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!”
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.