"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.
AS 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.
For some reason, I'd shown the Atkins family photo to Elaine. "You remember Atkins," I said, handing her the late-arriving Christmas card.
"Poor Tom," Elaine automatically said; we both laughed, but Elaine stopped laughing when she had a look at the photograph. "What's the matter with him--what's he got in his mouth?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"He's got something in his mouth, Billy--he doesn't want anyone to see it," Elaine told me. "And what's the matter with those children?"
"The children?" I asked her. I'd not noticed that anything was wrong with the kids.
"They look like they've been crying," Elaine explained. "Jesus--it looks like they cry all the time!"
"Let me see that," I said, taking the photo. The children looked okay to me. "Atkins used to cry a lot," I told Elaine. "He was a real crybaby--maybe the kids got it from Tom."
"Come on, Billy--something's not normal. I mean with all of them," Elaine said.
"The dog looks normal," I said. (I was just fooling around.)
"I'm not talking about the dog, Billy," Elaine said.
IF YOUR PASSAGE THROUGH the Reagan years (1981-89) was unclouded by watching someone you knew die of AIDS, then you don't remember those years (or Ronald Reagan) the way I do. What a decade it was--and we would have that horseback-riding B actor in charge for most of it! (For seven of the eight years he was president, Reagan would not say the AIDS word.) Those years have been blurred by the passage of time, and by the conscious and unconscious forgetting of the worst details. Some decades slip by, others drag on; what made the eighties last forever was that my friends and lovers kept dying--into the nineties, and beyond. By '95--in New York, alone--more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.
It was some months after that February conversation Elaine and I had about the Atkins family photo--I know it was later in '81--when Larry's young lover Russell got sick. (I felt awful that I'd dismissed Russell as a Wall Street guy; I'd called him a poetaster, too.)