“Everyone has a roommate?” the bed-wetter’s mom asked; it was usually the mothers who asked the roommate question.
“Yes, everyone—no exceptions,” I said; those were the rules.
“What’s ‘not typical’ about Kittredge’s room?” Elaine asked, after the visiting family was through their tour.
“We’ll soon see,” I said. “Uncle Bob didn’t tell me.”
“Jesus, no one in your family tells you anything, Billy!” Elaine exclaimed.
I’d been thinking the same thing. In the yearbook room, I was up only to the Class of ’40. I had twenty years to go before I got to my own graduating class, and I’d just discovered that the yearbook for 1940 was missing. I’d skipped from the ’39 Owl to ’41 and ’42, before I realized that ’40 was gone.
When I asked the academy librarian about it, I said: “Nobody can check out a yearbook. The Owl for 1940 must have been stolen.”
The academy librarian was one of Favorite River’s fussy old bachelors; everyone thought that such older, unmarried males on the Favorite River faculty were what we called at that time “nonpracticing homosexuals.” Who knew if they were or weren’t “practicing,” or if they were or were not homosexuals? All we’d observed was that they lived alone, and there was a particular fastidiousness about the way they dressed, and the way they ate and spoke—hence we imagined that they were unnaturally effeminate.
“Students may not check out a yearbook, Billy—the faculty can,” the academy librarian said primly; his name was Mr. Lockley.
“The faculty can,” I repeated.
“Yes, of course they can,” Mr. Lockley told me; he was looking through some filing cards. “Mr. Fremont has checked out the 1940 Owl, Billy.”
“Oh.”
Mr. Fremont—Robert Fremont, Class of ’35, Miss Frost’s classmate—was my uncle Bob, of course. But when I asked Bob if he was finished with the ’40 Owl, because I was waiting to have a look at it, good old easygoing Bob wasn’t so easygoing about it.
“I’m pretty sure I returned that yearbook to the library, Billy,” my uncle said; he was a good guy, basically, but a bad liar. Uncle Bob was a fairly forthright fella, but I knew he was hanging on to the ’40 Owl, for some unknown reason.
“Mr. Lockley thinks you still have it, Uncle Bob,” I told him.
“Well, I’ll look all around for it, Billy, but I swear I took it back to the library,” Bob said.
“What did you need it for?” I asked him.
“A member of that class is newly deceased,” Uncle Bob replied. “I wanted to say some nice things about him, when I wrote to his family.”
“Oh.”
Poor Uncle Bob would never be a writer, I knew; he couldn’t make up a story to save his ass.
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Whose name, Billy?” Bob said in a half-strangled voice.
“The deceased, Uncle Bob.”
“Gosh, Billy—I can’t for the life of me remember the fella’s name!”
“Oh.”
“More fucking secrets,” Elaine said, when I told her the story. “Ask Gerry to find the yearbook and give it to you. Gerry hates her parents—she’ll do it for you.”
“I think Gerry hates me, too,” I told Elaine.
“Gerry hates her parents more,” Elaine said.
We’d located the door to Kittredge’s room in Tilley, and I let us in with the master key Uncle Bob had given me. At first, the only “not typical” thing about the dorm room was how neat it was, but neither Elaine nor I was surprised to see that Kittredge was tidy.
The one bookshelf had very few books on it; there was a lot of room for more books. The one desk had very little on it; the one chair had no clothes draped over it. There were just a couple of framed photographs on top of the lone chest of drawers, and the wardrobe closet, which typically had no door—not even a curtain—revealed Kittredge’s familiar (and expensive-looking) clothes. Not even the solitary single bed had any stray clothes on it, and the bed was perfectly made—the sheets and blanket uncreased, the pillowcase unwrinkled.
“Jesus,” Elaine suddenly said. “How did the bastard swing a single?”
It was a single room; Kittredge had no roommate—that’s what was “not typical” about it. Elaine and I speculated that the single room might have been part of the deal Mrs. Kittredge made with the academy when she’d told them—and Mr. and Mrs. Hadley—that she would take Elaine to Europe and get the unfortunate girl a safe abortion. It was also possible that Kittredge had been an overpowering and abusive roommate; perhaps no one had wanted to be Kittredge’s roommate, but this struck both Elaine and me as unlikely. At Favorite River Academy, it would have been prestigious to be Kittredge’s roommate; even if he abused you, you wouldn’t want to give up the honor. The single room, in combination with Kittredge’s evidently compulsive neatness, smacked of privilege. Kittredge exuded privilege, as if he’d managed (even in utero) to create his own sense of entitlement.
What was most upsetting to Elaine about Kittredge’s room was that there was absolutely no evidence in it that he’d ever known her; maybe she’d expected to see a photograph of herself. (She admitted to me that she’d given him several.) I didn’t ask her if she’d given Kittredge one of her bras, but that was because I was hoping to ask her if she would give me another one.
There were some school-newspaper photographs, and yearbook photos, of Kittredge wrestling. There were no pictures of girlfriends (or ex-girlfriends). There were no photographs of Kittredge as a child; if he’d ever had a dog, there were no pictures of the dog. There were no photos of anyone who could have been his father. The only picture of Mrs. Kittredge had been taken the one time she’d come to Favorite River to see her son wrestle. The photo must have been taken after the match; Elaine and I had been at that match—it was the only time I saw Mrs. Kittredge. Elaine and I didn’t remember seeing anyone take a picture of Kittredge and his mom at the match, but someone had.
What Elaine and I noticed, simultaneously, was that an unseen hand—it must have been Kittredge’s—had cut off Mrs. Kittredge’s face and glued it to Kittredge’s body. There was Kittredge’s mother in Kittredge’s wrestling tights and singlet. And there was Kittredge’s handsome face glued to his mother’s beautiful and exquisitely tailored body. It was a funny photograph, but Elaine and I didn’t laugh about it.
The truth is, Kittredge’s face worked on a woman’s body, with a woman’s clothes, and Mrs. Kittredge’s face went very well with Kittredge’s wrestler’s body (in tights and a singlet).
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said to Elaine, “that Mrs. Kittredge could have switched the faces in the photograph.” (I didn’t really think so, but I said it.)
“No,” Elaine flatly said. “Only Kittredge could have done it. That woman has no imagination and no sense of humor.”
“If you say so,” I told my dear friend. (As I’ve already told you, I wouldn’t question Elaine’s authority on the subject of Mrs. Kittredge. How could I?)
“YOU’D BETTER GO TO work on Gerry and find that 1940 yearbook, Billy,” Elaine told me.
I did this at our family dinner on Christmas Day—when Aunt Muriel and Uncle Bob and Gerry joined my mom and me, and Richard Abbott, at Grandpa Harry’s house on River Street. Nana Victoria always made a big to-do about the essential and necessary “old-fashionedness” of Christmas dinner.