"I suppose I can't go around looking like Lear's shadow, can I?" I asked the two of them. I was just showing off, but, in retrospect, it was inadvisable to give my mother and Richard Abbott a taste of my newfound confidence.
It was only a little later that same evening--I'm sure I was still in the yearbook room of the academy library--when Kittredge showed up at Bancroft Hall, looking for me. My mother answered the door to our apartment, but when she saw who it was, I'm certain she wouldn't have invited Kittredge in. "Richard!" she no doubt called. "Jacques Kittredge is here!"
"I was hoping for a word with the German scholar," Kittredge said charmingly.
"Richard!" my mom would have called again.
"I'm coming, Jewel!" Richard would have answered. It was a small apartment; while my mother wanted nothing to do with talking to Kittredge, I'm sure she overheard every word of Kittredge's conversation with Richard.
"If it's the German scholar you're looking for, Jacques, I'm afraid he's gone to the library," Richard told Kittredge.
"Which library?" Kittredge asked. "He's a two-library student, that German scholar. The other night, he was hanging out in the town library--you know, the public one."
"What's Billy doing in the public library, Richard?" my mom might have asked. (She would have thought this, anyway; she would have asked Richard later, if not while Kittredge was still there.)
"I guess Miss Frost is continuing to advise him about what to read," Richard Abbott may have answered--either then or later.
"I gotta be going," Kittredge probably said. "Just tell the German scholar that I did pretty well on the quiz--my best grade ever. Tell him he was dead-on about the 'passion brings pain' part. Tell him he even guessed right about the 'terrifying angel'--I nailed that part," Kittredge told Richard.
"I'll tell him," Richard would have said to Kittredge. "You got the 'passion brings pain' part--you nailed the 'terrifying angel,' too. I'll be sure to tell him."
By then, my mother would already have found the library book in my bedroom. She knew that I kept Elaine's bra under my pillow; I'll bet that's the first place she looked.
Richard Abbott was a well-informed guy; he may have already heard what Giovanni's Room was about. Of course, my German homework--the ever-present Goethe and Rilke--would have been visible in my bedroom, too. Whatever was preoccupying me, in which library, it didn't appear to be my German homework. And folded in the pages of Mr. Baldwin's superb novel would have been my handwritten notes--quotations from Giovanni's Room included, of course. Naturally, "stink of love" would have been among my jottings, and that sentence I thought of whenever I thought of Kittredge: "With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes."
Kittredge would have been long gone from Bancroft by the time Richard and my mom drew their conclusions and called the others. Maybe not Mrs. Hadley--that is, not at first--but certainly my meddlesome aunt Muriel and my much-abused uncle Bob, and of course Nana Victoria and First Sister's most famous female impersonator, Grandpa Harry. They must have all drawn their conclusions, and even come up with a rudimentary plan, while I was still in the process of leaving the old yearbook room; by the time their plan of attack took its final form, I'm sure I was already en route to the First Sister Public Library, where I arrived shortly before closing time.
I HAD A LOT on my mind about Miss Frost--especially after seeing the 1935 Owl. I did my best not to linger over that heartthrob of a boy on the '31 wrestling team; there wasn't anyone who arrested my attention in the Favorite River Academy yearbook of 1932, not even among the wrestlers. In the Drama Club photos from '33 and '34, there were some boys-as-girls who looked convincingly feminine--at least onstage--but I didn't pay very close attention to those photographs, and I completely missed Miss Frost in the wrestling-team pictures of the '33 and '34 teams, when she was in the back row.
It was the '35 Owl that was the shocker--what would have been Miss Frost's senior year at Favorite River Academy. In that year, Miss Frost--even as a boy--was unmistakable. She was seated front-row center, because "A. Frost" was noted as the wrestling captain in '35; just the initial "A." was used in the captions under the team photo. Even sitting down, her long torso made her a head taller than any of the other boys in the front row, and I spotted her broad shoulders and big hands as easily as I doubtless would have if she'd been dressed and made up as a girl.
Her long, pretty face had not changed, though her thick hair was cut unfamiliarly short. I quickly flipped to the head shots of the graduating seniors. To my surprise, Albert Frost was from the town of First Sister, Vermont--a day student, not a boarder--and while the eighteen-year-old Albert's choice of college or university was cited as "undecided," the young man's chosen career was revealing. Albert had designated "fiction"--most fitting for a future librarian and a handsome boy on his way to becoming a passable (albeit small-breasted) woman.
I guessed that Aunt Muriel must have remembered Albert Frost, the handsome wrestling-team captain-
-Class of '35--and that it was as a boy that Muriel meant Miss Frost "used to be very good-looking." (Albert certainly was.)
I was not surprised to see Albert Frost's nickname at Favorite River Academy. It was "Big Al."
Miss Frost hadn't been kidding when she'd told me that "everyone used to" call her Al--including, very probably, my aunt Muriel.
I was surprised that I recognized another face among the head shots of the graduating seniors in the Class of 1935. Robert Fremont--my uncle Bob--had graduated in Miss Frost's class. Bob, whose nickname was "Racquet Man," must have known Miss Frost when she was Big Al. (It was one of life's little coincidences that, in the '35 Owl, Robert Fremont was on the page opposite Albert Frost.)
I realized, on that short walk from the yearbook room to the First Sister Public Library, that everyone in my family, which for a few years now included Richard Abbott, had to have known that Miss Frost had been born--and, in all likelihood, still was--a man. Naturally, no one had told me that Miss Frost was a man; after all, a lack of candor was endemic in my family.
It occurred to me, as I stood looking at my frightened face in that mirror in the dimly lit foyer of the town library, where Tom Atkins had so recently startled himself, that almost anyone of a certain age in First Sister, Vermont, would have known that Miss Frost was a man; this surely included everyone over the age of forty who had seen Miss Frost onstage as an Ibsen woman in those amateur productions of the First Sister Players.
I had subsequently found Miss Frost in the wrestling-team photos in the '33 and '34 yearbooks, where A. Frost was not quite so big and broad-shouldered; in fact, she'd stood so unsure of herself in the back row of those team photos that I had overlooked her.
I'd overlooked her, too, in the Drama Club photographs. A. Frost was always cast as a woman; she'd been onstage in a variety of female roles, but wearing such absurd wigs, and with breasts so unsuitably big, that I had failed to recognize her. What a lark that must have been for the boys--to see their wrestling-team captain, Big Al, flouncing around onstage, pretending to be a girl! Yet, when Richard had asked Miss Frost if she'd ever been onstage--if she'd ever acted--she'd answered, "Only in my mind."
What a lot of lies! I was thinking, as I saw myself shaking in the mirror.
"Is someone here?" I heard Miss Frost call. "Is that you, William?" she called, loudly enough that I knew we were alone in the library.
"Yes, it's me, Big Al," I answered.
"Oh, dear," I heard Miss Frost say, with an exaggerated sigh. "I told you we didn't have much time."