by Laurel Brett
“Draft counseling.”
“Really? You? A high school kid?”
“We tell them to register. It’s against the law not to, but we tell them to leave their address blank. Can you imagine if everyone did that? They couldn’t draft anyone if they couldn’t find them.”
She said this with the peculiar logic of adolescents who exist in a world where hoping makes dreams come true.
Neither Schrödinger girl had ever said anything about Vietnam. I hadn’t either. At college the war was a constant companion. Kids organized protests, boycotted classes, and handed out flyers on a regular basis. I hadn’t declared myself either a hawk or a dove. Enrollment kept growing. As long as college attendance earned a draft deferment, the ranks of young male college students would continue to swell. I didn’t want any of my students to go off to fight and be killed, but I hadn’t confronted the issue of the war. I had left it to the Harvard think tank that was behind it to figure all that out. I braced myself, because Daphne was clearly going to challenge me.
“You’re not a hawk, are you?” Her face registered anxiety and the beginning of disgust. Her upset was clearly worry for the purity of my convictions. The disgust was . . . I have no idea. I desperately wanted her to approve of me, so I began feeling a little anxious.
Times Square is very noisy, always. In midday, it was a cacophony of car horns, traffic, sirens, and crowd noises. “Let’s go somewhere quiet,” I suggested, eager for the tête-à-tête that defined my relationship with Daphne.
“I don’t think there is anywhere quiet in Times Square,” she said, but something else was up. “Let’s go into the recruiting office.”
“Why would we go there?”
“I’ll show you.” And she rushed in before I could stop her.
The office had a predictable American flag, a big desk with chairs for army personnel in uniform, and rows of chairs for young guys who wandered in off the street. Although lots of college kids were against the war, there were many young men who still were itching to serve their country in Southeast Asia, and many poor white, Hispanic, and black kids who just needed a decent gig.
Daphne stood with her back to the recruiters and faced the three or four young men who were patiently waiting, scattered throughout the two rows of folding chairs. She raised her voice and shouted, “Guys, this is an illegal war! Kids are being killed! Don’t be part of that!”
This was more than draft counseling; Daphne was actually disrupting the recruiting center, and the army personnel appeared ready to arrest her, or worse. She was oblivious to the threat, warming to her message, but I felt that I needed to get her out of there. The sergeant in charge rose from his chair and approached Daphne. I was afraid he was going to drag her off. But then he thought better of it and approached me. “Mister,” he said, “you’d better get your daughter out of here. She’s causing a disturbance.” I thought he wanted to throttle her. His uniform and dour expression had me cowed, yet Daphne acted completely unperturbed. She renewed her entreaty to the guys in the chairs until they started heckling her. They were definitely hawks.
“Leave us the hell alone,” one said.
“Who cares what you think? Go home to your mama,” said another.
I took her by the arm and forcefully pulled her out into the street. I was in no mood to be polite. “What do you think you’re doing? You could have gotten into real trouble.”
“Who gives a shit, Garrett? Didn’t you hear me? Kids are being napalmed. Kids are being killed! Shouldn’t we do something? Shouldn’t you?” Her emerald eyes flashed. “I’m not afraid of that sergeant. I don’t give a flying fuck what they do to me.”
“Calm down,” I said.
“There’s no time to be calm,” she answered.
I managed to steer her to a small hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. I ordered us slices and Cokes. “Now sit down and behave yourself,” I said.
She took out her cigarettes and very pointedly lit one up.
“I don’t want cigarette smoke with my lunch,” I told her. “Could you please put that out?”
She did.
“You don’t really believe that domino theory crap, do you?”
The domino theory was the idea that once one country fell—that is, became Communist—another would follow and all of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes. This idea was the professed cornerstone of our Vietnam War policy, thought up by the Ivy League think tank Kennedy had brought with him that was still on board for Johnson.
“What do you think is going on?” I asked in a level, noncommittal tone. I wasn’t a college professor for nothing.
“I think Vietnam is fighting for self-determination and we should just back the fuck away. We are killing American soldiers and local civilians on the news every night. How are you okay with that?”
“When did you start saying fuck all the time?”
My problem with adopting Daphne’s position was that it would mean repudiating a lot of the ideas I’d grown up with, especially the idea that we could trust our government to take care of us. Because my dad had been killed in World War II, I had a strong belief in fighting and valor—the only way I could bear it. I was afraid of betraying him and of the abyss that would open up if I entertained the possibility that our government was a mouthpiece for corporate interests, as the doves insisted. I was still on the fence. Teaching had brought me face to face with committed doves every day, but I was still reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace their ideology.
The pizza came and Daphne settled down a bit.
“How did this new conviction come about?” I asked her.
“I tried to have a pen pal in Vietnam. I got him at school. Rick Lopez. He had to fight because he only has a green card. How unfair is that? After his first letter he stopped writing back. And then I met Terry Collins, a guy who dropped out of the University of Ohio. He was in SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, at a rally the day after I met you, and he started a chapter in the next town. He rents a big house with some other guys his age where we all hang out and smoke grass.”
“But you’re only sixteen, what about your parents?”
“They’re too dumb to know what’s going on.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“No. But we fuck sometimes.”
“And . . . that’s okay with you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, allowing the chink in her bravado to show. “I started going to the high school in the next town, where Terry’s house is. A few months ago. I changed schools.”
“Why?”
“Just because. Because I couldn’t stand my friends. Because I wanted to devote all my time to movement work.”
“What about Schrödinger? And R.D. Laing? And Walt Whitman? Didn’t you tell me that you want to understand reality?”
“I can’t be bothered with all that crap. I have to act.”
“But you’re still going to school, right?”
“Yeah, but I feel stupid. Selfish.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re a kid. You’re supposed to study.”
“Aren’t I supposed to stop people from killing Vietnamese kids?”
“Did you want to talk about the war, or shock me by smoking cigarettes in front of me and saying fuck?”
“I don’t know. Did you hear? The sergeant called you my father.”
“Yeah. I’m old enough to be, but I’m not, though when you act stupid I have to act like one. A father, I mean.”
As usual, Daphne refused to talk about parents. “I don’t want a father. I want an ally.”
“I think you need a father.”
“My father was in the OSS during the war. You know. Codes. Spy stuff. He was very young. And he believed in that war and won’t say anything against the government now. I wish you would see things as I do, like your students do.”
“Some of them,” I corrected. “Go home. Move out of Terry’s house. You’re living with him, right? Do something productive with your summer. The world will st
ill be here when you grow up a bit.”
“Spoken like a grandfather to a little girl. Fuck that. I like living at Terry’s. I like being an emancipated minor. I have this summer job living with a family in the Hamptons and being their au pair. But they went to Europe for the week, so I have some time off.”
“That sounds fine. Just don’t be so impatient to grow up.”
“Garrett!”
“What?”
“You know that’s the crap adults always say.” Then her mood changed and her countenance softened. “I like your longer hair. And I like that you were singing the Beatles. You do think about the war, right? If you really think about it, I just don’t believe you will be on the fence anymore. It’s vile. In fact, that’s what I was researching. The war. Not Schrödinger. Not physics. Not poetry. You’ll think about it?”
“Absolutely. Speaking about something else, I didn’t know when I’d see you again. Not after you ran out of the Forester Gallery.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The Galen Green portrait?”
Her eyebrows met in a picture of puzzlement, and she gently shook her head. No, she did not know what I was talking about. Then she glanced down at her watch, a large-faced man’s wristwatch, her father’s, Terry’s, or maybe even Rick Lopez’s. “Fuck,” she said. “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. I never went to any gallery with you, and I have no idea what portrait you’re talking about. The last time I saw you, you brought those stupid index cards. But I’m going to miss my train. Terry has an organizing meeting I have to help him with. I just wanted to check in with you. It’s a good thing we’re so near Penn Station.” She hurried out, barely taking the time to wave goodbye.
“Wait!” I shouted after her. “You do know me from the bookstore, right? You did buy the Schrödinger book?”
“Of course,” she called back over her shoulder without breaking her stride.
Wow. I would have bet the bank that I had just met another Daphne. That foulmouthed urchin didn’t resemble either of the two Daphnes, apart from being exactly the same. The contradiction was dizzying. What was happening? The girl was like a hydra, sprouting existences like the monster sprouted heads. If I was right, there were enormous questions opening up before me, questions about her nature and the mechanics of her life. And questions about reality, which just didn’t work this way. And something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Adams? Since I had no idea what was going on, I had no idea how Daphne’s life worked.
Here’s what I knew: all these girls had met and formed some kind of bond with me, though they seemed to have no idea of each other. Each was Daphne; each was different. I had no proof of my new suspicions about this new Daphne, but I was going to have to find out, and I was afraid that if I really understood the Schrödinger girls everything in the world would start to be different. Or it was still possible that she was a fraud, or that I was crazy? Is definitive evidence about reality ever available?
Chapter Seven
* * *
All the picayune details that go into planning a semester started to drive me crazy. Creating new courses and researching new texts published that year was a time-consuming process, and this summer I had little interest in my job. I wanted to analyze the Schrödinger mystery full time, not that I really had much to go on.
I finally submitted book requests for the fall 1967 semester to our department secretary. When I left the social science building I noticed the hydrangeas burgeoning with their riotous mophead blooms of blue, pink, and purple. As a natural litmus test announcing the pH of the soil just by their color, they had always fascinated me. Back home, I pulled my ten-year-old T-bird, my one extravagance, into the driveway of the old house I rented.
Stepping up my efforts to understand these girls, I dedicated my small study to sorting out the Daphne data. I took down my framed van Gogh reproductions, Starry Night and Pear Tree in Blossom, without thinking and stood them on the floor facing the far wall of the room to free up the wall space for my investigation.
All my meetings with the Daphnes, those auburn-haired adolescents, those Schrödinger girls, swirled in my head, so I began with a time line. I taped paper to the wall and gathered up my markers—I used black for the dates, red for the settings, and blue for the descriptions of Daphne.
After I finished the time line I added the snapshot of Galen’s Daphne standing by the swan boats in Boston. When she had handed me the photo I put it in my jacket pocket instead of giving it back. Since the time stamp on the snapshot exactly matched the time I had been at the gallery in front of the portrait with Daphne, I reasoned that I had proof, of a sort, that there were two Daphnes. I had worked on enough twin studies in grad school to know that sometimes twins were separated and adopted and knew nothing of each other, but the girl in Bronxville knew me and had shared experiences with my original Daphne. So did the girl at the recruiting office. All three claimed to be the girl from the bookstore. And although physics suggested that an alternate Daphne could theoretically exist, no one expected a second or third girl to actually show up. I remembered my first meeting with Ur-Daphne and her explanation of Ovid’s myth. Maybe I was Apollo, and my gaze was splitting the girls apart. Instead of being transformed into a tree, each new incarnation just began a new life, a kind of tree, right? With each Daphne one of its branches? Now I was just being fanciful, I thought. Maybe Jerry was right when he called Jung myth, and the collective unconscious clinically irrelevant.
The time line didn’t divulge much, but maybe another reading of the R.D. Laing book Daphne had given me could help. I flopped down into the brown chenille chair that served as my reading spot. A floor lamp and a small side table were the only furniture in the room apart from a small wooden desk. I’d left Daphne’s gift on the table by the chair.
Laing didn’t provide any clues to understanding my multiplying girl, but he seemed to be talking directly to me. Meeting these Daphnes had me imagining a reality constructed in an entirely different way than ordinary reality. Instinct told me that these were not twins or triplets, and that the girl in Bronxville and the girl in Times Square were not acting. I had to admit to myself that I believed that the girl in the bookstore was now three girls. She had split into another self. One girl had run off with Galen Green, one had returned to her parents and was still in high school, and one had emancipated herself and lived in a student house with an SDS organizer. As outlandish as it might seem to Jerry, this is what I believed.
What if I was mentally ill? Laing’s main idea was that the mentally ill are not insane, just differently sane, a radical notion. My mind protested. What about the guy in the loony bin thinking he was Napoleon? Was he just differently sane too? I wasn’t comfortable with Laing’s conclusions, as I had spent my entire academic life avoiding just this rhetoric. It was exactly his way of thinking that had led me to behaviorism where we didn’t have to consider these questions. Didn’t people think Copernicus was crazy? And Semmelweis had gone crazy knowing the truth that germs caused childbed fever and having to watch so many women die. Slow down, I thought. I had to guard against grandiosity now. I knew that was a symptom of paranoia. No, you are not in the company of Copernicus or Semmelweis, I reprimanded myself.
I was certain of one thing: I wouldn’t find out who Daphne was from a book. Feeling agitated because I was getting nowhere, I decided to retrace my steps and return to the Bookmasters where I had first met her. I might find a clue there. Driving down along Storm King, a hilly, curving highway, I glimpsed striking vistas of the green world, orchards and the stalwart river, glistening blue in the late-July sunshine. I arrived in the afternoon, and the store was almost empty. The day was too beautiful for book browsing. I walked down the science aisle, but then I swerved toward classics. I stood facing several different translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I chose the one with the nicest font.
As I left the store, on a whim I stopped at a nearby phone booth. The
huge, ratty White Pages hung down. I leafed through the book until I found the listing for the Forester Gallery. Caroline answered. After the normal greetings I said, “Hey, are you willing to have dinner with me tonight? I know it’s short notice. I was a bit distant last time. Would you give me another chance?” I wanted to ask her about the Daphne painting.
“Hmm. Would I be willing? Not the best line ever, Garrett,” she joked. “Let’s see. I assume you’re paying,” she said in a lighthearted way. I assured her that I was. “Well, then, sure. What’s a girl got to lose? Where?”
I suggested the Russian Tea Room. I had wanted to go since Daphne said that she and Galen had met there. I was stalking an apparition. But the legendary restaurant also had its own glamorous appeal; it was very near the gallery. I hoped I’d be able to afford something on the menu.
“I’ll meet you at seven,” I said, giving her time to finish up. “I’ll make a reservation. If there’s a problem, I’ll call you back.”
“Sounds good to me.”
I was lucky that day because my change held out long enough to make the arrangements from the pay phone. I headed to the usual coffee shop to kill some time; I could sit and read the Ovid. I saw our usual waitress. She asked, “Where’s your redheaded friend?” in her soft Caribbean accent.
I half hoped that the Schrödinger girl would be sitting at our table eating a grilled cheese sandwich, but of course she wasn’t. This time I was able to sit against the mirror so I would not be plagued by the random views of myself, a lanky fellow with medium-brown hair, now in a Beatles cut, wearing his new granny glasses. I didn’t want to be embarrassed by glimpsing my own earnestness.
The encyclopedia entry I had read had summarized Ovid’s tale faithfully. Apollo ridicules Cupid as the lesser archer, so Cupid takes revenge by shooting Apollo with a golden arrow and Daphne with a lead one, causing Apollo to fall deeply in love with the nymph. He pursues her, but she flees and begs her father, the river god, to protect her. He does, by turning her into a laurel tree. That much I already knew, but the summary did not communicate the intensity of Apollo’s desire for her, or the pathos of Daphne’s desire to escape him and remain devoted to Artemis, a virgin goddess. Although I couldn’t see much relevance, I realized that all Ovid’s stories described metamorphoses. There was a connection there.