by John Irving
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 Elaine.
"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 do
or 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.
"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 m
isgivings 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 present 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.