"I shall think about it and get back to you," Miss Frost told Richard. There was a tall, narrow, dimly lit mirror in the foyer of the library, where a long row of coat hooks revealed a solitary raincoat--probably Miss Frost's. She glanced at her hair in the mirror. "I've been considering longer hair," she said, as if to her double.
"I imagine Hedda with somewhat longer hair," Richard said.
"Do you?" Miss Frost asked, but she was smiling at me again. "Just look at you, William," she said suddenly. "Talk about 'coming of age'--just look at this boy!" I must have blushed, or looked away--clutching those three coming-of-age novels to my heart.
MISS FROST CHOSE WELL. I would read Tom Jones, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre--in that order--thus becoming, to my mom's surprise, a reader. And what those novels taught me was that adventure was not confined to seafaring, with or without pirates. One could find considerable excitement by not escaping to science fiction or futuristic fantasies; it wasn't necessary to read a Western or a romance novel in order to transport oneself. In reading, as in writing, all one needed--that is, in order to have an utterly absorbing journey--was a believable but formidable relationship. What else, after all, did crushes--especially crushes on the wrong people--lead to?
"Well, Bill, let's get you home so you can start reading," Richard Abbott said that warm September evening, and--turning to Miss Frost, in the foyer of the library--he said (in a voice not his own) the last thing Judge Brack says to Hedda in act 4, " 'We shall get on capitally together, we two!' "
There would be two months of rehearsals for Hedda Gabler that fall, so I would become most familiar with that line--not to mention the last lines Hedda says, in response. She has already exited the stage, but--speaking offstage, loud and clear, as the stage directions say--Miss Frost (as Hedda) responds, " 'Yes, don't you flatter yourself we will, Judge Brack? Now that you are the one cock in the basket--' " A shot is heard within, the stage directions then say.
Do I sincerely love that play, or did I adore it because Richard Abbott and Miss Frost brought it to life for me? Grandpa Harry was outstanding in a small role--that of George's aunt Juliana, Miss Tesman--and my aunt Muriel was the needy comrade of Eilert Lovborg, Mrs. Elvsted.
"Well, that was some performance," Richard Abbott said to me, as we strolled along the River Street sidewalk on that warm September evening. It was dark now, and a distant thunder was in the air, but the neighborhood backyards were quiet; children and dogs had been brought indoors, and Richard was walking me home.
"What performance?" I asked him.
"I mean Miss Frost!" Richard exclaimed. "I mean her performance! The books you should read, all that stuff about crushes, and her elaborate dance about whether she would play Nora or Hedda--"
"You mean she was always acting?" I asked him. (Once again, I felt protective of her, without knowing why.)
"I take it that you liked her," Richard said.
"I loved her!" I blurted out.
"Understandable," he said, nodding his head.
"Didn't you like her?" I asked him.
"Oh, yes, I did--I do like her--and I think she'll be a perfect Hedda," Richard said.
"If she'll do it," I cautioned him.
"Oh, she'll do it--of course she's going to do it!" Richard declared. "She was just toying with me."
"Toying," I repeated, not sure if he was criticizing Miss Frost. I was not at all certain that Richard had liked her sufficiently.
"Listen to me, Bill," Richard said. "Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she's given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays--well, Bill, this could be the door to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life."
This was all so overwhelming. It was staggering to imagine that there were novels about crushes--even, perhaps especially, crushes on the wrong people. Furthermore, our town's amateur theatrical society would be performing Ibsen's Hedda Gabler with a brand-new leading man, and with a tower of sexual strength (and untamable freedom) in the leading female role. And not only did my wounded mother have a "beau," as Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria referred to Richard Abbott, but my uncomfortable crush on Richard had been supplanted. I was now in love with a librarian who was old enough to be my mother. My seemingly unnatural attraction to Richard Abbott notwithstanding, I felt a new and unknown lust for Miss Frost--not to mention that I suddenly had all this serious reading to do.
No wonder that, when Richard and I came in the house from our excursion to the library, my grandmother felt my forehead--I must have looked flushed, as if I had a fever. "Too much excitement for a school night, Billy," Nana Victoria said.
"Nonsense," Grandpa Harry said. "Show me the books you have, Bill."
"Miss Frost chose them for me," I told him, handing him the novels.
"Miss Frost!" my grandmother again declared, her contempt rising.
"Vicky, Vicky," Grandpa Harry cautioned her, like little back-to-back slaps.
"Mommy, please don't," my mother said.
"They're great novels," my grandfather announced. "In fact, they're classics. I daresay Miss Frost knows what novels a young boy should read."
"I daresay!" Nana repeated haughtily.
There then followed some difficult-to-understand nastiness from my grandmother, concerning Miss Frost's actual age. "I don't mean her professed age!" Nana Victoria cried. I offered that I thought Miss Frost was my mom's age, or a little younger, but Grandpa Harry and my mother looked at each other. Next came what I was familiar with, from the theater--a pause.