In One Person (8 page)

I found Grandpa Harry’s explanation of First Sister’s origins to be less exciting than my earliest assumption that our small town had been named for my mother’s older, bullying sister.

But both Richard Abbott and I were thinking about those two Marshall girls, when Miss Frost made her remark—“Two sisters come to mind.” Miss Frost must have noticed that I appeared puzzled, and Richard had lost his leading-man aura; he seemed confused, even unsure of himself. Miss Frost then said, “I mean the Brontë sisters, obviously.”

“Obviously!” Richard cried; he looked relieved.

“Emily Brontë wrote
Wuthering Heights,
” Miss Frost explained to me, “and Charlotte Brontë wrote
Jane Eyre
.”

“Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic,” Richard told me. “And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.”

“Those are some
crushes,
” Miss Frost said meaningfully.

“But aren’t they
women’s
crushes?” Richard asked the librarian. “Bill might have a young
man’s
crush, or crushes, more in mind.”

“Crushes are crushes,” Miss Frost said, without hesitation. “It’s the
writing
that matters; you’re not suggesting that
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
are novels ‘for women only,’ are you?”

“Certainly not! Of course it’s the
writing
that matters!” Richard Abbott exclaimed. “I just meant that a more
masculine
adventure—”

“More
masculine
!” Miss Frost repeated. “Well, I suppose there’s Fielding,” she added.

“Oh, yes!” Richard cried. “Do you mean
Tom Jones
?”

“I do,” Miss Frost replied, with a sigh. “If one can count sexual escapades as one result of
crushes
—”

“Why not?” Richard Abbott quickly said.

“You’re
how
old?” Miss Frost asked me. Once again, her long fingers touched my shoulder. I recalled how Aunt Muriel had fainted (twice), and briefly feared I would soon lose consciousness.

“I’m thirteen,” I told her.

“Three novels are enough of a beginning at thirteen,” she said to Richard. “It wouldn’t be wise to overload him with crushes at too young an age. Let’s just see where these three novels lead him, shall we?” Once more Miss Frost smiled at me. “Begin with the Fielding,” she advised me. “It’s arguably the most primitive. You’ll find that the Brontë sisters are more emotional—more psychological. They’re more grown-up novelists.”

“Miss Frost?” Richard Abbott said. “Have you ever been
onstage
—have you ever
acted
?”

“Only in my mind,” she answered him, almost flirtatiously. “When I was younger—all the time.”

Richard gave me a conspiratorial look; I knew perfectly well what the talented young newcomer to the First Sister Players was thinking.
A tower of
sexual strength
stood before us; to Richard and me, Miss Frost was a woman with an
untamable
freedom—a certain
lawlessness
definitely accompanied her.

To a younger man, Richard Abbott, and to me—I was a thirteen-year-old daydreamer who suddenly desired to write the story of my crushes on the wrong people
and
to have sex with a librarian in her thirties—Miss Frost was an unquestionable sexual
presence
.

“There’s a part for you, Miss Frost,” Richard Abbott ventured, while we followed her through the stacks, where she was gathering my first three
literary
novels.

“Actually, one of two possible parts,” I pointed out.

“Yes, you have to choose,” Richard quickly added. “It’s either Hedda in
Hedda Gabler,
or Nora in
A Doll’s House
. Do you know Ibsen? These are often called
problem
plays—”

“That’s some choice,” Miss Frost said, smiling at me. “Either I get to shoot myself in the temple, or I get to be the kind of woman who abandons her three young children.”

“I think it’s a
positive
decision, in both cases,” Richard Abbott tried to reassure her.

“Oh, how very
positive
!” Miss Frost said, laughing—with a wave of her long-fingered hand. (When she laughed, there was something hoarse and low in her voice, which almost immediately jumped to a higher, clearer register.)

“Nils Borkman is the director,” I warned Miss Frost; I was feeling protective of her already, and we’d only just met.

“My dear boy,” Miss Frost said to me, “as if there’s a soul in First Sister who doesn’t know that a neuroses-ridden Norwegian—no neophyte to ‘serious drama’—is our little theater’s director.”

She said suddenly to Richard: “I would be interested to know—if
A Doll’s House
is the Ibsen that we choose, and I am to be the much-misunderstood Nora—how
you
will be cast, Mr. Richard Abbott.” Before Richard could answer her, Miss Frost went on: “My guess is that you would be Torvald Helmer, Nora’s dull and uncomprehending husband—he whose life Nora saves, but he can’t save hers.”

“I would guess that is how I will be cast,” Richard ventured cautiously. “Of course I’m not the director.”

“You must tell me, Richard Abbott, if you intend to
flirt
with me—I don’t mean in our onstage roles,” Miss Frost said.

“No—not at all!” Richard cried. “I’m seriously flirting with Bill’s mom.”

“Very well, then—that’s the right answer,” she told him—once more ruffling my hair, but she kept talking to Richard. “And if it’s
Hedda Gabler
that we do, and I’m Hedda—well, the decision regarding
your
role is a more complicated one, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Richard said thoughtfully. “I hope, in the case of
Hedda Gabler,
I am not the dull, uncomprehending husband—I would
hate
to be George,” Richard said.

“Who
wouldn’t
hate to be George?” Miss Frost asked him.

“There’s the writer Hedda destroys,” Richard speculated. “I don’t put it past Nils to cast me as Eilert Løvborg.”

“You would be wrong for the part!” Miss Frost declared.

“That leaves Judge Brack,” Richard Abbott surmised.

“That might be fun,” Miss Frost told him. “I shoot myself to escape your clutches.”

“I could well imagine being destroyed by that,” Richard Abbott said, most graciously. They were acting, even now—I could tell—and they were not amateurs. My mother wouldn’t need to be doing much prompting in their cases; I didn’t imagine that Richard Abbott or Miss Frost would ever forget a line or misspeak a single word.

“I shall think about it and get back to you,” Miss Frost told Richard. There was a tall, narrow, dimly lit mirror in the foyer of the library, where a long row of coat hooks revealed a solitary raincoat—probably Miss Frost’s. She glanced at her hair in the mirror. “I’ve been considering longer hair,” she said, as if to her double.

“I imagine Hedda with somewhat longer hair,” Richard said.

“
Do
you?” Miss Frost asked, but she was smiling at me again. “Just look at you, William,” she said suddenly. “Talk about ‘coming of age’—just look at
this boy
!” I must have blushed, or looked away—clutching those three coming-of-age novels to my heart.

M
ISS
F
ROST CHOSE WELL
. I would read
Tom Jones, Wuthering Heights
, and
Jane Eyre
—in that order—thus becoming, to my mom’s surprise, a reader. And what those novels taught me was that adventure was not confined to seafaring, with or without pirates. One could find considerable excitement by not escaping to science fiction or futuristic fantasies; it wasn’t necessary to read a Western or a romance novel in order to transport oneself. In reading, as in writing, all one needed—that is, in
order to have an utterly absorbing journey—was a believable but formidable relationship. What else, after all, did crushes—especially crushes on the wrong people—lead to?

“Well, Bill, let’s get you home so you can start reading,” Richard Abbott said that warm September evening, and—turning to Miss Frost, in the foyer of the library—he said (in a voice not his own) the last thing Judge Brack says to Hedda in act 4, “ ‘We shall get on capitally together, we two!’ ”

There would be two months of rehearsals for
Hedda Gabler
that fall, so I would become most familiar with that line—not to mention the last lines Hedda says, in response. She has already exited the stage, but—speaking offstage,
loud and clear,
as the stage directions say—Miss Frost (as Hedda) responds, “ ‘Yes, don’t you flatter yourself we will, Judge Brack? Now that you are the one cock in the basket—’ ”
A shot is heard within,
the stage directions then say.

Do I sincerely love that play, or did I adore it because Richard Abbott and Miss Frost brought it to life for me? Grandpa Harry was outstanding in a small role—that of George’s aunt Juliana, Miss Tesman—and my aunt Muriel was the needy comrade of Eilert Løvborg, Mrs. Elvsted.

“Well,
that
was some performance,” Richard Abbott said to me, as we strolled along the River Street sidewalk on that warm September evening. It was dark now, and a distant thunder was in the air, but the neighborhood backyards were quiet; children and dogs had been brought indoors, and Richard was walking me home.

“
What
performance?” I asked him.

“I mean Miss Frost!” Richard exclaimed. “I mean
her
performance! The books you should read, all that stuff about
crushes,
and her elaborate dance about whether she would play Nora or Hedda—”

“You mean she was always
acting
?” I asked him. (Once again, I felt protective of her, without knowing why.)

“I take it that you liked her,” Richard said.

“I
loved
her!” I blurted out.

“Understandable,” he said, nodding his head.

“Didn’t
you
like her?” I asked him.

“Oh, yes, I did—I
do
like her—and I think she’ll be a perfect Hedda,” Richard said.

“If she’ll do it,” I cautioned him.

“Oh, she’ll do it—of course she’s going to
do
it!” Richard declared. “She was just toying with me.”

“Toying,” I repeated, not sure if he was criticizing Miss Frost. I was not at all certain that Richard had liked her
sufficiently
.

“Listen to me, Bill,” Richard said. “Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she’s given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays—well, Bill, this could be the door to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life.”

This was all so overwhelming. It was staggering to imagine that there were novels about crushes—even, perhaps especially, crushes on the wrong people. Furthermore, our town’s amateur theatrical society would be performing Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler
with a brand-new leading man, and with a tower of
sexual strength
(and
untamable
freedom) in the leading female role. And not only did my wounded mother have a
“beau,”
as Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria referred to Richard Abbott, but my uncomfortable crush on Richard had been supplanted. I was now in love with a librarian who was old enough to be my mother. My seemingly unnatural attraction to Richard Abbott notwithstanding, I felt a new and unknown lust for Miss Frost—not to mention that I suddenly had all this serious reading to do.

No wonder that, when Richard and I came in the house from our excursion to the library, my grandmother felt my forehead—I must have looked flushed, as if I had a fever. “Too much excitement for a school night, Billy,” Nana Victoria said.

“Nonsense,” Grandpa Harry said. “Show me the books you have, Bill.”

“Miss Frost chose them for me,” I told him, handing him the novels.

“
Miss
Frost!” my grandmother again declared, her contempt rising.

“Vicky, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry cautioned her, like little back-to-back slaps.

“Mommy, please don’t,” my mother said.

“They’re great novels,” my grandfather announced. “In fact, they’re classics. I daresay Miss Frost knows what novels a young boy should read.”

“I
daresay
!” Nana repeated haughtily.

There then followed some difficult-to-understand nastiness from my grandmother, concerning Miss Frost’s actual age. “I don’t mean her
professed
age!” Nana Victoria cried. I offered that I thought Miss Frost was my mom’s age, or a little younger, but Grandpa Harry and my
mother looked at each other. Next came what I was familiar with, from the theater—a pause.