In One Person

have sex intercrurally without
exactly
imitating the Greeks,” Miss Frost explained. “One doesn’t always have to do it from behind. Between the thighs will work sideways, or in other positions—even in the missionary position.”
    “The
what
?” I asked her.
    “We’ll try it next time, William,” she whispered. It might have been in the midst of her quiet whisper when I thought I heard the first creak on the basement stairs. Either Miss Frost heard it, too, or it was merely a coincidence that she took that moment to glance at her watch.
    “You told Richard and me that you’d been
onstage
—that you had
acted
—only in your mind. But I saw you in those Drama Club photos. You’d been onstage—you
had
acted before,” I said to her.
    “Poetic license, William,” Miss Frost replied, with one of her theatrical sighs. “Besides, that wasn’t
acting
. That was merely dressing up—that was overacting! Those boys were clowns—they were just fooling around! There was no Richard Abbott at Favorite River Academy in those days. There was no one in charge of the Drama Club who knew half as much as
Nils
knows, and Nils Borkman is a dramaturgical
pedant
!”
    There was a second creak on the basement stairs, which both Miss Frost and I heard; there was no mistaking it this time. I was mainly surprised that Miss Frost seemed so unsurprised. “In our haste, William, did we forget to lock the library door?” she whispered to me. “Oh, dear—I think we did.”
    We had so little time—as Miss Frost knew, from the beginning.
    U PON THE THIRD CREAK on those basement stairs, on that most memorable night in the clearly unlocked First Sister Public Library, Miss Frost—who’d been kneeling beside her big bathtub while she thoughtfully attended to my penis and we talked about all sorts of interesting things—stood up and said in a clarion voice, which would have impressed my friend Elaine and her voice-teacher mother, Mrs. Hadley: “Is that you, Harry? I’ve been thinking that those cowards would send
you
. It
is
you, isn’t it?”
    “Ah, well—yes, it’s me,” I heard Grandpa Harry say sheepishly, from the basement stairs. I sat up straight in the bathtub. Miss Frost stood very erect, with her shoulders back and her small but pointy breasts aimed at her open bedroom door. Miss Frost’s nipples were rather long, and her unpronounceable areolae were the intimidating size of silver dollars.
    When my grandfather stepped tentatively into Miss Frost’s basement room, he was not the confident character I’d so often seen onstage; he was not a woman with a commanding presence, but just a man—bald and small. Grandpa Harry had clearly not volunteered to be the one to come and rescue me.
    “I’m disappointed that Richard didn’t have the balls to come,” Miss Frost said to my embarrassed grandfather.
    “Richard asked to be the one, but Mary wouldn’t let him,” my grandfather said.
    “Richard is pussy-whipped, like all of you men married to those Winthrop women,” Miss Frost told him. My grandfather couldn’t look at her, with her bare breasts showing, but she would not turn away from him—nor did she seek her clothes. She wore just the pearl-gray half-slip in front of him, as if it were a formal gown and she had overdressed for the occasion.
    “I don’t imagine Muriel was willing to let Bob come,” Miss Frost continued. Grandpa Harry just shook his head.
    “That Bobby is a sweetheart, but he was always a pussy—even before he was pussy-whipped,” Miss Frost went on. I’d never heard Uncle Bob called “Bobby,” but I now knew that Robert Fremont had been Albert Frost’s classmate at Favorite River Academy, and when you’re in a boarding school in those formative years, you call one another names you never hear or use again. (No one calls me Nymph anymore, for example.)
    I was attempting to get out of the bathtub without showing all of myself to my grandpa, when Miss Frost handed me a towel. Even with the towel, it was awkward getting out of the tub, and drying myself, and trying to put on my clothes.
    “Let me tell you something about your aunt Muriel, William,” Miss Frost said, standing as a barrier between my grandfather and me. “Muriel actually had a crush on
me
—before she started hanging out with her ‘first and only
beau
,’ your uncle Bob. Imagine if I had taken Muriel up—I mean on her
offering
herself to me!” Miss Frost cried, in her best Ibsen-woman fashion.
    “Al,