In One Person

I did this at our family dinner on Christmas Day—when Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bob and Gerry joined my mom and me, and Richard Abbott, at Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. Nana Victoria always made a big to-do about the essential and necessary “old-fashionedness” of Christmas dinner.

It was also a tradition in our family that the Borkmans joined us for Christmas dinner. In my memory, Christmas was one of the few days of the year I saw Mrs. Borkman. At Nana Victoria’s insistence, we all called her “Mrs.” Borkman; I never knew her first name. When I say “all,” I don’t mean only the children. Surprisingly, that is how Aunt Muriel and my mother addressed Mrs. Borkman—and Uncle Bob and Richard Abbott, when they spoke to the presumed “Ibsen woman” Nils had married. (She had not left Nils, nor had she shot herself in the temple, but we assumed that Nils Borkman would never have married a woman who wasn’t an Ibsen woman, and we therefore wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. Borkman had done something dire.)

The Borkmans did not have children, which indicated to my aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria that there was something amiss (or indeed dire) in their relationship.

“Motherfucking Christ,” Gerry said to me on that Christmas Day, 1960. “Isn’t it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depresses the shit out of me, and I’m neither suicidal nor Norwegian!”

On that warmhearted note, I decided to introduce Gerry to the mysterious subject of the missing 1940 Owl, which—according to Mr. Lockley’s records—Uncle Bob had checked out of the academy library and had not returned.

“I don’t know what your dad is doing with that yearbook,” I told Gerry, “but I want it.”

“What’s in it?” Gerry asked me.

“Some members of our illustrious family don’t want me to see what’s in it,” I said to Gerry.

“Don’t sweat it. I’ll find the fucking yearbook—I’m dying to see what’s in it myself,” Gerry told me.

“It’s probably something of a delicate nature,” I said to her.

“Ha!” Gerry cried. “Nothing I get my hands on is ‘of a delicate nature’ for very long!”

When I repeated what she’d said to Elaine, my dear friend remarked: “The very idea of having sex with Gerry is nauseating to me.”

To me, too, I almost told Elaine. But that’s not what I said. I thought my sexual forecast was cloudy; I wasn’t at all sure about my sexual future. “Sexual desire is pretty specific,” I said to Elaine, “and it’s usually pretty decisive, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Elaine answered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that, in the past, my sexual desire has been very specific—my attraction to someone very decisive,” I said to Elaine. “But all that seems to be changing. Your breasts, for example—I love them specifically, because they’re yours, not just because they’re small. Those dark parts,” I tried to tell her.

“The areolae,” Elaine said.

“Yes, I love those parts. And kissing you—I love kissing you,” I told her.

“Jesus—now you tell me, Billy!” Elaine said.

“I only know it now—I’m changing, Elaine, but I’m not at all sure how,” I told her. “By the way, I wonder if you would give me one of your bras—my mother cut up the old one.”

“She did?” Elaine cried.

“Maybe there’s one you’ve outgrown, or you’re just tired of it,” I said to her.

“My stupid breasts grew only a little, even when I was pregnant,” she told me. “Now I think I’ve stopped growing. You can have as many of my bras as you want, Billy,” Elaine said.

One night, after Christmas, we were in my bedroom—with the door open, of course. Our parents were seeing a movie together in Ezra Falls; we’d been invited to join them, but we hadn’t wanted to go. Elaine had just started kissing me, and I was fondling her breasts—I’d managed to get one of her breasts out of her bra—when there was a pounding on the apartment door.

“Open the fucking door, Billy!” my cousin Gerry was shouting. “I know your parents and the Hadleys are at a movie—my asshole parents went with them!”

“Jesus—it’s that awful girl!” Elaine whispered. “She’s got the yearbook, I’ll bet you.”

It hadn’t taken Gerry long to find the ’40 Owl. Uncle Bob may have been the one to check it out of the academy library, but Gerry found the yearbook under her mother’s side of the bed. It had doubtless been my aunt Muriel’s idea to keep the yearbook of that graduating class away from me, or maybe Muriel and my mom had cooked up the idea together. Uncle Bob was just doing what those Winthrop women had told him to do; according to Miss Frost, Uncle Bob had been a pussy before he was pussy- whipped.

“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.”