When I glanced (as casually as I could) at Miss Frost, she was smiling at me again. She put her index and middle fingers to her lips and kissed them. Before I could blow her a kiss, she was once more watching the wrestling.
“Boy, did that get Kittredge’s attention!” Tom Atkins said excitedly. I kept looking at Miss Frost, but only for a moment; I didn’t need Atkins to tell me in order to know that Kittredge was looking at me.
“Bill, Kittredge is—” Atkins began.
“I know, Tom,” I told him. I let my gaze linger on Miss Frost a little longer, before I glanced—as if accidentally—at Kittredge. He’d stopped jumping rope and was staring at me. I just smiled at him, as unmeaningfully as I’d ever managed to smile at him, and Kittredge began to skip rope again; he had picked up the pace, either consciously or unconsciously, but he was once again staring at Miss Frost. I couldn’t help wonder if Kittredge was reconsidering the disgusting word. Perhaps the everything that Kittredge imagined I’d done with Miss Frost didn’t disgust him anymore, or was this wishful thinking?
The atmosphere in the wrestling room changed abruptly when Kittredge’s match began. Both team benches viewed the mauling with a clinical appreciation. Kittredge usually beat up his opponents before he pinned them. It was confusing for a nonwrestler like myself to differentiate among the displays of Kittredge’s technical expertise, his athleticism, and the brute force of his physical superiority; Kittredge thoroughly dominated an opponent before pinning him. There was always a moment in the third and final period when Kittredge glanced at the clock on the scorers’ table; at that moment, the home crowd began chanting, “Pin! Pin! Pin!” By then, the torturing had gone on for so long that I imagined Kittredge’s opponent was hoping to be pinned; moments later, when the referee signaled the fall, the pin seemed both overdue and merciful. I’d never seen Kittredge lose; I hadn’t once seen him challenged.
I don’t remember the remaining matches that Saturday afternoon, or which team won the dual meet. The rest of the competition is clouded in my memory by Kittredge’s nearly constant staring at Miss Frost, which continued long after his match—Kittredge interrupting his fixed gaze only with cursory (and occasional) glances at me.
I, of course, continued to look back and forth between Kittredge and Miss Frost; it was the first time I could see both of them in the same place, and I admit I was deeply disturbed about that imagined split second when Miss Frost would look at Kittredge. She didn’t—not once. She continued to watch the wrestling and, albeit briefly, to smile at me—while the entire time Tom Atkins kept asking, “Do you want to leave, Bill? If this is uncomfortable for you, we should just leave—I would go with you, you know.”
“I’m fine, Tom—I want to stay,” I kept telling him.
“Europe—well, I never imagined I would see Europe!” Atkins at one point exclaimed. “I wonder where in Europe, and how we would travel. By train, I suppose—by bus, maybe. I wish I knew what we would need for clothes—”
“It will be summer, Tom—we’ll need summer clothes,” I told him.
“Yes, but how formal, or not—that’s what I mean, Bill. And how much money would we need? I truly have no idea!” Atkins said in a panicky voice.
“We’ll ask someone,” I said. “Lots of people have been to Europe.”
“Don’t ask Kittredge, Bill,” Atkins continued, in his panic-stricken mode. “I’m sure we couldn’t afford any of the places Kittredge goes, or the hotels he stays in. Besides, we don’t want Kittredge to know we’re going to Europe together—do we?”
“Stop blithering, Tom,” I told him. I saw that Delacorte had emerged from under the towel; he appeared to be breathing normally, paper cup in hand. Kittredge said something to him, and Delacorte instantly started to stare at Miss Frost.
“Delacorte gives me the—” Atkins began.
“I know, Tom!” I told him.
I realized that the wrestling-team manager was a servile, furtive-looking boy in glasses; I’d not noticed him before. He handed Kittredge an orange, cut in quarters; Kittredge took the orange without looking at the manager or saying anything to him. (The manager’s name was Merryweather; with a last name like that, as you might imagine, no one ever called him by his first name.)
Merryweather handed Delacorte a clean paper cup; Delacorte gave Merryweather the old, spat-in cup, which Merryweather dropped in the spit bucket. Kittredge was eating the orange while he and Delacorte stared at Miss Frost. I watched Merryweather, who was gathering up the used and discarded towels; I was trying to imagine my father, Franny Dean, doing the things a wrestling-team manager does.
“I must say, Bill—you’re rather remote for someone who’s just asked me to spend a summer in Europe with him,” Atkins said tearfully.
“Rather remote,” I repeated. I was beginning to regret that I’d asked Tom Atkins to go to Europe with me for a whole summer; his neediness was already irritating me. But suddenly the wrestling was over; the student spectators were filing down the corrugated-iron stairs, which led from the running track to the gym floor. Parents and faculty—and the other adult spectators, from the bleacher seats—were milling around on the wrestling mat, where the wrestlers were talking to their families and friends.
“You’re not going to speak to her, are you, Bill? I thought you weren’t allowed,” Atkins was fretting.
I must have wanted to see what might happen, if I accidentally bumped into Miss Frost—if I just said, “Hi,” or something. (Elaine and I used to mill around on the wrestling mat after we’d watched Kittredge wrestle—probably hoping, and fearing, that we would bump into Kittredge “accidentally.”)
It was not hard to spot Miss Frost in the crowd; she was so tall and erect, and Tom Atkins was whispering beside me with the nervous constancy of a bird dog. “There she is, Bill—over there. Do you see her?”
“I see her, Tom.”
“I don’t see Kittredge,” Atkins said worriedly.
I knew that Kittredge’s timing was not to be doubted; when I had made my way to where Miss Frost was standing (not coincidentally, in the intimidating center of that starting circle on the wrestling mat), I found myself stopping in front of her at the very instant Kittredge materialized beside me. Miss Frost probably realized that I couldn’t speak; Atkins, who’d been blathering compulsively, was now struck speechless by the awkward gravity of the moment.
Smiling at Miss Frost, Kittredge—who was never at a loss for words—said to me: “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Nymph?”
Miss Frost continued smiling at me; she did not look at Kittredge when she spoke to him.
“I know you onstage, Master Kittredge—on this stage, too,” Miss Frost said, pointing a long finger at the wrestling mat. (Her nail polish was a new color to me—magenta, maybe, more purplish than red.) “But Tom Atkins will have to introduce us. William and I,” she said, not once looking away from me as she spoke, “are not permitted to speak to each other, or otherwise engage.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” Kittredge started to say, but he was interrupted.
“Miss Frost, this is Jacques Kittredge—Jacques, this is Miss Frost!” Atkins blurted out. “Miss Frost is a great . . . reader!” Atkins told Kittredge; poor Tom then considered what options remained for him. Miss Frost had only tentatively extended her hand in Kittredge’s direction; because she kept looking at me, Kittredge was perhaps unsure if she was offering her hand to him or to me. “Kittredge is our best wrestler,” Tom Atkins forged ahead, as if Miss Frost had no idea who Kittredge was. “This will be his third undefeated season—that is, if he remains undefeated,” Atkins bumbled on. “It will be a school record—three undefeated seasons! Won’t it?” Atkins asked Kittredge uncertainly.