In One Person by John Irving

she’d once loved.
    I even began an early novel with this tortured and overlong sentence: “According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any fiction, by which she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked—she meant reality, of course.”
    My mom’s assessment of “pure imagining” was not flattering. Fiction was frivolous to her; no, it was worse than frivolous.
    One Christmas—I believe it was the first Christmas I’d come home to Vermont, for a visit, in several years—I was scribbling away in a notebook, and my mother asked me, “What are you writing now, Billy?”
    “A novel,” I told her.
    “Well, that should make you happy,” she suddenly said to Grandpa Harry, who’d begun to lose his hearing—sawmill damage, I suppose.
    “Me? Why should it make me happy that Bill is writing another novel? Not that I didn’t love the last one, Bill, because I sure-as-shit did love it!” Grandpa Harry quickly assured me.
    “Of course you loved it,” my mother told him. “Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?”
    “Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry had started to say, but then stopped. As Harry got older, he stopped himself from saying what he was going to say—more and more.
    I know the feeling. When I was a teenager, when I began to sense that my mom wasn’t as nice to me as she’d been before, I got in the habit of stopping myself from saying what I wanted to say. Not anymore.
    M ANY YEARS LATER, LONG after I’d left Favorite River Academy, at the height of my interest in she-males—I mean dating them, not being one—I was having dinner with Donna one night, and I told her about Grandpa Harry’s onstage life as a female impersonator.
    “Was it only onstage?” Donna asked.
    “As far as I know,” I answered her, but you couldn’t lie to her. One of a couple of uncomfortable things about Donna was that she always knew when you were holding out on her.
    Nana Victoria had been dead for more than a year when I first heard from Richard that no one could persuade Grandpa Harry to part with my late grandmother’s clothes. (At the sawmill, of course, Harry Marshall was sure-as-shit still dressing like a lumberman.)
    Eventually, I would come clean to Donna about Grandpa Harry spending his evenings in his late wife’s attire—if only in the privacy of his River Street home. I would leave out the part about Harry’s cross-dressing adventures after he was moved to that assisted-living facility he and Nils Borkman had (years before) generously built for the elderly in First Sister. The other residents had complained about Harry repeatedly surprising them in drag. (As Grandpa Harry would one day tell me, “I think you’ve noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.”)
    Fortunately, when Richard Abbott told me what had happened at the assisted-living facility, Grandpa Harry’s River Street home had not yet been sold; it was still on the market. Richard and I quickly moved Harry back into the familiar surroundings of the house he’d lived in with Nana Victoria for so many years. Nana Victoria’s clothes were moved back into the River Street house with him, and the nurse Richard and I hired, for Grandpa Harry’s round-the-clock care, made no objection to Harry’s apparently permanent transformation as a woman. The nurse fondly remembered Harry Marshall’s many female impersonations onstage.
    “Did the cross-dressing bug ever bite you, Billy?” Donna asked me one night.
    “Not really,” I’d answered her.
    My attraction to transsexuals was pretty specific. (I’m sorry, but we didn’t use to say “transgender”—not till the eighties.) Transvestites never did it for me, and the transsexuals had to be what they call “passable”—one of few adjectives I still have trouble with, in