In One Person

I was getting a lot of shouts and sighs from my mother that spring; when I’d announced my plans to go to Europe with Tom Atkins for the summer, I got both the sigh and the shout. (First the sigh, of course, which was swiftly followed by: “Tom Atkins—that fairy!”)

“Ladies, ladies,” Nils Borkman was saying. “This is a forward young man, Mr. Archie Kramer—he asks Alma, ‘What’s there to do in this town after dark?’ That’s pretty forward, isn’t it?”

“Ah, yes,” Grandpa Harry jumped in, “and there’s a stage direction about Alma—‘she gathers confidence before the awkwardness of his youth’—and there’s another one, when Alma ‘leans back and looks at him under half-closed lids, perhaps a little suggestively.’ I think Alma is kind of encouragin’ this young fella to look at her breasts!”

“There can be only one director, Daddy,” my mother told Grandpa Harry.

“I don’t do ‘suggestively’—I don’t encourage anyone to look at my breasts,” Muriel said to Nils Borkman.

“You’re so full of shit, Muriel,” my mom said.

There’s a fountain in that final scene—so that Alma can give one of her sleeping pills to the young man, who washes the pill down by drinking from the fountain. There were originally benches in the scene, too, but Nils didn’t like the benches. (Muriel had been too agitated to sit still, given that I was staring at her breasts.)

I foresaw a problem with losing the benches. When the young man hears that there’s a casino, which offers “all kinds of after-dark entertainment” (as Alma puts it), he says to Alma, “Then what in hell are we sitting here for?” But there were no benches; Alma and the young man couldn’t be sitting.

When I pointed this out to Nils, I said: “Shouldn’t I say, ‘Then what in hell are we doing here?’ Because Alma and I aren’t sitting—there’s nothing to sit on.”

“You’re not writing this play, Billy—it’s already written,” my mother (ever the prompter) told me.

“So we bring the benches back,” Nils said tiredly. “You’ll have to sit still, Muriel. You’ve just absorbed a sleeping pill, remember?”

“Absorbed!” Muriel exclaimed. “I should have absorbed a whole bottle of sleeping pills! I can’t possibly sit still with Billy staring at my breasts!”

“Billy isn’t interested in breasts, Muriel!” my mother shouted. (This was not true, as I know you know—I simply wasn’t interested in Muriel’s breasts.)

“I’m just acting—remember?” I said to Aunt Muriel and my mom.

In the end, I leave the stage; I go off shouting for a taxi. Only Alma remains—“she turns slowly about toward the audience with her hand still raised in a gesture of wonder and finality as . . . the curtain falls.”

I hadn’t a clue as to how Muriel might bring that off—“a gesture of wonder” seemed utterly beyond her capabilities. As for the “finality” aspect, I had little doubt that my aunt Muriel could deliver finality.

“Let’s one more time try it,” Nils Borkman implored us. (When our director was tired, his word order eluded him.)

“Let’s try it one more time,” Grandpa Harry said helpfully, although Mrs. Winemiller isn’t in that final scene. (It is dusk in the park in Summer and Smoke; only Alma and the young traveling salesman are onstage.)

“Behave yourself, Billy,” my mom said to me.

“For the last time,” I told her, smiling as sweetly as I could—at both Muriel and my mother.

“‘The water—is—cool,’” Muriel began.

“‘Did you say something?’” I asked her breasts—as the stage direction says, eagerly.

THE FIRST SISTER PLAYERS opened Summer and Smoke in our small community theater about a week after my Favorite River graduation. The academy students never saw the productions of our local amateur theatrical society; it didn’t matter that the boarders, Kittredge and Atkins among them, had left town.

I spent the whole play backstage, until the twelfth and final scene. I was past caring about observing my mother’s disapproval of Grandpa Harry as a woman; I’d seen all I needed to know about that. In the stage directions, Mrs. Winemiller is described as a spoiled and selfish girl who evaded the responsibilities of later life by slipping into a state of perverse childishness. She is known as Mr. Winemiller’s “Cross.”

It was evident to my mom and me that Grandpa Harry was drawing on Nana Victoria—and what a “Cross” she was for him to bear—in his testy portrayal of Mrs. Winemiller. (This was evident to Nana Victoria, too; my disapproving grandmother sat in the front row of the audience looking as if she’d been poleaxed, while Harry brought the house down with his antics.)

My mother had to prompt the shit out of the two child actors who virtually ruined the prologue. But in scene 1—specifically, the third time Mrs. Winemiller shrieked, “Where is the ice cream man?”—the audience was roaring, and Mrs. Winemiller brought the curtain down at the end of scene 5 by taunting her pussy-whipped husband. “‘Insufferable cross yourself, you old—windbag . . .’” Grandpa Harry cackled, as the curtain fell.

It was as good a production as Nils Borkman had ever directed for the First Sister Players. I have to admit that Aunt Muriel was excellent as Alma; it was hard for me to imagine that Miss Frost could have matched Muriel in the repressed area of my aunt’s agitated performance.

Beyond prompting the child actors in the prologue, my mom had nothing to do; no one muffed a line. It is fortunate that my mother had no further need to prompt anyone, because it was fairly early in the play when we both spotted Miss Frost in the front row of the audience. (That Nana Victoria found herself sitting in the same row as Miss Frost perhaps contributed to my grandmother’s concussed appearance; in addition to suffering her husband’s scathing portrayal of a shrewish wife and mother, Nana Victoria had to sit not more than two seats away from the transsexual wrestler!)

Upon seeing Miss Frost, my mom might have inadvertently prompted her mother to crap in a cat’s litter box. Of course, Miss Frost had chosen her front-row seat wisely. She knew where the prompter had positioned herself backstage; she knew I always hung out with the prompter. If we could see her, my mother and I knew, Miss Frost could see us. In fact, for entire scenes of Summer and Smoke, Miss Frost paid no attention to the actors onstage; Miss Frost just kept smiling at me, while my mother increasingly took on the brained-by-a-two-by-four expressionlessness of Nana Victoria.

Whenever Muriel-as-Alma was onstage, Miss Frost removed a compact from her purse. While Alma repressed herself, Miss Frost admired her lipstick in the compact’s small mirror, or she applied some powder to her nose and forehead.

At the closing curtain, when I’d run offstage, shouting for a taxi—leaving Muriel to find the gesture that implies (without words) both “wonder and finality”—I encountered my mother. She knew where I exited the stage, and she had left her prompter’s chair to intercept me.

“You will not speak to that creature, Billy,” my mom said.

I had anticipated such a showdown; I’d rehearsed so many things that I wanted to say to my mother, but I had not expected her to give me such a perfect opportunity to attack her. Richard Abbott, who’d played John, must have been in the men’s room; he wasn’t backstage to help her. Muriel was still onstage, for a few more seconds—to be followed by resounding and all-concealing applause.

“I will speak to her, Mom,” I began, but Grandpa Harry wouldn’t let me continue. Mrs. Winemiller’s wig was askew, and her enormous falsies were crowded too closely together, but Mrs. Winemiller wasn’t asking for ice cream now. She was nobody’s cross to bear—not in this scene—and Grandpa Harry needed no prompting.

“Just stop it, Mary,” Grandpa Harry told my mother. “Just forget about Franny. For once in your life, stop feelin’ so sorry for yourself. A good man finally married you, for Christ’s sake! What have you got to be so angry about?”

“I am speaking to my son, Daddy,” my mom started to say, but her heart wasn’t in it.