The Vermont State Police reported that my mother and Muriel were killed instantly; Aunt Muriel had only recently turned sixty, and my mom would have been fifty-eight in April of that year. Richard Abbott was just forty-eight. “Kinda young to be a widower,” as Grandpa Harry would say. Uncle Bob was on the young side to be a widower, too. Bob was Miss Frost’s age—he was sixty-one.
Elaine and I rented a car and drove to Vermont together. We argued the whole way about what I “saw” in Rachel, the thirty-something fiction writer who was teaching at Columbia.
“You’re flattered when younger writers like your writing—or you’re oblivious to how they come on to you, maybe,” Elaine began. “All the time you’ve spent around Larry has at least taught you to be wary of older writers who suck up to you.”
“I guess I’m oblivious to it—namely, that Rachel is sucking up to me. But Larry never sucked up to me,” I said. (Elaine was driving; she was an aggressive driver, and when she drove, it made her more aggressive in other ways.)
“Rachel is sucking up to you, and you don’t see it,” Elaine said. I didn’t say anything, and Elaine added: “If you ask me, I think my tits are bigger.”
“Bigger than—”
“Rachel’s!”
“Oh.”
Elaine was never sexually jealous of anyone I was sleeping with, but she didn’t like it when I was hanging out with a writer who was younger than she was—man or woman.
“Rachel writes in the present tense—‘I go, she says, he goes, I think.’ That shit,” Elaine declared.
“Yes, well—”
“And the ‘thinking, wishing, hoping, wondering’—that shit!” Elaine cried.
“Yes, I know—” I started to say.
“I hope she doesn’t verbalize her orgasms: ‘Billy—I’m coming!’ That shit,” Elaine said.
“Well, no—not that I remember,” I replied.
“I think she’s one of those young-women writers who baby her students,” Elaine said.
Elaine had taught more than I had; I never argued with her about teaching, or Mrs. Kittredge. Grandpa Harry was generous to me; he gave me a little money for Christmas every year. I’d had part-time college-teaching jobs, the occasional writer-in-residence stint—the latter never longer than a single semester. I didn’t dislike teaching, but it hadn’t invaded my writing time—as I knew it did invade the writing time of many writer friends, Elaine among them.
“Just so you know, Elaine—I find there’s more to like about Rachel than her small breasts,” I said.
“I would sincerely hope so, Billy,” Elaine said.
“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked my old friend.
“You know that guy Rachel almost married?” Elaine asked me.
“Not personally,” I told her.
“He hit on me,” Elaine said.
“Oh.”
“He told me that, one time, Rachel shit in the bed—that’s what he told me, Billy,” Elaine said.
“Nothing like that has happened, yet,” I told Elaine. “But I’ll be on the lookout for anything suspicious.”
After that, we drove for a while in silence. When we left New York State and crossed into Vermont, a little west of Bennington, there were more dead things in the road; the bigger dead things had been dragged to the side of the road, but we could still see them. I remember a couple of deer, in the bigger category, and the usual raccoons and porcupines. There’s a lot of roadkill in northern New England.
“Would you like me to drive?” I asked Elaine.
“Sure—yes, I would,” Elaine answered quietly. She found a place to pull off the road, and I took over the driving. We turned north again, just before Bennington; there was more snow in the woods, and more dead things in the road and along the roadside.
We were a long way from New York City when Elaine said, “That guy didn’t hit on me, Billy—I made up the story about Rachel shitting in bed, too.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’re writers. We make things up.”
“I did run into someone you went to school with—this is a true story,” Elaine told me.
“Who? In school with where?” I asked her.
“At the Institute, in Vienna—she was one of those Institute girls,” Elaine said. “When she met you, you told her you were trying to be faithful to a girlfriend back in the States.”
“I did tell some girls that,” I admitted.
“I told this Institute girl that I was the girlfriend you were trying to be faithful to, when you were in Vienna,” Elaine said.
We both had a laugh about that, but Elaine then asked me—more seriously—“Do you know what that Institute girl said, Billy?”
“No. What?” I asked.
“She said, ‘Poor you!’ That’s what she said—this is a true story, Billy,” Elaine told me.
I didn’t doubt it. Das Institut was awfully small; every student there knew when I was fucking a soprano understudy—and, later, when I was fucking a famous American poet.
“If you’d been my girlfriend, I would have been faithful to you, Elaine—or I would have sincerely tried,” I told her. I let her cry for a while in the passenger seat.
“If you’d been my boyfriend, I would have sincerely tried, too, Billy,” Elaine finally said.
We drove northeast, then headed west from Ezra Falls—the Favorite River running beside us, to the north side of the road. Even in February, as cold as it was, that river was never entirely frozen over. Of course I’d thought about having children with Elaine, but there was no point in bringing that up; Elaine wasn’t kidding about the size of babies’ heads—in her view, they were enormous.
When we drove down River Street, past the building that had once been the First Sister Public Library—it was now the town’s historical society—Elaine said, “I ran lines with you on that brass bed, for The Tempest, about a century ago.”
“Almost twenty years ago, yes,” I said. I wasn’t thinking about The Tempest, or running lines with Elaine on that brass bed. I had other memories of that bed, but as I drove past what used to be the public library, it occurred to me—a mere seventeen years after the much-maligned librarian had left town—that Miss Frost might have protected (or not) other young men in her basement bedroom.
But what other young men would Miss Frost have met in the library? I suddenly remembered that I’d never seen any children there. As for teenagers, there were only those occasional girls—the high school students condemned to Ezra Falls. I’d never seen any teenage boys in the First Sister Public Library—except for the night Tom Atkins came, looking for me.
Except for me, our town’s young boys would not have been encouraged to visit that library. Surely, no responsible parents in First Sister would have wanted their young male children to be in the company of the transsexual wrestler who was in charge of the place!
I suddenly realized why I’d been so late in getting a library card; no one in my family would ever have introduced me to Miss Frost. It was only because Richard Abbott proposed taking me to the First Sister Public Library, and no one in my family could ever say no to Richard—nor was anyone in my family quick enough to overrule Richard’s good-hearted and impromptu proposition. I’d managed to meet Miss Frost only because Richard recognized the absurdity of a small-town thirteen-year-old boy not having a library card.