"Definitely German-sounding," I said.
If Kittredge had wasted away in Zurich--even if he'd died in Switzerland "of natural causes"--possibly his wife was Swiss, but Irmgard was a German name. Boy, was that ever a tough Christian name to carry around! It was terribly old-fashioned; one immediately felt the stiffness of the person wearing that heavy name. I thought it was a suitable name for an elderly schoolmistress, a strict disciplinarian.
I was guessing that the only child, the son named Jacques, would have been born sometime in the early seventies; that would have been right on schedule for the kind of career-oriented young man I imagined Kittredge was, in those early years--given the MFA from Yale, given his first few steps along a no doubt bright and shining career path in the world of drama. Only at the appropriate time would Kittredge have paused, and found a wife. And then what? How had things unraveled after that?
"That fucker--God damn him!" Elaine cried, when I told her Kittredge had died. She was furious--it was as if Kittredge had escaped, somehow. She couldn't speak about the "of natural causes" bullshit, not to mention the wife. "He can't get away with this!" Elaine cried.
"Elaine--he died. He didn't get away with anything," I said, but Elaine cried and cried.
Unfortunately, it was one of the few nights when Amanda didn't have dorm duty; she was staying with me in the River Street house, and so I had to tell her about Kittredge, and Elaine, and all the rest.
No doubt, this history was more bi--and gay, and "transgender" (as Amanda would say)--in nature than anything Amanda had been forced to imagine, although she kept saying how much she loved my writing, where she'd no doubt encountered a world of sexual "differences" (as Richard would say).
I blame myself for not saying anything to Amanda about the frigging ghosts in that River Street house; only other people saw them--they never bothered me! But Amanda got up to go to the bathroom--it was the middle of the night--and her screaming woke me. It was a brand-new bathtub in that bathroom--it was not the same tub Grandpa Harry had pulled the trigger in, just the same bathroom--but, when Amanda finally calmed down enough to tell me what happened (when she was sitting on the toilet), it had no doubt been Harry she'd seen in that brand-new bathtub.
"He was curled up like a little boy in the bathtub--he smiled at me when I was peeing!" Amanda, who was still sobbing, explained.
"I'm really sorry," I said.
"But he was no little boy!" Amanda moaned.
"No, he wasn't--that was my grandfather," I tried to tell her calmly. Oh, that Harry--he certainly loved a new audience, even as a ghost! (Even as a man!)
"At first, I didn't see the rifle--but he wanted me to see it, Billy. He showed me the gun, and then he shot himself in the head--his head went all over the place!" Amanda wailed.
Naturally, I had some explaining to do; I had to tell her everything about Grandpa Harry. We were up all night. Amanda would not go to the bathroom by herself in the morning--she wouldn't even be alone in one of the other bathrooms, which I'd suggested. I understood; I was very understanding. I've never seen a frigging ghost--I'm sure they're frightening.
I guess the last straw, as I would later explain to Mrs. Hadley and Richard, was that Amanda was so rattled in the morning--after all, the anxious young woman hadn't had a good night's sleep--she opened the door to my bedroom closet, thinking she was opening the door to the upstairs hall. And there was Grandpa Harry's .30-30 Mossberg; I keep that old carbine in my closet, where it just leans against a wall.
Amanda screamed and screamed--Christ, she wouldn't stop screaming. "You kept the actual gun--you keep it in your bedroom closet! Who would ever keep the very same gun his grandfather used to blow himself all over the bathroom, Billy?" Amanda yelled at me.
"Amanda has a point about the gun, Bill," Richard would say to me, when I told him that Amanda and I were no longer seeing each other.
"Nobody wants you to have that gun, Billy," Martha Hadley said.
"If you get rid of the gun, maybe the ghosts will leave, Billy," Elaine told me.
But those ghosts have never appeared to me; I think you have to be receptive to see ghosts like that, and I guess I'm not "receptive" in that way. I have my own ghosts--my own "terrifying angels," as I (more than once) have thought of them--but my ghosts don't live in that River Street house in First Sister, Vermont.
I would go to Mexico, alone, that mud season of 1995. I rented a house Elaine told me about in Playa del Carmen. I drank a lot of cerveza, and I picked up a handsome, swashbuckling-looking guy with a pencil-thin mustache and dark sideburns; honestly, he looked like one of the actors who played Zorro--one of the old black-and-white versions. We had fun, we drank a lot more cerveza, and when I came back to Vermont, it was almost looking like spring.
Not much would happen to me--not for fifteen years--except that I became a teacher. The private schools--you're supposed to call them "independent" schools, but I still let the private word slip out--aren't so strict about the retirement age. Richard Abbott wouldn't retire from Favorite River Academy until he was in his early seventies, and even after he retired, Richard went to all the productions of the school's Drama Club.
Richard wasn't very happy about his various replacements--well, nobody was happy about that lackluster bunch of buffoons. There wasn't anyone in the English Department who had Richard's feelings for Shakespeare, and there was no one who knew shit about theater. Martha Hadley and Richard were all over me to get involved at the academy.
"The kids read your novels, Billy," Richard kept telling me.
"Especially--you know--the kids who are sexually different, Billy," Mrs. Hadley said; she was still working with individual "cases" (as she called them) in her eighties.
It was from Elaine that I first heard there were groups for lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender kids on college campuses. It was Richard A
bbott--in his late seventies--who told me there was even such a group of kids at Favorite River Academy. It was hard for a bi guy of my generation to imagine such organized and recognized groups. (They were becoming so common, these groups were known by their initials. When I first heard about this, I couldn't believe it.)
When Elaine was teaching at NYU, she invited me to come give a reading from a new novel to the LGBT group on campus. (I was so out of it; it took me days of reciting those initials before I could keep them in the correct order.)
It would have been the fall term of 2007 at Favorite River Academy when Mrs. Hadley told me there was someone special she and Richard wanted me to meet. I immediately thought it was a new teacher at the academy--someone in the English Department, either a pretty woman or a cute guy, I guessed, or possibly this "special" person had just been hired to breathe a hope of new life into the failing, all-but-expired Drama Club at Favorite River.
I was remembering Amanda--that's where I thought this match-making enterprise of Martha Hadley's (and Richard's) was headed. But, no--not at my age. I was sixty-five in the fall of 2007. Mrs. Hadley and Richard weren't trying to fix me up. Martha Hadley was a spry eighty-seven, but one slip on the ice or in the snow--one bad fall, a broken hip--and she would be checking into the Facility. (Mrs. Hadley would soon be checking in there, anyway.) And Richard Abbott was no longer leading-man material; at seventy-seven, Richard had come partway out of retirement to teach a Shakespeare course at Favorite River, but he didn't have the stamina to put Shakespeare onstage anymore. Richard was just reading the plays with some first-year kids at the academy; all of them were starting freshmen at the school. (Kids in the Class of 2011! I couldn't imagine being that young again!)