In One Person

the person wearing that heavy name. I thought it was a suitable name for an elderly schoolmistress, a strict disciplinarian.
    I was guessing that the only child, the son named Jacques, would have been born sometime in the early seventies; that would have been right on schedule for the kind of career-oriented young man I imagined Kittredge was, in those early years—given the MFA from Yale, given his first few steps along a no doubt bright and shining career path in the world of
drama
. Only at the appropriate time would Kittredge have paused, and found a wife. And
then
what? How had things unraveled after that?
    “That fucker—God
damn
him!” Elaine cried, when I told her Kittredge had died. She was furious—it was as if Kittredge had
escaped
, somehow. She couldn’t speak about the “of natural causes” bullshit, not to mention the wife. “He can’t get away with this!” Elaine cried.
    “Elaine—he
died
. He didn’t get away with anything,” I said, but Elaine cried and cried.
    Unfortunately, it was one of the few nights when Amanda didn’t have dorm duty; she was staying with me in the River Street house, and so I had to tell her about Kittredge, and Elaine, and all the rest.
    No doubt, this history was more bi—and gay, and “transgender” (as Amanda would say)—in nature than anything Amanda had been forced to imagine, although she kept saying how much she
loved
my writing, where she’d no doubt encountered a world of sexual “differences” (as Richard would say).
    I blame myself for not saying anything to Amanda about the frigging ghosts in that River Street house; only other people saw them—they never bothered
me
! But Amanda got up to go to the bathroom—it was the middle of the night—and her screaming woke me. It was a brand-new bathtub in that bathroom—it was
not
the same tub Grandpa Harry had pulled the trigger in, just the same bathroom—but, when Amanda finally calmed down enough to tell me what happened (when she was sitting on the toilet), it had no doubt been Harry she’d seen in that brand-new bathtub.
    “He was curled up like a little boy in the bathtub—he
smiled
at me when I was peeing!” Amanda, who was still sobbing, explained.
    “I’m really sorry,” I said.
    “But he was no little boy!” Amanda moaned.
    “No, he wasn’t—that was my grandfather,” I tried to tell her calmly. Oh, that Harry—he certainly loved a new audience, even as a ghost! (Even
as a man
!)
    “At first, I didn’t see the rifle—but he
wanted
me to see it, Billy. He showed me the gun, and then he shot himself in the head—his head went all over the place!” Amanda wailed.
    Naturally, I had some explaining to do; I had to tell her everything about Grandpa Harry. We were up all night. Amanda would not go to the bathroom by herself in the morning—she wouldn’t even be alone in one of the other bathrooms, which I’d suggested. I understood; I was very understanding. I’ve never seen a frigging ghost—I’m sure they’re frightening.
    I guess the last straw, as I would later explain to Mrs. Hadley and Richard, was that Amanda was so rattled in the morning—after all, the anxious young woman hadn’t had a good night’s sleep—she opened the door to my bedroom closet, thinking she was opening the door to the upstairs hall. And there was Grandpa Harry’s .30-30 Mossberg; I keep that old carbine in my closet, where it just leans against a wall.
    Amanda screamed and screamed—Christ, she wouldn’t stop screaming. “You kept the actual gun—you keep it in your bedroom closet! Who would ever keep the very same gun his grandfather used to blow himself all over the bathroom, Billy?” Amanda yelled at me.
    “Amanda has a point about the gun, Bill,” Richard would say to me, when I told him that Amanda and I were no longer seeing each other.
    “
Nobody
wants you to have that gun, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.
    “If you get rid of the gun, maybe the ghosts will leave, Billy,” Elaine told me.
    But those ghosts have never appeared to me; I think you have to be receptive to see ghosts like that, and I guess I’m not “receptive” in that way. I have my own ghosts—my own “terrifying angels,” as I (more than once) have thought of them—but
my
ghosts don’t live in that River Street house in First Sister, Vermont.
    I would go to Mexico, alone, that mud season of 1995. I rented a house Elaine told me about in Playa del Carmen. I drank a lot of
cerveza
, and I picked