In One Person (15 page)

“Not this time, Jacques,” my mom told him. “It’s ‘No, precious
creature
’—not
mistress
.”

“I think I’m trying too hard to please you—I want you to like me, but I’m afraid you don’t, Mrs. Abbott,” Kittredge said to my mother. He was flirting with her, and she blushed. I was embarrassed by how often I thought of my mom as easily seduced; it was almost as if I believed she was somewhat retarded, or so sexually naïve that anyone who flattered her could win her over.

“I
do
like you, Jacques—I certainly don’t
not
like you!” my mom blurted out, while Elaine (as Miranda) stood there seething; Elaine knew that Kittredge had used the
hot
word for my mom.

“I get so nervous around you,” Kittredge told my mother, though he didn’t look nervous; he seemed increasingly confident.

“What a lot of bullshit!” Elaine Hadley croaked. Kittredge cringed at the sound of her voice, and my mother flinched as if she’d been slapped.

“Elaine, mind your language,” my mom said.

“Can we just get on with the
play
?” Elaine asked.

“Oh, Naples—you’re so impatient,” Kittredge said with a most disarming smile, first to Elaine and then to my mother. “Elaine can’t wait to get to the hand-holding part,” Kittredge told my mom.

Indeed, the scene they were rehearsing—act 3, scene 1—ends with Ferdinand and Miranda holding hands. It was Elaine’s turn to blush, but Kittredge, who was in complete control of the moment, had fixed his most earnest gaze on my mother. “I have a question, Mrs. Abbott,” he began, as if Elaine and Miranda didn’t exist—as if they’d never existed. “When Ferdinand says, ‘Full many a lady / I have eyed with best regard, and many a time / The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear’—you know,
that
line—I wonder if that means I have been with a lot of women, and if I shouldn’t somehow imply that I am, you know,
sexually experienced
.”

My mom blushed more deeply than before.

“Oh,
God
!” Elaine Hadley cried.

And I—where was I? I was Ariel—“an airy Spirit.” I was waiting for Ferdinand and Miranda to
exeunt—separately,
like the stage direction said. I was standing by, with Caliban, Stephano (“a drunken butler,” Shakespeare calls him), and Trinculo; we were all in the next scene, in which I was invisible. With my mother blushing at Kittredge’s clever manipulations, I felt invisible—or I wanted to be.

“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.

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.

Perhaps it was a small measure of my becoming a writer (though never for the stage) that I believed
The Tempest
should have ended with Prospero’s speech to Ferdinand and Miranda—the “Our revels now are ended” speech in act 4, scene 1. And surely Prospero should have ended that speech (and the play) with the wonderful “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Why does Prospero need to say more? (Maybe he
does
feel responsible for Caliban.)

But when I expressed these thoughts to Richard, he said, “Well, Bill—if you’re rewriting Shakespeare at seventeen, I expect great things of you!” Richard wasn’t given to satire at my expense, and I was hurt by it; Kittredge was quick to pick up on someone else’s pain.

“Hey,
Rewriter
!” Kittredge called to me, across the quadrangle of dorms. Alas, that nickname didn’t stick; Kittredge never said it again, preferring Nymph. I would have preferred Rewriter; at least it was true to the kind of writer I would one day become.

But I’ve strayed from the Caliban character; I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become. Caliban is onstage 25 percent of the time. (My mother’s approximations never took into account the lines spoken, only the onstage time of the characters.) This was my very first experience with
The Tempest,
but as many times as I’ve seen the play performed, I always find Caliban a deeply disturbing character; as a writer, I would call him an “unresolved” character. By how harshly Prospero treats him, we know how unforgivingly Prospero thinks of Caliban, but I wonder what Shakespeare wanted us to feel about the monster. Sympathy, maybe—some guilt, perhaps.

That fall of ’59, I wasn’t at all sure what Richard Abbott made of
Caliban; that Richard had cast Grandpa Harry as the monster sent a mixed message. Harry had never been onstage as a male
anything;
that Caliban was less than human was further “unresolved” by Grandpa Harry’s steadfastly
female
impersonation. Caliban may indeed have lusted after Miranda—we know the monster has tried to
rape
her!—but Harry Marshall, even when he was cast as a villain, was almost never unsympathetic onstage, nor was he ever entirely
male
.

Perhaps Richard had acknowledged that Caliban was a confusing monster, and Richard knew that Grandpa Harry would find a way to add to the confusion. “Your grandfather is weird,” was how Kittredge unambiguously put it to me. (“Queen Lear,” Kittredge called him.)

Even I believe that Harry out-weirded himself in Caliban’s case; Grandpa Harry gave a sexually ambiguous performance—he played Caliban as an androgynous hag.

The wig (Grandpa Harry was bald) would have worked for either sex. The costume was something an eccentric urban bag lady might have worn—floppy sweatpants with an oversize sweatshirt, both as workout-gray as the wig. To complete the gender-unknown image, Harry had whorishly painted the toenails of his bare feet. There was a mannishly chunky rhinestone earring attached to the lobe of one ear—more appealing to a pirate, or a professional wrestler, than a hooker—and a fake-pearl necklace (the cheapest costume jewelry) over the sweatshirt.

“What is Caliban, exactly?” Kittredge would ask Richard Abbott.

“Earth and water, Kittredge—brute force and guile,” Richard had repeated.