In One Person (10 page)

No one, least of all the suicidal Norwegian, could explain to the fourteen-year-old Elaine Hadley whether Hedvig means to shoot the wild duck and
accidentally
shoots herself, or if—as Dr. Relling says—Hedvig
intends
to kill herself. Nevertheless, Elaine was a terrific Hedvig—or at least a loud and clear Hedvig.

It was sadly funny, when the doctor says of the bullet that has gone through Hedvig’s heart, “The ball has entered her breast.” (Poor Elaine had no breasts.)

Startling the audience, the fourteen-year-old Hedvig cries out, “The wild duck!”

This is just before Hedvig exits the stage. The stage directions say:
She steals over and takes the pistol
—well, not quite. Elaine Hadley actually brandished the weapon and stomped offstage.

What bothered Elaine most about the play was that no one says a word about what will become of the wild duck. “The poor thing!” Elaine lamented. “It’s
wounded
! It tries to
drown
itself, but the horrid dog brings it up from the bottom of the sea. And the duck is confined in a garret!
What kind of life can a wild duck have in a
garret
? And after Hedvig
offs
herself, who’s to say that the crazy old military man—or even Hjalmar, who’s such a
wimp,
who feels so sorry for himself—won’t just
shoot
it? It’s simply
awful
how that duck is treated!”

I know now, of course, it was not sympathy for the
duck
that Henrik Ibsen so arduously sought, or that Nils Borkman attempted to elicit from the unsophisticated audience in First Sister, Vermont, but Elaine Hadley would be marked for life by her too-young, altogether too-innocent immersion in what a mindless melodrama Borkman made of
The Wild Duck
.

To this day, I’ve not seen a professional production of the play; to see it done right, or at least as right as it could be done, might be unbearable. But Elaine Hadley would become my good friend, and I will not be disloyal to Elaine by disputing her interpretation of the play. Gina (Miss Frost) was by far the most sympathetic human being onstage, but it was the wild duck itself—we never see the stupid bird!—that garnered the lion’s share of Elaine’s sympathy. The unanswered or unanswerable question—“What happens to the duck?”—is what resonates with me. This has even become one of the ways Elaine and I greet each other. All children learn to speak in codes.

G
RANDPA
H
ARRY DIDN’T WANT
a part in
The Wild Duck;
he would have feigned laryngitis to get free from that play. Also, Grandpa Harry had grown tired of being directed by his long-standing business partner, Nils Borkman.

Richard Abbott was having his way with the staid all-boys’ academy; not only was he teaching Shakespeare to those boringly single-sex boys at Favorite River—Richard was putting Shakespeare onstage, and the female roles would be played by girls and women. (Or by an expert female impersonator, such as Harry Marshall, who could at least teach those prep-school boys how to act like girls and women.) Richard Abbott hadn’t only married my abandoned mother and given me a crush on him; he had found a kindred soul in Grandpa Harry, who (especially as a woman) much preferred having Richard as his director than the melancholic Norwegian.

There was a moment, in those first two years Richard Abbott was performing for the First Sister Players—and he was teaching and directing Shakespeare at Favorite River Academy—when Grandpa Harry would yield to a familiar temptation. In the seemingly endless list of
Agatha Christie plays that were waiting to be performed, there was more than one Hercule Poirot mystery; the fat Belgian was an acknowledged master at getting murderers to betray themselves. Both Aunt Muriel and Grandpa Harry had played Miss Marple countless times, but there was what Muriel would have called a
“dearth”
of cast-worthy fat Belgians in First Sister, Vermont.

Richard Abbott didn’t do fat, and he refused to perform Agatha Christie at all. We simply had no Hercule Poirot, and Borkman was fjord-jumping morose about it. “An idea fairly leaps to mind, Nils,” Grandpa Harry told the troubled Norwegian one day. “Why must it be
Hercule
Poirot. Would you consider instead a
Hermione
?”

Thus was
Black Coffee
performed by the First Sister Players, with Grandpa Harry in the role of a sleek and agile (almost balletic) Belgian woman, Hermione Poirot. A formula for a new explosive is stolen from a safe; a character named Sir Claud is poisoned, and so on. It was no more memorable than Agatha Christie ever is, but Harry Marshall brought the house down as Hermione.

“Agatha Christie is rolling in her grave, Father,” was all my disapproving aunt Muriel could say.

“I daresay she is, Harold!” my grandmother joined in.

“Agatha Christie isn’t dead yet, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry told Nana Victoria, winking at me. “Agatha Christie is very much alive, Muriel.”

Oh, how I loved him—especially as a
her
!

Yet in those same two years when Richard Abbott was new in our town, he could not persuade Miss Frost to make a guest appearance in a single one of the Shakespeare plays that he directed for the Drama Club at Favorite River Academy. “I don’t think so, Richard,” Miss Frost told him. “I’m not at all sure it would be good for those boys to have me put myself ‘out there,’ so to speak—by which I mean, they are all boys, they are all young, and they are all
impressionable
.”

“But Shakespeare can be fun, Miss Frost,” Richard argued with her. “We can do a play that is strictly
fun
.”

“I don’t think so, Richard,” she repeated, and that appeared to be the end of the discussion. Miss Frost didn’t do Shakespeare, or she wouldn’t—not for those oh-so-
impressionable
boys. I didn’t know what to make of her refusal; seeing her onstage was thrilling to me, not that I needed an added incentive to love and desire her.

But once I started being a student, a mere freshman, at Favorite
River, there were all these older boys around; they weren’t especially friendly to me, and some of them were distractions. I developed a distant infatuation with a striking-looking boy on the wrestling team; it wasn’t only that he had a beautiful body. (I say “distant,” because initially I did my best to keep my distance from him—to keep as far away from him as I could get.) Talk about a crush on the wrong person! And it was
not
my imagination that every other word out of many of the older boys’ mouths was “homo” or “fag” or “queer”; these purposely hurtful words seemed to me to be the worst things you could say about another boy at the prep school.

Were these “distractions,” my crushes on the wrong people, part of the genetic package I had inherited from my code-boy father? Curiously, I doubted it; I thought these particular crushes were all my fault, for hadn’t the sergeant been a notorious womanizer? Hadn’t my combative cousin Gerry labeled him with the
womanizer
word? Gerry may have heard it, or she got that impression, from my uncle Bob or my aunt Muriel. (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—but
not 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 going on; those Favorite River boys must have been frightened. I looked closely at the faces of the graduating seniors, and at their college choices and career ambitions; many of the seniors were “undecided” about both. Almost all the seniors had nicknames, even back then.

I looked very closely at the wrestling-team photographs, and somewhat less closely at the Drama Club photos; in the latter case, there were many boys in makeup and dressed as girls. It seemed that there’d always been a wrestling team and a Drama Club at Favorite River. (You must remember that this particular 1914–1915 yearbook searching was in the fall of 1959; the much-admired traditions in single-sex boarding schools were vigorously upheld through the fifties, and into the sixties.)

I suppose I liked that reading room with all the yearbooks, and with the occasional faculty member, because there were never any other students there—no bullies, in other words, and no distracting crushes. How lucky was I to have had my own room in my mom and Richard’s faculty apartment? All the boarders at the academy had roommates. I cannot imagine what abuse, or what more subtle form of cruelty, I might have suffered from a roommate. And what would I have done with my mother’s mail-order clothing catalogs? (The very thought of not being able to masturbate was abusive enough—I mean, just
imagining
it!)

At seventeen, which I was in the fall of 1959, I had no reason to go back to the First Sister Public Library—that is, no reason I would have dared to express. I’d found a haven to get my homework done; the yearbook room in the academy library was a place to write, or just to imagine. But I must have missed Miss Frost. She was not onstage enough to satisfy me, and now that I skipped the rehearsals at the First Sister Players, I saw her only when she was in an actual performance; these were “too few and far between,” as my cliché-spouting grandmother might have said.

I could have talked to Grandpa Harry about it; he would have understood. I could have told him about missing Miss Frost, about my crush on her
and
on those older boys—even about my earliest, inappropriate crush on my stepfather, Richard Abbott. But I didn’t talk to Grandpa Harry about any of it—not then.