John Irving - In One Person

Mary Marshall Dean did not dare to leave home again; the world had wounded her too gravely. She lived with my scornful, cliché-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 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 .”