Free In One Person by John Irving

but there was Nils Borkman, the distraught director; he looked as if he’d seen a ghost, possibly some previous fjord-jumper he had known.
    “I’ve seen her! I’ve heard her speak! She would be a perfect Hedvig!” Nils Borkman cried.
    Poor Elaine Hadley! It was her bad luck to be half blind—and breastless and shrill. (In The Wild Duck, a big deal is made of what is wrong with Hedvig’s eyes.) Elaine, that sexless but crystal-clear child, would be cast as the wretched Hedvig, and once more Borkman would unleash The (dreaded) Wild Duck on the aghast citizens of First Sister. Fresh from his surprising success as Krogstad in A Doll’s House, Nils would cast himself as Gregers.
    “That miserable moralizer,” Richard Abbott had called Gregers.
    Determined, as he was, to personify the idealist in Gregers, Nils Borkman would play the clownish aspect of the character to unwitting perfection.
    No one, least of all the suicidal Norwegian, could explain to the fourteen-year-old Elaine Hadley whether Hedvig means to shoot the wild duck and accidentally shoots herself, or if—as Dr. Relling says—Hedvig intends to kill herself. Nevertheless, Elaine was a terrific Hedvig—or at least a loud and clear Hedvig.
    It was sadly funny, when the doctor says of the bullet that has gone through Hedvig’s heart, “The ball has entered her breast.” (Poor Elaine had no breasts.)
    Startling the audience, the fourteen-year-old Hedvig cries out, “The wild duck!”
    This is just before Hedvig exits the stage. The stage directions say: She steals over and takes the pistol —well, not quite. Elaine Hadley actually brandished the weapon and stomped offstage.
    What bothered Elaine most about the play was that no one says a word about what will become of the wild duck. “The poor thing!” Elaine lamented. “It’s wounded ! It tries to drown itself, but the horrid dog brings it up from the bottom of the sea. And the duck is confined in a garret!What kind of life can a wild duck have in a garret ? And after Hedvig offs herself, who’s to say that the crazy old military man—or even Hjalmar, who’s such a wimp, who feels so sorry for himself—won’t just shoot it? It’s simply awful how that duck is treated!”
    I know now, of course, it was not sympathy for the duck that Henrik Ibsen so arduously sought, or that Nils Borkman attempted to elicit from the unsophisticated audience in First Sister, Vermont, but Elaine Hadley would be marked for life by her too-young, altogether too-innocent immersion in what a mindless melodrama Borkman made of The Wild Duck .
    To this day, I’ve not seen a professional production of the play; to see it done right, or at least as right as it could be done, might be unbearable. But Elaine Hadley would become my good friend, and I will not be disloyal to Elaine by disputing her interpretation of the play. Gina (Miss Frost) was by far the most sympathetic human being onstage, but it was the wild duck itself—we never see the stupid bird!—that garnered the lion’s share of Elaine’s sympathy. The unanswered or unanswerable question—“What happens to the duck?”—is what resonates with me. This has even become one of the ways Elaine and I greet each other. All children learn to speak in codes.
    G RANDPA H ARRY DIDN’T WANT a part in The Wild Duck; he would have feigned laryngitis to get free from that play. Also, Grandpa Harry had grown tired of being directed by his long-standing business partner, Nils Borkman.
    Richard Abbott was having his way with the staid all-boys’ academy; not only was he teaching Shakespeare to those boringly single-sex boys at Favorite River—Richard was putting Shakespeare onstage, and the female roles would be played by girls and women. (Or by an expert female impersonator, such as Harry Marshall, who could at least teach those prep-school boys how to act like girls and women.) Richard Abbott hadn’t only married my abandoned mother and given me a crush on him; he