The Patch

by John McPhee

  More speakers and much discussion followed, through the afternoon. “It’s a pleasure to talk to a group that is representative of the I.Q. elite,” one speaker said. “The structure of society discriminates against people of extraordinary intelligence. Society expects intelligent people to be strange, then creates the circumstances that guarantee this will be true.” There was some laughter, a bit of applause.

  An M spoke up sharply from the floor. “Are you suggesting that we hide our light under a blanket?” he asked.

  CLICK. THE NINE BALL plops into the side pocket, the cue ball hits one cushion and stops near the center spot. Big as a water tower but light on his feet, with a diamond ring on a pudgy finger, the fat man moves around the table. For thirty-one consecutive hours, with an almost incredible repertory of massé shots, bank shots, gather shots, and combinations, with just enough English and the right amount of draw, he has been defending his reputation as the best there is. He chalks up and shoots again. Click. The fifteen ball slams into the corner and disappears. Minnesota Fats is still the greatest pool shark in the world.

  Jackie Gleason does his new job with remarkable ease. He memorizes at first sight. While Method actors search their souls and “live” their roles, Gleason riffles through a script and is ready to go. His fellow performers both amuse and irritate him with their warm-up exercises. While shooting The Hustler, Paul Newman was forever shaking his wrists like a swimmer before a race. Now, on the set of Requiem for a Heavyweight, Anthony Quinn shadowboxes and dances up and down—“marinating,” as Gleason puts it—for half an hour before a take. Gleason stands around cracking jokes and shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” But his directors uniformly report that when they call for action, Gleason snaps instantly into the character he is playing.

  HER VOICE WAS CLEAR, vibrant, strong, untrained. She wore no makeup, and her long black hair hung like drapery, parting around her long almond face. In performance, she came on, walked straight to the microphone, and began to sing. No patter. No remarks. She usually wore a sweater and skirt, or a simple dress. Occasionally, she affected something semi-Oriental that seemed to have been hand-sewn out of burlap. The purity of her voice suggested purity of approach. She was only twenty-one and palpably nubile, but there was little sex in that clear flow of sound. It was haunted and plaintive, a mother’s voice, and it had in it distant reminders of madrigal singers performing at court, and of saddened Gypsies trying to charm death into leaving their caves. “Barbara Allen” was one of the set pieces of folk singing, and no one sang it as achingly as she did. From “Lonesome Road” to “All My Trials,” her most typical selections were so mournful and quietly desperate that her early recordings would not have been out of place had they been played at a funeral. She added some lighter material to create a semblance of variety, but the force of sadness in her personality remained compelling.

  Her mother was English-Scottish, her father was born in Mexico. His academic track as a physicist took him to Los Angeles, Buffalo, Baghdad, Boston, and Paris. Along the way, their three daughters learned some memorable lessons in bigotry. When Dr. Baez was doing military research in Buffalo, for example, the family thought it would be a pleasant experience to settle in a small and typical American town. They chose Clarence Center, New York, population nine hundred. Their next-door neighbor was a senile old man who scowled at Joan’s dark skin and said, “Niggers.” The Baezes called the neighbor Old Bogey. To keep Old Bogey confused, they sank a plug spout into a telephone pole outside the house and hung a bucket on it. Dr. Baez picks up the narrative. “We knew that he would be full of contempt for our supposed ignorance of maple tapping, but we knew that he could not resist peeping into the bucket. We were in stitches of laughter, peeping from our window when he would come by, look around furtively, and peek into the bucket. Then we began to put things in the bucket—water and so on. He was astonished. Poor Old Bogey.”

  In Redlands, California, Joan found a situation that cut deeper than one old crank. The Hispanic schoolchildren there played in separate groups from the “whites.” Observably, the dominant tone of her personality changed from ebullience to melancholy. Her thirteenth birthday came, and she said something she would repeat often: “Mummy, I don’t want to grow up.”

  She spent a month or so at Boston University studying theatre—the beginning and end of college for her—and she met several semipro folk singers who taught her songs and guitar techniques. She never studied voice or music, or even took the trouble to study folklore and pick up songs by herself. She just soaked them up from those around her. She sang in coffeehouses in and around Harvard Square that were populated by the Harvard underworld—drifters with Penguin Classics protruding from their blue jeans, and no official standing at Harvard or anywhere else. They pretended they were Harvard students, ate in the university dining halls, and sat in on some classes. Joan Baez—who would long be thought of as a sort of ethereal beatnik because of her remote manner, long hair, bare feet, and burlap wardrobe—actually felt distaste for these academic bums from the start. She said, “They just lie in their beds, smoke pot, and do stupid things.” They were her first audiences, with real Harvard students and general citizens, who grew in numbers until the bums were choked out. She was often rough on them all. When one patron lisped a request to her, she lisped in reply. When another singer turned sour in performance, Baez suddenly stood up in the back of the room and began to sing, vocally stabbing the hapless singer on the stage into silence. In the summer of 1959, another singer invited her to the first Newport Folk Festival. Her clear-lighted voice poured over the thirteen thousand people there and chilled them with surprise. Recording companies closed in. A representative of Columbia Records—dropping the magical name of Mitch Miller, the star-making artists-and-repertoire man—said to her, “Would you like to meet Mitch, baby?”

  She said, “Who’s Mitch?”

  THOMAS WOLFE WAS an undisciplined, ungovernable American Conrad whose sea was the land of his birth. His words, seeking “to find language again in its primitive sinews,” rioted onto paper in millions, growing out of him, over him, and sometimes beyond him. In the West a few years before he died, Wolfe saw a sequoia for the first time. He stared upward for a moment in unbelieving silence, then ran to the big tree, his long arms stretched wide. It was a boyish gesture, but this man of thirty-five still believed that he might draw into his embrace the biggest thing that lived.

  He strode along in his size-thirteen shoes, embarrassed by his six-foot-six-inch, two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame, carrying his eccentricities with him until fame had transformed them into folklore. He seldom washed, changed his shirt, or had a haircut; he could live for hours, even days, on cigarettes and coal-black coffee, then swallow twelve eggs, two quarts of milk, and an entire loaf of bread in one breakfast. Wild-eyed and forever talking with all the intensity of his written prose, he sprayed everyone in range with reservoirs of spittle from the corners of his mouth. Some thought him ludicrous, but thousands worshipped the ground his feet never quite touched. Sooner or later he accused all his friends of tormenting him, but he needed them badly, and once, at a party in his new Manhattan apartment, he reached to the ceiling with a black crayon and wrote, “Merry Christmas to all my friends and love from Tom.”

  GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD have long found it convenient to bury their gold in Manhattan. The site is five thousand three hundred and twenty paces due south of the Public Library, then two thousand two hundred and eighty paces due west, and it is betokened by the topographical configuration of an old and now obscured streambed in Maiden Lane, whence the route proceeds straight down into the earth until, fifty-five feet below sea level, one enters a grotto jackhammered out of solid metamorphic rock and there finds the gold. The hoard has become, as far as is known, the largest quantity of gold that has been accumulated in one place ever. It is a sixth of all the gold that has been mined during the history of the world. The limestone palazzo overhead is the Federal Reserve Bank, which serves as th
e custodian of the gold, although the United States’ share of the total is under a hundred million dollars’ worth—around half of one per cent. Just knowing all that gold is there produces a sensuous need to be in its presence, a certain stir in the lower coin.

  The Fed resembles a men’s club with unusually high dues. Wood fires burn discreetly. Art from the Metropolitan Museum is hung in the galleried corridors. Washrooms are full of combs, brushes, clothes brushes, dental towels, doctor scales. One instinctively spruces up before being ushered into the presence of the gold. I stopped first in an upstairs office to see Thomas O. Waage, a senior vice-president, whose Cash Custody Department has physical responsibility for money of all kinds within the building, including bullion. He said that things would be very quiet down at bedrock, because gold was not, except in a more or less religious sense, backing anybody’s currency anymore. There might be more gold than ever down there, but it was doing less. As a base of currency, it no longer had any practical meaning. In the old days, when gold was gold, the gold deep under the Fed was literally moved about in support of the currencies of nations. Suppose Denmark owed a large sum of money to France. A coded cable would arrive from Copenhagen and another from Paris, with matching instructions from each country. Then, down in the gold bins, professional stackers—men with forefingers the size of bananas from the handling of bars of gold—would go into Denmark’s compartment and take out what was owed to France. They would wheel it to the French compartment and stack it inside. That sort of thing went on all the time. If, say, Argentina paid a debt to Britain, or Indonesia paid one to Kuwait, gold was lugged from one stack to another deep under Manhattan, which is why so many nations—about sixty in all—wanted to keep gold in one place. The work was so exhausting that the stackers functioned in units, like lacrosse midfielders or hockey lines, going in and out of action every few minutes. They wore magnesium covers over their shoes. A bar of gold was only seven inches long, but it weighed four hundred troy ounces.

  The price of gold traded on the free market had long since come unstuck from the official price agreed upon in international monetary circles, and between the two prices a gap had grown that had widened beyond the point of absurdity. The official price now, the “official” value of gold as the underpinning of currencies, was forty-two dollars and twenty-two cents an ounce. The price of gold on the free market—jewelry gold, industrial gold, gold of private hoarders—was approaching two hundred dollars an ounce. This difference had paralyzed the great treasures below us. At the official price, no one, obviously, was going to use gold to pay a debt, nor were many nations psychologically prepared to fling their gold into the free market, receiving paper, even huge amounts of paper, in return. Forces of atavism, mysticism, primitivism still apparently combined in the human soul to give spiritual status to this metal. So now it sat in limbo—fourteen thousand tons of it, anyway—deep in a man-made cave.

  The mouth of the cave, its only entrance, is plugged with a steel cylinder that weighs ninety tons. When the cylinder is turned, it presents an opening large enough to walk through. A whole team must go in if anyone goes at all. I, for example, after I left Mr. Waage, was taken down to the bedrock level by Richard Hoenig, an assistant vice-president of the bank, and we were met at the steel cylinder by Edward Hood, of Cash Custody; by Albert Nyland, of the Vault Division; and by Sam Ludman, an auditor. No one ever goes into the presence of the gold unaccompanied by a trio from the Auditing, Vault, and Cash Custody divisions, who, among other things, supervise the gold stackers. On any number of doors, including the hundred and twenty-two doors of the gold-storage compartments, there are three locks, the keys or combinations of which are separately held in the pockets or memories of people from the three divisions. To avoid collusion, assignments are rotated, so that no threesome works consistently together. “It’s my gold,” Hood said, by way of explanation. “I keep it in Al’s house, and Sam handles it.” Among them, these three had worked in the bank ninety-four years. “You eventually come down to this job,” said Sam.

  “We go down the ladder instead of up,” said Al.

  “The next step is to be buried,” said Ed.

  We stepped through the steel and into the cavern. The predominant color in there was dull yellow. The architectural ambience was early cellblock. The place might have been a county jail. Visible through the steel mesh and the steel dowels in the doors of the cells were stacks and stacks of sullen, imprisoned gold. A thousand bars or so were lying around on pallets outside the cells, evidence that all activity had not stopped. Switzerland, for example, has a law that a certain ratio must be kept constant between amounts of paper money and amounts of gold on hand in Switzerland, so the Swiss occasionally call for gold from their bin in New York. I reached for a bar of gold and picked it up. It was a bit smaller than an ordinary construction brick. It weighed twenty-eight pounds. It lacked lustre—in fact, it appeared to be a lead brick borrowed from a radiation lab and painted with gold dope. Its markings indicated that it was 99.94 per cent pure. It was worth, officially, about seventeen thousand dollars and could bring perhaps seventy-five thousand in the free market. I felt a tendon preparing to snap in my shoulder, and I put the gold down.

  “Be sure to call it a bar, not a brick,” Mr. Hoenig said. “Everyone who works down here is sensitive and touchy about having them called bricks.”

  National identities were secret. I peered into various numbered cells, wondering whose gold was sulking there. I saw a bar that was marked with a hammer and sickle, but that could have been anyone’s by now; it had been cast in the Soviet Union in 1937. The value of the contents of each compartment was written on a tag on the door. No. 3, for example, contained fourteen thousand five hundred and sixty-eight bars, worth, officially, about two hundred and fifty million dollars—the hoard of a modest client. Accounts might range from under a hundred thousand dollars to five or six billion dollars, Hoenig said. Each compartment represented all or part of an individual account, for the gold of different customers was never commingled.

  The stacks had been put together with both the care and the pattern that masons would employ in the making of a dry wall—level courses, shimmed (with wood), interlocking. In one large compartment was well over half as much gold as there is in Fort Knox. It was in three separate stacks. Two were about fifteen feet high and included a hundred thousand bars apiece, while the third had been built with fifty thousand bars. Stackers—sweating, working like the slaves of pharaohs—could handle a maximum of twelve hundred bars a day, so the construction of these three stacks alone had taken nearly a working year.

  Suddenly, the composite foolishness of all this shivered through history and fell on me like a ton of gold. I thanked everybody and split for sunlight. Suffering from acute duodenal aurophobia, I staggered into the street.

  THERE IS A CONVENTION in musical theatre called the Girl’s First Song—that first number in which the heroine states who she is, what she wants, and hints at the perils that might befall her, such as “A Cockeyed Optimist” from South Pacific and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” from My Fair Lady. In Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand stands under the marquee of a theatre and declares in her first song:

  I’m the greatest star,

  I am by far,

  But no one knows it.

  From that moment, no one has a chance not to know it. “I’m a great big clump of talent,” she sings with conviction. “I’ve got thirty-six expressions—sweet as pie to tough as leather—and that’s six expressions more than all the Barrymores put together. I’m the greatest star—an American Beauty rose, with an American beauty nose.”

  This nose is a shrine. It starts at the summit of her hive-piled hair and ends where a trombone reaches pedal B flat. The face it divides is long and sad, and the look in repose is the essence of hound. But as she sings number after number and grows in the mind, she touches the heart with her awkwardness, her lunging humor, and a bravery that is all the more winning because she seems so vulnerable.r />
  When the lights go up for intermission, people dive into the Playbill to find out about Barbra Streisand. They don’t learn much. In the biographical notes, Barbra remains onstage. She wrote them herself. Her young life’s work has been to elevate and sculpt her own archetypical personality, and no string of drab printed facts is going to get in her way. She reveals that she is an accomplished bead stringer and a collector of old shoes, born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon. Her pharaonic profile and scarab eyes more nearly suggest Aswan. In truth, she was born and raised in Brooklyn, between Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal.

  More than willing to forsake her anonymity, she nonetheless feels the pain of its loss. People who recognize her in the street and ask her for autographs make her uncomfortable. Some of these people wear their hair in the lofted way that she does, and attempt to replicate her glassy, communicant look, for she is a godhead of their private reveries. Others who stop her are just impious strangers. Seeing her tasseled yellow blouse showing through under a South American skunk coat, her white wool slacks and dirty sneakers, they will say, “Hey, you look like Barbra Streisand!”

  THE AGE OF OARED SHIPS lasted three thousand years, and the largest of them were built closer to the beginning than to the end of that span of time. Ships with single banks of oars took the Greeks to Troy. Biremes transported the Phoenicians. Eventually, toward the end of the sixth century B.C., triremes developed. A hundred and twenty feet long and with a twenty-foot beam and three coordinated banks of oars, the trireme was the most sensible expression that this form of naval architecture would ever be given. With the Battle of Salamis, the brief, extraordinary era of the super-galleys began: quadriremes, quinqueremes, decaremes, dodecaremes—even tredecaremes, with eighteen hundred men at the oars. Huge, high-sided, millipede ships, they rammed one another out of existence. The largest oared ships in history were two trigintaremes, constructed in the third century B.C. by King Ptolemy II of Egypt. Soon after that, according to the historian Callixenos, Ptolemy IV built a quadragintareme, but scholars consider Callixenos untrustworthy and doubt whether such a ship ever existed. The trigintaremes were awkward enough. With thirty banks of oars sticking into the water like roots into the earth, they had the over-all mobility of banyan trees. The trend reversed. Before long, most Mediterranean navies were back at least to quinqueremes. The Romans, for the most part, used biremes and triremes, and one of Mark Antony’s many troubles at Actium may have been that he had with him a fleet of outmoded decaremes. A millennium passed. The nautical merchants of Venice were still using three-bank ships in the thirteenth century, and the Venetian vessels had almost exactly the same dimensions as the early Greek triremes.