In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  “Okay. You ask Larry if he’s heard anything about Kittredge. I’ll check out some of the hospices, if you check out St. Vincent’s, Billy,” Elaine said.

  “Tom never said that Kittredge was sick, Elaine.”

  “If Tom saw him, Kittredge may be sick, Billy. Who knows where Tom went? Apparently, Kittredge went there, too.”

  “Okay, okay—I’ll ask Larry, I’ll check out St. Vincent’s,” I said. I waited a moment, while New Jersey passed by outside the windows of our train. “You’re holding out on me, Elaine,” I told her. “What makes you think that Kittredge might have the disease? What don’t I know about Mrs. Kittredge?”

  “Kittredge was an experimenter, wasn’t he, Billy?” Elaine asked. “That’s all I’m going on—he was an experimenter. He would fuck anyone, just to see what it was like.”

  But I knew Elaine so well; I knew when she was lying—a lie of omission, maybe, not the other kind—and I knew I would have to be patient with her, as she had once (for years) been patient with me. Elaine was such a storyteller.

  “I don’t know what or who Kittredge is, Billy,” Elaine told me. (This sounded like the truth.)

  “I don’t know, either,” I said.

  Here we were: Tom Atkins had died; yet Elaine and I were even then thinking about Kittredge.

  Chapter 13

  NOT NATURAL CAUSES

  It still staggers me when I remember the impossible expectations Tom Atkins had for our oh-so-youthful romance those many summers ago. Poor Tom was no less guilty of wishful thinking in the desperation of his dying days. Tom hoped I might make a suitable substitute father for his son, Peter—a far-fetched notion, which even that darling fifteen-year-old boy knew would never happen.

  I maintained contact with Charles, the Atkins family nurse, for only five or six years—not more. It was Charles who told me Peter Atkins was accepted at Lawrenceville, which—until 1987, a year or two after Peter had graduated—was an all-boys’ school. Compared to many New England prep schools—Favorite River Academy included—Lawrenceville was late in becoming coeducational.

  Boy, did I ever hope Peter Atkins was not—to use poor Tom’s words—“like us.”

  Peter went to Princeton, about five miles northeast of Lawrenceville. When my misadventure of cohabiting with Elaine ended in San Francisco, she and I moved back to New York. Elaine was teaching at Princeton in the academic year of 1987–88, when Peter Atkins was a student there. He showed up in her writing class in the spring of ’88, when the fifteen-year-old we’d both met was in his early twenties. Elaine thought Peter was an economics major, but Elaine never paid any attention to what her writing students were majoring in.

  “He wasn’t much of a writer,” she told me, “yet he had no illusions about it.”

  Peter’s stories were all about the suicide—when she was seventeen or eighteen—of his younger sister, Emily.

  I’d heard about the suicide from Charles, at the time it happened; she’d always been a “deeply troubled” girl, Charles had written. As for Tom’s wife, Sue, she died a long eighteen months after Atkins was gone; she’d had Charles replaced as a nurse almost immediately after Tom’s death.

  “I can understand why Sue didn’t want a gay man looking after her,” was all Charles said about it.

  I’d asked Elaine if she thought Peter Atkins was gay. “No,” she’d said. “Definitely not.” Indeed, it was sometime in the late nineties—a couple of years after the worst of the AIDS epidemic—when I was giving a reading in New York, and a ruddy-faced, red-haired young man (with an attractive young woman) approached me at the book signing that followed the event. Peter Atkins must have been in his early thirties then, but I had no trouble recognizing him. He still looked like Tom.

  “We got a babysitter for this—that’s pretty rare for us,” his wife said, smiling at me.

  “How are you, Peter?” I asked him.

  “I’ve read all your books,” the young man earnestly told me. “Your novels were kind of in loco parentis for me.” He said the Latin slowly. “You know, ‘in the place of a parent’—kind of,” young Atkins said.

  We just smiled at each other; there was nothing more to say. He’d said it well, I thought. His father would have been happy how his son turned out—or as happy as poor Tom ever was, about anything. Tom Atkins and I had grown up at a time when we were full of self-hatred for our sexual differences, because we’d had it drummed into our heads that those differences were wrong. In retrospect, I’m ashamed that my expressed hope for Peter Atkins was that he wouldn’t be like Tom—or like me. Maybe, for Peter’s generation, what I should have hoped for him was that he would be “like us”—only proud of it. Yet, given what happened to Peter’s father and mother—well, it suffices to say that I thought Peter Atkins had been burdened enough.

  I SHOULD PEN A brief obituary for the First Sister Players, my hometown’s obdurately amateur theatrical society. With Nils Borkman dead, and with the equally violent passing of that little theater’s prompter (my mother, Mary Marshall Abbott)—not to mention my late aunt, Muriel Marshall Fremont, who had wowed our town in various strident and big-bosomed roles—the First Sister Players simply slipped away. By the eighties, even in small towns, the old theaters were becoming movie houses; movies were what people wanted to see.

  “More folks stayin’ home and watchin’ television, too, I suppose,” Grandpa Harry commented. Harry Marshall himself was “stayin’ home”; his days onstage as a woman were long gone.

  It was Richard who called me, after Elmira found Grandpa Harry’s body.

  “No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira,” Harry had said, when he’d earlier seen the nurse hanging Nana Victoria’s clean clothes in his closet.

  “I musta misheard him,” Elmira would later explain to Richard. “I thought he said, ‘Not more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he was teasin’ me, ya know? But now I’m pretty sure he said, ‘No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he knew then what he was gonna do.”

  As a favor to his nurse, Grandpa Harry had dressed himself as the old lumberman he was—jeans, a flannel shirt, “nothin’ fancy,” as Elmira would say—and when he’d curled up on his side in the bathtub, the way a child goes to sleep, Harry had somehow managed to shoot himself in the temple with the Mossberg .30-30, so that most of the blood was in the bathtub, and what there was of it that spattered the tile in other parts of the bathroom had presented no insurmountable difficulty for Elmira to clean.

  The message on my answering machine, the night before, had been business as usual for Grandpa Harry. “No need to call me back, Bill—I’m turnin’ in a bit early. I was just checkin’ to be sure you were all right.”

  That same night—it was November 1984, a little before Thanksgiving—the message on Richard Abbott’s answering machine was similar, at least in regard to Grandpa Harry “turnin’ in a bit early.” Richard had taken Martha Hadley to a movie in town, in what was the former theater for the First Sister Players. But the end of the message Grandpa Harry had left for Richard was a little different from the one Harry left for me. “I miss my girls, Richard,” Grandpa Harry had said. (Then he’d curled up in the bathtub and pulled the trigger.) Harold Marshall was ninety, soon to be ninety-one—just a bit early to be turning in.

  Richard Abbott and Uncle Bob decided to turn that Thanksgiving into what would serve as a remembrance of Grandpa Harry, but Harry’s contemporaries—the ones who were still alive—were all in residence at the Facility. (They wouldn’t be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner in Grandpa Harry’s River Street home.)

  Elaine and I drove up from New York together; we’d invited Larry to come with us. Larry was sixty-six; he was without a boyfriend at the moment, and Elaine and I were worried about him. Larry wasn’t sick. He didn’t have the disease, but he was worn out; Elaine and I had talked about it. Elaine had even said that the AIDS virus was killing Larry—“in another way.”

  I was happy to have Larry along for the ride. This prevented Elaine from makin
g up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.

  Richard had invited some foreign students from Favorite River Academy for our Thanksgiving dinner; it was too far for them to go home for such a short school vacation—therefore, we were joined by two Korean girls and a lonely-looking boy from Japan. The rest of us all knew one another—not counting Larry, who’d never been to Vermont before.

  Even though Grandpa Harry’s River Street house was practically in the middle of town—and a short walk to the Favorite River Academy campus—First Sister itself struck Larry as a “wilderness.” God knows what Larry thought of the surrounding woods and fields; the regular firearm season for deer had started, so the sound of shooting was all around. (A “barbaric wilderness” was what Larry called Vermont.)

  Mrs. Hadley and Richard handled the kitchen chores, with help from Gerry and Helena; the latter was Gerry’s new girlfriend—a vivacious, chatty woman who’d just dumped her husband and was coming out, though she was Gerry’s age (forty-five) and had two grown children. Helena’s “kids” were in their early twenties; they were spending the holiday with her ex-husband.

  Larry and Uncle Bob had perplexingly hit it off—possibly because Larry was the exact same age Aunt Muriel would have been if Muriel hadn’t been in the head-on collision that also killed my mom. And Larry loved talking to Richard Abbott about Shakespeare. I liked listening to the two of them; in a way, it was like overhearing my adolescence in the Favorite River Academy Drama Club—it was like watching a phase of my childhood pass by.

  Since there were now female students at Favorite River, Richard Abbott was explaining to Larry, the casting of the Drama Club plays was very different than it had been when the academy was an all-boys’ school. He’d hated having to cast those boys in the female roles, Richard said; Grandpa Harry, who was no “boy,” and who’d been outstanding as a woman, was an exception (as were Elaine and a handful of other faculty daughters). But now that there were boys and girls at his disposal, Richard bemoaned what many theater directors in schools—even in colleges—are often telling me today. More girls like theater; there are always more girls. There aren’t enough boys to cast in all the male parts; you have to look for plays with more female parts for all the girls, because there are almost always more girls than there are female roles to play.

  “Shakespeare was very comfortable about switching sexes, Richard,” Larry said provocatively. “Why don’t you tell your theater kids that in those plays where there are an overabundant number of male parts, you’re going to cast all the male roles with girls, and that you’ll cast the female roles with boys? I think Shakespeare would have loved that!” (There was little doubt that Larry would have loved that. Larry had a gender-lens view of the world, Shakespeare included.)

  “That’s a very interesting idea, Larry,” Richard Abbott said. “But this is Romeo and Juliet.” (That would be Richard’s next Shakespeare play, I was guessing; I hadn’t been paying that close attention to the school-calendar part of the conversation.) “There are only four female roles in the play, and only two of them really matter,” Richard continued.

  “Yes, yes—I know,” Larry said; he was showing off. “There’s Lady Montague and Lady Capulet—they’re of no importance, as you say. There’s really just Juliet and her Nurse, and there must be twenty or more men!”

  “It’s tempting to cast the boys as women, and the other way around,” Richard admitted, “but these are just teenagers, Larry. Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?”

  “Ah . . .” Larry said, and stopped. (Even Larry had no answer for that.) I remember thinking how this wasn’t, and never would be, my problem. Let it be Richard’s problem, I thought; I had other things on my mind.

  Grandpa Harry had left his River Street house to me. What was I going to do with a five-bedroom, six-bathroom house in Vermont?

  Richard had told me to hang on to it. “You’ll get more for it if you sell it later, Bill,” he said. (Grandpa Harry had left me a little money, too; I didn’t need the additional money I could have gotten by selling that River Street house—at least, not yet.)

  Martha Hadley vowed to organize an auction to get rid of the unwanted furniture. Harry had left some money for Uncle Bob, and for Richard Abbott; Grandpa Harry had left the largest sum for Gerry—in lieu of leaving her a share of the house.

  It was the house I’d been born in—the house I’d grown up in, until my mom married Richard. Grandpa Harry had said to Richard: “This house should be Bill’s. I guess a writer will be okay livin’ with the ghosts—Bill can use ’em, can’t he?”

  I didn’t know the ghosts, or if I could use them. That Thanksgiving, what I couldn’t quite imagine were the circumstances that would ever make me want to live in First Sister, Vermont. But I decided there was no hurry to make a decision about the house; I would hang on to it.

  The ghosts sent Elaine from her bedroom to mine—the very first night we slept in that River Street house. I was in my old childhood bedroom when Elaine burst in and crawled into my bed with me. “I don’t know who those women think they are,” Elaine said, “but I know they’re dead, and they’re pissed off about it.”

  “Okay,” I told her. I liked sleeping with Elaine, but the next night we moved into one of the bedrooms that had a bigger bed. I saw no ghosts that Thanksgiving holiday—actually, I never saw ghosts in that house.

  I’d put Larry in the biggest bedroom; it had been Grandpa Harry’s bedroom—the closet was still full of Nana Victoria’s clothes. (Mrs. Hadley had promised me she would get rid of them when she and Richard auctioned off the unwanted furniture.) But Larry saw no ghosts; he just had a complaint about the bathtub in that bathroom.

  “Uh, Bill—is this the tub where your grandfather—”

  “Yes, it is,” I quickly told him. “Why?”

  Larry had looked for bloodstains, but the bathroom and the tub were spotlessly clean. (Elmira must have scrubbed her ass off in there!) Yet Larry had found something he wanted to show me. There was a chip in the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.

  “Was that chip always there?” Larry asked me.

  “Yes, always—this bathtub was chipped when I was a small child,” I lied.

  “So you say, Bill—so you say,” Larry said suspiciously.

  We both knew how the bathtub had been chipped. The bullet from the .30-30 must have passed through Grandpa Harry’s head while he had been curled up on his side. The bullet had chipped the enamel on the floor of the bathtub.

  “When you’re auctioning off the old furniture,” I told Richard and Martha privately, “please get rid of that bathtub.”

  I didn’t have to specify which bathtub.

  “You’ll never live in this terrible town, Billy. You’re crazy even to imagine you might,” Elaine said. It was the night after our Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps we were lying awake in bed because we’d eaten too much, and we couldn’t fall asleep, or maybe we were listening for ghosts.

  “When we used to live here, in this terrible town—when we were in those Shakespeare plays—was there ever, in that time at Favorite River, a boy with the balls to play Juliet?” I asked Elaine. I could feel her imagining him, as I was, in the darkness—talk about listening for ghosts!

  “There was only one boy who had the balls for it, Billy,” Elaine answered me, “but he wouldn’t have been right for the part.”

  “Why not?” I asked her. I knew she meant Kittredge; he was pretty enough—he had the balls, all right.

  “Juliet is nothing if she’s not sincere,” Elaine said. “Kittredge would have looked the part, of course, but he would have hammed it up, somehow—Kittredge didn’t do sincere, Billy,” Elaine said.

  No, he didn’t, I thought. Kittredge could have been anyone—he could look the part in any role. But Kittredge was never sincere; he was forever concealed—he was always just playing a part.

  AT THAT THANKSGIVING DINNER,
there was both awkwardness and comedy. In the latter category, the two Korean girls managed to give the Japanese boy the idea that we were eating a peacock. (I don’t know how the girls conveyed the peacock idea to the lonely-looking boy, or why Fumi—the boy—was so stricken at the thought of eating a peacock.)

  “No, no—it’s a turkey,” Mrs. Hadley said to Fumi, as if he were having a pronunciation problem.

  Since I’d grown up in that River Street house, I found the encyclopedia and showed Fumi what a turkey looked like. “Not a peacock,” I said. The Korean girls, Su Min and Dong Hee, were whispering in Korean; they were also giggling.

  Later, after a lot of wine, it was the vivacious, chatty mother of two—now Gerry’s girlfriend—who gave a toast to our extended family for welcoming her to such an “intimate” holiday occasion. It was doubtless the wine, in combination with the intimate word, that compelled Helena to deliver an impromptu address on the subject of her vagina—or perhaps she’d meant for her remarks to praise all vaginas. “I want to thank you for having me,” Helena had begun. Then she got sidetracked. “I used to be someone who hated my vagina, but now I love it,” she said. She seemed, almost immediately, to think better of her comments, because she quickly said, “Of course, I love Gerry’s vagina—that goes without saying, I guess!—but it’s because of Gerry that I also love my vagina, and I used to just hate it”; she was standing, a bit unsteadily, with her glass raised. “Thank you for having me,” she repeated, sitting down.

  I’m guessing that Uncle Bob had probably heard more toasts than anyone else at the dinner table—given all the glad-handing he did for Alumni Affairs, those back-slapping dinner parties with drunken Favorite River alums—but even Uncle Bob was rendered speechless by Helena’s toast to at least two vaginas.