In One Person

Chapter 7 MY TERRIFYING ANGELS

If an unwanted pregnancy was the “abyss” that an intrepid girl could fall into—the abyss word was my mother’s, though I’ll bet she’d heard it first from fucking Muriel—surely the abyss for a boy like me was to succumb to homosexual activity. In such love lay madness; in acting out my most dire imaginings, I would certainly descend to the bottomless pit of the universe of desire. Or so I believed in the fall of my senior year at Favorite River Academy, when I once more ventured to the First Sister Public Library—this time, I thought, to save myself. I was eighteen, but my sexual misgivings were innumerable; my self-hatred was huge.

If you were, like me, at an all-boys’ boarding school in the fall of 1960, you felt utterly alone—you trusted no one, least of all another boy your age—and you loathed yourself. I’d always been lonely, but self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

With Elaine starting her new life at Northfield, I was spending more and more time in the yearbook room of the academy library. When my mom or Richard asked me where I was going, I always answered: “I’m going to the library.” I didn’t tell them which library. And without Elaine to slow me down—she could never resist showing me those hot-looking boys from the more contemporary of the yearbooks—I was blazing my way through the graduating classes of the decreasingly distant past. I’d left World War I behind; I was way ahead of my imagined schedule. At the rate I was going through those yearbooks, I would catch up with the present well before the spring of ’61 and my own graduation from Favorite River.

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.

“Try it again, Bill,” Richard said.

“I can’t say it,” I replied.

“Maybe we need a new Fool,” Kittredge suggested.

“That would be my decision, Kittredge,” Richard told him.

“Or mine,” I said.

“Ah, well—” Grandpa Harry started to say, but Uncle Bob interrupted him.

“It seems to me, Richard, that Billy could say ‘Lear’s reflection,’ or even ‘Lear’s ghost’—if, in your judgment, this fits with what the Fool means or is implying,” Uncle Bob suggested.

“Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Kittredge said.

“The line is ‘Lear’s shadow,’ Billy,” my mother, the prompter, said. “Either you can say it or you can’t.”

“Please, Jewel—” Richard started to say, but I interrupted him.

“Lear should have a proper Fool—one who can say everything,” I told Richard Abbott. I knew, as I was leaving, that I was walking out of my final rehearsal as a Favorite River Academy student—my last Shakespeare play, perhaps. (As it would turn out, King Lear was my last Shakespeare play as an actor.)

The faculty daughter whom Richard cast as Cordelia was and remains so completely unknown to me that I can’t recall her name. “An unformed girl, but with a crackerjack memory,” Grandpa Harry had said about her.

“Neither a present nor a future beauty,” was all my aunt Muriel said of the doomed Cordelia, implying that, in King Lear, no one would ever have married this Cordelia—not even if she’d lived.

Lear’s Fool would be played by Delacorte. Since Delacorte was a wrestler, he’d probably learned that the part was available because Kittredge had told him. Kittredge would later inform me that, because the fall Shakespeare play was rehearsed and performed before the start of the wrestling season, Delacorte wasn’t as ill affected as he usually was by the complications of cutting weight. Yet the lightweight who, according to Kittredge, would have had the shit kicked out of him in a heavier weight-class, still suffered from cotton-mouth, even when he wasn’t dehydrated—or perhaps Delacorte dreamed of cutting weight, even in the off-season. Therefore, Delacorte constantly rinsed his mouth out with water from a paper cup; he eternally spat out the water into another paper cup. If Delacorte were alive today, I’m sure he would still be running his fingers through his hair. But Delacorte is dead, along with so many others. Awaiting me, in the future, was seeing Delacorte die.

Delacorte, as Lear’s Fool, would wisely say: “‘Have more than thou showest, / Speak less than thou knowest, / Lend less than thou owest.’” Good advice, but it won’t save Lear’s Fool, and it didn’t save Delacorte.

Kittredge acted strangely in Delacorte’s company; he could behave affectionately and impatiently with Delacorte in the same moment. It was as if Delacorte had been a childhood friend, but one who’d disappointed Kittredge—one who’d not “turned out” as Kittredge had hoped or expected.

Kittredge was preternaturally fond of Delacorte’s rinsing-and-spitting routine; Kittredge had even suggested to Richard that there might be onstage benefits to Lear’s Fool repeatedly rinsing and spitting.

“Then it wouldn’t be Shakespeare,” Grandpa Harry said.

“I’m not prompting the rinsing and spitting, Richard,” my mom said.

“Delacorte, you will kindly do your rinsing and spitting backstage,” Richard told the compulsive lightweight.

“It was just an idea,” Kittredge had said with a dismissive shrug. “I guess it will suffice that we at least have a Fool who can say the shadow word.”

To me, Kittredge would be more philosophical. “Look at it this way, Nymph—there’s no such thing as a working actor with a restricted vocabulary. But it’s a positive discovery, to be made aware of your limitations at such a young age,” Kittredge assured me. “How fortuitous, really—now you know you can never be an actor.”

“You mean, it’s not a career choice,” I said, as Miss Frost had once declared to me—when I’d first told her that I wanted to be a writer.

“I should say not, Nymph—not if you want to give yourself a fighting chance.”

“Oh.”

“And you might be wise, Nymph, to clarify another choice—I mean, before you get to the career part,” Kittredge said. I said nothing; I just waited. I knew Kittredge well enough to know when he was setting me up. “There’s the matter of your sexual proclivities,” Kittredge continued.

“My sexual proclivities are crystal-clear,” I told him—a little surprised at myself, because I was acting and there wasn’t a hint of a pronunciation problem.

“I don’t know, Nymph,” Kittredge said, with that deliberate or involuntary flutter in the broad muscles of his wrestler’s neck. “In the area of sexual proclivities, you look like a work-in-progress to me.”

“OH, IT’S YOU!” Miss Frost said cheerfully, when she saw me; she sounded surprised. “I thought it was your friend. He was here—he just left. I thought it was him, coming back.”

“Who?” I asked her. (I had Kittredge on my mind, of course—not exactly a friend.)

“Tom,” Miss Frost said. “Tom was just here. I’m never sure why he comes. He’s always asking about a book he says he can’t find at the academy library, but I know perfectly well the school has it. Anyway, I never have what he’s looking for. Maybe he comes here looking for you.”

“Tom who?” I asked her. I didn’t think I knew a Tom.

“Atkins—isn’t that his name?” Miss Frost asked. “I know him as Tom.”

“I know him as Atkins,” I said.

“Oh, William, I wonder how long the last-name culture of that awful school will persist!” Miss Frost said.

“Shouldn’t we be whispering?” I whispered.

After all, we were in a library. I was puzzled by how loudly Miss Frost spoke, but I was also excited to hear her say that Favorite River Academy was an “awful school”; I secretly thought so, but out of loyalty to Richard Abbott and Uncle Bob, faculty brat that I was, I would never have said so.

“There’s no one else here, William,” Miss Frost whispered to me. “We can speak as loudly as we want.”

“Oh.”

“You’ve come to write, I suppose,” Miss Frost loudly said.

“No, I need your advice about what I should read,” I told her.

“Is the subject still crushes on the wrong people, William?”

“Very wrong,” I whispered.

She leaned over, to be closer to me; she was still so much taller than I was, she made me feel that I hadn’t grown. “We can whisper about this, if you want to,” she whispered.

“Do you know Jacques Kittredge?” I asked her.

“Everyone knows Kittredge,” Miss Frost said neutrally; I couldn’t tell what she thought about him.

“I have a crush on Kittredge, but I’m trying not to,” I told her. “Is there a novel about that?”

Miss Frost put both her hands on my shoulders. I knew she could feel me shaking. “Oh, William—there are worse things, you know,” she said. “Yes, I have the very novel you should read,” she whispered.

“I know why Atkins comes here,” I blurted out. “He’s not looking for me—he probably has a crush on you!”

“Why would he?” Miss Frost asked me.

“Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t any boy have a crush on you?” I asked her.

“Well, no one’s had a crush on me for a while,” she said. “But it’s very flattering—it’s so sweet of you to say so, William.”

“I have a crush on you, too,” I told her. “I always have, and it’s stronger than the crush I have on Kittredge.”

“My dear boy, you are so very wrong!” Miss Frost declared. “Didn’t I tell you there were worse things than having a crush on Jacques Kittredge? Listen to me, William: Having a crush on Kittredge is safer!”

“How can Kittredge be safer than you?” I cried. I could feel that I was starting to shake again; this time, when she put her big hands on my shoulders, Miss Frost hugged me to her broad chest. I began to sob, uncontrollably.

I hated myself for crying, but I couldn’t stop. Dr. Harlow had told us, in yet another lamentable morning meeting, that excessive crying in boys was a homosexual tendency we should guard ourselves against. (Naturally, the moron never told us how we should guard ourselves against something we couldn’t control!) And I’d overheard my mother say to Muriel: “Honestly, I don’t know what to do when Billy cries like a girl!”

So there I was, in the First Sister Public Library, crying like a girl in Miss Frost’s strong arms—having just told her that I had a stronger crush on her than the one I had on Jacques Kittredge. I must have seemed to her like such a sissy!

“My dear boy, you don’t really know me,” Miss Frost was saying. “You don’t know who I am—you don’t know the first thing about me, do you? William? You don’t, do you?”

“I don’t what?” I blubbered. “I don’t know your first name,” I admitted; I was still sobbing. I was hugging her back, but not as hard as she hugged me. I could feel how strong she was, and—once again—the smallness of her breasts seemed to stand in surprising contrast to her strength. I could also feel how soft her breasts were; her small, soft breasts struck me as such a contradiction to her broad shoulders, her muscular arms.

“I didn’t mean my name, William—my first name isn’t important,” Miss Frost said. “I mean you don’t know me.”

“But what is your first name?” I asked her.

There was a theatricality in the way Miss Frost sighed—a staged exaggeration in the way she released me from her hug, almost pushing me away from her.

“I have a lot at stake in being Miss Frost, William,” she said. “I did not acquire the Miss word accidentally.”

I knew something about not liking the name you were given, for I hadn’t liked being William Francis Dean, Jr. “You don’t like your first name?” I asked her.

“We could begin with that,” she answered, amused. “Would you ever name a girl Alberta?”

“Like the province in Canada?” I asked. I could not imagine Miss Frost as an Alberta!

“It’s a better name for a province,” Miss Frost said. “Everyone used to call me Al.”

“Al,” I repeated.

“You see why I like the Miss,” she said, laughing.

“I love everything about you,” I told her.

“Slow down, William,” Miss Frost said. “You can’t rush into crushes on the wrong people.”

Of course, I didn’t understand why she thought of herself as “wrong” for me—and how could she possibly imagine that my crush on Kittredge was safer? I believed that Miss Frost must have meant merely to warn me about the difference in our ages; maybe an eighteen-year-old boy with a woman in her forties was a taboo to her. I was thinking that I was legally an adult, albeit barely, and if it were true that Miss Frost was about my aunt Muriel’s age, I was guessing that she would have been forty-two or forty-three.

“Girls my own age don’t interest me,” I said to Miss Frost. “I seem to be attracted to older women.”

“My dear boy,” she said again. “It doesn’t matter how old I am—it’s what I am. William, you don’t know what I am, do you?”

As if that existential-sounding question wasn’t confusing enough, Atkins chose this moment to enter the dimly lit foyer of the library, where he appeared to be startled. (He told me later he’d been frightened by the reflection of himself he had seen in the mirror, which hung silently in the foyer like a nonspeaking security guard.)

“Oh, it’s you, Tom,” Miss Frost said, unsurprised.

“Do you see? What did I tell you?” I asked Miss Frost, while Atkins went on fearfully regarding himself in the mirror.

“You’re so very wrong,” Miss Frost told me, smiling.

“Kittredge is looking for you, Bill,” Atkins said. “I went to the yearbook room, but someone said you’d just left.”

“The yearbook room,” Miss Frost repeated; she sounded surprised. I looked at her; there was an unfamiliar anxiety in her expression.

“Bill is conducting a study of Favorite River yearbooks from past to present,” Atkins said to Miss Frost. “Elaine told me,” Atkins explained to me.

“For Christ’s sake, Atkins—it sounds like you’re conducting a study of me,” I told him.

“It’s Kittredge who wants to talk to you,” Atkins said sullenly.

“Since when are you Kittredge’s messenger boy?” I asked him.

“I’ve had enough abuse for one night!” Atkins cried dramatically, throwing up his slender hands. “It’s one thing to have Kittredge insulting me—he insults everyone. But having you insult me, Bill—well, that’s just too much!”

In an effort to leave the First Sister Public Library in a flamboyant pique, Atkins once again encountered that menacing mirror in the foyer, where he paused to deliver a parting shot. “I’m not your shadow, Bill—Kittredge is,” Atkins said.

He was gone before he could hear me say, “Fuck Kittredge.”

“Watch your language, William,” Miss Frost said, putting her long fingers to my lips. “After all, we’re in a fucking library.”

The fucking word was not one that came to mind when I thought of her—in the same way that Miss Frost seemed an implausible Alberta—but when I looked at her, she was smiling. She was just teasing me; her long fingers now brushed my cheek.

“A curious reference to the shadow word, William,” she said. “Would it be the unpronounceable word that caused your unplanned exit from King Lear?”

“It would,” I told her. “I guess you heard. In a town this small, I think everyone hears everything!”

“Maybe not quite everyone—possibly not quite everything, William,” Miss Frost said. “It appears to me, for example, that you haven’t heard everything—about me, I mean.”

I knew that Nana Victoria didn’t like Miss Frost, but I didn’t know why. I knew that Aunt Muriel had issues with Miss Frost’s choice in bras, but how could I have brought up the training-bra subject when I had just expressed my love for everything about Miss Frost?

“My grandmother,” I started to say, “and my aunt Muriel—”

But Miss Frost lightly touched my lips with her long fingers again. “Shhh, William,” she whispered. “I don’t need to hear what those ladies think of me. I’m much more interested in hearing about that project of yours in the old yearbook room.”

“Oh, it’s not really a project,” I told her. “I just look at the wrestling-team photos, mostly—and at the pictures of the plays that the Drama Club performed.”

“Do you?” Miss Frost somewhat absently asked. Why was it I got the feeling that she was acting—in a kind of on-again, off-again way? What was it she’d said, when Richard Abbott had asked her if she’d ever been onstage—if she’d ever acted?

“Only in my mind,” she’d answered him, almost flirtatiously. “When I was younger—all the time.”

“And what year are you up to in those old yearbooks, William—which graduating class?” Miss Frost then asked.

“Nineteen thirty-one,” I answered. Her fingers had strayed from my lips; she was touching the collar of my shirt, almost as if there were something about a boy’s button-down dress shirt that had affected her—a sentimental attachment, maybe.

“You’re so close,” Miss Frost said.

“Close to what?” I asked her.

“Just close,” she said. “We haven’t much time.”

“Is it time to close the library?” I asked her, but Miss Frost only smiled; then, as if giving the matter more thought, she glanced at her watch.

“Well, what harm is there in closing a little early tonight?” she said suddenly.

“Sure—why not?” I said. “There’s no one here but us. I don’t think Atkins is coming back.”

“Poor Tom,” Miss Frost said. “He doesn’t have a crush on me, William—Tom Atkins has a crush on you!”

The second she said so, I knew it was true. “Poor Tom,” which would become how I thought of Atkins, probably sensed I had a crush on Miss Frost; he must have been jealous of her.

“Poor Tom is just spying on me, and you,” Miss Frost told me. “And what does Kittredge want to talk to you about?” she suddenly asked me.

“Oh, that’s nothing—that’s just a German thing. I help Kittredge with his German,” I explained.

“Tom Atkins would be a safer choice for you than Jacques Kittredge, William,” Miss Frost said. I knew this was true, too, though I didn’t find Atkins attractive—except in the way that someone who adores you can become a little attractive to you, over time. (But that almost never works out, does it?)

Yet, when I began to tell Miss Frost that I wasn’t really attracted to Atkins—that not all boys were attractive to me, just a very few boys, actually—well, this time she put her lips to mine. She simply kissed me. It was a fairly firm kiss, moderately aggressive; there was only one assertive thrust, a single dart of her warm tongue. Believe me: I’ll soon be seventy; I’ve had a long lifetime of kisses, and this one was more confident than any man’s handshake.

“I know, I know,” she murmured against my lips. “We have so little time—let’s not talk about poor Tom.”

“Oh.”

I followed her into the foyer, where I was still thinking that her concern with “time” had only to do with the closing time of the library, but Miss Frost said: “I presume that check-in time for seniors is still ten o’clock, William—except on a Saturday night, when I’m guessing it’s still eleven. Nothing ever changes at that awful school, does it?”

I was impressed that Miss Frost even knew about check-in time at Favorite River Academy—not to mention that she was exactly right about it.

I watched her lock the door to the library and turn off the outdoor light; she left the dim light in the foyer on, while she went about the main library, killing the other lights. I had completely forgotten that I’d asked her advice—on the subject of a book about my having a crush on Kittredge, and “trying not to”—when Miss Frost handed me a slender novel. It was only about forty-five pages longer than King Lear, which happened to be the story I’d read most recently.

It was a novel by James Baldwin called Giovanni’s Room—the title of which I could barely read, because Miss Frost had extinguished all the lights in the main library. There was only the light from the dimly lit foyer—scarcely sufficient for Miss Frost and me to see our way to the basement stairs.

On the dark stairs, lit only by what scant light followed us from the foyer of the library—and a dull glowing ahead of us, which beckoned us to Miss Frost’s cubicle, partitioned off from the furnace room—I suddenly remembered that there was another novel I wanted the confident librarian’s advice about.

The name Al was on my lips, but I could not bring myself to say it. I said, instead: “Miss Frost, what can you tell me about Madame Bovary? Do you think I would like it?”

“When you’re older, William, I think you’ll love it.”

“That’s kind of what Richard said, and Uncle Bob,” I told her.

“Your uncle Bob has read Madame Bovary—you can’t mean Muriel’s Bob!” Miss Frost exclaimed.

“Bob hasn’t read it—he was just telling me what it was about,” I explained.

“Someone who hasn’t read a novel doesn’t really know what it’s about, William.”

“Oh.”

“You should wait, William,” Miss Frost said. “The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing—even devastating—consequences.”

“I’ll wait to read it until then,” I told her.

Her bedroom and bathroom—formerly, the coal bin—was lit only by a reading lamp, affixed to the headboard of rails on the old-fashioned brass bed. Miss Frost lit the cinnamon-scented candle on the night table, turning off the lamp. In the candlelight, she told me to undress. “That means everything, William—please don’t keep on your socks.”

I did as she told me, with my back turned to her, while she said she would appreciate “some privacy”; she briefly used the toilet with the wooden seat—I believe I heard her pee, and flush—and then, from the sound of running water, I think she had a quick wash-up and brushed her teeth in the small sink.

I lay naked on her brass bed; in the flickering candlelight, I read that Giovanni’s Room was published in 1956. From the attached library card, I saw that only one patron of the First Sister Public Library had checked out the novel—in four years—and I wondered if Mr. Baldwin’s solitary reader had in fact been Miss Frost. I did not finish the first two paragraphs before Miss Frost said, “Please don’t read that now, William. It’s very sad, and it will surely upset you.”

“Upset me how?” I asked her. I could hear her hanging her clothes in the wardrobe closet; it was distracting to imagine her naked, but I kept reading.

“There’s no such thing as trying not to have a crush on Kittredge, William—‘trying not to’ doesn’t work,” Miss Frost said.

That was when the penultimate sentence of the second paragraph stopped me; I just closed the book and shut my eyes.

“I told you to stop reading, didn’t I?” Miss Frost said.

The sentence began: “There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her”—I stopped there wondering if I would dare to continue.

“It’s not a novel your mother should see,” Miss Frost was saying, “and if you’re not prepared to talk about your crush on Kittredge with Richard—well, I wouldn’t let Richard know what you’re reading, either.” I could feel her lie down on the bed, behind me; her bare skin touched my back, but she’d not taken off all her clothes. She gently took hold of my penis in her big hand.

“There’s a fish called a shad,” Miss Frost said.

“A shad?” I asked; my penis was stiffening.

“Yes—that’s what it’s called,” Miss Frost told me. “It migrates upstream to spawn. Shad roe is a delicacy. You know what roe is, don’t you?” she asked me.

“The eggs, right?”

“The unborn eggs, yes—they take them out of the female fish, and some people love to eat them,” Miss Frost explained.

“Oh.”

“Say ‘shad roe’ for me, William.”

“Shad roe,” I said.

“Try saying it without the r,” she told me.

“Shadow,” I said, without thinking; my penis and her hand had most of my attention.

“Like Lear’s shadow?” she asked me.

“Lear’s shadow,” I said. “I didn’t want a part in the play, anyway,” I told her.

“Well, at least you didn’t say Lear’s shad roe,” Miss Frost said.

“Lear’s shadow,” I repeated.

“And what’s this that I’ve got in my hand?” she asked me.

“My penith,” I answered.

“I wouldn’t change that penith for all the world, William,” Miss Frost said. “I believe you should say that word any fucking way you want to.”

What happened next would usher in the unattainable; what Miss Frost did to me would prove inimitable. She pulled me suddenly to her—I was flat on my back—and she kissed me on my mouth. She was wearing a bra—not a padded one, like Elaine’s, but a see-through bra with only slightly bigger cups than I’d expected. The material was sheer, and much silkier than the soft cotton of Elaine’s bra, and—to compare it to the more utilitarian undergarments in my mother’s mail-order catalogs—Miss Frost’s bra was not in the training-bra category; it was altogether sexier and more sophisticated. Miss Frost also wore a half-slip, of the slinky kind women wear under a skirt—this one was a beige color—and when she straddled my hips and sat on me, she appeared to hike up the half-slip, well above mid-thigh. Her weight, and how firmly she held me, pressed me into the bed.

I held one of her small, soft breasts in one hand; with my other hand, I tried to touch her, under her half-slip, but Miss Frost said, “No, William. Please don’t touch me there.” She took my straying hand and clasped it to her other breast.

It was my penis that she guided under her half-slip. I had never penetrated anyone, and when I felt this most amazing friction, of course this felt like penetration to me. There was a slippery sensation—there was absolutely no pain, yet my penis had never been so tightly gripped—and when I ejaculated, I cried out against her small, soft breasts. I was surprised that my face was pressed against her breasts and her silky bra, because I didn’t remember the moment when Miss Frost had stopped kissing me. (She’d said, “No, William. Please don’t touch me there.” Obviously, she couldn’t have been kissing me and speaking to me at the same time.)

There was so much I wanted to say to her, and ask her, but Miss Frost was not in a mood for conversation. Perhaps she was feeling the curious constraints of “so little time” again, or so I managed to convince myself.

She drew a bath for me; I was hoping that she would take off the rest of her clothes and get into the big tub with me, but she did not. She knelt beside that bathtub with the lion paws for feet, and the lion heads for faucets, and she gently bathed me—she was especially gentle with my penis. (She even spoke of it affectionately, using the penith word in a way that made us both laugh.)

But Miss Frost kept looking at her watch. “Late for check-in means a restriction, William. A restriction might entail an earlier check-in time. No visits to the First Sister Public Library after closing time—we wouldn’t like that, would we?”

When I had a look at her watch, I saw it was not even nine-thirty. I was just a few minutes’ walk from Bancroft Hall, which I pointed out to Miss Frost.

“Well, you might run into Kittredge and have a German discussion—you never know, William,” was all she said.

I had noticed a wet, silky feeling, and when I touched my penis—before stepping into the bath—my fingers had a vaguely perfumy smell. Maybe Miss Frost had used a lubricant of some kind, I imagined—something I would be reminded of years later, when I first smelled those liquid soaps that are made from almond or avocado oil. But, whatever it was, the bath had washed it away.

“No detours to that old yearbook room—not tonight, William,” Miss Frost was saying; she helped me get dressed, as if I were a child going off to my first day of school. She even put a dab of toothpaste on her finger, and stuck it in my mouth. “Go rinse your mouth in the sink,” she told me. “I assume you can find your way out—I’ll lock up again, when I go.” She kissed me then—a long, lingering kiss that caused me to put both my hands on her hips.

Miss Frost quickly intercepted my hands, taking them from her slinky, knee-length half-slip and clasping them to her breasts, where (I had the distinct impression) she believed my hands belonged. Or perhaps she believed that my hands didn’t belong below her waist—that I should not, or must not, touch her “there.”

As I made my way up the dark basement stairs, toward the faint light that was glowing from the foyer of the library, I was remembering an idiot admonition in a long-ago morning meeting—the always-numbing warning from Dr. Harlow, on the occasion of a weekend dance we were having with a visiting all-girls’ school. “Don’t touch your dates below their waists,” our peerless school physician said, “and you and your dates will be happier!”

But this couldn’t be true, I was thinking, when Miss Frost called to me—I was still on the stairs. “Go straight home, William—and come see me soon!”

We have so little time! I almost called back to her—one of those premonitory thoughts I would remember later, and forever, though at the time I imagined I was thinking of saying it just to see what she would say. Miss Frost was the one who seemed to think we had so little time, for whatever reason.

Outside, I had a passing thought about poor Atkins—poor Tom. I was sorry that I’d been mean to him, though it made me laugh at myself to recall I had ever imagined he might have a crush on Miss Frost. It was funny to think of them being together—Atkins with his pronunciation problem, his complete incapability of saying the time word, and Miss Frost saying it every other minute!

I had passed the mirror in the dimly lit foyer, scarcely looking at myself, but—in the star-bright September night—I considered that I had looked much more grown up to myself (than before my encounter with Miss Frost, I mean). Yet, as I made my way along River Street to the Favorite River campus, I reflected that I could not tell from my expression in the mirror that I’d just had sex for the first time.

And that thought had an unnerving, disturbing companion—namely, I suddenly imagined that maybe I hadn’t had sex. (Not actual sex—no actual penetration, I mean.) Then I thought: How can I be thinking such a thing on what is the most pleasurable night of my young life?

I as yet had no idea that it was possible not to have actual sex (or actual penetration) and still have unsurpassable sexual pleasure—a pleasure that, to this day, has been unmatched.

But what did I know? I was only eighteen; that night, with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room in my book bag, my crushes on the wrong people were just beginning.

THE COMMON ROOM IN Bancroft Hall was, like the common rooms in other dorms, called the butt room; the seniors who were smokers were allowed to spend their study hours there. Many nonsmokers who were seniors thought it was a privilege too important to be missed; even they chose to spend their study hours there.

No one warned us of the dangers of secondhand smoke in those fearless years—least of all our imbecilic school physician. I don’t recall a single morning meeting that addressed the affliction of smoking! Dr. Harlow had devoted his time and talents to the treatment of excessive crying in boys—in the doctor’s stalwart belief that there was a cure for homosexual tendencies in the young men we were becoming.

I was fifteen minutes early for check-in; when I walked into the familiar blue-gray haze of smoke in the Bancroft butt room, Kittredge accosted me. I don’t know what wrestling hold it was. I would later try to describe it to Delacorte—who I heard didn’t do a bad job as Lear’s Fool, by the way. Between rinsing and spitting, Delacorte said: “It sounds like an arm-bar. Kittredge arm-bars the shit out of everyone.”

Whatever the name of the wrestling hold is, it didn’t hurt. I just knew I couldn’t get away from him, and I didn’t try. It was frankly overwhelming to be held so tightly by Kittredge, when I had just been held by Miss Frost.

“Hi, Nymph,” Kittredge said. “Where have you been?”

“The library,” I answered.

“I heard you left the library a while ago,” Kittredge said.

“I went to the other library,” I told him. “There’s a public library, the town library.”

“I suppose one library isn’t enough for a busy boy like you, Nymph. Herr Steiner is hitting us with a quiz tomorrow—I’m guessing more Rilke than Goethe, but what do you think?”

I’d had Herr Steiner in German II—he was one of the Austrian skiers. He wasn’t a bad teacher, or a bad guy, but he was pretty predictable. Kittredge was right that there would be more Rilke than Goethe on the quiz; Steiner liked Rilke, but who didn’t? Herr Steiner also liked big words, and so did Goethe. Kittredge got in trouble in German because he was always guessing. You can’t guess in a foreign language, especially not in a language as precise as German. Either you know it or you don’t.

“You’ve got to know the big words in Goethe, Kittredge. The quiz won’t be all Rilke,” I told him.

“The phrases Steiner likes in Rilke are all the long ones,” Kittredge complained. “They’re hard to remember.”

“There are some short phrases in Rilke, too. Everyone likes them—not just Steiner,” I warned him. “‘Musik: Atem der Statuen.’”

“Shit!” Kittredge cried. “I know that—what is that?”

“‘Music: breathing of statues,’” I translated for him, but I was thinking about the arm-bar, if that was the wrestling hold; I was hoping he would hold me forever. “And there’s this one: ‘Du, fast noch Kind’—do you know that one?”

“All the childhood shit!” Kittredge cried. “Did fucking Rilke never get over his childhood, or something?”

“‘You, almost still a child’—I guarantee that’ll be on the quiz, Kittredge.”

“And ‘reine Übersteigung’! The ‘pure transcendence’ bullshit!” Kittredge cried, holding me tighter. “That one will be there!”

“With Rilke, you can count on the childhood thing—it’ll be there,” I warned him.

“‘Lange Nachmittage der Kindheit,’” Kittredge sang in my ear. “‘Long afternoons of childhood.’ Aren’t you impressed that I know that one, Nymph?”

“If it’s the long phrases you’re worried about, don’t forget this one: ‘Weder Kindheit noch Zukunft werden weniger—neither childhood nor future grows any smaller.’ Remember that one?” I asked him.

“Fuck!” Kittredge cried. “I thought that was Goethe!”

“It’s about childhood, right? It’s Rilke,” I told him. Dass ich dich fassen möcht—If only I could clasp you! I was thinking. (That was Goethe.) But all I said was “‘Schöpfungskraft.’”

“Double-fuck!” Kittredge said. “I know that’s Goethe.”

“It doesn’t mean ‘double-fuck,’ though,” I told him. I don’t know what he did with the arm-bar, but it started hurting. “It means ‘creative power,’ or something like that,” I said, and the pain stopped; I had almost liked it. “I’ll bet you don’t know ‘Stossgebet’—you missed it last year,” I reminded him. The pain was back in the arm-bar; it felt pretty good.

“You’re feeling dauntless tonight, aren’t you, Nymph? The two libraries must have boosted your confidence,” Kittredge told me.

“How’s Delacorte doing with ‘Lear’s shadow’—and all the rest of it?” I asked him.

He let up on the arm-bar; he seemed to hold me almost soothingly. “What’s a fucking ‘Stossgebet,’ Nymph?” he asked me.

“An ‘ejaculatory prayer,’” I told him.

“Triple-fuck,” he said, with uncharacteristic resignation. “Fucking Goethe.”

“You had trouble with ‘überschlechter’ last year, too—if Steiner gets sneaky and throws an adjective in. I’m just trying to help you,” I told him.

Kittredge released me from the arm-bar. “I think I know this one—it means ‘really bad,’ right?” he asked me. (You must understand that the entire time we were not exactly wrestling—and not exactly conversing, either—the denizens of the Bancroft butt room were enthralled. Kittredge was ever the eye magnet, in any crowd, and here I was—at least appearing to hold my own with him.)

“Don’t get fooled by ‘Demut,’ will you?” I asked him. “It’s a short word, but it’s still Goethe.”

“I know that one, Nymph,” Kittredge said, smiling. “It’s ‘humility,’ isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said; I was surprised he knew the word, even in English. “Just remember: If it sounds like a homily or a proverb, it’s probably Goethe,” I told him.

“‘Old age is a polite gentleman’—you mean that sort of bullshit.” To my further surprise, Kittredge even knew the German, which he then recited: “‘Das Alter ist ein höflich’ Mann.’”

“There’s one that sounds like Rilke, but it’s Goethe,” I warned him.

“It’s the one about the fucking kiss,” Kittredge said. “Say it in German, Nymph,” he commanded me.

“‘Der Kuss, der letzte, grausam süss,’” I said to him, thinking of Miss Frost’s frank kisses. I couldn’t help but think of kissing Kittredge, too; I was starting to shake again.

“‘The kiss, the last one, cruelly sweet,’” Kittredge translated.

“That’s right, or you could say ‘the last kiss of all,’ if you wanted to,” I told him. “‘Die Leidenschaft bringt Leiden!’” I then said to him, taking every word to heart.

“Fucking Goethe!” Kittredge cried. I could tell he didn’t know it—there was no guessing it, either.

“‘Passion brings pain,’” I translated for him.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots of pain.”

“You guys,” one of the smokers said. “It’s almost check-in time.”

“Quadruple-fuck,” Kittredge said. I knew he could sprint across the quadrangle of dorms to Tilley, or—if he was late—Kittredge could be counted on to make up a brilliant excuse.

“‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,’” I said to Kittredge, as he was leaving the butt room.

“Rilke, right?” he asked me.

“It’s Rilke, all right. It’s a famous one,” I told him. “‘Every angel is terrifying.’”

That stopped Kittredge in the doorway to the butt room. He looked at me before he ran on; it was a look that frightened me, because I thought I saw both complete understanding and total contempt in his handsome face. It was as if Kittredge suddenly knew everything about me—not only who I was, and what I was hiding, but everything that awaited me in my future. (My menacing Zukunft, as Rilke would have called it.)

“You’re a special boy, aren’t you, Nymph?” Kittredge quickly asked me. But he ran on, not expecting an answer; he just called to me as he ran. “I’ll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!”

I know it isn’t what Rilke meant by “every angel,” but I was thinking of Kittredge and Miss Frost, and maybe poor Tom Atkins—and who knew who else there would be in my future?—as my terrifying angels.

And what was it Miss Frost had said, when she advised me to wait before reading Madame Bovary? What if my terrifying angels, beginning with Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge (my “future relationships,” was what Miss Frost had said), all had “disappointing—even devastating—consequences,” as she’d also put it?

“What’s wrong, Bill?” Richard Abbott asked, when I came into our dormitory apartment. (My mother had already gone to bed; at least their bedroom door was closed, as it often was.) “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” Richard said.

“Not a ghost,” I told him. “Just my future, maybe,” I said. I chose to leave him with the mystery of my remark; I went straight to my bedroom, and closed the door.

There was Elaine’s padded bra, where it nearly always was—under my pillow. I lay looking at it for a long time, seeing little of my future—or my terrifying angels—in it.