In One Person

he peered into the hallway, outside my bedroom, checking to be sure that my mom (or my grandmother, or Aunt Muriel) wasn’t within listening distance. Even though the coast was clear, Bob lowered his voice: “I believe it’s about adultery, Billy—an unfaithful wife.” I must have looked baffled, utterly uncomprehending, because Uncle Bob quickly said, “You should ask Richard what Madame Bovary is about—literature, you know, is Richard’s department.”

“It’s a novel?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s a true story,” Uncle Bob answered. “But Richard would know.”

“Or I could ask Miss Frost,” I suggested.

“Uh-huh, you could—just don’t say it was my idea,” Uncle Bob said.

“I know a story,” I started to say. “Maybe you told me.”

“You mean the one about the guy reading Madame Bovary on a hundred toilets at the same time?” Bob cried. “I absolutely love that story!”

“Me, too,” I said. “It’s very funny!”

“Hilarious!” Uncle Bob declared. “No, I never told you that story, Billy—at least I don’t remember telling you that story,” he said quickly.

“Oh.”

“Maybe your mom told you?” Uncle Bob asked. I must have given him an incredulous look, because Bob suddenly said, “Probably not.”

“It’s a dream I keep having, but someone must have told me first,” I said.

“Dinner-party conversation, perhaps—one of those stories children overhear, when the adults think they’ve gone to bed or they can’t possibly be listening,” Uncle Bob said. While this was more credible than my mother being the source of the toilet-seat story, neither Bob nor I looked very convinced. “Not all mysteries are meant to be solved, Billy,” he said to me, with more conviction.

It was shortly after he’d left when I discovered another squash ball, or the same squash ball, under my covers.

I knew perfectly well that my mother hadn’t told me the Madame Bovary, multiple- toilet-seats story, but of course I asked her. “I never thought that story was the least bit funny,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had anything to do with telling you that story, Billy.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe Daddy told you—I asked him not to!” my mother said.

“No, Grandpa definitely didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I’ll bet Uncle Bob did,” my mom said.

“Uncle Bob says he doesn’t remember telling me,” I replied.

“Bob drinks—he doesn’t remember everything,” my mother told me. “And you’ve had a fever recently,” she reminded me. “You know the dreams a fever can give you, Billy.”

“I thought it was a funny story, anyway—how the man’s ass made a slapping sound as he was skipping over the toilet seats!” I said.

“It’s not the least bit funny to me, Billy.”

“Oh.”

It was after I’d completely recovered from the scarlet fever that I asked Richard Abbott his opinion of Madame Bovary. “I think you would appreciate it more when you’re older, Bill,” Richard told me.

“How much older?” I asked him. (I would have been fourteen—I’m guessing. I’d not yet read and reread Great Expectations, but Miss Frost had already started me on my life as a reader—I know that.)

“I could ask Miss Frost how old she thinks I should be,” I suggested.

“I would wait a while before you ask her, Bill,” Richard said.

“How long a while?” I asked him.

Richard Abbott, who I thought knew everything, answered: “I don’t know, exactly.”

I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY when my mom became the prompter for Richard Abbott’s theatrical productions in the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy, but I was very much aware of her being the prompter for The Tempest. There were the occasional scheduling conflicts, because my mother was still prompting for the First Sister Players, but prompters could miss rehearsals now and then, and the performances—the actual shows put on by our town’s amateur theatrical society and Favorite River’s Drama Club —never overlapped.

In rehearsals, Kittredge would pretend to botch a line just to have my mom prompt him. “O most dear maid,” Ferdinand misspoke to Miranda in one of our rehearsals, when we were newly off-script.

“No, Jacques,” my mother said. “That would be ‘O most dear mistress,’ not maid.”

But Kittredge was acting—he was only pretending to flub the line, so that he could engage my mother in conversation. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Abbott—it won’t happen again,” he said to her; then he blew the very next dialogue assigned him.

“No, precious creature,” Ferdinand is supposed to say to Miranda, but Kittredge said, “No, precious mistress.”

“Not this time, Jacques,” my mom told him. “It’s ‘No, precious creature’—not mistress.”

“I think I’m trying too hard to please you—I want you to like me, but I’m afraid you don’t, Mrs. Abbott,” Kittredge said to my mother. He was flirting with her, and she blushed. I was embarrassed by how often I thought of my mom as easily seduced; it was almost as if I believed she was somewhat retarded, or so sexually naive that anyone who flattered her could win her over.

“I do like you, Jacques—I certainly don’t not like you!” my mom blurted out, while Elaine (as Miranda) stood there seething; Elaine knew that Kittredge had used the hot word for my mom.

“I get so nervous around you,” Kittredge told my mother, though he didn’t look nervous; he seemed increasingly confident.

“What a lot of bullshit!” Elaine Hadley croaked. Kittredge cringed at the sound of her voice, and my mother flinched as if she’d been slapped.

“Elaine, mind your language,” my mom said.

“Can we just get on with the play?” Elaine asked.

“Oh, Naples—you’re so impatient,” Kittredge said with a most disarming smile, first to Elaine and then to my mother. “Elaine can’t wait to get to the hand-holding part,” Kittredge told my mom.

Indeed, the scene they were rehearsing—act 3, scene 1—ends with Ferdinand and Miranda holding hands. It was Elaine’s turn to blush, but Kittredge, who was in complete control of the moment, had fixed his most earnest gaze on my mother. “I have a question, Mrs. Abbott,” he began, as if Elaine and Miranda didn’t exist—as if they’d never existed. “When Ferdinand says, ‘Full many a lady / I have eyed with best regard, and many a time / The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear’—you know, that line—I wonder if that means I have been with a lot of women, and if I shouldn’t somehow imply that I am, you know, sexually experienced.”

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