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I'd always believed that Richard Abbott was a vastly better man than my mother deserved, and that Martha Hadley was entirely too good for Mr. Hadley. Not only could I never remember that man's first name, if he ever had one; something about Mr. Hadley's fleeting brush with fame--the fame was due to his emergence as a political historian, and a voice of protest, during the Vietnam War--had served to dislocate him. If he'd once appeared aloof from his family--not only remote-seeming to his wife, Mrs. Hadley, but even distant from his only child, Elaine--Mr. Hadley's identification with a cause (his anti-Vietnam crusades with the Favorite River students) completely severed him from Elaine and Martha Hadley, and further led him to have little (if anything) to do with adults.
It happens in boarding schools: There's occasionally a male faculty member who is unhappy with his life as a grown-up. He tries to become one of the students. In Mr. Hadley's case--according to Elaine--his unfortunate regression to become one of the students when he himself was already in his fifties coincided with Favorite River Academy's decision to admit girls. This was just two years before the end of the Vietnam War.
"Uh-oh," as I'd heard Elaine say, so many times, but this time she'd added something. "When the war is over, what crusade will my father be leading? How's he going to engage all those girls?"
Elaine and I didn't see my uncle Bob until the "party." I had just read the Racquet Man's query in the most recent issue of The River Bulletin; attached to the class notes for the Class of '61, which was my class, there was this plaintive entry in the "Cries for Help from the Where-Have-You-Gone? Dept."
"What's up with you, Jacques Kittredge?" Uncle Bob had written. Following his undergraduate degree from Yale ('65), Kittredge had completed a three-year residence at the Yale School of Drama; he'd earned an MFA in '67. Thereafter, we'd heard nothing.
"An MFA in fucking what?" Elaine had asked more than ten years ago--when The River Bulletin had last heard a word from (or about) Kittredge. Elaine meant that it could have been a degree in acting, design, sound design, directing, playwriting, stage management, technical design and production, theater management--even dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. "I'll bet he's a fucking critic," Elaine said. I told her I didn't care what Kittredge was; I said I didn't want to know.
"Yes, you do want to know. You can't bullshit me, Billy," Elaine had said.
Now here was the Racquet Man, slumped on a couch--actually sunken into a couch in Grandpa Harry's living room, as if it would take a wrestling team to get Bob back on his feet.
"I'm sorry about Aunt Muriel," I told him. Uncle Bob reached up from the couch to give me a hug, spilling his beer.
"Shit, Billy," Bob said, "it's the people you would least expect who are disappearing."
"Disappearing," I repeated warily.
"Take your classmate, Billy. Who would have picked Kittredge as a likely disappearance?" Uncle Bob asked.
"You don't think he's dead, do you?" I asked the Racquet Man.
"An unwillingness to communicate is more likely," Uncle Bob said. His speech was so slowed down that the communicate word sounded as if it had seven or eight syllables; I realized that Bob was quietly but spectacularly drunk, although the gathering in memory of my aunt Muriel and my mother was just getting started.
There were some empty beer bottles at Bob's feet; when he dropped the now-empty bottle he'd been drinking (and spilling), he deftly kicked all but one of the bottles under the couch--somehow, without even looking at the bottles.
I'd once wondered if Kittredge had gone to Vietnam; he'd had that hero-looking aspect about him. I knew two other Favorite River wrestlers had died in the war. (Remember Wheelock? I barely remember him--an adequately "swashbuckling" Antonio, Sebastian's friend, in Twelfth Night. And how about Madden, the self-pitying heavyweight who played Malvolio in that same production? Madden always saw himself as a "perpetual victim"; that's all I remember about him.)
But, drunk as he was, Uncle Bob must have read my mind, because he suddenly said, "Knowing Kittredge, I'll bet he ducked Vietnam--somehow."
"I'll bet he did," was all I said to Bob.
"No offense, Billy," the Racquet Man added, accepting another beer from one of the passing caterers--a woman about my mom's age, or Muriel's, with dyed-red hair. She looked vaguely familiar; maybe she worked with Uncle Bob in Alumni Affairs, or she might have worked with him (years ago) in the Admissions Office.
"My dad was sloshed before he got here," Gerry told Elaine and me, when we were standing together in the line for the buffet. I knew Gerry's girlfriend; she was an occasional stand-up comic at a club I went to in the Village. She had a deadpan delivery and always wore a man's black suit, or a tuxedo, with a loose-fitting white dress shirt.
"No bra," Elaine had observed, "but the shirt's too big for her, and it's not see-through material. The point is, she doesn't want you to know she has breasts--or what they look like."
"Oh."
"I'm sorry about your mom, Billy," Gerry said. "I know she was completely dysfunctional, but she was your mother."
"I'm sorry about yours," I told Gerry. The stand-up comic made a horsey snorting sound.
"Not as deadpan as usual," Elaine would say later.
"Someone's gotta get the car keys from my f
ucking father," Gerry said.
I was keeping an eye on Grandpa Harry. I was afraid he would sneak away from the party, only to reappear as a surprise reincarnation of Nana Victoria. Nils Borkman was keeping an eye on his old partner, too. (If Mrs. Borkman was there, I either didn't see her or didn't recognize her.)
"I'm back-watching your grandfather, Bill," Nils told me. "If the funny stuff gets out of hand, I am emergency-calling you!"
"What funny stuff?" I asked him.
