The Day After Tomorrow

7

THE DAY after his father’s funeral, Paul Osborn’s mother moved them out of their house and in with her sister in a small two-story home on Cape Cod.

His mother’s name had been Becky. He assumed it was short for Elizabeth or Rebecca but he’d never asked and never heard her referred to as anything but Becky. She’d married Paul’s father when she was only twenty and still in nursing school.

George David Osborn was handsome, but quiet and introverted. He’d come from Chicago to Boston to attend M.I.T. and immediately following graduation had gone to work for Raytheon and then later for Microtab, a small engineering design firm on the Route 128 high-tech hub. The most Paul knew about what his father did was that he designed surgical instruments. Much more than that, he’d been too young to remember.

What he did remember in the blur that followed the funeral was packing up and moving from their big house in the Boston suburbs to the much smaller house on Cape Cod. And that almost immediately, his mother began drinking.

He remembered nights when she made dinner for them both, then left hers to get cold and instead drank cocktail after cocktail until she could no longer talk, and then fell asleep. He remembered being afraid as the drinks mounted up and he tried to get her to eat but she wouldn’t. Instead she became angry. At little things at first, but then the anger always came around to him. He was to blame for not having done something—anything—that might have helped save his father. And if his father were alive, they would still be living in their fine home near Boston, instead of where they were in that tiny little house on Cape Cod with her sister.

And then always, the rage would turn to the killer and I the life he had left her. And then to the police, who were inept and impotent, and finally to herself, whom she despised most of all, for not being the kind of mother she should have been, for not being prepared or equipped to deal with the aftermath of such a tragedy.

At forty, Paul’s aunt Dorothy was eight years older than her sister. Unmarried and overweight, she was a simple, pleasant woman who went to church every Sunday and was active in community projects. In bringing Paul and Becky into her home, she did everything possible to encourage Becky to pick up her life again. To join the church and go back to nursing school and to one day make nursing a career she could be proud of.

“Dorothy is a clerk who works in the county administration building,” his mother would rail halfway through her third Canadian Club and ginger ale. “What does she know of the horrors of raising a child without a father? How can she possibly understand that the mother of a ten-year-old boy has to be available every single day when he comes home from school?”

Who would help with his homework? Make his supper? Make certain he didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd? Dorothy didn’t understand that. Couldn’t understand it. And kept on about the church, a career and a normal life. Becky swore she was prepared to move out. There was quite enough life insurance for them to live alone, if frugally, until Paul graduated from high school.

What Becky couldn’t understand was that church, a career and a new life weren’t what Dorothy was talking about. It was her drinking. Dorothy wanted her to stop. But Becky had no intention of doing so.

Eight months and three days later Becky Osborn drove her car into Barnstable Harbor and sat there until she drowned. She had just turned thirty-three. The funeral was held at First Presbyterian Church in Yarmouth, December 15, 1966. The day was gray, with a forecast of snow. Twenty-eight people, including Paul and Dorothy, attended the service. Mostly they were Dorothy’s friends.

On January 4, 1967, at age eleven, Aunt Dorothy became Paul Osborn’s legal guardian. On January 12 of that same year, he entered Hartwick, a publicly funded private school for boys in Trenton, New Jersey. He would live there, ten months out of the year, for the next seven years.