I’d heard about the suicide from Charles, at the time it happened; she’d always been a “deeply troubled” girl, Charles had written. As for Tom’s wife, Sue, she died a long eighteen months after Atkins was gone; she’d had Charles replaced as a nurse almost immediately after Tom’s death.
“I can understand why Sue didn’t want a gay man looking after her,” was all Charles said about it.
I’d asked Elaine if she thought Peter Atkins was gay. “No,” she’d said. “Definitely not.” Indeed, it was sometime in the late nineties—a couple of years after the worst of the AIDS epidemic—when I was giving a reading in New York, and a ruddy-faced, red-haired young man (with an attractive young woman) approached me at the book signing that followed the event. Peter Atkins must have been in his early thirties then, but I had no trouble recognizing him. He still looked like Tom.
“We got a babysitter for this—that’s pretty rare for us,” his wife said, smiling at me.
“How are you, Peter?” I asked him.
“I’ve read all your books,” the young man earnestly told me. “Your novels were kind of in loco parentis for me.” He said the Latin slowly. “You know, ‘in the place of a parent’—kind of,” young Atkins said.
We just smiled at each other; there was nothing more to say. He’d said it well, I thought. His father would have been happy how his son turned out—or as happy as poor Tom ever was, about anything. Tom Atkins and I had grown up at a time when we were full of self-hatred for our sexual differences, because we’d had it drummed into our heads that those differences were wrong. In retrospect, I’m ashamed that my expressed hope for Peter Atkins was that he wouldn’t be like Tom—or like me. Maybe, for Peter’s generation, what I should have hoped for him was that he would be “like us”—only proud of it. Yet, given what happened to Peter’s father and mother—well, it suffices to say that I thought Peter Atkins had been burdened enough.
I SHOULD PEN A brief obituary for the First Sister Players, my hometown’s obdurately amateur theatrical society. With Nils Borkman dead, and with the equally violent passing of that little theater’s prompter (my mother, Mary Marshall Abbott)—not to mention my late aunt, Muriel Marshall Fremont, who had wowed our town in various strident and big-bosomed roles—the First Sister Players simply slipped away. By the eighties, even in small towns, the old theaters were becoming movie houses; movies were what people wanted to see.
“More folks stayin’ home and watchin’ television, too, I suppose,” Grandpa Harry commented. Harry Marshall himself was “stayin’ home”; his days onstage as a woman were long gone.
It was Richard who called me, after Elmira found Grandpa Harry’s body.
“No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira,” Harry had said, when he’d earlier seen the nurse hanging Nana Victoria’s clean clothes in his closet.
“I musta misheard him,” Elmira would later explain to Richard. “I thought he said, ‘Not more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he was teasin’ me, ya know? But now I’m pretty sure he said, ‘No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he knew then what he was gonna do.”
As a favor to his nurse, Grandpa Harry had dressed himself as the old lumberman he was—jeans, a flannel shirt, “nothin’ fancy,” as Elmira would say—and when he’d curled up on his side in the bathtub, the way a child goes to sleep, Harry had somehow managed to shoot himself in the temple with the Mossberg .30-30, so that most of the blood was in the bathtub, and what there was of it that spattered the tile in other parts of the bathroom had presented no insurmountable difficulty for Elmira to clean.
The message on my answering machine, the night before, had been business as usual for Grandpa Harry. “No need to call me back, Bill—I’m turnin’ in a bit early. I was just checkin’ to be sure you were all right.”
That same night—it was November 1984, a little before Thanksgiving—the message on Richard Abbott’s answering machine was similar, at least in regard to Grandpa Harry “turnin’ in a bit early.” Richard had taken Martha Hadley to a movie in town, in what was the former theater for the First Sister Players. But the end of the message Grandpa Harry had left for Richard was a little different from the one Harry left for me. “I miss my girls, Richard,” Grandpa Harry had said. (Then he’d curled up in the bathtub and pulled the trigger.) Harold Marshall was ninety, soon to be ninety-one—just a bit early to be turning in.
Richard Abbott and Uncle Bob decided to turn that Thanksgiving into what would serve as a remembrance of Grandpa Harry, but Harry’s contemporaries—the ones who were still alive—were all in residence at the Facility. (They wouldn’t be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner in Grandpa Harry’s River Street home.)
Elaine and I drove up from New York together; we’d invited Larry to come with us. Larry was sixty-six; he was without a boyfriend at the moment, and Elaine and I were worried about him. Larry wasn’t sick. He didn’t have the disease, but he was worn out; Elaine and I had talked about it. Elaine had even said that the AIDS virus was killing Larry—“in another way.”
I was happy to have Larry along for the ride. This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.
Richard had invited some foreign students from Favorite River Academy for our Thanksgiving dinner; it was too far for them to go home for such a short school vacation—therefore, we were joined by two Korean girls and a lonely-looking boy from Japan. The rest of us all knew one another—not counting Larry, who’d never been to Vermont before.
Even though Grandpa Harry’s River Street house was practically in the middle of town—and a short walk to the Favorite River Academy campus—First Sister itself struck Larry as a “wilderness.” God knows what Larry thought of the surrounding woods and fields; the regular firearm season for deer had started, so the sound of shooting was all around. (A “barbaric wilderness” was what Larry called Vermont.)
Mrs. Hadley and Richard handled the kitchen chores, with help from Gerry and Helena; the latter was Gerry’s new girlfriend—a vivacious, chatty woman who’d just dumped her husband and was coming out, though she was Gerry’s age (forty-five) and had two grown children. Helena’s “kids” were in their early twenties; they were spending the holiday with her ex-husband.
Larry and Uncle Bob had perplexingly hit it off—possibly because Larry was the exact same age Aunt Muriel would have been if Muriel hadn’t been in the head-on collision that also killed my mom. And Larry loved talking to Richard Abbott about Shakespeare. I liked listening to the two of them; in a way, it was like overhearing my adolescence in the Favorite River Academy Drama Club—it was like watching a phase of my childhood pass by.
Since there were now female students at Favorite River, Richard Abbott was explaining to Larry, the casting of the Drama Club plays was very different than it had been when the academy was an all-boys’ school. He’d hated having to cast those boys in the female roles, Richard said; Grandpa Harry, who was no “boy,” and who’d been outstanding as a woman, was an exception (as were Elaine and a handful of other faculty daughters). But now that there were boys and girls at his disposal, Richard bemoaned what many theater directors in schools—even in colleges—are often telling me today. More girls like theater; there are always more girls. There aren’t enough boys to cast in all the male parts; you have to look for plays with more female parts for all the girls, because there are almost always more girls than there are female roles to play.