“I have a crush on you, too,” I told her. “I always have, and it’s stronger than the crush I have on Kittredge.”
“My dear boy, you are so very wrong!” Miss Frost declared. “Didn’t I tell you there were worse things than having a crush on Jacques Kittredge? Listen to me, William: Having a crush on Kittredge is safer!”
“How can Kittredge be safer than you?” I cried. I could feel that I was starting to shake again; this time, when she put her big hands on my shoulders, Miss Frost hugged me to her broad chest. I began to sob, uncontrollably.
I hated myself for crying, but I couldn’t stop. Dr. Harlow had told us, in yet another lamentable morning meeting, that excessive crying in boys was a homosexual tendency we should guard ourselves against. (Naturally, the moron never told us how we should guard ourselves against something we couldn’t control!) And I’d overheard my mother say to Murieclass="underline" “Honestly, I don’t know what to do when Billy cries like a girl!”
So there I was, in the First Sister Public Library, crying like a girl in Miss Frost’s strong arms—having just told her that I had a stronger crush on her than the one I had on Jacques Kittredge. I must have seemed to her like such a sissy!
“My dear boy, you don’t really know me,” Miss Frost was saying. “You don’t know who I am—you don’t know the first thing about me, do you? William? You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t what?” I blubbered. “I don’t know your first name,” I admitted; I was still sobbing. I was hugging her back, but not as hard as she hugged me. I could feel how strong she was, and—once again—the smallness of her breasts seemed to stand in surprising contrast to her strength. I could also feel how soft her breasts were; her small, soft breasts struck me as such a contradiction to her broad shoulders, her muscular arms.
“I didn’t mean my name, William—my first name isn’t important,” Miss Frost said. “I mean you don’t know me.”
“But what is your first name?” I asked her.
There was a theatricality in the way Miss Frost sighed—a staged exaggeration in the way she released me from her hug, almost pushing me away from her.
“I have a lot at stake in being Miss Frost, William,” she said. “I did not acquire the Miss word accidentally.”
I knew something about not liking the name you were given, for I hadn’t liked being William Francis Dean, Jr. “You don’t like your first name?” I asked her.
“We could begin with that,” she answered, amused. “Would you ever name a girl Alberta?”
“Like the province in Canada?” I asked. I could not imagine Miss Frost as an Alberta!
“It’s a better name for a province,” Miss Frost said. “Everyone used to call me Al.”
“Al,” I repeated.
“You see why I like the Miss,” she said, laughing.
“I love everything about you,” I told her.
“Slow down, William,” Miss Frost said. “You can’t rush into crushes on the wrong people.”
Of course, I didn’t understand why she thought of herself as “wrong” for me—and how could she possibly imagine that my crush on Kittredge was safer? I believed that Miss Frost must have meant merely to warn me about the difference in our ages; maybe an eighteen-year-old boy with a woman in her forties was a taboo to her. I was thinking that I was legally an adult, albeit barely, and if it were true that Miss Frost was about my aunt Muriel’s age, I was guessing that she would have been forty-two or forty-three.
“Girls my own age don’t interest me,” I said to Miss Frost. “I seem to be attracted to older women.”
“My dear boy,” she said again. “It doesn’t matter how old I am—it’s what I am. William, you don’t know what I am, do you?”
As if that existential-sounding question wasn’t confusing enough, Atkins chose this moment to enter the dimly lit foyer of the library, where he appeared to be startled. (He told me later he’d been frightened by the reflection of himself he had seen in the mirror, which hung silently in the foyer like a nonspeaking security guard.)
“Oh, it’s you, Tom,” Miss Frost said, unsurprised.
“Do you see? What did I tell you?” I asked Miss Frost, while Atkins went on fearfully regarding himself in the mirror.
“You’re so very wrong,” Miss Frost told me, smiling.
“Kittredge is looking for you, Bill,” Atkins said. “I went to the yearbook room, but someone said you’d just left.”
“The yearbook room,” Miss Frost repeated; she sounded surprised. I looked at her; there was an unfamiliar anxiety in her expression.
“Bill is conducting a study of Favorite River yearbooks from past to present,” Atkins said to Miss Frost. “Elaine told me,” Atkins explained to me.
“For Christ’s sake, Atkins—it sounds like you’re conducting a study of me,” I told him.
“It’s Kittredge who wants to talk to you,” Atkins said sullenly.
“Since when are you Kittredge’s messenger boy?” I asked him.
“I’ve had enough abuse for one night!” Atkins cried dramatically, throwing up his slender hands. “It’s one thing to have Kittredge insulting me—he insults everyone. But having you insult me, Bill—well, that’s just too much!”
In an effort to leave the First Sister Public Library in a flamboyant pique, Atkins once again encountered that menacing mirror in the foyer, where he paused to deliver a parting shot. “I’m not your shadow, Bill—Kittredge is,” Atkins said.
He was gone before he could hear me say, “Fuck Kittredge.”
“Watch your language, William,” Miss Frost said, putting her long fingers to my lips. “After all, we’re in a fucking library.”
The fucking word was not one that came to mind when I thought of her—in the same way that Miss Frost seemed an implausible Alberta—but when I looked at her, she was smiling. She was just teasing me; her long fingers now brushed my cheek.
“A curious reference to the shadow word, William,” she said. “Would it be the unpronounceable word that caused your unplanned exit from King Lear?”
“It would,” I told her. “I guess you heard. In a town this small, I think everyone hears everything!”
“Maybe not quite everyone—possibly not quite everything, William,” Miss Frost said. “It appears to me, for example, that you haven’t heard everything—about me, I mean.”
I knew that Nana Victoria didn’t like Miss Frost, but I didn’t know why. I knew that Aunt Muriel had issues with Miss Frost’s choice in bras, but how could I have brought up the training-bra subject when I had just expressed my love for everything about Miss Frost?
“My grandmother,” I started to say, “and my aunt Muriel—”
But Miss Frost lightly touched my lips with her long fingers again. “Shhh, William,” she whispered. “I don’t need to hear what those ladies think of me. I’m much more interested in hearing about that project of yours in the old yearbook room.”
“Oh, it’s not really a project,” I told her. “I just look at the wrestling-team photos, mostly—and at the pictures of the plays that the Drama Club performed.”
“Do you?” Miss Frost somewhat absently asked. Why was it I got the feeling that she was acting—in a kind of on-again, off-again way? What was it she’d said, when Richard Abbott had asked her if she’d ever been onstage—if she’d ever acted?