Setting Free the Bears Page 39

  Given my grandfather's elevated status in our town, it was perhaps surprising that the First Sister Players always cast him in female roles. My grandpa was a terrific female impersonator; in our town's little playhouse, Harry Marshall had many (some would say most) of the leading women's roles. I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man. He was more vibrant and engaged in his onstage female roles than I ever saw him be in his monotonous real-life role as a mill manager and lumberman.

  Alas, it was a source of some family friction that Grandpa Harry's only competition for the most demanding and rewarding female roles was his elder daughter, Muriel--my mother's married sister, my oft-mentioned aunt.

  Aunt Muriel was only two years older than my mother; yet she'd done everything before my mom had thought of doing it, and Muriel had done it properly and (in her estimation) to perfection. She'd allegedly "read world literature" at Wellesley and had married my wonderful uncle Bob--her "first and only beau," as Aunt Muriel called him. At least I thought Uncle Bob was wonderful; he was always wonderful to me. But, as I later learned, Bob drank, and his drinking was a burden and an embarrassment to Aunt Muriel. My grandmother, from whom Muriel had obtained her imperiousness, would often remark that Bob's behavior was "beneath" Muriel--whatever that meant.

  For all her snobbishness, my grandmother's language was riddled with proverbial expressions and cliches, and, in spite of her highly prized education, Aunt Muriel seemed to have inherited (or she merely mimicked) the ordinariness of her mother's uninspired speech.

  I think that Muriel's love and need for the theater was driven by her desire to find something original for her lofty-sounding voice to say. Muriel was good-looking--a slender brunette, with an opera singer's noteworthy bosom and booming voice--but she had an absolutely vacuous mind. Like my grandmother, Aunt Muriel managed to be both arrogant and judgmental without saying anything that was either verifiable or interesting; in this respect, both my grandmother and my aunt struck me as superior-sounding bores.

  In Aunt Muriel's case, her impeccable enunciation made her entirely credible onstage; she was a perfect parrot, but a robotic and humorless one, and she was simply as sympathetic or unsympathetic as the character she played. Muriel's language was elevated, but her own "character" was lacking; she was just a chronic complainer.

  In my grandmother's case, she was of an unyielding age and she'd had a conservative upbringing; these constraints led her to believe that the theater was essentially immoral--or, to be more forgiving, amoral--and that women should play no part in it. Victoria Winthrop (the Winthrop was my grandmother's maiden name) believed that all the women's roles in any dramatic performance should be played by boys and men; while she confessed to finding my grandfather's many onstage triumphs (as various women) embarrassing, she also believed this was the way drama should be enacted--strictly by male actors.

  My grandmother--I called her Nana Victoria--found it tiresome that Muriel was inconsolable (for days) when she lost a plum part to Grandpa Harry. In contrast, Harry was a good sport whenever the sought-after role went to his daughter. "They must have wanted a good-lookin' girl, Muriel--you have me beat in that category, hands down."

  I'm not so sure. My grandfather was small-boned and had a pretty face; he was light on his feet, and effortless at girlish laughter and at sobbing his heart out. He could be convincing as a scheming woman, or as a wronged one, and he was more convincing with the onstage kisses he gave to various miscast men than my aunt Muriel ever managed to be. Muriel cringed at onstage kissing, though Uncle Bob didn't mind. Bob seemed to enjoy seeing his wife and his father-in-law bestowing kisses onstage--a good thing, too, since they had the leading female roles in most of the productions.

  Now that I'm older, I have more appreciation for Uncle Bob, who "seemed to enjoy" many people and things, and who managed to convey to me an unexpressed but sincere commiseration. I believe that Bob understood where the Winthrop side of the family was coming from; those Winthrop women were long accustomed (or genetically inclined) to looking down their noses at the rest of us. Bob took pity on me, because he knew that Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel (and even my mother) were watching me warily for telltale signs that I was--as they all feared, as I feared myself--my no-good father's son. I was being judged for the genes of a man I didn't know, and Uncle Bob, perhaps because he drank and was considered "beneath" Muriel, knew what it felt like to be judged by the Winthrop side of the family.

  Uncle Bob was the admissions man at Favorite River Academy; that the school's standards for admission were lax did not necessarily make my uncle personally accountable for Favorite River's failures. Yet Bob was judged; by the Winthrop side of the family, he was called "overly permissive"--another reason I thought he was wonderful.

  Though I remember hearing about Bob's drinking from a variety of sources, I never saw him drunk--well, except for one spectacular occasion. In fact, in the years I was growing up in First Sister, Vermont, I believed that Bob's drinking problem was exaggerated; those Winthrop women were known for their overstatements in the morally outraged category. Righteous indignation was a Winthrop trait.

  It was during the summer of '61, when I was traveling with Tom, that it somehow came up that Bob was my uncle. (I know--I haven't told you about Tom. You'll have to be patient with me; it's hard for me to get to Tom.) For Tom and me, this was that allegedly all-important summer between our graduation from prep school and the start of our freshman year in college; Tom's family and mine had granted us a reprieve from our usual summer jobs so that we could travel. We were probably expected to be satisfied with spending no more than a single summer in that doubtful pursuit of "finding" ourselves, but for Tom and me the gift of this summer didn't seem as all-important as that time in your life is supposed to be.

  For one thing, we had no money, and the sheer foreignness of European travel frightened us; for another, we'd already "found" ourselves, and there was no making peace with who we were--not publicly. Indeed, there were aspects of ourselves that poor Tom and I found every bit as foreign (and as frightening) as what we managed to see, in our half-assed way, of Europe.

  I don't even remember the reason Uncle Bob's name came up, and Tom already knew I was related to "old Let-'em-in Bob," as Tom called him.

  "We're not related by blood," I'd started to explain. (Notwithstanding Uncle Bob's blood-alcohol level at any given time, there wasn't a drop of Winthrop blood in him.)

  "You're not at all alike!" Tom had exclaimed. "Bob is just so nice, and so uncomplicated."

  Granted, Tom and I had been arguing a lot that summer. We'd taken one of the Queen ships (student class) from New York to Southampton; we'd crossed to the continent, landing in Ostend, and the first town in Europe we'd stayed overnight in was the medieval city of Bruges. (Bruges was beautiful, but I was more infatuated with a girl who worked at the pension where we stayed than I was with the belfry atop the old Market Hall.)

  "I suppose you were intending to ask her if she had a friend for me," Tom said.

  "We just walked all over town--we just talked and talked," I told him. "We barely kissed."

  "Oh, is that all?" Tom said--so when he later remarked that Uncle Bob was "just so nice, and so uncomplicated," I took it that Tom meant I wasn't nice.

  "I just meant that you're complicated, Bill," Tom told me. "You're not as easygoing as Admissions Man Bob, are you?"

  "I can't believe you're pissed off about that girl in Bruges," I told him.

  "You should have seen how you stared at her tits--they didn't amount to much. You know, Bill--girls know when you're staring at their tits," Tom told me.

  But the girl in Bruges was of no importance to me. It was only that her small breasts had reminded me of the rise and fall of Miss Frost's surprisingly girlish breasts, and I'd not gotten over Miss Frost.

  OH, THE WINDS OF change; they do not blow gently into the small towns of northern New England. The first casting call that brought Richard Abbott to our town's little t
heater would even change how the women's roles were cast, for it was evident from the start that those parts calling for dashing young men and evil (or plainly bourgeois) husbands and treacherous lovers were all within Richard Abbott's grasp; hence the women chosen to play opposite Richard would have to match up to him.

  This posed a problem for Grandpa Harry, who would soon be Richard's father-in-law--Grandpa Harry was too much the older woman to be romantically involved with a handsome young man like Richard in the first place. (There would be no onstage kissing for Richard Abbott and Grandpa Harry!)

  And, befitting her superior-sounding voice but empty-minded character, this posed a greater problem for my aunt Muriel. Richard Abbott was too much leading-man material for her. His appearance at that very first casting call reduced Muriel to psychosexual babble and dithering; my devastated aunt said later that she could tell my mom and Richard were "moonstruck by each other from the start." It was altogether too much for Muriel to imagine being romantically involved with her future brother-in-law--even onstage. (And with my mother prompting them, no less!)

  At thirteen, I detected little of my aunt Muriel's consternation at encountering (for the first time) what leading-man material was like; nor did I recognize that my mom and Richard Abbott were "moonstruck by each other from the start."

  Grandpa Harry was charming and entirely welcoming to the graceful young man, who was brand-new to the faculty at Favorite River Academy. "We're always lookin' for new actin' talent," Grandpa said warmly to Richard. "Did you say it was Shakespeare you're teachin'?"

  "Teaching and putting onstage," Richard answered my grandfather. "There are theatrical disadvantages at an all-boys' school, of course--but the best way for young boys or girls to understand Shakespeare is for them to put on the plays."

  "You mean by 'disadvantages,' I would guess, that the boys have to play the women's roles," Grandpa Harry said slyly. (Richard Abbott, upon first meeting the mill manager Harry Marshall, could not have known about the lumberman's success as an onstage cross-dresser.)

  "Most boys haven't the vaguest idea how to be a woman--it's a mortal distraction from the play," Richard said.

  "Ah," Grandpa Harry said. "Then how will you manage it?"

  "I'm thinking of asking the younger faculty wives to audition for roles," Richard Abbott replied, "and the older faculty daughters, maybe."

  "Ah," Grandpa Harry said again. "There might be townspeople who are also qualified," my grandfather suggested; he'd always wanted to play Regan or Goneril, "Lear's loathsome daughters," as Grandpa alliteratively spoke of them. (Not to mention how he longed to play Lady Macbeth!)

  "I'm considering open auditions," Richard Abbott said. "But I hope the older women won't be intimidating to the boys at an all-boys' school."

  "Ah, well--there's always that," Grandpa Harry said with a knowing smile. As an older woman, he'd been intimidating countless times; Harry Marshall had merely to look at his wife and elder daughter to know how female intimidation worked. But, at thirteen, I was unaware of my grandfather's jockeying for more women's roles; the conversation between Grandpa Harry and the new leading man seemed entirely friendly and natural to me.

  What I noticed on that fall Friday night--casting calls were always on Friday nights--was how the dynamic between our theater's dictatorial director and our variously talented (and untalented) would-be cast was changed by Richard Abbott's knowledge of the theater, as much as by Richard's gifts as an actor. The stern director of the First Sister Players had never been challenged as a dramaturge before; our little theater's director, who said he had no interest in "merely acting," was no amateur in the area of dramaturgy, and he was a self-appointed expert on Ibsen, whom he worshipped to excess.

  Our heretofore-unchallenged director, Nils Borkman--the aforementioned Norwegian who was also Grandpa Harry's business partner and, as such, a forester and logger and dramaturge--was the very picture of Scandinavian depression and melancholic forebodings. Logging was Nils Borkman's business--or, at least, his day job--but dramaturgy was his passion.

  It further contributed to the Norwegian's ever-blackening pessimism that the unsophisticated theatergoers in First Sister, Vermont, were unschooled in serious drama. A steady diet of Agatha Christie was expected (even nauseatingly welcome) in our culturally deprived town. Nils Borkman visibly suffered through the ceaseless adaptations of lowbrow potboilers like Murder at the Vicarage, a Miss Marple mystery; my superior-sounding aunt Muriel had many times played Miss Marple, but the denizens of First Sister preferred Grandpa Harry in that shrewd (but oh-so-feminine) role. Harry seemed more believable at divining other people's secrets--not to mention, at Miss Marple's age, more feminine.

  At one rehearsal, Harry had whimsically said--as Miss Marple herself might have--"My word, but who would want Colonel Protheroe dead?"

  To which my mom, ever the prompter, had remarked, "Daddy, that line isn't even in the script."

  "I know, Mary--I was just foolin' around," Grandpa said.

  My mother, Mary Marshall--Mary Dean (for those unlucky fourteen years before she married Richard Abbott)--always called my grandpa Daddy. Harry was unfailingly addressed as Father by my lofty-sounding aunt Muriel, in the same black-tie-dinner tone of voice that Nana Victoria unstintingly hailed her husband as Harold--never Harry.

  Nils Borkman directed Agatha Christie's "crowd-pleasers," as he mockingly referred to them, as if he were doomed to be watching Death on the Nile or Peril at End House on the night of his death--as if his indelible memory of Ten Little Indians might be the one he would take to his grave.

  Agatha Christie was Borkman's curse, which the Norwegian bore less than stoically--he hated her, and he complained about her bitterly--but because he filled the house with Agatha Christie, and similarly shallow entertainments of the time, the morbid Norwegian was permitted to direct "something serious" as the fall play every year.

  "Something serious to coincide with that time of year when the leafs are dying," Borkman said--the leafs word indicating that his command of English was usually clear but imperfect. (That was Nils in a nutshell--usually clear but imperfect.)

  On that Friday casting call, when Richard Abbott would change many futures, Nils announced that this fall's "something serious" would again be his beloved Ibsen, and Nils had narrowed the choice of which Ibsen to a mere three.

  "Which three?" the young and talented Richard Abbott asked.

  "The problem three," Nils answered--he presumed, definitively.

  "I take it you mean Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House," Richard rightly guessed. "And would the third be The Wild Duck?"

  By Borkman's uncharacteristic speechlessness, we all saw that, indeed, The (dreaded) Wild Duck was the dour Norwegian's third choice.

  "In that case," Richard Abbott ventured, after the telltale silence, "who among us can possibly play the doomed Hedvig--that poor child?" There were no fourteen-year-old girls at the Friday night casting call--no one at all suitable for the innocent, duck-loving (and daddy-loving) Hedvig.

  "We've had ... difficulties with the Hedvig part before, Nils," Grandpa Harry ventured. Oh, my--had we ever! There'd been tragicomic fourteen-year-old girls who were such abysmal actors that when the time came for them to shoot themselves, the audience had cheered! There'd been fourteen-year-old girls who were so winningly naive and innocent that when they shot themselves, the audience was outraged!

  "And then there's Gregers," Richard Abbott interjected. "That miserable moralizer. I could play Gregers, but only as a meddlesome fool--a self-righteous and self-pitying clown!"

  Nils Borkman often referred to his fellow Norwegians who were suicidal as "fjord-jumpers." Apparently, the abundance of fjords in Norway provided many opportunities for convenient and unmessy suicides. (Nils must have noticed, to his further gloom, that there were no fjords in Vermont--a landlocked state.) Nils now looked at Richard Abbott in such a scary way--it was as if our depressed director wanted this upstart newcomer to find the nearest fjord.

/>   "But Gregers is an idealist," Borkman began.

  "If The Wild Duck is a tragedy, then Gregers is a fool and a clown--and Hjalmar is nothing more than a jealous husband of the pathetic, before-she-met-me kind," Richard continued. "If, on the other hand, you play The Wild Duck as a comedy, then they're all fools and clowns. But how can the play be a comedy when a child dies because of adult moralizing? You need a heartbreaking Hedvig, who must be an utterly innocent and naive fourteen-year-old; and not only Gregers but Hjalmar and Gina, and even Mrs. Sorby and Old Ekdal and the villainous Werle, must be brilliant actors! Even then, the play is flawed--not the easiest amateur production of Ibsen that comes to mind."

  "Flawed!" Nils Borkman cried, as if he (and his wild duck) had been shot.

  "I was Mrs. Sorby in the most recent manifestation," my grandfather told Richard. "Of course, when I was younger, I got to play Gina--albeit only once or twice."

  "I had thoughts of young Laura Gordon as Hedvig," Nils said. Laura was the youngest Gordon girl. Jim Gordon was on the faculty at Favorite River Academy; he and his wife, Ellen, had been actors for the First Sister Players in the past, and two older Gordon daughters had previously shot themselves as poor Hedvig.

  "Excuse me, Nils," my aunt Muriel interposed, "but Laura Gordon has highly visible breasts."

  I saw I was not alone in noticing the fourteen-year-old's astonishing development; Laura was barely a year older than I was, but her breasts were way beyond what an innocent and naive Hedvig should have.

  Nils Borkman sighed; he said (with near-suicidal resignation) to Richard, "And what would the young Mr. Abbott consider an easier Ibsen for us mortally mere amateurs to perform?" Nils meant "merely mortal," of course.

  "Ah ..." Grandpa Harry began; then he stopped himself. My grandfather was enjoying this. He had the utmost respect and affection for Nils Borkman as a business partner, but--without exception--every keenly devoted and most casual member of the First Sister Players knew Nils to be an absolute tyrant as a director. (And we were almost as sick of Henrik Ibsen, and Borkman's idea of serious drama, as we were of Agatha Christie!)