In One Person

by John Winslow Irving

  “Melodramatic, don’t you think?” Miss Frost asked me. “And Oliver cries too much; he is more of a cipher for Dickens’s abundant passion for damaged children than he is ever a fully fleshed-out character.” She told me that Dickens would write better of these themes, and of such children, in his more mature novels—most notably in David Copperfield, the next Dickens she gave me, and Great Expectations, for which I was made to wait.

  When Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver to those “dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish”—where Fagin is waiting to be hanged—I cried for poor Fagin, too.

  “It’s a good sign when a boy cries reading a novel,” Miss Frost assured me.

  “A good sign?” I asked her.

  “It means you have more of a heart than most boys have,” was all she would say about my crying.

  When I was reading with what Miss Frost described as the “reckless desperation of a burglar ravishing a mansion,” she one day said to me, “Slow down, William. Savor, don’t gorge. And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it—perhaps your favorite sentence—to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.” (If Miss Frost thought Oliver cried too much, I wondered what she really thought of me.) In the case of Oliver Twist, alas, I forget which sentence I chose to memorize.

  After David Copperfield, Miss Frost gave me my first taste of Thomas Hardy. Was I then fourteen, going on fifteen? (Yes, I think so; Richard Abbott happened to be teaching the same Hardy novel to the boys at Favorite River Academy, but they were prep-school seniors and I was still in the lowly eighth grade, I’m sure.)

  I remember looking, with some uncertainty, at the title—Tess of the d’Urbervilles—and asking Miss Frost, with apparent disappointment, “It’s about a girl?”

  “Yes, William—a most unlucky girl,” Miss Frost quickly said. “But—more important, for your benefit as a young man—it’s also about the men she meets. May you never be one of the men Tess meets, William.”

  “Oh,” I said. I would know soon enough what she meant about the men Tess meets; indeed, I would never want to be one of them.

  Of Angel Clare, Miss Frost said simply: “What a wet noodle he is.” And when I looked uncomprehending, she added: “Overcooked spaghetti, William—think limp, think weak.”

  “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 cr
ied.

  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!”

  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-b
oys’ 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.