In One Person

Uncle Bob said.
    Later, Bob and I agreed we were glad that Herm Hoyt hadn’t lived to hear about it. I called Elaine in New York that night. She had her own small place in Chelsea, just a little northwest of the West Village and due north of the Meatpacking District. I told Elaine about Miss Frost, and I asked her to sing me that Mendelssohn song—the one she’d said she was saving for me, the same one she’d sung for Larry.
    “I promise I won’t die on your shift, Elaine. You’ll never have to sing that song for me. Besides, I need to hear it now,” I told her.
    As for the Mendelssohn song, Elaine explained it was a small part of
Elijah
—Mendelssohn’s longest work. It comes near the end of that oratorio, after God arrives (in the voice of a small child), and the angels sing blessings to Elijah, who sings his last aria—“For the Mountains Shall Depart.” That’s what Elaine sang to me; her alto voice was big and strong, even over the phone, and I said good-bye to Miss Frost, listening to the same music I’d heard when I was saying good-bye to Larry. Miss Frost had been lost to me for almost thirty years, but that night I knew she was gone for good, and all that Uncle Bob would say about her in
The River Bulletin
wasn’t nearly enough.
    Sad tidings for the Class of ’35! Al Frost: born, First Sister, Vermont, 1917; wrestling team captain, 1935 (undefeated); died, Dover or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1990.
    “That’s
it
?” I remember asking Uncle Bob.
    “Shit, Billy—what else can we say in an alumni magazine?” the Racquet Man said.
    When Richard and Martha were auctioning off the old furniture from Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, they told me they’d found thirteen beer bottles under the living-room couch—all Uncle Bob’s. (If I had to bet, all from that one party to commemorate Aunt Muriel and my mother.)
    “Way to go, Bob!” I’d said to Mrs. Hadley and Richard.
    I knew the Racquet Man was right. What
can
you say in a frigging alumni magazine about a transsexual wrestler who was killed in a bar fight? Not much.
    I T WAS A COUPLE of years later—I was slowly adjusting to living in Vermont—when I got a late-night phone call from El. It took me a second or two to recognize her voice; I think she was drunk.
    “You know that friend of yours—the girl like me, but she’s older?” El asked.
    “You mean Donna,” I said, after a pause.
    “Yeah, Donna,” El said. “Well, she
is
sick now—that’s what I heard.”
    “Thank you for telling me,” I was saying, when El hung up the phone. It was too late to call anybody in Toronto; I just slept on the news. I’m guessing this would have been 1992 or ’93; it may even have been early in 1994. (After I moved to Vermont, I didn’t pay such close attention to time.)
    I had a few friends in Toronto; I asked around. I was told about an excellent hospice there—everyone I knew said it was quite a wonderful place, under the circumstances. Casey House, it was called; just recently, someone told me it still exists.
    The director of nursing at Casey House, at that time, was a great guy; his first name was John, if I remember correctly, and I think he had an Irish last name. Since I’d moved back to First Sister, I was discovering that I wasn’t very good at remembering names. Besides, whenever this was, exactly—when I heard about Donna being sick—I was already fifty, or in my fifties. (It wasn’t just
names
I had trouble remembering!)
    John told me that Donna had been admitted to hospice care several months before. But Donna was “Don” to the nurses and other caregivers at Casey House, John had explained to me.
    “Estrogen has side effects—in particular, it can affect the liver,” John told me. Furthermore, estrogens can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. “The itching that occurs with this condition was driving Don nuts,” was how John put it. It was Donna herself who’d told everyone to call her Don; upon stopping the estrogens, her beard came back.
    It seemed exceptionally unfair to me that Donna, who had worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS; she was being forced to return to her former male self.
    Donna also had cytomegalovirus. “In this case, the blindness may be a blessing,” John told me. He meant that Donna was spared
seeing
her beard, but of course she could feel it—even though one of the nurses shaved her face every day.
    “I just want to prepare