On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

“Cecelia’s jealous,” Milly explained. “Aurelia earns approximately double what she does. Despite how many years in dental school?”

  “A lifetime.”

  “Aurelia is awfully pretty,” Rose explained.

  “She certainly is,” Abe agreed with paternal complaisance. “But so is Cecelia. Every bit as pretty. They’re twins, after all.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Michael, and held out his empty wine glass.

  Daniel, sitting next to the bottle, refilled his brother-in-law’s glass.

  “Let’s change the subject, shall we?” suggested Cecelia. “I’m sure Daniel has all kinds of questions he’s dying to ask.”

  “I’m sure I must, but so help me I can’t think of one.”

  “Then I can,” said Rose, holding out her glass to him. “Or have you already heard about Eugene Mueller?”

  “No.” The bottle was empty, so Daniel reached behind him for a fresh bottle from the bucket on the folding table. “Has Eugene returned from the dead too?”

  Rose nodded. “Years and years ago. With a wife and two sons and a degree from Harvard Law School.”

  “No kidding.”

  “They even say he’s going to be the next mayor. He’s a real idealist. I think.”

  “If he is elected,” Michael said, “he’ll be the first Democrat mayor in Amesville in nearly half a century.”

  “Incredible,” said Daniel. “Gee, I wish I could vote for him.”

  “He was a good friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Jerry asked.

  Daniel nodded.

  “And his brother,” Rose went on, ignoring dirty looks from both Milly and Cecelia, “that is to say, his oldest brother, Carl — you knew him too, didn’t you?”

  Daniel popped the cork from the third bottle and managed to fill Rose’s glass without spilling a drop. “We’d met,” he allowed.

  “Well, he’s dead,” said Rose with satisfaction. “A sniper got him in Wichita.”

  “What was he doing in Wichita?”

  “He’d been called up for National Guard duty.”

  “Oh.”

  “I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Well, now he knows,” said Milly. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Daniel. He looked round the table. “Anybody else need to be replenished?”

  Abe looked at his glass, which was almost empty.

  Milly said, “Abe.”

  “I guess I’ve had my limit.”

  “I guess you have,” said Milly. “You have some more, if you want, Daniel. You’re probably more used to it than we are.”

  “That’s show business, Mother. We drink it for breakfast. But in fact I’ve reached my limit too. I’ve got to go on stage in two hours.”

  “An hour and a half, more nearly,” said Cecelia. “Don’t worry — I’m keeping track.”

  The phone rang again just after Cecelia had passed round the dessert, which was home-made raspberry ice cream. It was tremendous ice cream, and she was back at the table before anyone had bothered to start talking again.

  “Who was that?” Michael asked.

  “Another crank. Best thing is just ignore them.”

  “You, too?” said Milly.

  “Oh, they’re all harmless enough, I’m sure.”

  “You should tell them to stuff it,” said Rose militantly. “That’s what I do.”

  “You all get crank phone calls?” Daniel asked.

  “Oh, I don’t get them on your account,” Rose assured him. “It’s because I’m a phoney.”

  “I told her not to,” said Jerry morosely, “but she wouldn’t listen. She never listens.”

  “It’s a person’s own business what color she is.” She looked Daniel square in the eye. “Am I right?”

  “Don’t lay the blame on Daniel’s shoulders,” Milly snapped. “It was your own damned folly, and you’ll just have to live with it till the stuff wears off. How long does that take, by the way?”

  “About six months,” said Daniel.

  “Christ All-Mighty.” Jerry turned to his ex-fiancée. “You said six weeks.”

  “Well, I don’t intend to let it wear off. So there. You all act like it’s a crime or something. It’s not a crime — it’s an affirmation!”

  “I thought we’d agreed,” said Cecilia, “that Rose’s trip to the beauty parlor was something we weren’t going to talk about.”

  “Don’t all look at me,” said Rose, who was showing some visible signs of distress. “I didn’t bring it up.”

  “Yes you did,” said Jerry. “You brought it up when you said about the phone calls you’d been getting.”

  Rose began to cry. She left the table and went out into the living room, and then (the screen door banged) into the front yard. Jerry followed a moment later, mumbling an apology.

  “What kind of phone calls?” Daniel asked Cecelia.

  “Really, it isn’t worth discussing.”

  “There’s various kinds,” said Milly. “Most are just obscene in an ordinary loudmouth way. A few have been personally threatening, but you can tell they don’t really mean it. I’ve also had a couple who said they were going to burn down the restaurant, and I reported those to the police.”

  “Mother!”

  “And so should you, Cecelia, if you do get that kind.”

  “It isn’t Daniel’s fault if a bunch of lunatics have nothing better to do with their time than to… Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I’m not blaming Daniel. I’m answering his question.”

  “I was going to ask you, Daniel,” said his father, with a composure that came from not having paid attention to what had seemed, by the sound of it, just another squabble, “about the book you gave me. What’s it called?” He looked under his chair.

  “The Chicken Consubstantial With the Egg,” said Daniel. “I think you left it in the other room.”

  “That’s it. Kind of a strange title, isn’t it? What does it mean?”

  “It’s a sort of popular modern-day account of the Holy Trinity. And about different heresies.”

  “Oh.”

  “When I was in prison you brought me a book by the same writer, Jack Van Dyke. This is his latest book, and it’s actually rather amusing. I got him to sign it for you.”

  “Oh. Well, when I read it, I’ll write him a letter, if you think he’d like that.”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  “I thought perhaps it was something you wrote.”

  “No. I’ve never written a book.”

  “He sings,” Milly explained, with ill-controlled resentment. Abe’s vagaries brought out her mean streak. “ ‘La di da and la di dee, this is living, yessiree.’”

  This time it was Cecelia who got up from the table in tears, knocking over, as she did so, the folding table on which the over-flow of the dinner had been placed, including the carcass of the half-cooked turkey.

  Daniel regarded the idyl of the Hendricks’ front yard with a wistful, megalopolitan nostalgia. It all seemed so remote and unobtainable — the pull-toy on the sidewalk, the idle water-sprinkler, the modest flower-beds with their parallelograms of pansies, marigolds, petunias, and bachelor buttons.

  Milly was perfectly within her rights being pissed off with him. Not just for not having got in touch for all those years, but because he’d violated her first principles, as they were written out in this front yard and up and down all the streets of Amesville: stability, continuity, family life, the orderly handing on of the torch from generation to generation.

  In his own way, Grandison Whiting was probably after pretty much the same thing. Except in his version of it, it wasn’t just a family he wanted, but a dynasty. At the distance from which Daniel observed it, it looked like six of one, half a dozen of the other. He wondered if it wasn’t really the only way it could be done, and thought it probably was.

  “Where do you go next?” Michael asked, as though reading his thoughts.

  “Des Moines, tomorrow
. Then Omaha, St. Louis, Dallas, and God only knows. Big cities, mostly. We’re starting out in Amesville for symbolic reasons. Obviously.”

  “Well, I envy you, seeing all those places.”

  “Then we’re even. I was just sitting here envying your front yard.”

  Michael looked out at his front yard and couldn’t see much there besides the fact that the grass was getting brown from lack of rain. It always did in August. Also, the couch out here on the porch smelled of mildew, even in this dry weather. And his car was a heap. In every direction he looked there was something broken down or falling apart.

  The year after he’d dropped out of St. Olaf’s College in Mason City, Michael Hendricks had played rhythm guitar in a country-western band. Now, at twenty-five, he’d had to relinquish that brief golden age for the sake of a steady job (he ran his father’s dairy in Amesville) and a family, but the sacrifice still smarted, and the old dreams still thrashed about in his imagination like fish in the bottom of a boat that have outlasted all reasonable expectations. Finding himself, all of a sudden, the brother-in-law of a nationwide celebrity had been unsettling, had set those fish into a proper commotion, but he’d promised his wife not to seem to be looking for a handout from Daniel in the form of a job with his road show. It was hard, though, to think of anything to say to Daniel that didn’t seem to lead in that direction.

  At last he came up with, “How is your wife?”

  Daniel flinched inwardly. Just that morning, on top of his standard argument with Irwin Tauber, he’d had a fight with him on the subject of Boa. Tauber insisted that until the tour was over they should stick to the story that Boa was still convalescing at the Betti Bailey Clinic. Daniel maintained that honesty, besides being simply the best policy, would also generate further publicity, but Tauber said that death is always bad P.R. And so, as far as the world knew, the romance of the century was still a going concern.

  “Boa’s fine,” said Daniel.

  “Still in the hospital though?”

  “Mm.”

  “It must be strange, her coming back after all that time.”

  “I can tell you in confidence, Michael. I don’t feel that close to her any more. It’s a heart-throb of a love story in theory. In practice it’s something else.”

  “Yeah. People can go thorugh a lot of changes in fifteen years. In less time than that.”

  “And Boa isn’t ‘people’.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When you’re out of your body that long, you stop being altogether human.”

  “You fly though, don’t you?”

  Daniel smiled. “Who’s to say I’m altogether human?”

  Not Michael, evidently. He chewed on the idea that his brother-in-law was not, in some essential respect, his fellow man. There was something to it.

  Far off down County Road B, in the direction of Amesville, you could see the limousine coming for Daniel.

  There was a single backdrop for the show as it was being presented that night in the auditorium of the Amesville High School, an all-purpose Arcadian vista of green hills and blue sky framed by a spatter of foliage on one side and a sprightly, insubstantial colonnade on the other. It was utterly bland and unspecific, like a cheese that tastes only of cheese, not like any particular kind, and as such was very American, even (Daniel liked to think) patriotic.

  He loved the set and he loved the moment when the curtains parted, or went up, and the lights of a theater discovered him there on his stool in Arcady, ready to sing yet another song. He loved the lights. The brighter they became, the brighter he wanted them to be. They seemed to concentrate in their tireless gaze the attention of the entire audience. They were his audience, and he played to them, and did not, therefore, have to consider the separate faces swimming beneath that sea of light. Most of all he loved his own voice, when it threaded into the delicate tumble of other voices that swelled and subsided in his own twenty-two piece orchestra, the Daniel Weinreb Symphonette. And he was willing, at last, that this should be his life, his only life. If it were small, that was a part of its charm.

  So he sang his old favorites, and they looked at him, and listened, and understood, for the force of song is that it must be understood. His mother, with a fixed smile on her face, understood, and his father, sitting beside her and tapping his foot in time to Mrs. Schiff’s a la turca march-tune, understood quite as clearly. Rose, in the next row, hiding her tape recorder under her seat (she had taped the entire family reunion as well), understood, and Jerry, watching little bubbles of colored light behind his closed eyes, understood, although a major part of his understanding was that this sort of thing wasn’t for him. Far at the back of the auditorium Eugene Mueller’s twelve-year-old son, who had come here in defiance of his father’s strict orders, understood with a rapture of understanding, not in gleams and flashes, but as an architect might understand, in a vision of great arching spaces carved by the music from the raw black night; of stately, stated, mathematic intervals; of commodious, firm delight. Even Daniel’s old nemesis from Home Room 113, even the Iceberg understood, though it was a painful thing for her, like the sight of sunlit clouds beyond the iron grating of a high window. She sat there, stiff as a board in her fifth row seat, with her mind fixed on the words, especially on the words, which seemed at once so sinister and so unbearably sad, but it wasn’t the words she understood, it was the song.

  At last, when he’d sung all but the last number on the program, Daniel stopped to explain to his audience that though in general this was a practice of which he did not approve, he had been persuaded by his manager, Mr. Irwin Tauber, to use a flight apparatus while he sang his last song for them. Perhaps he would not take off, perhaps he would: one never knew in advance. But he felt as though he might, because it felt so great to be back in Amesville among his family and friends. He wished he could explain all that Amesville meant to him, but really he couldn’t begin to, except to say that there was still more of Amesville in him than of New York.

  The audience dutifully applauded this declaration of loyalty.

  Daniel smiled and raised his arms, and the applause stopped.

  He thanked them.

  He wanted them, he said, to understand the wonder and glory of flight. There was nothing, he declared, so glorious, no ecstasy so sublime. What was it he asked rhetorically, to fly? What did it mean? It was the act of love and the vision of God; it was the highest exaltation the soul can reach to; it was, therefore, paradise; and it was as real as the morning or the evening star. And anyone who wanted to fly could do so at the price of a song.

  ‘The song,’ he had written in one of his songs, ‘does not end,’ and though he had written that song before he’d learned to fly himself, it was true. The moment one leaves one’s body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues. He hoped, if he were to leave his own body tonight, they would remember that. The song does not end.

  That wasn’t the song he meant to sing now, however. The song he was going to sing now was “Flying.” (The audience applauded.) The Symphonette started its slow, ripply introduction. Daniel’s assistant wheeled the gimmicked flight apparatus on-stage. Daniel hated the thing. It looked like something from the bargain corner of a mortuary showroom. Irwin Tauber had designed it, since he didn’t want anyone else but himself and Daniel to know that the wiring was rigged. Tauber might be a whiz at electronics but as a designer he had negative flair.

  Daniel was wired into the apparatus. It felt like sitting in a chair that was tipping over. That was so that when he pretended to go limp he wouldn’t fall on his face.

  He rested his hand lightly on the armrest. With his thumb he felt for the hidden switch under the satin on the armrest. Even now, he didn’t have to use it. But he probably would.

  He sang. “We’re dying!” he sang.

  We’re dying!

  We’re flying

  Up to the ceiling, down to the floor,

 
Out of the window, and down to the shore.

  We’re ailing!

  We’re sailing

  Over the ocean, down to the sea.

  Into the tempest, across a cup of tea.

  We’re sowing!

  We’re flowing

  Down through the sewer, out with the tide,

  And in at the gate that yawns so wide.

  We’re dying!

  We’re flying

  Up to the ceiling, down to the floor,

  Out of the window, and in at the door.

  Like a flash flood the Symphonette swept him into the chorus. Despite being strapped down to the apparatus, he was singing beautifully.

  Flying, sailing, flowing, flying:

  While you’re alive there’s no denying

  That flying and sailing and flowing and flying

  Are wiser and saner and finer pursuits

  Than cheating and lying and selling and buying

  And trying to fathom… a fathomless truth.

  He repeated the chorus. This time, as he came to the last line, at the caesura, he applied the lightest of pressures to the switch on the armrest, and at the same moment closed his eyes and ceased to sing. The Symphonette finished the song by themselves.

  The dials of the apparatus showed that Daniel was in flight.

  It was the moment Mrs. Norberg had been waiting for. She stood up, in her fifth row seat, and took aim with the revolver she had concealed, the evening before, in the upholstery of her seat. A needless precaution, for there had been no security check at the door.

  The first bullet lodged in Daniel’s brain. The second ruptured his aorta.

  Later, when, as a preliminary to her sentencing, the judge was to ask Mrs. Norberg why she had killed Daniel Weinreb, she would reply that she had acted in defense of the system of free enterprise. Then she placed her right hand on her breast, turned to the flag, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. “I pledge allegiance,” she declared, with her voice breaking and tears in her eyes, “to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”