On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Eugene would sneak single volumes down to his room hidden in his underwear and read them there by candlelight late at night. The books were like ghosts themselves, their margins crumbling to dust at his fingers’ touch. He’d read each story once quickly and if it was one he liked, a second time, lingeringly. Then, with its topic fresh in his memory, he would retell the story to the news-carriers at the Register office, while they waited for the truck to arrive with the papers. Sometimes he would draw it out over several days to increase the suspense.

  Daniel also had a paper route, though not as lucrative a one as the ex-Mayor’s son. He listened to Eugene Mueller’s stories with the ravished reverence of a disciple. They — and their presumed author — became an emotional necessity to him. Months ago he’d exhausted the school library’s meager resources — a ragged copy of thirteen tales by Poe and bowdlerised editions of Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds. Once he’d bicycled to Fort Dodge and back, forty miles each way, to see a double feature of old black-and-white horror movies. It was terrible, loving something so inaccessible, and all the more wonderful therefore, when the long drought came to an end. Even when Eugene confessed, privately, to having practiced on his friend’s credulity and had shown him his store of treasure, even then Daniel went on thinking of him as a superior person, set apart from other seventh and eighth graders, possibly even a genius.

  Daniel became a frequent overnight guest at the Mueller home. He ate with Eugene’s family at their dinner table, even times when his father was there. With all of them Daniel was charming, but he only came alive when he was alone with Eugene — either in the attic, reading and creating their own artless Grand Guignol, or in Eugene’s room, playing with the great arsenal of his toys and games.

  In his own way he was as bad — that is, as good — a social climber as his mother.

  Three days before he got his certificate for passing seventh grade, Daniel received third prize in a statewide contest sponsored by the Kiwanis (a pair of front row seats at a Hawkeye game of his choosing) for his essay on the topic, “Good Sports Make Good Citizens.” He read the essay aloud at a school assembly and everyone had to clap until Mr. Cameron, the Principal, held up his hand. Then Mr. Cameron gave him a book of speeches by Herbert Hoover, who was born in West Branch. Mr. Cameron said that someday, when the country got back on its feet again, he wouldn’t be surprised to see another Iowan occupying the White House. Daniel supposed that Mr. Cameron was referring to him and felt a brief intense ache of gratitude.

  On that same day the Weinrebs moved to their new home on Chickasaw Avenue, which was reckoned (by those who lived there) to be nearly as nice a neighborhood as Linden Drive. It was a smallish gray clapboard ranch-style house with two bedrooms. Inevitably the second bedroom fell to the twins, Aurelia and Cecelia, and Daniel was relegated to the room in the basement. Despite its gloom and the damp cinder-block walls he decided it was to be preferred to the twins’ room, being larger and so private that it could boast its own entrance onto the driveway.

  The last owner of the house had tried to make ends meet (and failed, apparently) by renting the basement room to a family of Italian refugees. Think of it: four people living in this one room, with two basement windows for light, and a sink with only a cold water tap!

  Daniel kept the laminated nameplate with their name on it: Bosola. Often late at night, alone in his room, he tried to imagine the sort of life the Bosolas had led hemmed in by these four gray walls. His mother said they’d probably been happier, which was her way of ignoring any otherwise incontrovertible misery. No one in the neighborhood knew what had become of them. Maybe they were still in Amesville. A lot of Italians lived in trailer courts on the outskirts of town and worked for Ralston-Purina.

  Daniel’s father was a refugee too, though his case was different from most. His mother had been American, his father a native-born Israeli. He’d grown up on a kibbutz four miles from the Syrian border, and gone to the University in Tel Aviv, majoring in chemistry. When he was twenty his maternal grandparents offered to put him through Dental School if he would come and live with them in Queens. A providential kindness, for two weeks after he left for the States the rockets were launched that destroyed most of Tel Aviv. On his twenty-first birthday he had the choice of which country’s citizen he wanted to be. At that point it couldn’t really be called a choice. He pledged his allegiance to the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stood, and changed his name from Shazer to Weinreb in deference to his grandfather and the bill he was footing at N.Y.U. He got through Dental School and joined the elder Weinreb’s faltering practice in Elmhurst, which went on faltering for twelve more years. The one action in his whole life he had seemed to undertake of his own spontaneous and uncoerced will was at age thirty-nine to marry sixteen-year-old Milly Baer, who had come to him with an impacted wisdom tooth. As Milly would often later insist, in her fits of reminiscense, even that choice had not been, in the final analysis, his.

  Daniel was never able to satisfactorily account for the fact that he didn’t like his father. Because he wasn’t as important or as well-to-do as Roy Mueller, for instance? No, for Daniel’s feeling, or lack of it, went back before the time he’d become aware of his father’s limitations in these respects. Because he was, after all, a refugee? Specifically, a Jewish refugee? No, for if anything he wasn’t sufficiently a Jewish refugee. Daniel was still young enough to take a romantic view of hardship, and to his way of thinking the Bosolas (as he imagined them) were a much better, more heroic sort than any Weinrebs whatsoever. Then why?

  Because — and this possibly was the real reason, or one of them — he sensed that his father, like every other father, expected him and, what was worse, wanted him to follow the same career that he’d been sinking in all through his life. He wanted Daniel to become a dentist.

  It wasn’t enough for Daniel to insist that he didn’t want to be one. He had to find something he did want to be. And he couldn’t. Not that it made a great deal of difference, yet. He was young, he had time. But even so — he didn’t like thinking about it.

  The house of Mrs. Boismortier, his old fourth-grade teacher, was the very last stop on Daniel’s route. She was an older woman, forty or fifty years old, and fat, like a lot of other women her age in Amesville. Her name was pronounced Boys-More-Teer. No one that Daniel had ever talked to could remember a time when there had been a Mr. Boismortier, but there must have been once in order for her to be a Mrs.

  Daniel remembered her as a careful rather than an inspired teacher, content to return eternally to the verities of spelling, grammer, and long division rather than to call down the lightning of a new idea. She would never read them stories, for instance, or talk about things from her own life. Her only livelier moments were on Fridays when for an hour at the end of the day she led her class in singing. They always started with the National Anthem and ended with “Song of Iowa.” Daniel’s three favorite songs in their songbook had been “Santa Lucia,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Anchors Aweigh.” Most teachers shied away from teaching music in the Friday free periods, because it was controversial, but Mrs. Boismortier, whenever the subject came up — at a PTA meeting or even in class discussions — simply declared that any country whose schoolchildren could not do justice to their own National Anthem was a country in deep trouble, and how could you argue with that? But for all her talk of God and Country, it was obvious to the children in her classes that she taught them singing because she enjoyed it herself. In every song her voice was loudest and loveliest, and no matter what kind of singer you might be yourself it was a pleasure to sing along because it was her voice you heard, not your own.

  Nevertheless, over the years Mrs. Boismortier had made enemies by insisting on teaching music, especially among undergoders, who were very strong in this part of Iowa, and very outspoken and sure of themselves. If you could believe the Register, they practically ran Iowa, and they’d been even more powerful in the days just after the defeat of th
e national Anti-Flight Amendment, when they were able to get the State Legislature to pass a law prohibiting all secular musical performances, live or recorded. Three days after Governor Brewster vetoed this law his only daughter was shot at and though it was never proven that her would-be killer had been an undergoder the crime did turn a lot of sympathizers away. Those days were over, and the worst that Mrs. Boismortier had to worry about now was the occasional broken window or dead cat strung up to her front porch. Once when Daniel was delivering her paper he found a two-inch hole drilled into the middle of the front door. At first he supposed it was for the paper, and then he realized it was meant to be a fairy-hole. As a sign of his solidarity Daniel made a tight cylinder of the paper and forced it into the hole, as if that were what it was there for. At school the next day Mrs. Boismortier went out of her way to thank him, and instead of repairing the hole she enlarged it and covered it with a metal plate that could be slipped to the side, thereby making it officially a slot for the Register.

  That had been the beginning of the special relationship between Daniel and Mrs. Boismortier. Often on the coldest winter nights she would waylay him when he brought the paper and have him come into her living room for a hot cup of something she made from corn starch. “Embargo cocoa” she called it. There were either books or pictures on all the walls, including a very careful watercolor of the First Baptist Church and a store next to it (where there wasn’t any now) called A P. Also, right in plain sight, with shelves of records above it up to the ceiling, was a stereo phonograph. There wasn’t anything illegal about that, strictly speaking, but most people who had records — the Muellers, for instance — kept them out of sight and, usually, locked up. It seemed very gutsy, considering the way she was harrassed in general.

  As his fingers and ears grew warmer and started tingling, Mrs. Boismortier would ask him questions. Somehow she’d learned that he liked ghost stories, and she would recommend titles that he could ask his mother to take out for him from the adult section of the library. Sometimes these were a little too plodding and high-toned for his taste but twice at least she hit the nail on the head. She almost never talked about herself, which seemed unusual in someone basically so talkative.

  Gradually, as he began to realize that despite her reticence and her fat incapable body Mrs. Boismortier was a definite human being, Daniel began to grow curious. Mostly about the music. He knew that music was not something you talked about with other people, but it was hard not to think about, especially with those shelves of records looming down, like a microfilm library of all the sins in the world. Not that music was wrong, exactly. But where there’s smoke, as they say. After all, it was music that helped people fly. Not listening to music, of course, but doing it. And anything associated with flying was irresistably interesting.

  And so, one snowy afternoon in November, after he’d accepted his cup of embargo cocoa, he screwed up his courage and asked if he might be allowed to hear one of her records.

  “Why surely, Daniel, what record would you like to hear?”

  The only pieces of music he knew by name were the songs in the school’s songbook. He was certain, just because they were in the songbook, that those weren’t the kinds of music that people used to fly.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Something that you like.”

  “Well, here’s something I listened to last night, and it seemed quite splendid, though it may not appeal to you at all. A string quartet, by Mozart.” Ever so tenderly, as if the record were a living thing, she slipped it from its cardboard sleeve and placed it on the turntable.

  He braced his mind against some unimaginable shock, but the sounds that issued from the speakers were dull and innocuous — wheezings and whinings, groanings and grindings that continued interminably without getting anywhere. Once or twice out of the murk he could hear melodies begin to get started but then they’d sink back into the basic diddle-diddle-diddle of the thing before you could start to enjoy them. On and on and on, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but all of a dullness and drabness uniform as housepaint. Even so, you couldn’t just say thank you, that was enough, not while Mrs. Boismortier was swaying her head back and forth and smiling in a faraway way, as if this really were some incredible mystic revelation. So he stared at the record revolving on the turntable and sweated it out to the end. Then he thanked Mrs. Boismortier and trudged home through the snow feeling betrayed, disillusioned and amazed.

  That couldn’t be all there was to it. It just could not. She was hiding something. There was a secret.

  That winter, in the first week of the new year, there was a national crisis. Of course if you could believe the Register the nation was always having crises, but they seldom impinged on Iowa. There had been a small uproar once when the Federal Government threatened to send in agents to collect the twelve percent luxury tax on meat, but before a real confrontation could develop the Supreme Court declared Iowa to have been right all along in maintaining that meats, except for ham and sausages, were “unprocessed” and so not taxable, at least in Iowa. Another time there had been a riot in Davenport concerning which Daniel only remembered that the Register printed an unusual number of photos, all showing the State Police in firm control. With these two exceptions life had gone along from day to day without being affected by the news. What happened in January was that unidentified terrorists blew up the Alaska pipeline. Despite precautions this had happened many times before, and there was supposed to be a foolproof system for shutting down the flow, patching up the damage, and getting back to normal before there were major repercussions. This time, though, several miles of line were taken out by bombs that went off at neat six hundred yard intervals. According to the Register this meant that the bombs must have traveled inside the giant pipes, with the oil, and there were diagrams showing why this was impossible. Fairies were blamed, but so were, variously, Iran, Panama, several sorts of terrorists, and the League of Women Voters.

  How this affected Iowa was very simple: there was no fuel. Every conceivable form of leverage and legal blackmail was used to wangle concessions for the Farm Belt states, but the fuel really wasn’t there. Now they were going to have a taste of what winter rationing was like for the unfortunates who lived in less affluent parts of the country.

  The taste was bitter. The winter’s cold crept into stores and schools and houses, into the food you ate and the water you bathed in, into your every bone and thought. The Weinrebs camped in their own living room and kitchen to squeeze as much warmth as possible from the remaining liters of fuel in the tank. After eight P.M. there was no electricity, so you couldn’t even read or watch tv to make the freezing hours pass a little faster. Daniel would sit with his parents in the dark and silent room, unmoving, unable to sleep, hoarding the warmth of his sweaters and blankets. The boredom became a worse torment than the cold. Nine-thirty was bedtime. He slept between his two sisters and began to smell of their piss.

  Sometimes he would be allowed to visit Eugene and if he were lucky he might be asked to spend the night. The Muellers’ house was noticably warmer. For one thing, they had a fireplace and through the early evening there would always be a fire going. They used the books in the attic as fuel (with Daniel’s help Eugene was able to spirit away their horror stories), as well as unwanted sticks of furniture. Mr. Mueller also had a source (Daniel suspected) of bootleg fuel.

  The Register had temporarily suspended publication for the duration of the crisis, so that at least he didn’t have to freeze his ass off delivering papers. The world seemed different without news. Daniel hadn’t supposed, till now, that he was interested in the official world represented by the Register, the world of strikes and settlements, debates and issues, Republicans and Democrats. He would have been hard-pressed to say what most of the headlines he’d looked at were about, but now that there were none it was as though civilization had ground to a halt, like some old Chevy that no one could get started, as though winter had overtaken not only nature but history as well
.

  In March, with life beginning to look almost ordinary again, Daniel’s father came down with pneumonia. The Iowa winters had always been hard for him. He got through them by pumping himself full of antihistamines. Finally like a tooth that’s been drilled and filled until there’s nothing left of it, his health collapsed. He’d gone into the office feverish and had to let his nurse finish the draining of a root-canal when he couldn’t keep his hands from shaking. Against her employer’s protest the nurse called in Dr. Caskey from down the hall. Caskey, after examining his colleague, wrote out an admission order to the hospital in Fort Dodge.

  Through the whole crisis hospitals were the one place you could be warm, and Milly, Daniel and the twins would have basked at Abraham’s bedside every day from the start of visiting hours till the nurses threw them out — if only Fort Dodge hadn’t been so far away. As it was, they wouldn’t have seen him at all if it hadn’t been for Roy Mueller, who drove in to Fort Dodge in his pickup two or three times a week and always had room for either Daniel or Milly, though not for both at once.

  There wasn’t a great deal of communication at the best of times between Daniel and his father. Abraham Weinreb was fifty-two now and he looked, with his fringe of gray hair and the loose flesh wrinkling on his face, like someone living on Social Security. Since coming to the hospital he had developed a strain of lachrymose seriousness that made Daniel more than usually uneasy when they were together. One windy Saturday during the first real thaw of the year Abraham took a New Testament from the metal night-table by his bed and asked Daniel to read aloud to him from the beginning of John. All the while he read Daniel kept worrying whether his father were developing into some kind of religious fanatic, and when he told Milly about it that night she was even more alarmed. They were both certain he was dying.