In One Person

“Don’t be disappointed,” he kept whispering in my ear, as if he were still translating and we were still sitting at the bar.
    My father, standing in his dressing room, was already stripped to the waist—wig off—by the time Bovary and I got backstage. William Francis Dean had a snow-white crew cut and the starved-down, muscular body of a lightweight wrestler or a jockey. The little falsies, and a bra no bigger than Elaine’s—the one I used to wear when I was sleeping—were on my dad’s dressing-room table, all heaped together with the pearl necklace. The dress, which unzipped from the back, had been undone only as far as my father’s slender waist, and he’d slipped the top half off his shoulders.
    “Shall I unzip you the rest of the way, Franny?” Señor Bovary asked the performer. My father turned his back to Bovary, allowing his lover to unzip him. Franny Dean stepped out of the dress, revealing only a tight black girdle; he’d already unfastened his black stockings from the girdle—the stockings were rolled at his narrow ankles. When my dad sat at his dressing-room table, he pulled the rolled-down stockings off his small feet and threw them at Señor Bovary. (All this before he began to remove his makeup, starting with the eyeliner; he’d already removed the fake eyelashes.)
    “It’s a good thing I didn’t see you
whispering
to young William at the bar until I was almost done with the Boston part of the story,” my father said peevishly to Bovary.
    “It’s a good thing
someone
invited young William to come see you before you’re dead, Franny,” Señor Bovary told him.
    “Mr. Bovary
exaggerates
, William,” my dad told me. “As you can see for yourself, I’m
not
dying.”
    “I’ll leave you two alone,” Mr. Bovary told us in a wounded tone.
    “Don’t you dare,” my dad said to the love of his life.
    “I dare not,” Bovary replied, with droll resignation. He gave me a long-suffering look, of the you-see-what-I-put-up-with kind.
    “What’s the point of having a love of your life, if he’s not
always
with you?” my father asked me.
    I didn’t know what to say; I was quite at a loss for words.
    “Be nice, Franny,” Señor Bovary told him.
    “Here’s what women do, William—small-town girls, anyway,” my father said. “They find something they love about you—even if there’s just one thing they find endearing. For example, your mother liked to dress me up—and I liked it, too.”
    “Maybe
later
, Franny—maybe say this to young William
after
you’ve had a chance to get to know each other,” Mr. Bovary suggested.
    “It’s too late for young William and me to get to know each other. We were denied that opportunity. Now we already are who we are, aren’t we, William?” my dad asked me. Once again, I didn’t know what to say.
    “Please
try
to be nicer, Franny,” Bovary told him.
    “Here’s what women do, as I was saying,” my father continued. “Those things they
don’t
love about you—those things they don’t even
like
—well, guess what women do about
those
things? They imagine they can
change
those things—
that’s
what women do! They imagine they can change you,” my father said.
    “You knew
one
girl, Franny,
una mujer difícil
—” Mr. Bovary started to say.
    “Now who’s not being
nice
?” my dad interrupted him.
    “I’ve known some
men
who tried to change me,” I told my father.
    “I can’t compete with everyone
you’ve
known, William—I couldn’t possibly claim to have had
your
experience,” my dad said. I was surprised he was a prig.
    “I used to wonder where I came from,” I told him. “Those things in myself that I didn’t understand—those things I was
questioning
, especially. You know what I mean. How much of me came from my mother? There was little that came from her that I could see. And how much of me came from
you
? There was a time when I thought about that, quite a lot,” I told him.
    “We heard about you beating up some boy,” my father said.
    “Say this
later
, Franny,” Mr. Bovary pleaded with him.
    “You beat up a kid at school—rather recently, wasn’t it?” my dad asked me. “Bob told me about it. The Racquet Man was quite proud of you for it, but I found it upsetting. You didn’t get
violence
from me—you didn’t get
aggression
. I wonder if all that anger doesn’t come from those
Winthrop women
,” he told me.
    “He was a
big
kid,” I said. “He was nineteen, a football player—a