In One Person

Chapter 6 THE PICTURES I KEPT OF ELAINE

I was in German III my junior year at Favorite River Academy. That winter after old Grau died, Fräulein Bauer’s section of German III acquired some of Dr. Grau’s students—Kittredge among them. They were an ill-prepared group; Herr Doktor Grau was a confusing teacher. It was a graduation requirement at Favorite River that you had to take three years of the same language; if Kittredge was taking German III as a senior, this meant that he had flunked German in a previous year, or that he’d started out studying another foreign language and, for some unknown reason, had switched to German.

“Isn’t your mom French?” I asked him. (I assumed he’d spoken French at home.)

“I got tired of doing what my alleged mother wanted,” Kittredge said. “Hasn’t that happened to you yet, Nymph?”

Because Kittredge was so witheringly smart, I was surprised he was such a weak German student; I was less surprised to discover he was lazy. He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted. Foreign languages demand a willingness to memorize and a tolerance for repetition; that Kittredge could learn his lines for a play showed he had the capacity for this kind of self-polishing—onstage, he was a poised performer. But he lacked the necessary discipline for studying a foreign language—German, especially. The articles—“The frigging der, die, das, den, dem shit!” as Kittredge angrily stated—were beyond his patience.

That year, when Kittredge should have graduated, I didn’t help his final grade by agreeing to assist him with his homework; that Kittredge virtually copied my translations of our daily assignments would be of no help to him in the in-class exams, which he had to write by himself. I most certainly didn’t want Kittredge to fail German III; I foresaw the repercussions of him repeating his senior year, when I would also be a senior. But it was hard to say no to him when he asked for help.

“It’s hard to say no to him, period,” Elaine would later say. I blame myself that I didn’t know they were involved.

That winter term, there were auditions for what Richard Abbott called “the spring Shakespeare”—to distinguish it from the Shakespeare play he had directed in the fall term. At Favorite River, Richard sometimes made us boys do Shakespeare in the winter term, too.

I hate to say this, but I believe that Kittredge’s participation in the Drama Club was responsible for a surge in the popularity of our school plays—notwithstanding all the Shakespeare. There was more than usual interest when Richard read aloud the cast list for Twelfth Night at morning meeting; the list was later posted in the academy dining hall, where students actually stood in line for their opportunity to stare at the dramatis personae.

Orsino, Duke of Illyria, was our teacher and director, Richard Abbott. Richard, as the Duke, begins Twelfth Night with those familiar and rhapsodic lines “‘If music be the food of love, play on,’” not ever needing any prompting from my mother on that subject.

Orsino first professes his love for Olivia, a countess played by my complaining aunt Muriel. Olivia rejects the Duke, who (wasting no time) quickly falls in love with Viola, thus making Orsino an overproclaiming figure—“maybe more in love with love than with either lady,” as Richard Abbott put it.

I always thought that, because Olivia turns down Orsino as her lover, Muriel must have felt comfortable in accepting the role of the countess. Richard was still a little too much leading-man material for Muriel; she never entirely relaxed in her handsome brother-in-law’s company.

Elaine was cast as Viola, later disguised as Cesario. Elaine’s immediate response was that Richard had anticipated Viola’s necessary cross-dressing of herself as Cesario—“Viola has to be flat-chested, because for much of the play she’s a guy,” was how Elaine put it to me.

I actually found it a little creepy that Orsino and Viola end up in love—given that Richard was noticeably older than Elaine—but Elaine didn’t seem to care. “I think girls got married younger back then,” was all she said about it. (With half a brain, I might have realized that Elaine already had a real-life lover who was older than she was!)

I was cast as Sebastian—Viola’s twin brother. “That’s perfect for you two,” Kittredge said condescendingly to Elaine and me. “You’ve already got a brother-sister thing going, as anyone can see.” (At the time, I didn’t pick up on that; Elaine must have told Kittredge that she and I weren’t interested in each other in that way.)

I’ll admit I was distracted; that Muriel, as Olivia, is first smitten with Elaine (disguised as Cesario) and later falls for me, Sebastian—well, that was a test of the previously mentioned disbelief business. For my part, I found it impossible to imagine falling in love with Muriel—hence I stared fixedly at my aunt’s operatic bosom. Not once did this Sebastian look in that Olivia’s eyes—not even when Sebastian exclaims, “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!”

Or when Olivia, whose bossiness was right up Muriel’s alley, demands to know, “Would thou’dst be rul’d by me!”

I, as Sebastian, staring straight ahead at my aunt Muriel’s breasts, which were laughably at eye level to me, answer her in a lovestruck fashion: “‘Madam, I will.’”

“Well, you best remember, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said to me, “Twelfth Night is sure-as-shit a comedy.”

When I grew just a little taller, and a little older, Muriel would object to my staring at her breasts. But that later play wasn’t a comedy, and it only now occurs to me that when we were cast as Olivia and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Muriel probably couldn’t see that I was staring at her breasts, because her breasts were in the way! (Given my height at the time, Muriel’s breasts blocked her line of vision.)

Aunt Muriel’s husband, my dear uncle Bob, well understood the comic factor in Twelfth Night. That Bob’s drinking was such a burden for Muriel to bear seemed a subject of mockery when Richard cast Uncle Bob as Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s kinsman and—in his most memorable moments in the play—a misbehaving drunk. But Bob was as much loved by the Favorite River students as he was by me—after all, he was the school’s overly permissive admissions man. Bob thought it was no big deal that the students liked him. (“Of course they like me, Billy. They met me when I interviewed them, and I let them in!”)

Bob also coached the racquet sports, tennis and squash—ergo the squash balls. The squash courts were on the basement level of the gym, underground and dank. When one of the squash courts stank of beer, the boys said that Coach Bob must have been playing there—sweating out the poisons of the night before.

Both Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria complained to Grandpa Harry that casting Bob as Sir Toby Belch “encouraged” Bob’s drinking. Richard Abbott would be blamed for “making light” of the deplorable pain caused to poor Muriel whenever Bob drank. But while Muriel and my grandmother would bitch to Grandpa Harry about Richard, they would never have breathed a word of discontent to Richard himself.

After all, Richard Abbott had come along “in the nick of time” (to use Nana Victoria’s cliché) to save my damaged mother; they spoke of this rescue as if no one else might have managed the job. My mother was seen as no longer Nana Victoria’s or Aunt Muriel’s responsibility, because Richard had shown up and taken her off their hands.

At least this was very much the impression that my aunt and my grandmother gave to me—Richard could do no wrong, or what wrong-doing Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel thought that Richard had done would be spelled out for Grandpa Harry, as if he could ever be expected to speak to Richard about it. My cousin Gerry and I overheard it all, because when Richard and my mother weren’t around, my disapproving grandmother and my meddlesome aunt talked ceaselessly about them. I got the feeling they would still be calling them “the newlyweds,” however facetiously, after my mom and Richard had been married for twenty years! As I grew older, I was realizing that all of them—not only Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel, but also Grandpa Harry and Richard Abbott—treated my mother like a temperamental child. (They pussyfooted around her, the way they would have done with a child who was in danger of doing some unwitting damage to herself.)

Grandpa Harry would never criticize Richard Abbott; Harry might have agreed that Richard was my mom’s savior, but I think Grandpa Harry was smart enough to know that Richard had chiefly saved my mother from Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel—more than from the next man who might have come along and swept my easily seducible mom off her feet.

However, in the case of this ill-fated production of Twelfth Night, even Grandpa Harry had his doubts about the casting. Harry was cast as Maria, Olivia’s waiting-gentlewoman. Both Grandpa Harry and I had thought of Maria as much younger, though Harry’s chief difficulty with the role was that he was supposed to be married off to Sir Toby Belch.

“I can’t believe that I’m going to be betrothed to my much-younger son-in-law,” Grandpa Harry said sadly, when I was having dinner with him and Nana Victoria one winter Sunday night.

“Well, you best remember, Grandpa, Twelfth Night is sure-as-shit a comedy,” I reminded him.

“A good thing it’s only onstage, I guess,” Harry had said.

“You and your only-onstage routine,” Nana Victoria snapped at him. “I sometimes think you live to be weird, Harold.”

“Tolerance, have tolerance, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry intoned, winking at me.

Maybe that was why I decided to tell him what I had told Mrs. Hadley—about my slightly faded crush on Richard, my deepening attraction to Kittredge, even my masturbation to the unlikely contrivance of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model, but not (still not) my unmentioned love for Miss Frost.

“You’re the sweetest boy, Bill—by which I mean, of course, you have feelin’s for other people, and you take the greatest care not to hurt their feelin’s. This is admirable, most admirable,” Grandpa Harry said to me, “but you must be careful not to have your feelin’s hurt. Some people are safer to be attracted to than others.”

“Not other boys, you mean?” I asked him.

“I mean not some other boys. Yes. It takes a special boy—to safely speak your heart to. Some boys would hurt you,” Grandpa Harry said.

“Kittredge, probably,” I suggested.

“That would be my guess. Yes,” Harry said. He sighed. “Maybe not here, Bill—not in this school, not at this time. Maybe these attractions to other boys, or men, will have to wait.”

“Wait till when, and where?” I asked him.

“Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry started to say, but he stopped. “I think that Miss Frost has been very good at findin’ books for you to read,” Grandpa Harry started again. “I’ll bet you that she could recommend somethin’ for you to read—I mean on the subject of bein’ attracted to other boys, or men, and regardin’ when and where it may be possible to act on such attractions. Mind you, I haven’t read that book, Bill, but I bet there are such stories; I know such books exist, and maybe Miss Frost would know about them.”

I almost told him on the spot that Miss Frost was one of my confusing attractions, though something held me back from saying this; perhaps that she was the most powerful of all my attractions was what stopped me. “But how do I begin to tell Miss Frost,” I said to Grandpa Harry. “I don’t know how to start—I mean before I get to the business of there being books on the subject, or not.”

“I believe you can tell Miss Frost what you told me, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “I have a feelin’ she would be sympathetic.” He kissed me on the forehead and gave me a hug—there was both affection and concern for me in my grandfather’s expression. I saw him suddenly as I had so often seen him—onstage, where he was almost always a woman. It was the way he’d used the sympathetic word that had triggered a long-ago memory; it may have been something I completely imagined, but, if I had to bet, it was a memory.

How old I was, I couldn’t say—ten or eleven, at most. This was long before Richard Abbott appeared; I was Billy Dean, and my single mom was suitorless. But Mary Marshall Dean was already the long-established prompter for the First Sister Players, and, whatever my age, and notwithstanding my innocence, I’d been a long-accepted presence backstage. I had the run of the place—provided I kept out of the actors’ way, and I stayed quiet. (“You’re not backstage to talk, Billy,” I remember my mom saying to me. “You’re here to watch and listen.”)

I believe it was one of the English poets—was it Auden?—who said that before you could write anything, you had to notice something. (Admittedly, it was Lawrence Upton who told me this; I’m just guessing it was Auden, because Larry was a fan of Auden’s.)

It doesn’t really matter who said it—it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something. That part of my childhood—when I was backstage in the little theater of our town’s amateur theatrical society—was the noticing phase of my becoming a writer. One of the things I noticed, if not the very first thing, was that not everyone thought it was wonderful or funny that my grandfather took so many women’s roles in the productions of the First Sister Players.

I loved being backstage, just watching and listening. I liked the transitions, too—for example, that moment when all the actors were off-script, and my mother was called upon to start prompting. There then came a magical interlude, even among amateurs, when the actors seemed completely in character; regardless of how many rehearsals I’d attended, I remember that quickly passing illusion when the play suddenly seemed real. Yet there was always something you saw or heard in the dress rehearsal that struck you as entirely new. Last, on opening night, there was the excitement of seeing and hearing the play for the first time with an audience.

I remember that, even as a child, I was as nervous on opening night as the actors. I had a pretty good (albeit partial) view of the actors from my hiding place backstage. I had a better view of the audience—though I saw only those faces in the first two or three rows of seats. (Depending on where my mother had positioned herself as the prompter, this was either a stage-right or stage-left view of the people in those first few rows of seats.)

I saw those faces in the audience only slightly more head-on than in profile, though the people in the audience were looking at the actors onstage; they were never looking at me. To tell you the truth, it was a kind of eavesdropping—I felt as if I were spying on the audience, or just this small segment of it. The houselights were dark, but the faces in the first couple of rows of seats were illuminated by whatever light there was onstage; naturally, in the course of the play, the light on the people in the audience varied, though I could almost always see their faces and make out their expressions.

The feeling that I was “spying” on these most exposed theatergoers of First Sister, Vermont, came from the fact that when you’re in the audience in a theater, and your attention is captured by the actors onstage, you never imagine that someone is watching you. But I was observing them; in their expressions, I saw everything they thought and felt. Come opening night, I knew the play by heart; after all, I’d been to most of the rehearsals. By then, I was much more interested in the audience’s reaction than I was in what the actors onstage were doing.

In every opening-night performance—no matter which woman, or what kind of woman, Grandpa Harry was playing—I was fascinated to observe the audience’s reactions to Harry Marshall as a female.

There was the delightful Mr. Poggio, our neighborhood grocer. He was as bald as Grandpa Harry, but woefully shortsighted—he was always a first-row customer, and even in the first row, Mr. Poggio was a squinter. The moment Grandpa Harry came onstage, Mr. Poggio was convulsed with suppressed laughter; tears rolled down his cheeks, and I had to look away from his openmouthed, gap-toothed smile or I would have burst out laughing.

Mrs. Poggio was curiously less appreciative of Grandpa Harry’s female impersonations; she frowned when she first saw him and bit her lower lip. She also did not seem to enjoy how happy her husband was with Grandpa Harry as a woman.

And there was Mr. Ripton—Ralph Ripton, the sawyer. He operated the main blade at Grandpa Harry’s sawmill and lumberyard; it was a highly skilled (and dangerous) position in the mill, to be the main-blade operator. Ralph Ripton was missing the thumb and first two joints of his index finger on his left hand. I’d heard the story of the accident many times; both Grandpa Harry and his partner, Nils Borkman, liked to tell the blood-spattered tale.

I’d always believed that Grandpa Harry and Mr. Ripton were friends—they were more than fellow workers, surely. Yet Ralph didn’t like Grandpa Harry as a woman; Mr. Ripton had an angry, condemning expression whenever he saw Grandpa Harry onstage in a female role. Mr. Ripton’s wife—she was completely expressionless—sat beside her overcritical husband as if she’d been brain-damaged by the very idea of Harry Marshall performing as a woman.

Ralph Ripton skillfully managed to pack his pipe with fresh tobacco; at the same time, he never took his hard eyes from the stage. I guessed, at first, that Mr. Ripton was loading up his pipe for a smoke at the intermission—he always used the stump of his severed left index finger to tamp the tobacco tightly into the bowl of his pipe—but I later noticed that the Riptons never returned after the intermission. They came to the theater for the devout purpose of hating what they saw and leaving early.

Grandpa Harry had told me that Ralph Ripton had to sit in the first or second row in order to hear; the main blade in the sawmill made such a high-pitched whine that the saw had deafened him. But I could see for myself that there was more wrong with the sawyer than his deafness.

There were other faces in the collective audiences—many regular customers in those front-row seats—and while I didn’t know most of their names or their professions, I had no difficulty (even as a child) recognizing their obdurate dislike of Grandpa Harry as a woman. To be fair: When Harry Marshall kissed as a woman—I mean when he kissed another man onstage—most of the audience laughed or cheered or applauded. But I had a knack for finding the unfriendly faces—there were always a few. I saw people cringe, or angrily look away; I saw their eyes narrow with disgust at Grandpa Harry kissing as a woman.

Harry Marshall played all kinds of women—he was a crazy lady who repeatedly bit her own hands, he was a sobbing bride who was ditched at the altar, he was a serial killer (a hairstylist) who poisoned her boyfriends, he was a policewoman with a limp. My grandfather loved the theater, and I loved watching him perform, but perhaps there were folks in First Sister, Vermont, who had rather limited imaginations; they knew Harry Marshall was a lumberman—they couldn’t accept him as a woman.

Indeed, I saw more than obvious displeasure and condemnation in the faces of our townsfolk—I saw more than derision, worse than meanness. I saw hatred in a few of those faces.

One such face I wouldn’t know by name until I saw him in my first morning meeting as a Favorite River Academy student. This was Dr. Harlow, our school’s physician—he who, when he spoke to us boys, was usually so hearty and cajoling. On Dr. Harlow’s face was the conviction that Harry Marshall’s love of performing as a woman was an affliction; in Dr. Harlow’s expression was the hardened belief that Grandpa Harry’s cross-dressing was treatable. Thus I feared and hated Dr. Harlow before I knew who he was.

And, even as a backstage child, I used to think: Come on! Don’t you get it? This is make-believe! Yet those hard-eyed faces in the audience weren’t buying it. Those faces said: “You can’t make-believe this; you can’t make-believe that.”

As a child, I was frightened by what I saw in those faces in the audience from my unseen, backstage position. I never forgot some of their expressions. When I was seventeen, and I told my grandfather about my crushes on boys and men, and my contradictory attraction to a made-up version of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model, I was still frightened by what I’d seen in those faces in the audience at the First Sister Players.

I told Grandpa Harry about watching some of our fellow townspeople, who were caught in the act of watching him. “They didn’t care that it was make-believe,” I told him. “They just knew they didn’t like it. They hated you—Ralph Ripton and his wife, even Mrs. Poggio, no question about Dr. Harlow. They hated you pretending to be a woman.”

“You know what I say, Bill?” Grandpa Harry asked me. “I say, you can make-believe what you want.” There were tears in my eyes then, because I was afraid for myself—not unlike the way, as a child, I had been afraid backstage for Grandpa Harry.

“I stole Elaine Hadley’s bra, because I wanted to wear it!” I blurted out.

“Ah, well—that’s a good fella’s failin’, Bill. I wouldn’t worry about that,” Grandpa Harry said.

It was strange what a relief it was—to see that I couldn’t shock him. Harry Marshall was only worried about my safety, as I’d once been afraid for his.

“Did Richard tell you?” Grandpa Harry suddenly asked me. “Some morons have banned Twelfth Night—I mean, over the years, total imbeciles have actually banned Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, many times!”

“Why?” I asked him. “That’s crazy! It’s a comedy, it’s a romantic comedy! What could possibly be the reason for banning it?” I cried.

“Ah, well—I can only guess why,” Grandpa Harry said. “Sebastian’s twin sister, Viola—she looks a lot like her brother; that’s the story, isn’t it? That’s why people mistake Sebastian for Viola—after Viola has disguised herself as a man, and she’s goin’ around callin’ herself Cesario. Don’t you see, Bill? Viola is a cross-dresser! That’s what got Shakespeare in trouble! From everythin’ you told me, I think you’ve noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said.

But it was what I had failed to notice that would haunt me. All those years when I was backstage, when I had the prompter’s perspective of those front-row faces in the audience, I had neglected to look at the prompter herself. I had not once noticed my mother’s expression, when she saw and heard her father onstage as a woman.

That winter Sunday night, when I walked back to Bancroft, after my little talk with Grandpa Harry, I vowed I would watch my mom’s face when Harry was performing as Maria in Twelfth Night.

I knew there would be opportunities—when Sebastian was not onstage but Maria was—when I could spy on my mother backstage and observe her expression. I was frightened of what I might see in her pretty face; I doubted she would be smiling.

I had a bad feeling about Twelfth Night from the start. Kittredge had talked a bunch of his wrestling teammates into auditioning. Richard had given four of them what he’d called “some smaller parts.”

But Malvolio isn’t a small part; the wrestling team’s heavyweight, a sullen complainer, was cast in the role of Olivia’s steward—an arrogant pretender who is tricked into thinking that Olivia desires him. I must say that Madden, the heavyweight who thought of himself as a perpetual victim, was well cast; Kittredge had told Elaine and me that Madden suffered from “going-last syndrome.”

In those days, all dual meets in wrestling began with the lightest weight-class; heavyweights wrestled last. If the meet was close, it came down to who won the heavyweight match—Madden usually lost. He had the look of someone wronged. How perfect that Malvolio, who is jailed as a lunatic, protests his fate—“‘I say there was never man thus abused,’” Madden, as Malvolio, whines.

“If you want to be in character, Madden,” I heard Kittredge say to his unfortunate teammate, “just think to yourself how unfair it is to be a heavyweight.”

“But it is unfair to be a heavyweight!” Madden protested.

“You’re going to be a great Malvolio. I know you are,” Kittredge told him—as ever, condescendingly.

Another wrestler—one of the lightweights who struggled to make weight at every weigh-in—was cast as Sir Toby’s companion, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The boy, whose name was Delacorte, was ghostly thin. He was often so dehydrated from losing weight that he had cotton-mouth. He rinsed his mouth out with water from a paper cup—he spat the water out into another cup. “Don’t mix your cups up, Delacorte,” Kittredge told him. (“Two Cups,” I’d once heard Kittredge call him.)

We would not have been surprised to see Delacorte faint from hunger; one rarely saw him in the dining hall. He was constantly running his fingers through his hair to be sure it wasn’t falling out. “Loss of hair is a sign of starvation,” Delacorte told us gravely.

“Loss of common sense is another sign,” Elaine said to him, but this didn’t register with Delacorte.

“Why doesn’t Delacorte move up a weight-class?” I’d asked Kittredge.

“Because he would get the shit kicked out of him,” Kittredge had said.

“Oh.”

Two other wrestlers were cast as sea captains. One of the captains isn’t very important—he’s the captain of the wrecked ship, the one who befriends Viola. I can’t remember the name of the wrestler who played him. The second sea captain is Sebastian’s friend Antonio. I’d earlier feared that Richard might cast Kittredge as Antonio, who is a brave and swashbuckling type. There is something so genuinely affectionate in Sebastian’s friendship with Antonio, I was anxious how that affection would play out—I mean, in the case of Kittredge being Antonio.

But Richard either sensed my anxiety or knew that Kittredge would have been wasted as Antonio. In all likelihood, Richard, from the start, had a better part in mind for Kittredge.

The wrestler Richard chose for Antonio was a good-looking guy named Wheelock; whatever was swashbuckling about Antonio, Wheelock could convey.

“Wheelock can convey little else,” Kittredge told me about his teammate. I was surprised that Kittredge seemed to feel superior to his wrestling teammates; I’d heretofore thought it was only the likes of Elaine and me he felt superior to. I saw that I’d underestimated Kittredge: He felt superior to everyone.

Richard cast Kittredge as the Clown, Feste—a very clever clown, and a somewhat cruel one. Like others of Shakespeare’s fools, Feste is smart and superior. (It’s no secret that Shakespeare’s fools are often wiser than the ladies and gentlemen they share the stage with; the Clown in Twelfth Night is one of those smart fools.) In fact, in most productions I’ve seen of Twelfth Night, Feste steals the show—Kittredge certainly did. That late winter of 1960, Kittredge stole more than the show.

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN as I crossed the quadrangle that night, following my conversation with Grandpa Harry, that the blue light in Elaine’s fifth-floor bedroom window was—as Kittredge had called it—a “beacon.” Kittredge had been right: That lamp with the blue shade was shining for him.

I’d once imagined that the blue light in Elaine’s bedroom window was the last light old Grau saw—if only dimly, as he lay freezing. (A far-fetched idea, perhaps. Dr. Grau had hit his head; he’d passed out in the snow. Old Grau probably saw no lights at all, not even dimly.)

But what had Kittredge seen in that blue light—what about that beacon had encouraged him? “I encouraged him, Billy,” Elaine would tell me later, but she didn’t tell me at the time; I had no idea she was fucking him.

And all the while, my good stepfather, Richard Abbott, was bringing me condoms—“Just to be safe, Bill,” Richard would say, as he bestowed another dozen rubbers on me. I had no use for them, but I kept them proudly; occasionally, I masturbated in one.

Of course, I should have given a dozen (or more) condoms to Elaine. I would have somehow summoned the courage to give them all to Kittredge, if I’d known!

Elaine didn’t tell me when she knew she was pregnant. It was the spring term, and Twelfth Night was only a few weeks away from production; we’d been off-script for a while, and our rehearsals were improving. Uncle Bob (as Sir Toby Belch) was making us howl every time he said, “‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’”

And Kittredge had a strong singing voice—he was quite a good singer. That song the Clown, Feste, sings to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew Aguecheek—the “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” song—well, it’s a sweet but melancholic kind of song. It’s the one that ends, “Youth’s a stuff will not endure.” It was hard to hear Kittredge sing that song as beautifully as he did, though the slight mockery in his voice—in Feste’s character, or in Kittredge’s—was unmistakable. (When I knew about Elaine being pregnant, I would remember a line from one of the middle stanzas of that song: “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”)

There’s no question that Elaine and Kittredge did their “meeting” in her fifth-floor bedroom. The Hadleys were still in the habit of going to the movies in Ezra Falls with Richard and my mom. I remember there were a few foreign films with subtitles that did not qualify as sex films. There was a Jacques Tati film showing in Vermont that year—Mon Oncle, was it, or maybe the earlier one, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday?—and I went to Ezra Falls with my mom and Richard, and with Mr. and Mrs. Hadley.

Elaine didn’t want to come; she stayed home. “It’s not a sex film, Elaine,” my mother had assured her. “It’s French, but it’s a comedy—it’s very light.”

“I don’t feel like light—I don’t feel like a comedy,” Elaine had said. She was already throwing up at Twelfth Night rehearsals, but no one had figured out that she had morning sickness.

Maybe that’s when Elaine told Kittredge that he’d knocked her up—when her family and mine were watching a Jacques Tati film, with subtitles, in Ezra Falls.

When Elaine knew she was pregnant, she eventually told her mother; either Martha Hadley or Mr. Hadley must have told Richard and my mom. I was in bed—naturally, I was wearing Elaine’s bra—when my mother burst into my bedroom. “Don’t, Jewel—try to take it easy,” I heard Richard saying, but my mom had already snapped on my light.

I sat up in bed, holding Elaine’s bra as if I were hiding my nonexistent breasts.

“Just look at you!” my mother cried. “Elaine is pregnant!”

“It wasn’t me,” I told her; she slapped me.

“Of course it wasn’t you—I know it wasn’t you, Billy!” my mom said. “But why wasn’t it you—why wasn’t it?” she cried. She went out of my room, sobbing, and Richard came in.

“It must have been Kittredge,” I said to Richard.

“Well, Bill—of course it’s Kittredge,” Richard said. He sat on the side of my bed, trying his hardest not to notice the bra. “You’ll have to forgive your mom—she’s upset,” he said.

I didn’t reply. I was thinking about what Mrs. Hadley had said to me—that bit about “certain sexual matters” upsetting my mother. (“Billy, I know there are things she’s kept from you,” Martha Hadley had told me.)

“I think Elaine will have to go away for a while,” Richard Abbott was saying.

“Away where?” I asked him, but Richard either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me; he just shook his head.

“I’m really sorry, Bill—I’m sorry about everything,” Richard said. I had just recently turned eighteen.

It was then I realized that I didn’t have a crush on Richard anymore—not even a slight one. I knew I loved Richard Abbott—I still do love him—but that night I’d found something I disliked about him. In a way, he was weak—he let my mother push him around. Whatever my mom had kept from me, I knew then that Richard was keeping it from me, too.

IT HAPPENS TO MANY teenagers—that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly. It happens to some teenagers when they’re younger than I was, but I was a brand-new eighteen when I simply tuned out my mother and Richard. I trusted Grandpa Harry more, and I still loved Uncle Bob. But Richard Abbott and my mom had drifted into that discredited area occupied by Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria—in their case, an area of carping, undermining commentary to be ignored or avoided. In the case of Richard and my mother, it was their secrecy I shunned.

As for the Hadleys, they sent Elaine “away” in stages. I can only guess what passed between Mrs. Kittredge and the Hadleys—the deals adults make aren’t often explained to kids—but Mr. and Mrs. Hadley agreed to let Kittredge’s mother take Elaine to Europe. I have no doubt that Elaine wanted the abortion. Martha Hadley and Mr. Hadley must have agreed it was best. It was definitely what Mrs. Kittredge had wanted. I’m guessing that, being French, she knew where to go in Europe; being Kittredge’s mom, she may have had some previous experience with an unwanted pregnancy.

At the time, I imagined that a boy like Kittredge had gotten girls pregnant before—he easily could have. But I was also thinking that Mrs. Kittredge might have needed to get herself out of a jam—I mean, when she was younger. It’s hard to explain what gave me that idea. I had overheard a conversation at a Twelfth Night rehearsal; I’d wandered into the middle of something Kittredge and his teammate Delacorte were saying—Delacorte, the rinser and spitter. It sounded as if they’d been arguing; it seemed to me that Delacorte was frightened of Kittredge, but so was everyone.

“No, I didn’t mean that—I just said she was the most beautiful mother of the mothers I’ve met. Your mom is the best-looking—that’s all I said,” Delacorte was anxiously saying; then he rinsed and spat.

“If she’s anyone’s mother, you mean,” Kittredge said. “She doesn’t have a very motherly look, does she? She looks like someone who’s asking for trouble—that’s what she looks like.”

“I didn’t say what your mom looks like,” Delacorte insisted. “I just said she was the most beautiful. She’s the best-looking mom of all the moms!”

“Maybe she doesn’t look like a mom because she isn’t one,” Kittredge said. Delacorte looked too frightened to speak; he just kept rinsing and spitting, clutching the two paper cups.

My idea that Mrs. Kittredge might have needed to get herself out of a jam came from Kittredge; he was the one who said, “She looks like someone who’s asking for trouble.”

Quite possibly, Mrs. Kittredge had more in mind than helping Elaine out of a jam; the deal she made with the Hadleys probably kept Kittredge in school. “Moral turpitude” was among the stated grounds for dismissal at Favorite River Academy. For a senior at the school to impregnate a faculty child—remember, Elaine was not yet eighteen; she was under the age of legal maturity—certainly struck me as base or depraved or vile behavior, but Kittredge stayed.

“You’re traveling with Kittredge’s mother—just the two of you?” I’d asked Elaine.

“Of course it’s just the two of us, Billy—who else needs to come along?” Elaine responded.

“Where in Europe?” I asked.

Elaine shrugged; she was still throwing up, though less frequently. “What does it matter where it is, Billy? It’s somewhere Jacqueline knows.”

“You’re calling her Jacqueline?”

“She asked me to call her Jacqueline—not Mrs. Kittredge.”

“Oh.”

Richard had cast Laura Gordon as Viola; Laura was now a senior in the high school in Ezra Falls. According to my cousin Gerry, Laura “put out”—not that I saw, but Gerry seemed well informed about such matters. (Gerry was a university student now, at last liberated from Ezra Falls.)

If Laura Gordon’s breasts had been too developed for her to be cast as Hedvig in The Wild Duck, they should have disqualified her for Viola, who somehow has to disguise herself as a man. (Laura would need to be wrapped flat with Ace bandages, and, even so, there was no flattening her.) But Richard knew that Laura could learn her lines on short notice; that she looked nothing like my twin notwithstanding, she wouldn’t be a bad Viola. The show went on, though Elaine would miss our performances; she would linger in Europe—recuperating, I could only guess.

The Clown’s song concludes Twelfth Night. Feste is alone onstage. “‘For the rain it raineth every day,’” Kittredge sang four times.

“The poor kid,” Kittredge had said to me, about Elaine. “Such bad luck—her first time, and everything.” As had happened to me before, I was speechless.

I didn’t notice that Kittredge’s German homework was any worse, or any better. I didn’t even notice my mother’s expression when she saw her father onstage as a woman. I was so upset about Elaine that I forgot about my plan to observe the prompter.

When I say that the Hadleys sent Elaine away “in stages,” I mean that the trip to Europe—not to mention the obvious reason for that trip—was just the beginning.

The Hadleys had decided that their dormitory apartment in an all-boys’ school was the wrong place for Elaine to finish her high school years. They would send her away to an all-girls’ boarding school, but not until the fall. That spring of 1960 was a write-off for Elaine, and she would have to repeat her sophomore year.

It was said publicly that Elaine had had “a nervous breakdown,” but everyone in a town as small as First Sister, Vermont, knew what had happened when a girl of high school age withdrew from school. Everyone at Favorite River Academy knew what had happened to Elaine, too. Even Atkins understood. I came out of Mrs. Hadley’s office in the music building, not long after Elaine had disembarked for Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. Martha Hadley had been undone by the ease with which I’d pronounced the abortion word; she’d dismissed me from our appointment twenty minutes early, and I encountered Atkins on the stairwell between the first and second floors. I could see it crossing his mind—that it was not yet time for his appointment with Mrs. Hadley, but his struggle with the time word clearly prevented him from saying it. Instead he said, “What kind of breakdown was it? What does Elaine have to be nervous about?”

“I think you know,” I said to him. Atkins had an anxious, feral-looking face, but with dazzling blue eyes and a girl’s smooth complexion. He was a junior, like me, but he looked younger—he wasn’t yet shaving.

“She’s pregnant, isn’t she? It was Kittredge, wasn’t it? That’s what everybody’s saying, and he isn’t denying it,” Atkins said. “Elaine was really nice—she always said something nice to me, anyway,” he added.

“Elaine really is nice,” I told him.

“But what’s she doing with Kittredge’s mother? Have you seen Kittredge’s mom? She’s not like a mom. She’s like one of those old movie stars who is secretly a witch or a dragon!” Atkins declared.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I told him.

“A woman who used to be that beautiful can never accept how—” Atkins stopped.

“How time passes?” I guessed.

“Yes!” he cried. “Women like Mrs. Kittredge hate young girls. Kittredge told me,” Atkins added. “His dad left his mom for a younger woman—she wasn’t more beautiful, just younger.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t imagine traveling with Kittredge’s mother!” Atkins exclaimed. “Will Elaine have her own room?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I told him. I hadn’t thought about Elaine sharing a room with Mrs. Kittredge; it gave me the shivers just to think about it. What if she wasn’t Kittredge’s mother, or anyone’s mother? But Mrs. Kittredge had to be Kittredge’s mom; there was no way those two were unrelated.

Atkins had inched his way past me, up the stairs. I took a step or two down the stairs; I thought we were through talking. Suddenly Atkins said, “Not everyone here understands people like us, but Elaine did—Mrs. Hadley does, too.”

“Yes,” was all I said, continuing down the stairs. I tried not to consider too carefully what he’d meant by people like us, but I was sure that Atkins wasn’t exclusively referring to our pronunciation problems. Had Atkins made a pass at me? I wondered, as I crossed the quad. Was that the first pass that a boy like me ever made at me?

The sky was lighter now—it didn’t get dark so soon in the afternoon—but it would already be past nightfall in Europe, I knew. Elaine would be going to bed soon, in a room of her own or not. It was warmer now, too—not that there was ever much of a spring in Vermont—but I shivered as I crossed the quadrangle, on my way to my Twelfth Night rehearsal. I should have been thinking of my lines, of what Sebastian says, but I could only think of that song the Clown sings before the final curtain—Feste’s song, the one Kittredge sang. (“For the rain it raineth every day.”)

Just then, it began to rain, and I thought about how Elaine’s life had been changed forever, while I was still just acting.

I HAVE KEPT THE photographs Elaine sent me; they were never very good photos, just black-and-white or color snapshots. Because of how many of my desktops these pictures have sat on—often in sunlight, and for so many years—the photographs are badly faded, but of course I have no trouble recalling the circumstances.

I just wish that Elaine had sent me some pictures of her trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, but who would have taken those photographs? I can’t imagine Elaine snapping photos of Kittredge’s fashion-model mother—doing what? Brushing her teeth, reading in bed, getting dressed or undressed? And what might Elaine have been doing to inspire the artist-as-photographer in Mrs. Kittredge? Vomiting into a toilet from a kneeling position? Waiting, nauseated, in the lobby of this or that hotel, because her room—or the room she would share with Kittredge’s mom—wasn’t ready?

I doubt there were many photo opportunities that captured Mrs. Kittredge’s imagination. Not the visit to the doctor’s office—or was it a clinic?—and certainly not the messy but matter-of-fact procedure itself. (Elaine was in her first trimester. I’m sure the procedure was a standard dilation and curettage—you know, the usual scraping.)

Elaine would later tell me that, after the abortion, when she was still taking the painkillers—when Mrs. Kittredge would regularly check the amount of blood on the pad, to be sure the bleeding was “normal”—Kittredge’s mom felt her forehead, to ascertain that Elaine didn’t have a fever, and that was when Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine those outrageous stories.

I used to think the painkillers might have been a factor in what Elaine remembered, or believed she heard, in those stories. “The painkillers weren’t that strong, and I didn’t take them for more than a day or two,” Elaine always said. “I wasn’t in a whole lot of pain, Billy.”

“But weren’t you drinking wine? You told me that Mrs. Kittredge gave you all the red wine you wanted,” I would remind Elaine. “I’m sure that you weren’t supposed to mix the painkillers with alcohol.”

“I never had more than a glass or two of red wine, Billy,” Elaine always told me. “I heard every word that Jacqueline said. Either those stories are true, or Jacqueline was lying to me—and why would anyone’s mother lie about that kind of thing?”

Admittedly, I don’t know why “anyone’s mother” would make up stories about her only child—at least, not that kind—but I don’t hold Kittredge or his mom in the highest moral esteem. Whatever I believed, or didn’t, about the stories Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine, Elaine seemed to believe every word.

According to Mrs. Kittredge, her only child was a sickly little boy; he had no confidence in himself and was picked on by the other children, especially by the boys. While this was truly difficult to imagine, it was even harder to believe that Kittredge was once intimidated by girls; he apparently was so shy that he stuttered when he tried to talk to girls, and the girls either teased him or ignored him.

In the seventh grade, Kittredge would fake being sick so that he could stay home from school—these were “very competitive schools,” in Paris and New York, Mrs. Kittredge had explained to Elaine—and at the start of eighth grade, he’d stopped talking to both the boys and the girls in his class.

“So I seduced him—it’s not as if I had lots of other options,” Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine. “The poor boy—he had to gain a little confidence somewhere!”

“I guess he gained quite a lot of confidence,” Elaine ventured to say to Kittredge’s mom, who’d simply shrugged.

Mrs. Kittredge had an insouciant shrug; one can only wonder if she was born with it, or if—after her husband had left her for a younger but indisputably less attractive woman—she’d developed an instinctive indifference to any kind of rejection.

Mrs. Kittredge matter-of-factly told Elaine that she’d slept with her son “as much as he’d wanted to,” but only until Kittredge demonstrated a lack of fervor or a wandering sexual attention span. “He can’t help it that he loses interest every twenty-four hours,” Kittredge’s mom told Elaine. “He didn’t gain all that confidence by being bored—believe me.”

Did Mrs. Kittredge imagine she was giving Elaine what amounted to an excuse for her son’s behavior? All the time she was talking, Mrs. Kittredge went on checking to see if the blood on Elaine’s pad was “normal,” or feeling Elaine’s forehead to be sure she didn’t have a fever.

There are no pictures of their time together in Europe—only what I have managed (over the years) to coax out of Elaine, and what I’ve inevitably imagined of my dear friend aborting Kittredge’s child, and her subsequent recuperation in the company of Kittredge’s mother. If Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her own son, so that he might gain a little confidence, did this explain why Kittredge felt so strongly that his mom was somewhat less (or maybe more) than motherly?

“For how long did Kittredge have sex with his mom?” I asked Elaine.

“That eighth-grade year, when he would have been thirteen and fourteen,” Elaine answered, “and maybe three or four times after he’d started at Favorite River—he would have been fifteen when it stopped.”

“Why did it stop?” I asked Elaine—not that I completely believed it had happened!

Perhaps the insouciance of Elaine’s shrug was something she’d picked up from Mrs. Kittredge.

“Knowing Kittredge, I suppose he got tired of it,” Elaine had said. She was packing her bags for what would be her sophomore year at Northfield—fall term, 1960—and we were in her bedroom in Bancroft. It would have been late August; it was hot in that room. The lamp with the dark-blue shade had been replaced with a colorless job, like the desk lamp in an anonymous office, and Elaine had cut her hair short—almost like a boy’s.

Although the phases of her going away would be marked by an increasingly conscious masculinity in her appearance, Elaine said she would never be in a lesbian relationship; yet she told me she’d experimented with being a lesbian. Had she “experimented” with Mrs. Kittredge? If Elaine had ever been attracted to women, I imagined how Mrs. Kittredge might have ended that, but Elaine was vague about it. I think of my dear friend as someone doomed to be attracted to the wrong men, but Elaine was vague about that, too. “They’re just not the sort of men who last,” was how she put it.

AS FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHS: The pictures Elaine sent me of her three years at Northfield are the ones I have kept. They may be black-and-white or color, and utterly amateur snapshots, but they are not as artless as they first appear.

I’ll begin with the photo of Elaine standing on the porch of a three-story wooden house; she doesn’t look like she belongs there—perhaps she was only visiting. Together with the name of the building, and the date of its construction—Moore Cottage, 1899—there is also this hope expressed, in Elaine’s careful longhand, on the back of the photograph: I wish this were my dorm. (Apparently, it wasn’t—nor would it be.)

On the ground floor of Moore Cottage, there were wooden clapboards, painted white, but there were white-painted wooden shingles on the second and third floors—as if to suggest not only the passage of time but a lingering indecision. Possibly this uncertainty had to do with Moore Cottage’s use. Over the years, it would be used as a dormitory for girls—later, as a guesthouse for visiting parents. From the spread-out look of the building, there were probably a dozen or more bedrooms—far fewer bathrooms, I’ll bet—and a large kitchen with an adjoining common room.

More bathrooms might have made the visiting parents happier, whereas the students (when they lived there) were long accustomed to making do with less. The porch, where Elaine stood—she seemed uncharacteristically unsure of herself—had a contradictory appearance. What use do students have for porches? In a good school, which Northfield was, students are too busy for porches, which are better suited for people with more time for leisure—such as guests.

In the picture of herself on the porch at Moore Cottage—it was among the very first of the photographs Elaine sent me from Northfield—maybe she felt like a guest. Curiously, there is someone in the window of one of the ground-floor rooms overlooking the porch: a woman of indeterminate age, to judge her by her clothes and the length of her hair—her face lost in the shadows, or obscured by an unclear reflection in the window.

Also among the earliest photos Elaine sent me from her new school, which was, in fact, a very old school, was that picture of the birthplace of Dwight L. Moody. Our founder’s birthplace, alleged to be haunted, Elaine had written on the back of this photo, though that can’t be the ghost of D.L. himself in a small upstairs window of the birthplace. It is a woman’s face in profile—neither young nor old, but definitely pretty—her expression unknown. Elaine, smiling, is in the foreground of the photograph; she appears to be pointing in the direction of that upstairs window. (Maybe the girl was a friend of hers, or so I first imagined.)

Then there’s the picture labeled The Auditorium, 1894—on a slight hill. I guess Elaine meant “slight” by Vermont standards. (I remember it as the first of the photos where the mystery woman seemed to be consciously posed; after seeing this picture, I began to look for her.) The Auditorium was a red-brick building with arched windows and doorways, and with two castle-size towers. A shadow cast by one of the towers fell across the lawn where Elaine was standing, near the trunk of an imposing tree. Sticking out, from behind the tree—in sunlight, not in the tower’s shadow—was a woman’s shapely leg. Her foot, which was pointed toward Elaine, was in a dark and sensible shoe; her kneesock was properly pulled up to her bare knee, above which her long gray skirt had been hiked to mid-thigh.

“Who’s the other girl, or woman?” I’d asked Elaine.

“I don’t know who you mean,” Elaine replied. “What girl or woman?”

“In the pictures. There’s always someone else there, in the photographs,” I said. “Come on—you can tell me. Who is it—a friend of yours, maybe, or a teacher?”

In the photo of East Hall, the woman’s face is very small—and partially hidden by a scarf—in an upper-story window. East Hall was, evidently, a dormitory, though Elaine didn’t say; the fire escape gave it away.

In the picture of Stone Hall, there is a clock tower of that copper-green color, and very tall windows; it must have had warm light inside, on those few ungray days in the school-year months in western Massachusetts. Elaine is somewhat awkwardly positioned at the far side of the photograph; she is facing the camera, but she is standing almost perfectly back-to-back with someone. You can count two or three extra fingers on Elaine’s left hand; holding her right hip is a third hand.

There’s the one of the school chapel, I guess you would call it—a massive-looking cathedral with one of those big wooden doors inlaid with cast iron. A woman’s bare arm is holding the heavy-looking door open for Elaine, who seems not to notice the arm—a bracelet on the wrist, rings on both the pinkie and the index finger—or maybe Elaine didn’t care whether or not the woman was there. One can read the Latin engraved on the chapel: ANNO DOMINI MDCCCCVIII. Elaine had translated this on the back of the photo: In the year of the Lord 1908. (She’d added, Where I want to get married, if I’m ever desperate enough to get married—if so, please just shoot me.)

I believe I love best the picture of Margaret Olivia Hall, Northfield’s music building, because I knew how much Elaine loved to sing—singing was one thing her big voice was born to do. (“I love to sing until I cry, and then sing some more,” she once wrote to me.)

The names of composers were engraved between the upper-story windows of the music hall; I have memorized the names. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini. In the window above the u in Gluck, which had been carved like a v, was a headless woman—just her torso—wearing only a bra. Unlike Elaine, who is leaning against the building, the headless woman in the window has very noticeable breasts—big ones.

“Who is she?” I asked Elaine, again and again.

If you didn’t know it already, the music building with the names of those composers was an accurate indication of how sophisticated a school Northfield was; it put a place like Favorite River Academy to shame. It was a quantum leap heavenward from what Elaine had been used to at the public high school in Ezra Falls.

Most of the prep schools in New England were single-sex schools at that time. Many all-boys’ schools provided faculty daughters with a tuition stipend; the girls could attend an all-girls’ boarding school, and not be adrift in whatever public high school served the community. (To be fair: The public schools in Vermont were not all as bad as the one in Ezra Falls.)

As a result of the Hadleys’ sending Elaine to Northfield—at first, at their expense—Favorite River did the right thing: It provided what amounted to vouchers for its faculty daughters. I would never hear the end of it from my crude cousin Gerry—namely, that this change in policy had happened too late to rescue her from the public high school in Ezra Falls. As I’ve said, Gerry was a college girl that same spring when Elaine traveled to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. “I guess I would have been wise to get myself knocked up a few years ago—provided the lucky guy had a French mother,” was how Gerry put it. (I could easily imagine Muriel saying this when Muriel had been a teenager—although, after staring nonstop at my aunt’s breasts in Twelfth Night, it was terrifying to think of Aunt Muriel as a teenager.)

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.