“We’re like an old married couple,” Elaine said; I was already thinking the same thing.
Our first evening in Miss Frost’s snowstorm room, Elaine fell asleep. I knew she had to get up earlier than I did; due to the bus ride to Ezra Falls, she was always tired. When Miss Frost knocked on the door, Elaine was startled; she threw her arms around my neck, and she was still holding tight when Miss Frost came inside the small room. Notwithstanding these amorous-looking circumstances, I don’t believe that Miss Frost assumed we’d been making out. Elaine and I certainly didn’t look as if we’d been necking, and Miss Frost merely said, “It’s almost time for me to close the library. Even Shakespeare has to go home and get some sleep.”
As everyone who’s ever been part of a theatrical production knows, after all the stressful rehearsals, and the interminable memorization—I mean when your lines are truly run—even Shakespeare comes to an end. We put on four shows of The Tempest. I managed to make liest rhyme with finest in every performance, though on opening night I almost said “finest breasts,” when I thought I saw Kittredge’s wonderfully dressed mother in the audience—only to learn from Kittredge, during the intermission, that I was mistaken. The woman wasn’t his mom.
“The woman you think is my mom is in Paris,” Kittredge dismissively said.
“Oh.”
“You must have seen some other middle-aged woman who spends too much money on her clothes,” Kittredge said.
“Your mother is very beautiful,” I told him. I genuinely meant this, in the nicest possible way.
“Your mom is hotter,” Kittredge told me matter-of-factly. There was no hint of sarcasm, nor anything the slightest suggestive, in his remark; he spoke in the same empirical way in which he’d said his mother (or the woman who wasn’t his mother) was in Paris. Soon, the hot word, the way Kittredge meant it, would be the rage at Favorite River.
Later, Elaine would say to me, “What are you doing, Billy—trying to be his friend?”
Elaine was an excellent Miranda, though opening night was not her best performance; she’d needed prompting. It was probably my fault.
“Good wombs have borne bad sons,” Miranda says to her father—in reference to Antonio, Prospero’s brother.
I’d talked to Elaine about the good-wombs idea, possibly too much. I’d told Elaine my own ideas about my biological father—how whatever seemed bad in me I had ascribed to the code-boy, to the sergeant’s genes (not my mom’s). At the time, I still counted my mother among the good wombs in the world. She may have been embarrassingly seducible—the very word I used to describe my mom to Elaine—but Mary Marshall Dean or Abbott was essentially innocent of any wrongdoing. Maybe my mother was gullible, occasionally backward—I said this to Elaine, in lieu of the retarded word—but never “bad.”
Admittedly, it was funny how I couldn’t pronounce the wombs word—not even the singular. Both Elaine and I had laughed about how hard I came down on the letter b.
“It’s a silent b, Billy!” Elaine had cried. “You don’t say the b!”
It was comical, even to me. What need did I have of the womb (or wombs) word?
But I’m sure this was why Elaine had moms on her mind on opening night—“Good moms have borne bad sons,” Elaine (as Miranda) almost said. Elaine must have heard the moms word coming; she stopped herself short after “Good—” There was then what every actor fears: an incriminating silence.
“Wombs,” my mother whispered; she had a prompter’s perfect whisper—it was almost inaudible.
“Wombs!” Elaine Hadley had shouted. Richard (as Prospero) had jumped. “Good wombs have borne bad sons!” Miranda, back in character, too emphatically said. It didn’t happen again.
Naturally, Kittredge would say something to Elaine about it—after our opening-night performance.
“You need to work on the wombs word, Naples,” he told her. “It’s probably a word that causes you some nervous excitement. You should try saying to yourself, ‘Every woman has a womb—even I have a womb. Wombs are no big deal.’ We can work on saying this together—if it helps. You know, I say ‘womb,’ you say ‘wombs are no big deal,’ or I say ‘wombs,’ and you say ‘I’ve got one!’—that kind of thing.”
“Thanks, Kittredge,” Elaine said. “How very thoughtful.” She was biting her lower lip, which I knew she did only when she was pining for him and hating herself for it. (I was accustomed to the feeling.)
Then suddenly, after months of such histrionic closeness, our contact with Kittredge was over; Elaine and I were despondent. Richard tried to talk to us about the postpartum depression that occasionally descends on actors following a play. “We didn’t give birth to The Tempest,” Elaine said impatiently. “Shakespeare did!”
Speaking strictly for myself, I missed running lines on Miss Frost’s brass bed, too, but when I confessed this to Elaine, she said, “Why? It’s not like we ever fooled around, or anything.”
I was increasingly fond of Elaine, if not in that way, but you have to be careful what you say to your friends when you’re trying too hard to make them feel better.
“Well, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to fool around with you,” I told her.
We were in Elaine’s bedroom—with the door open—on a Saturday night at the start of winter term. This would have been the New Year, 1960, though our ages hadn’t changed; I was still seventeen, and Elaine was sixteen. It was movie night at Favorite River Academy, and from Elaine’s bedroom window, we could see the flickering light of the movie projector in the new onion-shaped gym, which was attached to the old gym—where, on winter weekends, Elaine and I often watched Kittredge wrestle. Not this weekend; the wrestlers were away, competing somewhere to the south of us—at Mount Hermon, maybe, or at Loomis.
When the team buses returned, Elaine and I would see them from her fifth-floor bedroom window. Even in the January cold, with all the windows closed, the sound of shouting boys reverberated in the quadrangle of dormitories. The wrestlers, and the other athletes, would carry their gear from the buses to the new gym, where the lockers and the showers were. If the movie was still playing, some of the jocks would stay in the gym to see the end.
But they were showing a Western on this Saturday night; only morons watched the end of a Western without seeing the beginning of the movie—the endings were all the same. (There would be a shoot-out, a predictable comeuppance.) Elaine and I had been betting on whether or not Kittredge would stay in the gym to see the end of the Western—that is, if the wrestling-team bus returned before the movie was over.
“Kittredge isn’t stupid,” Elaine had said. “He won’t hang around the gym to watch the final fifteen minutes of a horse opera.” (Elaine had a low opinion of Westerns, which she called “horse operas” only when she was being kind; she more often called them “male propaganda.”)
“Kittredge is a jock—he’ll hang around the gym with the other jocks,” I had said. “It doesn’t matter what the movie is.”