by John Irving
IN TWO YEARS' TIME, when I sat as a fifteen-year-old freshman in my first morning meeting at Favorite River Academy, I would hear the school physician, Dr. Harlow, invite us boys to treat the most common afflictions of our tender age aggressively. (I am certain that he used the word afflictions; I'm not making this up.) As for what these "most common" afflictions were, Dr. Harlow explained that he meant acne and "an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys or men." For our pimples, Dr. Harlow assured us there was a variety of remedies. In regard to those early indications of homosexual yearnings--well, either Dr. Harlow or the school psychiatrist, Dr. Grau, would be happy to talk to us.
"There is a cure for these afflictions," Dr. Harlow told us boys; there was a doctor's customary authority in his voice, which was at once scientific and cajoling--even the cajoling part was delivered in a confident, man-to-man way. And the gist of Dr. Harlow's morning-meeting speech was perfectly clear, even to the greenest freshmen--namely, we had only to present ourselves and ask to be treated. (What was also painfully apparent was that we had only ourselves to blame if we didn't ask to be cured.)
I would wonder, later, if it might have made a difference--that is, if I'd been exposed to Dr. Harlow's (or Dr. Grau's) buffoonery at the time I first met Richard Abbott, instead of two years after meeting him. Given what I know now, I sincerely doubt that my crush on Richard Abbott was curable, though the likes of Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau--the available authorities in the medical sciences of that time--emphatically believed that my crush on Richard was in the category of a treatable affliction.
Two years after that life-changing casting call, it would be too late for a cure; on the road ahead, a world of crushes would open before me. That Friday night casting call was my introduction to Richard Abbott; to everyone present--not least to Aunt Muriel, who fainted twice--it was obvious that Richard had taken charge of us all.
"It seems that we need a Nora, or a Hedda, if we're going to do Ibsen at all," Richard said to Nils.
"But the leafs! They are already color-changing; they will keep falling," Borkman said. "It is the dying time of the year!"
He was not the easiest man to understand, except that Borkman's beloved Ibsen and fjord-jumping were somehow connected to the serious drama, which was always our fall play--and to, no less, the so-called dying time of the year, when the leafs were unstoppably falling.
Looking back, of course, it seems such an innocent time--both the dying time of the year and that relatively uncomplicated time in my life.
Chapter 2
CRUSHES ON THE WRONG PEOPLE
How long was it, after that unsuccessful casting call, before my mom and young Richard Abbott were dating? "Knowing Mary, I'll bet they were doing it immediately," I'd overheard Aunt Muriel say.
Only once had my mother ventured away from home; she'd gone off to college (no one ever said where), and she had dropped out. She'd managed only to get pregnant; she didn't even finish secretarial school! Moreover, to add to her moral and educational failure, for fourteen years, my mother and her almost-a-bastard son had borne the Dean name--for the sake of conventional legitimacy, I suppose.
Mary Marshall Dean did not dare to leave home again; the world had wounded her too gravely. She lived with my scornful, cliche-encumbered grandmother, who was as critical of her black-sheep daughter as my superior-sounding aunt Muriel was. Only Grandpa Harry had kind and encouraging words for his "baby girl," as he called her. From the way he said this, I got the impression that he thought my mom had suffered some lasting damage. Grandpa Harry was ever my champion, too--he lifted my spirits when I was down, as he repeatedly tried to bolster my mother's ever-failing self-confidence.
In addition to her duties as prompter for the First Sister Players, my mom worked as a secretary in the sawmill and lumberyard; as the owner and mill manager, Grandpa Harry chose to overlook the fact that my mother had failed to finish secretarial school--her typing sufficed for him.
There must have been remarks made about my mother--I mean, among the sawmill men. The things they said were not about her typing, and I'll bet they'd heard them first from their wives or girlfriends; the sawmill men would have noticed that my mom was pretty, but I'm sure the women in their lives were the origin of the remarks made about Mary Marshall Dean around the lumberyard--or, more dangerously, in the logging camps.
I say "more dangerously" because Nils Borkman supervised the logging camps; men were always getting injured there, but were they sometimes "injured" because of their remarks about my mom? One guy or another was always getting hurt at the lumberyard, too--occasionally, I'll bet it was a guy who was repeating what he'd heard his wife or girlfriend say about my mother. (Her so-called husband hadn't been in any hurry to marry her; he'd never lived with her, married or not, and that boy had no father--those were the remarks made about my mom, I imagine.)
Grandpa Harry wasn't a fighting man; I'm guessing that Nils Borkman stuck up for his beloved business partner, and for my mother.
"He can't work for six weeks--not with a busted collarbone, Nils," I'd heard Grandpa Harry say. "Every time you 'straighten out' someone, as you put it, we're stuck payin' the workers' compensation!"
"We can afford the workers' compensation, Harry--he'll watch what he says the time next, won't he?" Nils would say.
"The 'next time,' Nils," Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.
In my eyes, my mom was not only a couple of years younger than her mean sister, Muriel; my mother was by far the prettier of the two Marshall girls. It didn't matter that my mom lacked Muriel's operatic bosom and booming voice. Mary Marshall Dean was altogether better-proportioned. She was almost Asian-looking to me--not only because she was petite, but because of her almond-shaped face and how strikingly wide open (and far apart) her eyes were, not to mention the acute smallness of her mouth.
"A jewel," Richard Abbott had dubbed her, when they were first dating. It became what Richard called her--not "Mary," just "Jewel." The name stuck.
And how long was it, after they were dating, before Richard Abbott discovered that I didn't have my own library card? (Not long; it was still early in the fall, because the leaves had just begun to change color.)
My mom had revealed to Richard that I wasn't much of a reader, and this led to Richard's discovery that my mother and grandmother were bringing books home from our town library for me to read--or not to read, which was usually the case.
The other books that were brought into my life were hand-me-downs from my meddlesome aunt Muriel; these were mostly romance novels, the ones my crude elder cousin had read and rejected. Occasionally, Cousin Geraldine had expressed her contempt for these romances (or for the main characters) in the margins of the books.
Gerry--only Aunt Muriel and my grandmother ever called her Geraldine--was three years older than I was. In that same fall when Richard Abbott was dating my mom, I was thirteen and Gerry sixteen. Since Gerry was a girl, she wasn't allowed to attend Favorite River Academy. She was vehemently angry about the "all-boys' factor" at the private school, because she was bused every school day to Ezra Falls--the nearest public high school to First Sister.
Some of Gerry's hatred of boys found its way into the marginalia she contributed to the hand-me-down romance novels; some of her disdain for boy-crazy girls was also vented in the margins of those pages. Whenever I was given a hand-me-down romance novel courtesy of Aunt Muriel, I read Gerry's comments in the margins immediately. The novels themselves were stultifyingly boring. But to the tiresome description of the heroine's first kiss, Gerry wrote in the margin: "Kiss me! I'll make your gums bleed! I'll make you piss yourself!"
The heroine was a self-congratulatory prig, who would never let her boyfriend touch her breasts--Gerry responded in the margin with: "I would rub your tits raw! Just try to stop me!"
As for the books my mother and grandmother brought home from the First Sister Public Library, they were (at best) adventure novels: seafaring stories, usually with pirates, or Zane Gre
y Westerns; worst of all were the highly unlikely science-fiction novels, or the equally implausible futuristic tales.
Couldn't my mom and Nana Victoria see for themselves that I was both mystified and frightened by life on Earth? I had no need of stimulation from distant galaxies and unknown planets. And the present gripped me with sufficient incomprehension, not to mention the daily terror of being misunderstood; even to contemplate the future was nightmarishly unwelcome.
"But why doesn't Bill choose what books he likes for himself?" Richard Abbott asked my mother. "Bill, you're thirteen, right? What are you interested in?"
Except for Grandpa Harry and my ever-friendly uncle Bob (the accused drinker), no one had asked me this question before. All I liked to read were the plays that were in rehearsal at the First Sister Players; I imagined that I could learn these scripts as word-for-word as my mother always learned them. One day, if my mom were sick, or in an automobile accident--there were car crashes galore in Vermont--I imagined I might be able to replace her as the prompter.
"Billy!" my mother said, laughing in that seemingly innocent way she had. "Tell Richard what you're interested in."
"I'm interested in me," I said. "What books are there about someone like me?" I asked Richard Abbott.
"Oh, you would be surprised, Bill," Richard told me. "The subject of childhood giving way to early adolescence--well, there are many marvelous novels that have explored this pivotal coming-of-age territory! Come on--let's go have a look."
"At this hour? Have a look where?" my grandmother said with alarm. This was after an early school-night supper--it was not quite dark outside, but it soon would be. We were still sitting at the dining-room table.
"Surely Richard can take Bill to our town's little library, Vicky," Grandpa Harry said. Nana looked as if she'd been slapped; she was so very much a Victoria (if only in her own mind) that no one but my grandpa ever called her "Vicky," and when he did, she reacted with resentment every time. "I'm bettin' that Miss Frost keeps the library open till nine most nights," Harry added.
"Miss Frost!" my grandmother declared, with evident distaste.
"Now, now--tolerance, Vicky, tolerance," my grandfather said.
"Come on," Richard Abbott said again to me. "Let's go get you your own library card--that's a start. The books will come later; if I had to guess, the books will soon flow."
"Flow!" my mom cried happily, but with no small measure of disbelief. "You don't know Billy, Richard--he's just not much of a reader."
"We'll see, Jewel," Richard said to her, but he winked at me. I had a growingly incurable crush on him; if my mother was already falling in love with Richard Abbott, she wasn't alone.
I remember that captivating night--even such a commonplace thing as walking on the River Street sidewalk with the enthralling Richard Abbott seemed romantic. It was muggy, like a summer night, with a far-off thunderstorm brewing. All the neighborhood children and dogs were at play in the River Street backyards, and the bell in the clock tower of Favorite River Academy tolled the hour. (It was only seven on a September school night, and my childhood, as Richard had said, was giving way to early adolescence.)
"Exactly what about you are you interested in, Bill?" Richard Abbott asked me.
"I wonder why I have sudden, unexplainable . . . crushes," I said to him.
"Oh, crushes--you'll soon have many more of them," Richard said encouragingly. "Crushes are common, and to be expected--to be enjoyed!" he added.
"Sometimes, the crushes are on the wrong people," I tried to tell him.
"But there are no 'wrong' people to have crushes on, Bill," Richard assured me. "You cannot will yourself to have, or not to have, a crush on someone."
"Oh," I said. At thirteen, this must have meant to me that a crush was more dire than I'd first thought.
It's so funny to think that, only six years later, when I took that summer-long trip with Tom--that trip to Europe, which got off to a bit of a bad start in Bruges--the very idea of falling in love seemed no longer likely; it even seemed impossible. That summer, I was only nineteen, but I was already convinced that I would never fall in love again.
I'm not entirely sure what expectations poor Tom had for that summer, but I was still so inexperienced that I imagined I'd seen the last of a crush that was dire enough to hurt me. In fact, I was so woefully naive--so was Tom--that I further imagined I had the rest of my life to recover from whatever slight damage I had done to myself in the throes of my love for Miss Frost. I'd not been in enough relationships to realize the lasting effect that Miss Frost would have on me; the damage wasn't "slight."
As for Tom, I simply thought I had to be more circumspect in the looks I gave to the younger chambermaids, or to those other small-breasted girls and young women Tom and I encountered in our travels.
I was aware that Tom was insecure; I knew how sensitive he was about being "marginalized," as he called it--he was always feeling overlooked or taken for granted, or flat-out ignored. I thought I was being careful not to let my eyes linger on anyone else for too long.
But one night--we were in Rome--Tom said to me, "I wish you would just stare at the prostitutes. They like to be looked at, Bill, and it's frankly excruciating how I know you're thinking about them--especially that very tall one with the faint trace of a mustache--but you won't even look!"
Another night--I don't remember where we were, but we'd gone to bed and I thought Tom was asleep--he said in the dark, "It's as if you've been shot in the heart, Bill, but you're unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!"
But I'm getting ahead of myself; alas, it's what a writer who knows the end of the story tends to do. I'd better be getting back to Richard Abbott, and that charming man's quest to get me my first library card--not to mention Richard's valiant efforts to assure me, a thirteen-year-old, that there were no "wrong" people to have crushes on.
THERE WAS ALMOST NO one in the library that September evening; as I would later learn, there rarely was. (Most remarkably, there were never any children in that library; it would take me years to realize why.) Two elderly women were reading on an uncomfortable-looking couch; an old man had surrounded himself with stacks of books at one end of a long table, but he seemed less determined to read all the books than he was driven to barricade himself from the two old ladies.
There were also two despondent-looking girls of high school age; they and Cousin Gerry were fellow sufferers at the public high school in Ezra Falls. The high school girls were probably doing what Gerry had described to me as their "forever minimal" homework.
The dust, long accumulated in the countless book bindings, made me sneeze. "Not allergic to books, I hope," someone said--these were Miss Frost's first words to me, and when I turned around and saw her, I couldn't speak.
"This boy would like a library card," Richard Abbott said.
"And just who would 'this boy' be?" Miss Frost asked him, not looking at me.
"This is Billy Dean--I'm sure you know Mary Marshall Dean," Richard explained. "Well, Bill is Mary's boy--"
"Oh, my--yes!" Miss Frost exclaimed. "So this is that boy!"
The thing about a small town like First Sister, Vermont, was that everyone knew the circumstances of my mother having me--with one of those husbands in-name-only. I had the feeling that everybody knew the history of my code-boy dad. William Francis Dean was the disappearing kind of husband and father, and all that remained of the sergeant in First Sister, Vermont, was his name--with a junior tacked on at the end of it. Miss Frost may not have officially met me until this September night in 1955, but she surely knew all about me.
"And you, I presume, are not Mr. Dean--you're not this boy's father, are you?" Miss Frost asked Richard.
"Oh, no--" Richard started to say.
"I thought not," said Miss Frost. "You are then . . ." She waited; she had no intention of finishing that halted sentence.
"Richard Abbott," Richard announced.
"The new teacher!" Miss
Frost declared. "Hired with the fervent hope that someone at Favorite River Academy should be able to teach those boys Shakespeare."
"Yes," Richard said, surprised that the public librarian would know the details of the private school's mission in hiring him--not only to teach English but to get the boys to read and understand Shakespeare. I was marginally more surprised than Richard; while I'd heard him tell my grandfather about his interest in Shakespeare, this was the first I'd heard of his Shakespearean mission. It seemed that Richard Abbott had been hired to beat the boys silly with Shakespeare!
"Well, good luck," Miss Frost told him. "I'll believe it when I see it," she added, smiling at me. "And are you going to put on any of Shakespeare's plays?" she asked Richard.
"I believe that's the only way to make the boys read and understand Shakespeare," Richard told her. "They've got to see the plays performed--better yet, they've got to perform them."
"All those boys, playing girls and women," Miss Frost speculated, shaking her head. "Talk about 'willing suspension of disbelief,' and all the other stuff that Coleridge said," Miss Frost remarked, still smiling at me. (I normally disliked it when someone ruffled my hair, but when Miss Frost did it, I just beamed back at her.) "That was Coleridge, wasn't it?" she asked Richard.
"Yes, it was," he said. He was quite taken with her, I could tell, and if he hadn't so recently fallen in love with my mother--well, who knows? Miss Frost was a knockout, in my unseasoned opinion. Not the hand that ruffled my hair, but her other hand now rested on the table next to Richard Abbott's hands; yet, when Miss Frost saw me looking at their hands, she took her hand off the table. I felt her fingers lightly touch my shoulder.
"And what might you be interested in reading, William?" she asked. "It is William, isn't it?"
"Yes," I answered her, thrilled. "William" sounded so grown up. I was embarrassed to have developed a crush on my mother's boyfriend; it seemed much more permissible to be developing an even bigger crush on the statuesque Miss Frost.
Her hands, I had noticed, were both broader in the palms and longer in the fingers than Richard Abbott's hands, and--standing as they were, beside each other--I saw that Miss Frost's upper arms were more substantial than Richard's, and her shoulders were broader; she was taller than Richard, too.