In One Person

Eilert Løvborg.”
    “You would be wrong for the part!” Miss Frost declared.
    “That leaves Judge Brack,” Richard Abbott surmised.
    “That might be fun,” Miss Frost told him. “I shoot myself to escape your clutches.”
    “I could well imagine being destroyed by that,” Richard Abbott said, most graciously. They were acting, even now—I could tell—and they were not amateurs. My mother wouldn’t need to be doing much prompting in their cases; I didn’t imagine that Richard Abbott or Miss Frost would ever forget a line or misspeak a single word.
    “I shall think about it and get back to you,” Miss Frost told Richard. There was a tall, narrow, dimly lit mirror in the foyer of the library, where a long row of coat hooks revealed a solitary raincoat—probably Miss Frost’s. She glanced at her hair in the mirror. “I’ve been considering longer hair,” she said, as if to her double.
    “I imagine Hedda with somewhat longer hair,” Richard said.
    “
Do
you?” Miss Frost asked, but she was smiling at me again. “Just look at you, William,” she said suddenly. “Talk about ‘coming of age’—just look at
this boy
!” I must have blushed, or looked away—clutching those three coming-of-age novels to my heart.
    M ISS F ROST CHOSE WELL . I would read
Tom Jones, Wuthering Heights
, and
Jane Eyre
—in that order—thus becoming, to my mom’s surprise, a reader. And what those novels taught me was that adventure was not confined to seafaring, with or without pirates. One could find considerable excitement by not escaping to science fiction or futuristic fantasies; it wasn’t necessary to read a Western or a romance novel in order to transport oneself. In reading, as in writing, all one needed—that is, in order to have an utterly absorbing journey—was a believable but formidable relationship. What else, after all, did crushes—especially crushes on the wrong people—lead to?
    “Well, Bill, let’s get you home so you can start reading,” Richard Abbott said that warm September evening, and—turning to Miss Frost, in the foyer of the library—he said (in a voice not his own) the last thing Judge Brack says to Hedda in act 4, “‘We shall get on capitally together, we two!’”
    There would be two months of rehearsals for
Hedda Gabler
that fall, so I would become most familiar with that line—not to mention the last lines Hedda says, in response. She has already exited the stage, but—speaking offstage,
loud and clear
, as the stage directions say—Miss Frost (as Hedda) responds, “‘Yes, don’t you flatter yourself we will, Judge Brack? Now that you are the one cock in the basket—’”
A shot is heard within
, the stage directions then say.
    Do I sincerely love that play, or did I adore it because Richard Abbott and Miss Frost brought it to life for me? Grandpa Harry was outstanding in a small role—that of George’s aunt Juliana, Miss Tesman—and my aunt Muriel was the needy comrade of Eilert Løvborg, Mrs. Elvsted.
    “Well,
that
was some performance,” Richard Abbott said to me, as we strolled along the River Street sidewalk on that warm September evening. It was dark now, and a distant thunder was in the air, but the neighborhood backyards were quiet; children and dogs had been brought indoors, and Richard was walking me home.
    “
What
performance?” I asked him.
    “I mean Miss Frost!” Richard exclaimed. “I mean
her
performance! The books you should read, all that stuff about
crushes
, and her elaborate dance about whether she would play Nora or Hedda—”
    “You mean she was always
acting
?” I asked him. (Once again, I felt protective of her, without knowing why.)
    “I take it that you liked her,” Richard said.
    “I
loved
her!” I blurted out.
    “Understandable,” he said, nodding his head.
    “Didn’t
you
like her?” I asked him.
    “Oh, yes, I did—I
do
like her—and I think she’ll be a perfect Hedda,” Richard said.
    “If she’ll do it,” I cautioned him.
    “Oh, she’ll do it—of course she’s going to
do
it!” Richard declared. “She was just toying with me.”
    “Toying,” I repeated, not sure if he was criticizing Miss Frost. I was not at all certain that Richard had liked her
sufficiently
.
    “Listen to me, Bill,” Richard said. “Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she’s given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays—well, Bill, this could be the door