John Irving - In One Person

It was unfortunate for me that Prospero commands Ariel: “Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea, be subject / To no sight but thine and mine—invisible / To every eyeball else.”

Alas, I would not be invisible to the audience. The Enter Ariel as a water nymph always got a big laugh—even before I was in costume with makeup. That stage direction was what led Kittredge to start calling me “Nymph.”

I remember exactly how Richard had put it: “Keeping the character of Ariel in the male gender is simpler than tricking out one more choirboy in women’s garb.” (But women’s garb—well, at least the wig —was how I would be tricked out!)

Nor was it lost on Kittredge when Richard said, “It’s possible that Shakespeare saw a continuum from Caliban through Prospero to Ariel—a kind of spiritual evolution. Caliban is all earth and water, brute force and guile. Prospero is human control and insight—he’s the ultimate alchemist. And Ariel,” Richard said, smiling at me—no smile was ever lost on Kittredge—“Ariel is a spirit of air and fire, freed from mortal concerns. Perhaps Shakespeare felt that presenting Ariel as explicitly female might detract from this notion of a continuum. I believe that Ariel’s gender is mutable .”

“Director’s choice, in other words?” Kittredge asked Richard.

Our director and teacher regarded Kittredge cautiously before answering him. “The sex of angels is also mutable,” Richard said. “Yes, Kittredge—director’s choice.”

“But what will the so-called water nymph look like?” Kittredge asked. “Like a girl, right?”

“Probably,” Richard said, more cautiously.

I was trying to imagine how I would be costumed and made up as an invisible water nymph; I could never have foreseen the algae-green wig I wore, nor the crimson wrestling tights. (Crimson and silver-gray—“death-gray,” Grandpa Harry had called it—were the Favorite River Academy colors.)

“So Billy’s gender is . . . mutable, ” Kittredge said, smiling.

“Not Billy’s— Ariel’s, ” Richard said.

But Kittredge had made his point; the cast of The Tempest would not forget the mutable word. “Nymph,” Kittredge’s nickname for me, would stick. I had two years to go at Favorite River Academy; a Nymph I would be.

“It doesn’t matter what costume and makeup do to you, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me privately. “You’ll never be as hot as your mother.”

I was aware that my mom was pretty, and—at seventeen—I was increasingly conscious of how the other students at an all-boys’ academy like Favorite River regarded her. But no other boy had told me that my mom was “hot”; as I often found myself with Kittredge, I was at a loss for words. I’m sure that the hot word was not yet in use—not the way Kittredge had used it. But Kittredge definitely meant “hot” in that way.

When Kittredge spoke of his own mother, which he rarely did, he usually raised the issue of there being a possible mix-up. “Maybe my real mom died in childbirth,” Kittredge said. “My father found some unwed mother in the same hospital—an unfortunate woman (her child was stillborn, but the woman never knew), a woman who looked like my mother. There was a switch. My dad would be capable of such a deception. I’m not saying the woman knows she’s my stepmother. She may even believe my dad is my stepfather! At the time, she might have been taking a lot of drugs—she must have been depressed, maybe suicidal. I have no doubt that she believes she’s my mom—she just doesn’t always act like a mother. She’s done some contradictory things—contradictory to motherhood. All I’m saying is that my dad has never been answerable for his behavior with women—with any woman. My dad just makes deals. This woman may look like me, but she’s not my mom—she’s not anyone’s mother.”

“Kittredge is in denial—big time,” Elaine had told me. “That woman looks like his mother and his father!”

When I told Elaine Hadley what Kittredge had said about my mom, Elaine suggested that I tell Kittredge our opinion of his mother—based on our shameless staring at her, at one of his wrestling matches. “Tell him his mom looks like him, with tits, ” Elaine said.

“ You tell him,” I told her; we both knew I wouldn’t. Elaine wouldn’t talk to Kittredge about his mom, either.

Initially, Elaine was almost as afraid of Kittredge as I was—nor would she ever have used the tits word in his company. She was very conscious of having inherited her mom’s flat chest. Elaine was nowhere near as homely as her mother; Elaine was thin and gawky, and she had no boobs, but she had a pretty face—and, unlike her mom, Elaine would never be big-boned. Elaine was delicate-looking, which made her trombone of a voice all the more surprising. Yet, at first, she was so intimidated in Kittredge’s presence that she often croaked or mumbled; at times, she was incoherent. Elaine was so afraid of sounding too loud around him. “Kittredge fogs up my glasses,” was the way she put it.

Their first meeting onstage—as Ferdinand and Miranda—was dazzlingly clear; one never saw two souls so unmistakably drawn to each other. Upon seeing Miranda, Ferdinand calls her a “wonder”; he asks, “If you be maid or no?”

“‘No wonder sir, / But certainly a maid,’” Elaine (as Miranda) replies in a vibrant, gonglike voice. But offstage, Kittredge had managed to make Elaine self-conscious about her booming voice. After all, she was only sixteen; Kittredge was eighteen, going on thirty.

Elaine and I were walking back to the dorm after rehearsal one night—the Hadleys had a faculty apartment in the same dorm where I lived with Richard Abbott and my mom—when Kittredge magically materialized beside us. (Kittredge was always doing that.) “You two are quite a couple,” he told us.

“We’re not a couple !” Elaine blurted out, much louder than she’d meant to. Kittredge pretended to stagger, as if from an unseen blow; he held his ears.

“I must warn you, Nymph—you’re in danger of losing your hearing,” Kittredge said to me. “When this little lady has her first orgasm, you better be wearing earplugs. And I wouldn’t do it in the dormitory, if I were you,” Kittredge warned me. “The whole dorm would hear her.” He then drifted away from us, down a different, darker path; Kittredge lived in the jock dorm, the one nearest the gym.

It was too dark to see if Elaine Hadley had blushed. I touched her face lightly, just enough to ascertain if she was crying; she wasn’t, but her cheek was hot and she brushed my hand away. “No one’s giving me an orgasm anytime soon!” Elaine cried after Kittredge.

We were in a quadrangle of dormitories; in the distance, there were lights in the surrounding dorm windows, and a chorus of voices whooped and cheered—as if a hundred unseen boys had heard her. But Elaine was very agitated when she cried out; I doubted that Kittredge (or anyone but me) had understood her. I was wrong, though what Elaine had cried with police-siren shrillness sounded like, “No nun’s liver goes into spasm for a raccoon!” (Or nonsense of a similar, incomprehensible kind.)

But Kittredge had grasped Elaine’s meaning; his sweetly sarcastic voice reached us from somewhere in the dark quadrangle. Cruelly, it was as the sexy Ferdinand that Kittredge called out of the darkness to my friend Elaine, who was (at that moment) not feeling much like Miranda.

“O, if a virgin, / And your affection not gone forth, I’ll make you / The Queen of Naples,” Ferdinand swears to Miranda—and so Kittredge amorously called. The quad of dorms was eerily quiet; when those Favorite River boys heard Kittredge speak, they were silenced by their own awe and stupefaction. “Good night, Nymph!” I heard Kittredge call. “Good night, Naples!”