In One Person

visiting family was through their tour.
    “We’ll soon see,” I said. “Uncle Bob didn’t tell me.”
    “Jesus, no one in your family tells you
anything
, Billy!” Elaine exclaimed.
    I’d been thinking the same thing. In the yearbook room, I was up only to the Class of ’40. I had twenty years to go before I got to my own graduating class, and I’d just discovered that the yearbook for 1940 was missing. I’d skipped from the ’39
Owl
to ’41 and ’42, before I realized that ’40 was gone.
    When I asked the academy librarian about it, I said: “Nobody can check out a yearbook.
The Owl
for 1940 must have been stolen.”
    The academy librarian was one of Favorite River’s fussy old bachelors; everyone thought that such older, unmarried males on the Favorite River faculty were what we called at that time “nonpracticing homosexuals.” Who knew if they were or weren’t “practicing,” or if they were or were not homosexuals? All we’d observed was that they lived alone, and there was a particular fastidiousness about the way they dressed, and the way they ate and spoke—hence we imagined that they were unnaturally effeminate.
    “
Students
may not check out a yearbook, Billy—the
faculty
can,” the academy librarian said primly; his name was Mr. Lockley.
    “The
faculty
can,” I repeated.
    “Yes, of course they can,” Mr. Lockley told me; he was looking through some filing cards. “Mr. Fremont has checked out the 1940
Owl
, Billy.”
    “Oh.”
    Mr. Fremont—Robert Fremont, Class of ’35, Miss Frost’s classmate—was my uncle Bob, of course. But when I asked Bob if he was finished with the ’40
Owl
, because I was waiting to have a look at it, good old easygoing Bob wasn’t so easygoing about it.
    “I’m pretty sure I returned that yearbook to the library, Billy,” my uncle said; he was a good guy, basically, but a bad liar. Uncle Bob was a fairly forthright fella, but I knew he was hanging on to the ’40
Owl
, for some unknown reason.
    “Mr. Lockley thinks you still have it, Uncle Bob,” I told him.
    “Well, I’ll look all around for it, Billy, but I swear I took it back to the library,” Bob said.
    “What did you need it for?” I asked him.
    “A member of that class is newly deceased,” Uncle Bob replied. “I wanted to say some nice things about him, when I wrote to his family.”
    “Oh.”
    Poor Uncle Bob would never be a writer, I knew; he couldn’t make up a story to save his ass.
    “What was his name?” I asked.
    “
Whose
name, Billy?” Bob said in a half-strangled voice.
    “The
deceased
, Uncle Bob.”
    “Gosh, Billy—I can’t for the life of me remember the fella’s name!”
    “Oh.”
    “More fucking secrets,” Elaine said, when I told her the story. “Ask Gerry to find the yearbook and give it to you. Gerry hates her parents—she’ll do it for you.”
    “I think Gerry hates me, too,” I told Elaine.
    “Gerry hates her parents
more
,” Elaine said.
    We’d located the door to Kittredge’s room in Tilley, and I let us in with the master key Uncle Bob had given me. At first, the only “not typical” thing about the dorm room was how neat it was, but neither Elaine nor I was surprised to see that Kittredge was tidy.
    The one bookshelf had very few books on it; there was a lot of room for more books. The one desk had very little on it; the one chair had no clothes draped over it. There were just a couple of framed photographs on top of the lone chest of drawers, and the wardrobe closet, which typically had no door—not even a curtain—revealed Kittredge’s familiar (and expensive-looking) clothes. Not even the solitary single bed had any stray clothes on it, and the bed was perfectly made—the sheets and blanket uncreased, the pillowcase unwrinkled.
    “Jesus,” Elaine suddenly said. “How did the bastard swing a
single
?”
    It was a single room; Kittredge had no roommate—that’s what was “not typical” about it. Elaine and I speculated that the single room might have been part of the deal Mrs. Kittredge made with the academy when she’d told them—and Mr. and Mrs. Hadley—that she would take Elaine to Europe and get the unfortunate girl a safe abortion. It was also possible that Kittredge had been an overpowering and abusive roommate; perhaps no one had
wanted
to be Kittredge’s roommate, but this struck both Elaine and me as unlikely. At Favorite River Academy, it would have been prestigious to be Kittredge’s roommate; even