In One Person

abandoned academy library. Those old
Owl
s from ’37 , ’38, and ’39 beckoned us, and we soon found much to marvel about in their revealing pages.
    W ILLIAM F RANCIS D EAN WAS a smiling little boy in the 1937
Owl
, when he would have been twelve. He seemed a charmingly elfin manager of the 1936–37 wrestling team, and the only other evidence Elaine and I could find of him was as the prettiest little girl in the Drama Club photos of that long-ago academic year—a scant five years before I would be born.
    If Franny Dean had met the older Mary Marshall in ’37, there was no record of it in the
Owl
of that year—nor was there any record of their meeting in the ’38 and ’39
Owls
, wherein the wrestling-team manager grew only a little in stature but seemingly a lot in self-assurance.
    Onstage, for the Drama Club, in those ’38 and ’39 yearbooks, Elaine and I could tell that the future Harvard-boy, who’d chosen “performer” as his career path, had developed into a most fetching femme fatale—he was a nymphlike presence.
    “He was good-looking, wasn’t he?” I asked Elaine.
    “He looks like you, Billy—he’s handsome but different,” Elaine said.
    “He already must have been dating my mother,” I said, when we’d finished with the ’39
Owl
and were hurrying back to Bancroft Hall. (My dad was fifteen when my mom was nineteen!)
    “If ‘dating’ is the right word, Billy,” Elaine said.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “You have to talk to your grandpa, Billy—if you can get him alone,” Elaine told me.
    “I could try talking to Uncle Bob first, if I can get Bob alone. Bob isn’t as smart as Grandpa Harry,” I said.
    “I’ve got it!” Elaine suddenly said. “You talk to the admissions man first, but you tell him you’ve
already
talked to Grandpa Harry—and that Harry has told you everything he knows.”
    “Bob’s not that dumb,” I told Elaine.
    “Yes, he is,” Elaine said.
    We had about an hour alone in Elaine’s fifth-floor bedroom before Mr. and Mrs. Hadley came home from the movie in Ezra Falls. It being the Christmas holiday, we figured that the Hadleys and my mother and Richard—together with Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bob—would have stopped for a drink somewhere after the movie, and they had.
    We’d had more than enough time to peruse the ’40
Owl
and look at all the photos of flaming Franny Dean—the prettiest boy in the class. William Francis Dean was a cross-dressing knockout in the photos from the Drama Club of that year, and there—at last, at the Senior Dance—was the missing picture Elaine and I had so fervently sought. There was little Franny holding my mom, Mary Marshall, in a slow-dancing embrace. Watching them, with evident disapproval, was big-sister Muriel. Oh, those Winthrop girls, “those Winthrop women,” as Miss Frost had labeled my mother and my aunt Muriel—giving them Nana Victoria’s maiden name of Winthrop. (When it came to who had the balls in the Marshall family, the Winthrop genes were definitely the ball-carriers.)
    I wouldn’t wait long to trap Uncle Bob. The very next day, a prospective student and his parents were visiting Favorite River Academy; Uncle Bob gave me a call and asked if I felt like being a tour guide.
    When I’d finished the tour, I found Uncle Bob alone in the Admissions Office; it being Christmas break, the secretaries weren’t necessarily working.
    “What’s up, Billy?” Uncle Bob asked me.
    “I guess you forgot that you actually
did
take the ’40
Owl
back to the library,” I began.
    “I
did
?” Uncle Bob asked. I could see he was wondering how he would ever explain this to Muriel.
    “It didn’t show up in the yearbook room by itself,” I said. “Besides, Grandpa Harry has told me all about ‘flaming Franny’ Dean, and what a pretty boy he was. What I don’t get is how it all began with my mom—I mean why and when. I mean, how did it start in the first place?”
    “Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Billy,” Uncle Bob quickly said. “He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean.”
    I’d heard the expression—from Kittredge, of course—but all I said was, “Why did my mom ever fall for him in the first place? How did it
start
?”
    “He was an awfully young boy when he met your mother—she was four years older, which is a big difference at that age, Billy,” Uncle Bob said. “Your mom saw him in a play—as a girl, of course. Afterward, he complimented her