In One Person

playing around in my mouth had given me an erection—more evidence of what old Grau had called “infantile sexual tendencies.”)
    “Not to defame the dead,” Mrs. Hadley said, as I was leaving, “but I hope you’re aware, Billy, that the late Dr. Grau and our sole surviving faculty member in the medical sciences—I mean Dr. Harlow—are both imbeciles.”
    “That’s what Richard says,” I told her.
    “Listen to Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said. “He’s a sweet man.”
    It would be years later, when I had this thought: In a small, less-than-first-rate boarding school, there were various indications of the adult world—some truly sensitive and good-hearted grown-ups who were trying to make the adult world more comprehensible and more bearable for young people, while there were also those dinosaurs of an inflexible rectitude (the Dr. Graus and the Dr. Harlows) and the tirelessly intractable
homophobes
men of their ilk and generation have spawned.
    “How did Dr. Grau really die?” I asked Mrs. Hadley.
    The story they’d told us boys—Dr. Harlow had told us, in morning meeting—was that Grau had slipped and fallen in the quadrangle one winter night. The paths were icy; the old Austrian must have hit his head. Dr. Harlow did not say that Herr Doktor Grau actually froze to death—I believe that “hypothermia” was the term Dr. Harlow used.
    The boys who were on the kitchen crew found the body in the morning. One of them said that Grau’s face was as white as the snow, and another boy told us that the old Austrian’s eyes were open, but a third boy said the dead man’s eyes were closed; there was agreement among the kitchen boys that Dr. Grau’s Tyrolean hat (with a greasy-looking pheasant feather) was discovered at some distance from the body.
    “Grau was drunk,” Martha Hadley told me. “There’d been a faculty dinner party in one of the dorms. Grau probably
did
slip and fall—he
may
have hit his head, but he was definitely drunk. He was passed out in the snow all night! He froze.”
    Dr. Grau, like no small number of the faculty at Favorite River, had applied for a job at the academy because of the nearby skiing, but old Grau hadn’t skied for years. Dr. Grau was terribly fat; he said he could still ski very well, but he admitted that, when he fell down, he couldn’t get up—not without taking his skis off first. (I used to imagine Grau fallen on the slope, flailing to release his bindings, shouting “infantile sexual tendencies” in English and German.)
    I’d chosen German for my language requirement at Favorite River, but only because I’d been assured that there were three other German teachers at the academy; I never had to be taught by Herr Doktor Grau. The other German teachers were also Austrians—two of them skiers. My favorite, Fräulein Bauer, was the only nonskier.
    As I was leaving Mrs. Hadley’s office, I suddenly remembered what Fräulein Bauer had told me; I made many grammatical mistakes in German, and the word-order business gave me fits, but my pronunciation was perfect. There was no German word I couldn’t pronounce. Yet when I told Martha Hadley this news, she seemed barely interested—if at all. “It’s psychological, Billy. You can say anything, in the sense that you’re able to say it. But you either won’t say a word, because it triggers something, or—”
    I interrupted her. “It triggers something
sexual
, you mean,” I said.
    “Maybe,” said Mrs. Hadley; she shrugged. She seemed barely interested in the
sexual
part of my pronunciation problems, as if sexual speculation (of any kind) was in a category as uninteresting to her as my excellent pronunciation in German. I had an Austrian accent, naturally.
    “I think you’re as angry at your mother as she is at you,” Martha Hadley told me. “At times, Billy, I think you’re too angry to speak.”
    “Oh.”
    I heard someone coming up the stairs. It was Atkins, still staring at Mrs. Hadley’s watch; I was surprised he didn’t trip on the stairs. “It hasn’t been thirty minutes yet,” Atkins reported.
    “I’m leaving—you can go in,” I told him, but Atkins had paused on the stairs, one step away from the third floor. I passed him as I headed down the stairs.
    The stairwell was wide; I must have been close to the ground floor when I heard Mrs. Hadley say, “Please come in.”
    “But it hasn’t been thirty minutes. It’s not …” Atkins didn’t (or couldn’t) finish his