In One Person

Twelfth Night with those familiar and rhapsodic lines “‘If music be the food of love, play on,’” not ever needing any prompting from my mother on that subject.

Orsino first professes his love for Olivia, a countess played by my complaining aunt Muriel. Olivia rejects the Duke, who (wasting no time) quickly falls in love with Viola, thus making Orsino an overproclaiming figure—“maybe more in love with love than with either lady,” as Richard Abbott put it.

I always thought that, because Olivia turns down Orsino as her lover, Muriel must have felt comfortable in accepting the role of the countess. Richard was still a little too much leading-man material for Muriel; she never entirely relaxed in her handsome brother-in-law’s company.

Elaine was cast as Viola, later disguised as Cesario. Elaine’s immediate response was that Richard had anticipated Viola’s necessary cross-dressing of herself as Cesario—“Viola has to be flat- chested, because for much of the play she’s a guy,” was how Elaine put it to me.

I actually found it a little creepy that Orsino and Viola end up in love—given that Richard was noticeably older than Elaine—but Elaine didn’t seem to care. “I think girls got married younger back then,” was all she said about it. (With half a brain, I might have realized that Elaine already had a real-life lover who was older than she was!)

I was cast as Sebastian—Viola’s twin brother. “That’s perfect for you two,” Kittredge said condescendingly to Elaine and me. “You’ve already got a brother-sister thing going, as anyone can see.” (At the time, I didn’t pick up on that; Elaine must have told Kittredge that she and I weren’t interested in each other in that way.)

I’ll admit I was distracted; that Muriel, as Olivia, is first smitten with Elaine (disguised as Cesario) and later falls for me, Sebastian—well, that was a test of the previously mentioned disbelief business. For my part, I found it impossible to imagine falling in love with Muriel—hence I stared fixedly at my aunt’s operatic bosom. Not once did this Sebastian look in that Olivia’s eyes—not even when Sebastian exclaims, “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!”

Or when Olivia, whose bossiness was right up Muriel’s alley, demands to know, “Would thou’dst be rul’d by me!”

I, as Sebastian, staring straight ahead at my aunt Muriel’s breasts, which were laughably at eye level to me, answer her in a lovestruck fashion: “‘Madam, I will.’”

“Well, you best remember, Bill,” Grandpa Harry said to me, “Twelfth Night is sure- as-shit a comedy.”

When I grew just a little taller, and a little older, Muriel would object to my staring at her breasts. But that later play wasn’t a comedy, and it only now occurs to me that when we were cast as Olivia and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Muriel probably couldn’t see that I was staring at her breasts, because her breasts were in the way! (Given my height at the time, Muriel’s breasts blocked her line of vision.)

Aunt Muriel’s husband, my dear uncle Bob, well understood the comic factor in Twelfth Night. That Bob’s drinking was such a burden for Muriel to bear seemed a subject of mockery when Richard cast Uncle Bob as Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s kinsman and—in his most memorable moments in the play—a misbehaving drunk. But Bob was as much loved by the Favorite River students as he was by me—after all, he was the school’s overly permissive admissions man. Bob thought it was no big deal that the students liked him. (“Of course they like me, Billy. They met me when I interviewed them, and I let them in!”)

Bob also coached the racquet sports, tennis and squash—ergo the squash balls. The squash courts were on the basement level of the gym, underground and dank. When one of the squash courts stank of beer, the boys said that Coach Bob must have been playing there—sweating out the poisons of the night before.

Both Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria complained to Grandpa Harry that casting Bob as Sir Toby Belch “encouraged” Bob’s drinking. Richard Abbott would be blamed for “making light” of the deplorable pain caused to poor Muriel whenever Bob drank. But while Muriel and my grandmother would bitch to Grandpa Harry about Richard, they would never have breathed a word of discontent to Richard himself.

After all, Richard Abbott had come along “in the nick of time” (to use Nana Victoria’s cliche) to save my damaged mother; they spoke of this rescue as if no one else might have managed the job. My mother was seen as no longer Nana Victoria’s or Aunt Muriel’s responsibility, because Richard had shown up and taken her off their hands.

At least this was very much the impression that my aunt and my grandmother gave to me—Richard could do no wrong, or what wrong-doing Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel thought that Richard had done would be spelled out for Grandpa Harry, as if he could ever be expected to speak to Richard about it. My cousin Gerry and I overheard it all, because when Richard and my mother weren’t around, my disapproving grandmother and my meddlesome aunt talked ceaselessly about them. I got the feeling they would still be calling them “the newlyweds,” however facetiously, after my mom and Richard had been married for twenty years! As I grew older, I was realizing that all of them—not only Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel, but also Grandpa Harry and Richard Abbott—treated my mother like a temperamental child. (They pussyfooted around her, the way they would have done with a child who was in danger of doing some unwitting damage to herself.)

Grandpa Harry would never criticize Richard Abbott; Harry might have agreed that Richard was my mom’s savior, but I think Grandpa Harry was smart enough to know that Richard had chiefly saved my mother from Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel—more than from the next man who might have come along and swept my easily seducible mom off her feet.

However, in the case of this ill-fated production of Twelfth Night, even Grandpa Harry had his doubts about the casting. Harry was cast as Maria, Olivia’s waiting-gentlewoman. Both Grandpa Harry and I had thought of Maria as much younger, though Harry’s chief difficulty with the role was that he was supposed to be married off to Sir Toby Belch.

“I can’t believe that I’m going to be betrothed to my much-younger son-in-law,” Grandpa Harry said sadly, when I was having dinner with him and Nana Victoria one winter Sunday night.

“Well, you best remember, Grandpa, Twelfth Night is sure-as-shit a comedy,” I reminded him.

“A good thing it’s only onstage, I guess,” Harry had said.

“You and your only-onstage routine,” Nana Victoria snapped at him. “I sometimes think you live to be weird, Harold.”

“Tolerance, have tolerance, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry intoned, winking at me.

Maybe that was why I decided to tell him what I had told Mrs. Hadley—about my slightly faded crush on Richard, my deepening attraction to Kittredge, even my masturbation to the unlikely contrivance of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model, but not (still not) my unmentioned love for Miss Frost.

“You’re the sweetest boy, Bill—by which I mean, of course, you have feelin’s for other people, and you take the greatest care not to hurt their feelin’s. This is admirable, most admirable,” Grandpa Harry said to me, “but you must be careful not to have your feelin’s hurt. Some people are safer to be attracted to than others.”

“Not other boys, you mean?” I asked him.

“I mean not some other boys. Yes. It takes a special boy—to safely speak your heart to. Some boys would hurt you,” Grandpa Harry said.

“Kittredge, probably,” I suggested.

“That would be my guess. Yes,” Harry said. He sighed. “Maybe not here, Bill—not in this school, not at this time. Maybe these attractions to other boys, or men, will have to wait.”

“Wait till when, and where?” I asked him.

“Ah, well . . .” Grandpa Harry started to say, but he stopped. “I think that Miss Frost has been very good at findin’ books for you to read,” Grandpa Harry started again. “I’ll bet you that she could recommend somethin’ for you to read—I mean on the subject of bein’ attracted to other boys, or men, and regardin’ when and where it may be possible to act on such attractions. Mind you, I haven’t read that book, Bill, but I bet there are such stories; I know such books exist, and maybe Miss Frost would know about them.”

I almost told him on the spot that Miss Frost was one of my confusing attractions, though something held me back from saying this; perhaps that she was the most powerful of all my attractions was what stopped me. “But how do I begin to tell Miss Frost,” I said to Grandpa Harry. “I don’t know how to start—I mean before I get to the business of there being books on the subject, or not.”