In One Person

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.

“You tell him,” I told her; we both knew I wouldn’t. Elaine wouldn’t talk to Kittredge about his mom, either.

Initially, Elaine was almost as afraid of Kittredge as I was—nor would she ever have used the tits word in his company. She was very conscious of having inherited her mom’s flat chest. Elaine was nowhere near as homely as her mother; Elaine was thin and gawky, and she had no boobs, but she had a pretty face—and, unlike her mom, Elaine would never be big-boned. Elaine was delicate-looking, which made her trombone of a voice all the more surprising. Yet, at first, she was so intimidated in Kittredge’s presence that she often croaked or mumbled; at times, she was incoherent. Elaine was so afraid of sounding too loud around him. “Kittredge fogs up my glasses,” was the way she put it.

Their first meeting onstage—as Ferdinand and Miranda—was dazzlingly clear; one never saw two souls so unmistakably drawn to each other. Upon seeing Miranda, Ferdinand calls her a “wonder”; he asks, “If you be maid or no?”

“‘No wonder sir, / But certainly a maid,’” Elaine (as Miranda) replies in a vibrant, gonglike voice. But offstage, Kittredge had managed to make Elaine self-conscious about her booming voice. After all, she was only sixteen; Kittredge was eighteen, going on thirty.

Elaine and I were walking back to the dorm after rehearsal one night—the Hadleys had a faculty apartment in the same dorm where I lived with Richard Abbott and my mom—when Kittredge magically materialized beside us. (Kittredge was always doing that.) “You two are quite a couple,” he told us.

“We’re not a couple!” Elaine blurted out, much louder than she’d meant to. Kittredge pretended to stagger, as if from an unseen blow; he held his ears.

“I must warn you, Nymph—you’re in danger of losing your hearing,” Kittredge said to me. “When this little lady has her first orgasm, you better be wearing earplugs. And I wouldn’t do it in the dormitory, if I were you,” Kittredge warned me. “The whole dorm would hear her.” He then drifted away from us, down a different, darker path; Kittredge lived in the jock dorm, the one nearest the gym.

It was too dark to see if Elaine Hadley had blushed. I touched her face lightly, just enough to ascertain if she was crying; she wasn’t, but her cheek was hot and she brushed my hand away. “No one’s giving me an orgasm anytime soon!” Elaine cried after Kittredge.

We were in a quadrangle of dormitories; in the distance, there were lights in the surrounding dorm windows, and a chorus of voices whooped and cheered—as if a hundred unseen boys had heard her. But Elaine was very agitated when she cried out; I doubted that Kittredge (or anyone but me) had understood her. I was wrong, though what Elaine had cried with police-siren shrillness sounded like, “No nun’s liver goes into spasm for a raccoon!” (Or nonsense of a similar, incomprehensible kind.)

But Kittredge had grasped Elaine’s meaning; his sweetly sarcastic voice reached us from somewhere in the dark quadrangle. Cruelly, it was as the sexy Ferdinand that Kittredge called out of the darkness to my friend Elaine, who was (at that moment) not feeling much like Miranda.

“O, if a virgin, / And your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you / The Queen of Naples,” Ferdinand swears to Miranda—and so Kittredge amorously called. The quad of dorms was eerily quiet; when those Favorite River boys heard Kittredge speak, they were silenced by their own awe and stupefaction. “Good night, Nymph!” I heard Kittredge call. “Good night, Naples!”

Thus Elaine Hadley and I had our nicknames. When Kittredge named you, it may have been a dubious honor, but the designation was both lasting and traumatic.

“Shit,” Elaine said. “It could be worse—Kittredge could be calling me Maid or Virgin.”

“Elaine?” I said. “You’re my one true friend.”

“‘Abhorred slave,’” she said to me.

This was uttered as sharply as a bark; there was a doglike echo in the quadrangle of dorms. We both knew it is what Miranda says to Caliban—“a savage and deformed slave,” Shakespeare calls him, but Caliban is an unfinished monster.

Prospero berates Caliban: “thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child.”

Caliban doesn’t deny it. Caliban hates Prospero and his daughter (“toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”), though the monster once lusted after Miranda and wishes he “had peopled” the island with little Calibans. Caliban is evidently male, but it’s uncertain how human he is.

When Trinculo, the jester, first notices Caliban, Trinculo says, “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive?”

I knew that Elaine Hadley had been kidding—speaking to me as Miranda speaks to Caliban, Elaine was just fooling around—but as we drew near to our dormitory, the lights from the windows illuminated her tear-streaked face. In only a minute or two, Kittredge’s mockery of Ferdinand and Miranda’s romance had taken effect; Elaine was crying. “You’re my only friend!” she blubbered to me.

I felt sorry for her, and put my arm around her shoulders; this provoked more whoops and cheers from those unseen boys who’d whooped and cheered before. Did I know that this night was the beginning of my masquerade? Was I conscious of giving those Favorite River boys the impression that Elaine Hadley was my girlfriend? Was I acting, even then? Consciously or not, I was making Elaine Hadley my disguise. For a while, I would fool Richard Abbott and Grandpa Harry—not to mention Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, and (if not for long, and to a lesser extent) my mother.

Yes, I was aware that my mom was changing. She’d been so nice to me when I was little. I used to wonder, when I was a teenager, what had become of the small boy she’d once loved.

I even began an early novel with this tortured and overlong sentence: “According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any fiction, by which she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I preferred this kind of fantasizing or pure imagining to what other people generally liked—she meant reality, of course.”

My mom’s assessment of “pure imagining” was not flattering. Fiction was frivolous to her; no, it was worse than frivolous.

One Christmas—I believe it was the first Christmas I’d come home to Vermont, for a visit, in several years—I was scribbling away in a notebook, and my mother asked me, “What are you writing now, Billy?”

“A novel,” I told her.

“Well, that should make you happy,” she suddenly said to Grandpa Harry, who’d begun to lose his hearing—sawmill damage, I suppose.