by Lewis Shiner
She carried a Pyrex serving dish full of rare steak, sliced into strips and garnished with parsley. She set it on the table and held out her hand. “You must be Cole.”
“I suppose I must,” he said, “but I can try to change.”
She offered him the charity of her smile. The only unclaimed chair was next to his, so he pulled it out for her. She thanked him and then Cole, the last man standing, finally took his own seat.
No matter how hungry you are, his mother had taught him, be patient. Watch the hostess and follow her lead. What she did was hold her hands out, palm up, and the others around the table joined hands and bowed their heads.
“Jimmy?” Montoya said. “Will you do the honors?”
“Bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” the kid said. “Make us ever mindful of the needs of others.”
Cole, a devout atheist since age 12, didn’t join the chorus of amens. He let his attention linger on the feel of Susan’s hand in his. Small, soft, warming to his touch. He was careful to release it at the first sign of her letting go.
He took small portions as the serving dishes came around, said, “Everything smells wonderful,” and braced himself to tell his life story over again. Instead Montoya asked him what he thought of the Gemini V flight. “I can’t imagine,” Montoya said, “what it must be like to be stuck inside a big tin can for a week. I would go crazy.”
At Cole’s house they ate on tv trays in front of the big black and white console set, and Cole’s father complained if anyone tried to talk over the news. If Cole’s father was home, the tv was on, so they never had any conversation at all. Which was okay with Cole, as his father found something to object to in most anything Cole said.
“It might be worth it for the sights,” Cole said. “The thing that would drive me crazy is having so little control. It’s all done by computers and the ground crew.” Cole had all 55 Topps Astronaut Cards from two years before.
Montoya nodded. “That would get to me, too.”
At the first lull, Cole looked at Susan, who hadn’t spoken since her “amen.” “How do you like ut? It’s really big, right?”
“Thirty thousand,” Susan said. “Some of my lecture classes have two or three hundred people in them. The hard part is getting the prerequisite classes for your major. Sometimes they don’t have enough sections and you can get stuck in a holding pattern for years.”
She was acting, Cole thought, as if he were a human in his own right and not just her little brother’s friend. “Do you know what you’re going to major in?”
Jimmy, barely audible, said, “Football players.”
Susan blushed and her mother said, “Jimmy! Apologize to your sister.”
“Sorry, Susan.” He drew the words out in a singsong.
Cole’s own face felt hot. Of course she was dating football players, and probably majoring in Home Ec. What had he expected, Russian Lit?
“No,” Susan said. “I don’t know yet.”
The pain in her eyes was connected to this, and he couldn’t possibly ask her about it at the dinner table. Or anywhere else, he reminded himself.
*
Alex played it cool, keeping one eye on Cole as they ate. You could see he knew how to handle people. Say something to make them feel good about themselves, the oldest gimmick in the book, and that shit always worked, even on his father, who prided himself on not getting bluffed at the poker table. The trick was in the delivery, pretending he was kidding while at the same time coming off like he really meant it. It was a kind of non-sexual flirting, and he must have figured it out early on. You would need to make friends fast, moving around like that.
Cole finished his beer and smoothly got Alex’s father talking about the brewery. “You want another?” Alex asked.
“Uh, sure,” Cole said.
“I’ll get it,” Susan said, pushing back her chair and ignoring both Cole’s token protest and their father’s raised eyebrow. “Anybody else?”
Alex raised his own nearly empty bottle, pleased at the way he and Susan and Cole had taken advantage of the situation. Yes, Alex thought. I think he’ll do.
Alex and his father and Cole stayed at the table until after nine. Cole didn’t give up his attempts to help with the dishes until Alex’s mother promised him, “Next time.” Cole had eaten three helpings of everything and completely won her over.
“Cole lived in Villahermosa for a year, Pop,” Alex said.
“Really? How old were you?”
“I turned ten there.”
“Do you speak any Spanish?”
“I can get by. Between that and Spanish classes at school.”
You could see that Cole wanted to ask why they didn’t speak it at home, why the dirty looks when his mother used it. Even so, he’d read the mood well enough to answer in English.
Eventually Alex said, “It’s late. I’d better take him home.”
“You’ve had two beers,” his father said. “You’re not driving. Susan can take him.”
Alex stood up abruptly. “Let’s go, then.”
Cole thanked everyone extravagantly, including Frederica, and then he and Alex went outside to wait on Susan. “She’s got to brush her teeth,” Alex said, “and fix her hair and freshen her makeup. In case Prince Charming pulls up next to her at the light.”
“She seems nice.”
Alex shrugged. “Don’t forget your books.”
Cole got his stuff out of the Monza and after an awkward minute said, “Are you pissed off about something?”
“I hate it when my father treats me like a kid.”
“We’re fifteen years old,” Cole said. “We are kids.”
“When he was my age, he was working twelve hours a day and bringing home most of the family’s money. And he didn’t take shit from anyone, including his old man.”
A floodlight snapped on above them and Susan made her entrance. “Shall we?” she said. She’d carefully tied a scarf over her hair and her lips shone. Cole moved quickly to open the driver door of her T-Bird, then glanced at Alex and said, “Shotgun.”
Alex got in and stretched both arms across the back of the seats. Cole gave directions while Susan backed out. They cut over to Marsh and cruised north, three lanes each way, traffic sparse, the late summer wind pinning Alex’s shirt to his chest. The nearness of fall made him lonely and impatient.
“The Dylan concert is the twenty-fifth,” Susan said. “I’m getting tickets Monday morning before I go back. You want any?”
“Cole?” Alex said. “You interested?”
“I have to ask my parents… but yeah. Definitely.” He looked at Susan. “Do you need money tonight?”
“Alex knows where to find you,” she said.
“That’s right,” Cole said. “Whenever you need me.”
*
The girls in Mr. Casey’s Civics class had pronounced him “a hunk.” All but Madelyn. She found it alarming that he was so clearly aware of his good looks and that he took so much pleasure in the way the girls responded to him. His dark hair was unkempt and slightly too long; his tattersall shirts and knit ties were daringly casual; his smile radiated inappropriate warmth.
“Miss Brooks?” he said. “Will you tell the class the subject you chose for your essay?”
Madelyn had been dreading this moment. They’d spent the first few weeks of class discussing a major paper due mid-semester, and on Monday they’d had to turn in preliminary topic paragraphs. Now Mr. Casey was calling on the students he thought had provided good examples, with the idea that this would somehow inspire those who hadn’t. Rather than, in fact, make them sullen, jealous, and resentful.
Madelyn’s strategy for surviving high school centered on the avoidance of negative attention. On a tactical level this meant not doing anything to emphasize her quiet good looks, not binding herself to any of the social cliques that she easily moved among, and above all not making a display of her erudition.
“It’s, um, about the crisis in Gr
eece.”
“I don’t think,” Mr. Casey said, “most of us know about this crisis. Can you explain it? And stand up, please, Miss Brooks, so we can all hear you.”
She reluctantly got to her feet. Keep it simple, she reminded herself. “Well, it’s a monarchy there, and the new king just took over, and he’s very young and kind of pushy. He forced the prime minister to resign, but the prime minister is really popular, so none of the king’s replacements have been able to win a vote of confidence.”
“And this is important because…?”
Madelyn felt herself get caught up, against her will. “Because the power struggle is over who controls the army. Like in most countries, the Greek army is deeply conservative, and they don’t like the wave of liberalism that’s been happening over the last few years. If the civilian government can’t hold power, the army could take over and impose a right-wing dictatorship.”
She must have let some emotion into her voice because she heard, from the back of the room, Ed Wallingford say, “Big woo.” Ed, the kicker and the smallest boy on the football team, was given to deflating what he saw as pretension.
Mr. Casey said, “Your title is ‘The July Apostasy in Greece.’ Can you explain that?”
His wrongheaded attempt to hold her up for admiration, she knew, would only end in ridicule. “That’s what they call it over there.” She looked at Mr. Casey and saw that he wanted more. “The prime ministers that the king appointed were members of the first guy, Papandreou’s, party. So Papandreou’s people called them apostates. Traitors, basically.”
“Where did you get all this?”
“We listen to the bbc sometimes.” In fact she and her father ritually tuned in the bbc Overseas Service—since March called the bbc World Service—nearly every weeknight.
“And Greece? Why Greece?”
That, Madelyn thought, was none of Mr. Casey’s beeswax. “Greece is the cradle of democracy. If they became a military dictatorship, the symbolism would be pretty ominous.”
“Excellent, Miss Brooks. I very much look forward to reading your paper.”
“Me, too,” muttered Ed Wallingford, prompting antiphonal sniggering on the back row.
When the bell finally released her from her agony, Madelyn got out of the classroom as fast as she could, unable to bear any more of Mr. Casey’s veneration or Ed Wallingford’s hostility.
It could have been worse, she supposed. Mr. Casey could have kept at her until he got to the truth of her fascination with Greece.
As much as her father doted on her, Madelyn’s mother was the one who read her to sleep when she was little. They must have started with the usual Little Golden Books and then moved on to A. A. Milne; what Madelyn remembered was the night her mother set The House at Pooh Corner aside and said, “Would you like to try something different?” Madelyn was three, and this would be her earliest memory.
“Yes,” she said, not having a real opinion of her own, responding purely to her mother’s excitement. Her mother went away and came back with a thick book wrapped in an orange paper cover. She turned a few pages and began to read.
“‘Tell me, O muse,’” she began, and then she said something about heroes and sacks and Ilion.
Her mother looked up. “Ilion, of course, that would be Troy.”
Madelyn had laughed then, because she had no idea who Troy was either, or what a muse was, or what it was that was getting put in a sack.
Over the years, she returned repeatedly to that S. O. Andrew translation of The Odyssey, sometimes reading no more than a few lines. She’d absorbed enough about romantic love, long before the upheavals of puberty, to grasp the concept. The perfect lover was always available, always consoling, able to sweep you away from mundane reality, to obsess you, to steal your heart.
How could the Mr. Caseys of this world, let alone the Ed Wallingfords, ever compare to books?
*
Dave had come to Greenwich Village for the first time on a stifling Friday night in August of 1961, six-foot-minus-a-little, scrawny, 25 and already losing his hair. He’d never set foot there, despite growing up in Yonkers and two years at New York City Community College and four years working in midtown after graduation. From childhood, his parents had warned him about the Bolsheviks and gypsies and dope fiends of the Village, to the point where, even as an adult who knew better, he feared that if he went and got into trouble, God forbid, he would never hear the end of it.
On that particular night, he’d fled his airless Brooklyn apartment after another horrible scene with Rachel, her shouting, him retreating until he’d found himself in the hall, smelling overcooked cabbage and exhaust fumes from the air shaft, sick to death of his life so far.
For no conscious reason, he’d gotten on a train headed into Manhattan. A self-destructive impulse, planted by Rachel’s venom and brought to fruition by the sight of the Bleecker Street station, had sent him off the train and up the stairs and out onto Lafayette.
As he walked up Bleecker past nyu and into the Village proper, he could see the history in every brick, some of which had no doubt been hurled at policemen. From the bohemian painters of the twenties and thirties to the radical theaters and playwrights of the forties, from the beats of the fifties to the current jazzmen and folkies, the Village had witnessed a continuous outpouring of dissent that was as alien to Dave as fakirs walking on hot coals.
Back when his name was Fischel Cohen, he had grown up with Zionist folk songs, and when the Weavers put “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” on the flip of “Goodnight, Irene,” he was permitted to buy a copy. The guitars and the unrestrained power of the voices touched something in him as frightening as it was compelling. Years later, still in college, he heard the same thing in the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley.” So he knew the names—The Village Vanguard, Gerde’s Folk City, The Cock and Bull—even though he’d always believed himself too old, too married, too square to ever act on that knowledge.
At the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal, the excitement seized him in the pit of his stomach, a feeling indistinguishable from the terror he felt when he walked past a cluster of duck-tailed, Lucky-smoking, motorcycle-jacketed hoods on Flatbush Avenue. This crowd was more benign, dressed the same way as Dave, in white short-sleeved shirts and narrow ties and shiny black Florsheims, yet they had an air of knowledge and purpose that had always eluded him.
He followed a group of them up MacDougal and ended up in a line twenty people long that led down the stairs to the Gaslight Café. Fifteen minutes after that he crowded into a damp, unbearably hot basement where every table was filled and the overflow leaned against every inch of available space along the bare brick wall. The only light came from the occasional fake Tiffany lamp that hung from the ceiling and Dave had to walk with his hands in front of him until his eyes adjusted.
On stage, a guy in an elegant suit and a neatly trimmed brown beard manipulated the microphone to produce startlingly realistic sound effects, creating characters through weird voices and then tossing them aside, dispensing with punchlines in favor of building and abandoning entire surrealist worlds. When he finished, everybody snapped their fingers instead of applauding, and Dave began to suspect he was asleep and dreaming in Brooklyn.
“First time here?”
Dave turned to see a stunning black-haired woman in black-framed glasses, jeans, and a black sweater that was coming off one shoulder. He nodded.
“Apartments upstairs,” the woman said, pointing. She spoke with exaggerated clarity to be heard without raising her voice. “Same airshaft. People complained about the noise.” She ended on a smile.
“Who was that guy?”
“Hugh Romney. On staff here.”
Overwhelmed by shyness, Dave nodded thanks and turned away.
A hugely tall man with a thick moustache and brown hair that fell in his eyes arrived on stage and sat on a stool with his guitar. He joked with the crowd and then began to pick intricate patterns and sing in a raw, powerful voice. Some of what the
man played was what Dave had always thought of as folk music, and some was blues, jazz, Dixieland, gospel, and anything else that came into his head.
Between two of the songs he turned and gave the black-haired woman a questioning look.
“Dave Van Ronk.” She seemed amused.
He’d heard of Van Ronk. Everybody in the music business expected him to be huge, and nobody would take a chance on him other than the Village’s own beatnik label, Folkways.
Van Ronk played for half an hour and then announced Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry, a guitar player and a blind harmonica player, both Negro. Dave’s parents had told him that in the Village the schvartzers mixed with the goyim on the streets, in the clubs, even in the bedrooms. It still struck Dave as very odd, not objectionable, merely strange. And speaking of mixing, Van Ronk had obviously paid close attention to McGee’s guitar playing and singing style.
Eventually he wandered out onto the street and let himself be drawn up MacDougal to Washington Square. In April there had been a so-called Beatnik Riot there, after the city had tried to shut down the Sunday afternoon folk singing. Naturally the city won. Dave arrived to find the police enforcing a six-pm curfew on musical instruments. He sat at the central fountain anyway and listened to the kids as they passed around cigarettes and argued, mostly about ideological purity of one kind or another: clawhammer versus Scruggs-style banjo picking, Negro blues versus Childe ballads, hammered dulcimer versus guitar. After that he’d walked the streets until daylight, fueled by espresso and an anxious, irresistible excitement.
That had been the start. After he separated from Rachel, he rented a cheap fourth-floor walkup on Sullivan Street and over the next six months began to make sense of the emotional onslaught. Seeing Fred Neil at the Café Wha?, Bob Dylan at Gerde’s, and Tim Hardin at the Night Owl had shown him why Van Ronk was not going to be famous beyond the Village. The zealots in Washington Square had missed the same thing that Van Ronk had. The problem was not a failure of authenticity, but rather an excess of it. This was not shaping up to be a decade of reverence.