“That may indeed be Miss Frost’s motive, Billy,” Elaine said. “I’m not so sure about what’s motivating your whole fucking family, as you say.”
MY CRUDE COUSIN GERRY came home from college that same Christmas break. In Gerry’s case, I use the crude word affectionately. Please don’t dismiss Gerry as a stridently angry lesbian who hated her parents and all heterosexuals; she had always loathed boys, but I’d foolishly imagined that she might like me a little bit, because I knew she would have heard about my scandalous relationship with Miss Frost. Yet, at least for a few more years, Gerry wouldn’t like gay or bisexual boys any better than she liked straight ones.
Nowadays, I hear my friends say that our society tends to be more accepting of gay and bi women than we are of gay and bi men. In our family’s case, there was little apparent reaction to Gerry being a lesbian, at least compared to almost everyone having a cow about my relationship with Miss Frost—not to mention my mom’s horror at how I was “turning out,” sexually. Yes, I know, it’s true that many people treat lesbians and bi women differently than they treat gay and bi men, but Gerry wasn’t accepted by our family as much as she was simply ignored by them.
Uncle Bob loved Gerry, but Bob was a coward; he loved his daughter, in part, because she was more courageous than he was. I think Gerry deliberately misbehaved, and not only to build a barrier around herself; I think she was aggressive and “crude” because this forced our family to notice her.
I had always liked Gerry, but I kept my fondness for her a secret. I wish I’d told her that I liked her—I mean, sooner than I did.
We would become better friends when we were older; nowadays, we’re quite close. I’m truly fond of Gerry—okay, in an odd way—but Gerry was not very likable when she was a young woman. All I’m saying is that Gerry purposely made herself unlikable. Elaine detested her, and would never like her—not even a little.
That Christmas, Elaine and I were up to our usual but separate pursuits in the yearbook room of the academy library. The library was open over the Christmas break—except for Christmas Day. Many of the faculty liked to work there, and Christmastime was when a lot of prospective students and their parents visited Favorite River Academy. My summer job, for the past three years, had been as a tour guide; I showed prospective students and their parents my awful school. I got a part-time job as a tour guide over the Christmas break, too; the boys among the faculty brats frequently did this. Uncle Bob, the admissions man, was our overly permissive boss.
Elaine and I were in the yearbook room when my cousin Gerry found us. “I hear you’re queer,” Gerry said to me, ignoring Elaine.
“I guess so,” I said, “but I’m attracted to some women, too.”
“I don’t want to know,” Gerry told me. “No one’s sticking anything up my ass, or anywhere else.”
“You never know till you try it,” Elaine said. “You might like it, Gerry.”
“I see you’re not pregnant,” Gerry said to her, “unless you’re already pregnant again, Elaine, and you’re not yet showing.”
“You got a girlfriend?” Elaine asked her.
“She could beat the shit out of you, Elaine,” Gerry said. “You, too—probably,” Gerry told me.
I could be forgiving of Gerry, knowing that Muriel was her mother; that couldn’t have been easy, especially for a lesbian. I was less inclined to forgive Gerry for how harsh she was with her father, because I had always liked Uncle Bob. But Elaine felt no forgiveness for Gerry at all. There must have been some history between them; maybe Gerry had hit on her, or when Elaine had been pregnant with Kittredge’s child, it’s entirely possible that Gerry had said or written something cruel to her.
“My dad’s looking for you, Billy,” Gerry said. “There’s a family he wants you to show the school to. The kid looks like a bed-wetter to me, but maybe he’s a homo, and you can suck each other off in one of the empty dorm rooms.”
“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.