In One Person

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.
    But once I started being a student, a mere freshman, at Favorite River , there were all these older boys around; they weren’t especially friendly to me, and some of them were distractions. I developed a distant infatuation with a striking-looking boy on the wrestling team; it wasn’t only that he had a beautiful body. (I say “distant,” because initially I did my best to keep my distance from him—to keep as far away from him as I could get.) Talk about a crush on the wrong person! And it was
not
my imagination that every other word out of many of the older boys’ mouths was “homo” or “fag” or “queer”; these purposely hurtful words seemed to me to be the worst things you could say about another boy at the prep school.
    Were these “distractions,” my crushes on the wrong people, part of the genetic package I had inherited from my code-boy father? Curiously, I doubted it; I thought these particular crushes were all my fault, for hadn’t the sergeant been a notorious womanizer? Hadn’t my combative cousin Gerry labeled him with