GREEN NIGHTS. Saturday to be exact, at loose ends, driving my father’s car up Raysburg Hill not sure where. Lyle was out with Shirley, and Linda was grounded for the weekend. Windows down, rock ’n roll pounding on the radio, so hot in the Valley already I wouldn’t need a jacket even if I stayed out all night. That morning, I’d been standing on the porch looking at the dirty Ohio River when my father had uncharacteristically joined me, still in his bathrobe, coffee cup in his hand, and we’d stood there side by side in the swelling heat. He’d smelled like Vitalis. Finally he’d said, “Well, John, it’s all over but the shouting.” That moment stuck in my mind and bothered me, but I didn’t know why.
Beautifully soaring night, but I had nobody to share it with, felt sour and restless. I turned into the parking lot at the Oval. Eighteen, draft card in my pocket as a pass to any bar in town, I pushed through the door.
“What say, gentlemen.” Five or six fellow seniors from the Academy were sitting around one of the big circular tables, gallon pitcher of beer in the center.
“Hey Dupre, where are you going to flunk out?”
“Shit, figured I’d flunk out of WVU. How about you?” I sat down and waved at the waitress for a glass.
“Oh, I figure W & J’s good enough for me to flunk out of.”
“Some sweet meeting,” I said. Captain Barkley, our English teacher known as “the Toad,” had called us together after school to roast us for slacking off. Now Revington, from the corner where he sat, his long body sprawled bonelessly over the chair, feet on the table, imitated the Toad’s voice perfectly: “With the attitude displayed by this class, you gentlemen are going to flunk out of every school foolish enough to admit you. Do I make myself clear?”
I looked around at the laughing faces: the out-the-pike boys, scions of Raysburg money—I could add them up like a handful of dollars—Benton, Clark, and Revington, all Raysburg Steel; Ramsey of the department store, Stewart of the bank, Greer and Phillips of the law firm, Jim Howell, the son of the mayor. I could slip in and out of that crowd easily enough by now, but I never felt comfortable in it.
I saw Revington’s dark eyes on mine. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered to me out of the side of his mouth.
“See you guys at Raysburg College,” I said to them, leaving. That’s where the Toad had told us we’d all end up.
Crunching across the gravel of the parking lot, Revington said, “It’s no joke, John.” He leaned against his father’s Porsche and stared up into the sky blanked out with Raysburg’s perpetual industrial haze. “This fucking two-bit town,” he said, “with its two-bit ambitions.”
“Hey,” I said, “congratulations.” He’d been admitted to Yale. I still had mixed feelings about that. My grades were far better than his, and I might have gone to Yale too, or to any of the Ivy League colleges. In fact, Colonel Sloan had called me into his office to give me hell for not applying to any of them, to which I’d replied, “My father doesn’t make that kind of money.” True enough, but that was only an excuse, and I still don’t know exactly why I chose the state university down at Morgantown. I do remember that after four years at the Academy I wanted to go to school with girls, but there was something more going on. Riding a university education into the upper middle class was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to be a writer, a poet, a folk singer; as Lyle and I kept telling each other, I wanted to experience life. I probably chose WVU because that’s where I thought the real people went.
“You don’t suppose the fact that my father went to Yale has anything to do with my getting in, do you?” Revington said in his bitterest voice, scowled, and dragged on his cigarette. It was only recently I’d begun to realize that he wasn’t merely another jack-off rich kid.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I said, meaning Polack Town.
“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm, but then looked quickly at me, grinning. “Hey, I know. Let’s go visit the doctor.”
“Who’s that? What doctor?”
“Don’t worry, ace, you’ll see.”
I followed along behind the Porsche’s taillights thinking this must be another one of Revington’s mysterious practical jokes. So what did he have planned for me this time? (But it wasn’t until later that I realized the full implication of it: he’d also been the one who’d hauled me to that party where I’d met Linda.) He took me to meet, surprisingly, someone our fathers’ age, a bandy-legged balding little man with a pipe and a pot belly—Doctor Markapolous.
“Evening, Doctor,” Revington said. “This is my friend, John Dupre.”
The man half-rose from his chair, grabbed my hand with a grip as solid as a coach’s. He had a blunt stubborn bulldog face and bright friendly eyes; I liked him at once. “That’s Zoë, my youngest,” he said, jerking his head toward the couch where a little pigtailed girl of nine or ten was intently clipping pictures out of a magazine and didn’t bother to look up. “You boys want a beer?” Revington and I exchanged significant glances.
He brought in a quart, we drank it in five minutes flat, and he went back for another one. This guy’s all right, I thought, although I was perched smugly atop my assessment of the situation. Revington and his father were not exactly close (his standard one-liner: “My father spoke to me once . . . Nineteen fifty-one, I think. Or maybe fifty-two,”) and I was thinking: Oh, so here’s William’s father substitute. But we guzzled down the beer and found ourselves in the middle of a fiery conversation, and, by God, it was just as exciting as any symposium with the boys in the bar. The doctor was down on the rat race as much as we were; we all seemed to be keen on changing the world, “through art,” I said. “No,” Doctor Markapolous said, “through education. People listen when I talk because I’ve got that MD after my name, and damn it, it does mean something. Learn as much as you can, boys. Never stop learning.” And it didn’t appear that we were ever going to stop drinking either. He seemed delighted that we’d dropped in; smoking his pipe, yelling, trotting off for more beer, he showed no signs of running down. I’d never met an adult like that before in my life, and eventually I realized that I’d fallen under his spell just as much as Revington must have. I thought: Christ, why couldn’t my father be like this?
That’s when it happened, with me half drunk and fully relaxed, not expecting to get sucker punched. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that someone had whisked in and out of the room, an eerily brief flicker like a shy animal coming to look and then gone again before anyone could notice. “Cassandra,” the doctor yelled. A girl bounded back into the living room. She was at that difficult age when it’s impossible to tell if she’s old enough: narrow hips, tiny breasts, the lithe long legs of a colt, but her hair was set, up on rollers as big as orange juice cans, and her legs were shaved. She was barefoot, in minimal camp shorts and a plain white blouse.
“This is my eldest,” the doctor said. “Cassandra. This is John Dupre,” with a wink to me. “He’s a pretty bright kid.” I would have expected almost any girl to smile. She did not smile. Not a hint, not a suggestion, not a trace of a smile. She stopped perfectly still, feet flat on the carpet. She had gray eyes—clear, somber, and direct.
Not even summer yet, and she was tanned evenly all over, or maybe it was her Greek blood and the light in the living room, but she looked nearly as dark as mahogany, her complexion Mediterranean, just a shade lighter than olive. A strong face—I don’t mean thick or heavy—but a high forehead, positive nose, vigorous unplucked brows, firm lips as beautifully cut as those on one of the exquisite boy athletes the classical Greek sculptors all seemed to have been in love with. Her eyes were widely spaced and almond-shaped, angling upward at the outer margins. When she spoke, her voice was as somber and self-possessed as her eyes: “Hello, John Dupre.”
“Come back again,” Doctor Markapolous said at one in the morning when Revington and I stumbled up, dead drunk, to leave. I knew I would.
◊ ◊ ◊
I DON’T suppose I’d seen Cassandra longer than two minutes, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood leaning on the porch railing staring out at the lights of town reflected in the river. What the hell was the matter with me? I was in love with Linda, wasn’t I? So what was I doing getting struck down at first sight like some pathetic Romeo by a little kid just at the edge of puberty? Without having been, I hoped, too obvious about it, I’d extracted her age from her father. Fourteen.
Linda had been fourteen when I’d met her. And there was something else; I’d known it, of course, as an emotional background blur in my mind, but this was the first time I’d been able to put it into words: I like young girls. Not children, but girls right at the edge, just as they’re beginning to turn into women. But when I’d met Linda, I’d been sixteen; now I was eighteen, and those two extra years felt like a barrier wide as a moat. Where did it come from, what could it possibly mean?
I didn’t enjoy thinking about my childhood. Remembering it filled me with painful, skin-crawling embarrassment, but now I seemed to be stuck thinking about it. When I’d been little, I hadn’t known any men, and the few I’d met had scared me to death. I couldn’t remember much of anything about being four, but that’s the year my father had come home from the war, and I gather that I kept telling my mother I wanted that man to go away again. By the time I entered grade school, I knew he didn’t like me very much, and that was just fine; I didn’t like him either. I’d never seen a naked human body other than my own, and I thought that the only difference between boys and girls was the length of their hair. I can remember—I must have been in the first grade—telling my mother that I didn’t want to be a boy anymore, that I’d decided to be a girl. I thought it was that simple. She said I couldn’t really do that—because “boys and girls have different bodies.” That didn’t make the least bit of sense to me. I looked at my hand, and it didn’t look any different from a girl’s hand.
At Jefferson Elementary School on Raysburg Island at the end of the forties, it was obvious that it was much better to be a girl than a boy. At any rate, it was obvious to me. Girls were smarter than boys. Girls talked to each other (in fact, some of them never shut up). Girls got to wear pretty clothes. Girls liked doing all the things I liked doing—coloring, reading, sewing, stringing beads, cutting pretty pictures out of magazines. Girls, most of them, were nice to me. But boys weren’t nice. They knocked each other down, punched and kicked each other, played dumb boring games like softball. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to be a boy. I kept pestering my mother to buy me a skirt. Boys in Scotland wear kilts, I said, and I was part Scottish, wasn’t I? The skirt she bought me (I picked it out) was a short pleated Stewart tartan that didn’t look even remotely like a kilt. I wore it every day after school. “Don’t you ever let your father catch you like that,” my mother told me.
I was a solitary kid, but I did have a few friends, and they were always girls. Sometimes we played dress-up, and I tried on their clothes every chance I got. Halloween was my favorite holiday, the one day a year I could wear anything I wanted; until I grew old enough to know better, I used the occasion to turn myself into a series of storybook princesses. The second grade sticks in my mind as the prettiest costume I ever wore, the only time I was ever photographed dressed as a girl. I had decided to be Alice in Wonderland. I knew what Alice looked like because I had books about her, and I insisted that I wanted to look like her all the way down to the finest detail. I don’t know how my mother managed to assemble the costume—maybe she rented it somewhere—but she found the right blond wig, the right dress and apron, and even the right frothy petticoat to make the skirt flare. I borrowed patent leather shoes from one of my girlfriends. When I showed up at school, the other kids teased me briefly and then, strangely enough, stopped teasing me. It’s almost as though they forgot I was a boy—or maybe I simply seemed more natural to them as a girl. By the end of the day, the other girls were calling me Alice as though it was really my name. I wanted Halloween to last forever.
I couldn’t feel any anger toward my mother for aiding and abetting me. Her indifference still felt like kindness. “He’ll outgrow it,” I overheard her saying to my father. And she’d been right; I had outgrown it—if burying it in myself and escaping into a compulsive world of fantasy and science fiction was outgrowing it. When I’d been little, I’d been oddly proud of my girlishness, but gradually I’d learned to be ashamed of it. By the time I was twelve, I never would have admitted to anyone that I still sometimes wanted to be a girl. I hated it when the kids at Jefferson called me “Miss Dupre.” A boy who wanted to be a girl was a sissy, and that was the most shameful disgusting thing a boy could be. I learned to be careful.
I paced up and down on the porch, cutting into memory, trying to make sense of all this. The second grade, I remembered, was also the year I fell in love with a girl in my class named Nancy Clark. Her mother set her blond hair into perfect Shirley Temple sausage curls and sent her to school every day in party dresses and classic Mary Janes, and I thought Nancy was so wonderful that I couldn’t imagine why everyone in the world wasn’t in love with her. She even tap danced; I remember admiring her in school recitals. Nancy was— I was about to say “shy,” but that’s not right. She was the kind of girl who, when she wanted to tell you something, bent close and whispered in your ear. And she liked me as much as I liked her. We walked around the school yard holding hands, sat together when we could, and announced to the world that we were going to get married. I was delighted to be her boyfriend, and I fully intended to marry her—and I wanted to be just like her. At the time, those things did not seem contradictory.
Seven-year-old boys at Jefferson Elementary did not have girlfriends. A normal boy—a real boy—would have rather died on the rack than be seen walking around at recess holding hands with a girl. So Nancy and I must have made quite a spectacle of ourselves, and I think now that there must have been some adult plot to separate us. In the third grade, we were put into different classes. We got older and drifted apart. I’ve forgotten everyone else at Jefferson, but I’ll never forget Nancy Clark.
◊ ◊ ◊
I WAS still pacing when dawn began to whiten the streets. My mind kept coming back to Linda and Cassandra. Then, as suddenly as slicing through a knot, I found something more. Fourteen, the magic age, had been another bad year for me, another year I’d been doing my best to forget. Halfway through the eighth grade, I’d begun to sprout a blond fuzz of pubic hair. One morning I woke out of my first wet dream; I’d read enough to know what it meant, so I’d been expecting it, but still my reaction was violent. I shut myself in the bathroom and threw up. I remember thinking: It’s true. I really am a boy. There’s no escape from it. And then I tried to escape from it.
I could not possibly have worked up the courage to walk up to a newsstand and buy a copy of Seventeen, but it was easy enough to read it in the library—hiding it inside another magazine. Seventeen told you, in as much detail as you’d ever want or need, exactly how to be a girl. I read it, and other girls’ magazines, cover to cover, storing information I could never use. I knew, in theory at least, how to set hair, how to put on makeup, what styles were in and what were out. At home I swiped the Sears Roebuck catalogue, clipped pictures out of the girls’ section, and pasted them into a secret scrapbook. I could get lost for hours in that scrapbook. I had compelling, intense, and vividly detailed fantasies. They weren’t sexual fantasies. I never imagined a sexual act of any kind with anybody, and it never occurred to me to play with myself. I imagined ordinary everyday events like setting my hair and shaving my legs, putting on a nice outfit—nothing sexy, just the normal clothes a fourteen-year-old girl would wear, a blouse and a skirt, bobby socks and loafers—and walking over to town to meet my girlfriends and go to a matinee at the Liberty. Back in the real world, summer twilight drove me crazy, filled me with an unbearable anguish that felt like an iron ring crushing my lungs and stomach; all I could find to do for it was ride my bike around and around the Island until darkness brought the illusion of relief.
I decided that I should match the weight-height charts for teenage girls. Those dopey charts were everywhere in those days; the one I’d found was for “ideal” weight and was broken down not only by height but also by age and “frame.” I already fit into the section for fourteen-year-old girls of my height with a “heavy frame,” but that wasn’t good enough for me. The top end of the “light frame” range was 112, the bottom end 98, and I became obsessed with those numbers. I went on cottage cheese and grapefruit diets until I weighed 110. I found a million excuses not to visit the barber shop, feathered my hair over my forehead to look like bangs, dressed to the teeth in pink and charcoal—the colors that were in that year—and painted my nails with clear polish. When my father was deeply displeased with me, he always expressed himself through my mother. “Your father is very upset,” she said.
“But he does it!” I said. My mother explained to me that there was a difference between a grown-up businessman getting a manicure once a month and a fourteen-year-old boy wearing nail polish. And, while she was on the subject of my appearance, she really had to mention my hair. It was a disgrace, and if I didn’t do something about it, my father certainly would.
I stopped wearing nail polish, got a haircut, and decided to try for the low end of the weight chart. “You’re not going on any more crazy diets,” my mother said. “You’re thin enough already.” So I got sneaky—found ways to miss meals, rearrange things on my plate so it looked as though I’d been eating, secretly dump food into the garbage. My mother took me to our family doctor. I told him three lies: that I felt fine, always ate as much as I wanted, and was never hungry. Breaking 100 pounds was one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my life, and I was enormously pleased with myself. For a few days, I even weighed 98. Then it occurred to me that if I could get my weight below 98, I’d be even better than a real girl. But that fall my father sent me to the Raysburg Military Academy, and all of a sudden I had more serious things to worry about than trying to drop off the bottom of a girls’ weight chart.
I’d put all that—my miserable embarrassing childhood— behind me, or so I’d thought. I was eighteen now, and I was doing just fine. Nobody any longer suspected that there was anything wrong with me. Finding Linda had made everything fall into place, and up until tonight, that had been enough. So what had happened to me in those two minutes I’d seen Cassandra Markapolous? By then I’d read not only Freud and Havelock Ellis but every book on sex in the library. I’d learned what “fetishes” were and knew that I had quite a few of them myself; I adored anything that struck me as archetypically feminine: high heels, stockings and petticoats, lipstick and nail polish, little white gloves, a majorette’s short skirt and white boots. According to everything I’d read, with a childhood like mine, I might well have been a homosexual, but I knew that I wasn’t. My friendship with Lyle was the most intense I’d ever had with anybody, but I didn’t want to go to bed with him; not only was the thought of it repellent, it was utterly ridiculous. And I did want to go to bed with Linda—sometime, in the dim future. But suddenly there’d been this little kid, Cassandra, too young for me, breastless, tanned, with her direct tomboy gaze and her hair up in rollers—a boy-girl—which is what, in the privacy of my mind, in my bed, in the dark, I still felt myself to be. All of the books I’d read hadn’t helped a bit. Not a single one of them had described anyone who sounded the least bit like me. It was full daylight, and I was still immensely confused.
◊ ◊ ◊
GREEN MORNINGS. I can’t stay confused for long: life’s too sweet. Only a few months ago, I’d hated the sound of the alarm tearing away my sleep, had awakened into the cold darkness thinking: oh Christ, not another day! My senior year had been an enormous ordeal to get through, like prison or Marine boot camp, but now the Boards are over, classes are over, I’m going away to university in the fall, and I have Linda. The green wind blowing in is hot already. I’m awake ahead of the alarm, and by noon the sun will be burning bright. I slip out of bed, feel the good ache of use in my legs, the sweat under my arms. I slip into jock, shorts, and sneakers and bicycle down to the Island stadium. Saturday morning and nobody up yet, the track deserted except for me and the birds, I run two miles at just under fourteen minutes. It seems slow to me, a romp; I’m not pushing myself in the least. Drifting home to the click of the wheels, I’m astonished again at my own happiness and good fortune. It’s so big and fat and sunny I can never quite get ahold of it: life broad and straight as Front Street and I can’t possibly lose.
But in an hour I’m wondering how the hell I’m going to get through the rest of the day. It takes me only ten minutes to get sick of playing the guitar. Now I’m as tense and twanging as my steel strings. I pick the car keys off the dining room table. It’s only a short drive to Cassandra’s house. I’ve seen a lot of her father lately but next to nothing of her. I’m beginning to suspect that she’s avoiding me. I arrive around noon. The doctor, as I know damned well, is on the golf course. The first person I see is little Zoë. She’s playing all alone, riding her bicycle from one end of the street to the other. “My daddy’s not home,” she says whizzing by me. I sit down on the glider.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I don’t know,” she yells on the next pass.
A glimpse of Cassandra just inside the front door—babydoll pajamas, hammer blow to my ribs. She doesn’t come out onto the porch. “Dad’s not home.”
“That’s what your sister said.”
“I think he’s playing golf or something.” She’s gone. I wait. It’s turning into a viciously hot day.
In a few minutes Cassandra returns in shorts and a halter top, throws herself down on the glider next to me but doesn’t look in my direction at all. She has a wonderful thick mane of reddish-brown hair. She puts her feet up on the railing; the soles are filthy. (Does she ever were shoes?) Her knees are knobby and the bones in her ankles sharp as cherry stones. “I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she says. (Does she ever smile?) We swing gently in the glider. (Does she ever talk?)
My mouth’s gone dry, and I can actually feel the increase in my heart rate. I’m just on the point of standing up to leave when Zoë parks her bike, runs up the steps, and, without any warning at all, jumps smack onto my lap. It’s as though Cassandra got all the Greek blood and there wasn’t any left for her sister; Zoë’s got a cute pink-cheeked oval face, a perfect little cupid’s bow mouth, and huge long-lashed eyes, blue as cornflowers. She’s almost too pretty, like a sentimentalized painting of a cherub. And now what am I supposed to do with her sitting on me—pet her like a cat? And isn’t she a little big for this sort of thing?
“Zoë,” Cassandra says, her voice sharp, “don’t be a pest.”
“I’m not a pest. Ask John. Am I a pest?”
“Zo-ë! ” Cassandra’s voice has a distinct warning in it.
Little sister gives big sister a murderous look, slips off my lap, and marches into the house, banging the door behind her. “Good grief,” Cassandra says, lets her head fall back so she’s looking directly up at the ceiling.
“Well, tell your dad I was here, will you?” But I continue to sit there.
Still without looking at me, she says, “You go with Linda Edmonds, don’t you?”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“Oh, I heard it.”
“How about you? Do you go with anybody?”
“Oh sure. They line up halfway around the block.” What’s that supposed to be, a joke? She’d said it with no expression in her voice at all.
Suddenly I can’t stand to be there any longer. I’m on my feet with sweat pouring down my sides, hear myself saying again, asininely, “Tell your dad I was here.”
She doesn’t answer, and I’m in the car and gone. I’m making a fool of myself; that much is obvious. Stop thinking about Cassandra Markapolous, I tell myself. She’s too young for you. And besides, you’re in love with Linda.
◊ ◊ ◊
YEAH, IT really did seem that Linda and I were in love. As I squired her through all of our year-end functions, the dances and the Prom and the graduation parties and banquets, I’d never been happier with a girl or felt better about myself as a male; going steady or not, she was “my girl,” and everyone knew it. She might have been something of an embarrassment when I’d started dating her, but she wasn’t any longer. If I’d wanted a girl to show off, she’d grown into the role perfectly. I remember one night, a dinner party, the dining room table set with white linen and candles, aureoles of soft light on the crystal, flames glinting from the silver, and Linda stepping into the scene as though she’d prepared particularly for candlelight and white linen—a short powder-blue cocktail dress and exquisite white heels to show off her legs, her schoolgirl pageboy replaced by a stylish bouffant, her nails polished and as lucent as the silverware—graceful and charming, outshining the table. Or Linda at the Prom in a formal gown, floating on the dance floor with a rustle of crinolines, as easy to lead as thistledown, avatar of a Southern belle.
But something was going wrong so subtly that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Although they’d been invited to my graduation, her parents didn’t come. At the time, I didn’t think a thing of it. And there I was, the Salutatorian, standing up in front of the lectern, reading my speech to my friends and classmates, my teachers, to everybody in the whole goddamned Academy. I glanced at Linda only once. She was sitting with my parents, looking up at me with her huge eyes and beautiful smile. To keep my panic under control, I stared hard at the paper in front of me. My voice, like that of a distant Doppelgänger, was reverberating out of the PA speakers. “We can make ourselves in any image we desire,” I was saying. “We are not merely creatures of environment to be measured and tabulated by the social sciences, but, if we control habit instead of habit controlling us, we are masters of our fate. As Will James writes: ‘Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.’”
Then it was over, high school was over. Lyle pumped my hand. “Wonderful speech, boy. You really told them.” My father congratulated me, my mother was crying, and I couldn’t stand it, had to be alone for a minute with Linda. I walked her away from the crowd to a tree, took her white-gloved hands in mine. Suddenly the full weight of it sunk into me for the first time; it wasn’t a game, not a story I was writing or a play I was starring in. I wasn’t in high school anymore, and now I’d have to leave. Jesus, I thought, I can’t let her see me cry. She threw her arms around me and hung on.
“It’s all right, John,” she said, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
The last event of the year was final drills. I’d been looking forward to it, but our parade was rained out.