Free Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray Page B

card, if I was trying to escape from Mom, or waiting to see if I would get to play the lead role in
The Sea Gull
. I didn’t have a telephone in my apartment, so I only wrote letters to Mom and Dad, but rarely. Mostly I wrote letters to Meg. Some time in early winter, which really wasn’twinter for me down there in Houston with all those palm trees and swimming pools and muggy warm days, I got the following letter from Dad:
    Dear Brewster,
    I have not been a very good correspondent lately, have had to write twice a week to the Bentons, get my housework and meals done and I suppose it’s somewhat due to lethargy. Mother is not doing well at all. Not long after you left for Houston she had a relapse. I had high hopes that she might get better at Fuller, but, if anything, I think, she is worse. While in the beginning I phoned her twice a week, there was very little to say and I only seemed to upset her. Hence I infrequently call now. I did talk with her last Tuesday, but it was very discouraging—she is now certain that she is insane and that she can never recover. This is a very difficult frame of mind to recover from. While I keep avoiding the thought, I find myself more and more wondering if maybe this is so—it does happen to people—but I can’t believe it is really happening to us.
    There had been some thought of Mother coming home with a Christian Science nurse if one could be located—at least to get her out of the institution atmosphere—but nothing definite as yet.
    Friday night when I came home I went into the bedroom and found glass all over the floor—then discovered that the storm window and one 8 by 10 pane next to mother’s bed had been smashed. I was about to call the police and looked around for the stone or other object, but found nothing—then discovered feathers and after looking further found a partridge, dead on my bedside table. It’s hard to believe that a bird which weighed one and a quarter pounds could go through two windows, brush through the curtain, knock over the TV aerial and, without losing any altitude, zoom across the room hitting the corner and dropping dead on the table without even disturbing the lampshade.
    It took me about two hours to clean up the mess and, I might add, dress the bird for the ice box. Gram North came for the weekend and we had a delicious partridge dinner Saturday night. So far I have not been able to get hold of the storm window man but have the window covered with a sheet of cardboard and masking tape, which does a pretty good job considering the temperature this morning was five degrees.
    Would love to hear further from you when there is time.
    Love,
    Dad
    It was as though the mad bird in Mom had at last burst out of her and broken free like a heart with wings flying out of that sanitarium, to find its way to home to crash and die on Dad’s bedside table. Then, after all of that, to at last be eaten by Dad and his mother … well, it was all really too much.
    And what was happening in Houston didn’t make it any better. The role of Konstantin in
The Sea Gull
was given to an older, less sensitive actor named Brian, who was not at all right for the role. But he had tenure, which means he’d been suffering down there for five years, and I, after all, had only just arrived. And to add great insult to injury, the director of the theater decided that because of my obviously tortured sensitivity, Brian should use me as a life study. He should observe me in my daily routines. What he was really observing was my disappointment at not having the role of Konstantin. I went home and cried alone for one whole day.
    The director, who was this very histrionic, flamboyant woman named Thelma, decided that I should also “create” (I think that was her word) a very imaginative collection of sound effects for the final dinner party that is going on offstage while Konstantin has his last sad unrequited love meeting with Nina. She wanted me to organize the other actors