In One Person

quickly searched through the head shots of the graduating seniors in the Class of 1940.
    “Who said he was a
womanizer
?,” Gerry asked me.
    “I thought
you
did,” I said, “or maybe it was something you heard your mother say about him.”
    “I don’t remember the
womanizer
word,” Gerry told me. “All I heard about him was that he was kind of a
pansy
.”
    “A
pansy
,” I repeated.
    “Jesus—the repetition, Billy. It’s got to stop,” Elaine said.
    “He wasn’t a
pansy
!” I said indignantly. “He was a
womanizer
—my mom caught him kissing someone
else
!”
    “Yeah—some other
boy
, maybe,” my cousin Gerry said. “That’s what I heard, anyway, and he sure looks like a
poofter
to me.”
    “Like a
poofter
!” I cried.
    “My dad said your dad was as flaming a fag as he ever saw,” Gerry said.
    “As flaming a fag,” I repeated.
    “Dear God, Billy—please stop it!” Elaine said.
    There he was: William Francis Dean, as pretty a boy as I’d ever seen; he could have passed for a girl, with a whole lot less effort than Miss Frost had put into
her
transformation. It was easy to see why I might have missed him in those earlier yearbooks. William Francis Dean looked like me; his features were so familiar to me that I must have skipped over him without really seeing him. His choice of college or university: “Harvard.” His career path: “performer.”
    “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