by John Irving
My mom blushed more deeply than before.
"Oh, God!" Elaine Hadley cried.
And I--where was I? I was Ariel--"an airy Spirit." I was waiting for Ferdinand and Miranda to exeunt--separately, like the stage direction said. I was standing by, with Caliban, Stephano ("a drunken butler," Shakespeare calls him), and Trinculo; we were all in the next scene, in which I was invisible. With my mother blushing at Kittredge's clever manipulations, I felt invisible--or I wanted to be.
"I'm just the prompter," my mother said hastily to Kittredge. "That's a question for the director--you should ask Mr. Abbott," she said. My mom's agitation was obvious, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked years ago, when she was either pregnant with me or already my mother--when she'd seen my womanizing father kissing someone else. I remembered how she'd said the else word when she told me about it, in the same perfunctory way she had corrected Kittredge's purposeful flubs. (Once we were in performances of The Tempest, Kittredge wouldn't muff a line--not a single word. I realize that I haven't acknowledged this, but Kittredge was very good onstage.)
It was painful for me to see how easily undone my mom was--by the slightest sexual suggestion, from a teenager! I hated myself, because I saw that I was ashamed of my own mother, and I knew that whatever shame I felt for her had been formed by Muriel's constant condescension and her chiding gossip. Naturally, I hated Kittredge for how effortlessly he had rattled my damaged mom--for how smoothly he was able to rattle Elaine and me, too--and then my mother called for help. "Richard!" she called. "Jacques has a question about his character!"
"Oh, God," Elaine said again--this time, under her breath; she was barely audible, but Kittredge had heard her.
"Patience, dear Naples," Kittredge said to her, taking her hand. He grasped her hand exactly as Ferdinand takes Miranda's hand--before they part at the end of act 3, scene 1--but Elaine yanked her hand away from him.
"What is it about your character, Ferdinand?" Richard Abbott asked Kittredge.
"This is more bullshit," Elaine said.
"Your language, Elaine!" my mother said.
"Some fresh air would be good for Miranda," Richard said to Elaine. "Just a couple of deep breaths, and perhaps a needed expulsion of whatever words spontaneously come to mind. Take a break, Elaine--you should take a break, too, Bill," Richard told me. "We want our Miranda and our Ariel in character." (I guess Richard could see that I was agitated, too.)
There was a loading dock off the carpentry shop, to the rear of the backstage area, and Elaine and I stepped out on the dock in the cool night air. I tried to take her hand; at first she pulled her hand away from me, though not as violently as she'd jerked it away from Kittredge. Then, with the door to the loading dock still open, Elaine gave me back her hand; she rested her head against my shoulder. "They're a cute couple, aren't they?" we heard Kittredge say to someone, or to them all, before the door closed.
"Motherfucker!" Elaine Hadley yelled. "Penis-breath!" she shouted; then she gulped the cold air, until her breathing had returned to almost normal, and we went back inside the theater, where Elaine's glasses instantly fogged up.
"Ferdinand is not saying to Miranda that he is sexually experienced," Richard was telling Kittredge. "Ferdinand is saying how attentive he has been to women, and how often women have made an impression on him. All he means is that no one has impressed him as forcefully as Miranda."
"It's a speech about impressions, Kittredge," Elaine managed to say. "It's not a speech about sex."
Enter Ariel, invisible--that was the stage direction to my upcoming scene (act 3, scene 2). But I was already truly invisible; I had somehow succeeded in giving them all the impression that Elaine Hadley was my love interest. For Elaine's part, she seemed to be going along with it--maybe for self-protective reasons of her own. But Kittredge was smiling at us--in that sneering, superior way he had. I do not think the impressions word ever meant very much to Kittredge. I believe that everything was always about sex--about actual sex--to him. And if the present company was convinced that Elaine and I were interested in each other in a sexual way, possibly Kittredge alone remained unconvinced--at least this was the impression that his sneer gave Elaine and me.
Maybe this was why Elaine suddenly turned from him and kissed me. She barely brushed her lips against mine, but there was actual (if fleeting) contact; I suppose I even appeared to kiss her back, albeit briefly. That was all. It wasn't much of a kiss; it didn't even fog up her glasses.
I doubt that Elaine had an iota of sexual interest in me, and I believe she knew from the beginning that I was only pretending to be interested in her in that way. We were the most amateur actors--her innocent Miranda and my largely invisible Ariel--but we were acting, and there was an unspoken complicity in our deception.
After all, we both had something to hide.
Chapter 4
ELAINE'S BRA
To this day, I don't know what to make of the wretched Caliban--the monster whose attempted rape of Miranda earns Prospero's unforgiving condemnation. Prospero seems to take minimal responsibility for Caliban--"this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine."
For someone as self-centered as Kittredge, of course, The Tempest was all about Ferdinand; it's a love story, in which Ferdinand woos and wins Miranda. But Richard Abbott called the play a "tragicomedy," and for those two (almost three) months in the fall of '59 when Elaine Hadley and I were in rehearsals for the play, we felt that our close-enough-to-touch proximity to Kittredge was our tragicomedy--notwithstanding that The Tempest has a happy ending for Miranda and Ariel.
My mother, who always maintained she was just the prompter, had the curiously mathematical habit of timing each actor; she used a cheap stove timer, and (in the margins of her copy of the play) she noted the approximate percent of the characters' actual time onstage. The value of my mom's calculations seemed questionable to me, though both Elaine and I enjoyed the fact that Ferdinand was onstage for only 17 percent of the play.
"What about Miranda?" Elaine made a point of asking my mom, within Kittredge's keenly competitive hearing.
"Twenty-seven percent," my mother replied.
"What about me?" I asked my mom.
"Ariel is onstage thirty-one percent of the time," she told me.
Kittredge scoffed at this degrading news. "And Prospero, our peerless director--he of the much-ballyhooed magical powers?" Kittredge inquired sarcastically.
"Much-ballyhooed!" Elaine Hadley thunderously echoed.
"Prospero is onstage approximately fifty-two percent of the time," my mother told Kittredge.
"Approximately," Kittredge repeated, sneering.
Richard had told us that The Tempest was Shakespeare's "farewell play," that the bard was knowingly saying good-bye to the theater, but I didn't understand the necessity for act 5--especially the tacked-on epilogue, spoken by Prospero.
Perhaps it was a small measure of my becoming a writer (though never for the stage) that I believed The Tempest should have ended with Prospero's speech to Ferdinand and Miranda--the "Our revels now are ended" speech in act 4, scene 1. And surely Prospero should have ended that speech (and the play) with the wonderful "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." Why does Prospero need to say more? (Maybe he does feel responsible for Caliban.)
But when I expressed these thoughts to Richard, he said, "Well, Bill--if you're rewriting Shakespeare at seventeen, I expect great things of you!" Richard wasn't given to satire at my expense, and I was hurt by it; Kittredge was quick to pick up on someone else's pain.
"Hey, Rewriter!" Kittredge called to me, across the quadrangle of dorms. Alas, that nickname didn't stick; Kittredge never said it again, preferring Nymph. I would have preferred Rewriter; at least it was true to the kind of writer I would one day become.
But I've strayed from the Caliban character; I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become. Caliban is onstage 25 percent of the time. (My mother's app
roximations never took into account the lines spoken, only the onstage time of the characters.) This was my very first experience with The Tempest, but as many times as I've seen the play performed, I always find Caliban a deeply disturbing character; as a writer, I would call him an "unresolved" character. By how harshly Prospero treats him, we know how unforgivingly Prospero thinks of Caliban, but I wonder what Shakespeare wanted us to feel about the monster. Sympathy, maybe--some guilt, perhaps.
That fall of '59, I wasn't at all sure what Richard Abbott made of Caliban; that Richard had cast Grandpa Harry as the monster sent a mixed message. Harry had never been onstage as a male anything; that Caliban was less than human was further "unresolved" by Grandpa Harry's steadfastly female impersonation. Caliban may indeed have lusted after Miranda--we know the monster has tried to rape her!--but Harry Marshall, even when he was cast as a villain, was almost never unsympathetic onstage, nor was he ever entirely male.
Perhaps Richard had acknowledged that Caliban was a confusing monster, and Richard knew that Grandpa Harry would find a way to add to the confusion. "Your grandfather is weird," was how Kittredge unambiguously put it to me. ("Queen Lear," Kittredge called him.)
Even I believe that Harry out-weirded himself in Caliban's case; Grandpa Harry gave a sexually ambiguous performance--he played Caliban as an androgynous hag.
The wig (Grandpa Harry was bald) would have worked for either sex. The costume was something an eccentric urban bag lady might have worn--floppy sweatpants with an oversize sweatshirt, both as workout-gray as the wig. To complete the gender-unknown image, Harry had whorishly painted the toenails of his bare feet. There was a mannishly chunky rhinestone earring attached to the lobe of one ear--more appealing to a pirate, or a professional wrestler, than a hooker--and a fake-pearl necklace (the cheapest costume jewelry) over the sweatshirt.
"What is Caliban, exactly?" Kittredge would ask Richard Abbott.
"Earth and water, Kittredge--brute force and guile," Richard had repeated.
"But what sex is the guile supposed to be?" Kittredge asked. "Is Caliban a lesbian monster? Is it a she or a he who tried to rape Miranda?"
"Sex, sex, sex!" Elaine Hadley screamed. "All you think about is sex!"
"Don't forget those earplugs, Nymph," Kittredge said, smiling at me.
Elaine and I couldn't look at him without seeing his mother, with her legs so perfectly crossed on those uncomfortable bleacher seats at Kittredge's wrestling match; Mrs. Kittredge had seemed to watch her son's systematic mauling of his overmatched opponent as if it were a pornographic film, but with the detached confidence of an experienced woman who knew she could do it better. "Your mother is a man with breasts," I wanted to say to Kittredge, but of course I didn't dare.
I could only guess how Kittredge might have responded. "Do you mean my stepmother?" he would have asked, before breaking my arms and legs.
I spoke to my mom and Richard in the privacy of our dormitory apartment. "What is it about Grandpa Harry?" I asked them. "I know that Ariel's gender is polymorphous--more a matter of habiliment than anything organic, as you say," I said to Richard. "Okay, so my trappings, my equipment--the wig, the tights--suggest that Ariel's gender is mutable. But isn't Caliban a male monster? Isn't Grandpa Harry playing Caliban like some kind of . . ." I paused. I refused to call my grandfather Queen Lear, because that was Kittredge's nickname for him. "Like some kind of dyke?" was how I put it. The dyke word was in vogue at Favorite River--among those students (like Kittredge) who never tired of homo, fag, and queer, which they used viciously.
"Daddy isn't a dyke!" my mother snapped. Snapping had once seemed so unlike her; now, increasingly, when she snapped, she snapped at me.
"Well, Bill . . ." Richard Abbott started to say; then he stopped. "Don't get upset, Jewel," he said to my mom, whose agitation had distracted Richard. "What I really think, Bill," Richard began again, "is that gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us."
A lame response, I thought, but I didn't say so. Was I growing disappointed in Richard, or was I just growing up?
"I guess that wasn't an answer to your question, was it?" Elaine Hadley asked me later, when I confessed to her that the sexual identity of Grandpa Harry as Caliban was confusing to me.
IT WAS FUNNY HOW, when Elaine and I were alone, we didn't usually hold hands, or anything like that, but when we were out in public, we spontaneously reached for each other's hands, and we would maintain contact for only as long as we had an audience. (It was another kind of code between us, like the way we would ask each other, "What happens to the duck?")
Yet, on our initial visit together to the First Sister Public Library, Elaine and I didn't hold hands. It was my impression that Miss Frost wouldn't be fooled into thinking that Elaine and I were romantically involved--not for a minute. Elaine and I were just seeking a possible place where we could run our lines for The Tempest. Our dormitory apartments were claustrophobic and very public--unless we ran our lines in her bedroom or mine, with the door closed. We'd been too successful in masquerading as boyfriend and girlfriend. My mom and Richard, or the Hadleys, would have had a cow if we'd closed our bedroom doors when we were together.
As for the yearbook room in the academy library, there was the occasional faculty member at work there, and it wasn't a room with a door you could close; our voices would have been heard elsewhere in the building. (Elaine and I feared we could be heard throughout the much smaller First Sister Public Library!)
"We wondered if there might be a more private room here," I explained to Miss Frost.
"More private," the librarian repeated.
"Where we wouldn't be heard," Elaine said, in her sonic-boom voice. "We want to run our lines for The Tempest, but we don't want to bother anyone!" Elaine hastily added--lest Miss Frost think we were seeking some soundproof asylum for Elaine's aforementioned first orgasm.
Miss Frost looked at me. "You want to run lines in a library," she said, as if this were a well-fitted piece to the puzzle of my earlier wanting to write in a library. But Miss Frost didn't betray my intentions--namely, becoming a writer. (I had not yet been candid with my good friend Elaine on the writing subject; my desire to be a writer and my other desires were still kept secret from Elaine.)
"We can try to run our lines quietly," Elaine said, in an abnormally soft voice--for her.
"No, no, dear--you must feel free to run lines as they should be said, onstage," Miss Frost told Elaine, patting my friend's hand with her much bigger hand. "I think I know a place where you could scream and no one would hear you." As it turned out, the concept that there was a contained space in the First Sister Public Library where one could scream unheard was not as much of a miracle as the room itself.
Miss Frost led Elaine and me down the basement stairs to what, at first glance, appeared to be the furnace room of the old library. It was a red-brick building of the Georgian period, and the building's first furnace had been coal; the blackened remains of the coal chute were still hanging from a transom window. But the hulking coal burner had been toppled on its side and dragged to an unused corner of the basement; its replacement was a more modern oil furnace. Quite a new-looking propane hot-water heater stood near the oil-burning furnace, and a separate room (with a door) had been assembled in the vicinity of the transom window. A rectangular notch, near the basement ceiling, had been cut in one wall of the room--where the remnants of the coal chute dangled from the lone window. At one time, the coal chute had run from the transom window into the room--formerly, the coal bin. It was now a furnished bedroom and bathroom.
There was an old-fashioned brass bed with a headboard of brass rails, as sturdy-looking as prison bars, to which a reading lamp had been affixed. There was a small sink and mirror in one corner of the room, and in another corner, unconcealed, stood a solitary sentinel--not an actual guard but a toilet with a wooden seat. There was a night table by the bed, where I saw an orderly stack of books and a squat, scented candle. (It sme
lled like cinnamon in the room; I guessed that the candle concealed the smell of oil fumes from the nearby furnace.)
There was also an open wardrobe closet, where Elaine and I could see some shelves and hangers--with what appeared to be a most minimal assortment of Miss Frost's clothes. What was unquestionably the centerpiece of the small room--"my converted coal bin," Miss Frost called it--was a bathtub of Victorian opulence, with very visible plumbing. (The floor of the room was unfinished plywood, and the wiring was very visible, too.)
"When there's a snowstorm, and I don't feel like driving or walking home," Miss Frost said--as if this explained everything that was at once cozy but rudimentary about the basement room. (Neither Elaine nor I knew where Miss Frost lived, but we gathered it must have been within walking distance of the town library.)
Elaine stared at the bathtub; it had lion paws for feet, and lion heads for faucets. I was, I confess, fixated on the brass bed with the prison-bars headboard.
"Unfortunately, there's nowhere to sit but the bed," Miss Frost said, "unless you want to run lines in the tub." She seemed not in the least concerned that Elaine and I might ever do anything on the bed, or take a bath together.
Miss Frost was about to leave us alone, to actually close the door on us--in her makeshift bedroom, her expedient home-away-from-home--when Elaine Hadley exclaimed, "The room is perfect! Thank you for helping us, Miss Frost."
"You're very welcome, Elaine," Miss Frost said. "I assure you that you and William can scream your heads off in here, and no one will hear you." But before closing the door, Miss Frost looked at me and smiled. "If you need any help running lines--if there's a question of emphasis, or a pronunciation problem--well, you know where to find me." I didn't know that Miss Frost had noticed my pronunciation problems; I'd actually spoken very little in her company.
I was too embarrassed to speak, but Elaine didn't hesitate. "Now that you mention it, Miss Frost, Billy has encountered only one difficulty in Ariel's vocabulary, and we're working on it," Elaine said.
"What difficulty is that, William?" Miss Frost asked me, with her most penetrating look. (Thank God there were no penises in Ariel's vocabulary!)