John Irving - In One Person

“‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown,’” Elaine recited. “Is that the bit you mean, Billy?”

“Yes, that’s it,” I told my dearest friend. That was exactly how I felt— o’erthrown.

“Okay, okay,” Elaine said, putting her arms around me. “You can cry now, Billy—we both can. Okay, okay.”

I was trying not to think of that line in Madame Bovary —Atkins had absolutely hated it. You know, that moment after Emma has given herself to the undeserving Rodolphe—when she feels her heart beating, “and the blood flowing in her body like a river of milk.” How that image had disgusted Tom Atkins!

Yet, as hard as it was for me to imagine—having seen the ninety-something pounds of Atkins as he lay dying, and his doomed wife, whose blood was no “river of milk” in her diseased body—Tom and Sue Atkins must have felt that way, at least once or twice.

“YOU’RE NOT SAYING THAT Tom Atkins told you Kittredge was gay —you’re not telling me that, are you?” Elaine asked me on the train, as I knew she would.

“No, I’m not telling you that—in fact, Tom both nodded and shook his head at the gay word. Atkins simply wasn’t clear. Tom didn’t exactly say what Kittredge is or was, only that he’d ‘seen’ him, and that Kittredge was ‘beautiful.’ And there was something else: Tom said Kittredge was not at all who we thought he was, Elaine—I don’t know more,” I told her.

“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.

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.