In One Person

“Let’s hear you
try
it, anyway.”
    “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Lear asks.
    The Fool answers: “Lear’s shadow.”
    Since when had the
shadow
word given me any grief in the pronunciation department? Since Elaine had come back from that trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, when Elaine seemed as insubstantial as a shadow—at least in comparison to her former self. Since Elaine had come back from Europe, and there seemed to be an unfamiliar shadow dogging her every step—a shadow that bore a ghostly but ultrasophisticated resemblance to Mrs. Kittredge herself. Since Elaine had gone away again, to Northfield, and I was left with a shadow following me around—perhaps the disquieting, unavenged shadow of my absent best friend.
    “‘Lear’s …
shed
,’ ” I said.
    “His
shed
!” Kittredge exclaimed.
    “Try it again, Bill,” Richard said.
    “I can’t say it,” I replied.
    “Maybe we need a new Fool,” Kittredge suggested.
    “That would be my decision, Kittredge,” Richard told him.
    “Or mine,” I said.
    “Ah, well—” Grandpa Harry started to say, but Uncle Bob interrupted him.
    “It seems to me, Richard, that Billy could say ‘Lear’s
reflection
,’ or even ‘Lear’s
ghost
’—if, in your judgment, this fits with what the Fool means or is implying,” Uncle Bob suggested.
    “Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Kittredge said.
    “The line is ‘Lear’s
shadow
,’ Billy,” my mother, the prompter, said. “Either you can say it or you can’t.”
    “Please, Jewel—” Richard started to say, but I interrupted him.
    “Lear should have a proper Fool—one who can say everything,” I told Richard Abbott. I knew, as I was leaving, that I was walking out of my final rehearsal as a Favorite River Academy student—my last Shakespeare play, perhaps. (As it would turn out,
King Lear
was my last Shakespeare play
as an actor.)
    The faculty daughter whom Richard cast as Cordelia was and remains so completely unknown to me that I can’t recall her name. “An unformed girl, but with a crackerjack memory,” Grandpa Harry had said about her.
    “Neither a present nor a future beauty,” was all my aunt Muriel said of the doomed Cordelia, implying that, in
King Lear
, no one would ever have married
this
Cordelia—not even if she’d lived.
    Lear’s Fool would be played by Delacorte. Since Delacorte was a wrestler, he’d probably learned that the part was available because Kittredge had told him. Kittredge would later inform me that, because the fall Shakespeare play was rehearsed and performed before the start of the wrestling season, Delacorte wasn’t as ill affected as he usually was by the complications of cutting weight. Yet the lightweight who, according to Kittredge, would have had the shit kicked out of him in a heavier weight-class, still suffered from cotton-mouth, even when he wasn’t dehydrated—or perhaps Delacorte dreamed of cutting weight, even in the off-season. Therefore, Delacorte
constantly
rinsed his mouth out with water from a paper cup; he
eternally
spat out the water into another paper cup . If Delacorte were alive today, I’m sure he would still be running his fingers through his hair. But Delacorte is dead, along with so many others. Awaiting me, in the future, was seeing Delacorte die.
    Delacorte, as Lear’s Fool, would wisely say: “‘Have more than thou showest, / Speak less than thou knowest, / Lend less than thou owest.’ ” Good advice, but it won’t save Lear’s Fool, and it didn’t save Delacorte.
    Kittredge acted strangely in Delacorte’s company; he could behave affectionately and impatiently with Delacorte in the same moment. It was as if Delacorte had been a childhood friend, but one who’d disappointed Kittredge—one who’d not “turned out” as Kittredge had hoped or expected.
    Kittredge was preternaturally fond of Delacorte’s rinsing-and-spitting routine; Kittredge had even suggested to Richard that there might be onstage benefits to Lear’s Fool repeatedly rinsing and spitting.
    “Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Grandpa Harry said.
    “I’m not
prompting
the rinsing and spitting, Richard,” my mom said.
    “Delacorte, you will kindly do your rinsing and spitting backstage,” Richard told the compulsive lightweight.
    “It was just an idea,” Kittredge had said with a dismissive shrug. “I guess it will suffice that we at least have a Fool who can say the
shadow
word.”
    To me, Kittredge would be