In One Person

Jacques Kittredge—she better watch out for him! That Kittredge is a boy who doesn’t just want to
seduce
women—he wants women to
submit
to him!” my mother said.
    “Jewel, Jewel—let it rest,” Richard Abbott was saying.
    “You don’t know everything, Richard,” my mother told him.
    “No, I don’t,” Richard admitted.
    “I know boys like Kittredge,” my mom said; she said it to me, not to Richard—even so, she blushed.
    It occurred to me that, when my mother was angry at me, it was because she saw something of my
womanizing
father in me—perhaps, increasingly, I looked like him. (As if I could help
that!)
    I thought of Elaine’s bra, which was waiting for me under my pillow—“more a matter of habiliment than anything organic,” as Richard had said about Ariel’s gender. (If that small padded bra didn’t fit the
habiliment
word, what did?)
    “What was the foreign film about?” I asked Richard.
    “It’s not an appropriate subject for
you
,” my mother told me. “Don’t you tell him about it, Richard,” my mother said.
    “Sorry, Bill,” Richard said sheepishly.
    “Nothing Shakespeare would have shied away from, I’ll bet,” I said to Richard, but I kept looking at my mom. She wouldn’t look at me; she went back inside her bedroom and closed the door.
    If I was less than forthcoming to my one true friend, Elaine Hadley, I needed only to think of my mother; if I couldn’t tell Richard about my crush on Kittredge, or admit to Miss Frost that I loved her, I had no doubt concerning where my lack of candor came from. (From my mother, unquestionably, but possibly from my
womanizing
father, too. Maybe from both of them, it only now occurred to me.)
    “Good night, Richard—I love you,” I said to my stepfather. He quickly kissed me on my forehead.
    “Good night, Bill—I love you, too,” Richard said. He gave me a please-forgive-me kind of smile. I really did love him, but I was fighting against my disappointment in him at the same time.
    Also, I was mortally tired; it is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are, and Elaine’s bra was summoning me to my bed.

Chapter
5
    L EAVING E SMERALDA
    Perhaps you need to have your world change, your entire world, to understand why anyone would write an epilogue—not to mention why there is an act 5 to
The Tempest
, and why the epilogue to that play (spoken by Prospero) is absolutely fitting. When I made that juvenile criticism of
The Tempest
, my world hadn’t changed.
    “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” Prospero begins the epilogue—not unlike the way Kittredge might have started a conversation, offhand and innocent-seeming.
    That winter of 1960, when Elaine and I were continuing our masquerade, which even extended to our holding hands while we watched Kittredge wrestle, was marked by Martha Hadley’s first official efforts to address the probable cause (or causes) of my pronunciation problems. I use the
official
word because I made appointments to see Mrs. Hadley, and I met with her in her office—it was in the academy music building.
    At seventeen, I’d not yet seen a psychiatrist; had I ever been tempted to talk to Herr Doktor Grau, I’m certain that my beloved stepfather, Richard Abbott, would have persuaded me not to. Besides, that same winter when I was faithfully keeping my appointments with Mrs. Hadley, old Grau died. Favorite River Academy would eventually replace him with a younger (if no less modern) school psychiatrist, but not before the fall term of the next academic year.
    Moreover, while I was seeing Martha Hadley, I had no need of a psychiatrist; in the ferreting out of those myriad words I couldn’t pronounce, and in her far-reaching speculations regarding the reason (or reasons) for my mispronunciations, Mrs. Hadley, an expert voice and singing teacher, became my first psychiatrist.
    My closer contact with her gave me a better understanding of my attraction to her—her homeliness notwithstanding. Martha Hadley had a masculine kind of homeliness; she was thin-lipped but she had a big mouth, and big teeth. Her jaw was as prominent as Kittredge’s, but her neck was long and contrastingly feminine; she had broad shoulders and big hands, like Miss Frost. Mrs. Hadley’s hair was longer than Miss Frost’s, and she wore it in a severe ponytail. Her flat chest never failed to remind me of Elaine’s overlarge nipples, and those darker-skinned rings around them—the areolae, which I imagined were a