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"No, Miss Frost is closer to Muriel's age," my grandpa said.
"That woman is older than Muriel!" my grandmother snapped.
"Actually, they're about the same age," my mother very quietly said.
At the time, all this meant to me was that Miss Frost was younger-looking than Muriel. In truth, I gave the matter little thought. Nana Victoria evidently didn't like Miss Frost, and Muriel had issues with Miss Frost's breasts or her bras--or both.
It would be later--I don't remember when, exactly, but it was several months later, after I was regularly in the habit of getting novels from Miss Frost in our town's public library--when I overheard my mean aunt Muriel talking about Miss Frost (to my mother) in that same tone of voice my grandmother had used. "And I suppose that
she has not progressed from the ridiculous training bra?" (To which my mom merely shook her head.)
I would ask Richard Abbott about it, albeit indirectly. "What are training bras, Richard?" I asked him, seemingly out of the blue.
"Something you're reading about, Bill?" Richard asked.
"No, I just wondered," I told him.
"Well, Bill, training bras aren't something I know a great deal about," Richard began, "but I believe they are designed to be a young girl's first bra."
"Why training?" I asked.
"Well, Bill," Richard continued, "I guess the training part of the bra works like this. A girl whose breasts are newly forming wears a training bra so that her breasts begin to get the idea of what a bra is all about."
"Oh," I said. I was completely baffled; I couldn't imagine why Miss Frost's breasts needed to be trained at all, and the concept that breasts have ideas was also new and troubling to me. Yet my infatuation with Miss Frost had certainly shown me that my penis had ideas that seemed entirely separate from my own thoughts. And if penises could have ideas, it was not such a stretch (for a thirteen-year-old) to imagine that breasts could also think for themselves.
In the literature Miss Frost was presenting me with, at an ever increasing rate, I'd not yet encountered a novel from a penis's point of view, or one where the ideas that a woman's breasts have are somehow disturbing to the woman herself--or to her family and friends. Yet such novels seemed possible, if only in the way that my ever having sex with Miss Frost also seemed (albeit remotely) possible.
WAS IT PRESCIENT OF Miss Frost to make me wait for Dickens--to work up to him, as it were? And the first Dickens she allowed me was not what I've called the "crucial" one; she made me wait for Great Expectations, too. I began, as many a Dickens reader has, with Oliver Twist, that young and Gothic novel--the hangman's noose at Newgate casts its macabre shadow over several of the novel's most memorable characters. One thing Dickens and Hardy have in common is the fatalistic belief that, particularly in the case of the young and innocent, the character with a good heart and unbudging integrity is at the greatest risk in a menacing world. (Miss Frost had the good sense to make me wait for Hardy, too. Thomas Hardy is not thirteen-year-old material.)
In the case of Oliver, I readily identified with the resilient orphan's progress. The criminal, rat-infested alleys of Dickens's London were excitingly far, far away from First Sister, Vermont, and I was more forgiving than Miss Frost, who criticized the early novel's "creaky plot mechanism," as she called it.
"Dickens's inexperience as a novelist shows," Miss Frost pointed out to me.
At thirteen, going on fourteen, I wasn't critical of inexperience. To me, Fagin was a lovable monster. Bill Sikes was purely terrifying--even his dog, Bull's-eye, was evil. I was seduced, actually kissed, by the Artful Dodger in my dreams--no more winning or fluid a pickpocket ever existed. I cried when Sikes murdered the good-hearted Nancy, but I also cried when Sikes's loyal Bull's-eye leaps from the parapet for the dead man's shoulders. (Bull's-eye misses his mark; the dog falls to the street below, dashing out his brains.)
"Melodramatic, don't you think?" Miss Frost asked me. "And Oliver cries too much; he is more of a cipher for Dickens's abundant passion for damaged children than he is ever a fully fleshed-out character." She told me that Dickens would write better of these themes, and of such children, in his more mature novels--most notably in David Copperfield, the next Dickens she gave me, and Great Expectations, for which I was made to wait.
When Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver to those "dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish"--where Fagin is waiting to be hanged--I cried for poor Fagin, too.
"It's a good sign when a boy cries reading a novel," Miss Frost assured me.
"A good sign?" I asked her.
"It means you have more of a heart than most boys have," was all she would say about my crying.
When I was reading with what Miss Frost described as the "reckless desperation of a burglar ravishing a mansion," she one day said to me, "Slow down, William. Savor, don't gorge. And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it--perhaps your favorite sentence--to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears." (If Miss Frost thought Oliver cried too much, I wondered what she really thought of me.) In the case of Oliver Twist, alas, I forget which sentence I chose to memorize.
After David Copperfield, Miss Frost gave me my first taste of Thomas Hardy. Was I then fourteen, going on fifteen? (Yes, I think so; Richard Abbott happened to be teaching the same Hardy novel to the boys at Favorite River Academy, but they were prep-school seniors and I was still in the lowly eighth grade, I'm sure.)
I remember looking, with some uncertainty, at the title--Tess of the d'Urbervilles--and asking Miss Frost, with apparent disappointment, "It's about a girl?"
"Yes, William--a most unlucky girl," Miss Frost quickly said. "But--more important, for your benefit as a young man--it's also about the men she meets. May you never be one of the men Tess meets, William."
"Oh," I said. I would know soon enough what she meant about the men Tess meets; indeed, I would never want to be one of them.
Of Angel Clare, Miss Frost said simply: "What a wet noodle he is." And when I looked uncomprehending, she added: "Overcooked spaghetti, William--think limp, think weak."
"Oh."
