by John Irving
I don't remember the remaining matches that Saturday afternoon, or which team won the dual meet. The rest of the competition is clouded in my memory by Kittredge's nearly constant staring at Miss Frost, which continued long after his match--Kittredge interrupting his fixed gaze only with cursory (and occasional) glances at me.
I, of course, continued to look back and forth between Kittredge and Miss Frost; it was the first time I could see both of them in the same place, and I admit I was deeply disturbed about that imagined split second when Miss Frost would look at Kittredge. She didn't--not once. She continued to watch the wrestling and, albeit briefly, to smile at me--while the entire time Tom Atkins kept asking, "Do you want to leave, Bill? If this is uncomfortable for you, we should just leave--I would go with you, you know."
"I'm fine, Tom--I want to stay," I kept telling him.
"Europe--well, I never imagined I would see Europe!" Atkins at one point exclaimed. "I wonder where in Europe, and how we would travel. By train, I suppose--by bus, maybe. I wish I knew what we would need for clothes--"
"It will be summer, Tom--we'll need summer clothes," I told him.
"Yes, but how formal, or not--that's what I mean, Bill. And how much money would we need? I truly have no idea!" Atkins said in a panicky voice.
"We'll ask someone," I said. "Lots of people have been to Europe."
"Don't ask Kittredge, Bill," Atkins continued, in his panic-stricken mode. "I'm sure we couldn't afford any of the places Kittredge goes, or the hotels he stays in. Besides, we don't want Kittredge to know we're going to Europe together--do we?"
"Stop blithering, Tom," I told him. I saw that Delacorte had emerged from under the towel; he appeared to be breathing normally, paper cup in hand. Kittredge said something to him, and Delacorte instantly started to stare at Miss Frost.
"Delacorte gives me the--" Atkins began.
"I know, Tom!" I told him.
I realized that the wrestling-team manager was a servile, furtive-looking boy in glasses; I'd not noticed him before. He handed Kittredge an orange, cut in quarters; Kittredge took the orange without looking at the manager or saying anything to him. (The manager's name was Merryweather; with a last name like that, as you might imagine, no one ever called him by his first name.)
Merryweather handed Delacorte a clean paper cup; Delacorte gave Merryweather the old, spat-in cup, which Merryweather dropped in the spit bucket. Kittredge was eating the orange while he and Delacorte stared at Miss Frost. I watched Merryweather, who was gathering up the used and discarded towels; I was trying to imagine my father, Franny Dean, doing the things a wrestling-team manager does.
"I must say, Bill--you're rather remote for someone who's just asked me to spend a summer in Europe with him," Atkins said tearfully.
"Rather remote," I repeated. I was beginning to regret that I'd asked Tom Atkins to go to Europe with me for a whole summer; his neediness was already irritating me. But suddenly the wrestling was over; the student spectators were filing down the corrugated-iron stairs, which led from the running track to the gym floor. Parents and faculty--and the other adult spectators, from the bleacher seats--were milling around on the wrestling mat, where the wrestlers were talking to their families and friends.
"You're not going to speak to her, are you, Bill? I thought you weren't allowed," Atkins was fretting.
I must have wanted to see what might happen, if I accidentally bumped into Miss Frost--if I just said, "Hi," or something. (Elaine and I used to mill around on the wrestling mat after we'd watched Kittredge wrestle--probably hoping, and fearing, that we would bump into Kittredge "accidentally.")
It was not hard to spot Miss Frost in the crowd; she was so tall and erect, and Tom Atkins was whispering beside me with the nervous constancy of a bird dog. "There she is, Bill--over there. Do you see her?"
"I see her, Tom."
"I don't see Kittredge," Atkins said worriedly.
I knew that Kittredge's timing was not to be doubted; when I had made my way to where Miss Frost was standing (not coincidentally, in the intimidating center of that starting circle on the wrestling mat), I found myself stopping in front of her at the very instant Kittredge materialized beside me. Miss Frost probably realized that I couldn't speak; Atkins, who'd been blathering compulsively, was now struck speechless by the awkward gravity of the moment.
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 t
hen 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. 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.