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CHAPTER 1. THE DAUGHTER OF AN EARL

Lady Penelope Effingham was the daughter of the sixth Earl of Markham. Slim and athletic, she was an avid tennis player who could hold her own against men as well as other women; she was considered a beauty and was courted by many very desirable young men, though she had not shown a clear preference for any one of them. She was also a brilliant conversationalist and writer who, at the age of 20, had already published two slim volumes of poetry which received measured praise from the critics of the day. Penelope’s father travelled often and maintained a chateau in the Loire valley in France and a small mansion in the suburbs of Berlin, at both of which Lady Penelope spent considerable portions of her childhood. As a result, she was totally fluent in both French and German, as well as in Latin, which she had taught herself.

And then the second great European war came and, after working in various volunteer jobs, Lady Penelope suddenly disappeared from public view. Her friends and even her siblings had no idea where she was at, and they knew enough not to inquire. Her father did know, but did not talk about it. Only after the war did it become known that she had been approached by Colonel Colin Gubbins, an old friend of her father, who asked her to join a very clandestine organization which was being set up, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE was founded in June of 1940 and dedicated to conducting covert operations behind enemy lines. Lady Penelope joined without hesitation. After a year of conducting language classes for SOE operatives at the SOE’s first headquarters at 64 Baker Street in London (which led to the nickname “The Baker Street Irregulars”) and then at Wanborough Manor in Guildford, she volunteered for frontline action. She was trained as a wireless operator and was dropped into France in the fall of 1941 to act as liaison with the French CLOUCHE resistance network.

For seven months, the CLOUCHE network conducted sabotage raids against German targets, helped rescue downed British airmen and convey them to Spain or Switzerland, and provided highly valuable intelligence data on German operations in the Paris area. Then, somehow, the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) were able to identify and penetrate them and, in a coordinated operation, all of the network’s leaders were rounded up or killed. Lady Penelope was apparently surprised in her bed in the garret where she slept. When her friends came the next morning, they found signs of a struggle and a blood-stained bullet-holed bed sheet. The Gestapo had apparently taken Penelope - dead or alive - with them. Her body was never recovered nor did any Gestapo records as to what happened to her ever come to light.

After the war, when the story of the SOE was published, the tale of Penelope Effingham was one of the highlights - the intelligent, beautiful, aristocratic young lady who sacrificed herself for the cause of fighting the Nazis. Those who knew her during the war told and retold stories of her courage, her leadership, and her sweetness which kept them going in many a dark hour. At least three books and two movies appeared based (rather loosely) on her life. The bullet-holed bed sheet stained with her blood was prominently displayed in the Imperial War Museum in London. Then, as inevitably happens, the interest in Penelope Effingham waned. A new postwar generation grew up that cared more about the future than the past, and the generation after that knew or cared even less about the war. Even the endless sequence of BBC and History Channel documentaries about the war seemed rather lifeless after a while. The story of Penelope Effingham, SOE heroine, became a footnote in a tome now rarely removed from the shelves.

CHAPTER 2. THE REVIVAL OF INTEREST

The revival of interest in Penelope Effingham came, surprisingly, not from her wartime heroics but from the two volumes of poetry she had published before her 20th birthday. Academic researchers in the late 90’s stumbled upon them and decided that they had a seminal influence on modern British poetry. Hugh Malcolm, a Cambridge don and expert on contemporary poetry, led the way with a brilliantly-written treatise entitled “The Eff Factor” in which he maintained that the poems Lady Penelope Effingham had a direct and major impact on all poets after the war, whether they were aware of it or not. Indeed, he diagrammed these effects with a series of eye-catching diagrams showing lines of influence (which he called “Eff-rays”) emanating from her to everybody else. Malcolm’s book, originally intended for specialists, became a best seller and the quickly-reissued volumes of Penelope’s poetry sold out as fast as they could be reprinted. Her image changed - instead of being seen as the heroic secret agent and fighter, she began being portrayed as the great and promising poet who was martyred in a useless and needless display of senseless patriotism. (In the big picture, one must admit, the heroics of the SOE were essentially negligible and contributed very little to hastening the end of the war or influencing its direction.)

The BBC was quick to announce that it was funding a new miniseries about her, and that it had commissioned a special group of historians and forensic scientists to try and find the answer to the mystery of what happened to Penelope after her capture and to locate where she was buried. If her bones were found, they would of course be brought back to Britain and reinterred in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abby, alongside of Geoffrey Chaucer, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and many others.

CHAPTER 3. WHO WAS PENELOPE EFFINGHAM, REALLY?

While the BBC’s group of historians (and their graduate-student and research-assistant camp followers) headed for France and Germany to look for clues in the Gestapo archives which had survived the war, the forensic scientists concentrated on the only physical clue they had - the bullet-holed and blood-stained bed sheet still on display at the Imperial War Museum. Using the techniques of modern science, they were able to extract some DNA samples which, while barely usable, still might provide some information. These they intended to compare with DNA taken from Penelope’s only surviving sibling, her brother Herbert, now in his 80’s but still in full command of his mental facilities. Herbert Effingham had spent the war on the staff of Lord Mountbatten in Kandy and, after the conflict was over, parlayed the contacts he made into a very lucrative import/export business from which he had retired only at the age of 75. (The Earldom had passed from his father to his older brother Oliver and then on to Oliver’s eldest son, so Herbert Effingham was free to concentrate on making money without worrying about the burdens of aristocracy.)

When Dr. Hollis McBride, the head of the BBC’s forensic team, contacted him, he was of course willing to provide a DNA sample. Unfortunately, he had no papers or other memorabilia of his sister, all of these having been destroyed when the south wing of Markham Manor suffered a direct hit by a V-2 missile in the closing days of the war.

Dr. McBride duly arrived for their appointment two days later, and startled Herbert by telling him that he had made an amazing discovery, and so would not need a DNA sample after all. “What is that?” asked Herbert. “The blood on the sheet is not your sister’s blood,” replied Dr. McBride, “I know that for certain.” Herbert wondered how Dr. McBride could be so sure, without having another DNA sample to compare it to. “We did a preliminary analysis,” explained Dr. McBride, “and found that the blood is definitely of a man. Therefore it cannot be your sister’s.” Dr. McBride went on to explain that the historians were all very excited about this find, since it opened the question that if Penelope Effingham was not killed in that garret, what happened to her? Was she overpowered and taken alive to a Gestapo prison? Or, perhaps, did she go willingly? Maybe she was the traitor who told the Gestapo about the CLOUCHE network to begin with? She had, after all, spent a considerable amount of her girlhood in Germany - perhaps her loyalties secretly lay there?

Herbert Effingham sat quietly and looked very sad while Dr. McBride kept spinning wilder and wilder theories. Finally, he interjected quietly. “My sister was no traitor, and she did die in that garret.”

“I am going to tell you a long-hidden story,” he continued, “and then I am going to ask you and your group not to use it in any way. The story begins when I was four years old - barely old enough to understand what was happening around me. At the time, I had two brothers: Peter, the eldest, and Oliver, who was two years older than me. My mother had passed away a year before, and we were being raised by various governesses. As you pointed out, we lived in Germany quite a bit in those days, purportedly for my father’s business interests. Only many years later, after my father also passed away, did I find out that he really worked for SIS and was there collecting information on German industrial production and its military implications. One day, my father called us all into his study and told us that Peter was in the hospital, and it would be a while until he returned. But that when he returned, he would no longer be Peter any more, but would be a girl, whom we were to call Penelope from now on. We were not to pester her with questions, but just accept that this is what had to happen. Some of the governesses giggled and some were shocked (and one even tendered her resignation the next day) but Oliver and I, being little children, just accepted it as part of the game of life, which we were still learning how to play.

It was only several years later that I had the courage to ask Penelope to explain what had happened. She was very frank, as was her way. She told me that she had always felt she was a girl, even though she had the body of a boy, and discussed the matter openly with our parents. She sufficiently convinced them of her seriousness - but then she was always a very convincing talker - that my father took her to see a Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld who, in 1931, performed the first “sex-change” operation on Lili Elbe and on another person, whose name is known only as “Dora R”. Surprisingly, Dr. Hirschfeld was very slow and careful in arriving at his diagnosis, and called in not one but two psychologists to subject Penelope to a long series of interviews and tests. Only after almost a year, he concluded that she would be a good subject for another such operation.

Dr. Hirschfeld’s first two operations had been only qualified successes, mainly because the subjects were already adults who had been homosexually active and had definite sex drives they wished to fulfill immediately. These expectations were never met. He hoped, however, that by operating on someone who had not yet reached puberty, he would cause the body to secrete female hormones of its own accord and thus Penelope would be a more “normal” female. My father agreed to the operation which, for obvious reasons, was done under conditions of complete secrecy at a private clinic in Berlin. Dr. Hirschfeld had planned to follow Penelope’s subsequent development closely, but in 1933 the Nazis sacked and burned his offices and library in Berlin. He was out of Germany at the time, and never returned. Instead, he settled in France, first in Paris and later in Nice. Penelope was able to see him on a few occasions, but since her files had been left behind in Berlin, there was not much he could do. In 1935, Dr. Hirschfeld died of a heart attack.

While there is no clinical data, it does appear that Dr. Hirschfeld’s theory that Penelope’s body would generate its own female hormones was justified, for - as you know - she became a very lovely and very feminine lady.”

At this point Herbert Effingham took a longish break, and looked silently at the wall of his study. Then he continued.

“Of course, I knew nothing of what Penelope did during the war though my father who, as I told you, was in the SIS, most certainly did. After the war was over, he was determined to find Penelope’s body and bring it for burial in England. He had many chits that he could, and did, call in and was finally able to piece together the story of what happened to the CLOUCHE network with the help of some former Gestapo officers who, subsequently and rather unexpectedly, were granted early rehabilitation by the West German government. Basically, the story is this: while it is true that Nazi hotheads burned down Dr. Hirschfeld’s institute and library in 1933, many of his medical files were “rescued” by far-sighted leaders of what later became the Gestapo, who could foresee their possible future use. Among these was Penelope’s file. When, a few months after her arrival in France, she was identified on the street by a Gestapo informant, somebody managed to put two and two together and realize that they could blackmail her into working for them.

The Gestapo sent four men to confront Penelope. Of those four only one, Hans Joachim Mecke, survived the war. In 1949, he was personally interrogated by my father in a safe house not far from Bonn. According to Mecke, the four broke into Penelope’s garret and confronted her with her medical file from Dr. Hirschfeld’s clinic. They offered her a choice - act as their double agent inside the CLOUCHE network or the file would be leaked to the British authorities and to the “neutral” press in Sweden. While pretending to reluctantly acquiesce with their offer, Penelope reached for a gun she had hidden underneath her pillow and shot the leader directly in the head. Mecke pulled his gun and killed her on the spot. The three Gestapo agents then took both bodies away with them. Hans Joachim Mecke gave the exact details of where her corpse was dumped. He then had no more information to provide. As sometimes happens in such situations, he did not survive the interrogation. Pity.

My father managed to locate Penelope’s body where Herr Mecke said it would be and, using dental records, confirmed that it was indeed hers. He then secretly brought the body back to England. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered in the copse of trees where she often sat while writing her poetry, here at Markham Manor.”

Again, Herbert Effingham paused for a few moments.

“I have absolutely no documentary or other evidence to back up what I have just told you, nor will you be able to find any corroboration to it. If the BBC tries to air this story it will be skating on some very thin legal ice indeed. The SIS does not like tales like this to float around. I strongly suggest that the whole miniseries project be dropped.”

And so it was.

EPILOGUE: This story is fiction but, as usual, I have incorporated real people in walk-on roles. One of these is Colonel Colin Gubbins, Director of Operations and Training at the SOE, and the other, of course, is Dr. Marcus Hirschfeld, the flamboyant Berlin sexologist who performed the first sex-change operations. The character of Penelope Effingham is loosely based on that of Noor Inayat Khan, the Indian princess (raised in England and France) who served as an SOE wireless operator with the PHYSICIAN network in France; she was arrested by the Germans in 1943 and later executed by them. It is her picture which appears at the top of this story.

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Admin Note: Originally published on BigCloset TopShelf on Thursday 11-09-2006 at 12:15 am, this retro classic was pulled out of the closet, and re-presented for our newer readers. ~Sephrena
 
 

Adam Domanski considered himself to be lucky to have all of the opportunities he had in life. His father, the late Prof. Wlodzimierz Domanski, defected from Poland at the height of the Cold War by single-handedly stealing a light plane and piloting it to Denmark, flying very low to escape detection by the Polish and East German radar. After a short period of newspaper and television fame, he settled down to the relative obscurity of teaching chemistry at a small American college, met and married a Polish-American woman from Chicago, and fathered one child, Adam, who was brought up in a household which was both deeply conservative politically and very Catholic. The language of the house was Polish, and Adam grew up speaking it fluently.

Adam was a good and serious student, who met and, in turn, married a good Catholic girl, Mary-Ellen McCarthy, while both were undergraduates. They were virgins until their honeymoon. After he graduated with honors, Adam went on to law school, where he had achieved good grades, but -- to admit it -- did not find much satisfaction in the minutae of the law. One day, one of his law professors called him into his office and asked Adam for help. The professor had been doing some consulting to an American corporation which was trying to sign a very large export deal with the Polish government, and urgently needed some legal documents translated from Polish to English. Did Adam know anyone who could do it? Adam offered to do it himself, and found that he had no trouble at all finding the precise translations of the legal terms. He even liked the task, and was very surprised when the professor insisted on paying him at the going rate -- over $5000 -- for his work.

The word got around and soon Adam decided that he had found his vocation. He left law school at the end of the year and opened an office for legal translations. First, it specialized in translations between Polish and English, which he did himself. Later, he added a young Russian-American lawyer, Olga Yablokova, who handled legal translations between Russian and English and an African-American woman, Tracy Green, who had a master's degree in Slavic languages from Georgetown University and several years' experience in a government agency (best left unnamed -- as she put it, since No Such Agency exists) before she decided to leave Washington after her husband died on assignment for the same unnamed agency. Since Tracy had no law background, she acted as office manager in order to free Adam and Olga to concentrate on actual translation work. Clients would talk to her first, and would usually be startled when she conversed with them in fluent Russian, Polish, or other Slavic languages. Since she was also a generation older than Adam and Olga, she soon became the office "housemother," helping everyone with their personal problems as well. When Adam's father died suddenly of a stroke, she comforted him and helped him get over the loss and the pain. Finally, Maria Wajch, a young lady just out of high school, joined the group as secretary and general gofer.

Adam and Mary-Ellen were very much in love, and that love grew over the years, though it was accompanied by one deep sorrow: they did not have any children. Many years and dollars were spent on various doctors and spiritual counselors, but to no avail. Finally, after many tries, Prof. Harrison at the University Hospital pinpointed the problem -- a malformation in Mary-Ellen's womb which prevented any fertilized ovum from developing. There was hope, however, albeit rather slim: the doctor suggested an experimental technique whereby an ovum from Mary-Ellen be fertilized by Adam's sperm in a laboratory, and them implanted outside the womb, where -- if the implantation was done early enough in its development -- it could develop in its own placenta. The baby would then be delivered by Caesarian section, when the time came. This procedure, he explained, had been successfully tried on sheep and cows. but had never been done on humans. His team, however, had obtained permission from the hospital Ethics Committee to attempt it and, if Adam and Mary-Ellen were willing, the cost of the procedure and followup treatment would be covered from their research grant.

After a lot of soul searching and prayer, and after consulting with their parish priest, they agreed. Three months went by, as Mary-Ellen was extensively tested. Then, the day finally arrived. In separate rooms, Adam contributed sperm and Mary-Ellen contributed ova. They were told to wait for two hours to see if the laboratory fertilization was a success. Having nothing to do, they decided to go to a coffee shop across the road from the hospital, to get something to eat. They were so excited, they held hands and had eyes only for each other. As they crossed, they did not see the car, driven by a highly intoxicated driver, which ran a red light and was headed directly towards them ...

 

*          *          *
 

When Adam woke up, he was in a hospital bed, with one leg in a cast and traction and his head and left arm heavily bandaged. He felt terrible. Next to him sat his mother, and Father McQueen, his parish priest. Crying, his mother filled him in on what happened: Mary-Ellen had been killed outright in the crash, and Adam had been unconscious for over 24 hours. There appear to be no major injuries, but he would have to remain in the hospital for at least another three weeks. (He was lucky that the accident occurred right outside of the hospital, so that he was rushed into ER immediately, which was probably what saved his life.) He could not even get up to attend Mary-Ellen's funeral. Needless to say, Adam was crushed, and even Father McQueen's kind manner did little to comfort him.

It took almost a week before Adam's grip on reality returned, and he was able to think straight about his situation and about the future. His mother and Father McQueen had been daily visitors, as had been Olga, Tracy and Maria, who assured him that the work at the office was continuing with no problems and that he should feel free to take as much "leave" as necessary from the pressures of work. The couple's many friends filled the room with flowers and kind words about Mary-Ellen and there was talk of suitably memorializing her contributions to various church activities.

And then, a week after the accident, Prof. Harrison and his assistant, Dr. Anne Mayberry, came to visit, bringing a problem that had to be solved immediately. Everyone, it seems, had forgotten about the original purpose of Adam and Mary-Ellen's visit to the hospital -- the fertility treatment. The lab tests had shown that Mary-Ellen's ovum had, indeed, been successfully fertilized, and the embryo was now developing. It was time, imperatively, to make a decision what to do, since the embryo could not be kept alive in the laboratory for more than a few additional hours. Adam's eyes immediately filled with tears -- it must be allowed to live, so that it will be, in some sense, the continuation of Mary-Ellen's life. Was there not any other woman in whom it could be implanted?

Dr. Harrison explained that there would be no chance of implanting the embryo in a stranger -- the body would reject it. The only hope was finding somebody which a close genetic identity to the parents. Unfortunately, Adam was an only child, and Mary-Ellen had two brothers, but no sister. Adam asked for a few moments to consult with Father McQueen. It was the priest's opinion that, from the Church's position, everything should be done to save this living thing struggling to be born. There seemed to be no way out, and he and Adam both turned to silent prayer and asked for guidance.

Finally, Adam came to a decision. Calling Dr. Harrison back into the room, he asked, "Can you implant the embryo in my body?" Dr. Harrison was startled, but admitted that it might be possible. "Then do it," said Adam, "Mary-Ellen gave her life so that child might be born; I cannot have its death on my conscience." Things moved quickly. Within two hours, Adam had been sedated and transferred to a gurney. When he was returned to the room several hours later, he was still unconscious, but there was an additional scar on his abdomen, where the embryo had been implanted. Now it was a matter of waiting to see what would happen.

 

*          *          *
 

For another three weeks, Adam remained in the hospital, immobile in his bed while his leg and arm healed. Twice daily, members of Prof. Harrison's team visited him, took blood and urine samples, and sometimes scanned him with various exotic machines. Finally, when he was ready to leave, he was taken in a wheelchair to the office of Dr. Mayberry, who would be directly in charge of monitoring his progress.

"Call me Anne," she said, "We are going to be seeing a lot of each other for the next nine months. How do you feel at the moment?" she asked with a smile.

Adam said that he didn't feel anything special, and was sure that the implant had failed.

"No," said Anne, "it worked. You are, as best we can determine, pregnant. The embryo has built a placenta around itself, and is developing as one would expect. Your body is undergoing many changes, without you feeling them. Our tests show that it is producing a large quantity of female hormones, estrogen and progesterone -- this is necessary in order that the baby develop properly. We will give you additional shots to aid the process. You will notice the changes in a few weeks, when your breasts begin to grow. The areolas around your nipples will enlarge and darken too. This is necessary as your body begins to prepare itself towards breastfeeding after the baby arrives. In general, expect that your body will also become more feminine. Your voice will change, and so will your psychological reactions. You are also going to feel more tired. That too is normal. Also, be prepared for the possibility of nausea in the morning or at other times during the day. The important thing is to eat properly, get plenty of rest, and be mentally prepared for what is coming. I will be seeing you as often as you need me to, but certainly twice a week, because we want to keep a very close record of your physical changes."

Adam just sat there, not knowing what to say. He looked at the floor, not at the doctor. Anne smiled. "I know you suffered a great loss, Adam, that nothing can repair. But you also have elected to have the unique chance of bringing a life into the world, and be part of that wonderful miracle which God has given to the human race. So be proud of yourself, hon, and carry your baby with love and dignity." She gave him a booklet for pregnant mothers, and a swift hug, which he did not return.

Adam's mother drove him back to his house. He sat in the car and looked moodily at the floor of the car and did not speak. When they arrived, he got out of the car, felt dizzy all of a sudden, and then vomited all over the garage floor. His mother was horribly frightened, and wanted to take him back to the hospital, but he said no, and told her that he had something to tell her when they went inside. It was going to be somewhat of a shock.

"I am going to be a grandmother," she said after Adam explained what happened. "This is not the way I anticipated it, but you made the right decision, and I will stick by you and help you any way I can."

Adam hugged her tightly. "I need it mom, I need all of the love and care I can get very badly. For now, I just want to rest. I feel very tired."

Adam's mother understood, and unpacked his bag, while Adam slipped into bed. She smiled when she saw the booklet which Dr. Mayberry had given him, and thought about her own pregnancy. She must have dozens of things in the attic which Adam will need. She would have to check things out. She remembered how important it was that her mother was there with her; it was tenfold more important that she be with Adam, and offer her total support.

Tracy, Olga and Maria came over that afternoon, and Adam felt that he had to tell them about his situation too. They were overjoyed, especially Olga and Maria, who wanted to know everything he was feeling. He had to promise to tell them what it was like at every stage of the pregnancy. Tracy was much more practical. Her first concern was who would take care of him now. "You clearly can't do all of the housework yourself, in your condition," she insisted, "especially since you don't have a man to help you out."

Adam was afraid that it wouldn't "look right", but the next day, after vomiting again while trying to make morning coffee, he gave in. A compromise was reached: he talked to Dr. Mayberry and they decided that a nursing student would be assigned to live in Adam's house and take care of him, while at the same time monitoring his medical progress. That afternoon she showed up, a diminutive and almost-hyperactive young lady named Kathy Stryon, who said that she had experience before with "expecting mommies" and could handle anything. When Adam laughed at that description, she just smiled and said that Anne insisted that she treat Adam just like any other pregnant woman. "In fact," she decided, "from now on I am going to call you ... Wanda, which will be more appropriate as things get ... rounded out." Adam was not too crazy about that but Tracy, when she came over that afternoon with a large supply of groceries, loved it. "It is a good Polish name, hon," she said. "Just think about Wanda Landowska, the famous Polish concert pianist. You are going to be Wanda, the loveliest mother in the office."

After a few days at home, Adam (or Wanda, as everyone -- including his mother -- now insisted on calling him) felt ready to return to the office. (Working at home was not an option; he needed to have ready access to the large library of books on Polish law which was kept in the office.) He had gotten used to the morning sickness and managed to live with it. His chest area was very sore, and he did notice some swelling there, or so it seemed. He also noticed that he didn't need to shave any more. Kathy insured that he stick to a healthy diet and did some mild exercises to help overcome his tiredness. Still, he found out that it was harder for him to concentrate on work, and that every so often he would just sink back in his chair and stare at the wall. When that happened, Olga or Maria would come in and give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and ask him if he was all right.

There were days when he could work well, but days when he would feel so dizzy and lightheaded that nothing would get done. Maria had gotten into the habit of putting a vase of fresh flowers on his desk in the morning, saying that expectant mothers should have happy things to think about. He no longer objected to being referred to as a woman. Indeed, it was beginning to feel sort of natural. And when one of the "other" girls in the office kissed him, he would blush and smile. And he would think about the baby. He would often dream about it, living inside him, turning from an embryo into a fetus, and from a fetus into ...

At the end of the second month, Dr. Mayberry was able to tell Wanda that they now knew for certain that the fetus was female. Wanda kissed her. He had been hoping so much for a girl, who would of course be named Mary-Ellen.

 

*          *          *
 

As the second trimester began, Wanda began noticing that his clothes no longer fit well, they constricted him. His mother, Tracy, Olga, Maria, and Kathy were all of the same opinion -- he had to buy maternity wear, including maternity dresses. However, Wanda objected that he couldn't very well go around looking like a "man in a dress," and so they decided that he had to be taught how to present himself as a woman. That meant, of course, getting an appropriate hairstyle, learning the appropriate mannerisms, and learning how to dress in a whole new wardrobe. Wanda did not like the idea, but he was clearly outnumbered and, really, was too lightheaded and uncertain of himself to argue much. In fact, he noticed that for the past month or so he was unable to really make a decision and stick to it. He did what he was told. Tracy had taken over the total management of the office and she assigned work to him just as she did to Olga, That was OK, however; he was not sure he could trust himself to make business decisions any more.

And so, one day Tracy and Wanda's mother came over while he was away at the office, bagged all of his male clothes, and put them in the attic. In their place, they brought a complete selection of maternity slacks, skirts, tops, and dresses, comfortable but stylish shoes, and lingerie, including the bras which he was beginning to definitely need. Frilly nighties replaced his pyjama, and a dressing table was added to his bedroom, with enough lotions and cosmetics "to cover the world," as he said later. A well-stocked jewelry box was added, containing some very expensive pieces handed down from his grandmother. Of those, the most important, in his mother's words, were his grandmother's wedding and engagement rings. Wanda should wear them all the time, she insisted, so that nobody would whisper behind his back. Surprisingly, they actually fit his ring finger. Kathy took it upon herself to redecorate Wanda's room in an appropriately-feminine style. At the same time, Wanda's mother brought over many things that she felt that would be needed, including a sewing machine, which she insisted on teaching Wanda how to use, and some baby furniture for the guest bedroom, which was to become the baby's room in time.

It was not easy. Despite all of the support from his own "fabulous five fans," as Wanda liked to call them, Wanda had a hard time adjusting. The first time he came to the University Hospital dressed in a skirt and blouse, even though Kathy accompanied him, he felt he was going to die of embarrassment. Dr. Mayberry, however, did her best to put him at ease, taking it all as very natural. She was also very encouraging about the baby. It was developing well, and the ultrasound pictures showed no problems at all. Gradually, it all came together though, and by the middle of the fourth month of his pregnancy, Wanda was as used to his new clothes as he had been to his old ones.

Being at work was simpler. Tracy managed the office. As far as clients were concerned, Adam had taken an extended leave and there was a new woman temporarily replacing him. His morning sickness was now past, and he could concentrate more on his work. Except for those times when he leaned back daydreamed about the baby. By the fourth month, he was definitely beginning to "show," and Tracy bought him a special cushion for his office chair to help him manage the back pain. He also had trouble sleeping, for a while, because of the shift in weight in his body, but managed to find a comfortable position rather quickly. Fortunately, he did not have the gum and nosebleed problems that many pregnant women have. Following Kathy's advice, he ate a calcium-rich diet so that the baby would have strong bones.

He was glad now for the wardrobe of maternity clothes that he had. In fact, he really liked them. He also got used to putting on makeup in the morning, and no longer needed Kathy to help him. Surprisingly, he enjoyed that too, and would occasionally experiment with new and different looks. Kathy had arranged for him to visit a beauty salon; at first he was very apprehensive, but he was treated well there, and by now he was getting to be a regular customer. His regular hairdresser kept on inquiring about the baby and, when the baby started kicking and he allowed her to feel his growing tummy, she almost screamed with excitement and then refused to charge him for that day's treatment. In order to look more feminine, he had tips added to his fingernails and enjoyed looking as his longer, thinner-looking hands with their bright red polish. His toes has the same color, even though it became harder and harder to see them, as his pregnancy became more advanced. But Kathy insisted on applying the polish to them, saying that a woman, even when pregnant, had to look her best.

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When Wanda entered his third trimester, Dr. Mayberry insisted that he start attending classes for expectant mothers. While it was clear that his baby would be delivered by Caesarian section, and not by natural childbirth, she said that he had to learn about breastfeeding, as well as about the changes he was going to undergo during the final three months. Also, she said, he would learn to bond with other mothers-to-be. Wanda didn't even flinch at that. He was, by now, so used to thinking and acting like a woman, that the term didn't faze him. He didn't even get upset when his mother called him "my blossoming lovely daughter" and warned him to take care of himself, since he was carrying her granddaughter in there. Wanda found breastfeeding classes very interesting. He would definitely breastfeed his baby as long as possible. After all, Dr. Mayberry had assured him that this was no problem and, in fact, had used a breast pump to extract some milk from his (now C-cup) breasts to prove it. He loved the feeling, and at night would dream of holding little Mary-Ellen in his arms and nurturing her. He thought about the baby constantly. When his mother offered to teach him how to knit, he gladly accepted and, by the beginning of his third trimester, had already knitted a quilt for the baby, and was going to begin on some booties. He would sometimes take his knitting to work with him, much to the delight of the other women in the office.

One of the problems of the third trimester was his frequent need to go to the bathroom. Since he started dressing as a woman, he had, of course, been using the women's rest room, but at first had always made sure it was empty before he entered. Now, there were times when he could not afford to wait, and often would rush in while Tracy or Olga were still there. Needless to say, they never said anything about it, even when, once, he came in just as Maria was changing her tampon. He learned to elevate his legs while he was working, and to drink lots of water to avoid dehydration. His belly seemed to be so huge, and growing every day, that sometimes he was sure he would burst. The baby would kick him at the most unexpected moments, and sometimes he nearly lost his balance. Even though he always took Kathy's advice and wore very comfortable and sensible shoes, he felt surprisingly attached to the low heels he had worn during his second trimester. He missed how his legs felt nice and sexy. Tracy assured him that the sexiest thing about a woman is a pregnant belly.

Meanwhile, the workload in the office increased. When it was clear that Wanda could no longer carry his share of the load, Tracy decided to hire another worker to help him handle the Polish translation work. The choice fell on Jerzy Dudek, a recent immigrant from Warsaw with a law degree from there. At first, the others were apprehensive about having a man working in "this hen house," but even Wanda agreed to it in the end, since they could find nobody else. Of course Jerzy was not told that Wanda was anything except a pregnant woman who needed an assistant to carry out her duties. He was expected to help him until he gave birth, and then stay on for a few months while Wanda was on maternity leave. Jerzy was five years older than Wanda and treated him, as everyone else, with an old-world deference that Wanda remembered from when he was little. Jerzy always referred to "Madame Tracy," "Madame Olga," and "Madame Wanda," and would kiss their hand with a very exaggerated motion. He was especially solicitous to Wanda, because of his condition, and would always insist on holding his chair for him and on helping him on with his coat. Often, he would drive Wanda home and, after a while, would be invited in for a cup of coffee as a reward. Wanda had to admit that he enjoyed his attention, and looked forward to it.

When, one day, Jerzy invited Wanda to a concert by the visiting Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and, before he thought about it much, Wanda accepted. Only later that night, did he gasp when he realized what that meant -- he was about to go on his first date as a woman. Kathy, was delighted. She went with Wanda to pick out a new dress, appropriate both to his condition and to the occasion, and some new shoes and a handbag to go with it. When Jerzy came to pick him up, he brought a large bouquet of flowers and Wanda thanked him with a peck on the cheek -- it just seemed like the natural thing to do. After the concert, when he escorted him home, Jerzy kissed him on the lips. Wanda smiled and returned the kiss. He had had a wonderful evening, and dreamt about Jerzy that night -- not for the first time.

From that day on, Jerzy and Wanda would go out together often. Nothing sexual happened between them beyond short kisses. Jerzy was too much of an old-world gentleman to try anything with an obviously-pregnant woman. Wanda, for his part, forgot that he was not a woman, and just enjoyed being in the company of a nice male companion who flattered and pampered him, with whom he could speak Polish, and with whom he had so much in common.

 

*          *          *
 

And then, before he knew it, "the date" approached. Dr. Mayberry was the first to breach the topic. "We have to schedule the birth," she said. "Will a week from Wednesday be OK?" Wanda was shocked and unprepared. "Look at you," said Dr. Mayberry. "If you get any bigger you won't fit through the door. You have a healthy wonderful young girl inside of you and she wants to get out." Wanda burst into tears. "It is all right, honey, it is all right," Dr. Mayberry comforted her. "Go home and have Kathy pack a hospital bag for you. She will know what to put in it, and she will accompany you to the hospital."

On the evening before the Wanda was scheduled to go to the hospital, Tracy, Olga, Maria, and Kathy threw a "coming out" party for the baby. Jerzy was there too, but while all of the women were so excited and made a big fuss, he was surprisingly quiet and sat by himself in a corner, in deep thought. Then, finally, he pulled Wanda aside and asked to talk to her privately.

"Madame Wanda," he said quietly as they sat together on the sofa, "tomorrow you will have your baby. I know that the baby's father is no longer with us, and it will be bad for a child to grow up like that with no father. It is bad and it is wrong. Madame Wanda, you know that you are very special to me. I have been thinking about this a lot, though we have never talked about it. Madame Wanda, will you honor me by being my wife?" Wanda looked at him, his eyes filled with tears ... and he fainted.

 

*          *          *
 

It took a few minutes until Wanda came to. During that time, Jerzy retreated, very scared, to a seat in the corner while Tracy and the girls hovered over him. Even though he was not scheduled for his Caesarian until the following morning, Kathy insisted (in her role as resident nurse) that, just to be on the safe side, he had better be taken to the hospital immediately. Dr. Mayberry, when contacted by phone, agreed with her and so Wanda was bundled into the back seat of Kathy's old Ford and driven to the hospital, where he was admitted to the maternity ward and assigned to a private room. Dr. Mayberry was waiting for him, very anxious about the cause of his fainting spell. When Wanda told her what had happened, she laughed, and then asked whether Wanda was going to say yes or not. Wanda's eyes filled with tears, and he didn't answer.

"In other words," Dr. Mayberry said, "you are not rejecting it offhand, are you?"

"I can't say yes," said Wanda. "You know that. But I must admit that I am very fond of him."

"I know no such thing, hon," said Dr. Mayberry. "You are a mother about to give birth to a baby girl. Jerzy is right, the baby needs a father as well as a mother. You cannot be both, and being a mother is more natural for you at the moment. You have become a very feminine woman, because your body created all of those hormones to make the fetus' development possible. That will stop, however, once the birth is over. If you want to continue breastfeeding the baby afterwards -- which I gather you do -- you will have to take hormone shots, and well as injections to increase your milk production. After that, if you wish, it is not that great a step to surgically turn you fully into a woman. Think about it, honey. Think of your daughter's future and yours. But meanwhile, we have an operation to prepare for."

Wanda was very tired and quickly fell asleep. In his dreams, she saw herself in a white bridal dress, walking down the aisle with Jerzy at his side. However, before Father McQueen could begin the ceremony, he was awakened by Kathy and another nurse, who came to prep him for his Caesarian section. They carefully cleaned his huge abdomen with an antiseptic solution. He was moved to a gurney, and taken into the operating room. There, an IV was connected to his arm so that he would have plenty of bodily fluids. He was given a local anesthetic so that he would feel no pain, and his abdominal area was curtained off with surgical drapes. Dr. Mayberry and two others were going to perform the procedure. Wanda remained conscious, but was groggy and soon, almost against his will, dozed off. When he awoke, he was being transferred to the recovery room for post-operative care. The baby was fine and healthy, he was assured, and he would be able to hold it as soon as he felt he was fully alert.

And it happened! Within four hours, Wanda was able to sit up in bed and hold a tiny bundle of joy, little Mary-Ellen, in her hands and clasp her to his breast. The baby, with inborn instincts, began to suck at Wanda's breast, and looked at him with beautiful blue eyes. She seemed to say to him, "You are my mommy; please be my mommy always; I need you." Mother- and-daughter bonding, stronger than the strongest superglue, began to form.

One person who had not been completely happy with the emergence of Wanda was Father McQueen. Although he had approved of Adam's original pregnancy, he had his doubts about the advisability and suitability of Adam living as a women. When that happened, he advised Adam that the best course would be for Wanda to attend a church in another parish, where Adam had not been known previously. Nonetheless, the two remained close friends and Father McQueen would visit Wanda at home once a week, and hear his confession. He was among the first to visit Wanda in the hospital too, and, the moment he saw the him holding the baby and nursing it, he knew that Adam had made a right decision. He and Wanda decided that the baby had best be baptized at the Church which Wanda was now attending, but Father McQueen promised to be present.

In confession, Wanda told Father McQueen all about Jerzy's proposal, and how he had fainted. He asked for guidance, but Father McQueen could not give it. He would consider the matter carefully, and they will talk again. When he left the hospital, he was deep in thought and prayer and, in his head, was already composing a long confidential letter to the bishop, requesting an urgent personal interview. Before that, he knew he had a lot of theological research to do.

Tracy, Olga, and Maria, on the other hand, were totally ecstatic when they first saw the baby. They brought flowers, of course, and Tracy surprised Wanda by bringing a basket of bagels, reminding him that the earliest reference to bagels was in a Krakow manuscript from 1610, which mentions "beygls" as a gift to women after childbirth, though she admitted that nobody really knew if, in that source, "beygls" referred to the food, to a stirrup ("beugal" -- but then traditional Polish bagels are stirrup-shaped rather than round) or to something else altogether. They also brought lots of baby clothes.

Jerzy did not come to the hospital, much to Wanda's disappointment and dismay. He sent a huge bouquet of flowers and a wonderful card, saying that he loved her but would have to wait until she and the baby came home before he came to see them, since he was ill with the flu and did not want to infect the baby. Silently, Wanda cried.

When Wanda did come home, a surprise awaited him. His mother had completely outfitted the spare room as a baby's room, with all of the necessary furniture, piles of toys, and what seemed like a fifty-year supply of disposable diapers (In fact, they were all gone within six months.) The walls were painted a bright pink, and were decorated with pictures of angels.

Wanda needed to do some urgent shopping too. He had no "non-maternity" outfits and it would be clearly inappropriate to go back to wearing his male clothes at this stage. Fortunately, he and Olga were roughly the same size now, and she lent him some jeans and a top before they went off to the mall to splurge, with little Mary-Ellen being watched over by her doting grandmother. If he wondered a bit at how it came about that he was trying on skirts and blouses, all he had to do was touch his breasts, full of milk for his lovely infant daughter, to know in his heart that he was doing the only right thing. He would also admit, off the bat, that he loved the experience. Trying on beautiful clothes when you are pregnant and thinking of only the next few months is quite a different experience from doing it when you have committed yourself, knowingly or not, to the permanence of it all.

A week after Wanda came home, Father McQueen visited him and the baby, and then asked to talk to him frankly about his situation. "What is the most important thing in your life?" asked Father McQueen.

Wanda answered without hesitation, "I want to walk in the ways of my Lord and my Savior, the ways of life and love. I have been blessed to bring a baby into the world, and nurturing and raising her is now the center of my life. I feel that this is my destiny in life at the moment."

"Do you feel comfortable as you are, dressed as a woman, having people relate to you as a woman?"

"I cannot say that it was easy at first, nor that it is the way of life I imagined I would find myself in. There are times when I feel very uncomfortable in this role though, I must say, though, that I am beginning to enjoy it. Perhaps it is a result of the hormones which my body created, but it feels comfortable now, and sometimes fun. However, even if I did not enjoy it -- even if I hated it entirely -- I would sacrifice my own happiness and dreams for those of my baby, and continue on this path."

"Do you love Jerzy?" "Yes, Father, I do. I know that it is a sin for me to love another man, but I do not feel that way. He is a good man, and would be a good parent for Mary-Ellen and would be a good husband to me. I think we both need him and I am sure that I have a large enough supply of love to share with him as well.

The probing continued for over an hour. Father McQueen made Wanda confront his present situation and his feelings about it. Sometimes the same question returned in a different form. Sometimes it came in the form of a challenge. Finally, he was ready to give his opinion. "It is as I thought, and as I presented the situation to the bishop. Yours is a very unique case, Wanda. It has happened because God, in His infinite wisdom, has made available for humans to know the medical technology and knowledge which allowed you to be pregnant with Mary-Ellen to begin with. In His infinite wisdom, he has allowed you to bring your pregnancy to fruition, and has provided you with a beautiful daughter. It is therefore only right and fitting that you make use of other medical technology and knowledge to help raise your daughter, when such technology is available. The bishop and I talked about this and even consulted my old professor of theology at Marquette University, and we came to a rather unusual, but logical, conclusion, and one which seems necessary though it be rather non-canonical. We recommend, Wanda, that you strongly consider Sexual Reassignment Surgery to turn yourself into a legally-recognized woman. Then you will be allowed, in the eyes of the law and the eyes of the church, to marry Jerzy and pursue the life that you two, and your daughter, deserve."

Wanda was, needless to say, totally shocked. The idea of having a sex change had, of course, crossed his mind over the past months, and at one point Dr. Mayberry had brought the idea up as well, though she did not press it. She did point out that the operation has become relatively routine and that there are many fine surgeons available to do it. Moreover, Wanda certainly had the requisite "real life experience" as a woman already behind him, so that if Wanda wanted it, the matter could be arranged with relative swiftness. Still, Wanda had always assumed as a matter of course that the church would oppose such a decision. Here, all of a sudden, his own priest, backed explicitly by the bishop, was not only condoning it, but actively recommending it.

"The church is not as hidebound as people think, Wanda," said Father McQueen, "and it recognizes that special and unusual problems require creative, special and unusual solutions. You have been a very fine son of the church, one of which I am very proud. I am sure you will be a very fine daughter of the church as well. Jerzy is a good Catholic, and a good man. He will be a good father to Mary-Ellen."

The next day, as if on cue, Jerzy came to visit. He apologized for not coming earlier, but had been so worried that he might infect the baby, that he preferred to stay away. He hugged Wanda and kissed her repeatedly, and she returned his kisses. After looking at the sleeping baby, and gingerly holding it, and after half an hour of obviously-strained small talk, he finally came to the point. "Madame Wanda," he shyly said, "before you want to the hospital, I asked you a question. Have you thought of your answer?"

"Dearest Jerzy," Wanda replied, "I first have to tell you something ... you had better sit down."

"No you don't have to, Madame Wanda," he replied, "I already know all about you."

"You know?" gasped Wanda, "How?"

"I am a man of old-fashioned manners, Madame Wanda, as you know," he replied. "Before I even approached you, I talked to your mother, and formally asked for your hand in marriage. That is how things are done in the Old Country. She told me everything."

"And it didn't make any difference?" said Wanda, unbelieving. "No, darling, it didn't. I love you Wanda, and that is all that is important. The other things are details which can be worked out, somehow. The love is what is important."

"I love you too," said Wanda, "and my answer to you is yes, yes, yes, yes!"

And so it came to be. With the help (and even partial funding) of Prof. Harrison and Dr. Mayberry, Wanda was able to have her surgery within half a year. On Mary-Ellen's first birthday, they were married by Father McQueen in a full Catholic ceremony. Wanda was already a mother but, like her mother before her, was nonetheless a virgin when she walked up to the altar and wore her beautiful white dress with pride. As Father McQueen predicted, she was and would always be a good daughter of the church.

 

*          *          *
 

AUTHOR'S ENDNOTE This story was written to show that it is possible to come up with a plausible scenario in which a heterosexual male with no transsexual tendencies, coming from a deeply religious and conservative background, would decide to decide of his own free will to become a woman, and do so with the support of the people around him. Magic, domination and force play no part in the tale, and are not needed. Pure love is much stronger than any of them.

Notes:

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A multipart story ...

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James Brown had planned his transition to womanhood very carefully. He was in his early thirties when he made the final decision to realize his lifelong dream and transform his body into that of the woman which, inside, he knew he really was. For several years, he had been living a dual life. During the work day, he was still James Brown, owner and manager of Enterprise Travel, a small but prosperous travel agency which specialized in handling institutional clients. James Brown was cheerful and personable, though he tended to be very quiet and not particularly sociable. The three women who worked in his office always wondered why he was still single, and each of them (secretly) set her sights on nabbing him one day.

Away from the office, however, James Brown lived the life of Janet Bowen, a vivacious woman who was the life of the party at the several singles bars she liked to frequent. She was beautiful, cheerful, and carefree, though she was careful not to get involved sexually with any of the many men who tried to pick her up. She drank only in moderation, and never went beyond casual kissing and petting. Still, many a bachelor had high hopes for her.

Nobody knew what Janet Bowen did for a living, but in fact she had recently also set up a travel agency, Carefree Travel, about two miles away from James Brown’s agency. At its inception, Carefree Travel had no clients, but Ms. Bowen did hire a secretary and an office manager. She explained that she was in the process of negotiating long-term contracts with various institutional clients, but that this would probably take some time. She also had to be out of town for a few weeks to deal with an urgent personal problem. In the meantime, the office manager was asked to assemble a new staff and organize the office.

Shortly after Carefree Travel was finally set up and duly registered with the state, James Brown called the staff of Enterprise Travel together and delivered the bad news. The doctors, he explained, had found it necessary to perform major surgery on him, which would force him to make significant changes in his life. Therefore, with a heavy heart, he decided to close down his business and sell all of his existing contracts to another agency. The best he could offer his workers was a generous severance package and very good letters of recommendation. He was sure that they would find other work with no problems. Indeed, he had checked with the agency he was selling out to (he did not name it) but they were not hiring at the moment.

The women who worked at Enterprise Travel were sad, but there was nothing they could do. They wished Mr. Brown the best of health and left with tears in their eyes. James Brown sent out letters to all of his institutional clients, explaining that - for medical reasons - he was forced to close his business and that their contracts had been transferred to Carefree Travel, whom he could guarantee were extremely professional and efficient. He gave them a special e-mail address at which he could be contacted in case problems arose.

Following these events, James Brown left town for good, leaving no forwarding address. Janet Bowen was also away, but she returned after ten days, looking much happier than she had been before. Carefree Travel, she gleefully announced, had purchased all of the institutional business of the now-defunct Enterprise Travel, and was ready to begin its operations.

So far, so good! It would seem that Janet had managed what many transsexuals dream of: a seamless transition which changed her identity but not her profession and which allowed her to keep the client base she had taken years assembling. But of course, the fabric of life, no matter how carefully tailored, inevitably has a thread or two sticking out, and pulling on such a thread, potentially, can unravel it all.

In Janet’s case, the “thread” was a very minor client - the State Commission for the Preservation of Historical Sites (CPHS), the travel arrangements for which had been handled by Enterprise Travel and was now to be handled by Carefree Travel. Being a state agency, the finances of the CPHS were subject to scrutiny by the office of the State Comptroller. In practice, this was a mere technicality. The CPHS duly submitted an annual report with the comptroller’s office, which was usually just filed away after a cursory read-through by some minor clerk (after all, the CPHS was a very insignificant cog in the big machine of state government and its budget was too small for anyone to really care about). However, state accounting procedure mandated that, every year, a few reports to the comptroller be chosen at random for detailed review and audit, and it just so happened that, in the given year, the report of the CPHS was among those selected.

The auditing of the CPHS’s expenses was assigned to Howard Wilson, a recent graduate of the Fisher School of Accounting at the University of Florida who was very eager to prove herself in the eyes of his bosses. Although he realized that he was turning his investigative microscope on a crumb in the state’s total budgetary loaf, he decided to do so with vigor and zeal.

The transfer of the CPHS’s accounts from Enterprise Travel to Carefree Travel immediately stood out for, in Howard’s eyes, this violated the letter of the law. By law, all services to state agencies performed by outside contractors must be allocated through a process of competitive bidding. The proper procedure, when Enterprise Travel closed its doors, would have been to ask for new bids from all travel agencies interested in getting the contract. While the terms of the contract between the CPHS and Carefree Travel were identical with those between the CPHS and Enterprise travel, a reopening of the bidding might have saved the state some money.

Howard next checked on the agencies themselves. Travel agencies are not licensed by the state (in fact, the only state in the US to require licensing of travel agencies, Rhode Island, rescinded that requirement in 2008) but they do have to register with the state and file information about their owners and staff. Howard pulled the files on both Enterprise and Carefree and found them very interesting. The owners of both agencies gave very similar biographical details: both were born on the same date in the same city, and both claimed to have earned degrees from the same university. This looked like more than a coincidence - this looked like possible fraud.

Howard called Special Investigations Division of the state Attorney General’s office and turned the matter over to Geraldine Towson, an SID fraud investigator. Geraldine began by checking out James Brown and came up with a lot of blanks. The birth records showed no James Brown was born on or near the date listed as his birth date (he had, of course, retroactively altered his birth certificate to Janet Bowen, as he was legally entitled to do after his SRS) but there were records of a James Brown with the given birth date attending grade school, middle school, and high school (he had forgotten to have those altered). At the university he claimed to graduate from, there were no transcripts and no graduation record in his name (he had had those altered to Janet Bowen) but there were records of him living in the dorms for two years, and two police records for being involved in brawls at bars in the campus area, as well as a few traffic citations. After one of the brawls, he spent a night in jail and, as part of the routine booking procedures, he had been fingerprinted.

On the other hand, there were birth records for Janet Bowen, but no school records and there was a university transcript and record of graduation, but none of the other supplementary documentation which one would expect from a college student. Janet Bowen did not even have a bank account or a credit card during her entire college period. She had never applied for a loan or a scholarship during her college years. Yet it also seemed that she had no income then or later - and did not file federal or state income tax returns - until she suddenly emerged from her cloud of obscurity with sufficient funds to start a travel agency. In fact, until Janet Bowen started her agency, she had no telephone (land line or cell phone), no car registered in her name, no utility bills.

With clear evidence of fraud in hand, Geraldine summoned both James Brown and Janet Bowen to her office for questioning - or at least tried to do so. It seems that Mr. Brown could not be located. His last known address was a rented apartment, which he had vacated a few months before. He had cancelled his phones (both landline and cellular) and his credit cards. His bank account had also been closed. The matter was turned over to the police and they issued a warrant for his arrest.

Janet Bowen was easier to find and, on the appropriate day, showed up in Geraldine Towson’s office. She explained that she had purchased the CPHS’ business as part of a package from Enterprise Travel and certainly did not realize that there was anything illegal in the matter. If there were any legal problems, she would be more than happy to relinquish the contract and let the state go through a bidding process (and, to tell the truth, she would probably not bother competing for it; the CPHS’ business was too small to be worth the effort). Geraldine was not satisfied. There was clear indication of fraud in Carefree Travel’s registration with the state. There were indications of possible money-laundering and tax fraud as well. From where did Janet Bowen get the money to start her travel agency, given that she had no previous job or credit history? She demanded that Janet produce documentation concerning the source of her income. Janet decided that it was time to consult a lawyer and refused to answer any more questions. Geraldine threatened to turn the matter over to the IRS, the police and the FBI. Janet stormed out of her office. Geraldine sent her a registered letter demanding that she produce certain financial records within two weeks. Janet did not comply. Geraldine went to the police, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Janet Bowen.

Janet had not been inactive for those two weeks. She talked to Dr. Jayne Mautner, who had performed her surgery, and Dr. Mautner had referred her to a lawyer in her state, Robert McIntyre Esq., whom she recommended warmly. Not only was he a very well-known attorney, but Robert, born Robyn, was a female-to-male post-op transsexual who had also been one of Dr. Mautner’s patients (and who had authorized Dr. Mautner to reveal this fact to any of her other patients who might need legal help).

Attorney McIntyre was a senior partner in the firm of Cohen, Herron & McIntyre which specialized in dealing with state agencies and interpretation of state business regulations. As he sat (clad in his usual impeccable dark blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie, looking very professional indeed) and listened to Janet Bowen’s tale, he realized that he had a serious problem to contend with, but was sure that he could handle it. In a long formal letter to the SID, he broke the matter up into several subissues. Among them:

(1) Did Howard Wilson have the legal right to initiate any background check on Janet Bowen? The comptroller’s office is legally empowered only to conduct audits of the accounts of state agencies and their financial relationships with outside bodies. Since Carefree Travel had yet to perform any services for the CPHS or bill them, it and its management did not fall under that mandate. The proper procedure would have been to send a letter to Carefree Travel informing them that their acquisition of the CPHS contract was not in accordance with state law, and was therefore void.
(2) As to possible fraud in the registration of Carefree Travel with the state, the office of the comptroller is not empowered to investigate that or reach any conclusions in the matter; any suspicions should have been turned over to the appropriate state office which handled registration of travel agencies.
(3) Since Howard Wilson’s investigation of Carefree Travel was not founded in law, neither was the basis for Geraldine Towson’s investigation. The SID has no right to initiate investigations into the personal lives of innocent citizens without legally-obtained significant evidence of possible fraud. In particular, the court orders which she had obtained and which allowed her to look into the school and bank records of James Brown and Janet Bowen were without proper foundation and so the results would be inadmissible, should the matter come to trial.
(4) On that basis as well, the warrant for the arrest of Janet Bowen should be quashed immediately. Any failure to do so could result in a lawsuit by Ms. Bowen against the state and against Ms. Towson personally, for the violation of Ms. Bowen’s civil liberties.
As to the facts of the matter at hand, Attorney McIntyre was willing to meet with Dan Harrison, the deputy Attorney General who handled the SID, and try to clear up any misunderstandings.

The choice of Dan Harrison was deliberate. He and Robyn McIntyre had been classmates in law school, and had belonged to the same study group, which made them very close indeed. Several times, Dan had been rebuffed by Robyn when he tried to date her, but when she announced to everybody that she was transitioning into Robert, he had been one of the first to stand by her/his side and support him through that very difficult period. Since then, they met frequently at various social functions and on committees of the bar association and always remained on good terms personally, though they were often on opposite sides of various cases.

When Robert McIntyre walked into Dan Harrison’s office, Geraldine Towson’s lengthy report was open on his desk. “This looks serious, Bob”, he said. “Geraldine is a very good investigator and there is definitely some hanky-panky going on here. She suspects some serious money laundering, and so do I. You can raise all of the technicalities you want about the investigation up to this point, but we are not going to let this one get away.”

Robert McIntyre just looked calm. “Dan,” he said, “do you remember when we were in Law School?”

“How could I forget, Bob? I had real hots for you, as you were certainly aware, until I found out that under that pretty exterior you are really a guy.”

“Do you remember how difficult it was for me at the beginning, trying to get people to stop thinking of me as Robyn and start thinking of me as Robert?”

“Sure, it must have been horrid for you.”

“It was pretty bad, especially persuading the various secretaries that the paper submitted by Robert McIntyre satisfied a seminar requirement for Robyn McIntyre, and stuff like that. Some of them couldn’t handle it at all. At more than one point in time, I was nearly suspended from law school because of some such technicality.”

“Yeah, I remember that you once had to threaten to sue the Dean.”

“Well, here we have essentially the same situation.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Janet Bowen and James Brown are really the same person?”

“That is precisely correct. I have the documents here to prove it, and of course you can match Janet Bowen’s fingerprints with the ones of James Brown which Geraldine found,” said Robert McIntyre and handed over a large manila envelope. “There is no money laundering; there is no fraud. All that there is here is an attempt by my client to transition quietly without losing her sole source of income. Now she admits that the CPHS bit was handled poorly and, as she told Geraldine, she is quite willing to cancel the contract immediately and will probably not submit a new bid for it when the time comes. But everything else is just a matter of her switching from one identity to the other in as painless a way as she knew how.”

“She should have been more careful.”

“Yes, she should have; but the transition period is a very hard one - take my word for it. And, the last time I looked, carelessness was not a crime in this state. Please, look over the documents and then let’s draw up some sort of agreement which will make everyone feel happy and feel that they have done their jobs properly, without compromising by client’s right to keep her private life private. If she has to pay a reasonable fine for the trouble her carelessness caused, I am sure she would not object.”

After a certain amount of negotiation, such an agreement was hammered out between the two attorneys. Dan Harrison had some trouble selling it to Geraldine Towson, who was not told the real reason the case was being dropped. She protested loudly about a “sellout” and threatened to take the matter to the Attorney General himself. It was only after Dan Harrison pointed out to her that her own violations of formal procedure - as catalogued by Robert McIntyre - were far more serious than those of Janet Bowen and could easily result in her dismissal from the civil service, should he choose to make an issue of it, that she assented. Howard Wilson, who was more concerned with keeping his job than with standing on principle, had no objections.

After it was all over, Robert McIntyre and Janet Bowen had a long talk over dinner at a fashionable restaurant. “There is an inherent cusp point in transitioning,” Robert explained. “an existential Rubicon if you wish, which has to be crossed; it is the point at which the persona you present to the world formally switches from the ‘old you’ to the ‘new you’.

Many transsexuals do not attempt at any sort of continuity at that point - they change their name, location, and occupation. They break off all contact with their former friends and acquaintances and, literally, begin a new life. One person simply vanishes off of the face of the earth as another emerges. This may be hard at first, but can be done and can work, especially if there was nobody you really cared to remain in contact with. It has the advantage that one doesn’t have to explain things to others, but does require a lot of preparation and, of course, entails the loss of everything you have built up in your old identity.

Other transsexuals try to maintain their life continuity as best they can. They change their name and legal paperwork, but remain (or try to) in the same social setting with the same job. This can work if friends and coworkers are supportive and understanding for the most part, something which is more and more frequent as transgendered people become more accepted by society and protected by law. But it is often very hard on all sides. People who refuse to accept the transition can cause a lot of trouble.

You tried a middle path - changing your identity but trying to maintain your previous occupational status and - most importantly - your client base, without disclosing to them what is going on. That was really not a good idea. You probably would have had less trouble if you had kept Enterprise Travel and just let your workers and clients know that you were about to undergo the perfectly legal procedure of sexual reassignment. You would undoubtedly have lost a few of them, but it would have come out better in the end. At least they would have appreciated your honesty and not suspected that you were masking some other illegal activities. As it is, we had to disclose your transition to the state authorities and I have no doubt that most of your clients will find out too, sooner or later.”

Janet looked at him with dreamy eyes. She wasn’t really concentrating on what he had to say, but kept on thinking that he was really very cute as well as very smart. As far as she knew, he was also single.

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CHAPTER 1. LIBERTY AND GENDER

“There is no liberty for a man, apart from the God of his manhood.” D. H. Lawrence put that in the mouth of one of the characters of his novel “The Plumed Serpent”. I nearly gagged when I read it. I was reading the novel for an honors seminar in early 20th-century literature. Lawrence wrote the book in 1924, when he was staying at a ranch near Taos, New Mexico. It must have been warm then. It was warm now. I was wearing only a bra and a mini skirt, sprawled on the big bed in the small room I rented three blocks from the campus. The room was somewhat of a mess. So too - in my opinion - was Lawrence’s novel, or at least his view of gender.

Lawrence’s character goes on to explain: “God gives me my manhood, then leaves me to it. I have nothing but my manhood. Then God gives it me, and leaves me to do further.” Yeah sure, this guy is all about his holy manhood. I put down the book in disgust. Lawrence was a sexual fascist as well as a political one. Anyway, it was time for me to go to my weekly meeting with my gender counselor. This was just what I needed. I could see it would be an interesting session.

“Look Jenny,” my counselor said when I told her, “Lawrence wrote that over 80 years ago. He thought like a male, he couldn’t help it. Moreover, Lawrence really believed in the philosophy of Nietzsche and in male dominance. At the time, the distinction between gender and sex was not understood, so you should not be surprised that he messes things up. Notice, however, that he is talking about 'manhood' rather than about 'maleness'. I think he is just referring to a person’s gender identity, in his crude way. Let us try to rephrase those two quotes, replacing the word 'manhood' by 'gender identity' and see what we get:

There is no liberty for a man, apart from the God of his gender identity.

and

God gives me my gender identity, then leaves me to it. I have nothing but my gender identity.
Then God gives it me, and leaves me to do further.

Does that sound closer to home?"

It did, sort of. I should explain a bit here. My name is Jenny Howe, and I am a junior at a large state university, majoring in English literature. Jenny is the name I chose, not the name I was born with. My birth certificate still says Jeremy Howe. Yes, I was born a boy, and legally I am still one, though you could never tell by the way I look, dress, or act. I am a transsexual and am in the final few months of my Real Life Experience before I undergo sexual reassignment surgery this summer. It is all very open. The university knows, of course, and is paying for my counseling and hormones as part of my student insurance. (The hormones are really powerful, apparently - the B-cup bra which I have been wearing for the past year is beginning to feel too tight; C-cup here I come.) That insurance will also cover a part of the cost of my surgery. The rest will be covered by my parents who - very reluctantly - came to the conclusion that they might as well accept what they cannot control. I had made it clear to them that I would be transitioning with or without their blessing, but that I would much prefer to have them on and at my side. I do love them very dearly. They love me too, and seem to be willing to make what is for them - and I understand it entirely - a major readjustment. At least my mom is. My dad is less able to deal with this, but they too have begun going to a counselor who is helping him understand what is happening, or so I hope.

Most of my classmates have accepted what I am doing. Those who could not or would not accept it are not the sort of people I would want as my friends anyway. A few girls even went out of their way to make friends with me and helped me the first few times I went shopping for clothes at the mall. Now that was a wonderful experience. One guy in my Shakespeare class even tried to date me, but I told him that the time was not ripe yet. I needed time before I would begin dating boys seriously. In the mean time, I just hung out with groups. Literature students are a rather inbred crowd anyway - something like math students I suppose - nobody else understands how we can be so crazy as to spend enthusiastic hours analyzing some obscure poem or novel which nobody else can make heads or tails of.

My mom just phoned to say that my dad has been really depressed. I asked how the counseling sessions were going and she said that it is so-so. Sometimes he seems to be getting it and sometimes he just can’t. But she thinks things will turn out all right.

Anyway, back to Lawrence. There is no liberty for a man, apart from the God of his gender identity. Hmmm. Is my gender identity my god? Well I have certainly sacrificed enough of myself to it. My whole existence, at least since I was old enough to become conscious of gender and sex, revolved around the fact that I realized that my gender identity and my sexual identity did not seem to mesh properly, as it did in other kids. That sounds so very cold and analytic. Actually, it took years before I could even put it in those terms. But once I had figured things out, yes, I suppose, my gender identity also became my liberty. Protecting it and nurturing it from the pressures of conformity and even that of my parents' sometimes-misguided love, helped define my own emotional and intellectual independence. I am free to the extent I am free to be me. So by serving it I preserve my liberty. Ok, that makes sense … sort of. No transsexual is a good card-carrying member of the herd. (What a mixed metaphor! Sometimes, however, deliberately mixed metaphors, like oxymorons, have their use.) The fact that I was able to impose my decision on my parents is a sign that I have earned my freedom.

God gives me my gender identity, then leaves me to it. I have nothing but my gender identity. Then God gives it me, and leaves me to do further. That is harder. I was given my gender identity. That is the hardest thing for most people to understand. I had no choice in the matter. When people ask me “at what age did you decide you were a transsexual?” I reply that that question is like asking “at what age did you decide you were left-handed?” (I am, by the way.) My transsexuality is like my left-handedness: it was always there, though it took a while for me to recognize what it was.

My dad phoned and asked for Jeremy. I told him that Jeremy doesn’t live here, Jenny does. He hung up without saying another word. I hope everything is all right.

I am a girl because I have the soul of a girl. To quote Lawrence again, “if there is one thing men need to learn … it is to collect each man his own soul together deep inside him, and to abide by it.” Damn Lawrence for always thinking and writing only in male terms, but he does have a point. If you do not abide by your soul, you certainly have no mandate to abide by your body. Or abide by the laws; or abide by customs; or abide by anything else.

CHAPTER 2. SERPENTS AND PLUMES

The plumed serpent who gives the book its name is the ancient Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, whose worship is first documented from around the year 400 BC. He was sacred to the Maya, the Tolmecs, and later to the Aztecs. Among his various attributes, he was a god of both warfare and of the planet Venus, as well as being a god of fertility. When Cortés appeared in Mexico, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma is said to have believed he was the embodiment of Quetzalcoatl, thus facilitating the Spanish conquest. (At least so claimed the Spaniards after the fact; there are no Aztec sources which have survived to confirm this.)

In Lawrence’s novel the cult of the god Quetzalcoatl is revived by a group of Mexican nationalists as a way of countering the gringo domination of the Mexican spirit, as represented by Jesus and his mother Maria. The manhood of Quetzalcoatl is very basic to the story, and he is, in their lights, indeed the god of the manhood of the Mexican. In the society which is proposed here women are subordinate to men (representatives of Quetzalcoatl address the people in crowds as “men, and women of men”) and all are subordinate to Quetzalcoatl or his human embodiment.

The image of a plumed serpent is strangely transgendered. The serpent, of course, is a male symbol, representing the ultimate extension of the male sexual organ and, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, standing for both the sin and the hope in sexual intercourse. But the plume, on the other hand, is a female symbol - the symbol of finery and extravagant dress for the sake of temptation of the male. A plumed serpent is almost a cross dresser, if not an outright transsexual. Encasing a male sexual organ in the fine panties of a woman is surely the pluming of the serpent.

Does this mean anything? To the Aztecs, it probably represented the fusion between the physical, and especially sexual (“coatl” = serpent) and the intellectual or imaginative flight of fancy (as represented by the quetzal, which is a type of bird).

But that is how I see myself too. As a transsexual I am the fusion between a physical body into which I was born and a soul which is disjoint from that body and which has the ability and the right to define itself independently of what the physical body says it should be. These two are fused into what at first seems to be a most dysfunctional creature: a plumed serpent can neither crawl nor fly particularly well, if at all. But yet it transcends function and becomes a god, at least unto itself. As I am unto myself.

And I know that I am on the right track, I must be. I must not let anything deter me.

My mom just phoned and told me about my dad’s suicide attempt. He is in the hospital and the doctors say he is out of danger. Tomorrow I will go visit him. I will wear the new dress I bought last week. I hope he likes it.

AFTERWORD: This work is fiction, not an essay in literary criticism. It is not about D. H. Lawrence or about his fine novel but rather about Jenny Howe and her attempts to cope with her transsexuality by reading her own feelings and emotions into Lawrence’s novel. She could easily have read them into any other book she was assigned to study. (What would she have done with, say, “The Scarlet Letter” or even “Moby Dick”? Perhaps that is the topic of another story.)

A multipart story ...

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I am a fighter, and will always be one. But I fight wisely. They say that the difference between a smart person and a wise person is this: a smart person knows how to get out of situations that a wise person knows how not to get into. Well, it is the same with fighters. A wise fighter knows how to fight only those fights which do not lead to situations best not gotten into. That means, of course, that there are times when one must walk away from a fight in order to live to fight another day. That is very hard for many people to understand.

I am also a transsexual. That is even harder for many people to understand. It took me a while to figure it all out and figure out the implications, but, by the time I was in my last year of high school, I had it analyzed -- more or less. Basically, I had two options. I could “be myself”, live as a female, and eventually undergo surgery. The gain would be greater personal harmony (but perhaps not complete, I read too many stories of post-op transsexuals who still had deep problems); the cost would be ostracism by my parents and a good portion of my family and friends, who could not or would not understand gender dysphoria, and probably considerable difficulties in being accepted by society as a whole. I am 5’9” and rather male in appearance; plastic surgery could change that, of course, but such surgery was way beyond my foreseeable financial means. To many people, I would always be a “freak”. I would certainly have a problem getting married and raising a family.

The second option would be to “live a lie” by continuing to live and function as a male, at least among family and friends, and be myself only when alone at home. Hopefully, I could find a wife who would understand and support me, within these limits.

Neither option was particularly attractive. Henry Kissinger once wrote that, in diplomacy, the choice is never between “good” and “better”; it is always between “bad” and “worse”. I was in precisely that situation. I agonized over it a lot, and finally concluded that the second course would be the wisest. I would swallow my self-esteem and live a lie externally. I would be “under deep cover” like a spy - a female in soul forced to pass myself off as a citizen of the land of men. I called this my Unwelcome Compromise.

The story of the next few years is not pleasant, so I won’t go into detail. I kept my male identity and kept on good terms with my family and friends. I finished college and found a very “macho” job. I also found a woman who was not frightened when I told her that I liked to “dress up” occasionally. We were married and reached a modus vivendi which allowed me to wear women’s clothes around the house so long as nobody saw me. But I would not go out dressed (I doubted if I could pass in any case) and I wouldn’t wear a wig or put on makeup. That was the best bargain I could manage. I hoped, in my heart, that little by little I could push the envelope out a bit.

Over the next ten years, I didn’t manage to do it much, but I survived. As with any animal living in a zoo, I got used to the limitations on my freedom to realize myself. What I lost in self-fulfillment I did gain in having a loving relationship with my wife and a satisfactory relationship with my family. I had a good job, and was well-liked by my colleagues. I was convinced that I had made the wise decision.

And then it happened. One morning, when I woke up, my knees hurt terribly. Within a week, I could no longer walk. My legs were swollen and, slowly but surely, I began to lose my coordination and balance. I was in terrible pain. It took the doctors a while to diagnose what had happened, but they finally settled on a rather frightening diagnosis. I had idiopathic peripheral polyneuropathy. What that means is that the nerves in my limbs were progressively degenerating. Nerves cannot be regrown or regenerated. There is no cure. The only treatment that could be given was symptomatic -- very strong pain relievers that target nerve cells (analgesics such as aspirin don’t work), anti-depressants , and physical therapy to try and slow down the degeneration.

My life, or what was left of it, had become one of increasing pain and decreasing hope. I knew that I could not live much longer in this state, something that the doctors confirmed. Then, one day, it hit me that the basis for my Unwelcome Compromise was no longer valid. I had made it because I thought that the best future I could have would be one of living a lie. But now I had no future -- I was dying a lie. The enormity of this realization overwhelmed me, but it made me reconsider what I wanted to be, and to be seen as being, in my short remaining time in this world.

The University Medical Center, where I was being treated, had a special program of psychiatric help to patients suffering from incurable medical conditions. Ever since my condition was diagnosed, I had regular meetings with Dr. Anna Wong, one of the senior resident psychiatrists. At the next of our meetings, I spilled out the whole story of my transsexuality, and of my Unwelcome Compromise. I told her that since the premises of that compromise were no longer valid, I had decided that I wanted to transition as best I could and as fast as I could, so that I could enjoy at least a few years of harmony between my body and my soul, before the former broke down completely. We talked about it a lot, then and at our next two meetings. Finally, she asked my permission to mention the details of my case to some colleagues (without mentioning names, of course) so that she could come to a final decision. I agreed, of course.

The doctors in whom Dr. Wong chose to confide were Dr. Catherine Gold, a psychologist who was an international expert in handling transsexuals, and Dr. Jayne Mautner, a plastic surgeon in whose clinic Dr. Gold worked. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: background on Dr. Mautner and Dr. Gold -- both of whom are post-op transsexuals themselves -- can be found in my stories “The Doctor, I” and “The Doctor II”). The trio agreed that there was no reason not to allow me to begin hormone treatment. As to surgery, that would depend on the extent to which my nervous system continued to degenerate by the time I was ready for it. Dr. Mautner was rather worried about performing a full SRS under such conditions, if my neuropathy reached beyond a certain “point of no return” on which it was currently rapidly closing. They finally decided that I would begin receiving large doses of hormones and testosterone-blockers immediately, and that I would meet regularly with Dr. Gold as well as with Dr. Wong. A decision on surgery would be made after six months. Should we decide to go ahead, Dr. Mautner would do the surgery, including facial feminization surgery, on a pro bono basis.

It all depended on whether my physical condition continued to deteriorate.

It didn’t! In fact, after six months I was actually better than I had been before - my pain had lessened and my coordination seemed to have improved. All of the signs on my physical tests suggested that the neuropathy had reversed itself. The doctors didn’t understand it and, quite frankly, neither did I. But who was I to argue? Dr. Mautner conducted her own tests and decided to go ahead. I had to be wheeled into her clinic in a wheelchair, and when the operation was over, I had to be wheeled out. But I was wheeled out a woman.

I continued to improve, for reasons the doctors could not understand. When visited Dr. Mautner for a checkup six months after my operation, I walked into her office by myself. I felt so good that I promised her that the next time I visited her, I would walk in again, wearing heels!

EPILOGUE: A year later, my neuropathy had almost completely disappeared. Dr. Wong presented a paper on my case at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. In the panel discussion which followed her presentation, Dr. Gold emphasized the unknown relationship between mind and body. She hypothesized that my Unwelcome Compromise had caused an existential tension in my mind which my body was unable to handle and which translated into the development of neuropathy. After I restored the concord between my body and my soul, the body responded by halting -- and ultimately reversing -- the neuropathy. Sister Angela Dominica of Fordham University gave a more religious interpretation: centuries of observations by the Catholic Church have shown that miracles can happen only to those in whom the soul and body are in harmony. Thus my transition brought about the condition of harmony which allowed God to perform a miracle and reverse the “irreversible” neuropathy in my body. Prof. Matityahu Kesselman of Yeshiva University cited several Rabbinic and Hassidic sources in support of that view.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story is fiction, but is based on the story of a real transsexual with peripheral polyneuropathy whom I have been privileged to know. Unfortunately, the final miracle has not yet happened to her, and I can only pray that the Power which controls her destiny will read it and take the hint.

The person in the picture used to illustrate the story has nothing to do with the content of the story.

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It was Alice Carter’s birthday: fortysomething. She sat in her favorite easy chair, a drink in hand, and thought back on her life. Birthdays are the time one takes stock.

She had been born Alan, a boy, though inside she knew that she was really a girl. At one point she tried to explain this to her parents, tried to get them to understand, but they were unable to do so. This was in the days before the internet and the local public library was very unhelpful when it came to information about what, as she was later to learn, was called transsexualism. She hid her feelings as best she could, and suffered from her parents, her siblings, and her schoolmates when she did not conform to the expected boy stereotype. That whole period in her life was so painful to remember, that, even now, Alice preferred to fast-forward through it.

After high school, Alice had started college, but could not concentrate on her studies. The college library, however, did have information which helped her, and she finally wrote a pain-filled letter to the author of an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, who was kind enough to put her in touch with a colleague in the city where Alice was studying. Thus, slowly, she began the long journey to become what she knew she was destined to be.

When she turned 21, Alice (then still Alan) gained control of a small trust fund which her grandfather had left her in his will. This money, which was intended to finance her professional education (her grandfather had been a lawyer and hoped that his grandson would continue in his footsteps), went instead to finance her transition. She began appearing in public as a woman, at first sparingly, then often, then full-time. She underwent facial feminization surgery, surgery on her vocal chords, and finally sexual reassignment surgery. All the time she was under the care of psychiatrists and counselors. By the time Alice was 25, she was legally a woman, and had sex organs which nobody other than a gynecologist could distinguish from those of a genetic female. She had arrived at the end of the rainbow and her dreams, so she felt, had been realized. She had no doubt that she was the luckiest woman alive.

Those were heady years. Alice loved to go to clubs dressed as a girl. First she went to gay clubs, then clubs for cross dressers and transsexuals, and finally — after her SRS — to pickup clubs for young singles. She was popular and a good dancer, and had more than a few flings and one-night stands. However, she had only two real romantic episodes in her life. The first was with Stuart, a young and promising engineer. She fell madly in love with him. He loved her too, and after going together for five months, he proposed marriage to her. She accepted, but then told him her secret, namely that she was a post-op transsexual, and he was in total shock. The next day, he called her and said that he just couldn’t handle the situation, and that it was best to break off the engagement. They never met face-to-face again, and when she learned that, a month later, he had resigned his job and moved to California, she accepted the news with resignation, and cried herself to sleep.

Two years after that, Alice did get married to Thomas, a low-echelon insurance executive who was not fazed when she revealed her secret to him, and said he loved her all the more for it. However, their sex life turned out to be much less satisfying than she had hoped, and there seemed to be a shadow constantly intruding on their married life. Then, less than a year and a half after the wedding, she caught him in bed with his (male) personal trainer, and realized that he had married her precisely because, in his eyes, she wasn’t really a woman at all. The divorce was speedy and uncontested. The divorce settlement stated explicitly that she would go back to using her maiden name.

By the time she turned 30, Alice concentrated less on her social life and more on work. She had managed to go back to college and finish a business degree, though her grades were not that good. Still, she was offered a position as a management intern with F&S Industries, the leading local manufacturer. (“F&S” stands for “Feldhausen and Schoentaller”, the names of the original owners of what began as a simple machine shop.) By dint of hard work and concentration, she managed to get a permanent position and to rise to her present position of Assistant Director of Human Resources, of which she was very proud.

F&S Industries employed over 1,500 workers and was an international leader and innovator in the field of specialized couplings for industrial-scale pipes and hoses. In order to maintain its leading position, it repeatedly introduced the latest cutting-edge computerized tools to automate its production and managerial processes. The introduction of each new computerized manufacturing or administrative process entailed, unfortunately, a further decrease in the number of workers needed on the production line or in the executive offices, and it was Alice’s job to handle the repeated waves of firings. Behind her back, and sometimes to her face, she became known as “the F&S hatchet lady”. She explained to whomever was willing to listen was that the only alternative to what the company was doing was to lose its industrial position to Japanese or Korean competitors, which would lead to entire plants being closed, or to move the entire production process to Mexico or China. She really felt that the company should be praised for making the utmost effort to stay in America. However, most people were more concerned about their jobs and the support of their families, and weren’t really interested in her rationalizations.

With the money Alice received in her divorce settlement (which involved a lump-sum payment in lieu of alimony), she bought a very nice condominium apartment. She lived alone. At the beginning, she thought of buying a cat for company — she really liked cats -- but was afraid of the “spinster with a cat” stereotype, and so gave up the idea.

When she was young, Alice always dressed in a very fashionable manner. She had nice legs, and loved to show them off by wearing skirts as short as fashion would allow (and sometimes a bit shorter than that), as well as sandals or boots with heels as high as fashion would allow (and sometimes a bit higher than that). However, as she rose in the executive ranks at F&S, her wardrobe perforce began to center more and more on conservative and expensive business suits, with the skirt at knee length and with matching sensible (though definitely fashionable) shoes. Even her casual wear became more tailored and less flamboyant. After all, she did have an image to project.

Time passed. The notorious F&S hatchet lady was obviously not the most desirable of all dates, and after a while Alice understood that men were avoiding her. She had stopped going to singles clubs anyway (there had been a very unfortunate incident when she accidentally ran into somebody whom she had fired the week before; only the timely intervention of one of the bartenders prevented it from degenerating into physical violence), and her social life consisted mainly of invitations to parties and receptions from her colleagues or others in the business world, almost all of whom were married. She couldn’t really count many of them as friends. Almost everyone in the company feared that, one day, they will get the dreaded letter summoning them to Alice’s office to discuss “severance alternatives” and to hear an offer which they knew they could not refuse. The women her age whom she knew were inevitably married with children, and these tended to be the focus of their conversations. Unfortunately, Alice had not much to say about the state of the local schools or scout organizations.

Alice had tried joining organizations such as the local Friends of the Red Cross or the Civic Center Boosters, but found that they expected their members to either donate considerable sums of money or spend time getting others to donate money, and she could not afford the former nor was she particularly good at the latter. She met very few people whom she was interested in befriending, or who were interested in befriending her, and soon gave up.

A tear appeared on Alice’s cheek. This is not what the young Alan had dreamed of when, alone in his bed, he fantasized about one day achieving womanhood. Somehow, the glamour, the romance, and the beauty of it all had gotten lost along the way. Alan had been so concentrated on gender that he had lost his grasp on the life that went with it. “Is this the body I want?” turns out, in retrospect, not to be the same question as “Is this the life I want?”, nor are the answers to the two necessarily linked. Alan had been obsessed with becoming, externally, the female he knew he was internally. He had neither time nor inclination to worry about other aspects of his life. He never read much (other than purloined copies of fashion magazines) and never developed a hobby. He never learned how to play a musical instrument or even how to use a computer for anything other than basic surfing, chat, and role-playing games. He didn’t care about what went on in the community, the nation, the world. His life was one-dimensional and, after his sole dream had been realized, the number of dimensions decreased.

The situation was intolerable, and Alice resolved to act. She had to do something. She would buy a cat after all, stereotypes be damned!

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POSTSCRIPT: The author has had many occasions to talk to, and advise, several transsexuals in various stages of transition or post-transition. This story came out of those conversations.

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CHAPTER 1: HELGA

The decadence of Berlin in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s has been amply documented and described by writers ranging from Bertold Brecht to Christopher Isherwood. It had a large and vibrant homosexual community, as well as a smaller but equally-vibrant transsexual community. The bridge between the two was the flamboyantly-gay doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the World League for Sexual Reform, who is best known for attempting the first “sex change” operations, which, though they were not considered particularly successful, did lead the way for the SRS operations a generation later.

Many runaways from all over Europe flocked to Berlin to join these communities, and among them was a slightly-built and extremely beautiful blond boy of 16 from Augsburg by the name of Helmut Angermann. Helmut was not really the sort to fit into “the life”, being both shy and unable to hold his liquor, but he managed to hang on for two years, earning his living in ways best left unelaborated. The crowning achievement of his short career as a performer on and off stage was to obtain from one Martin Pietsch, a minor bureaucrat in the Ministry of the Interior who had certain “unspeakable” tastes best satisfied at cabarets such as the notorious Eldorado Club (the model for the Kit Kat Klub in the movie "Cabaret"), a complete set of quite authentic documents in the name of Helga Schmidt, the name which he now used. Having received those documents and enough cash to build a small nest egg, Helga Schmidt vanished from the Berlin nightclub scene as suddenly as she arrived. Martin Pietsch was devastated by the loss, and sank into a deep introspective depression.

Helga was not stupid. Her ambition in life was to be a “real and ordinary” woman, and she realized that the Berlin scene was not the place to fulfill this ambition. She also noted the rise of various nationalist groups, the National Socialists being the foremost among them, which she sensed would close down the Berlin demimonde at the first opportunity. It was important to get out while there was time to do so.

So Helga bought a suitcase and filled it with clothes and jewelry suitable for a prim and proper middle-class young lady of 18, and took the train to Dresden, leaving behind all of her other belongings (including a rather interesting and exotic collection of whips, chains, and other tools of the trade which she had learned how to use during her short stay in Berlin, as well as the appropriate leather costumes to go with them) and anything that could in any way tie her to the now-officially-nonexistent Helmut Angermann. In Dresden, Helga found a room in a boarding house for young ladies and enrolled in secretarial school, where she learned typewriting and shorthand and from which she graduated with honors.

Things did not go smoothly, of course. Helga’s “transition” was done without the assistance of female hormones, which were not then available, and without any psychiatric counseling or support groups. But she was lucky in having a very girlish build (she was flat-chested, of course, but that was the fashion during the 20’s and early 30’s) as well as an iron will to overcome all obstacles. Often, when things went badly for her, or when she thought she was not passing well enough (though she never had any real incidents of being “read”) she would first sit in her room and cry for an hour but then follow that up with an hour of Buddhist meditation and breathing exercises (they were all the rage in Germany at the time; like everyone else in her generation, Helga had read Hermann Hesse’s short novel Siddhartha and was profoundly influenced by it) which restored her control over herself and her life.

Helga did not date men, yet, for fear of “complications”, but did form friendships with several of the other women living in the boarding house and would go out with her friends to concerts or the theater, or sometimes just to sit in a café or in the park. Often, they would be joined by young men, and Helga slowly learned how to socialize on the more respectable plane than that on which she had lived in Berlin. She soon earned a reputation as being a nice girl, the sort you would bring to your mother, but not one to ever take to a nightclub or even a rowdy party at the University.

And so Helga found her niche, and just in time, as it turned out. While she was still in secretarial school, the Nazis came to power and the era of toleration towards transsexuals came to an end. Indeed, one of the first things the Nazis did, having assumed power, was to destroy Dr. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin and burn its extensive library and records. Helmut Angermann, if he had still existed, would undoubtedly have been thrown into prison or, perhaps, been beaten to death by SA thugs. But Helga Schmidt, with her authentic papers, was not suspected — at least not for the time being.

CHAPTER 2. DIETER

After completing secretarial school, Helga found a very nice job as a secretary at the Dresden museum. She was assigned to the office that handled the group of young researchers attached to the museum, most of them still working on their Doctorate or Habilitation at the University. There were seven of them — five men and two women — but Helga’s favorite was clearly Dieter von Stuhler.

Dieter was an aristocrat, the second son of a Bavarian count. Dieter’s father had been a Major General during the World War and -- following the family tradition -- Dieter’s older brother Hans had also joined the army and, in the new Wehrmacht, had achieved the rank of Oberst (Lieutenant Colonel). He made no bones (at least in private) about detesting the Nazis and their thugs, but he insisted that it was his duty to make sure that the military was staffed by professionals with a sense of duty and history, who would do their best to keep it above politics. Dieter was gentler and had a more academic frame of mind and was allowed to go to the University and study art history. His doctoral thesis had to do with the famous Amber Room, originally designed for Prussian queen Sophie Charlotte by sculptor Andreas Schlueter but never assembled. It was later sent by Prussian king Friedrich William I as a gift to Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. After various constructions and reconstructions, it ended up in the palace of Catherine the Great in Tsarskoye Selo (now called Pushkin) outside of St. Petersburg (now called Leningrad), where it was considered one of the artistic treasures of Russia. A room the walls of which were amber panels, and which was lit by over 500 candles -- it shimmered like a living jewel and was often called one of the wonders of the architectural world. How Dieter yearned to actually see the Amber Room, something which was of course impossible in the current political constellation. He devoted years to studying it in minute detail, and was sure that one day he could see and examine it.

Helga was immediately attracted to this gentle aristocrat, and did her best in typing his letters and notes, often working late to get things just right. He, in turn, was always very thankful and kind to her, and would often bring her presents of chocolates or flowers. On her birthday, he even bought her a very fine-looking gold bracelet. After a while, he asked her if she would be willing to type some private manuscripts for him (unrelated to his work at the museum) in her off hours, for which he would of course pay her a quite generous fee. He had a typewriting machine in the study of his townhouse, which she would be able to use.

Helga agreed, of course, though she feared that he would abuse the situation in order to make sexual advances at her. On one hand, she was flattered that he took an interest in her, but on the other she knew that she could not expose the secret of her body to him. Still, she took the chance and soon found herself spending three evenings a week at Dieter’s luxurious townhouse, ostensibly to type his personal correspondence and papers, but in fact often just talking with him about his work and his life. At some point in the evening, they would adjourn to a restaurant or a café for dinner, and often afterwards they would walk along the boulevards or in one of the municipal parks. They sometimes held hands.

Dieter’s behavior was, at all times, correct. In fact, it was unusually so. Helga sensed that he would like to get closer to her — several times he seemed to bend over and want to kiss her but backed off at the last moment. She felt that he liked her, but something held him back.

One evening, when Helga arrived for their usual meeting, Helga found Dieter unusually disturbed. Instead of greeting her politely and sitting down on the sofa next to her, as had been his habit, he paced the room in a very agitated manner. Finally, he faced her and blurted out. “Helga, I have reached a decision. There is something I have to tell you. It is very difficult.” She looked at him quizzically and he continued: “Helga, I am in love with you, and have been for a long time now. I have been wanting to say this and have been putting it off again and again.”

“I love you too, Dieter,” Helga replied quietly.

“Helga … dear …”, said Dieter, “there is unfortunately a problem.”

“Have I done anything wrong?” asked Helga.

“No,” he replied. “The problem is mine. I have a terrible secret, which will forever prevent me from having an affair with a woman, even one as beautiful and perfect as you. It is one that it is impossible to explain, and certainly a well-bred girl like you could never understand.”

Helga approached Dieter and hugged him. “Please,” she said, “confide in me.”

“You see,” Dieter began, “ever since I was a schoolboy I had a terrible and vile attraction not only to women but especially to women-boys, those creatures who look like women but who are really boys underneath their clothes. They live in certain neighborhoods of the city which I am sure you have never frequented, but to which I find myself compelled to go every once in a while. I have tried to cure this passion, and have even visited a psychoanalyst, a disciple of Herr Doktor Freud of Vienna, but nothing seems to work. Therefore, much as I love you, I know that if I ask you to marry me, it would just end up causing you much pain and suffering, which would be unbearable for both of us.” He then fell on his knees, weeping.

Helga held Dieter tightly and slowly kissed him on the lips. “I too have a secret, Dieter, which I have never told anyone. Now is the time, however, for you to know it.” Then, slowly, she took Dieter’s hand in hers and guided it under her skirt.

CHAPTER 3. MARRIAGE AND WAR

Four months later, Dieter and Helga were married in a private ceremony in the family’s ancestral castle in Bavaria. Helga feared, at first, that the count would object to Dieter marrying a mere typist, but that turned out not to be the case. In fact, as the old general merrily explained, his own wife of forty years (who had died a few years earlier) had been a barmaid at a tavern in Leipzig where she met him, a young and very lonely lieutenant, just beginning his military career; his mother -- the wife of the famous Grand Admiral von Stuhler and, judging from the portraits of her on the walls, a most imposing and aristocratic woman -- had begun life as a chambermaid in a Hamburg hotel. So Dieter was merely following the family tradition in going outside the ranks of the aristocracy to find a suitable mate. Of course, nobody in the family or out of it knew Helga’s secret.

After her marriage, Helga resigned from her job at the museum and devoted herself to caring for her husband and helping him complete his doctorate, which he did successfully in 1937. He then was given a permanent appointment at the museum as curator of their imposing amber collection, while continuing his researches into the history of the Amber Room. Life seemed placid and carefree and Helga was very happy.

And then the war broke out.

Dieter, being both aristocratic and academic, detested the Nazis and all they stood for, even more than his brother. However, he was not one to act on his political beliefs, and, with a resigned sigh indicating that “this too will pass”, he dug himself deeply into the cocoon of his work while the troops marched through Europe under the sign of the swastika. He, Helga, and their friends never talked about politics and tried to avoid newspapers and radio broadcasts, so as not even to think about it. They both practiced Buddhist meditation. However, Dieter did accept an invitation from his brother Hans, who led one of the Panzer divisions now occupying Paris, to pay a visit to the City of Lights and see the Louvre. He also agreed to consult concerning the “repatriation to Germany” of a certain rare collection of amber artifacts liberated from the home of a rich Dutch Jewish banker, who seems to have mysteriously disappeared, leaving everything behind him. Upon his — purely professional, you understand — advice, the collection was split between the museums of Dresden and Stuttgart, with a few choice pieces unfortunately disappearing along the way. (After the war, they turned up in the private collection of Marshall Goering.)

Helga, who typed and arranged the paperwork involved, did not especially like this and felt it was morally wrong, but what could she do against the whole government? She meditated more than usual that evening.

The war continued. England was bombed extensively but not invaded, as everybody expected it would. Suddenly, Hitler turned eastward and sent his armies deep into Russia. Smolensk and Kiev fell, and mighty armies were headed for Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. It seemed only a matter of time until Russia shared the fate of France. Nothing could stop the unbeatable Wehrmacht. Dieter, however, was busy in the Dresden museum, cataloging and studying amber. Helga did her breathing exercises every night.

Then, one cold day in January, 1942, an officer in full uniform knocked on the door of their townhouse. “I am Captain Karl-Heinz von und zu Faunberg, on the staff of Panzer Generalmajor (Brigadier General) von Stuhler ” he announced, “I have an urgent message for Herr Doktor von Stuhler.” Helga invited Captain von und zu Faunberg in, and called her husband from his study. When he came, Captain von und zu Faunberg clicked his heels smartly and handed him a large envelope. Dieter opened it and quietly read what was written. He then gasped. “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it!”

Helga ran to him and asked him if it was bad news about his brother, whom they knew was somewhere on the Russian front. “No, he said, it is good news, tremendously good news.” Hans’ panzer division has conquered Tsarskoye Selo, and he is acting commander of the town. He is writing this letter to me from his office in a room of Catherine’s palace. And it is not just any room — he has located his office in THE AMBER ROOM!” Captain von und zu Faunberg explained the details. The Russians had, of course, done their best to evacuate all of the artistic treasures of the palace before the Germans had closed in around Leningrad. However, they could not figure out how to dismantle the walls of the Amber Room (which would be too big and too fragile to move in any case) and so tried to cover them up and hide them. They had worked in haste and the German soldiers had no trouble noticing and removing the camouflage.

Captain von und zu Faunberg continued that there was another message, which he was empowered to transmit orally. Even though Generalmajor von Stuhler was fully confident that Leningrad would fall in the coming spring, he was worried that the Amber Room would be damaged by the bombardment which the Russians were directing from the city towards Tsarskoye Selo, either from a direct hit or as a result of vibrations caused by a near miss. He has therefore decided that it would be best to dismantle the room and pack it for safekeeping, perhaps sending it back to Germany. Since Herr Doktor von Stuhler was without a doubt the world’s greatest expert on the room and its construction, he was instructed to bring Herr Doktor back with him to Tsarskoye Selo as soon as possible to help save this priceless treasure — in the interests of civilization -- from the needless fury of war.

Helga did not want Dieter to go. In her eyes, he was being made an accomplice to art theft on a grand scale, perhaps the biggest art theft since Napoleon “liberated” the art treasures of Italy or since the Venetians “liberated” the art treasures of Byzantium. But Dieter disagreed. He must help save the Amber Room from damage and destruction. It was his duty to humanity.

CHAPTER 4. KOENIGSBERG

Dieter accompanied Captain von und zu Faunberg back to Tsarskoe Selo in a military aircraft. For three months, Helga heard not a word from him. Then she received a long letter, again by military courier. After careful study, Dieter had figured out how the room was assembled and was able to take it apart without causing damage to the highly-fragile amber panels. They were now carefully packed in special crates. By the personal order of the Fuehrer, they were to be shipped to Koenigsberg, where the room was to be reassembled in the Koenigsberg castle, built by the Medieval Teutonic knights. Dieter would accompany them on their way. Helga was requested to go to Koenigsberg, where a villa would be put at the disposal of the couple, while Herr Doktor von Stuhler supervised the reassembly of the room.

Helga was still very much opposed to what she considered theft on a grand scale, but had no real choice. And so she agreed to be flown by military transport to Koenigsberg, where she reported to Professor Doktor Alfred Rohde, the director of the museum in Koenigsberg castle, who had made all of the arrangements. When she met him in his office, she deliberately displayed a coldness and aloofness which signaled her lack of enthusiasm for the entire project. This distaste was clearly evident to Prof. Doktor Rohde, as it was to the man who was with him (and whom he did not introduce to Helga). Still, he behaved correctly, if not warmly, and gave the keys to the villa to this unnamed person, and told him to drive Helga to her new home.

When they were in the car, the man turned to Helga with a smile, and said that he was the Gauleiter (regional leader) of the Nazi party in Koenigsberg, and that he was sure that Helga would be very cooperative in the project of the Amber Room. When she didn’t reply, he added that it was very nice to see her again after all of these years. “Again?” asked Helga, “Have we ever met before? “Yes we have,” he replied, “and I am sorry that you have forgotten it so quickly. Of course, at the time you were called Helmut, not Helga. And I am Martin Pietsch, in case you have forgotten my name. As you see, I have advanced somewhat since my days as a flunky in the Ministry of the Interior. And it is now I who hold the whips. So let me make things very clear — you will enthusiastically support your husband in his project of preserving the Amber Room and returning this jewel of German art to its rightful home. You will even give interviews to the newspapers on how fitting it is that we have liberated it from the barbarian Slavs. Of course, should you refuse to do your part for the Fatherland, certain information could be sent to General von Stuhler and his father the count, information which would ruin their lives, as well as that of your husband. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”

And so Helga felt boxed in. As she looked through the magnificent villa put at her disposal (which had been confiscated from a Jewish merchant who “would no longer be needing it”) she tried to think of ways to get out of this situation. She was determined, Siddhartha to the contrary, that she could not just accept this as another situation in life which is not to be fought. Somewhere, there was a way out. She meditated.

Dieter arrived in Koenigsberg three weeks later. The crates containing the Amber Room were in two special railway cars, guarded at all times by a company of soldiers supplied by his brother, waiting to be transported to the castle. On their first night together, Helga told him about Martin Pietsch and his threats. “It is not just a matter of the Amber Room,” she said, “if we let him get away with this, he will blackmail me, and you, forever. We will never hear the end of this.” Dieter was convinced. He would find a way out. Somehow. Meanwhile, Helga did whatever Martin Pietsch requested.

Before the room could be reassembled, Dieter had to carefully survey the castle and find a suitable and safe place for the Amber Room to be reassembled. This, needless to say, took a certain amount of time, and Dieter managed to stretch it out as long as possible — well into the autumn of 1942. Meanwhile, the war was not going as well as expected. Both Leningrad and Moscow were besieged but held out. In the summer of 1942, the Wehrmacht tried to capture Stalingrad, also without success. Resources were being drained from the army. The crates containing the Amber Room were unloaded from their railway cars and stored in the cellars of the castle. Then the British began bombing German cities, including a raid on Koenigsberg. Not much damage was done, but perhaps it was inadvisable to begin just now. The project of reconstructing the Amber Room was put on a back burner.

Herr and Frau Doktor von Stuhler asked for permission to return to Dresden. Permission was denied. They were to remain in Koenigsberg for as long as it took to finish the Amber Room project. This was a direct order from the Fuehrer. Martin Pietsch was becoming more and more impatient, but Museum Director Rohde sided with Doktor von Stuhler. The Amber Room was too precious to risk any damage. Helga and Dieter meditated, and planned.

The year 1943 came and went. An entire German army group surrendered at Stalingrad. The Wehrmacht was everywhere in retreat. In January, 1944, the German forces retreated from the Leningrad area. In Koenigsberg people began talking about the defense of the city from the advancing Red Army. Obviously there was no point in erecting the Amber Room now. Dieter had urgent meetings with Prof. Doktor Rohde and the military authorities. The crates containing the Amber Room must be moved to a more secure place deep in Germany.

It was decided to send the crates to safety in Saxony, where nobody would be likely to bomb them. They were reloaded onto a train and sent westward. However, as the special military train headed onward, it was overtaken by a dispatch rider on a motorcycle (he was none other than Captain von und zu Faunberg, who was killed in action a month later), carrying new orders, signed — so it appeared — by Marshall Goering himself. The train was to be diverted to another destination.

On the lands of the von Stuhler estate in Bavaria there was an abandoned coal mine, with a convenient railway spur leading right up to it. The train carrying the crates with the Amber Room was diverted to that mine, and the crates hidden deep in it. Then the entrance to the mine was covered over, and the railway spur torn up. Only Herr and Frau Doktor von Stuhler (who had carefuly forged the orders to divert the train) knew where the treasures lay. They would be safe there until the war ended — however it was to end. Meanwhile, they returned to Dresden and tried to live as normal a life as they could.

For three days, between the 13 and 15 of February, 1945, 1300 bombers of the RAF and the USAAF mercilessly pounded the city of Dresden with high-powered and incendiary bombs, creating a firestorm which claimed over 25,000 civilian casualties. Among these were Dieter von Stuhler and his wife, and with them — unfortunately -- the secret of the location of the Amber Room. It has never been recovered.
 
 

~*~
 
 
AFTERWARD: This story is fiction, and the characters (with the exception of a few “walk-ons” such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Rohde) are figments of my imagination. The Amber Room is not. The facts about the room, its removal from Catherine’s palace in Tsarskoye Selo to Koenigsberg, and its subsequent disappearance are well-documented. What happened to it after that remains a mystery; it has never been found. The case of the Amber Room remains the largest art theft, and its fate is one of the greatest question marks, of the 20th century.

---

 
 

CHAPTER 1. TWO BEAUTIES ON A YACHT

Leros, home of the Olympian goddess Artemis (identified with the Roman Diana), is a small beautiful island in the Dodecanese chain of islands in the Aegean Sea. It has clean and inviting beaches, green hills, and a fine harbor. One fine July day, an expensive yacht, chartered by the Italian film and television superstar Gina Rossi, glided into the harbor of Platanos, the capital of the Island. On the deck of the yacht, two exquisite beauties were sunbathing, clad only in matching expensive bikinis, obviously the work of a top Milan designer. One of them was Gina Rossi herself — at the age of 40 still stunningly gorgeous — and the other, aged 17, was … her son Claudio, who, for reasons which will become obvious, preferred being called Claudia.

The Island of Leros has less than 10,000 inhabitants, and it is safe to say that the eyes of almost every male above the age of 12 were glued on Gina and Claudia Rossi as their ship glided into port and tied up at quayside. Each pair of eyes carefully registered every delicate move as Gina and Claudia rose from their deckchairs, shook their identical long black hair, wrapped each other in a towel, gave each other a peck on the cheek, and then headed below decks to shower and dress. The brain behind each pair of eyes immediately conjured up the most delicious fantasies of the two of them washing off their suntan lotion, and doing … what … before dressing.

Of course, nobody imagined that Claudia was really male. Very few people knew the secret. He had been born when Gina was just beginning her career. His father, a professional racing driver, was killed in a fiery crash at Le Mans one year later. Gina never remarried but was determined to bring up her child by herself, despite the difficulties. By the time the child was 3, it was clear that he bore an extraordinary resemblance to his mother, and was “way too pretty to be a boy”. The habit of calling him “Claudia” started not with Gina but with her friends and acquaintances. Claudia loved it. When he was asked (as grownups are wont to ask little children) what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would always answer “I want to be a beautiful actress, just like my mommy”. On his fourth birthday, when Gina took him shopping for a present, he saw a yellow girl’s dress in the store window and said he wanted that. Gina tried to object, but — since she thought that he would look very pretty in it — not for long, and bought him the dress, with matching panties and shoes. He did look stunning, and so Gina and her friends bought him more clothes, and pretty soon his entire wardrobe was very feminine, just like his mommy’s.

Claudia never went to a formal school. Since Gina was constantly travelling for modeling assignments or for film shooting on location, and since she insisted on taking Claudia with her wherever she went, it was much simpler to engage a succession of private tutors. At first, Claudia’s “situation” was carefully explained to them, but after a while nobody even bothered. Her tutors just assumed she was a girl, and nobody corrected them. What her tutors did notice, though, was that besides being very beautiful, Claudia was also very intelligent, and extremely quick in understanding things she read. By the time she was 16, she was already studying material which is usually met only in college. She also picked up languages quickly and, as a consequence of all of the travelling she did with Gina, she was fluent not only in Italian but also in English, French, German, and Spanish. She planned to learn Japanese, as soon as an appropriate tutor could be found.

As Claudia grew older, she became more and more a miniature copy of her mother. When she reached the age of 11, Gina decided it was time for a “long hard talk”. Together with a psychologist, she explained to Claudia what was going on and what her options were. The psychologist examined Claudia thoroughly, as did a doctor who checked her physical development. As a result, it was decided unanimously (with Claudia vehemently insisting) that she continue as a girl and that she be given hormone replacement therapy to make sure that her male hormones never kick in and that her body develop like that of any other teenage girl. The results were spectacular, though not unexpected. Claudia developed into a perfect-but-younger copy of her mother, and in fact was so much like her that she appeared in several films in which her mother starred, playing in flashbacks where the character portrayed by her mother is seen as a teenager.

While the law did not allow Claudia to have SRS surgery until she was 18 (despite her pleas that forcing her to refrain from sex with boys was cruel and unusual punishment — both to her and to them), it was clearly the direction in which she was headed.

CHAPTER 2. STAVROS

The teenage boys and young men who lived on Leros were used to beautiful women coming ashore looking for a summer adventure, and were quite willing to oblige. If one adds to them the college students and other outsiders who beef up the service staff of the various hotels, restaurants, and tavernas during the summer, one ends up with a large number of males whose main objective is to get into the panties of as many vacationing young females as possible in as short a time as possible — and brag about it to their friends afterwards. And all of them were setting their sights on Claudia, as she reemerged on deck dressed in a halter and very short shorts. She would star in many wet dreams on the island that night.

There were a few exceptions, of course, and one of them was Stavros Karamenaios, a first-year mathematics student at the National Technical University in Athens. Stavros was an archetypical nerd who was more at home reading a calculus textbook than looking at Playboy. He would have been content to be doing that during the summer, but he needed extra money and his parents insisted that he “get out of the library and enjoy himself” so he signed on as a waiter at the Hotel Angelou on Leros. If nothing else, it would be a good way of improving his English, which is the de facto international language of tourists.

The Hotel Angelou, near Alinda beach, is a converted mansion, secluded in its own large estate, and intended for very discriminating (and rich) guests. Stavros figured that he would be not be too busy there, and would have plenty of free time to spend reading linear algebra and differential equations, in preparation for next year. He had no plans to go after girls. (In fact, should the truth be told, Stavros had never had a romantic relationship with a girl, and was — needless to say — a virgin.) That does not imply, of course, that Stavros was not good looking. On the contrary, he had a very handsome “Greek god” look, with curly black hair just begging to run one’s fingers through, an olive complexion, and deep dark eyes.

As fate would have it, Gina and Claudia decided to stay at the Hotel Angelou, because of the seclusion and privacy it afforded. As fate would further have it, Stavros Karamenaios was assigned to wait on their table. The other waiters offered to trade tables with him, and were even willing to give him two-week’s worth of tips for the privilege, but Stavros felt that would anger the maitre d’, who handled the table assignments, and so declined. He, quite frankly, didn’t care whom he was serving, and barely noticed them. His mind was usually on mathematics.

Claudia, on the other hand, did notice Stavros. He was cute and shy, and didn’t try to start with her, as every other male on the island seemed to. On her first day on the island, she had gone into Platanos to buy some sunscreen and — as she put it later to Gina — had so many eyes following her that she felt like a chicken being plucked. The way some of the boys strutted in front of her was so comical; it was all she could do to keep from breaking out laughing. She was happy that Stavros didn’t try to force himself on her while she and Gina were eating, but was also a bit taken back. Perhaps he was gay? Perhaps he had a girl friend that was even more beautiful than she was? By the third day of their stay, she decided to try flirting with him. But, while he was polite and attentive to all her requests, he didn’t go beyond good and efficient service.

Now she was determined. She almost wanted to shout out to him: “Hey, in case you haven’t noticed, my mom is a famous film star, and I am as beautiful as she is!” But of course, she didn’t. Yet.

That afternoon, though, when she went out on the hotel grass to lie in the sun, she saw Stavros sitting in a corner and reading a book. This, she thought, was an opening. She walked over to him and asked him what he was reading. “Oh, something that probably won’t interest you,” he replied, and went back to his book. “Try me,” she said. “It is a book called Linear Algebra and its Applications by David Lay,” he said, “I am a math student at the university.” “You are right that the book is not very interesting,” she replied. “You should really try something more serious, such as Sheldon Axler’s book Linear Algebra Done Right.” Now THAT caught Stavros’ attention. “What? You know linear algebra? Are you a math student too?” “No,” Claudia replied, “I am going to be an actress like my mom. But I got interested in algebra for a while, and my tutor recommended Axler’s book to me, so I read through it.”

“Wow!” said Stavros. “Look, maybe you can help me with a proof I am having trouble understanding.” “Sure,” Claudia replied, “let me see …” And so the two of them spent the next hour talking about generating sets and bases and dimensions, while Claudia managed to inch herself closer and closer to Stavros, until their legs were touching. He, almost unconsciously, put his arm around her shoulder and she leaned on his. “You are really smart,” he said, “did anybody ever tell you that?” “And you are really cute,” she replied, “did anybody ever tell you THAT?” Claudia then did something that she had never done before in her life — she initiated a kiss on the mouth to a man who had not shown any interest in kissing her. Fortunately for Claudia, male instincts take over even when experience is lacking, and Stavros responded to the kiss with all of the fervor one would expect in a young man. Pretty soon, they were locked in an embrace, exploring each other’s mouths with their tongues, while Lay’s book slid, unnoticed, to the grass.

CHAPTER 3. LOVE

Claudia lay in her bed, dressed only in panties, and examined her body. She was very aware that by any standards, including those of the most exacting film and model-agency directors, she was an exquisite and rare beauty, totally feminine. Totally, that is, except for the part they never saw, the part now covered by her panties so that she, too, would not have to look at it. What was hidden there — underdeveloped and dysfunctional as it was — ruined everything. When she would be 18 — on the very day after her birthday, if she had her wish -- she would have that horrid part of her removed. Until then, only she and Gina knew about her blemish (and a few doctors, of course). One more year, one more year! Until then, her body was betraying her soul, keeping her from being, totally, the woman she knew she was.

Claudia thought about love. Like all teenage girls, she had her crushes on boys but she has intelligent enough to understand that because she was built differently, she had to rein her desires in. While she enjoyed partying and being with guys, she never allowed herself to fall in love with any of them, and preserved a certain emotional distance. “One more year,” she kept on thinking to herself, “one more year and I will be able to have my operation and then … boys beware!”

But now Eros had clearly aimed one of his mightiest shafts right at her, for she was totally stricken by Stavros. Claudia wanted to be his, totally, and wanted it now. She could not wait one more week, let alone one more year. What was she to do? The last thing she could do was talk to Gina about Stavros.

In her head, Claudia played back every word of her conversations with Stavros, and reexamined every gesture. Was he in love with her?

Yes he was. At the same time Claudia was fantasizing about love, so was Stavros. For the first time in his life, he was totally smitten by a girl. He was in love, and was not sure he could handle it. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He felt very inadequate. How could he, a poor mathematics student, even consider a long-time relationship with the glamorous daughter of a famous movie star, who was clearly destined for stardom in her own right? There was no way she would have him. When she and her mother left Leros, he was sure to be forgotten, or written off as a trivial summer adventure. But what could he do? His body ached for her.

CHAPTER 4. BEING CAREFUL

The next day, Gina’s agent called her. A featured guest scheduled to appear on one of the most popular Italian television talk shows had been hospitalized with appendicitis. A replacement was urgently needed. Could Gina fly back to Rome immediately? A private plane would be dispatched to pick her up. This was very important to her career. Gina agreed. Since the hotel suite had been ordered for an entire month, and had been paid for in advance, she and Claudia decided that Claudia would remain on Leros while her mother was away — probably for three or four days but possibly as long as a week.

This, of course, afforded Claudia the opportunity of being with Stavros as much as possible, during the hours he didn’t work and on his days off. They biked to Partheni to see the archeological excavations, and walked along the seashore. They held hands a lot, and kissed and hugged every few minutes. When they were on a secluded (or sometimes not-so-secluded) beach, Claudia would remove her bikini top and let Stavros fondle or suckle her breasts. She loved to feel his hands and the warmth of his body.

Needless to say, Stavros was — after a while — also quite eager to proceed “below the belt”, but here Claudia stopped him. She explained to him, gently but firmly, that while she loved him dearly, she was not yet ready to allow anyone to get into her pants. She had promised Gina, she said, that she would remain a virgin at least until her 18th birthday, and intended to honor that promise. She asked Stavros to respect it. With an obvious reluctance, he did. But Claudia’s refusal to do what every other girl visiting the island did sooner or later (or at least that is what the other waiters all told Stavros, in graphic detail) bothered him.

Meanwhile, Gina came back and she and Claudia prepared to return to Italy. Claudia and Stavros exchanged cell-phone numbers and Instant Messenger addresses, and vowed to stay in touch daily. On the final day together, Stavros whispered in her ear, “This is a dream, and I know that it is going to end. You will soon be with your friends from the movie world and will forget me utterly.” “No,” Claudia promised, “that will never happen. I love you Stavros, and always will love you. I promise you that you will be the star of my thoughts and my dreams forever.”

CHAPTER 5. A YEAR OF ANTICIPATION

Every day, faithfully, Claudia and Stavros contacted each other — sometimes on the internet and sometimes by telephone. When the summer ended and Stavros returned to school, Claudia got a list of all of the textbooks he had to read and read them herself, so she could discuss the material with him and try to help him. During the semester break, Claudia flew to Athens and met Stavros’ family, whom she liked very much. They seemed to like her too. She and Stavros spent several very passionate days together, talking about the future. He respected her request that he not go “below the belt” until after her birthday, but they managed to get very intense with each other within the limits of this prohibition.

As the date of her 18th birthday approached, Claudia counted the days, the hours, the minutes until she could have her operation and be the total woman Stavros expected of her. And, sure enough, on the morning of her birthday Gina handed her the present she had always dreamt of — round-trip tickets to a clinic near Geneva where her operation was scheduled to take place the following week.

No girl ever entered the operating room for SRS surgery with as much anticipation and hope as did Claudia Rossi, and none came out of it with as great a feeling of satisfaction and sheer joy. She was now ready to fulfill her dream.

During the course of the year and during their meeting in Athens, Claudia and Stavros had made plans. Claudia had informed Gina that, much as she liked acting, she wanted to go to university before she began a career, and Gina reluctantly agreed. However, since they both realized that Claudia’s celebrity status would make it hard for her to blend in as a normal student on any campus in Italy, it was decided that she should go abroad to study. The obvious place, the most beautiful place, the most romantic place that mother and daughter could think of, was Paris. Gina applied to, and was accepted at, Université Paris Denis-Diderot (Paris VII), on Place Jussieu in Paris’ historical Latin Quarter. Among all of the campuses of the University of Paris, this one had an especially-good mathematics department. Because of the programs of the European Union which encourage students from one member country to spend part of their studies at an institution in another member country. Stavros too had no difficulty transferring there to complete his degree.

Claudia rented a luxurious apartment near the Cluny museum (Musée National du Moyen Age) on Place Paul Painlevé (named after a 19th-century French mathematician who also served as Prime Minister of France), and refurnished it lavishly to her taste. Stavros, for his part, decided to share a much plainer apartment on Rue Gaspard Monge (named after another famous mathematician who was a close friend of Napoleon) with two other Greek students, with whom he drove in a rented van across Europe from Athens to Paris. As soon as he arrived in Paris, he contacted Claudia, and within the hour was headed for her waiting arms.

The reunion of the two lovers was, as one would expect, extremely passionate. As they kissed and fondled each other, Claudia whispered in Savros’ ear: “I am over 18 now, and all doors are open to you.”

“Do you mean that you have had your operation?” Stavros asked.

Claudia backed off and gave him a shocked look … “What did you say?”

“Relax darling,” said Stavros, “I have known for a long time, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

“But how ….?” Claudia stammered.

“Well,” Stavros explained, “last year you said that you wanted to wait until you were 18 years old, but didn’t tell me when your birthday was. So I decided to find out. Most people don’t realize that birth and death records are considered public information under EU law. For a very modest fee, I was able to search all of the birth records in Italy for 17 years ago. Your name was not among them. So I searched by the name of the mother, and found that Gina Rossi had only one child, a son named Claudio. At first, I couldn’t believe it; then I thought that you were playing a big joke on me. But that didn’t fit — you are way too feminine to be able to fake that. You had to be a girl, no matter what the birth records said. But I also did some research on the internet and in the university library, and read about women who were unlucky enough to be born with male genitals. My love for you only increased, since I could just imagine how hard it was for you to be what you are, what you must be. When you visited me in Athens, if you remember, I took you to meet my grandmother, who is blind. What I did not tell you is that she has a considerable local reputation as a Wise Woman and Seer, one who cannot see the physical world but who can see the future. After you left, I asked her for her opinion of you. She said that you are a perfect soul mate for me and would make a wonderful wife, though you will not be able to bring me children. She blessed our union, and told me that it was arranged by the saints — whom I suspect she identifies with the Olympian gods.”

CHAPTER 6. PUBLICITY

When Stavros told Claudia that he had known her secret and that it didn’t matter to him, a weight was lifted off Claudia's heart, and she was able to turn her attention to her studies. Indeed, Claudia was resolved to live the life of an ordinary student, going to classes and enjoying Paris and the love of her boyfriend. While Stavros was, formally, ahead of her by two years, she had studied sufficient material on her own to automatically pass over various introductory courses and even found herself together with him in a few classes. The mathematics was taught at a very high level, but their major problem turned out not to be the material itself but rather the fact that it was being presented in French. Knowing a language fairly well is one thing; knowing it enough to be able to take notes from a lecturer mumbling at top speed and writing on the blackboard in an undecypherable handwriting -- is quite something else.

Another problem is that, despite all of her efforts to preserve her anonymity, various screen-gossip magazines found out about Claudia, and before she knew what was happening a photograph of her embracing Stavros appeared in the Italian version of Teen Screen, under the headline ‘CLAUDIA ROSSI STUDYING GREEK IN PARIS’. Pretty soon, she and Stavros found paparazzi trailing them, trying to take photographs — the more compromising the better. Claudia was sufficiently used to this sort of thing and took it in her stride, but Stavros was not, and it upset him tremendously. One day, when he was surprised by a photographer who started shooting pictures of him while he was in the library trying to study for an exam, he lost his calm and seized the camera, smashing it against the floor. This, of course, just made things worse, and nearly got him in serious trouble with the university authorities. In fact, Stavros was very worried that all the attention would lead others to discover Claudia’s birth secret, but she reassured him. After she had her operation, she successfully petitioned to have her birth certificate altered retroactively (which was possible under Italian law) so that if anyone did an internet search now, the result would be that she was born female. Stavros checked this out, and found it to be true, but was still worried. One day, he walked past a kiosk and saw a tabloid with the headline ‘CLAUDIA ROSSI IN PARIS BARES HER MOST INTIMATE SECRET’. Worried, he bought a copy, only to find out that it was a false alarm — the “most intimate secret” referred to the fact that she bought her jeans off the rack at shops in the Latin Quarter which catered to students, and not from the boutiques of exclusive Parisian designers.

In reality, Stavros did have good reason to worry. The photographer whose camera he smashed, a Swiss citizen by the name of Klaus Wedemeier, was at that moment getting drunk with his boyhood friend Hans Kimmel in a bar in Geneva. Hans asked him who was the girl who was causing all of the excitement, and when Klaus showed him a picture of Claudia, he said that he recognized her. Hans worked in information technology and he explained that several months earlier he had seen the girl while he was repairing the internet connection of a private clinic not far from town. This caught Klaus’ attention. He asked for more details about the clinic. Hans didn’t know too many, but said that, from what he understood, it was used by children of the rich for “discreet” abortions. There were rumors that the doctor in charge, Herr Prof. Doktor Grau, also performed sex-change operations there. Klaus was definitely interested. He offered Hans 10,000 euro if he could hack into the clinic’s computers and get a copy of Claudia Rossi’s medical file.

CHAPTER 7. THREAT AND RESPONSE

Two days later, Herr Prof. Doktor Grau personally called Gina Rossi to tell her that an attempt had been made to obtain her daughter’s medical file from the clinic’s computer. He assured her that the attempt failed (“Our firewalls are impregnable,” he boasted). At the same time, he also mentioned that a Paris-based photographer named Wedemeier was caught trying to surreptitiously photograph the clinic, after illegally climbing over the fence that surrounded it. His camera had been confiscated by the guards. Herr Prof. Doktor Grau was not sure that there was a connection between the two incidents, but felt it his duty to pass on the information.

Gina knew that the matter was serious, and called Claudia and Stavros to Rome for an urgent consultation. The three of them decided that something had to be done to make sure that no suspecion of Gina's birth sex ever arose, and worked out a plan. A year or so earlier, Gina had shot a film which was never released, for various financial reasons. In that movie, she played a pregnant woman. To show her pregnancy as realistically as possible, the studio had five very realistic prosthetic bellies — one for each of the last five months of pregnancy — made up for her. These were made from latex and silicon and were held in place by very thin yet very strong skin-colored Velcro straps wrapping around the body, as well as an adhesive. Once the straps and the seams were covered with body makeup, the belly would look very real, even in a close-up photograph. She now fetched them from the studio prop storage building. Since Claudia’s skin tone was the same as Gina’s. she was sure that they would fit Claudia with no difficulty.

Between the first and second semester, Stavros and Gina vacationed at an exclusive hotel in Morocco. By pure coincidence, a paparazzo just happened to locate them and managed to take some photos of Claudia lying on the beach in her bikini. These were printed in a British tabloid, along with a rather catty remark that Claudia needed to study less and exercise more, for she seemed to be gaining weight. Two weeks later, the Italian gossip blog BAMBINA carried the big headline ‘IS CLAUDIA ROSSI STUDYING TO BE A MOMMY?’. It reprinted the picture from Morocco and added to it a photo of Claudia in Paris, wearing rather loose clothing and entering a building which housed, among other offices, the clinic of a well-known Parisian gynecologist. Similar stories (all, of course, planted by one of Gina’s spokespeople) began popping up in other European screen and gossip magazines, and attracted considerable attention from those people who have nothing better to do than follow the private lives of the stars.

Finally, Claudia called a press conference and, wearing her fifth-month “bump”, admitted that she was indeed pregnant. The father was her dear friend Stavros (who declined to be present), and that she looked forward to having the baby very much. This, of course, set off a feeding frenzy among the paparazzi and gossip columnists. A lot of inanities were written about her, and some of the columnists even learned a few mathematical expressions (there were various remarks about “subsets” and “implicit functions”, for example, by people who had no idea what the terms actually mean).

The months and the size of Claudia’s “bump” progressed, with pictures constantly appearing in the gossip press. Claudia made sure that the photographers did not get too close to her, and it was absolutely impossible to tell that the pregnancy was not real. The only person who was not impressed by it was Klaus Wedemeier, who was still convinced something was fishy here. He spent a lot of time digging into Claudia’s past, and managed to find Victoria, one of her former tutors, who told him that while Claudia was treated as a girl, it was “common knowledge” that he was really a boy. Unfortunately, Victoria also told him that it was “common knowledge” that the Pope was really an alien from the planet Uranus who, with the help of an army of Martian mercenaries disguised as Jesuit priests, was about to take over the world. Reluctantly, Klaus decided that Victoria would not make a credible source. But he kept digging.

At the beginning of her “ninth month”, Claudia left Paris to be — so she told the press — at her mother’s home in Rome, where she would give birth to her baby away from the public eye. In fact, she and Gina flew incognito by private plane to Buenos Aires a week later. Argentina is a country in which the Catholic Church still has a dominant influence and hence many women refuse to take anti-pregnancy precautions, even when they are in no position, financial or marital, to bring up a child. As a result, there are large numbers of babies available there for adoption, through legal or semi-legal channels. Gina had contracted with an Argentine lawyer to look for a woman who matched Claudia’s build and coloration, who would give birth around the time Claudia was "expecting", and who would be willing to give up her baby, sight unseen, for a suitable remuneration. Several candidates were identified and Claudia talked to all of them before making her decision. Palms were greased where necessary, and on the same day the baby was born, and checked to make sure it was healthy, it was legally adopted by Claudia Rossi. Three days later, accompanied by Claudia, Gina, and a nurse, it was flown back to Rome.

A week later, the first pictures of Claudia, Stavros, and their baby boy, whom they called Valentino, appeared in the press. Around the same time, Klaus Wedemeier decided that his time would be better spent following the antics of one of Britain's more alcoholic princes.

EPILOGUE: It would be nice to end this story with “and they lived happily ever after,” but in this case it didn’t quite happen. After Valentino was born, Claudia decided not to go back to school, but to concentrate on raising her son and restarting her acting career. Stavros finished his degree in mathematics, but found it difficult to continue being “Mr. Claudia Rossi” and felt more and more marginalized in her life. After graduation, he was offered a fellowship to work on his doctorate at Ohio State University and, when Claudia refused to leave Europe, the two of them parted sadly but amicably. Claudia had full custody of the baby, and took Valentino with her wherever she went on assignment. The child was immensely charming and pretty. Way too pretty, everyone said, to be a boy….

A multipart story ...

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PROLOGUE.

A boy is born; only inside he knows that he is not a male but rather a female. He cannot understand this, nor can he explain it to his parents or to others. So he grows to up suffering and only after he attains the independence of adulthood can he live the life he had always known he was meant to live. This tale has been told thousands of times, here and in many other places, and is experienced by tens of thousands of people around the world at any given moment. Fortunately, in our time, hormone replacement therapy and surgery allow the fulfillment of the desired transition and there is a growing acceptance of it by the community. However, in other societies and at other times this was not so.

The following tale takes place in Japan in the 1880’s, during the rule of the Emperor Meiji. This was a heady time, when Japan abandoned its policy of isolation from the rest of the world and plunged into an intensive program of industrialization and modernization which led to it becoming a world-class industrial and military power by the first decade of the 20th century. Tens of thousands of Japanese were sent to study abroad, and tens of thousands of Europeans and Americans were brought to Japan to teach and train future generations in western science and technology. The result was an immense cultural shock and reorientation, in which the fulfillment of all dreams seemed possible.

CHAPTER 1. THE INN

My name is Hatsue, and I manage the Blossoming Willow Inn. “Hatsue” is not the name I was born with, for it is a woman’s name, and I was born a boy. Nonetheless, it is the name I use and the name by which I have been known ever since I ran away from my parents’ home and chose to live my life as a woman. I will not burden you with the tale of how I managed to do that, nor do I care to remember it, for it is a hard and heart-breaking story, full of suffering, sacrifice, and, finally, some lucky breaks.

The openness of Japan to the rest of the world under our Emperor Meiji has, paradoxically, made life for women like me all the more difficult, for it has brought with it the “modern” outlook of Victorian England and Europe towards sexual roles, which is far more rigid and restrictive than that of traditional Japan. Paradoxically, in the name of “modernity”, acceptance — or at least toleration — of people like me seems to be disappearing from Japanese society.

The inn that I manage is not a large one. It has eight guest rooms in all, together with a dining room which also serves as a public restaurant. It is in Japanese style but caters mainly to foreigners who wish to live a bit exotically while they are here. Of course, I had to make some adjustments to fit them. At one end of the corridor on which the guest rooms are located is a Japanese-style toilet and hot tub, but at the other is a European-style WC and shower stall. While the rooms are all furnished in Japanese style, I do have a supply of western-style beds in the storage room, which the guests can request. In one corner of the dining room, there is one western-style table and chairs, for guests who cannot eat at low Japanese tables, and there are even sets of western-style cutlery available for those who request them. I cannot understand how people can eat with those barbaric utensils, but one must accommodate one’s guests as best one can, especially paying guests.

Why did I choose to work primarily with foreigners? I am good enough in the role of a woman that most Japanese people accept me as a one, though some look at me in a questioning manner because of my hands and feet which seem a bit too large, and my voice which is not quite as feminine as it should be. Most of them pity me for being so ugly, rather than question what I might have between my legs. Foreigners, on the other hand, are less discriminating or perhaps less observant, in this respect. They do not see the nuances which we Japanese see. If I am dressed as a woman, they take me for one unquestioningly. I am more comfortable among them.

Two of the guest rooms are currently being used by long-term boarders. The others are occupied by businessmen or travelers who come and go after a few days. One of the long-term boarders is Japanese — a retired court official by the name of Mr. Nakayama — who is 70 years old. His wife died last year and his only son is studying in France for the next six months. He prefers not to be alone in his home. He is very quiet and rarely bothers anybody.

The other long-term boarder is an American, a huge red-headed giant by the name of Edward Springfield Throckmorton. That name is totally unpronounceable in Japanese, and so everybody calls him “Moto-san”. I will call him that too. Moto-san is an expert on the construction and maintenance of locomotives and comes from California in the United States of America. He has been in Japan for three years now, and speaks passable Japanese (though his accent is terrible). He moved into my inn last month, and plans to stay here until his contract expires, in a few months.

When Moto-san goes to the railway yard, where he trains Japanese engineers, he wears western-style overalls sewn of a crude blue cloth which he had made for him especially by a tailor in his native San Francisco by the name of Levi Strauss. He is very proud of them and says that they are the best work clothes in the world, but I find them hard to look at. He predicts that one day everyone in the world, even women, will wear them all of the time, but I find that idea totally fantastic. Still, who knows what changes in fashion our exposure to the rest of the world will bring.

Around the inn, Moto-san prefers to dress in Japanese style, and wears a cotton yukata, which he also had to have tailored for him especially, to fit his great height. (He says he is six feet and eight inches tall, in his way of measuring things; by that same system of measurement, I am five feet and one inch tall.) He is surprisingly supple and has no trouble sitting cross-legged at a Japanese-style table and eating his food with sticks, at which he is surprisingly adept. He is obviously very strong but is able to channel his strength into delicate and precise movements, if necessary. I suppose that engineers have to be that way. Somebody who saw him at work says that at one moment he might be wrestling with all of his strength to turn a huge wheel which controls the flow of steam from a boiler, and at the next he might have to delicately calibrate a valve to the nearest thousandth of an inch.

This combination of strength and delicacy reminds me of the ideal of a samurai warrior.

He is very interested in Japanese culture. Indeed, every day he spends at least one hour with Mr. Nakayama, who is teaching him Japanese calligraphy. He writes beautifully.

One day, a few weeks after he moved into our inn, Moto-san asked me if I would be so kind as to show him the best areas in our area to view the cherry blossoms, which had begun to bloom. We agreed to an outing the next day. When he came to my room the following morning, I was surprised to see that he was dressed in a formal and fancy kimono, like a very proper Japanese gentleman, and he behaved quite properly as one too. We drove down to the river bank in a carriage which he had hired especially for the day, and spent a wonderful day looking at the cherry blossoms. I had brought along a book of poems appropriate for the occasion, and recited them, while he seemed profoundly moved. It was a lot of fun, though I must admit that, walking next to this huge and gentle man, I felt like a little girl walking with her father or big brother. It was a most wonderful experience.

CHAPTER 2. LOVE AND DISASTER

I am clearly falling in love with Moto-san. I say this to myself, and do my best not to reveal it to him. Being built the way I am, I know that I could never have a real relationship with a man, but being the girl that I am, I can still dream. Sometimes I daydream about what it would be like if I were a girl physically as well as emotionally. One of the servant girls had seen Moto-san naked after coming out of the hot tub, and said that he is HUGE. I can only imagine. And yet I think of him as gentle, and not as a brute. I constantly fantasize being held in his huge arms and making love to him.

No matter how well Moto-san learns to speak Japanese, to write Japanese, to act and behave like a Japanese gentleman, or even to think in the Japanese manner, he can never be fully Japanese — his body will forever keep him apart. Perhaps he is like me in that regard, for I know that no matter how well I act as a woman, or am even taken for a woman by others, I know that I can never fully be a woman — my body too, keeps me apart.

Moto-san apparently likes my company as much as I like his. Whenever he is free, he suggests that we go on a trip to the beach or to the woods or some other place. He is always very correct and has never forced himself on me, though one time he did take my hand and I did not pull it away, so now he does it frequently. His body exuded warmth and kindness. I wonder what he thinks of mine.

He tells me a lot about his childhood. His father went to California to look for gold, but ended up starting a small machine-shop to make mechanical devices for the miners. The shop prospered and the family became quite well-off. As Moto-san says, in California it is much easier and more profitable to extract gold from the pockets of the miners than it is from the streams. Later his father’s workshop began building and repairing steam engines and then, as it grew, entire locomotives. Moto-san learned his mechanical skills working in his father’s workshop. Later, he went to a technical school and became trained as a mechanical engineer.

San Francisco, as he describes it, is much like Japan. There are hills and woods and beaches nearby. Also, as in Japan, the ground sometimes quakes and rumbles, and many lives are lost. He says that many people from Japan have come to live in San Francisco and that he had even learned the rudiments of the Japanese language when he was a child, from some of his playmates. He had been fascinated by the stories of Japan and, when a representative of the Japan railroads came to San Francisco looking for people to help train locomotive engineers, he jumped at the chance.

As I said, I often lie on my futon dreaming of what it would be like to have Moto-san with me, to be in his arms, and to be loved by him as a woman. Sometimes I can feel him entering me and impregnating me with his seed. How can I feel what I have never experienced and am not equipped physically to ever experience? Well how can a man without legs experience the sensation of running, or a blind man experience the colors of the cherry blossom? Sometimes our soul can feel what the body cannot. Perhaps this is what the monks mean, when they pose their riddle about the sound of one hand clapping?

I was in the midst of one such reverie when, all of a sudden, I felt the room shaking about me. For a split second I thought that my dreams had taken hold of reality, until I realized that it was the earth, and the room, which were moving. I hurriedly tried to get to my feet to run out of doors, when suddenly the ceiling caved in and I lost consciousness. When I came to, after several minutes, I found that I could not move. The main roof beam had fallen directly across my chest and I was pinned under it. All around me, I could hear people shouting and running about, while I was trapped. I could also smell fire, somewhere beyond my plane of vision. I could not move or even cry out for help.

And suddenly he was there — Moto-san came through the ruins, pushing the remains of walls aside and calling my name. When he saw me lying there, he bent his huge body over the beam and, with the strength of an elephant and the determination of a lion, pushed it aside and pulled me out from under the rubble. I was naked and so he grabbed a length of fabric which was lying in the room (and from which I intended to sew some clothes for myself), wrapped me in it, and carried me to safety.

CHAPTER 3. REVELATIONS

Moto-san had carried me to a grassy knoll not far from the inn, safe and away from the multitudes of people who had run into the streets when the quake hit, and from the fire which was destroying the restaurant area of my inn. He set me down gently and then sat cross-legged next to me, stroking my hair tenderly. At first I was in shock but then, when the sequence of events slowly replayed itself in my mind, I burst out crying. Moto-san cradled my head with his arm and asked if I was in pain. I replied that, more than I was in pain, I was covered with shame. He had seen me naked and therefore had seen the secret of my body. How could I possibly go on living after that? His rescue was in vain, for it would be my duty now to take my own life.

Moto-san held me tightly. “Hatsue, all I saw then, and all I see now, is a beautiful person who is a woman-by-choice. All I see now and all I will ever see is someone who has managed to be what she needs to be. A person who has managed to do that has everything to live for.” He then told me that in San Francisco he had met several women-by-choice. While some narrow-minded or no-minded people give them trouble, others accept them for what they want to be and even applaud them for having the courage to master the physical difficulties and live the way their souls told them they must live.

He then looked directly into my eyes. “Hatsue, I have been trying to find the words to say something to you for a long time, and now I think it is best if I say it directly. I love you, Hatsue, and would like very much to marry you. Could you possibly consider marrying a barbaric gaijin?”

“Even after what you have seen?” I asked.

“Yes, even after what I have seen, for it shows that you have a truly feminine soul and heart. I have known all too many women who have a feminine body but a soul and heart of a stone, of a bird, or of a fish.”

“But the authorities here will not let me marry a man,” I said, “and I doubt if they will do so in your country either.”

“That is true,” he replied, “but every problem has a solution, and engineers are trained to find them. Under international law, the captain of a ship on the high seas is empowered to perform marriages, which are then considered valid in all countries. I have already booked my return passage to San Francisco next month, on the Star of the West, the captain of which is my old friend Nathaniel Cooper from Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco. I am sure that he would marry us based solely on my word, and without asking for the usual documentation. That is, of course, if you accept my proposal.”

“Yes, yes, yes!” I replied. “Yes, I accept, for there is nothing more I could wish for in the whole world than to be your bride.”

Moto-san hugged me tightly and kissed me on the lips, for the first of many many times. Finally, he said “Of course, there is one more major difficulty, but we have a month to try and overcome it.” I asked him what it was, and he replied with a smile, “I will have to teach you how to correctly pronounce your new name, ‘Throckmorton’. A woman who cannot even pronounce her surname correctly would be most unseemly.”

EPILOGUE.

Ed Throckmorton and his new bride returned to San Francisco, where he found a job with the Central Pacific Railway, quickly rising to the rank of Head of Rolling Stock Maintenance for the entire system and later to Corporate Vice-President. He and his wife (who soon anglicized her name to “Sue”) adopted four children — two of European stock and two of Japanese stock — and purchased a home on Nob Hill. Sue Throckmorton became a patron of the San Francisco Opera and a well-know society hostess. One of her sons, Hideyuki Throckmorton, later followed in his father’s footsteps and became a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California in Berkeley.

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CHAPTER 1. ME

The day I had my sexual reassignment surgery it rained. It also rained the day before and the day after. That was no big deal. Portland, Oregon, is one of the rainiest cities in the United States and 1993 was considered a particularly wet year. The natives like to joke that if the sun ever shines in Oregon, you don’t tan — you rust. I believe them. Anyway, on a very wet day I took the final step into my transition. I was now as close to being all-woman as I could get, at least until somebody perfects womb transplants.

The operation took place on a Thursday, which at least provided a happy end to a week which started out as dismal as the weather. I was informed by email that the departmental tenure committee had turned down my application for tenure. The reason given was the number of my publications (admittedly pretty small) and the significance (admittedly pretty minor) of those which had appeared, as well as the (admittedly lukewarm) evaluations which I had received from my students. No tenure -- no contract extension! My employment with the university would terminate at the end of next month. A formal letter would be in the mail within a few days.

I had rather expected this, and so was not overly shocked. At least I was still employed by them when I underwent surgery, so the medical insurance plan could not back out of paying my bills. Bye-bye academia. I could, of course, try to get a job teaching at some community college or other lesser institution of purportedly-higher learning, but I first I would have to change all of my diplomas and other documents to match my new female identity. Was the hassle worth it? I doubted it.

So I stayed in Portland and looked for another job. That was 13 years ago, and I am still here. I am married now, and the mother of two beautiful girls. (No, I didn’t have a womb implant; I solved the ts-motherhood problem by marrying a wonderful man whom I had known almost from the beginning of my stay in Portland and who became a widower when his wife was killed in an unfortunate traffic accident, leaving him to take care of two babies under two years old whom he was totally unable to care for by himself. After ten years of marriage, we still grow more in love with each other every day.) I threw myself into the motherhood thing, serving on the board of the Peony Place Child Care Cooperative when the girls were enrolled there and later doing a stint as vice-president of the Meriwether Lewis Elementary School PTA when the girls moved on to there.

I am a mommy then, but I was never pregnant. I tried to live this part of a woman’s existence vicariously by finding a job as a saleslady in a branch of the Mommy-To-Be store for expectant mothers. This was about two years after my operation, and after I had tried several other jobs which either bored me to tears or which turned out to be unsuited to my personality or to my spending habits. I have been there ever since, and have risen to the post of branch manager. The executives of the chain are very happy with me, and wanted to have me take over the management of a larger store in Denver, but by then I was married and so I opted to stay in Portland, which I have grown to love — rainy weather included.

CHAPTER 2. KAREN

As one would expect, the vast majority of people who come into my store are young women in the early or middle stages of pregnancy. Sometimes they are accompanied by their husband or boyfriend. On occasion I get mothers, or even fathers, looking for a gift for a pregnant daughter. A few times I have even had children coming in wanting to buy something for their mother who told them that they were about to have yet another brother or sister. In these cases as a rule, the mother was usually an old customer of mine, so her size and preferences were on file on my computer.

One day, however, about half an hour before closing time, I had a most unusual customer. He was obviously a boy, though he was dressed in what seemed like girls’ jeans and a t-shirt sporting the name of a local rock band, as well as very gender-ambiguous sandals. He had long blond hair, well combed, but no makeup or nail polish. Silver rings adorned three of his fingers. He wasn’t carrying a purse, but had a small pastel-colored backpack, more likely to be worn by a girl than a boy. He started looking at some of the dresses, keeping his eyes down so as not to make eye-contact with me. Of course, I knew what was going on. I had been there myself, when I was his age. Somehow, I needed to make contact with him.

He had taken a red-and-white checked dress off of the rack and was looking at it with a vacant stare as I came over to him. “That is a very nice dress, it fits your coloration,” I said as I approached him. “Would you care to try it on?” He looked at me like he was about to drop the dress and run. “Don’t be scared, it is quite all right,” I reassured him. “It is unlikely that any more customers will be coming in at this hour.” I pointed out where the changing booths were. “Go ahead; I am sure you will be very pretty in it.” As he slowly went to one of the booths, I pointed out that on the bench in the booth there was a pillow he could attach around his belly with Velcro straps, to see how he would look once he started showing.

When he came out of the changing booth, his visage had altered completely. He was obviously very excited — though he tried to be outwardly calm — and his eyes showed the deep pleasure he was feeling. He looked at himself longingly in the mirror. “You look very pretty in that,” I said, “it becomes you.” I told him the price. When he looked a bit crestfallen, I quickly added, “Of course, for new customers we give a 25% discount on the first item, if you agree to be on our list to receive further sales information via SMS.” That made him feel better, and he said he would take the dress, and ducked back to get money out of his backpack. I started entering his information into the computer. When I asked him his name, he obviously hesitated. “It doesn’t have to be the name on your driver’s license, hon,” I reassured him. “I just need some name I can call you by.” “You can call me Karen,” he said in a low voice. “Fine, Karen,” I answered. “I am Helen. I am sure that you will find many interesting things in the store. But I have to close now, so it will have to wait until next time. Please come back soon.”

He started to go to change his clothes, but I stopped him. “You look so beautiful in your new dress,” I said, “why not keep it on?” He looked in the mirror and sighed. “Oh, you can keep the pillow, if that is what you are worried about,” I reassured him. “The chain sends me many more of those than I actually need.” He ducked back into the changing booth to get his things, and I folded his jeans and put them in a bag with our store’s logo in bright red on it.

As I let him out and locked up the store, I reiterated that I hoped I would see him again soon, and that if he ever needed my help in anything, I would be glad to be there.

I hoped that Karen would return, but I was not positive. It was very pleasing, therefore, to see her (from now on, I am going to use feminine pronouns in speaking about her; it is more appropriate) again four days later, a Saturday, again just before closing time. She was not wearing the dress she had bought, but again was in girl’s jeans and, this time, a more-obviously girly top. She had also applied lipstick and some minimal makeup, and was carrying a plastic bag which, as it turned out, contained the belly pillow I had given her last time. This time, she was interested in buying some maternity jeans, and felt much more at home in the store. She tried on several pair, before settling on a very sexy one that accentuated both her long legs and (with pillow in place), her obvious pregnancy. I also suggested a maternity t-shirt to go with them. It was pink, and on the lower front — the part that covered her bump — was a big black question mark.

I was in no hurry to go home that evening, since my husband had taken the girls to visit his parents in Eugene and would not be back until Sunday evening. I couldn’t accompany them, of course, because I had to be in the store. As I locked up, I therefore asked Karen if she would like to join me for a bite to eat at a nearby restaurant. She nodded in agreement and we went down the street, with her wearing her new jeans (and, of course, her belly pillow). When we came to the restaurant, a young woman who was just leaving held the door open for her, looking admiringly at her bump. She smiled, and I could feel the pure happiness she must have been experiencing. For a transsexual, having her apparent pregnancy envied by a genetic woman is an unbelievable high.

When we sat down in a booth, far away from the other patrons, I asked her to tell me about herself. She looked down and said nothing. “Look, Karen,” I said soothingly. “When I was your age, I was in your position … exactly in your position. I know how it feels. I was lucky then that I had an older woman whom I was able to open up to, and I would be honored if you would allow me to be such a woman for you.” Karen looked at me in disbelief. “But you are married and have children; I saw the picture next to the cash register.” (On the wall next to the register I have a framed photo of my husband and me, together with our two girls. I have found from experience that it lends a maternal atmosphere to the store and puts many of the clients at ease when they talk about their hopes and fears — all of which leads to more sales.) “You can be there too, when you are my age, if you just want,” I assured her. “Later, if you wish, I will tell you all about it.”

And so, for the next hour, we exchanged life stories. Karen (born Kenneth), was a faculty brat, the sole child of two members of the Reed College faculty: her father was a Professor of French Literature and her mother was a Professor of Sociology. She had been born and raised in Portland. Despite her parents’ high educational and intellectual level, they were not able to understand, nor cope with, their son’s transsexual feelings. As both of them were very busy playing the academic oneupsmanship game (to which I, in my previous life, was never able to devote enough attention) they tended to leave her to her own devices. Somehow they acquiesced to the fact that she wore girls’ jeans and sandals or boots (or maybe never noticed the difference) but gave her no encouragement or support. Other than the maternity dress she bought from me, she had no dresses or skirts.

Karen finished high school with a scholastic average good enough to get into most colleges, but preferred to take a year off to “find herself” before continuing her education. At the moment, she worked as a clerk in a used-book store (and was usually called “ma’am” or “young lady” by the customers, to her great delight). She had recently befriended Selene, a girl who worked in a beauty parlor two doors down from the bookstore, and who was teaching Karen the basics of proper feminine hair care and makeup techniques. However, since Karen still lived with her parents, she still did not dare to wear any noticeable makeup around the house, though she could get by with mascara if it were not too obvious. She had no contact with transgender support groups, and was afraid to get involved with the one on campus, since its faculty advisor was a colleague and close friend of her mother.

Pregnancy had always fascinated her, and was an integral part of her female self-image. When I asked her if she ever planned to go “the whole way” and have sexual reassignment surgery, her answer was that there was no point in it, since she still could never get pregnant. When I told her about how she could still experience the joys of motherhood, as I had, she was unconvinced. To her, carrying the baby was the crux, not caring for it after it came out into the world.

3. PREGNANT KAREN

I saw Karen frequently over the next two months. She now wore her belly pillow constantly, except when she went back home. In fact, I was able to get her a better one, which had a zipper in the back so that more stuffing could be inserted as the pregnancy progressed. She bought several pairs of jeans and tops to go with them, as well as more maternity dresses. She told me that her boss at the bookstore was very understanding about her pregnancy (he knew, of course, that she was not really pregnant but apparently felt that it would be best to go with the fantasy) and would not let her lift boxes of books or even climb the ladder to fetch rarely-needed books from the upper shelves. Her lessons with Selene were clearly bearing fruit, and she now made herself up quite well. Of course, the makeup and the belly all came off before she returned home at the end of the day, but she was seriously considering renting a room of her own and moving out of her parents’ home. In fact, her mother had hinted that the experience of living by herself would be good for her social development, and offered to pay half of the rent. She had not introduced Selene to her parents, but did hint that she had a girlfriend who worked in the city.

We met quite often, and shared experiences. I told her about my transition and about the joy of raising my daughters. She told me that she hoped to be able to “go all the way” also one day. One day, I asked her what her plans were in two months time. She didn’t understand where the question was coming from. “Look Karen,” I said, “pregnancies do not go on indefinitely. By the look of you, you are in your seventh month now. In two months or so, everybody is going to ask where the baby is.”

She hadn’t really thought of that, or even worked out some sort of a story. So we considered several alternatives and finally decided that, since she was unmarried, the best story would be that she decided to “give the baby up for adoption” as soon as it was born. When her time came, she would go out of town for a week, and come back “after”, with a suitable story about how she handed over the baby to a very nice couple, who would love it and take care of it.

As the last two months wore on, I could see that Karen was less and less satisfied with this course of action. Several times, she cried that she could not possibly give up her baby. Then she would calm down and realize that, of course, there was no real baby. It was very very difficult for her. However, when the time came, she told her parents she was going to visit a friend in San Francisco for a week or two. I took her to the bus station and kissed her goodbye.

She didn’t come back.

4. AFTERMATH

The above tale was written three years ago. For all of those years, I worried about Karen. It was almost as though she was another of my daughters. Then, one day, she suddenly appeared in the store. We hugged and kissed, and she told me her story. When she went to San Francisco, she met several other transsexuals and had decided to stay with them. She got a job as a librarian in a city library and the health care plan provided to municipal employees covered her SRS operation. She was now legally a woman. Moreover, she had met a very sweet and understanding man, with whom she had recently started living. They planned to get married shortly, and she had come to Portland to let me be the first to know. As I hugged her tightly, I felt her belly and looked down. Sure enough, she appeared to be four months pregnant.

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CHAPTER 1. HIGH FARM

The year is 1850, the place is a farm in Missouri, about 20 miles from St. Louis. There is a big bold sign on the road in front of the farmhouse, proudly stating the name in big red letters.

HigH Farm.

People kept on joshing David Gorlitsky, the farmer, about the second “h” in the name being in the wrong case, and he kept on saying that he would fix it one of these days, but he never did. The neighbors took this for pure laziness, but there was really another more compelling reason. The sign was a sign, and a well-known one at that, among those who were in the know. There were a total of eight farms, situated at strategic points in the prairies, all of which had names which began and ended in “H”, something that could be seen and recognized even by a person who could not read and write. These were more than farms — they were stations, stations on one of the main lines of the Underground Railroad for slaves escaping from their masters in the states along the Mississippi River and making their way, across the prairies and the Dakota country, into Canada.

The Gorlitsky farm was one of the major stations in what became known as the “H line”. Runaway slaves would arrive at the farm, usually hidden in a hay wagon or some other covered vehicle. There Hannah and Edna Gorlitsky, the stationmaster’s wife and daughter, would look after their wounds, give them food and rest, and a change of clothes. Indeed, the cellar of the Gorlitsky farm looked like a clothing store, with outfits of all description, including uniforms of the (nonexistent) Royal Jamaican Militia and even clerical robes.

David’s son worked in a print shop in St. Louis and, after hours, he would run off false documents of various sorts, which could be filled in to create a false identity that would, hopefully, stand up under cursory examination. Often, individual runaways would band together in a group and would be given papers attesting to the fact that they were settlers headed for Minnesota Territory under the aegis of the (nonexistent) Baron Fleury de Monsarrat, who was bankrolling a settlement of freedmen to grow special varieties of grain and rice on the northern prairies, for exclusive export to France. The genuineness of these documents was attested to by a document from a M. Henri de la Courtault (nonexistent) First Secretary of the French Embassy in Washington City, complete with fancy seals and ribbons. Other escaped slaves would be given genuine forged certificates of freedom, signed and notarized by nonexistent judges and honorable landowners in Cincinnati, New York, or Fort Wayne.

The guides who would take them to the next station, called “conductors”, would meet at the Gorlitsky farm to coordinate information about risks along the way, and plan alternative routes. The location of Congregationalist and Methodist churches, which served as emergency places of refuge, was also disseminated and updated.

CHAPTER 2. THE BRIGHT PASSENGER

The escaped slaves travelling along the lines of the Underground Railroad were called “passengers”. The vast majority of them were young adult males, strong from long hours of work in the fields, who were capable both of escaping from their masters in the South and of standing up to the rigors of the long trek. When women accompanied them, they were usually as tough and sometimes as muscular as the menfolk. It was therefore with surprise that Hannah, one day, beheld a new arrival, called Will. Unlike the others, he was short and wiry. He was also very “bright”, in the sense of being light-skinned: he obviously had a considerable amount of white blood in him. Unlike most of the other passengers, he was relatively educated and could read and write not only in English but also in Spanish. Not only was he literate, but he was clearly widely-read as well. The other escaped slaves in his group, all from the same plantation, seem to have taken him along with them more as a talisman than as an active participant in the escape plan.

Will arrived at HigH Farm in very poor physical shape. He had been a “house slave” and was clearly not used to walking long distances or going with very little food and water. The group which brought him (often literally carrying him on their backs) did not want to leave him behind but it was clear that he could go no farther, while they could not stay long in one place. Missouri was full of bounty hunters tracking down escaped slaves and it was known that this group was too big to go unnoticed for long. David Gorlitsky heard a lot of disturbing news in St. Louis, and told them that they had to move on as soon as possible, and must leave Will behind. Another conductor would take him to Canada when he was able to travel, and they could wait for him there, if they wished. Reluctantly, the group of escapees left around midnight, leaving Will in a bed, with Edna Gorlitsky applying herbal compresses to lower his fever.

Will was still bedridden, though recovering, when the bad news about his group arrived: they had been ambushed by slave catchers near the Cedar River in Iowa. Three had been captured and two more had been seriously injured, among these the group’s conductor. The rest of the group scattered and were now trying to make their way northward individually and without help. Their chances of crossing the trackless and often waterless badlands and prairies, and of getting through Indian country safely, were unfortunately quite slim. Everyone grieved at the tragedy, but also realized that they were in immediate danger. From past experience, David Gorlitsky knew that the recaptured slaves were likely to be tortured in order to get them to reveal the location of the stations they had passed through. The HigH Farm station had to be “cleansed” and all signs that it was anything other than a peaceful farm had to be temporarily eliminated. It was imperative that Will be moved out as soon as possible. But he was still so very weak.

CHAPTER 3. A LADY AND HER MAID

The Gorlitsky family and some of their supporters from St. Louis met that night to work out some sort of stratagem. Several ideas were proposed, and discarded as being beyond Will’s endurance. Finally, Edna suggested something very daring. “Will is about my size,” she said, “let him wear one of my dresses and present himself as a woman.” Beginning with that notion, they worked out a complex story. Will would be disguised as Lady Wilma Hamilton, the wife of a British-born Jamaican planter (this would help “explain” his coffee-colored skin) travelling up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers on her way from New Orleans to Canada to visit her husband’s relatives in Ontario. Edna would accompany “Lady Hamilton” as her maid and companion until they reached Louisville, Kentucky, where another conductor would take over to lead “her” northward. They would be travelling on the St. Louis Bride, a river boat the captain of which was a sympathizer who frequently hid runaway slaves on his vessel. Since “Lady Hamilton” would be feeling unwell, she would stay in her cabin most of the time, while Edna would coach her in how to pass herself off as a female.

Edna feared that Will would not agree to the plan, but, surprisingly, he showed very little reluctance and allowed himself to be dressed in one of Edna’s best frocks, which fit him surprisingly well, as did her shoes. Edna did his hair as best she could, and covered it with a big bonnet. They then packed two trunks, one for “Lady Wilma” and a smaller one for her “maid”, and set off by buggy to St. Louis. There they were given documents prepared for them during the night, including letters of introduction from the American consul in Jamaica, the New Orleans business correspondent of “Lord Hamilton”, and from a purported friend and business associate of the aged senator Henry Clay of Kentucky. They also carried a (forged) letter of credit on Barings Bank of London, in the sum of 5,000 pounds, and a (real) letter of credit on Pontchartrain Bank of New Orleans in the sum of $500, to be used in case of emergency only. Captain Hopper of the St. Louis Bride had arranged for them to use an empty first-class cabin gratis, and they settled in there without arousing suspicion. They were ready.

The next morning, they were on their way. Edna brought breakfast to the cabin, since “her ladyship” was not feeling well and could not make her way to the dining room, and after the empty plates had been returned to the kitchen, she began teaching Wilma how to act like a lady. Only there wasn’t much to teach … Wilma seemed to know it all already. When Edna showed her surprise, Wilma told her to sit down, and began to explain.

“As you know, I was a house slave on the plantation of Judge Thomas DeWitt, as was my mother. I have no idea who my father was but the rumors persist that it was Judge DeWitt himself. Judge DeWitt had three daughters, all slightly older than me, and his wife had died as a result of her last childbirth. My mother looked after all of us together and, since Judge DeWitt was absent from the plantation for long stretches of time, she was the effective mistress of the house. I grew up feeling as “one of the family”, and not as a slave, and was treated as such by the girls and by the judge. That, by the way, is the real reason the others in the group of escapees brought me along with them and why they were so reluctant to leave me behind; I was a form of protection for them, as long as they had me with them, they believed -- probably correctly -- that the judge would give strict orders not to shoot at the group.

“We grew up very close, and the girls delighted in dressing me up in their clothes and calling me their ‘sister’. At first, I cannot say I enjoyed it, but I was a slave, after all, and had to go along with whatever they wanted. Even my mother could not protect me. After a while, however, I must admit that it was a lot of fun. The judge thought it was fun too, and when he was at home he would insist that his ‘four little girls’ be present. My mother’s protests were feeble at best, since she too was worried about what he could do to her if he but wished. And so I learned how to dress, and act, and comport myself like a belle of the Deep South. On the other hand, I was also educated along with my ‘sisters’ by tutors, who did not know my real identity.

“As we grew older, the girls tired of the game, and I spent more and more time as a male. Nonetheless, they would at times dress me up as a girl when men would come courting, and often giggle with glee as some pimply-faced young blade would try to curry favor with me, or even (on more than one occasion) try to kiss me when he thought we were alone. I cannot tell a lie — I enjoyed flirting with them too, and was quite capable of returning their kisses. After the boys left, the ‘girls’ would sit up all night in our shifts and compare our experiences.”

Edna was highly amused at the story, and hugged Wilma. “In that case,” she said, “things are going to be much easier than I had feared, and much more fun as well.” For the rest of the morning, she tested Wilma’s feminine behavior, making her act out various situations which they were likely to encounter. Wilma passed with flying colors, and even was able to modulate her voice to a very acceptable feminine register. Edna felt so much better that she suggested that Lady Hamilton was ready to make an appearance in the dining room with the other passengers.

Edna dressed Wilma with particular care, lacing her corset very tightly in order to force the appearance of cleavage (enhanced with tissue paper). Wilma smiled and told her how she and her “sisters” always believed that corsets were invented by the female house slaves in order to torture their mistresses. “Some day,” she said, “women are going to be liberated enough to do without corsets.” But she endured the ordeal bravely, as Edna squeezed her waist until her body fat produced a semblance of a bosom. It was all worth it, of course, when she was able to fit into the dress which Edna had selected for her. Since her hair was not long enough to be properly styled, she wore a bonnet which matched the dress. Edna of course, being just her maid, dressed very plainly and acted as obsequiously as she could as Her Ladyship entered the dining room. But she was pleased to see that many of the men had taken notice of their entrance. This was definitely going to be interesting.

Edna looked around the dining room carefully and then whispered to Wilma. “Do you see that group of four men sitting in the corner? The one with the white hat and string tie is Randolph Clarke, a notorious bounty hunter and slave catcher. I know him well and, unfortunately, he also knows me and believes that HigH Farm is part of the Railroad, though he has never caught anyone there. I suspect his companions are of the same ilk. It may be just a coincidence that they are on the boat with us, but we cannot be sure. Try to avoid them as much as you can.” Edna remained nervous the rest of the meal but the men, though they had obviously noticed “Lady Hamilton’s” entrance, did not make a move to approach them or show any sign of interest. After an uneventful and rather tasty meal, the ladies retired to their cabin.

That evening, they decided that it be best that Wilma remain in the cabin, indisposed, and that Edna bring dinner to her. As she was leaving the kitchen with a basket of food, she was unexpectedly stopped by Randolph Clarke, who had obviously been lurking in the corridor which led to her cabin. “I do declare, Miss Gorlitsky, it is a pleasure seeing you on board. Are you and your dusky friend taking a holiday?” “My ‘dusky friend’, as you call her,” replied Edna icily, “is Lady Wilma Hamilton from Jamaica. You can confirm that with the captain, if you don’t believe me. Since her travelling companion decided to stay in St. Louis, she hired me to accompany her on her trip as far as Louisville, where I have some important business to attend to. I imagine that you and your friends will not be travelling that far.” “Actually,” replied Randolph, “we will be, for we too have important business in Kentucky. I would not be surprised if our business interest and yours may even coincide.” “I doubt that”, replied Edna, “for my business is very personal. I am going to meet my fiancé and his family.” “Congratulations,” replied Randolph, “the young men in St. Louis must be very upset that such a beautiful lady has spurned them all in favor of someone from so far away.” “As you well know,” replied Edna, “I am of the Jewish faith and there are, unfortunately, very few young men of our persuasion living in St. Louis. That is why my parents arranged a match for me with someone from Louisville. He is a brilliant lawyer, and is looking forward to moving to Missouri and starting a practice.” “I wish him the best of luck,” replied Randolph. “In the mean while, I hope that you and Lady Hamilton will do us the honor of joining us for dinner.” “I am afraid that Lady Hamilton is not feeling too well, and will be dining in her cabin this evening,” replied Edna. “And now, if you will excuse me, this food is getting cold.”

When Edna closed and locked the door to the cabin, she realized how much she was sweating. It was clear that Randolph Clarke suspected Wilma, and that he and his friends would have the two ladies under constant surveillance for the rest of the trip.

The St. Louis Bride stopped frequently to pick up and leave off passengers at small jetties along the river. Several times, Edna noticed that Randolph Clarke stood near the gangplank as though he was awaiting somebody to join him. The next morning, when she went to pick up breakfast for her mistress, she noted that the group around him now numbered six people. By that afternoon, when she went to get more food, it had numbered seven. Something was clearly afoot. Edna told Wilma about her conversation with Randolph, and about the unspecified “business” which was clearly bringing a large group of bounty hunters to Louisville.

Louisville, Kentucky, was a major hub in the Underground Railroad, with three major lines leading from it across the Ohio river to Indiana and from there to Michigan, from where the runaway slaves were transported to Canada. (The foremost of those lines went from Louisville to Madison, Indiana, to Fountain City to Fort Wayne to Dekalb, and from there into Michigan.) Most of the 20,000 or so escaped slaves who make it successfully into Canada travelled along those lines and some of them, such as Thornton Blackburn, later played major roles in the development of Toronto as an important city. Though a “southern” city in character in which slavery was legal, Louisville had many opponents of slavery (ten years after the events of this story, Kentucky would refuse to secede from the union and Louisville became an important military center for the Union armies) who helped finance and run the Railroad. If bounty hunters were converging on Louisville — and both Edna and Wilma doubted that the group on their boat was the only one doing so — it might represent a major threat to the entire escape enterprise.

CHAPTER 4. THE PLAN

What to do? Edna thought that when they reached Paducah, she could arrange to have a fast messenger sent to Louisville to warn the people at the station there, but Wilma pointed out that unless they had more concrete information, there was very little to warn about. Somehow they had to get more information out of Randolph Clarke. “He won’t talk to me,” said Edna. “He doesn’t trust me.”

“Well,” replied Wilma, “maybe he will talk to me.” Edna objected that it would be too dangerous for Wilma to talk to Randolph. He is an intelligent man, and if he guessed Wilma’s real identity, then she was very unlikely to survive — after all, accidents involving passengers falling overboard into the paddlewheel happened frequently. “I am just going to have to risk it,” replied Wilma. “The lives of many people may be at stake here.”

The next day, Wilma joined Edna in the dining room and smiled discretely at Randolph Clarke, when he happened to look in their direction. A few moments later, Edna went over to him and invited him, in Her Ladyship’s name, to join their table. He excused himself to his companions, and followed her back to her table, where he greeted Wilma, who extended her hand in a very ladylike manner. Mr. Clarke looked at it carefully and then put it to his lips and gently kissed it, as would be expected of a gentleman. (Wilma and Edna, of course, had rehearsed this gesture many times — and Edna had spent hours buffing Wilma’s nails to a fine polish and applying various creams to her hands, to make them soft and ladylike.) Without speaking, she motioned for him to sit. “I hope that your Ladyship is enjoying the trip,” he opened. “Very much so,” replied Wilma, “though I have been somewhat unwell. I am not used to your food, I am afraid.”

“Yes,” replied Randolph Clarke, “I know that things are different in Jamaica. I have a good friend who lives there, about five miles south of Luana.” “Your friend must have gills then,” smiled Wilma, “for that would put him right in the middle of Black River Bay.” (Again, Edna smiled to herself; her father had insisted that they take along a map of Jamaica for Will to study, and that precaution -- which she had thought unnecessary -- had just paid for itself.) “I am sorry,” Randolph Clarke corrected himself, “I had meant to say ‘east’”. “Oh yes, replied Wilma, he must be near Lacovia then. Our estate is on the other side of the Island, near Hope Bay, so I am afraid I do not know the people from there.” It was a game of “geography poker”. Wilma was bluffing her way through, but obviously so was Randolph Clarke, and he was the one to blink first, by folding and changing the topic.

“Will your Ladyship be staying long in Lousiville? If so, I would be honored to act as a guide to some of the more cosmopolitan sights of the city.” “I am afraid not,” replied Wilma, “I am anxious to continue my journey to Toronto as soon as things can be arranged. Besides, I understand that you and your friends have business in Louisville, and I would not like to detain you.”

“Yes,” replied Randolph Clarke, “but there is always time to entertain a beautiful lady. After several days on a river boat, it is good to see the sights of the city.”

“That is true,” added Wilma, “and I do thank you for your offer. Can your business wait for a day or so, though?”

“Actually,” replied Randolph Clarke, “it will be over with in short order. I expect that all will be done within 12 hours of our arrival in the city. I have many friends already there, who are just waiting for me to arrive before we set our plans in motion.”

“It sounds very mysterious,” smiled Wilma, as she exchanged glances with Edna. Here was the clue they were waiting for. “Not at all,” laughed Randolph Clarke, “we are just a group of law-abiding citizens doing our duty to insure that the law is indeed honored and obeyed. There are just a few technical details that need to be taken care of.” “You are a lawyer, then?” asked Wilma. “No, he said,” let us say that I am with the arm of the law, and not its head.”

The banter continued in this manner for another hour, with Wilma extracting several more bits of information, including where he and his friends will be staying and the name of some of the local people he was scheduled to meet. Finally, she pleaded that her head was aching again, and asked Edna to take her back to her cabin.

They had enough information. Edna had a talk with Capitan Hopper and they decided that the ship would have “boiler trouble” in Paducah, which would entail a delay of several hours. As soon as they arrived there, Edna slipped ashore and contacted Rev. Martin Reed of the First African Baptist Church of Paducah, who dispatched a rider to Louisville to warn of an impending raid. By the time Randolph Clarke and his men disembarked, all of the Railroad’s stations in the Louisville area had been thoroughly “cleansed” and all of the runaway slaves were safely in Indiana or Ohio. The raid, so carefully and expensively planned, was a total failure.

Will was taken out of town by one of the conductors. Since there was no time to arrange for a new identity, it was decided that he would continue being “Lady Hamilton” until she reached Canada. That took longer than expected, and it was not until four months later that she finally stepped on Canadian soil and was free. By that time, she had become so used to her female role, that she decided to remain “Wilma Hamilton” (without the title, of course) and settled in Deptford, Ontario, where she opened a boarding house and inn, which became quite successful, and was the first link in what was to eventually become the Hamilton House chain of luxury hotels -- Canada's second largest hotel chain.

When the Civil War broke out, Randolph Clarke joined the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Captain. He died at the battle of Shiloh.

Edna met her fiancé, Asher Stern, and fell in love with him. They were married that fall, and the couple returned to Missouri, where he set up a law office in St. Louis. Many years later, after the Civil War had torn the region and the nation to shreds, he extended his law practice to other areas of the South. One day, he and his wife (who sometimes travelled with him) were approached outside the courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi by an old man. He greeted Asher and complimented him on his handling of the complex case then in progress, but then turned to Edna. “My name is Judge Thomas DeWitt of the Mississippi State Supreme Court, now retired,” he said. “I used to own a large plantation north of here, but it was burned and destroyed by Union troops. My three daughters, who lived there, were all killed. My only other child was a bastard son by one of my slaves, named Will. He escaped from the plantation in the 1850’s, and I have spent the years since the war trying to track down his movements, so I could apologize to him and arrange to have him declared my legal heir. I know that he traveled through your parents’ farm, Mrs. Stern, but after that his tracks disappear. Please, if you know anything about his whereabouts, do a favor to an old man and tell me.

Edna looked at the old man’s eyes, brimming with tears, and told him.

---

 
 

Nadia had nothing to live for, and that made her a perfect revolutionary leader. She had nothing to live for because, in fact, she wasn’t even a she (at least not in the legal sense) - though nobody in the anarchist revolutionary cell to which she belonged knew that startling fact. Nadia had been born in a boy’s body, though she was - obviously in her own eyes - a girl. The fact that nobody in her immediate family recognized this fact and was willing to accept it only proved how corrupt and distorted society was and how dire was the need to tear it down and rebuild it from the ground up. Nadia’s father, a fairly wealthy lawyer and a good and reasonable person (at least in the eyes of everyone except Nadia) tried at first to humor her contentions that she was a girl and then, as she grew older, insisted on sending her to various doctors and even professors at the university, not to mention various priests and “holy men” of the Orthodox Church. Not that that was of any use - none of them could see and understand what, to Nadia, was perfectly plain. They were stupid or mad. They wouldn’t even call her “Nadia”, as she repeatedly insisted, but only by the silly boy’s name of Genady - she refused to even think about it - which they had mistakenly attached to her at birth and considered inviolate.

Finally, at the age of 16, Nadia could take it no longer. She stole some money from her father’s study and some clothes from the room of one of the servant girls who was the same size as she was, and ran away from home. She would live as Nadia for good, whether they liked it or not.

Nadia was an intelligent and voracious reader, especially of political tracts. She had been trying, for some time, to find somebody else who, in his writings, saw the same corruptness and emptiness of society that she had sensed since she was a child. Finally, she found her Shining Prince in the person of a real prince: Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin. Prince Kropotkin was a descendent of Tsars on his father’s side and of a famous general on his mother’s side. He too had served as an officer in the Tsar’s army. However, he was also an intellectual who became exposed to the liberal thought which had penetrated sectors of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. The more he considered possible reforms of society the more he realized that they could not be anything but halfhearted and ineffectual. The underlying social structures had to be uprooted and destroyed, not reformed. Thus he became the father of what was later called anarchist communism, a theory which advocated the abolition of the state and of private property, and the communal ownership of the means of production.

Prince Kropotkin’s writings were not openly available, of course, but Nadia managed to obtain copies of them - initially through a friend who knew someone who knew a member of an anarchist cell composed mostly of students the university, and later directly through a member of that cell. Now that she had run away from her parent’s house, her first reaction was to seek out her anarchist contact -- who went by the code name of Ivan Ivanovich -- and ask him to hide her. Ivan had never met Nadia in person until now, and so was totally surprised at the young girl who came up to him at the prearranged meeting place near the university’s aula and told him a story - totally false, of course, but then he expected that - about how she had to run away from her family. He was surprised, moreover, by her intellectual maturity and mastery of Kropotkin’s writings, as well as her determination to turn anarchist theory into action. Indeed, after a long night of political debate he still felt that he had not plumbed the depths of her intellect. She was indeed a find.

Finally, around 4am, Nadia curled up to sleep on the floor of Ivan’s rented room in a broken-down and stinking rooming house not far from the university. Ivan had offered to share his bed, but Nadia told him that he must first prove himself to her by taking her to a meeting of his anarchist cell. Ivan hesitated for a moment, but only for that. It was very unlikely that the Okhrana (AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Okhrana -- Department for Guarding the Public Security and Order - was the arm of the tsarist Ministry of the Interior formed to combat and suppress political terrorism and left-wing political activity) would employ a 16-year-old girl as an agent; it was even more unlikely that they would employ anyone as intelligent as Nadia certainly was.

And so, two days later, Ivan Ivanovich brought Nadia to a meeting of the anarchist cell. There were only four members present, all male students at the university: Ivan Ivanovich, Alexei Alexeievich, Nicholai Nicholaievich, and Dimitri Dimitrovich. (Dimitri Dimitrovich was also an Okhrana informant, but of course nobody was aware of that.) True to their anarchist tradition, they had no leader or, rather, each member fancied himself as the leader. True to their Russian male tradition, none of them was willing at first to believe that Nadia had the intellectual capacity to understand them, let alone join them. It was only after long bouts of mental arm-wrestling that they were convinced that she was “the real thing” and offered to allow her to attend their meetings. The first thing she must do, they explained, is to pick a revolutionary code name. Nadia was ready for it. “A true anarchist must remove all ego and all thought of self; a true anarchist must count for nothing in light of the goals of the revolution. Therefore I will be Nikto. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: “nikto” means “nobody” in Russian.) If you are arrested by the Okhrana and asked who else is in your cell, you can truly answer that nobody is.”

And so Nadia, who was born and still officially Genady, became Nikto the revolutionary anarchist. Ivan still had dreams of getting her into his bed, but she constantly refused. The revolution should not be compromised by emotions. She slept on the floor of his room for several more days until she found a room of her own. She also managed to find a part-time job as a waitress, which gave her a meager but steady income. But most of all she lived for the revolution. Little by little, Nadia came to dominate the cell. Until her arrival, it was more of a study group, with various members offering interpretations of the writings of Kropotkin and his disciples or trying (very tentatively) to suggest ideas of his own. Nadia swept all of that aside. “One cannot philosophize a revolution,” she would shout at them, “one makes a revolution with bombs and blood.” She would taunt the others mercilessly - “Am I the only one with balls in this room? Are there no men here?”

Her life away from the cell was not easy. Male puberty was setting in, and had to be combated. Nadia removed her facial and body hair as best she could, using various creams and potions - often dangerous - which she obtained from old women in the marketplace. She learned to modulate her voice, which was not very deep in any case, into an acceptable female register. She became an adept shoplifter and was able by this means to supplement her wardrobe and, though she felt no obligation to look particularly stylish, did wear corsets which forced her body fat into a semblance of a bust. She despised society all the more for forcing her to partake of such charades. “Come the revolution,” she would say to herself, “people like me would not need to pretend any more. We will be able to be what we feel we are and have others treat us with respect.”

She continued to bully the cell into action. They were terrified, of course, but she constantly hammered home her theme - the structures of society are rotten and must be uprooted before the seeds of a new society can be planted. “We must destroy the weeds that choke the vital seedlings of life,” she would sway. “We must uproot them by force.”

Finally, she put forth to the group a concrete plan. A “holy man” of the Russian Orthodox Church, one Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, who was said to be very close to the Tsarina, was scheduled to visit their city in a few weeks. He would be staying at the local monastery and would give a sermon, open to the general public, in its church. Nadia decided that he must be assassinated. “Rasputin is a fraud and a madman,” she declared. “He represents the worst in the Russian Orthodox Church and in the regime of the Tsar. Eliminating him will be a body blow to the social order. We must do it.”

Dimitry Dimitrovich, of course, reported this to his controller the Okhrana, who passed it on to his superiors, who in turn passed it up to the very top of the administrative ladder. But the aristocrats who ran the Ministry of the Interior hated Rasputin and his growing influence over the Tsar at their expense, even more than Nadia did. The report was quietly filed away, and Dimitry was removed from contact with the cell and transferred to another city far away.

How does one go about killing Rasputin? Several ideas were suggested - poison, a deadly serpent or scorpion introduced into his cell, etc. but Nadia derided them all. “The point in killing Rasputin is not just to have him dead; the point is to exhibit for all to see that he was executed, by anarchists. He must be killed in a very public manner and in the most brutal manner possible. We will make a bomb and I will personally toss it at his face while he is preaching his sermon. While I am doing this, you will hang a banner outside the monastery gate saying that the fraud Rasputin was assassinated by anarchists. There will be total confusion and we will be able to escape.”

The other members of the cell wondered a bit at the tremendous hatred which Nadia exhibited towards Rasputin. They could not have guessed the truth, of course. Several years before, when Nakia’s father was still trying to “cure” his son Genady of his “delusions”, he had contacted a holy man named Makarii and asked him to treat the child. Against her will, Nadia was sent to Makarii’s hut, not far from the famous Verkhoturye monstary. The holy man had a short talk with Nadia, and then turned her over to one of his followers, Grigori (who was in fact the same Grigori Rasputin). Surprisingly, this Grigori did not rail against Nadia’s claim that she was really a girl. On the contrary, he brought Nadia some girl’s clothes (Grigori was married and had three children) and told her to wear them when she was with him. He also always referred to her in the feminine (AUTHOR’S NOTE: Russian has separate masculine and feminine forms of address) and behaved most courteously to her - in fact, perhaps a bit TOO courteously. Then, one day, he put his arm around her and kissed her.

Nadia knew immediately what was going to happen. Before Grigori could do anything more, she jumped back, picked up the stool she had been sitting on, and hurled it at him. She then ran out the door and into the study of the holy man Makarii, where she demanded to be sent back to her father immediately. She raised such a commotion that he finally agreed, and sent her back home, along with a sealed letter saying that she was incorrigible and that he could do nothing more.

Nadia had thought a lot about Rasputin. On one hand, she hated him for what he obviously intended to do to her. On the other hand, can a teenage girl really hate the man who was the first to kiss her? He was a lecher and impure - or maybe he was just overwhelmed by her emerging beauty. He was a monster - but he was so handsome and manly. He stood for all that is wrong in Russian society - but maybe he loved her.

And now Nadia was going to kill him. Alexei Alexeievich, who studied chemistry, prepared the bomb. It was crude - as one would expect - but was sure to be effective. He had in fact prepared four of them. One day, he and Nadia went out into the forest and tried two of them. They exploded with tremendous bangs. The other two bombs were well concealed in the church where Rasputin was to give his talk. Nadia would take one out of its hiding place and throw it. If, for some unforeseen reason, it did not explode, she would then get and throw the backup. The cell members prepared banners to be hung outside while the bomb went off, and printed broadsheets containing a special manifesto which they had written for the occasion, to be scattered around the area of the church.

On the day of the talk, Nadia - dressed as a respectful and pious young lady, arrived early in the church and found a seat in the front row. She carefully removed one of the bombs from its hiding place and hid it under her skirt. She plotted her motions - in one swoop she would take up the bomb, light the fuse from a candle less than a yard away from her right hand, and then throw it directly at Rasputin. In her mind, she rehashed all her hatred for society in general and Rasputin in particular. She recalled his look as he talked to her, leaning ever closer. He had looked deeply into her eyes, his hand had, at first, touched her leg and then her arm … and he had bent forward. And then he … . Nadia’s reverie was interrupted by a stir in the crowd. Rasputin, accompanied by several senior monks, had entered the church. He seemed taller than she had remembered him, and his beard was longer. But he was still strikingly handsome, and his eyes were almost hypnotic in their power. She could not remove her gaze from his sensual lips and he strode to the podium and began to address the audience. An expectant hush had descended on the crowd, as they drank in his words.

But Nadia knew that she must act and act now; her very identity, her very existence as a woman depended on this man. She jumped forward, totally surprising him, flung out her arms, and kissed him with fervor.

~~*~~

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story is fiction but, as usual, I have included various real people in walk-on roles. The most notable of these are Prince Peter Kropotkin, whose literate and persuasive anarchist writings influenced many a disaffected Russian youth, such as Nadia, and played a crucial role in bringing about the intellectual ferment that led to the Russian revolution. His autobiography, “Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” is still worth reading. The “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin, through his hypnotic presence, gained immense influence over the Tsar and his family at the beginning of the 20th century, and his bad advice helped lead to the eventual downfall of the monarchy. Ironically, had Nadia’s assassination attempt been successful, the Tsar would have been in a better position to survive.

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CHAPTER 1: A STAR IS BORN

In the communist Soviet Union of the 1970’s, as in the imperialist Britain of the 1870’s, family lineage was an important factor in a person’s success. Vladimir Ivanovich Nekrasov therefore considered himself extremely lucky, for few Soviet citizens had a better lineage than he did. His grandfather, Colonel-General Alexander Michaelovich Nekrasov, died valiantly in the heroic defense of Stalingrad during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazi invaders. The eulogy at his state funeral was delivered in person by Comrade Stalin, and he was declared a posthumous Martyr of the Soviet Union. Vladimir’s father, Academician Ivan Alexandrovich Nekrasov, was awarded the Order of Lenin for his brilliant publications in theoretical physics and, more importantly, for his equally brilliant secret work on the next generation of Soviet nuclear weapons. Academician Nekrasov’s untimely death in a small-plane crash not far from Novosibirsk was officially listed as an accident due to bad weather, but was generally believed, among those in the know, to have been a “wet job” by the CIA. Vladimir’s mother, Yelena Petrovna Nekrasova, was a rising power in the Party and the Government who at one point held the position of Deputy Minister of Culture and the Arts.

Vladimir, himself, had different interests. As a young boy, he was rather hyperactive and showed a great affinity for music, so his parents decided to send him, at the age of 7, to ballet school. (In the Soviet Union, ballet was a very respectable occupation for boys as well as girls, and premier male ballet dancers were held in the same respect as star football players.) In this field, he showed unusual talent and, by the time he had finished his secondary schooling, he had appeared in several all-Union dance troupes and was well on his way to a career as a professional dancer. Indeed, upon graduation he was offered a position with Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, second only to Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet (with its rabid fans maintaining, of course, that it is better than the Bolshoi). Of course, the fact that Vladimir’s mother was, among other things, in charge of allocating funds to various ballet companies may have had something to do with their decision to select him, but then again that may just be a malicious rumor spread by other companies.

The Kirov Ballet operated four distinct dance companies. Company A was the premier company, composed of the best dancers. They appeared in major cities in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact bloc, and were sometimes allowed to travel abroad for (very lucrative) appearances at dance festivals around the world. Company B traveled to major provincial cities such as Minsk or Novosibirsk (usually augmented by one or two of the stars from Company A) and served as a source of backups for Company A. Company C traveled to more minor provincial cities, from Gomel to Irkutsk. All newcomers were first assigned to Company C, where their skills were tested. Company D was composed of fading stars who could no longer handle a full program of dancing. They were usually sent, individually or in pairs, to appear at ballet schools around the country, giving pep talks and mainly acting as talent scouts, trying to spot the dancers of the future.

Vladimir, like all newcomers, began with Company C, and there he seemed to be stuck. While everybody acknowledged that he was a talented dancer, with a very good grasp of technique and theory, as well as deep insight and ability to improvise, it was also clear that he was not physically strong enough to perform the daring leaps demanded of Soviet male ballet stars, nor could he even hold a ballerina over his head for more than a few seconds. Still, everybody liked him and there was no question of releasing him from the Kirov (he was Deputy Minister Nekrasova’s son, after all!). To be fair, he soon realized that he would never be a Company A star, and accepted his role. He spent a lot of time with the choreographers, helping them work out ideas and helping coach other dancers — both male and female — to get ready for their parts. Soon, he had found his niche and even after his mother’s untimely death from cancer, continued without any problems. He figured that he had about four or five dancing years left, and then he would try to go into choreography.

The change in Vladimir’s life came one February when the company arrived in Vladivostok for two performances. They were going to try out a new ballet, which Vladimir had helped choreograph and which he was very excited about. In order to be at their physical best and recover from the considerable difference between Leningrad time and Vladivostok time, the company arrived in Vladivostok a week ahead of time and arranged to use the facilities of a local ballet school for practice. However, these facilities were not the best and on the first day there, during one of the run-throughs, Olga Pashkova, the lead dancer, slipped and twisted her ankle. Since the work was new and she had no understudy, it seemed clear that the performance would have to be cancelled.

Tatyana Feliksovna Kostochko, administrative director of Company C and a prima ballerina with the Kirov in her youth, called an emergency meeting of the company to decide what to do. Cancelling a performance, especially one which had been sold out for months, was a very serious thing to do, and would have definite repercussions when they returned. The Kirov had a long “the show must go on” tradition, which she felt should be upheld at all costs. She outlined the situation, and then turned to Vladimir. “You are the only person here who knows that role, Vladimir. You coached Olga personally. You are also of Olga’s height and build. I want to ask you to do a big favor to the company and dance the role in her place.” Vladimir was stunned. He immediately replied that he could hardly be mistaken for a ballerina, but Tatyana disagreed — “You will be in heavy makeup anyway, and the stage is big. Nobody in the audience will see you that closely. Moreover, we are very far away from Leningrad. Nobody is going to hear about this outside this company. “ (And here she gave the rest of the company one of her patented “anybody who leaks a word about this will spend the next 20 years working in the uranium mines without a helmet” look.) “But”, Vladimir objected, “they will surely know that I am not Olga. You can’t very well put in the program that the Vladimir Nekrasov will be dancing in place of Olga Pashkova. We will be laughed at.” “Of course, you are right,” said Tatyana, “and therefore we are going to create a fictitious dancer, let’s call her Vera Ivanova Tertiak, and you are going to be her. Until we leave Vladivostok, you are going to have to turn yourself into this person, and be her on stage and off. Please, Vladimir, do it. It will save the company’s reputation.”

Vladimir hesitated and did not know what to answer, but Olga herself came up to him on her crutches, and kissed him on the forehead. “Please, Vlad, we really need you.” Finally, he lowered his eyes and meekly said “OK”. Everybody cheered and Olga volunteered to help make “Vera” ready by lending Vladimir some of her clothes and going shopping with him for the rest (paid for, of course, from one of Tatyana’s secret slush funds).

The next days were very hectic. For several hours, Vera (we shall now call her that, as everyone else did, even the other male dancers) practiced her role, getting used to wearing Olga’s costume. Then, after practice, she learned the role of a woman. Fortunately, as a dancer she was used to wearing a gaff. It was easy for her to adopt a woman’s deportment and body language, and she had surprisingly little trouble getting used to low heels (dancers never wear high-heel shoes since their feet tend to get muscular and gnarled by constant practice so that high-heeled shoes do not fit them well) and dresses. It was harder for her to get used to talking in a feminine gender (the Russian language has distinct masculine and feminine noun and verb forms), to learn to give a female inflection to her voice, and to become proficient in the thousand and one other tricks of passing one’s self off as a woman. The company’s prop manager succeeded in finding a flattering wig and a pair of breast forms for her, which she glued into place so that they would not dislodge while she was dancing. Of course, she moved out of the hotel room she had shared with another male dancer, and moved in with Olga, who treated her just like any other female friend.

What went on in Vera’s mind during all of this was, to say the least, turbulent, but she kept on repeating to herself that it was only for a few more days. Back in Leningrad, everything will be back to normal.

The first performance went well. Vera received a standing ovation and nobody seemed to have noticed anything unusual about her, either during the dance or afterwards, at the reception for local VIP’s in the lobby. True, she had been very tense during it all, and left the reception early, saying that she needed her sleep for the morrow’s performance.

The second performance was spectacular. Vera now felt very much at ease in her role. Now only did she perform flawlessly, she also dared some improvisations and unusual steps which, three times, brought the audience to its feet in the middle of a solo. She had eight encores, and the audience would not be satisfied until she did a small “bashful girl with a mirror” solo from another work in progress that the Kirov had commissioned but had not yet performed. It brought down the house.

That night, lying in her bed, Vera was very happy, but at the same time glad that it was all over. Tomorrow, before they left for the airport, she would revert to being Vladimir, or so she thought.

Unfortunately, Vera had not reckoned with the fact that Simyon Yakubovich Bernshtein, himself, had been in the audience. For ten years, Simyon Yakubovich had been the highly-feared chief theater and ballet critic of Pravda, whose biting words could make or break reputations and careers. After that period, and after the death of his beloved wife, he seemed to mellow and resigned that position in favor of writing a column, called “The Whole Union is a Stage”. The format of his writing was very simple: he would travel to some provincial locality and wander around, treating everything that he saw as one big theatrical performance put on for his benefit. He would then write a “review” of that performance for his column. His erudition, wit, and insight made him one of the most popular writers in the Soviet Union and since he praised honest workmen and courteous civil servants as frequently as he scolded bumbling apparatchiks, he was considered politically correct and was bothered neither by the state nor the KGB. As fate would have it, he was in Vladivostok on the night on Vera’s second performance, and had attended it, intending to write a humorous piece about provincial bumpkins raving about third-tier dancers. Instead, he found himself writing something else.

The next morning, when Vera came down to breakfast, Tatyana called her over to her table. “Comrade Tertiak,” she smiled, “we have a problem.” On the table before her was the Vladivostok issue of Pravda (which, because of the time differences, appeared several hours before the Leningrad issue would be published), and she pointed out Simyon Yakubovich’s column, in it’s regular place at the top page 2.

“Last night, in Vladivostok, this critic witnessed a miracle. The Kirov Ballet’s C-company showed off a new dancer, Vera Ivanova Tertiak, so new to the company that she is not even listed on the official roster of Kirov dancers, in a work which has never been performed in a major city before. I cannot say that I had great expectations for what was to follow, but what ensued was nothing less than a miracle in dance. Comrade Tertiak is, without any doubt, the most talented, most brilliant dancer in the Soviet Union, now or during the past thirty years. She is probably the most talented dancer we have ever produced since the days of the legendary Anna Pavlova and Olga Preobrazhenskaya. Her talent, her poise, her innovation, and her sparkle transported me, and all those in the audience with more aesthetic sense than a walrus, into an artistic garden of delights which we are likely never to see again.

(here he goes on to praise Vera in extravagant language for several more paragraphs)

Why has the Kirov Ballet been hiding this great light? Are we to believe that they assigned her to Company C because they are incapable of recognizing genius when it hits them in the face? We hope, no, we DEMAND, that she immediately be promoted to Company A, and appear in the major cities of our Union, to delight us all.”

Vera blanched. “Yes,” she said meekly, “we do have a problem.” Apparently, a preliminary copy of the column had been telegraphed to Oleg Stefanovich Shapeev, the director of the Kirov Ballet, in the hope of eliciting a comment. He, in turn, telephoned Tatyana at 4 o’clock in the morning, demanding to know who the hell this Vera Tertiak is, and why didn’t he know about her. “We — you and I — have an appointment with him as soon as our plane lands in Leningrad,” she said. “But I am flying back as Vladimir”, said Vera. “No, comrade, I am afraid you aren’t.” replied Tatyana. “You will have to be Vera until comrade Shapeev makes his decision.”

By the time the company reached the airport, everyone had read Bernshtein’s column and it was more or less the consensus of the company that Vera had deserved all of the praise he had given her. Still, they were a bit shocked that Vera, and not Vladimir, showed up in the lobby waiting for the bus. Tatyana gathered everyone around and informed them that Vera would be around for a few more days, and that they were to remember that certain secrets are not to be talked about under any circumstances. At the airport, as they were waiting for their flight, it was Vera who was approached several times by groups teenage girls asking for her autograph (which she gladly granted) and by at least two boys asking for a kiss (which she also granted). Olga, still on crutches, was constantly at her side and if she was jealous, she definitely didn’t show it. Vera, needless to say, was very nervous. “Passing” as a ballerina in far-off Vladivostok is one thing. Doing it in the sophisticated city of Leningrad, where Vladimir Nekrasov was well-known, is quite something else.

During the flight, Tatyana asked Vera to sit next to her. “Comrade,” she said, “I am going to be very blunt with you. What you decide when we reach Leningrad, is up to you alone. You can revert to being Vladimir, a competent-but-not-great dancer, and nobody will blame you. The artistic meteor Vera Tertiak will disappear from the skies as suddenly as she appeared and, within a year, will probably be forgotten. Comrade Bernshtein will probably decide he had had too much vodka to drink that evening, and never refer to you again. Or … if you dare … you can become the prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet, and carve a niche for yourself in the history of Soviet artistic achievement. The column was right, you know. You gave an extraordinary performance, one which I too have never seen. All of the instincts and moves which seem only mediocre when performed by a man, somehow came together amazingly when danced by a woman, creating a whole new dimension of dance.

Can I ask you a personal question?”

Vera nodded dumbly, and she continued. “I know you are not married, and I have never seen you flirt with the women of the company. Are you more attracted to men?” Vera blushed but did not answer. Homosexuality, in the Soviet Union, was a criminal offense. “Relax, comrade,” said Tatyana. “if you did not know that I am particularly attracted to young female dancers, then you are the only one in the company who doesn’t.” “Anton Markovich and I, …,” Vera stammered, naming one of the other male dancers. “Think of this, comrade,” Tatyana replied, “Vladimir Ivanovich and Anton Markovich are criminals when they are together. But nobody could find any fault with Vera Ivanova and Anton Markovich being openly in love, or living together. Indeed, one of the perks of being a prima ballerina is that you are entitled to quite a big apartment, paid for and maintained by the Kirov Ballet.”

“I could never pull it off,” said Vera, “it is just too difficult.” “No it isn’t, comrade.” You make a beautiful woman. I watched you at the airport with all of those autograph seekers around you. Just act naturally, and everything will come easy to you.”

Nonetheless, Vera worried all of the flight. She couldn’t sleep and horrid scenarios kept on running through her head. Still, she had enough presence of mind to pull herself together an hour before they reached Leningrad, and to go to the washroom to reapply her makeup, as Olga had taught her. On the way back to her seat, she stopped to talk to Olga (who was given an aisle seat because of her crutches) and worriedly asked if she looked OK. “You are wonderful, Vera.” Olga replied. “Your beauty is as radiant as your dancing.”

CHAPTER 2: PRIMA BALLERINA

The return of Kirov’s Company C to Leningrad is not usually considered newsworthy, and the dancers were used to waiting in line for their suitcases like everyone else and then going home individually with no fanfare. They were very surprised to find that, when they deplaned, there were at least a dozen reporters at the airport, all primed to photograph the new dancing sensation Vera Tertiak. Director Shapeev personally appeared to welcome them back to the city, and escorted Tatyana and Vera to a waiting limo, assuring them that their baggage will be taken care of. Tatyana told him that Vladimir Nekrasov had missed the plane, and asked that his suitcase also be retrieved and stored somewhere until he could claim it.

On the limo ride back into the city, Director Shapeev turned all of his attention to Vera. If he did not recognize Vladimir underneath the makeup, it was because the two had never, in all of the years Vladimir had been with the Kirov, exchanged more than a few pro-forma greetings at receptions. Director Shapeev was a political appointee who knew, and cared, little about ballet as art, and it was not his habit to mix socially with any but the most prominent of his dancers. There were, of course, rumors that his present position had something to do with rather intimate relations between him and the late Deputy Minister Nekrasova, but even if those malicious rumors were true, the two would have certainly been discreet enough so as not to involve her son. All that Oleg Shapeev saw, as he studied the slim woman seated next to him in the back seat of the limo (Tatyana had been seated next to the driver), was the next star and weapon in his ongoing battle with the Bolshoi for top ratings.

When they reached his office, Tatyana told him a more-or-less convincing story about this provincial dancer whom they had discovered on the trip and whom they adjoined to the company as an unpaid apprentice, how Olga sprained her ankle and Vera stepped in and saved the day. She was sorry she had not informed Director Shapeev about the developments, but they had no way of knowing that Comrade Bernshtein would be in the audience in Vladivostok and they hoped to do things in an orderly and proper manner upon their return to Leningrad, according to the accepted procedure. Vera added bashfully that she was grateful for the opportunity to dance with company C, and that she really did not think that she was good enough to dance at any higher level as yet, but was just honored by the opportunity of being associated in any way possible with the legendary Kirov Ballet. She hoped that she would prove herself worthy of a formal contract.

Director Shapeev regained his professional demeanor enough to say that, of course, she would have to have an audition in front of the full application board before any formal contract could be worked out, but that he had full faith that comrade Bernshtein, who was not easily fooled (and, if anything, was known to be prejudiced against the Kirov and in favor of the Bolshoi), was not wrong. As he escorted her out of his office, he gave her hand a tight and unmistakable squeeze. Vera gave him a peck on the cheek, as she said goodbye.

“You handled that very well,” said Tatyana as they walked out of the building. “Be careful of Shapeev, there is a reason he has a big couch in his office. I know from personal experience.” Since Vera could obviously not go back to Vladimir’s apartment, she was given the use of one of the many small furnished apartments overlooking the river Neva, which the Kirov owned and put at the disposal of visiting artists and other favored guests.

The next day, Vera was told that she was to audition for the lead in Yuri Nikolayevich Grigorovich’s ballet “The Legend of Love”, and would dance with Ilia Antonovich Feiglin himself, the Kirov’s leading male dancer since the departure of the great Valery Panov. This was a lucky break for her, since she already knew the ballet well, and had used it as a vehicle for some innovative choreographic variations which she and the choreographers of company C had been trying out. She perfected these during the two weeks of rehearsal allotted to her, and showed Feiglin, who had been instructed to agree to whatever she requested, what she intended to do. The innovations worked so well that, when the pair finished the dances assigned to them, the members of the audition board could not help themselves from giving them a standing ovation. Indeed, a new star was about to appear in the Kirov’s firmament.

This is not to imply that things were easy for Vera. Vladimir, after all, had lived in Leningrad most of his life and many people knew him well. When Vera entered a store or walked down the street, she sometimes sensed the puzzled glances by people whom (as Vladimir) she knew very well, and whom she now had to treat as total strangers. At the beginning, she nearly gave herself away by wanting to greet an old family friend or classmate, only to realize what she was about to do at the last moment, and shy away. She developed a technique similar to that of Bernshtein — to her too, the whole world was a stage and she was in the middle of it, acting a part.

When the final production of “The Legend of Love” opened, she became an instant star. Simyon Yakubovich Bernshtein was again in the audience and wrote another rapturous column about Vera. Soon, she had to get used to being recognized on the street and mobbed by people seeking autographs. Handling herself at press conferences and in personal interviews with reporters required special coaching by a team from the Kirov’s PR department. The hardest part, of course, was to maintain her absolute refusal to talk about her background. “I fix my concentration on the future,” she would always say. “The past is of interest to nobody.”

As Tatyana predicted, she was given the use of a big apartment in an exclusive neighborhood. She invited Anton Markovich to share it with her, but he refused. “I was in love with a handsome boy named Vladimir.” he explained, “I do not feel right being the consort of a beautiful ballerina named Vera.” Two weeks later, Anton resigned from the Kirov Ballet and returned to his native city of Kiev, where he took up a position as a teacher at a small ballet academy.

As a reward for “discovering” Vera, Tatyana Feliksovna was promoted to deputy manager of Company A, with the direct responsibility for keeping Vera happy and, literally, on her toes. It was she who arranged with the captain of the Helsinki — Leningrad ferryboat to smuggle in a regular supply of special hormone pills for Vera. Later, during one of the vacations, she would arrange for Vera to fly to a special clinic outside East Berlin where a specialist brought in from West Germany performed silicon-based breast augmentation surgery on her, a procedure unknown in the Soviet Union at the time. She was also the one who informed Director Shapeev that dancer Vladimir Nekrasov, who had been on an unpaid leave of absence since the trip to Vladivostok, had died under tragic circumstances. He had, apparently, been staying at a small resort hotel near Yalta. When he did not show up for meals two days in a row, the police broke into his room and found all of his clothes and effects except for his bathing suit. The presumption was that he had taken his customary morning swim from the beach near the hotel and drowned, with his body being carried into the Black Sea by the strong current. Such accidents happened, unfortunately, to at least a dozen tourists every year; there are signs on the beach forbidding swimming during hours when lifeguards are not on duty, but they are also routinely ignored. The police saw no reason to investigate the matter further.

Olga Pashkova, whose ankle never healed completely enough to allow her to return to dancing on a regular basis, replaced Tatyana as director of Company C. She gladly accepted Vera’s offer to share the apartment and the two became even closer friends than before. Other members of the ballet smiled knowingly when they saw Vera and Olga wearing each other’s clothes, styling their hair identically, or hugging each other a bit too tightly and too long than politeness dictated. When it became known that Tatyana often visited them and frequently stayed the night, well, everybody knew about HER tastes, and so one could only guess … .

One of the drawbacks of being a star, as Vera soon found out, was that it carried with it considerable social obligations. Two or three times a week, Director Shapeev would inform her that she was expected to be present at a reception for a Hungarian trade delegation or a group of French communist intellectuals, or perhaps at a private birthday party for a high government or KGB official. At one such reception, Vera was even introduced to Kim Philby himself. She was often told to be “especially nice” to some specific person (not always the guest of honor). Vera, one must admit, enjoyed flirting with men, and Tatyana taught her several gambits to insure that the requisite niceness did not extend beyond a lot of laughs and a few harmless kisses. These ranged from the hoary “it is my time of the month” to gentle hints that she was expected shortly at another private party for someone further up the political food chain. Nonetheless, there were some very scary moments, including a time when she had to be “especially nice” to an old family friend of her parents, who had known her since childhood. Fortunately, he was too fatigued and full of vodka to look at her very perceptively and even seemed relieved when she did not tarry long with him. (In fact, he was suffering from acute prostate problems and was more worried as to whether his bladder would hold for the length of their conversation.)

As the season went on, Vera’s professional star continued to shine. She revived and renewed Anna Pavlova’s role in “The Dying Swan”, to rave reviews. There were rumors that the Bolshoi was trying everything short of outright kidnapping to bring her to Moscow, including extreme political pressure. Director Shapeev became more and more protective of Vera, entrusting Tatyana more and more with the task of seeing that she not be “tampered with” by a rival company. And, indeed, the constant pressures of work, public relations, and fame were beginning to take their toll on Vera, and had definite effects on her relationship with Olga, which were at first very subtle but grew more and more intense as the months passed. More frequently than not, she let Olga make the decisions concerning their life, both personal and professional, and would inevitably defer to her will. Company members would sometimes overhear a conversation between the two, in which Vera would call her apartment-mate “Oleg” and use masculine verb forms in addressing her.

Once, towards the end of a vodka-soaked cast party to celebrate the end of a successful season, she referred to Olga as “my husband”, and then giggled hysterically. Everybody else joined in the fun and someone suggested that the two should be “officially” married. Of course, there was no difficulty finding a bridal dress and a tuxedo in the prop room. Tatyana, in the robes of an Orthodox priest and with a long fake beard, then performed what could, through a sufficiently dense haze of vodka fumes, be mistaken for a wedding ceremony. It was all considered to be great fun.

Actually, Tatyana, whose job it was to keep Vera on keel, was worried enough to talk to Director Shapeev about what was going on, and suggested that Vera was overworked and needed a long holiday. Since the Kirov Ballet was planning several appearances at festivals abroad during the summer, they decided that Vera and Olga would be given a two-week vacation in Spain, before joining up with the company again a week before their first international appearance, in Paris.

CHAPTER 3: FREEDOM

At the end of June, Vera, Olga, and three attendants (two of whom also worked for the KGB and served both as bodyguards and informers) travelled incognito to a villa on the Costa Brava, which had been lent to the Kirov by a rich Spaniard, who was a well-known ballet aficionado as well as a fellow-traveler. There they lay on the beach getting suntans and, away from their attendants, also had some serious discussions.

Contrary to impressions, neither Vera nor Olga had forgotten about Vladimir, nor had they been unaware of the fact that, sooner or later, Vera’s real identity was bound to be discovered. While the members of Company C had so far, to the best of their knowledge, held their tongues, it was only a matter of time before one of them would let the story slip to the waiting ears of the KGB, or maybe one day Vera would need emergency medical attention and a doctor would see what she was not supposed to see. Neither of them cared to contemplate what such a discovery would lead to. They decided that they could trust nobody, not even Tatyana, and that they must find a way to escape the situation. The terrifying prospects finally led them to a very daring and dangerous plan, of which their silly behavior towards each other was just the first phase. Now that they were in the West, it was time for the second phase. One day, the two of them, acting ditzier than usual, announced that they had rented a two-seat sports car and were going to drive to Granada to see the Alhambra. Before their attendants could object, they were gone, leaving all of their possessions behind them.

Their destination however was not the Alhambra but rather a regional airport, where they caught a flight to Madrid. There, they immediately took a taxicab to the American embassy and announced to the startled cultural attaché that they wished to defect to the United States. Of course, such a defection would be a great propaganda coup, given Vera’s artistic fame, and before 24 hours passed (and while, on the Costa Brava, they were being frantically searched for), they were crossing the Atlantic in a business jet with the markings of a company known, in certain circles, to be a CIA front operation.

The Agency people at the safe house in Virginia, to which they were taken for debriefing, expected to have to accommodate a famous prima ballerina and her lesbian girlfriend, both having a reputation for being airheads. They did not really expect to reap much information of value, and saw the defection primarily in terms of its public-relations value. It therefore came as a shock to them when Vera immediately announced that her real name was Vladimir Nekrasov, the son of the famous (or notorious, depending on how you looked at it) nuclear physicist, and that he was willing to give them considerable information — including the location and details of a secret laboratory to which his father had once taken him as a teenager, and which the CIA had known nothing about. All this, of course, was subject to certain conditions — one of which was that the defection not be publicized — to which the CIA agreed.

For the next two months, Vera talked and talked, about her father, her mother and their cronies, about the big shots she met at receptions, and about the political machinations in Leningrad. At the end of that time, the CIA performed its end of the defection bargain, and, at one of their clinics, removed the last traces of Vladimir from Vera’s body. In addition, both Vera and Olga underwent facial plastic surgery and were given new identities. They were given sufficient money to insure their future.

Six months after the defection, Vera Levinskaya and Olga Kagan, two Soviet Jewish women who managed to receive immigrant permits to the United States after a protracted struggle, set up a small ballet school in San Francisco, a city in which lesbian couples were not only tolerated but respected. Since the defection of the ballerina Vera Tertiak was never announced in the western press, the official Soviet line was that she and her friend Olga Pashkova had had an unfortunate automobile accident while on vacation (where they had been staying was never revealed). A suitably-impressive funeral was held for them in Leningrad. Unfortunately, the bodies of the two had apparently been so mangled that the caskets were not opened in public. Director Shapeev bewailed the loss of a great Soviet dance artist. “Whom the gods love,” he quoted the ancient Greeks, “they take young.”

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My name is Beverly Johnson. I am a girl, 20 years old, a sophomore at Santa Isabella Community College in Santa Isabella California. I hope to get a degree in occupational therapy. I was not always what I am now. Two years ago, I was a man: Jonas McCracken, 29 years old, a Baptist preacher originally from Arkansas.

If this is a bit confusing, I had better explain: I was born in Clearwater Pass, Arkansas, population 2534. I was a boy, or so it seemed on the outside, but I knew very early in life that I was really, inside, a girl. Somehow, for my sins, I had been condemned to live in a boy’s body. (There was a lot of talk of sinning in our house, and one just assumed that everything bad that happened was “for my sins”.) I envied the other girls in my school, and tried to act as much like them as I could. This, of course, made me the butt of many cruel and painful “jokes” by the boys, but I couldn’t help myself. Fortunately for me, my dad was the preacher in the local Baptist Church, and so they didn’t dare beat me up, or really get to me too bad. The girls, on the other hand, accepted me, more or less, as a friend. I jumped rope with them and even played with dolls with them, when I could. Of course, as we all grew older, and their thoughts turned to puberty and boys, I found myself more and more excluded from their circle.

It did not help that, physically, I was not very impressive: 5’6” and skinny — like my dad. (My mom was even shorter, about 5’2”.) I certainly was not a football player or anything like that. By the time I reached high school, I was pretty much of a loner. Because of that, I studied a lot and was, by far, the best pupil in the district.

My dad arranged a scholarship for me to his Alma Mater, the Baptist Bible Academy of Arkansas, and, being a dutiful son (on the outside, of course; inside, I was just a frightened girl), I went there and did well. My religious beliefs are, after all, quite sincere. By the age of 20, I had become an ordained minister, like my dad.

It is very hard for a young preacher to immediately get a congregation, especially in the South. You either take a fairly low-paying low-prestige job as an assistant at some church, hoping that the minister will soon hear the call of Gabriel’s trumpet, or you go on the circuit, making guest appearances at churches, revival meetings, and the like, and taking over temporarily for preachers who are ill or on leave. This is the path I chose, among other things, because it would take me out of Arkansas and let me see the rest of the country. My appearances were booked by another BBAA graduate, who ran an agency called Pulpits on Fire. He videotaped several of my more successful sermons and even a revival meeting which I organized, sent them out to his contacts in churches around the country, and arranged my bookings in advance. For these efforts, he received 15% of the fees I earned.

As I traveled around the circuit, I had plenty of time to think about myself, and my condition. I searched the internet for information, and learned that “transsexualism” (I had never encountered the word before) was something not as uniquely mine as I thought. Little by little, I began to understand myself. I also began buying some items of women’s clothing and trying them on, first in the privacy of my motel room and then, little by little, daring to go outside. By the end of my first year, I wore female lingerie regularly, even when I was preaching. I taught myself how to put on makeup, how to coordinate outfits, and the body language of a woman. It’s not that hard, really, especially when it seemed to come naturally to me — something that just reinforced my conviction that this is what I was meant to do.

By my third year on the circuit, I had begun to make a name for myself and my bookings took me from coast to coast. Wherever I went, I observed the women around me, how they acted, what they wore and how they reacted to others, especially men. It is easy to pick up the little signs and learn them. Certainly, I had no problem going out as a woman, first just walking the streets, then going to malls to shop. Going to clubs or bars was harder; because of my size and delicate features, I look much younger than my age, and was constantly being carded. Needless to say, I did not have the proper ID. Every once in a while, a man would try to pick me up, but I always turned him down. I was not ready for sex, nor was I sure I could handle it.

As time passed, however, I found it harder and harder to be able to sustain the “male me”. When I had to dress as a man, to hold services in front of a congregation, or to preach a fiery sermon, I felt that I was a woman playacting. I knew that I could not continue in this manner, and decided to start planning an alternative future.

Every so often, I would volunteer to go to a local prison to preach to the prisoners and talk to them individually afterwards. It is a preacher’s equivalent of a lawyer’s “pro bono” work — good for public relations and for filling out an otherwise empty date. On one such occasion, I met a man who was in for forgery, and convinced him to see the light of Jesus. Two years later, I met him again, this time on the outside. He came to a church at which I was preaching and, after the service, came up to me and told me that he owed me his life and sanity, and would do anything possible to repay me. I instantly saw my chance, and grasped at it. I improvised a story (I am very good at that) about a girl who ran away from her alcoholic father and sadistic mother, and whom I was now sheltering. The authorities were intent on restoring her to her family, and the only way I could keep that from happening is to provide her with a new identity in life, as I had in Christ. Would he be willing to go back to his old ways — this time in the service of the Lord — and provide her with a birth certificate, high school diploma, and driver’s license under a new name, so that she could have a new identity? No problem! The next day, I met him and gave him her physical data, as well as a picture. Within two weeks, I had the documents.

Needless to say, the data I gave him were mine, and the picture was mine too, wearing one of my best wigs and made up to look like a teenage girl. Within two weeks, I had perfect documents. I carefully chose the name of Beverly Johnson, the sister of one of my friends at BBAA, who had died when she was 5, and was of the “right” age. At the time, her parents were missionaries in the jungle of Colombia, where she is buried, so her death was not recorded in the U.S. However, in case anybody looked up the Arkansas birth records, she would be there.

I now drew up my plan. The first step was to apply for, and get, a passport for Beverly Johnson, which was surprisingly easy to do. I also opened a bank account in her name, and deposited in it a rather large sum of money which I had been slowly skimming off of my fees without telling Pulpits on Fire (or, needless to say, that Instrument of Resolute Satan, the IRS). I then checked the internet for names of reliable surgeons in Bangkok who are good at what they do, but are willing to forget about the various documents from psychologists which American doctors insist on. By the end of the year, everything was set.

I had a revival meeting set in southern California. After it was over — and it was very successful by the way — I went to a beach and took off my clothes in one of the cabanas, leaving my wallet and keys in the pocket of my pants. I then dressed in my “Beverly” outfit, and caught a cab to LAX, where I retrieved from a locker the suitcase full of clothes I had previously saved there, and caught a flight to Thailand. My idea was that my clothes would be discovered by somebody at the end of the day, and after a suitable police investigation and search, Rev. Jonas McCracken would be declared dead by drowning — a tragic ending to the life of an up-and-coming man of the church.

The first part of the plan worked perfectly. Within two months, a joyous 18-year-old young lady, Beverly Johnson, returned from Thailand “completely equipped”, as they say, and ready for life. She had money in the bank, and no obligations. Reality, however, quickly set in. My original plan was to go to UCLA to study pre-law, but either the SAT exams are harder now, or I had forgotten quite a bit since I was in school. My scores were not that good, and I ended up having to go to a community college, in the hope of raising my grades. I was all ready to date, and have (safe) sex, but the boys at SICC not already taken are either real dweebs or very immature. I was not current about the latest bands and Hollywood stars, or teenage lingo of Southern California, and found out that making friends was not that easy. The other girls in my class thought that I was way too serious, or were turned off by my southern accent, or whatever. While I am quite pretty, if I say so myself, I am not a “Valley Girl” or whatever the current in-style of Southern California is (these things change monthly, I think) and I could not really fit in. Except for a few one-night stands after being picked up in a bar, I was high and dry.

To tell you the truth, I also missed the excitement and adrenalin rush of the pulpit. Standing before a crowd and molding its thoughts and actions is a definite turn-on.

In short, I found myself again a loner. I was not doing well in class, and ended up studying occupational therapy after it became clear that I would never get grades good enough to transfer to a real university. I was discovering, rather rapidly, what most girls learn sooner or later: tinsel is a base metal. And a good man is hard to find.

To keep my figure down and my spirits up, I took up jogging. One day, as I followed a new route, I came across a Baptist church which had just recently opened. The bulletin board in front proclaimed the title of the sermon and underneath it, in big letters: “Guest Preacher: Rev. Jonas McCracken”. Rev. Jonas McCracken was supposed to be dead!

That Sunday, I was among the worshippers. It was the first time I had entered a church in over a year, and it was a bit odd sitting in the congregation, rather than up on the pulpit. When the guest was introduced, I had a good look at him. He was about two inches taller than I am, but otherwise similar in build. His face looked somewhat like mine used to look, before my surgery. He spoke with a similar Southern accent (though I would have placed him as being from Alabama, rather than from Arkansas) and his sermon was full of the same clichés showing that, if he had not graduated from BBAA, he had at least read the same textbooks used there. I found the sermon rather uninspiring, but then one always thinks that one can (or at least could) do better.

After the service, I walked up “Rev. McCracken”, who was shaking hands at the door of the church, and told him that I wanted to speak to him in private. “It is a very personal thing,” I said, “a matter of faith and honor.”

“I always have time to help a young lady with her problems,” he replied with a twinkle in his eye, and we arranged to meet at the hotel in which he was staying that afternoon. I deliberately dressed in a rather seductive manner. We initially met in the lobby, but, since I told him that I what I wanted to talk about was rather personal, he was kind enough to invite me up to his room. He even offered me a drink, Coca Cola to be sure, which I accepted. I sat down in one of the easy chairs, deliberately crossing my legs rather revealingly, and giving him the sweetest most innocent look I could.

“Who are you?” I asked, “Why are you pretending to be Rev. McCracken?”

He was a bit taken back by my directness, and just looked at me.

“I was very close to the real Rev. McCracken two years ago,” I replied. “I know who he is — and who he isn’t. You look a bit like him, but you are not Rev. McCracken. You could never fool St. Paul.”

“How close were you to him?” he asked.

“As close as a man and woman can ever be, believe me,” I smiled.

“What does St. Paul have to do with this?”

“`St. Paul’ was the nickname of Jonas McCracken’s roommate at BBAA,” I replied. “His real name was Arne Olson and he came from the capital of Minnesota. Now of course, the real Jonas McCracken would have known that, wouldn’t he? And I am sure that Rev. Olson would be prepared to come to California to testify in court that you are not the real Jonas McCracken.”

The room seemed a bit hot, and I asked him to turn on the air conditioning, but he said it wasn’t working properly. My head began to ache.

“OK,” he said, “I suppose I have to tell you. I am not Jonas McCracken, just a California beach bum, seriously considering ending my life. I had no money, no goal or prospect in life, no future. One day, I found a wallet full of Rev. McCracken’s identification, as well as his checkbook and the keys to his hotel room, in an abandoned cabana on the beach. I realized that I looked enough like him that I could make use of them. My life was turned around, and I became Jonas McCracken. I was truely reborn, physically and spiritually. I changed my ways and …”

He droned on, speaking in a rather singsong monotone, but my head ached and I sort of stopped paying attention. Then I passed out.

When I came too, I was lying on his bed, naked. He was beside me, naked as well. “What the …?” I stammered.

“Flunitrazepam,” he smirked, “otherwise known as the Date Rape Drug.” Now let us see how close you really were to Jonas McCracken.”

I won’t go into the details of what happened next. As Beverly, I was not a virgin (though my few sexual adventures had been rather disappointing), but nothing prepared me for the wonderful experience of the next three (yes, three!) hours. He was wonderful! He was great! He was God! Hallelujah, I am saved!

When I left his room, I was in a reverie, a dream. But I was back there the next day, and again the next. He moved on to another pulpit on the circuit, but he too was smitten, and returned to Santa Isabella and to my arms two weeks later. He left and returned again. And again. Then the minister of one of the local Baptist churches was called to a bigger church in Atlanta, and he applied for the post, and was given a job.

Two weeks from now, the outgoing minister will perform his last act: he will marry us in our new church, and I will become what I know that destiny and my Lord always intended me to be: Mrs. Rev. Jonas McCracken. Perhaps, some day, we may even appear on the pulpit together. What a story we will tell!

A multipart story ...

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CHAPTER 1. THE DUCHESS IN HER CASTLE

The English peerage has, throughout the ages, more than its fair share of eccentrics (and not infrequently outright lunatics) but, should a compendium of these characters ever be compiled for the edification of the casual reader, there is no doubt that the Duchess of Bradford would insure her prominent mention. She was, after all, one of the richest of the peerage, her extensive holdings contained rich mineral deposits and her family fortune having been skillfully invested over the generations in banking, industry, and commerce. She also, though not of her own volition, became the center of immense public interest and controversy which rocked the throne of England as had nothing in the preceding centuries.

When Lady Holly Denise Binnion, the Duchess of Bradford, was born, she had been named Holden, for she was, at birth, a biologically male child - the only son of the sixth Duke of Bradford, retired General Miles Binnion, and his wife Anne. Though the young Holden knew deep inside that he was really meant to be a girl, he also was intelligent enough to know that there was no way he could explain this to his sickly mother and his domineering father. He was 14 when his mother, the duchess, passed away from one of her many lingering illnesses - not aided by the Yorkshire weather, which the duke maintained was “invigorating” or the lack of central heating in their home of Bradford Castle, which the duke decried as a sign of “modern decadence”.

After his mother’s death, young Holden found that he was able to indulge in dressing as a girl during the long and frequent periods when his father was away (usually in southern France in the company of one or more extremely young ladies). Fortunately for him, he had several female companions who thought it great fun to help him on his way to femininity so that, without his father knowing it, he soon lived the life of a very beautiful and vibrant teenage girl for considerable stretches of time. Of course, the local press and local constabulary soon knew about this, but they also knew better than to mention it, and certainly none would dare incur the legendary wrath of the Duke by telling him. On the several occasions when constables found Holden intoxicated in public places, usually dressed in a manner which would have shocked many a whore of the previous generation, he would be discreetly bundled back home and put to bed, with no official paperwork ever being filed (though stories about “the little lord Ho” did make the rounds of the pubs at which the constables and newsmen gathered after work).

The duke, himself, did not pass on to the next world until Holden was 30 years of age, and securely married to Lady Mary Dowling, the daughter of an Earl. Mary knew about Holden’s cross dressing and didn’t mind it, so long as it was done away from the public eye. In fact, she had a lot of fun buying frocks for him, and managed to alter his fashion taste from the provocative and trashy to the aristocratically elegant. At the time of the duke’s demise, she was in her 5th month of pregnancy and had bought an “empathy belly” for her husband, so that both of them could go through the process together. They were very much in love.

As both Mary and Holly - the name she picked for him - grew larger and larger, they planned the birth with care so as to share the experience as much as possible. However, the best-laid plans of mice and peers sometimes go astray. One day - roughly two weeks before her due date - Mary suddenly felt excruciating pains in her womb where, as it later turned out, a blood vessel had ruptured and severe peritonitis had set in. She was rushed to the hospital where doctors operated on her for the entire night and it was only in the morning that Holden was given the terrible news. The baby - a girl whom they had resolved to name Anne in memory of Holden’s mother - was healthy and well, but the mother’s life could not be saved.

Holden, of course, was in shock but, by the time the funeral services were over, he knew what he had to do. A wet nurse was hired to take care of the baby for the next six months, while Holden Binnion, the seventh Duke of Bradford, disappeared from view. At the end of that time, Lady Holly Denise Binnion came home, legally and physically a woman. (One should pause here to cogitate on the ability of the aristocrats - especially if they are extremely wealthy - to make clocks move so much faster. Psychiatric evaluations and medical opinions that normally take months if not years to obtain were available to Holden within days; Harley Street surgeons whom one would normally have to book years in advance all of a sudden found convenient holes in their schedules. Legal paperwork was filed and approved almost before the ink dried.)

Lady Holly Denise made no attempt to hide, now. Debrett’s was informed that the Duke of Bradford was now the Duchess and expected to be listed as such among the peerage. Suitable stationary and visiting cards were printed and readied. On the other hand, the Duchess made no attempt to force herself on society, especially the London society with which she had never been comfortable. Lady Holly Denise had only one goal in mind, and that was to be a good and loving mother to her daughter, a purpose to which she devoted her entire energies - rarely leaving Bradford Castle. She did, however, modernize her home (and install decent heating) to make it a suitable place for the baby. As little Anne grew, her doting mother did everything to make sure that she would have the most perfect girlhood imaginable, one that Holly had always fantasized for herself but had never enjoyed.

When Anne reached school age, Holly enrolled her in the local school, rather than send her to a special school for rich girls or have her educated by governesses. At the same time, moreover, she also became a very active supporter of quality education and freely donated her name, her time, and considerable amounts of her money to projects for upgrading the local schools. The West Riding of Yorkshire could boast, within a few years, of having some of the best schools in the country, including an amazingly-equipped secondary school for scientifically-gifted students which ran its own satellite tracking station, manned entirely by 16-year-olds (under the guidance of their teachers, of course) which was part of the international network for ecological monitoring. Anne, who had shown a distinct aptitude for science and mathematics, hoped to enroll there next year.

CHAPTER 2. THE DISASTEROUS BANQUET

The Duchess of Bradford’s refusal to be part of London society meant that she turned down an invitation to participate in The Event of The Decade, a festive three-day cruise on the QE2 in honor of the aging monarch’s birthday. Almost all of the other high-ranking peers did attend, and - as the ship sailed off of the coast of Ireland, partook of a sumptuous grand banquet more appropriate to first decade of the 20th century than to that of the more egalitarian 21st century. They all ate their fill (or more) and then, within hours, they all retched. There was something terribly wrong with the food. Helicopters were quickly summoned to take the worst cases to hospitals on land, while the ship’s infirmary tried to cope with the others. But the dimensions of the disaster turned out to be unbelievable: forty three of England’s foremost peers lost their lives that night. (The monarch, who had not felt well earlier, chose to eat only some fresh fruit, and so was not affected.)

A subsequent investigation by Scotland Yard revealed that there had been not one but two separate poisonings by terrorists infiltrated onto the ship in the guise of cooks: one of them a member of a radical Islamic group which campaigned to have Shariyeh - Islamic religious law - replace British Common Law and the second a member of an anarchist group that had passed a public “death sentence” on all peers of the realm for the continued theft of land and lives since the days of William the Conqueror. The two poisons placed in the food reinforced each other and neutralized any possible antidote.

The nation was in total shock, and it took many months for the anger and indignation to subside enough that a proper assessment of the situation. As editorial writers poured out pages and pages of opinion about the future of the aristocracy, and as countless talking heads debated the situation over and over again on television, one startling fact suddenly emerged: the Duchess of Bradford, who had not been on the cruise, was now second in line to the throne of England.

CHAPTER 3. A TRANSSEXUAL QUEEN?

The possibility that a transsexual might, some day, be queen of England caused public controversy unlike any before, but with several interesting realignments of opinion. Conservatives - traditional supporters of the monarchy - now insisted that everything be done to bar the Duchess of Bradford from ever reaching the throne, though it was not clear what in fact could be done. After all, there have been British monarchs who were overtly homosexual - Edward II being the most notorious - and certainly there have been many homosexual peers - including the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II, who had a long and well-publicized gay relationship with playwright Noel Coward. Speculation even persists, and some reputable historians even maintain, that Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a crossdressing male (the real princess Elizabeth having died - from natural or unnatural causes - in girlhood and a boy having been substituted for her).

On the other hand, leftists who traditionally advocated the abolishment of the monarchy altogether now found themselves in the position of defending the Duchess of Bradford and her right to be queen, if events turned out that way. They repeatedly pointed out that both British and European law forbade job discrimination against the transgendered, and that would include barring a transsexual from the throne. In the name of political correctness, they ended up supporting the monarchy.

Of course, there were those who said that the “situation” was a perfect excuse to eliminate the monarchy altogether, but these were considered extremist cranks and were not taken seriously by the media. What would England be without its monarchy?

The Duchess was condemned by one camp as being a pervert and a freak, and praised by the other as being an exemplary mother and a public-spirited champion of quality education. She, herself, took no part in the public debate. She refused to be interviewed or even to issue a public statement. She remained in Bradford Castle, devoting her time to her daughter and to her various educational projects. Her main concern was that the controversy surrounding her would not hurt Anne.

Anne had known about her mother for many years. When she was ten years old, her mother - aided by psychologist, sat down and explained the situation to her. Since Anne was very intelligent, and loved her mother very much, she was able to accept the situation and deal with it. Now came the real test. The Duchess was worried that the intense publicity would harm her and initiated meetings with the police and school officials and how to handle the situation. Reporters were barred from the grounds of Anne’s school and when one was caught infiltrating the building while carrying a tiny hidden video camera, he was arrested and charged as being a suspected pedophile (the camera being evidence that - on the face of it - he intended to photograph a minor or minors without their consent, perhaps in some compromising or intimate situation). The charges were dropped only after the leaders of the press pledged not to try to harass Anne in any way, on or off the school grounds.

CHAPTER 4. THE NEXT QUEEN OF ENGLAND

Then broke the news that the heir to the throne was thrown from his horse while fox hunting and died the next day. The Duchess of Bradford was now next in line to the throne of England, occupied by an aged monarch of increasingly-questionable health.

The succession to the throne of England is governed by complex but well-defined criteria in which the qualifications of the candidate to actually perform the duties of sovereign play no part. A king may be an imbecile or even stark raving mad - as was George III - and still reign over England. Paradoxically, as the monarchy lost much of its actual power and the monarch became more and more of a figurehead, the qualifications needed to perform for the job decreased and so any possible argument for disbarring someone from holding it. The only hope of disqualifying the Duchess from the throne lay in the fact that the monarch of England is also head of the Church of England. This was, after all, the technicality used to force the abdication of the pro-fascist king Edward VIII, who had married a divorcée, contrary to the rules of the Church, and therefore could not technically serve as its head. Many commentators speculated that a transsexual also, could not fill that position. But the Church of England itself had changed considerably since the 1930’s. The current Archbishop of Canterbury had - before he was chosen for his position - expressed considerable doubt over the divinity of Jesus and even was willing to “appreciate” the notion that God Himself was a “convenient myth” necessary for the social survival of mankind. It was therefore hard to maintain that there was any Church doctrine left by which the Duchess of Bradford could be judged. Still, this was the only hope of those who opposed her, and they managed to build a case against her which was duly laid before the House of Lords.

The government, led by a weak and dithering PM whose major concern was trying to reduce government spending in the face of increasing social entitlements and an even-faster-increasing trade deficit, tried to remain neutral in the controversy on the grounds that there was no immediate and compelling need to take a stand.

And then the monarch passed away.

The next few days were a mixture of official mourning and unofficial panic at the future. The Duchess of Bradford made her first appearance in London in years, at the funeral service. She refused to make any comment to the press during the mourning period, saying that the time was not right. She promised, however, to make a formal statement to the press after the official period of mourning was over. Behind the scenes, intensive negotiations were in progress between her, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Foreign Minister, representing the government. At the end of the mourning period, the Duchess of Bradford appeared at a news conference in Buckingham Palace. In a short and dignified statement, she announced that, in the interests of national unity, she had decided to forgo the throne of England, which she had never sought in the first place. The next queen of England would, by mutual agreement of all concerned, be her daughter Anne. Holly would, officially, be the Queen Dowager or, as she is informally called, "the queen mum".

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DISCLAIMER: Needless to say, this story is fiction and is not intended to reflect any real-life situation or any actual member of the British royal family or peerage.

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CHAPTER 1. THE SUMMONS.

My phone at work rang at around 10 am.

“Hello.”

“Miss Lane Reynolds?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Special Agent Stan Slovak of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have an important and urgent matter to discuss with you. Would it be convenient for me and my partner to come to your office now?”

I had a sudden mental image of a phalanx of 6’6” FBI agents, in identical blue suits and crew cuts, walking in perfect lock-step down the aisle to my cubicle, to the accompaniment of the theme music from some television “crime busters” series.

“I am due in a meeting in a few minutes,” I replied (lying). “Can this wait until noon?”

“Noon is fine.”

“Perhaps it would be better if I come to you; this is no place to conduct a private conversation.”

“That is acceptable. I am in room 1743 of the Federal Building, which is only a few blocks away from your office. I will expect you at noon sharp.”

They say that if you randomly select ten people out of the telephone book and call them around midnight, leaving the message that “all has been discovered, flee!”, at least seven of them will be out of town by daybreak. I must admit that, after putting down the phone, my first reaction was to check if there was a flight to Costa Rica in the next two hours. However, I quickly put that aside (the feds are probably watching all of the exits to this building anyway, to see if I make a run for it) and tried to calm down.

CHAPTER 2. WHY WOULD THE FBI WANT TO TALK TO ME?

I should begin with an explanation about myself. I am 35 years old. I was given the gender-neutral name Lane at birth not because of any premonitions which my parents had, but simply because it was my grandfather’s name. It turned out, however, to be very convenient. You see, I was born a genetic male, though I realized after a few years that there was something wrong with that, and that I should have been a girl. Having a gender-neutral name helped me cope with the situation, especially during my teens. It wasn’t a very happy period of my life, but since it also isn’t especially germane to this story, I will pass over that confused and unfortunate time. I managed, from time to time, to dress as a girl either for Halloween or sometimes just as a joke, but that was about it.

When I got to college, I realized that I was a “transsexual” and attended a support group on campus. I also grew my hair longer and started dressing in a unisex manner. There is no greater thrill then when you get “ma'amed” by a sales clerk, without even trying. Since the school I attended was not in my state of residence, I had to apply for a new drivers’ license. I went down to the DMV dressed in a definitely feminine manner, with makeup and nail polish. I filled out the form correctly, but did not check the “sex” box at all. When I handed the form to the woman at the counter, she noticed the oversight, glanced at me, checked “female” without saying a word, and sent it off to be processed. Thus I ended up with the dearest possession of a pre-op transsexual, a license with an “F” on it. By my senior year, I was in “girl mode” most of the time, and I think some of my professors thought I was a girl. It didn’t matter, actually. My friends accepted me for what I was — college students tend to be rather open-minded — and of course my diploma didn’t mention my sex at all.

I had been seeing a gender counselor and was able to get a letter from her recommending breast implants, which I had in the summer following my graduation. Unfortunately, sexual reassignment surgery was way beyond my financial means, and so that had to be deferred until later.

My degree was in computer science and I was lucky enough to land a job with X-nautics, a software firm near Seattle, which did work primarily for Boeing and other defense contractors. I presented myself as a woman (as I have done ever since) and nobody suspected otherwise. The system at X-nautics is for new programmers to be assigned, in groups of five, to a more senior “mentor”. My mentor was Dave Zimmer, one of the company’s more hot-shot programmers. I apparently impressed him considerably because, after eight months of the computer equivalent of coolie-labor, he asked me to participate with him in a special project, and I agreed.

The software which Dave and I were supposed to write involved one aspect of a new airborne radar system that was codenamed Green Dragon. In order to maintain security, work on Green Dragon was compartmentalized and we were told only what we needed to know. For the next six months, we would be working together, without contact with any other of the X-nautics programmers, on one particular problem. We were expected (by the customer, by our bosses, and mostly by ourselves) to put in 12-15 hour days in front of our monitors. Often we put in more. The office which was assigned to us had room for two sofas, and before long both of us were using them frequently, rather than go home to sleep.

Like me, Dave was single and very dedicated to work, but the circumstances — and the pressures under which we operated — drove us close to each other. When a block of code would fall in place, we would high-five each other. Then we started hugging each other. Then we started kissing each other. Then the kisses became deeper. There was no doubt that each of us was developing an emotional attachment towards the other.

I was falling in love. Little by little, Dave became much more than a mentor and coworker. I began taking notice of his little mannerisms and quirks, and tried as best I could, to accomodate myself to them. Making him happy became very important to me, in little things as well as big. I tried to anticipate his moods and emotions, and be ready to ameliorate them. He was obviously doing the same. Programming is an emotional rollercoaster which took us from highs to lows to highs again (and not necessarily at the same time), and the support we received from each other played a crucial part in our ability to function together and overcome the obstacles in our way.

Finally, one day, he looked up from his monitor directly at me and said, "Lane, I love you."

"I love you too, Dave," I replied, and went over and hugged him, and I felt in seventh heaven.

As we neared the end of the project, Dave suggested (in his rather nerdy way) that we "carry things to their ultimate conclusion." I hugged him tightly but told him that there was something that I had to explain ... and I did. Poor Dave just sat there as I told him that I was a pre-op transsexual, and tried -- as best I could -- to explain what that was and what that meant to me and, more importantly, to us. By the time I finished, I was on the verge of tears. Dave was on the verge of catatonic shock.

"You mean that you have a cock under your skirt?" he asked.

I told him that, yes, I did, but hopefully not for long. The company's health plan, unfortunately, would not cover SRS surgery, but I was saving money and hoped to be able to afford a trip to Bangkok by next year. He just sat there and stared. Finally, after about 10 minutes of silence, he got up and said that I had given him a lot to think about, and that he needed to clear his head. He walked to the door and said he would be back later. I just sat there, emotionally drained, and burst into tears.

CHAPTER 3. TREASON.

Dave didn't return for two days, and I was frantic with worry. Later, I found out from friends that he had gone on a drinking spree (which is unusual for him -- I rarely saw him drink anything except a glass of wine at dinner) in a bar down the street, and had to be taken home by some other programmers from the firm. He kept on muttering about getting so soused that he couldn't tell the boys from the girls any more. However, by the time he returned, he had sobered up, showered and changed his clothes, and behaved as though nothing had happened. He said hello politely, sat down at his console, and began working.

There were no hugs, no kisses. Not then nor ever again.

Two weeks later, we finished our project, ahead of schedule and to the delight of our bosses. We were both rewarded. I was promoted to Senior Programmer and given a hefty pay raise. I was then assigned to another part of Green Dragon.

Dave, surprisingly, opted to go to a three-month management training course. When he returned, he did not return to programming but was assigned to a job in the Human Resources Division. Since the management offices were in another building, about two miles away from where the programmers worked, I didn't see very much of him. I tried contacting him by phone, but his secretary kept on coming up with excuses until I realized that he must have given her orders not to put me through to him. Then, in December, all of the workers received a letter from the HRD saying that, effective January 1, our health care program would be switched to a new provider (see enclosed booklet for details). The letter I received had a yellow post-in note attached, unsigned but in Dave's handwriting, saying "This provider will cover your operation; I made sure of that during the negotiations." It was his final peace offering.

By February, I took a month's sick leave to have my SRS. I was now a complete woman, or rather as complete as I could be. I was doing fairly well at work, though not as great as they had anticipated. I worked with several other partners on various parts of Green Dragon, but never clicked and never did the "brilliant" work I did with Dave. I was not promoted any further.

After my operation, I was anxious to put my new vagina to use and had a succession of fairly superficial relationships with men, some of whom worked for X-nautics and some of whom I met at various bars or other gathering places for lonely singles. None of them evoked the feelings that I had had for Dave. Still, a lay is a lay is a lay. I finally settled down to a more-or-less steady relationship with Antonio Russo, a salesman for a company down the street from our building who frequented the same watering-hole that the programmers at X-nautics preferred. He was short and dark and had a somewhat odd accent, which I couldn't place. He claimed that it had to do with all of the New-Jersey-Sicilian blood in his veins and even, once, admitted to having some cousins who were connected with the Mafia in some unspecified way. But he was a nice guy and a fairly good lover. After a while, we had a fixed a routine of twice-a-week trysts, mostly at my place.

Orgasms can be overrated, but sometimes they do transport me, and after one very good one, I looked up at Antonio with what I suppose was an "I am willing to do anything for you in return for another one" look. At least he thought so, because he suddenly sat up in bed and looked at me, lying there naked. "You know, Lane, I ran into someone who knew you, years ago." "Who is that?" I muttered. "Abulfasi Mussawi, do you remember him?" Vaguely. Abulfasi Mussawi was an Iranian graduate student in computer science at the time I was an undergraduate, and he was a TA in two courses I took, one in data structures and one in automata theory. I did well in his sections. "Dr. Mussawi is now a professor of computer science in Isfahan. He remembers you well, as being a very capable and intelligent boy."

The last word jerked me back to reality. "So you know," I said. "Yes," he replied, "I know, and in fact I have known from the beginning. It is unfortunate for you that you have decided to keep the matter secret from your bosses, though I doubt if they would let you work on supersecret projects had they known. Still, what is unfortunate for you is fortunate for me. You see, Dr. Mussawi and I are -- how shall I put it -- colleagues in a certain enterprise, and that enterprise is now going to involve you."

I just lay there stunned. Something told me that "Antonio" was not really Sicilian after all.

"You have access to the Green Dragon software," continued Antonio. "I want a copy of it. Mind you, you will be compensated for your effort. An account has been created in a bank in Geneva into which we have deposited ten million dollars. When you deliver the software to me, I will give you the access codes to the account. We will meet again, here, tomorrow evening. I trust that, by then, you will have all I need. Oh, and please don't try contacting to the FBI or to your company's internal security offce, we will know if you do."

Without another word, he got dressed and left. I sat there stunned. Then I cried. Then I raised the phone. Then I put it down without dialing. Then I cried again.

I fell asleep. In the morning, my first reaction was that it was all a bad dream. However, I soon realized that it was not. The Iranians (and I had no doubt that "Antonio" was really Iranian) wanted Green Dragon. They knew they could blackmail me by threatening to reveal my background, but were willing also to pay me a large sum of money, knowing that if I took it, they would have another hold on me to blackmail me further.

They wanted Green Dragon's software. Let them have it! One thing which they obviously didn't know, but which I had found out a few days ago, was that Green Dragon was a dud. We at X-nautics had done our job well, and our software was working. However, the engineers at Boeing could not get the hardware to work. The radical concept on which the whole design was based turned out to be flawed. A decision had been arrived at to mothball the project -- not formally kill it (that would mean a black eye for the various people at the Pentagon who had approved it) but put it on a back burner awaiting further technological developments (maybe in the next 20 years?). So I decided to go ahead. It would not really hurt national security, and maybe even help if it sent the Iranians in the wrong direction.

The next day, I met with Antonio and brought him what he wanted. He was honest enough to give me the necessary access codes to the Swiss bank account he promised, and I verified that the money was indeed there. In fact, I removed it immediately and laundered it through a series of internet "pipes" until I was sure that even the Iranians couldn't find the offshore tax haven where it finally lay. Two weeks later, I handed in my resignation to X-nautics. citing a better offer from another company.

The offer was in fact real. When I was transitioning, I met another computer science student in one of the support groups. She was a crossdresser, not a transsexual, but we became good friends and used to go shopping together. I later heard that she had managed to set up a software firm specializing in computer action games. With her, I could be as open as I wanted about my past. She was very happy to hear that I had taken the final step and had SRS and, yes, she would be glad to offer me a job if I were interested. I was.

CHAPTER 4. ENDGAME.

So here I am, writing code for fake weapons rather than real ones, sitting in a cubicle rather than a spacious office. I have been here for seven years now. The younger programmers consider me a "burnt out case", and it is clear that I am not going to advance very much. The boss won't fire me, because we are good friends and she still likes to dress and go out with me as a lesbian pair, but she too knows that my value to the company is very negligable. After my affair with Antonio, I stopped seeing guys altogether. Somehow I don't trust them. He hasn't tried to contact me either. Apparently action games don't really interest the Iranians. My money is earning a nice interest where it is invested, and will take care of my retirement needs.

I felt safe and secure -- until now. But now the FBI is, apparently, on to me. There is not much I can do, I suppose. I will go to the meeting with them, and give myself up. There is no point fighting them. That is why I am writing all of this out. I will leave this file, unencrypted, on my computer. In case I am arrested, I imagine that somebody will find it, and know the true story. I must hurry now, I don't want to be late for my appointment.

EPILOGUE: THE INTERVIEW.

"Thank you for coming, Miss Reynolds, and I am sorry to put you through this trouble. We are conducting a background investigation into David Zimmer, who is being considered for an executive position with DARPA. You worked with him closely, and we thought that you could shed some light ... "

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CHAPTER 1. GERMANY. It is January of 1952. The weather was as cold as the political climate in occupied central Europe. Along a road separating the American and Russian zones of occupation in Germany, an American truck moved slowly. In the front seat sat two soldiers, the driver and the armed guard. In the back, hidden by the truck’s canvas siding, sat a third soldier, Cpl. Bernard Doyle, surrounded by heavy and very secret equipment. Cpl. Doyle, aged 20 and from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was a communications specialist and the equipment he was supervising covertly recorded the radio messages sent by nearby units of the Red Army. These recordings would be dispatched to AFSA, the Armed Forces Security Agency, for possible decryption. Two months before, Director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, had drafted a memo creating a new top secret agency, to be called National Security Agency, into which AFSA would be merged, though the formal creation of the NSA would not be completed until November.

Suddenly, a huge explosion rocked the truck. A large land mine, either recently planted by the Russians or washed down from the hills in last week’s torrential rains, exploded directly underneath. The driver and the guard were killed instantly. Cpl. Doyle, shielded from the blast by the equipment which surrounded him, was alive but severely wounded. Fortunately for him, the blast was also seen by an army jeep traveling half a mile behind, and within a ten minutes the area was swarming with American soldiers, who made sure that the top-secret equipment was not purloined. A chopper quickly evacuated Cpl. Doyle to a military hospital, and from there he was dispatched, still unconscious, back to the U.S.

CHAPTER 2. WASHINGTON, D.C. When Cpl. Doyle regained consciousness, all he could see was the white ceiling of a hospital room and the face of a nurse standing by his bedside. When she saw him open his eyes, she smiled and stroked his forehead. “We weren’t sure you would make it,” she said. “Welcome back to the land of the free.”

“Where am I?” Cpl Boyle asked. “You are in a hospital in Washington, D.C.", replied the nurse. "I will call Dr. Hazleton, and he will give you all of the details.” Cpt. Boyle tried to piece together what happened. He was clearly not in good shape. One of his legs was in traction, and the whole groin area was covered in bandages, with plastic tubes emerging from them. His abdomen was bandaged, covering the area which the surgeons had opened up several times. His head too was covered with bandages. But he was alive, and that was most important. The hospital that he was in was a very special one, though he did not know it at the time. It was a special closed-off area of Walter Reed Hospital, for the treatment of those patients who had a high security clearance (which Cpl. Doyle had, because of his connection with AFSA) who might, in their delirium, reveal national secrets. Three years later, in the very room where Cpl. Doyle was now lying, the great mathematician and one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, John von Neumann, would lose his fight with pancreatic cancer. All of the hospital staff and all of its doctors had been cleared by the CIA and, in some sense, were responsible to it.

Dr. Milton Hazleton, who now strode slowly into the room, was one of the younger staff. The son of a much-decorated admiral, he had studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University and was now doing his residency at Walter Reed. He had been totally briefed on Cpl. Boyle and was in charge of day-to-day care. In a slow and kind voice, he explained to his patient what had happened. The wounds were severe, but were treatable, and within a few months, should heal completely. There was only one area of damage which, unfortunately, the doctors could not save.

“What is that?” asked Cpl. Doyle.

“I am afraid,” replied Dr. Hazleton, “that your private parts had to be amputated. Your penis and scrotum were beyond saving, and had to be removed.”

Cpl. Doyle let his head fall back on the pillow, looked up at the ceiling, and whispered “Thank God”.

This was, needless to say, not the response that Dr. Hazleton expected, and he just sat there for a moment without reacting. Cpl. Doyle saw the quizzical look on his face, and opened up. “I had better tell you the story of my life, doctor. I know that it is hard for you to understand, but my deepest prayers have just been answered.”

And so it all came out. Bernard Doyle had been born in Oklahoma in the early 30’s, in the depth of the depression. His father was a mechanic, unemployed most of the time and drunk at those times when he had money to buy hootch. Even during the war years — when undrafted mechanics were in great demand -- he was unable to hold a steady job because of his drinking problem. His mother was a part-time barmaid, who supplemented her income by casual prostitution. Home life for Bernard and his two older sisters ranged from chaotic to terrifying. Bernard himself was a sensitive child who could not endure the constant beatings or threats of beatings from his parents. He ran away several times and was twice placed in temporary foster care. Somehow, he managed to stay in school and graduate, just before he was drafted into the postwar army. When he said goodbye to his parents, he wished them, under his breath, good riddance as well. He had no intention of ever seeing them again.

Throughout his childhood, Bernard had one fixation — one pole, if you wish, around which all his world turned. He was convinced that he was really a girl “inside”. That conviction, in some sense, helped him remain sane and focused. He hated his penis and testes, and once almost tried to cut them off (he backed off at the last second). When he could, he would steal and wear his sisters’ underwear, often suffering beatings if he was found out. Fortunately for him, the army psychometric tests showed that he had an aptitude for electronics and he was selected to work in that area. That kept him away from the more macho types who might have abused him, had he been in a combat unit. It also allowed him to fantasize about being a woman while sitting before his tape recorders and other secret devices.

Cpl. Doyle was sure that his story was unique, but in fact Dr. Hazleton had heard similar stories before. When studying at Johns Hopkins, he had come under the influence of endocrinologist Dr. Harry Benjamin, a pioneer in the study of what he later called “transsexuality” and had attended several of Dr. Benjamin’s seminars at which similar cases had been discussed. Unlike most doctors, including most of his colleagues at Walter Reed, he did not dismiss them as the ravings of perverts or psychos, but was inclined to look at such situations as areas of treatment. Dr. Benjamin had speculated that, based on the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, it would be possible to create a viable facsimile of a vagina and that, along with the administration of large controlled doses of female hormones, it could be possible to change a genetic male into a socially-accepted woman who, though she could not bring children into the world of course, would be able to live a more-or-less normal female life.

It seemed that Cpl. Doyle was a perfect candidate for such a procedure, both physically and psychologically. In a detailed memorandum and case summary which he compiled that evening, he wrote out a recommendation to the effect that Dr. Benjamin be consulted and that, if he concurred, that Cpl. Doyle be operated on to turn him into a woman. The next morning, he submitted his recommendation to his section chief who read it and, in the best military tradition, bucked the decision up to a higher level.

And so, while Cpl. Doyle slowly recovered from his wounds and Dr. Hazleton had long and probing talks with him, the recommendation moved up the bureaucratic ladder echelon by echelon, with each doctor in turn refusing to take a definite stand one way or another. Finally, the file landed on the desk of General Milland Rosenhaus, Surgeon General of the United States Army.

And he exploded!

“How dare you write this drivel?” General Rosenhaus screamed at the startled Dr. Hazleton, whom he summoned to his office.

“The United States Army turns boys into men. We do not turn them into women!” “I am thinking of the good of my patient,” Dr. Hazleton replied, “it is all explained in the report.” “And I am thinking of the good of the Army,” yelled General Rosenhaus. “Just think what would happen if this story got out. We would be the laughing stock of the world.”

“We could keep it secret,” said Dr. Hazleton.

“How?” replied General Rosenhaus. “Once you turn Cpl. Doyle into Miss Doyle, you are going to have to discharge him and once he or she or whatever, is a civilian, you have no way of knowing that he is not going to run to the nearest yellow press and sell his story to them. You will have no control over things.”

“But what if we don’t discharge her,” replied Dr. Hazleton. “I have thought about that, and have come up with an idea.”

Dr. Hazleton’s plan was roughly the following.

(1) Cpl. Doyle would be assessed by Dr. Benjamin and, if approved, would undergo the necessary surgery, which would be done at Walter Reed to insure security.
(2) In return, Cpl. Doyle would agree to reenlist in the Army and to continue to reenlist until the Army felt free to discharge her.
(3) Cpl. Doyle’s personnel file would be altered so that all traces of “Bernard Doyle” would be destroyed. Instead, a new persona, “Brenda Doyle”, would be created with all of the appropriate backdated paperwork. The army could truthfully claim that it had no record of a “Bernard Doyle” from Oklahoma City ever having served in the military.
(4) Cpl. Doyle would be assigned to permanent duty at the new top-security communications center being built at Ft. Meade Maryland. This would, on one hand, leave her in close contact with the medical people at Johns Hopkins so that her life progress could be monitored. On the other hand, it would also keep her out of contact with any unauthorized civilians whatsoever. She would live on base and leave it only when accompanied by appropriate guards.
(5) All files, including medical records, pertaining to this affair would be given the highest possible security classification.

This plan somewhat mollified General Rosenhaus, especially when he was assured that Cpl. Doyle would willfully cooperate with it. Reluctantly, he gave his approval.

CHAPTER 3. FT. MEADE, MARYLAND. On the morning of a warm day in late June, 1952, Cpl. Brenda Doyle descended the stairs of Walter Reed Hospital into a waiting Army car. She wore a smart WAC dress uniform, adorned with a Purple Heart ribbon. At the top of the steps, she smartly saluted General Rosenhaus, who had come personally to see her off, and gave a quick peck on the cheek to Dr. Hazleton, who stood beside him. Then she was gone, on her way to Ft. Meade, her future home.

Ft. George Meade, named after the Union general during the Civil War, is located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Since it was established during World War I, it served various purposes, including that of a prisoner-of-war center during World War II. After the war, it was chosen to be the site of the headquarters of the National Security Agency, formally authorized by President Truman only weeks before, and was to become one of the most closely-guarded and secret military bases in the world. The fort was to become a small city unto itself, and Brenda Doyle became one of the “founding mothers” of what was to become a complex employing tens of thousands of people. Not only did she do spectacular (and highly secret) work in cryptography and signals analysis, but she also worked diligently to create a townlike atmosphere for those who lived on the base, serving for many terms as a member of the “city council” that dealt with the quality of life of the workers. She was known to all as a cheerful and delightful woman, who was always ready to help people in need. She often worked 12-15 hour shifts, but still found time, especially in the early years, to participate in the amateur theatricals (including a never-to-be-forgotten performance as Buttercup in the production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H. M. S. Pinafore”, which included William F. Friedman, himself, playing Sir Joseph Porter) and other community affairs which kept up the morale in a very small and closed society.

Over the years, she rarely left Ft. Meade for other than NSA business, except to go to Johns Hopkins for regular checkups and, as she would later put it, “having my software upgraded”. Dr. Benjamin, whom she always called “my angel from heaven” and who became a close personal friend, always regretted that he could never reveal her case, which he considered his most successful.

EPILOGUE. In 2002, at the age of 70, Brig. General Brenda Doyle, generally known among those in the know as the “mother of post-war American cryptography”, retired from active duty in the United States Army. In a secret ceremony held in the Oval Office of the White House, President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Merit for her outstanding contributions to national security. She still looked smart and professional in her dress uniform, the same as she did when she first left Walter Reed hospital. She planned to travel abroad, something that she had never been allowed to do before (though she would still have to have security escorts), and in particular visit a particular site on a road in Germany, to say a very personal prayer of thanks.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story is fiction, and is not based on any living person. The names of several real people, such as Dr. Harry Benjamin and William F. Friedman, are included as a literary device. However, the events in which they are purportedly involved are all fictional and not based on real events. They are not to be taken as an assertion of fact. The photograph used to illustrate this story is just intended to show a typical WAC of the postwar era. The person in it has no connection with the story.

A multipart story ...

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In the year 1906, when the Turkish Empire extended from the Bosporus to the Euphrates, a young widow took up residence in the Mea Shearim quarter of the holy city of Jerusalem, the center of the ultraorthodox Jewish settlement. Her name was Hannah and she was accompanied by her two-year-old daughter, Hassia. Nobody knew from where she came, and nobody knew her background, nor did she volunteer any information about her past. Hannah found a small one-room apartment to rent and earned a very modest living doing embroidery work — first on clothes for one of the many seamstresses in the area and later on velvet tallis bags and even parochet curtains which cover the ark of the Law. Indeed, the parochet she embroidered for the synagogue of the Belz hassidim was considered so beautiful that it was used only during the High Holidays.

Hannah quickly distinguished herself by her modesty and pious demeanor. She spoke only in whispers and kept her eyes firmly fixed on the floor, lest she should make eye contact with a man. Her dresses covered her ankles and wrists, even during the hottest days of summer, and her high collars enclosed most of her neck. Her hair was always enclosed in a scarf, which covered her entire head. She never wore jewelry or, tfu-tfu-tfu, makeup, but always appeared clean and healthy looking. Her age, so people guessed, was around 25. At prayers in the women’s gallery of the synagogue, she was a model of concentration and purpose, never utilizing the occasion for idle gossip or frivolity. When she went to the ritual bath, she did so in the very early hours of the morning, so as to have complete privacy. When she had moments free from her work or household duties, she would piously read psalms or meditate on sermons she had heard the Sabbath before.

From time to time, matchmakers would try to talk to her about remarrying a suitable candidate, but she would always turn them away. Not only would she not provide any details about herself and her lineage, she would always claim that she was not worthy of whomever the matchmaker suggested as a possible candidate for betrothal. All she wanted, so she said, was to raise her daughter in peace.

Nonetheless, it was impossible for Hannah not to catch the eye of some of the younger men, and foremost among them was Eliyahu Teitelboim, a young and very promising talmudic scholar and the grandson of the famous Rabbi Hirsch Teitelboim, the 80-year-old president of the Ashkenazic Beis Din (religious court) of Mea Shearim, who was considered one of the patriarchs and pillars of the community. The young Eliyahu would, of course, never dare to approach Hannah in person, or even look her way more than for a few seconds at a time, but he did mention his attraction to her to his mother (his father having died of cholera in an epidemic many years before). When the efforts of matchmakers consulted by his mother failed, she approached Rabbi Hirsch and asked him if he could intervene.

And so it came to pass that Rabbi Hirsch Teitelboim issued an official summons to the good woman Hannah to appear before him in his study, on such-and-such a day of such-and-such a month. A summons from the president of the Beis Din cannot be refused, and so, on the appointed day, Hannah shyly knocked on the door of the great Rabbi Hirsch, full of trepidation and awe at the invitation. Without raising her eyes from the floor, she accepted his invitation to sit. “My dear daughter,” Rabbi Hirsch began, ” since you have no family here, I must talk to you directly of a matter which should really be that for your parents to decide. I have been told that you have refused all attempts by matchmakers to arrange a match with my grandson Eliyahu, a matter which is causing him much pain and suffering. Is he considered in your eyes to be unworthy of you?” Hannah blushed and fixed her stare on the tiles of the floor. “It is me who is unworthy, your honor. I am unfit for any man.”

“I have been told by many that you are a pious and modest woman,” replied Rabbi Hirsch, “and a loving mother to your daughter. Why do you think that you are unfit for any man?” Hannah blushed even more and for several minutes did not reply. Finally, she said in a whisper so low that Rabbi Hirsch had to lean forward to hear her. “It is a long and sad story, your honor, but you are the president of the Beis Din and so I am obliged to tell you. I will leave it to your judgment as to whether this tale is ever to be repeated.”

“I was born, your honor, in the city of Safed, the home of the holy Ari, the great kabbalist, from whom I am directly descended on my mother’s side. I was not what I am now — I was born a male, and was trained as a yeshiva scholar, like your grandson. Like him, I was called an illui, a genius, and a great future was predicted for me. At the age of 20, a match was arranged between me and Golda, the only granddaughter of the miracle-worker Rebbe Mendel of Provishch. Our marriage was, of course, consummated and in due time our daughter Hassia was born. Two months after her birth, tragedy struck. My wife, may her memory be blessed, was hit by the speeding carriage of Murad Abu Hameed Pasha, governor of the Galilee in the name of the Turkish Sultan, a pig of a man who would no more think of stopping to help a Jewess than he would of stopping to help a dog. She died the next morning, in great agony.

My parents having passed away, and having no siblings, I was left to take care of the baby by myself, a task with I undertook with great effort, while at the same time continuing my studies as best I could. I had, at the time of the accident, been delving into the hidden meanings of the first of the Biblical mysteries, namely the creation of Eve. As you know, God creates Eve from Adam’s rib. Why does he do that? Why not create her from the same clay and dust from which he created Adam? There is obviously a great significance here, and one day, as I was feeding the baby, it came to me in a flash: inside each man there is, hidden, a woman: a woman who will one day control his destiny. Slowly but deliberately, I began to search for the woman in me, and to appeal to her to come to my aid, making use of all of the kabbalistic tools which I had mastered. Equally slowly, Hannah emerged. At first she was but a voice, whispering suggestions as to how to take care of the baby, how to feed it and how to sew dresses for it. Later, she became a presence, one which I could feel, not apart from me but as another aspect of myself. As the weeks passed, this aspect took control of me more and more, until I felt that it was I who was but a minor aspect of her.

Finally, I realized that Hannah was ready to take over my body and my life completely. I packed up my late wife’s clothing, and all of the baby’s things, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, took the coach to Jaffa. There I rented a room from a Turk. I shaved my hair, my beard, and my ear locks. Later I would pull out the hairs of my face one by one by the roots, so they would not grow back. I threw away my male clothes and donned Golda’s dresses and shoes, which miraculously fit me exactly. I let Hannah take control of my speech and gestures, and I became her. I found work as an apprentice to a British lady who worked as a seamstress, and from her learned the art of embroidery. After over a year, I felt ready to move to Jerusalem, to seek my fate.

Now that you know my story, that fate is in your hands, and I will accept your judgment in this as in all matters, as I, a poor woman, must.”

Rabbi Hirsch was, needless to say, astounded by this tale, and found it rather hard to believe. “It is very difficult for me to accept what you say,” he remarked, “without any sort of proof”.

“There is, of course, one way which I could exhibit that what I say is true,” replied Hannah, but it would be most immodest of me to do so. Let me suggest an indirect approach. We both know that girls receive very little education beyond reading and writing and basic understanding of the Law, whereas boys are rigorously and thoroughly taught the secrets of the Talmud and its commentaries from an early age. Why not question me about the minutiae of Talmudic scholarship, and see whether I once was the illui I claimed to be?” Rabbi Hirsch accepted this suggestion and, for the next two hours, grilled Hannah intensively until he was convinced that she knew matters which were never taught to any female, and was as capable a master of Talmudic dialectics as even the best of his students. He then dismissed her, telling her that he would think deeply about her tale, and render his verdict in the morrow.

That night, sleep came hard to Rabbi Hirsch Teitelboim. After tossing and turning in his bed until almost the crack of dawn, when he suddenly fell into a deep sleep and immediately found himself in an immense marble hall, the walls of which glowed with a strange but comforting golden glow. Seated on four thrones in the hall, were four women, who bade him to approach. “We are the Four Mothers, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah,” they said, “and you are to know that the good woman Hannah is under our special protection. Do as your grandson wishes and sanction his marriage to her, for she shall be an ideal wife and a mother in Israel.” At this, they vanished, and Rabbi Hirsch awoke, as refreshed as if he had slept soundly all night. As he put on his phylacteries to say his morning prayers, he suddenly heard a voice speaking to him from no direction and all directions at once: “Rabbi Hirsch, heed your dream, for it is the will of Heaven”.

Later that day, in the synagogue, Rabbi Hirsch Teitelboim announced the betrothal of his grandson Eliyahu to the good woman Hannah. The marriage itself took place three months later, and was considered one of the most beautiful and moving ceremonies of that year, with hundreds of guests dancing in the street to honor the bride and groom.

The post-nuptial festivities lasted for a week, but Rabbi Hirsch was not able to be at all of them, since two days after the wedding he was urgently called to the city of Tiberius to adjudicate a complex legal matter. He stayed there for over four months, and after his return to Jerusalem he immediately inquired about his grandson’s marriage. Eliyahu assured him that all was well, and invited the old man to visit his house to see for himself. There Rabbi Hirsch saw his radiant granddaughter-in-law, preparing the evening meal for her husband and her young daughter, and very obviously pregnant with twins.

POSTSCRIPT: In 1970, when Hannah Teitelboim passed away at the age of 91, she was acknowledged by all Israelis, religious and secular alike, as one of the great personalities of the state, who actively worked for tolerance and understanding among all people. Her funeral was attended by the President of the State, by the Prime Minister, and by the leaders of all religious communities, as well as her nine children and 56 grandchildren. She is buried on the Mount of Olives, in a grave overlooking the courtyard of the Holy Temple. Five years later, the State of Israel issued a stamp in her honor. One of the main streets of the city of Safed, where she was reputed to have been born (no record of the birth was ever found, but then so many records from the time of the Turks have been irreplaceably lost) was named Hannah Teitelboim Avenue.

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Winston, Kansas, is a very small town, population less than 1000, in the middle of a prosperous agricultural area. It has three churches, of which the smallest by far is the Grace Church of Winston. The Grace Church is congregationalist in the traditional meaning of the word — it is owned and run by its congregation. It belongs to no national denomination or other organization. The members of the congregation hire the minister or appoint one from among them to serve as minister. The order and content of the service is determined by a vote of all of the congregants. At one point over a hundred families were active members of the church but membership has declined as people left organized religion and the country, and now it is considered a good day if twenty five people show up on Sunday morning.

For the past 45 years, the minister of Grace Church had been the kind and thoughtful Rev. Henry Martin. However, as he reached his 80th year he finally realized that caring for even this small congregation, and battling the fierce prairie winters, was getting too much for him and succumbed to the demands by his grandchildren that he move to a retirement community in Arizona. This left the congregation of Grace Church with the dilemma of finding a new minister. A search committee was appointed but, after a few months, came back empty handed. No minister was willing to take over such a small flock in such a small town, especially at the very small salary that they were able to offer him. There seemed to be no alternative, at least for the foreseeable future, but to appoint one of their own as spiritual leader of this tiny flock.

The consensus of the members of the congregation seemed, slowly, to converge on Miss Ellen Pryor as the best choice. Miss Pryor, a spinster in her late forties, moved to Winson some ten years earlier and had been a member of the congregation of Grace Church since the day she arrived. She worked as a (part-time) secretary in one of the local agricultural cooperatives, with her income supplemented by large monthly checks she received from New York. She owned a large house, paid for in cash, which she kept meticulously clean and surrounded with a beautiful flower garden. Though somewhat on the plump side, she was always well groomed and dressed in expensive clothes obviously purchased at the more upscale stores of Omaha or Kansas City. She was always ready to do volunteer work for the church, if necessary, and organized many of its social activities. The distinct traces of a Southern accent in her speech showed that she was not originally from these parts.

During the summer months, she would often sit on the veranda of her house, strumming her acoustic guitar and singing country music songs softly to herself. Indeed, that is precisely what she was doing when August Hawkins, chairman of the search committee, came over and formally offered her the position as church minister. Ellen declined, saying that she was not worthy of such a post, and would end up bringing shame to the church and its congregation. But August persisted, praising her lavishly and saying that she was exactly what the church needed.

“I cannot, Augie, I really cannot,” she replied, “for I have a terrible secret in my past, and should it come out, everything would be ruined.” “Nothing in your past could possibly ruin your present, Ellen,” replied August, “and we really need you.”

Ellen slowly strummed her guitar. “Let me tell you my story, Augie. It is about time I tell someone. I trust your discretion and friendship not to repeat it to anyone.”

“I was born in Northern Mississippi, the fifth of ten children.” We were what is known in those parts as “po’ white trash”, the poorest of the poor, the ones the people in the trailer parks looked down on. I was not born a girl, Augie, I was born a boy. Though it took me not many years to figure out that that was wrong and that I was one of God’s mistakes — I should have been a girl but was somehow shoved into the wrong body. Needless to say, I couldn’t talk about this to anyone, and just barely understood it myself. I had a miserable childhood.

“When you are on the butt end of the social scale, there are only two ways to escape: through sports or through music. I was always too weak and too meek to be good in sports, but I did have a good musical sense and a good voice. By the time I was 15, I was earning some money for the family by singing and playing country music in roadhouses and bars, and sometimes even on street corners. I was lucky. A talent scout happened to be in the audience during one of my better appearances, and he packed me off to Nashville for “polishing”. There I managed to survive — I won’t tell you how — and even cut a record, which turned out to be a hit on the radio and which led to a modest tour series in real concert halls. Again, I was lucky and was invited to appear on a television show in Knoxville, which was picked up by the network and broadcast over the US. I caught on. I was invited to New York to sing on one of the most popular television shows at the time, and — before I knew it — I was a star.

“Being a rock star has certain advantages. I wore my hair long at the time when men wore theirs in crew cuts. I wore close-fitting pants, colorful silk shirts, and sequin-spangled jackets which no ‘real man’ would be caught dead in. I plucked my eyebrows and lengthened my eyelashes. I danced with the gyrating motions of a teenage girl. But it was all a sham, and the emptiness in my soul only grew greater. I wanted to be the woman I am inside, not just have some of the mannerisms of one. I want to be one of the girls screaming in the audience, not the singer onstage at whom they are screaming.

“I tried, Augie, I really tried to overcome it. I even put my career on hold and joined the army in the hope of making myself into the ‘real man’ I was supposed to be. But it was no use. And so I resumed singing, becoming wealthier and wealthier on the outside, but emptier and emptier on the inside. It began to eat at me so much, that I could not perform any more.

“One of the advantages of being very rich, Augie, is that you can do quite a lot of things, including arrange your own death if necessary. I called together some of the various human barnacles who had attached themselves to me as my career developed, and together we worked out a plan. First of all, we set up a very discreet but quite large fund that would provide me with ample money for the rest of my life. Then, we arranged for visits to the best surgeons who not only reconfigured my private parts and enlarged my breasts, but also performed extensive plastic surgery on my face, so that I would never be recognized as who I was. When all of this was done, my death was announced, while I quietly disappeared and, after trying out several places, arrived here, where I have found peace and serenity.

“Please, Augie, do not ruin that.”

Ellen strummed her guitar, and sobbed.

NOTE: This story is fiction. Any resemblance to people (presumed) dead or (presumed) alive is (presumably) coincidental.

A multipart story ...

A multipart story ...

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(Note: This story has been somewhat modified since it was originally posted, to correct errors of fact pointed out to me by readers. I must say that I am amazed at the number of alumni of the Summer of Love who, apparently, read these pages. -- MT)

CHAPTER 1. NEVER GROW UP

In the summer of 1967, they came from all over the United States to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. They wore flowers in their hair, walked barefoot down the streets of the Haight-Ashbury district, gamboled in Golden Gate Park, ran up and kissed random people of both sexes on Market Street, smoked pot, and behaved as if the Middle East and Vietnam were not going up in flames.

Sundancer was there — tall and muscular, from Iowa. He wore his hair long and his jeans tattered. When he didn’t go barefoot, he wore cowboy boots that had seen better days. They somehow went with the wide-brimmed leather hat (with flowers in the hatband) which was usually on his head. He was 17, but had that weathered look one associates with the Okies celebrated in the songs of Woody Guthrie and the stories of John Steinbeck. With him, at all times, was Moonchild — short and frail, from Ohio. She wore loose-fitting shifts or muumuus and always went barefoot. Her long blonde hair reached down her back, and was always crowned with a floral wreath which she wove herself. She would often go down to Montgomery Street and spy some executive-looking type, run up to him, and take the wreath off of her head and put it on his. (This being San Francisco, most of them would politely thank her and leave it on their heads, at least until she was out of sight.)

Sundancer and Moonchild vowed that they would never let it end, but somehow the Summer of Love slowly soured into the Autumn of Disillusion. Many of the flower children went home in September, so they could head off to New Haven or Ann Arbor and prepare themselves to fit in their apportioned holes in the ticky-tacky of life. (Author’s note: those who do not know what “ticky-tacky” means are referred to Malvina Reynolds' song Little Boxes, made famous by Joan Baez (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUYgZB0dQoo) and Pete Seeger (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpMMrWoC9po&feature=related); those who don’t recognize the names of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, are beyond redemption.) Others stayed in San Francisco but lost their grip on love. Slowly but surely, the gathering of the tribes of the innocent was replaced by the gathering of the druggies and the tourists, both of whom turned Haight-Ashbury into something very different from what it was. The “San Francisco Oracle,” Haight-Ashbury’s own psychedelic newspaper, began accepting ads from insurance companies and escort services.

Sundancer and Moonchild would not let go of the dream, even as it was fading away. When San Francisco became less hospitable, they moved down the coast to Santa Imelda, a quiet community of simple farmers and fishing folk, who let people live as they wished. They squatted in an empty farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Here, it turns out, they were very lucky. The owner of the farm had died the previous year and the property was finally (after considerable legal battles) inherited by a corporate lawyer from San Clemente, in the southern part of the state. The lawyer had no interest in the farm but, on the other hand, was not thinking of selling it for the low price it would fetch. The California real estate market is very volatile and if one held on to a property long enough, it is bound to become valuable. Who knows, Santa Imelda could be the next Carmel. When he finally got around to visiting the farm, and found Sundancer and Moonchild living there, he was very happy to reach a simple agreement with them: they could continue living on the farm indefinitely and free of charge, on the condition that they looked after the place and kept it up.

All of this was fine with Sundancer and Moonchild. There were no utilities, of course, but that was not important. At the beginning, Sundancer pumped water from the well on the property and carried it into the house. Then he remembered the Amish in his native Iowa and rigged up a small windmill which did the work for him. Since they were vegetarians, they cooked very little and that over a gas ring, with the gas being supplied in cylinders kept in a special shed and piped into the kitchen. Electricity was something they never really thought they needed.

Sundancer and Moonchild tended large plots where they grew their own (organic) vegetables, herbs, and pot. The herbs were Moonchild’s domain. Over the years she had learned a lot about herbs by talking to the wise women of the area, including many of the old Mexican women who lived in the gulch on the east side of town. Soon, people were coming to her for advice, especially women with child. She always gave advice, and herbs, gratis but usually people insisted on paying something and she would accept whatever they gave her — be it money or a dozen apples or a new belt — with a smile and a kiss.

Sundancer had good hands and a good mechanical sense, and would often be called upon by people who needed something built or repaired. He too, would never ask for money but would take, with a smile, whatever people offered him at the end. It was quite enough for the two of them to satisfy their modest needs.

And so Sundancer and Moonchild lived in Santa Imelda for almost forty years, and became part of the landscape. They, no less than for the mountains and the sea, seemed to be outside of time. Sundancer still dressed in jeans and the loose shirts which Moonchild sewed for him and tie-dyed with her own home-made dyes. In the winter, he wore a sheepskin jacket. Moonchild still wore her loose shifts and muumuus, with a Chinese-style quilted jacket in the winter. As she grew older, she would occasionally wear sandals made of twisted hemp, but for most of the time she still went around barefoot. The toys of the age: personal computers, CD players, DVDs, ipods, cellphones, never touched their lives. When they wanted music, which was often, they would sit on the veranda of their house, with Sundancer playing the acoustic guitar or the oud, and Moonchild accompanying him on a Japanese shakuhachi flute. Often other people would come and join them, and some would also bring instruments. They taught folk tunes to each other. There was no need for anything more.

CHAPTER 2. TRAGEDY

And then they died, together as they had lived. It was an unusually cold winter that year and one of the neighbors thought that perhaps Sundancer and Moonchild could use an extra comforter which she had lying around the house. When she knocked on the door, she smelled something funny and called 911. The emergency team which arrived broke the door down and found the house full of gas. Apparently, because of the cold, Sundancer had rigged up a gas heater in the bedroom but sometime during the night the flame had gone out and gas continued to leak into the room. Both Sundancer and Moonchild had died hugging each other, in their sleep.

This verdict was confirmed by Doc Carleson, who also functioned as county medical examiner, and by Deputy Grant of the country sheriff’s office, who examined the bodies and the room after everyone had been shooed out of the place. Death by accidental asphyxiation -- it seemed very straightforward and very tragic.

After Doc Carleson gave permission to move the bodies, the deputy looked at Moonchild and commented sadly: “She seemed like such a nice woman — I heard all sorts of stories about how she helped women around here. He also helped us once, when we needed some work done at the station. I think the whole community is going to miss them.”

Doc Carleson looked first at the bodies and then at the deputy and then said: “I am sure that you are going to find this out anyway, when you take away the bodies, so I might as well tell you now. As you know, by California law the dead lose their right to privacy, and their medical records can be made public. I am now going to let you in on a secret, which I have guarded carefully over the past thirtysomething years. I am going to ask you to help guard it further, even though there is no legal basis for doing so. You see, from a purely physical point of view, Sundancer is the female; Moonchild is the male. You can check yourself, if you do not believe me. But I would appreciate if you do not include that in your report. Sometimes unnecessary revelation of irrelevant truths can only harm, and they both deserve better.”

“I think you better tell me more,” said deputy Grant. “OK,” said Doc, “but let’s do it in my office — I don’t want anyone overhearing us. Meanwhile, just arrange to have the bodies taken to the morgue in sealed body bags, ostensibly for further investigation. Do not let anybody see them uncovered.”

CHAPTER 3: SUNDANCER’S STORY (AS TOLD BY DOC CARLESON)

After the bodies were removed and safely taken to the morgue, Deputy Grant came into the Doctor’s office and settled down on the sofa. Doc sat behind his desk and looked wistfully out of the window.

“I came to this community 40 years ago as a young general practitioner. I was one of two doctors in town and, between us, we did just about everything. I got to know Moonchild very early. She would sometimes consult me about herbs she had heard about or had found in the hills, and use the books in my modest library. Women in labor especially valued her help, and she not only suggested dietary supplements to them, she also comforted them and helped them cope. Very frequently, she was present at the birth, either calming the mother by talking and playing that flute of hers or helping the midwife if things got rough. One day, a few years after I came here, she came running to my office to say that one of the Mexican women was giving birth and that there were complications which the midwife couldn’t deal with. Could I please come immediately? When I came, the mother was in a very bad state and the midwife was totally out of her element. Since, at the time, I spoke no Spanish, I motioned her to stand aside and, with Moonchild assisting, performed an emergency makeshift operation which saved the lives of both the mother and the baby. Even though Moonchild had absolutely no medical training, you could sense that she had instinctive knowledge of what needed to be done, and the gentleness to do it well.

After that incident, we became quite close and I would often call on her to help me with a patient who needed a more homeopathic and natural approach. One day, Moonchild said she had a very special request. ‘Doc,’ she said, ‘have you ever performed an abortion?’ Now that shocked me totally since I knew that Moonchild had a total reverence for life, and I couldn’t imagine that she would advocate aborting any fetus unless the circumstances were very special. ‘Is there someone who needs one badly?’ She nodded and looked at the floor. ‘Are you pregnant?’ I asked. ’No,’ she said and looked at the floor, ‘It’s Sundancer. He missed his period last month, and has not been feeling well for the past few weeks.’

Well, you could have bowled me over with a feather, needless to say. I tried to stay as professionally-unperturbed as I could and told her that I had better talk to Sundancer first. The two of them came back that afternoon, with Sundancer looking very embarrassed, as one can imagine. I told him that I needed to examine him (notice that it is impossible for me to use anything but a male pronoun when referring to Sundancer, even though I now knew he was really female.) He sheepishly climbed onto the bed, removed his pants, and put his feet in the stirrups, looking very odd and out of place lying there. But he definitely was all female between the legs. Fortunately, a short examination revealed that he was not pregnant but rather had a minor vaginal infection which could be easily treated with antibiotics.

When he climbed down, I told him that it would be best if he told me the whole story, and assured him that doctor-patient communications were confidential and that even a court could not force me to reveal them — at least not while he was alive. And so he let it all come out.

Sundancer had been born on a farm in Iowa, the only daughter after four sons. His mother died when he was four years old, and his father raised the brood by himself. As one can imagine, in an all-male household Sundancer grew up as “one of the boys” and this was furthered by the fact that he was tall, large-boned and rough, with no noticeable feminine traits. Everybody — including his father, his siblings, his schoolmates, and even his teachers — called him 'Tom’, short for ‘tomboy’, and he would answer to no other name. He attended a small rural school, with less than 150 pupils all told. When he went on to high school, he wanted to go out for football. The principal (who was also the team coach) checked and couldn’t find any regulation specifically stating that football players had to be biologically male, and saw no reason to say no, especially since Tom had been showering with the other boys in gym class for years now, and nobody gave it the slightest thought (if anybody would have said anything Tom would probably have beat the shit out of him). In fact, he proved to be an outstanding halfback and, in his senior year, was scouted by several universities, one of which offered him a very good scholarship. At this point the principal called Tom in for a long talk and, as gently as he could, explained to him that things were different at the university level and that there was no chance he would be allowed to play football there. Tom brooded and thought about the future. Then, one day, he packed some of his clothes and, without even saying goodbye to anyone, walked down to the highway and hitched a ride in the general direction of San Francisco.

I made Sundancer promise that he would come back every year for a checkup (a promise, by the way, which he honored religiously).

CHAPTER 4: MOONCHILD’S STORY (AS TOLD BY DOC CARLSON)

I then turned to Moonchild. ‘You though that Sundancer might be pregnant. If he had been, would you have minded?’ She said that she wouldn’t, of course. ‘Would you wonder who the father was?’ She said that she imagined it would be her. By now, I was beyond surprise.

So Moonchild said that as long as I knew Sundancer’s secret, I might as well know hers too — she lifted her dress, and revealed that she was very obviously male (and quite well hung, too). And then she told me her background.

Moonchild had been born in Sandusky, Ohio, the son of a Polish construction worker. She was always small and delicate, to the disgust of her father, who was really hoping for a Bronco Nagurski or Ted Kluszewski in the family. When, during the Beatles craze, she started wearing her hair long, his father swore at her and said that he would not tolerate a sissy-boy in the family. The open warfare between father and son continued for several months, until one day the boy took whatever money he could steal from his parents, went down to the Trailways station, and caught the first bus for Chicago. When she got there, Moonchild suddenly realized how alone she was and how vulnerable. Her father would certainly call the cops and the first thing they would do would be to check the bus stations. She sat on a bench and cried, not knowing what to do, when a lady came up to her, wiped her face, and said to her “Don’t cry dear; you are a big girl. I am sure the people for whom you are waiting will be along shortly.” She thanked the lady politely. Her words suggested an idea. If a stranger mistook her for a girl, perhaps other people would too. She went down to the nearest Goodwill store and bought several loose-fitting dresses, some underwear, and a backpack to put it all in. She bought a pair of shoes too, by they didn’t fit well and she threw them away a few hours later. She then went back to the bus station and bought a ticket for San Francisco.

Sundancer and Moonchild met a few days after they arrived in the Haight-Ashbury district. Moonchild was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, looking at the world and waiting for something to happen. She had just finished making a wreath of flowers and decided to place it on the head of the first person who would passed by — and that person happened to be Sundancer. He bent down so that she could reach him and then picked her up with both hands, raised her to his face, and kissed her tenderly. She kissed him back and thought he was the nicest man in the whole universe. They were together all day, talking very little — just holding on to each other. After midnight, they lay down on the grass in Golden Gate Park and looked into each other’s eyes. Moonchild, without even thinking where it came from, whispered into his ear ‘I want you, Sundancer’. Sundancer looked very sad, opened the top of his pants, took Moonchild’s hand, and guided it there. ‘I am sorry,’ he sighed. But Moonchild’s face just lit up. She took his hand, put it under her skirt, and guided it upwards. Suddenly his face lit up too.

After a night of love, which was new to both of them, Sundancer and Moonchild decided that God had made them just for each other and had insured that they would find each other by interchanging certain of their parts so that nobody else would have them. They vowed that they would stay together always and, moreover, would never allow time or circumstance to change them from the state of purity they felt that night. They would recreate that night again and again for the rest of their life.

And they did.”

Deputy Grant agreed that there was no reason in the world to tell anybody about Sundancer’s and Moonchild’s true sex. They wondered what to do with the bodies when the mayor of Santa Imelda knocked on the door. Several citizens had come to him and told him about the tragic death of Sundancer and Moonchild, and had praised them as unique assets to the community. They had also taken up a large collection, of which he was put in charge, to arrange for their burial in the local cemetery. That solved the problem. They had also wanted to pay for a suitable monument, but Doc suggested that planting a flower garden would be much more appropriate, and the mayor agreed.

CHAPTER 5. THE OTHER WHITE LIE (AS WRITTEN BY DOC CARLESON IN HIS PRIVATE DIARY)

“Dear Diary … I persuaded Deputy Grant to go along with one white lie, but did not tell him about the other one I told — the death of Sundancer and Moonchild was not as accidental as I wrote in my official Findings. Both of them had been in my office the day before, when I told Moonchild the results of some medical tests which I forced her to take the previous month. She had cancer of the liver, inoperable and rapidly-spreading. The several specialists I talked to all concurred that she probably had less than a month to live. They both thanked me for my efforts, and walked silently out the door. I watched through the window as Sundancer took a flower out of his hatband and put it in Moonchild's hair. They held hands. From behind, they looked just like a pair of innocent children, forever living that Summer of Love.

I am positive, though I cannot prove it, that the gas heater had been turned on, but never lit.”

A multipart story ...

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CHAPTER I. MARYANNE
 
 
When doctors Mautner and Gold talked about their former patients who had undergone sexual reassignment, one of the topics which recurred had to do with the fact that those who were very successful in their male careers often chose, after their operation, to begin a new career at a definitely lower socioeconomic level which corresponded to the stereotypical image of a “woman’s job”. Former corporate executives chose to live out their lives as secretaries, former engineers became waitresses, and former professors taught kindergarten or elementary school.

Dr. Gold did not look on this phenomenon kindly. She thought that it was a result of the fact that post-op transsexuals often cannot really cope with being a woman, and so took refuge in the behavior that they thought society expected of them. In other words, they lived a stereotype. Dr. Mautner, on the other hand, said that the opposite was as likely to be true. Their male persona had been stereotypical behavior — doing what they figured society expected of a “man” — and that their surgery liberated them from the need to do something they really didn’t want to do and allowed them to take a job which fit their inclinations and personalities. (One should note that both Dr. Mautner and Dr. Gold were themselves post-op transsexuals who continued in their original careers — surgeon and clinical psychologist respectively — after their operations.) Whenever such a discussion began, one name inevitably cropped up: Maryanne Torre. It could not be otherwise.

Maryanne Torre was born Marvin. As with most transsexuals, Marvin suffered through a difficult childhood and adolescence with parents who either did not or would not understand his gender dysphoria and felt obliged to compensate for his yearnings to be a woman by trying to act as “manly” as possible. Since Marvin was short and thin, athletics were out of the question for him. But he did have good manual dexterity and excelled, as a boy, in building model airplanes (first from kits and later of his own design) — a hobby that his father encouraged. By his mid teens, he was making and flying radio-controlled models and even won several awards from model clubs. When he was 16, his father enrolled him in a flying club and, by the age of 18, he had obtained his light-plane pilot’s license. By the time he finished college, he had also obtained a commercial license and earned money on the side as a reserve pilot with a regional airline, flying jets on weekends when the company needed additional manpower. Two years later and after further training, he was a full-time pilot for United Airlines, qualified to fly Boeing 767 jets.

All of this activity helped disguise Marvin’s longing to be a girl, but of course did not change it. He dressed as a woman whenever he could, especially on overnight stops far away from home. He became very proficient at makeup and choosing clothes, and had no trouble “passing” as a woman when he went out to bars or clubs. Of course, he made sure that United knew nothing about this — deviant behavior of any sort was enough to revoke one’s pilot’s license.

But it was clear that occasional cross dressing was not enough. Marvin wanted to be a woman, totally. Finally, he made a big decision. After his father passed away and his mother moved to a retirement community in Florida, where she slowly but surely slipped into senility, he went to Dr. Mautner’s clinic and there, after several long interviews with Dr. Gold and her staff, was approved for sexual reassignment surgery. Marvin had entered the clinic, and Maryanne left it, with full papers and documentation and with a determination to lead a woman’s life from now on.

Maryanne had no desire to resume her work as a pilot. Instead, she enrolled in a course to become a flight attendant.

Being a flight attendant (formerly called “stewardess”) for a big airline is one of the most stereotypically-female jobs in modern society. Although many flight attendants are now male (and many of these are really security personnel in disguise), the job still has the image of tight skirts, wild nights in hotels around the world, and “coffee, tea or me”. Walking up and down and aisle in turbulent weather while wearing high heels, attending to screaming babies and drunken lechers, and forcing a smile no matter what the circumstances are not easy, but the job still has its attraction and glamour and Maryanne had always dreamed of it ever since she was little. When she built and flew models of commercial aircraft, she always envisioned herself not as the pilot but rather as one of the flight attendants making flying enjoyable for the passengers under her care. Now, her secret dream was about to become reality.
 
 
CHAPTER 2. THE CRISIS
 
 
Maryanne Torre worked as a flight attendant for American Airlines (she thought it was best to change employers, encountering her old colleagues at United could lead to problems she would just as soon not have) for three years. She was always cheerful, competent, and well-liked both by the passengers and the other members of the flight crew. Twice she was cited as “flight attendant of the month” once was even featured in a write-up in the inflight magazine given away to passengers. At first she worked regional routes, but gradually was assigned more often to transcontinental routes. She began taking French lessons in the hope of being assigned to transatlantic routes as well. Needless to say, nobody ever suspected she was a post-op transsexual.

Then, one day, it happened. Maryanne was working the Business Class section of a New-York-to-San-Francisco flight. The plane was only half full. As it turned out, Dr. Gold was one of the passengers — she was flying from a meeting in New York to a conference in Berkeley and was busy preparing the notes for her talk. When Maryanne showed her to her seat, she did recognize her and managed to give her hand an extra squeeze. Maryanne winked back at her and smiled. She looked very contented. Hopefully, thought Dr. Gold, they would have a chance to talk later in the flight.

The pilot on the flight was Capt. William Ahern, one of AA’s veterans. He had flown jet fighters during the Vietnam War and then moved into civil aviation. Now, he was just three years away from retirement. His copilot was Warren Wells, a freshly-accredited young pilot on his first regularly-scheduled flight. Ordinarily, in such circumstances, there would also be a third pilot onboard, just in case, but the intended “babysitter” had called in sick at the last moment and the New York dispatcher, unable to find a replacement, decided to let the flight go ahead without one. After all, Bill Ahern was a professional’s professional so there was nothing to worry about. Besides, the plane was urgently needed in San Francisco because another craft had to be pulled out of the rotation for unscheduled maintenance. Since the Boeing 767 was designed to be flown by a two-man crew, there was no flight engineer.

So the flight took off on schedule and proceeded smoothly through the skies. The weather was fine, the passengers were undemanding, and the female flight attendants had plenty of time to gossip and plan their evening in San Francisco. There were rumors of a big party at the Mark Hopkins. One hour into the flight, Maryanne went to the cockpit to bring the flight crew a snack. What she saw was a sight of utter chaos. Capt. Ahern was slumped over his controls, lifeless. He had apparently suffered a fatal heart attack. He had no pulse, and was by now clearly beyond saving. Warren Wells, himself, was in the copilot’s chair praying with all his might for Jesus to intervene and save him. He was not attending to the plane (which, fortunately, was on autopilot). Somebody had to take control of the situation, and that somebody had to be Maryanne.

A pilot learns (and an ex-pilot retains) the ability to prioritize instantly. Maryanne realized that the first thing that had to be done was to get the copilot back into a condition where he could fly the plane. She left the cockpit and, with her best “can I get you an extra pillow?” demeanor and smile, went up to Dr. Gold and asked her -- in a whisper -- to come, urgently, to the cockpit. Together, they removed Capt. Ahern’s lifeless body from the pilot’s seat and lay it out along the side. Then Maryanne sat down in his place and tried to familiarize herself anew with the 767’s controls which Marvin had known so well. Warren Wells didn’t say a word, nor did he move to help her. Oblivious to his surroundings, he just prayed to his Savior to save his own soul. Dr. Gold crouched next to him and began talking to him in a low voice, trying to get through to him. Meanwhile, Maryanne contacted the airline’s emergency control center.

Briefly, Maryanne outlined the situation to the controllers. She felt confident that she could keep the airliner on course but was unsure about landing it. She explained that she had a clinical psychologist talking to the copilot and, hopefully, he would come back to normal in a short time and be able to take over flying the plane. The emergency controllers notified air controllers all along the way and a wide path in the sky was cleared around for plane. Maryanne suggested that two sites be warned of a possible emergency landing — Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and Denver International Airport. Should Warren Wells be in a condition to land the plane, he would do so at one of these two. If not, the flight would proceed to Oakland International Airport, which is considered easier to land at than San Francisco International. The controllers did not know, of course, that Maryanne had, in her previous life, extensive experience landing 767’s at all of those sites, nor would they have believed her if she had told them (since her pilot’s experience was not on her CV). She was sure, in any case, that Dr. Gold would manage to bring Warren Wells around before it was time to land.

Only she couldn’t. Dr. Gold was Jewish and, even in the best of times, sometimes found it difficult to relate to evangelical Christians when it came to matters of belief. Under the present circumstances, it was essentially impossible. Warren Wells had worked himself into an ecstatic fit, praying with all his body and soul for salvation. He seemed incapable of communicating with her and she was not sure that he even heard what she said. For a while, he began “babbling in tongues”. It was hopeless. She too, realized the need to prioritize. Since the obvious overriding priority was to land the plane safely, she decided that she had best keep Maryanne on an even keel for the coming emergency landing.

Maryanne, though she kept her outward calm, was in fact tottering psychologically. It had been over three years since she last sat at the controls of an airplane, and when she had last done so, it was with a totally different identity which she had since rejected and tried to bury within her. When she had transitioned, she did not attempt to build a bridge of continuity between the past and the future. Rather, she had rejected her past totally and had been intent on creating a new future. Sitting at the controls brought back memories of Marvin, memories and associations which were, to say the least, highly undesirable and with which she could barely handle even at a normal time, let alone in a time of crisis. Maryanne did not want to be Marvin again, did not want to think like Marvin nor make use of Marvin’s skills; in fact was unsure she was able to do so. Her entire psychological makeup and outlook were now different.

When Dr. Gold turned to her and asked her how she was feeling, she said that she felt she was living one nightmare and, to cope with that, was afraid she would have to start reliving another. Dr. Gold told her to hold up her hand and look at it — slender fingers, with beautiful red nails, and two dainty gold rings. “That is not Marvin’s hand,” she said, “even if it is, for the moment controlling this airplane. Marvin has not returned, nor will he ever return. He doesn’t have to return. The ground control people will talk you down to the ground, just do what they say. Be exactly what you are — an intelligent and courageous member of the cabin crew whose coolness under pressure and steady hand have allowed her to take command and save the lives of the 150 or so people on board.” She then hugged Maryanne tightly. “Just remember, Marvin is not going to land this plane, Maryanne is going to do it by herself.”

While all of this was going on, the flight proceeded smoothly. Maryanne talked to the other flight attendants over the intercom and explained to them that there is some trouble and she would have to remain in the cockpit. However, they should do their best to give the impression of normality. The passengers need not get upset. She suggested that the meal be served a bit early.

Meanwhile, the plane had crossed the Mississippi so that the St. Louis option was now closed. Dr. Gold tried again to get through to the copilot, but to no avail. The emergency control center talked to Maryanne constantly, offering encouragement and having her read off the bearings and try out the controls. In fact, the plane was being tracked by a special satellite system in place for precisely such emergencies. When it was time to make a decision about landing at Denver, they decided to continue on to Oakland, since the Denver airport was very crowded and they could not clear the right runways in time. In the meantime, a flight instructor began giving Maryanne, in a calm and clear voice, instructions on landing the plane, having her first upload to the plane’s computer a special emergency landing program which was relayed to her via an internet link and would allow most of the landing procedure to be handled by controllers on the ground. All this time, Dr. Gold crouched by Maryanne’s side, holding her hand and doing her best to calm her down. Only at the last moment did she belt herself into the jump seat at the rear of the cockpit.

It worked. The landing in Oakland went essentially smoothly. The passengers were told that “due to problems at San Francisco International Airport” the flight had been diverted to Oakland. They had no inkling of the drama that was happening inside the cockpit. As the plane taxied to a standstill at the end of a runway far away from the terminal, Maryanne could finally let out a sign of relief — and then she fainted.
 
 
EPILOGUE
 
 
The airline rewarded Maryanne handsomely for her coolness and courage and offered her a promotion. Since she preferred not to fly again, she was appointed an instructor at the airline’s school for flight attendants, where she is working until this day.
 
 

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The poet John Edward Remington burst onto the literary scene like a meteor. His first book of poetry was published at the age of 21. Three years and four books later, he was a superstar of the sort never seen before in America. Halls, then auditoria, then stadiums filled to capacity by people who came to hear him read. Over 45,000 turned out to hear him in Yankee Stadium, then over 80,000 people came to the Astrodome, then over 100,000 to the Rose Bowl. Rock singers and symphonic orchestras vied for the right to set his works to music. His popularity was compared to that of the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay. But JohnER, as he was popularly known, was more than them; he was something far more spectacular, far more special. In an age when people mourned the death of literacy, and certainly literature, he sold more volumes of poetry in one week than Sandburg and Auden, together, sold in their lifetimes.

But then, at the height of his popularity, Remington disappeared from view. Only after a hiatus of five years, a new volume of Remington’s poetry appeared, entitled “Desperately Seeking Leah”. Unlike his previous vibrant and sensual work, this one was introspective and private. Like Petrarch seeking his Laura, Remington was in search of a mysterious woman, “Leah”, whom he claimed to have met but briefly and to whom he dedicated the entire work. The reviews of this book were mixed, with many critics calling it “derivative” and “self-indulgent”. After that, John Edward Remington wrote no more. Who Leah was, if she really existed at all, nobody was ever able to discern.

It was ten years after the publication of this last book that I set out to find what happened to John Edward Remington. Let me introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth Clay. I am 35 years old, and a PhD student in American literature at the University of Illinois. If I am older than my fellow students, it is because I had spent nine years of my life as an FBI agent before I realized that analyzing literature interested me much more than detecting and solving crimes, and left the Bureau in order to return to school.

After I chose Remington as the topic of my PhD thesis, and set out in search of him, I called in some chits I still had with the Bureau and was able (unofficially, of course) to look at his file in the FBI computer. It seems that, at the age of 19, JohnER had been arrested in connection with a barroom brawl in Chicago. The charges against him were later dropped. However, before that he had been fingerprinted, and a copy of those prints was duly filed in the FBI computer. Now I had a copy of those prints too.

It took me a year of painstaking investigation, and many false leads, but after that period of time I found myself in the college town of Moscow, Idaho. In a cluttered used-book store, not far from the University, I came across a balding middle-aged man who only vaguely resembled the dynamic young man whom groupies by the hundreds used to follow from appearance to appearance and adulate like a rock star. But it COULD be him. I asked the man for a copy of “Desperately Seeking Leah”, and watched carefully as he took it from a shelf and put it in a bag for me without wrapping it. I then took it back to my motel room, carefully dusted it for fingerprints, scanned them into my laptop, and compared them with the prints from the FBI’s file. They were a perfect match!

Here, in the obscurity of the Palouse Valley, selling used textbooks to students and Harlequin romances to bored housewives, I had found the greatest poet America had ever produced.

I returned to the store just as he was getting ready to close for the evening. “You are John Edward Remington,” I said, “and I would like to have a talk with you.” He did not protest. Meekly, he closed the store and led me to a small restaurant two blocks away, where he normally had his dinner. On the way, I told him who I was and how I identified him.

“I have no interest in ‘outing’ you, if you do not wish it,” I assured him. “But I do want to talk to you about your poetry and, first of all, I want to find out about Leah.”

JohnER’s eyes clouded over, he leaned back in his chair, and seemed to enter his own private world. Then, slowly, he began to speak.

“It was at Oberlin College, where I was spending a two-week period as visiting writer in residence. As part of the deal — which was very lucrative I may add -- I was expected to give a series of talks about poetry, illustrated with readings from my works and the works of others, to a select group of English majors. At the first of these lectures, she was sitting in the front row of the room, directly in front of me. She had raven black hair and black eyes, a pale complexion, and radiated femininity in a way that I had never seen in a woman before. She hung on every word I said and, when I recited my own poems, I noticed her lips moving in sync with mine — clearly she knew all of my poems by heart. After the talk, when I talked informally to the students, she remained in the room, but did not come up to the dais to introduce herself, as did most of the others. Instead, her eyes followed every gesture I made, from a distance of several yards away. Nonetheless, I felt her from afar, enveloping me and drawing me to her, without any regard to the other students in the room, some of whom were blatantly and futilely trying to flirt with me.

The next day, she was in the same place. I delivered the talk just to her, trying my best to make eye contact and mind contact with her. Again, at the end of the talk she remained in the room, but did not approach me. This time, however, I walked up to her, and asked her name. She whispered “Leah”, and began to say something more, then suddenly changed her mind and rushed out of the room. It took all of the will power I could summon, to remain calm and not rush after her. I had been totally smitten with a girl who had, so far, said only one word to me.

After the third talk I was bolder. I came up to her and asked her if she would care to have a bite to eat with me. I could see the inner struggle in her, before she finally, with downcast eyes, agreed. I took her to an Indian restaurant near the campus. We talked about poetry, and the role of literature in an electronic-media society. Typical superficial dorm-room or undergraduate-seminar philosophizing, but slowly she unwound a bit and told me about herself. She was a junior, and hoped to be a poet some day. No, she dared not show me anything that she had written. I could not concentrate on her words. It was her presence which overwhelmed me. I felt, as I had never felt before or since, that I had met The Woman, the ultimate icon of femininity the batting of whose eyelash could launch a thousand ships or a thousand sonnets. As we walked back to the campus, I felt like a 15-year-old boy on my first date. I took hold of her hand, lightly. She pulled away, slightly, and then extended her hand back to me. It was so slender, so delicate, like a piece of Meissen china. We stood there and I slowly raised her hand to my lips and kissed it. I then held it against her cheek and lightly kissed them both.

When she tensed up, I knew I had gone too far. Still, I could not let go. The next day was Saturday, and I asked her if she would meet me again in the morning. Again, her painful inner struggle was evident, but in the end she agreed. I could not sleep that night, in anticipation.

We met at 10, and sat under a tree in a secluded part of the campus. I brought her the most special gift I could think of, a sonnet I spent most of the night writing just for her. (It was later published as the first poem in “Desperately Seeking Leah”.) She cried when I finished reciting it to her, and I put her head on my shoulder and kissed her, this time on the lips. She did not resist, but the tears kept on flowing. She was obviously fighting with herself and then — a victory! She put her arms around my neck and returned my kiss with full fervor. Soon, we were deeply entwined and engaged in an act of mutual oral exploration. She was divine. I felt that I had to go farther, farther. My hand slowly found its way under her skirt, and inched its way upward. She tensed and tried to stop me, but not before my fingers touched … her penis.

Before I could say a word, Leah jumped up and ran away, crying. I never saw her again. On Monday, she did not come to my talk. When I went to the rooming house where she told me she lived, I was informed by the landlady that she had moved out on Sunday, and did not leave a forwarding address. Afterwards, I hired the best detective agencies available to try to track her down, but it was no use. She seems to have disappeared off of the face of the planet. Finally, I wrote my last book of poems, dedicated to her, in the hope that she would read them and make contact with me. But she never did.”

He leaned forward, as though trying to regain his lost balance.

“Leah haunts my dreams, day and night, ever since. To me, she was the ultimate woman, even more so because of what I had discovered. She was not a woman by birth, but she was a woman by choice, and therefore even more perfect. She had chosen her goal, and had accomplished it so perfectly that I felt like a crude oaf with my clumsy verses. Having seen a vision of perfection, I found that I could write no more.”

“Perhaps it is you who were mistaken, and still are,” I replied. “You totally misunderstood Leah, and because of your misunderstanding, you were incapable of appreciating her, and therefore lost her.

You say that she chose to be a woman. If that is correct, why did she still have her male sex organs? If she was a junior in college, she certainly had enough ‘real life experience’ living as a female to qualify her for sexual reassignment surgery. Such surgery is not cheap, but it certainly costs less than one semester’s tuition at Oberlin, and so would have certainly been a viable option for somebody who can afford to enroll in an expensive private college and dream of poetry, rather than some more mundane and well-paying profession, as a vocation.

No, Leah did not choose to be a woman, femininity forced itself on her. It was in her when she was born — ‘hardwired’ as the computer geeks would say -- and she could no more have resisted being a woman than you could have resisted being a poet. The fact that she still had her male parts shows that she had not yet come to terms with this. She was still trying to find her way. Maybe she was looking for guidance in poetry — your poetry.

You sensed her inner struggle but misinterpreted it. It was not you she was struggling against. She was trying to find a way of expressing her love for you, for she clearly loved you as deeply as you loved her, in the manner which her feminine nature dictated but consistent with the physical facts of her body.

She needed your love, but your love for her as a person, not as the ideal woman. By treating her not as an individual, but as an icon, you only made things worse for her. No wonder she had to disappear. No wonder she would not respond to your book. You made her vanish with your poetic wand.”

“You cannot be serious,” he said angrily, “you cannot! You don’t you what it was like, and you cannot know what she was like. You are just being contrary."

Under the table, I took his hand in mine, moving it up my skirt. He felt and understood. I knew exactly what I was talking about.

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Acknowledgement: The picture used above, called "Poetry Reading", is by contemporary artist Irene Sheri.

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CHAPTER 1. THE SPECIAL AUDIT

Almost every major corporation, and certainly all of those dealing with defense contracts, has an internal investigations group — an in-house detective agency as it were. This group is usually hidden under some innocuous title where nobody would notice it. At the Wright-Terradyne Corporation (WTC), where I work, it is known as Section 3 of the Special Audits Division of the Company Comptroller’s Office. Sections 1 and 2 of the Special Audits Division are headed by experienced CPA’s and their job is — duh — to perform special audits. Section 3 is headed by Bill Novak, who had 15 years’ experience working with the FBI but who can barely balance his own checkbook. My name is Mary Ingham, and I am one of Bill’s senior investigators.

The case which Bill assigned to me was serious. We had good reason to believe that details of a radically-new satellite-stabilization system which we had developed were being leaked to one of our competitors. At stake was a multi-billion-dollar contract with the Defense Department, and so it was important to locate the leak and plug it quickly. I was given unlimited resources and authority to do what was needed.

A quick check of those who had access to the leaked information and the technical know-how to understand it narrowed the field down to fifteen engineers and project managers. Of these, twelve seemed to be above suspicion — they were married with children, lived within their means, displayed no suspicious behavior, had no unusual spending habits. As far as we could see, they did not have gambling, alcohol, drug, or other problems. They were just good clean-cut citizens leading dull, nerdy, and normal lives. The other three required a more detailed look-see.

The first was Harry Chan, a 45-year-old bachelor who seemed to have no life at all other than his work. He went directly home from work and never left his apartment until the next morning. He did all of his shopping — including grocery shopping and nightly ordering of pizzas — over the internet. In fact, he seemed glued to his computer every minute away from work (and, from what I gather, most of the time at work too). We tapped into his DSL connection and found that Harry’s “life” was split between participation in rather raunchy chat rooms, often several simultaneously, and viewing rather extreme and disgusting pornography (adult stuff only — no kiddy porn; at least that is some consolation). A good part of his time was spent jerking off, and broadcasting this over the net via his webcam. But we could find no evidence that he was in touch with anybody outside the company or that he was passing company secrets to an outsider. His bank account showed no influxes of cash. As far as we could determine, he drank nothing stronger than Diet Pepsi.

The second special case was Martin Orlinsky. Martin was a mathematics freak (though he had studied engineering rather than theoretical mathematics in college) and was obsessed with proving the Goldbach Conjecture — a famous problem in number theory that has been open for the past 200 years and is considered so difficult that few serious mathematicians are willing to sacrifice their careers working on it. Since Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995, the Goldbach Conjecture has become the major target of amateurs and mathematical cranks around the world, and most of them were tied together in a network of internet newsgroups and fora, feeding each other’s egos. Among these were people from North Korea, Iran, China, Syria, and other places that raised red flags on our computer. Martin Orlinsky was an active member of all of these groups. However, after following his activities for a while, we concluded he was just a harmless geek, as were the others. (Six months later we were rather shocked to find that an article of his was published in the prestigious journal Mathematische Annalen and was hailed by senior mathematicians as “a major step forward in eventually solving the Goldbach Conjecture”.)

The third special case was Chris Davis. Chris was a young and very promising engineer, who had been with the company for only five years. He was quiet and lived alone, or so it seemed. However, the first day we staked out his apartment we noticed a very pretty woman leaving it a few hours or so after Chris arrived home. Chris was obviously no monk. She returned that evening, and stayed the night. The next morning, Chris went to work as usual. That afternoon, the same pattern was repeated. The young lady went out shortly after Chris returned home and came back several hours later. Again, she stayed the night. Our taps showed no internet or phone activity from the apartment while she was away, nor did we hear any music, television, or other noise.

We decided to follow the woman, and I assigned two female operatives to the task. They reported that she went to a local mall, window-shopped a bit, tried on some clothes but bought nothing. She then went to a steakhouse and ate dinner by herself, and returned to the apartment. What was Chris doing while she was gone? What did the two of them do after she returned? What did she do during the day while he was at work? Every day the pattern was the same. The woman would leave the apartment, spend a few hours shopping or just walking around, have dinner by herself at the same steakhouse, and then return to Chris’ apartment.

I asked one of the operatives trailing her to make contact, and she did so at the steakhouse, asking if she could share a table. She said the woman, whose name was Linda, was nice enough, and seemed to have nothing to hide. In fact, they had a very enjoyable conversation.

We had to find out what Linda did during the day. One of our men, carrying phone-company credentials, arrived at Chris’ apartment building during the day, when Chris was at work, and persuaded the manager to let him in to check a problem with the lines. The apartment was empty! So where was Linda? She was seen returning the evening before, and nobody had left the apartment during the night. Suddenly I had an inspiration. I brought up on my computer screen pictures of Chris and Linda and scaled them to the same size. I then superimposed one on the other. The bone structures and eyes matched exactly. Eureka! Linda and Chris had to be the same person — in other words, Chris was a secret crossdresser.

Crossdressing is not illegal and WTC, like most big corporations, has learned to accept that form of deviant behavior from its employees. There is even a support group for crossdressers which meets at the company’s Activity Center once every other week. Granted, that sort of thing did not sit well with certain people in the Pentagon and the DoD, who were among our biggest customers, but even they were learning to be tolerant. The important thing was not to try and hide the fact, because attempting to hide any sort behavior left the employee open to possible blackmail. With Bill Novak’s approval, I decided to call Chris in for a talk.

CHAPTER 2. CHRIS AND LINDA

Chris was asked to meet me in one of the conference rooms “in connection with a special audit being conducted into the work of your department.” He arrived promptly. He was neatly dressed and well-groomed, and seemed to be unaware that he was under any suspicion. I pulled a photo of Linda out of the file I had in front of me and asked him of he recognized the person in the picture. He blanched a bit, and then slowly nodded his head.

“That is you, isn’t it?” I said. Again, he nodded, without saying a word.

“Would you like to tell me about it?” I asked. He sat there and didn’t say a word.

“Look,” I said,” there is a major leak in your department and we are checking everyone very carefully. Anyone with anything to hide is a suspect. Now if you have something to tell us, it is best to come right out and tell it. We will find out the truth anyway, and there is no point in allowing things to get rough.”

Chris sat there looking glum for a few seconds, and then put his face in his hands, as though he were going to cry. Then he looked at me and began his story.

“You think that I am a crossdresser, and I suppose that technically you are right. However, it is not at all what you believe. The situation is much more complicated.

First of all, Linda is, in some sense, ‘the real me’. Biologically, I am not a male, I am female. If you want, I can prove it to you by getting undressed or by giving you a sample of my DNA. The name on my birth certificate is Linda Christine Davis. However, ever since I was around 6 years old I was convinced that I was ‘really’ a boy inside and insisted on being called Chris rather than Linda. At first, my parents humored me, thinking that I was just going through a ‘tomboy’ stage, as many girls do. But I never got over it. I wore only boys’ clothes, cut my hair short, and hung out with boys as a boy. Even in school, the teachers got used to calling me Chris and treating me like a boy. By the time my parents realized that something was wrong, I was big enough and mean enough to frighten them into living with my behavior. I must say that I was somewhat of a terror as a teenager. When my breasts started growing, I bound them with Ace bandages. When I started getting a period, I took steps to make sure that it did not impinge on my macho image or behavior. I even picked up girls.

When I went to college, I deliberately enrolled in engineering school -- a boy thing to do -- and continued to behave like a male. I was registered under the name of Chris Davis and while I expect that, somewhere in my records, there is an “F” in the appropriate “sex” box, nobody seems to have paid attention to it.

I had intended to have my breasts surgically removed and undertake sexual reassignment surgery after I completed college, but somehow kept on pushing the date back, ostensibly because of the cost involved but in fact because I was a bit afraid of the finality of it all. Even though I am convinced that I am a man ‘inside’, somehow I found it hard to translate that conviction into concrete surgical steps. Finally, last year, I sat down and assessed my position. I realized that I had to make up my mind. After thinking things over carefully, I came to the conclusion that my life had passed a point of no return and that — whatever fears were lurking in me — I was stuck in a male life forever. I therefore contacted the office of the noted gender surgeon Dr. Jayne Mautner, who has recently begun doing female-to-male sexual reassignment surgery as well as male-to-female surgery, and asked her to operate on me. She explained to me that I must first undergo a psychological screening by her in-house psychologist, Dr. Catherine Gold. I assumed that this was just a formality to limit Dr. Mautner’s legal liabilities, but it turned out to be far from that.

Dr. Gold subjected me to a long series of psychological tests, as well as extensive interviews, after which she told me that she was unconvinced that I was a true transsexual and that, in her opinion, I should reassess whether I truly wanted to be a man. She suggested that I try living as Linda for a period of a few months, just so that I could see what that would be like. I told her that it was impossible because of my job, and we arrived at a compromise. I would continue going to work at WTC as Chris, but as soon as I came home I would change into being Linda — not the tomboy I had grown up to be, but Linda a young woman in her late twenties who has the world before her.

This experiment was to last three months and you people caught me two weeks before the end.”

I asked Chris what he had concluded.

“I am not sure,” replied Chris. “I have encountered a Linda which I had really never known, whom I really never let emerge during her girlhood. I think she now deserves a chance. I think that I would like to be her full-time, at least for a while. That does not mean that Chris will disappear — after all, Linda may turn out to get a kick from crossdressing at times. But I doubt if there will be any surgery in my future.”

“Dr. Gold is a very wise woman,” I said. “I was very impressed by her the first time I met her. She explained to me once that all too many people diagnose themselves as transsexuals on flimsy or uncertain grounds and are ready to hop under a knife -- in a foreign country if necessary -- only to regret it after the irreversible fact. That is why there are so many suicides among post-ops. She was really very concerned that the multiplication of TG-oriented websites and chat rooms is enticing people to come to facile conclusions that they end up regretting later, when it is too late to turn back."

“I am surprised you know her,” said Chris.

“Oh yes, I have known her for many years.” I replied. “In fact, I even underwent the same battery of tests you took — only in my case she had no problem approving my operation.”

AFTERMATH.

I made arrangements to have Chris’ corporate identity changed to Linda and to have her transferred to another of WTC’s many engineering centers. Indeed, she ended up getting a slight promotion along the way. Dr. Gold phoned me and thanked me for my efforts. Linda and I have become good friends. We often go out together, with or without dates. She tells me about her experiences with Drs. Mautner and Gold, and I tell her about mine, and about what having the operation is like. When she feels that she misses Chris, I suggest that I would be very honored if he were to emerge and escort me to the opera or some such event. We both have a wonderful time.

As far as the leak is concerned, I went back and examined the twelve others who were “above suspicion”. Sure enough, it turned out that the father-in-law of one of them had had a major stroke the year before and had to be moved to a quite expensive managed-care geriatric home. The tab for his stay was being picked up by someone who turned out to be a senior employee of our competitor. It took only a few hours of Bill Novak’s “intensive interrogation” for the man to confess.

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The traditions of our tribe are matrilineal. The children of a wedded woman belong primarily to her and not to her husband, and she belongs primarily to her mother and not to her spouse. Should a married woman die, leaving behind small children, and should her mother still be alive, the mother has the right to choose from among the woman’s siblings a “substitute mother”, whom the widower is then obliged to marry, to replace her deceased daughter as mother of the grandchildren.

This tradition is very strong and never to be questioned. And so, when my sister Sidi died suddenly of a fever, leaving behind a two-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter, and when my mother came to me and told me that I was chosen to be their substitute mother, I knew that I had no alternative but to obey. Sidi’s husband did protest a bit, questioning whether I was old enough (I had just reached the age of 12) to be a mother and wife, but my mother insisted and so, on the appointed day, I was adorned with the special clothes and jewelry of a bride, and he and I were married according to the tribe’s rites and rituals. That evening, after the ritual feast, I moved into my new husband’s compound.

My husband is a kind and gentle man whom I looked up to ever since he married Sidi. He realized that it would take time for me to learn how to function as a mother and head of household so he did not press himself on me with impossible demands at the onset. The other married women of the tribe were also very kind and helpful; they came to visit me often and helped me learn how to manage the household and my new family, giving me invaluable tips and sage advice, especially on how to feed the children — given that I had no milk in my breasts for them. A few women even took me aside and explained to me how to satisfy my husband when he called me to his bed, for the satisfaction of his desires is part of a grown woman’s job in life.

Slowly I adapted from the role of a child to my new role as a married woman, and before six months were up I, too, sat with the other young married women in the shade of the trees next to the village well, watching the babies play with each other while we gossiped and braided each other’s hair. When one of the women became fat with child, we would all hug her and rub our bellies against hers so that her good fortune would pass into us. We giggled at stories of men who called their wives into their hut, and then were unable to perform, and oohed-and-aahed at tales of extraordinary feats by others.

I am sure my husband loves me, and I have grown to love him very much. I clearly intend to be the best of all wives to him, and the best of all mothers to my adopted children. I know that it will take time, and I know that I have the patience to do it.

My husband, like the other men in the village, tried to work a small plot of land to grow food. But the earth near our village is not very fertile, and the rains have been erratic for the past two years, so his efforts came to naught. In the end he, like most of the other men of the village, went to work for the agents of the British colonial government who were building a road from the capital of Lagos into the interior. They would be gone for two weeks at a time and then return together in a lorry, bringing sacks of corn, yams, and other foodstuffs on which they spent their pay. After two days’ rest, the lorry would come to take them back to the construction site. The night of the men’s return would be celebrated with a singing and dancing until, late into the night, each man would take his wife back to his hut for a private continuation of the festivities.

On one such occasion, my husband brought me a special present. The day before, Mr. Huddleston -- one of the British overseers -- had called him off of the site and told him to go to the overseer’s home. The Huddlestons were returning to England after spending ten years in our country of Nigeria, and Mrs. Huddleston needed help loading the many boxes and packs containing their belongings onto a lorry. At the end of the day’s work, Mrs. Huddleston asked him if he was married and, when he said he was, she gave him a bundle of some of her old clothes which she had decided not to take back with her to Northampton. They were very beautiful, though rather unsuitable for wearing in the village. I therefore selected two of the best-fitting dresses to save for an appropriate occasion, and from the rest I intended to salvage the cloth and sew for myself some garments more fitting for everyday wear.

For many months, there was no occasion for me to wear one of my fancy dresses, though I did show them off to my friends. Then, one day, a missionary couple arrived and settled in a derelict compound on the outskirts of our village, which they repaired and turned into a makeshift church. The missionary’s name was Dr. Horace Humphries (“just call me HoHum,” he used to say when he introduced himself, laughing loudly at his own joke) and he came from the tribe of Nebraska in the country of America, a land of white people even farther away from us than Britain.

Dr. and Mrs. HoHum were very friendly people. They went from compound to compound, introducing themselves and inviting the villagers to come to their church on the following Sunday. Since the men were away working on the road on that day, three of us decided to go, just to see what it was like, and I took the opportunity to wear one of my special dresses. It was long and red and had buttons on the back which I had to ask one of my friends to fasten for me. I felt very much like a grand English lady wearing it, though it would be nicer if I had had shoes to go along with it.

The “service” at the church was interesting, though I did not understand very much about what was going on. Since there were only five people — Dr. and Mrs. HoHum and three villagers, it was very informal. Mrs. HoHum sang several hymns while Dr. HoHum accompanied her on a small musical instrument which he held in his mouth and which, he explained, was called a “harmonica”. Then Dr. HoHum spoke about the baby Jesus and about how he was reborn to bring us love and how he died for our sins. I am not sure I understood much of it, but I felt very pretty in my dress and Mrs. HoHum was very impressed and said that I looked like a very proper married woman. She was rather shocked to hear that I was not yet fourteen years old.

The next day, Mrs. HoHum visited me in my compound to thank me again for coming to church, and brought me a present — a picture of Jesus to hang on the wall. I will place it next to the picture of the British king George, which was distributed to everyone by the colonial authorities a few years ago. Both Jesus and King George have the same pale face and sad eyes.

I proudly showed off my two children and she was very surprised that someone as young as I could already by the mother of two. So I explained to her about my sister Sidi and about the traditions of the tribe which required me to take Sidi’s place as the wife of my husband and mother of the children she left behind when she died. Mrs. HoHum was very sympathetic. She felt that for me to take over the care of my sister’s children and husband was a very Christian thing to do. She said that my children and husband were very lucky indeed that Sidi had a younger sister who could take her place, and was willing to do so.

“You don’t understand.” I told her. “Sidi had no sisters; I am her younger brother.”

A multipart story ...

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CHAPTER 1: DAUGHTER OF A DICTATOR

She was the daughter of a dictator. Her father, General Ximenes, ran his South-American country the old-fashioned way, with an iron hand. He was an old soldier, with an old soldier’s way of looking at things. Whatever tenderness he had, he lavished on his only offspring. Every move of his darling blonde Rose was widely publicized. The whole country watched on television (there was only one channel, run by the government) as she took her first baby steps. When she blew out the candles on her sixth-birthday cake, the event was commemorated on a postage stamp (ostensibly issued to mark World Children’s Day, though nobody checked if such a day really existed, or when precisely it fell). She became the Daughter of the Nation and, since she was beautiful, cheerful, and intelligent, the country took her to heart. She was the Yellow Rose of the Andes, to whom poems and novels were regularly dedicated by the country’s best writers and songs were sung by the country’s foremost singers.

My name is Juan. I was Rose’s closest playmate. I was roughly her age (a difference of two months), the son of the dreaded Minister of the Police in General Ximenes’ government. Rose and I were brought up by the same nanny, and later taught by the same private tutors. Though my image was kept out of the public view, there is no doubt that I was closer to Rose than anybody else in the country.

Dictators meet their end, as a rule, very suddenly and that was definitely true for General Ximenes. After 16 years in power he was overthrown in a lightning coup purportedly in the name of restoring the rights of the common people but actually managed by a junta of young army officers looking for higher pay and a share of the graft which had been flowing mostly into General Ximenes’ private accounts in Switzerland. Rose and I were 12 years old at the time. We were with our mathematics tutor when the coup started with the ritual strafing of the presidential palace by an Air Force warplane, the traditional opening signal of Latin American coups. Two of the General’s aides came running into the classroom and whisked both of us away into a waiting limousine which sped out of the back gate of the palace compound to a nearby airfield, where a private plane was kept fueled and waiting for precisely such emergencies. We were flown to Mexico, to a remote hacienda owned secretly by General Ximenes. There, we transferred to another private plane, this one with the markings of a Canadian mining corporation (also owned secretly by General Ximenes) and flew to Montreal. At the airport we waited for some more of General Ximenes’ familiars to arrive and then flew in a chartered Boeing 747 to Nice, France, from which we travelled in a caravan of cars to a large and remote farm, owned by General Ximenes.

On the flight to France, Rose and I both learned that our parents had been killed in the coup, which had been successful. As we hugged each other and cried, we also realized that we were headed for exile, from which there was likely to be no return.

Fortunately, we were not paupers. General Ximenes had salted away over $500,000,000 in various Swiss bank accounts, and had considerable property and stock holdings as well. My father’s share of the gross national graft, though not on the same scale, was still considerable and amounted to over $50,000,000. We were without a country, but not without means.

The French government, while publically condemning General Ximenes’ regime for years, had no problems granting us political asylum (after the appropriate palms were greased, needless to say). Further bribes to the local police insured that we were not bothered by representatives of the new government who had the wild idea that the money somehow belonged to them and ought to be paid back.

After six months had passed, the situation at our farm had stabilized, more or less. There were a hundred of us “refugees” (not counting servants and secretaries), led — if one can use the word — by Dr. Alvarez, the former Minister of Justice in the general’s cabinet. Obviously, all thoughts were on how to make it back home, and into power, again. Fortunately, we were being “helped” by the incompetence of the junta which had taken power. The leaders of that group immediately started arguing among themselves, and before very long Air Force warplanes again strafed the presidential palace. By the time a year was up, the junta had been replaced by another dictator, who was greedier and definitely less able than General Ximenes. Behind him lurked a shadowy group of drug barons, who had not been allowed to operate in the country during the Ximenes regime. There was no doubt that the situation was deteriorating, and public-opinion polls, which we surreptitiously conducted, showed that there was a strong undercurrent of yearning for a return to the political stability which the old general had somehow symbolized.

Dr. Alvarez decided to capitalize on this sentiment by promoting Rose as a possible future leader. Stories were planted in the press describing the beautiful Yellow Rose of the Andes growing up far away from her home, pining to return and bring order and happiness to the people, for whose plight she cried daily. Excerpts from “Rose’s diary” were leaked, showing her worries and concerns only for the welfare of her homeland. He even managed to arrange for a carefully-scripted interview with her to be aired on CNN and then have copies of the tape distributed widely. As time passed, the myth of “the Yellow Rose of the Andes waiting to return to her homeland” was slowly and carefully built up.

Meanwhile, Rose and I were growing up and behaving just like the thousands of other rich spoiled expatriate teenagers living in the south of France. We swam in the Mediterranean and skied in the Alps. We smoked, drank, and experimented with drugs (though not very seriously). We gambled in Monte Carlo and sunned ourselves on the beaches of the Riviera. We were only 16.

And then the tragedy happened. Much to Dr. Alvarez’ consternation, Rose had been dating the son of Prince Hammed Abu Musa, a member of the Saudi royal family. They were returning to Nice in his prize souped-up vintage MG sports car, when it overturned on a rain-slick road, killing both passengers.

The day after Rose’s funeral, a “council of war” was held at the farm. Without Rose, there was no hope of return home or certainly to power. Fortunately, Dr. Alvarez had been able to keep the news of Rose’s death from becoming publicized. After the payment of a rather large sum to the head of the local constabulary (and a similar payment by the prince), the official report of the accident simply mentioned that the victims were two teenagers, carrying no identification papers. The discussions about our future lasted all day, and most of the next day too. Needless to say, I did not participate. However, on the afternoon of the second day, I was summoned to the room in which the deliberations were taking place, and found myself in a semicircle of very worried men.

Dr. Alvarez quickly explained the situation to me. Without Rose as a figurehead, not only was our last chance of return to our homeland lost, but also the glue which held the group together. It was most likely that many of the people in the room would leave the farm for good, taking with them not only their money but also their influence with the French and Swiss governments. It was known that considerable pressure was being placed on those governments to freeze our financial assets. Unless we were able to present a united front, and show that we had some hope of returning to power, we could not hold out.

“But Rose is dead,” I replied, “and we cannot change that.” “Well,” said Dr. Alvarez, “Rose is dead but, officially, nobody knows that other than the people in this room. Our only hope is to find somebody to take Rose’s place -- somebody to become Rose, for all practical purposes. There is only one person in the world that can do it, only one person who knew Rose so well, and who was fully acquainted with all of the minute details and secrets of her life. That person is you! Juan — the future of all of us is in your hands. We want you to become Rose.”

“But I am a boy.” I protested. “How can I become Rose?”

“It is not impossible,” replied Dr. Alvarez. “You are the same size and build as Rose. A small amount of plastic surgery can make you look very much like her. Other, quite routine, surgery can turn you into a girl for all practical purposes. With suitable coaching, you should be able to pass as Rose quite easily within, say, a year. Think about it Juan, think about the possibility of returning home in triumph, of becoming president of the state. Think of the honors and the glory.”

Think about being turned into a girl! No way! But I did think about it, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed like an alluring idea. I was thin and scrawny, not a big and muscular type which the girls on the Riviera liked. I had no great talents and, quite frankly, my education at the hands of private tutors was not the best. Should our community disintegrate, and should my funds evaporate, I would have nothing to fall back on and very little to look forward to. I was, and would be, nothing. On the other hand, Rose was the golden girl. Rose was the legend. Being Rose meant being adored by millions of people. Even when we were children, she was the one who was always in the limelight, always in front of the cameras. I was the one always held in the shadows so that I would not be seen impinging on the national icon. Now I had a chance to become that icon. Should I do it? Could I do it?

I told Dr. Alvarez that I was willing to try, and he set the appropriate wheels in motion. It took not one year but five! For five very long years, I was trained, coached, groomed, disciplined and conditioned. My face, my body, and my genital area were operated on. I suffered failures, doubts, and misgivings. I savored minor successes and, later, major ones. I had even been initiated into sex as a woman by an (albeit somewhat minor) Italian rock star. I was now Rose, and ready to burst forth in bloom.

CHAPTER 2: DAUGHTER OF THE NATION

“I, Rose Ximenes, do solemnly swear to uphold our sacred constitution, to safeguard the lives and rights of the people, and to govern our nation in their name to the best of my ability. So help me God.”

With these words, I was sworn in as the new president of our great republic. I was 25 years old, and had spent more than half of my life in exile. During that time, my poor unhappy land had suffered under a succession of military coups, counter-coups, juntas, and dictatorships. Seven men had held the title of “president” in the past 13 years. Only one of those was still alive, and he is in exile in Iran, where he has conveniently converted to Islam and changed his name to Haj Ali Mustafa. The others all died defending their grasp on power, either at the hands of their successors or (in two cases) by their own hand. My immediate predecessor shot himself in the head after his palace was strafed by the Air Force warplane routinely held in readiness for such operations and surrounded by tanks the commanders of which also wanted to get into the act. Why should the Air Force have all of the glory of initiating the downfall of the president?

I was brought back by popular clamor. Throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of citizens poured out of their homes into the streets and plazas, each waving a symbolic yellow rose. A delegation of members of Parliament came to visit me in exile, and begged me to return to my homeland. It is ironic that Dr. Alvarez, who had worked so hard to make this day possible, did not live to see it. On hearing that I had been recalled to take control of the country, he had an apoplectic fit and died on the spot. His coffin will be returned to the capital, and reburied in the National Cemetery.

This does not mean that I lack advisors. A few of my father’s old confidants have returned from France with me, but I am mainly surrounded by new men, sons of some of our nation’s most important oligarchs whom I met when I was in exile. They are young men: men who see the future, and who know how to direct the nation’s resources to areas which will make it great -- nanotechnology, biotechnology, and genetic engineering. One of them, for example, has set up an extremely advanced center for research in crystalline tropane alkaloids, and he assures me that we can easily become a world leader in their production. I will definitely encourage him in this project, and divert some government funds for that purpose.

At the reception following my inauguration, I looked at myself in the mirror. I am, I must admit it, stunningly beautiful. Of course, the best French fashion designers and makeup artists, flown in for the occasion from Paris, had something to do with it, but a great part of it is my natural beauty. Even as a little girl, I was very beautiful — or so everyone keeps telling me. The orchestra, in the background, is playing a medley of the many tunes dedicated to me on my eighth birthday, oh so long ago. To celebrate my inauguration, a book containing many of the poems which were dedicated to me as a child has been reissued, illustrated by some of the foremost artists in Latin America. At my insistence, the funds raised from the sale of the book will go to various programs for children’s welfare.

My escort to the inaugural ball is Marco Baggio from Turino. He is the son of one of the wealthiest men in Italy, whom I met one wild night in Cannes. He claims he is madly in love with me. Marco promised that he will persuade his father to invest large sums in the industrial development of my country. In particular, we have plans for building the world's largest factory to manufacture synthetic entactogens of phenethylamine -- a product for which there is a steady worldwide demand. He knows he must make good on that promise, at least if he ever wants to get in bed with me. You see, unlike my father, I am really and truly interested in the economic development of my country, and will do everything in my power — and beautiful women have many more tools to play with — to encourage it. But there will be no compromises — first invest, then embed.

You must think that I have forgotten that I was not born Rose Ximenes. After all, I talk about “my father” and “my eighth birthday” as though these things were really mine. No, that is not true at all. I remember Juan, remember him well. This is especially so at night, when I let my manicured fingers roam to the area where I once kept my “crown jewels”, now sold in the name of ambition and fame. When I am in bed with a man, I cannot help comparing his equipment with that which I formerly had. I was quite well-endowed when I was a boy, if I say so myself, and so, in most cases the men I bring home flunk the test. But I enjoy them anyway, for my present body has its own demands, and my country needs me.

That is not to say that I do not enjoy being Rose. Rose was a beautiful girl, and I honor her memory by being a beautiful woman. Rose was witty and intelligent, and I do my best to be even more so. Rose was loved by the people, and I intend to do my utmost to return that love.

Why did I agree to become Rose Ximenes? When Rose died, as I mentioned before, we were 16. While we played the role of spoiled kids, and enjoyed it, we did have a serious side to ourselves. Without letting our tutors and Dr. Alvarez know, we read together some of the material distributed by the more enlightened opposition groups to her father’s regime, and found out the very shocking truth about her father and mine. To put it very bluntly, we realized that her father was a thief on a colossal scale, and mine was a sadist and a murderer. Dr. Alvarez was no better — his title should have been Minister of Perverted Justice. We were well aware that we were living on funds plundered from the poor people of our land. One night, Rose and I vowed that, should she ever manage to get in power, she would do her best to right the wrongs done to the land by her father and mine, to wash all of the dirty linen in public if necessary, and to work to bring real prosperity to a country that has been raped repeatedly by its leaders.

When Rose died, I saw that vow as her testament, and I felt it my duty to do my all to fulfill it. I would do everything I could to bring justice and prosperity to my country, and if it meant sacrificing my manhood and my identity to do so — well others have sacrificed so much more.

I do not find it hard to be Rose. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” wrote John Keats. If it is a joy to see, how much more of a joy is it to be. I enjoy being a pretty woman, I enjoy having men ogle at me and undress me with their eyes. I enjoy wearing chic clothes, having my hair styled just right, and putting on my makeup with flair. But I also enjoy the power that goes with being a beautiful woman and when that power is coupled with political power, who knows where it will take me.

MEMO TO MYSELF: Scrap all of the warplanes in the Air Force. We won’t be needing them any more.

A multipart story ...

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CHAPTER 1. PAPERS

Her immigration permit was stamped

W. O. P.

which stands for “with out papers”. That means that the personal information which she provided

NAME: Antonia Bocci

SEX: female

AGE: 25

PLACE OF BIRTH: Angri, Italy

was not backed up by any documentation. The immigration officer at Ellis Island knew, as did just about everybody else, that “Italy” - as Metternich is said to have put it - was a geographic expression, not really a country. It did not have the governmental infrastructure that could provide reliable documentation on births or deaths. However, this did not, in itself, mean that Antonia could not legally enter the United States. After all, the USA welcomed immigrants, at least those from Europe. The officer who handled Antonia remembered that his own mother had come from Ireland forty years before with more hope than papers. She worked hard; she succeeded to some measure, married a local man, and her children were fully Americans. He had looked at Antonia sadly. She was almost sure to end up in the sweatshops of the garment district of Manhattan or Brooklyn, working 14 hours a day at a starvation wage. But she was healthy and cheerful-looking and would undoubtedly meet some nice man too and get married and raise a family. Her children, too, will be fully Americans. Her grandchildren, in all probability, would not be able to conduct a conversation with her in Italian, just as his children could not talk to their grandmother in Gaelic and the children of his colleague at the next window, Dan Cass (born Daniel Katzenellenboigen) could not talk to their grandmother in Yiddish. Welcome to the melting pot!

The immigration officer smiled back at the nervous young woman and added the final stamp to her permit.

Next!

CHAPTER 2. THE SEAMSTRESS

Antonia too smiled as she left the great hall clutching her satchel of belongings and her permit. Every bit of information written on it was wrong. Care and a hard life made her look 25, but she was in fact only 19. She was not born in Angri, but in Montecito. More importantly, she was not female, though she did dress and behave like a woman. Under her skirt, she was biologically male. And the name given to her at her christening was Antonio, not Antonia.

Antonio Bocci knew, by the age of five, that something was wrong. He understood that children were divided into two distinct groups: boys and girls. He did not understand why he was somehow put in the “boys” group and not in the “girls” group. He felt much more in common with his sisters and with the other girls his age than he did with the boys. No matter how much his mother (who died when he was six) his father, and the priest tried to explain it to him, he kept on repeating that he didn’t care what he had or didn’t have between his legs. He knew that he was a girl with as much certainty that he knew that he was a Catholic - probably more, actually, but he thought it best not to mention that to the priest. Antonio’s father was a simple man and had a simple man’s method of dealing with something that could not be explained to a stubborn child - beat it into him. The result was a state of constant warfare between father and (purported) son which ended when, at the age of 12, Antonio ran away from home. His father did not make superhuman efforts to find and return him.

For the next two years, Antonio survived by wits and cunning, drifting vaguely westward from Montecito and living by occasional odd jobs, begging, and stealing. During the winter, he slept in deserted buildings, in barns and in stables; during the summer, under the skies. He bathed in streams and stole food from the fields. Occasionally he managed to land a fish or kill a small animal for meat. Then, one day, he had a lucky break. As he passed a farmhouse not far from the town of Angri, he saw girl’s clothes hanging on a clothesline to dry. He took one dress and tried it on; it fit perfectly. Crossing himself and uttering a short prayer of thanks for what he was sure was a sign from God if not an outright a miracle, he took all of the remaining clothes and tied them into a bundle which he made from a sheet, also taken from the clothesline. He then disappeared into the forests.

A week later, Antonia Bocci made her way into the town of Angri. She told a sad tale of being orphaned from her family, all of whom were killed when their farmhouse burned down after a lightning strike. In the end, she was taken in by a local widow, a seamstress, as a combined apprentice and servant. Signora Gambolati turned out to be a kind woman. Not only did she teach Antonia her profession, she also helped her learn the deportment and manners of “a proper lady”. She found out Antonia’s secret after a few months - one cannot live in close proximity with a young girl without seeing what is to be seen - but was unfazed by it. After Antonia broke down and told her the whole story of her life, she took Antonia’s head and held it tightly to her breast. “You are a sweet girl, Antonia,” she said, “no matter how you were born. I can only wish that more young ladies would realize that being a woman is a privilege, not an automatic right.” Antonia cried and hugged her tightly. And so Signora Gambolati took it upon herself to help Antonia learn to be a woman. She became the substitute for the mother whom Antonia barely remembered and guided her through the difficult years of puberty. She showed Antonia how to permanently remove unwanted hairs from her face and body using a honey-and-wax mixture. Fortunately, there were not that many of these. Also, fortunately, Antonia’s voice never broke.

Of course, a teenage girl, and a pretty one at that, cannot escape the attention of the boys. In particular, a young man named Francesco Raffaele Nittoni paid special attention to the beautiful apprentice seamstress. Antonia liked him, and allowed him to kiss her one day in the street behind the church, and many times thereafter. However, she would not allow him to “go further”, and he respected it. Slowly, Antonia fell in love with him, and he seemed to reciprocate. However, their relationship was cut short when Francesco’s father - who had immigrated to America several years before - sent money for his wife and children to follow him to the New World. Antonia and Francesco said a tearful goodbye, and - inwardly - Antonia vowed to herself that one day she too would cross the oceans to meet him again.

CHAPTER 3. THE PASSAGE

Antonia confided her plan to Signora Gambolati. She scrimped and saved as best she could, but it was hard going. Finally, after two years, Signora Gambolati said that they needed to have a serious talk. “I am getting old, Antonia, and my eyes are beginning to fail me” she said sadly. “I can no longer continue my work. I have therefore decided to leave Angri and move in with my widowed sister in Pagliano. You have been like a daughter to me, but there is no room in my sister’s house for you too. Therefore, I am afraid that we must part. I want to give you one last present, and thank you for all you have done for me. You have been the daughter I never had.”

Signora Gambolati handed Antonia an envelope. When Antonia opened it, she saw that it contained some money and, most importantly, a paid-up ticket entitling her to one steerage-class passage to New York on a boat leaving Naples in two months’ time.

And indeed, two months later, Antonia was among the horde of people packed into the steerage accommodations of a rusting and barely-safe Greek-owned steamship headed for New York. She slept in a narrow wooden bunk bed (four levels high) in a crowded poorly-ventilated room full of the sound of screaming children and the smells of vomit and urine from the overflowing and inadequate toilets. Surviving the passage through rough seas was an ordeal which few would forget and some could not endure (over fifty of the steerage passengers died on the trip; their bodies were unceremoniously thrown overboard by the crew) but when she managed to get on deck and see the Statue of Liberty raising her torch of freedom as they entered New York harbor, all was forgotten and forgiven.

CHAPTER 4. GROWING GRAPES IN ILLINOIS

Antonia stood on the dock and thought about the immensity of her transition. From a runaway Italian boy, living off the land as best he could, she had become an American woman. She was not a citizen yet - that would take time, she knew - but she was a legal immigrant with everything to look forward to. More importantly, she was legally a woman, and had the papers to prove it. She knew she was pretty and even desirable in the eyes of men - every male under the age of 40 on the boat (including members of the crew), so it seemed, made passes at her. She had told them all that her fiancé, Francesco, was waiting for her in America. Perhaps “fianc锝 was too strong a word, but in her imagination she could see herself walking down the aisle in church with him at her side. If only … .

Antonia wanted to find Francesco, of course, but had no idea how or where to begin. In any case, she first had to get settled. She had heard enough about the tenements and sweatshops of New York to know that she did not intend to stay there. Fortunately, she had another alternative worked out.

European immigrants tended to congregate on the East Coast, where they arrived, unless they were transported farther westward, usually under the aegis of a “settlement company”. These companies would buy government land in the west cheaply or obtain it under the Homestead Act, usually fairly near a railroad line. They would then invest a certain amount of money in building materials and farming or other equipment, and bring in a group of settlers from Europe to work the land, often with an option of later buying it from the company. Each group of immigrants came from the same area, often from the same village. They brought the customs of the old country with them, and frequently the place names as well. Thus, Swiss dairy farmers settled in southern Wisconsin in towns they named New Glarus, New Berne and Lake Geneva, Norwegian and Swedish loggers settled in the forests of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, and so forth.

The settlement companies were usually formed with the idea of making a profit, but sometimes they were “philanthropically” organized by members of various immigrant associations who sincerely felt that they were helping their compatriots find a new and better life. One such company was the Columbus Settlement Society (CSS), founded in New York by wealthy Italian-Americans to help newer immigrants move out of the eastern seaboard. The CSS had several projects under consideration, but the largest of them concerned the Tolland Valley in southern Illinois.

The project began with a proposal by a St. Louis attorney named Marco Grimaldi, who sent them a copy of a long report by Prof. Harold McCann of the University of Illinois School of Agriculture showing that the Tolland Valley, hitherto unsettled, was ideal for raising wine grapes. Prof. McCann’s detailed study - over five hundred printed pages in length and full of drawings, charts, graphs and tables - considered all aspects of the Tolland Valley from a geological, meteorological, and hydrological point of view. While Illinois is usually not considered grape country, the particular soils in the Tolland Valley, coupled by the protection from the winds afforded by the surrounding hills and the abundance of good water sources, made it ideal for that purpose. Attorney Grimaldi proposed that CSS purchase the entire Tolland Valley and organize a large group of Italian wine growers to come and settle there. Members of the CSS were enthusiastic and agreed to the proposal. They authorized Attorney Grimaldi to purchase the land and change its name to New Benevento. He was also to incorporate a new company, New Benevento Vinyards. Wine experts were sent to Italy to organize a group of expert wine growers and arrange for the shipment of cuttings of the best vines to bring with them. This project was sure to be a great success (and, by the way, insure a nice profit for the CSS). All details were planned in the most meticulous way possible. Large sums of money were sent to Attorney Grimaldi to insure that sufficient building material and food supplies for the entire group be brought to New Benevento by the time the settlers arrived.

The members of the New Benevento group sailed on the same ship that carried Antonia and she befriended them. She enjoyed the company of several of the group’s members, and especially that of Giovanni Fortunato, one of the leaders who was both very smart and very hardsome. If her circumstances weren’t what they were, she thought, she would surely fall in love with him. When one of the women in the group - who was to be the town’s seamstress - died during the passage, Giovanni asked her if she would like to join the group. She gladly accepted.

So, three days after she disembarked from her ship in New York, Antonia climbed onto a railway carriage which was to take her far to the west. The train was a special one, chartered by the CSS. It carried not only the settlers but also all of their precious grape cuttings, their agricultural equipment, and other materials necessary for wine making. Nothing was left to chance and no expense was spared. As she and the others sped along the tracks, they fantasized about their new home and the paradise which awaited them.

It wasn’t there! The Tolland Valley turned out to be a swamp, must unsuitable for any sort farming, let alone growing grapes. True, there were plenty of sources of water - too many, in fact, for the poor drainage to handle. The soil was unsuitable and rocky. The hills did not block the winds which howled off of the plains. The promised construction materials and food which attorney Grimaldi was to have purchased did not appear. One of the leaders of the group rode to Urbana only to come back with the news that, according to the secretary of the School of Agriculture, nobody named Harold McCann had been on the faculty of the University of Illinois in the past 25 years. Another returned from St. Louis saying that Mark Grimm, aka Marcus Grimstein, aka Marco Grimaldi had been disbarred by the Missouri Bar Association after being indicted as part of another land scam there. His matter was still in court but he had apparently skipped bail and disappeared. His present address was unknown.

The representative of the CSS who had accompanied the New Benevento group was devastated by the events but there was nothing he could do. He telegraphed the details to the society’s executive committee, which could only sit back and calculate the amount of money which they had poured down the drain. The land deeds themselves, fortunately, were in their hands (though they did not know that Marco Grimaldi had paid much less for the land than he reported to the CSS) but everything else was a total loss. Moreover, it was unlikely that they would be able to raise any more capital to help the settlers whom they had now left stranded in the middle of nowhere. The best they could do is come up with the following offer: the deeds to the land and the agricultural equipment would be distributed gratis among those of the settlers who wanted to stay in the Tolland Valley. Those who wished to leave would be offered free railway tickets back to New York and a minimal financial compensation. Nobody would be asked to recompense the CSS for the cost of their travel from Italy to America, as had been specified in their original contracts.

The CSS’ offer split the members of the group. Most elected to return to New York and make the best of it, the same as hundreds of thousands of other immigrants, even if it meant giving up the agricultural way of life they had known. A minority decided to remain. These were dedicated farmers who thought that something of the situation could be saved. Foremost among these was Giovanni Fortunato, who was convinced that the drainage problem in the valley could be solved by building a canal connecting several of the creeks, and by clearing a certain blocked-up area. It would be hard work, but it could be done. If the settlers managed to drain the valley, and if they managed to raise some crops (grapes were clearly out of the question), they would end up owning farms which, by the standards of the villages in Italy from which they came, were absolutely huge.

Antonia was a special case. Since she was not a member of the original group, it was not clear that the CSS’ offer applied to her. On the other hand, CSS did acknowledge a certain responsibility to her. Furthermore, as an unmarried woman with no farming experience, she was certainly in no position to own and run her own farm. There were several unmarried men in the group who were attracted to her, and while the whole drama of what to do was playing out, she was besieged by attention which culminated in three offers of marriage. As a woman, she was very tempted to say “yes”, especially to the handsome and daring Giovanni Fortunato who was clearly destined to be a leader. (Giovanni, much later in his life and by then a very successful farmer, did in fact go into politics and served in the Illinois Legislature and the US Congress, but that is another story.) On the other hand, she was oh-so-well aware that she was a woman “with a difference” which men were unlikely to take too kindly if they ever found out. All of the young men who proposed to her talked about their desire to raise a large family, something that she knew she could not do. So she fell back, again and again, on her story of a fiancé waiting for her somewhere in America.

Finally, Antonia reached an agreement with the CSS to receive railway fare to Chicago, rather than New York, and a cash settlement which would enable her to set up work as a seamstress.

CHAPTER 5. CHICAGO

Antonia settled in a small apartment on South Halsted Street in Chicago. It had two rooms, one of which served as her private living area and the other as her dressmaking studio and fitting room. Chicago was a booming transportation and manufacturing center which managed to attract a large immigrant population, including many Italians, many of whom lived in the area of South Halsted Street. Before long, Antonia had a reasonable stream of clients. One of the first of these was Victoria Moresco, a well-known Chicago madam (though Antonia did not know this at first), who had recently married the racketeer Vincenzo (“Diamond Jim”) Colosimo. When Victoria heard the story of New Benevento, she was incensed and told Vincenzo about it.

Vincenzo may be a crook and a thug, but he was also a good Italian and cared about his countrymen. He did not like the idea of Italian-Americans being cheated - unless, of course, he was the one doing the cheating. So he decided to act. A week later, Antonia read in the Chicago Tribune that the body of one Marco Grimaldi, a former Missouri lawyer wanted by the police in that state, was found lying on State Street. Its tongue had been cut out and its hands had been cut off. Around the same time, Giovanni Fortunato received a letter from the “Santa Cristina Italian Benevolent Society” of Chicago offering to supply him and his group with the services of two engineers and all of the steel and concrete they needed for their drainage project, at no cost to them. The Society would also be glad to supply an agronomist who would advise them on which crops could grow successfully on the reclaimed land.

Victoria Moresco also chose Antonia as dressmaker for her growing chain of bordellos (which, in a few years, numbered almost 200). As time went on, the two became close friends. When Vincenzo invited Johnny Torrio to come to Chicago from New York, Antonia helped welcome him. Johnny and Antonia soon became very friendly indeed, and Johnny became the first male to learn of Antonia’s genital secret. It didn’t faze him and he promised not to reveal it to anyone without her expressed permission. He told her that he knew several women like her in New York, and in fact intended to employ a few at The Four Deuces, a new exclusive brothel he was opening on South Wabash Street. In fact, he knew that the person he was bringing in from New York to work there, a young kid and former lieutenant of his named Alphonse Gabriel Capone, was rather partial to women like her. Antonia asked him not to tell Capone either. She was saving herself for her fiancé. Johnny Torrio agreed, but told her that if she ever changed her mind, he knew several nice men he would like to introduce her to.

Capone turned out to be a very likeable and charming guy, in his own way. He was born in America but his mother had come from Angri, the same town that Antonia listed as her place of birth. That made the two of them practically paisani. Al worked himself rapidly up the ladder in Chicago and it was not many years before he, too, was bringing in a lieutenant from New York. “He is another paisano from Angri,” Al told her, and he is just a bit older than you are, so you might even know him.” When Antonia asked what his name was, Al laughed. “He calls himself Frank Nitti these days, but his real name is Francesco Raffaele Nittoni. He and his wife will be arriving at Union Station in two days.” Antonia blanched - after all of these years, Francesco was alive, he was coming to Chicago, and he was already married!

When the time came, Antonia accompanied Al Capone to Union Station. Frank Nitti alit from the train, accompanied by his wife, the former Chicagoan Rosa Levitt. Al introduced Antonia to them. “I am so pleased to see you again,” Antonia said to Frank in Italian. Frank looked rather bewildered. “Don’t you remember me?” asked Antonia. “You used to kiss me behind the church in Angri.” Frank was still a bit confused. “I used to kiss many girls behind that church,” he replied lamely. “I can’t be expected to remember them all.” He then asked her to speak English since his wife (who had just dug her elbow in the ribs) did not understand Italian. “Never mind,” replied Antonia. A few moments later, she excused herself and let Al take the Nittis to their hotel. Only when she was out of sight did the tears begin to flow.

Antonia was still crying several hours later, when she telephoned Johnny Torrio and told him what had happened. Johnny came right over to South Halsted Street; he took Antonia in his arms and held her tightly as she let out all of her frustration, not only at Frank but also at herself, for being a woman “in all but the most important part”. Johnny wiped away the tears from her face. “I have hundreds of girls who put that part to work every day for me,” he said, “but you are more of a woman than any of them. You are a good woman, Antonia, and you should never ever think otherwise.” Johnny then said that he knew someone - a client of the “special services branch” at the Four Deuces - whom he thought would be perfect for her. “He is a man of gold,” Johnny said, “and should really find a wife and not have use my services. He is partial to women like you, and it is a shame that he cannot find a respectable one. Let me introduce you to him.”

Reluctantly, Antonia agreed. A week later, Johnny telephoned her and told her that he had reserved a table for the two of them at one of the fanciest restaurants on Michigan Avenue. Johnny would bring the man in, but - because of prior business arrangements - could not stay. On the next day, precisely at 1:00, Antonia walked in to the restaurant and the maitre d’ showed her to the table reserved for her. Two minutes later, Johnny came through the door and with him was the man he had selected for Antonia.

Johnny pointed to the table where Antonia was sitting (with her back to them) and excused himself, after telling the maitre d’ that the entire dinner was to be put on his tab. As the man came over, he coughed politely. Antonia turned around - and nearly fainted. It was Giovanni Fortunato!

For the next two hours over dinner, and another three hours in a park next to the lake shore, Giovanni and Antonia talked and talked. She told him about her successes as a seamstress, and he told her about how the Tolland Valley had been successfully drained and turned into productive farmland. The settlers of New Benevento who had elected to remain were now prosperous farmers. He also told her about his desire for women with “special parts”, and how he hid it because he was afraid of what people would think. She, in turn, told him how much she was attracted to him on the ship and, later, in the early days of New Benevento, when he had proposed marriage to him. “I very nearly said ‘yes’,” she confided, but was afraid of what you would say when you found out what I am.” “You said you had a fiancé in America,” he said. “Well,” she admitted, “I had a boyfriend whom I elevated to the ranks of fiancé in my dreams. But I have recently found out that he married an American woman.”

“My proposal of marriage is still on the table,” he said, “if you would have me.” “I would rather have you than anyone else in the whole world,” said Antonia, and leaned over to kiss him. “And I you,” he replied, and kissed her back.

Three months later, Giovanni Fortunato and Antonia Bocci were married at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral. After their short honeymoon at Lake Geneva, they moved into the home which Giovanni had built in New Benevento. Over the years, they adopted and raised five children who were fully Americans and who, in turn, later presented them with several grandchildren. With these, Antonia had to speak English, for the grandchildren were not able to conduct conversations with her in Italian.

~~*~~

AFTERWARD: This story is fiction but, as usual, I have incorporated real people into it. All of the people mentioned in connection with the Chicago gangland are real. I had to take a small liberty with the date Frank Nitti left Angri to go to the United States (in real life, he left at the age of 12; I extended this by an unspecified few years). The Four Deuces bordello is also a real place and definitely a Chicago historical landmark.
Nothing in this story is to be taken as supporting the pejorative stereotype that Italian-Americans are all Mafiosi of one form or another. Nothing is farther from the truth. I needed to involve Antonia with the Chicago gangland in order to provide help and clout for the honest and decent settlers in New Benevento and to help reunite her with Frank Nitti. The rackets were one of many ways for first-generation immigrants (Irish, Jews, Germans, etc. no less than Italians) to advance out of the tenements of the eastern seaboard; joining the police was another.

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CHAPTER 1. JASMINE
 
Her mother taught her how to balance a full jar of water on her head, while walking barefoot up the stony path from the well to their tent. The Bedouin encampment was on a parched and barren hillside, with only sparse vegetation in some of the arroyos for the goats to feed upon. Soon, that would be gone too, for the black goats pulled the grasses up by their roots, and they would not grow back again after the next rain. Then the tribe would move on to another encampment.

Jasmine smiled to herself when she thought of those days, now long past. She lived in Amman now, in a beautiful luxury apartment on the seventh floor of a modern hi-rise apartment house with two elevators. Water for washing came not from the well, but from indoor plumbing, and water for drinking came in plastic bottles, imported from the foothills of the Italian Alps. She no longer went barefoot, but preferred light sandals with a low heel — black to match her long jet-black hair. The lasting effect of those clay water jars, however, could still be seen in her erect bearing and her slow and determined pace. She looked like a model walking down the runway displaying the latest fashions from Beirut, London, and Milan. Of course, she observed due modesty as befits a Muslim woman — she never wore skirts above the knee, nor did she bare her shoulders. She was proud of how she walked, and proud of how she looked.

Jasmine Shukri, Attorney at Law and one of the Golden Women of Amman society -- how ill that fit when superimposed on the image of a Bedouin urchin from the south. Who would have believed that the bedraggled Bedouin brat would now regularly eat at the expensive Fakhr El-Din restaurant, or be on the board of Friends of the National Gallery of Fine Arts, or be regularly invited to receptions at the Palace or at the various foreign embassies.

Jasmine liked the diplomatic receptions best of all, especially those at the American embassy, where she was a very frequent guest. The American ambassador took an interest in the tall dark Jordanian beauty, and so, especially, did the Cultural Attaché, Bill Vroliak (who was, so rumor had it, really the CIA station chief in Amman). Bill used Jasmine’s association with the National Gallery and his formal title as an excuse for frequent meetings between the two on the terrace of the Grand Hyatt Amman or Le Méridien hotels, as well as at the openings of various art exhibitions and gallery showings. At first, he tried to flirt with her, but when she indicated that, as a good Muslim, she preferred that he desist, he immediately took the hint and their relations were on the purely friendly level, c’est tout. Still, even among friends many topics are discussed.

CHAPTER 2. A SPECIAL WOMAN

Bill Vroliak was just one of many men in the Jordanian capital who thought that Jasmine was a very special woman, but none of them knew just how special she was. Indeed, Jasmine was much more unique than any of them suspected — biologically, she was a male.

The story is a very complex one. When Fatma, Jasmine’s mother, was in her last month of pregnancy, she suffered very severe infections and illnesses. Even the tribe midwife, who believed she had seen everything and could handle everything, realized that her sole medical training — a six-week course taught by a Red Crescent fieldworker — was not enough and persuaded the tribe leaders to summon an ambulance and have Fatma rushed to a government hospital in Aqaba. There she hovered between life and death for several days. The baby was delivered safely, but at the cost of an operation which left Fatma unable to have any further children. Furthermore, the fever seems to have permanently affected her mind. She had been convinced that she was pregnant with a girl, and when the baby turned out to be a boy, she refused to believe it. “It is a girl, I know it is!” she kept on repeating, and insisted on calling the baby “Jasmine”, even though the official birth certificate carried the name “Ali”.

By Islamic and Jordanian law, Jasmine’s father was entitled to take another wife, now that his first wife could not bear any further children. However, he was a gentle man who truly loved Fatma, and it was hard for him to do so. For a year, he brooded and brooded while his wife insisted on raising “their daughter Jasmine” and the other men in the tribe made fun of him behind his back. Then, one day, he just disappeared. He had never shown interest in politics and was only laxly religious. However, two weeks later, the media reported that he had crossed the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank, strapped a Hamas-supplied bomb to his waist, and blew himself up at an Israeli army check post, killing two soldiers and five innocent bystanders, purportedly (at least so said the Hamas) in protest of “Israeli atrocities in Gaza”. He was declared a shahid — a martyr — and a well-known charitable foundation (covertly funded by the Iranian government) awarded his widow a pension of 1,000 dinars per month in memory of his sacrifice for the glory of Islam.

The tribe rallied around Fatma and allowed her to live with her “daughter” in the encampment. However, after several years, when it became clear that no man was willing to marry her, and little children began calling her “the crazy one” even to her face, she decided it was time to leave and moved to the slums of Amman, where she managed to live off of her pension and from selling home-made baklava from a stall in the open market. At the time, Jasmine was a beautiful girl of eight. She was also very intelligent, and within a few weeks managed to catch up with her schoolmates, though she had never been in a formal classroom before. By the time of her first report card, she ranked first in her class.

In the middle of her first year in school, a government nurse came to give all of the children a checkup, and discovered that, underneath her dress, Jasmine was biologically male. She told the principal, who called Jasmine’s mother in for a conference. Fatma, of course, insisted that Jasmine was a girl, and that the fact that she was a girl had been prophesied in a dream before she gave birth. It did not take long for the principal to realize that there was something very wrong here and, following the procedures of the Ministry of Education, she brought the case to a Ministry social worker. The social worker, Rania Birouni, interviewed both Jasmine and her mother, and then consulted psychologists and other experts. She also consulted the qadi of one of the Amman religious courts who dealt exclusively with gender problems (which arose in Islamic countries from time to time, though they were never reported in the media). From her interviews with Jasmine, she concluded that the Jasmine was quite well-adjusted as a girl and that any attempt to force her into a male role would be a major traumatic experience both for her and for her mother, and might have permanent effects on her sanity, since there is a chance that she inherited her mother’s mental instability. Moreover, there seemed to be no gain to be had from such a move. The qadi (who was quite enlightened and, beside his religious training, had a master’s degree in psychology from the Sorbonne) concurred and issued a decree allowing Jasmine to begin hormone replacement therapy so that she would never undergo male puberty. The funding would be done through another charitable foundation, which specialized in “rectifying special medical problems”. When Jasmine would reach adulthood, she would be given the option of having SRS surgery.

And so Jasmine passed from girlhood to womanhood, without ever having experienced anything else. She knew, of course, that she was “built differently” from other girls, but the rules of Islamic modesty allowed her to avoid showing her genital area to her classmates, even during physical education classes in school (the showers in the gym were built in closed private stalls; the girls did not see each other undressed) and, since her hormone treatment gave her breasts just like all of the other girls and prevented a change in voice or the formation of facial hair, nobody had any reason to suspect anything was wrong.

When Jasmine reached her 18th birthday, she was summoned to the qadi who, in the presence of a psychologist, explained to Jasmine exactly what her situation was and what surgical options were available to her. Surprisingly, she refused surgery. She was a woman, she said, and would always be one, but she saw no reason to alter her genitals. A vagina without a womb was, in her opinion, analogous to a picture frame without a picture — and just as useless. Since the purpose of sex with a man was to create children, something she would not be able to do even after surgery, she would have to abstain from sex altogether, and in that case the surgery would be superfluous.

Jasmine was too preoccupied, in any case, to think much about sex. She had graduated from high school with highest possible honors, including one bestowed by the Queen herself, and was headed to the University of Amman to study law. She would be safe there -- if she made it clear that she took her religion seriously, the boys would respect that not bother her for dates or harass her in other ways. Paradoxically, universities in Arab countries are safer for women than those in the more permissive (and less supervised) West.

CHAPTER 3. THE LAWYER AND A CLIENT

Jasmine finished her pre-law and law degrees Magna Cum Laude, and began attracting attention in the “right” places. While a student, she volunteered to work as a paralegal for a clinic that specialized in helping Bedouin caught in the kingdom’s legal maze, and at another that specialized in women’s issues. This drew media attention, and she was interviewed several times on state television, where she proved herself to be an eloquent spokeswoman for the rights of poor or neglected minorities. After she took her degree and passed her bar exams, she was invited to participate in various panels on the legal rights of women in Islamic societies. She once gave a long interview on the subject to the BBC Arabic-language broadcast. She was profiled in women’s magazines and once, even, in the in-flight magazine distributed on Royal Jordanian Airlines.

Jasmine attracted several well-paying clients, among them some wealthy foreign businessmen. Her law office, which soon grew to include a dozen associates, began to specialize in commercial law, though she still insisted on devoting 20% of her personal time to pro-bono work with the poor. It was in this connection, she assumed, that she received a request for an appointment sent by one Sheik Nasr Abu Zain, a bearded and turbaned man who was obviously as far from the business community as one can imagine. She granted the appointment, and when Sheik Abu Zain requested that they meet at a mosque in the city, rather than at her office, she agreed to it, understanding that some of her pro-bono clients feel distinctly uncomfortable in the luxurious surroundings of a modern law office.

The mosque turned out to be a dingy one indeed in a poor area of town. When Jasmine walked in, she found nobody there except for a ragtag student from a religious school, reciting verses from the Quran to himself. “You will follow me, Attorney Shukri,” he said rather impolitely. “Sheik Abu Zain will meet with you not far from here.” Jasmine followed him, trusting that a religious Islamic male, whatever his desires, would not attack a lone woman, and went with him through several twisting streets until they entered an unmarked door in a low and rather decrepit building. Sheik Abu Zain waited for them there, standing in semi-darkness. He dismissed the student with a wave of his hand, and then turned to Jasmine.

“Welcome Jasmine, I have been waiting for you for a long time. I knew your father, and in fact I was the one who sent him on his mission for the glory of Islam. It is now your turn, and you will prepare yourself to join him in heaven. In a week the Americans will be celebrating their Independence Day with the traditional diplomatic reception. You are a frequent and welcome guest in their embassy, and unlikely to be body-searched when you arrive. This time, however, you will be wearing the same sort of belt that your father wore, and when you shake the hand of the ambassador, you will set it off, for the glory of Allah.”

“No!” shouted Jasmine. “How dare you even suggest such a thing to me?” “Please understand,” replied Sheik Abu Zaid calmly, “you have no choice in the matter. I know what is under that fashionable skirt of yours and if you do not do what I just told you to do, the world will soon know it as well. I am quite able, and quite capable, of destroying you utterly. Never, for a moment, forget that. You will now begin to prepare yourself for your martyrdom by fasting and prayer. In three days, we will talk again.” At, Sheik Abu Zain calmly opened the door and walked out. The student, who had been waiting outside, motioned to Jasmine to follow him, as he led her back to a main street, where she would be able catch a taxi which would take her back to her office.

CHAPTER 4. A SECRET REVEALED

Jasmine did not go back to her office. Instead, she went to a café in downtown Amman which, she knew, still had old-fashioned public telephones (in this age of cell phones, they were becoming as scarce as typewriters) and used one of them to call a number which Bill Vroliak had given her for use in emergencies only. Her call was answered on the first ring and the receptionist promised her that an unmarked embassy car (she gave the license number) would pick her up within 10 minutes. Half an hour later, Jasmine was seated across from Bill Vroliak in a safe house on the outskirts of town. Nobody tailed them, the driver of her car and that of the backup car which followed them made sure of that. Jasmine was sobbing hysterically, and Bill, who had never had seen her when she was other than under perfect emotional control, was trying as best he could to calm her down so that he could find out what the problem was.

Finally, after a long time, she was able to tell him about her meeting with Sheik Abu Zain, though she did not reveal to him what secret about her he knew, merely that it was “something that could destroy my life”. He did not seem surprised that there would be an attempt on the life of the American ambassador. “He has tried before,” Bill explained. “His name is not really Abu Zain, by the way, and he is no sheik. His real name is Abdulla ibn Musa Yihye, though he usually goes under the pseudonym Abu Jilda, naming himself after the famous bandit of the early 20th century. He is a high-ranking member of the Hamas, and sometimes acts as a liaison between them and the Iranian government. We have a big file on him. I think that I will be able to help you, but you must tell me what hold he has on you.”

“I can’t do that,” replied Jasmine, “just telling it, even to you, will bring my world crashing down. It is absolutely horrible.” “I know many secrets,” said Bill, “that is my job. Believe me, they usually turn out to be much less horrible than you imagine, once a bit of light shines on them.”

Jasmine knew she had no choice, and, without saying a word, stood up and unbuttoned her skirt. After it fell to the ground, she removed her panties. Bill saw what there was to see, and then calmly suggested that she get dressed again. The expression on his face did not change.

“I can understand your sense of fear, Jasmine”, he began, “but first of all you have to understand that it is misplaced. There are more women like you out there than you know, or can even imagine. If it makes you feel a tiny bit better, at least two of the staff of our embassy are built like you, as is one of our ambassadors in a major world capital. They choose not to tell people about it, and that is their prerogative. If you were living in the United States, you could, if you wished, be quite open about yourself and have the full protection of the law, as well as the acceptance of most people. I understand that your society is different, but it is changing too. I know of at least one high-ranking person in the Palace — you know her too — I won’t tell you who it is, of course.”

“Let me ask you one question, though. Why did you never have an operation to have your genitals modified?”

“I was young and silly, I suppose, when things were first explained to me” replied Jasmine. “I thought that it didn’t make much of a difference. Now I wish that, at the time, I had made a different decision.”

“In that case,” replied Bill, “the solution to your problem is simple. I can arrange for you to be operated on in very short order. That will destroy Abu Jilda’s hold on you. In case he tries to spread the story, we can have several unimpeachable women testify that they saw you naked and that what he says is simply false. Meanwhile, we will work out a plan to catch him red-handed.”

“Can you really do that?” asked Jasmine.

“No problem”, replied Bill. “Give me half an hour to make the arrangements.”

As Bill retired to another room, Jasmine waited patiently, praying to Allah that things would work out. Before half an hour was up, Bill came back and laid out his plan: “OK, this is what we will do. You will be driven back into the city, to a street near the university. You will leave the car and walk across the street. Unfortunately, another car will hit you (not very hard, don’t worry); you will fake being unconscious and will be rushed to University Hospital, where you will be put in a special well-guarded private room normally reserved for members of the royal family, still apparently unconscious. When you emerge from there two days later, I can assure you that you will be equipped to win a beauty contest in a nudist colony. Meanwhile, I will meet with members of the Jordanian security services, and we will prepare a few surprises for our friend Abu Jilda.

CHAPTER 5. A NEW WOMAN

It happened as Bill said it would. Within 24 hours, a team of CIA doctors flown from the US had operated on Jasmine, after studying the results of medical tests and x-rays which were emailed to them while they were still in the air. While the surgery would take time to heal, and there was much follow-up work to be done, there would be no question that any outsider taking a close look at Jasmine would just see a perfectly normal genetic woman who had just undergone pelvic surgery in the wake of being in an automobile accident, which is what was written in her hospital records. Indeed, these records were surreptitiously consulted by one of the hospital’s doctors — another known Hamas supporter — and his entry into the computer was recorded by waiting agents. When he left the hospital, and later when he met with Abu Jilda, members of the Jordanian security forces were there to arrest both of them. Abu Jilda was tried in secret, with Jasmine deposing that he had threatened to invent a false story about her to defame her character. Not surprisingly, he was sentenced to death by firing squad, a sentence which was carried out that very afternoon, before the Hamas could organize a rescue attempt.

The embassy’s Independence Day reception was a great success. Jasmine did not attend, as she was still recuperating from her operation. The ambassador and his wife visited her in the hospital, though, and brought a piece of the red-white-and-blue cake which was served to the distinguished guests.

EPILOGUE

Ten years after the events of this story, Jasmine Shukri was invited to give a lecture on the role of women in Islamic law at a conference at Georgetown University. She managed to get away from the conference one evening, however, to meet for dinner with Bill Vroliak, now reassigned to a desk in Langley. Unexpectedly, Bill brought along his daughter, a blonde and bouncy 14-year-old teenager wearing a bright pink t-shirt decorated with rhinestones and a denim mini-skirt. “I wanted you to meet Jenny,” he said. “I hope that you will be able to find time to talk to her. You see, she has the same problem you used to have.”

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Whitfield Junction, Nebraska, used to be a small but prosperous agricultural town, catering to the needs of the farmers in the area. However, after the railroad ceased operation and the new superhighway was built 20 miles to the south, it slowly withered and dried up. Officially, it ceased to exist when the post office was closed, 30 years ago, but a letter addressed to there will still arrive with no problems. Its current population is 1: me! My great-grandfather founded Whitfield Junction. I live in the big house built by my grandfather. Most of the fields surrounding the junction, as far as you can see, belong to me. Until five years ago, my late husband and I farmed them, with the help of several hands. However, after he died I leased the land out to an agribusiness conglomerate headquartered in Omaha. It, in turn, is owned by an investment firm in New York which, in turn, is owned by a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands. That, in turn, is owned by a reclusive godzillionaire in Denver, or so I am told.

I work as principal of the district elementary school, some 15 miles to the east of here. Living alone doesn’t bother me. An older woman is safer living alone in rural Nebraska than she would ever be in, say, Manhattan. I have satellite TV and a fast internet connection, and I read a lot. I also have two dogs to keep me company and a loaded pistol in the kitchen drawer which, believe me, I know how to use.

One Saturday, as I was just washing the luncheon dishes, I was rather surprised to hear the doorbell ring. When I went to answer it, I found a nice well-dressed young man carrying a briefcase, who said he was looking for a Kenneth Whitfield, formerly of Whitfield Junction, and wondered if I knew where he was. I told him that I was the only person living here now and, seeing that he seemed a bit hot (it was high summer on the prairies) invited him to come in for a cold drink. After I served him a glass of lemonade and some of my home-baked cookies, I asked him what he wanted Kenneth Whitfield for. “To give him some money he has coming to him, a bit more than a billion dollars,” he replied.

I told him he must be joking. “No,” he replied, “this is quite serious.” First, he showed me his card. His name was Alex Anderson and he was an investigator for a firm of private investigators from Denver, employed by the most prestigious law firm in the state: McClosky, Feinstein, Nicholson & Bowen. He then took two documents from his briefcase. The first of these, a copy of a will dated ten years ago, was very short and to the point:

“I, Howard Hunter, being of sound mind and body, leave my entire estate to Kenneth Whitfield of Whitfield Junction, Nebraska. Should Mr. Whitfield not be located within three years of my demise, I leave my entire estate to the Humane Society of Denver for the purpose of housing and feeding stray cats and dogs.”

“At the time of his unexpected death two months ago,” Alex explained, “Mr. Hunter’s estate was worth 1.05 billion dollars. If I don’t find this Kenneth Whitfield, Denver is going to have the richest stray cats and dogs in creation.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said. “What is the connection between Howard Hunter and Kenneth Whitfield?” To answer this, Alex gave me a copy of a second document, much longer than the first, and written in Mr. Hunter’s own handwriting. It was dated with the same date as the will,

TO BE OPENED ONLY AFTER MY DEMISE

I, Howard Hunter, was born and raised in the city of Wenatchee, Washington. In 1976, after receiving my degree in business from Washington State University, I found employment as an intern with a (somewhat dubious) investment firm in Denver that specialized in selling stocks to potential customers contacted over the phone. (This technique is generally known as a “boiler room operation”.) To save money, I shared an apartment with another intern -- Kenneth Whitfield, who came from a very small town in Nebraska.

We were both a bunch of hayseeds, to tell the truth. Like most young men in the big city for the first time, we spent a good part of our time outside work having fun, or at least trying to as best we could on a limited budget. This, of course, is easier dreamt of than accomplished, but after a while we had settled down to a routine of bar-hopping and socializing. By the end of the first few months of work, I was making very good commissions, while Kenneth was still struggling. I could have easily afforded to live alone, but he was a nice guy and I enjoyed rooming and socializing with him.

Neither of us found a steady girlfriend, but we were joined more or less permanently by Katherine Bell, a costume designer and makeup artist for one of the local theaters. Katherine was more of a boon companion than a girlfriend — she was a confirmed lesbian — but she was a Denver native and knew all of the right places to go and the right times to go to them. Often the three of us would end up picking up a trio of girls and having a good time. Katherine could drink both Kenneth and me under the table, if she chose to do so — which she often did.

One Friday night, we were sitting in a bar, not getting much action, when an absolutely stunning blonde walked in, dressed in a very short miniskirt, 5” heels, and a very revealing top. All three of us followed her every move, as she walked the length of the bar to the waiting arms of her boyfriend, who looked the size of a moving van. Kenneth, in particular, couldn’t stop staring at her. Finally, Katherine asked him what he found so interesting. “I was just wondering,” he said, “what it must feel like for someone to walk into a place like this in an outfit like that, knowing that every eye in the house will be on her. What must she be experiencing?”

“Why don’t you try it and find out?” Katherine replied. “You’re joking,” Kenneth said. “Not at all,” I bet I could make you up to be a bombshell at least as lethal as that one.” Katherine took Kenneth’s face in her hand. “You have good bones, Kenny boy, and with the proper makeup and … err … certain additions, you could make that cheap bimbo look like Raggedy-Ann”. “Oh come on now,” I interjected, “I know you are good at your job Katherine, but what you are claiming is impossible. There is no way that you could turn Kenny into something like that.”

“I am willing to put my money where my mouth is,” said Katherine. “Let’s make it a bet. I bet I can make Kenny up to be a woman at least as beautiful as that one. The stakes are steaks … the loser takes the other two out for a steak dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Denver.” “You’re on!” I said. Kenny protested that he wasn’t exactly being consulted, but we ignored him. Finally, he agreed to go along with the bet. At 10 am the next morning, Saturday, he would meet Katherine at the theater. I would show up that afternoon, and we would go out for a steak dinner that evening.

When I showed up at the theater that afternoon, I found Katherine sitting and talking to the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, clearly one of the company’s new actresses. She introduced her to me as Pamela. I asked where Kenny was, and said that I bet he chickened out of the whole deal. Before I could answer, Pamela took my hand in hers and whispered in a very sexy voice: “Howard, honey, don’t you even recognize me?” I couldn’t believe it! Even after looking very carefully, it was next to impossible to discern that this fabulous female was really my male apartment-mate Kenneth. I don’t know what magic Katherine had worked, but it was absolutely unbelievable.

Katherine explained that, as she suspected, Kenny really was a natural. All it took was some depilatory treatment, prosthetic breasts, a wig, a gaff, and a waist cincher, together with far less makeup than one would think, to turn him into a beautiful girl. Most of their time together had been spent on acting and deportment lessons and even then, Katherine maintained, it was a matter not so much of teaching patterns of behavior as of liberating patterns that seem to have been already there, waiting to come out into the light. She had clearly won the bet.

The three of us piled into my car, and Katherine gave me a suitcase containing Kenny’s old clothes as well as “some other clothes which Pamela will certainly need over the weekend” and, we went off to the promised steak dinner at the fanciest restaurant I could afford. Never was I prouder to walk into a room with a girl on my arm than I was then, and never did my date attract so much attention. The eyes of all of the men in the room were on Pamela, and some of them made it so obvious that it was almost pathetic. One very big guy was totally ignoring the woman who was with him and just staring at her, with his eyes popping out of their sockets. I pointed him out, and said that he looked familiar. “He should,” said Katherine, “he is the quarterback for the Broncos, and that woman with him is one of the Broncos cheerleaders.” Pamela got up and walked over to him, taking a small notebook out of her purse. She talked to him for a few minutes and then came back, after giving him a peck on the cheek. The poor fellow just sat there and looked like he had wet his pants. “My gosh, what did you do?” Katherine asked. “Oh, I asked him for his autograph,” Pamela smiled, “and he gave it to me. He also promised that there will be box-seat tickets to the first Broncos game of the season waiting for the three of us at the stadium box office.”

We had a wonderful time. Katherine phoned one of her friends to join us, and after dinner the four of us went dancing and later to a bar. When we finally came home, Pamela took her suitcase into Kenny’s room, and disappeared. However, after 15 minutes there was a knock on my door and there she was, dressed in a very sexy pink baby-doll. “I thought I would give you a goodnight kiss, Howard, you were so sweet,” she said and pressed her lips against my forehead. She then ran off, before I could do anything else.

The next morning there was another knock on my door and Pamela, dressed in very tight jeans and one of Kenny’s old T-shirts, brought in a tray of breakfast. “This is to pay you back for the wonderful dinner,” she said, and again kissed me on the forehead. It was another lovely day. After we ate, we took my car and drove to the mountains, where we had a wonderful time just walking around. There is nothing like being with a beautiful girl to make a man feel great. Pamela also was happy and perky. I was so excited that, on the way home, I insisted we stop off at a mall and bought her a special present — a silver bracelet on the inside of which I had engraved a special message. Only when we came home, did she suddenly look very depressed.

“Well,” she said in a low monotone, “I guess it is over, isn’t it.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Tomorrow we have to go back to work, and I have to go back to being Kenneth,” she replied, looking at the floor.

“Stay Pamela for a while, please,” I answered. “Call in sick or something.” “I can’t,” she answered. “I have that stock package I have to get rid of.” It seems that the firm had bought a large block of stock in an unknown and rather weird new California company called Apple Computers, which looked like a sure dud, and Kenneth had been trying, unsuccessfully, to flog the paper over the phone. He had not had much luck and his supervisor finally gave him an ultimatum. Get rid of the stock — all of it -- by Tuesday or find another job. I offered him a deal. If he agreed to remain Pamela for a week, I, personally, would buy up all of the stock in the portfolio. What the heck, it was cheap and Wenatchee, my home town, was the self-proclaimed apple capital of the world, so maybe it would bring me luck.

And so Pamela remained Pamela and I was the happiest man alive. We were happy together, and went out that night to celebrate.

If, two months earlier, a genie had appeared and asked me what I most wanted in the world, sharing an apartment with the most beautiful girl in creation would have been right up there at the top of the list. Could I possibly want anything more? Well, yes … S E X for instance. Pamela was lovely, considerate and a joy to be with; she was a fun person and a wonderful dancer; but our personal relationship never got behind a few hugs and kisses on the forehead.

After two weeks, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and tried to embrace her tightly and kiss her on the lips. She wouldn’t let me. “Howard,” she said very slowly, “let us not forget reality. You know that my breasts are fake and that bulge I have between my legs is not. I am only an illusion.” I got down on my knees and begged. I told her that I loved her, that I needed her, and that I wanted her more than anything in the world. I told her that I had read about sex-change operations being done by a doctor at Johns Hopkins University, and that I would gladly pay for her to have one. She cut me short. “Howard, it is too soon to even think of those things. You are a wonderful man, and if I were a real woman, I would be all over you by now. But if this is all complicated to you, it is even more complicated to me. I have to sort it all out in my mind, and that will take time” Then she bent over and kissed me on the lips. “Let me think about things, honey, while you are at work tomorrow. I will try to come up with a solution.”

The next day, Pamela fixed breakfast as though nothing had happened, and I managed to go off to the office for another day of sticking shady stock on suckers. When I came back, she was gone. There was just a short note which she left on my bed: THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, HOWARD. IT JUST CANNOT WORK OUT. All of her clothes and personal effects were gone. I never saw her again, nor did she ever try to contact me.

I did not even have a picture to remember Pamela by. The only thing I had was that large block of stock in Apple Computer Co., which I had bought from Kenneth and which in fact made me its third-largest stockholder. I kept it at first for purely sentimental reasons, without even thinking about it, but of course it soon started its meteoric rise and became the basis of the fortune which I am now in the process of parlaying into what even I believe are obscene proportions. I never married, since no woman I ever met could compare to Pamela, about whom I have dreamt every night of my life. I have no heirs to leave my money to, and never will have. My fortune, as my life, are only hers, and she should receive them when I am gone.

“That is quite a story,” I told Mr. Anderson, and handed the papers back to him. I then refilled his lemonade and asked him to excuse me for a few moments. I am sure that he thought I was going to the bathroom. In fact, I went up to my bedroom to bring down two manilla envelopes.

The the first envelope contained a silver bracelet, with an inscription on the inner rim: TO THE LOVELY PAMELA, FROM YOUR DEVOTED ADMIRER, HOWARD. The second envelope contained the legal documents showing that, before my SRS operation twenty years ago, my name had been Kenneth Whitfield. There was no envelope to hold the trials, frustrations, heartbreaks, and crises I went through between the time I left Howard and the time I finally became a woman in full, as I had always dreamed of being.

A multipart story ...