title: Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine
author:  Noelle Howey 
description: If the only time you think you've seen a transsexual is on the Jerry Springer show, Noelle Howey's thoughtful, funny memoir of her suburban childhood with a cross-dressing dad may leave you wondering where all the fireworks are. The first half of <i>Dress Codes</i> is like anyone's story of parental neglect. "I had a dad possibly like yours," Howey explains, "sullen, sporadically hostile, frequently vacant." It was her loving mother who eventually confided her father's secret when Howey was 15, by which time it came as a relief that the remoteness, the drinking, the mood swings were not the young Noelle's fault, but the result of her father's constantly stifled "yearning for angora." Although the early chapters are interesting, <i>Dress Codes</i> really takes off at the halfway point, when her father realized he was not a heterosexual male transvestite, but a woman. His sexual transition, and the family's awkward adjustment to it--including the author's inability in high school to keep any secret aside from this One Big Secret--is written with warmth and insight, and colored with a lonely girl's lingering disappointment. <i>--Regina Marler</i>
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  The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes
  
  
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  # The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes
  
  
  ### By Henry James
  
  
  This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
      
  
  Etext by Ian Hillman
  
  
  TOWARD the middle of the eighteenth century there lived in the
  
  
  Province of Massachusetts a widowed gentlewoman, the mother of three
  
  
  children. Her name is of little account: I shall take the liberty of
  
  
  calling her Mrs. Willoughby, a name, like her own, of a highly
  
  
  respectable sound. She had been left a widow after some six years of
  
  
  marriage, and had devoted herself to the care of her children. These
  
  
  latter grew up in a manner to reward her tender care and to gratify her
  
  
  fondest hopes. The first-born was a son, whom she had called Bernard,
  
  
  after his father. The others were daughters ,born at an interval of
  
  
  three years apart. Good looks were traditional in the