob had given me. At first, the only “not typical” thing about the dorm room was how neat it was, but neither Elaine nor I was surprised to see that Kittredge was tidy.

The one bookshelf had very few books on it; there was a lot of room for more books. The one desk had very little on it; the one chair had no clothes draped over it. There were just a couple of framed photographs on top of the lone chest of drawers, and the wardrobe closet, which typically had no door—not even a curtain—revealed Kittredge’s familiar (and expensive-looking) clothes. Not even the solitary single bed had any stray clothes on it, and the bed was perfectly made—the sheets and blanket uncreased, the pillowcase unwrinkled.