“And I’ve never heard of a woman who wanted to marry a fairy. Not knowingly, anyway.”
“Well, then.” Bea flushed. “Consider me down on one knee.”
He scratched behind one ear, then the other. The wig had made him itchy, and the scratching was straightforward and satisfying. He kept at it, needing more as he went. “I barely know you.”
“You know of me.”
“I know you spend a great deal of time trying to rid the world of my second-favorite vice.”
“That’s only politics.”
“If that’s only politics, you’re quite an actress.”
He watched her watching him, her eyes taking in his tutu and his woman’s shoes.
Nothing more had been said that night. Albert took her hand as if he’d done it a hundred times before, and turned them to face the room.
Dear Bea,
Out the window, just visible through the budding tree that flanked the opposite townhouse, was Lillian and Henry’s house one block over on Chestnut Street, their windows turning purple as they caught the sun. Albert guessed Henry would hate him, and Lillian would act as if she hated him, too, while secretly she would soften toward him, relieved. Albert didn’t think he should care what his in-laws thought, and yet he did, which was yet another problem, not what they thought but his caring, or it was emblematic of his largest problem, which was, he supposed, if he was going to be honest—he took out a fresh piece of paper—what he really wanted to tell Bea.
There was a secret court
Albert’s senior year at Harvard, there had been a secret court. It was convened after the suicide of a student named Cyril Wilcox, who had been involved—according to his brother—in homosexual activities. (Cyril’s brother informed Harvard’s acting dean of this only after he’d gone and beat up Cyril’s lover.) Thus the court, consisting of the dean, a professor of hygiene, and several others, began interviewing reputedly homosexual students about their practices of masturbation, habits of cross-dressing, uses of slang, parties attended and with whom, etc. After thirty such interviews, the court reported its findings to President Abbott Lawrence Lowell and, based on the evidence, expelled eight students, one of whom, Eugene Cummings, killed himself in Stillman Infirmary a few days later.
I was not called in
It could be said—it would be said—that no one knew what had gone on. But the court knew. President Lowell (the same man Governor Fuller had just appointed to sit on the Sacco and Vanzetti commission) knew. And the boys knew: the ones who were refused positive references by Harvard and therefore rejected by other colleges; the ones who had perjured themselves before the court and denied all kissing, mutual masturbation, fondling, and dancing; and the ones like Albert, who had stayed so far away, kept his head so low, and pretended so earnestly to himself that he was nothing like Wilcox or Cummings that he never got called in.
I watched