Who's afraid of Edward Albee?

It had been a long time since I had seen Edward Albee, my old teacher, and as I waited for him at the bottom of the escalator at the Portland Jetport, I hoped we would recognize each other.

I shouldn’t have worried about that, though. As he descended the escalator, his eyes fell upon me, and his face crinkled into a smile.

“Ah,” he said, embracing me. “There you are.” It was as if it had been fifteen minutes, instead of fifteen years.

I bundled him into the car and drove him north toward Waterville, where he was scheduled to speak to the students the next afternoon, on “Improvisation and the Creative Mind.”

He’d been my teacher, back in 1986, when he produced a play of mine called “Big Baby.” This was when I lived in Baltimore and I was a student at Johns Hopkins. He was a terribly tough teacher, but I loved him. He seemed to know just how to turn a phrase on stage that opened up a character’s heart.

My play wasn’t very good. It was about a baby who, somehow, grows to be really, really big. By big, I mean, the size of a Buick. On stage, the baby—concealed inside a huge bassinet—growls and screams and throws bowling pins at his parents.

After the first performance, Albee sat down with me and asked the question for which I had no answer. “But why,” he asked, as if the question pained him. “Why is the baby so large?”

In the years since then, I’ve asked questions like this of my own students, and they’ve given me the same look that I gave Albee back then, the look that says, Why are you demanding so much of me? Why is the thing I’ve written not good enough?

Albee gave his lecture to a packed house at Colby the next day, and got a standing ovation. As he signed books at the podium, a young man came up to me. “Excuse me,” he said. “Jenny? I don’t suppose you remember me?”

Of course I remembered him. It was Nick Malick, class of 2004, one of my better students. He’d been a writer of short stories when I knew him, a man of promise and imagination.

“What have you been doing, Nickles?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’m a teacher now,” he said, proudly. “In New Hampshire. I came here with my students.”

For a teacher, there are few pleasures like the knowledge that someone you have taught is himself becoming a teacher. There really is a sense that a torch is getting passed, from hand to hand, down the generations.

As one of my children observed, later that day, “So for your student, Edward Albee was kind of like, his grand-teacher.”

I felt self conscious, though, in my old student’s presence, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to say. I glanced for a moment over at the podium, where Edward was surrounded by his fans.

When I looked back at Nickles, he was gone.

I took Edward back to the airport the next morning, dropped him off at the check in for United.

Just before he headed into the terminal, Edward took me by the shoulders and smiled that elusive smile of his.

“We have done well,” he said. “You and I.” Then he kissed me on the cheek, turned his back, and was gone.

I thought about that moment all the way home, so grateful for everything the man had taught me over the years. I thought about my Baltimore days, about trying to become a writer, about that question I’d asked, and been asked, again and again since then: Why are you demanding so much of me?

And I thought about my old student Nickles, a teacher himself now, working with his students.

I hoped that someday, Nickles will take one of his students by the shoulder, and say what I should have said to him the day before.

“We have done well. You and I.”