“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.