Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

He was expected to do her shopping, to deliver letters and scores, and to take her elderly, ginger-colored spaniel Incubus for his morning and his evening walk. Incubus, like his mistress, was an eccentric. He had a consuming interest in strangers (and none at all in other dogs), but it was an interest he did not wish to see reciprocated. He preferred people who would let him snuffle about on his own, investigating their shoes and other salient smells. However, if you ventured to talk to him, much less to pet him, he became edgy and took the first opportunity to escape from such attentions. He was neither mean nor friendly, neither frisky nor wholly torpid, and was very regular in his habits. Unless Daniel had some shopping to accomplish at the same time, the course of their walk never varied: due west to Lincoln Center, twice round the fountain, then (after Daniel had dutifully scooped up that morning’s or evening’s turd and disposed of it down a drain) home again to West 65th, just round the corner from the park, where Mrs. Schiff, no less predictable in her habits, would be hovering, anxious and undemonstrative, somewhere in the hallway of the apartment. She never condescended to Incubus, but spoke to him on the assumption that he was a precocious child, enchanted (by his own preference) into the shape of a dog. She treated Daniel no differently.

Daniel, in exchange for these services, and for providing a masculine, protective presence, received the largest of the apartment’s many rooms. The others were so many closets and cubbyholes, the legacy of the apartment’s previous existence as a residence hotel. When Mrs. Schiff had inherited the building, twenty years ago, she had never bothered to take down the plaster-board partitions, and indeed had added her own distinctive wrinkle to the maze in the form of folding screens and free-standing bookshelves (all of her own carpentering). Daniel felt awkward, at first, occupying the only humanly proportioned room in the apartment, and even when he was convinced, from her reluctance to enter his room, that Mrs. Schiff really preferred her own cozy warrens, he never stopped being grateful. It was a grand room, and with a coat of fresh paint on the walls and the floor sanded and waxed it became magnificent.

Mrs. Schiff did like to be visited, and it was soon their settled custom, when her day’s work was over and he had returned from the Metastasio and taken Incubus twice round the fountain and back home, to sit in her bedroom, with a pot of gunpowder tea between them and a packet of cookies (Daniel had never known Mrs. Schiff to eat anything but sweets), and to talk. Sometimes they might listen to a record (she had hundreds, all horribly scratched), but only by way of intermission. Daniel had known many good talkers in his time, but none of them could hold a candle to Mrs. Schiff. Wherever her fancy lighted, ideas formed, and grew, and became systems. Whatever she spoke seemed illumined, sometimes in only a whimsical way, but often seriously and even rather intensely. Or so it seemed, till, with a turn of a phrase, she’d veer off on some new tangent. Most of it, in the way of much supposed “great conversation” was mere mermaid enchantment and fool’s gold, but some of her notions did stick to the ribs of the mind, especially those ideas that derived from her ruling passion, which was opera.

She had a theory, for instance, that the Victorian Age had been a time of massive and systematic repression on a scale more awful than was ever to be achieved again on the stage of history, even at Auschwitz, that all of Europe, from Waterloo to World War Two, was one colossal police state, and that it was the function of Romantic Art, but especially of opera, to train and inspire the rising younger generation of robber barons and aristocrats to be heroes in the Byronic mold; that is, to be intelligent, bold, and murderous enough to be able to defend their wealth and privilege against all comers. How she’d come to this theory was by listening to Verdi’s I Masnadieri , based on a play of Schiller about an idealistic young man whom circumstance requires to become the head of a band of outlaws and who ends up killing his fiancee sheerly on principle. Daniel thought the whole thing ridiculous until Mrs. Schiff, peeved at his obstinacy, got down her copy of Schiller and read The Robbers aloud, and then, the next evening, made him listen to the opera. Daniel admitted there might be something to it.

“I’m right . Say it — say that I’m right.”

“Okay, you’re right.”

“Not only am I right, Daniel, but what’s true of Schiller’s apprentice mafiosi is true of all the heroic criminals from that day to this, all the cowboys and gangsters and rebels without causes. They’re all businessmen in disguise. Indeed, the gangsters even dispensed with the disguise. I should know — my father was one.”

“Your father was a gangster?”

“He was one of the city’s leading labor racketeers in his day. I was an heiress in my gilded youth, no less.”

“Then what happened?”

“A bigger fish gobbled him up. He had a number of so-called residence hotels like this one. The government decided to eliminate the middleman. Just when he thought he’d become respectable.”

She said it without rancor. Indeed, he’d never known her to be fazed at anything. She seemed content to understand the hell she lived in (for such she insisted it was) with her best clarity of apprehension, and then to pass on to the next apprensible horror, as though all existence were a museum of more or less malefic exhibits: instruments of torture and the bones of martyrs side by side with jeweled chalices and the portraits of merciless children in beautiful clothes.

Not that she was callous herself, but rather that she had no hope. The world dismayed her, and she turned from it to her own snug burrow, which the wolves and foxes had somehow not yet discovered. There she lived in the inviolate privacy of her work and her contemplations, seldom venturing out except to the opera or to one or another of her favorite restaurants, where she would hold forth to other musician friends and dine on a succession of desserts. She had surrendered long since to the traditional vices of a recluse: she didn’t bathe, or cook meals, or wash dishes; she kept strange hours, preferring night to day; she never let sunlight or fresh air into her own rooms, which came to smell, most intensely, of Incubus. She talked to herself constantly, or rather to Incubus and the dolls, inventing long wandering whimsical tales for them about the Honeybunny twins, Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny, tales from which all possibility of pain or conflict was debarred. Daniel suspected that she slept with Incubus as well, but what of that? Was anyone harmed by her dirtiness or dottiness? If there was such a thing as the life of the mind then Mrs. Schiff was one of its champions, and Daniel’s hat was off to her.

So, for that matter, was hers, for she was beset, like so many who live apart from the world, with a naive self-conceit that was at once ludicrous and deserved. Indeed, she was aware of this, and prone to discussing it with Daniel, who had rapidly been elevated to the status of confessor.

“My problem has always been,” she confided one evening, a month after he’d moved in, “that I have a hyperkinetic intelligence. But it’s also been my salvation. When I was a girl, they wouldn’t keep me in any of the schools my father bundled me off to, as part of his program of redeeming the family name. My problem was I took my education seriously, which would have been forgiveable in itself, except that I tended to be evangelical in my enthusiasms. I was labeled a disruptive influence, and treated as such, which I resented. Soon I made it my business to be a disruptive influence, and found ways to make my teachers look like fools. Lord, how I hated school! My daydream has always been to go back, as a celebrity, and give a speech at the graduation exercises, a speech denouncing them all. Which is perfectly unfair of me, I know. Did you like school?”