In One Person

jam—I mean, when she was younger. It’s hard to explain what gave me that idea. I had overheard a conversation at a
Twelfth Night
rehearsal; I’d wandered into the middle of something Kittredge and his teammate Delacorte were saying—Delacorte, the rinser and spitter. It sounded as if they’d been arguing; it seemed to me that Delacorte was frightened of Kittredge, but so was everyone.
    “No, I didn’t mean that—I just said she was the most beautiful mother of the mothers I’ve met. Your mom is the best-looking—that’s all I said,” Delacorte was anxiously saying; then he rinsed and spat.
    “If she’s anyone’s mother, you mean,” Kittredge said. “She doesn’t have a very
motherly
look, does she? She looks like someone who’s asking for trouble—
that’s
what she looks like.”
    “I didn’t say what your mom looks
like
,” Delacorte insisted. “I just said she was the most beautiful. She’s the best-looking mom of
all
the moms!”
    “Maybe she doesn’t look like a mom because she
isn’t
one,” Kittredge said. Delacorte looked too frightened to speak; he just kept rinsing and spitting, clutching the two paper cups.
    My idea that Mrs. Kittredge might have needed to get herself out of a jam came from
Kittredge
; he was the one who said, “She looks like someone who’s asking for trouble.”
    Quite possibly, Mrs. Kittredge had more in mind than helping Elaine out of a jam; the deal she made with the Hadleys probably kept Kittredge in school. “Moral turpitude” was among the stated grounds for dismissal at Favorite River Academy. For a senior at the school to impregnate a faculty child—remember, Elaine was not yet eighteen; she was under the age of legal maturity—certainly struck me as base or depraved or vile behavior, but Kittredge stayed.
    “You’re
traveling
with Kittredge’s mother—just the two of you?” I’d asked Elaine.
    “Of course it’s just the two of us, Billy—who
else
needs to come along?” Elaine responded.
    “
Where
in Europe?” I asked.
    Elaine shrugged; she was still throwing up, though less frequently. “What does it matter where it is, Billy? It’s somewhere Jacqueline knows.”
    “You’re calling her Jacqueline?”
    “She asked me to call her Jacqueline—not Mrs. Kittredge.”
    “Oh.”
    Richard had cast Laura Gordon as Viola; Laura was now a senior in the high school in Ezra Falls. According to my cousin Gerry, Laura “put out”—not that I saw, but Gerry seemed well informed about such matters. (Gerry was a university student now, at last liberated from Ezra Falls.)
    If Laura Gordon’s breasts had been too developed for her to be cast as Hedvig in
The Wild Duck
, they should have disqualified her for Viola, who somehow has to disguise herself as a man. (Laura would need to be wrapped flat with Ace bandages, and, even so, there was no flattening her.) But Richard knew that Laura could learn her lines on short notice; that she looked nothing like my twin notwithstanding, she wouldn’t be a bad Viola. The show went on, though Elaine would miss our performances; she would linger in Europe—recuperating, I could only guess.
    The Clown’s song concludes
Twelfth Night
. Feste is alone onstage. “‘For the rain it raineth every day,’” Kittredge sang four times.
    “The poor kid,” Kittredge had said to me, about Elaine. “Such bad luck—her first time, and everything.” As had happened to me before, I was speechless.
    I didn’t notice that Kittredge’s German homework was any worse, or any better. I didn’t even notice my mother’s expression when she saw her father onstage as a woman. I was so upset about Elaine that I forgot about my plan to observe the prompter.
    When I say that the Hadleys sent Elaine away “in stages,” I mean that the trip to Europe—not to mention the obvious reason for that trip—was just the beginning.
    The Hadleys had decided that their dormitory apartment in an all-boys’ school was the wrong place for Elaine to finish her high school years. They would send her away to an all-girls’ boarding school, but not until the fall. That spring of 1960 was a write-off for Elaine, and she would have to repeat her sophomore year.
    It was said publicly that Elaine had had “a nervous breakdown,” but everyone in a town as small as First Sister, Vermont, knew what had happened when a girl of high school age withdrew from school. Everyone at Favorite River Academy knew what had happened to Elaine, too.