John Irving - In One Person

“The perfect parts in what ?” I asked.

“He is the American Ibsen!” Nils Borkman cried. “He is the new Ibsen, from your backward American South!”

“ Who is?” I asked.

“Tennessee Williams—the most important playwright since Ibsen,” Borkman reverentially intoned.

“What play is it?” I asked.

“Summer and Smoke,” Nils answered, trembling. “The repressed female character has another woman smoldering inside her.”

“I see,” I said. “That would be the Miss Frost character?”

“Miss Frost would have been a perfect Alma!” Nils cried.

“But now—” I started to say; Borkman wouldn’t let me finish.

“Now I have no choice—it’s Mrs. Fremont as Alma, or nobody,” Nils muttered darkly. I knew “Mrs. Fremont” as Aunt Muriel.

“I think Muriel can do repressed, ” I told Nils encouragingly.

“But Muriel doesn’t smolder, Bill,” Nils whispered.

“No, she doesn’t,” I agreed. “What was my part going to be?” I asked him.

“It’s still yours, if you want it,” Nils told me. “It’s a small role—it won’t interfere with your work-home.”

“My homework,” I corrected him.

“ Yes —that’s what I said!” the Norwegian dramaturge declared again. “You play a traveling salesman, a young one. You make a pass at the Alma character in the last scene of the play.”

“I make a pass at my aunt Muriel, you mean,” I said to the ardent director.

“But not onstage—don’t worry!” Borkman cried. “The hanky-panky is all imagined; the repetitious sexual activity happens later, offstage.”

I was pretty sure that Nils Borkman didn’t mean the sexual activity was “repetitious”—not even offstage.

“ Surreptitious sexual activity?” I asked the director.

“Yes, but there’s no hanky-panky with your auntie onstage!” Borkman assured me, excitedly. “It just would have been so symbolic if Alma could have been Miss Frost.”

“So suggestive, you mean?” I asked him.

“Suggestive and symbolic!” Borkman exclaimed. “But with Muriel, we stick to the suggestive—if you know what I mean.”

“Maybe I could read the play first—I don’t even know my character’s name,” I said to Nils.

“I have a copy for you,” Borkman whispered. The paperback was badly beaten up—the pages had come unglued from the binding, as if the excitable director had read the little book to death. “Your name is Archie Kramer, Bill,” Borkman informed me. “The young salesman is supposed to wear a derby hat, but in your case we can piss-dense with the derby!”

“ Dispense with the derby,” I repeated. “As a salesman, what do I sell?”

“Shoes,” Nils told me. “In the end, you’re taking Alma on a date to a casino—you have the last line in the play, Bill!”

“Which is?” I asked the director.

“‘Taxi!’” Borkman shouted.

Suddenly, we were no longer alone. The Christmas-dinner crowd was startled by Nils Borkman shouting for a taxi. My mother and Richard Abbott were staring at the paperback copy of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, which I held in my hands; no doubt they feared it was a sequel to Giovanni’s Room .

“You want a taxi, Nils?” Grandpa Harry asked his old friend. “Didn’t you come in your own car?”

“It’s all right, Harry—Bill and I were just shop-talking,” Nils explained to his colleague.

“That would be ‘talkin’ shop,’ Nils,” Grandpa Harry said.

“What part does Grandpa Harry have?” I asked the Norwegian dramaturge.

“You haven’t offered me a part in anything, Nils,” Grandpa Harry said.

“Well, I was about to!” Borkman cried. “Your grandfather would be a brilliant Mrs. Winemiller—Alma’s mother,” the wily director said to me.

“If you do it, I’ll do it,” I said to Grandpa Harry. It would be the spring production for the First Sister Players, the premiere of a serious drama in the spring—my last onstage performance before my departure from First Sister and that summer in Europe with Tom Atkins. It would not be for Richard Abbott and the Drama Club, but I would sing my swan song for Nils Borkman and the First Sister Players—the last time my mother would have the occasion to prompt me.

I liked the idea of it already—even before I read the play. I’d only glanced at the title page, where Tennessee Williams had included an epigraph from Rilke. The Rilke was good enough for me. “Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” It seemed that, everywhere I looked, I just kept happening upon Rilke’s terrifying angels. I wondered if Kittredge knew the German.

“Okay, Bill—if you do it, I’ll do it,” Grandpa Harry said; we shook on it.

Later, I found a discreet way to ask Nils if he’d already signed up Aunt Muriel and Richard Abbott in the Alma and John roles. “Don’t worry, Bill,” Borkman told me. “I have Muriel and Richard in my pocket-back!”

“In your back pocket—yes,” I said to the crafty deerstalker on skis.

That Christmastime night when Elaine and I ran across the deserted Favorite River campus to the academy library—on our eager way to the old yearbook room—we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course, and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.)

It being Christmas break, I did not necessarily expect to see Mr. Lockley at the check-out desk of the academy library, but there he was—as if it were a working night, or perhaps the alleged “nonpracticing homosexual” (as Mr. Lockley was called, behind his back) had nothing else to do.

“No luck with Uncle Bob finding the ’40 Owl, huh?” I asked him.

“Mr. Fremont believes he returned it, but he did not —that is, not to my knowledge,” Mr. Lockley stiffly replied.

“I’ll just keep bugging him about it,” I said.

“You do that, Billy,” Mr. Lockley said sternly. “Mr. Fremont does not often frequent the library.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t,” I said, smiling.

Mr. Lockley did not smile—certainly not at Elaine, anyway. He was one of those older men who lived alone; he would not take kindly to the coming two decades—by which time most (if not all) of the all-boys’ boarding schools in New England would finally become coeducational.

In my estimation, coeducation would have a humanizing effect on those boarding schools; Elaine and I could testify that boys treat other boys better when there are girls around, and the girls are not as mean to one another in the presence of boys.

I know, I know—there are those diehards who maintain that single-sex education was more rigorous, or less distracting, and that coeducation came with a cost—a loss of “purity,” I’ve heard the Mr. Lockleys of the boarding-school world argue. (Less concentration on “academics,” they usually mean.)

That Christmastime night, all Mr. Lockley could manage to direct to Elaine was a minimally cordial bow—as if he were saying the unutterable, “Good evening, knocked-up faculty daughter. How are you managing now, you smelly little slut?”

But Elaine and I went about our business, paying no attention to Mr. Lockley. We were alone in the yearbook room—and more alone than usual in the otherwise abandoned academy library. Those old Owl s from ’37, ’38, and ’39 beckoned us, and we soon found much to marvel about in their revealing pages.

WILLIAM FRANCIS DEAN WAS a smiling little boy in the 1937 Owl, when he would have been twelve. He seemed a charmingly elfin manager of the 1936–37 wrestling team, and the only other evidence Elaine and I could find of him was as the prettiest little girl in the Drama Club photos of that long-ago academic year—a scant five years before I would be born.