In One Person

Atkins had named the dog after Kittredge!) But Tom had missed the family photograph.
    “Maybe he wasn’t feeling very photogenic,” I said to Elaine.
    “His color wasn’t so hot last Christmas, was it? And he’d lost all that weight,” Elaine said.
    “The ski hat was hiding his hair
and
his eyebrows,” I added. (There’d been no Tom Atkins review of my fourth novel, I’d noticed. I doubted that Atkins had changed his mind about
Madame Bovary
.)
    “Shit, Billy,” Elaine said. “What do you make of the message?”
    The message, which was written by hand on the back of the Christmas photo, was from the wife. There was not a lot of information in it, and it wasn’t very Christmasy.

    “I think he’s dying—that’s what I think,” I told Elaine.
    “I’ll go with you, Billy—Tom always liked me,” Elaine said.
    Elaine was right—poor Tom had always adored her (and Mrs. Hadley)—and, not unlike old times, I felt braver in Elaine’s company. If Atkins was dying of AIDS, I was pretty sure his wife would already know everything about that summer twenty years ago, when Tom and I were in Europe together.
    That night, I called Sue Atkins. It turned out that Tom had been placed in hospice care at his home in Short Hills, New Jersey. I’d never known what Atkins did, but his wife told me that Tom had been a CEO at a life-insurance company; he’d worked in New York City, five days a week, for more than a decade. I guessed that he’d never felt like seeing me for lunch or dinner, but I was surprised when Sue Atkins said that she’d thought her husband had been seeing me; apparently, there were nights when Tom hadn’t made it back to New Jersey in time for dinner.
    “It wasn’t me he was seeing,” I told Mrs. Atkins. I mentioned that Elaine wanted to visit Tom, too—if we weren’t “intruding,” was how I’d put it.
    Before I could explain who Elaine was, Sue Atkins said, “Yes, that would be all right—I’ve heard all about Elaine.” (I didn’t ask Mrs. Atkins what she’d heard about me.)
    Elaine was teaching that term—grading final papers, I explained on the phone. Perhaps we could come to Short Hills on a Saturday; there wouldn’t be all the commuters on the train, I was thinking.
    “The children will be home from school, but that will be fine with Tom,” Sue said. “Certainly Peter knows who you are. That trip to Europe—” Her voice just stopped. “Peter knows what’s going on, and he’s devoted to his father,” Mrs. Atkins began again. “But Emily—well, she’s younger. I’m not sure how much Emily really knows. You can’t do much to counter what your kids hear in school from the other kids—not if your kids won’t tell you what the other kids are saying.”
    “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” I told Tom’s wife.
    “I always knew this might happen. Tom was candid about his past,” Sue Atkins said. “I just didn’t know he’d gone back there. And this terrible disease—” Her voice stopped again.
    I was looking at the Christmas card while we spoke on the phone. I’m not good at guessing young girls’ ages. I wasn’t sure how old Emily was; I just knew she was the younger child. I was estimating that the boy, Peter Atkins, would have been fourteen or fifteen—about the same age poor Tom had been when I’d first met him and thought he was a loser who couldn’t even pronounce the
time
word. Atkins had told me he’d called me Bill, instead of Billy, because he noticed that Richard Abbott always called me Bill, and anyone could see how much I loved Richard.
    Poor Tom had also confessed to me that he’d overheard Martha Hadley’s outburst, when I was seeing Mrs. Hadley in her office and Atkins had been waiting for his turn. “Billy, Billy—you’ve done nothing
wrong
!” Mrs. Hadley had cried, loud enough for Atkins to have heard her through the closed door. (It was when I’d told Martha Hadley about my crushes on other boys and men, including my slightly fading crush on Richard and my much more devastating crush on Kittredge.)
    Poor Tom told me that he’d thought I was having an affair with Mrs. Hadley! “I actually believed you’d just
ejaculated
in her office, or something, and she was trying to assure you that you’d done nothing ‘wrong’—that’s what I thought she meant by the
wrong
word, Bill,” Atkins had confessed to me.
    “What an
idiot
you are!” I’d told him; now I felt ashamed.
    I asked Sue Atkins how Tom was