John Irving - In One Person

In fact, I was a mere thirty years behind myself; on the same September evening I decided to leave the academy library and pay a visit to Miss Frost, I’d begun to peruse the yearbook for the Class of ’31. An absolutely heart-stopping boy in the wrestling-team photo had caused me to abruptly close the yearbook. I thought: I simply can’t keep thinking about Kittredge, and boys like him; I must not give in to those feelings, or I am doomed.

Just what exactly was holding my doom at bay? My contrived image of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model in a mail-order catalog wasn’t working anymore. It was increasingly difficult to masturbate to even the most imaginative transposing of Mrs. Hadley’s homely face on the least bosomy of those small-breasted young girls. All that held Kittredge (and boys like him) at bay was my ardent fantasizing about Miss Frost.

The Favorite River Academy yearbook was called The Owl. (“Anyone who knows why is probably dead,” Richard Abbott had replied, when I’d asked him why.) I pushed the ’31 Owl aside. I gathered up my notebooks, and my German homework—cramming everything but The Owl into my book bag.

I was taking German IV, though it wasn’t required. I was still helping Kittredge with German III, which he’d flunked but was perforce repeating. It was somewhat easier to help him, since we were no longer taking German III together. Essentially, all I did was save Kittredge a little time. The hard stuff in German III was the introduction to Goethe and Rilke; there was more of them in German IV. When Kittredge got stuck on a phrase, I saved him time by giving him a quick and rudimentary translation. That some of the same Goethe and Rilke was as confounding to Kittredge the second time truly incensed him, but frankly the notes and hurried comments that now passed between us were easier for me than our previous conversations. I was trying to be in Kittredge’s presence as little as I possibly could.

To that end, I dropped out of the fall Shakespeare play—to Richard’s oft-expressed disappointment. Richard had cast Kittredge as Edgar in King Lear . Furthermore, there was an unforeseen flaw in Richard’s having cast me as Lear’s Fool. When I was telling Mrs. Hadley that I wanted no part in the play, because Kittredge had “a hero’s part”—not to mention that Edgar is later disguised as Poor Tom, so that Kittredge had essentially been given “a dual role”—Martha Hadley wanted to know how closely I’d looked over my lines. Given that my number of unpronounceables was growing, did I foresee that the Fool presented me with any vocabulary issues? Was Mrs. Hadley hinting that my pronunciation problems could excuse me from the play?

“What are you getting at?” I asked her. “You think I can’t handle ‘cutpurses’ or ‘courtesan,’ or are you worried that ‘codpiece’ will throw me for a loop—just because of the whatchamacallit the codpiece covers, or because I have trouble with the word for the whatchamacallit itself?”

“Don’t be defensive, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.

“Or was it the ‘arrant whore’ combination that you thought might trip me up?” I asked her. “Or maybe ‘coxcomb’—either the singular or the plural, or both!”

“Calm down, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said. “We’re both upset about Kittredge.”

“Kittredge had the last lines in Twelfth Night !” I cried. “Now Richard gives him the last lines again! We have to hear Kittredge say, ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’”

“‘The oldest hath borne most,’” Kittredge-as-Edgar continues.

In the story of King Lear —given what happens to Lear, not to mention the blinding of Gloucester (Richard had cast himself as Gloucester)—this is certainly true. But when Edgar ends the play by declaring that “we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long”—well, I don’t know if that is universally true.

Do I dispute the concluding wisdom of this great play because I can’t distinguish Edgar from Kittredge? Can anyone (even Shakespeare) know how future generations will or will not suffer ?

“Richard is doing what’s best for the play, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. “Richard isn’t rewarding Kittredge for seducing Elaine.” Yet it somehow seemed that way to me. Why give Kittredge as good a part as Edgar, who is later disguised as Poor Tom? After what had happened in Twelfth Night, why did Richard have to give Kittredge a role in King Lear at all? I wanted out of the play—being, or not being, Lear’s Fool wasn’t the issue.

“Just tell Richard you don’t want to be around Kittredge, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley said to me. “Richard will understand.”

I couldn’t tell Martha Hadley that I also didn’t want to be around Richard. And what point was there, in this production of King Lear, to observe my mother’s expression when she watched her father onstage as a woman? Grandpa Harry was cast as Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter; Goneril is such a horrid daughter, why wouldn’t my mom look at anyone playing Goneril with the utmost disapproval? (Aunt Muriel was Regan, Lear’s other awful daughter; I assumed that my mother would glower at her sister, Muriel, too.)

It wasn’t only because of Kittredge that I wanted nothing to do with this King Lear . I had no heart to see Uncle Bob fall short in the leading-man department, for the good-hearted Bob— Squash Ball Bob, Kittredge called him—was cast as King Lear. That Bob lacked a tragic dimension seemed obvious, if not to Richard Abbott; perhaps Richard pitied Bob, and found him tragic, because Bob was (tragically) married to Muriel.

It was Bob’s body that was all wrong—or was it his head? Bob’s body was big, and athletically robust; compared to his body, Bob’s head seemed too small, and improbably round—a squash ball lost between two hulking shoulders. Uncle Bob was both too good-natured and too strong-looking to be Lear.

It is relatively early in the play (act 1, scene 4) when Bob-as-Lear bellows, “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’”

Who could forget how Lear’s Fool answers the king? But I did; I forgot that I even had a line. “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am,’ Bill ?” Richard Abbott asked me.

“It’s your line, Nymph,” Kittredge whispered to me. “I had anticipated that you might have a little trouble with it.” Everyone waited while I found the Fool’s line. At first, I wasn’t even aware of the pronunciation problem; my difficulty in saying this word was so recent that I hadn’t noticed it, nor had Martha Hadley. But Kittredge, clearly, had detected the potential unpronounceable. “Let’s hear you say it, Nymph,” Kittredge said. “Let’s hear you try it, anyway.”

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Lear asks.

The Fool answers: “Lear’s shadow.”

Since when had the shadow word given me any grief in the pronunciation department? Since Elaine had come back from that trip to Europe with Mrs. Kittredge, when Elaine seemed as insubstantial as a shadow—at least in comparison to her former self. Since Elaine had come back from Europe, and there seemed to be an unfamiliar shadow dogging her every step—a shadow that bore a ghostly but ultrasophisticated resemblance to Mrs. Kittredge herself. Since Elaine had gone away again, to Northfield, and I was left with a shadow following me around—perhaps the disquieting, unavenged shadow of my absent best friend.

“‘Lear’s . . . shed,’” I said.

“His shed !” Kittredge exclaimed.