Since I'd told Miss Frost that I wanted to become a writer, she might accept that the First Sister town library was where I wanted to try my hand at it. In the evening, I knew, there were mostly elderly people there, and few of them; there might also be scant representation of those sullen high school girls, condemned to further their education in Ezra Falls. There was no one who would interrupt me in our town's forlorn library. (No children, especially.)
I was afraid that Miss Frost wouldn't recognize me. I had started to shave, and I thought I was somehow altered--I was so much more grown up, in my estimation. I knew that Miss Frost knew my name had changed, and that she must have seen me--albeit only occasionally, in the last two years, either backstage or in the audience at the First Sister Players' little theater. She certainly knew I was the prompter's son--I was that boy.
On the night I presented myself at the public library--not to take out a book, or even read one, but to actually work on my own writing--Miss Frost stared at me for the longest time. I assumed she was having trouble remembering me, and my heart was breaking, but she remembered far more than I'd imagined.
"Don't tell me--it's William Abbott," Miss Frost suddenly said. "I suppose you want to read Great Expectations a record-breaking third time."
I confessed to her that I hadn't come to the library to read. I told Miss Frost that I was trying to get away from my friends--so that I could write.
"You've come here, to the library, to write," she repeated. I remembered that Miss Frost had a habit of repeating what you said. Nana Victoria said that Miss Frost must have enjoyed the repetition, because by repeating what you said to her, she could keep the conversation going a little longer. (Aunt Muriel had claimed that no one liked to talk to Miss Frost.)
"Yes, I do," I told Miss Frost. "I want to write."
"But why here? Why this place?" Miss Frost demanded.
I couldn't think of what to say. A word (and then another word) just popped into my head, and Miss Frost made me so nervous that I spontaneously said the first word, which was quickly followed by the second. "Nostalgia," I said. "Maybe I'm nostalgic."
"Nostalgia!" Miss Frost cried. "You're nostalgic!" she repeated. "Just how old are you, William?" she asked.
"Seventeen," I told her.
"Seventeen!" Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. "Well, William Dean--forgive me, I mean William Abbott--if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!"
She was the first one who said so--for a while, she was the only one who knew what I wanted to be--and I believed her. At the time, Miss Frost struck me as the most genuine person I knew.
Chapter 3
MASQUERADE
The wrestler with the most beautiful body was named Kittredge. He had a hairless chest with absurdly well-defined pectoral muscles; those muscles were of an exaggerated, comic-book clarity. A thin line of dark-brown, almost-black hair ran from his navel to his pubes, and he had one of those cute penises--I have such a dread of that plural! His penis was inclined to curl against his right thigh, or it appeared to be preternaturally pointed to the right. There was no one I could ask concerning what the rightward inclination of Kittredge's penis signified. In the showers, at the gym, I lowered my eyes; for the most part, I wouldn't look at him above his strong, hairy legs.
Kittredge had a heavy beard, but he had perfect skin and was generally clean-shaven. I found him at his most devastatingly handsome with two or three days' stubble, when he looked older than the other students, and even some of the Favorite River faculty--including Richard Abbott and Mr. Hadley. Kittredge played soccer in the fall, and lacrosse in the spring, but wrestling was the foremost showcase for his beautiful body, and the wrestling seemed well suited to his innate cruelty.
While I rarely saw him bully anyone--that is, physically--he was aggressive and intimidating, and his sarcasm was of a cutting-edge kind. In that all-boys', boarding-school world, Kittredge was honored as an athlete, but I remember him best for how effectively abusive he was. Kittredge was brilliant at inflicting verbal pain, and he had the body to back up what he said; no one stood up to him. If you despised him, you kept quiet about it. I both despised and adored him. Alas, the despising-him part did little to lessen my crush on him; my attraction to him was a burden I bore through my junior year, when Kittredge was a senior--when I believed I had only one year of agony remaining. I foresaw a day, just around the corner, when my longing for him would cease to torment me.
It would be a blow, and an additional burden, to discover that Kittredge had failed to pass the foreign-language requirement; he would stay at the school for a fifth year. We would be seniors together. By then, Kittredge not only looked older than the other Favorite River students--he truly was older.
If only at the beginning of those seemingly endless years of our incarceration together, I misheard the nuance in the pronunciation of Kittredge's first name--"Jock," I thought everyone called him. It fit. Surely, I thought, Jock was a nickname--anyone who was as cool as Kittredge had one. But his first name, his actual name, was Jacques.
"Zhak," we called Kittredge. In my infatuation with him, I must have imagined that my fellow students found him as beautiful as I did--that we'd instinctively Frenchified the jock word because of Kittredge's good looks!
He was born and grew up in New York City, where his father had something to do with international banking--or maybe it was international law. Kittredge's mother was French. She was a Jacqueline--in French, the feminine of Jacques. "My mom, who I don't believe really is my mom, is very vain," Kittredge said, repeatedly--as if he weren't vain. I wondered if it was a measure of Jacqueline Kittredge's vanity that she had named her son--he was an only child--after herself.
I saw her only once--at a wrestling match. I admired her clothes. She certainly was beautiful, though I thought her boy was better-looking. Mrs. Kittredge had a masculine kind of attractiveness; she looked chiseled--she even had her son's prominent jaw. How could Kittredge have believed she wasn't his mom? They looked so much alike.
"She looks like Kittredge with breasts," Elaine Hadley said to me--with her typical, clarion-voiced authority. "How could she not be his mother?" Elaine asked me. "Unless she's his much-older sister. Come on, Billy--if they were the same age, she could be his twin!"
At the wrestling match, Elaine and I had stared at Kittredge's mother; she seemed unfazed by it. With her striking bones, her jutting breasts, her perfectly fitted and most flattering clothes, Mrs. Kittredge was surely used to being stared at.
"I wonder if she waxes her face," I said to Elaine.
"Why would she have to?" Elaine asked me.
"I can imagine her with a mustache," I said.
"Yeah, but with no hair on her chest, like him," Elaine replied. I suppose that Kittredge's mom was riveting to us because we could see Kittredge in her, but Mrs. Kittredge was also riveting in her own disturbing way. She was the first older woman who made me feel I was too young and inexperienced to understand her. I remember thinking that it must have been intimidating to have her as a mother--even for Kittredge.
I knew that Elaine had a crush on Kittredge because she'd told me. (Embarrassingly, we'd both memorized Kittredge's chest.) That fall of '59, when I was seventeen, I hadn't been honest with Elaine about my crushes; I'd not yet been brave enough to tell her that both Miss Frost and Jacques Kittredge turned me on. And how could I have told Elaine about my confounding lust for her mom? Occasionally, I was still masturbating to the homely and flat-chested Martha Hadley--that tall, big-boned woman with a wide, thin-lipped mouth, whose long face I imagined on those young girls who were the training-bra models in my mom's mail-order catalogs.