RANSVESTIA

the girls side and a pencilled on mustache on the boy side it would do for a costume.

So, actually having some girl stuff in the house and a justified excuse for wearing it I boldly left the dress on, wore both gold pumps and went out into the living room and lay down on the davenport. My wife looked up and said, "Go get out of those clothes; you look ridicu- lous." I said, "I will in a bit, I'm reading the paper." In a few more minutes she repeated her demands and I put if off figuring to enjoy wearing a dress and heels as long as possible. She kept nagging me and finally I just had had it. I sat up, swung my legs around and informed her that I would take them off when I got good and ready and that she might as well know that I liked to wear them. I further told her that since we had some engagement the following night, the party was on Saturday and we had something else to do on Sunday night that I would tell her the whole thing on Monday.

This calmed her for the moment. The party went off fine and the costume was a big success. Came Monday and I sat down and told her all. She was pretty upset but managed to make an adjustment by saying that she didn't want to see me but if things got to the point where I just had to get dressed to let her know and she would go into the back bedroom and I could have the rest of the house to myself. That wasn't one heck of a lot of space since it was one of those little four-room bungalows built like a square and divided into two bed- rooms, a living room and a kitchen-dinette. She also told me that she didn't want me going around and buying things for myself and if I had to buy something she would get it for me. Which she did. Well, for the next year and a half I kept a record of when things got so tight that I just had to dress. It averaged out to once every two weeks over eighteen months.

Somewhere in this period she got pregnant and in 1944 a baby boy was born to us. I never loved her more than during the last days of the pregnancy and the first days with our new son. Although I wasn't his mother I took over a lot of motherly duties partially out of interest and partly to spare her. I made up all the formulas he drank. I put him to bed at night and I got up in the middle of the night for him. I remem- ber that I painted some cut-out stars with phosphorescent paint and pasted them on the ceiling of his nursery in the form of the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopoeia and other constellations. Then I would tell him about them as he got older. We used to talk about "Rion" for

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