In One Person

"What about?" I asked Bob, with badly faked indifference, but the Racquet Man was busy; he was pouring himself another beer.

Robert Fremont, my uncle Bob, was sixty-seven. He was retiring next year, but he'd told me that he would continue to volunteer his services to Alumni Affairs, and particularly continue to contribute to the academy's alumni magazine, The River Bulletin. Whatever one thought of Uncle Bob's "Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept."--well, what can I say?--his enthusiasm for tracking down the school's most elusive alums made him very popular with folks in Alumni Affairs.

"What would Coach Hoyt like to have a word with me about?" I tried asking Uncle Bob again.

"I think you gotta ask him yourself, Billy," the ever-genial Racquet Man said. "You know Herm--he can be a kind of protective fella when it comes to talking about his wrestlers."

"Oh."

Maybe not a welcome change of subject, I thought.

IN ANOTHER TOWN, AT a later time, the Facility--"for assisted living, and beyond"--would probably have been named the Pines, or (in Vermont) the Maples. But you have to remember the place was conceived and constructed by Harry Marshall and Nils Borkman; ironically, neither of them would die there.

Someone had just died there, on that Thanksgiving weekend when I went to visit Herm Hoyt. A shrouded body was bound to a gurney, which an elderly, severe-looking nurse was standing guard over in the parking lot. "You're neither the person nor the vehicle I'm waitin' for," she told me.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's gonna snow, too," the old nurse said. "Then I'll have to wheel him back inside."

I tried to change the subject from the deceased to the reason for my visit, but--First Sister being the small town it was--the nurse already knew who I was visiting. "The coach is expectin' ya," she said. When she'd told me how to find Herm's room, she added: "You don't look much like a wrestler." When I told her who I was, she said: "Oh, I knew your mother and your aunt--and your grandfather, of course."

"Of course," I said.

"You're the writer," she added, with her eyes focused on the ash-end of her cigarette. I realized that she'd wheeled the body outside because she was a smoker.

I was forty-two that year; I judged the nurse to be at least as old as my aunt Muriel would have been--in the latter half of her sixties. I agreed that I was "the writer," but before I could leave her in the parking lot, the nurse said: "You were a Favorite River boy, weren't ya?"

"Yes, I was--'61," I said. I could see her scrutinizing me now; of course she would have heard everything about me and Miss Frost--everyone of a certain age had heard all about that.

"Then I guess ya knew this fella," the old nurse said; she passed her hand over the body bound to the gurney, but she touched nothing. "I'm guessin' he's waitin' in more ways than one!" the nurse said, exhaling an astonishing plume of cigarette smoke. She was wearing a ski parka and an old ski hat, but no gloves--the gloves would have interfered with her cigarette. It was just starting to snow--some scattered flakes were falling, not nearly enough to have accumulated on the body on the gurney.

"He's waitin' for that idiot kid from the funeral home, and he's waitin' in whatchamacallit!" the nurse exclaimed.

"Do you mean purgatory?" I asked her.

"Yes, I do--what is that, anyway?" she asked me. "You're the writer."

"But I don't believe in purgatory, or all the rest of it--" I started to say.

"I'm not askin' ya to believe in it," she said. "I'm askin' ya what it is!"

"An intermediate state, after death--" I started to answer her, but she wouldn't let me finish.

"Like Almighty God is decidin' whether to send this fella to the Underworld or the Great Upstairs--isn't that supposed to be what's goin' on there?" the nurse asked me.

"Kind of," I said. I had a limited recollection of what purgatory was for--for some kind of expiatory purification, if I remembered correctly. The soul, in that aforementioned intermediate state after death, was expected to atone for something--or so I guessed, w

ithout ever saying it. "Who is it?" I asked the old nurse; as she had done, I moved my hand safely above the body on the gurney. The nurse narrowed her eyes as she looked at me; it might have been the smoke.

"Dr. Harlow--you remember him, don'tcha? I'm guessin' it won't take the Almighty too long to decide about him!" the old nurse said.

I just smiled and left her to wait for the hearse in the parking lot. I didn't believe that Dr. Harlow could ever atone enough; I believed he was already in the Underworld, where he belonged. I hoped that the Great Upstairs had no room for Dr. Harlow--he who had been so absolute about my affliction.

Herm Hoyt told me that Dr. Harlow had moved to Florida after he'd retired. But when he got sick--he'd had prostate cancer; it had metastasized, as that cancer does, to bone--Dr. Harlow had asked to come back to First Sister. He'd wanted to spend his last days in the Facility. "I can't figure out why, Billy," Coach Hoyt said. "Nobody here ever liked him." (Dr. Harlow had died at age seventy-nine; I hadn't seen the bald-headed owl-fucker since he'd been a man in his fifties.)

But Herm Hoyt hadn't asked to see me because he'd wanted to tell me about Dr. Harlow.

"I'm guessing you've heard from Miss Frost," I said to her old wrestling coach. "Is she all right?"