The town hall was the ideal venue for our project. With its heaving old wooden aisles, canted like the deck of a storm-tossed sailing ship, and its faded purple stage curtain redolent of mildew and the stardust of dozens of school and town plays and the brave collective hopes of scores of graduation valedictories—and let us not omit the bloody stains of not a few town-meeting brawls—the place was emblematic of our town. For a backdrop, the stage boasted several painted flats left over from a long-ago production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Teddy in his pith helmet, headed down cellar. The two patrician poisoner aunts, offering tea to an unsuspecting gentleman boarder. The mad doctor with his gleaming instruments of terror. In the disused orchestra well sat a piano once used to accompany silent movies, whose sole function for years had been to bang out, in hideous, off-key strains, the graduation march.
It’s amazing how well Wilder’s timeless play still reflects the human details of life in any American small town, and the hall was packed for the premiere. True, there was some ill-suppressed laughter when the curtain went up on the bare, stark stage, with the narrator—good old Bill—and the miming actors. But the audience was quickly drawn in by the stately rhythms of daily life in Grover’s Corners, aka Orleans, and the substitutions of Kingdom names and anecdotes.
Soon it became apparent that other alterations had been made to the play, alterations I had not known about until now. These included references to old and current local love affairs, bitter feuds that had gone on for years, and the unsavory private habits, real or imagined, of a number of prominent Orleans citizens, including the local reverend, the mayor, the mill manager, some of us teachers, and old Prof. The audience began to murmur. A chill ran up my back as Big Prof, in the role of his father, came on stage staggering home from a school board meeting, muttering, “These Christly teachers aren’t earning their pay. I’ll get to the bottom of this or today isn’t a three-quart day!”
Had the young rapscallions actually gotten their hands on some booze? The actors, now passing around a flask, were speaking directly to the audience about the townspeople’s most private transgressions. Interactive theater had come to Orleans years ahead of the rest of the country. The mayor, a notorious alcoholic, lay passed out on the proscenium. The reverend’s wife was picking the postmaster’s pocket; the lecherous old business teacher had his hand on little Emily Webb’s knee. What the hell was happening?
Up onto the stage rampaged the real Prof, red-faced, demanding that the production be halted, cuffing Big and Little, rushing from actor to actor like a mad bull. I ran onto the stage and shouted, “The play’s the thing! It must go on.”
Our undaunted leader had been drinking all afternoon, and his efforts to stop the presentation were ineffectual. Big and Little were laughing at their father. “Hand over that Christly flask,” he roared, lunging for Big. The boys tossed the flask over Prof’s head, behind their backs, under their legs, playing keep-away with it.
“Mosher, you crazy son of a bitch, stop this so-called play,” Prof bellowed.
“The play must and will continue,” I intoned. “Get back to your right lines, kids.”
“No!” bayed Prof. Lowering his big round cannonball of a head, he came charging across the stage, determined to butt me into next Wednesday. Prof had several inches and a good hundred pounds on me. But I was young and wiry and brimming over with a whole school year of grievances against him and the board of education and authority in general. My employer’s words of a year ago, at our teaching interview, flashed through my mind. “If you have to knock ’em down, make sure they stay down.” As he charged me, trumpeting like a rogue elephant, I slipped aside and administered a swift, ungentle rap to his right ear, and he crashed head-first into the six-by-four-foot plywood flat of Teddy from Arsenic and Old Lace. Prof’s head, sticking through the splintered hole in the flat, bore a striking resemblance to Teddy’s. All my superintendent needed was a pith helmet.
“Waaah!” Prof roared. With the sheet of plywood still attached to his neck, he began to plunge around the crowded stage in a panic, scattering the young thespians.
“Dad! Hold still. What are you doing?” Big Prof shouted.
“Where’s Mosher?” Prof shouted. “I’m going to kill Mosher.”
School board members were hastening down the aisles, making for the stage. That was fine by me. I’d give them a dose of the same, the cheapskates. Prof was swinging the plywood flat from side to side. Finally, he pushed the thing off his head.
I don’t know what the audience thought. Later some claimed that they supposed Prof’s antics and mine were part of the performance. Then a transformation seemed to come over the old administrator. Grinning hideously, he approached me, right hand extended. “I’m sorry, Mosher,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”
As he started to extend his hand, he said, “Oops. I dropped my hat.”
He hadn’t been wearing a hat, and that should have tipped me off. As he bent over to retrieve his nonexistent chapeau, I too bent over, and Prof delivered a tremendous uppercut to the side of my jaw. Miraculously, he didn’t break it, but the blow lifted me off my feet and sent me sailing backward into the flat of the dear old-maid sisters. As I slid down it, I saw Prof collapsed facedown nearby. I was sure he was dead. Somehow, I had managed to murder the superintendent of schools. But no, he’d merely passed out. Students and school board members rushed hither and yon on the stage, which, Jim Hayford later remarked, resembled nothing so much as the body-strewn stage of the Globe Theater in the last scene of Hamlet.
Bill, the Middlebury-bound scholar and narrator of Our Town, put his arm under my shoulders and helped me to my feet. Some of the students laughed. Others applauded. Slowly, I raised a directorial finger.
“Ring down the curtain,” I croaked out, and as someone blessedly did, I had the distinct impression that the curtain was about to come down on my short-lived career as a teacher as well.
“Not necessarily,” Prof said to me a couple of nights later. His wife had kicked him out of the house temporarily, and he was holed up at the local hotel. “Up here in the Kingdom, folks will just respect both of us more after our little dust-up at the hall.”
We sipped our beers, bought earlier that evening in the next town over. Prof grinned at me. “No hard feelings?”
“None,” I said. After all, what was a little slugfest, in front of half the town, between fishing partners and friends?
“Remember when we went to get old Hayford’s piano?” Prof said, chuckling.
“I do.”
“That was a good time, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
For the fourth or fifth time that evening, Prof put out his hand, and for the fourth or fifth time, somewhat warily, I shook it.
“Don’t fall for that ‘I dropped my hat’ business again, okay?” Prof advised. “That’s the oldest bar-fighting trick in the book.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“So which do you think it’ll be?” he asked, genuinely interested. “The University of Pennsylvania? Or another year here in the Kingdom?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “I can’t really see myself as an Ivy League graduate student. Or as a professor at some college. Can you?”
Prof cracked open two more cold ones, shook my hand again, and looked me square in the eye. “Nope,” he said. “I most surely cannot.” And then, echoing Verna’s words on the evening of the day Phillis and I got married, “Welcome home, my friend.”