The Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

  If you think such thoughts are incompatible with good art, then you haven’t read Michelangelo’s poems or especially van Gogh’s letters. They meant every picture as a forthright message, to change men’s souls. Anyhow that night I was suddenly surer than ever that—if I was good and daring enough as a painter—I’d finish the summer with a picture that would also be a real gift of beauty and useful knowledge, for myself and every patient onlooker. Finally the whole good day fell on me. And lying under Mike’s dusty Navaho blanket, I slid off to sleep and rested deeper than dreams or fears till cold first light.

  Then Mike came limping through the door. With his stiff shock of white hair and his broad seamed face, he looked more than a little like pictures of God. And though he was older than Chief, he made at least as big a presence. When he finally saw me, he said “O Wise One, arise and dress. Seven new immortal souls await thee!” I had sat in on some of his Indian talks. He was genuinely informed on the subject, not just a half-baked enthusiast. And he’d taken to calling me Wise One because I also knew some Indian history.

  I won’t describe our many long talks. But from here looking back, I can see that Mike Dorfman was one of that summer’s really good influences on my life. He’d graduated from Juilliard “back before God,” as he said. Then he’d taken an M.A. in anthropology from Columbia, with fieldwork among two bands of the Sioux. And all this was forty years ago, just one generation after Wounded Knee and the Custer massacre. But the plight of the Indians disturbed him too deeply. So he turned aside, had a nervous breakdown—which he freely admitted to me—and spent his life teaching composition, piano, violin and “everything else but gynecology” at various conservatories and colleges. His wife had died young, leaving him with a daughter who was now somewhere with the Red Cross in Africa.

  He’d met Chief in the late twenties, when he came down here to the Smokies to convalesce from TB. And once he retired from teaching, he decided to spend his summers at Juniper. That was mainly because it was so near the Cherokees. And also, he told me, because he had a whole lifetime of guilt to repay. He’d never forgiven himself for turning aside from the Sioux. He thought he could make some recompense by teaching white boys what a wrong we’d done, destroying the Indians. Since beginning to read I’d also consumed every word I could find on the same people, and I shared his guilt. If God is just, this country may never finish paying for their death—though maybe Vietnam was part of the payment, more or less exactly a century after our red version of a Final Solution. If so, at fifty thousand dead boys, we got off light.

  Anyhow it was the first morning of second session and I’d overslept. I raced to shower and dress in my whites. Parents and new boys were driving towards us already from every corner of the South and a few from the Northeast. For the first time, I resented their droning nearness and my own renewed commitment to five more weeks of babysitting. A mind hot as mine, and aimed as narrowly, thought it needed whole days and weeks free to see and to translate. Or so I told myself, as I poised upright and old enough to know much better, on the doorsill of launching what may be the real piece of harm I’ve done the world.

  In those days even middle-class Americans didn’t pick up the long distance phone just to say “Good evening” to distant friends and ask what they might have had for dessert. Back then when you got a ring and picked up the receiver, that moment of staticky long distance noise would scare you cold— somebody was dead or deathly sick. But I’d promised myself for the past five weeks to call my girlfriend between the two sessions, also my mother. I’d written regularly to both, but voice is voice and I thought I was in special need of my girlfriend’s. I haven’t mentioned that I called her Viemme, our French pronunciation of her American initials V.M. She was apparently waiting table at a hotel on Mount Desert Island, Maine and had sent me a number for emergencies.

  So that Sunday night I went down to the camp office. It was open to counselors by request for just such calls or for typing letters to campers’ parents—“errands of mercy only,” Chief had said. I thought I was being merciful to me; and I placed the call, charging it to Mother in Winston. In seconds, I thought, this will all make sense. I’ll send Mother a check before her bill comes; she’ll understand. But the phone in Maine sounded farther off than the Dalai Lama’s deepest cell. And as its ring bored on unanswered, I began to feel humiliated.

  Here I’d spent two months with no sight, not to mention touch, of Viemme or any girl. I’d done serious work; we’d exchanged full letters, with my lyrical anatomical drawings that she responded to with a sonnet—what on Earth would I say? My mind whited out. I’ve mentioned that Viemme’s cool good sense had stopped us from talking of eternal love. And we’d never ventured into the brand of long-distance pornographic transaction that some of the counselors informed me of. So what would we say?

  Then I knew it didn’t matter. Words weren’t the point, for me anyhow, just her sound. I thought I needed the brief reminder that I still existed in a young woman’s mind, that her hands recalled the times she’d taught me various grades of joy.

  Finally a man’s voice said “Mist Over.”

  At first I thought he was some sort of weather report I’d stumbled on by mistake—the rocky north coast, mist, nobody out tonight. Then I recalled “Mist Over” was the name of Viemme’s hotel. So I asked for her.

  The man took a long pause—Mother’s bill was rising—and then he came back to say “Her roommate says she’s spending the night where they don’t have a phone.”

  I was more shocked by the fact of the news than by its contents. It was another long decade before American youth were that candid to strangers. For all the man knew, I was Viemme’s father. What would these Yankees stop at, with their tact as raw as oysters? I thanked him anyhow and hung up firmly before I began to feel more than desolate. Granted that

  Viemme and I had agreed to be sensible about our time-bound relations. Still, when skin has been as mutually kind to skin as she and I had been, the sudden news that yet another whole suit of epidermis has been inserted literally between us—you know the feeling. Unspeakable sadness, followed by hot anger and cold disdain.

  So I called Mother collect right away to head off the blues a few minutes longer. As usual she was sitting on the phone, with an instant cultivated “Hello.” So we talked on for twenty minutes, a major financial commitment back then. At first I must have sounded preposterously official. Your distant son is making a courteous inquiry as to whether you’re still breathing, madam. But her genius, and the secret weapon of all good mothers, was to pretend not to hear me and to plunge forthwith into a quiet and boring but deeply consoling narrative of the events of her daily life.

  She started with how she went out to Aunt Sely’s this morning to get the laundry and found Sely lying in the yard, with a broken hip and nothing but a blind dog for company. Sely had been there all night, Mother thought—of course it hadn’t been terribly cold but still. Then Mother continued with how she rounded up some boys, and they got Sely into the car and safe to Bowman Gray Hospital. And how just tonight, just before I called, she’d come from the hospital where Sely was plaster-casted but happy, saying God had known—had flat out knowed—when to tame her pride. Sely, had worked for us all through my parents’ early marriage and then my childhood. And she’d quit awhile back on what she figured was more or less her eightieth birthday. But she’d insisted on washing our sheets till now. “Maybe this’ll stop her finally,” Mother said. “But don’t bank on it. I’m dying to take my sheets to the laundry and get em pressed right. But Sely will rise from this, mark my word.”

  In five minutes she had me nodding in the old conspiracy of mothers that of course this is the purpose and goal of life, not some heroic baying at the hazy moons of art and flesh. It was only when we’d played out all the events we could mention to one another that she took a little misstep and broke her spell. She said “Is your spending money holding out?”

  Money of course was a joke this summer, my enormo
us salary. But I still had a fifty-dollar bank balance, and that would see me through another few book-buying trips to Asheville. I wasn’t about to take funds from a working widow. I said “Yes, Mother. I’m solvent as a Vanderbilt.”

  She saw her mistake. “I knew that, Bridge. But I wanted to help.”

  Then I recovered my primal warmth long enough to get through a final restorative minute. I promised her that no, I didn’t need her to come up and get me at the end of the month and that yes, I’d let her hear the moment anything went wrong.

  She took a long pause, and I thought she was going to say she loved me—she generally did. I even braced for it. But she’d long since out-thought me. Or was just more honest. She said “I remember you plain as my father.” Despite her father’s early death, she loved him intensely to the end of her days. But what a strange and moving thing to say.

  I was grateful at once and opened my mouth to let the spirit move me, and what came out still seems a fair match. I said “I remember you clear as the day I first saw you.”

  She laughed. “Well, damn! That was your first day.”

  I said “You’re right.”

  * * *

  And just before dawn I dreamed of her back then—Mother, not Viemme or any other girl. In my mind for what seemed hours of sleep, my mother wandered smiling beyond me, always near but just past reaching. She was young as me now and wildly lovely, with long black hair that bronzed in the light and eyes far deeper than any cave.

  TWO

  MY SECOND ROUND of boys looked even more manageable than the first. They were all on the smooth-cheeked side of puberty, and my newly honed scoutmaster skills served me better from the start. I could see that I met the anxious parents with more confidence and reassurance than before, so there were a minimum of whispered conferences on Jerry’s constipation or Jake’s ringworm. I knew now to say “We’re well prepared for any problem, ma’m, though we don’t expect any.” One of my more easily acquired skills resulted from a tip of Chief’s at an early counselors’ meeting. He said “Any sentence delivered in a firm baritone or bass voice is automatically twice as forceful as the same exact words from a tenor or soprano.” Now I met all comers successfully with my plummiest baritone. And I started the session with a private promise to pay more personal notice to the campers and to know them earlier.

  The opening night campfire was held in the usual place, the ring by the lake. It was a semicircular bowl of benches around a sandy performance space, all set in a natural hillside covered with towering hemlocks. Siegfried or Beowulf wouldn’t have scorned to die there. It was that grand a setting, and all the human race had done for a change was to make it slightly better. It was there that I first saw Rafe Noren. I mentioned him far back at the start, and you may have wondered where he went.

  I hope you’ll eventually understand how all this story is more than partly about him. But his considerable presence doesn’t enter my life till here tonight, where he entered the life of the second session. Because Rafe had spent most of his childhood summers at Juniper, his talents were familiar and precious to Chief. So he’d been asked to dance tonight, last thing except for the prayer to Wakonda.

  Once we’d sung our way through the familiar songs and heard the old truths from Chief, Mike stood by the dying fire and told us that the second session was to be privileged by a three-week visit from Bright Day. Many of the veteran boys cheered. Bright Day, Mike said, was a full-blood Sioux from North Dakota. He was a nationally respected Indian expert and teacher. He’d recently testified before Congress, and this would be his fifth year with us. Even I, strapped as I was to my landscape, was curious to test my Indian-book knowledge against blood experience. Then Mike said that Ray Noren would conclude the evening with his eagle dance. The veteran boys responded again but without raucous cheers, more of a hushed reminder to themselves. And Mike went to his seat in the front row of benches and began to beat slowly on a small tom-tom.

  There was more light than the weak glow thrown by the fire —two small spots, high on trees—but as Rafe entered he drew all the shining directly his way. I’ve said he was fourteen and well along on his climb to physical maturity, but I doubt I can tell how serious an image he made on first sight. Whatever the state of his mind, he was already a young man, compressed into a body maybe five foot nine in height. He wore only a beaded deerskin breechclout, a porcupine-quill roach on his head, bands of iron bells on his ankles and wrists and wings of dark gray feathers on his arms.

  I’d watched various dance companies as they passed through Winston or Chapel Hill or on occasional trips to New York. I’d even seen the Sadler’s Wells Ballet with Margot Fonteyn. And towards the end of Cinderella, she did something the human body absolutely can’t do. She was balanced far forward on her right point. Then instantly without visibly moving, she switched feet and was poised way forward at exactly the same angle, still as a resting bird, on her left point. So I had some notion of what dancing could be.

  But within a minute of soaring around that ring and those coals, Rafe Noren managed in my mind what no other performer of anything had managed. He became a nocturnal eagle —that self-sufficient, that strong. He was riding the drafts of a summer night, oblivious of us. You’ll grant, I trust, that for an adolescent boy to achieve an air of credible brute majesty is unlikely on a phenomenal scale. Yet Shakespeare’s boy actors had to be capable of just such a reach. Think of Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Goneril and Regan.

  Rafe Noren did at least as much, if not more. Once he’d brought off a real metamorphosis, he then held us with him. And we were two dozen adults and a hundred cold children, well past their bedtime. We watched intent through maybe four minutes till the drumbeat slowed and the eagle’s wings locked full out for a glide to Earth. That was his perch in the ring at our feet.

  Will I sound crazier still if I say that it didn’t occur to me that he was a boy again till people started clapping and he stood up? I was glad anyhow he didn’t break down into grins and bows. He nodded his unsmiling head one time and then somehow vanished from the ring. On his two feet surely, though I don’t recall. In the years since, I’ve seen Olivier eight times and Gielgud more still. I’ve seen Vanessa Redgrave, Nureyev, Martins and Baryshnikov. I’ve heard Flagstad and Melchior, Callas, Bjoerling and Price and was grateful to them all. But it’s only the simple truth to say that I never saw but one actor change into what he meant to be—change and stay there as long as he wanted to and keep you with him—and that was Rafe Noren.

  By the time we were back in Cabin 16, I’d learned a few facts from one of my veteran boys. Ray was Raphael, from south Georgia. He was fourteen and “well-known” wherever Juniper boys lived.

  When I asked if Rafe did anything but dance, my boy thought an instant and laughed. “He can turn his eyelids inside out. Worst-looking thing you ever saw! One boy got sick last year when he did it at supper, and Mrs. Chief told Ray not to ever do it again or he’d go blind and be expelled from camp, both.”

  The news didn’t make or break my night. I mean, I charged up the metamorphosis more to my own highly tuned senses than to any uncanny skill in Rafe.

  And it was the third day before I saw him again. Like college students, the boys shopped around in the morning classes before settling on what they’d pursue for the rest of the month. I had my art class already grounded with drawing boards before a new boy drifted in. With remarkable self-possession he began to tour the room, silently judging the work. He was making no

  disturbance, and I had no idea that he’d been the eagle dancer.

  But finally I went over and asked if he was interested in the class.

  He said “Oh sir, I was looking for you. A couple of the other old boys have told me you’re somebody to know.”

  Flattery is something you almost never get from children. Since you never give them enough of anything they need, they have no reason to overpraise you. So I took him at his word— there were three or four ten-week campers in the older cabins; they mig
ht have told him. I said “You want to practice your seeing skills? Get you some supplies and start drawing that bowl of rocks. I’ll check you in a few minutes.”

  He said “One question, please sir. I’ve heard of drawing bowls of fruit or flowers but a bowl of rocks?” No smile at all.

  I said “They were what I had. Try to imagine they’re edible. Any painter’s got to learn to eat what’s before him.”

  He thought and then grinned. “Oh they’re nutritious. I been eating them for years, and look how I’ve grown.” Then he said “Is there something I sign to stay here, like a class roll?”

  I told him I wasn’t that formal, but what was his name?

  Some faceless voice at the back of the room boomed “RAY-feel.”

  He held out his hand to me and said “Raphael Noren.”

  All I’d heard that first night was the name Ray Something, so this name still didn’t dawn on me. I said “Can I call you Rafe?”

  He laughed. “Oh lord, please do. Everybody else calls me Ray, and that just gives me the fantods. I been aiming at Rafe for countless ages. Don’t it sound like a riverboat gambler?”

  I said “Sure does but I didn’t know anybody had the fantods since Huck Finn.”

  “And me, Rafe Noren—not but ten times an hour.” He grinned and went about finding his supplies.

  In a quarter hour I checked by his stool. On the big piece of clean newsprint, he had already outlined the subject. Just by judgment of the eye, he had transferred the deep bowl and the various stones to his paper in almost perfect one-to-one scale. That is, his drawing was precisely the size of the subject. He had no way of knowing, but he’d employed almost identically the same method I used in my underdrawing for the mountain landscape. He employed a strong sinuous line with no shading, something like a classical-period Picasso drawing. To be sure I was immediately struck by the coincidence and said “Have you seen the painting I just started?”