In One Person

"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 sna

pping 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 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 shrug was something she'd picked up from Mrs. Kittredge.