"No, I'm just the prompter," she told him. "I don't act."
"Ah, but, Mary--" Grandpa Harry began.
"I don't, Daddy," my mother said. "You and Muriel are the actresses," she said, with no uncertain emphasis on 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.
IN 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 innocent time--both the dying time of the year and that relatively uncomplicated time in my life.
Chapter 2
CRUSHES ON THE WRONG PEOPLE
How long was it, after that unsuccessful casting call, before my mom and young Richard Abbott were dating? "Knowing Mary, I'll bet they were doing it immediately," I'd overheard Aunt Muriel say.
Only once had my mother ventured away from home; she'd gone off to college (no one ever said where), and she had dropped out. She'd managed only to get pregnant; she didn't even finish secretarial school! Moreover, to add to her moral and educational failure, for fourteen years, my mother and her almost-a-bastard son had borne the Dean name--for the sake of conventional legitimacy, I suppose.
Mary Marshall Dean did not dare to leave home again; the world had wounded her too gravely. She lived with my scornful, cliche-encumbered grandmother, who was as critical of her black-sheep daughter as my superior-sounding aunt Muriel was. Only Grandpa Harry had kind and encouraging words for his "baby girl," as he called her. From the way he said this, I got the impression that he thought my mom had suffered some lasting damage. Grandpa Harry was ever my champion, too--he lifted my spirits when I was down, as he repeatedly tried to bolster my mother's ever-failing self-confidence.
In addition to her duties as prompter for the First Sister Players, my mom worked as a secretary in the sawmill and lumberyard; as the owner and mill manager, Grandpa Harry chose to overlook the fact that my mother had failed to finish secretarial school--her typing sufficed for him.
There must have been remarks made about my mother--I mean, among the sawmill men. The things they said were not about her typing, and I'll bet they'd heard them first from their wives or girlfriends; the sawmill men would have noticed that my mom was pretty, but I'm sure the women in their lives were the origin of the remarks made about Mary Marshall Dean around the lumberyard--or, more dangerously, in the logging camps.
I say "more dangerously" because Nils Borkman supervised the logging camps; men were always getting injured there, but were they sometimes "injured" because of their remarks about my mom? One guy or another was always getting hurt at the lumberyard, too--occasionally, I'll bet it was a guy who was repeating what he'd heard his wife or girlfriend say about my mother. (Her so-called husband hadn't been in any hurry to marry her; he'd never lived with her, married or not, and that boy had no father--those were the remarks made about my mom, I imagine.)