“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!”
“The perfect parts in what?” I asked.
“He is the American Ibsen!” Nils Borkman cried. “He is the new Ibsen, from your backward American South!”
“Who is?” I asked.
“Tennessee Williams—the most important playwright since Ibsen,” Borkman reverentially intoned.
“What play is it?” I asked.
“Summer and Smoke,” Nils answered, trembling. “The repressed female character has another woman smoldering inside her.”
“I see,” I said. “That would be the Miss Frost character?”
“Miss Frost would have been a perfect Alma!” Nils cried.
“But now—” I started to say; Borkman wouldn’t let me finish.
“Now I have no choice—it’s Mrs. Fremont as Alma, or nobody,” Nils muttered darkly. I knew “Mrs. Fremont” as Aunt Muriel.
“I think Muriel can do repressed,” I told Nils encouragingly.
“But Muriel doesn’t smolder, Bill,” Nils whispered.
“No, she doesn’t,” I agreed. “What was my part going to be?” I asked him.
“It’s still yours, if you want it,” Nils told me. “It’s a small role—it won’t interfere with your work-home.”
“My homework,” I corrected him.
“Yes—that’s what I said!” the Norwegian dramaturge declared again. “You play a traveling salesman, a young one. You make a pass at the Alma character in the last scene of the play.”
“I make a pass at my aunt Muriel, you mean,” I said to the ardent director.
“But not onstage—don’t worry!” Borkman cried. “The hanky-panky is all imagined; the repetitious sexual activity happens later, offstage.”
I was pretty sure that Nils Borkman didn’t mean the sexual activity was “repetitious”—not even offstage.
“Surreptitious sexual activity?” I asked the director.
“Yes, but there’s no hanky-panky with your auntie onstage!” Borkman assured me, excitedly. “It just would have been so symbolic if Alma could have been Miss Frost.”
“So suggestive, you mean?” I asked him.
“Suggestive and symbolic!” Borkman exclaimed. “But with Muriel, we stick to the suggestive—if you know what I mean.”
“Maybe I could read the play first—I don’t even know my character’s name,” I said to Nils.
“I have a copy for you,” Borkman whispered. The paperback was badly beaten up—the pages had come unglued from the binding, as if the excitable director had read the little book to death. “Your name is Archie Kramer, Bill,” Borkman informed me. “The young salesman is supposed to wear a derby hat, but in your case we can piss-dense with the derby!”