John Irving - In One Person

“Oh.”

I RACED HOME FROM school to read; I raced when I read, unable to heed Miss Frost’s command to slow down. I raced to the First Sister Public Library after every school-night supper. I modeled myself on what Richard Abbott had told me of his childhood—I lived in the library, especially on the weekends. Miss Frost was always making me move to a chair or a couch or a table where there was better light. “Don’t ruin your eyes, William. You’ll need your eyes for the rest of your life, if you’re going to be a reader.”

Suddenly I was fifteen. It was Great Expectations time—also, it was the first time I wanted to reread a novel—and Miss Frost and I had that awkward conversation about my desire to become a writer. (It was not my only desire, as you know, but Miss Frost and I didn’t discuss that other desire—not then.)

It was suddenly time for me to attend Favorite River Academy, too. Fittingly—since she would be so instrumental in my overall education—it was Miss Frost who pointed out to me what a “favor” my mother and Richard Abbott had done for me. Because they got married in the summer of 1957—more to the point, because Richard Abbott legally adopted me—my name was changed from William Francis Dean, Jr., to William Marshall Abbott. I would begin my prep-school years with a brand-new name—one I liked!

Richard had a faculty apartment in one of the dormitories of the boarding school, which he and my mom shared in their new life together, and I had my own bedroom there. It was not a long walk, on River Street, to my grandparents’ house, where I’d grown up, and I was a frequent visitor there. As little as I liked my grandmother, I was very fond of Grandpa Harry; of course I would continue to see my grandfather onstage, as a woman, but once I became a student at Favorite River, I would no longer be a backstage regular at the rehearsals of the First Sister Players.

I had much more homework at the academy than I’d ever seen in middle or elementary school, and Richard Abbott was in charge of the Drama Club (as it was called) at the prep school. Richard’s Shakespearean ambitions would draw me more to the Drama Club, and away from all but the finished performances at the First Sister Players. The Drama Club’s stage, the academy’s theater, was both bigger and more sophisticated than our town’s quaint little playhouse. (The quaint word was a new one for me. I became a bit of a snob in my years at Favorite River, or so Miss Frost would one day inform me.)

And if my inappropriate crush on Richard Abbott had been “supplanted” (as I’ve said) by my lust and ardent longing for Miss Frost, so had two gifted amateurs (Grandpa Harry and Aunt Muriel) been replaced by two vastly more talented actors. Richard Abbott and Miss Frost were soon superstars on the stage of the First Sister Players. Not only was Miss Frost cast as the neurotic Hedda to Richard’s hideously controlling Judge Brack; in the fall of ’56, she played Nora in A Doll’s House . Richard, as he’d guessed, was cast as her dull, uncomprehending husband, Torvald Helmer. An uncharacteristically subdued Aunt Muriel did not speak to her own father for almost a month, because Grandpa Harry (not Muriel) was cast as Mrs. Linde. And Richard Abbott and Miss Frost managed to persuade Nils Borkman to play the unfortunate Krogstad, which the grim Norwegian brought off with a creepy combination of doom and righteousness.

More important than what this mixed bag of amateurs made of Ibsen, a new faculty family had arrived at Favorite River Academy at the start of the academic year of 1956 and ’57—a couple named Hadley. They had an only child—a gawky-looking daughter, Elaine. Mr. Hadley was a new history teacher. Mrs. Hadley, who played the piano, gave voice and singing lessons; she directed the school’s several choruses and conducted the academy choir. The Hadleys became friends with Richard and my mom, and so Elaine and I often found ourselves thrust together. I was a year older, which—at the time—made me feel a lot older than Elaine, who lagged far behind in the breast-development department. (Nor would Elaine ever have any breasts, I imagined, for I’d also noticed that Mrs. Hadley was virtually flat-chested—even when she sang.)

Elaine was extremely nearsighted; in those days, there was no remedy for this, save those super-thick lenses that magnified your eyes and made them appear as if they were exploding out of your head. But her mother had taught her to sing, and Elaine also had a vibrant, well-enunciated speaking voice. When she spoke, it was almost as if she were singing—you could hear every word.

“Elaine really knows how to project, ” was how Mrs. Hadley put it. Her name was Martha; she was not pretty, but she was very nice, and she was the first person to notice with some accuracy that there were certain words I couldn’t pronounce properly. She told my mother that there were vocal exercises I could try, or that singing might be of some benefit to me, but that fall of ’56 I was still in middle school, and I was consumed by reading. I wanted nothing to do with “vocal exercises” or singing.

All these significant changes in my life came together and moved forward with an unexpected momentum: In the fall of ’57, I was a student at Favorite River Academy; I was still rereading Great Expectations, and (as you know) I’d let it slip to Miss Frost that I wanted to be a writer. I was fifteen, and Elaine Hadley was a nearsighted, flat-chested, clarion-voiced fourteen-year-old.

One night that September, there came a knocking on the door of Richard’s faculty apartment, but it was study hours in the dormitory—no boy came to our apartment door then, unless he was sick. I opened the door, expecting to see a sick student standing anxiously in the dorm hall, but there was Nils Borkman, the distraught director; he looked as if he’d seen a ghost, possibly some previous fjord-jumper he had known.

“I’ve seen her! I’ve heard her speak! She would be a perfect Hedvig!” Nils Borkman cried.

Poor Elaine Hadley! It was her bad luck to be half blind—and breastless and shrill. (In The Wild Duck, a big deal is made of what is wrong with Hedvig’s eyes.) Elaine, that sexless but crystal-clear child, would be cast as the wretched Hedvig, and once more Borkman would unleash The (dreaded) Wild Duck on the aghast citizens of First Sister. Fresh from his surprising success as Krogstad in A Doll’s House, Nils would cast himself as Gregers.

“That miserable moralizer,” Richard Abbott had called Gregers.

Determined, as he was, to personify the idealist in Gregers, Nils Borkman would play the clownish aspect of the character to unwitting perfection.

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!”