John Irving - In One Person

“What is it that’s so appealin’ about a wake ?” Grandpa Harry asked Elaine and me. We went first to his house on River Street; I’d half expected Harry to greet us as a woman, or at least dressed in Nana Victoria’s clothes, but he was looking like a lumberman—jeans, a flannel shirt, unshaven. “I mean, why would anyone livin’ find it suitable to watch over the bodies of the dead—that is, before you get to the buryin’ part? Where are the dead bodies gonna go? Why do dead bodies need watchin’ ?” Grandpa Harry asked.

It was Vermont; it was February. Nobody was burying Muriel or my mother until April, after the ground had thawed. I could only guess that the funeral home had asked Grandpa Harry if he’d wanted to have a proper wake; that had probably started the tirade.

“Jeez—we’ll be watchin’ the bodies till spring !” Harry had shouted.

There was no religious service planned. Grandpa Harry had a big house; friends and family members would show up for cocktails and a catered buffet. The memorial word was allowed, but not a “memorial service”; Elaine and I didn’t hear the service word mentioned. Harry seemed distracted and forgetful. Elaine and I both thought he didn’t behave like a man who’d just lost his only children, his two daughters; instead, Harry struck us as an eighty-four-year-old who had misplaced his reading glasses—Grandpa Harry was eerily disconnected from the moment. We left him to ready himself for the “party”; Elaine and I were not mistaken—Harry had used the party word.

“Uh-oh,” Elaine had said, as we were leaving the River Street house.

It was the first time I had been “home” when school was in session—that is, to Richard Abbott’s faculty apartment in Bancroft Hall—since I’d been a Favorite River student. But how young the students looked was more unnerving to Elaine.

“I don’t see anyone I could even imagine having sex with,” Elaine said.

At least Bancroft was still a boys’ dorm; it was disconcerting enough to see all the girls on the campus. In a process that was familiar to most of the single-sex boarding schools in New England, Favorite River had become a coed institution in 1973. Uncle Bob was no longer working in Admissions. The Racquet Man had a new career in Alumni Affairs. I could easily see Uncle Bob as a glad-hander, a natural at soliciting goodwill (and money) from a sentimental Favorite River alum. Bob also had a gift for inserting his queries into the class notes in the academy’s alumni magazine, The River Bulletin. It had become Bob’s passion to track down those elusive Favorite River graduates who’d failed to keep in touch with their old school. (Uncle Bob called his queries “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”)

Cousin Gerry had forewarned me that Bob’s drinking had been “unleashed” by all his traveling for Alumni Affairs, but I counted Gerry as the last surviving Winthrop woman—albeit a watered-down, lesbian version of that steadfastly disapproving gene. (You will recall that I’d always imagined Uncle Bob’s reputation for drinking was exaggerated.)

On another subject: Upon our return to Bancroft Hall, Elaine and I discovered that Richard Abbott couldn’t speak, and that Mr. and Mrs. Hadley weren’t talking to each other. The lack of communication between Martha Hadley and her husband was not unknown to me; Elaine had long predicted that her parents were headed for a divorce. (“It won’t be acrimonious, Billy—they’re already indifferent to each other,” Elaine had told me.) And Richard Abbott had confided to me—that is, before my mother died, when Richard could still speak—that he and my mom had stopped socializing with the Hadleys.

Elaine and I had speculated on the mysterious “stopped socializing” part. Naturally, this dovetailed with Elaine’s twenty-year theory that her mother was in love with Richard Abbott. Since I’d had crushes on Mrs. Hadley and Richard, what could I possibly contribute to this conversation?

I’d always believed that Richard Abbott was a vastly better man than my mother deserved, and that Martha Hadley was entirely too good for Mr. Hadley. Not only could I never remember that man’s first name, if he ever had one; something about Mr. Hadley’s fleeting brush with fame—the fame was due to his emergence as a political historian, and a voice of protest, during the Vietnam War—had served to dislocate him. If he’d once appeared aloof from his family—not only remote-seeming to his wife, Mrs. Hadley, but even distant from his only child, Elaine—Mr. Hadley’s identification with a cause (his anti-Vietnam crusades with the Favorite River students) completely severed him from Elaine and Martha Hadley, and further led him to have little (if anything) to do with adults.

It happens in boarding schools: There’s occasionally a male faculty member who is unhappy with his life as a grown-up. He tries to become one of the students. In Mr. Hadley’s case—according to Elaine—his unfortunate regression to become one of the students when he himself was already in his fifties coincided with Favorite River Academy’s decision to admit girls . This was just two years before the end of the Vietnam War.

“Uh-oh,” as I’d heard Elaine say, so many times, but this time she’d added something. “When the war is over, what crusade will my father be leading? How’s he going to engage all those girls ?”

Elaine and I didn’t see my uncle Bob until the “party.” I had just read the Racquet Man’s query in the most recent issue of The River Bulletin; attached to the class notes for the Class of ’61, which was my class, there was this plaintive entry in the “Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept.”

“What’s up with you, Jacques Kittredge?” Uncle Bob had written. Following his undergraduate degree from Yale (’65), Kittredge had completed a three-year residence at the Yale School of Drama; he’d earned an MFA in ’67. Thereafter, we’d heard nothing.

“An MFA in fucking what ?” Elaine had asked more than ten years ago—when The River Bulletin had last heard a word from (or about) Kittredge. Elaine meant that it could have been a degree in acting, design, sound design, directing, playwriting, stage management, technical design and production, theater management—even dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. “I’ll bet he’s a fucking critic, ” Elaine said. I told her I didn’t care what Kittredge was; I said I didn’t want to know.

“Yes, you do want to know. You can’t bullshit me, Billy,” Elaine had said.

Now here was the Racquet Man, slumped on a couch—actually sunken into a couch in Grandpa Harry’s living room, as if it would take a wrestling team to get Bob back on his feet.

“I’m sorry about Aunt Muriel,” I told him. Uncle Bob reached up from the couch to give me a hug, spilling his beer.

“Shit, Billy,” Bob said, “it’s the people you would least expect who are disappearing.”

“Disappearing,” I repeated warily.

“Take your classmate, Billy. Who would have picked Kittredge as a likely disappearance?” Uncle Bob asked.

“You don’t think he’s dead, do you?” I asked the Racquet Man.

“An unwillingness to communicate is more likely,” Uncle Bob said. His speech was so slowed down that the communicate word sounded as if it had seven or eight syllables; I realized that Bob was quietly but spectacularly drunk, although the gathering in memory of my aunt Muriel and my mother was just getting started.

There were some empty beer bottles at Bob’s feet; when he dropped the now-empty bottle he’d been drinking (and spilling), he deftly kicked all but one of the bottles under the couch—somehow, without even looking at the bottles.