In One Person

Kittredge’s presence as little as I possibly could.

To that end, I dropped out of the fall Shakespeare play—to Richard’s oft-expressed disappointment. Richard had cast Kittredge as Edgar in King Lear. Furthermore, there was an unforeseen flaw in Richard’s having cast me as Lear’s Fool. When I was telling Mrs. Hadley that I wanted no part in the play, because Kittredge had “a hero’s part”—not to mention that Edgar is later disguised as Poor Tom, so that Kittredge had essentially been given “a dual role”—Martha Hadley wanted to know how closely I’d looked over my lines. Given that my number of unpronounceables was growing, did I foresee that the Fool presented me with any vocabulary issues? Was Mrs. Hadley hinting that my pronunciation problems could excuse me from the play?

“What are you getting at?” I asked her. “You think I can’t handle ‘cutpurses’ or ‘courtesan,’ or are you worried that ‘codpiece’ will throw me for a loop—just because of the whatchamacallit the codpiece covers, or because I have trouble with the word for the whatchamacallit itself?”

“Don’t be defensive, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

“Or was it the ‘arrant whore’ combination that you thought might trip me up?” I asked her. “Or maybe ‘coxcomb’—either the singular or the plural, or both!”

“Calm down, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “We’re both upset about Kittredge.”

“Kittredge had the last lines in Twelfth Night!” I cried. “Now Richard gives him the last lines again! We have to hear Kittredge say, ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’”

“‘The oldest hath borne most,’” Kittredge-as-Edgar continues.

In the story of King Lear—given what happens to Lear, not to mention the blinding of Gloucester (Richard had cast himself as Gloucester)—this is certainly true. But when Edgar ends the play by declaring that “we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long”—well, I don’t know if that is universally true.

Do I dispute the concluding wisdom of this great play because I can’t distinguish Edgar from Kittredge? Can anyone (even Shakespeare) know how future generations will or will not suffer?

“Richard is doing what’s best for the play, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. “Richard isn’t rewarding Kittredge for seducing Elaine.” Yet it somehow seemed that way to me. Why give Kittredge as good a part as Edgar, who is later disguised as Poor Tom? After what had happened in Twelfth Night, why did Richard have to give Kittredge a role in King Lear at all? I wanted out of the play—being, or not being, Lear’s Fool wasn’t the issue.

“Just tell Richard you don’t want to be around Kittredge, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said to me. “Richard will understand.”

I couldn’t tell Martha Hadley that I also didn’t want to be around Richard. And what point was there, in this production of King Lear, to observe my mother’s expression when she watched her father onstage as a woman? Grandpa Harry was cast as Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter; Goneril is such a horrid daughter, why wouldn’t my mom look at anyone playing Goneril with the utmost disapproval? (Aunt Muriel was Regan, Lear’s other awful daughter; I assumed that my mother would glower at her sister, Muriel, too.)

It wasn’t only because of Kittredge that I wanted nothing to do with this King Lear. I had no heart to see Uncle Bob fall short in the leading-man department, for the good-hearted Bob— Squash Ball Bob, Kittredge called him—was cast as King Lear. That Bob lacked a tragic dimension seemed obvious, if not to Richard Abbott; perhaps Richard pitied Bob, and found him tragic, because Bob was (tragically) married to Muriel.

It was Bob’s body that was all wrong—or was it his head? Bob’s body was big, and athletically robust; compared to his body, Bob’s head seemed too small, and improbably round—a squash ball lost between two hulking shoulders. Uncle Bob was both too good-natured and too strong-looking to be Lear.

It is relatively early in the play (act 1, scene 4) when Bob-as-Lear bellows, “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’”

Who could forget how Lear’s Fool answers the king? But I did; I forgot that I even had a line. “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am,’ Bill?” Richard Abbott asked me.

“It’s your line, Nymph,” Kittredge whispered to me. “I had anticipated that you might have a little trouble with it.” Everyone waited while I found the Fool’s line. At first, I wasn’t even aware of the pronunciation problem; my difficulty in saying this word was so recent that I hadn’t noticed it, nor had Martha Hadley. But Kittredge, clearly, had detected the potential unpronounceable. “Let’s hear you say it, Nymph,” Kittredge said. “Let’s hear you try it, anyway.”

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Lear asks.

The Fool answers: “Lear’s shadow.”

Since when had the shadow word given me any grief in the pronunciation department? Since Elaine had come back from that trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, when Elaine seemed as insubstantial as a shadow—at least in comparison to her former self. Since Elaine had come back from Europe, and there seemed to be an unfamiliar shadow dogging her every step—a shadow that bore a ghostly but ultrasophisticated resemblance to Mrs. Kittredge herself. Since Elaine had gone away again, to Northfield, and I was left with a shadow following me around—perhaps the disquieting, unavenged shadow of my absent best friend.

“‘Lear’s . . . shed,’” I said.

“His shed!” Kittredge exclaimed.

“Try it again, Bill,” Richard said.

“I can’t say it,” I replied.

“Maybe we need a new Fool,” Kittredge suggested.

“That would be my decision, Kittredge,” Richard told him.

“Or mine,” I said.

“Ah, well—” Grandpa Harry started to say, but Uncle Bob interrupted him.

“It seems to me, Richard, that Billy could say ‘Lear’s reflection,’ or even ‘Lear’s ghost’—if, in your judgment, this fits with what the Fool means or is implying,” Uncle Bob suggested.

“Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Kittredge said.

“The line is ‘Lear’s shadow,’ Billy,” my mother, the prompter, said. “Either you can say it or you can’t.”

“Please, Jewel—” Richard started to say, but I interrupted him.

“Lear should have a proper Fool—one who can say everything,” I told Richard Abbott. I knew, as I was leaving, that I was walking out of my final rehearsal as a Favorite River Academy student—my last Shakespeare play, perhaps. (As it would turn out, King Lear was my last Shakespeare play as an actor.)

The faculty daughter whom Richard cast as Cordelia was and remains so completely unknown to me that I can’t recall her name. “An unformed girl, but with a crackerjack memory,” Grandpa Harry had said about her.

“Neither a present nor a future beauty,” was all my aunt Muriel said of the doomed Cordelia, implying that, in King Lear, no one would ever have married this Cordelia—not even if she’d lived.

Lear’s Fool would be played by Delacorte. Since Delacorte was a wrestler, he’d probably learned that the part was available because Kittredge had told him. Kittredge would later inform me that, because the fall Shakespeare play was rehearsed and performed before the start of the wrestling season, Delacorte wasn’t as ill affected as he usually was by the complications of cutting weight. Yet the lightweight who, according to Kittredge, would have had the shit kicked out of him in a heavier weight-class, still suffered from cotton-mouth, even when he wasn’t dehydrated—or perhaps Delacorte dreamed of cutting weight, even in the off-season. Therefore, Delacorte constantly rinsed his mouth out with water from a paper cup; he eternally spat out the water into another paper cup. If Delacorte were alive today, I’m sure he would still be running his fingers through his hair. But Delacorte is dead, along with so many others.