In One Person

"I'm just the prompter," my mother said hastily to Kittredge. "That's a question for the director--you should ask Mr. Abbott," she said. My mom's agitation was obvious, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked years ago, when she was either pregnant with me or already my mother--when she'd seen my womanizing father kissing someone else. I remembered how she'd said the else word when she told me about it, in the same perfunctory way she had corrected Kittredge's purposeful flubs. (Once we were in performances of The Tempest, Kittredge wouldn't muff a line--not a single word. I realize that I haven't acknowledged this, but Kittredge was very good onstage.)

It was painful for me to see how easily undone my mom was--by the slightest sexual suggestion, from a teenager! I hated myself, because I saw that I was ashamed of my own mother, and I knew that whatever shame I felt for her had been formed by Muriel's constant condescension and her chiding gossip. Naturally, I hated Kittredge for how effortlessly he had rattled my damaged mom--for how smoothly he was able to rattle Elaine and me, too--and then my mother called for help. "Richard!" she called. "Jacques has a question about his character!"

"Oh, God," Elaine said again--this time, under her breath; she was barely audible, but Kittredge had heard her.

"Patience, dear Naples," Kittredge said to her, taking her hand. He grasped her hand exactly as Ferdinand takes Miranda's hand--before they part at the end of act 3, scene 1--but Elaine yanked her hand away from him.

"What is it about your character, Ferdinand?" Richard Abbott asked Kittredge.

"This is more bullshit," Elaine said.

"Your language, Elaine!" my mother said.

"Some fresh air would be good for Miranda," Richard said to Elaine. "Just a couple of deep breaths, and perhaps a needed expulsion of whatever words spontaneously come to mind. Take a break, Elaine--you should take a break, too, Bill," Richard told me. "We want our Miranda and our Ariel in character." (I guess Richard could see that I was agitated, too.)

There was a loading dock off the carpentry shop, to the rear of the backstage area, and Elaine and I stepped out on the dock in the cool night air. I tried to take her hand; at first she pulled her hand away from me, though not as violently as she'd jerked it away from Kittredge. Then, with the door to the loading dock still open, Elaine gave me back her hand; she rested her head against my shoulder. "They're a cute couple, aren't they?" we heard Kittredge say to someone, or to them all, before the door closed.

"Motherfucker!" Elaine Hadley yelled. "Penis-breath!" she shouted; then she gulped the cold air, until her breathing had returned to almost normal, and we went back inside the theater, where Elaine's glasses instantly fogged up.

"Ferdinand is not saying to Miranda that he is sexually experienced," Richard was telling Kittredge. "Ferdinand is saying how attentive he has been to women, and how often women have made an impression on him. All he means is that no one has impressed him as forcefully as Miranda."

"It's a speech about impressions, Kittredge," Elaine managed to say. "It's not a speech about sex."

Enter Ariel, invisible--that was the stage direction to my upcoming scene (act 3, scene 2). But I was already truly invisible; I had somehow succeeded in giving them all the impression that Elaine Hadley was my love interest. For Elaine's part, she seemed to be going along with it--maybe for self-protective reasons of her own. But Kittredge was smiling at us--in that sneering, superior way he had. I do not think the impressions word ever meant very much to Kittredge. I believe that everything was always about sex--about actual sex--to him. And if the present company was convinced that Elaine and I were interested in each other in a sexual way, possibly Kittredge alone remained unconvinced--at least this was the impression that his sneer gave Elaine and me.

Maybe this was why Elaine suddenly turned from him and kissed me. She barely brushed her lips against mine, but there was actual (if fleeting) contact; I suppose I even appeared to kiss her back, albeit briefly. That was all. It wasn't much of a kiss; it didn't even fog up her glasses.

I doubt that Elaine had an iota of sexual interest in me, and I believe she knew from the beginning that I was only pretending to be interested in her in that way. We were the most amateur actors--her innocent Miranda and my largely invisible Ariel--but we were acting, and there was an unspoken complicity in our deception.

After all, we both had something to hide.

Chapter 4

ELAINE'S BRA

To this day, I don't know what to make of the wretched Caliban--the monster whose attempted rape of Miranda earns Prospero's unforgiving condemnation. Prospero seems to take minimal responsibility for Caliban--"this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine."

For someone as self-centered as Kittredge, of course, The Tempest was all about Ferdinand; it's a love story, in which Ferdinand woos and wins Miranda. But Richard Abbott called the play a "tragicomedy," and for those two (almost three) months in the fall of '59 when Elaine Hadley and I were in rehearsals for the play, we felt that our close-enough-to-touch proximity to Kittredge was our tragicomedy--notwithstanding that The Tempest has a happy ending for Miranda and Ariel.

My mother, who always maintained she was just the prompter, had the curiously mathematical habit of timing each actor; she used a cheap stove timer, and (in the margins of her copy of the play) she noted the approximate percent of the characters' actual time onstage. The value of my mom's calculations seemed questionable to me, though both Elaine and I enjoyed the fact that Ferdinand was onstage for only 17 percent of the play.

"What about Miranda?" Elaine made a point of asking my mom, within Kittredge's keenly competitive hearing.

"Twenty-seven percent," my mother replied.

"What about me?" I asked my mom.

"Ariel is onstage thirty-one percent of the time," she told me.

Kittredge scoffed at this degrading news. "And Prospero, our peerless director--he of the much-ballyhooed magical powers?" Kittredge inquired sarcastically.

"Much-ballyhooed!" Elaine Hadley thunderously echoed.

"Prospero is onstage approximately fifty-two percent of the time," my mother told Kittredge.

"Approximately," Kittredge repeated, sneering.

Richard had told us that The Tempest was Shakespeare's "farewell play," that the bard was knowingly saying good-bye to the theater, but I didn't understand the necessity for act 5--especially the tacked-on epilogue, spoken by Prospero.