In One Person

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 wrestling 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.”