“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 Arieclass="underline" “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.”
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.