“You don’t have to come up to the third floor with me,” I told my grandpa.
“If I don’t come up with you, Bill, you’ll be doin’ the explainin’,” Grandpa Harry said. “You’ve had quite a night already—why don’t you leave the explainin’ to me?”
“I love you—” I began, but Harry wouldn’t let me continue.
“Of course you do, and I love you, too,” he told me. “You trust me to say all the right things, don’t you, Bill?”
“Of course I do,” I told him. I did trust him, and I was tired; I just wanted to go to bed. I needed to hold Elaine’s bra to my face, and cry in such a way that none of them would hear me.
But when Grandpa Harry and I entered that third-floor apartment, the assembled family gathering—which had included Mrs. Hadley, I only later learned—had dispersed. My mother was in her bedroom, with the door meaningfully closed; maybe there would be no further prompting from my mom tonight. Only Richard Abbott was there to greet us, and he looked about as comfortable as a dog with fleas.
I went straight to my bedroom, without saying a word to Richard—that pussy-whipped coward!—and there was Giovanni’s Room on top of my pillow, not under it. They’d had no right to poke around my bedroom, pawing over my stuff, I was thinking; then I looked under my pillow. Elaine Hadley’s pearl-gray bra was gone.
I went back into the living room of our small apartment, where I could tell that Grandpa Harry had not yet started “doin’ the explainin’,” as he’d put it to me.
“Where’s Elaine’s bra, Richard?” I asked my stepfather. “Did my mom take it?”
“Actually, Bill, your mother was not herself,” Richard told me. “She destroyed that bra, Bill, I’m sorry to say—she cut it up in small pieces.”
“Jeez—” Grandpa Harry began, but I interrupted him.
“No, Richard,” I said. “That was Mom being herself, wasn’t it? That wasn’t Mom being ‘not herself.’ That’s who Mom is.”
“Ah, well—Bill,” Grandpa Harry chimed in. “There are more discreet places to put your women’s clothes than under your pillow—speakin’ from experience.”
“I’m disgusted with both of you,” I said to Richard Abbott, not looking at Grandpa Harry; I didn’t mean him, and my grandfather knew it.
“I’m pretty disgusted with all of us, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Now why don’t you be goin’ to bed, and let me do the explainin’.”
Before I could leave them, I heard my mother crying in her bedroom; she was crying loudly enough for us all to hear her. That was the point of her crying loudly, of course—so that we would all hear her, and Richard would go into her bedroom to attend to her, which Richard did. My mom wasn’t done prompting.
“I know my Mary,” Grandpa Harry whispered to me. “She wants to be in on the explainin’ part.”
“I know her, too,” I told my grandfather, but I had much more to learn about my mother—more than I knew.
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’!”
Chapter 9
DOUBLE WHAMMY
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.)