The Songs

by Charles Elton

  After all these years Joseph was frightened every time they did a new show. Even their successes, the ones that yielded the songs that were recorded by many singers and made him and Alan a great deal of money, had had difficult starts. This time he was not handling it well. There was too much displacement activity, too many late nights. Normally he was very disciplined, but something surprising had happened to him, something terrifying and exciting at the same time. Shirley had noticed that something was up. She had put her hand on his arm one evening as he was leaving and said meaningfully, “Take care, Joseph. I’m worried about you.”

  He had always taken care before; he had avoided things because he was frightened of the consequences. He didn’t know why it was different now. Maybe it was because Gav was different. He told people he was called Gavin, but in fact his name was Gavriel, an Old Testament variation on Gabriel. He had been brought up by parents who were part of an isolationist Christian Fundamentalist sect and adhered to every commandment in the Old Testament. The name Gavriel meant strong or powerful. He certainly worked out in the gym enough —Joseph paid for his membership.

  There was a time when Joseph thought Gav might become part of his life, but now he knew that it was not going to be. Maybe that was just as well. In his line of work he had seen enough of those kind of boys dragged around by an older actor or director, boys who wanted to act or dance or sing and quickly got a taste for tables at expensive restaurants and champagne and private islands in the Caribbean and then began to feel resentful that their talent was not being taking seriously enough.

  At least Gav didn’t want to be in show business. He had no interest in it. Although Joseph had invited him, he didn’t come to the last day of rehearsals in London when they filled the hall with friends and did a run-through of the show to see how it would play to an audience. Not well, it turned out. There was probably some biblical law about musicals: you were unclean if you saw one. There were laws about everything else. Not that the laws seemed to stop Gav. He felt bad afterwards, but you didn’t have to be a Fundamentalist to feel bad afterwards. Christians didn’t hold a monopoly on regret. Gav, drunk — one of the many things forbidden by his religion — sometimes sent him texts late at night quoting commandments from the Bible. They’re not my laws, Joseph thought.

  Did Gav believe any of them? He told lies all the time. He told Joseph he did security on the last Take That tour. He told him he had been offered a modeling contract by Vogue. He said his father was an elder in their church, but in fact he was only a lay preacher. He had no idea where Gav even lived. For a long time he didn’t even have his number, but then Gav broke his phone because he threw it against the wall in a temper and Joseph bought him a new one and got his number that way. Not that he ever answered it. He would just turn up at odd times. Sometimes Joseph came home and Gav was standing outside on the street waiting, lost and afraid. Something awful had usually happened — his wallet had been stolen or he had been mugged. Who knew if any of it was true?

  Gav always laughed about his parents and their beliefs. At the end of Lent, when his parents were celebrating finishing their forty days of fasting and abstaining from secular pleasures, Gav suggested that he and Joseph should have their own celebration. Joseph did not think that Lent had necessarily been a period of fasting and abstinence for Gav. How Gav wanted to celebrate was with an expensive meal and a lot of coke. Normally, he was the one who had it, but he said he couldn’t get any because Joseph never gave him any money, which was not entirely true.

  Joseph had done embarrassing things in his time. Who hasn’t? he thought. He called a PR guy who had worked on their last show. Joseph could tell he was taken aback by the request although he was nice enough to put on a breezy no-prob-mate voice as if he organized coke deliveries all the time, which he probably did but not usually for fifty-eight-year-olds. He was not to know that this particular one was already a dab hand at squatting in the lavatory of smart restaurants chopping out lines on the seat. Gav had introduced him to that.

  Amazingly quickly, in no more than twenty minutes — Joseph would have liked to find someone who would come to repair a leaking pipe with such efficiency — a leather-clad motorbike messenger arrived and the deal was done. Gav, briefly, was happy.

  His therapist once said to Joseph, “The life you lead is the life you have chosen.” Joseph didn’t ask him what the choice would be if you were born in a slum in Delhi or found yourself in Auschwitz. What he did not tell his therapist was that choice was the last thing he was looking for. He wanted not to have control, to be devoid of power like a child, to be encircled by someone else’s strength: bound and powerless and with no regrets. It was only conditioning that made you feel regret. Or the Bible. Or the blue morning light and the mess and the credit cards with the white residue on their edges and the empty bottles and the broken glasses.

  Joseph’s father had once written a song that Joseph could relate to. It was called “Let Them See Your Scars.” It could have just been about him, but it was also about everyone: in great songs the specific becomes general, the objective personal. People who have never been to America understand “New York, New York.” We all know that The First Cut Is the Deepest. We always think You’ll Never Walk Alone.

  He wondered sometimes — not often — if his father had ever seen any of his shows. Joseph doubted it: not pure enough for him. Dinner and a West End show might not be his thing. Of course, Joseph did not know for certain. He had only seen him once in his life.

  Luckily, most people did not know Iz Herzl was his father. Sometimes it was mentioned in interviews in a believe-it-or-not kind of way — “surprisingly, lyricist Joseph Carter’s father is the famed political activist and singer Iz Herzl, but he scoffs at any notion that songwriting might be in the genes…” — but with a different surname he normally managed to fly under the radar. It was not that he was embarrassed by him — he was distinguished if you liked that kind of thing: a father you could admire, probably — it was just that Iz Herzl didn’t feel like his father. He was like a rhyme that works but doesn’t connect, like the one Joseph had come up with the other night: “hierarchy” and “teriyaki.” Even Cole Porter couldn’t fit that into a song.

  A long time ago, Iz Herzl had rejected him. In a letter that was sent a few years after their only meeting Joseph was told that he would be cut out of his father’s life “like a canker.” Joseph supposed that “canker” must be an archaic word used in folk songs and he had looked it up: it was a destructive growth on a tree that required excision before it killed it. He apparently had “betrayed” Iz Herzl, and maybe he had. Joseph didn’t care much. And yet, there was something intriguing about their connection, some itch that Joseph needed to scratch from time to time. After all, the man was his only living relative apart from his other children, whom Joseph knew nothing about. His mother had died long ago. He hardly remembered her. She was gone by the time he was five. His grandparents, her parents, who were named Carter, brought him up. At any rate, he lived at their house — a house in which the name of Iz Herzl was not to be mentioned.

  Although they had only met once, Joseph had seen Iz Herzl another time, ten years before. Their new show on Broadway, Monte Cristo, regarded as a surefire hit, had opened disastrously and closed after a week. The first night party was held at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. By midnight in New York you can get the morning papers, and someone had gone to find them. There was a whisper in Joseph’s ear: “We’ve got a problem with the Times…” That was one way of putting it. “Those who doubt the sterling qualities of Les Miserables might find their minds changed by a trip to the Shubert Theatre, where they will discover the noisy and witless facsimile that calls itself Monte Cristo. The audience’s desire to escape may well turn out to be as desperate as that of the Count himself, limply portrayed by…” As if a yellow fever flag had been hoisted, the party emptied out in about five minutes. Failure is catching on Broadway. Shirley was weeping. Alan had his head in his hands.
Joseph left.

  The closing notices were put up the next day and he booked himself a flight home. In the cab back from the airport, he was reading the paper and saw a piece about his father: it was his seventieth birthday and there was a concert that night at the Festival Hall. Joseph booked a ticket.

  The audience was quite different from the ones he was used to, not a first night kind of crowd. A lot of beards, and gray hair worn unwisely long, sometimes even ponytails — the Old Testament prophet look that Iz Herzl seemed to favor in the photos Joseph had seen. But there was a surprising amount of young people, earnest couples holding hands who probably wanted to make the world a better place, and believed that it might still be possible. A lot of badges and T-shirts with slogans. Very few AIDS ribbons, Joseph was glad to see. They tended to be the accessory of choice at the kind of shows he was involved with.

  He had presumed the show would be rather shambling, but from the beginning he was surprised at how well put together it was. A good set, simple: a patchwork quilt backdrop with a seemingly random mix of posters and photographs — Joseph recognized the miners’ strike and the riots at Sharpeville. There were drops right and left, mirror images, with the same giant photo of the man himself. The sound mix was balanced well and they had clearly got someone good to do the lighting. There’s a proper producer on this, Joseph thought.

  And the crowd there: Joseph wanted to organize buses to Heathrow, charter a plane and fly them to New York as quickly as possible to see Monte Cristo before it closed. They would certainly cheer. The audience in New York hadn’t. The Count could let them see his scars. Political prisoners, jails and escape from oppression. What more could they want?

  What his father had that night was what Joseph always prayed for: an audience show. No us and them, no division between stage and audience. They connect. They rhyme. Although the Festival Hall was full, there was a kind of intimacy there. It helped that the crowd knew the material — they cheered at the first strum of most of the songs — but Joseph had seen shows with familiar songs fall as flat as a pancake.

  It was billed as “Iz Herzl and Friends” but his father did not actually come on until the end of the first half. There were a lot of friends. For the first number a very young girl sang a folk song unaccompanied in Hebrew. Joseph remembered that Israel was where his father had first become famous. That was where he began collecting folk songs when he wasn’t freedom fighting.

  After the girl, a whole variety of people came on. Some spoke and some sang. He didn’t know who most of them were. There was a lot of talk about inspiration from people who’d been with Isaac Herzl in South Africa or Guatemala or on the Aldermaston March. Joseph knew that before too long someone was going to come on and talk about the famous demonstration outside the US Embassy. He kept thinking, How long can they keep this going without the star appearing? You’d never have got away with it in proper theater.

  Then about an hour in, the stage lights went off and stayed off for what seemed like an agonizingly long time. People began shouting his name. Someone screamed, “Happy birthday!” and everyone laughed and clapped. Then there was movement on the stage. All Joseph could see were little beams of light pointing horizontally out and moving downstage. Slowly a group of men assembled — they were miners with lighted helmets. A follow spot suddenly lit up a figure at the back and Iz Herzl walked forward to the front of the stage. The audience went wild. He didn’t acknowledge them at all. If he hadn’t started playing his guitar, Joseph thought they would go on cheering forever, but when he began singing the words If they take you from the light, And force you into darkest night everyone fell into an awed silence. When the miners began singing the chorus, Joseph could see tears rolling down the face of the man next to him.

  At the end of the song, the miners stood there impassively facing the audience as his father walked off. Then, one by one, they turned the lights in their helmets off until the stage was in darkness once again. That’s how you stage a number, that’s how you do it, Joseph thought in awe.

  Iz Herzl did not talk much, but he was a strangely charismatic figure, big and bearded with a powerful tenor voice, wearing a leather cap and a baggy suit that looked as if it was made from old burlap sacks. Joseph imagined that if you hugged him, he might smell of tobacco and mustiness. The greatest performers, he thought, give you an intense feeling that they are quite different from you, on some other plane completely, but the strength of their personality can pull you into their world. That was what Iz Herzl was like.

  The moment the audience loved most was the most intimate. Joseph thought it was a bit of a cheap trick. What he guessed to be Iz Herzl’s children were brought onstage. They clearly did not know what they were meant to be doing — the boy was tiny, maybe four or five, the girl a little older. They looked terrified. Iz Herzl began to sing and the little boy started crying. Bizarrely, people seemed to love that and they began to clap. Joseph did not understand much about children — the only child he had ever really known, certainly the only child he had loved, was Shirley’s daughter, Sally, who had died fifteen years ago — but he thought that what Iz Herzl was doing was cruel. The girl put her arms round the boy and glared at the audience. She had an angry, sulky look on her face. Joseph liked the look of her, he liked her spirit.

  The final song Iz Herzl did, the last of several encores, was the oddest moment for Joseph. Isaac Herzl sang “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” It was a fairly predictable choice at a concert like that—a song about an activist who had been wrongly executed—but he felt something move in his stomach: a hard little ball of lead. It’s my name, he thought, the name my father gave me at birth—Joe Hill Herzl—the name I have never used.

  Iz Herzl’s voice filled the hall, so powerful and loud that Joseph thought the sound system might not be up to it, that the speakers might begin to throb. The applause went on and on. He just stood there for a while, then he laid his guitar gently on the floor of the stage, gave the tiniest bow and walked off. When the lights came up and people began filing out, Joseph stayed in his seat for a while. He was thinking. He was rewriting the song Isaac Herzl was singing:

  Iz dreamed he saw Joe Hill tonight

  Unseen for thirty years

  Said he, “But Joe — I cut you out,”

  “Oh no,” Joe cried, “I’m here!”

  “Oh no,” Joe cried, “I’m here!”

  “Betrayal knifed my heart,” Iz cried,

  “You were like a canker.”

  Said Joe, “It wasn’t me, but you

  Although I hold no rancor

  Although I hold no rancor.”

  He was almost the last person to leave the hall. There was an old lady walking slowly up the aisle closest to him, leaning on a stick. She looked at him and smiled. Joseph wondered if she thought he was so overwhelmed by the concert that he was unable to get out of his seat.

  “Very moving,” she said. “So much to do in the world, so much bloodshed. Extraordinary man, isn’t he? He’s held us all in place.”

  “Yes,” Joseph said, “like an anchor.”

  Rose

  THE PROBLEM WITH HUDDIE was that his limbs were wasted. I felt that was an ambiguous description because it could imply that he might have wasted them by his own doing, like a talent that he had been careless with. The talents in question were walking and moving and breathing and he had not been careless with them: he had Duchenne, which was in the muscular dystrophy family, one of the forty or so versions of the disease and the most deadly, not that anyone was listing them by speed of death in Guinness World Records.

  I don’t really remember the beginning of the disease, but Carla told me. Huddie was about five. He had begun to have a kind of waddling walk that people thought was cute and funny. In fact he was compensating because his leg muscles were wasting. Doctors came to the house. At first, the things the doctors did made us laugh. Once, one of them knelt by Huddie and kept gently hitting his knee with a little steel hammer. I was on the other s
ide of the room watching them and I did it to myself with the edge of my hand. The difference was that my leg bounced upwards while Huddie’s did not. Even a reflex needs muscles. A year or so later, he seemed unable to run. Then, by the time he was nine or so, he began falling over all the time and could not get up.

  There were hushed conversations behind closed doors. Iz seemed to be around more, which was unusual in itself. Huddie kept going into hospital and I was not allowed to go with him. I knew things were being hidden from me. They should have told me what was happening; I don’t believe you should shield children from anything, even the worst things.

  What I remember most vividly was a van pulling up outside the house. I followed Carla and Iz outside and watched two men open the doors at the back and lower a wheelchair out. They pushed it through the front door and into the study.

  “Huddie!” Carla called.

  Huddie came in, slowly maneuvering himself on the crutches he had been using for a while, and stood in the corner. The wheelchair sat in the middle of the room and we all watched it warily for what seemed a long time, as if it was a strange animal that might attack at any moment. I knew there was no going back from this.

  I was intrigued by the things that were handed down from parent to child. We came from a family of songwriters, but clearly that particular gene had not passed down to me and Huddie because we had no talent in that direction whatsoever. It must have been passed down to our mysterious half brother, Joseph, though, because almost the only thing we knew about him was that he wrote songs.