John Irving - In One Person

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.

“Actually,” Kittredge said, smiling at Miss Frost, “I can only tie the school record, if I remain undefeated. Some stud did it in the thirties,” Kittredge said. “Of course, there was no New England tournament back then. I don’t suppose they wrestled as many matches as we do today, and who knows how tough their competition was—”

Miss Frost stopped him. “It wasn’t bad,” she said, with a disarming shrug; by how perfectly she’d captured Kittredge’s shrug, I suddenly realized for how long (and how closely) Miss Frost had been observing him.

“Who’s the stud—whose record is it?” Tom Atkins asked Kittredge. Of course I knew by the way Kittredge answered that he had no idea whose record he was trying to tie.

“Some guy named Al Frost,” Kittredge said dismissively. I feared the worst from Tom Atkins: nonstop crying, explosive vomiting, insane and incomprehensible repetition of the vagina word. But Atkins was mute and twitching.

“How’s it goin’, Al?” Coach Hoyt asked Miss Frost; his battered head came up to her collarbones. Miss Frost affectionately put her magenta-painted hand on the back of the old coach’s neck, pulling his face to her small but very noticeable breasts.

(Delacorte would explain to me later that wrestlers called this a collar-tie.) “How are you, Herm?” Miss Frost said fondly to her former coach.

“Oh, I’m hangin’ in there, Al,” Herm Hoyt said. An errant towel protruded from one of the side pockets of his rumpled sports jacket; his tie was askew, and the top button of his shirt was unbuttoned. (With his wrestler’s neck, Herm Hoyt could never button that top button.)

“We were talking about Al Frost, and the school record,” Kittredge explained to his coach, but Kittredge continued to smile at Miss Frost. “All Coach Hoyt will ever say about Frost is that he was ‘pretty good’—of course, that’s what Herm says about a guy who’s very good or pretty good,” Kittredge was explaining to Miss Frost. Then he said to her: “I don’t suppose you ever saw Frost wrestle?”

I don’t think that Herm Hoyt’s sudden and obvious discomfort gave it away; I honestly believe that Kittredge realized who Al Frost was in the split second that followed his asking Miss Frost if she’d ever seen Frost wrestle. It was the same split second when I saw Kittredge look at Miss Frost’s hands; it wasn’t the nail polish he was noticing.

“Al—Al Frost,” Miss Frost said. This time, she unambiguously extended her hand to Kittredge; only then did she look at him. I knew that look: It was the penetrating way she’d once looked at me—when I was fifteen and I wanted to reread Great Expectations . Both Tom Atkins and I noticed how small Kittredge’s hand looked in Miss Frost’s grip. “Of course we weren’t—we aren’t, I should say—in the same weight-class,” Miss Frost said to Kittredge.

“Big Al was my one-seventy-seven-pounder,” Herm Hoyt was telling Kittredge. “You were a little light to wrestle heavyweight, Al, but I started you at heavyweight a couple of times—you kept askin’ me to let you wrestle the big guys.”

“I was pretty good— just pretty good,” Miss Frost told Kittredge. “At least they didn’t think I was very good—not when I got to Pennsylvania.”

Both Atkins and I saw that Kittredge couldn’t speak. The handshaking part was over, but either Kittredge couldn’t let go of Miss Frost’s hand or she didn’t let him let go.

Miss Frost had lost a lot of muscle mass since her wrestling days; yet, with the hormones she’d been taking, I’m sure her hips were bigger than when she used to weigh in at 177 pounds. In her forties, I’m guessing Miss Frost weighed 185 or 190 pounds, but she was six feet two—in heels, she’d told me, she was about six-four—and she carried the weight well. She didn’t look like a 190-pounder.

Jacques Kittredge was a 147-pounder. I’m estimating that Kittredge’s “natural” weight—when it wasn’t wrestling season—was around 160 pounds. He was five-eleven (and a bit); Kittredge had once told Elaine that he’d just missed being a six-footer.

Coach Hoyt must have seen how unnerved Kittredge was—this was so uncharacteristic—not to mention the prolonged hand-holding between Kittredge and Miss Frost, which was making Atkins breathe irregularly.

Herm Hoyt began to ramble; his impromptu dissertation on wrestling history filled the void (our suddenly halted conversation) with an odd combination of nervousness and nostalgia.

“In your day, Al, I was just thinkin’, you wore nothin’ but tights—everyone was bare-chested, don’tcha remember?” the old coach asked his former 177-pounder.

“I most certainly do, Herm,” Miss Frost replied. She released Kittredge’s hand; with her long fingers, Miss Frost straightened her cardigan, which was open over her fitted blouse—the bare-chested word having drawn Kittredge’s attention to her girlish breasts.

Tom Atkins was wheezing; I’d not been told that Atkins suffered from asthma, in addition to his pronunciation problems. Perhaps poor Tom was merely hyperventilating, in lieu of bursting into tears.

“We started wearin’ the singlets and the tights in ’58—if you remember, Jacques,” Herm Hoyt said, but Kittredge had not recovered the ability to speak; he managed only a disheartened nod.

“The singlets and the tights are redundant,” Miss Frost said; she was examining her nail polish disapprovingly, as if someone else had chosen the color. “It should either be just a singlet, and no tights, or you wear only tights and you’re bare-chested,” Miss Frost said. “Personally,” she added, in a staged aside to the silent Kittredge, “I prefer to be bare-chested.”