In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  “Who is she?” I asked Elaine, again and again.

  If you didn’t know it already, the music building with the names of those composers was an accurate indication of how sophisticated a school Northfield was; it put a place like Favorite River Academy to shame. It was a quantum leap heavenward from what Elaine had been used to at the public high school in Ezra Falls.

  Most of the prep schools in New England were single-sex schools at that time. Many all-boys’ schools provided faculty daughters with a tuition stipend; the girls could attend an all-girls’ boarding school, and not be adrift in whatever public high school served the community. (To be fair: The public schools in Vermont were not all as bad as the one in Ezra Falls.)

  As a result of the Hadleys’ sending Elaine to Northfield—at first, at their expense—Favorite River did the right thing: It provided what amounted to vouchers for its faculty daughters. I would never hear the end of it from my crude cousin Gerry—namely, that this change in policy had happened too late to rescue her from the public high school in Ezra Falls. As I’ve said, Gerry was a college girl that same spring when Elaine traveled to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. “I guess I would have been wise to get myself knocked up a few years ago—provided the lucky guy had a French mother,” was how Gerry put it. (I could easily imagine Muriel saying this when Muriel had been a teenager—although, after staring nonstop at my aunt’s breasts in Twelfth Night, it was terrifying to think of Aunt Muriel as a teenager.)

  I could describe other photographs that Elaine sent me from Northfield—I’ve kept them all—but the pattern would simply repeat itself. There was always a partial, imperfect image of another woman in the pictures of Elaine and those impressive buildings on the Northfield campus.

  “Who is she? I know you know who I mean—she’s always there, Elaine,” I said repeatedly. “Don’t be coy about it.”

  “I’m not being coy, Billy—you should talk about being coy, if that’s the word you’re using for being evasive, or not talking about things directly. If you know what I mean,” Elaine would say.

  “Okay, okay—so I have to guess who she is, is that it? So you’re paying me back for being less than candid with you—am I getting warm?” I asked my dear friend.

  ELAINE AND I WOULD try living together, though this would be many years later, after we’d both had sufficient disappointments in our lives. It wouldn’t work out—not for very long—but we were too good friends not to have tried it. We were also old enough, when we embarked on this adventure, to know that friends were more important than lovers—not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships. (It’s best not to generalize, but this was certainly the case for Elaine and me.)

  We had a seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street in San Francisco—in that area of Post Street between Taylor and Mason, near Union Square. Elaine and I had our own rooms, to write. Our bedroom was large and accommodating—it overlooked some rooftops on Geary Street, and the vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio. At night, the neon for the HOTEL word was dark—burned out, I guess—so that only the ADAGIO was lit. In my insomnia, I would get out of bed and go to the window and stare at the bloodred ADAGIO sign.

  One night, when I came back to bed, I inadvertently woke up Elaine, and I asked her about the adagio word. I knew it was Italian; not only had I heard Esmeralda say it, but I’d seen the word in her notes. In my forays into the world of opera and other music—both with Esmeralda and with Larry, in Vienna—I knew that the word had some use in music. I knew that Elaine would know what it meant; like her mother, Elaine was very musical. (Northfield had been a good fit for her—it was a great school for music.)

  “What’s it mean?” I asked Elaine, as we lay awake in that seedy Post Street apartment.

  “Adagio means slowly, softly, gently,” Elaine answered.

  “Oh.”

  That would be about the best you could say for our efforts at lovemaking, which we tried, too—with no more success than the living-together part, but we tried. “Adagio,” we would say, when we tried to make love, or afterward, when we were trying to fall asleep. We say it still; we said it when we left San Francisco, and we say it when we close letters or emails to each other now. It’s what love means to us, I guess—only adagio. (Slowly, softly, gently.) It works for friends, anyway.

  “So who was she, really—the lady in all those pictures?” I would ask Elaine, in that accommodating bedroom overlooking the neon-damaged Hotel Adagio.

  “You know, Billy—she’s still looking after me. She’ll always be hovering somewhere nearby, taking my temperature by hand, checking the blood on my pad to see if the bleeding is still ‘normal.’ It was always ‘normal,’ by the way, but she’s still checking—she wanted me to know that I would never leave her care, or her thoughts,” Elaine said.

  I lay there thinking about it—the only light out the window being the dull glow of lights from Union Square and that damaged neon sign, the vertical ADAGIO in bloodred, the HOTEL unlit.

  “You actually mean that Mrs. Kittredge is still—”

  “Billy!” Elaine interrupted me. “I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman. I will never be as close to anyone again.”

  “What about Kittredge?” I asked her, though I should have known better—after all those years.

  “Fuck Kittredge!” Elaine cried. “It’s his mother who marked me! It’s her I’ll never forget!”

  “How intimate? Marked you how?” I asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and I thought that I should just hold her—slowly, softly, gently—and say nothing. I’d already asked her about the abortion; it wasn’t that. She’d had another abortion, after the one in Europe.

  “They’re not so bad, when you consider the alternative,” was all Elaine ever said about her abortions. However Mrs. Kittredge had marked her, it wasn’t about that. And if Elaine had “experimented” with being a lesbian—I mean with Mrs. Kittredge—Elaine would go to her grave being vague about that.

  The pictures I kept of Elaine were what I could imagine about Kittredge’s mother, or how “close” Elaine ever was to her. The shadows and body parts of the woman (or women) in those photographs are more vivid to me than my one memory of Mrs. Kittredge at a wrestling match, the first and only time I actually saw her. I know “that awful woman” best by her effect on my friend Elaine—the way I know myself best by my persistent crushes on the wrong people, the way I was formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved.

  Chapter 7

  MY TERRIFYING ANGELS

  If an unwanted pregnancy was the “abyss” that an intrepid girl could fall into—the abyss word was my mother’s, though I’ll bet she’d heard it first from fucking Muriel—surely the abyss for a boy like me was to succumb to homosexual activity. In such love lay madness; in acting out my most dire imaginings, I would certainly descend to the bottomless pit of the universe of desire. Or so I believed in the fall of my senior year at Favorite River Academy, when I once more ventured to the First Sister Public Library—this time, I thought, to save myself. I was eighteen, but my sexual misgivings were innumerable; my self-hatred was huge.

  If you were, like me, at an all-boys’ boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I’d always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

  With Elaine starting her new life at Northfield, I was spending more and more time in the yearbook room of the academy library. When my mom or Richard asked me where I was going, I always answered: “I’m going to the library.” I didn’t tell them which library. And without Elaine to slow me down—she could never resist showing me those hot-looking boys from the more contemporary of the yearbooks—I was blazing my way through the graduating classes of the decreasingly distant past. I’d left World War I behind; I was way ahead of my imagined schedule. At the rate I was going through those yearbooks, I would catch up with the pre
sent well before the spring of ’61 and my own graduation from Favorite River.

  In fact, I was a mere thirty years behind myself; on the same September evening I decided to leave the academy library and pay a visit to Miss Frost, I’d begun to peruse the yearbook for the Class of ’31. An absolutely heart-stopping boy in the wrestling-team photo had caused me to abruptly close the yearbook. I thought: I simply can’t keep thinking about Kittredge, and boys like him; I must not give in to those feelings, or I am doomed.

  Just what exactly was holding my doom at bay? My contrived image of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model in a mail-order catalog wasn’t working anymore. It was increasingly difficult to masturbate to even the most imaginative transposing of Mrs. Hadley’s homely face on the least bosomy of those small-breasted young girls. All that held Kittredge (and boys like him) at bay was my ardent fantasizing about Miss Frost.

  The Favorite River Academy yearbook was called The Owl. (“Anyone who knows why is probably dead,” Richard Abbott had replied, when I’d asked him why.) I pushed the ’31 Owl aside. I gathered up my notebooks, and my German homework—cramming everything but The Owl into my book bag.

  I was taking German IV, though it wasn’t required. I was still helping Kittredge with German III, which he’d flunked but was perforce repeating. It was somewhat easier to help him, since we were no longer taking German III together. Essentially, all I did was save Kittredge a little time. The hard stuff in German III was the introduction to Goethe and Rilke; there was more of them in German IV. When Kittredge got stuck on a phrase, I saved him time by giving him a quick and rudimentary translation. That some of the same Goethe and Rilke was as confounding to Kittredge the second time truly incensed him, but frankly the notes and hurried comments that now passed between us were easier for me than our previous conversations. I was trying to be in Kittredge’s presence as little as I possibly could.

  To that end, I dropped out of the fall Shakespeare play—to Richard’s oft-expressed disappointment. Richard had cast Kittredge as Edgar in King Lear. Furthermore, there was an unforeseen flaw in Richard’s having cast me as Lear’s Fool. When I was telling Mrs. Hadley that I wanted no part in the play, because Kittredge had “a hero’s part”—not to mention that Edgar is later disguised as Poor Tom, so that Kittredge had essentially been given “a dual role”—Martha Hadley wanted to know how closely I’d looked over my lines. Given that my number of unpronounceables was growing, did I foresee that the Fool presented me with any vocabulary issues? Was Mrs. Hadley hinting that my pronunciation problems could excuse me from the play?

  “What are you getting at?” I asked her. “You think I can’t handle ‘cutpurses’ or ‘courtesan,’ or are you worried that ‘codpiece’ will throw me for a loop—just because of the whatchamacallit the codpiece covers, or because I have trouble with the word for the whatchamacallit itself?”

  “Don’t be defensive, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

  “Or was it the ‘arrant whore’ combination that you thought might trip me up?” I asked her. “Or maybe ‘coxcomb’—either the singular or the plural, or both!”

  “Calm down, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “We’re both upset about Kittredge.”

  “Kittredge had the last lines in Twelfth Night!” I cried. “Now Richard gives him the last lines again! We have to hear Kittredge say, ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’”

  “‘The oldest hath borne most,’” Kittredge-as-Edgar continues.

  In the story of King Lear—given what happens to Lear, not to mention the blinding of Gloucester (Richard had cast himself as Gloucester)—this is certainly true. But when Edgar ends the play by declaring that “we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long”—well, I don’t know if that is universally true.

  Do I dispute the concluding wisdom of this great play because I can’t distinguish Edgar from Kittredge? Can anyone (even Shakespeare) know how future generations will or will not suffer?

  “Richard is doing what’s best for the play, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. “Richard isn’t rewarding Kittredge for seducing Elaine.” Yet it somehow seemed that way to me. Why give Kittredge as good a part as Edgar, who is later disguised as Poor Tom? After what had happened in Twelfth Night, why did Richard have to give Kittredge a role in King Lear at all? I wanted out of the play—being, or not being, Lear’s Fool wasn’t the issue.

  “Just tell Richard you don’t want to be around Kittredge, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said to me. “Richard will understand.”

  I couldn’t tell Martha Hadley that I also didn’t want to be around Richard. And what point was there, in this production of King Lear, to observe my mother’s expression when she watched her father onstage as a woman? Grandpa Harry was cast as Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter; Goneril is such a horrid daughter, why wouldn’t my mom look at anyone playing Goneril with the utmost disapproval? (Aunt Muriel was Regan, Lear’s other awful daughter; I assumed that my mother would glower at her sister, Muriel, too.)

  It wasn’t only because of Kittredge that I wanted nothing to do with this King Lear. I had no heart to see Uncle Bob fall short in the leading-man department, for the good-hearted Bob—Squash Ball Bob, Kittredge called him—was cast as King Lear. That Bob lacked a tragic dimension seemed obvious, if not to Richard Abbott; perhaps Richard pitied Bob, and found him tragic, because Bob was (tragically) married to Muriel.

  It was Bob’s body that was all wrong—or was it his head? Bob’s body was big, and athletically robust; compared to his body, Bob’s head seemed too small, and improbably round—a squash ball lost between two hulking shoulders. Uncle Bob was both too good-natured and too strong-looking to be Lear.

  It is relatively early in the play (act 1, scene 4) when Bob-as-Lear bellows, “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’”

  Who could forget how Lear’s Fool answers the king? But I did; I forgot that I even had a line. “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am,’ Bill?” Richard Abbott asked me.

  “It’s your line, Nymph,” Kittredge whispered to me. “I had anticipated that you might have a little trouble with it.” Everyone waited while I found the Fool’s line. At first, I wasn’t even aware of the pronunciation problem; my difficulty in saying this word was so recent that I hadn’t noticed it, nor had Martha Hadley. But Kittredge, clearly, had detected the potential unpronounceable. “Let’s hear you say it, Nymph,” Kittredge said. “Let’s hear you try it, anyway.”

  “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Lear asks.

  The Fool answers: “Lear’s shadow.”

  Since when had the shadow word given me any grief in the pronunciation department? Since Elaine had come back from that trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, when Elaine seemed as insubstantial as a shadow—at least in comparison to her former self. Since Elaine had come back from Europe, and there seemed to be an unfamiliar shadow dogging her every step—a shadow that bore a ghostly but ultrasophisticated resemblance to Mrs. Kittredge herself. Since Elaine had gone away again, to Northfield, and I was left with a shadow following me around—perhaps the disquieting, unavenged shadow of my absent best friend.

  “‘Lear’s . . . shed,’” I said.

  “His shed!” Kittredge exclaimed.

  “Try it again, Bill,” Richard said.

  “I can’t say it,” I replied.

  “Maybe we need a new Fool,” Kittredge suggested.

  “That would be my decision, Kittredge,” Richard told him.

  “Or mine,” I said.

  “Ah, well—” Grandpa Harry started to say, but Uncle Bob interrupted him.

  “It seems to me, Richard, that Billy could say ‘Lear’s reflection,’ or even ‘Lear’s ghost’—if, in your judgment, this fits with what the Fool means or is implying,” Uncle Bob suggested.

  “Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Kittredge said.

  “The line is ‘Lear’s shadow,’ Billy,” my mother, the prompter, said. “Either you c
an say it or you can’t.”

  “Please, Jewel—” Richard started to say, but I interrupted him.

  “Lear should have a proper Fool—one who can say everything,” I told Richard Abbott. I knew, as I was leaving, that I was walking out of my final rehearsal as a Favorite River Academy student—my last Shakespeare play, perhaps. (As it would turn out, King Lear was my last Shakespeare play as an actor.)

  The faculty daughter whom Richard cast as Cordelia was and remains so completely unknown to me that I can’t recall her name. “An unformed girl, but with a crackerjack memory,” Grandpa Harry had said about her.

  “Neither a present nor a future beauty,” was all my aunt Muriel said of the doomed Cordelia, implying that, in King Lear, no one would ever have married this Cordelia—not even if she’d lived.

  Lear’s Fool would be played by Delacorte. Since Delacorte was a wrestler, he’d probably learned that the part was available because Kittredge had told him. Kittredge would later inform me that, because the fall Shakespeare play was rehearsed and performed before the start of the wrestling season, Delacorte wasn’t as ill affected as he usually was by the complications of cutting weight. Yet the lightweight who, according to Kittredge, would have had the shit kicked out of him in a heavier weight-class, still suffered from cotton-mouth, even when he wasn’t dehydrated—or perhaps Delacorte dreamed of cutting weight, even in the off-season. Therefore, Delacorte constantly rinsed his mouth out with water from a paper cup; he eternally spat out the water into another paper cup. If Delacorte were alive today, I’m sure he would still be running his fingers through his hair. But Delacorte is dead, along with so many others. Awaiting me, in the future, was seeing Delacorte die.