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"Your mother is very beautiful," I told him. I genuinely meant this, in the nicest possible way.
"Your mom is hotter," Kittredge told me matter-of-factly. There was no hint of sarcasm, nor anything the slightest suggestive, in his remark; he spoke in the same empirical way in which he'd said his mother (or the woman who wasn't his mother) was in Paris. Soon, the hot word, the way Kittredge meant it, would be the rage at Favorite River.
Later, Elaine would say to me, "What are you doing, Billy--trying to be his friend?"
Elaine was an excellent Miranda, though opening night was not her best performance; she'd needed prompting. It was probably my fault.
"Good wombs have borne bad sons," Miranda says to her father--in reference to Antonio, Prospero's brother.
I'd talked to Elaine about the good-wombs idea, possibly too much. I'd told Elaine my own ideas about my biological father--how whatever seemed bad in me I had ascribed to the code-boy, to the sergeant's genes (not my mom's). At the time, I still counted my mother among the good wombs in the world. She may have been embarrassingly seducible--the very word I used to describe my mom to Elaine--but Mary Marshall Dean or Abbott was essentially innocent of any wrongdoing. Maybe my mother was gullible, occasionally backward--I said this to Elaine, in lieu of the retarded word--but never "bad."
Admittedly, it was funny how I couldn't pronounce the wombs word--not even the singular. Both Elaine and I had laughed about how hard I came down on the letter b.
"It's a silent b, Billy!" Elaine had cried. "You don't say the b!"
It was comical, even to me. What need did I have of the womb (or wombs) word?
But I'm sure this was why Elaine had moms on her mind on opening night--"Good moms have borne bad sons," Elaine (as Miranda) almost said. Elaine must have heard the moms word coming; she stopped herself short after "Good--" There was then what every actor fears: an incriminating silence.
"Wombs," my mother whispered; she had a prompter's perfect whisper--it was almost inaudible.
"Wombs!" Elaine Hadley had shouted. Richard (as Prospero) had jumped. "Good wombs have borne bad sons!" Miranda, back in character, too emphatically said. It didn't happen again.
Naturally, Kittredge would say something to Elaine about it--after our opening-night performance.
"You need to work on the wombs word, Naples," he told her. "It's probably a word that causes you some nervous excitement. You should try saying to yourself, 'Every woman has a womb--even I have a womb. Wombs are no big deal.' We can work on saying this together--if it helps. You know, I say 'womb,' you say 'wombs are no big deal,' or I say 'wombs,' and you say 'I've got one!'--that kind of thing."
"Thanks, Kittredge," Elaine said. "How very thoughtful." She was biting her lower lip, which I knew she did only when she was pining for him and hating herself for it. (I was accustomed to the feeling.)
Then suddenly, after months of such histrionic closeness, our contact with Kittredge was over; Elaine and I were despondent. Richard tried to talk to us about the postpartum depression that occasionally descends on actors following a play. "We didn't give birth to The Tempest," Elaine said impatiently. "Shakespeare did!"
Speaking strictly for myself, I missed running lines on Miss Frost's brass bed, too, but when I confessed this to Elaine, she said, "Why? It's not like we ever fooled around, or anything."
I was increasingly fond of Elaine, if not in that way, but you have to be careful what you say to your friends when you're trying too hard to make them feel better.
"Well, it wasn't because I didn't want to fool around with you," I told her.
We were in Elaine's bedroom--with the door open--on a Saturday night at the start of winter term. This would have been the New Year, 1960, though our ages hadn't changed; I was still seventeen, and Elaine was sixteen. It was movie night at Favorite River Academy, and from Elaine's bedroom window, we could see the flickering light of the movie projector in the new onion-shaped gym, which was attached to the old gym--where, on winter weekends, Elaine and I often watched Kittredge wrestle. Not this weekend; the wrestlers were away, competing somewhere to t
he south of us--at Mount Hermon, maybe, or at Loomis.
When the team buses returned, Elaine and I would see them from her fifth-floor bedroom window. Even in the January cold, with all the windows closed, the sound of shouting boys reverberated in the quadrangle of dormitories. The wrestlers, and the other athletes, would carry their gear from the buses to the new gym, where the lockers and the showers were. If the movie was still playing, some of the jocks would stay in the gym to see the end.
But they were showing a Western on this Saturday night; only morons watched the end of a Western without seeing the beginning of the movie--the endings were all the same. (There would be a shoot-out, a predictable comeuppance.) Elaine and I had been betting on whether or not Kittredge would stay in the gym to see the end of the Western--that is, if the wrestling-team bus returned before the movie was over.
"Kittredge isn't stupid," Elaine had said. "He won't hang around the gym to watch the final fifteen minutes of a horse opera." (Elaine had a low opinion of Westerns, which she called "horse operas" only when she was being kind; she more often called them "male propaganda.")
"Kittredge is a jock--he'll hang around the gym with the other jocks," I had said. "It doesn't matter what the movie is."
The jocks who did not hang around the gym after their road trips didn't have far to go. The jock dorm, which was called Tilley, was a five-story brick rectangle next to the gym. For whatever mindless reason, the jocks always whooped it up in the quad of dorms when they walked or ran to Tilley from the gym.
Mr. Hadley and his homely wife, Martha, were out; they'd gone off with Richard and my mom--as they often did together, especially when there was a foreign film playing in Ezra Falls. The marquee at the movie house in Ezra Falls capitalized it when a film had SUBTITLES. This wasn't just a warning to those local Vermonters who were disinclined (or unable) to read subtitles; this amounted to a caveat of a different kind--namely, that a foreign film was likely to have more sexual content than many Vermonters were used to.
When my mom and Richard and the Hadleys went to Ezra Falls to see those films with subtitles, Elaine and I weren't usually invited. Therefore, while our parents were out watching sex movies, Elaine and I were alone--either in her bedroom or in mine, always with the door open.
Elaine did not attend movie night in the Favorite River gym--not even when they weren't showing a Western. The atmosphere in the academy gym on movie nights was too all-boys for Elaine's liking. Faculty daughters of a certain age did not feel comfortable in that young-male environment. There was intentional farting, and far worse signs of loutish behavior. Elaine hypothesized that if they showed the foreign sex films in the academy gym on movie nights, some of the boys would beat off on the basketball court.
Generally, when we were left alone, Elaine and I preferred her bedroom to mine. The Hadleys' fifth-floor dormitory apartment had more of an overview of the quad; Richard and my mom's apartment, and my bedroom, were on the third floor of the dorm. Our dormitory was called Bancroft, and there was a bust of old Bancroft, a long-dead professor emeritus at Favorite River, in the ground-floor common room--the butt room, it was called. Bancroft (or at least his bust) was bald, and he had bushy eyebrows.
