John Irving - In One Person

“I gotta go,” was all Kittredge said. He said it to me—he didn’t answer Atkins. Even Tom Atkins could tell that Kittredge’s confidence was shaken.

Atkins and I watched Kittredge run along the catwalk; he clutched the towel around his waist as he ran. It was a small towel—as tight around his hips as a short skirt. The towel made Kittredge run like a girl.

“You don’t think Kittredge could lose a match this season—do you, Bill?” Atkins asked me.

Like Kittredge, I didn’t answer Atkins. How could Kittredge lose a wrestling match in New England? I would have loved to ask Miss Frost that question, among other questions.

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU are tired of being treated like a child—tired of adolescence, too—that suddenly opening but quickly closing passage, when you irreversibly want to grow up, is a dangerous time. In a future novel (an early one), I would write: “Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.” (I might have been thinking of that simultaneous desire to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost, not necessarily in that order.)

In a later novel, I would approach this idea a little differently—a little more carefully, maybe. “In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.” I suppose I could have written “betrayals” instead of “robberies”; in my own family’s case, I might have used the deceptions word—citing lies of both omission and commission. But I’ll stand by what I wrote; it suffices.

In another novel—very near the beginning of the book, in fact—I wrote: “Your memory is a monster; you forget— it doesn’t. It simply files things away; it keeps things for you, or hides things from you. Your memory summons things to your recall with a will of its own. You imagine you have a memory, but your memory has you!” (I’ll stand by that, too.)

It would have been late February or early March of ’61 when the Favorite River Academy community learned that Kittredge had lost; in fact, he’d lost twice. The New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championships were in East Providence, Rhode Island, that year. Kittredge was beaten badly in the semifinals. “It wasn’t even close,” Delacorte told me in an almost-incomprehensible sentence. (I could detect the vowels but not the consonants, because Delacorte was speaking with six stitches in his tongue.)

Kittredge had lost again in the consolation round to determine third place—this time, to a kid he’d beaten before.

“That first loss kind of took it out of him—after that, Kittredge didn’t seem to care if he finished third or fourth,” was all Delacorte could manage to say. I saw blood in his spitting cup; he’d bitten through his tongue—hence the six stitches.

“Kittredge finished fourth, ” I told Tom Atkins.

For a two-time defending champion, this must have hurt. The New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championships had begun in ’49, fourteen years after Al Frost finished his third undefeated season, but in the Favorite River school newspaper, nothing was said about Al Frost’s record—or Kittredge’s failure to tie it. In thirteen years, there’d been eighteen two-time New England champions—Kittredge among them. If he’d managed to win a third championship, that would have been a first. “A first and a last,” Coach Hoyt was quoted as saying, in our school newspaper. As it would turn out, ’61 was the final year there were all-inclusive New England schoolboy wrestling championships; starting in ’62, the public high schools and the private schools would have separate tournaments.

I asked Herm Hoyt about it one early spring day, when our paths crossed in the quad. “Somethin’ will be lost—havin’ one tournament for everyone is tougher,” the old coach told me.

I asked Coach Hoyt about Kittredge, too—if there was anything that could explain those two losses. “Kittredge didn’t give a shit about that consolation match,” Herm said. “If he couldn’t win it all, he didn’t give a good fuck about the difference between third and fourth place.”

“What about the first loss?” I asked Coach Hoyt.

“I kept tellin’ Kittredge, there’s always someone who’s better,” the old coach said. “The only way you beat the better guy is by bein’ tougher . The other guy was better, and Kittredge wasn’t tougher.”

That seemed to be all there was to it. Atkins and I found Kittredge’s defeat anticlimactic. When I mentioned it to Richard Abbott, he said, “It’s Shakespearean, Bill; lots of the important stuff in Shakespeare happens offstage—you just hear about it.”

“It’s Shakespearean,” I repeated.

“It’s still anticlimactic,” Atkins said, when I told him what Richard had to say.

As for Kittredge, he seemed only a little subdued; he didn’t strike me as much affected by those losses. Besides, it was that time in our senior year when we were hearing about what colleges or universities we’d been admitted to. The wrestling season was over.

Favorite River was not in the top tier of New England preparatory schools; understandably, the academy kids didn’t apply to the top tier of colleges or universities. Most of us went to small liberal-arts colleges, but Tom Atkins saw himself as a state-university type; he’d seen what small was like, and what he wanted was bigger —“a place you could get lost in,” Atkins wistfully said to me.

I cared less about the getting-lost factor than Tom Atkins did. I cared about the English Department—whether or not I could continue to read those writers Miss Frost had introduced me to. I cared about being in or near New York City.

“Where’d you go to college?” I had asked Miss Frost.

“Someplace in Pennsylvania,” she’d told me. “It’s no place you’ve ever heard of.” (I liked the “no place you’ve ever heard of” part, but it was the New York City factor that mattered most to me.)

I applied to every college and university I could think of in the New York City area—ones you’ve heard of, ones you’ve never heard of. I made a point of speaking to someone in the German Department, too. In every case, I was assured that they would help me find a way to study abroad in a German-speaking country.

I already had the feeling that a summer in Europe with Tom Atkins would only serve to stimulate my desire to be far, far away from First Sister, Vermont. It seemed to me to be what a would-be writer should do—that is, live in a foreign country, where they spoke a foreign language, while (at the same time) I would be making my earliest serious attempts to write in my own language, as if I were the first and only person to ever do it.

Tom Atkins ended up at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst; it was a big school, and Atkins would manage to get lost there—maybe more lost than he’d meant, or had wanted.

No doubt, my application to the University of New Hampshire provoked some suspicion at home. There’d been a rumor that Miss Frost was moving to New Hampshire. This had prompted Aunt Muriel to remark that she wished Miss Frost were moving farther away from Vermont than that —to which I responded by saying I hoped to move farther away from Vermont than that, too. (This must have mystified Muriel, who knew I’d applied to the University of New Hampshire.)

But that spring, there was no confirmation that Miss Frost’s rumored move to New Hampshire was true—nor did anyone say where in New Hampshire she might be moving to. Truly, my reasons for applying to the University of New Hampshire had nothing to do with Miss Frost’s future whereabouts. (I’d only applied there to worry my family—I had no intention of going there.)