On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  7

  After the argument with her hateful — literally hateful — sister, Boadicea wrapped herself in her old school cape of green loden and went up to the roof, where the wind whipped her hair and walloped the cape with satisfying emphasis. The twit, she thought, concerning Alethea, the prig, the bitch; the sneak, the spy, the snob; the sly, mindless, soulless, self-regarding slut. The worst of it was that Boadicea could never, when it came to a showdown, translate her scorn into language that Alethea would admit to understanding, whereas Alethea had a monolithic confidence in her snobberies that gave even the most banal a kind of authority.

  Even the roof wasn’t far enough. With grim elation Boadicea mounted the west wind pylon, pausing in the lee of the first vane to marvel, dispassionately, that there could be enough heat left in these wintry blasts to be converted into the steady whirling of the metal blades. Was it heat? or just the momentum of the molecules of gas? or was there any difference? In any case, science was wonderful.

  So forget Alethea, she told herself. Rise above her. Consider the clouds, and determine the actual colors incorporated in their mottled, luminous, numinous gray. Arrange the world so that her intolerable sneering profile was not in the foreground, and then it would become, perhaps, a satisfactory sort of world, large and bright and full of admirable processes that a clear mind could learn to deal with, the way the pylons dealt with the wind, the way her father dealt with people, even such otherwise intractable people as Alethea and, occasionally, herself.

  Higher she mounted, above the highest vanes, to the small eyrie of steel hoops at the top of the pylon. The winds buffeted. The platform swayed. But she felt no vertigo, only the steadying satisfaction of seeing the world spread out in so orderly a way. The great jumble of Worry became, from this height, as comprehensible as a set of blueprints: the fallow flowerbeds and quincunxes of small trees in the Whitings’ private gardens on the roof below; then, stepwise in terraces below these, on the more extensive rooftops of the wings, were the pools and playgrounds of the other residents of the complex; farthest down, bounded by a broad defensive crescent of garages, stables, and silos, were the kitchen gardens, poultry yards, and tennis courts. The few people in sight all seemed to be engaged in emblematic tasks, like figures in a Brueghel: children skating, a woman scattering corn for chickens, two blue-jacketed mechanics bent over the idling engine of a limousine, a man walking a dog toward the trees that screened the western gate-house. To one who stood on the roof those trees would mark the limit of the horizon, but from this higher vantage one could see over them as far as the blue-gray zigzag of housetops that had once been — and not so long ago that Boadicea couldn’t remember it herself — the village of Unity. Most of the village’s former residents lived in Worry now. Their clapboard houses stood empty through most of the year, as many as still stood at all. It was saddening to think that a whole way of life, a century of traditions, had to come to an end for the new way to begin. But what was the alternative? To keep it going artificially, an instant Williamsburg? In effect that was what the summer people were doing now, at least with the better homes. The rest had been scavenged for their meat — siding, plumbing, curious bits of carpentry — and the bones left to weather into a more picturesque condition, at which point, doubtless, they would go to the auction block too. It was sad to see, but it was necessary — the result of forces too large to be withstood, though they might be channeled and shaped with more or less love and imagination. Worry, with its neo-Norman castellations, its out-lying parks and commons, and its innovative social engineering, surely represented the process of feudalization at its most humane and, so to speak, democratic. A Utopia of sorts. Whether, finally, it were a Utopia for the likes of Boadicea she could never decide. Ownership of so much land and wealth was problematical enough, but beyond this was the moral question of one’s relation with one’s tenants. There were over five hundred at last count. Though they would all have denied it — and could in fact be seen denying it in the movie Boadicea had made way back when — their condition was uncomfortably close to serfdom. But uncomfortable, it seemed, only for Boadicea, since the waiting list of qualified applicants who wanted to sign on and move in was ridiculously in excess of the foreseeable openings. Kids at school were always sounding her out about their chances of being moved to the top of the list; some had offered outright bribes if she would put in a word with her father. Once poor Serjeant had got into hot water for accepting such a bribe.

  But to suppose that Daniel Weinreb had so venal a purpose in cultivating her acquaintance was a patent absurdity. The accusation revealed the limits of Alethea’s imagination, for it couldn’t begin to do justice to the scale of Daniel’s ambitions. Daniel meant to be an artist, as great an artist as he could become. Boadicea doubted whether he’d given so much as a moment’s thought to the long-term possibilities of their friendship. Aside from the opportunity (which he was finally to take up today) of paying a visit to Worry and trying his hand at the Whitings’ various instruments, it was unlikely that he considered the acquaintance especially advantageous. Except for the chance (the glorious chance) to talk with someone else who also meant to become a great artist. So really he didn’t seem to have, in a word, designs.

  Boadicea, by contrast, lived most of her life in an endless design. Every moment she wasn’t entirely focused on the task in hand she was planning, rehearsing, imagining, daydreaming. What she had planned, vis-a-vis Daniel, was that they would be lovers. She had not drawn up a detailed scenario of how it would come about. She wasn’t even entirely sure of the details of their love’s consummation, since such pornography as she’d looked into had seemed rather ishy, but she was certain that once they’d actually got involved erotically it would be very nice, not to say ecstatic. Daniel, she’d heard tell from various independent sources, had been “intimate” with a number of women (one of them six years older than him and engaged to another man), though no one was prepared to say whether he’d definitely gone all the way. Sex, therefore, could be trusted to take care of itself (at least in her daydreams), and Boadicea was free to elaborate the associated drama: how, quite suddenly, on a whim or a dare or after a fight with her sister, she would run off with Daniel to some sinister far-away capital — Paris or Rome or Toronto — there to lead a life that would be thrilling, elegant, virtuous, simple, and entirely devoted to art in its highest manifestations. Not, however, till they’d graduated, for even in her wildest dreams Boadicea proceeded with caution.

  A mile beyond Unity the road climbed a short rise and you could see, for the first time, the gray ferro-concrete tower of Worry. Then the road dipped and the tower sank back into featureless fields.

  He was short of breath and his legs were aching from pedaling too fast, but being so near it was psychologically impossible to slow down. Even the wind, gusting from the west, and puffing up his windbreaker before him like a small red sail, seemed to be trying to speed him on his way. He turned right at the unmarked turn-off that everyone knew was the road to Worry, zipped past a man out walking a German shepherd, and arrived out-of-breath at the gatehouse.

  A metal gate sprang up from the road in front of him, a hooter began hooting, stopped just long enough for a recorded voice to tell him to get out of his car, and started up again. A uniformed guard came out of the gatehouse holding a sub-machine gun. It would have been disconcerting anywhere else, but Daniel, never having been to Worry before, supposed this was the standard reception that unannounced visitors received.

  He reached into his jacket pocket for the invitation disc that Boadicea had given him, but the guard shouted that he should put his hands above his head.

  He put his hands above his head.

  “Where do you think you’re going, son?” the guard asked.

  “I’m visiting Miss Whiting. At her invitation. The disc she gave me is in my pocket.”

  The guard reached into Daniel’s pocket and took out the disc.

  Daniel lowered his hands. The guard seem
ed to consider whether to take offense. Instead he went into the gatehouse with the disc, and for five minutes Daniel saw no more of him. Finally he set his bike on its kickstand and went to the door of the gatehouse. Through the glass he could see the guard talking on the phone. The guard gestured for him to go back to his bike.

  “Is something wrong?” Daniel shouted through the glass.

  The guard opened the door and handed the phone to Daniel with a peculiar kind of smile. “Here, he wants to talk to you.”

  “Hello,” Daniel said into the grill of the mouthpiece.

  “Hello,” replied a pleasant, purring baritone. “There seems to be a problem. I assume this is Daniel Weinreb that I’m speaking to.”

  “This is Daniel Weinreb, yes.”

  “The problem is this, Daniel. Our security system insists on identifying you as, probably, an escaped prisoner. The guard is understandably reluctant to admit you. In fact, under the circumstances, he hasn’t the authority to do so.”

  “Well, I’m not an escaped prisoner, so that should solve your problem.”

  “But it doesn’t explain why the security system, which is preternaturally sensitive, should continue to declare that you are carrying a Pole-Williams lozenge of the type used by the state’s prison system.”

  “Not the lozenge. Just the housing for it.”

  “Ah-ha. Our system isn’t up to making such nice distinctions, apparently. It’s none of my business, of course, but don’t you think it would be wiser — or at least more convenient — to have it taken out? Then this sort of confusion wouldn’t happen.”

  “You’re right — it is none of your business. Now, would you please buzz me in, or do I have to have surgery first?”

  “By all means. Let me speak to the guard again, would you.”

  Daniel handed the phone to the guard and went back to his bicycle. As soon as he came nearer the gatehouse, the hooter started in again, but this time it was switched off.

  The guard came out of the gatehouse and said, “Okay. Just go down the road. The Whitings’ entrance is the one with the wrought iron gates. There’s another guard there, but he’s expecting you.”

  Daniel nodded, smug with small triumph.

  Alethea, at the base of the wind pylon, signaled with her scarf to Boadicea on the summit. Since their quarrel Alethea had put on a riding habit and looked more than ever the belle dame sans merci.

  Boadicea waved back. She didn’t want to come down, but Alethea must have had some reason for being so persistent, and anyway she did want to come down since her face and her fingers were numb with cold. The wind and the view had served the simultaneous purpose of calming her down and lifting her up. She could return to earth and talk to Alethea in a spirit of no more than sisterly combativeness.

  “I thought,” said Alethea, disdaining to shout but waiting until Boadicea was quite close by, “that your story of having invited that boy here was a complete fabrication. But he’s come, on his bicycle, and there seems to be some question whether he’s to be allowed through the gate. I thought you should know.”

  Boadicea was taken aback. Alethea’s action too much resembled ordinary courtesy for her to take exception to it. “Thank you,” she had to say, and Alethea smiled.

  “I gave him a disc,” Boadicea fretted.

  “They must have thought he looked suspicious. He does to me.”

  Inside the stairwell, on the next landing down, was a phone. Boadicea dialled the gatehouse. The guard said that Daniel had already gone through, on her father’s say-so.

  Alethea was waiting for her by the elevator. “Seriously, Bobo…”

  “Didn’t you say, less than an hour ago, that my biggest problem was that I was always too serious?”

  “Yes, of course, but seriously: what can you see in this Weinreb boy? Is it because he was in prison? Do you think that’s glamorous?”

  “That has precisely nothing to do with it.”

  “I’ll allow he has tolerable good looks—”

  Boadicea raised her eyebrows challengingly. Daniel’s looks deserved more than a five on anyone’s scale of ten.

  “—but, after all, he does represent the lower depths, doesn’t he?”

  “His father’s a dentist.”

  “And from what I’ve heard not even a particularly good one.”

  “From whom did you hear that?”

  “I forget. In any case, good or bad: a dentist! Isn’t that enough? Didn’t you learn anything in Switzerland?”

  “Indeed I did. I learned to value intelligence, taste, and breeding — the qualities I admire in Daniel.”

  “Breeding!”

  “Yes, breeding. Don’t provoke me to comparisons.”

  The elevator arrived. They had captured one of the maids, who’d been trying to go down to the kitchen on 2. They rode down in silence until she got off. Boadicea pressed G.

  Alethea sighed. “I think you’re being very foolish. And, come the day that you finally do drop him, very cruel.”

  “Who is to say, Alethea, that that day will ever come?”

  She’d said it only to be provoking, but hearing the words spoken, she wondered if they might conceivably be true. Was this the beginning of her real life? (As against the provisional life she’d been leading up to now.)

  “Oh, Bobo. Really!”

  “Why not?” Boadicea demanded, a trifle too emphatically. “If we’re in love.”

  Alethea giggled, with complete sincerity. And shook her head, by way of saying good-bye, and set off down the hall in the other direction, toward the stables.

  It was, Boadicea had to admit, an enormous “if.” She loved talking with Daniel, she loved looking at him, for he had the sort of features that bear contemplation. But love? Love, in the sense commemorated by centuries of books and operas and films?

  Once, when she’d followed him about on his paper route, they had sat snuggling together in a broken-down car in a dark garage. It had seemed, for those fifteen minutes, the supreme happiness of her life. To be warm. To relax in that utter anonymity. To savor the silences and smells of a stranger’s garage — rust, dry leaves, the ghosts of ancient motor oils. They’d talked in a dreamy way of going back to the golden age of V-8 engines and superhighways and being two totally average teenagers in a movie about growing up. A lovely pastoral moment, certainly, but scarcely proof of their being in love.

  She wondered if Daniel ever wondered whether they were in love; or whether they would be, some day. She wondered if she could get up the nerve to ask him, and what he would say if she did, for he could hardly come right out and say no, the thought had never crossed his mind. While she was still in the midst of her wonderings, there he was, with his bicycle, on the raked gravel of the crescent. The first snowflakes of the year were alighting on his beautiful black hair. His nose and forehead, his cheekbones and his chin were straight out of the most arrogantly lovely Ghirlandaio in all the museums of the world.

  “Daniel!” she called out, bounding down the steps, and from the way he smiled at her in reply she thought that maybe it was possible that they were already in love. But she understood, as well, that it would be wrong to ask, or even to wonder.

  Grandison Whiting was a tall, spare-limbed, thin-faced, pilgrimish man who stood in violent contradiction to his own flamboyantly bushy beard, a beard of the brightest carrot-orange, a beard that any pirate could have gloried in. His suit was puritanically plain, but across the muted check of the waistcoat hung a swag of gold chain so heavy as to seem actually serviceable in conjunction, say, with manacles or fetters. And glinting within the cuffs of his coat were cufflinks blazoned with diamonds larger than any that Daniel had ever seen, even in the windows of the Des Moines branch of Tiffany’s, so that he seemed to wear, not his heart, but his checkbook on his sleeve.

  His manners and accent were uniquely, unnaturally his own; neither English nor Iowan, but a peculiar hybrid of both that preserved the purr of the former and the twang of the latter. You would have fe
lt almost guilty to say that you liked such a person as Grandison Whiting, but for all that Daniel didn’t positively dislike him. His strangeness was fascinating, like the strangeness of some exotic bird illustrated in a book of color plates, a heron or an ibis or a cockatoo.

  As to the nest that this rare bird inhabited, Daniel was in no such state of equivocation. All of Worry made Daniel uncomfortable. You couldn’t walk on the carpets or sit on the chairs without thinking you’d do them some damage. And of all the rooms that Daniel had been taken through, Grandison Whiting’s drawing room, where they’d come at five for tea, was, if not the grandest, surely the most elegantly perishable. Not that Daniel, by this time, was still making sharp distinctions among the degrees of bon ton. It was all equally unthinkable, and hours ago he’d closed his mind to any but the simplest sense of having to resist the various intimidations of so much money. If you once allowed yourself to admire any of it — the spoons, the cups, the sugar bowl, the exquisite creamer filled with cream as thick and gloppy as mucilage — where would you stop? So he shut it out: he took his tea without sugar or cream and passed up all the cakes for one dry curl of unbuttered toast.

  No one urged him to change his mind.

  After they’d been introduced all round and the weather had been deplored, Grandison Whiting asked Daniel what he had thought of the harpsichord. Daniel (who’d been expecting a genuine antique, not a modern reconstruction built in Boston forty years ago) replied, guardedly, that it was nothing like a piano, that the touch, and the two manuals, would take some getting used to. What he’d said at the time, to Boa, was “Weird”; what he hadn’t said, even to her, was that the Steinway grand was as far beyond his ken as the harpsichord (or as the harp, for that matter), just as weird, in the sense of being wholly and unsettlingly beautiful.

  Then Boa’s sister Alethea (in a white dress as stiff and resplendent as the table napkins) asked him how, in the wilderness of Amesville, he had managed to take piano lessons. He said he was self-taught, which she must have suspected was less than the whole truth, for she insisted: “Entirely?” He nodded, but with a smile meant to be teasing. She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks. Daniel wondered if she weren’t actually the more interesting of the two sisters: interesting as an object, like some dainty cup with flowers painted on it in microscopic details, or like an armchair with golden legs carved into watery shapes, with that same eggshell elegance, the same intrinsic, unhesitating disdain for boors, bears, clods, and paupers like himself, which Daniel found (somewhat guiltily) arousing. Boa, by contrast, seemed just another person, a contender in the sweepstakes of growth and change, who sometimes would pull ahead of him, sometimes fall behind. No doubt the family money was in her blood as much as it was in Alethea’s, but its effect on her was problematical, whereas with Alethea it was as though the money had blotted out everything else: as though she were the form that money took translated into flesh and blood — no longer a problem, just a fact.