In One Person

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 the 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,