by John Irving
"I think Elaine knows, better than I do, which words give me the most trouble," I said.
"Billy makes a mess of the last two syllables in ominousness every time," Elaine went on.
"I say penith," I ventured.
"I see," Martha Hadley said.
"Don't ask him to say the plural," Elaine told her mother.
If Favorite River Academy had admitted girls in those days, Elaine Hadley and I would probably have become best friends sooner than we did, but I didn't get to go to school with Elaine. I managed to see as much of her as I did only because the Hadleys so frequently socialized with my mom and Richard--they were becoming such good friends.
Thus, occasionally, it was the homely and flat-chested Mrs. Hadley I imagined in those training bras--I thought of Martha Hadley's small breasts when I perused the young-girl models in my mom's mail-order catalogs.
In the academy library, where I was becoming a writer--or, more accurately, dreaming of becoming one--I especially liked the room with the vast collection of Favorite River yearbooks. Other students seemed to take no interest in that reading room; the occasional faculty member could be found there, either reading or grading papers and blue books.
Favorite River Academy was old; it had been founded in the nineteenth century. I liked looking at the old yearbooks. (Perhaps all the past held secrets; I knew my past did.) If I kept at it, I imagined, I might eventually catch up to the yearbook of my own graduating class--but not before the spring of my senior year. In the fall of my junior year, I was still looking through yearbooks from 1914 and 1915. World War I was going on; those Favorite River boys must have been frightened. I looked closely at the faces of the graduating seniors, and at their college choices and career ambitions; many of the seniors were "undecided" about both. Almost all the seniors had nicknames, even back then.
I looked very closely at the wrestling-team photographs, and somewhat less closely at the Drama Club photos; in the latter case, there were many boys in makeup and dressed as girls. It seemed that there'd always been a wrestling team and a Drama Club at Favorite River. (You must remember that this particular 1914-1915 yearbook searching was in the fall of 1959; the much-admired traditions in single-sex boarding schools were vigorously upheld through the fifties, and into the sixties.)
I suppose I liked that reading room with all the yearbooks, and with the occasional faculty member, because there were never any other students there--no bullies, in other words, and no distracting crushes. How lucky was I to have had my own room in my mom and Richard's faculty apartment? All the boarders at the academy had roommates. I cannot imagine what abuse, or what more subtle form of cruelty, I might have suffered from a roommate. And what would I have done with my mother's mail-order clothing catalogs? (The very thought of not being able to masturbate was abusive enough--I mean, just imagining it!)
At seventeen, which I was in the fall of 1959, I had no reason to go back to the First Sister Public Library--that is, no reason I would have dared to express. I'd found a haven to get my homework done; the yearbook room in the academy library was a place to write, or just to imagine. But I must have missed Miss Frost. She was not onstage enough to satisfy me, and now that I skipped the rehearsals at the First Sister Players, I saw her only when she was in an actual performance; these were "too few and far between," as my cliche-spouting grandmother might have said.
I could have talked to Grandpa Harry about it; he would have understood. I could have told him about missing Miss Frost, about my crush on her and on those older boys--even about my earliest, inappropriate crush on my stepfather, Richard Abbott. But I didn't talk to Grandpa Harry about any of it--not then.
Was Harry Marshall an actual transvestite? Was Grandpa Harry more than the occasional cross-dresser? Today, would we call my grandpa a closeted gay man who only acted as a woman under the most permissible circumstances of his time? I honestly don't know. If my generation was repressed, and we certainly were, I can only imagine that my grandfather's generation--whether or not Grandpa Harry truly was a homosexual--flew well under the existing radar.
Thus it seemed to me, at the time, that there was no remedy for missing Miss Frost--except making up a reason to see her. (If I was going to be a writer, after all, I should be able to make up a believable reason for my frequenting the First Sister Public Library again.) And so I settled upon a story--namely, that the only place I could work on my writing was the public library, where my academy friends wouldn't keep interrupting me. Maybe Miss Frost wouldn't know that I didn't have many friends, and what few friends I had at Favorite River kept their heads down and were as timid as I was; they wouldn't have dared to interrupt anyone.
Since I'd told Miss Frost that I wanted to become a writer, she might accept that the First Sister town library was where I wanted to try my hand at it. In the evening, I knew, there were mostly elderly people there, and few of them; there might also be scant representation of those sullen high school girls, condemned to further their education in Ezra Falls. There was no one who would interrupt me in our town's forlorn library. (No children, especially.)
I was afraid that Miss Frost wouldn't recognize me. I had started to shave, and I thought I was somehow altered--I was so much more grown up, in my estimation. I knew that Miss Frost knew my name had changed, and that she must have seen me--albeit only occasionally, in the last two years, either backstage or in the audience at the First Sister Players' little theater. She certainly knew I was the prompter's son--I was that boy.
On the night I presented myself at the public library--not to take out a book, or even read one, but to actually work on my own writing--Miss Frost stared at me for the longest time. I assumed she was having trouble remembering me, and my heart was breaking, but she remembered far more than I'd imagined.
"Don't tell me--it's William Abbott," Miss Frost suddenly said. "I suppose you want to read Great Expectations a record-breaking third time."
I confessed to her that I hadn't come to the library to read. I told Miss Frost that I was trying to get away from my friends--so that I could write.
"You've come here, to the library, to write," she repeated. I remembered that Miss Frost had a habit of repeating what you said. Nana Victoria said that Miss Frost must have enjoyed the repetition, because by repeating what you said to her, she could keep the conversation going a little longer. (Aunt Muriel had claimed that no one liked to talk to Miss Frost.)
"Yes, I do," I told Miss Frost. "I want to write."
"But why here? Why this place?" Miss Frost demanded.
I couldn't think of what to say. A word (and then another word) just popped into my head, and Miss Frost made me so nervous that I spontaneously said the first word, which was quickly followed by the second. "Nostalgia," I said. "Maybe I'm nostalgic."
"Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You're nostalgic!" she repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" she asked.
"Seventeen," I told her.
"Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Dean--forgive me, I mean William Abbott--if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!"
She was the first one who said so--for a while, she was the only one who knew what I wanted to be--and I believed her. At the time, Miss Frost struck me as the most genuine person I knew.
Chapter 3
MASQUERADE
The wrestler with the most beautiful body was named Kittredge. He had a hairless chest with absurdly well-defined pectoral muscles; those muscles were of an exaggerated, comic-book clarity. A thin line of dark-brown, almost-black hair ran from his navel to his pubes, and he had one of those cute penises--I have such a dread of that plural! His penis was inclined to curl against his right thigh, or it appeared to be preternaturally pointed to the right. There was no one I could ask concerning what the rightward inclination of Kittredge's penis signified. In the showers, at the gym, I lowered my eyes; for the most part, I wouldn't look at him above his strong, hairy legs.
Kittredge had a heavy beard, but he had perfect skin and was generally clean-shaven. I found him at his most devastatingly handsome with two or three days' stubble, when he looked older than the other students, and even some of the Favorite River faculty--including Richard Abbott and Mr. Hadley. Kittredge played soccer in the fall, and lacrosse in the spring, but wrestling was the foremost showcase for his beautiful body, and the wrestling seemed well suited to his innate cruelty.
While I rarely saw him bully anyone--that is, physically--he was aggressive and intimidating, and his sarcasm was of a cutting-edge kind. In that all-boys', boarding-school world, Kittredge was honored as an athlete, but I remember him best for how effectively abusive he was. Kittredge was brilliant at inflicting verbal pain, and he had the body to back up what he said; no one stood up to him. If you despised him, you kept quiet about it. I both despised and adored him. Alas, the despising-him part did little to lessen my crush on him; my attraction to him was a burden I bore through my junior year, when Kittredge was a senior--when I believed I had only one year of agony remaining. I foresaw a day, just around the corner, when my longing for him would cease to torment me.
It would be a blow, and an additional burden, to discover that Kittredge had failed to pass the foreign-language requirement; he would stay at the school for a fifth year. We would be seniors together. By then, Kittredge not only looked older than the other Favorite River students--he truly was older.
If only at the beginning of those seemingly endless years of our incarceration together, I misheard the nuance in the pronunciation of Kittredge's first name--"Jock," I thought everyone called him. It fit. Surely, I thought, Jock was a nickname--anyone who was as cool as Kittredge had one. But his first name, his actual name, was Jacques.
"Zhak," we called Kittredge. In my infatuation with him, I must have imagined that my fellow students found him as beautiful as I did--that we'd instinctively Frenchified the jock word because of Kittredge's good looks!
He was born and grew up in New York City, where his father had something to do with international banking--or maybe it was international law. Kittredge's mother was French. She was a Jacqueline--in French, the feminine of Jacques. "My mom, who I don't believe really is my mom, is very vain," Kittredge said, repeatedly--as if he weren't vain. I wondered if it was a measure of Jacqueline Kittredge's vanity that she had named her son--he was an only child--after herself.
I saw her only once--at a wrestling match. I admired her clothes. She certainly was beautiful, though I thought her boy was better-looking. Mrs. Kittredge had a masculine kind of attractiveness; she looked chiseled--she even had her son's prominent jaw. How could Kittredge have believed she wasn't his mom? They looked so much alike.
"She looks like Kittredge with breasts," Elaine Hadley said to me--with her typical, clarion-voiced authority. "How could she not be his mother?" Elaine asked me. "Unless she's his much-older sister. Come on, Billy--if they were the same age, she could be his twin!"
At the wrestling match, Elaine and I had stared at Kittredge's mother; she seemed unfazed by it. With her striking bones, her jutting breasts, her perfectly fitted and most flattering clothes, Mrs. Kittredge was surely used to being stared at.
"I wonder if she waxes her face," I said to Elaine.
"Why would she have to?" Elaine asked me.
"I can imagine her with a mustache," I said.
"Yeah, but with no hair on her chest, like him," Elaine replied. I suppose that Kittredge's mom was riveting to us because we could see Kittredge in her, but Mrs. Kittredge was also riveting in her own disturbing way. She was the first older woman who made me feel I was too young and inexperienced to understand her. I remember thinking that it must have been intimidating to have her as a mother--even for Kittredge.
I knew that Elaine had a crush on Kittredge because she'd told me. (Embarrassingly, we'd both memorized Kittredge's chest.) That fall of '59, when I was seventeen, I hadn't been honest with Elaine about my crushes; I'd not yet been brave enough to tell her that both Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge turned me on. And how could I have told Elaine about my confounding lust for her mom? Occasionally, I was still masturbating to the homely and flat-chested Martha Hadley--that tall, big-boned woman with a wide, thin-lipped mouth, whose long face I imagined on those young girls who were the training-bra models in my mom's mail-order catalogs.
It might have comforted Elaine to know that I shared her misery over Kittredge, who at the outset was as scathing or indifferent (or both) to her as he was to me, though he had been treating us slightly better lately--since Richard Abbott had cast the three of us in The Tempest. It was wise of Richard to have cast himself as Prospero, because there was no mere boy among the Favorite River students who could have properly played the "true" Duke of Milan, as Shakespeare calls him, and Miranda's loving father. His twelve years of island life have honed Prospero's magical powers, and there are few prep-school boys who can make such powers evident onstage.
Okay--maybe Kittredge could have done it. He was well cast as a ravishingly sexy Ferdinand; Kittredge was convincing in his love for Miranda, though this caused Elaine Hadley, who was cast as Miranda, no end of suffering.
"I would not wish / Any companion in the world but you," Miranda tells Ferdinand.
And Ferdinand says to Miranda: "I, / Beyond all limit of what else i' the world, / Do love, prize, honor you."
How hard it must have been for Elaine to hear that--in one rehearsal after another--only to be ignored (or belittled) by Kittredge whenever she encountered him offstage. That he was treating us "slightly better" since the start of rehearsals for The Tempest didn't mean that Kittredge couldn't still be awful.
Richard had cast me as Ariel; in the dramatis personae for the play, Shakespeare calls Ariel "an airy Spirit."
No, I don't believe that Richard was being particularly prescient in regard to my emerging and confusing sexual orientation. He told the cast that Ariel's gender was "polymorphous--more a matter of habiliment than anything organic."
From the first Enter Ariel moment (act 1, scene 2), Ariel says to Prospero: "To thy strong bidding task / Ariel and all his quality." Richard had called the cast's attention--especially my attention--to the male pronoun. (In the same scene, the stage direction for Ariel reads: he demonstrates.)
It was unfortunate for me that Prospero commands Ariel: "Go make thyself like a nymph o' th' sea, be subject To no sight but thine and mine--invisible To every eyeball else."
Alas, I would not be invisible to the audience. The Enter Ariel as a water nymph always got a big laugh--even before I was in costume with makeup. That stage direction was what led Kittredge to start calling me "Nymph."
I remember exactly how Richard had put it: "Keeping the character of Ariel in the male gender is simpler than tricking out one more choirboy in women's garb." (But women's garb--well, at least the wig--was how I would be tricked out!)
Nor was it lost on Kittredge when Richard said, "It's possible that Shakespeare saw a continuum from Caliban through Prospero to Ariel--a kind of spiritual evolution. Caliban is all earth and water, brute force and guile. Prospero is human control and insight--he's the ultimate alchemist. And Ariel," Richard said, smiling at me--no smile was ever lost on Kittredge--"Ariel is a spirit of air and fire, freed from mortal concerns. Perhaps Shakespeare felt that presenting Ariel as explicitly female might detract from this notion of a continuum. I believe that Ariel's gender is mutable."
"Director's choice, in other words?" Kittredge asked Richard.
Our director and teacher regarded Kittredge cautiously before answering him. "The sex of angels is also mutable," Richard said. "Yes, Kittredge--director's choice."
"But what will the so-called water nymph look like?" Kittredge asked. "Like a girl, right?"
"Probably," Richard said, more cautiously.
I was trying to imagine how I would be costumed and made up as an invisible water nymph; I could never have foreseen the algae-green wig I wore, nor the crimson wrestl
ing tights. (Crimson and silver-gray--"death-gray," Grandpa Harry had called it--were the Favorite River Academy colors.)
"So Billy's gender is . . . mutable," Kittredge said, smiling.
"Not Billy's--Ariel's," Richard said.
But Kittredge had made his point; the cast of The Tempest would not forget the mutable word. "Nymph," Kittredge's nickname for me, would stick. I had two years to go at Favorite River Academy; a Nymph I would be.
"It doesn't matter what costume and makeup do to you, Nymph," Kittredge said to me privately. "You'll never be as hot as your mother."
I was aware that my mom was pretty, and--at seventeen--I was increasingly conscious of how the other students at an all-boys' academy like Favorite River regarded her. But no other boy had told me that my mom was "hot"; as I often found myself with Kittredge, I was at a loss for words. I'm sure that the hot word was not yet in use--not the way Kittredge had used it. But Kittredge definitely meant "hot" in that way.
When Kittredge spoke of his own mother, which he rarely did, he usually raised the issue of there being a possible mix-up. "Maybe my real mom died in childbirth," Kittredge said. "My father found some unwed mother in the same hospital--an unfortunate woman (her child was stillborn, but the woman never knew), a woman who looked like my mother. There was a switch. My dad would be capable of such a deception. I'm not saying the woman knows she's my stepmother. She may even believe my dad is my stepfather! At the time, she might have been taking a lot of drugs--she must have been depressed, maybe suicidal. I have no doubt that she believes she's my mom--she just doesn't always act like a mother. She's done some contradictory things--contradictory to motherhood. All I'm saying is that my dad has never been answerable for his behavior with women--with any woman. My dad just makes deals. This woman may look like me, but she's not my mom--she's not anyone's mother."
"Kittredge is in denial--big time," Elaine had told me. "That woman looks like his mother and his father!"
When I told Elaine Hadley what Kittredge had said about my mom, Elaine suggested that I tell Kittredge our opinion of his mother--based on our shameless staring at her, at one of his wrestling matches. "Tell him his mom looks like him, with tits," Elaine said.