In One Person (47 page)

Smiling at Miss Frost, Kittredge—who was never at a loss for words—said to me: “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Nymph?”

Miss Frost continued smiling at me; she did not look at Kittredge when she spoke to him.

“I know you onstage, Master Kittredge—on
this
stage, too,” Miss Frost said, pointing a long finger at the wrestling mat. (Her nail polish was a new color to me—magenta, maybe, more purplish than red.) “But Tom Atkins will have to introduce us. William and I,” she said, not once looking away from me as she spoke, “are not permitted to speak to each other, or otherwise
engage
.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Kittredge started to say, but he was interrupted.

“Miss Frost, this is Jacques Kittredge—Jacques, this is Miss Frost!” Atkins blurted out. “Miss Frost is a great . . .
reader
!” Atkins told Kittredge; poor Tom then considered what options remained for him. Miss Frost had only tentatively extended her hand in Kittredge’s direction;
because she kept looking at me, Kittredge was perhaps unsure if she was offering her hand to him or to me. “Kittredge is our best wrestler,” Tom Atkins forged ahead, as if Miss Frost had no idea who Kittredge was. “This will be his third undefeated season—that is, if he remains undefeated,” Atkins bumbled on. “It will be a school record—three undefeated seasons! Won’t it?” Atkins asked Kittredge uncertainly.

“Actually,” Kittredge said, smiling at Miss Frost, “I can only
tie
the school record, if I remain undefeated. Some stud did it in the thirties,” Kittredge said. “Of course, there was no New England tournament back then. I don’t suppose they wrestled as many matches as we do today, and who knows how tough their competition was—”

Miss Frost stopped him. “It wasn’t bad,” she said, with a disarming shrug; by how perfectly she’d captured Kittredge’s shrug, I suddenly realized for how long (and how closely) Miss Frost had been observing him.

“Who’s the stud—whose record is it?” Tom Atkins asked Kittredge. Of course I knew by the way Kittredge answered that he had no idea whose record he was trying to tie.

“Some guy named Al Frost,” Kittredge said dismissively. I feared the worst from Tom Atkins: nonstop crying, explosive vomiting, insane and incomprehensible repetition of the
vagina
word. But Atkins was mute and twitching.

“How’s it goin’, Al?” Coach Hoyt asked Miss Frost; his battered head came up to her collarbones. Miss Frost affectionately put her magenta-painted hand on the back of the old coach’s neck, pulling his face to her small but very noticeable breasts.

(Delacorte would explain to me later that wrestlers called this a collar-tie.) “How are you, Herm?” Miss Frost said fondly to her former coach.

“Oh, I’m hangin’ in there, Al,” Herm Hoyt said. An errant towel protruded from one of the side pockets of his rumpled sports jacket; his tie was askew, and the top button of his shirt was unbuttoned. (With his wrestler’s neck, Herm Hoyt could never button that top button.)

“We were talking about Al Frost, and the school record,” Kittredge explained to his coach, but Kittredge continued to smile at Miss Frost. “All Coach Hoyt will ever say about Frost is that he was ‘pretty good’—of course, that’s what Herm says about a guy who’s
very
good
or
pretty good,” Kittredge was explaining to Miss Frost. Then he said to her: “I don’t suppose
you
ever saw Frost wrestle?”

I don’t think that Herm Hoyt’s sudden and obvious discomfort gave it away; I honestly believe that Kittredge realized who Al Frost was in the split second that followed his asking Miss Frost if she’d ever seen Frost wrestle. It was the same split second when I saw Kittredge look at Miss Frost’s hands; it wasn’t the nail polish he was noticing.

“Al—Al Frost,” Miss Frost said. This time, she unambiguously extended her hand to Kittredge; only then did she look at him. I knew that look: It was the
penetrating
way she’d once looked at me—when I was fifteen and I wanted to reread
Great Expectations
. Both Tom Atkins and I noticed how small Kittredge’s hand looked in Miss Frost’s grip. “Of course we weren’t—we
aren’t,
I should say—in the same weight-class,” Miss Frost said to Kittredge.

“Big Al was my one-seventy-seven-pounder,” Herm Hoyt was telling Kittredge. “You were a little light to wrestle heavyweight, Al, but I started you at heavyweight a couple of times—you kept askin’ me to let you wrestle the big guys.”

“I was pretty good—
just
pretty good,” Miss Frost told Kittredge. “At least they didn’t think I was
very
good—not when I got to Pennsylvania.”

Both Atkins and I saw that Kittredge couldn’t speak. The handshaking part was over, but either Kittredge couldn’t let go of Miss Frost’s hand or she didn’t
let
him let go.

Miss Frost had lost a lot of muscle mass since her wrestling days; yet, with the hormones she’d been taking, I’m sure her hips were bigger than when she used to weigh in at 177 pounds. In her forties, I’m guessing Miss Frost weighed 185 or 190 pounds, but she was six feet two—in heels, she’d told me, she was about six-four—and she carried the weight well. She didn’t look like a 190-pounder.

Jacques Kittredge was a 147-pounder. I’m estimating that Kittredge’s “natural” weight—when it wasn’t wrestling season—was around 160 pounds. He was five-eleven (and a bit); Kittredge had once told Elaine that he’d just missed being a six-footer.

Coach Hoyt must have seen how unnerved Kittredge was—this was so uncharacteristic—not to mention the prolonged hand-holding between Kittredge and Miss Frost, which was making Atkins breathe irregularly.

Herm Hoyt began to ramble; his impromptu dissertation on wrestling history filled the void (our suddenly halted conversation) with an odd combination of nervousness and nostalgia.

“In your day, Al, I was just thinkin’, you wore nothin’ but tights—everyone was bare-chested, don’tcha remember?” the old coach asked his former 177-pounder.

“I most certainly do, Herm,” Miss Frost replied. She released Kittredge’s hand; with her long fingers, Miss Frost straightened her cardigan, which was open over her fitted blouse—the
bare-chested
word having drawn Kittredge’s attention to her girlish breasts.

Tom Atkins was wheezing; I’d not been told that Atkins suffered from asthma, in addition to his pronunciation problems. Perhaps poor Tom was merely hyperventilating, in lieu of bursting into tears.

“We started wearin’ the singlets
and
the tights in ’58—if you remember, Jacques,” Herm Hoyt said, but Kittredge had not recovered the ability to speak; he managed only a disheartened nod.

“The singlets
and
the tights are redundant,” Miss Frost said; she was examining her nail polish disapprovingly, as if someone else had chosen the color. “It should either be
just
a singlet, and
no
tights, or you wear
only
tights and you’re bare-chested,” Miss Frost said. “Personally,” she added, in a staged aside to the silent Kittredge, “I
prefer
to be bare-chested.”

“One day, it will be just a singlet—no tights, I’ll bet ya,” the old coach predicted. “No bare chests allowed.”

“Pity,” Miss Frost said, with a theatrical sigh.

Atkins emitted a choking sound; he’d spotted the scowling Dr. Harlow, maybe a half-second before I saw the bald-headed owl-fucker. I had my doubts that Dr. Harlow was a wrestling fan—at least Elaine and I had never noticed him when we’d watched Kittredge wrestle before. (But why would we have paid any attention to Dr. Harlow then?)

“This is strictly forbidden, Bill—there’s to be no contact between you two,” Dr. Harlow said; he didn’t look at Miss Frost. The “you two” was as close as Dr. Harlow could come to saying her name.

“Miss Frost and I haven’t said a word to each other,” I told the bald-headed owl-fucker.

“There’s to be no
contact,
Bill,” Dr. Harlow sputtered; he still wouldn’t look at Miss Frost.

“
What
contact?” Miss Frost said sharply; her big hand gripped the doctor’s shoulder, causing Dr. Harlow to spring away from her. “The only
contact
I’ve had is with young Kittredge here,” Miss Frost told Dr. Harlow; she now put both her hands on Kittredge’s shoulders. “Look at me,” she commanded him; when Kittredge looked up at her, he seemed as suddenly
impressionable as a submissive little boy. (If Elaine had been there, she at last would have seen the innocence she’d sought, unsuccessfully, in Kittredge’s younger photographs.) “I wish you luck—I hope you tie that record,” Miss Frost told him.

“Thank you,” Kittredge managed to mumble.

“See you around, Herm,” Miss Frost said to her old coach.

“Take care of yourself, Al,” Herm Hoyt told her.

“I’ll see you, Nymph,” Kittredge said to me, but he didn’t look at me—or at Miss Frost. Kittredge quickly jogged off the mat, catching up to one of his teammates.

“We were talkin’ about
wrestlin’,
Doc,” Herm Hoyt said to Dr. Harlow.

“
What
record?” Dr. Harlow asked the old coach.

“
My
record,” Miss Frost told the doctor. She was leaving when Tom Atkins made a gagging sound; Atkins couldn’t contain himself, and now that Kittredge was gone, poor Tom was no longer afraid to say it.

“Miss Frost!” Atkins blurted out. “Bill and I are going to Europe together this summer!”

Miss Frost smiled warmly at me, before turning her attention to Tom Atkins. “I think that’s a
wonderful
idea, Tom,” she told him. “I’m sure you’ll have a great time.” Miss Frost was walking away when she stopped and looked back at us, but it was clear, when Miss Frost spoke to us, that she was looking straight at Dr. Harlow. “I hope you two get to do
everything
together,” Miss Frost said.

Then they were gone—both Miss Frost and Dr. Harlow. (The latter didn’t look at me as he was leaving.) Tom Atkins and I were left alone with Herm Hoyt.

“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. Suddenly, 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.