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the same—a liberty we preserved by putting the gloves back on when we stood up to leave. I loved the passion, the self-forgetfulness of those nights, though more than once my swelling heart clenched at the sight of the dining-hall staff, all other tables stripped and set for breakfast, wearily waiting for us to shut up so they could finish their work and go home.
    It was our headmaster who had persuaded Frost to visit. He always called his old teacher
Mr. Frost,
and a few of us tried that ourselves a time or two, until we saw the headmaster wince. Then we all understood that
Frost
or
Robert Frost
was fine for us, but that despite its apparently greater formality,
Mr. Frost
was reserved for those who could claim acquaintance.
    All of us understood, that is, but George Kellogg. Once George sank his teeth into
Mr. Frost
he wasn’t about to let go, and seized any chance to say it. He was completely blind to the headmaster’s discomfort, his helpless hunch and shudder at every repetition of the blunder. None of us had the heart to straighten him out, and of course the headmaster couldn’t do it without sounding ridiculous:
I get to say Mr. Frost, but you don’t!
It was a nuance of etiquette as inexplicable as a joke, and George wasn’t snob enough to get it. But now, by a quirk of fate, he was going to meet Robert Frost on his own, and afterward what had been presumptuous would become impeccable—without George ever knowing it!
    Purcell fell in with me outside the dining hall and declared his astonishment that George’s poem had been selected. His respect for Frost’s intelligence, he said, had suffered irreversible damage.
    George’s poem isn’t that bad, I said, if you read it a certain way.
    As a take-off, you mean.
    Right, as a take-off.
    But it isn’t a take-off.
    It could be. That’s how Frost read it.
    But it isn’t. And you know that.
    It doesn’t matter what I know.
    Bullshit.
    It doesn’t. Let’s say you find it in a bottle. You’re walking on the beach and you find George’s poem in a bottle. You don’t know anything about the person who wrote it, you just have the poem. You’d probably read it as a take-off.
    Frost.
I don’t know why I even bothered submitting anything, given how he writes. I mean, he’s still using
rhyme.
    Yeah, so?
    Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I’m being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It’s true—rhyme’s a completely bankrupt device. It’s just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.
    I’m not laughing at you, I said, and I wasn’t. What I was laughing at was the thought of George Kellogg getting aroused over his own poem. But Purcell was offended and turned away. Good thing, too. To prove I wasn’t laughing at him I would’ve told him about George. He’d have told everyone else, and George would have gotten endless grief, and I would have despised myself.
    If, as Talleyrand said, loyalty is a matter of dates, virtue itself is often a matter of seconds.
     
    Robert Frost arrived during dinner. When he appeared in the dining hall, slowly crossing from the side door with the headmaster, gingerly mounting the two steps to the high table, the ordinary din died almost to silence. We kept eating and tried not to stare, but we couldn’t help ourselves.
    Frost let himself down into the chair at the headmaster’s right, facing out over the room. He bent his big white head as he arranged his napkin, taking his time. He seemed deeply absorbed in the problem of the napkin. He looked up, nodded at something the headmaster said, and gravely surveyed the hall. The door to the kitchen swung open: a clatter of pans, someone shouting; the door swung to and the silence resumed. Then Dean Makepeace rose at the head of his table and turned toward Frost and began to clap, each report of his hands sharp as a shot, but measured, decorous, and the rest of us jumped to our feet in a great scrape of chairs