Free In One Person by John Irving Page B

(Didn’t womanizer sound like a word Muriel might have used?)
    I suppose I should have talked to Richard Abbott about it, but I didn’t; I didn’t dare mention it to Miss Frost, either. I kept these new, unhappy crushes entirely to myself, the way—so often—children do.
    I began to stay away from the First Sister Public Library. I must have felt that Miss Frost was smart enough to sense that I was being unfaithful to her—if only in my imagination. In fact, my first two years as a Favorite River student were spent almost entirely in my imagination, and the new library in my life was the more modern and better-lit one at the academy. I did all my homework there, and what amounted to my earliest attempts at writing.
    Was I the only boy at the all-boys’ school who found that the wrestling matches gave me a homoerotic charge? I doubt it, but boys like me kept their heads down.
    I went from having these unmentionable crushes on this or that boy to masturbating with the dubious aid of one of my mother’s mail-order clothing catalogs. The advertisements for bras and girdles got my attention. The models for the girdles were mostly older women. For me, it was an early exercise in creative writing—at least I managed some clever cutting and pasting. I took the faces of these older women and moved them to the young-girl models for the training bras; thus did Miss Frost come to life for me, albeit (like most other things) only in my imagination.
    Girls my own age didn’t usually interest me. While she was flat-chested and not pretty, as I’ve said, I took a preternatural interest in Mrs. Hadley—I suppose because she was around a lot, and she took a sincere interest in me (or in my mounting number of speech impediments, anyway). “What words are the hardest for you to pronounce, Billy?” she asked me once, when she and Mr. Hadley (and the trombone-voiced Elaine) were having dinner with my mother and Richard and me.
    “He has trouble with the library word.” Elaine spoke up—loudly and clearly, as always. (I had absolutely zero sexual interest in Elaine, but she was growing on me in other ways. She never teased me about my mispronunciations; she seemed as genuinely interested in helping me to say a word the right way as her mother was.)
    “I was asking Billy, Elaine,” Mrs. Hadley said.
    “I think Elaine knows, better than I do, which words give me the most trouble,” I said.
    “Billy makes a mess of the last two syllables in ominousness every time,” Elaine went on.
    “I say penith, ” I ventured.
    “I see,” Martha Hadley said.
    “Don’t ask him to say the plural,” Elaine told her mother.
    If Favorite River Academy had admitted girls in those days, Elaine Hadley and I would probably have become best friends sooner than we did, but I didn’t get to go to school with Elaine. I managed to see as much of her as I did only because the Hadleys so frequently socialized with my mom and Richard—they were becoming such good friends.
    Thus, occasionally, it was the homely and flat-chested Mrs. Hadley I imagined in those training bras—I thought of Martha Hadley’s small breasts when I perused the young-girl models in my mom’s mail-order catalogs.
    In the academy library, where I was becoming a writer—or, more accurately, dreaming of becoming one—I especially liked the room with the vast collection of Favorite River yearbooks. Other students seemed to take no interest in that reading room; the occasional faculty member could be found there, either reading or grading papers and blue books.
    Favorite River Academy was old; it had been founded in the nineteenth century. I liked looking at the old yearbooks. (Perhaps all the past held secrets; I knew my past did.) If I kept at it, I imagined, I might eventually catch up to the yearbook of my own graduating class—butnot before the spring of my senior year. In the fall of my junior year, I was still looking through yearbooks from 1914 and 1915. World War I was