In One Person

As for Tom’s wife, Sue, she died a long eighteen months after Atkins was gone; she’d had Charles replaced as a nurse almost immediately after Tom’s death.
    “I can understand why Sue didn’t want a gay man looking after her,” was all Charles said about it.
    I’d asked Elaine if she thought Peter Atkins was gay. “No,” she’d said. “Definitely not.” Indeed, it was sometime in the late nineties—a couple of years after the worst of the AIDS epidemic—when I was giving a reading in New York, and a ruddy-faced, red-haired young man (with an attractive young woman) approached me at the book signing that followed the event. Peter Atkins must have been in his early thirties then, but I had no trouble recognizing him. He still looked like Tom.
    “We got a babysitter for this—that’s pretty rare for us,” his wife said, smiling at me.
    “How are you, Peter?” I asked him.
    “I’ve read all your books,” the young man earnestly told me. “Your novels were kind of in loco parentis for me.” He said the Latin slowly. “You know, ‘in the place of a parent’—kind of,” young Atkins said.
    We just smiled at each other; there was nothing more to say. He’d said it well, I thought. His father would have been happy how his son turned out—or as happy as poor Tom ever was, about anything. Tom Atkins and I had grown up at a time when we were full of self-hatred for our sexual differences, because we’d had it drummed into our heads that those differences were wrong. In retrospect, I’m ashamed that my expressed hope for Peter Atkins was that he
wouldn’t
be like Tom—or like me. Maybe, for Peter’s generation, what I should have hoped for him was that he
would
be “like us”—only proud of it. Yet, given what happened to Peter’s father and mother—well, it suffices to say that I thought Peter Atkins had been burdened enough.
    I SHOULD PEN A brief obituary for the First Sister Players, my hometown’s obdurately amateur theatrical society. With Nils Borkman dead, and with the equally violent passing of that little theater’s prompter (my mother, Mary Marshall Abbott)—not to mention my late aunt, Muriel Marshall Fremont, who had wowed our town in various strident and big-bosomed roles—the First Sister Players simply slipped away. By the eighties, even in small towns, the old theaters were becoming movie houses; movies were what people wanted to see.
    “More folks stayin’ home and watchin’ television, too, I suppose,” Grandpa Harry commented. Harry Marshall himself was “stayin’ home”; his days onstage
as a woman
were long gone.
    It was Richard who called me, after Elmira found Grandpa Harry’s body.
    “No more dry-cleanin’, Elmira,” Harry had said, when he’d earlier seen the nurse hanging Nana Victoria’s clean clothes in his closet.
    “I musta misheard him,” Elmira would later explain to Richard. “I thought he said, ‘
Not
more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he was teasin’ me, ya know? But now I’m pretty sure he said,
No
more dry-cleanin’, Elmira’—like he knew
then
what he was gonna do.”
    As a favor to his nurse, Grandpa Harry had dressed himself as the old lumberman he was—jeans, a flannel shirt, “nothin’ fancy,” as Elmira would say—and when he’d curled up on his side in the bathtub, the way a child goes to sleep, Harry had somehow managed to shoot himself in the temple with the Mossberg .30-30, so that most of the blood was in the bathtub, and what there was of it that spattered the tile in other parts of the bathroom had presented no insurmountable difficulty for Elmira to clean.
    The message on my answering machine, the night before, had been business as usual for Grandpa Harry. “No need to call me back, Bill—I’m turnin’ in a bit early. I was just checkin’ to be sure you were all right.”
    That same night—it was November 1984, a little before Thanksgiving—the message on Richard Abbott’s answering machine was similar, at least in regard to Grandpa Harry “turnin’ in a bit early.” Richard had taken Martha Hadley to a movie in town, in what was the former theater for the First Sister Players. But the end of the message Grandpa Harry had left for Richard was a little different from the one Harry left for me. “I miss my girls, Richard,” Grandpa Harry had said. (Then he’d curled up in the bathtub and pulled the trigger.) Harold Marshall was ninety, soon to be ninety-one—just a
bit
early to be turning