The Drifters (36 page)

‘The beheading was a notable affair, with Mary Hamilton dressed handsomely in her finest silks. When her head rolled in the street, the Czar picked it up, kissed it twice, then delivered a funeral oration. Then he kissed it again and threw it back into the gutter.’

In early 1968, after hard negotiation, Frederick Cole and I reached an agreement on the Fenway Park project, and to celebrate he invited me back to Brookline for a champagne dinner, to which I brought a special gift that I had picked up in London, but when we sat down to dinner I was much disappointed to find that Gretchen was not to join us. ‘She’s in New Hampshire heading one of the McCarthy offices,’ her mother said with some disgust. ‘She took the slogan “Be Clean for Gene” quite seriously and has hired a barber to give male volunteers free haircuts.’

When I said that I thought it rather refreshing to find young people concerned about politics, Mrs. Cole said, ‘Oh, I don’t mind that at all. Frederick and I are Republicans, of course, and I’m sure you are too, and I admit it seems strange to have our daughter working so hard for a Democrat. But we can adjust to that. What disturbs me is the fact that she’s dropped out of graduate school. Didn’t even attend her first classes. I think that’s a pity.’

‘She’s young,’ Cole said. ‘A year’s more maturity will be good for her.’

So that night I was not able to make my presentation, but when Gretchen came back to Boston after the thrilling McCarthy performance in New Hampshire, the family invited me over again, and I found young Gretchen, now twenty, even more refreshing and provocative than before. She was filled with stories about the New Hampshire primary: ‘President Johnson is definitely through. We’re all going out to Wisconsin … the whole team … you ought to see our spirit. I assure you, we’re going to change politics in this country. No one will ever again be able to start anything like the Vietnam war.’

You ought to de-escalate a little yourself,’ Mr. Cole said. ‘Mr. Fairbanks has a present for you.’

She now became a little girl, excited at the prospect of a gift, and when I showed her a rather large and heavy
box, she clasped her fingertips to her mouth and tried to guess what it might be. I am fairly sure she could not have known what it was, for even when she removed the wrapping to uncover the heavy cardboard box inside, she was obviously perplexed. Opening the lid, she encountered wads of tissue paper and cried, ‘What is it? You’re driving me frantic.’

When the tissue was pulled away she saw the ten handsome volumes of Professor Child’s
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882–1898
, bound in heavy leather by some former London owner. She had nothing to say. These books were not only one of the major accomplishments of American scholarship; they were also the work of a man who had been her grandmother’s neighbor, the inspiration of all the young balladeers in America and England who sang the haunting poetry he had rescued. This was more than a set of ten books; it was a basic testament for Gretchen’s generation.

Choosing one of the volumes at random, she leafed through the pages she knew so well from library study, and cried, ‘Here’s the one I shall sing as my thank-you letter,’ and she brought her guitar into the living room and handed me Volume IV, opened to the last page: ‘Child 113. “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie.” ’

‘It’s quite a name,’ I said.

‘A silkie is a seal.’ When I shrugged my shoulders, she said, ‘A seal that swims in the water. When he comes on land he’s transformed into a man. This seal has had a baby boy by a nursemaid he seduced. He has come to see how his son is doing.

The music that accompanied these strange words was a haunting thing; you could hear the whisper of the cold Scottish sea and the mysteriousness of a time when seals and men interchanged their being. It was the kind of ballad that young people of this generation loved, for it had both the simplicity they longed for and the beauty they respected. I was reflecting on such matters while Gretchen played a minor-key transitional passage on her
guitar. She then began the final verse of her song, and I was astonished at its content, quite unlike anything I had heard previously in the ballads. The seal is telling the nursemaid that after he takes his son from land and teaches him to be a good seal, the nurse will find a good life of her own with the gold that he has given her.

It was as if this very old ballad had foreseen the sense of tragedy that was to overtake the young people of this generation in the United States. There was nothing in the preceding verses of the ballad that prepared one for the seal’s presentiment of his death at the hands of the arbitrary gunner; it burst upon the listener with a kind of divine irrationality. I have often had a similar sense of broken sequences when discussing the draft with young men like Joe or race relations with Cato. Intuitively they perceived aspects of the future that I could not.

In succeeding months, while I worked in Boston getting the project started, I saw a good deal of the Coles, and although Gretchen was often absent working for Senator McCarthy, whenever she was in the area she kept me advised as to what was happening. I found she was a much better singer than I had supposed when I bought her the ten volumes; she sang in coffeehouses and occasionally with groups in set concerts attended by collegians from the Boston area, and whereas the others specialized in songs of protest until you would think that revolution was just around the corner, she kept to the Child ballads and was unquestionably the star of whatever concert she appeared in.

She still wore her hair in braids, preferred low-heeled brown shoes and simple dresses. She had a clear complexion which required little makeup and sufficient beauty to attract attention. Her manner was clean and unaffected; she neither mimicked the illiterate mountain accent then so popular with entertainers nor vulgarized her songs with topical allusions or sex. She kept severely to the Child text, as if the old professor might drop in at any time to check on what was being done to his handiwork. Also, as
she told me one night, ‘The further back you go in selecting your words, the more likely you are to be right.’ I asked her what she meant by this, and she showed me one of her volumes. For Child 12, which was perhaps the most popular of the 305—it dealt with Lord Randal, who was poisoned by his sweetheart—there were fifteen distinct versions, including a fine one edited by Sir Walter Scott, and she said, ‘If I used the latest, you’d find it had been all gimmicked up with touches that were supposed to improve it. You go back to the earliest version and you always find it stark and harsh and very close to human emotions. I think that’s why the kids dig them so much.’

In time I came to know some of the Child ballads rather well, but the highlight of any performance came when Gretchen announced in her soft voice, ‘I shall now sing Child 173,’ for then the audience would cheer; in the Boston area it was known that her rendition of ‘Mary Hamilton’ was tops. But I preferred Child 113, that haunting ballad of the seal’s premonition of death. She did not sing at every concert, for sometimes the mood of the audience was not right, but sometimes late at night when the crowd was composed mostly of young men worried about the war in Vietnam, she would sing this song, and the strange ending would stupefy the men, as if this clever girl from Radcliffe had penetrated their minds and dredged up the things they had really been thinking about:

I first became aware that Gretchen might be in trouble one afternoon when she burst into my office near Fenway Park and asked, ‘Can you let me have two hundred dollars … now?’

Her request was so abrupt and in a sense irrational, for her family was better than well-to-do, that I asked, ‘What’s it for?’

She looked at me impatiently and asked, ‘Do you really want to know?’ When I nodded, she said, ‘Well, it’s not for an abortion, which I’m sure you thought it would be. And I’m not running away from home.’

‘That takes care of the interesting reasons,’ I said.

‘But you still want to know?’ she asked with some irritation.

‘For two hundred dollars, yes.’

‘It won’t please you,’ she said, and she left my office, stood in the hall and whistled. Soon she was joined by two young men, as miserable a pair as I had ever seen outside the television newsreels. The first was tall, very skinny, hirsute, impressed and downright dirty. The second was stocky, close-cropped and mad at the world. They seemed about Gretchen’s age but lacked her assurance. In fact, the only hopeful thing I noticed about them was that their teeth were white and very straight, as if parents had taken them regularly to the orthodontist.

‘This is Harry from Phoenix and Carl from New Orleans. They need one hundred dollars each.’

‘What for?’ I asked, suspecting that she had been right when she said I wouldn’t want to know.

Very evenly she replied, ‘They have to get over the border … to Canada. Harry has to escape the draft. Carl’s already in … he’s deserting.’

When she said this, a whole constellation of objections flashed before my mind, in a sequence she must have encountered before: First he’s thinking, ‘These damned punks, taking money from a girl.’ Then he thinks, ‘The army would do them a lot of good. I ought to call the police.’ Then he thinks, ‘I could get into a lot of trouble if I gave that kid from Phoenix money to escape the draft. Even worse if I helped the other one desert. They could arrest me for giving counsel and comfort.’ And finally he thinks: ‘I don’t want any part of this.’

Soberly I asked Gretchen, ‘You know that what you’re doing is illegal?’

‘And necessary.’

Turning to the young men, I asked, ‘Why do you feel you have to run away?’ They shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “Look, man, we can’t go through all that jazz again. Either give us the two hundred or don’t, but for Christ’s sake, lay off the sermons.’

I said, ‘I don’t want to know your names. I don’t want to know anything about this. I’ll lend you the two hundred, Gretchen, but I want my secretary to hand it to you—personally—in front of witnesses.’ I showed the two fugitives the door and they left. When they were well out of sight I called my secretary and said, ‘Miss Cole wants to
borrow two hundred dollars. Will you please get it from the cashier?’

‘Your personal account?’

‘Naturally.’ When she left, Gretchen said, ‘You’re pretty cautious, aren’t you?’ and I said, ‘Look, young lady. I work out of Geneva in a dozen different countries. A lot of people would just love to catch me playing the black market or smuggling currency or running dope … or helping young punks evade military service. If that’s your bag, all right. It’s not mine.’ I summoned two draftsmen, ostensibly to review a segment of their work. I wanted them there when my secretary returned to my office with the two hundred. They could watch me hand it to Gretchen and hear me say, ‘Here’s two hundred till next Friday. Don’t waste it.’

Later that afternoon she returned to my office and thanked me. ‘It was a real crisis,’ she said. ‘Those two poor kids had one more day before they’d be in real trouble. By this time tomorrow they’ll be safe over the border.’

Her tone was so conspiratorial that I asked, ‘Do you do this sort of thing all the time?’ and she countered, ‘Why do you suppose I sing so much in the cafés? Every penny I earn goes to helping kids escape the draft. My allowance, too.’

‘But why?’

‘Because we’re trapped in a cruel, unreasonable situation. Last year about twenty of us Radcliffe girls took a course with Harvard juniors. We soon learned that if we pulled down the top grades, the boys would be left with the low ones, which would mean they’d lose their deferments and be grabbed by the army. So I organized the girls. We agreed to play dumb … allow the boys to carry off the top grades. But after our first exam the professor called us in and said, “I know what you girls are doing. You’re a lot more intelligent than your exams show. Cut it out.” When we tried to explain about the draft, he interrupted: “Before class started I had decided to drop each girl two grades and lift each boy one. So please write your most brilliant papers, get an education and let me protect the boys.” Only
C
I ever got. I cherish it.’

I took her to dinner and listened as she outlined the corrupt tricks she used in helping boys beat the draft: drugs that induced high temperatures prior to physicals,
other drugs that simulated heart murmurs, fake medical reports, forged educational documents, and an underground railroad such as slaves had used in the 1850s, leading from New York to New Haven to Boston to Montreal. One of her classmates at Radcliffe, daughter of a minister, specialized in teaching young atheists how to be conscientious objectors with the aid of fake documents from fake clergymen. A miasma of corruption and sprouted from the Vietnam war, and Gretchen Cole found herself at the middle of it.

‘I know it’s filthy—smuggling able-bodied young Tarzans over the border into Canada—but nothing we do compares with the greater crime of waging an undeclared war that kills off young Americans and leaves people like you and Father free to go ahead with your normal business enterprises. That two hundred dollars was not a loan, Mr. Fairbanks. It was a tax.’

We went from dinner to a club where she was singing, and as I saw her seated beneath the lights, her large guitar masking her body, her braids about her shoulders, I thought that here was a girl of crystal purity; she was like a woodland spring on a winter’s day, running clear and cold, without one molded leaf along the edge. When she sang the old ballads she seemed to bring them from some deep and protected reservoir of human experience, almost as if she were a priestess responsible for the preservation of things which the race had found to be good. She was no ordinary girl, this one. She was an authentic, a compelling combination of intelligence, character and morality. It was proper that she should restrict herself to the pure old ballads, uncontaminated by modernisms introduced to make them more palatable, for they expressed her personality and conveyed to her youthful listeners the ideas she wished to communicate.