In One Person (58 page)

It was interesting: I never really learned how to throw a decent punch, but Jim taught me how to cover up—how not to get hit so hard. Occasionally, one of Jim’s punches would land a little harder than he’d intended; he always said he was sorry.

In the wrestling room, too, I took some occasional (albeit accidental) punishment—a split lip, a bloody nose, a jammed finger or thumb. Because I was concentrating so hard on various ways to set up (and conceal) my duck-under, I was banging heads a lot; you more or less have to bang heads if you like being in the collar-tie. Arthur inadvertently head-butted me, and I took a few stitches in the area of my right eyebrow.

Well, you should have heard Larry and Elaine—and all the others.

“Macho Man,” Larry called me, for a while.

“You’re telling me everyone’s friendly to you—is that right, Billy?” Elaine asked. “This was just a cordial kind of head-butt, huh?”

But—the teasing from those friends in my writing world notwithstanding—I
was learning a little more wrestling. I was getting a
lot
better at the duck-under, too.

“The one-move man,” Arthur had called me, in my earliest days in that wrestling room—but, as time went on, I picked up a few other moves. It must have been boring for the real wrestlers to have me as a workout partner, but they didn’t complain.

To my surprise, three or four of the old-timers gave me some pointers. (Maybe they appreciated my staying out of the sauna.) There was a fair number of wrestlers in their forties—a few in their fifties, tough old fellas. There were kids right out of college; there were some Olympic hopefuls and former Olympians. There were Russians who’d defected (one Cuban, too); there were many Eastern Europeans, but only two Iranians. There were Greco-Roman guys and freestyle guys, and strictly folkstyle guys—the latter were most in evidence among the kids and the old-timers.

Ed showed me how a cross-leg pull could set up my duck-under; Wolfie taught me an arm-drag series; Sonny showed me the Russian arm-tie and a nasty low-single. I wrote to Coach Hoyt about my progress. Herm and I both knew that I would never become a wrestler—not in my late thirties—but, as for learning to
protect
myself, I was learning. And I liked the 7
P.M.
wrestling routine in my life.

“You’re becoming a gladiator!” Larry had said; for once, he wasn’t teasing me.

Even Elaine withheld her near-constant fears. “Your body is different, Billy—you know that, don’t you? I’m not saying you’re one of those gym rats who are doing it for cosmetic reasons—I know you have
other
reasons—but you are starting to look a little scary,” Elaine said.

I knew I wasn’t “scary”—not to anyone. But, as the old decade ended and the eighties began, I was aware of the passing of some ancient, ingrained fears and apprehensions.

Mind you: New York was not a safe city in the eighties; at least it was nowhere near as “safe” as it’s become. But I, personally, felt safer—or more secure about who I was—than I’d ever felt before. I’d even begun to think of Miss Frost’s fears for me as groundless, or else she’d lived in Vermont too long; maybe she’d been right to fear for my safety in Vermont, but not in New York.

There were times when I didn’t really feel like going to wrestling practice at the NYAC, but Arthur and many others had gone out of their
way to make me feel welcome there. I didn’t want to disappoint them, yet—increasingly—I was thinking: What do you need to defend yourself for? Whom do you need to defend yourself
from
?

There was an effort under way to make me an official member of the New York Athletic Club; I can barely remember the process now, but it was very involved and it took a long time.

“A lifetime membership is the way to go—you don’t imagine yourself moving away from New York, do you, Billy?” Arthur had asked; he was sponsoring my membership. It would be a stretch to say I was a famous novelist, but—with a fourth book about to be published—I was at least a well-known one.

Nor did the money matter. Grandpa Harry was excited that I was “keepin’ up the wrestlin’ ”—my guess is that Herm Hoyt had talked to him. Harry said he would happily pay the fee for my lifetime membership.

“Don’t put yourself out, Arthur—no more than you already have,” I told him. “The club has been good for me, but I wouldn’t want you alienating people or losing friends over me.”

“You’re a shoo-in, Billy,” Arthur told me. “It’s no big deal being gay.”

“I’m bi—” I started to say.

“I mean bi—it’s no big deal, Billy,” Arthur said. “It’s not like it
was
.”

“No, I guess it isn’t,” I said, or so it seemed—as 1980 was soon to become 1981.

How one decade could slide unnoticed into another was a mystery to me, though this period of time was marked by the death of Nils Borkman—and Mrs. Borkman’s subsequent suicide.

“They were
both
suicides, Bill,” Grandpa Harry had whispered to me over the phone—as if his phone were being tapped.

Nils was eighty-eight—soon to be eighty-nine, had he lived till 1981. It was the regular firearm season for deer—this was shortly before Christmas, 1980—and Nils had blown off the back of his head with a .30-30 carbine while he was transversing the Favorite River Academy athletic fields on his cross-country skis. The students had already gone home for Christmas vacation, and Nils had called his old adversary Chuck Beebe—the game warden who was opposed to Nils and Grandpa Harry making deer-hunting a biathlon event.

“Poachers, Chuck! I have with my own eyes seen them—on the Favorite River athletic fields. I am, as we speak, off to hunt down them!” Nils had urgently shouted into the phone.

“What?
Whoa!
” Chuck had shouted back. “There’s poachers in deer season—what are they usin’, machine guns or somethin’? Nils?” the game warden had inquired. But Nils had hung up the phone. When Chuck found the body, it appeared that the rifle had been fired while Nils was withdrawing the weapon—from behind himself. Chuck was willing to call the shooting an accident, because he’d long believed that the way Nils and Grandpa Harry hunted deer was dangerous.

Nils had known perfectly well what he was doing. He normally hunted deer with a .30-06. The lighter .30-30 carbine was what Grandpa Harry called a “varmint gun.” (Harry hunted deer with it; he said deer were varmints.) The carbine had a shorter barrel; Harry knew that it was easier for Nils to shoot himself in the back of the head with the .30-30.

“But
why
would Nils shoot himself?” I’d asked Grandpa Harry.

“Well, Bill—Nils was Norwegian,” Grandpa Harry had begun; it took several minutes for Harry to remember that he’d not told me Nils had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.

“Oh.”

“
Mrs
. Borkman will be the next to go, Bill,” Grandpa Harry announced dramatically. We’d always joked about Mrs. Borkman being an Ibsen woman, but, sure enough, she shot herself that same day. “Like Hedda—with a handgun, in the temple!” Grandpa Harry had said admiringly—in a not that much later phone call.

I have no doubt that losing his partner and old friend, Nils, precipitated Grandpa Harry’s decline. Of course Harry had lost his wife and his only children, too. Thus Richard and I would soon venture down that assisted-living road of committing Grandpa Harry to the Facility, where Harry’s “surprise” appearances in drag would quickly wear out his welcome. And—still early in ’81, as I recall—Richard and I would move Grandpa Harry back into his River Street home, where Richard and I hired a live-in nurse to look after him. Elmira was the nurse’s name; not only did she have fond memories of seeing Harry onstage
as a woman
(when Elmira had been a little girl), but Elmira even participated in choosing Grandpa Harry’s dress-of-the-day from his long-hoarded stash of Nana Victoria’s clothes.

It was also relatively early in that year (’81) when Mr. Hadley left Mrs. Hadley; as it turned out, he ran off with a brand-new Favorite River Academy graduate. The girl was in her freshman year of college—I can’t remember where. She would drop out of college in order to live with Mr.
Hadley, who was sixty-one—Martha Hadley’s age, exactly. Mrs. Hadley was my mother’s age; she was a whopping ten years older than Richard Abbott, but Elaine must have been right in guessing that her mom had always loved Richard. (Elaine was usually right.)

“What a
melodrama,
” Elaine said wearily, when—as early as the summer of ’81—Mrs. Hadley and Richard started living together. Old hippie that she was, Martha Hadley refused to get married again, and Richard (I’m sure) was happy just to be in Mrs. Hadley’s uncomplaining presence. What did Richard Abbott care about remarrying?

Besides, they both understood that if they
didn’t
get married, they would be asked to move out of Bancroft Hall. It may have been the start of the eighties, but it was small-town Vermont, and Favorite River had its share of boarding-school rules. An unmarried couple, living together in a faculty apartment in a prep school—well, this wouldn’t quite do. Both Mrs. Hadley and Richard had
had
it with an all-boys’ dorm; Elaine and I didn’t doubt that. It’s entirely possible that Richard Abbott and Martha Hadley decided they would be crazy to get married; by choosing to live together in sin, they got out of living in a dorm!

Mrs. Hadley and Richard had the summer to find a place to live in town, or at least near First Sister—a modest house, something a couple of secondary-school teachers could afford. The place they found was not more than a few doors down River Street from what had once been the First Sister Public Library—now the historical society. The house had gone through a succession of owners in recent years; it needed some repairs, Richard told me somewhat haltingly over the phone.

I sensed his hesitation; if it was money he needed, I would have gladly given him what I could, but I was surprised Richard hadn’t asked Grandpa Harry first. Harry loved Richard, and I knew that Grandpa Harry had given his blessing to Richard’s living with Martha Hadley.

“The house isn’t more than a ten-minute walk from Grandpa Harry’s house, Bill,” Richard said over the phone. I could tell he was stalling.

“What is it, Richard?” I asked him.

“It’s the former Frost home, Bill,” Richard said. Given the history of the many recent and unreliable owners, we both knew that no traces of Miss Frost could conceivably have remained. Miss Frost was gone—both Richard Abbott and I knew that. Yet the house being “the former Frost home” was a glimpse into the darkness—the
past
darkness, I thought at the time. I saw no foreshadow of a
future
darkness.

A
S FOR MY SECOND
warning that a plague was coming, I just plain missed it. There’d been no Christmas card from the Atkins family in 1980; I hadn’t noticed. When a card came—it was long after the holiday, but the card still proclaimed “Season’s Greetings”—I remember being surprised that Tom hadn’t included a review of my fourth novel. (The book wasn’t yet published, but I’d sent Atkins a copy of the galleys; I thought that such a faithful fan of my writing deserved a sneak preview. After all, no one else was comparing me favorably to Flaubert!)

But there was nothing enclosed with the “Season’s Greetings” card, which arrived sometime in February of ’81—at least I think it showed up that late. I noted that the children and the dog looked older. What gave me pause was how much older poor Tom looked; it was almost as if he’d aged several years between Christmases.

My guess was that the photo had been taken on a family ski trip—everyone was dressed for skiing, and Atkins even wore a ski hat. They’d brought the dog
skiing
! I marveled.

The kids looked tanned—the wife, too. Remembering how fair-skinned Tom was, he probably had to be careful about the sun; thus I saw nothing amiss about Tom not being tanned. (Knowing Atkins, he’d probably heeded the earliest alarms about skin cancer and the importance of wearing sunscreen—he’d always been a boy who had heeded every alarm.)

But there was something silvery about Tom’s skin color, I thought—not that I could see much of his face, because Atkins’s stupid ski hat covered his eyebrows. Yet I could tell—just from that partial view of poor Tom’s face—that he’d lost weight. Quite a
lot
of weight, I speculated, but, given the ski clothes, I couldn’t really tell. Maybe Atkins had always been a bit hollow-cheeked.

Yet I’d stared at this belated Christmas card for the longest time. There was a look I hadn’t seen before in the expression of Tom’s wife. How was it possible, in a single expression, to convey a fear of both the unknown and the known?

Mrs. Atkins’s expression reminded me of that line in
Madame Bovary
—it’s at the end of chapter 6. (The one that goes like a dart to a bull’s-eye, or to your heart—“it seemed quite inconceivable that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to
dream.”) Tom’s wife didn’t look afraid—she seemed
terrified
! But what could possibly have frightened her so?

And where was the smile that the Tom Atkins I knew could rarely suppress for long? Atkins had this goofy, openmouthed smile—with lots of teeth and his tongue showing. But poor Tom had tightly closed his mouth—like a kid who’s trying to conceal a wad of chewing gum from a teacher, or like someone who knows his breath is bad.