In One Person

(As my father had said: “We already are who we are, aren’t we?”)
    But the
good-bye
word felt too final; I couldn’t say it.
    “
Adiós
, young William,” Señor Bovary said.
    “
Adiós
,” I said to him. They were walking away—holding hands, of course—when I called after my father. “
Adiós
, Dad!”
    “Did he call me ‘Dad’—is that what he said?” my father asked Mr. Bovary.
    “He did—he distinctly did,” Bovary told him.
    “
Adiós
, my son!” my father said.
    “
Adiós
!” I kept calling to my dad and the love of his life, until I could no longer see them.
    A T F AVORITE R IVER A CADEMY , the black-box theater in the Webster Center for the Performing Arts was not the main stage in that relatively new but brainless building—well intentioned, to be kind, but stupidly built.
    Times have changed: Students today don’t study Shakespeare the way I did. Nowadays, I could not fill the seats for a main-stage performance of any Shakespeare play, not even
Romeo and Juliet
—not even with a former boy playing Juliet! The black box was a better teaching tool for my actors, anyway, and it was great for smaller audiences. The students were much more relaxed in our black-box productions, but we all complained about the mice. It may have been a relatively new building, but—due to either faulty design or misguided contracting—the crawl space under the Webster Center was poorly insulated and had not been mouse-proofed.
    When it starts to get cold, any stupidly built building in Vermont will have mice. The kids working with me in our black-box production of
Romeo and Juliet
called them “stage mice”; I can’t tell you why, except that the mice had occasionally been spotted onstage.
    It was cold that November. The Thanksgiving break was only a week away, and we already had snow on the ground—it was even cold, for that time of year, for
Vermont
. (No wonder the mice had moved indoors.)
    I’d just persuaded Richard Abbott to move into the River Street house with me; at eighty, Richard hardly needed to spend another winter in Vermont in a house by himself—he was on his own now that Martha was in the Facility. I gave Richard what had been my bedroom as a child, and that bathroom I’d once shared with Grandpa Harry.
    Richard didn’t complain about the ghosts. Maybe he would have, if he’d ever encountered Nana Victoria’s ghost, or Aunt Muriel’s—or even my mother’s—but the only ghost Richard ever saw was Grandpa Harry’s. Naturally, Harry’s ghost showed up a few times in that bathroom he’d once shared with me—thankfully,
not
in that bathtub.
    “Harry appears to be confused, as if he’s lost his toothbrush,” was all Richard ever said about Grandpa Harry’s ghost.
    The bathtub Harry had blown his brains out in was gone. If Grandpa Harry was actually going to
repeat
blowing his brains out in a bathroom, it would be the master bathroom—the one I now used—and that inviting new bathtub (the way Harry had
repeated
himself for Amanda).
    But, as I’ve told you, I never saw the ghosts in that River Street house. There was the one morning when I woke up and found my clothes—neatly arranged, in the order I would put them on—at the foot of my bed. These were clean clothes, my jeans on the bottom of the pile; the shirt was perfectly folded, with my socks and underwear on top. It was precisely the way my mother used to prepare my clothes for me when I was a little boy. She must have done this every night, after I’d fallen asleep. (She’d stopped doing this around the time when I became a teenager or shortly before.) I had completely forgotten how she’d once loved me. My guess is that her ghost wanted to remind me.
    It happened only that one morning, but it was enough to make me remember when I had loved her—without reservation. Now, after those many years when I had lost her affection and believed I no longer loved her, I was able to mourn her—the way we are supposed to mourn our parents when they’re gone.
    W HEN I FIRST MOVED into the River Street house, I found Uncle Bob standing beside a box of books in the downstairs hall. Aunt Muriel had wanted me to have these “monuments of world literature,” Bob had struggled to explain, but Muriel’s ghost hadn’t delivered the books—Uncle Bob had brought the box. He’d belatedly discovered that Muriel had intended to give me the books, but that fatal car crash must have interrupted her plans. Uncle Bob hadn’t