In One Person

Chapter 10 ONE MOVE

The next-to-last time I saw Miss Frost was at a wrestling match—a dual meet at Favorite River Academy in January 1961. It was the first home meet of the season; Tom Atkins and I went together. The wrestling room—at one time, it was the only gym on the Favorite River campus—was an ancient brick building attached to the more modern, bigger gym by an enclosed but unheated cement catwalk.

The old gym was encircled by a wooden running track, which hung over the wrestling room; the track sloped downward at the four corners. The student spectators sat on the wooden track with their arms resting on the center bar of the iron railing. On this particular Saturday, Tom Atkins and I were among them, peering down at the wrestlers below.

The mat, the scorers’ table, and the two team benches took up most of the gym floor. At one end of the wrestling room was a slanted rectangle of bleachers, with not more than a dozen rows of seats. The students considered the bleachers to be appropriate seating for the “older types.” Faculty spectators sat there, and visiting parents. There were some townspeople who regularly attended the wrestling matches, and they sat in the bleachers. The day Elaine and I had seen Mrs. Kittredge watch her son wrestle, Mrs. Kittredge had sat in the bleachers—while Elaine and I had closely observed her from the sloped wooden running track above her.

I was remembering my one and only sighting of Mrs. Kittredge, when Tom Atkins and I noticed Miss Frost. She was sitting in the first row of the bleacher seats, as close to the wrestling mat as she could get. (Mrs. Kittredge had sat in the back row of the bleachers, as if to signify her immortal-seeming aloofness from the grunting and grimacing of human combat.)

“Look who’s here, Bill—in the first row. Do you see her?” Atkins asked me.

“I know, Tom—I see her,” I said. I instantly wondered if Miss Frost often, or always, attended the wrestling matches. If she’d been a frequent spectator at the home meets, how had Elaine and I missed seeing her? Miss Frost was not only tall and broad-shouldered; as a woman, it wasn’t just her size that was imposing. If she’d frequently had a front-row seat at the wrestling matches, how could anyone have missed seeing her?

Miss Frost seemed very much at home where she was—at the edge of the wrestling mat, watching the wrestlers warm up. I doubted that she’d spotted Tom Atkins and me, because she didn’t glance up at the surrounding running track—even during the warm-ups. And once the competition started, didn’t everyone watch the wrestlers on the mat?

Because Delacorte was a lightweight, he wrestled in one of the first matches. If Delacorte had played Lear’s Fool as a death-in-progress, that was certainly the way he wrestled; it was agonizing to watch him. Delacorte managed to make a wrestling match resemble a death-in-progress. The weight-cutting took a toll on him. He was so sucked down—he was all loose skin and super-prominent bones. Delacorte looked as if he were starving to death.

He was noticeably taller than most of his opponents; he often outscored them in the first period, and he was usually leading at the end of the second period, when he began to tire. The third period was Delacorte’s time to pay for the weight-cutting.

Delacorte finished every wrestling match desperately trying to protect an ever-diminishing lead. He stalled, he fled the mat; his opponent’s hands appeared to grow heavy on him. Delacorte’s head hung down, and his tongue lolled out a corner of his open mouth. According to Kittredge, Delacorte ran out of gas every third period; a wrestling match was always a couple of minutes too long for him.

“Hang on, Delacorte!” one of the student spectators inevitably cried; soon all of us would echo this plea.

“Hang on! Hang on! Hang on!”

At this point in Delacorte’s matches, Elaine and I had learned to look at Favorite River’s wrestling coach—a tough-looking old geezer with cauliflower ears and a crooked nose. Almost everyone called Coach Hoyt by his first name, which was Herm.

When Delacorte was dying in the third period, Herm Hoyt predictably took a towel from a stack at the end of the wrestling-team bench nearest the scorers’ table. Coach Hoyt unfailingly sat next to the towels, as near as he could get to the scorers’ table.

As Delacorte tried to “hang on” a little longer, Herm unfolded the towel; he was bowlegged, in that way a lot of old wrestlers are, and when he stood up from the team bench, he (for just a moment) looked like he wanted to strangle the dying Delacorte with the towel, which Herm instead put over his own head. Coach Hoyt wore the towel as if it were a hood; he peered out from under the towel at Delacorte’s final, expiring moments—at the clock on the scorers’ table, at the ref (who, in the waning seconds of the third period, usually first warned Delacorte, and then penalized him, for stalling).

While Delacorte died, which I found unbearable to watch, I looked instead at Herm Hoyt, who seemed to be dying of both anger and empathy under the towel. Naturally, I advised Tom Atkins to keep his eyes on the old coach instead of enduring Delacorte’s agonies, because Herm Hoyt knew before anyone else (including Delacorte) whether Delacorte would hang on and win or finish dying and lose.

This Saturday, following his near-death experience, Delacorte actually hung on and won. He came off the mat and collapsed into Herm Hoyt’s arms. The old coach did as he always did with Delacorte—win or lose. Herm covered Delacorte’s head with the towel, and Delacorte staggered to the team bench, where he sat sobbing and gasping for breath under the all-concealing mantle.

“For once, Delacorte isn’t rinsing or spitting,” Atkins sarcastically observed, but I was watching Miss Frost, who suddenly looked at me and smiled.

It was an unselfconscious smile—accompanied by a spontaneous little wave, just the wiggling of her fingers on one hand. I instantly knew: Miss Frost had known all along that I was there, and she’d expected that I would be.

I was so completely undone by her smile, and the wave, that I feared I would faint and slip under the railing; I foresaw myself falling from the wooden track to the wrestling room below. In all likelihood, it wouldn’t have been a life-threatening fall; the running track was not at a great height above the gym floor. It just would have been humiliating to fall in a heap on the wrestling mat, or to land on one or more of the wrestlers.

“I don’t feel well, Tom,” I said to Atkins. “I’m a little dizzy.”

“I’ve got you, Bill,” Atkins said, putting his arm around me. “Just don’t look down for a minute.”

I kept looking at the far end of the gym, where the bleachers were, but Miss Frost had returned her attention to the wrestling; another match had started, while Delacorte was still wracked by sobs and gasps—his head was bobbing up and down under the consoling towel.

Coach Herm Hoyt had sat back down on the team bench next to the stack of clean towels. I saw Kittredge, who was beginning to loosen up; he was standing behind the bench, just bouncing on the balls of his feet and turning his head from side to side. Kittredge was stretching his neck, but he never stopped looking at Miss Frost.

“I’m okay, Tom,” I said, but the weight of his arm rested on the back of my neck for a few seconds more; I counted to five to myself before Atkins took his arm from around my shoulders.

“We should think about going to Europe together,” I told Atkins, but I still watched Kittredge, who was skipping rope. Kittredge couldn’t take his eyes off Miss Frost; he continued to stare at her, skipping rhythmically, the speed of the jump rope never changing.

“Look who’s captivated by her now, Bill,” Atkins said petulantly.

“I know, Tom—I see him,” I said. (Was it my worst fear, or was it secretly thrilling—to imagine Kittredge and Miss Frost together?)

“We would go to Europe this summer—is that what you mean, Bill?” Atkins asked me.

“Why not?” I replied, as casually as I could—I was still watching Kittredge.

“If your parents approve, and mine do—we could ask them, couldn’t we?” Atkins said.

“It’s in our hands, Tom—we have to make them understand it’s a priority,” I told him.

“She’s looking at you, Bill!” Atkins said breathlessly.

When I glanced (as casually as I could) at Miss Frost, she was smiling at me again. She put her index and middle fingers to her lips and kissed them. Before I could blow her a kiss, she was once more watching the wrestling.

“Boy, did that get Kittredge’s attention!” Tom Atkins said excitedly. I kept looking at Miss Frost, but only for a moment; I didn’t need Atkins to tell me in order to know that Kittredge was looking at me.

“Bill, Kittredge is—” Atkins began.

“I know, Tom,” I told him. I let my gaze linger on Miss Frost a little longer, before I glanced—as if accidentally—at Kittredge. He’d stopped jumping rope and was staring at me. I just smiled at him, as unmeaningfully as I’d ever managed to smile at him, and Kittredge began to skip rope again; he had picked up the pace, either consciously or unconsciously, but he was once again staring at Miss Frost. I couldn’t help wonder if Kittredge was reconsidering the disgusting word. Perhaps the everything that Kittredge imagined I’d done with Miss Frost didn’t disgust him anymore, or was this wishful thinking?

The atmosphere in the wrestling room changed abruptly when Kittredge’s match began. Both team benches viewed the mauling with a clinical appreciation. Kittredge usually beat up his opponents before he pinned them. It was confusing for a nonwrestler like myself to differentiate among the displays of Kittredge’s technical expertise, his athleticism, and the brute force of his physical superiority; Kittredge thoroughly dominated an opponent before pinning him. There was always a moment in the third and final period when Kittredge glanced at the clock on the scorers’ table; at that moment, the home crowd began chanting, “Pin! Pin! Pin!” By then, the torturing had gone on for so long that I imagined Kittredge’s opponent was hoping to be pinned; moments later, when the referee signaled the fall, the pin seemed both overdue and merciful. I’d never seen Kittredge lose; I hadn’t once seen him challenged.

I don’t remember the remaining matches that Saturday afternoon, or which team won the dual meet. The rest of the competition is clouded in my memory by Kittredge’s nearly constant staring at Miss Frost, which continued long after his match—Kittredge interrupting his fixed gaze only with cursory (and occasional) glances at me.

I, of course, continued to look back and forth between Kittredge and Miss Frost; it was the first time I could see both of them in the same place, and I admit I was deeply disturbed about that imagined split second when Miss Frost would look at Kittredge. She didn’t—not once. She continued to watch the wrestling and, albeit briefly, to smile at me—while the entire time Tom Atkins kept asking, “Do you want to leave, Bill? If this is uncomfortable for you, we should just leave—I would go with you, you know.”

“I’m fine, Tom—I want to stay,” I kept telling him.

“Europe—well, I never imagined I would see Europe!” Atkins at one point exclaimed. “I wonder where in Europe, and how we would travel. By train, I suppose—by bus, maybe. I wish I knew what we would need for clothes—”

“It will be summer, Tom—we’ll need summer clothes,” I told him.

“Yes, but how formal, or not—that’s what I mean, Bill. And how much money would we need? I truly have no idea!” Atkins said in a panicky voice.

“We’ll ask someone,” I said. “Lots of people have been to Europe.”

“Don’t ask Kittredge, Bill,” Atkins continued, in his panic-stricken mode. “I’m sure we couldn’t afford any of the places Kittredge goes, or the hotels he stays in. Besides, we don’t want Kittredge to know we’re going to Europe together—do we?”

“Stop blithering, Tom,” I told him. I saw that Delacorte had emerged from under the towel; he appeared to be breathing normally, paper cup in hand. Kittredge said something to him, and Delacorte instantly started to stare at Miss Frost.

“Delacorte gives me the—” Atkins began.

“I know, Tom!” I told him.

I realized that the wrestling-team manager was a servile, furtive-looking boy in glasses; I’d not noticed him before. He handed Kittredge an orange, cut in quarters; Kittredge took the orange without looking at the manager or saying anything to him. (The manager’s name was Merryweather; with a last name like that, as you might imagine, no one ever called him by his first name.)

Merryweather handed Delacorte a clean paper cup; Delacorte gave Merryweather the old, spat-in cup, which Merryweather dropped in the spit bucket. Kittredge was eating the orange while he and Delacorte stared at Miss Frost. I watched Merryweather, who was gathering up the used and discarded towels; I was trying to imagine my father, Franny Dean, doing the things a wrestling-team manager does.

“I must say, Bill—you’re rather remote for someone who’s just asked me to spend a summer in Europe with him,” Atkins said tearfully.

“Rather remote,” I repeated. I was beginning to regret that I’d asked Tom Atkins to go to Europe with me for a whole summer; his neediness was already irritating me. But suddenly the wrestling was over; the student spectators were filing down the corrugated-iron stairs, which led from the running track to the gym floor. Parents and faculty—and the other adult spectators, from the bleacher seats—were milling around on the wrestling mat, where the wrestlers were talking to their families and friends.

“You’re not going to speak to her, are you, Bill? I thought you weren’t allowed,” Atkins was fretting.

I must have wanted to see what might happen, if I accidentally bumped into Miss Frost—if I just said, “Hi,” or something. (Elaine and I used to mill around on the wrestling mat after we’d watched Kittredge wrestle—probably hoping, and fearing, that we would bump into Kittredge “accidentally.”)

It was not hard to spot Miss Frost in the crowd; she was so tall and erect, and Tom Atkins was whispering beside me with the nervous constancy of a bird dog. “There she is, Bill—over there. Do you see her?”

“I see her, Tom.”

“I don’t see Kittredge,” Atkins said worriedly.

I knew that Kittredge’s timing was not to be doubted; when I had made my way to where Miss Frost was standing (not coincidentally, in the intimidating center of that starting circle on the wrestling mat), I found myself stopping in front of her at the very instant Kittredge materialized beside me. Miss Frost probably realized that I couldn’t speak; Atkins, who’d been blathering compulsively, was now struck speechless by the awkward gravity of the moment.

Smiling at Miss Frost, Kittredge—who was never at a loss for words—said to me: “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Nymph?”

Miss Frost continued smiling at me; she did not look at Kittredge when she spoke to him.

“I know you onstage, Master Kittredge—on this stage, too,” Miss Frost said, pointing a long finger at the wrestling mat. (Her nail polish was a new color to me—magenta, maybe, more purplish than red.) “But Tom Atkins will have to introduce us. William and I,” she said, not once looking away from me as she spoke, “are not permitted to speak to each other, or otherwise engage.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Kittredge started to say, but he was interrupted.

“Miss Frost, this is Jacques Kittredge—Jacques, this is Miss Frost!” Atkins blurted out. “Miss Frost is a great . . . reader!” Atkins told Kittredge; poor Tom then considered what options remained for him. Miss Frost had only tentatively extended her hand in Kittredge’s direction; because she kept looking at me, Kittredge was perhaps unsure if she was offering her hand to him or to me. “Kittredge is our best wrestler,” Tom Atkins forged ahead, as if Miss Frost had no idea who Kittredge was. “This will be his third undefeated season—that is, if he remains undefeated,” Atkins bumbled on. “It will be a school record—three undefeated seasons! Won’t it?” Atkins asked Kittredge uncertainly.

“Actually,” Kittredge said, smiling at Miss Frost, “I can only tie the school record, if I remain undefeated. Some stud did it in the thirties,” Kittredge said. “Of course, there was no New England tournament back then. I don’t suppose they wrestled as many matches as we do today, and who knows how tough their competition was—”

Miss Frost stopped him. “It wasn’t bad,” she said, with a disarming shrug; by how perfectly she’d captured Kittredge’s shrug, I suddenly realized for how long (and how closely) Miss Frost had been observing him.

“Who’s the stud—whose record is it?” Tom Atkins asked Kittredge. Of course I knew by the way Kittredge answered that he had no idea whose record he was trying to tie.

“Some guy named Al Frost,” Kittredge said dismissively. I feared the worst from Tom Atkins: nonstop crying, explosive vomiting, insane and incomprehensible repetition of the vagina word. But Atkins was mute and twitching.

“How’s it goin’, Al?” Coach Hoyt asked Miss Frost; his battered head came up to her collarbones. Miss Frost affectionately put her magenta-painted hand on the back of the old coach’s neck, pulling his face to her small but very noticeable breasts.

(Delacorte would explain to me later that wrestlers called this a collar-tie.) “How are you, Herm?” Miss Frost said fondly to her former coach.

“Oh, I’m hangin’ in there, Al,” Herm Hoyt said. An errant towel protruded from one of the side pockets of his rumpled sports jacket; his tie was askew, and the top button of his shirt was unbuttoned. (With his wrestler’s neck, Herm Hoyt could never button that top button.)

“We were talking about Al Frost, and the school record,” Kittredge explained to his coach, but Kittredge continued to smile at Miss Frost. “All Coach Hoyt will ever say about Frost is that he was ‘pretty good’—of course, that’s what Herm says about a guy who’s very good or pretty good,” Kittredge was explaining to Miss Frost. Then he said to her: “I don’t suppose you ever saw Frost wrestle?”

I don’t think that Herm Hoyt’s sudden and obvious discomfort gave it away; I honestly believe that Kittredge realized who Al Frost was in the split second that followed his asking Miss Frost if she’d ever seen Frost wrestle. It was the same split second when I saw Kittredge look at Miss Frost’s hands; it wasn’t the nail polish he was noticing.

“Al—Al Frost,” Miss Frost said. This time, she unambiguously extended her hand to Kittredge; only then did she look at him. I knew that look: It was the penetrating way she’d once looked at me—when I was fifteen and I wanted to reread Great Expectations. Both Tom Atkins and I noticed how small Kittredge’s hand looked in Miss Frost’s grip. “Of course we weren’t—we aren’t, I should say—in the same weight-class,” Miss Frost said to Kittredge.

“Big Al was my one-seventy-seven-pounder,” Herm Hoyt was telling Kittredge. “You were a little light to wrestle heavyweight, Al, but I started you at heavyweight a couple of times—you kept askin’ me to let you wrestle the big guys.”

“I was pretty good—just pretty good,” Miss Frost told Kittredge. “At least they didn’t think I was very good—not when I got to Pennsylvania.”

Both Atkins and I saw that Kittredge couldn’t speak. The handshaking part was over, but either Kittredge couldn’t let go of Miss Frost’s hand or she didn’t let him let go.

Miss Frost had lost a lot of muscle mass since her wrestling days; yet, with the hormones she’d been taking, I’m sure her hips were bigger than when she used to weigh in at 177 pounds. In her forties, I’m guessing Miss Frost weighed 185 or 190 pounds, but she was six feet two—in heels, she’d told me, she was about six-four—and she carried the weight well. She didn’t look like a 190-pounder.

Jacques Kittredge was a 147-pounder. I’m estimating that Kittredge’s “natural” weight—when it wasn’t wrestling season—was around 160 pounds. He was five-eleven (and a bit); Kittredge had once told Elaine that he’d just missed being a six-footer.

Coach Hoyt must have seen how unnerved Kittredge was—this was so uncharacteristic—not to mention the prolonged hand-holding between Kittredge and Miss Frost, which was making Atkins breathe irregularly.

Herm Hoyt began to ramble; his impromptu dissertation on wrestling history filled the void (our suddenly halted conversation) with an odd combination of nervousness and nostalgia.

“In your day, Al, I was just thinkin’, you wore nothin’ but tights—everyone was bare-chested, don’tcha remember?” the old coach asked his former 177-pounder.

“I most certainly do, Herm,” Miss Frost replied. She released Kittredge’s hand; with her long fingers, Miss Frost straightened her cardigan, which was open over her fitted blouse—the bare-chested word having drawn Kittredge’s attention to her girlish breasts.

Tom Atkins was wheezing; I’d not been told that Atkins suffered from asthma, in addition to his pronunciation problems. Perhaps poor Tom was merely hyperventilating, in lieu of bursting into tears.

“We started wearin’ the singlets and the tights in ’58—if you remember, Jacques,” Herm Hoyt said, but Kittredge had not recovered the ability to speak; he managed only a disheartened nod.

“The singlets and the tights are redundant,” Miss Frost said; she was examining her nail polish disapprovingly, as if someone else had chosen the color. “It should either be just a singlet, and no tights, or you wear only tights and you’re bare-chested,” Miss Frost said. “Personally,” she added, in a staged aside to the silent Kittredge, “I prefer to be bare-chested.”

“One day, it will be just a singlet—no tights, I’ll bet ya,” the old coach predicted. “No bare chests allowed.”

“Pity,” Miss Frost said, with a theatrical sigh.

Atkins emitted a choking sound; he’d spotted the scowling Dr. Harlow, maybe a half-second before I saw the bald-headed owl-fucker. I had my doubts that Dr. Harlow was a wrestling fan—at least Elaine and I had never noticed him when we’d watched Kittredge wrestle before. (But why would we have paid any attention to Dr. Harlow then?)

“This is strictly forbidden, Bill—there’s to be no contact between you two,” Dr. Harlow said; he didn’t look at Miss Frost. The “you two” was as close as Dr. Harlow could come to saying her name.

“Miss Frost and I haven’t said a word to each other,” I told the bald-headed owl-fucker.

“There’s to be no contact, Bill,” Dr. Harlow sputtered; he still wouldn’t look at Miss Frost.

“What contact?” Miss Frost said sharply; her big hand gripped the doctor’s shoulder, causing Dr. Harlow to spring away from her. “The only contact I’ve had is with young Kittredge here,” Miss Frost told Dr. Harlow; she now put both her hands on Kittredge’s shoulders. “Look at me,” she commanded him; when Kittredge looked up at her, he seemed as suddenly impressionable as a submissive little boy. (If Elaine had been there, she at last would have seen the innocence she’d sought, unsuccessfully, in Kittredge’s younger photographs.) “I wish you luck—I hope you tie that record,” Miss Frost told him.

“Thank you,” Kittredge managed to mumble.

“See you around, Herm,” Miss Frost said to her old coach.

“Take care of yourself, Al,” Herm Hoyt told her.

“I’ll see you, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me, but he didn’t look at me—or at Miss Frost. Kittredge quickly jogged off the mat, catching up to one of his teammates.

“We were talkin’ about wrestlin’, Doc,” Herm Hoyt said to Dr. Harlow.

“What record?” Dr. Harlow asked the old coach.

“My record,” Miss Frost told the doctor. She was leaving when Tom Atkins made a gagging sound; Atkins couldn’t contain himself, and now that Kittredge was gone, poor Tom was no longer afraid to say it.

“Miss Frost!” Atkins blurted out. “Bill and I are going to Europe together this summer!”

Miss Frost smiled warmly at me, before turning her attention to Tom Atkins. “I think that’s a wonderful idea, Tom,” she told him. “I’m sure you’ll have a great time.” Miss Frost was walking away when she stopped and looked back at us, but it was clear, when Miss Frost spoke to us, that she was looking straight at Dr. Harlow. “I hope you two get to do everything together,” Miss Frost said.

Then they were gone—both Miss Frost and Dr. Harlow. (The latter didn’t look at me as he was leaving.) Tom Atkins and I were left alone with Herm Hoyt.

“Ya know, fellas—I gotta be goin’,” the old coach told us. “There’s a team meetin’—”

“Coach Hoyt,” I said, stopping him. “I’m curious to know who would win—if there were ever a match between Kittredge and Miss Frost. I mean, if they were the same age and in the same weight-class. You know what I mean—if everything were equal.”

Herm Hoyt looked around; maybe he was checking to be sure that none of his wrestlers was near enough to overhear him. Only Delacorte had lingered in the wrestling room, but he was standing far off by the exit door, as if he were waiting for someone. Delacorte was too far away to hear us.

“Listen, fellas,” the old coach growled, “don’t quote me on this, but Big Al would kill Kittredge. At any age, no matter what weight-class—Al could kick the shit out of Kittredge.”

I won’t pretend that it wasn’t gratifying to hear this, but I would rather have heard it privately; it wasn’t something I wanted to share with Tom Atkins.

“Can you imagine, Bill—” Atkins began, when Coach Hoyt had left us for the locker room.

I interrupted Atkins. “Yes, of course I can imagine, Tom,” I told him.

We were at the exit to the old gym when Delacorte stopped us. It was me he’d been waiting for.

“I saw her—she’s truly beautiful!” Delacorte told me. “She spoke to me as she was leaving—she said I was a ‘wonderful’ Lear’s Fool.” Here Delacorte paused to rinse and spit; he was holding two paper cups and no longer resembled a death-in-progress. “She also told me I should move up a weight-class, but she put it in a funny way. ‘You might lose more matches if you move up a weight, but you won’t suffer so much.’ She used to be Al Frost, you know,” Delacorte confided to me. “She used to wrestle!”

“We know, Delacorte!” Tom Atkins said irritably.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Atkins,” Delacorte said, rinsing and spitting. “Then Dr. Harlow interrupted us,” Delacorte told me. “He said something to your friend—some bullshit about it being ‘inappropriate’ for her even to be here! But she just kept talking to me, as if the bald-headed owl-fucker weren’t there. She said, ‘Oh, what is it Kent says to Lear—act one, scene one, when Lear has got things the wrong way around, concerning Cordelia? Oh, what is the line? I just saw it! You were just in it!’ But I didn’t know what line she meant—I was Lear’s Fool, I wasn’t Kent—and Dr. Harlow was just standing there. Suddenly, she cries out: ‘I’ve got it—Kent says, “Kill thy physician”—that’s the line I was looking for!’ And the bald-headed owl-fucker says to her, ‘Very funny—I suppose you think that’s very funny.’ But she turns on him, she gets right in Dr. Harlow’s face, and she says, ‘Funny? I think you’re a funny little man—that’s what I think, Dr. Harlow.’ And the bald-headed owl-fucker scurried off. Dr. Harlow just ran away! Your friend is marvelous!” Delacorte told me.

Someone shoved him. Delacorte dropped both paper cups—in a doomed effort to regain his balance, to try to stop himself from falling. Delacorte fell in the mess from his rinsing and spitting cups. It was Kittredge who’d shoved him. Kittredge had a towel wrapped around his waist—his hair was wet from the shower. “There’s a team meeting after showers, and you haven’t even showered. I could get laid twice in the time it takes to wait for you, Delacorte,” Kittredge told him.

Delacorte got to his feet and ran down the enclosed cement catwalk to the new gym, where the showers were.

Tom Atkins was attempting to make himself invisible; he was afraid that Kittredge would shove him next.

“How did you not know she was a man, Nymph?” Kittredge suddenly asked me. “Did you overlook her Adam’s apple, did you not notice how big she is? Except her tits. Jesus! How could you not know she was a man?”

“Maybe I did know,” I said to him. (It just came out, as the truth only occasionally will.)

“Jesus, Nymph,” Kittredge said. He was starting to shiver; there was a draft of cold air from the unheated catwalk that led to the bigger, newer gym, and Kittredge was wearing just a towel. It was unusual to see Kittredge appear vulnerable, but he was half naked and shivering from the cold. Tom Atkins was not a brave boy, but even Atkins must have sensed Kittredge’s vulnerability—even Atkins could summon a moment of fearlessness.

“How did you not know she was a wrestler?” Atkins asked him. Kittredge took a step toward him, and Atkins—again fearful—stumbled backward, almost falling. “Did you see her shoulders, her neck, her hands?” Atkins cried to Kittredge.

“I gotta go,” was all Kittredge said. He said it to me—he didn’t answer Atkins. Even Tom Atkins could tell that Kittredge’s confidence was shaken.

Atkins and I watched Kittredge run along the catwalk; he clutched the towel around his waist as he ran. It was a small towel—as tight around his hips as a short skirt. The towel made Kittredge run like a girl.

“You don’t think Kittredge could lose a match this season—do you, Bill?” Atkins asked me.

Like Kittredge, I didn’t answer Atkins. How could Kittredge lose a wrestling match in New England? I would have loved to ask Miss Frost that question, among other questions.

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU are tired of being treated like a child—tired of adolescence, too—that suddenly opening but quickly closing passage, when you irreversibly want to grow up, is a dangerous time. In a future novel (an early one), I would write: “Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.” (I might have been thinking of that simultaneous desire to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost, not necessarily in that order.)

In a later novel, I would approach this idea a little differently—a little more carefully, maybe. “In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.” I suppose I could have written “betrayals” instead of “robberies”; in my own family’s case, I might have used the deceptions word—citing lies of both omission and commission. But I’ll stand by what I wrote; it suffices.

In another novel—very near the beginning of the book, in fact—I wrote: “Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away; it keeps things for you, or hides things from you. Your memory summons things to your recall with a will of its own. You imagine you have a memory, but your memory has you!” (I’ll stand by that, too.)

It would have been late February or early March of ’61 when the Favorite River Academy community learned that Kittredge had lost; in fact, he’d lost twice. The New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championships were in East Providence, Rhode Island, that year. Kittredge was beaten badly in the semifinals. “It wasn’t even close,” Delacorte told me in an almost-incomprehensible sentence. (I could detect the vowels but not the consonants, because Delacorte was speaking with six stitches in his tongue.)

Kittredge had lost again in the consolation round to determine third place—this time, to a kid he’d beaten before.

“That first loss kind of took it out of him—after that, Kittredge didn’t seem to care if he finished third or fourth,” was all Delacorte could manage to say. I saw blood in his spitting cup; he’d bitten through his tongue—hence the six stitches.

“Kittredge finished fourth,” I told Tom Atkins.

For a two-time defending champion, this must have hurt. The New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championships had begun in ’49, fourteen years after Al Frost finished his third undefeated season, but in the Favorite River school newspaper, nothing was said about Al Frost’s record—or Kittredge’s failure to tie it. In thirteen years, there’d been eighteen two-time New England champions—Kittredge among them. If he’d managed to win a third championship, that would have been a first. “A first and a last,” Coach Hoyt was quoted as saying, in our school newspaper. As it would turn out, ’61 was the final year there were all-inclusive New England schoolboy wrestling championships; starting in ’62, the public high schools and the private schools would have separate tournaments.

I asked Herm Hoyt about it one early spring day, when our paths crossed in the quad. “Somethin’ will be lost—havin’ one tournament for everyone is tougher,” the old coach told me.

I asked Coach Hoyt about Kittredge, too—if there was anything that could explain those two losses. “Kittredge didn’t give a shit about that consolation match,” Herm said. “If he couldn’t win it all, he didn’t give a good fuck about the difference between third and fourth place.”

“What about the first loss?” I asked Coach Hoyt.

“I kept tellin’ Kittredge, there’s always someone who’s better,” the old coach said. “The only way you beat the better guy is by bein’ tougher. The other guy was better, and Kittredge wasn’t tougher.”

That seemed to be all there was to it. Atkins and I found Kittredge’s defeat anticlimactic. When I mentioned it to Richard Abbott, he said, “It’s Shakespearean, Bill; lots of the important stuff in Shakespeare happens offstage—you just hear about it.”

“It’s Shakespearean,” I repeated.

“It’s still anticlimactic,” Atkins said, when I told him what Richard had to say.

As for Kittredge, he seemed only a little subdued; he didn’t strike me as much affected by those losses. Besides, it was that time in our senior year when we were hearing about what colleges or universities we’d been admitted to. The wrestling season was over.

Favorite River was not in the top tier of New England preparatory schools; understandably, the academy kids didn’t apply to the top tier of colleges or universities. Most of us went to small liberal-arts colleges, but Tom Atkins saw himself as a state-university type; he’d seen what small was like, and what he wanted was bigger—“a place you could get lost in,” Atkins wistfully said to me.

I cared less about the getting-lost factor than Tom Atkins did. I cared about the English Department—whether or not I could continue to read those writers Miss Frost had introduced me to. I cared about being in or near New York City.

“Where’d you go to college?” I had asked Miss Frost.

“Someplace in Pennsylvania,” she’d told me. “It’s no place you’ve ever heard of.” (I liked the “no place you’ve ever heard of” part, but it was the New York City factor that mattered most to me.)

I applied to every college and university I could think of in the New York City area—ones you’ve heard of, ones you’ve never heard of. I made a point of speaking to someone in the German Department, too. In every case, I was assured that they would help me find a way to study abroad in a German-speaking country.

I already had the feeling that a summer in Europe with Tom Atkins would only serve to stimulate my desire to be far, far away from First Sister, Vermont. It seemed to me to be what a would-be writer should do—that is, live in a foreign country, where they spoke a foreign language, while (at the same time) I would be making my earliest serious attempts to write in my own language, as if I were the first and only person to ever do it.

Tom Atkins ended up at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst; it was a big school, and Atkins would manage to get lost there—maybe more lost than he’d meant, or had wanted.

No doubt, my application to the University of New Hampshire provoked some suspicion at home. There’d been a rumor that Miss Frost was moving to New Hampshire. This had prompted Aunt Muriel to remark that she wished Miss Frost were moving farther away from Vermont than that—to which I responded by saying I hoped to move farther away from Vermont than that, too. (This must have mystified Muriel, who knew I’d applied to the University of New Hampshire.)

But that spring, there was no confirmation that Miss Frost’s rumored move to New Hampshire was true—nor did anyone say where in New Hampshire she might be moving to. Truly, my reasons for applying to the University of New Hampshire had nothing to do with Miss Frost’s future whereabouts. (I’d only applied there to worry my family—I had no intention of going there.)

It was frankly more of a mystery—chiefly, to Tom Atkins and me—that Kittredge was going to Yale. Granted, Atkins and I had the kind of SAT scores that made Yale—or any of the Ivy League schools—unattainable. My grades had been better than Kittredge’s, however, and how could Yale have overlooked the fact that Kittredge had been forced to repeat his senior year? (Tom Atkins had erratic grades, but he had graduated on schedule.) Atkins and I knew that Kittredge had great SAT scores, but Yale must have been motivated to take him for other reasons; Atkins and I knew that, too.

Atkins mentioned Kittredge’s wrestling, but I think I know what Miss Frost would have said about that: It wasn’t the wrestling that got Kittredge into Yale. (As it turned out, he wouldn’t wrestle in college, anyway.) His SAT scores probably helped, but Kittredge’s father, from whom he was estranged, had gone to Yale.

“Trust me,” I told Tom. “Kittredge didn’t get into Yale for his German—that’s all I can tell you.”

“Why does it matter to you, Billy—where Kittredge is going to college?” Mrs. Hadley asked me. (I was having a pronunciation problem with the Yale word, which was why the subject came up.)

“I’m not envious,” I told her. “I assure you, I don’t want to go there—I can’t even say it!”

As it turned out, it meant nothing—where Kittredge went to college, or where I went—but, at the time, it was infuriating that Kittredge was accepted to Yale.

“Forget about fairness,” I said to Martha Hadley, “but doesn’t merit matter?” It was an eighteen-year-old question to ask, though I had turned nineteen (in March 1961); in due time, of course, I would get over where Kittredge went to college. Even in that spring of ’61, Tom Atkins and I were more interested in planning our summer in Europe than we were obsessed by the obvious injustice of Kittredge getting into Yale.

I admit: It was easier to forget about Kittredge, now that I rarely saw him. Either he didn’t need my help with his German or he’d stopped asking for it. Since Yale had admitted him, Kittredge wasn’t worried about what grade he got in German—all he had to do was graduate.

“May I remind you?” Tom Atkins asked me sniffily. “Graduating was all Kittredge had to do last year, too.”

But in ’61, Kittredge did graduate—so did we all. Frankly, graduation seemed anticlimactic, too. Nothing happened, but what were we expecting? Apparently, Mrs. Kittredge hadn’t been expecting anything; she didn’t attend. Elaine also stayed away, but that was understandable.

Why hadn’t Mrs. Kittredge come to see her only child graduate? (“Not very motherly, is she?” was all Kittredge had to say about it.) Kittredge seemed unsurprised; he was notably unimpressed with graduating. His aura was one of already having moved beyond the rest of us.

“It’s as if he’s started at Yale—it’s like he’s not here anymore,” Atkins observed.

I met Tom’s parents at graduation. His father took a despairing look at me and refused to shake my hand; he didn’t call me a fag, but I could feel him thinking it.

“My father is very . . . unsophisticated,” Atkins told me.

“He should meet my mom,” was all I said. “We’re going to Europe together, Tom—that’s all that matters.”

“That’s all that matters,” Atkins repeated. I didn’t envy him his days at home before we left; it was evident that his dad would give him endless shit about me while poor Tom was home. Atkins lived in New Jersey. Having seen only the New Jersey people who came to Vermont to ski, I didn’t envy Atkins that, either.

Delacorte introduced me to his mom. “This is the guy who was going to be Lear’s Fool,” Delacorte began.

When the pretty little woman in the sleeveless dress and the straw hat also declined to shake my hand, I realized that my being the original Lear’s Fool was probably connected to the story of my having had sex with the transsexual town librarian.

“I’m so sorry for your troubles,” Mrs. Delacorte told me. I only then remembered that I didn’t know where Delacorte was going to college. Now that he’s dead, I’m sorry I never asked him. It may have mattered to Delacorte—where he went to college—maybe as much as where I went didn’t matter to me.

THE REHEARSALS FOR THE Tennessee Williams play weren’t time-consuming—not for my small part. I was only in the last scene, which is all about Alma, the repressed woman Nils Borkman believed Miss Frost would be perfect for. Alma was played by Aunt Muriel, as repressed a woman as I’ve ever known, but I managed to invigorate my role as “the young man” by imagining Miss Frost in the Alma part.

It seemed suitable to the young man’s infatuation with Alma that I stare at my aunt Muriel’s breasts, though they were gigantic (in my opinion, gross) in comparison to Miss Frost’s.

“Must you stare at my breasts, Billy?” Muriel asked me, in one memorable rehearsal.

“I’m supposed to be infatuated with you,” I replied.

“With all of me, I would imagine,” Aunt Muriel rejoined.

“I think it’s appropriate for the young man to stare at Alma’s bosoms,” our director, Nils Borkman, intoned. “After all, he’s a shoe salesman—he’s not very refinery.”

“It’s not healthy for my nephew to look at me like that!” Aunt Muriel said indignantly.

“Surely, Mrs. Fremont’s bosoms have attracted the stares of many young mens!” Nils said, in an ill-conceived effort to flatter Muriel. (I’ve momentarily forgotten why my aunt didn’t complain when I stared at her breasts in Twelfth Night. Oh, yes—I was a little shorter then, and Muriel’s breasts had blocked me from her view.)

My mother sighed. Grandpa Harry, who was cast as Alma’s mother—he was wearing a huge pair of falsies, accordingly—suggested that it was “only natural” for any young man to stare at the breasts of a woman who was “well endowed.”

“You’re calling me, your own daughter, ‘well endowed’—I can’t believe it!” Muriel cried.

My mom sighed again. “Everyone stares at your breasts, Muriel,” my mother said. “There was a time when you wanted everyone to stare at them.”

“You don’t want to go down that road with me—there was a time when you wanted something, Mary,” Muriel warned her.

“Girls, girls,” said Grandpa Harry.

“Oh, shut up—you old cross-dresser!” my mother said to Grandpa Harry.

“Maybe I could just stare at one of the breasts,” I suggested.

“Not that you care about either of them, Billy!” my mom shouted.

I was getting a lot of shouts and sighs from my mother that spring; when I’d announced my plans to go to Europe with Tom Atkins for the summer, I got both the sigh and the shout. (First the sigh, of course, which was swiftly followed by: “Tom Atkins—that fairy!”)

“Ladies, ladies,” Nils Borkman was saying. “This is a forward young man, Mr. Archie Kramer—he asks Alma, ‘What’s there to do in this town after dark?’ That’s pretty forward, isn’t it?”

“Ah, yes,” Grandpa Harry jumped in, “and there’s a stage direction about Alma—‘she gathers confidence before the awkwardness of his youth’—and there’s another one, when Alma ‘leans back and looks at him under half-closed lids, perhaps a little suggestively.’ I think Alma is kind of encouragin’ this young fella to look at her breasts!”

“There can be only one director, Daddy,” my mother told Grandpa Harry.

“I don’t do ‘suggestively’—I don’t encourage anyone to look at my breasts,” Muriel said to Nils Borkman.

“You’re so full of shit, Muriel,” my mom said.

There’s a fountain in that final scene—so that Alma can give one of her sleeping pills to the young man, who washes the pill down by drinking from the fountain. There were originally benches in the scene, too, but Nils didn’t like the benches. (Muriel had been too agitated to sit still, given that I was staring at her breasts.)

I foresaw a problem with losing the benches. When the young man hears that there’s a casino, which offers “all kinds of after-dark entertainment” (as Alma puts it), he says to Alma, “Then what in hell are we sitting here for?” But there were no benches; Alma and the young man couldn’t be sitting.

When I pointed this out to Nils, I said: “Shouldn’t I say, ‘Then what in hell are we doing here?’ Because Alma and I aren’t sitting—there’s nothing to sit on.”

“You’re not writing this play, Billy—it’s already written,” my mother (ever the prompter) told me.

“So we bring the benches back,” Nils said tiredly. “You’ll have to sit still, Muriel. You’ve just absorbed a sleeping pill, remember?”

“Absorbed!” Muriel exclaimed. “I should have absorbed a whole bottle of sleeping pills! I can’t possibly sit still with Billy staring at my breasts!”

“Billy isn’t interested in breasts, Muriel!” my mother shouted. (This was not true, as I know you know—I simply wasn’t interested in Muriel’s breasts.)

“I’m just acting—remember?” I said to Aunt Muriel and my mom.

In the end, I leave the stage; I go off shouting for a taxi. Only Alma remains—“she turns slowly about toward the audience with her hand still raised in a gesture of wonder and finality as . . . the curtain falls.”

I hadn’t a clue as to how Muriel might bring that off—“a gesture of wonder” seemed utterly beyond her capabilities. As for the “finality” aspect, I had little doubt that my aunt Muriel could deliver finality.

“Let’s one more time try it,” Nils Borkman implored us. (When our director was tired, his word order eluded him.)

“Let’s try it one more time,” Grandpa Harry said helpfully, although Mrs. Winemiller isn’t in that final scene. (It is dusk in the park in Summer and Smoke; only Alma and the young traveling salesman are onstage.)

“Behave yourself, Billy,” my mom said to me.

“For the last time,” I told her, smiling as sweetly as I could—at both Muriel and my mother.

“‘The water—is—cool,’” Muriel began.

“‘Did you say something?’” I asked her breasts—as the stage direction says, eagerly.

THE FIRST SISTER PLAYERS opened Summer and Smoke in our small community theater about a week after my Favorite River graduation. The academy students never saw the productions of our local amateur theatrical society; it didn’t matter that the boarders, Kittredge and Atkins among them, had left town.

I spent the whole play backstage, until the twelfth and final scene. I was past caring about observing my mother’s disapproval of Grandpa Harry as a woman; I’d seen all I needed to know about that. In the stage directions, Mrs. Winemiller is described as a spoiled and selfish girl who evaded the responsibilities of later life by slipping into a state of perverse childishness. She is known as Mr. Winemiller’s “Cross.”

It was evident to my mom and me that Grandpa Harry was drawing on Nana Victoria—and what a “Cross” she was for him to bear—in his testy portrayal of Mrs. Winemiller. (This was evident to Nana Victoria, too; my disapproving grandmother sat in the front row of the audience looking as if she’d been poleaxed, while Harry brought the house down with his antics.)

My mother had to prompt the shit out of the two child actors who virtually ruined the prologue. But in scene 1—specifically, the third time Mrs. Winemiller shrieked, “Where is the ice cream man?”—the audience was roaring, and Mrs. Winemiller brought the curtain down at the end of scene 5 by taunting her pussy-whipped husband. “‘Insufferable cross yourself, you old—windbag . . .’” Grandpa Harry cackled, as the curtain fell.

It was as good a production as Nils Borkman had ever directed for the First Sister Players. I have to admit that Aunt Muriel was excellent as Alma; it was hard for me to imagine that Miss Frost could have matched Muriel in the repressed area of my aunt’s agitated performance.

Beyond prompting the child actors in the prologue, my mom had nothing to do; no one muffed a line. It is fortunate that my mother had no further need to prompt anyone, because it was fairly early in the play when we both spotted Miss Frost in the front row of the audience. (That Nana Victoria found herself sitting in the same row as Miss Frost perhaps contributed to my grandmother’s concussed appearance; in addition to suffering her husband’s scathing portrayal of a shrewish wife and mother, Nana Victoria had to sit not more than two seats away from the transsexual wrestler!)

Upon seeing Miss Frost, my mom might have inadvertently prompted her mother to crap in a cat’s litter box. Of course, Miss Frost had chosen her front-row seat wisely. She knew where the prompter had positioned herself backstage; she knew I always hung out with the prompter. If we could see her, my mother and I knew, Miss Frost could see us. In fact, for entire scenes of Summer and Smoke, Miss Frost paid no attention to the actors onstage; Miss Frost just kept smiling at me, while my mother increasingly took on the brained-by-a-two-by-four expressionlessness of Nana Victoria.

Whenever Muriel-as-Alma was onstage, Miss Frost removed a compact from her purse. While Alma repressed herself, Miss Frost admired her lipstick in the compact’s small mirror, or she applied some powder to her nose and forehead.

At the closing curtain, when I’d run offstage, shouting for a taxi—leaving Muriel to find the gesture that implies (without words) both “wonder and finality”—I encountered my mother. She knew where I exited the stage, and she had left her prompter’s chair to intercept me.

“You will not speak to that creature, Billy,” my mom said.

I had anticipated such a showdown; I’d rehearsed so many things that I wanted to say to my mother, but I had not expected her to give me such a perfect opportunity to attack her. Richard Abbott, who’d played John, must have been in the men’s room; he wasn’t backstage to help her. Muriel was still onstage, for a few more seconds—to be followed by resounding and all-concealing applause.

“I will speak to her, Mom,” I began, but Grandpa Harry wouldn’t let me continue. Mrs. Winemiller’s wig was askew, and her enormous falsies were crowded too closely together, but Mrs. Winemiller wasn’t asking for ice cream now. She was nobody’s cross to bear—not in this scene—and Grandpa Harry needed no prompting.

“Just stop it, Mary,” Grandpa Harry told my mother. “Just forget about Franny. For once in your life, stop feelin’ so sorry for yourself. A good man finally married you, for Christ’s sake! What have you got to be so angry about?”

“I am speaking to my son, Daddy,” my mom started to say, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“Then treat him like your son,” my grandfather said. “Respect Bill for who he is, Mary. What are you gonna do—change his genes, or somethin’?”

“That creature,” my mother said again, meaning Miss Frost, but just then Muriel exited the stage. There was thunderous applause; Muriel’s massive chest was heaving. Who knew whether the wonder or the finality had taken it out of her? “That creature is here—in the audience!” my mom cried to Muriel.

“I know, Mary. Do you think I didn’t see him?” Muriel said.

“See her,” I corrected my aunt Muriel.

“Her!” Muriel said scornfully.

“Don’t you call her a creature,” I said to my mother.

“She was doin’ her best to look after Bill, Mary,” Grandpa Harry (as Mrs. Winemiller) said. “She really was lookin’ after him.”

“Ladies, ladies . . .” Nils Borkman was saying. He was trying to ready Muriel and Grandpa Harry to go back onstage for their bows. Nils was a tyrant, but I appreciated how he allowed me to miss the all-cast curtain call; Nils knew I had a more important role to play backstage.

“Please don’t speak to that . . . woman, Billy,” my mom was pleading. Richard was with us, preparing to take his bows, and my mother threw herself into his arms. “Did you see who’s here? She came here! Billy wants to speak to her! I can’t bear it!”

“Let Bill speak to her, Jewel,” Richard said, before running onstage.

The audience was treating the cast to more rousing applause when Miss Frost appeared backstage, just seconds after Richard had left.

“Kittredge lost,” I said to Miss Frost. For months I had imagined speaking to her; now this was all I could say to her.

“Twice,” Miss Frost said. “Herm told me.”

“I thought you’d gone to New Hampshire,” my mom said to her. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I never should have been here, Mary—I shouldn’t have been born here,” Miss Frost told her.

Richard and the rest of the cast had come offstage. “We should go, Jewel—we should leave these two alone for a minute,” Richard Abbott was saying to my mother. Miss Frost and I would never be “alone” together again—that much was obvious.

To everyone’s surprise, it was Muriel Miss Frost spoke to. “Good job,” Miss Frost told my haughty aunt. “Is Bob here? I need a word with the Racquet Man.”

“I’m right here, Al,” Uncle Bob said uncomfortably.

“You have the keys to everything, Bob,” Miss Frost told him. “There’s something I would like to show William, before I leave First Sister,” Miss Frost said; there was no theatricality in her delivery. “I need to show him something in the wrestling room,” Miss Frost said. “I could have asked Herm to let us in, but I didn’t want to get Herm in any trouble.”

“In the wrestling room!” Muriel exclaimed.

“You and Billy, in the wrestling room,” Uncle Bob said slowly to Miss Frost, as if he had trouble picturing it.

“You can stay with us, Bob,” Miss Frost said, but she was looking at my mom. “You and Muriel can come, too, Mary—if you think William and I need more than one chaperone.”

I thought my whole fucking family might die on the spot—merely to hear the chaperone word—but Grandpa Harry once more distinguished himself. “Just give me the keys, Bob—I’ll be the chaperone.”

“You?” Nana Victoria cried. (No one had noticed her arrival backstage.) “Just look at you, Harold! You’re a sexual clown! You’re in no condition to be anyone’s chaperone!”

“Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry started to say, but he couldn’t continue. He was scratching under one of his falsies; he was fanning his bald head with his wig. It was hot backstage.

This was exactly how it unfolded—the last time I would see Miss Frost. Bob went to the Admissions Office to get his keys to the gym; he would have to come with us, my uncle explained, because only he and Herm Hoyt knew where the lights were in the new gym. (You had to enter the new gym, and cross to the old gym on the cement catwalk; there was no getting into the wrestling room any other way.)

“There was no new gym in my day, William,” Miss Frost was saying, as we traipsed across the dark Favorite River campus with Uncle Bob and Grandpa Harry—not with Mrs. Winemiller, alas, because Harry was once more wearing his lumberman’s regalia. Nils Borkman had decided to come along, too.

“I’m interested in seeing gives-what with the wrestling!” the eager Norwegian said.

“In seein’ what gives with the wrestlin’,” Grandpa Harry repeated.

“You’re going out in the world, William,” Miss Frost said matter-of-factly. “There are homo-hating assholes everywhere.”

“Homo-assholes?” Nils asked her.

“Homo-hating assholes,” Grandpa Harry corrected his old friend.

“I’ve never let anyone into the gym at night,” Uncle Bob was telling us, apropos of nothing. Someone was running to catch up to us in the darkness. It was Richard Abbott.

“Increasin’ popular interest in seein’ what gives with the wrestlin’, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said to me.

“I wasn’t planning on a coaching clinic, William—please try to pay attention. We don’t have much time,” Miss Frost added—just as Uncle Bob found the light switch, and I could see that Miss Frost was smiling at me. It was our story—not to have much time together.

Having Uncle Bob, Grandpa Harry, Richard Abbott, and Nils Borkman for an audience didn’t necessarily make what Miss Frost had to show me a spectator sport. The lighting in the old gym was spotty, and no one had cleaned the wrestling mats since the end of the ’61 season; there was dust and grit on the mats, and some dirty towels on the gym floor in the area of the team benches. Bob, Harry, Richard, and Nils sat on the home-team bench; it was where Miss Frost had told them to sit, and the men did as they were directed. (In their own ways, and for their own reasons, these four men were genuine fans of Miss Frost.)

“Take your shoes off, William,” Miss Frost began; I could see that she’d taken off hers. Miss Frost had painted her toenails a turquoise color—or maybe it was an aqua color, a kind of greenish blue.

It being a warm June night, Miss Frost was wearing a white tank top and Capri pants; the latter, in a blue-green color that matched her toenail polish, were a little tight for wrestling. I was wearing some baggy Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt.

“Hi,” Elaine suddenly said. I hadn’t noticed her in the theater. She’d followed us to the old gym—at a discreet distance behind us, no doubt—and now sat watching us from the wooden running track above the wrestling room.

“More wrestling,” was all I said to Elaine, but I was happy my dear friend was there.

“You will one day be bullied, William,” Miss Frost said. She clamped what Delacorte had called a collar-tie on the back of my neck. “You’re going to get pushed around, sooner or later.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“The bigger and more aggressive he is, the more you want to crowd him—the closer you want to get to him,” Miss Frost told me. I could smell her; I could feel her breath on the side of my face. “You want to make him lean on you—you want him cheek-to-cheek, like this. Then you jam one of his arms into his throat. Like this,” she said; the inside of my own elbow was constricting my breathing. “You want to make him push back—you want to make him lift that arm,” Miss Frost said.

When I pushed back against her—when I lifted my arm, to take my elbow away from my throat—Miss Frost slipped under my armpit. In a split second, she was at once behind me and to one side of me. Her hand, on the back of my neck, pulled my head down; with all her weight, she drove me shoulder-first into the warm, soft mat. I felt a tweak in my neck. I landed at an awkward angle; how I fell put a lot of strain on that shoulder, and in the area of my collarbone.

“Imagine the mat is a cement sidewalk, or just a plain old wood floor,” she said. “That wouldn’t feel so good, would it?”

“No,” I answered her. I was seeing stars; I’d never seen them before.

“Again,” Miss Frost said. “Let me do it to you a few more times, William—then you do it to me.”

“Okay,” I said. We did it again and again.

“It’s called a duck-under,” Miss Frost explained. “You can do it to anyone—he just has to be pushing you. You can do it to anyone who’s being aggressive.”

“I get it,” I told her.

“No, William—you’re beginning to get it,” Miss Frost told me.

We were in the wrestling room for over an hour, just drilling the duck-under. “It’s easier to do to someone who’s taller than you are,” Miss Frost explained. “The bigger he is, and the more he’s leaning on you, the harder his head hits the mat—or the pavement, or the floor, or the ground. You get it?”

“I’m beginning to,” I told her.

I will remember the contact of our bodies, as I learned the duck-under; as with most things, there is a rhythm to it when you start to do it correctly. We were sweating, and Miss Frost was saying, “When you hit it ten more times, without a glitch, you can go home, William.”

“I don’t want to go home—I want to keep doing this,” I whispered to her.

“I wouldn’t have missed making your acquaintance, William—not for all the world!” Miss Frost whispered back.

“I love you!” I told her.

“Not now, William,” she said. “If you can’t stick the guy’s elbow in his throat, stick it in his mouth,” she told me.

“In his mouth,” I repeated.

“Don’t kill each other!” Grandpa Harry was shouting.

“What’s goin’ on here?” I heard Coach Hoyt ask. Herm had noticed all the lights; the old gym and that wrestling room were sacred to him.

“Al’s showing Billy a duck-under, Herm,” Uncle Bob told the old coach.

“Well, I showed it to Al,” Herm said. “I guess Al oughta know how it goes.” Coach Hoyt sat down on the home-team bench—as close as he could get to the scorers’ table.

“I’ll never forget you!” I was whispering to Miss Frost.

“I guess we’re done, William—if you can’t concentrate on the duck-under,” Miss Frost said.

“Okay, I’ll concentrate—ten more duck-unders!” I told her; she just smiled at me, and she ruffled my sweat-soaked hair. I don’t believe she’d ruffled my hair since I was thirteen or fifteen—not for a long time, anyway.

“No, we’re done now, William—Herm is here. Coach Hoyt can take over the duck-unders,” Miss Frost said. I suddenly saw that she looked tired—I’d never seen her look tired before.

“Give me a hug, but don’t kiss me, William—let’s just play by the rules and make everyone happy,” Miss Frost told me.

I hugged her as hard as I could, but she didn’t hug me back—not nearly as hard as she could have.

“Safe travels, Al,” Uncle Bob said.

“Thanks, Bob,” Miss Frost said.

“I gotta get home, before Muriel sends out the police and the firemen to find me,” Uncle Bob said.

“I can lock up the place, Bob,” Coach Hoyt told my uncle. “Billy and I will just hit a few more duck-unders.”

“A few more,” I repeated.

“Till I see how you’re gettin’ it,” Coach Hoyt said. “How ’bout all of you goin’ home?” the old coach asked. “You, too, Richard—you, too, Harry,” Herm was saying; the coach probably didn’t recognize Nils Borkman, and if Coach Hoyt recognized Elaine Hadley, he would have known her only as the unfortunate faculty daughter who’d been knocked up by Kittredge.

“I’ll see you later, Richard—I love you, Elaine!” I called, as they were leaving.

“I love you, Billy!” I heard Elaine say.

“I’ll see you at home—I’ll leave some lights on, Bill,” I heard Richard say.

“Take care of yourself, Al,” Grandpa Harry said to Miss Frost.

“I’m going to miss you, Harry,” Miss Frost told him.

“I’m gonna miss you, too!” I heard Grandpa Harry say.

I understood that I shouldn’t watch Miss Frost leave, and I didn’t. Occasionally, you know when you won’t see someone again.

“The thing about a duck-under, Billy, is to make the guy kinda do it to himself—that’s the key,” Coach Hoyt was saying. When we locked up with the growingly familiar collar-ties, I had the feeling that grabbing hold of Herm Hoyt was like grabbing hold of a tree trunk—he had such a thick neck that you couldn’t get much of a grip on him.

“The place to stick the guy’s elbow is anywhere it makes him uncomfortable, Billy,” Herm was saying. “In his throat, in his mouth—stick it up his nose, if you can find a way to fit it up there. You’re only stickin’ his elbow in his face to get him to react. What you want him to do is overreact, Billy—that’s all you’re doin’.”

The old coach did about twenty duck-unders on me; they were very fluid, but my neck was killing me.

“Okay—your turn. Let’s see you do it,” Herm Hoyt told me.

“Twenty times?” I asked him. (He could see that I was crying.)

“We’ll start countin’ the times as soon as you stop cryin’, Billy. I’m guessin’ you’ll be cryin’ for the first forty times, or so—then we’ll start countin’,” Coach Hoyt said.

We were there in the old gym for at least another two hours—maybe three. I had stopped counting the duck-unders, but I was beginning to get the feeling that I could do a duck-under in my sleep, or drunk, which was a funny thing for me to think because I’d not yet been drunk. (There was a first time for everything, and I had a lot of first times ahead of me.)

At some point, I made the mistake of saying to the old coach: “I think I could do a duck-under blindfolded.”

“Is that so, Billy?” Herm asked me. “Stay right here—don’t leave the mat.” He went off somewhere; I could hear him on the catwalk, but I couldn’t see him. Then the lights went out, and the wrestling room was in total darkness.

“Don’t worry—just stay where you are!” the coach called to me. “I can find you, Billy.”

It wasn’t long before I felt his presence; his strong hand clamped me in a collar-tie and we were locked up in the surrounding blackness.

“If you can feel me, you don’t need to see me,” Herm said. “If you’ve got hold of my neck, you kinda know where my arms and legs are gonna be, don’tcha?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“You better do your duck-under on me before I do mine on you, Billy,” Herm told me. But I wasn’t quick enough. Coach Hoyt hit his duck-under first; it was a real head-banger. “I guess it’s your turn, Billy—just don’t make me wait all night,” the old coach said.

“Do you know where she’s going?” I asked him later. It was pitch-dark in the old gym, and we were lying on the mat—both of us were resting.

“Al told me not to tell you, Billy,” Herm said.

“I understand,” I told him.

“I always knew Al wanted to be a girl.” The old coach’s voice came out of the darkness. “I just didn’t know he had the balls to go through with it, Billy.”

“Oh, he has the balls, all right,” I said.

“She—she has the balls, Billy!” Herm Hoyt said, laughing crazily.

There were some windows surrounding the wooden track above us; an early-dawn light gave them a dull glow.

“Listen up, Billy,” the old coach said. “You’ve got one move. It’s a pretty good duck-under, but it’s just one move. You can take a guy down with it—maybe hurt him a little. But a tough guy is gonna get up and keep comin’ after you. One move won’t make you a wrestler, Billy.”

“I see,” I said.

“When you hit your duck-under, you get the hell out of there—wherever you are, Billy. Do you get what I’m sayin’?” Coach Hoyt asked me.

“It’s just one move—I hit it and run. Is that what you’re telling me?” I asked him.

“You hit it and run—you know how to run, don’tcha?” the old coach said.

“What will happen to her?” I asked him suddenly.

“I can’t tell you that, Billy,” Herm said, sighing.

“She’s got more than one move, doesn’t she?” I asked him.

“Yeah, but Al’s not gettin’ any younger,” Coach Hoyt told me. “You best get home, Billy—there’s enough light to see by.”

I thanked him; I made my way across the absolutely empty Favorite River campus. I wanted to see Elaine, and hug her and kiss her, but I didn’t think that would be our future. I had a summer ahead of me to explore the much-ballyhooed sexual everything with Tom Atkins, but I liked boys and girls; I knew Atkins couldn’t provide me with everything.

Was I enough of a romantic to believe Miss Frost knew this about me? Did I believe she was the first person to understand that no one person could ever give me everything?

Yes, probably. After all, I was only nineteen—a bisexual boy with a pretty good duck-under. It was just one move, and I was no wrestler, but you can learn a lot from good teachers.