In One Person

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