In One Person

I said good-bye to El--either that same day or the next one. She wasn't very understanding about it.

I called Richard Abbott and got Mrs. Hadley on the phone. "Tell Richard I'm going to try it," I told her.

"I've got my fingers crossed for you, Billy--Richard and I would love it if you were living here," Martha Hadley said.

That was why I was living in Grandpa Harry's River Street house, now mine, on the morning Uncle Bob called me from the office of Alumni Affairs at the academy.

"It's about Big Al, Billy," Bob said. "This isn't an obituary I would ever run, unedited, in The River Bulletin, but I gotta run the unedited version by you."

It was February 1990 in First Sister--colder than a witch's tit, as we say in Vermont.

Miss Frost was the same age as the Racquet Man; she'd died from injuries she suffered in a fight in a bar--she was seventy-three. The injuries were mostly head injuries, Uncle Bob told me. Big Al had found herself in a barroom brawl with a bunch of airmen from Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire. The bar had been in Dover, or maybe in Portsmouth--Bob didn't have all the details.

"What's 'a bunch,' Bob--how many airmen were there?" I asked him.

"Uh, well, there was one airman first-class, and one airman basic, and a couple more who were only identified by the airmen word--that's all I can tell you, Billy," Uncle Bob said.

"Young guys, right? Four of them? Were there four of them, Bob?" I asked him.

"Yes, four. I assume they were young, Billy--if they were enlisted men and still in service. But I'm just guessing about their ages," Uncle Bob told me.

Miss Frost had probably received her head injuries after the four of them finally managed to get her down; I imagine it took two or three of them to hold her down, while the fourth man had kicked her in the head.

All four men had been hospitalized, Bob told me; the injuries to two of the four were listed as "serious." But none of the airmen had been charged; at that time, Pease was still a SAC base. According to Uncle Bob, the Strategic Air Command "disciplined" its own, but Bob admitted that he didn't truly understand how the "legal stuff" (when it came to the military) really worked. The four airmen were never identified by name, nor was there any information as to why four young men had a fight with a seventy-three-year-old woman, who--in their eyes--may or may not have been acceptable as a woman.

My guess, and Bob's, was that Miss Frost might have had a past relationship--or just a previous meeting--with one or more of the airmen. Maybe, as Herm Hoyt had speculated to me, one of the fellas had objected to the intercrural sex; he might have found it insufficient. Perhaps, given how young the airmen were, they knew of Miss Frost only "by reputation"; it might have been enough provocation to them that she was, in their minds, not a real woman--it might have been only that. (Or they were frigging homophobes--it might have been only that, too.)

Whatever led to the altercation, it was apparent--as Coach Hoyt had predicted--that Big Al would never back down from a fight.

"I'm sorry, Billy," 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.

IT 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.)