John Irving - In One Person

If I was less than forthcoming to my one true friend, Elaine Hadley, I needed only to think of my mother; if I couldn’t tell Richard about my crush on Kittredge, or admit to Miss Frost that I loved her, I had no doubt concerning where my lack of candor came from. (From my mother, unquestionably, but possibly from my womanizing father, too. Maybe from both of them, it only now occurred to me.)

“Good night, Richard—I love you,” I said to my stepfather. He quickly kissed me on my forehead.

“Good night, Bill—I love you, too,” Richard said. He gave me a please-forgive-me kind of smile. I really did love him, but I was fighting against my disappointment in him at the same time.

Also, I was mortally tired; it is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are, and Elaine’s bra was summoning me to my bed.

Perhaps you need to have your world change, your entire world, to understand why anyone would write an epilogue—not to mention why there is an act 5 to The Tempest, and why the epilogue to that play (spoken by Prospero) is absolutely fitting. When I made that juvenile criticism of The Tempest, my world hadn’t changed.

“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” Prospero begins the epilogue—not unlike the way Kittredge might have started a conversation, offhand and innocent-seeming.

That winter of 1960, when Elaine and I were continuing our masquerade, which even extended to our holding hands while we watched Kittredge wrestle, was marked by Martha Hadley’s first official efforts to address the probable cause (or causes) of my pronunciation problems. I use the official word because I made appointments to see Mrs. Hadley, and I met with her in her office—it was in the academy music building.

At seventeen, I’d not yet seen a psychiatrist; had I ever been tempted to talk to Herr Doktor Grau, I’m certain that my beloved stepfather, Richard Abbott, would have persuaded me not to. Besides, that same winter when I was faithfully keeping my appointments with Mrs. Hadley, old Grau died. Favorite River Academy would eventually replace him with a younger (if no less modern) school psychiatrist, but not before the fall term of the next academic year.

Moreover, while I was seeing Martha Hadley, I had no need of a psychiatrist; in the ferreting out of those myriad words I couldn’t pronounce, and in her far-reaching speculations regarding the reason (or reasons) for my mispronunciations, Mrs. Hadley, an expert voice and singing teacher, became my first psychiatrist.

My closer contact with her gave me a better understanding of my attraction to her—her homeliness notwithstanding. Martha Hadley had a masculine kind of homeliness; she was thin-lipped but she had a big mouth, and big teeth. Her jaw was as prominent as Kittredge’s, but her neck was long and contrastingly feminine; she had broad shoulders and big hands, like Miss Frost. Mrs. Hadley’s hair was longer than Miss Frost’s, and she wore it in a severe ponytail. Her flat chest never failed to remind me of Elaine’s overlarge nipples, and those darker-skinned rings around them—the areolae, which I imagined were a mother-daughter thing. But, unlike Elaine, Mrs. Hadley was very strong-looking. I was realizing how much I liked that look.

When the areola and areolae words were added to my long list of troublesome pronunciations, Martha Hadley asked me: “Does the difficulty lie in what they are?”

“Maybe,” I answered her. “Fortunately, they’re not words that come up every day.”

“Whereas library or libraries, not to mention penis —” Mrs. Hadley started to say.

“It’s more of a problem with the plural,” I reminded her.

“I suppose you don’t have much use for penises—I mean the plural, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

“Not every day,” I told her. I meant that the occasion to say the penises word rarely came up—not that I didn’t think about penises every day, because I did. And so—maybe because I hadn’t told Elaine or Richard Abbott or Grandpa Harry, and probably because I didn’t dare tell Miss Frost—I told Mrs. Hadley everything. (Well, almost everything.)

I began with my crush on Kittredge. “You and Elaine!” Martha Hadley said. (Elaine had even been forthcoming to her mother about it!)

I told Mrs. Hadley that, before I ever saw Kittredge, I’d had a homoerotic attraction to other wrestlers, and that—in my perusal of the old yearbooks in the Favorite River Academy library—I had a special fondness for the wrestling-team photographs, in comparison to a merely passing interest in the photos of the school Drama Club. (“I see,” Mrs. Hadley said.)

I even told her about my slightly fading crush on Richard Abbott; it had been at its strongest before he became my stepfather. (“My goodness— that must have been awkward!” Martha Hadley exclaimed.)

But when it came to confessing my love for Miss Frost, I stopped; my eyes welled with tears. “What is it, Billy? You can tell me,” Mrs. Hadley said. She took my hands in her bigger, stronger hands. Her long neck, her throat, was possibly the only pretty thing about her; without much evidence, I could merely speculate that Martha Hadley’s small breasts were like Elaine’s.

In Mrs. Hadley’s office, there was just a piano with a bench, an old couch (where we always sat), and a desk with a straight-backed chair. The third-floor view out her office window was uninspiring—the twisted trunks of two old maple trees, some snow on the more horizontal limbs of the trees, the sky streaked with gray-white clouds. The photo of Mr. Hadley (on Mrs. Hadley’s desk) was also uninspiring.

Mr. Hadley—I’ve long forgotten his first name, if I ever knew it—seemed unsuited to boarding-school life. Mr. Hadley—shaggy, spottily bearded—would one day become a more active figure on the Favorite River campus, where he lent his history-teaching expertise to discussions (which later led to protests) of the Vietnam War. More memorable, by far, than Mr. Hadley was the day of my confession in Martha Hadley’s office, when I concentrated all my attention on Mrs. Hadley’s throat. “Whatever you tell me, Billy, will not leave this office—I swear,” she said.

Somewhere in the music building, a student was practicing the piano—not with the greatest competence, I thought, or perhaps there were two students playing two different pianos. “I look at my mother’s mail-order catalogs,” I confessed to Mrs. Hadley. “I imagine you among the training-bra models,” I told her. “I masturbate,” I admitted—one of the few verbs that gave me a little trouble, though not this time.

“Oh, Billy, this isn’t criminal activity!” Martha Hadley said happily. “I’m only surprised that you would think of me —I’m not in the least good-looking—and it’s a mild surprise that training bra is so easy for you to pronounce. I’m not finding a discernible pattern here,” she said, waving the growing list of those words that challenged me.

“I don’t know what it is about you,” I confessed to her.

“What about girls your own age?” Mrs. Hadley asked me. I shook my head. “Not Elaine?” she asked. I hesitated, but Martha Hadley put her strong hands on my shoulders; she faced me on the couch. “It’s all right, Billy—Elaine doesn’t believe that you’re interested in her in that way. And this is strictly between us, remember?” My eyes filled with tears again; Mrs. Hadley pulled my head to her hard chest. “Billy, Billy—you’ve done nothing wrong !” she cried.

Whoever knocked on the door to her office surely had heard the wrong word. “Come in!” Mrs. Hadley called, in such a strident way that I realized where Elaine’s stop-you-in-your-tracks voice came from.