"Oh, crushes--you'll soon have many more of them," Richard said encouragingly. "Crushes are common, and to be expected--to be enjoyed!" he added.
"Sometimes, the crushes are on the wrong people," I tried to tell him.
"But there are no 'wrong' people to have crushes on, Bill," Richard assured me. "You cannot will yourself to have, or not to have, a crush on someone."
"Oh," I said. At thirteen, this must have meant to me that a crush was more dire than I'd first thought.
It's so funny to think that, only six years later, when I took that summer-long trip with Tom--that trip to Europe, which got off to a bit of a bad start in Bruges--the very idea of falling in love seemed no longer likely; it even seemed impossible. That summer, I was only nineteen, but I was already convinced that I would never fall in love again.
I'm not entirely sure what expectations poor Tom had for that summer, but I was still so inexperienced that I imagined I'd seen the last of a crush that was dire enough to hurt me. In fact, I was so woefully naive--so was Tom--that I further imagined I had the rest of my life to recover from whatever slight damage I had done to myself in the throes of my love for Miss Frost. I'd not been in enough relationships to realize the lasting effect that Miss Frost would have on me; the damage wasn't "slight."
As for Tom, I simply thought I had to be more circumspect in the looks I gave to the younger chambermaids, or to those other small-breasted girls and young women Tom and I encountered in our travels.
I was aware that Tom was insecure; I knew how sensitive he was about being "marginalized," as he called it--he was always feeling overlooked or taken for granted, or flat-out ignored. I thought I was being careful not to let my eyes linger on anyone else for too long.
But one night--we were in Rome--Tom said to me, "I wish you would just stare at the prostitutes. They like to be looked at, Bill, and it's frankly excruciating how I know you're thinking about them--especially that very tall one with the faint trace of a mustache--but you won't even look!"
Another night--I don't remember where we were, but we'd gone to bed and I thought Tom was asleep--he said in the dark, "It's as if you've been shot in the heart, Bill, but you're unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!"
But I'm getting ahead of myself; alas, it's what a writer who knows the end of the story tends to do. I'd better be getting back to Richard Abbott, and that charming man's quest to get me my first library card--not to mention Richard's valiant efforts to assure me, a thirteen-year-old, that there were no "wrong" people to have crushes on.
THERE WAS ALMOST NO one in the library that September evening; as I would later learn, there rarely was. (Most remarkably, there were never any children in that library; it would take me years to realize why.) Two elderly women were reading on an uncomfortable-looking couch; an old man had surrounded himself with stacks of books at one end of a long table, but he seemed less determined to read all the books than he was driven to barricade himself from the two old ladies.
There were also two despondent-looking girls of high school age; they and Cousin Gerry were fellow sufferers at the public high school in Ezra Falls. The high school girls were probably doing what Gerry had described to me as their "forever minimal" homework.
The dust, long accumulated in the countless book bindings, made me sneeze. "Not allergic to books, I hope," someone said--these were Miss Frost's first words to me, and when I turned around and saw her, I couldn't speak.
"This boy would like a library card," Richard Abbott said.
"And just who would 'this boy' be?" Miss Frost asked him, not looking at me.
"This is Billy Dean--I'm sure you know Mary Marshall Dean," Richard explained. "Well, Bill is Mary's boy--"
"Oh, my--yes!" Miss Frost exclaimed. "So this is that boy!"
The thing about a small town like First Sister, Vermont, was that everyone knew the circumstances of my mother having me--with one of those husbands in-name-only. I had the feeling that everybody knew the history of my code-boy dad. William Francis Dean was the disappearing kind of husband and father, and all that remained of the sergeant in First Sister, Vermont, was his name--with a junior tacked on at the end of it. Miss Frost may not have officially met me until this September night in 1955, but she surely knew all about me.
"And you, I presume, are not Mr. Dean--you're not this boy's father, are you?" Miss Frost asked Richard.
"Oh, no--" Richard started to say.
"I thought not," said Miss Frost. "You are then . . ." She waited; she had no intention of finishing that halted sentence.
"Richard Abbott," Richard announced.
"The new teacher!" Miss
Frost declared. "Hired with the fervent hope that someone at Favorite River Academy should be able to teach those boys Shakespeare."
"Yes," Richard said, surprised that the public librarian would know the details of the private school's mission in hiring him--not only to teach English but to get the boys to read and understand Shakespeare. I was marginally more surprised than Richard; while I'd heard him tell my grandfather about his interest in Shakespeare, this was the first I'd heard of his Shakespearean mission. It seemed that Richard Abbott had been hired to beat the boys silly with Shakespeare!
"Well, good luck," Miss Frost told him. "I'll believe it when I see it," she added, smiling at me. "And are you going to put on any of Shakespeare's plays?" she asked Richard.
"I believe that's the only way to make the boys read and understand Shakespeare," Richard told her. "They've got to see the plays performed--better yet, they've got to perform them."
"All those boys, playing girls and women," Miss Frost speculated, shaking her head. "Talk about 'willing suspension of disbelief,' and all the other stuff that Coleridge said," Miss Frost remarked, still smiling at me. (I normally disliked it when someone ruffled my hair, but when Miss Frost did it, I just beamed back at her.) "That was Coleridge, wasn't it?" she asked Richard.
"Yes, it was," he said. He was quite taken with her, I could tell, and if he hadn't so recently fallen in love with my mother--well, who knows? Miss Frost was a knockout, in my unseasoned opinion. Not the hand that ruffled my hair, but her other hand now rested on the table next to Richard Abbott's hands; yet, when Miss Frost saw me looking at their hands, she took her hand off the table. I felt her fingers lightly touch my shoulder.