Atkins nodded vigorously; I thought poor Tom had that verge-of-tears aspect, in the way he wouldn’t stop nodding his head, but Mrs. Hadley saved him from crying—albeit only momentarily.
“Tom Atkins!” Martha Hadley called down the stairwell. “I can hear your voice, but you are late for your appointment! I am waiting for you!”
Atkins started to run up the stairs, without thinking. He gave me a friendly but vaguely embarrassed look, over his shoulder; I distinctly heard him call to Mrs. Hadley as he continued up the stairs. “I’m sorry! I’m coming!” Atkins shouted. “I just lost track of the time!” Both Martha Hadley and I had clearly heard him.
“That sounds like a breakthrough to me, Tom!” I hollered up the stairs.
“What did you just say, Tom Atkins? Say it again!” I heard Mrs. Hadley call down to him.
“Time! Time! Time!” I heard Atkins crying, before his tears engulfed him.
“Oh, don’t cry, you silly boy!” Martha Hadley was saying. “Tom, Tom—please stop crying. You should be happy!” But I heard Atkins blubbering on and on; once the tears started, he couldn’t stop them. (I knew the feeling.)
“Listen to me, Tom!” I called up the stairwell. “You’re on a roll, man. Now’s the time to try ‘vagina.’ I know you can do it! If you can conquer ‘time,’ trust me—‘vagina’ is easy! Let me hear you say the vagina word, Tom! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!”
“Watch your language, Billy,” Mrs. Hadley called down the stairwell. I would have kept up the encouragements to poor Tom, but I didn’t want Martha Hadley—or another faculty person in the music building—to give me a restriction.
I had a date—a fucking date!—with Miss Frost, so I didn’t repeat the vagina word. I just went on my way down the stairs; all the way out of the music building, I could hear Tom Atkins crying.
IT’S EASY TO SEE, with hindsight, how I gave myself away. I wasn’t in the habit of showering and shaving before I went out in the evening to the library. While I was in the habit of not saying to Richard or my mom which library I was going to, I suppose I should have been smart enough to take Giovanni’s Room with me. (I left the novel under my pillow, with Elaine’s bra, but that was because I wasn’t intending to return the book to the library. I wanted to lend it to Tom Atkins, but only after I’d asked Miss Frost if she thought that was a good idea.)
“You look nice, Billy,” my mother commented, as I was leaving our dormitory apartment. She almost never complimented me on my appearance; while she’d more than once said I was “going to be good-looking,” she hadn’t said that in a couple of years. I’m guessing that I was already too good-looking, in my mom’s opinion, because the way she said the nice word wasn’t very nice.
“Going to the library, Bill?” Richard asked me.
“That’s right,” I said. It was stupid of me not to take my German homework with me. Because of Kittredge, I was almost never without my Goethe and my Rilke. But that night my book bag was practically empty. I had one of my writing notebooks with me—that was all.
“You look too nice for the library, Billy,” my mom said.
“I suppose I can’t go around looking like Lear’s shadow, can I?” I asked the two of them. I was just showing off, but, in retrospect, it was inadvisable to give my mother and Richard Abbott a taste of my newfound confidence.
It was only a little later that same evening—I’m sure I was still in the yearbook room of the academy library—when Kittredge showed up at Bancroft Hall, looking for me. My mother answered the door to our apartment, but when she saw who it was, I’m certain she wouldn’t have invited Kittredge in. “Richard!” she no doubt called. “Jacques Kittredge is here!”
“I was hoping for a word with the German scholar,” Kittredge said charmingly.
“Richard!” my mom would have called again.
“I’m coming, Jewel!” Richard would have answered. It was a small apartment; while my mother wanted nothing to do with talking to Kittredge, I’m sure she overheard every word of Kittredge’s conversation with Richard.
“If it’s the German scholar you’re looking for, Jacques, I’m afraid he’s gone to the library,” Richard told Kittredge.
“Which library?” Kittredge asked. “He’s a two-library student, that German scholar. The other night, he was hanging out in the town library—you know, the public one.”
“What’s Billy doing in the public library, Richard?” my mom might have asked. (She would have thought this, anyway; she would have asked Richard later, if not while Kittredge was still there.)
“I guess Miss Frost is continuing to advise him about what to read,” Richard Abbott may have answered—either then or later.
“I gotta be going,” Kittredge probably said. “Just tell the German scholar that I did pretty well on the quiz—my best grade ever. Tell him he was dead-on about the ‘passion brings pain’ part. Tell him he even guessed right about the ‘terrifying angel’—I nailed that part,” Kittredge told Richard.
“I’ll tell him,” Richard would have said to Kittredge. “You got the ‘passion brings pain’ part—you nailed the ‘terrifying angel,’ too. I’ll be sure to tell him.”
By then, my mother would already have found the library book in my bedroom. She knew that I kept Elaine’s bra under my pillow; I’ll bet that’s the first place she looked.
Richard Abbott was a well-informed guy; he may have already heard what Giovanni’s Room was about. Of course, my German homework—the ever-present Goethe and Rilke—would have been visible in my bedroom, too. Whatever was preoccupying me, in which library, it didn’t appear to be my German homework. And folded in the pages of Mr. Baldwin’s superb novel would have been my handwritten notes—quotations from Giovanni’s Room included, of course. Naturally, “stink of love” would have been among my jottings, and that sentence I thought of whenever I thought of Kittredge: “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”
Kittredge would have been long gone from Bancroft by the time Richard and my mom drew their conclusions and called the others. Maybe not Mrs. Hadley—that is, not at first—but certainly my meddlesome aunt Muriel and my much-abused uncle Bob, and of course Nana Victoria and First Sister’s most famous female impersonator, Grandpa Harry. They must have all drawn their conclusions, and even come up with a rudimentary plan, while I was still in the process of leaving the old yearbook room; by the time their plan of attack took its final form, I’m sure I was already en route to the First Sister Public Library, where I arrived shortly before closing time.
I HAD A LOT on my mind about Miss Frost—especially after seeing the 1935 Owl. I did my best not to linger over that heartthrob of a boy on the ’31 wrestling team; there wasn’t anyone who arrested my attention in the Favorite River Academy yearbook of 1932, not even among the wrestlers. In the Drama Club photos from ’33 and ’34, there were some boys-as-girls who looked convincingly feminine—at least onstage—but I didn’t pay very close attention to those photographs, and I completely missed Miss Frost in the wrestling-team pictures of the ’33 and ’34 teams, when she was in the back row.
It was the ’35 Owl that was the shocker—what would have been Miss Frost’s senior year at Favorite River Academy. In that year, Miss Frost—even as a boy—was unmistakable. She was seated front-row center, because “A. Frost” was noted as the wrestling captain in ’35; just the initial “A.” was used in the captions under the team photo. Even sitting down, her long torso made her a head taller than any of the other boys in the front row, and I spotted her broad shoulders and big hands as easily as I doubtless would have if she’d been dressed and made up as a girl.