Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

“Boadicea,” he repeated, changing every vowel.

“My friends call me Bo, or sometimes Boa.”

Among a certain class this would have been enough. But he was certainly not of that class, nor ever would be, though it was clear from the way his eyes were fixed on her now, that the wish lingered on.

“And my father calls me Bobo.” She sighed theatrically. “It is hard to go through life with such a peculiar name, but my father is a fanatical Anglophile, as was his father before him. Both Rhodes scholars! I’m fairly sure my brother won’t be though. His name is Serjeant, and my sister’s is Alethea. I’m lucky, I suppose, that I wasn’t christened Brittania. Though as to nicknames, then I’d have had a choice between Brit and Tania. Do you like England?”

“I’ve been there, but only on business.”

“Does business lift you up so far, then, that liking simply doesn’t enter in?”

“Well, it rained most of the time I was there, and the hotel I stayed in was so cold I had to wear my clothes to bed, and there was food rationing then, which is why I was sent there to begin with. But aside from that I guess I liked it well enough. The people were friendly, the ones I had to deal with.”

She looked at him with a blank smile, and sipped the pink lady, which had begun to seem cloying. From marveling at the elegance and bitchery of what she’d just said she hadn’t taken in a word of his.

“I find,” he said resolutely, “that people usually are, if you let ’em.”

“Oh, people… yes. I think so too. People are wonderful. You’re wonderful, I’m wonderful, and the steward has wonderful red hair, though not as wonderful by half as my father’s. I have a theory about red hair.”

“What’s that?”

“I believe it’s a sign of spiritual distinction. Swinburne had intensely red hair.”

“Who was Swinburne?”

“The greatest poet of Victorian England.”

He nodded. “There’s Dolly Parsons too. Her hair’s pretty red.”

“Who’s Dolly Parsons?”

“The faith-healer. On tv.”

“Oh. Well, it’s only a theory.”

“Some of the things she does are pretty incredible too. A lot of people really believe in her. I’ve never heard anyone else say it was her hair though. I’ve got a cousin out in Arizona — he’s got red hair and says he hates it. He says people are always ribbing him about it, give him funny looks.”

She felt, as she was listening to the steady unreeling of his witless well-meaning speech, as if she had mounted a carousel, which was now revolving too fast for her to get off. The plane had canted several degrees to the left. The sun had moved noticeably higher in the west, so that its light made vast semaphores on the heaving waves, from which the clouds had all been wiped away.

“You must excuse me,” she said, and hastily left the lounge.

In the washroom a dim green light seemed to spill from the mirrors in a manner at once weird and reassuring. It would have been a wholly habitable refuge if only there hadn’t been, in each of the mirrors, the self-reproach of her own image.

Lord knows, she tried. How many weeks of her life had she wasted trying to subdue and civilize this other Boadicea, dressing her in overpriced designer clothes that ceased to be soigné the moment she removed them from their splendid boxes, dieting to the verge of anorexia, and fussing with creams, lotions, lashes, pots of rouge, copying on the oval canvas of her face the faces of Rubens, of Modigliani, of Reni and Ingres. But always behind these viscid masks was the same too full, too lively face, framed by the same abundant, intractable mid-brown hair, which was her mother’s hair. Indeed, she was her mother’s daughter through and through, except her mind, which was her own. But who is solaced by a sense of having perspicuous intellectual gifts? No one, certainly, who is drunk and surrounded by mirrors and wants, more than anything else in the world, to be loved by the likes of Grandison Whiting, a man who has declared that the first duty of an aristocrat is to his own wardrobe.

Wealth, Grandison Whiting had told his children, is the foundation of a good character, and though he might say some things, like the remark about the wardrobe, only for effect, he was sincere about this. Wealth was also, he would allow, the root of evil, but that was just the reverse of the coin, a logical necessity. Money was freedom, as simple as that, and people who had none, or little, could not be judged by the same standards as those who had some, or much, for they were not free agents. Virtue, therefore, was an aristocratic prerogative, and vice as well.

This was just the beginning of Grandison Whiting’s system of political economy, which went, in all its corollaries and workings-out, much farther and deeper than Boadicea had ever been allowed to follow, for at certain crucial moments in the unfolding of his system she had been required to go off to bed, or the gentlemen would remove themselves from the table to have their ideas and their cigars in masculine seclusion. Always, it seemed, that moment would come just when she thought she had begun to see him as he truly was — not the kindly, careless Santa Claus of a father indulging her in her girlish adorations, but the real Grandison Whiting whose renaissance energies seemed a more potent argument for the existence of God than any of the feeble notions of apologetics that she’d been required to learn by heart at Ste. Ursule. Ste. Ursule itself had been the most drastic of these exiles from his presence. Though she had come to understand the need for it (with her analyst’s help), though she had even wrung a consent from her own heart at the last, the two years’ exile from her father had been bitter bread indeed — all the more bitter because she had so clearly brought it on herself.

It had begun, as all her sorrows did, with an enthusiasm. She’d received a video camera for her fourteenth birthday, the latest model Editronic. Within three weeks she had so completely mastered the programs of which the camera was capable, and their various combinations, that she was able to construct a documentary about the operations and daily life of Worry (as the Whiting estate, and the film, was called) that was at once so smooth, so lively, and so professionally innocuous that it was shown in prime time on the state educational channel. This, in addition to what she called her “real movies,” which, if less suited to public broadcast, were no less prodigious. Her father gave his approval and encouragement — what else could he have done? — and Boadicea, exalted, exultant, was swept up by a passion of creativity as by a tornado.

In the three months following her freshman year of high school she mastered a range of equipment and programming techniques that would have required as many years of study at a technical college. Only when, with her father’s help, she had obtained her mail order diploma and a union license did she put forth the proposal that she had along been working toward. Would he, she asked, let her make an in-depth study of his own life? It would be a companion piece to Worry , but on a much loftier scale both as to length and to intensity.

At first he refused. She pleaded. She promised it would be a tribute, a monument, an apotheosis. He temporized, declaring that while he believed in her genius, he also believed in the sanctity of private life. Why should he spend a million dollars on the security of his house and grounds and then allow his own Bobo to expose that dear-bought privacy to the common gaze? She promised that no sanctums would be violated, that her film would do for him what Eisenstein had done for Stalin, what Riefenstahl had done for Hitler. She adored him, and she wanted the world to kneel beside her. It would, she knew it would, if only he would let her have the chance. At last — what else could he have done? — he consented, with the proviso that if he did not approve the finished product, it would be shown to no one else.