In One Person

office—or was it a clinic?—and certainly not the messy but matter-of-fact procedure itself. ( Elaine was in her first trimester. I’m sure the procedure was a standard dilation and curettage—you know, the usual scraping.)
    Elaine would later tell me that, after the abortion, when she was still taking the painkillers—when Mrs. Kittredge would regularly check the amount of blood on the pad, to be sure the bleeding was “normal”—Kittredge’s mom felt her forehead, to ascertain that Elaine didn’t have a fever, and that was when Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine those outrageous stories.
    I used to think the painkillers might have been a factor in what Elaine remembered, or believed she heard, in those stories. “The painkillers weren’t that strong, and I didn’t take them for more than a day or two,” Elaine always said. “I wasn’t in a whole lot of pain, Billy.”
    “But weren’t you drinking wine? You told me that Mrs. Kittredge gave you all the red wine you wanted,” I would remind Elaine. “I’m sure that you weren’t supposed to mix the painkillers with alcohol.”
    “I never had more than a glass or two of red wine, Billy,” Elaine always told me. “I heard every word that Jacqueline said. Either those stories are true, or Jacqueline was lying to me—and why would anyone’s mother lie about that kind of thing?”
    Admittedly, I don’t know why “anyone’s mother” would make up stories about her only child—at least, not that kind—but I don’t hold Kittredge or his mom in the highest moral esteem. Whatever I believed, or didn’t, about the stories Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine, Elaine seemed to believe every word.
    According to Mrs. Kittredge, her only child was a sickly little boy; he had no confidence in himself and was picked on by the other children, especially by the boys. While this was truly difficult to imagine, it was even harder to believe that Kittredge was once intimidated by girls; he apparently was so shy that he stuttered when he tried to talk to girls, and the girls either teased him or ignored him.
    In the seventh grade, Kittredge would fake being sick so that he could stay home from school—these were “very competitive schools,” in Paris and New York, Mrs. Kittredge had explained to Elaine—and at the start of eighth grade, he’d stopped talking to both the boys and the girls in his class.
    “So I seduced him—it’s not as if I had lots of other options,” Mrs. Kittredge told Elaine. “The poor boy—he had to gain a little confidence
somewhere
!”
    “I guess he gained quite a
lot
of confidence,” Elaine ventured to say to Kittredge’s mom, who’d simply shrugged.
    Mrs. Kittredge had an insouciant shrug; one can only wonder if she was born with it, or if—after her husband had left her for a younger but indisputably less attractive woman—she’d developed an instinctive indifference to any kind of rejection.
    Mrs. Kittredge matter-of-factly told Elaine that she’d slept with her son “as much as he’d wanted to,” but only until Kittredge demonstrated a lack of fervor or a wandering sexual attention span. “He can’t help it that he loses interest every twenty-four hours,” Kittredge’s mom told Elaine. “He didn’t gain all that confidence by being bored—believe me.”
    Did Mrs. Kittredge imagine she was giving Elaine what amounted to an excuse for her son’s behavior? All the time she was talking, Mrs. Kittredge went on checking to see if the blood on Elaine’s pad was “normal,” or feeling Elaine’s forehead to be sure she didn’t have a fever.
    There are no pictures of their time together in Europe—only what I have managed (over the years) to coax out of Elaine, and what I’ve inevitably imagined of my dear friend aborting Kittredge’s child, and her subsequent recuperation in the company of Kittredge’s mother. If Mrs. Kittredge had seduced her own son, so that he might gain a little confidence, did this explain why Kittredge felt so strongly that his mom was somewhat less (or maybe more) than
motherly
?
    “For how long did Kittredge have sex with his mom?” I asked Elaine.
    “That eighth-grade year, when he would have been thirteen and fourteen,” Elaine answered, “and maybe three or four times after he’d started at Favorite River—he would have been fifteen when it stopped.”
    “Why did it stop?” I asked Elaine—not that I completely believed it had happened!
    Perhaps the insouciance of Elaine’s