In One Person

innocent time—both the dying time of the year and that relatively uncomplicated time in my life.

Chapter
2
    C RUSHES ON THE W RONG P EOPLE
    How long was it, after that unsuccessful casting call, before my mom and young Richard Abbott were dating? “Knowing Mary, I’ll bet they were
doing it
immediately,” I’d overheard Aunt Muriel say.
    Only once had my mother ventured away from home; she’d gone off to college (no one ever said where), and she had dropped out. She’d managed only to get pregnant; she didn’t even finish secretarial school! Moreover, to add to her moral and educational failure, for fourteen years, my mother and her almost-a-bastard son had borne the Dean name—for the sake of conventional legitimacy, I suppose.
    Mary Marshall Dean did not dare to leave home again; the world had wounded her too gravely. She lived with my scornful, cliché-encumbered grandmother, who was as critical of her black-sheep daughter as my superior-sounding aunt Muriel was. Only Grandpa Harry had kind and encouraging words for his “baby girl,” as he called her. From the way he said this, I got the impression that he thought my mom had suffered some lasting damage. Grandpa Harry was ever my champion, too—he lifted my spirits when I was down, as he repeatedly tried to bolster my mother’s ever-failing self-confidence.
    In addition to her duties as prompter for the First Sister Players, my mom worked as a secretary in the sawmill and lumberyard; as the owner and mill manager, Grandpa Harry chose to overlook the fact that my mother had failed to finish secretarial school—her typing sufficed for him.
    There must have been remarks made about my mother—I mean, among the sawmill men. The things they said were not about her typing, and I’ll bet they’d heard them first from their wives or girlfriends; the sawmill men would have noticed that my mom was pretty, but I’m sure the women in their lives were the origin of the remarks made about Mary Marshall Dean around the lumberyard—or, more dangerously, in the logging camps.
    I say “more dangerously” because Nils Borkman supervised the logging camps; men were always getting injured there, but were they sometimes “injured” because of their remarks about my mom? One guy or another was always getting hurt at the lumberyard, too—occasionally, I’ll bet it was a guy who was repeating what he’d heard his wife or girlfriend say about my mother. (Her so-called husband hadn’t been in any hurry to marry her; he’d never lived with her, married or not, and
that boy
had no father—those were the remarks made about my mom, I imagine.)
    Grandpa Harry wasn’t a fighting man; I’m guessing that Nils Borkman stuck up for his beloved business partner, and for my mother.
    “He can’t work for six weeks—not with a busted collarbone, Nils,” I’d heard Grandpa Harry say. “Every time you ‘straighten out’ someone, as you put it, we’re stuck payin’ the workers’ compensation!”
    “We can afford the workers’ compensation, Harry—he’ll watch what he says the time next, won’t he?” Nils would say.
    “The ‘next time,’ Nils,” Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.
    In my eyes, my mom was not only a couple of years younger than her mean sister, Muriel; my mother was by far the prettier of the two Marshall girls. It didn’t matter that my mom lacked Muriel’s operatic bosom and booming voice. Mary Marshall Dean was altogether better-proportioned. She was almost Asian-looking to me—not only because she was petite, but because of her almond-shaped face and how strikingly wide open (and far apart) her eyes were, not to mention the acute smallness of her mouth.
    “A jewel,” Richard Abbott had dubbed her, when they were first dating. It became what Richard called her—not “Mary,” just “Jewel.” The name stuck.
    And how long was it, after they were dating, before Richard Abbott discovered that I didn’t have my own library card? (Not long; it was still early in the fall, because the leaves had just begun to change color.)
    My mom had revealed to Richard that I wasn’t much of a reader, and this led to Richard’s discovery that my mother and grandmother were bringing books home from our town library for me to read—or
not
to read, which was usually the case.
    The other books that were brought into my life were hand-me-downs from my meddlesome aunt Muriel; these were mostly romance novels, the ones my crude elder