In One Person

Even Atkins understood. I came out of Mrs. Hadley’s office in the music building, not long after Elaine had disembarked for Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. Martha Hadley had been undone by the ease with which I’d pronounced the
abortion
word; she’d dismissed me from our appointment twenty minutes early, and I encountered Atkins on the stairwell between the first and second floors. I could see it crossing his mind—that it was not yet time for his appointment with Mrs. Hadley, but his struggle with the
time
word clearly prevented him from saying it. Instead he said, “What kind of breakdown was it? What does Elaine have to be
nervous
about?”
    “I think you know,” I said to him. Atkins had an anxious, feral-looking face, but with dazzling blue eyes and a girl’s smooth complexion. He was a junior, like me, but he looked younger—he wasn’t yet shaving.
    “She’s pregnant, isn’t she? It was Kittredge, wasn’t it? That’s what everybody’s saying, and he isn’t denying it,” Atkins said. “Elaine was really nice—she always said something nice to me, anyway,” he added.
    “Elaine really
is
nice,” I told him.
    “But what’s she doing with Kittredge’s
mother
? Have you
seen
Kittredge’s mom? She’s not like a mom. She’s like one of those old movie stars who is secretly a witch or a dragon!” Atkins declared.
    “I don’t know what you mean,” I told him.
    “A woman who used to be that beautiful can never accept how—” Atkins stopped.
    “How time passes?” I guessed.
    “Yes!” he cried. “Women like Mrs. Kittredge
hate
young girls. Kittredge told me,” Atkins added. “His dad left his mom for a younger woman—she wasn’t more beautiful, just younger.”
    “Oh.”
    “I can’t imagine traveling with Kittredge’s mother!” Atkins exclaimed. “Will Elaine have her own room?” he asked me.
    “I don’t know,” I told him. I hadn’t thought about Elaine sharing a room with Mrs. Kittredge; it gave me the shivers just to think about it. What if she
wasn’t
Kittredge’s mother, or
anyone’s
mother? But Mrs. Kittredge
had
to be Kittredge’s mom; there was no way those two were unrelated.
    Atkins had inched his way past me, up the stairs. I took a step or two down the stairs; I thought we were through talking. Suddenly Atkins said, “Not everyone here understands people like us, but Elaine did—Mrs. Hadley does, too.”
    “Yes,” was all I said, continuing down the stairs. I tried not to consider too carefully what he’d meant by
people like us
, but I was sure that Atkins wasn’t exclusively referring to our pronunciation problems. Had Atkins made a pass at me? I wondered, as I crossed the quad. Was that the first pass that a boy
like me
ever made at me?
    The sky was lighter now—it didn’t get dark so soon in the afternoon—but it would already be past nightfall in Europe, I knew. Elaine would be going to bed soon, in a room of her own or not. It was warmer now, too—not that there was ever much of a spring in Vermont—but I shivered as I crossed the quadrangle, on my way to my
Twelfth Night
rehearsal. I should have been thinking of my lines, of what Sebastian says, but I could only think of that song the Clown sings before the final curtain—Feste’s song, the one Kittredge sang. (“For the rain it raineth every day.”)
    Just then, it began to rain, and I thought about how Elaine’s life had been changed forever, while I was still just acting.
    I HAVE KEPT THE photographs Elaine sent me; they were never very good photos, just black-and-white or color snapshots. Because of how many of my desktops these pictures have sat on—often in sunlight, and for so many years—the photographs are badly faded, but of course I have no trouble recalling the circumstances.
    I just wish that Elaine had sent me some pictures of her trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, but who would have taken those photographs? I can’t imagine Elaine snapping photos of Kittredge’s fashion-model mother—doing what? Brushing her teeth, reading in bed, getting dressed or undressed? And what might Elaine have been doing to inspire the artist-as-photographer in Mrs. Kittredge? Vomiting into a toilet from a kneeling position? Waiting, nauseated, in the lobby of this or that hotel, because her room—or the room she would share with Kittredge’s mom—wasn’t ready?
    I doubt there were many photo opportunities that captured Mrs. Kittredge’s imagination. Not the visit to the doctor’s