by John Irving
"I heard the wrestling team lost," another boy said.
"I'm not the team," Kittredge told him. "I can only win my weight-class."
We went down the stairwell to the third floor, where I said good night to him. Dorm check-in--even for seniors, on a Saturday night--was at eleven.
"I suppose Richard and your mom are out with the Hadleys," Kittredge said, matter-of-factly.
"Yes, there's a foreign film in Ezra Falls," I told him.
"Humping in French, Italian, or Swedish," Kittredge said. I laughed, but he wasn't trying to be funny. "You know, Nymph--you're not in France, Italy, or Sweden. You've got to be more careful with that girl you're humping, or not humping."
At the moment, I wondered if Kittredge might be genuinely concerned for Elaine's "reputation," as he'd referred to it, but you could never tell with Kittredge; you often didn't see where he was going with what he said.
"I would never do anything to hurt Elaine," I told him.
"Listen, Nymph," he said. "You can hurt people by having sex with them and by not having sex with them."
"I guess that's true," I said cautiously.
"Does your mom sleep naked, or does she wear something?" Kittredge asked me, as if he hadn't suddenly changed the subject.
"She wears something," I told him.
"Well, that's mothers for you," he said. "Most mothers, anyway," he added.
"It's almost eleven," I warned him. "You don't want to be late for check-in."
"Does Elaine sleep naked?" Kittredge asked me.
Of course, what I should have told him was that my desire never to do anything to hurt Elaine prevented me from telling the likes of Kittredge whether she slept naked or not, but in truth I didn't know if Elaine slept naked. I thought it would be perfectly mysterious to say to Kittredge, which I did, "When Elaine's with me, she's not asleep."
To which Kittredge simply said: "You're a mystery, aren't you, Nymph? I just don't know about you, but I'll figure you out one day--I really will."
"You're going to be late for check-in," I told him.
"I'm going to the infirmary--I'm going to get this mat burn checked out," he said, pointing to his cheek. It wasn't much of a mat burn, in my opinion, but Kittredge said, "I like the weekend nurse at the infirmary--the mat burn's just an excuse to see her. Saturday night is a good night to stay in the infirmary," he told me.
On that provocative note, he left me--that was Kittredge. If he was still figuring me out, I hadn't yet figured him out. Was there really a "weekend nurse" at the Favorite River infirmary? Did Kittredge have an older-woman thing going? Or was he acting, as Elaine and I had been? Was he just faking it?
I HADN'T BEEN BACK in our dormitory apartment for very long, not more than a couple of minutes, before my mom and Richard came home from the movie. I'd barely had time to take Elaine's padded bra from my Jockey briefs. (I'd no sooner put the bra under my pillow when Elaine phoned me.)
"You have my bra, don't you?" she asked me.
"What happens to the duck?" I asked her, but she wasn't in the mood for it.
"Do you have my bra, Billy?"
"Yes," I said. "It was a spur-of-the-moment thing."
"That's okay," she said. "I want you to have it." I didn't tell her that Kittredge had asked me if she slept naked.
Then Richard and my mom came home, and I asked them about the foreign film. "It was disgusting!" my mother said.
"I didn't know you were such a prude," I said to her.
"Take it easy, Bill," Richard said.
"I'm not a prude!" my mom told me. She seemed unreasonably upset. I had been kidding. It was just something I'd heard Elaine say to Kittredge.
"I didn't know what the movie was about, Jewel," Richard said to her. "I'm sorry."
"Look at you!" my mom said to me. "You look more wrinkled than an unmade bed. I think you should have that conversation with Billy, Richard."
My mom went into their bedroom and closed the door. "What conversation?" I asked Richard.
"It's about being careful with Elaine, Bill," Richard said. "She's younger than you are--it's about being sure you're protecting her," Richard told me.
"Are you talking to me about rubbers?" I asked him. "Because you can only get them in Ezra Falls, and that asshole pharmacist won't give condoms to kids."
"Don't say 'asshole,' Bill," Richard said, "at least not around your mom. You want rubbers? I'll get you rubbers."
"There's no danger with Elaine," I told him.
"Did I see Kittredge leaving Bancroft as we were coming home?" Richard asked.
"I don't know," I said. "Did you?"
"You're at a . . . pivotal age, Bill," Richard told me. "We just want you to be careful with Elaine."
"I am careful with her," I told him.
"You'd better keep Kittredge away from her," Richard said.
"Just how do I do that?" I asked him.
"Well, Bill . . ." Richard had started to say, when my mother came out of their bedroom. I remember thinking that Kittredge would have been disappointed by what she was wearing--flannel pajamas, not at all sexy.
"You're still talking about sex, aren't you?" my mom asked Richard and me. She was angry. "I know that's what you were talking about. Well, it's not funny."
"We weren't laughing, Jewel," Richard tried to tell her, but she wouldn't let him continue.
"You keep your pecker in your pants, Billy!" my mom told me. "You go slowly with Elaine, and you tell her to watch out for Jacques Kittredge--she better watch out for him! That Kittredge is a boy who doesn't just want to seduce women--he wants women to submit to him!" my mother said.
"Jewel, Jewel--let it rest," Richard Abbott was saying.
"You don't know everything, Richard," my mother told him.
"No, I don't," Richard admitted.
"I know boys like Kittredge," my mom said; she said it to me, not to Richard--even so, she blushed.
It occurred to me that, when my mother was angry at me, it was because she saw something of my womanizing father in me--perhaps, increasingly, I looked like him. (As if I could help that!)
I thought of Elaine's bra, which was waiting for me under my pillow--"more a matter of habiliment than anything organic," as Richard had said about Ariel's gender. (If that small padded bra didn't fit the habiliment word, what did?)
"What was the foreign film about?" I asked Richard.
"It's not an appropriate subject for you," my mother told me. "Don't you tell him about it, Richard," my mother said.
"Sorry, Bill," Richard said sheepishly.
"Nothing Shakespeare would have shied away from, I'll bet," I said to Richard, but I kept looking at my mom. She wouldn't look at me; she went back inside her bedroom and closed the door.
If I was less than forthcoming to my one true friend, Elaine Hadley, I needed only to think of my mother; if I couldn't tell Richard about my crush on Kittredge, or admit to Miss Frost that I loved her, I had no doubt concerning where my lack of candor came from. (From my mother, unquestionably, but possibly from my womanizing father, too. Maybe from both of them, it only now occurred to me.)
"Good night, Richard--I love you," I said to my stepfather. He quickly kissed me on my forehead.
"Good night, Bill--I love you, too," Richard said. He gave me a please-forgive-me kind of smile. I really did love him, but I was fighting against my disappointment in him at the same time.
Also, I was mortally tired; it is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are, and Elaine's bra was summoning me to my bed.
Chapter 5
LEAVING ESMERALDA
Perhaps you need to have your world change, your entire world, to understand why anyone would write an epilogue--not to mention why there is an act 5 to The Tempest, and why the epilogue to that play (spoken by Prospero) is absolutely fitting. When I made that juvenile criticism of The Tempest, my world hadn't changed.
"Now my charms are all o'erthrown," Prospero begins the epilogue--not unlike the way Kit
tredge might have started a conversation, offhand and innocent-seeming.
That winter of 1960, when Elaine and I were continuing our masquerade, which even extended to our holding hands while we watched Kittredge wrestle, was marked by Martha Hadley's first official efforts to address the probable cause (or causes) of my pronunciation problems. I use the official word because I made appointments to see Mrs. Hadley, and I met with her in her office--it was in the academy music building.
At seventeen, I'd not yet seen a psychiatrist; had I ever been tempted to talk to Herr Doktor Grau, I'm certain that my beloved stepfather, Richard Abbott, would have persuaded me not to. Besides, that same winter when I was faithfully keeping my appointments with Mrs. Hadley, old Grau died. Favorite River Academy would eventually replace him with a younger (if no less modern) school psychiatrist, but not before the fall term of the next academic year.
Moreover, while I was seeing Martha Hadley, I had no need of a psychiatrist; in the ferreting out of those myriad words I couldn't pronounce, and in her far-reaching speculations regarding the reason (or reasons) for my mispronunciations, Mrs. Hadley, an expert voice and singing teacher, became my first psychiatrist.
My closer contact with her gave me a better understanding of my attraction to her--her homeliness notwithstanding. Martha Hadley had a masculine kind of homeliness; she was thin-lipped but she had a big mouth, and big teeth. Her jaw was as prominent as Kittredge's, but her neck was long and contrastingly feminine; she had broad shoulders and big hands, like Miss Frost. Mrs. Hadley's hair was longer than Miss Frost's, and she wore it in a severe ponytail. Her flat chest never failed to remind me of Elaine's overlarge nipples, and those darker-skinned rings around them--the areolae, which I imagined were a mother-daughter thing. But, unlike Elaine, Mrs. Hadley was very strong-looking. I was realizing how much I liked that look.
When the areola and areolae words were added to my long list of troublesome pronunciations, Martha Hadley asked me: "Does the difficulty lie in what they are?"
"Maybe," I answered her. "Fortunately, they're not words that come up every day."
"Whereas library or libraries, not to mention penis--" Mrs. Hadley started to say.
"It's more of a problem with the plural," I reminded her.
"I suppose you don't have much use for penises--I mean the plural, Billy," Martha Hadley said.
"Not every day," I told her. I meant that the occasion to say the penises word rarely came up--not that I didn't think about penises every day, because I did. And so--maybe because I hadn't told Elaine or Richard Abbott or Grandpa Harry, and probably because I didn't dare tell Miss Frost--I told Mrs. Hadley everything. (Well, almost everything.)
I began with my crush on Kittredge. "You and Elaine!" Martha Hadley said. (Elaine had even been forthcoming to her mother about it!)
I told Mrs. Hadley that, before I ever saw Kittredge, I'd had a homoerotic attraction to other wrestlers, and that--in my perusal of the old yearbooks in the Favorite River Academy library--I had a special fondness for the wrestling-team photographs, in comparison to a merely passing interest in the photos of the school Drama Club. ("I see," Mrs. Hadley said.)
I even told her about my slightly fading crush on Richard Abbott; it had been at its strongest before he became my stepfather. ("My goodness--that must have been awkward!" Martha Hadley exclaimed.)
But when it came to confessing my love for Miss Frost, I stopped; my eyes welled with tears. "What is it, Billy? You can tell me," Mrs. Hadley said. She took my hands in her bigger, stronger hands. Her long neck, her throat, was possibly the only pretty thing about her; without much evidence, I could merely speculate that Martha Hadley's small breasts were like Elaine's.
In Mrs. Hadley's office, there was just a piano with a bench, an old couch (where we always sat), and a desk with a straight-backed chair. The third-floor view out her office window was uninspiring--the twisted trunks of two old maple trees, some snow on the more horizontal limbs of the trees, the sky streaked with gray-white clouds. The photo of Mr. Hadley (on Mrs. Hadley's desk) was also uninspiring.
Mr. Hadley--I've long forgotten his first name, if I ever knew it--seemed unsuited to boarding-school life. Mr. Hadley--shaggy, spottily bearded--would one day become a more active figure on the Favorite River campus, where he lent his history-teaching expertise to discussions (which later led to protests) of the Vietnam War. More memorable, by far, than Mr. Hadley was the day of my confession in Martha Hadley's office, when I concentrated all my attention on Mrs. Hadley's throat. "Whatever you tell me, Billy, will not leave this office--I swear," she said.
Somewhere in the music building, a student was practicing the piano--not with the greatest competence, I thought, or perhaps there were two students playing two different pianos. "I look at my mother's mail-order catalogs," I confessed to Mrs. Hadley. "I imagine you among the training-bra models," I told her. "I masturbate," I admitted--one of the few verbs that gave me a little trouble, though not this time.
"Oh, Billy, this isn't criminal activity!" Martha Hadley said happily. "I'm only surprised that you would think of me--I'm not in the least good-looking--and it's a mild surprise that training bra is so easy for you to pronounce. I'm not finding a discernible pattern here," she said, waving the growing list of those words that challenged me.
"I don't know what it is about you," I confessed to her.
"What about girls your own age?" Mrs. Hadley asked me. I shook my head. "Not Elaine?" she asked. I hesitated, but Martha Hadley put her strong hands on my shoulders; she faced me on the couch. "It's all right, Billy--Elaine doesn't believe that you're interested in her in that way. And this is strictly between us, remember?" My eyes filled with tears again; Mrs. Hadley pulled my head to her hard chest. "Billy, Billy--you've done nothing wrong!" she cried.
Whoever knocked on the door to her office surely had heard the wrong word. "Come in!" Mrs. Hadley called, in such a strident way that I realized where Elaine's stop-you-in-your-tracks voice came from.
It was Atkins--an acknowledged loser, but I'd not known he was a music student. Maybe Atkins had a voice issue; perhaps there were words he couldn't pronounce. "I can come back," Atkins said to Martha Hadley, but he wouldn't stop staring at me, or he couldn't look at her--one or the other. Any idiot would have known I'd been crying.
"Come back in half an hour," Mrs. Hadley told Atkins.
"Okay, but I don't have a watch," he said, still staring at me.
"Take mine," she told him. It was when she took her watch off and handed it to him that I saw what it was that attracted me to her. Martha Hadley not only had a masculine appearance--she was dominant, like a man, in everything she did. I could only imagine, sexually, that she was dominant, too--that she would impose what she wanted on anyone, and that it would be difficult to resist what she wanted you to do. But why would that appeal to me? (Naturally, I wouldn't make these thoughts part of my selective confession to Mrs. Hadley.)
Atkins was mutely staring at the watch. It made me wonder if he was such a loser and an idiot that he couldn't tell time.
"In half an hour," Martha Hadley reminded him.
"The numbers are Roman numerals," Atkins said despondently.
"Just keep your eye on the minute hand. Count to thirty minutes. Come back then," Mrs. Hadley said to him. Atkins walked off, still staring at the watch; he left the office door open. Mrs. Hadley got up from the couch and closed the door. "Billy, Billy," she said, turning to me. "It's all right to feel what you're feeling--it's okay."
"I thought of talking to Richard about it," I told her.
"That's a good idea. You can talk to Richard about anything--I'm sure of that," Martha Hadley said.
"But not my mother," I said.
"Your mother, Mary. My dear friend Mary . . ." Mrs. Hadley began; then she stopped. "No, not your mother--don't tell her yet," she said.
"Why?" I asked. I thought I knew why, but I wanted to hear Mrs. Hadley say it. "Because she's a little damaged?" I asked. "Or because s
he seems angry at me--I'm not sure why."
"I don't know about the damaged part," Martha Hadley said. "Your mother does seem angry at you--I'm not sure why, either. I was mainly thinking that she becomes rather easily unhinged--in some areas, given certain subjects."
"What areas?" I asked. "What subjects?"
"Certain sexual matters upset her," Mrs. Hadley said. "Billy, I know there are things she's kept from you."
"Oh."
"Secrecy isn't my favorite thing about New England!" Mrs. Hadley suddenly cried; she looked at her wrist, where her watch had been, and then laughed at herself. "I wonder how Atkins is managing the Roman numerals," she said, and we both laughed. "You can tell Elaine, too, you know," Martha Hadley said. "You can tell Elaine anything, Billy. Besides, I think she already knows."
I thought so, too, but I didn't say it. I was thinking about my mother becoming rather easily unhinged. I was regretting that I hadn't consulted Dr. Grau before he died--if only because I could have familiarized myself with his doctrine of how curable homosexuality was. (It might have made me less angry in the coming years, when I would be exposed to more of that punitive, dumber-than-dog-shit doctrine.)
"It's really helped me to talk to you," I told Mrs. Hadley; she moved away from her office door to let me pass. I was afraid she was going to grasp my hands or my shoulders, or even pull my head to her hard chest again, and that I would be unable to stop myself from hugging her--or kissing her, though I would have had to stand on my toes to do that. But Martha Hadley didn't touch me; she just stood aside.
"There's nothing wrong with your voice, Billy--there's nothing physically the matter with your tongue, or with the roof of your mouth," she said. I'd forgotten that she had looked in my mouth at our very first appointment.
She'd asked me to touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue, and she'd held the tip of my tongue with a gauze pad, and--with another gauze pad--she'd poked around on the floor of my mouth, apparently feeling for something that wasn't there. (I'd been embarrassed that her playing around in my mouth had given me an erection--more evidence of what old Grau had called "infantile sexual tendencies.")
"Not to defame the dead," Mrs. Hadley said, as I was leaving, "but I hope you're aware, Billy, that the late Dr. Grau and our sole surviving faculty member in the medical sciences--I mean Dr. Harlow--are both imbeciles."