In One Person by John Irving Read Free Book Online Page A

father, and all that remained of the sergeant in First Sister, Vermont, was his name—with a junior tacked on at the end of it. Miss Frost may not have officially met me until this September night in 1955, but she surely knew all about me.
    “And you, I presume, are not Mr. Dean—you’re not this boy’s father, are you?” Miss Frost asked Richard.
    “Oh, no—” Richard started to say.
    “I thought not,” said Miss Frost. “You are then . . .” She waited; she had no intention of finishing that halted sentence.
    “Richard Abbott,” Richard announced.
    “The new teacher !” Miss Frost declared. “Hired with the fervent hope that someone at Favorite River Academy should be able to teach those boys Shakespeare.”
    “Yes,” Richard said, surprised that the public librarian would know the details of the private school’s mission in hiring him—not only to teach English but to get the boys to read and understand Shakespeare. I was marginally more surprised than Richard; while I’d heard him tell my grandfather about his interest in Shakespeare, this was the first I’d heard of his Shakespearean mission . It seemed that Richard Abbott had been hired to beat the boys silly with Shakespeare!
    “Well, good luck,” Miss Frost told him. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she added, smiling at me. “And are you going to put on any of Shakespeare’s plays?” she asked Richard.
    “I believe that’s the only way to make the boys read and understand Shakespeare,” Richard told her. “They’ve got to see the plays performed—better yet, they’ve got to perform them.”
    “All those boys, playing girls and women,” Miss Frost speculated, shaking her head. “Talk about ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ and all the other stuff that Coleridge said,” Miss Frost remarked, still smiling at me. (I normally disliked it when someone ruffled my hair, but when Miss Frost did it, I just beamed back at her.) “That was Coleridge, wasn’t it?” she asked Richard.
    “Yes, it was,” he said. He was quite taken with her, I could tell, and if he hadn’t so recently fallen in love with my mother—well, who knows? Miss Frost was a knockout, in my unseasoned opinion. Not the hand that ruffled my hair, but her other hand now rested on the table next to Richard Abbott’s hands; yet, when Miss Frost saw me looking at their hands, she took her hand off the table. I felt her fingers lightly touch my shoulder.
    “And what might you be interested in reading, William?” she asked. “It is William, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” I answered her, thrilled. “William” sounded so grown up. I was embarrassed to have developed a crush on my mother’s boyfriend; it seemed much more permissible to be developing an even bigger crush on the statuesque Miss Frost.
    Her hands, I had noticed, were both broader in the palms and longer in the fingers than Richard Abbott’s hands, and—standing as they were, beside each other—I saw that Miss Frost’s upper arms were more substantial than Richard’s, and her shoulders were broader; she was taller than Richard, too.
    There was one similarity. Richard was so very youthful-looking—he seemed to be almost as young as a Favorite River Academy student; he might have needed to shave only once or twice a week. And Miss Frost, despite the broad shoulders and her strong-looking upper arms, and (I only now noticed) the conspicuous breadth of her chest, had these small breasts. Miss Frost had young, barely emerging breasts—or so they seemed to me, though, at thirteen, I was a relatively recent noticer of breasts.
    My cousin Gerry had bigger ones. Even fourteen-year-old Laura Gordon, who was too bosomy to play Hedvig in The Wild Duck, had more “highly visible breasts” (as my breast-conscious aunt Muriel had observed) than the otherwise imposing Miss Frost.
    I was too smitten to utter a word—I couldn’t answer her—but Miss Frost (very patiently) asked me her question again.