In One Person (30 page)

“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.

“Knowing Kittredge, I suppose he got tired of it,” Elaine had said. She was packing her bags for what would be her sophomore year at Northfield—fall term, 1960—and we were in her bedroom in Bancroft. It would have been late August; it was hot in that room. The lamp with the dark-blue shade had been replaced with a colorless job, like the desk lamp in an anonymous office, and Elaine had cut her hair short—almost like a boy’s.

Although the phases of her going away would be marked by an increasingly
conscious masculinity in her appearance, Elaine said she would never be in a lesbian relationship; yet she told me she’d experimented with being a lesbian. Had she “experimented” with Mrs. Kittredge? If Elaine had ever been attracted to women, I imagined how Mrs. Kittredge might have ended that, but Elaine was vague about it. I think of my dear friend as someone doomed to be attracted to the wrong men, but Elaine was vague about that, too. “They’re just not the sort of men who last,” was how she put it.

A
S FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHS
: The pictures Elaine sent me of her three years at Northfield are the ones I have kept. They may be black-and-white or color, and utterly amateur snapshots, but they are not as artless as they first appear.

I’ll begin with the photo of Elaine standing on the porch of a three-story wooden house; she doesn’t look like she belongs there—perhaps she was only visiting. Together with the name of the building, and the date of its construction—
Moore Cottage, 1899
—there is also this hope expressed, in Elaine’s careful longhand, on the back of the photograph:
I wish this were my dorm.
(Apparently, it wasn’t—nor would it be.)

On the ground floor of Moore Cottage, there were wooden clapboards, painted white, but there were white-painted wooden shingles on the second and third floors—as if to suggest not only the passage of time but a lingering indecision. Possibly this uncertainty had to do with Moore Cottage’s use. Over the years, it would be used as a dormitory for girls—later, as a guesthouse for visiting parents. From the spread-out look of the building, there were probably a dozen or more bedrooms—far fewer bathrooms, I’ll bet—and a large kitchen with an adjoining common room.

More bathrooms might have made the visiting parents happier, whereas the students (when they lived there) were long accustomed to making do with less. The porch, where Elaine stood—she seemed uncharacteristically unsure of herself—had a contradictory appearance. What use do students have for porches? In a good school, which Northfield was, students are too busy for porches, which are better suited for people with more time for leisure—such as guests.

In the picture of herself on the porch at Moore Cottage—it was among the very first of the photographs Elaine sent me from Northfield—maybe she felt like a guest. Curiously, there is someone in the window of one of the ground-floor rooms overlooking the porch: a woman
of indeterminate age, to judge her by her clothes and the length of her hair—her face lost in the shadows, or obscured by an unclear reflection in the window.

Also among the earliest photos Elaine sent me from her new school, which was, in fact, a very
old
school, was that picture of the birthplace of Dwight L. Moody.
Our founder’s birthplace, alleged to be haunted,
Elaine had written on the back of this photo, though that can’t be the ghost of D.L. himself in a small upstairs window of the birthplace. It is a woman’s face in profile—neither young nor old, but definitely pretty—her expression unknown. Elaine, smiling, is in the foreground of the photograph; she appears to be pointing in the direction of that upstairs window. (Maybe the girl was a friend of hers, or so I first imagined.)

Then there’s the picture labeled
The Auditorium, 1894—on a slight hill.
I guess Elaine meant “slight” by Vermont standards. (I remember it as the first of the photos where the mystery woman seemed to be consciously posed; after seeing this picture, I began to look for her.) The Auditorium was a red-brick building with arched windows and doorways, and with two castle-size towers. A shadow cast by one of the towers fell across the lawn where Elaine was standing, near the trunk of an imposing tree. Sticking out, from behind the tree—in sunlight,
not
in the tower’s shadow—was a woman’s shapely leg. Her foot, which was pointed toward Elaine, was in a dark and sensible shoe; her kneesock was properly pulled up to her bare knee, above which her long gray skirt had been hiked to mid-thigh.

“Who’s the other girl, or woman?” I’d asked Elaine.

“I don’t know who you mean,” Elaine replied. “
What
girl or woman?”

“In the pictures. There’s always someone else there, in the photographs,” I said. “Come on—you can tell me. Who is it—a friend of yours, maybe, or a teacher?”

In the photo of East Hall, the woman’s face is very small—and partially hidden by a scarf—in an upper-story window. East Hall was, evidently, a dormitory, though Elaine didn’t say; the fire escape gave it away.

In the picture of Stone Hall, there is a clock tower of that copper-green color, and very tall windows; it must have had warm light inside, on those few ungray days in the school-year months in western Massachusetts. Elaine is somewhat awkwardly positioned at the far side of the photograph; she is facing the camera, but she is standing almost perfectly back-to-back with someone. You can count two or three extra fingers on Elaine’s left hand; holding her right hip is a third hand.

There’s the one of the school chapel, I guess you would call it—a massive-looking cathedral with one of those big wooden doors inlaid with cast iron. A woman’s bare arm is holding the heavy-looking door open for Elaine, who seems not to notice the arm—a bracelet on the wrist, rings on both the pinkie and the index finger—or maybe Elaine didn’t care whether or not the woman was there. One can read the Latin engraved on the chapel:
ANNO DOMINI MDCCCCVIII.
Elaine had translated this on the back of the photo:
In the year of the Lord 1908.
(She’d added,
Where I want to get married, if I’m ever desperate enough to get married—if so, please just shoot me.
)

I believe I love best the picture of Margaret Olivia Hall, Northfield’s music building, because I knew how much Elaine loved to sing—singing was one thing her big voice was born to do. (“I love to sing until I cry, and then sing some more,” she once wrote to me.)

The names of composers were engraved between the upper-story windows of the music hall; I have memorized the names. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini. In the window above the
u
in
Gluck,
which had been carved like a
v,
was a headless woman—just her torso—wearing only a bra. Unlike Elaine, who is leaning against the building, the headless woman in the window has very noticeable breasts—big ones.

“Who is she?” I asked Elaine, again and again.

If you didn’t know it already, the music building with the names of those composers was an accurate indication of how sophisticated a school Northfield was; it put a place like Favorite River Academy to shame. It was a quantum leap heavenward from what Elaine had been used to at the public high school in Ezra Falls.

Most of the prep schools in New England were single-sex schools at that time. Many all-boys’ schools provided faculty daughters with a tuition stipend; the girls could attend an all-girls’ boarding school, and not be adrift in whatever public high school served the community. (To be fair: The public schools in Vermont were not all as bad as the one in Ezra Falls.)

As a result of the Hadleys’ sending Elaine to Northfield—at first, at their expense—Favorite River did the right thing: It provided what amounted to vouchers for its faculty daughters. I would never hear the end of it from my crude cousin Gerry—namely, that this change in policy had happened too late to rescue her from the public high school in Ezra
Falls. As I’ve said, Gerry was a college girl that same spring when Elaine traveled to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge. “I guess I would have been wise to get myself knocked up a few years ago—provided the lucky guy had a French mother,” was how Gerry put it. (I could easily imagine Muriel saying this when Muriel had been a teenager—although, after staring nonstop at my aunt’s breasts in
Twelfth Night,
it was terrifying to think of Aunt Muriel as a teenager.)

I could describe other photographs that Elaine sent me from Northfield—I’ve kept them all—but the pattern would simply repeat itself. There was always a partial, imperfect image of another woman in the pictures of Elaine and those impressive buildings on the Northfield campus.

“Who is she? I know you know who I mean—she’s always there, Elaine,” I said repeatedly. “Don’t be coy about it.”

“I’m not being coy, Billy—you should talk about being
coy,
if that’s the word you’re using for being evasive, or not talking about things directly. If you know what I mean,” Elaine would say.

“Okay, okay—so I have to
guess
who she is, is that it? So you’re paying me back for being less than candid with you—am I getting warm?” I asked my dear friend.

E
LAINE AND
I
WOULD
try living together, though this would be many years later, after we’d both had sufficient disappointments in our lives. It wouldn’t work out—not for very long—but we were too good friends not to have tried it. We were also old enough, when we embarked on this adventure, to know that friends were more important than lovers—not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships. (It’s best not to generalize, but this was certainly the case for Elaine and me.)

We had a seedy eighth-floor apartment on Post Street in San Francisco—in that area of Post Street between Taylor and Mason, near Union Square. Elaine and I had our own rooms, to write. Our bedroom was large and accommodating—it overlooked some rooftops on Geary Street, and the vertical sign for the Hotel Adagio. At night, the neon for the
HOTEL
word was dark—burned out, I guess—so that only the
ADAGIO
was lit. In my insomnia, I would get out of bed and go to the window and stare at the bloodred
ADAGIO
sign.

One night, when I came back to bed, I inadvertently woke up Elaine, and I asked her about the
adagio
word. I knew it was Italian; not only had I heard Esmeralda say it, but I’d seen the word in her notes. In my forays
into the world of opera and other music—both with Esmeralda and with Larry, in Vienna—I knew that the word had some use in music. I knew that Elaine would know what it meant; like her mother, Elaine was very musical. (Northfield had been a good fit for her—it was a great school for music.)

“What’s it mean?” I asked Elaine, as we lay awake in that seedy Post Street apartment.

“
Adagio
means slowly, softly, gently,” Elaine answered.

“Oh.”

That would be about the best you could say for our efforts at lovemaking, which we tried, too—with no more success than the living-together part, but we tried.
“Adagio,”
we would say, when we tried to make love, or afterward, when we were trying to fall asleep. We say it still; we said it when we left San Francisco, and we say it when we close letters or emails to each other now. It’s what love means to us, I guess—only
adagio
. (Slowly, softly, gently.) It works for friends, anyway.