Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

“I remembered the dream you’d told me about, the dream you had at Spirit Lake. So I sang that song. It was the first thing that came into my head.”

“ ‘I am the captain of the Pinafore.’ You sang that? ”

“And not even all the way through.”

Daniel laughed. It seemed splendidly unfair.

“I’m sorry I asked. Well… good-bye, then.” He took his coat from the hook on the door.

“Good-bye, Daniel. You will fly, won’t you?”

He nodded, and closed the door.

He did, of course, return many times to the Clinic, and Boa never failed to be cordial. Daniel felt obliged to give his own account of the intervening years, though he doubted whether his story held any real interest for her. Mostly when they talked it was about music. Day by day she grew stronger, until at last she was strong enough to attempt departure. She offered to let him be present on the day, just as she might have asked him to see her off at a dock. He declined to do so. She had been certain she’d succeed and she did. Two weeks after she had left her body, medical support was withdrawn, according to her written instructions. Her body continued its automatic processes for another few days, and then it stopped.

Early in July her ashes were spread, secretly, from a low-flying plane, over the fields of her father’s estate.

The turkey was half raw, but when Michael, at the head of the table, declared it to be done to a turn, they all assented to the proposition in open defiance of the truth. Poor Cecelia wasn’t to blame. She’d had to drive in to Amesville at noon to pick up Milly and Abe, and Milly, who had been threatening to boycott the family reunion along with her other daughter, had taken an hour to be persuaded to get in the car. By the time Cecelia got back to Unity and shoved the turkey in the oven, the dinner was doomed to failure, at least as a culinary event. If it was anyone’s fault it was Daniel’s, since it was because of his eight o’clock curtain that they couldn’t wait till the turkey was done. Family reunions shouldn’t have to be run on a timetable.

Daniel loved the house the Hendricks lived in. He wanted to move it, stuffed pike, slapdash sylvan canvas, and all, onto the stage of a theater and use it for the set of Werther . Behold, it would say, this is the way you must live! With coasters under drinks and African violets pining on the windowsill and mincing china statuettes and babies growing up and trying to smash the lot of it.

Daniel was entranced and already half-in-love with his nephew and namesake, and had already begun, in an avuncular manner, to corrupt the boy, building up towers of alphabet blocks for him to knock down and then inciting everyone to clap for this display of wit and skill. Danny understood at once the nature of applause, that it represented the highest degree of adult attention one could command. He wanted more. Daniel built higher towers, spelling out longer words — TOWER, FLOWER, MANIFEST — and Danny knocked them down with the lightning-bolts of his god-like hands, and the adults continued to enjoy themselves and to applaud. Until they did at last grow restive and started talking to each other again, at which point Danny had knocked over his father’s drink and had to be taken upstairs to bed.

Of the six other grown-ups at the family reunion, three were complete strangers to Daniel, though Michael, Cecelia’s husband, claimed to be able to remember Daniel from the days when they’d been neighbors on Chickasaw Avenue. Daniel, trying to dredge up a reciprocal remembrance, could only produce an account of a slice of apple pie he’d received as a trick-or-treat offering from Michael’s parents, the Hendricks, and the difficulty he’d had eating it through the mouth-hole of his mask. Actually, it had been another neighbor who’d given him that slice of pie, and the reason he remembered it so clearly was because it had been so much better than his mother’s apple pie. He didn’t however, go into that.

Across the table from Daniel sat Michael’s much younger brother, Jerry, and Jerry’s girlfriend (his fiancée, until a week ago), Rose. Rose was (if Daniel were excepted) Amesville’s first genuine phoney. Her color didn’t come off in the bathtub. She was also a follower of NBC’s Dr. Silentius and wore a large button that said GOD IS WITHIN. Between them, Rose and Daniel had kept the table-talk limping along in the face of several massive brown-outs. It wasn’t that his family was being unduly hostile (except for Milly, who was); it was more the natural reticence that anyone feels who’s forced to cozy up to a stranger, which, after all, was the situation they were in.

Of them all Abe seemed least unstrung. He was his usual gently taciturn self. Daniel thought Time had been unfair to say he was senile. The only time his mind seemed distinctly to slip the tracks was when after his second whiskey sour, he asked Daniel, in a tone of guarded inquiry, what prison had been like. Daniel gave the same evasive answer he’d given the first time his father had asked the question nineteen years ago. Prison was a disgrace and he’d rather not discuss it. To which his father replied, once again, that that was probably the wisest attitude Daniel could take. Time, Abe declared, heals all wounds.

Daniel declined, and then was compelled to accept, a ritual second helping of the stuffing. Just as his plate was passed back to him the phone rang. Cecelia disappeared into the kitchen and returned looking disappointed.

“That was Mr. Tauber,” she informed Daniel. “He was making sure you were here. He said your chauffeur will be here in half an hour or so.”

“His chauffeur!” Millie echoed, scathingly. “Get that.”

She spoke — habitually, it seemed — with her mouth full. Daniel couldn’t remember her doing that when he’d known her. She seemed, in just about every way, to have become coarser. Perhaps it came of running a restaurant.

“I thought,” Cecelia said, frowning (for she warned her mother about being sarcastic), “that it might be Aurelia. The least she could do is call up and say hello to Daniel.”

“Well, I’m sure she would,” said Milly, grinding pepper onto her potatoes, “if she didn’t have her job to think of.”

“Aurelia works for your old buddy Whiting,” Abe volunteered.

“He knows that,” Milly said, glaring at her husband.

“But it’s about all I know,” Daniel said, placatingly. “How did it happen?”

“Very simple,” Cecelia answered. “She sucked up to him.”

“Cecelia! Really!”

“Oh, not physically , Mother. But every other way she could think of. It started actually, on the day of your wedding, Daniel. My sister isn’t one to waste time. She started in on Boadicea, gushing about horses. Boadicea had to promise her that she could come out and ride one of her father’s horses.”

“It was perfectly natural for Aurelia to talk about horses. She had a passion for horses. Even Daniel should be able to remember that.” Milly was determined to defend her absent daughter, if only because Aurelia had had the courage to stick to her guns and stay away from the family reunion.

“She had a passion for anything that cost money. Anyhow,” Cecelia went on, relieved to have found, at last, a subject for conversation, “when we all next got together, at the memorial service for you and Boa, Aurelia’s first concern was to remind Miss Whiting, the one who lives in Brazil now—”

“Alethea lives in Brazil?” Daniel asked.

Cecelia nodded impatiently. “She came right out and told her about Boadicea’s promise. Well, what could they do? They invited her out there, and she did one of her numbers, and got invited back. She was out at Worry at least once a week for the rest of that summer.”