John Irving - In One Person

“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Gerry said, handing me the yearbook. “So it’s your runaway father’s graduating class—so fucking what !”

“My dad went to Favorite River?” I asked Gerry. I’d known that William Francis Dean was a Harvard-boy at fifteen, but no one had told me he’d gone to Favorite River before that. “He must have met my mother here, in First Sister!” I said.

“So fucking what !” Gerry said. “What’s it matter where they met?”

But my mom was older than my dad; this meant that William Francis Dean had been even younger than I thought when they first met. If he’d graduated from Favorite River in 1940—and he’d been only fifteen when he started his freshman year at Harvard in the fall of that same year—he might have been only twelve or thirteen when they met. He could have been a prepubescent boy.

“So fucking what !” Gerry kept saying. She’d obviously not looked over the yearbook in close detail, nor had she seen those earlier yearbooks (’37, ’38, ’39), where there might have been photographs of William Francis Dean when he was only twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. How had I overlooked him? If he’d been a four-year senior in ’40, he could have started at Favorite River in the fall of 1936—when William Francis Dean would have been only eleven !

What if my mom had known him then, when he’d been an eleven-year-old? Their “romance,” such as it was, might have been vastly different from the one I’d imagined.

“Did you see anything of the alleged womanizer in him?” I asked Gerry, as Elaine and I quickly searched through the head shots of the graduating seniors in the Class of 1940.

“Who said he was a womanizer ?” Gerry asked me.

“I thought you did,” I said, “or maybe it was something you heard your mother say about him.”

“I don’t remember the womanizer word,” Gerry told me. “All I heard about him was that he was kind of a pansy .”

“A pansy, ” I repeated.

“Jesus—the repetition, Billy. It’s got to stop,” Elaine said.

“He wasn’t a pansy !” I said indignantly. “He was a womanizer —my mom caught him kissing someone else !”

“Yeah—some other boy, maybe,” my cousin Gerry said. “That’s what I heard, anyway, and he sure looks like a poofter to me.”

“Like a poofter !” I cried.

“My dad said your dad was as flaming a fag as he ever saw,” Gerry said.

“As flaming a fag,” I repeated.

“Dear God, Billy—please stop it!” Elaine said.

There he was: William Francis Dean, as pretty a boy as I’d ever seen; he could have passed for a girl, with a whole lot less effort than Miss Frost had put into her transformation. It was easy to see why I might have missed him in those earlier yearbooks. William Francis Dean looked like me; his features were so familiar to me that I must have skipped over him without really seeing him. His choice of college or university: “Harvard.” His career path: “performer.”

“Performer,” I repeated. (This was before Elaine and I had seen any other photographs; we’d seen only the requisite head shot.)

William Francis Dean’s nickname was “Franny.”

“Franny,” I repeated.

“Look, Billy—I thought you knew,” Gerry was saying. “My dad always said it was a double whammy.”

“ What was?” I asked her.

“It was a double whammy that you would be queer,” Gerry told me. “You had Grandpa Harry’s homo genes on the maternal side of your family, and on the paternal side—well, shit, just look at him!” Gerry said, pointing to the picture of the pretty boy in the Class of ’40. “On the paternal side of your frigging gene pool, you had flaming Franny Dean! That’s a double fucking whammy,” Gerry said. “No wonder Grandpa Harry adored the guy.”

“Flaming Franny,” I repeated.

I was reading William Francis Dean’s abbreviated bio in the ’40 Owl. Drama Club (4). I had little doubt that Franny would have had strictly women’s roles—I couldn’t wait to see those photos. Wrestling team, manager (4). Naturally, he’d not been a wrestler—just the manager, the guy who made sure the wrestlers had water and oranges, and a bucket to spit in, and all the handing out and picking up of towels that a wrestling-team manager has to do.

“Genetically speaking, Billy, you were up against a stacked deck,” Gerry was saying. “My dad’s not the sharpest saw in the mill, but you were dealt the double-whammy card, for sure.”

“Jesus, Gerry—that’s enough for now,” Elaine said. “Would you just leave us, please?”

“Anyone would know you’ve been making out, Elaine,” Gerry told her. “Your tits are so small—one of them’s fallen out of your bra, and you don’t even know.”

“I love Elaine’s breasts,” I said to my cousin. “Fuck you, Gerry, for not telling me what I never knew.”

“I thought you did know, asshole!” Gerry shouted at me. “Shit, Billy—how could you not know? It’s so fucking obvious ! How could you be as queer as you are and not know?”

“That’s not fair, Gerry!” Elaine was shouting, but Gerry was gone. She left the door to the dormitory hall wide open when she went. That was okay with Elaine and me; we left the apartment shortly after Gerry. We wanted to get to the academy library while it was still open; we wanted to see all the photos we could find of William Francis Dean in those earlier yearbooks, where I had missed him.

Now I knew where to look: Franny Dean would be the prettiest girl in the Drama Club pictures, in the ’37, ’38, and ’39 Owl; he would be the most effeminate-looking boy in the wrestling-team photos, where he would not be bare-chested and wearing wrestling tights. (He would be wearing a jacket and a tie, the standard dress code in those years for the wrestling-team manager.)

Before Elaine and I went to the old yearbook room in the academy library, we took the ’40 Owl up to the fifth floor of Bancroft Hall, where we hid it in Elaine’s bedroom. Her parents didn’t search through her things, Elaine had told me. She had caught them at it, shortly after she’d returned from her trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine suspected them of trying to discover if she was having sex with anyone else.

After that, Elaine put condoms everywhere in her room. Naturally, Mrs. Kittredge had given her the condoms. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Hadley took the condoms as a sign that Elaine was being sexually active with an army of boys; more likely, I knew, Mrs. Hadley was smarter than that. Martha Hadley probably knew what the plethora of condoms meant: Stay the fuck out of my room! (After that one time, Mr. and Mrs. Hadley did.)

The ’40 Owl was safe in Elaine Hadley’s bedroom, if not in mine. Elaine and I could look at all the photos of flaming Franny Dean in that yearbook, but we both wanted to see the pictures of the younger William Francis Dean first. We would have the rest of our Christmas vacation to learn everything we could about the Favorite River Class of 1940.

OVER THAT SAME CHRISTMAS dinner of 1960, when I’d asked Gerry to get me the ’40 Owl, Nils Borkman had managed a moment—when we were briefly alone—to confide in me.

“Your librarian friend—they are roadrailing her, Bill!” Borkman whispered harshly to me.

“ Railroading her—yes,” I said.

“They are stereo sex-types!” Borkman exclaimed.

“Sexual stereotypes?” I asked.

“ Yes —that’s what I said!” the Norwegian dramaturge declared. “It’s a pity—I had the perfect parts for you two,” the director whispered. “But of course I cannot put Miss Frost onstage—the Puritan sex-types would stone her, or something!”