In One Person

imagine about Kittredge’s mother, or how “close” Elaine ever was to her. The shadows and body parts of the woman (or women) in those photographs are more vivid to me than my one memory of Mrs. Kittredge at a wrestling match, the first and only time I actually saw her. I know “that awful woman” best by her effect on my friend Elaine—the way I know myself best by my persistent crushes on the wrong people, the way I was formed by how long I kept the secret of myself from the people I loved.

Chapter
7
    M Y T ERRIFYING A NGELS
    If am unwanted pregnancy was the “abyss” that an intrepid girl could fall into—the
abyss
word was my mother’s, though I’ll bet she’d heard it first from fucking Muriel—surely the abyss for a boy like me was to succumb to homosexual activity. In such love lay madness; in acting out my most dire imaginings, I would certainly descend to the bottomless pit of the universe of desire. Or so I believed in the fall of my senior year at Favorite River Academy, when I once more ventured to the First Sister Public Library—this time, I thought, to save myself. I was eighteen, but my sexual misgivings were innumerable; my self-hatred was huge.
    If you were, like me, at an all-boys’ boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I’d always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
    With Elaine starting her new life at Northfield, I was spending more and more time in the yearbook room of the academy library. When my mom or Richard asked me where I was going, I always answered: “I’m going to the library.” I didn’t tell them
which
library. And without Elaine to slow me down—she could never resist showing me those hot-looking boys from the more contemporary of the yearbooks—I was blazing my way through the graduating classes of the decreasingly distant past. I’d left World War I behind; I was way ahead of my imagined schedule. At the rate I was going through those yearbooks, I would catch up with the present well before the spring of ’61 and my own graduation from Favorite River.
    In fact, I was a mere thirty years behind myself; on the same September evening I decided to leave the academy library and pay a visit to Miss Frost, I’d begun to peruse the yearbook for the Class of ’31. An absolutely heart-stopping boy in the wrestling-team photo had caused me to abruptly close the yearbook. I thought: I simply can’t keep thinking about Kittredge, and boys like him; I must not give in to those feelings, or I am doomed.
    Just what exactly was holding my doom at bay? My contrived image of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model in a mail-order catalog wasn’t working anymore. It was increasingly difficult to masturbate to even the most imaginative transposing of Mrs. Hadley’s homely face on the least bosomy of those small-breasted young girls. All that held Kittredge (and boys like him) at bay was my ardent fantasizing about Miss Frost.
    The Favorite River Academy yearbook was called
The Owl
. (“Anyone who knows why is probably dead,” Richard Abbott had replied, when I’d asked him why.) I pushed the ’31
Owl
aside. I gathered up my notebooks, and my German homework—cramming everything but
The Owl
into my book bag.
    I was taking German IV, though it wasn’t required. I was still helping Kittredge with German III, which he’d flunked but was perforce repeating. It was somewhat easier to help him, since we were no longer taking German III together. Essentially, all I did was save Kittredge a little time. The hard stuff in German III was the introduction to Goethe and Rilke; there was more of them in German IV. When Kittredge got stuck on a phrase, I saved him time by giving him a quick and rudimentary translation. That some of the
same
Goethe and Rilke was as confounding to Kittredge the second time truly incensed him, but frankly the notes and hurried comments that now passed between us were easier for me than our previous conversations. I was trying to be in Kittredge’s presence as little as I possibly could.
    To that end, I dropped out of the fall Shakespeare play—to Richard’s oft-expressed disappointment. Richard had cast Kittredge as Edgar in
King Lear
. Furthermore, there was an unforeseen flaw in Richard’s having cast me as Lear’s Fool. When I was telling Mrs. Hadley that I wanted no part in the play, because Kittredge had “a