"Ya know, fellas--I gotta be goin'," the old coach told us. "There's a team meetin'--"
"Coach Hoyt," I said, stopping him. "I'm curious to know who would win--if there were ever a match between Kittredge and Miss Frost. I mean, if they were the same age and in the same weight-class. You know what I mean--if everything were equal."
Herm Hoyt looked around; maybe he was checking to be sure that none of his wrestlers was near enough to overhear him. Only Delacorte had lingered in the wrestling room, but he was standing far off by the exit door, as if he were waiting for someone. Delacorte was too far away to hear us.
"Listen, fellas," the old coach growled, "don't quote me on this, but Big Al would kill Kittredge. At any age, no matter what weight-class--Al could kick the shit out of Kittredge."
I won't pretend that it wasn't gratifying to hear this, but I would rather have heard it privately; it wasn't something I wanted to share with Tom Atkins.
"Can you imagine, Bill--" Atkins began, when Coach Hoyt had left us for the locker room.
I interrupted Atkins. "Yes, of course I can imagine, Tom," I told him.
We were at the exit to the old gym when Delacorte stopped us. It was me he'd been waiting for.
"I saw her--she's truly beautiful!" Delacorte told me. "She spoke to me as she was leaving--she said I was a 'wonderful' Lear's Fool." Here Delacorte paused to rinse and spit; he was holding two paper cups and no longer resembled a death-in-progress. "She also told me I should move up a weight-class, but she put it in a funny way. 'You might lose more matches if you move up a weight, but you won't suffer so much.' She used to be Al Frost, you know," Delacorte confided to me. "She used to wrestle!"
"We know, Delacorte!" Tom Atkins said irritably.
"I wasn't talking to you, Atkins," Delacorte said, rinsing and spitting. "Then Dr. Harlow interrupted us," Delacorte told me. "He said something to your friend--some bullshit about it being 'inappropriate' for her even to be here! But she just kept talking to me, as if the bald-headed owl-fucker weren't there. She said, 'Oh, what is it Kent says to Lear--act one, scene one, when Lear has got things the wrong way around, concerning Cordelia? Oh, what is the line? I just saw it! You were just in it!' But I didn't know what line she meant--I was Lear's Fool, I wasn't Kent--and Dr. Harlow was just standing there. Suddenl
y, she cries out: 'I've got it--Kent says, "Kill thy physician"--that's the line I was looking for!' And the bald-headed owl-fucker says to her, 'Very funny--I suppose you think that's very funny.' But she turns on him, she gets right in Dr. Harlow's face, and she says, 'Funny? I think you're a funny little man--that's what I think, Dr. Harlow.' And the bald-headed owl-fucker scurried off. Dr. Harlow just ran away! Your friend is marvelous!" Delacorte told me.
Someone shoved him. Delacorte dropped both paper cups--in a doomed effort to regain his balance, to try to stop himself from falling. Delacorte fell in the mess from his rinsing and spitting cups. It was Kittredge who'd shoved him. Kittredge had a towel wrapped around his waist--his hair was wet from the shower. "There's a team meeting after showers, and you haven't even showered. I could get laid twice in the time it takes to wait for you, Delacorte," Kittredge told him.
Delacorte got to his feet and ran down the enclosed cement catwalk to the new gym, where the showers were.
Tom Atkins was attempting to make himself invisible; he was afraid that Kittredge would shove him next.
"How did you not know she was a man, Nymph?" Kittredge suddenly asked me. "Did you overlook her Adam's apple, did you not notice how big she is? Except her tits. Jesus! How could you not know she was a man?"
"Maybe I did know," I said to him. (It just came out, as the truth only occasionally will.)
"Jesus, Nymph," Kittredge said. He was starting to shiver; there was a draft of cold air from the unheated catwalk that led to the bigger, newer gym, and Kittredge was wearing just a towel. It was unusual to see Kittredge appear vulnerable, but he was half naked and shivering from the cold. Tom Atkins was not a brave boy, but even Atkins must have sensed Kittredge's vulnerability--even Atkins could summon a moment of fearlessness.
"How did you not know she was a wrestler?" Atkins asked him. Kittredge took a step toward him, and Atkins--again fearful--stumbled backward, almost falling. "Did you see her shoulders, her neck, her hands?" Atkins cried to Kittredge.
"I gotta go," was all Kittredge said. He said it to me--he didn't answer Atkins. Even Tom Atkins could tell that Kittredge's confidence was shaken.
Atkins and I watched Kittredge run along the catwalk; he clutched the towel around his waist as he ran. It was a small towel--as tight around his hips as a short skirt. The towel made Kittredge run like a girl.
"You don't think Kittredge could lose a match this season--do you, Bill?" Atkins asked me.
Like Kittredge, I didn't answer Atkins. How could Kittredge lose a wrestling match in New England? I would have loved to ask Miss Frost that question, among other questions.
THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU are tired of being treated like a child--tired of adolescence, too--that suddenly opening but quickly closing passage, when you irreversibly want to grow up, is a dangerous time. In a future novel (an early one), I would write: "Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult--in any way--something in your childhood dies." (I might have been thinking of that simultaneous desire to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost, not necessarily in that order.)
In a later novel, I would approach this idea a little differently--a little more carefully, maybe. "In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us--not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss." I suppose I could have written "betrayals" instead of "robberies"; in my own family's case, I might have used the deceptions word--citing lies of both omission and commission. But I'll stand by what I wrote; it suffices.
In another novel--very near the beginning of the book, in fact--I wrote: "Your memory is a monster; you forget--it doesn't. It simply files things away; it keeps things for you, or hides things from you. Your memory summons things to your recall with a will of its own. You imagine you have a memory, but your memory has you!" (I'll stand by that, too.)
It would have been late February or early March of '61 when the Favorite River Academy community learned that Kittredge had lost; in fact, he'd lost twice. The New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championships were in East Providence, Rhode Island, that year. Kittredge was beaten badly in the semifinals. "It wasn't even close," Delacorte told me in an almost-incomprehensible sentence. (I could detect the vowels but not the consonants, because Delacorte was speaking with six stitches in his tongue.)
Kittredge had lost again in the consolation round to determine third place--this time, to a kid he'd beaten before.
"That first loss kind of took it out of him--after that, Kittredge didn't seem to care if he finished third or fourth," was all Delacorte could manage to say. I saw blood in his spitting cup; he'd bitten through his tongue--hence the six stitches.
"Kittredge finished fourth," I told Tom Atkins.