Thomas Disch: On Wings of Song

Daniel was never able to satisfactorily account for the fact that he didn’t like his father. Because he wasn’t as important or as well-to-do as Roy Mueller, for instance? No, for Daniel’s feeling, or lack of it, went back before the time he’d become aware of his father’s limitations in these respects. Because he was, after all, a refugee? Specifically, a Jewish refugee? No, for if anything he wasn’t sufficiently a Jewish refugee. Daniel was still young enough to take a romantic view of hardship, and to his way of thinking the Bosolas (as he imagined them) were a much better, more heroic sort than any Weinrebs whatsoever. Then why?

Because — and this possibly was the real reason, or one of them — he sensed that his father, like every other father, expected him and, what was worse, wanted him to follow the same career that he’d been sinking in all through his life. He wanted Daniel to become a dentist.

It wasn’t enough for Daniel to insist that he didn’t want to be one. He had to find something he did want to be. And he couldn’t. Not that it made a great deal of difference, yet. He was young, he had time. But even so — he didn’t like thinking about it.

The house of Mrs. Boismortier, his old fourth-grade teacher, was the very last stop on Daniel’s route. She was an older woman, forty or fifty years old, and fat, like a lot of other women her age in Amesville. Her name was pronounced Boys-More-Teer. No one that Daniel had ever talked to could remember a time when there had been a Mr. Boismortier, but there must have been once in order for her to be a Mrs.

Daniel remembered her as a careful rather than an inspired teacher, content to return eternally to the verities of spelling, grammer, and long division rather than to call down the lightning of a new idea. She would never read them stories, for instance, or talk about things from her own life. Her only livelier moments were on Fridays when for an hour at the end of the day she led her class in singing. They always started with the National Anthem and ended with “Song of Iowa.” Daniel’s three favorite songs in their songbook had been “Santa Lucia,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Anchors Aweigh.” Most teachers shied away from teaching music in the Friday free periods, because it was controversial, but Mrs. Boismortier, whenever the subject came up — at a PTA meeting or even in class discussions — simply declared that any country whose schoolchildren could not do justice to their own National Anthem was a country in deep trouble, and how could you argue with that? But for all her talk of God and Country, it was obvious to the children in her classes that she taught them singing because she enjoyed it herself. In every song her voice was loudest and loveliest, and no matter what kind of singer you might be yourself it was a pleasure to sing along because it was her voice you heard, not your own.

Nevertheless, over the years Mrs. Boismortier had made enemies by insisting on teaching music, especially among undergoders, who were very strong in this part of Iowa, and very outspoken and sure of themselves. If you could believe the Register , they practically ran Iowa, and they’d been even more powerful in the days just after the defeat of the national Anti-Flight Amendment, when they were able to get the State Legislature to pass a law prohibiting all secular musical performances, live or recorded. Three days after Governor Brewster vetoed this law his only daughter was shot at and though it was never proven that her would-be killer had been an undergoder the crime did turn a lot of sympathizers away. Those days were over, and the worst that Mrs. Boismortier had to worry about now was the occasional broken window or dead cat strung up to her front porch. Once when Daniel was delivering her paper he found a two-inch hole drilled into the middle of the front door. At first he supposed it was for the paper, and then he realized it was meant to be a fairy-hole. As a sign of his solidarity Daniel made a tight cylinder of the paper and forced it into the hole, as if that were what it was there for. At school the next day Mrs. Boismortier went out of her way to thank him, and instead of repairing the hole she enlarged it and covered it with a metal plate that could be slipped to the side, thereby making it officially a slot for the Register .

That had been the beginning of the special relationship between Daniel and Mrs. Boismortier. Often on the coldest winter nights she would waylay him when he brought the paper and have him come into her living room for a hot cup of something she made from corn starch. “Embargo cocoa” she called it. There were either books or pictures on all the walls, including a very careful watercolor of the First Baptist Church and a store next to it (where there wasn’t any now) called A P. Also, right in plain sight, with shelves of records above it up to the ceiling, was a stereo phonograph. There wasn’t anything illegal about that, strictly speaking, but most people who had records — the Muellers, for instance — kept them out of sight and, usually, locked up. It seemed very gutsy, considering the way she was harrassed in general.

As his fingers and ears grew warmer and started tingling, Mrs. Boismortier would ask him questions. Somehow she’d learned that he liked ghost stories, and she would recommend titles that he could ask his mother to take out for him from the adult section of the library. Sometimes these were a little too plodding and high-toned for his taste but twice at least she hit the nail on the head. She almost never talked about herself, which seemed unusual in someone basically so talkative.

Gradually, as he began to realize that despite her reticence and her fat incapable body Mrs. Boismortier was a definite human being, Daniel began to grow curious. Mostly about the music. He knew that music was not something you talked about with other people, but it was hard not to think about, especially with those shelves of records looming down, like a microfilm library of all the sins in the world. Not that music was wrong, exactly. But where there’s smoke, as they say. After all, it was music that helped people fly. Not listening to music, of course, but doing it. And anything associated with flying was irresistably interesting.

And so, one snowy afternoon in November, after he’d accepted his cup of embargo cocoa, he screwed up his courage and asked if he might be allowed to hear one of her records.

“Why surely, Daniel, what record would you like to hear?”

The only pieces of music he knew by name were the songs in the school’s songbook. He was certain, just because they were in the songbook, that those weren’t the kinds of music that people used to fly.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Something that you like.”

“Well, here’s something I listened to last night, and it seemed quite splendid, though it may not appeal to you at all. A string quartet, by Mozart.” Ever so tenderly, as if the record were a living thing, she slipped it from its cardboard sleeve and placed it on the turntable.

He braced his mind against some unimaginable shock, but the sounds that issued from the speakers were dull and innocuous — wheezings and whinings, groanings and grindings that continued interminably without getting anywhere. Once or twice out of the murk he could hear melodies begin to get started but then they’d sink back into the basic diddle-diddle-diddle of the thing before you could start to enjoy them. On and on and on, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but all of a dullness and drabness uniform as housepaint. Even so, you couldn’t just say thank you, that was enough, not while Mrs. Boismortier was swaying her head back and forth and smiling in a faraway way, as if this really were some incredible mystic revelation. So he stared at the record revolving on the turntable and sweated it out to the end. Then he thanked Mrs. Boismortier and trudged home through the snow feeling betrayed, disillusioned and amazed.