He could make a break for it now, he supposed. He could go and live among those ruins, there to be ruined himself. But that would have meant surrendering Boa to her father, an act he could not, would not be driven to. It had been his whole pride, the source of all his self-respect, that he had, by privations great and small, by the daily indignities of these twelve years, been responsible for Boa’s maintenance (well-being would be stretching it). Other men have families. Daniel had his wife’s corpse (for such she was now, legally) to sustain him. But it served the same purpose: it kept him from believing, despite every other evidence, that his defeat was final, whole, and entire.
Once, he’d known why he was doing this, and why he must persevere. Fear moved him. But that fear had come, in time, to seem unfounded. Grandison Whiting might be a selfish man, but he was not insane. He might have judged Boa in error in taking Daniel as her spouse, he might have wished Daniel dead, he might even have arranged that to happen, other persuasions failing — but he wouldn’t have murdered his daughter. However, as the specific fear had diminished there had come in its stead a distaste for Whiting, and all his works and wiles, that mounted finally to horror.
He had no rationale for his aversion. In part it was simple class feeling. Whiting was an arch-reactionary, a Machiavelli, a Metternich, and if his reasons for it were more intellectual than most such sons-of-bitches’ reasons, even (Daniel had to admit) more persuasive, that only made him a more dangerous son-of-a-bitch than most. There was a religious side to it too, though Daniel resisted the idea of his having any connection whatever with religion. He was a no-nonsense, cut-and-dried, self-justified atheist. Religion, in the words of his friend Claude Durkin, was something you had to learn about in order fully to appreciate the Old Masters. But the book he’d read way back when in Spirit Lake had got a hold on Daniel, and the Reverend Jack Van Dyke’s blithe paradoxes had wormed their way into his mind, or will, or whatever corner of the soul it is that has faith in things unseen. There, in the darkness where no rational contradiction could touch it, the idea grew, and ramified, that Grandison Whiting was one of those Caesars whom Van Dyke had written of, who rule the world and unto whom there must be renderings, despite that they are savage, corrupt, and conscienceless.
In short, distance had turned Grandison Whiting into an idea — an idea that Daniel was determined to resist in the one way given him to do so: by refusing him the possession of his daughter’s twelve-years-comatose body.
Ward 17, where the corpse (as it was, in the eyes of the Law) of Boadicea Weinreb was to be found, occupied only a small part of the third sub-basement of the annex of First National Flightpaths. After Daniel had signed in at the desk in the lobby, and after Miss Marspan had, under protest, checked her pistol with the guard outside the elevator, they were allowed to go down to the ward unescorted, for Daniel’s was a familiar face at the annex. They walked down a long reverberating tunnel lighted, now harshly, now dimly, by irregularly spaced tubes of neon mounted on the broad low arch of the ceiling. On either side of them, spaced with the tight, terrible regularity of markers in a cemetery, lay the inert and weakly respiring bodies of those who had never returned from their flights into the spaces beyond their flesh. Only a few of the hundreds in this one ward would ever resume a corporeal life, but the husks lingered on, aging, withering, until some vital organ finally failed, or until the accounting office sent down the order to disconnect the life-supporting machineries, whichever came sooner.
They stopped before Boa’s cot, a kind of rubber sling suspended from a tubular frame.
“The name…” Miss Marspan observed, stooping to read the chart fixed to the foot of the bed. The sights of the ward had robbed her of her usual decisiveness. “Bosola? There’s some mistake.”
“It was the name we registered under, when we came here.”
Miss Marspan closed her eyes and laid her gloved hand lightly over them. As little as he liked the woman, Daniel could not but feel some sympathy for her. It must have been hard to accept this shriveled chrysalis as the niece she’d known and loved, so far as love was in her nature. Boa’s skin was the color of grimed light-bulbs of frosted glass and seemed, stretched tight across each prominence of bone, as brittle. All fullness was wasted, even her lips were thin, and the warmth you could detect in her hollow cheeks seemed borrowed from the humid airs of the tunnel and not her own. Nothing spoke of life or process except the plasma oozing through translucent tubes into the slow-revolving treadmill of her arteries and veins.
Miss Marspan squared her shoulders and made herself approach more closely. Her heavy skirts of pigeon-gray silk snagged on the frame of the cot adjacent to Boa’s. She knelt to loosen it, and remained a long while on one knee looking into the void of Boa’s face. Then she rose, shaking her head. “I can’t kiss her.”
“She wouldn’t know if you did.”
She backed away from Boa’s cot, and stood in the central aisle, looking about her nervously, but anywhere she turned the same sight was endlessly multiplied, row on row, body on body. At last she looked up, squinting, into the neon light.
“How long have you kept her here?” she asked.
“In this ward, five years. The wards on the upper floors are a bit cheerier, supposedly, but a lot more expensive. This is all I can afford.”
“It is a hell.”
“Boa’s not here, Miss Marspan. Only her body. When she wants to come back, if she wants to come back, she will. But if that isn’t what she wants, do you think a vase of flowers by the bed is going to make any difference?”
But Miss Marspan wasn’t listening to him. “Look, up there! Do you see? A moth.”
“Oh, there’s no harm in insects,” Daniel said, unable to repress his resentment. “People eat termites, you know. All the time. I used to work in a factory that mashed them up.”
Miss Marspan regarded Daniel with a level gaze; then, with the deliberated strength of a seasoned athlete, struck his face with the back of her gloved hand. Though he’d seen it coming and had braced himself, it was a blow to bring tears to the eyes.
When the echo had died out, he spoke out, not in anger but in pride. “I’ve kept her alive, Miss Marspan, think of that. Not Grandison Whiting, with his millions. Me, with nothing — I kept her alive.”
“I’m sorry, Daniel. I… appreciate what you’ve done.” She touched her hair to see that it was in place, and Daniel, in sarcastic mimicry, did the same. “But I don’t see why you don’t keep her with you, at home. Surely that would be cheaper than this… mausoleum.”
“I’m a temp, I don’t have a home. Even when I had a room at a hotel, it wouldn’t have been safe to leave her there alone. Rooms get broken into, and what would happen to anyone in Boa’s condition then—”
“Yes, of course. That didn’t occur to me.”
She flexed her fingers within their sheath of kid, flexed them and bent them backward, as if to defy the helplessness she felt. She had come here ready to step in and take charge, but there was nothing to take charge of.
“Grandison, I take it, has never learned of this? He doesn’t know that either of you is alive.”
“No. And I don’t want him to, ever.”
“Why? If I may ask.”
“That’s my business.”
Miss Marspan considered this. “Fair enough,” she decided at last, to Daniel’s disconcertion.
“You mean you’ll agree to that? You won’t tell him?”
“I would have thought this was too soon to begin bargaining,” she answered coolly. “There’s still much I want to know. But, if it will ease your mind, I can tell you that there’s little love lost between Grandison and myself. My sister, Boa’s mother, finally succeeded in killing herself a year ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Nonsense. You didn’t know her, and if you had I’m sure you’d have despised her. She was a foolish, vain hysteric with a modicum of redeeming virtues, but she was my sister and Grandison Whiting destroyed her.”
Miss Marspan smiled. “Oh, I doubt that. She was the brightest of his children, the one of whom he had the highest hope. When she died, as he believed, his mourning was as real, I daresay, as yours or mine.”
“Maybe it was. But I don’t give a shit about his feelings.”
Miss Marspan’s glance let it be known that even in these circumstances she did not like such language.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Gladly. Let me say this first, though, while it’s clear to me. The paramount question, the question I’ve been considering since we set off in the taxi, is whether Boadicea would be more… inclined… to return here, to you, or to her father.”
“Here, to me.”
“I think I have to agree.”
“Then you won’t tell him!”
“On one condition. That you allow me to have Boa taken from this place. If she’s ever to come back. I can’t believe she’d find this prospect at all inviting. It might even act to change her mind.”
“There’ve been studies. After a certain time it doesn’t seem to make any difference where they are, physically. The return rate is the same down here as anywhere.”
“Possibly, but I’ve never trusted studies. You have no objection, I hope, to my helping you if I can?”
“I guess that depends on the form that it would take.”
“Oh, I’m not about to lavish money on you. I have little enough myself. But I do have connections, which are the better part of anyone’s wealth, and I’m fairly sure I can find a home in which Boa would be safe and you’d be comfortable. I’ll talk to Alicia about it tonight, for she was at the opera with me, and she’s certain to have stayed up to find out what I’ve been so mysteriously up to. Is there somewhere I can get in touch with you in the morning?”
He couldn’t answer all at once. It had been years since he’d trusted anyone, except in passing or in bed, and Miss Marspan wasn’t someone he wanted to trust. But he did! At last, amazed at the turn his life had taken, all in a single day, he gave her the number of Adonis, Inc. and even let her, when they drove back to the city, drop him off outside the door before she returned to her friend’s apartment.
Lying alone in the sauna and listening to Lorenzo’s indefatigable exertions in the locker room, Daniel had difficulty getting to sleep. He came very close to going out and joining in and getting his rocks off just as a sedative, but though ordinarily that’s what he would have done, tonight was different. Tonight he would have felt a hypocrite if he’d mixed in with the others. Now that he could see a way out, the faintest glimmer of escape, he was aware just how much he wanted to put Adonis, Inc., behind him. Not that he hadn’t been having a wonderful time once he’d left off struggling and striving and just laid back and floated with the current. Sex is the one luxury for which money isn’t a qualification. So long live sex. But tonight he’d decided, or remembered, that he could, with a bit of effort, do better.
For openers, he’d take the job at the Metastasio. His only reason for having decided, earlier, not to, was the fear of being recognized. But Miss Marspan had recognized him, even with his beard, and so the moral of the story seemed to be that maybe he ought to take more risks. Hadn’t that been Gus’s advice, when they’d said good-bye? Something like that.
Moments before he fell asleep he remembered it was his birthday. “Happy birthday, dear Daniel,” he whispered into the rolled-up towels that served him as a pillow. “Happy birthday to you.”
He dreamed.
But when he woke, shivering, in the middle of the night, most of the dreams had already slipped away. He knew, though, that it had been a dream of flight. His first. All the details of his flight eluded him — where it had been, to what height, how it had felt. He remembered only being in a foreign country, where there was an old tumbledown mosque. In the courtyard of this mosque there was a fountain, and all about the fountain were pairs of shoes with pointy toes, lined up in rows. They’d been left there by worshippers who’d gone into the mosque.
The wonder of this coutyard was the fountain at its center, a fountain comprised of three stone basins. The upper basins seemed to be supported, so abundantly the water flowed, by the jets of white water gushing from the basins below. From the topmost basin, rising to inconceivable heights, was the final, fiercest flowering of all. It rose, and rose, until the sun turned it to spray.
And that was all. He didn’t know what to make of it. A fountain in a courtyard with old shoes around it. What sort of omen was that?
12
Mrs. Alicia Schiff, with whom Daniel was now to live, was, in the considered and by no means unreproving opinion of her friend Harriet Marspan, “the nearest thing to a genius I’ve ever known.” She was also, very nearly, a hunchback, though it seemed so natural and necessary a part of her character that you could almost believe she’d come by it the way she’d come by her squint — by dint of years scrunched up over a desk copying music — the way that pines at high altitudes are shaped by titanic winds. All in all, the sorriest wreck of human flesh Daniel had ever had to become acquainted with, and custom could never quite reconcile him to the facts: the crepey, flaking skin of her hands; the face all mottled pink and lemon and olive like a spoiled Rubens; the knobby head with its strands of sparse white hair, which she sometimes was inspired to cover with a scruffy red parody of a wig. Except when she left the apartment, which was seldom now that she had Daniel to run interference with the outside world, she dressed like the vilest and most lunatic vagrant. The apartment was filled with heaps little and big of cast-off clothes — blue jeans, bathrobes, dresses, sweaters, stockings, blouses, scarves, and underwear — which she changed into and out of at any hour of the day or night, with no apparent method or motive; it was sheer nervous habit.
At first he feared he’d be expected to excavate and order the apartment’s debris. The clothes were the least of it. Interleaved with these were layers and layers of alluvial deposits, a Christmas morning desolation of wrappings, boxes, books and papers, of crockery and rattling tins, of puzzles, toys, and counters from a dozen never-to-be-reassembled games. There was also, though mostly on the upper shelves, a collection of dolls, each with its own name and personality. But Mrs. Schiff assured Daniel that he wouldn’t be expected to act as chambermaid, that on the contrary she’d be grateful if he left things where they were. “Where,” she had actually said, “they belong.”
He was expected to do her shopping, to deliver letters and scores, and to take her elderly, ginger-colored spaniel Incubus for his morning and his evening walk. Incubus, like his mistress, was an eccentric. He had a consuming interest in strangers (and none at all in other dogs), but it was an interest he did not wish to see reciprocated. He preferred people who would let him snuffle about on his own, investigating their shoes and other salient smells. However, if you ventured to talk to him, much less to pet him, he became edgy and took the first opportunity to escape from such attentions. He was neither mean nor friendly, neither frisky nor wholly torpid, and was very regular in his habits. Unless Daniel had some shopping to accomplish at the same time, the course of their walk never varied: due west to Lincoln Center, twice round the fountain, then (after Daniel had dutifully scooped up that morning’s or evening’s turd and disposed of it down a drain) home again to West 65th, just round the corner from the park, where Mrs. Schiff, no less predictable in her habits, would be hovering, anxious and undemonstrative, somewhere in the hallway of the apartment. She never condescended to Incubus, but spoke to him on the assumption that he was a precocious child, enchanted (by his own preference) into the shape of a dog. She treated Daniel no differently.
Daniel, in exchange for these services, and for providing a masculine, protective presence, received the largest of the apartment’s many rooms. The others were so many closets and cubbyholes, the legacy of the apartment’s previous existence as a res
idence hotel. When Mrs. Schiff had inherited the building, twenty years ago, she had never bothered to take down the plaster-board partitions, and indeed had added her own distinctive wrinkle to the maze in the form of folding screens and free-standing bookshelves (all of her own carpentering). Daniel felt awkward, at first, occupying the only humanly proportioned room in the apartment, and even when he was convinced, from her reluctance to enter his room, that Mrs. Schiff really preferred her own cozy warrens, he never stopped being grateful. It was a grand room, and with a coat of fresh paint on the walls and the floor sanded and waxed it became magnificent.
Mrs. Schiff did like to be visited, and it was soon their settled custom, when her day’s work was over and he had returned from the Metastasio and taken Incubus twice round the fountain and back home, to sit in her bedroom, with a pot of gunpowder tea between them and a packet of cookies (Daniel had never known Mrs. Schiff to eat anything but sweets), and to talk. Sometimes they might listen to a record (she had hundreds, all horribly scratched), but only by way of intermission. Daniel had known many good talkers in his time, but none of them could hold a candle to Mrs. Schiff. Wherever her fancy lighted, ideas formed, and grew, and became systems. Whatever she spoke seemed illumined, sometimes in only a whimsical way, but often seriously and even rather intensely. Or so it seemed, till, with a turn of a phrase, she’d veer off on some new tangent. Most of it, in the way of much supposed “great conversation” was mere mermaid enchantment and fool’s gold, but some of her notions did stick to the ribs of the mind, especially those ideas that derived from her ruling passion, which was opera.
She had a theory, for instance, that the Victorian Age had been a time of massive and systematic repression on a scale more awful than was ever to be achieved again on the stage of history, even at Auschwitz, that all of Europe, from Waterloo to World War Two, was one colossal police state, and that it was the function of Romantic Art, but especially of opera, to train and inspire the rising younger generation of robber barons and aristocrats to be heroes in the Byronic mold; that is, to be intelligent, bold, and murderous enough to be able to defend their wealth and privilege against all comers. How she’d come to this theory was by listening to Verdi’s I Masnadieri, based on a play of Schiller about an idealistic young man whom circumstance requires to become the head of a band of outlaws and who ends up killing his fiancee sheerly on principle. Daniel thought the whole thing ridiculous until Mrs. Schiff, peeved at his obstinacy, got down her copy of Schiller and read The Robbers aloud, and then, the next evening, made him listen to the opera. Daniel admitted there might be something to it.
On Wings of Song Page 22
