In One Person

“That’s just how such things work out, I think. Your mom was hurt. Poor Mary just never understood the dressin’-up part—she thought it was somethin’ Franny would outgrow, I guess.”
    “And what about the
Madame Bovary
guy?” I asked my grandfather.
    “Ah, well—there’s people you meet, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said. “Some of ’em are merely encounters, nothin’ more, but occasionally there’s a love-of-your-life meetin’, and that’s different—you know?”
    I had only two times left when I would see Miss Frost. I
didn’t
know about the long-lasting effects of a “love-of-your-life meetin’ ”—not yet.

Chapter
10
    O NE M OVE
    The next-to-last I saw Miss Frost was at a wrestling match—a dual meet at Favorite River Academy in January 1961. It was the first home meet of the season; Tom Atkins and I went together. The wrestling room—at one time, it was the only gym on the Favorite River campus—was an ancient brick building attached to the more modern, bigger gym by an enclosed but unheated cement catwalk.
    The old gym was encircled by a wooden running track, which hung over the wrestling room; the track sloped downward at the four corners. The student spectators sat on the wooden track with their arms resting on the center bar of the iron railing. On this particular Saturday, Tom Atkins and I were among them, peering down at the wrestlers below.
    The mat, the scorers’ table, and the two team benches took up most of the gym floor. At one end of the wrestling room was a slanted rectangle of bleachers, with not more than a dozen rows of seats. The students considered the bleachers to be appropriate seating for the “older types.” Faculty spectators sat there, and visiting parents. There were some townspeople who regularly attended the wrestling matches, and they sat in the bleachers. The day Elaine and I had seen Mrs. Kittredge watch her son wrestle, Mrs. Kittredge had sat in the bleachers—while Elaine and I had closely observed her from the sloped wooden running track above her.
    I was remembering my one and only sighting of Mrs. Kittredge, when Tom Atkins and I noticed Miss Frost. She was sitting in the first row of the bleacher seats, as close to the wrestling mat as she could get. (Mrs. Kittredge had sat in the back row of the bleachers, as if to signify her immortal-seeming aloofness from the grunting and grimacing of human combat.)
    “Look who’s here, Bill—in the first row. Do you see her?” Atkins asked me.
    “I
know
, Tom—I see her,” I said. I instantly wondered if Miss Frost often, or always, attended the wrestling matches. If she’d been a frequent spectator at the home meets, how had Elaine and I missed seeing her? Miss Frost was not only tall and broad-shouldered; as a woman, it wasn’t just her size that was imposing. If she’d frequently had a front-row seat at the wrestling matches, how could anyone have missed seeing her?
    Miss Frost seemed very much at home where she was—at the edge of the wrestling mat, watching the wrestlers warm up. I doubted that she’d spotted Tom Atkins and me, because she didn’t glance up at the surrounding running track—even during the warm-ups. And once the competition started, didn’t everyone watch the wrestlers on the mat?
    Because Delacorte was a lightweight, he wrestled in one of the first matches. If Delacorte had played Lear’s Fool as a death-in-progress, that was certainly the way he wrestled; it was agonizing to watch him. Delacorte managed to make a wrestling match resemble a death-in-progress. The weight-cutting took a toll on him. He was so sucked down—he was all loose skin and super-prominent bones. Delacorte looked as if he were starving to death.
    He was noticeably taller than most of his opponents; he often out-scored them in the first period, and he was usually leading at the end of the second period, when he began to tire. The third period was Delacorte’s time to pay for the weight-cutting.
    Delacorte finished every wrestling match desperately trying to protect an ever-diminishing lead. He stalled, he fled the mat; his opponent’s hands appeared to grow heavy on him. Delacorte’s head hung down, and his tongue lolled out a corner of his open mouth. According to Kittredge, Delacorte ran out of gas every third period; a wrestling match was always a couple of minutes too long for him.
    “Hang on, Delacorte!” one of the student spectators inevitably cried; soon all of us would echo this