“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. Awaiting me, in the future, was seeing Delacorte die.
Delacorte, as Lear’s Fool, would wisely say: “‘Have more than thou showest, / Speak less than thou knowest, / Lend less than thou owest.’” Good advice, but it won’t save Lear’s Fool, and it didn’t save Delacorte.
Kittredge acted strangely in Delacorte’s company; he could behave affectionately and impatiently with Delacorte in the same moment. It was as if Delacorte had been a childhood friend, but one who’d disappointed Kittredge—one who’d not “turned out” as Kittredge had hoped or expected.
Kittredge was preternaturally fond of Delacorte’s rinsing-and-spitting routine; Kittredge had even suggested to Richard that there might be onstage benefits to Lear’s Fool repeatedly rinsing and spitting.
“Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Grandpa Harry said.
“I’m not prompting the rinsing and spitting, Richard,” my mom said.
“Delacorte, you will kindly do your rinsing and spitting backstage,” Richard told the compulsive lightweight.
“It was just an idea,” Kittredge had said with a dismissive shrug. “I guess it will suffice that we at least have a Fool who can say the shadow word.”
To me, Kittredge would be more philosophical. “Look at it this way, Nymph—there’s no such thing as a working actor with a restricted vocabulary. But it’s a positive discovery, to be made aware of your limitations at such a young age,” Kittredge assured me. “How fortuitous, really—now you know you can never be an actor.”
“You mean, it’s not a career choice,” I said, as Miss Frost had once declared to me—when I’d first told her that I wanted to be a writer.
“I should say not, Nymph—not if you want to give yourself a fighting chance.”
“Oh.”
“And you might be wise, Nymph, to clarify another choice—I mean, before you get to the career part,” Kittredge said. I said nothing; I just waited. I knew Kittredge well enough to know when he was setting me up. “There’s the matter of your sexual proclivities,” Kittredge continued.
“My sexual proclivities are crystal-clear,” I told him—a little surprised at myself, because I was acting and there wasn’t a hint of a pronunciation problem.
“I don’t know, Nymph,” Kittredge said, with that deliberate or involuntary flutter in the broad muscles of his wrestler’s neck. “In the area of sexual proclivities, you look like a work-in-progress to me.”
“OH, IT’S YOU!” Miss Frost said cheerfully, when she saw me; she sounded surprised. “I thought it was your friend. He was here—he just left. I thought it was him, coming back.”
“Who?” I asked her. (I had Kittredge on my mind, of course—not exactly a friend.)
“Tom,” Miss Frost said. “Tom was just here. I’m never sure why he comes. He’s always asking about a book he says he can’t find at the academy library, but I know perfectly well the school has it. Anyway, I never have what he’s looking for. Maybe he comes here looking for you.”
“Tom who?” I asked her. I didn’t think I knew a Tom.
“Atkins—isn’t that his name?” Miss Frost asked. “I know him as Tom.”
“I know him as Atkins,” I said.
“Oh, William, I wonder how long the last-name culture of that awful school will persist!” Miss Frost said.
“Shouldn’t we be whispering?” I whispered.
After all, we were in a library. I was puzzled by how loudly Miss Frost spoke, but I was also excited to hear her say that Favorite River Academy was an “awful school”; I secretly thought so, but out of loyalty to Richard Abbott and Uncle Bob, faculty brat that I was, I would never have said so.
“There’s no one else here, William,” Miss Frost whispered to me. “We can speak as loudly as we want.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve come to write, I suppose,” Miss Frost loudly said.
“No, I need your advice about what I should read,” I told her.
“Is the subject still crushes on the wrong people, William?”
“Very wrong,” I whispered.
She leaned over, to be closer to me; she was still so much taller than I was, she made me feel that I hadn’t grown. “We can whisper about this, if you want to,” she whispered.
“Do you know Jacques Kittredge?” I asked her.
“Everyone knows Kittredge,” Miss Frost said neutrally; I couldn’t tell what she thought about him.
“I have a crush on Kittredge, but I’m trying not to,” I told her. “Is there a novel about that?”
Miss Frost put both her hands on my shoulders. I knew she could feel me shaking. “Oh, William—there are worse things, you know,” she said. “Yes, I have the very novel you should read,” she whispered.
“I know why Atkins comes here,” I blurted out. “He’s not looking for me—he probably has a crush on you!”
“Why would he?” Miss Frost asked me.
“Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t any boy have a crush on you?” I asked her.
“Well, no one’s had a crush on me for a while,” she said. “But it’s very flattering—it’s so sweet of you to say so, William.”