On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Given such guarantees — a virtual suit of armor — Boadicea soon became the official gadfly of her class. Mrs. Norberg seemed rather more grateful than not to be supplied with a combatant who could be relied on to hold — and express — opinions that she would otherwise have been obliged to set forth herself before she could trounce them, never a very satisfactory arrangement for someone who delights in controversy. That these aberrant ideas possessed much more force and cogency as expressed by Boadicea than by the Iceberg’s usual straw-men seemed not to trouble her. Like most people of strong convictions, any contradiction registered on her consciousness as so much nonsense. Faith is a selective kind of blindness.

  So it was that whenever Boadicea would be holding forth on any subject, from the reasonableness of a graduated income tax to the unreasonableness of her Uncle Charles’s recent demagogic vendetta against the A.C.L.U., a fixed smile would settle on the Iceberg’s colorless lips, her eyes would glaze, and she would knit her fingers together in a thorny little clump of self-restraint, as who would say: “Though my duty be painful, I shall perform it to the last drop of my blood.” When Boadicea wound down, Mrs. Norberg would unclasp her hands, give a little sigh, and thank Boadicea ironically for what she was sure was a “very interesting” or “very unusual” point-of-view. If this seemed insufficiently withering, she would ask others in the class what their thoughts on the matter were, calling first on anyone she suspected to be a fellow-traveller. Most students, prudently, refused to be trapped into any opinion, pro or con, but there was a small contingent, eight of the thirty-two, who could be relied on to parrot Mrs. Norberg’s established prejudices, however silly, however blatantly contrary to fact. It was always one of these who was allowed to have the last word, a strategy that had the desired effect of making Boadicea seem, even to herself, a minority of one. Also, it tended to diffuse her animosity and deflect it toward the eight reliables, whose names became a kind of baleful litany for her: Cheryl and Mitch and Reuben and Sloan, and Sandra and Susan and Judy and Joan. All the girls, except Sandra Wolf, were cheerleaders, and all, without exception, were mindless. Three of the eight — Joan Small and Cheryl and Mitch Severson — came from the wealthier farm families of the area. The Seversons and Smalls were scarcely comparable to the Whitings, but they did qualify as “gentry” and were invited as a matter of course to all the larger functions at Worry. It distressed Boadicea to find herself at odds with three of the people she was expected to be on friendly, or at least neighborly, terms with, but she couldn’t help herself. There was no need for them to suck up to Mrs. Norberg so egregiously. Their parents weren’t undergoders, not in the benighted way they were. Fanaticism on the scale of the A.S.R.P. was a relic of the past. So why did they do it? Assuming they weren’t just boot-licking. And for that matter, how did you explain someone like the Iceberg herself? Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts? For that’s all the old undergoder dread of music (etc.) amounted to. They couldn’t bear for other people to have experiences they were incapable of. Resentment. Resentment and jealousy — it was as simple as that, though no one (not even Boadicea) dared to come right out and say so. Things were a little looser lately, but not as loose as all that.

  Like most well-seasoned teachers, Mrs. Norberg was a confirmed monologuist, and so Boadicea was not called upon every day to speak up for reason and sanity. Penance enough to have to be an audience to the Iceberg’s rambling reminiscences of her term in Congress (it was her special pride and unique distinction to have been present at every vote taken in those two years). These would shift, by the freest of associations, into (for instance) a cutesy-poo anecdote about the dear sweet squirrels in her back yard — Silverface, Tom-Boy, and Mittens, each of them a little philosopher-in-the-rough — and these whimseys would metamorphose, by imperceptible degrees, into diatribes against the F.D.A., the bête noir of the Farm Belt. All this — the memorabilia, the whimseys, the denunciations — would be set forth with an air of winking complicity, for it was the Iceberg’s underlying assumption that her students were sensible to their good fortune in having been assigned to her Social Studies class and not that of the wishy-washy liberal Mr. Cox.

  Listening to these monologues and battering her wits against the woman’s impassive, impervious authority, Boadicea came to hate Mrs. Norberg with a hatred that would leave her, by the hour’s end, trembling with impotent fury. Literally trembling. Sheerly from a sense of self-preservation, she took to cutting classes, even though there was no way, with the bus drivers posted at the doors, to leave the building. She would lock herself inside a toilet and sit cross-legged on the stool, working calculus problems. She became openly sarcastic in class, and sneered when she was sneered at. She made a point, whenever a soliloquy commenced, of turning away from the Iceberg and staring out the window, though there was nothing to be seen but sky and clouds and the slow curve of three suspended wires. Mrs. Norberg made no other response to these provocations than to move Boadicea to the front row, where, if Boadicea chose to divert her gaze, she would simply interpose herself between the viewer and the view.

  It was there, in the front row seat next to his, that Boadicea recognized Daniel Weinreb. They had been together in the class for two months without her making the connection. Not that the back of his head (which was mostly all she’d seen of him till the move to the front) was so very distinctive. Also, he’d changed his appearance since she’d fallen, briefly and platonically, in love with him at the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse: shorter hair, the moustache gone, the high spirits folded away, and an inert, affectless fortitude in their place. Except to answer the roll-call or shuffle his feet at a question directly addressed to him, he never spoke in class, and just as his words never betrayed his thoughts, his face never betrayed his feelings.

  Boadicea was certain, however, that they were not greatly unlike her own. He hated the Iceberg as fervently as she did; he must — or how could he dance so well? Perhaps as a syllogism this left something to be desired, and Boadicea didn’t rest content with an a priori conviction. She began to collect evidences — glints and flashes of the suspected smoldering fires.

  The first thing she discovered was that she was not alone in studying Daniel so closely. Mrs. Norberg herself demonstrated a curiosity altogether out of proportion to Daniel’s classroom contributions. Often when another student would be speaking her eyes would turn to Daniel, and at the militant moment when she would cut loose from classroom protocols and really testify for the gospel of the A.S.R.P., it was toward Daniel these goads were directed, despite the fact that it would be Boadicea, if anyone, who would rise to the bait and argue.

  At last, however, toward the end of the second six-week period, Mrs. Norberg threw out a challenge that Daniel did not turn away from. There had been a story in the news, recently, that had very much exercised the indignation of undergoders. Bud Scully, a farm manger for the Northrup Corp. farm outside LuVerne, had undertaken, on his own initiative, to do what it was no longer permitted the State of Iowa to do: he’d been jamming radio broadcasts originating in Minnesota. The stations had brought suit against him, and he was enjoined to desist. When he refused, on grounds of conscience and continued his private crusade, he was sent to prison. Undergoders were up in arms. Mrs. Norberg, who, to do her credit, tried to resist the passions of the passing hour (she never, for instance, went beyond Watergate in her American History class) was swept away. She devoted a week of the class’s time to an in-depth consideration of John Brown. She read aloud Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. She played a recording of the hymn of “John Brown’s Body,” standing over the tape recorder warily and jerking her head up and down in time to the music. When the hymn was over, with tears in her eyes (a quite inadvertent testimony to the power of music), she told how she had visited the park right here in Iowa where John Brown had drilled his volunteer army for the attack on Harpers Ferry. Then, shouldering her blackboard pointer like a rifle, she showed the class how th
e soldiers in that army would have drilled, marching back and forth across the shining maple floorboards — right face, left face, Ten-SHUN! to the rear MARCH, a perfect spectacle. At such moments, truly, you’d have had to have a heart of stone not to be grateful to be in the Iceberg’s class.

  All this while she had resisted mentioning Bud Scully by name, though none of them could have been unaware of the intended parallel. Now, after a formal salute to the flag in the corner, Mrs. Norberg abandoned all pretense of objectivity. She went to the blackboard and wrote out, in gigantic letters, the martyr’s name. BUD SCULLY. Then she went to her desk, secured herself behind her folded hands, and, glowering, defied the world to do its worst.

  Boadicea raised her hand.

  Mrs. Norberg called on her.

  “Do you mean,” Boadicea asked, with a disingenuous smile, “that Bud Scully is another John Brown? And that what he did was right?”

  “Did I say that?” the Iceberg demanded. “Let me ask you, Miss Whiting: is that your opinion? Is Bud Scully’s case analagous to that of John Brown?”

  “In the sense that he’s gone to jail for his convictions you might say so. But otherwise? One man tried to stop slavery, and the other is trying to stop popular music radio stations. At least that’s what I understand from the newspaper.”

  “Which newspaper would that be? I ask, you see, because I gave up reading the papers some time ago. My experiences (especially when I was on the Hill) have shown me that they’re not at all reliable.”

  “It was the Star-Tribune.”

  “The Star-Tribune,” the Iceberg repeated, turning to Daniel with a knowing look.

  “And what it said,” Boadicea continued, “in its editorial, was that everyone must obey the law just because it is the law, and the only way we’re ever going to live together peacefully is to respect the law. Even when it grates against us.”

  “That seems quite sound on the face of it. The question John Brown poses, though, remains to be answered. Are we required to obey an unjust law?” The Iceberg threw back her head, glittering with righteousness.

  Boadicea persisted. “According to the polls, most people thought the old law was unjust, the law that kept them from reading out-of-state newspapers and from listening to out-of-state broadcasts.”

  “According,” Mrs. Norberg said scornfully, “to the polls in those same newspapers.”

  “Well, the Supreme Court felt it was unjust too, or they wouldn’t have overturned it. And as I understand it, short of a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court has the last word on the rightness or the wrongness of laws.”

  Mrs. Norberg’s views on the Supreme Court were well known, and accordingly there was a tacit understanding among her students to steer clear of the reefs of this subject. But Boadicea was beyond compassion or prudence. She wanted to demolish the woman’s mind and send her back to Dubuque in a strait-jacket. She deserved nothing else.

  It wasn’t going to be that easy, however. Mrs. Norberg had a paranoid’s instinct for knowing when she was being persecuted. She stepped aside and Boadicea’s missile passed by harmlessly.

  “It is a knotty question, I agree. And highly complex. Everyone will be affected by it in a different way, and that is bound to color our attitudes. Right here in this room we have someone whose life was touched very directly by the decision Miss Whiting speaks of. Daniel, what is your opinion?”

  “About what?” Daniel asked.

  “Does the State of Iowa have the right, the sovereign right, to bar potentially harmful and disruptive material from being publicly available, or does that represent an interference with our constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech?”

  “I can’t say I ever thought much about it.”

  “Surely, Daniel, having gone to prison for breaking the state’s law…” She paused for the benefit of anyone in the class who might not have known this. Of course there was no one who hadn’t heard Daniel’s legend by now. It was nearly of the magnitude of Mrs. Norberg’s, which probably, more than the principles involved, accounted for her relentless, attentive dislike. “Surely, when you’re then released because the Supreme Court—” She lifted her eybrows sardonically, “—rules, that, after all, the law is not the law and never has been… surely, you must have some opinion on such a subject.”

  “I guess my opinion is that it doesn’t make much difference one way or the other.”

  “Not make much difference! A change that big?”

  “I got out two weeks earlier, and that’s about it.”

  “Really, Daniel, I don’t know what you can mean.”

  “I mean I still don’t think it’s safe to express an honest opinion anywhere in the state of Iowa. And so far as I know, there’s no law that says I have to. And I’m not about to.”

  First there was a silence. Then, led by Boadicea, a smattering of applause. Even with that unprecedented provocation, Mrs. Norberg did not take her eyes from Daniel. You could almost see the calculations going on behind that fixed stare: was his insolence defensible, in theory, as candor? Or might he be made to pay for it? Nothing less than expulsion would be worth a head-on contest, and at last, with evident reluctance, she decided not to risk it. There would always be another time.

  After the class Boadicea lay in wait for Daniel at the entrance to the lunchroom.

  “That was terrific,” she told him in a stage-whisper, as she slipped into place behind him in the cafeteria line. “A regular adventure movie.”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “Oh no! You were completely, universally right. The only way to deal with the Iceberg is silence. Let her talk to her eight echoes.”

  He just smiled. Not the fleshy, unforgettable smile of the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse, but a smile that was all mind and meaning. She felt abashed, as though, by making no reply, he meant to show that he considered her one of the people it wasn’t safe to talk to. The smile faltered.

  “Hey,” he said, “this is a dumb argument — you telling me I’m right, and me saying I’m wrong.”

  “Well, you are right.”

  “Maybe, but what’s right for me isn’t necessarily what’s right for you. If you stop sniping at her, what’ll there be for the rest of us to listen to?”

  “You mean I can afford to be brave because I’m safe.”

  “And I can’t afford it. Which wasn’t something I should have spelled out. That’s the mistake. One of the first things you learn in prison is that the guards like to think that you like them. Norberg’s no different.”

  Boadicea wanted to wrap her arms around him, to leap up and cheer for him like some silly cheerleader, to buy him something terrifically expensive and appropriate, such was the enormity of her agreement and of her gratitude at having anyone to be agreeing with.

  “School is a prison,” she agreed earnestly. “You know, I used to think I was the only person in the world who understood that. I was in Switzerland at this awful so-called finishing school, and I wrote a letter home, to my father, explaining all the ways it was a prison, and he wrote back saying, ‘Of course, my dear Bobo — school is a prison for the very good reason that all children are criminals.’”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They’d reached the food. Daniel took a dish of cole slaw onto his tray and pointed at the fishsticks.

  “Actually,” she went on, “that isn’t exactly what he said. What he said was that teenagers aren’t fully civilized yet, and so they’re dangerous. Not here in Iowa, perhaps, but in the cities certainly. But one of the differences between here and the cities… oh, just soup for me, please… is the degree to which people here do live by the official code. That’s what my father says anyhow.”

  Daniel gave his school credit card to the check-out girl. The machine fizzed with the prices of his lunch, and the girl handed him back his card. He picked up his tray.

  “Daniel?”

  He stopped and she asked, with her eyes, for him to wait till they were out of earshot of the check-out girl.
When they were, she asked him, “Are you having lunch with anyone else today?”

  “No.”

  “Why not have lunch with me then? I know it’s not for me to ask, and you probably prefer to have the time to yourself, to think.” She paused to allow him to contradict her, but he just stood there with his devastating superior smile. His handsomeness was so dark, so exotic, almost as though he belonged to another race. “But me,” she persisted, “I’m different. I like to talk before I think.”

  He laughed. “Say, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you have lunch with me?”

  “Why how nice of you to ask, Daniel,” she minced, her parody of pert insouciance. Or possibly it was the genuine article, pert insouciance itself. “Or should I call you Mr. Weinreb?”

  “Maybe something in between.”

  “Very funny.” Making her voice comically deep.

  “That’s what Susan McCarthy always says when she’s at a loss for words.”

  “I know. I’m a close observer. Too.” But for all that it had stung — to be compared (and accurately) with the likes of a Susan McCarthy.

  They’d found bench-space at a relatively quiet table. Instead of starting to eat, he just looked at her. Started to say something, and stopped. She felt tingly with excitement. She had caught his attention. It stopped short of liking or even, in any committed way, of interest, but the worst was over, and suddenly, incredibly, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She blushed. She smiled. And shook her head, with pert insouciance.