In One Person

heard the
wrong
word. “Come in!” Mrs. Hadley called, in such a strident way that I realized where Elaine’s stop-you-in-your-tracks voice came from.
    It was Atkins—an acknowledged loser, but I’d not known he was a music student. Maybe Atkins had a voice issue; perhaps there were words he couldn’t pronounce. “I can come back,” Atkins said to Martha Hadley, but he wouldn’t stop staring at me, or he couldn’t look at her—one or the other. Any idiot would have known I’d been crying.
    “Come back in half an hour,” Mrs. Hadley told Atkins.
    “Okay, but I don’t have a watch,” he said, still staring at me.
    “Take mine,” she told him. It was when she took her watch off and handed it to him that I saw what it was that attracted me to her. Martha Hadley not only had a masculine appearance—she was dominant, like a man, in everything she did. I could only imagine, sexually, that she was dominant, too—that she would impose what she wanted on anyone, and that it would be difficult to resist what she wanted you to do. But why would that appeal to me? (Naturally, I wouldn’t make these thoughts part of my selective confession to Mrs. Hadley.)
    Atkins was mutely staring at the watch. It made me wonder if he was such a loser and an idiot that he couldn’t tell time.
    “In half an hour,” Martha Hadley reminded him.
    “The numbers are Roman numerals,” Atkins said despondently.
    “Just keep your eye on the minute hand. Count to thirty minutes. Come back then,” Mrs. Hadley said to him. Atkins walked off, still staring at the watch; he left the office door open. Mrs. Hadley got up from the couch and closed the door. “Billy, Billy,” she said, turning to me. “It’s all right to feel what you’re feeling—it’s okay.”
    “I thought of talking to Richard about it,” I told her.
    “That’s a good idea. You can talk to Richard about anything—I’m sure of that,” Martha Hadley said.
    “But not my mother,” I said.
    “Your mother, Mary. My dear friend Mary …” Mrs. Hadley began; then she stopped. “No, not your mother—don’t tell her yet,” she said.
    “Why?” I asked. I thought I knew why, but I wanted to hear Mrs. Hadley say it. “Because she’s a little
damaged
?” I asked. “Or because she seems angry at me—I’m not sure why.”
    “I don’t know about the
damaged
part,” Martha Hadley said. “Your mother
does
seem angry at you—I’m not sure why, either. I was mainly thinking that she becomes rather easily
unhinged
—in some areas, given certain subjects.”
    “What areas?” I asked. “What subjects?”
    “Certain sexual matters upset her,” Mrs. Hadley said. “Billy, I know there are things she’s kept from you.”
    “Oh.”
    “Secrecy isn’t my favorite thing about New England!” Mrs. Hadley suddenly cried; she looked at her wrist, where her watch had been, and then laughed at herself. “I wonder how Atkins is managing the Roman numerals,” she said, and we both laughed. “You can tell Elaine, too, you know,” Martha Hadley said. “You can tell Elaine anything, Billy. Besides, I think she already knows.”
    I thought so, too, but I didn’t say it. I was thinking about my mother becoming rather easily
unhinged
. I was regretting that I hadn’t consulted Dr. Grau before he died—if only because I could have familiarized myself with his doctrine of how
curable
homosexuality was. (It might have made me less angry in the coming years, when I would be exposed to more of that punitive, dumber-than-dog-shit doctrine.)
    “It’s really helped me to talk to you,” I told Mrs. Hadley; she moved away from her office door to let me pass. I was afraid she was going to grasp my hands or my shoulders, or even pull my head to her hard chest again, and that I would be unable to stop myself from hugging her—or kissing her, though I would have had to stand on my toes to do that. But Martha Hadley didn’t touch me; she just stood aside.
    “There’s nothing wrong with your voice, Billy—there’s nothing physically the matter with your tongue, or with the roof of your mouth,” she said. I’d forgotten that she had looked in my mouth at our very first appointment.
    She’d asked me to touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue, and she’d held the tip of my tongue with a gauze pad, and—with another gauze pad—she’d poked around on the floor of my mouth, apparently feeling for something that wasn’t there. (I’d been embarrassed that her