On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  At the end of February, only a couple weeks before Daniel was due to be released, the Supreme Court ruled, in a six-to-three decision, that the measures taken by Iowa and other Farm Belt states to prohibit the distribution of newspapers and related printed material originating in other states was in violation of the First Amendment. Three days later Daniel was released from Spirit Lake.

  On the night before he was to leave the prison Daniel dreamed that he was back in Minneapolis, standing on the shore of the Mississippi at the point where it was spanned by the pedestrian bridge. But now instead of that remembered bridge there were only three inch-thick steel cables — a single cable to walk on and two higher up to hold on to. The girl with Daniel wanted him to cross the river on these simulated vines, but the span was too wide, the river too immensely far below. Going out even a little way seemed certain death. Then a policeman offered to handcuff one of his hands to a cable. With that safeguard Daniel agreed to try.

  The cables bounced and swayed as he inched his way out over the river, and his insides frothed with barely controlled terror. But he kept going. He even forced himself to take real footsteps instead of sliding his feet along the cable.

  At the midpoint of the bridge he stopped. The fear was gone. He looked down at the river where its storybook blue reflected a single sunlit cloud. He sang. It was a song he’d learned in the fourth grade from Mrs. Boismortier.

  “I am the captain of the Pinafore,” Daniel sang, “and a right good captain too. I’m very very good, and be it understood, I command a right good crew.”

  From either shore choruses of admiring spectators replied, like the faintest of echoes.

  He didn’t know the rest of the song, so he stopped. He looked at the sky. He was feeling terrific. If it hadn’t been for the damned handcuffs he could have flown. The air that had accepted his song would have accepted his body with no greater difficulty. He was as sure of this as he was that he was alive and his name was Daniel Weinreb.

  PART TWO

  5

  The clouds over Switzerland were pink puffy lobes of brain with, at intervals, great splintered bones of granite thrusting up through them. She loved the Alps, but only when she was above them. She loved France too, all purposeful and rectilinear in solemn shades of dun and olive-tinged viridian. She loved the whole round world, which seemed, at this moment, to be present to view in all its revolving glory, as the Concorde rose still higher.

  On the console before her she jabbed the numbers of her wish, and in an instant the beneficient mechanism beside her seat ejected yet another pink lady, her third. Apparently it made no difference, at this altitude, that she was only seventeen. It was all so lawless and lovely, and she loved it all, the pink ladies, the almonds, the off-blue Atlantic whizzing by below. She loved most of all to be returning home at long, long last and to be saying farewell and fuck you to the grey walls, grey skies, and grey smocks of Ste. Ursule.

  Boadicea Whiting was an enthusiast. She could, with the same heartfelt if fleeting passion of appreciation, applaud the world’s least raindrop or its most lavish hurricane. But she was no scatterbrain. She had other passions more abiding, and the chief of these was for her father, Mr. Grandison Whiting. She had not seen him for nearly two years, not even on cassettes, since he was fastidious about his personal correspondence and would send only hand-written letters. Though he’d written quite regularly, and though he was quite right (in matters of taste he was infallible), she had missed him terribly, missed the warmth and light of his presence, like a planet kept from the sun, like a nun. What a life it is, the life of repentence — or rather, what a life it isn’t! But (as he’d written in one of his weekly letters) the only way to learn the price of something is to pay it. And (she’d replied, though the letter was never sent) pay it and pay it.

  The seatbelt sign winked off, and Boadicea unstrapped herself and climbed the short windy staircase to the lounge. One other passenger had beat her to the bar, a heavy, red-faced man in a really ugly red blazer. Synthetic, she thought — a judgement against which there could be no appeal. A sin (Grandison was wont to say) may be forgiven, but not a synthetic. The man in the blazer was complaining, nasally, to the steward at the bar that every time he’d ordered a drink during takeoff the god-damn idiot machine had flashed a god-damn sign at him to say sorry, he wasn’t old enough, and god-damn it, he was thirty-two! With each god-damn, he would glance at Boadicea to see if she were scandalized. She couldn’t keep from beaming at the steward’s explanation — that the computer had got the man’s passport or seat number mixed up with someone else’s. The man mistook the meaning of her smile. With the miraculous self-regard of his kind, he came over and offered her a drink. She said she would like a pink lady.

  Would four be a mistake, she wondered? Would it prevent her, when she arrived, from shining? It would scarcely do to leave in disgrace and return, two years later, drunk. So far, however, she felt in command of herself, if maybe slightly more susceptible than usual.

  “Aren’t the clouds beautiful?” she said, when he’d returned with the drink and they had settled down before their first class view of heaven.

  Dismissing the question with a sociable smile, he asked if this were her first trip to America. Evidently, Ste. Ursule had done its work. She said no, it had been her first trip to Europe and now she was coming back.

  He asked her what she had seen. She said she’d seen art museums and churches mostly. “And you?” she asked.

  “Oh, I didn’t have time to go in for that kind of thing. It was a business trip.”

  “Oh. What business are you in?” She felt a guttersnipe delight in asking that most American of questions.

  “I’m a representative for Consolidated Food Systems.”

  “Really? My uncle is a representative too, though not for CFS. He has some connection with them, though.”

  “Well, CFS is the biggest company in Des Moines, so it’s not surprising.”

  “Is that where you live?”

  “I live just about anywhere CFS cares to send me, and at this point they’ve sent me just about anywhere.” He had that down pat. She wondered if it were something he’d made up himself at one time, or if all the CFS salesmen learned it when they were being trained. Then he took her by surprise. “Do you know,” he said in a tone of completely believable regret, and even thoughtfulness, “I do have an apartment in Omaha, but I haven’t seen the inside of it for over a year.”

  At once she felt guilty for baiting him. And why? Because he had a paunch and didn’t know how to dress? Because his voice was the whining, forlorn voice of the prairie? Because he had wanted the few minutes of their passage across the ocean to bear the stamp of an actual human encounter? Didn’t she, after all?

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think I may be drunk,” she said. “I’m not used to airplanes.”

  The clouds were now so far below they looked like a formica tabletop, opaque white whorled with a dismal greyish blue. In fact, the ledge on which she’d placed her drink was made of just such lamentable formica.

  “But I like,” she added, a little desperately, as he continued simply staring, “to fly. I think I could spend my whole life on the wing, just whizzing about like this. Whiz, whiz.”

  He looked at his watch so as not to have to look before him at the blue beyond the glass. Even here, she realized, even at twenty-five thousand feet, it was bad form to praise the act and power of flight. America!

  “And where do you live?” he asked.

  “In Iowa, on a farm.”

  “Is that so? A farmer’s daughter.” He fairly underlined his innuendo with a grin of masculine condescension.

  She could not keep hold of a sense of fairness. Everything about the man was an offense to decency — his flat, uninflected speech, his complacence, his stupidity. He seemed thoroughly to deserve his wretched life, and she wanted, meanly, to make him see the actual squalid shape of it.

  “Yes, that’s me. T
hough if one has to be any particular kind of daughter these days, that’s the kind to be. Don’t you agree?”

  He agreed, with a sufficient sense of having been deflated. He knew what she meant. She meant she had money and he did not, and that this was a superior advantage to being of the advantaged sex.

  “My name is Boadicea,” she informed him, seeming to offer, briefly, her hand, but then, before he could respond, reaching for her drink.

  “Boadicea,” he repeated, changing every vowel.

  “My friends call me Bo, or sometimes Boa.”

  Among a certain class this would have been enough. But he was certainly not of that class, nor ever would be, though it was clear from the way his eyes were fixed on her now, that the wish lingered on.

  “And my father calls me Bobo.” She sighed theatrically. “It is hard to go through life with such a peculiar name, but my father is a fanatical Anglophile, as was his father before him. Both Rhodes scholars! I’m fairly sure my brother won’t be though. His name is Serjeant, and my sister’s is Alethea. I’m lucky, I suppose, that I wasn’t christened Brittania. Though as to nicknames, then I’d have had a choice between Brit and Tania. Do you like England?”

  “I’ve been there, but only on business.”

  “Does business lift you up so far, then, that liking simply doesn’t enter in?”

  “Well, it rained most of the time I was there, and the hotel I stayed in was so cold I had to wear my clothes to bed, and there was food rationing then, which is why I was sent there to begin with. But aside from that I guess I liked it well enough. The people were friendly, the ones I had to deal with.”

  She looked at him with a blank smile, and sipped the pink lady, which had begun to seem cloying. From marveling at the elegance and bitchery of what she’d just said she hadn’t taken in a word of his.

  “I find,” he said resolutely, “that people usually are, if you let ’em.”

  “Oh, people… yes. I think so too. People are wonderful. You’re wonderful, I’m wonderful, and the steward has wonderful red hair, though not as wonderful by half as my father’s. I have a theory about red hair.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I believe it’s a sign of spiritual distinction. Swinburne had intensely red hair.”

  “Who was Swinburne?”

  “The greatest poet of Victorian England.”

  He nodded. “There’s Dolly Parsons too. Her hair’s pretty red.”

  “Who’s Dolly Parsons?”

  “The faith-healer. On tv.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s only a theory.”

  “Some of the things she does are pretty incredible too. A lot of people really believe in her. I’ve never heard anyone else say it was her hair though. I’ve got a cousin out in Arizona — he’s got red hair and says he hates it. He says people are always ribbing him about it, give him funny looks.”

  She felt, as she was listening to the steady unreeling of his witless well-meaning speech, as if she had mounted a carousel, which was now revolving too fast for her to get off. The plane had canted several degrees to the left. The sun had moved noticeably higher in the west, so that its light made vast semaphores on the heaving waves, from which the clouds had all been wiped away.

  “You must excuse me,” she said, and hastily left the lounge.

  In the washroom a dim green light seemed to spill from the mirrors in a manner at once weird and reassuring. It would have been a wholly habitable refuge if only there hadn’t been, in each of the mirrors, the self-reproach of her own image.

  Lord knows, she tried. How many weeks of her life had she wasted trying to subdue and civilize this other Boadicea, dressing her in overpriced designer clothes that ceased to be soigné the moment she removed them from their splendid boxes, dieting to the verge of anorexia, and fussing with creams, lotions, lashes, pots of rouge, copying on the oval canvas of her face the faces of Rubens, of Modigliani, of Reni and Ingres. But always behind these viscid masks was the same too full, too lively face, framed by the same abundant, intractable mid-brown hair, which was her mother’s hair. Indeed, she was her mother’s daughter through and through, except her mind, which was her own. But who is solaced by a sense of having perspicuous intellectual gifts? No one, certainly, who is drunk and surrounded by mirrors and wants, more than anything else in the world, to be loved by the likes of Grandison Whiting, a man who has declared that the first duty of an aristocrat is to his own wardrobe.

  Wealth, Grandison Whiting had told his children, is the foundation of a good character, and though he might say some things, like the remark about the wardrobe, only for effect, he was sincere about this. Wealth was also, he would allow, the root of evil, but that was just the reverse of the coin, a logical necessity. Money was freedom, as simple as that, and people who had none, or little, could not be judged by the same standards as those who had some, or much, for they were not free agents. Virtue, therefore, was an aristocratic prerogative, and vice as well.

  This was just the beginning of Grandison Whiting’s system of political economy, which went, in all its corollaries and workings-out, much farther and deeper than Boadicea had ever been allowed to follow, for at certain crucial moments in the unfolding of his system she had been required to go off to bed, or the gentlemen would remove themselves from the table to have their ideas and their cigars in masculine seclusion. Always, it seemed, that moment would come just when she thought she had begun to see him as he truly was — not the kindly, careless Santa Claus of a father indulging her in her girlish adorations, but the real Grandison Whiting whose renaissance energies seemed a more potent argument for the existence of God than any of the feeble notions of apologetics that she’d been required to learn by heart at Ste. Ursule. Ste. Ursule itself had been the most drastic of these exiles from his presence. Though she had come to understand the need for it (with her analyst’s help), though she had even wrung a consent from her own heart at the last, the two years’ exile from her father had been bitter bread indeed — all the more bitter because she had so clearly brought it on herself.

  It had begun, as all her sorrows did, with an enthusiasm. She’d received a video camera for her fourteenth birthday, the latest model Editronic. Within three weeks she had so completely mastered the programs of which the camera was capable, and their various combinations, that she was able to construct a documentary about the operations and daily life of Worry (as the Whiting estate, and the film, was called) that was at once so smooth, so lively, and so professionally innocuous that it was shown in prime time on the state educational channel. This, in addition to what she called her “real movies,” which, if less suited to public broadcast, were no less prodigious. Her father gave his approval and encouragement — what else could he have done? — and Boadicea, exalted, exultant, was swept up by a passion of creativity as by a tornado.

  In the three months following her freshman year of high school she mastered a range of equipment and programming techniques that would have required as many years of study at a technical college. Only when, with her father’s help, she had obtained her mail order diploma and a union license did she put forth the proposal that she had along been working toward. Would he, she asked, let her make an in-depth study of his own life? It would be a companion piece to Worry, but on a much loftier scale both as to length and to intensity.

  At first he refused. She pleaded. She promised it would be a tribute, a monument, an apotheosis. He temporized, declaring that while he believed in her genius, he also believed in the sanctity of private life. Why should he spend a million dollars on the security of his house and grounds and then allow his own Bobo to expose that dear-bought privacy to the common gaze? She promised that no sanctums would be violated, that her film would do for him what Eisenstein had done for Stalin, what Riefenstahl had done for Hitler. She adored him, and she wanted the world to kneel beside her. It would, she knew it would, if only he would let her have the chance. At last — what else could he have done? — he consented, with t
he proviso that if he did not approve the finished product, it would be shown to no one else.

  She went to work at once, with that fresh and resistless energy that only adolescence can command, and skill very nearly equal to her energy. The first rushes were in the promised hieratic manner and made Grandison Whiting seem even more Grandisonian than he did off-screen. He moved through the sceneries of his life with the ponderous, hypnotic grace of a Sun-King, his bright red hair forming a kind of aureole about his palely perfect Celtic face. Even his clothes seemed to allegorize some inner, unfailing nobility.

  The film’s fascination for Grandison himself must have been as irresistible as it was embarrassing. It was so patently an act of worship. But it might, for all that, have its use. The resources of art are not often devoted so unstintingly, after all, to celebrating the values of the very rich; or when they were, there is liable to be a perceptible sense of a commodity being bought and paid for, a smell, as of banks of cut flowers, that is sweet but not wholly natural. Boadicea’s film had none of the high gloss of captive art, and yet it was, possibly, in its headlong way, a real achievement.

  The work went on. Boadicea was allowed to resume her school attendance at the Amesville High School on a reduced schedule so as to have advantage of the daylight hours. As she felt more secure in the possession of her skills, she permitted herself liberties, little lyric departures from the early grand manner of the film. She caught her father, quite unawares, rough-housing with Dow Jones, his spaniel bitch. She recorded minutes, and soon whole cassettes, of his authentic, and delectable, table-talk, and one of these occasions was when her uncle Charles was on hand. Uncle Charles was the head of the House Ways and Means Committee. She followed her father about on a business trip to Omaha and Dallas, and there was some satisfactory footage of what seemed bonafide wheeling and dealing.

  She knew, though, that it was not, and she became obsessed (both as artist and as daughter) with penetrating to those shadowed recesses of his life where (she believed) he was most fully himself. She knew that what he ventured to say before her cameras differed essentially from what he would have said in candor, among friends; differed still from what, in his soul, he held to be truth. Or rather she suspected this; for with his children Grandison Whiting would only throw out the most equivocal hints as to his own opinions on any matters more serious than questions of taste and comportment. Instead, he had a donnish knack for showing how, on the one hand, one might think this, or, on the other hand, that, leaving it quite up in the air which of the twain, if either, represented the convictions of Grandison Whiting.