John Irving - In One Person

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.

GRANDPA HARRY 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.)