In One Person

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 farfetched 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