In One Person (7 page)

“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
.”

“Flow!”
my mom cried happily, but with no small measure of disbelief. “You don’t know Billy, Richard—he’s just not much of a reader.”

“We’ll see, Jewel,” Richard said to her, but he winked at me. I had a growingly incurable crush on him; if my mother was already falling in love with Richard Abbott, she wasn’t alone.

I remember that captivating night—even such a commonplace thing as walking on the River Street sidewalk with the enthralling Richard Abbott seemed romantic. It was muggy, like a summer night, with a far-off thunderstorm brewing. All the neighborhood children and dogs were
at play in the River Street backyards, and the bell in the clock tower of Favorite River Academy tolled the hour. (It was only seven on a September school night, and my childhood, as Richard had said, was giving way to early adolescence.)

“Exactly what about you are you interested in, Bill?” Richard Abbott asked me.

“I wonder why I have sudden, unexplainable . . .
crushes,
” I said to him.

“Oh,
crushes
—you’ll soon have many more of them,” Richard said encouragingly. “Crushes are common, and to be expected—to be
enjoyed
!” he added.

“Sometimes, the crushes are on the wrong people,” I tried to tell him.

“But there are no ‘wrong’ people to have crushes on, Bill,” Richard assured me. “You cannot will yourself to have, or not to have, a crush on someone.”

“Oh,” I said. At thirteen, this must have meant to me that a crush was more dire than I’d first thought.

It’s so funny to think that, only six years later, when I took that summer-long trip with Tom—that trip to Europe, which got off to a bit of a bad start in Bruges—the very idea of falling in love seemed no longer likely; it even seemed impossible. That summer, I was only nineteen, but I was already convinced that I would never fall in love again.

I’m not entirely sure what expectations poor Tom had for that summer, but I was still so inexperienced that I imagined I’d seen the last of a crush that was dire enough to hurt me. In fact, I was so woefully naïve—so was Tom—that I further imagined I had the rest of my life to recover from whatever slight damage I had done to myself in the throes of my love for Miss Frost. I’d not been in enough relationships to realize the lasting effect that Miss Frost would have on me; the damage wasn’t “slight.”

As for Tom, I simply thought I had to be more circumspect in the looks I gave to the younger chambermaids, or to those other small-breasted girls and young women Tom and I encountered in our travels.

I was aware that Tom was insecure; I knew how sensitive he was about being “marginalized,” as he called it—he was always feeling overlooked or taken for granted, or flat-out ignored. I thought I was being careful not to let my eyes linger on anyone else for too long.

But one night—we were in Rome—Tom said to me, “I wish you would just
stare
at the prostitutes. They like to be looked at, Bill, and it’s
frankly excruciating how I know you’re thinking about them—especially that very tall one with the faint trace of a mustache—but you won’t even
look
!”

Another night—I don’t remember where we were, but we’d gone to bed and I thought Tom was asleep—he said in the dark, “It’s as if you’ve been shot in the heart, Bill, but you’re unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!”

But I’m getting ahead of myself; alas, it’s what a writer who knows the end of the story tends to do. I’d better be getting back to Richard Abbott, and that charming man’s quest to get me my first library card—not to mention Richard’s valiant efforts to assure me, a thirteen-year-old, that there were no “wrong” people to have crushes on.

T
HERE WAS ALMOST NO
one in the library that September evening; as I would later learn, there rarely was. (Most remarkably, there were never any children in that library; it would take me years to realize why.) Two elderly women were reading on an uncomfortable-looking couch; an old man had surrounded himself with stacks of books at one end of a long table, but he seemed less determined to read all the books than he was driven to barricade himself from the two old ladies.

There were also two despondent-looking girls of high school age; they and Cousin Gerry were fellow sufferers at the public high school in Ezra Falls. The high school girls were probably doing what Gerry had described to me as their “forever minimal” homework.

The dust, long accumulated in the countless book bindings, made me sneeze. “Not allergic to
books,
I hope,” someone said—these were Miss Frost’s first words to me, and when I turned around and saw her, I couldn’t speak.

“This boy would like a library card,” Richard Abbott said.

“And just who would ‘
this boy
’ be?” Miss Frost asked him, not looking at me.

“This is Billy Dean—I’m sure you know Mary Marshall Dean,” Richard explained. “Well, Bill is Mary’s boy—”

“Oh, my—yes!” Miss Frost exclaimed. “So this is
that boy
!”

The thing about a small town like First Sister, Vermont, was that everyone knew the circumstances of my mother having me—with one of those husbands
in-name-only.
I had the feeling that everybody knew the history of my code-boy dad. William Francis Dean was the disappearing
kind of husband and father, and all that remained of the sergeant in First Sister, Vermont, was his name—with a
junior
tacked on at the end of it. Miss Frost may not have officially met me until this September night in 1955, but she surely knew all about me.

“And you, I presume, are
not
Mr. Dean—you’re not this boy’s
father,
are you?” Miss Frost asked Richard.

“Oh, no—” Richard started to say.

“I thought not,” said Miss Frost. “You are then . . .” She waited; she had no intention of finishing that halted sentence.

“Richard Abbott,” Richard announced.

“The new
teacher
!” Miss Frost declared. “Hired with the fervent hope that
someone
at Favorite River Academy should be able to teach those boys Shakespeare.”

“Yes,” Richard said, surprised that the public librarian would know the details of the private school’s mission in hiring him—not only to teach English but to get the boys to read and understand Shakespeare. I was marginally more surprised than Richard; while I’d heard him tell my grandfather about his interest in Shakespeare, this was the first I’d heard of his Shakespearean
mission
. It seemed that Richard Abbott had been hired to beat the boys silly with Shakespeare!

“Well, good luck,” Miss Frost told him. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she added, smiling at me. “And are you going to put on any of Shakespeare’s plays?” she asked Richard.

“I believe that’s the only way to make the boys read and understand Shakespeare,” Richard told her. “They’ve got to see the plays performed—better yet, they’ve got to perform them.”

“All those boys, playing girls and women,” Miss Frost speculated, shaking her head. “Talk about ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ and all the other stuff that Coleridge said,” Miss Frost remarked, still smiling at me. (I normally disliked it when someone ruffled my hair, but when Miss Frost did it, I just beamed back at her.) “That
was
Coleridge, wasn’t it?” she asked Richard.

“Yes, it was,” he said. He was quite taken with her, I could tell, and if he hadn’t so recently fallen in love with my mother—well, who knows? Miss Frost was a knockout, in my unseasoned opinion. Not the hand that ruffled my hair, but her other hand now rested on the table next to Richard Abbott’s hands; yet, when Miss Frost saw me looking at their hands, she took her hand off the table. I felt her fingers lightly touch my shoulder.

“And what might you be interested in reading, William?” she asked. “It
is
William, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answered her, thrilled. “William” sounded so grown up. I was embarrassed to have developed a crush on my mother’s boyfriend; it seemed much more permissible to be developing an even bigger crush on the statuesque Miss Frost.

Her hands, I had noticed, were both broader in the palms and longer in the fingers than Richard Abbott’s hands, and—standing as they were, beside each other—I saw that Miss Frost’s upper arms were more substantial than Richard’s, and her shoulders were broader; she was taller than Richard, too.

There was one similarity. Richard was so very youthful-looking—he seemed to be almost as young as a Favorite River Academy student; he might have needed to shave only once or twice a week. And Miss Frost, despite the broad shoulders and her strong-looking upper arms, and (I only now noticed) the conspicuous breadth of her chest, had these small breasts. Miss Frost had young, barely emerging breasts—or so they seemed to me, though, at thirteen, I was a relatively recent noticer of breasts.

My cousin Gerry had bigger ones. Even fourteen-year-old Laura Gordon, who was too bosomy to play Hedvig in
The Wild Duck,
had more “highly visible breasts” (as my breast-conscious aunt Muriel had observed) than the otherwise imposing Miss Frost.

I was too smitten to utter a word—I couldn’t answer her—but Miss Frost (very patiently) asked me her question again. “William? You’re interested in reading, I presume, but could you tell me if you like fiction or nonfiction—and what subject in particular you prefer?” Miss Frost asked. “I’ve seen
this boy
at our little theater!” she said suddenly to Richard. “I’ve spotted you backstage, William—you seem very
observant
.”

“Yes, I am,” I scarcely managed to say. Indeed, I’d been so
observant
of Miss Frost that I could have masturbated on the spot, but instead I summoned the strength to say: “Do you know any novels about young people who have . . . dangerous crushes?”

Miss Frost stared at me unflinchingly. “Dangerous crushes,” she repeated. “Explain what’s dangerous about a crush.”

“A crush on the wrong person,” I told her.

“I said, in effect, there’s no such thing,” Richard Abbott interjected. “There are no ‘wrong’ people; we’re free to have crushes on anyone we want.”

“There are no ‘wrong’ people to have crushes on—are you
kidding
?” Miss Frost asked Richard. “On the contrary, William, there is some notable literature on the subject of crushes on the wrong people,” she said to me.

“Well, that’s what Bill is into,” Richard told Miss Frost. “Crushes on the wrong people.”

“That’s quite a category,” Miss Frost said; she was all the while smiling beautifully at me. “I’m going to start you out slowly—trust me on this one, William. You can’t rush into crushes on the wrong people.”

“Just what do you have in mind?” Richard Abbott asked her. “Are we talking
Romeo and Juliet
here?”

“The problems between the Montagues and the Capulets were not Romeo’s and Juliet’s problems,” Miss Frost said. “Romeo and Juliet were the
right
people for each other; it was their families that were fucked up.”

“I see,” Richard said—the “fucked up” remark shocked him and me. (It seemed so unlike a librarian.)

“Two sisters come to
mind,” Miss Frost said, quickly moving on. Both Richard Abbott and I misunderstood her. We were thinking that she meant to say something clever about my mother and Aunt Muriel.

I’d once imagined that the town of First Sister had been named for Muriel; she exuded sufficient self-importance to have had a whole town (albeit a small one) named for her. But Grandpa Harry had set me straight about the origins of our town’s name.

Favorite River was a tributary of the Connecticut River; when the first woodsmen were logging the Connecticut River Valley, they renamed some of the rivers from which they ran logs into and down the Connecticut—from both the New Hampshire and Vermont sides of the big river. (Maybe they hadn’t liked all the Indian names.) Those early river drivers named Favorite River—what they called a straight shot into the Connecticut, with few bends that could cause log jams. As for naming our town First Sister, that was because of the millpond, which was created by the dam on the Favorite River. With our sawmill and the lumberyard, we became a “first sister” to those other, bigger mill towns on the Connecticut River.