"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.