John Irving - In One Person

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 making 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.