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 the pronunciation department. Furthermore, their breasts had to be natural--hormones were okay, but no surgical implants--and, not surprisingly, I preferred small breasts.
How feminine she was mattered a lot to Donna. She was tall but thin--even her upper arms were slender--and she was flawlessly smooth-skinned. (I've known many women who were hairier.) She was always having her hair done; she was very stylish.
Donna was self-conscious about her hands, though they were not as noticeably big and strong-looking as Miss Frost's. Donna didn't like to hold hands with me, because my hands were smaller.
She came from Chicago, and she tried living in New York--after we broke up, I heard she'd moved to Toronto--but Donna believed that Europe was the place for someone like her. I used to take her with me on publishing trips, when my novels were translated into various European languages. Donna said that Europe was more accepting of transsexuals--Europe was more sexually accepting and sophisticated, generally--but Donna was insecure about learning another language.
She'd dropped out of college, because her college years coincided with what she called her "sexual-identity crisis," and she had little confidence in herself intellectually. This was crazy, because she read all the time--she was very smart--but there are those years when we're supposed to feed and grow our minds, and Donna felt that she'd lost those years to her difficult decision to live as a woman.
Especially when we were in Germany, where I could speak the language, Donna was at her happiest--that is, when we were together on those German-language translation trips, not only in Germany but also in Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. Donna loved Zurich; I know it struck her, as Zurich does everyone, as a very well-to-do city. She loved Vienna, too--from my student days in Vienna, I still knew my way around (a little). Most of all, Donna was delighted with Hamburg--to her, I think, Hamburg was the most elegant-seeming German city.
In Hamburg, my German publishers always put me up at the Vier Jahreszeiten; it was such an elegant hotel, I think it gave Donna most of her delight with Hamburg. But then there was that awful evening, after which Donna could never be happy in Hamburg--or, perhaps, with me--again.
It began innocently enough. A journalist who'd interviewed me invited us to a nightclub on the Reeperbahn; I didn't know the Reeperbahn, or what kind of club it was, but this journalist (and his wife, or girlfriend) invited Donna and me to go out with them and see a show. Klaus (with a K) and Claudia (with a C) were their names; we took a taxi together to the club.
I should have known what kind of place it was when I saw those skinny boys at the bar on our way in. A Transvestiten-Cabaret--a transvestite show. (I'm guessing the skinny boys at the bar were the performers' boyfriends, because it wasn't a pickup place, and, the boys at the bar excepted, there wasn't a visible gay presence.)
It was a show for sex tourists--guys in drag, entertaining straight couples. The all-male groups were young men there for the laughs; the all-women groups were there to see the penises. The performers were comedians; they were very aware of themselves as men. They were not half as passable as my dear Donna; they were the old-fashioned transvestites who weren't really trying to pass as female. They were meticulously made up, and elaborately costumed; they were very good-looking, but they were good-looking men dressed as women. In their dresses and wigs, they were very feminine-looking men, but they weren't fooling anybody--they weren't even trying to.
Klaus and Claudia clearly had no idea that Donna was one of them (though she was much more convincing, and infinitely more committed).
"I didn't know," I told Donna. "I really didn't. I'm sorry."
Donna couldn't speak. It had not occurred to her--this was the seventies--that one of the more sophisticated and accepting things about Europe, when it came to difficult decisions regarding sexual identity, was that the Europeans were so used to sexual differences that they had already begun to make fun of them.
That the performers were making fun of themselves must have been terribly painful for Donna, who'd had to work so hard to take herself seriously as a woman.
There was one skit with a very tall tranny driving a make-believe car, while her date--a frightened-looking, smaller man--is attempting to go down on her. What frightens the small man is how big the tranny's cock is, and how his inexpert attentions to this monster cock are interfering with the tranny's driving.
Of course Donna couldn't understand the German; the tranny was talking nonstop, offering breathless criticism of what a bad blow job she was getting. Well, I had to laugh, and I don't think Donna ever forgave me.
Klaus and Claudia clearly thought I had a typical American girlfriend; they thought Donna was not enjoying the show because she was a sexually uptight prude. There was no way to explain anything to them--not there.
When we left, Donna was so distraught that she jumped when one of the waitresses spoke to her. The waitress was a tall transvestite; she could have passed for one of the performers. She said to Donna (in German), "You are looking really fine." It was a compliment, but I knew that the tranny knew Donna was a transsexual. (Almost no one could tell, not at that time. Donna didn't advertise it; her entire effort went into being a woman, not getting away as one.)
"What did she say?" Donna kept asking me, as we left the club. In the seventies, the Reeperbahn wasn't the tourist trap that it is today; there were the sex tourists, of course, but the street itself was seedier then--the way Times Square used to be seedier, too, and not so overrun with gawkers.
"She was complimenting you--she thought you looked 'really fine.' She meant you were beautiful," I told Donna.
"She meant 'for a man,' right--isn't that what she meant?" Donna asked me. She was crying. Klaus and Claudia still didn't get it. "I'm not some two-bit cross-dresser!" Donna cried.
"We're sorry if this was a bad idea," Klaus said rather stiffly. "It's meant to be funny--it's not intended to be offensive." I just kept shaking my head; there was no way to save the night, I knew.
"Look, pal--I've got a bigger dick than the tranny driving that nonexistent car!" Donna said to Klaus. "You want to see it?" Donna asked Claudia.
"Don't," I said to her--I knew Donna was no prude. Far from it!