In One Person

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 cried.
    Poor Elaine Hadley! It was her bad luck to be half blind—and breast-less 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.
    G RANDPA H ARRY DIDN’T WANT a part in
The Wild Duck
; he would have feigned laryngitis to get free from that play. Also,