In One Person

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 Grey Westerns; worst of all were the highly