The Drifters (35 page)

About four in the morning he was wakened in his sleeping bag by a noise. With intuitive prudence he made no sound, anxious to see what was happening, and in the shadowy light, he discerned that another couple had entered and were preparing to climb into the other bed. With natural curiosity he watched them undress, and when the girl stood naked only a few feet from where he lay, he recognized, with a deep stab of pain, that it was Britta, the Norwegian girl from the bar.

He was so dismayed that he must have gasped, for he heard her whisper, ‘Joe! I think there’s somebody in the sleeping bag.’

A tall man came over, lit a match, and studied the sleeping form. ‘Probably some kid somebody brought home from the bar.’

Britta stooped down to peer more closely. ‘It’s that boy from Israel! Cato must have brought him.’

‘The one who held up the tanks?’

‘Yes. I’m sure it’s he.’

The match went out. The two forms withdrew. And Yigal opened his eyes again, just in time to see Britta climb into the bed.

Sappho is a Greek dike.

It would be a sad day in American legal history when our courts refused protection under the law to the unwashed, unshod, unkempt, untrimmed and uninhibited.

Frodo is not dead. He is hiding out in Chicago until Mayor Daley leaves.

I have listened to a dozen families deplore the indifference of their children, praying that they might show an interest in something. But as soon as children display any interest in political movements, the parents choke up and charge them with radicalism. What the parents really want is for their children to be interested in what they were interested in thirty years ago.

Hire the handicapped. It’s a real gas watching them work.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

No phrase of the young is more revolutionary than that odd cry ‘Zap them right back with super-love.’ If this became a widespread tactic, it could demoralize society as presently constructed. If a southern sheriff puts his police dogs on a group of blacks, and they sing spirituals of forgiveness and pray for him with obvious love, they are going to accomplish miracles. If a college girl can accept being beaten by clubs and can then kiss the hands of her assailants and offer them her love, it’s going to knock hell out of their program. Christ devised this tactic two thousand years ago, and with it he helped bring down the Roman Empire.

The latest peace feeler from Hanoi has
just been arrested in Central Park.

The Youth of a Nation are the Trustees of Posterity.—Disraeli

I love America most when I am caught up in its politics … in the grubby battles whereby contending social groups try to hack out their unjust portion of the spoils. I like to see Catholics battling for a little more money for their schools, Jews fighting for a better relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, gasoline companies trying to defeat government supervision, and the developer of a new drug doing his damnedest to slip it past the health inspectors. To me, a place like Newark, where old Protestants surrendered to new Italians who will not surrender an inch to new Negroes, is more interesting than the battleground at Troy, for this is real warfare, in my terms, in my day. That’s why I enjoyed the Democratic convention at Chicago so much. You could stare at your television and see the dinosaurs of the west plodding slowly toward the volcano of extinction without being in the least aware of their march. It gave me more catharsis than the fall of the House of Atreus, because public suicide is inevitably thrilling, as the Japanese learned long ago.

Each day more of them die and more of us are born.

In late 1967 our head office in Geneva sent me to Boston to look into the possibility of our financing a rather large nest of apartment houses under contemplation for the Fenway Park region, and in the discussions I was thrown into daily contact with a formidable Boston financier, Frederick Cole. I found him aloof but capable; in most of our negotiation it was him against me, his judgment of facts against mine, and rarely have I met a man to whom I could present additional data with the assurance that he would inspect them fairly and adjust his former position if required. This is an unusual aptitude, for most of us, when we lock ourselves into a position, utilize additional data merely as additions to our fortifications. Cole could reason.

At the end of one difficult session, when the difference between our assessments amounted to more than eight million dollars, and he was coldly defending his figure, I sought to terminate that part of the discussion on an amicable note, so I said, ‘It’s odd to find an Irishman with the first name Frederick.’ He laughed and said, ‘Not Irish, German. When my great-great-grandfather came over here after the Revolution of 1848 his name was Kohl, but he was afraid Bostonians might think he was Jewish, so he changed it to Cole, and then everybody thought he was Irish, which in those days was worse.’ I laughed, and in his icy way he asked if I would care to have dinner with him that night, so on the spur of the moment it was arranged.

I had assumed that he meant us to drop into some restaurant, but his plans were quite different. He called his wife, told her he was bringing me along and that we’d eat whatever was available. We caught a cab and drove out Huntington Avenue to the more expensive section of Brookline, where we pulled into a garage set among trees and carefully tended shrubs. The white clapboard house
had been occupied during the last century by a famous professor at Harvard and had passed through his family to Mrs. Cole, who was apparently of distinguished lineage.

The three of us had barely sat down to a casually prepared meal of beef and potatoes, with New England touches such as spiced crab apple and quince jam on hot rolls, when we were unexpectedly joined by the Coles’ daughter, who was attending Radcliffe College nearby. She was tall, tanned, and with long brown hair which she wore in two braids. Her tweed suit was what we call ‘country expensive’ and her manner was patrician in the best Boston sense of that word. She was extremely quick in her appreciation of situations and knew without being told why I was there. I was not surprised, therefore, when her father said, as she disappeared to wash up, ‘Gretchen’s only nineteen and already has her B.A. summa cum laude from Radcliffe. She’s entering the graduate school in January.’

‘That is,’ her mother said, ‘if we can wean her away from this Senator McCarthy nonsense.’

Gretchen now returned and we had an enjoyable meal, with her making us laugh at stories about how uninstructed most of the kids were at the McCarthy headquarters. ‘They really expect politics to be either 1810 with torchlight parades or 2010 with super intellects reaching super decisions. They have no idea of the grubbiness of 1967, and very little taste for it.’

But it was not the politics of that first night with the Coles that I remember so vividly. After dinner Gretchen was about to run off to a meeting at Harvard—had to be there, she was the lady co-chairman—when her father said, ‘Gretchen, you look tired. Why don’t you relax for half an hour and sing to us?’ Apparently she had inherited her father’s gift of common sense, for she stopped, weighed the proposal for a moment, nodded her head briskly, and said, ‘That’s a damned good idea. I’ve been working all day.’

She threw aside her coat, went to a cupboard and returned with a rather large guitar, which when I first saw it, seemed a trifle too much for her to handle. However, she sat on a low stool, tossed her head so that her brown braids fell out of the way, and said quietly, ‘Child 243.’ I was about to ask what this meant when she strummed her guitar twice and started to play a gentle melody, after which she sang in a good, clear voice the ancient story
of a young woman who marries a ship-carpenter after being assured that her betrothed has died in a foreign land. Four years later, when she and the carpenter have three children, the lover returns:

The lady deserts her husband, flees with her first love, only to discover that he is no longer human but has become a daemon. Gretchen’s voice grew delicate and foreboding as she concluded:

‘What was the name of the song?’ I asked.

‘Child 243,’ she said, then laughed. ‘That’s the identification we use. Actually, it’s “The Daemon Lover.” The Child number came from an old-time friend of our family.’

Mrs. Cole explained that during the latter years of the last century, in a house not far from where we sat, a famous Harvard professor, Francis James Child, had collected historic ballads which were then disappearing from memory. He had spent nearly fifty years at this task, assembling every known variation of each ballad. Shortly before his death he published his findings in ten large volumes containing the life history of 305 classic ballads.

‘The amusing thing,’ Mrs. Cole said, ‘is that dear Professor Child used to leave Boston each spring to tramp over England and Scotland, searching for his precious ballads. He really spent all his money and energy on the task. But about the same time an English scholar was spending his vacations and his money tramping around the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, collecting
precisely the same ballads. Because, as you know, the first English settlers who hid themselves away in our southern mountains brought the ballads with them. Quite often our Kentucky mountaineers preserved them in a purer form than the English did.’

‘Mrs. Cole knows so much about this,’ her husband explained, ‘because Professor Child taught her mother to sing many of the ballads. Right in this room. Gretchen learned them from her grandmother, so the strain is fairly pure.’

‘Could I see one of the volumes?’ I asked.

‘Unfortunately, they’re quite valuable now,’ Cole said, ‘and our family has never owned a set. Gretchen studies her material at the library. Darling, sing us 173.’

I don’t know enough about ballads to say which one is the king. Later I was to hear Gretchen and her friends sing many manly ones about brave knights and doughty sea captains, and some of these old songs were most stirring; but I am quite certain what the queen of the ballads is. It has got to be Child 173. From the first moment that Gretchen strummed her guitar with a set of ominous chords, I was captivated by the story of Mary Hamilton, a country girl who came to Edinburgh to serve as one of four girls named Mary who were maids to Mary, Queen of Scots. Unfortunately, Queen Mary’s husband fell in love with this one and got her pregnant. The tragedy begins with one of the greatest single stanzas of English popular poetry:

When I studied this admirable ballad later, I concluded that the progression of those first three lines, the way in which rumor is depicted flying about the palace—gone, to, up—was folk poetry at its best. The entire misery of the ballad is foretold in those breathless lines, and when I heard Gretchen Cole sing them the first time, she imparted a wonderful sense of history to them. Mary Hamilton was a real girl, involved in a total scandal; here was a beginning
that could end only upon the scaffold, and such compelling situations are the stuff of poetry.

When Gretchen came to the last verse, as great in its sad way as the first, she sang in a low, heartbreaking manner she had learned from her grandmother, who had got it from the professor; I have never heard a conclusion to a popular song that I have found as totally satisfying as this, perhaps because when I hear it I recall the silence that always filled the room when Gretchen Cole finished singing it:

The first two lines are essence of tragedy, sparely portrayed; the last two, with their beautiful sequence of real names, bring the tragedy down to earth and remind us that it was a real girl who was hanged.

I was therefore startled when Mrs. Cole told me, ‘Whenever my mother sang 173 she would tell us children the true story of Mary Hamilton, as Professor Child had told it to her, and it would make us shiver with fear.’

‘Grandmother told me the story when I was young,’ Gretchen broke in, ‘and even today when I reach the last verse tears come to my eyes. Sometimes people tell me, “You get such emotion into the last verse.” I don’t tell them it’s because Grandmother put it there with her story about the real Mary Hamilton.’

‘Who was she?’

Mrs. Cole replied, ‘Court documents from Queen Elizabeth’s time show that when Mary of Scotland was young and in France she really did have four beautiful attendants, each named Mary. But it wasn’t one of them who was hanged. It was a beautiful Scottish adventuress who went to Leningrad a century later … in the time of Peter the Great. Somehow she got to court, and some accounts say she became Peter’s mistress. At any rate, she had an illegitimate child whom she wrapped in a napkin and threw in a well. She was condemned to death, not because Peter wanted it but because he had recently issued a proclamation decreeing death to women who slew their illegitimate children.