On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Daniel knew that every time he sang at Marble Collegiate he was taking a calculated risk of being recognized by someone from the still dimmer past. Because of Van Dyke’s association with the P.R.L. there was a constant influx of church groups and convention delegates dropping in for the Sunday services, and among these visitors there was bound, sometime, to be someone from Amesville or environs who’d known the old, unreconstructed Daniel Weinreb. His fears hadn’t finally stood in the way of his taking the job, but it might be just as well to continue to wear a mask that had proven so effective. Everyone would suppose he remained a phoney by preference, but that couldn’t be helped. Besides, admit it, it had its moments.

  He determined, at least, to change his markings. On his next visit to the cosmetician he had a small, mandorla-shaped spot bleached out high on his forehead, a process as painful as it was expensive. Then, to his great and immediate relief, the circles on his cheeks were filled in and his frizzed hair was straightened and cut to form a bang of oily ringlets obscuring the upright almond of whiteness on his brow. The new mask, being less flaunting, was even more effective as a disguise. His own mother, as the saying goes, wouldn’t have known him now.

  A year passed: a year immense with events, prodigies of history and of his own changed heart (if the heart it is, indeed, that registers the sense of vocation, of being summoned to a destined task, and not the eyes, or hands, or spine); a year of blessed tumult; a happy year too quickly gone by. What he did in that year could be quickly told. With Mrs. Schiff he finished a draft of a full-scale two-act version of Honeybunny Time, which Tauber immediately began showing to producers (all of them thought it was a put-on), and he wrote, or re-wrote, some seven or eight songs of his own. But what he learned would require a fairly epic catalogue. Insights blossomed into fugitive visions, branched into viable propositions, interlocked into systems, and the systems themselves seemed to resonate mysteriously with all manner of things, great and small, with his hugest, haziest intuitions as with the curves and colors of a gladiolus in a plastic pot. It was as though he’d been offered an interlinear translation to the whole span of his life. Old chunks of unsorted awareness fell together in patterns as lucid as a Mozart melody. Once, home alone and scaling the heights of Don Giovanni, the shape of the day’s epiphany was just that, a mere seven notes that seemed, from the height at which he heard them, to say more of justice, judgement and tragic fate than all of Aeschylus and Shakespeare rolled into one. It didn’t have to be music that got him going, though it usually was, somehow, a work of art and not the raw materials of Nature. New York doesn’t have that much unmodified Nature to offer, except its skies and what could be made to glow in the park, but it was chock-full of artifice and booming day and night with music. Daniel didn’t want for stimuli.

  How long could one go on summing things up like this? Mrs. Schiff said forever, so long as one remained on friendly terms with one’s Muse. But who was the Muse and what did she require? There Mrs. Schiff could offer no oracles.

  The question was important to Daniel, for he’d come in a rather superstitious way to believe that possibly Boa was his Muse. Hadn’t his awakening coincided with the time that he’d brought her here to live with him? But how ridiculous, to speak at all of ‘living’ with her, when she was nothing but an empty shell. It was with Mrs. Schiff, it was with Rey, that he’d lived for these three years. Yet he didn’t for a moment suppose them to be Muses. They’d been his teachers; or, if that didn’t do them sufficient honor or express the size of the debt, his Masters. The Muse was something, or someone, else.

  The Muse, first of all, was a woman, a woman to whom one remained faithful, and Daniel had, in his fashion, remained faithful to Boa. This might or might not be significant, might or might not connect to some fundamental bedrock of truth beneath the unexplored murk of the subconscious. When it wasn’t shining in the clear sunlight of joy, sex could be infinitely mysterious. But Daniel’s conception of Boa as his Muse was more literal than that. He thought of her as an active presence, a benign will-o’-wisp, touching his spirit and lighting his way with unseen, subliminal glimmerings. In much the same way he had, in his earliest youth, imagined his mother flying to him from far away, hovering over him, whispering to him, regarding him with a mournful, secret love that had been, nevertheless, the force that had sustained him through the desolations of the first loneliest years in Amesville. He had been wrong then; his mother had not been with him, had never known how to fly. But did that mean he was wrong now? Boa was a fairy; she might be with him; he believed she was, and, believing it, he spoke to her, prayed to her, beseeched her to let him off the hook.

  For the free ride was over. Rey, though he’d regarded it as an unqualified waste of money, had fulfilled the terms of their agreement. Now, with that debt satisfied, it was up to Daniel. Boa’s minumum weekly requirement cost a whopping $163, and there was no let-up in sight, as this wasn’t the black market price. Rationing was over, and Daniel was able to buy her supplies directly from the First National Flightpaths’ pharmacy. $163 represented the basic cost of one week’s vacation outside your body as fixed by the new Federal guidelines. By this means the government hoped to discourage fairies from permanently abandoning their vehicles by the roadside. Logically Daniel had to approve the new uniform code Congress had come up with — even in this particular. Alackaday, who would have supposed that such a wonder’s coming to pass would have been nothing but a new source of grief for Daniel, who had marched in so many parades and sung at so many rallies in this very cause? But such was the case, and though there had been a few woeful outcries in the press from parents and spouses (and even a granddaughter) who were in the same costly fix as Daniel, there really wasn’t much hope of this law being changed, for it represented a genuine concensus.

  $163 stood at the borderline of what was possible and left a very scant residue from which to supply his own necessities. It was painful, it was downright cruel, to be earning a good living for the first time in years and still to have no security, no comfort, no fun. He let Boa know it in no uncertain terms (assuming she was listening in). Enough was enough. He wanted to be rid of her. It wasn’t fair of her to expect him to go on like this. Fifteen years! He threatened to phone her father, and set deadlines for doing so, but since these threats weren’t carried out, he had to assume either that she wasn’t listening, or didn’t believe his threats, or didn’t care. Upping the ante, he menaced her with being disconnected from the umbilicus of tubes that sustained her vegetable life, but this was the merest huffing and puffing. Kill Boa? She was, God knows, an albatross around his neck; she was a constant memento mori (more so than ever, now that Claude Durkin’s tombstone nestled at the foot of her bed); but she was his wife, and she might be his Muse, and to fail in his obligation to her would just be asking for trouble.

  Aside from these notions about his Muse, Daniel was not, in general, a superstitious sort, but he was fast becoming a Christian, at least in the latter-day sense of the word as set forth in the teachings of Reverend Jack Van Dyke. According to Van Dyke, all Christians got to be that way by suspending their disbelief in a preposterous but highly improving fairy tale. This presented no difficulties to Daniel, who took naturally to pretending. His whole life these days was a game of make-believe. He pretended to be black. He had pretended, for one whole year, to be passionately in love with a eunuch. Sometimes he and Mrs. Schiff would pretend for hours at a time to be honeybunnies. Why not pretend to be a Christian? (Especially if it brought in, theoretically, a hundred bucks a week and, more to the point, a chance to perform in physical and social dimensions that suited the size of his voice and his art, which Marble Collegiate did to a tee). Why not say he was saved, if it might make someone else happy and did him no harm? Wasn’t that all most priests and ministers do? He’d never been the type, when people asked how he was feeling and he was feeling rotten, to say he felt rotten. He said he felt swell, and smiled, and he expected others to do the same. That was simply civil
ization, and so far as he could see, Christianity was just the logical outcome of such principles, the most devious and effective way ever discovered of being polite.

  Mrs. Schiff, an old-fashioned atheist, didn’t approve of his conversion, as he styled it, and they had some of their most enjoyable arguments on this topic. She said it wasn’t intellectually self-respecting to say you believed (for instance) that someone could die and then return to life, which was what Christianity boiled down to. It was all right for people who really did believe such nonsense to say so; it was even good that they did, since it gave one fair warning as to the limits of their rationality. But in Daniel it was charlatanry pure and simple. Daniel replied that nothing was pure and simple, least of all himself.

  Once, when Mrs. Schiff had been dead-certain about a fact of music history (Had Schumann written a violin concerto?), he made a wager with her, the forfeit of which was that she must accompany him to Marble Collegiate on a Sunday of his choosing. She was wrong. He chose a Sunday when Van Dyke was to preach on the immortality of the soul, and Daniel would be singing in Bach’s Actus Tragicus. It was not, as it turned out, one of Van Dyke’s best efforts, and the choir as well (including, alas, Daniel) had bitten off rather more than it could chew. Mrs. Schiff was commiserating, but otherwise unmoved.

  “Of course,” she conceded, “one must be grateful to churches for providing free concerts this way, but it does smack a little of the soup kitchen, doesn’t it? One has to sit there for the sermon and the rest of it for the sake of a very little music.”

  “But that isn’t the point,” Daniel insisted, somewhat testily, for he was still smarting from the mess he’d made of “Bestellet dein Haus.” “People don’t go to church for the sake of the music. They go there to be with the other people who go there. Being physically present, that’s the crucial thing.”

  “Do you mean that it’s a kind of proof that there is a community and they’re part of it? I should think a concert would do that just as well, or better, since one can talk in the intervals. And the music, if you’ll forgive my saying so, would probably be a touch more professional.”

  “I stank, I know that, but my singing, good or bad, is irrelevant.”

  “Oh, you weren’t the worst offender. Far from it. You’re learning to fake the notes you can’t reach very ably. But what is the point, Daniel? In a word.”

  “In a word, hope.”

  “Well then, in a few words.”

  “What was the cantata about? Death. The fact that that is what’s in store for all of us, and that there’s no way round it, and we all know there’s no way round it.”

  “Your Mr. Van Dyke maintains differently.”

  “And so did you, just by being there. That’s the point. Everyone has doubts. Everyone despairs. But when you’re there in church, surrounded by all those other people, it’s hard not to believe that some of them don’t believe something. And by our being there we’re helping them believe it.”

  “But what if all of them are thinking the same as us? What if none of them are bamboozled and are just offering their moral support to others, who similarly aren’t bamboozled?”

  “It’s a matter of degree. Even I’m bamboozled, as you say, a little. Even you are, if not in church, then when you’re listening to music, and even more when you’re writing your own. What’s the difference, ultimately, between Bunny Honeybunny’s song and Bach’s saying, ‘Come, sweet hour of death, for my soul is fed with honey from the mouth of the lion’?”

  “The chief difference is that Bach’s is immeasurably greater music. But I should say another difference is that my tongue is firmly in my cheek concerning the philosophic views of honeybunnies.”

  “Your tongue isn’t entirely in your cheek, though, and perhaps Bach’s isn’t completely out of his. He has ambiguous moments.”

  “But he knows, he says, that his Redeemer liveth. ‘Ich weiss,’ sagt Bach, ‘dass mein Erloser lebt.’ And I know that mine doesn’t.”

  “So you say.”

  “And what do you say, Daniel Weinreb?”

  “More or less the same as you, I suppose. But I sing something else.”

  It was the night before Christmas, and the night before the night before Daniel was to appear in the Off-Broadway première of Honeybunny Time. Dreams, it seems, really do come true. But he was not happy, and it was hard to explain to Boa, who was the underlying cause of this unhappiness, why this should be so. There she sat, propped up in her little cot, a Christmas angel complete with a halo and a pair of wings from Mrs. Galamian’s stock of costumes for the first-act dream-ballet that had been scrapped during the last week of rehearsals. Yet the problem was easily stated. He was broke, and while his prospects had never been brighter, his income had rarely been less. He’d had to leave the Metastasio two months ago, time enough to exhaust the little money he’d put away to tide him through an emergency. But this was the one emergency he hadn’t reckoned with — success. Rey and Tauber were both adament as to receiving their full cuts. Daniel had done the arithmetic, and even if Honeybunny Time didn’t just fizzle right out, Daniel’s net earnings from it would still fall short of what was required at the heady rate of some three hundred dollars a month. And if the show were a smash, he wouldn’t do any better, since he’d had to sign over his interest in the book for the chance to play Bunny. That, as Irwin Tauber had explained, was show business. But try and explain that to a corpse.

  “Boa,” he said, touching one of the nylon wings. But he didn’t know where to go from there. To talk to her at all was an admission of faith, and he didn’t want to believe, anymore, that she might be alive, and listening, and biding her time. If she were, it was cruel of her not to return. If she weren’t, if she’d left this world forever, as she’d left this husk of herself, this disposable container, then there could be no harm in his ceasing to care for it as well. “Boa, I’m not giving up another fifteen years. And I’m not going to peddle my ass again. I suppose I could ask Freddie Carshalton to loan me something, but I’m not going to. Or Shelly Gaines, who probably doesn’t have it to spare. What I am going to do is I’m going to call your father. If that’s wrong, then I’ll just have to bear the guilt. Okay?”

  The halo glinted.

  “If you want to come back later, you’ll have to come back to him. Maybe that’s what you’ve been waiting for. Am I right?”

  He leaned forward, careful not to touch the tube that snaked into her left nostril, and kissed the lips that were legally dead. Then he got up and went out into the hall and down the hall to Mrs. Schiff’s office, where the telephone was.

  In all these years he’d never forgotten the phone number for Worry.

  An operator answered at the third ring. He said he wanted to speak to Grandison Whiting. The operator asked his name. He said only that it was a personal call. The operator said she would give him Mr. Whiting’s secretary.

  Then a new voice said, “Miss Weinreb speaking.”

  Daniel was too taken aback to reply.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello,” he echoed, forgetting to use the deeper voice with which he’d addressed the operator. “Miss Weinreb?”

  Which Miss Weinreb? he wondered. His secretary!

  “I’m afraid Mr. Whiting isn’t available at the moment. I’m his secretary. Can I take a message?”

  In the other room Daniel could hear the telephone ringing. But it couldn’t be the telephone. It must be the doorbell. In which case Mrs. Schiff would answer it.

  “Which Miss Weinreb would that be?” he asked cautiously. “Cecelia Weinreb?”

  “This is Aurelia.” She sounded miffed. “Who is this, please?”

  “It’s a personal call. For Mr. Whiting. It concerns his daughter.”

  There was a long silence. Then Aurelia said, “Which daughter?” Hearing her dawning surmise, he became uneasy.

  At that moment Mrs. Schiff burst into the office. In one hand she held the halo from Boa’s head. He knew, just by looking, what she wa
s going to tell him. He replaced the phone in its cradle.

  It hadn’t been the doorbell.

  “It’s Boa,” he said. “She’s come back.”

  Mrs. Schiff nodded.

  Boa was alive.

  Mrs. Schiff put the halo down on top of the desk, where it rocked unsteadily. Her hands were shaking. “You’d better go see her, Daniel. And I’ll phone for a doctor.”

  19

  A week after it opened at the Cherry Lane, Honeybunny Time was transferred uptown to the St. James Theater, right across the street from the Metastasio, and Daniel was a star. His name, his own name, the name of Daniel Weinreb, was spelled out on the marquee in winking lights. His face, dark as molasses, could be seen on posters all over the city. His songs were on the radio day and night. He was rich and he was famous. Time featured him on its cover, rabbit ears and all, under a 36-point rainbow-shaped and hued headline asking, portentously: BEL CANTO — IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Inside, in an exclusive article, Mrs. Schiff told something like the story of his life.

  It was not his doing. Or perhaps it was. The phonecall to Worry had been automatically recorded and traced by Whiting’s security system. At his sister’s suggestion, the voice-prints of the call were compared with those of tapes Daniel had made with Boa in days gone by.

  The police appeared at the door of Mrs. Schiff’s apartment at the very moment the curtain was going up on Honeybunny Time. Mrs. Schiff, presciently indisposed, was on hand to receive them. Boa had already been taken off to a clinic to recuperate from the effects of her fifteen-year-long coma and so was spared the first onslaught. When the police had finally been persuaded that only Daniel could supply them with the name of the clinic and had been dispatched to the Cherry Lane, Mrs. Schiff, seeing that the cat was, in any case, out of the bag, decided to cash in her chips. With Irwin Tauber’s help she got through to the editor-in-chief of Time, and before Daniel had sung the closing reprise of “Honeybunnies Go to Heaven,” she had struck a deal, giving Time exclusive rights to her own 4,000-word version of the “Romance of Daniel Weinreb.” There was no way, after that, that Honeybunny Time wasn’t going to be a hit.