Quite possibly, Mrs. Kittredge had more in mind than helping Elaine out of a jam; the deal she made with the Hadleys probably kept Kittredge in school. “Moral turpitude” was among the stated grounds for dismissal at Favorite River Academy. For a senior at the school to impregnate a faculty child—remember, Elaine was not yet eighteen; she was under the age of legal maturity—certainly struck me as base or depraved or vile behavior, but Kittredge stayed.
“You’re traveling with Kittredge’s mother—just the two of you?” I’d asked Elaine.
“Of course it’s just the two of us, Billy—who else needs to come along?” Elaine responded.
“Where in Europe?” I asked.
Elaine shrugged; she was still throwing up, though less frequently. “What does it matter where it is, Billy? It’s somewhere Jacqueline knows.”
“You’re calling her Jacqueline?”
“She asked me to call her Jacqueline—not Mrs. Kittredge.”
“Oh.”
Richard had cast Laura Gordon as Viola; Laura was now a senior in the high school in Ezra Falls. According to my cousin Gerry, Laura “put out”—not that I saw, but Gerry seemed well informed about such matters. (Gerry was a university student now, at last liberated from Ezra Falls.)
If Laura Gordon’s breasts had been too developed for her to be cast as Hedvig in The Wild Duck, they should have disqualified her for Viola, who somehow has to disguise herself as a man. (Laura would need to be wrapped flat with Ace bandages, and, even so, there was no flattening her.) But Richard knew that Laura could learn her lines on short notice; that she looked nothing like my twin notwithstanding, she wouldn’t be a bad Viola. The show went on, though Elaine would miss our performances; she would linger in Europe—recuperating, I could only guess.
The Clown’s song concludes Twelfth Night. Feste is alone onstage. “‘For the rain it raineth every day,’” Kittredge sang four times.
“The poor kid,” Kittredge had said to me, about Elaine. “Such bad luck—her first time, and everything.” As had happened to me before, I was speechless.
I didn’t notice that Kittredge’s German homework was any worse, or any better. I didn’t even notice my mother’s expression when she saw her father onstage as a woman. I was so upset about Elaine that I forgot about my plan to observe the prompter.
When I say that the Hadleys sent Elaine away “in stages,” I mean that the trip to Europe—not to mention the obvious reason for that trip—was just the beginning.
The Hadleys had decided that their dormitory apartment in an all-boys’ school was the wrong place for Elaine to finish her high school years. They would send her away to an all-girls’ boarding school, but not until the fall. That spring of 1960 was a write-off for Elaine, and she would have to repeat her sophomore year.
It was said publicly that Elaine had had “a nervous breakdown,” but everyone in a town as small as First Sister, Vermont, knew what had happened when a girl of high school age withdrew from school. Everyone at Favorite River Academy knew what had happened to Elaine, too. Even Atkins understood. I came out of Mrs. Hadley’s office in the music building, not long after Elaine had disembarked for Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. Martha Hadley had been undone by the ease with which I’d pronounced the abortion word; she’d dismissed me from our appointment twenty minutes early, and I encountered Atkins on the stairwell between the first and second floors. I could see it crossing his mind—that it was not yet time for his appointment with Mrs. Hadley, but his struggle with the time word clearly prevented him from saying it. Instead he said, “What kind of breakdown was it? What does Elaine have to be nervous about?”
“I think you know,” I said to him. Atkins had an anxious, feral-looking face, but with dazzling blue eyes and a girl’s smooth complexion. He was a junior, like me, but he looked younger—he wasn’t yet shaving.
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she? It was Kittredge, wasn’t it? That’s what everybody’s saying, and he isn’t denying it,” Atkins said. “Elaine was really nice—she always said something nice to me, anyway,” he added.
“Elaine really is nice,” I told him.
“But what’s she doing with Kittredge’s mother? Have you seen Kittredge’s mom? She’s not like a mom. She’s like one of those old movie stars who is secretly a witch or a dragon!” Atkins declared.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I told him.
“A woman who used to be that beautiful can never accept how—” Atkins stopped.
“How time passes?” I guessed.
“Yes!” he cried. “Women like Mrs. Kittredge hate young girls. Kittredge told me,” Atkins added. “His dad left his mom for a younger woman—she wasn’t more beautiful, just younger.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t imagine traveling with Kittredge’s mother!” Atkins exclaimed. “Will Elaine have her own room?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I hadn’t thought about Elaine sharing a room with Mrs. Kittredge; it gave me the shivers just to think about it. What if she wasn’t Kittredge’s mother, or anyone’s mother? But Mrs. Kittredge had to be Kittredge’s mom; there was no way those two were unrelated.
Atkins had inched his way past me, up the stairs. I took a step or two down the stairs; I thought we were through talking. Suddenly Atkins said, “Not everyone here understands people like us, but Elaine did—Mrs. Hadley does, too.”
“Yes,” was all I said, continuing down the stairs. I tried not to consider too carefully what he’d meant by people like us, but I was sure that Atkins wasn’t exclusively referring to our pronunciation problems. Had Atkins made a pass at me? I wondered, as I crossed the quad. Was that the first pass that a boy like me ever made at me?
The sky was lighter now—it didn’t get dark so soon in the afternoon—but it would already be past nightfall in Europe, I knew. Elaine would be going to bed soon, in a room of her own or not. It was warmer now, too—not that there was ever much of a spring in Vermont—but I shivered as I crossed the quadrangle, on my way to my Twelfth Night rehearsal. I should have been thinking of my lines, of what Sebastian says, but I could only think of that song the Clown sings before the final curtain—Feste’s song, the one Kittredge sang. (“For the rain it raineth every day.”)
Just then, it began to rain, and I thought about how Elaine’s life had been changed forever, while I was still just acting.
I HAVE KEPT THE photographs Elaine sent me; they were never very good photos, just black-and-white or color snapshots. Because of how many of my desktops these pictures have sat on—often in sunlight, and for so many years—the photographs are badly faded, but of course I have no trouble recalling the circumstances.
I just wish that Elaine had sent me some pictures of her trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, but who would have taken those photographs? I can’t imagine Elaine snapping photos of Kittredge’s fashion-model mother—doing what? Brushing her teeth, reading in bed, getting dressed or undressed? And what might Elaine have been doing to inspire the artist-as-photographer in Mrs. Kittredge? Vomiting into a toilet from a kneeling position? Waiting, nauseated, in the lobby of this or that hotel, because her room—or the room she would share with Kittredge’s mom—wasn’t ready?
I doubt there were many photo opportunities that captured Mrs. Kittredge’s imagination. Not the visit to the doctor’s office—or was it a clinic?—and certainly not the messy but matter-of-fact procedure itself. (Elaine was in her first trimester. I’m sure the procedure was a standard dilation and curettage—you know, the usual scraping.)
Elaine would later tell me that, after the abortion, when she was still taking the painkillers—when Mrs. Kittredge would regularly check the amount of blood on the pad, to be sure the bleeding was “normal”—Kittredge’s mom felt her forehead, to ascertain that Elaine didn’t have a fever, and that was when Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine those outrageous stories.
I used to think the painkillers might have been a factor in what Elaine remembered, or believed she
heard, in those stories. “The painkillers weren’t that strong, and I didn’t take them for more than a day or two,” Elaine always said. “I wasn’t in a whole lot of pain, Billy.”
“But weren’t you drinking wine? You told me that Mrs. Kittredge gave you all the red wine you wanted,” I would remind Elaine. “I’m sure that you weren’t supposed to mix the painkillers with alcohol.”
“I never had more than a glass or two of red wine, Billy,” Elaine always told me. “I heard every word that Jacqueline said. Either those stories are true, or Jacqueline was lying to me—and why would anyone’s mother lie about that kind of thing?”
Admittedly, I don’t know why “anyone’s mother” would make up stories about her only child—at least, not that kind—but I don’t hold Kittredge or his mom in the highest moral esteem. Whatever I believed, or didn’t, about the stories Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine, Elaine seemed to believe every word.
According to Mrs. Kittredge, her only child was a sickly little boy; he had no confidence in himself and was picked on by the other children, especially by the boys. While this was truly difficult to imagine, it was even harder to believe that Kittredge was once intimidated by girls; he apparently was so shy that he stuttered when he tried to talk to girls, and the girls either teased him or ignored him.
In the seventh grade, Kittredge would fake being sick so that he could stay home from school—these were “very competitive schools,” in Paris and New York, Mrs. Kittredge had explained to Elaine—and at the start of eighth grade, he’d stopped talking to both the boys and the girls in his class.
“So I seduced him—it’s not as if I had lots of other options,” Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine. “The poor boy—he had to gain a little confidence somewhere!”
“I guess he gained quite a lot of confidence,” Elaine ventured to say to Kittredge’s mom, who’d simply shrugged.
Mrs. Kittredge had an insouciant shrug; one can only wonder if she was born with it, or if—after her husband had left her for a younger but indisputably less attractive woman—she’d developed an instinctive indifference to any kind of rejection.
Mrs. Kittredge matter-of-factly told Elaine that she’d slept with her son “as much as he’d wanted to,” but only until Kittredge demonstrated a lack of fervor or a wandering sexual attention span. “He can’t help it that he loses interest every twenty-four hours,” Kittredge’s mom told Elaine. “He didn’t gain all that confidence by being bored—believe me.”
Did Mrs. Kittredge imagine she was giving Elaine what amounted to an excuse for her son’s behavior? All the time she was talking, Mrs. Kittredge went on checking to see if the blood on Elaine’s pad was “normal,” or feeling Elaine’s forehead to be sure she didn’t have a fever.
There are no pictures of their time together in Europe—only what I have managed (over the years) to coax out of Elaine, and what I’ve inevitably imagined of my dear friend aborting Kittredge’s child, and her subsequent recuperation in the company of Kittredge’s mother. If Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her own son, so that he might gain a little confidence, did this explain why Kittredge felt so strongly that his mom was somewhat less (or maybe more) than motherly?
“For how long did Kittredge have sex with his mom?” I asked Elaine.
“That eighth-grade year, when he would have been thirteen and fourteen,” Elaine answered, “and maybe three or four times after he’d started at Favorite River—he would have been fifteen when it stopped.”
“Why did it stop?” I asked Elaine—not that I completely believed it had happened!
Perhaps the insouciance of Elaine’s shrug was something she’d picked up from Mrs. Kittredge.
“Knowing Kittredge, I suppose he got tired of it,” Elaine had said. She was packing her bags for what would be her sophomore year at Northfield—fall term, 1960—and we were in her bedroom in Bancroft. It would have been late August; it was hot in that room. The lamp with the dark-blue shade had been replaced with a colorless job, like the desk lamp in an anonymous office, and Elaine had cut her hair short—almost like a boy’s.
Although the phases of her going away would be marked by an increasingly conscious masculinity in her appearance, Elaine said she would never be in a lesbian relationship; yet she told me she’d experimented with being a lesbian. Had she “experimented” with Mrs. Kittredge? If Elaine had ever been attracted to women, I imagined how Mrs. Kittredge might have ended that, but Elaine was vague about it. I think of my dear friend as someone doomed to be attracted to the wrong men, but Elaine was vague about that, too. “They’re just not the sort of men who last,” was how she put it.
AS FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHS: The pictures Elaine sent me of her three years at Northfield are the ones I have kept. They may be black-and-white or color, and utterly amateur snapshots, but they are not as artless as they first appear.
I’ll begin with the photo of Elaine standing on the porch of a three-story wooden house; she doesn’t look like she belongs there—perhaps she was only visiting. Together with the name of the building, and the date of its construction—Moore Cottage, 1899—there is also this hope expressed, in Elaine’s careful longhand, on the back of the photograph: I wish this were my dorm. (Apparently, it wasn’t—nor would it be.)
On the ground floor of Moore Cottage, there were wooden clapboards, painted white, but there were white-painted wooden shingles on the second and third floors—as if to suggest not only the passage of time but a lingering indecision. Possibly this uncertainty had to do with Moore Cottage’s use. Over the years, it would be used as a dormitory for girls—later, as a guesthouse for visiting parents. From the spread-out look of the building, there were probably a dozen or more bedrooms—far fewer bathrooms, I’ll bet—and a large kitchen with an adjoining common room.
More bathrooms might have made the visiting parents happier, whereas the students (when they lived there) were long accustomed to making do with less. The porch, where Elaine stood—she seemed uncharacteristically unsure of herself—had a contradictory appearance. What use do students have for porches? In a good school, which Northfield was, students are too busy for porches, which are better suited for people with more time for leisure—such as guests.
In the picture of herself on the porch at Moore Cottage—it was among the very first of the photographs Elaine sent me from Northfield—maybe she felt like a guest. Curiously, there is someone in the window of one of the ground-floor rooms overlooking the porch: a woman of indeterminate age, to judge her by her clothes and the length of her hair—her face lost in the shadows, or obscured by an unclear reflection in the window.
Also among the earliest photos Elaine sent me from her new school, which was, in fact, a very old school, was that picture of the birthplace of Dwight L. Moody. Our founder’s birthplace, alleged to be haunted, Elaine had written on the back of this photo, though that can’t be the ghost of D.L. himself in a small upstairs window of the birthplace. It is a woman’s face in profile—neither young nor old, but definitely pretty—her expression unknown. Elaine, smiling, is in the foreground of the photograph; she appears to be pointing in the direction of that upstairs window. (Maybe the girl was a friend of hers, or so I first imagined.)
Then there’s the picture labeled The Auditorium, 1894—on a slight hill. I guess Elaine meant “slight” by Vermont standards. (I remember it as the first of the photos where the mystery woman seemed to be consciously posed; after seeing this picture, I began to look for her.) The Auditorium was a red-brick building with arched windows and doorways, and with two castle-size towers. A shadow cast by one of the towers fell across the lawn where Elaine was standing, near the trunk of an imposing tree. Sticking out, from behind the tree—in sunlight, not in the tower’s shadow—was a woman’s shapely leg. Her foot, which was pointed toward Elaine, was in a dark and sensible shoe; her kneesock was properly pulled up to her bare knee, above which her long gray skirt had been hiked to mid-thigh.
“Who’s the other girl, or woman?” I’d asked Elain
e.
“I don’t know who you mean,” Elaine replied. “What girl or woman?”
“In the pictures. There’s always someone else there, in the photographs,” I said. “Come on—you can tell me. Who is it—a friend of yours, maybe, or a teacher?”
In the photo of East Hall, the woman’s face is very small—and partially hidden by a scarf—in an upper-story window. East Hall was, evidently, a dormitory, though Elaine didn’t say; the fire escape gave it away.
In the picture of Stone Hall, there is a clock tower of that copper-green color, and very tall windows; it must have had warm light inside, on those few ungray days in the school-year months in western Massachusetts. Elaine is somewhat awkwardly positioned at the far side of the photograph; she is facing the camera, but she is standing almost perfectly back-to-back with someone. You can count two or three extra fingers on Elaine’s left hand; holding her right hip is a third hand.
There’s the one of the school chapel, I guess you would call it—a massive-looking cathedral with one of those big wooden doors inlaid with cast iron. A woman’s bare arm is holding the heavy-looking door open for Elaine, who seems not to notice the arm—a bracelet on the wrist, rings on both the pinkie and the index finger—or maybe Elaine didn’t care whether or not the woman was there. One can read the Latin engraved on the chapel: ANNO DOMINI MDCCCCVIII. Elaine had translated this on the back of the photo: In the year of the Lord 1908. (She’d added, Where I want to get married, if I’m ever desperate enough to get married—if so, please just shoot me.)
I believe I love best the picture of Margaret Olivia Hall, Northfield’s music building, because I knew how much Elaine loved to sing—singing was one thing her big voice was born to do. (“I love to sing until I cry, and then sing some more,” she once wrote to me.)
The names of composers were engraved between the upper-story windows of the music hall; I have memorized the names. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini. In the window above the u in Gluck, which had been carved like a v, was a headless woman—just her torso—wearing only a bra. Unlike Elaine, who is leaning against the building, the headless woman in the window has very noticeable breasts—big ones.
In One Person Page 20