I could describe other photographs that Elaine sent me from Northfield—I’ve kept them all—but the pattern would simply repeat itself. There was always a partial, imperfect image of another woman in the pictures of Elaine and those impressive buildings on the Northfield campus.
“Who is she? I know you know who I mean—she’s always there, Elaine,” I said repeatedly. “Don’t be coy about it.”
“I’m not being coy, Billy—you should talk about being coy, if that’s the word you’re using for being evasive, or not talking about things directly. If you know what I mean,” Elaine would say.
“Okay, okay—so I have to guess who she is, is that it? So you’re paying me back for being less than candid with you—am I getting warm?” I asked my dear friend.
ELAINE AND I WOULD try living together, though this would be many years later, after we’d both had sufficient disappointments in our lives. It wouldn’t work out—not for very long—but we were too good friends not to have tried it. We were also old enough, when we embarked on this adventure, to know that friends were more important than lovers—not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships. (It’s best not to generalize, but this was certainly the case for Elaine and me.)
We had a seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street in San Francisco—in that area of Post Street between Taylor and Mason, near Union Square. Elaine and I had our own rooms, to write. Our bedroom was large and accommodating—it overlooked some rooftops on Geary Street, and the vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio. At night, the neon for the HOTEL word was dark—burned out, I guess—so that only the ADAGIO was lit. In my insomnia, I would get out of bed and go to the window and stare at the bloodred ADAGIO sign.
One night, when I came back to bed, I inadvertently woke up Elaine, and I asked her about the adagio word. I knew it was Italian; not only had I heard Esmeralda say it, but I’d seen the word in her notes. In my forays into the world of opera and other music—both with Esmeralda and with Larry, in Vienna—I knew that the word had some use in music. I knew that Elaine would know what it meant; like her mother, Elaine was very musical. (Northfield had been a good fit for her—it was a great school for music.)
“What’s it mean?” I asked Elaine, as we lay awake in that seedy Post Street apartment.
“Adagio means slowly, softly, gently,” Elaine answered.
“Oh.”
That would be about the best you could say for our efforts at lovemaking, which we tried, too—with no more success than the living-together part, but we tried. “Adagio,” we would say, when we tried to make love, or afterward, when we were trying to fall asleep. We say it still; we said it when we left San Francisco, and we say it when we close letters or emails to each other now. It’s what love means to us, I guess—only adagio. (Slowly, softly, gently.) It works for friends, anyway.
“So who was she, really—the lady in all those pictures?” I would ask Elaine, in that accommodating bedroom overlooking the neon-damaged Hotel Adagio.
“You know, Billy—she’s still looking after me. She’ll always be hovering somewhere nearby, taking my temperature by hand, checking the blood on my pad to see if the bleeding is still ‘normal.’ It was always ‘normal,’ by the way, but she’s still checking—she wanted me to know that I would never leave her care, or her thoughts,” Elaine said.
I lay there thinking about it—the only light out the window being the dull glow of lights from Union Square and that damaged neon sign, the vertical ADAGIO in bloodred, the HOTEL unlit.
“You actually mean that Mrs. Kittredge is still—”
“Billy!” Elaine interrupted me. “I was never as intimate with anyone as I was with that awful woman. I will never be as close to anyone again.”
“What about Kittredge?” I asked her, though I should have known better—after all those years.
“Fuck Kittredge!” Elaine cried. “It’s his mother who marked me! It’s her I’ll never forget!”
“How intimate? Marked you how?” I asked her, but she’d begun to cry, and I thought that I should just hold her—slowly, softly, gently—and say nothing. I’d already asked her about the abortion; it wasn’t that. She’d had another abortion, after the one in Europe.
“They’re not so bad, when you consider the alternative,” was all Elaine ever said about her abortions. However Mrs. Kittredge had marked her, it wasn’t about that. And if Elaine had “experimented” with being a lesbian—I mean with Mrs. Kittredge—Elaine would go to her grave being vague about that.
The pictures I kept of Elaine were what I could imagine about Kittredge’s mother, or how “close” Elaine ever was to her. The shadows and body parts of the woman (or women) in those photographs are more vivid to me than my one memory of Mrs. Kittredge at a wrestling match, the first and only time I actually saw her. I know “that awful woman” best by her effect on my friend Elaine—the way I know myself best by my persistent crushes on the wrong people, the way I was formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved.
Chapter 7
MY TERRIFYING ANGELS
If an unwanted pregnancy was the “abyss” that an intrepid girl could fall into—the abyss word was my mother’s, though I’ll bet she’d heard it first from fucking Muriel—surely the abyss for a boy like me was to succumb to homosexual activity. In such love lay madness; in acting out my most dire imaginings, I would certainly descend to the bottomless pit of the universe of desire. Or so I believed in the fall of my senior year at Favorite River Academy, when I once more ventured to the First Sister Public Library—this time, I thought, to save myself. I was eighteen, but my sexual misgivings were innumerable; my self-hatred was huge.
If you were, like me, at an all-boys’ boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I’d always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
With Elaine starting her new life at Northfield, I was spending more and more time in the yearbook room of the academy library. When my mom or Richard asked me where I was going, I always answered: “I’m going to the library.” I didn’t tell them which library. And without Elaine to slow me down—she could never resist showing me those hot-looking boys from the more contemporary of the yearbooks—I was blazing my way through the graduating classes of the decreasingly distant past. I’d left World War I behind; I was way ahead of my imagined schedule. At the rate I was going through those yearbooks, I would catch up with the present well before the spring of ’61 and my own graduation from Favorite River.
In fact, I was a mere thirty years behind myself; on the same September evening I decided to leave the academy library and pay a visit to Miss Frost, I’d begun to peruse the yearbook for the Class of ’31. An absolutely heart-stopping boy in the wrestling-team photo had caused me to abruptly close the yearbook. I thought: I simply can’t keep thinking about Kittredge, and boys like him; I must not give in to those feelings, or I am doomed.