by John Irving
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 illfated 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."
"I believe you can tell Miss Frost what you told me, Bill," Grandpa Harry said. "I have a feelin' she would be sympathetic." He kissed me on the forehead and gave me a hug--there was both affection and concern for me in my grandfather's expression. I saw him suddenly as I had so often seen him--onstage, where he was almost always a woman. It was the way he'd used the sympathetic word that had triggered a long-ago memory; it may have been something I completely imagined, but, if I had to bet, it was a memory.
How old I was, I couldn't say--ten or eleven, at most. This was long before Richard Abbott appeared; I was Billy Dean, and my single mom was suitorless. But Mary Marshall Dean was already the long-established prompter for the First Sister Players, and, whatever my age, and notwithstanding my innocence, I'd been a long-accepted presence backstage. I had the run of the place--provided I kept out of the actors' way, and I stayed quiet. ("You're not backstage to talk, Billy," I remember my mom saying to me. "You're here to watch and listen.")
I believe it was one of the English poets--was it Auden?--who said that before you could write anything, you had to notice something. (Admittedly, it was Lawrence Upton who told me this; I'm just guessing it was Auden, because Larry was a fan of Auden's.)
It doesn't really matter who said it--it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something. That part of my childhood--when I was backstage in the little theater of our town's amateur theatrical society--was the noticing phase of my becoming a writer. One of the things I noticed, if not the very first thing, was that not everyone thought it was wonderful or funny that my grandfather took so many women's roles in the productions of the First Sister Players.
I loved being backstage, just watching and listening. I liked the transitions, too--for example, that moment when all the actors were off-script, and my mother was called upon to start prompting. There then came a magical interlude, even among amateurs, when the actors seemed completely in character; regardless of how many rehearsals I'd attended, I remember that quickly passing illusion when the play suddenly seemed real. Yet there was always something you saw or heard in the dress rehearsal that struck you as entirely new. Last, on opening night, there was the excitement of seeing and hearing the play for the first time with an audience.
I remember that, even as a child, I was as nervous on opening night as the actors. I had a pretty good (albeit partial) view of the actors from my hiding place backstage. I had a better view of the audience--though I saw only those faces in the first two or three rows of sea
ts. (Depending on where my mother had positioned herself as the prompter, this was either a stage-right or stage-left view of the people in those first few rows of seats.)
I saw those faces in the audience only slightly more head-on than in profile, though the people in the audience were looking at the actors onstage; they were never looking at me. To tell you the truth, it was a kind of eavesdropping--I felt as if I were spying on the audience, or just this small segment of it. The houselights were dark, but the faces in the first couple of rows of seats were illuminated by whatever light there was onstage; naturally, in the course of the play, the light on the people in the audience varied, though I could almost always see their faces and make out their expressions.
The feeling that I was "spying" on these most exposed theatergoers of First Sister, Vermont, came from the fact that when you're in the audience in a theater, and your attention is captured by the actors onstage, you never imagine that someone is watching you. But I was observing them; in their expressions, I saw everything they thought and felt. Come opening night, I knew the play by heart; after all, I'd been to most of the rehearsals. By then, I was much more interested in the audience's reaction than I was in what the actors onstage were doing.
In every opening-night performance--no matter which woman, or what kind of woman, Grandpa Harry was playing--I was fascinated to observe the audience's reactions to Harry Marshall as a female.
There was the delightful Mr. Poggio, our neighborhood grocer. He was as bald as Grandpa Harry, but woefully shortsighted--he was always a first-row customer, and even in the first row, Mr. Poggio was a squinter. The moment Grandpa Harry came onstage, Mr. Poggio was convulsed with suppressed laughter; tears rolled down his cheeks, and I had to look away from his openmouthed, gap-toothed smile or I would have burst out laughing.
Mrs. Poggio was curiously less appreciative of Grandpa Harry's female impersonations; she frowned when she first saw him and bit her lower lip. She also did not seem to enjoy how happy her husband was with Grandpa Harry as a woman.
And there was Mr. Ripton--Ralph Ripton, the sawyer. He operated the main blade at Grandpa Harry's sawmill and lumberyard; it was a highly skilled (and dangerous) position in the mill, to be the main-blade operator. Ralph Ripton was missing the thumb and first two joints of his index finger on his left hand. I'd heard the story of the accident many times; both Grandpa Harry and his partner, Nils Borkman, liked to tell the blood-spattered tale.
I'd always believed that Grandpa Harry and Mr. Ripton were friends--they were more than fellow workers, surely. Yet Ralph didn't like Grandpa Harry as a woman; Mr. Ripton had an angry, condemning expression whenever he saw Grandpa Harry onstage in a female role. Mr. Ripton's wife--she was completely expressionless--sat beside her overcritical husband as if she'd been brain-damaged by the very idea of Harry Marshall performing as a woman.
Ralph Ripton skillfully managed to pack his pipe with fresh tobacco; at the same time, he never took his hard eyes from the stage. I guessed, at first, that Mr. Ripton was loading up his pipe for a smoke at the intermission--he always used the stump of his severed left index finger to tamp the tobacco tightly into the bowl of his pipe--but I later noticed that the Riptons never returned after the intermission. They came to the theater for the devout purpose of hating what they saw and leaving early.
Grandpa Harry had told me that Ralph Ripton had to sit in the first or second row in order to hear; the main blade in the sawmill made such a high-pitched whine that the saw had deafened him. But I could see for myself that there was more wrong with the sawyer than his deafness.
There were other faces in the collective audiences--many regular customers in those front-row seats--and while I didn't know most of their names or their professions, I had no difficulty (even as a child) recognizing their obdurate dislike of Grandpa Harry as a woman. To be fair: When Harry Marshall kissed as a woman--I mean when he kissed another man onstage--most of the audience laughed or cheered or applauded. But I had a knack for finding the unfriendly faces--there were always a few. I saw people cringe, or angrily look away; I saw their eyes narrow with disgust at Grandpa Harry kissing as a woman.
Harry Marshall played all kinds of women--he was a crazy lady who repeatedly bit her own hands, he was a sobbing bride who was ditched at the altar, he was a serial killer (a hairstylist) who poisoned her boyfriends, he was a policewoman with a limp. My grandfather loved the theater, and I loved watching him perform, but perhaps there were folks in First Sister, Vermont, who had rather limited imaginations; they knew Harry Marshall was a lumberman--they couldn't accept him as a woman.
Indeed, I saw more than obvious displeasure and condemnation in the faces of our townsfolk--I saw more than derision, worse than meanness. I saw hatred in a few of those faces.
One such face I wouldn't know by name until I saw him in my first morning meeting as a Favorite River Academy student. This was Dr. Harlow, our school's physician--he who, when he spoke to us boys, was usually so hearty and cajoling. On Dr. Harlow's face was the conviction that Harry Marshall's love of performing as a woman was an affliction; in Dr. Harlow's expression was the hardened belief that Grandpa Harry's cross-dressing was treatable. Thus I feared and hated Dr. Harlow before I knew who he was.
And, even as a backstage child, I used to think: Come on! Don't you get it? This is make-believe! Yet those hard-eyed faces in the audience weren't buying it. Those faces said: "You can't make-believe this; you can't make-believe that."
As a child, I was frightened by what I saw in those faces in the audience from my unseen, backstage position. I never forgot some of their expressions. When I was seventeen, and I told my grandfather about my crushes on boys and men, and my contradictory attraction to a made-up version of Martha Hadley as a training-bra model, I was still frightened by what I'd seen in those faces in the audience at the First Sister Players.
I told Grandpa Harry about watching some of our fellow townspeople, who were caught in the act of watching him. "They didn't care that it was make-believe," I told him. "They just knew they didn't like it. They hated you--Ralph Ripton and his wife, even Mrs. Poggio, no question about Dr. Harlow. They hated you pretending to be a woman."
"You know what I say, Bill?" Grandpa Harry asked me. "I say, you can make-believe what you want." There were tears in my eyes then, because I was afraid for myself--not unlike the way, as a child, I had been afraid backstage for Grandpa Harry.
"I stole Elaine Hadley's bra, because I wanted to wear it!" I blurted out.
"Ah, well--that's a good fella's failin', Bill. I wouldn't worry about that," Grandpa Harry said.
It was strange what a relief it was--to see that I couldn't shock him. Harry Marshall was only worried about my safety, as I'd once been afraid for his.
"Did Richard tell you?" Grandpa Harry suddenly asked me. "Some morons have banned Twelfth Night--I mean, over the years, total imbeciles have actually banned Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, many times!"
"Why?" I asked him. "That's crazy! It's a comedy, it's a romantic comedy! What could possibly be the reason for banning it?" I cried.
"Ah, well--I can only guess why," Grandpa Harry said. "Sebastian's twin sister, Viola--she looks a lot like her brother; that's the story, isn't it? That's why people mistake Sebastian for Viola--after Viola has disguised herself as a man, and she's goin' around callin' herself Cesario. Don't you see, Bill? Viola is a cross-dresser! That's what got Shakespeare in trouble! From everythin' you told me, I think you've noticed that rigidly conventional or ignorant people have no sense of humor about cross-dressers."
"Yes, I've noticed," I said.
But it was what I had failed to notice that would haunt me. All those years when I was backstage, when I had the prompter's perspective of those front-row faces in the audience, I had neglected to look at the prompter herself. I had not once noticed my mother's expression, when she saw and heard her father onstage as a woman.
That winter Sunday night, when I walked back to Bancroft, after my littl
e talk with Grandpa Harry, I vowed I would watch my mom's face when Harry was performing as Maria in Twelfth Night.
I knew there would be opportunities--when Sebastian was not onstage but Maria was--when I could spy on my mother backstage and observe her expression. I was frightened of what I might see in her pretty face; I doubted she would be smiling.
I had a bad feeling about Twelfth Night from the start. Kittredge had talked a bunch of his wrestling teammates into auditioning. Richard had given four of them what he'd called "some smaller parts."
But Malvolio isn't a small part; the wrestling team's heavyweight, a sullen complainer, was cast in the role of Olivia's steward--an arrogant pretender who is tricked into thinking that Olivia desires him. I must say that Madden, the heavyweight who thought of himself as a perpetual victim, was well cast; Kittredge had told Elaine and me that Madden suffered from "going-last syndrome."
In those days, all dual meets in wrestling began with the lightest weight-class; heavyweights wrestled last. If the meet was close, it came down to who won the heavyweight match--Madden usually lost. He had the look of someone wronged. How perfect that Malvolio, who is jailed as a lunatic, protests his fate--" 'I say there was never man thus abused,' " Madden, as Malvolio, whines.
"If you want to be in character, Madden," I heard Kittredge say to his unfortunate teammate, "just think to yourself how unfair it is to be a heavyweight."
"But it is unfair to be a heavyweight!" Madden protested.
"You're going to be a great Malvolio. I know you are," Kittredge told him--as ever, condescendingly.
Another wrestler--one of the lightweights who struggled to make weight at every weigh-in--was cast as Sir Toby's companion, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The boy, whose name was Delacorte, was ghostly thin. He was often so dehydrated from losing weight that he had cotton-mouth. He rinsed his mouth out with water from a paper cup--he spat the water out into another cup. "Don't mix your cups up, Delacorte," Kittredge told him. ("Two Cups," I'd once heard Kittredge call him.)
