In One Person

the
actresses
word. “I’m always the prompter.”
    “About Nora?” Nils Borkman asked Richard. “You were something saying—”
    “Nora is more about freedom than Hedda,” Richard Abbott confidently said. “She not only has the strength to leave her husband; she leaves her children, too! There is such an
untamable
freedom in these women—I say, let your actor who will be Hedda or Nora choose. These women own these plays.”
    As he spoke, Richard Abbott was surveying our amateur theatrical society for possible Heddas or Noras, but his eyes kept coming back to my mother, who I knew was obdurately (forever) the prompter. Richard would not make a Hedda or a Nora out of my follow-the-script mom.
    “Ah, well …” Grandpa Harry said; he was reconsidering the part, either Nora or Hedda (his age notwithstanding).
    “No, Harry—not you again,” Nils said, his old dictatorial self emerging. “Young Mr. Abbott is right. There must be a certain
lawlessness
—both an uncontainable freedom
and
a sexual strength. We need a younger, more sexual
activity
woman than you.”
    Richard Abbott was regarding my grandfather with growing respect; Richard saw how Grandpa Harry had established himself as a woman to be reckoned with among the First Sister Players—if not as a sexual
activity
woman.
    “Won’t you consider it, Muriel?” Borkman asked my superior-sounding aunt.
    “Yes, will you?” Richard Abbott, who was more than a decade younger than Muriel, asked. “You have an unquestionable sexual
presence
—” he started to say.
    Alas, that was as far as young Mr. Abbott got—the
presence
word, modified by
sexual
—before Muriel fainted again.
    “I think that’s a ‘no,’ if I had to guess,” my mom told the dazzling young newcomer.
    I already had a bit of a crush on Richard Abbott, but I hadn’t yet met Miss Frost.
    I N TWO YEARS’ TIME , when I sat as a fifteen-year-old freshman in my first morning meeting at Favorite River Academy, I would hear the school physician, Dr. Harlow, invite us boys to treat the most common afflictions of our tender age aggressively. (I am certain that he used the word
afflictions
; I’m not making this up.) As for what these “most common” afflictions were, Dr. Harlow explained that he meant acne and “an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys or men.” For our pimples, Dr. Harlow assured us there was a variety of remedies. In regard to those early indications of homosexual yearnings—well, either Dr. Harlow or the school psychiatrist, Dr. Grau, would be happy to talk to us.
    “There is a cure for these afflictions,” Dr. Harlow told us boys; there was a doctor’s customary authority in his voice, which was at once scientific and cajoling—even the cajoling part was delivered in a confident, man-to-man way. And the gist of Dr. Harlow’s morning-meeting speech was perfectly clear, even to the greenest freshmen—namely, we had only to present ourselves and ask to be treated. (What was also painfully apparent was that we had only ourselves to blame if we didn’t ask to be cured.)
    I would wonder, later, if it might have made a difference—that is, if I’d been exposed to Dr. Harlow’s (or Dr. Grau’s) buffoonery at the time I first met Richard Abbott, instead of two years after meeting him. Given what I know now, I sincerely doubt that my crush on Richard Abbott was
curable
, though the likes of Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau—the available authorities in the medical sciences of that time—emphatically believed that my crush on Richard was in the category of a treatable affliction.
    Two years after that life-changing casting call, it would be too late for a cure; on the road ahead, a world of crushes would open before me. That Friday night casting call was my introduction to Richard Abbott; to everyone present—not least to Aunt Muriel, who fainted twice—it was obvious that Richard had taken charge of us all.
    “It seems that we need a Nora, or a Hedda, if we’re going to do Ibsen at all,” Richard said to Nils.
    “But the
leafs
! They are already color-changing; they will keep falling,” Borkman said. “It is the dying time of the year!”
    He was not the easiest man to understand, except that Borkman’s beloved Ibsen and fjord-jumping were somehow connected to the
serious drama
, which was always our fall play—and to, no less, the so-called dying time of the year, when the
leafs
were unstoppably falling.
    Looking back, of course, it seems such an