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!)

“Well . . .” Richard Abbott began; there was a thoughtful pause. “If it’s going to be Ibsen—and we are, after all, only amateurs—it should be either Hedda Gabler or A Doll’s House. No children at all in the former, and the children are of no importance as actors in the latter. Of course, there is the need for a very strong and complicated woman—in either play— and for the usual weak or unlikable men, or both.”

“Weak or unlikable, or both?” Nils Borkman asked, in disbelief.

“Hedda’s husband, George, is ineffectual and conventional—an awful combination of weaknesses, but an utterly common condition in men,” Richard Abbott continued. “Eilert Lovborg is an insecure weakling, whereas Judge Brack—like his name—is despicable. Doesn’t Hedda shoot herself because of her foreseeable future with both her ineffectual husband and the despicable Brack?”

“Are Norwegians always shooting themselves, Nils?” my grandfather asked in a mischievous way. Harry knew how to push Borkman’s buttons; this time, however, Nils resisted a fjord-jumping story—he ignored his old friend and cross-dressing business partner. (Grandpa Harry had played Hedda many times; he’d been Nora in A Doll’s House, too—but, at his age, he was no longer suitable for either of these female leads.)

“And what . . . weaknesses and other unlikable traits do the male characters in A Doll’s House present us with—if I may ask the young Mr. Abbott?” Borkman sputtered, wringing his hands.

“Husbands are not Ibsen’s favorite people,” Richard Abbott began; there was no pausing to think now—he had all the confidence of youth and a brand-new education. “Torvald Helmer, Nora’s husband—well, he’s not unlike Hedda’s husband. He’s both boring and conventional—the marriage is stifling. Krogstad is a wounded man, and a corrupted one; he’s not without some redeeming decency, but the weakness word also comes to mind in Krogstad’s case.”

“And Dr. Rank?” Borkman asked.

“Dr. Rank is of no real importance. We need a Nora or a Hedda,” Richard Abbott said. “In Hedda’s case, a woman who prizes her freedom enough to kill herself in order not to lose it; her suicide is not a weakness but a demonstration of her sexual strength.”

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your point of view—Richard took this moment to glance at Aunt Muriel. Her good looks and opera singer’s swaggering bosom notwithstanding, Muriel was not a tower of sexual strength; she fainted.

“Muriel—no histrionics, please!” Grandpa Harry cried, but Muriel (consciously or unconsciously) had foreseen that she did not match up well with the confident young newcomer, the sudden shining star of leading-man material. Muriel had physically taken herself out of the running for Hedda.

“And in the case of Nora . . .” Nils said to Richard Abbott, barely pausing to survey my mother’s ministrations to her older, domineering (but now fainted) sister.

Muriel suddenly sat up with a dazed expression, her bosom dramatically heaving.

“Breathe in through your nose, Muriel, and out through your mouth,” my mother prompted her sister.

“I know, Mary—I know!” Muriel said with exasperation.

“But you’re doing it the other way—you know, in through your mouth and out through your nose,” my mother said.

“Well . . .” Richard Abbott started to say; then he stopped. Even I saw how he looked at my mom.

Richard, who’d lost the toes of his left foot to a lawn-mower accident, which disqualified him from military service, had come to teach at Favorite River Academy directly upon receiving a master’s degree in the history of theater and drama. Richard had been born and grew up in western Massachusetts. He had fond memories of family ski vacations in Vermont, when he’d been a child; a job (for which he was overqualified) in First Sister, Vermont, had attracted him for sentimental reasons.

Richard Abbott was only four years older than my code-boy father had been in that photograph—when the sergeant was en route to Trinidad in ’45. Richard was twenty-five—my mom was thirty-five. Richard was a whopping ten years younger than my mother. Mom must have liked younger men; she’d certainly liked me better when I was younger.

“And do you act, Miss—” Richard began again, but my mom knew he was speaking to her, and she cut him off.

“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.

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