Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

She went to work at once, with that fresh and resistless energy that only adolescence can command, and skill very nearly equal to her energy. The first rushes were in the promised hieratic manner and made Grandison Whiting seem even more Grandisonian than he did off-screen. He moved through the sceneries of his life with the ponderous, hypnotic grace of a Sun-King, his bright red hair forming a kind of aureole about his palely perfect Celtic face. Even his clothes seemed to allegorize some inner, unfailing nobility.

The film’s fascination for Grandison himself must have been as irresistible as it was embarrassing. It was so patently an act of worship. But it might, for all that, have its use. The resources of art are not often devoted so unstintingly, after all, to celebrating the values of the very rich; or when they were, there is liable to be a perceptible sense of a commodity being bought and paid for, a smell, as of banks of cut flowers, that is sweet but not wholly natural. Boadicea’s film had none of the high gloss of captive art, and yet it was, possibly, in its headlong way, a real achievement.

The work went on. Boadicea was allowed to resume her school attendance at the Amesville High School on a reduced schedule so as to have advantage of the daylight hours. As she felt more secure in the possession of her skills, she permitted herself liberties, little lyric departures from the early grand manner of the film. She caught her father, quite unawares, rough-housing with Dow Jones, his spaniel bitch. She recorded minutes, and soon whole cassettes, of his authentic, and delectable, table-talk, and one of these occasions was when her uncle Charles was on hand. Uncle Charles was the head of the House Ways and Means Committee. She followed her father about on a business trip to Omaha and Dallas, and there was some satisfactory footage of what seemed bonafide wheeling and dealing.

She knew, though, that it was not, and she became obsessed (both as artist and as daughter) with penetrating to those shadowed recesses of his life where (she believed) he was most fully himself. She knew that what he ventured to say before her cameras differed essentially from what he would have said in candor, among friends; differed still from what, in his soul, he held to be truth. Or rather she suspected this; for with his children Grandison Whiting would only throw out the most equivocal hints as to his own opinions on any matters more serious than questions of taste and comportment. Instead, he had a donnish knack for showing how, on the one hand, one might think this , or, on the other hand, that , leaving it quite up in the air which of the twain, if either, represented the convictions of Grandison Whiting.

As the film progressed, and then, as it did not progress, Boadicea found herself running up against this equivocalness in everything her father said, in his very smiles. The more she considered, the less she understood, though she continued, still, to adore. It could not be that her father simply lacked a coherent view of the world and his place in it, that he did whatever had to be done to advance his interests on the basis of mere everyday expedience. This may have been the case with her Uncle Charles (who was, in the way of much younger brothers, as devoted to Grandison as Boadicea herself); it may be the case with many men who inhabit the corridors of power by birthright rather than by conquest; but it was not the case with him , not conceivably.

She began to pry. Left alone in his office, she would read the papers lying on his desk; she searched the drawers. She eavesdropped on phone calls, on his conversations with the staff and operations personnel, on their conversations about him. She learned nothing. She began to spy. With the equipment and competence she’d acquired in order to make her films she was able to bug his office, his private sitting room, and the smoking room. Grandison knew this, for his million-dollar security system was proof against much more formidable assaults than this, but he allowed it to go on. He simply refrained from saying anything in these rooms that he would not have said before a delegation from the Iowa Council of Churches. Indeed, Boadicea was audience to just such a delegation, who had come to enlist her father’s support (and through him, her uncle’s) for legislation that would withhold federal funds from all states and cities that directly or indirectly allowed tax dollars to be spent on cheap Argentine grain. Grandison was never more eloquent, though the delegation received no more, in the end, than his signature — and not on a check at that, but on a petition.

She could not turn back. It was no longer for the movie’s sake, or for the sake of any rational need. She surrendered, as to a long-resisted vice. With shame and with a trembling foreboding that there must be bitter consequences to so unseemly an act, yet with a maenad’s reckless pleasure in the very enormity of the risk, she placed a microphone behind the headboard of the bed in their best guest room. His father’s mistress, Mrs. Reade, was expected to be visiting Worry soon. She was also a friend of long-standing, and the wife of the director of an Iowa insurance company in which Grandison held a controlling interest. Surely in these circumstances her father would reveal something .

Her father did not go to Mrs. Reade’s room till late in the evening, and Boadicea had to sit in the sweaty embrace of her earphones, listening to the interminable sound track of Toora-Loora Turandot , a weary old Irish musical that Mrs. Reade had taken upstairs from the library. The minutes crept by, and the music poked along, and then at last Grandison knocked, and could be heard to enter, and to say: “Enough is enough, Bobo, and this, surely, is too much.”

“Darling?” said the voice of Mrs. Reade.

“A moment, my love. I have one thing more to say to my daughter, who is eavesdropping on us at this moment, while pretending to study her French. You are to be finished, Bobo. In Switzerland, at a very highly recommended finishing school in Vilars. I’ve already informed the principal at Amesville that you’ll be going abroad. To learn, I sincerely hope, better manners than you’ve shown evidence of these last few months. You’re to leave at six in the morning, so let me say now, by way of parting, shame on you, Bobo, and bon voyage! ”

“Good-bye, Miss Whiting,” said Mrs. Reade. “When you’re in Switzerland you must look up my niece Patricia. I’ll send you her address.” At that point the microphone was disconnected.

All during the drive from Des Moines — and they were now, a sign announced, only twenty-two miles from Amesville — Boadicea had been too upset to talk. She hadn’t meant to be rude to Carl Mueller, though it must have seemed like rudeness. It was anger, raw white anger that would return in surges of never-diminishing intensity and then, for a while, recede, leaving behind, like the wastes of oil and tar on a seaport’s beach, the blackest of black depressions, a horror-stricken sorrow during which she would be assaulted by images of violent self-immolation — of the Saab crashing into a power pylon and bursting into flames, of opened veins, shotgun blasts, and other spectacular annihilations, images she rather entertained than resisted, since to have such monstrous thoughts was in itself a kind of revenge. And then, suddenly irresistibly, the anger would return, so that she would have to press her eyes closed and clench her fists to keep from being overcome.

Yet she knew all the while that such transports were ridiculous and uncalled-for and that she was, in some sense, indulging herself. Her father, in sending Carl Mueller to the airport, had meant no slight, still less a chastisement. He had planned to come for her himself, his note had said, until this very morning when a business crisis had required him to go to Chicago. Similar crises had brought similar disappointments before, though never so passionate nor so unremitting as this. She really must calm down. If she returned to Worry in this state, she was certain to betray herself before Serjeant or Alethea. Just the thought of them, the mention of their names in her mind, could start her off again. Two years she’d been away, and they had sent a stranger to welcome her home. It was not to be believed, it could never be forgiven.