"You want a taxi, Nils?" Grandpa Harry asked his old friend. "Didn't you come in your own car?"
"It's all right, Harry--Bill and I were just shop-talking," Nils explained to his colleague.
"That would be 'talkin' shop,' Nils," Grandpa Harry said.
"What part does Grandpa Harry have?" I asked the Norwegian dramaturge.
"You haven't offered me a part in anything, Nils," Grandpa Harry said.
"Well, I was about to!" Borkman cried. "Your grandfather would be a brilliant Mrs. Winemiller--Alma's mother," the wily director said to me.
"If you do it, I'll do it," I said to Grandpa Harry. It would be the spring production for the First Sister Players, the premiere of a serious drama in the spring--my last onstage performance before my departure from First Sister and that summer in Europe with Tom Atkins. It would not be for Richard Abbott and the Drama Club, but I would sing my swan song for Nils Borkman and the First Sister Players--the last time my mother would have the occasion to prompt me.
I liked the idea of it already--even before I read the play. I'd only glanced at the title page, where Tennessee Williams had included an epigraph from Rilke. The Rilke was good enough for me. "Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?" It seemed that, everywhere I looked, I just kept happening upon Rilke's terrifying angels. I wondered if Kittredge knew the German.
"Okay, Bill--if you do it, I'll do it," Grandpa Harry said; we shook on it.
Later, I found a discreet way to ask Nils if he'd already signed up Aunt Muriel and Richard Abbott in the Alma and John roles. "Don't worry, Bill," Borkman told me. "I have Muriel and Richard in my pocket-back!"
"In your back pocket--yes," I said to the crafty deerstalker on skis.
That Christmastime night when Elaine and I ran across the deserted Favorite River campus to the academy library--on our eager way to the old yearbook room--we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course, and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.) It being Christmas break, I did not necessarily expect to see Mr. Lockley at the check-out desk of the academy library, but there he was--as if it were a working night, or perhaps the alleged "nonpracticing homosex
ual" (as Mr. Lockley was called, behind his back) had nothing else to do.
"No luck with Uncle Bob finding the '40 Owl, huh?" I asked him.
"Mr. Fremont believes he returned it, but he did not--that is, not to my knowledge," Mr. Lockley stiffly replied.
"I'll just keep bugging him about it," I said.
"You do that, Billy," Mr. Lockley said sternly. "Mr. Fremont does not often frequent the library."
"I'll bet he doesn't," I said, smiling.
Mr. Lockley did not smile--certainly not at Elaine, anyway. He was one of those older men who lived alone; he would not take kindly to the coming two decades--by which time most (if not all) of the all-boys' boarding schools in New England would finally become coeducational.
In my estimation, coeducation would have a humanizing effect on those boarding schools; Elaine and I could testify that boys treat other boys better when there are girls around, and the girls are not as mean to one another in the presence of boys.
I know, I know--there are those diehards who maintain that single-sex education was more rigorous, or less distracting, and that coeducation came with a cost--a loss of "purity," I've heard the Mr. Lockleys of the boarding-school world argue. (Less concentration on "academics," they usually mean.) That Christmastime night, all Mr. Lockley could manage to direct to Elaine was a minimally cordial bow--as if he were saying the unutterable, "Good evening, knocked-up faculty daughter. How are you managing now, you smelly little slut?"
But Elaine and I went about our business, paying no attention to Mr. Lockley. We were alone in the yearbook room--and more alone than usual in the otherwise abandoned academy library. Those old Owls from '37, '38, and '39 beckoned us, and we soon found much to marvel about in their revealing pages.
WILLIAM FRANCIS DEAN WAS a smiling little boy in the 1937 Owl, when he would have been twelve. He seemed a charmingly elfin manager of the 1936-37 wrestling team, and the only other evidence Elaine and I could find of him was as the prettiest little girl in the Drama Club photos of that long-ago academic year--a scant five years before I would be born.
If Franny Dean had met the older Mary Marshall in '37, there was no record of it in the Owl of that year--nor was there any record of their meeting in the '38 and '39 Owls, wherein the wrestling-team manager grew only a little in stature but seemingly a lot in self-assurance.
Onstage, for the Drama Club, in those '38 and '39 yearbooks, Elaine and I could tell that the future Harvard-boy, who'd chosen "performer" as his career path, had developed into a most fetching femme fatale--he was a nymphlike presence.
"He was good-looking, wasn't he?" I asked Elaine.
"He looks like you, Billy--he's handsome but different," Elaine said.
"He already must have been dating my mother," I said, when we'd finished with the '39 Owl and were hurrying back to Bancroft Hall. (My dad was fifteen when my mom was nineteen!) "If 'dating' is the right word, Billy," Elaine said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You have to talk to your grandpa, Billy--if you can get him alone," Elaine told me.