Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

Billy’s Dream of a Dead Friend (3:40)

When you take away a man’s sensations he will make up his own: take away his seeing and his hearing and let him smell nothing and let nothing touch him, he will see and hear and smell and feel what his mind makes up. And what does that prove but the loneliness we are born into, that we are born hungry for the world and lonesome in our hunger, and that the heart floods its banks of loneliness and runs over the earth, and is soaked away till there is no more blood of the lonely heart’s spring and our river runs dry. And my dream is of the pale-bled heart of Missy having run its courses and the last drops of its blood sifting into the sands of that southern beach; and the wind of my waking hours cleanses and dries the sands, but each night those darkening stains spread out again, just where they were before. Because my dream is made of facts and the facts can’t be dreamed away. Nobody over thirty in the whole country believed her the times she spoke out. But I knew that she never lied — that was not when she lied. She didn’t lie when she showed up on TV in the country where we were at war, she didn’t lie when she mourned for the three murdered men in Mississippi, she didn’t lie at the church in Birmingham or on the Mall in Washington, D.C. So one day the police come upon her as she’s out for a stroll down this country road with an old Negro lady. And they stop their car to investigate. And she says, We’re going to the beach. We’re looking to find a breath of fresh air. And all the grown-up liberals said she might be a sanctimonious fake and a phony, but she is a shrewd genius for that line; imagine saying that to that cop a good hundred and ten miles from the nearest ocean. The age of marches was over but a new age is begun and we will have a march to the sea for that old Negro lady. But the truth is she meant what she said, the words themselves, for when she said it that became her intention. And that old Negro lady was Carrie Mae, who sang to her in the cradle all the blues she sang; who grew her up in Columbus, Ohio; and who’d gone back to her home in South Carolina to live before she died. And Missy went down to see Carrie Mae and that was how they were taking a walk down the country road, the old woman in a fine black dress from Saks Fifth Avenue and a sun parasol on her shoulder and forty-five-dollar orthopedic shoes on her feet, arm in arm with Missy in her shirt and jeans and sandals and shades, the two of them out for a stroll on this hot dusty road where the police car is what kicked up the dust. And Missy says in front of the deputies, Momma Carrie how fine it will be when we smell the ocean breeze and can sit down on the cool wet sand and bathe our feet in that cool, absolving, never-ending ocean. And breathe air that has some breath in it. And the old woman, who knows her Missy from birth, from the moment she pushed out of real, soon-to-be-dead Momma, she smiles and says, All right. And pretends with her and believes with her at that moment that that is just what they’ll do. For it is a hot day, and the air is bad for breathing, as Carrie Mae knows because she has asthma, a bad, lifelong asthma. And the deputies hear that, and see them smiling at each other, old Carrie Mae and this famous troublemaker white girl, smiling in their love for each other, and they take offense. And when they radio the sheriff it becomes an infraction and when the AP stringer drives up he puts it on the wire and it becomes a news story, and by the next morning when the women get out of the jailhouse and stand before the judge, a wish to ease an old woman’s breathing has become a categorical truth for Missy, for nobody was ever more stubborn with the stubborn soul of a saint. She took a County Cab back to the old woman’s redbrick ranch house and packed a pull-string laundry bag and came back to town and the two of them walked east out of that town arm in arm for a summer if they wanted of walking free together wherever they wanted. But it wasn’t a march till the next morning when twenty-five seminarians from Columbia, S.C., stepped out of their bus and followed along. And it wasn’t a demonstration till the kids begin to pour down from the west and north. And it wasn’t a riot till days later when five thousand of them pushed their way gently and firmly through the patriots drinking their beers and throwing the bottles. And one was thrown back. Which is what the police with their helmets, shades, and carbines had been waiting for. And because I wasn’t there, what I see is myself walking up to Missy who faces the ocean like Venus about to go back into the sea, and I gently touch her shoulder and she turns and smiles at me her lovely smile of recognition and whispers words of a song I write for her in our minds: What do you believe, Billy? Tell me what you believe, Billy And I raise my hand, which is the signal for the carbine bullet to slam into her throat, and fell her, and spill her voice into the sand except for that portion of it that reddens the white surf and washes back into the blue ocean. And that is my dream-song of a dead friend. In life her life was whole major chords — nothing diminished, nothing flatted, nothing minor, nothing pushed a half tone off center. What kind of music was that? It was music for the bright and early morning. It sounds all right until those shadows of night begin to creep around the earth like the big dark hands of God, like the dark hands of God around your throat, children. And when you feel those hands is when you sing. When God is squeezing the breath out of you is the time to sing. So hear what I’m saying: when she spoke she represented herself truthfully. It was when she sang that she lied. And her lying is what gave her that voice, that truest purest voice in the whole amazed world, that uncanny voice stronger and sweeter than Christ’s Himself. Listen: it is so truly perfect it is raw it is so pure. And doesn’t she sing sad? And doesn’t she sing those Baptist blues hymns bluer and deeper blue than anyone? Well that blue is night blue, the blue of the shadow of God, and that was when Missy lied, because she never allowed that His shadow was in her being.

The Ballad of W. C. Fields (2:20)

And so we come to my most recent song, this ballad of W. C. Fields. I sat down not to write it but to give the urgency in my breast a controlled release through my fingertips, and this song is what happened. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time for the music, just the words and the beat. And so it is in the form of a walking song, it walks me through the underworld of the dreaming masses, where this pudgy demon of truth, Mr. W. C. Fields, with his dirty top hat, his run-down elegance of manners, his drunken scrollwork of a personality, presides like the Chief Official over the technology of our souls. And the singer doesn’t want this, he doesn’t like it, and he begins the song by telling Mr. Fields to go away: Go way from my window Mr. W. C. Fields Go way from this beautiful place Go way from my window Mr. W. C. Fields You’re blocking the view with your ugly face . But the clown won’t go away, you see, for he is taking the singer by the hand and leading him through the window over the great landscape of the underworld that looks so beautiful from the window of the safe house and showing him what it really is. And he sees the bubbling sulfur pits of intentions, and the slake mountains of ideals, and great plains of gray ash as far as he can see, the ashes of innocence creased by rivers of blood. And every man he sees is blind and running around in circles and no sound from the tapping of his cane to tell him where he’s going. And a great pestilential wind suppurates the skin of the people and sears their eyes and their hair, and it is the wind of Mr. W. C. Fields ranting. But the worst thing he sees is an old couple exempt from all the misery, a beautiful fair girl and boy in their youth who have grown old together, an aged couple who have loved each other and lived in each other all their lives, in joy and comfort, and now sit chuckling, immune to their surroundings, chuckling in their awful senility. And when the singer is back behind his window and the view looks fine and good and green again, he understands who Mr. W. C. Fields is, and he says: Some day we will stop laughing at you, Mr. Fields At your bulbous nose and the pain of your distress At your thirst and your drunken pratfalls, Mr. Fields At your bitter, bumbling, saintliness . And Mr. Fields brings forth a bottle and blows the dust from two glasses and rubs them on his dirty elegant sleeve and pours us each a drink and says to me: Drink it down, drink it all down, my boy And kick the kids at Christmas I give you my crooked cue stick, Billy Cause you know what the game is