In One Person (32 page)

“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.”

“O
H, 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
?”