In One Person

Frost, Bill—I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for givin’ it to me! I believe you’re in enough trouble, for the time bein’,” Grandpa Harry whispered.
    “I see,” I said, still holding his hand. But I
didn’t
see; I was merely scratching the surface of all of them. I was just getting started with the
seeing
part.
    When we got to Bancroft, the idolatrous boys in the butt room seemed disappointed to see us. I suppose they now expected the occasional sighting of the idolized Kittredge in my company, and here I was with my grandfather—bald and small, and dressed in the working clothes of a lumberman. Grandpa Harry was clearly not a faculty type, and he’d not attended Favorite River Academy; he’d gone to the high school in Ezra Falls, and had not gone to college. The butt-room boys paid no attention to my grandfather and me; I’m sure Grandpa Harry didn’t care. How would those boys have recognized Harry, anyway? Those who’d ever seen him before had seen Harry Marshall onstage, when he’d been a woman.
    “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