I tried to change the subject from the deceased to the reason for my visit, but—First Sister being the small town it was—the nurse already knew who I was visiting. “The coach is expectin’ ya,” she said. When she’d told me how to find Herm’s room, she added: “You don’t look much like a wrestler.” When I told her who I was, she said: “Oh, I knew your mother and your aunt—and your grandfather, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“You’re the writer,” she added, with her eyes focused on the ash-end of her cigarette. I realized that she’d wheeled the body outside because she was a smoker.
I was forty-two that year; I judged the nurse to be at least as old as my aunt Muriel would have been—in the latter half of her sixties. I agreed that I was “the writer,” but before I could leave her in the parking lot, the nurse said: “You were a Favorite River boy, weren’t ya?”
“Yes, I was—’61,” I said. I could see her scrutinizing me now; of course she would have heard everything about me and Miss Frost—everyone of a certain age had heard all about that.
“Then I guess ya knew this fella,” the old nurse said; she passed her hand over the body bound to the gurney, but she touched nothing. “I’m guessin’ he’s waitin’ in more ways than one!” the nurse said, exhaling an astonishing plume of cigarette smoke. She was wearing a ski parka and an old ski hat, but no gloves—the gloves would have interfered with her cigarette. It was just starting to snow—some scattered flakes were falling, not nearly enough to have accumulated on the body on the gurney.
“He’s waitin’ for that idiot kid from the funeral home, and he’s waitin’ in whatchamacallit!” the nurse exclaimed.
“Do you mean purgatory?” I asked her.
“Yes, I do—what is that, anyway?” she asked me. “You’re the writer.”
“But I don’t believe in purgatory, or all the rest of it—” I started to say.
“I’m not askin’ ya to believe in it,” she said. “I’m askin’ ya what it is!”
“An intermediate state, after death—” I started to answer her, but she wouldn’t let me finish.
“Like Almighty God is decidin’ whether to send this fella to the Underworld or the Great Upstairs—isn’t that supposed to be what’s goin’ on there?” the nurse asked me.
“Kind of,” I said. I had a limited recollection of what purgatory was for—for some kind of expiatory purification, if I remembered correctly. The soul, in that aforementioned intermediate state after death, was expected to atone for something—or so I guessed, without ever saying it. “Who is it?” I asked the old nurse; as she had done, I moved my hand safely above the body on the gurney. The nurse narrowed her eyes as she looked at me; it might have been the smoke.
“Dr. Harlow—you remember him, don’tcha? I’m guessin’ it won’t take the Almighty too long to decide about him!” the old nurse said.
I just smiled and left her to wait for the hearse in the parking lot. I didn’t believe that Dr. Harlow could ever atone enough; I believed he was already in the Underworld, where he belonged. I hoped that the Great Upstairs had no room for Dr. Harlow—he who had been so absolute about my affliction.
Herm Hoyt told me that Dr. Harlow had moved to Florida after he’d retired. But when he got sick—he’d had prostate cancer; it had metastasized, as that cancer does, to bone—Dr. Harlow had asked to come back to First Sister. He’d wanted to spend his last days in the Facility. “I can’t figure out why, Billy,” Coach Hoyt said. “Nobody here ever liked him.” (Dr. Harlow had died at age seventy-nine; I hadn’t seen the bald-headed owl-fucker since he’d been a man in his fifties.)
But Herm Hoyt hadn’t asked to see me because he’d wanted to tell me about Dr. Harlow.
“I’m guessing you’ve heard from Miss Frost,” I said to her old wrestling coach. “Is she all right?”
“Funny—that’s what she wanted to know about you, Billy,” Herm said.
“You can tell her I’m all right,” I said quickly.
“I never asked her to tell me the sexual details—in fact, I would just as soon know nothin’ about that stuff, Billy,” the coach continued. “But she said there’s somethin’ you should know—so you won’t worry about her.”
“You should tell Miss Frost I’m a top,” I told him, “and I’ve been wearing condoms since ’68. Maybe she won’t worry too much about me, if she knows that,” I added.
“Jeez—I’m too old for more sexual details, Billy. Just let me finish what I started to say!” Herm said. He was ninety-one, not quite a year older than Grandpa Harry, but Herm had Parkinson’s, and Uncle Bob had told me that the coach was having difficulty with one of his medications; it was something Herm was supposed to take for his heart, or so Bob had thought. (The Parkinson’s was why Coach Hoyt had moved into the Facility in the first place.)
“I’m not even pretendin’ that I understand this, Billy, but here’s what Al wanted you to know—forgive me, what she wanted you to know. She doesn’t actually have sex,” Herm Hoyt told me. “She means not with anybody, Billy—she just doesn’t ever do it. She’s gone to a world of trouble to make herself a woman, but she doesn’t ever have sex—not with men or women, I’m tellin’ you, not ever. There’s somethin’ Greek about what she does—she said you knew all about it, Billy.”
“Intercrural,” I said to the old wrestling coach.
“That’s it—that’s what she called it!” Herm cried. “It’s nothin’ but rubbin’ your thing between the other fella’s thighs—it’s just rubbin’, isn’t it?” the wrestling coach asked me.
“I’m pretty sure you can’t get AIDS that way,” I told him.
“But she was always this way, Billy—that’s what she wants you to know,” Herm said. “She became a woman, but she could never pull the trigger.”
“Pull the trigger,” I repeated. For twenty-three years, I had thought of Miss Frost as protecting me; I’d not once imagined that—for whatever reasons, even unwillingly, or unconsciously—she was also protecting herself.
“No penetratin’, no bein’ penetrated—just rubbin’,” Coach Hoyt repeated. “Al said—she said; I’m sorry, Billy—‘That’s as far as I can go, Herm. That’s all I can do, and all I ever will do. I just like to look the part, Herm, but I can’t ever pull the trigger.’ That’s what she told me to tell you, Billy.”
“So she’s safe,” I said. “She really is all right, and she’s going to stay all right.”
“She’s sixty-seven, Billy. What do you mean, ‘she’s safe’—what do you mean, ‘she’s gonna stay all right’? Nobody stays all right, Billy! Gettin’ old isn’t safe!” Coach Hoyt exclaimed. “I’m just tellin’ you she doesn’t have AIDS. She didn’t want you worryin’ about her havin’ AIDS, Billy.”
“Oh.”
“Al Frost—sorry, Miss Frost to you—never did anything safe, Billy. Shit,” the old coach said, “she may look like a woman—I know she’s got the moves down pat—but she still thinks, if you can call it that, like a fuckin’ wrestler. It’s just not safe to look and act like a woman, when you still believe you could be wrestlin’, Billy—that’s not safe at all.”