John Irving - In One Person

I kept thinking about the boy, Peter; in the Christmas photo, he reminded me of the Tom Atkins I’d known. I imagined that Peter might be what poor Tom himself had once described as “like us.” I was wondering if Atkins had noticed that his son was “like us.” That was how Tom had put it, years ago: “Not everyone here understands people like us,” he’d said, and I’d wondered if Atkins was making a pass at me. (It had been the first pass that a boy like me ever made at me.)

“Bill!” Sue Atkins said sharply, on the phone. I realized I was crying.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t you dare cry around us when you come here,” Mrs. Atkins said. “This family is all cried out.”

“Don’t let me cry,” I told Elaine on that Saturday, not long before Christmas 1981. The holiday shoppers were headed the other way, into New York City. There was almost no one on the train to Short Hills, New Jersey, on that December Saturday.

“How am I supposed to stop you from crying, Billy? I don’t have a gun—I can’t shoot you,” Elaine said.

I was feeling a little jumpy about the gun word. Elmira, the nurse Richard Abbott and I had hired to look after Grandpa Harry, ceaselessly complained to Richard about “the gun.” It was a Mossberg .30-30 carbine, lever-action—the same type of short-barreled rifle Nils had used to kill himself. (I can’t remember, but I think Nils had a Winchester or a Savage, and it wasn’t a lever-action; I just know it was also a .30-30 carbine.)

Elmira had complained about Grandpa Harry “excessively cleanin’ the damn Mossberg”; apparently, Harry would clean the gun in Nana Victoria’s clothes—he got gun oil on a lot of her dresses. It was all the dry-cleaning that upset Elmira. “He’s not out shootin’—no more deerhuntin’ on skis, not at his age, he’s promised me—but he just keeps cleanin’ and cleanin’ the damn Mossberg!” she told Richard.

Richard had asked Grandpa Harry about it. “There’s no point in havin’ a gun if you don’t keep it clean,” Harry had said.

“But perhaps you could wear your clothes when you clean it, Harry,” Richard had said. “You know—jeans, an old flannel shirt. Something Elmira doesn’t have to get dry-cleaned.”

Harry hadn’t responded—that is, not to Richard. But Grandpa Harry told Elmira not to worry: “If I shoot myself, Elmira, I promise I won’t leave you with any friggin’ dry-cleanin’.”

Now, of course, both Elmira and Richard were worried about Grandpa Harry shooting himself, and I kept thinking about that super-clean .30-30. Yes, I was worried about Grandpa Harry’s intentions, too, but—to be honest with you—I was relieved to know the damn Mossberg was ready for action. To be very honest with you, I wasn’t worrying about Grandpa Harry as much as I was worrying about me . If I got the disease, I knew what I was going to do. Vermont boy that I am, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I was planning to head home to First Sister—to Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. I knew where he kept that .30-30; I knew where Harry stashed his ammunition. What my grandpa called a “varmint gun” was good enough for me.

In this frame of mind, and determined not to cry, I showed up in Short Hills, New Jersey, to pay a visit to my dying friend Tom Atkins, whom I’d not seen for twenty years—virtually half my life ago.

With half a brain, I might have anticipated that the boy, Peter, would be the one to answer the door. I should have expected to be greeted by a shocking physical resemblance to Tom Atkins—as I first knew him—but I was speechless.

“It’s the son, Billy—say something!” Elaine whispered in my ear. (Of course I was already struggling to make an effort not to cry.) “Hi—I’m Elaine, this is Billy,” Elaine said to the boy with the carrot-colored hair. “You must be Peter. We’re old friends of your dad.”

“Yes, we’ve been expecting you—please come in,” Peter said politely. (The boy had just turned fifteen; he’d applied to the Lawrenceville School, for what would be his sophomore year, and he was waiting to hear if he got in.)

“We weren’t sure what time you were coming, but now is a good time,” Peter Atkins was saying, as he led Elaine and me inside. I wanted to hug the boy—he’d used the time word twice; he had no trace of a pronunciation problem!—but, under the circumstances, I knew enough not to touch him.

Off to one side of the lavish vestibule was a rather formal-looking dining room—where absolutely no one ate (or had ever eaten), I was thinking—when the boy told us that Charles had just left. “Charles is my dad’s nurse,” Peter was explaining. “Charles comes to take care of the catheter—you have to keep flushing out the catheter, or it will clot off,” Peter told Elaine and me.

“Clot off,” I repeated—my first words in the Atkins house. Elaine elbowed me in my ribs.

“My mom is resting, but she’ll be right down,” the boy was saying. “I don’t know where my sister is.”

We had stopped alongside a closed door in a downstairs hall. “This used to be my father’s study,” Peter Atkins said; the boy was hesitating before he opened the door. “But our bedrooms are upstairs—Dad can’t climb stairs,” Peter continued, not opening the door. “If my sister is in here, with him, she may scream—she’s only thirteen, about to be fourteen,” the boy told Elaine and me; he had his hand on the doorknob, but he wasn’t ready to let us in. “I weigh about a hundred and forty pounds,” Peter Atkins said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage. “My dad’s lost some weight, since you’ve seen him,” the boy said. “He weighs almost a hundred—maybe ninety-something pounds.” Then he opened the door.

“It broke my heart,” Elaine told me, later. “How that boy was trying to prepare us.” But as I was only beginning to learn about that goddamn disease, there was no way to be prepared for it.

“Oh, there she is—my sister, Emily,” Peter Atkins said, when he finally let us enter the room where his dad lay dying.

The dog, Jacques, was a chocolate Labrador with a gray-white muzzle—an old dog, I could tell, not only by his grizzled nose and jaws, but by how slowly and unsteadily the dog came out from under the hospital bed to greet us. One of his hind legs slipped a little on the floor; his tail wagged only slightly, as if it hurt his hips to wag his tail at all.

“Jacques is almost thirteen,” Peter told Elaine and me, “but that’s pretty old for a dog—and he has arthritis.” The dog’s cold, wet nose touched my hand and then Elaine’s; that was all the old Lab had wanted. There was a subsequent thump when the dog lay down under the bed again.

The girl, Emily, was curled up like a second dog at the foot of her father’s hospital bed. It was probably of some small comfort to Tom that his daughter was keeping his feet warm. It was an indescribable exertion for Atkins to breathe; I knew that his hands and feet would be cold—the circulation to Tom’s extremities was closing down, trying to shunt blood to his brain.

Emily’s reaction to Elaine and me was delayed. She sat up and screamed, but belatedly; she’d been reading a book, which flew from her hands. The sound of its fluttering pages was lost to the girl’s scream. I saw an oxygen tank in the cluttered room—what had been Atkins’s “study,” as his son had explained, now converted for a deathwatch.

I also observed that his daughter’s scream had little effect on Tom Atkins—he’d barely moved in the hospital bed. It probably hurt him to turn his head; yet his bare chest, while the rest of his shrunken body lay still, was vigorously heaving. The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Tom’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above the nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone.