In One Person

mother-daughter thing. But, unlike Elaine, Mrs. Hadley was very strong-looking. I was realizing how much I liked that look.
    When the
areola
and
areolae
words were added to my long list of troublesome pronunciations, Martha Hadley asked me: “Does the difficulty lie in what they are?”
    “Maybe,” I answered her. “Fortunately, they’re not words that come up every day.”
    “Whereas
library
or
libraries
, not to mention
penis
—” Mrs. Hadley started to say.
    “It’s more of a problem with the plural,” I reminded her.
    “I suppose you don’t have much use for penises—I mean the plural, Billy,” Martha Hadley said.
    “Not every day,” I told her. I meant that the occasion to say the
penises
word rarely came up—not that I didn’t think about penises every day, because I did. And so—maybe because I hadn’t told Elaine or Richard Abbott or Grandpa Harry, and probably because I didn’t dare tell Miss Frost—I told Mrs. Hadley everything. (Well,
almost
everything.)
    I began with my crush on Kittredge. “You
and
Elaine!” Martha Hadley said. (Elaine had even been forthcoming to her
mother
about it!)
    I told Mrs. Hadley that, before I ever saw Kittredge, I’d had a homoerotic attraction to other wrestlers, and that—in my perusal of the old yearbooks in the Favorite River Academy library—I had a special fondness for the wrestling-team photographs, in comparison to a merely passing interest in the photos of the school Drama Club. (“I see,” Mrs. Hadley said.)
    I even told her about my slightly fading crush on Richard Abbott; it had been at its strongest before he became my stepfather. (“My goodness—
that
must have been awkward!” Martha Hadley exclaimed.)
    But when it came to confessing my love for Miss Frost, I stopped; my eyes welled with tears. “What is it, Billy? You can tell me,” Mrs. Hadley said. She took my hands in her bigger, stronger hands. Her long neck, her throat, was possibly the only pretty thing about her; without much evidence, I could merely speculate that Martha Hadley’s small breasts were like Elaine’s.
    In Mrs. Hadley’s office, there was just a piano with a bench, an old couch (where we always sat), and a desk with a straight-backed chair. The third-floor view out her office window was uninspiring—the twisted trunks of two old maple trees, some snow on the more horizontal limbs of the trees, the sky streaked with gray-white clouds. The photo of Mr. Hadley (on Mrs. Hadley’s desk) was also uninspiring.
    Mr. Hadley—I’ve long forgotten his first name, if I ever knew it—seemed unsuited to boarding-school life. Mr. Hadley—shaggy, spottily bearded—would one day become a more active figure on the Favorite River campus, where he lent his history-teaching expertise to discussions (which later led to protests) of the Vietnam War. More memorable, by far, than Mr. Hadley was the day of my confession in Martha Hadley’s office, when I concentrated all my attention on Mrs. Hadley’s throat. “Whatever you tell me, Billy, will not leave this office—I swear,” she said.
    Somewhere in the music building, a student was practicing the piano—not with the greatest competence, I thought, or perhaps there were two students playing two different pianos. “I look at my mother’s mail-order catalogs,” I confessed to Mrs. Hadley. “I imagine
you
among the training-bra models,” I told her. “I masturbate,” I admitted—one of the few verbs that gave me a little trouble, though not this time.
    “Oh, Billy, this isn’t criminal activity!” Martha Hadley said happily. “I’m only surprised that you would think of
me
—I’m not in the least good-looking—and it’s a mild surprise that
training bra
is so easy for you to pronounce. I’m not finding a discernible pattern here,” she said, waving the growing list of those words that challenged me.
    “I don’t know what it is about you,” I confessed to her.
    “What about girls your own age?” Mrs. Hadley asked me. I shook my head. “Not Elaine?” she asked. I hesitated, but Martha Hadley put her strong hands on my shoulders; she faced me on the couch. “It’s all right , Billy—Elaine doesn’t believe that you’re interested in her in that way. And this is strictly between us, remember?” My eyes filled with tears again; Mrs. Hadley pulled my head to her hard chest. “Billy, Billy—you’ve done nothing
wrong
!” she cried.
    Whoever knocked on the door to her office surely had