AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Of course I had no memory of the prospective student or his parents.
"Thanks for everything, Uncle Bob," I said to him; I really did like him, and I felt sorry for him. "I think you're a good fella!" I called to him, as I ran out of the Admissions Office.
I knew where Grandpa Harry was; it was a workday, so he wouldn't be at home, under Nana Victoria's thumb. Harry Marshall didn't get a schoolteacher's Christmas break. I knew that Grandpa Harry was at the sawmill and the lumberyard, where I soon found him.
I told him I'd seen my father in the Favorite River Academy yearbooks; I said that Uncle Bob had confessed everything he knew about flaming Franny Dean, the effeminate cross-dressing boy who'd once tried on my mother's clothes--even, I'd heard, my aunt Muriel's clothes!
But what was this I'd heard about my dad actually visiting me--when I was sick with scarlet fever, wasn't it? And how was it possible that my father had actually told me that story of the soldier he met in the head of the Liberty ship during an Atlantic winter storm? The transport ship had just hit the open seas--the convoy was on its way to Italy from Hampton Roads, Virginia, Port of Embarkation--when my dad made the acquaintance of a toilet-seat skipper who was reading Madame Bovary.
"Who the hell was that fella?" I asked Grandpa Harry.
"That would be the someone else your mom saw Franny kissin', Bill," Grandpa Harry told me. "You had scarlet fever, Bill. Your dad heard you were sick, and he wanted to see you. I suspect, knowin' Franny, he wanted to get a look at Richard Abbott, too," Grandpa Harry said. "Franny just wanted to know you were in good hands, I guess. Franny wasn't a bad guy, Bill--he just wasn't really a guy!"
"And nobody told me," I said.
"Ah, well--I don't think any of us is proud of that, Bill!" Grandpa Harry exclaimed. "That's just how such things work out, I think. Your mom was hurt. Poor Mary just never u
nderstood the dressin'-up part--she thought it was somethin' Franny would outgrow, I guess."
"And what about the Madame Bovary guy?" I asked my grandfather.
"Ah, well--there's people you meet, Bill," Grandpa Harry said. "Some of 'em are merely encounters, nothin' more, but occasionally there's a love-of-your-life meetin', and that's different--you know?"
I had only two times left when I would see Miss Frost. I didn't know about the long-lasting effects of a "love-of-your-life meetin' "--not yet.
Chapter 10
ONE MOVE
The next-to-last time I saw Miss Frost was at a wrestling match--a dual meet at Favorite River Academy in January 1961. It was the first home meet of the season; Tom Atkins and I went together. The wrestling room--at one time, it was the only gym on the Favorite River campus--was an ancient brick building attached to the more modern, bigger gym by an enclosed but unheated cement catwalk.
The old gym was encircled by a wooden running track, which hung over the wrestling room; the track sloped downward at the four corners. The student spectators sat on the wooden track with their arms resting on the center bar of the iron railing. On this particular Saturday, Tom Atkins and I were among them, peering down at the wrestlers below.
The mat, the scorers' table, and the two team benches took up most of the gym floor. At one end of the wrestling room was a slanted rectangle of bleachers, with not more than a dozen rows of seats. The students considered the bleachers to be appropriate seating for the "older types." Faculty spectators sat there, and visiting parents. There were some townspeople who regularly attended the wrestling matches, and they sat in the bleachers. The day Elaine and I had seen Mrs. Kittredge watch her son wrestle, Mrs. Kittredge had sat in the bleachers--while Elaine and I had closely observed her from the sloped wooden running track above her.
I was remembering my one and only sighting of Mrs. Kittredge, when Tom Atkins and I noticed Miss Frost. She was sitting in the first row of the bleacher seats, as close to the wrestling mat as she could get. (Mrs. Kittredge had sat in the back row of the bleachers, as if to signify her immortal-seeming aloofness from the grunting and grimacing of human combat.)
"Look who's here, Bill--in the first row. Do you see her?" Atkins asked me.
"I know, Tom--I see her," I said. I instantly wondered if Miss Frost often, or always, attended the wrestling matches. If she'd been a frequent spectator at the home meets, how had Elaine and I missed seeing her? Miss Frost was not only tall and broad-shouldered; as a woman, it wasn't just her size that was imposing. If she'd frequently had a front-row seat at the wrestling matches, how could anyone have missed seeing her?
Miss Frost seemed very much at home where she was--at the edge of the wrestling mat, watching the wrestlers warm up. I doubted that she'd spotted Tom Atkins and me, because she didn't glance up at the surrounding running track--even during the warm-ups. And once the competition started, didn't everyone watch the wrestlers on the mat?
Because Delacorte was a lightweight, he wrestled in one of the first matches. If Delacorte had played Lear's Fool as a death-in-progress, that was certainly the way he wrestled; it was agonizing to watch him. Delacorte managed to make a wrestling match resemble a death-in-progress. The weight-cutting took a toll on him. He was so sucked down--he was all loose skin and super-prominent bones. Delacorte looked as if he were starving to death.
He was noticeably taller than most of his opponents; he often outscored them in the first period, and he was usually leading at the end of the second period, when he began to tire. The third period was Delacorte's time to pay for the weight-cutting.
Delacorte finished every wrestling match desperately trying to protect an ever-diminishing lead. He stalled, he fled the mat; his opponent's hands appeared to grow heavy on him. Delacorte's head hung down, and his tongue lolled out a corner of his open mouth. According to Kittredge, Delacorte ran out of gas every third period; a wrestling match was always a couple of minutes too long for him.
"Hang on, Delacorte!" one of the student spectators inevitably cried; soon all of us would echo this plea.
"Hang on! Hang on! Hang on!"
At this point in Delacorte's matches, Elaine and I had learned to look at Favorite River's wrestling coach--a tough-looking old geezer with cauliflower ears and a crooked nose. Almost everyone called Coach Hoyt by his first name, which was Herm.
When Delacorte was dying in the third period, Herm Hoyt predictably took a towel from a stack at the end of the wrestling-team bench nearest the scorers' table. Coach Hoyt unfailingly sat next to the towels, as near as he could get to the scorers' table.
As Delacorte tried to "hang on" a little longer, Herm unfolded the towel; he was bowlegged, in that way a lot of old wrestlers are, and when he stood up from the team bench, he (for just a moment) looked like he wanted to strangle the dying Delacorte with the towel, which Herm instead put over his own head. Coach Hoyt wore the towel as if it were a hood; he peered out from under the towel at Delacorte's final, expiring moments--at the clock on the scorers' table, at the ref (who, in the waning seconds of the third period, usually first warned Delacorte, and then penalized him, for stalling).
