“Well, that was some performance,” Richard Abbott said to me, as we strolled along the River Street sidewalk on that warm September evening. It was dark now, and a distant thunder was in the air, but the neighborhood backyards were quiet; children and dogs had been brought indoors, and Richard was walking me home.
“What performance?” I asked him.
“I mean Miss Frost!” Richard exclaimed. “I mean her performance! The books you should read, all that stuff about crushes, and her elaborate dance about whether she would play Nora or Hedda—”
“You mean she was always acting?” I asked him. (Once again, I felt protective of her, without knowing why.)
“I take it that you liked her,” Richard said.
“I loved her!” I blurted out.
“Understandable,” he said, nodding his head.
“Didn’t you like her?” I asked him.
“Oh, yes, I did—I do like her—and I think she’ll be a perfect Hedda,” Richard said.
“If she’ll do it,” I cautioned him.
“Oh, she’ll do it—of course she’s going to do it!” Richard declared. “She was just toying with me.”
“Toying,” I repeated, not sure if he was criticizing Miss Frost. I was not at all certain that Richard had liked her sufficiently.
“Listen to me, Bill,” Richard said. “Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she’s given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays—well, Bill, this could be the door to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life.”
This was all so overwhelming. It was staggering to imagine that there were novels about crushes—even, perhaps especially, crushes on the wrong people. Furthermore, our town’s amateur theatrical society would be performing Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler with a brand-new leading man, and with a tower of sexual strength (and untamable freedom) in the leading female role. And not only did my wounded mother have a “beau,” as Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria referred to Richard Abbott, but my uncomfortable crush on Richard had been supplanted. I was now in love with a librarian who was old enough to be my mother. My seemingly unnatural attraction to Richard Abbott notwithstanding, I felt a new and unknown lust for Miss Frost—not to mention that I suddenly had all this serious reading to do.
No wonder that, when Richard and I came in the house from our excursion to the library, my grandmother felt my forehead—I must have looked flushed, as if I had a fever. “Too much excitement for a school night, Billy,” Nana Victoria said.
“Nonsense,” Grandpa Harry said. “Show me the books you have, Bill.”
“Miss Frost chose them for me,” I told him, handing him the novels.
“Miss Frost!” my grandmother again declared, her contempt rising.
“Vicky, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry cautioned her, like little back-to-back slaps.
“Mommy, please don’t,” my mother said.
“They’re great novels,” my grandfather announced. “In fact, they’re classics. I daresay Miss Frost knows what novels a young boy should read.”
“I daresay!” Nana repeated haughtily.
There then followed some difficult-to-understand nastiness from my grandmother, concerning Miss Frost’s actual age. “I don’t mean her professed age!” Nana Victoria cried. I offered that I thought Miss Frost was my mom’s age, or a little younger, but Grandpa Harry and my mother looked at each other. Next came what I was familiar with, from the theater—a pause.
“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.)