On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  As the film progressed, and then, as it did not progress, Boadicea found herself running up against this equivocalness in everything her father said, in his very smiles. The more she considered, the less she understood, though she continued, still, to adore. It could not be that her father simply lacked a coherent view of the world and his place in it, that he did whatever had to be done to advance his interests on the basis of mere everyday expedience. This may have been the case with her Uncle Charles (who was, in the way of much younger brothers, as devoted to Grandison as Boadicea herself); it may be the case with many men who inhabit the corridors of power by birthright rather than by conquest; but it was not the case with him, not conceivably.

  She began to pry. Left alone in his office, she would read the papers lying on his desk; she searched the drawers. She eavesdropped on phone calls, on his conversations with the staff and operations personnel, on their conversations about him. She learned nothing. She began to spy. With the equipment and competence she’d acquired in order to make her films she was able to bug his office, his private sitting room, and the smoking room. Grandison knew this, for his million-dollar security system was proof against much more formidable assaults than this, but he allowed it to go on. He simply refrained from saying anything in these rooms that he would not have said before a delegation from the Iowa Council of Churches. Indeed, Boadicea was audience to just such a delegation, who had come to enlist her father’s support (and through him, her uncle’s) for legislation that would withhold federal funds from all states and cities that directly or indirectly allowed tax dollars to be spent on cheap Argentine grain. Grandison was never more eloquent, though the delegation received no more, in the end, than his signature — and not on a check at that, but on a petition.

  She could not turn back. It was no longer for the movie’s sake, or for the sake of any rational need. She surrendered, as to a long-resisted vice. With shame and with a trembling foreboding that there must be bitter consequences to so unseemly an act, yet with a maenad’s reckless pleasure in the very enormity of the risk, she placed a microphone behind the headboard of the bed in their best guest room. His father’s mistress, Mrs. Reade, was expected to be visiting Worry soon. She was also a friend of long-standing, and the wife of the director of an Iowa insurance company in which Grandison held a controlling interest. Surely in these circumstances her father would reveal something.

  Her father did not go to Mrs. Reade’s room till late in the evening, and Boadicea had to sit in the sweaty embrace of her earphones, listening to the interminable sound track of Toora-Loora Turandot, a weary old Irish musical that Mrs. Reade had taken upstairs from the library. The minutes crept by, and the music poked along, and then at last Grandison knocked, and could be heard to enter, and to say: “Enough is enough, Bobo, and this, surely, is too much.”

  “Darling?” said the voice of Mrs. Reade.

  “A moment, my love. I have one thing more to say to my daughter, who is eavesdropping on us at this moment, while pretending to study her French. You are to be finished, Bobo. In Switzerland, at a very highly recommended finishing school in Vilars. I’ve already informed the principal at Amesville that you’ll be going abroad. To learn, I sincerely hope, better manners than you’ve shown evidence of these last few months. You’re to leave at six in the morning, so let me say now, by way of parting, shame on you, Bobo, and bon voyage!”

  “Good-bye, Miss Whiting,” said Mrs. Reade. “When you’re in Switzerland you must look up my niece Patricia. I’ll send you her address.” At that point the microphone was disconnected.

  All during the drive from Des Moines — and they were now, a sign announced, only twenty-two miles from Amesville — Boadicea had been too upset to talk. She hadn’t meant to be rude to Carl Mueller, though it must have seemed like rudeness. It was anger, raw white anger that would return in surges of never-diminishing intensity and then, for a while, recede, leaving behind, like the wastes of oil and tar on a seaport’s beach, the blackest of black depressions, a horror-stricken sorrow during which she would be assaulted by images of violent self-immolation — of the Saab crashing into a power pylon and bursting into flames, of opened veins, shotgun blasts, and other spectacular annihilations, images she rather entertained than resisted, since to have such monstrous thoughts was in itself a kind of revenge. And then, suddenly irresistibly, the anger would return, so that she would have to press her eyes closed and clench her fists to keep from being overcome.

  Yet she knew all the while that such transports were ridiculous and uncalled-for and that she was, in some sense, indulging herself. Her father, in sending Carl Mueller to the airport, had meant no slight, still less a chastisement. He had planned to come for her himself, his note had said, until this very morning when a business crisis had required him to go to Chicago. Similar crises had brought similar disappointments before, though never so passionate nor so unremitting as this. She really must calm down. If she returned to Worry in this state, she was certain to betray herself before Serjeant or Alethea. Just the thought of them, the mention of their names in her mind, could start her off again. Two years she’d been away, and they had sent a stranger to welcome her home. It was not to be believed, it could never be forgiven.

  “Carl?”

  “Miss Whiting?” He did not take his eyes from the road.

  “I expect you’ll think this is silly, but I wonder if you could take me anywhere else but to Worry. The nearer we get, and we’re so near now, the more unable I feel to cope.”

  “I’ll go where you like, Miss Whiting, but there aren’t all that many places to go.”

  “A restaurant, somewhere away from Amesville? You haven’t had dinner, have you?”

  “No, Miss Whiting. But your folks will be expecting you.”

  “My father’s in Chicago, and as to my brother and sister, I doubt that either of them has gone to any personal expense of energy on account of my arrival. I’ll simply phone and say that I stopped in Des Moines to do some shopping — it’s what Alethea would do — and that I’m not equal to driving on to Amesville till I’ve had dinner. Do you mind?”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Whiting. I could do with a bite to eat, I guess.”

  She studied his blunt profile in silence, marvelling at his impassivity, the quiet fixity of his driving, which could not, on these monotonous roads, require such unwavering attention.

  As they were approaching a cloverleaf, he slowed, and asked, still without looking at her, “Somewhere quiet? There’s a pretty good Vietnamese restaurant over in Bewley. At least, that’s what they say.”

  “I think, actually, I’d prefer somewhere noisy. And a steak. I’m starved for the taste of rare midwestern beef.”

  He did, then, turn to look at her. His cheek dimpled with the inception of a smile, but whether it was a friendly smile, or only ironic, she couldn’t tell, for his sunglasses masked his eyes. In any case, they were not, she would have supposed, especially candid eyes.

  “Aren’t there places people go,” she insisted, “up by the border? Especially on Saturday nights. This is Saturday night.”

  “You’d need ID,” he said.

  She took out a plastic packet of cards and handed them to Carl Mueller. There was a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a Reader’s Digest Subscription Library card, an Iowa Women’s Defense League Registration card, a card declaring her to be a tithing member of the Holy Blood Pentecostal Mission Church (with a laminated photo), and assorted charge cards, all of them identifying her as Beverley Whittaker, age 22, of 512 Willow Street, Mason City, Iowa.

  The Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse combined wholesomeness and elegance in a manner archetypally midwestern. Under a glowing greenhouse ceiling lattices of pipes supported an aerial meadow of herbs and houseplants in hanging pots and tiers of terracotta planters. Beneath the greenery a great many antique kitchen tables of oak and pine (all tagged for sale, as were the plants) were grouped about an implausibly large dance floor. It really had b
een, long ago, a roller rink. Two couples were out on the floor dancing, with lively unspectacular competence, to the Chocolate Doughnut Polka. It was only seven o’clock: everyone else was eating dinner.

  The food was wonderful. Boadicea had explained the exact nature of its superiority to anything they might have eaten in Switzerland, had explained it into the ground. Now, with dessert still to be chosen, she had to think of something else for them to talk about, since Carl seemed perfectly prepared to sit there and say nothing. Even with his sunglasses off, his face was unreadable, though handsome enough, considered simple as sculpture: the broad brow and blunt nose, the massive muscles of the neck tapering into the simple geometries of his crew cut, the emphatic carving of the lips, nostrils, and eyes, which yet, for all their distinctness, yielded no meanings of a psychological order. If he smiled, it was that mechanical sort of smile that suggested gears and pulleys. Clank, screek, snik, and then a little card emerges from the metal slot with the word SMILE on it. Sitting there, facing him across the little spray of bachelor buttons and petunias, she tried it herself — tightening the corner of her lips, and lifting them, notch by notch. But then, before he’d noticed, the pendulum swung back and she felt the sting of guilt. What right had she to expect Carl Mueller to be forthcoming with her? She was nothing to him but the boss’s daughter, and she’d taken every mean advantage of that position, commandeering his company as though he had no life or feelings of his own. And then blaming him!

  “I’m sorry,” she said, with an utter sincerity of contrition.

  Carl crinkled his brow. “For what?”

  “For dragging you off like this. For taking up your time. I mean—” She pressed her fingers to the sides of her head just above the cheekbones, where the flux of various miseries was beginning to take the form of a monster headache. “I mean, I didn’t ask, did I, whether you had other plans for this evening?”

  He produced one of his clockwork smiles. “That’s okay, Miss Whiting. I didn’t exactly plan on coming here to Elmore tonight, but what the hell. Like you say, the food’s great. You worried about your folks?”

  “My feelings are pretty much the opposite of worry. I’m thoroughly pissed off with all of them.”

  “That’s what I’d gathered. Of course, it’s none of my business, but I can say for a fact that your father didn’t have much choice whether or not to go to Chicago.”

  “Oh yes, I learned long ago that business is business. And I don’t — I can’t — blame him. But Serjeant could have come. He is my brother.”

  “I didn’t mention it before, Miss Whiting—”

  “Beverley,” she corrected. Earlier she’d made a game of making him call her by the name on her false ID.

  “I didn’t mention it before, Miss Whiting, because it didn’t seem my place to, but the reason your brother couldn’t come for you is that two weeks ago he got his license suspended for drunk driving. He was driving home from Elmore, as a matter of fact.”

  “He could have come along with you then. So could Alethea.”

  “Maybe they could. But I don’t think either of them cares that much for my company. Not that they’ve got any kind of grudge against me. But after all, I’m just one of the operations managers, not a friend of the family.” With which — and with, it seemed, no sense at all of its being a questionable act — he poured the last of the wine in the carafe into his own glass.

  “If you want to take me home now, that’s all right.”

  “Just relax, Miss Whiting.”

  “Beverley.”

  “Okay, Beverley.”

  “There actually is a real Beverley Whittaker. She was in Switzerland, hiking. We met in a hospice about halfway up Mont Blanc. There was the most incredible lightning storm. Once you’ve seen lightning in the mountains, you can understand why the Greeks put their most important god in charge of it.”

  Carl nodded gloomily.

  She had to stop chattering, but the long silences, when they developed, panicked her equally.

  Another couple had gone out on the dance floor, but just as they started dancing the music stopped. The silence enlarged.

  She had a rule of thumb for such situations, and it was to take an interest in other people, since that was what they were interested in.

  “And, uh, what are you in charge of?” she asked.

  “Pardon?” But his eyes connected just long enough to let her see that he’d understood — and resented — the question.

  Which, nevertheless, she must repeat. “You said you were an operations manager. Which operation do you manage?”

  “Whatever has to do with the work crews. Recruitment and housing primarily. Transport, payroll, supervision.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a job that has to be done.”

  “Of course. My father says it’s the most important operation on the farm.”

  “That’s a way of saying it’s the dirtiest. Which it is.”

  “Well, it’s not what I meant. In fact, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You would if you had to deal with some of the types we end up with. In another month or so, at the height of it, we’ll have something like twelve hundred on the payroll, and of that twelve hundred I’d say a good half of them are no better than animals.”

  “I’m sorry, Carl, but I just can’t accept that.”

  “Well, there’s no reason you should have to, Miss Whiting.” He smiled. “Beverley, that is. Anyway, it’s a good job, and a hell of a lot of responsibility for someone my age, so it would be crazy to complain, if that’s what it seems like I’m doing. It’s not.”

  They were rescued by the waitress who came and asked them what they wanted for dessert. Carl asked for Bavarian cream. Boadicea, because it was her first meal back in America, ordered apple pie.

  A new polka had started up, and Boadicea, admitting defeat, turned her chair sideways to watch the dancers. There was a couple out on the floor now who actually could dance, whose bodies moved with the motions of life. They made the other dancers look like the simulacra you paid to see inside a tent at a county fair. The girl was especially good. She wore a wide, whirling, gypsyish skirt with a flounce at the hem, and the sway and flare and swirl of the skirt seemed to infuse the bland music with energies of an altogether higher order. The boy danced with equal energy but less panache. His limbs moved too abruptly, while his torso seemed never quite to unlock from its innate crouch. It was the body of a Brueghel peasant. Even so, the delight in his face was so lively, and it was such a handsome face (not in the least a Brueghel), that you couldn’t keep from feeling an answering delight. The girl (Boadicea was sure) wouldn’t have danced nearly so well with someone else, would not have been so set-on-fire. Together, for as long as the polka lasted, they brought time to a stop at the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse.

  6

  Among the traditions and institutions of Amesville High School Mrs. Norberg of Room 113 was one of the most awful — in, as Boadicea liked to say, the original sense of the word. Some years before, in a tight three-way contest, she had been elected to the House of Representatives on the ticket of the American Spiritual Renewal Party. In its heyday the A.S.R.P. had been the rallying point of the Farm Belt’s most diehard undergoders, but as their first fine vision of a spiritually awakened America faded, and especially when the party’s leaders were proven to be as venal as run-of-the-mill Republicans and Democrats, its members returned to the G.O.P. or became, like Mrs. Norberg, lone voices crying in a wilderness of political error.

  Mrs. Norberg had taught American History and Senior Social Studies at the time of her election, and when she returned to Iowa after her single term in Washington she taught the same subjects, and she was teaching them still, though recently she had added to the stature of her legend by having spent a two year so-called sabbatical in a rest home in Dubuque, where she was taken (much against her will) after having been inspired one day to cut off a student’s hair in the school lunchroom. Her students referred to thi
s as the Iceberg’s second term of office. They knew she was crazy, but no one seemed to mind all that much. Since Dubuque her frenzies against gum chewers and note passers were much abated, and she limited herself to a teacher’s conventional weapon, the report card. On an average, twenty percent of each year’s graduating class failed Social Studies and had to take a make-up class to get their diplomas. All her known enemies were failed, of course, but so might be, it seemed, anyone else. Her F’s fell, like the rain, on the just and unjust alike. Some even claimed that Mrs. Norberg drew names out of a hat.

  This would have been alarming enough with regard only to its gross injustice, but Boadicea had a special reason to dread the Iceberg’s class, in that it had been her Uncle Charles who had taken away Mrs. Norberg’s seat in the house. When she had expressed her misgivings to her father, he was dismissive. A majority of the people one had to deal with, Grandison declared, were lunatics. One of the chief reasons for Boadicea’s attending a public high school was precisely that she might come to terms with this unpleasant truth. As to the possibility of failing, she need not worry: Grandison had already arranged with the principal to correct any grade she received that was less than a B. All she had to do, therefore, was go to Room 113 for one hour every day and sit. She might be as reticent or as outspoken as she chose — it wouldn’t matter. But as to getting rid of Mrs. Norberg, that was not to be thought of. Incompetent she might be, or even bananas, but she was also the last certified undergoder on the high school’s faculty, and any attempt to dislodge her would have raised a major stink throughout the county and possibly across the state. In three years she would retire: till then she had to be endured.