John Irving - In One Person

“It’s not the least bit funny to me, Billy.”

“Oh.”

It was after I’d completely recovered from the scarlet fever that I asked Richard Abbott his opinion of Madame Bovary . “I think you would appreciate it more when you’re older, Bill,” Richard told me.

“How much older?” I asked him. (I would have been fourteen—I’m guessing. I’d not yet read and reread Great Expectations, but Miss Frost had already started me on my life as a reader—I know that.)

“I could ask Miss Frost how old she thinks I should be,” I suggested.

“I would wait a while before you ask her, Bill,” Richard said.

“How long a while?” I asked him.

Richard Abbott, who I thought knew everything, answered: “I don’t know, exactly.”

I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY when my mom became the prompter for Richard Abbott’s theatrical productions in the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy, but I was very much aware of her being the prompter for The Tempest . There were the occasional scheduling conflicts, because my mother was still prompting for the First Sister Players, but prompters could miss rehearsals now and then, and the performances—the actual shows put on by our town’s amateur theatrical society and Favorite River’s Drama Club—never overlapped.

In rehearsals, Kittredge would pretend to botch a line just to have my mom prompt him. “O most dear maid,” Ferdinand misspoke to Miranda in one of our rehearsals, when we were newly off-script.

“No, Jacques,” my mother said. “That would be ‘O most dear mistress, ’ not maid .”

But Kittredge was acting—he was only pretending to flub the line, so that he could engage my mother in conversation. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Abbott—it won’t happen again,” he said to her; then he blew the very next dialogue assigned him.

“No, precious creature,” Ferdinand is supposed to say to Miranda, but Kittredge said, “No, precious mistress.”

“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.”