In One Person

might have managed the job. My mother was seen as no longer Nana Victoria’s or Aunt Muriel’s responsibility, because Richard had shown up and taken her off their hands.
    At least this was very much the impression that my aunt and my grandmother gave to me—Richard could do no wrong, or what wrongdoing Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel
thought
that Richard had done would be spelled out for Grandpa Harry, as if
he
could ever be expected to speak to Richard about it. My cousin Gerry and I overheard it all, because when Richard and my mother weren’t around, my disapproving grandmother and my meddlesome aunt talked ceaselessly about them. I got the feeling they would still be calling them “the newlyweds,” however facetiously, after my mom and Richard had been married for twenty years! As I grew older, I was realizing that
all
of them—not only Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel, but also Grandpa Harry and Richard Abbott—treated my mother like a temperamental child. (They pussyfooted around her, the way they would have done with a child who was in danger of doing some unwitting damage to herself.)
    Grandpa Harry would never criticize Richard Abbott; Harry might have agreed that Richard was my mom’s savior, but I think Grandpa Harry was smart enough to know that Richard had chiefly saved my mother from Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel—more than from the next man who might have come along and swept my
easily seducible
mom off her feet.
    However, in the case of this ill-fated production of
Twelfth Night
, even Grandpa Harry had his doubts about the casting. Harry was cast as Maria, Olivia’s waiting-gentlewoman. Both Grandpa Harry and I had thought of Maria as much younger, though Harry’s chief difficulty with the role was that he was supposed to be married off to Sir Toby Belch.
    “I can’t believe that I’m going to be betrothed to my much-younger son-in-law,” Grandpa Harry said sadly, when I was having dinner with him and Nana Victoria one winter Sunday night.
    “Well, you best remember, Grandpa,
Twelfth Night
is sure-as-shit a comedy,” I reminded him.
    “A good thing it’s only onstage, I guess,” Harry had said.
    “You and your
only-onstage
routine,” Nana Victoria snapped at him. “I sometimes think you live to be weird, Harold.”
    “Tolerance, have tolerance, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry intoned, winking at me.
    Maybe that was why I decided to tell him what I had told Mrs. Hadley—about my slightly faded crush on Richard, my deepening attraction to Kittredge, even my masturbation to the unlikely contrivance of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model, but not (still not) my unmentioned love for Miss Frost.
    “You’re the sweetest boy, Bill—by which I mean, of course, you have feelin’s for other people, and you take the greatest care not to hurt
their
feelin’s. This is admirable, most admirable,” Grandpa Harry said to me, “but you must be careful not to have
your
feelin’s hurt. Some people are safer to be attracted to than others.”
    “Not other boys, you mean?” I asked him.
    “I mean not
some
other boys. Yes. It takes a
special
boy—to safely speak your heart to. Some boys would hurt you,” Grandpa Harry said.
    “Kittredge, probably,” I suggested.
    “That would be my guess. Yes,” Harry said. He sighed. “Maybe not here, Bill—not in this school, not at this time. Maybe these attractions to other boys, or men, will have to wait.”
    “Wait till when, and where?” I asked him.
    “Ah, well …” Grandpa Harry started to say, but he stopped. “I think that Miss Frost has been very good at findin’ books for you to read,” Grandpa Harry started again. “I’ll bet you that she could recommend somethin’ for you to read—I mean on the subject of bein’ attracted to other boys, or men, and regardin’ when and where it may be possible to act on such attractions. Mind you, I haven’t read that book, Bill, but I bet there are such stories; I know such books exist, and maybe Miss Frost would know about them.”
    I almost told him on the spot that Miss Frost was one of my confusing attractions, though something held me back from saying this; perhaps that she was the most powerful of all my attractions was what stopped me. “But how do I
begin
to tell Miss Frost,” I said to Grandpa Harry. “I don’t know how to
start
—I mean before I get to the business of there being books on the subject, or not.”
    “I believe you can tell Miss Frost what you told me, Bill,”