The Drifters (37 page)

‘I shall now sing Child 286,’ she announced before offering a ballad I had not heard before. Like the times, it was awkward, ill-polished and infuriating. It told of Sir Walter Raleigh’s action when his ship
The Golden Vanity
runs unexpectedly upon a superior Turkish galleon. When it looks as if Raleigh must lose his ship, he finds help in a surprising quarter:

The enterprising boy swims underwater to the Turkish enemy, bores holes in her flanks and sinks her, but when he swims back to
The Golden Vanity
, Sir Walter suffers a change of heart, finding it repugnant to give his gold and his daughter to a mere cabinboy.

When Gretchen finished the song, applause showed the crowd’s approval, for Raleigh’s crass immorality reminded the young listeners of the unjust world they faced, and as the night wore on, with professional groups taking over to sing the songs then popular, I sat alone and reflected on how little I knew of the music I had been taking to Monica and Yigal on their gift records and what a powerful influence it was having upon this generation.

It was ironic: children of the affluent classes sitting in Haifa cellars or Vwarda bungalows and listening to laments about murderers, bank robbers, bums, revolutionaries and motorcycle Robin Hoods, all chanted by unshaven young men in dungarees who earned a million dollars a year. The songs I heard that winter in Boston were an invitation to rebellion, and for the first time I realized that if able young people like Gretchen had been nurtured on these songs over the past ten years—the most formative of their lives—things in the adult world were bound to be changed.

The discovery was so new to me that one night I stopped listening to the music and paid attention only to the words that were being sung by a well-known soloist; in one normal group of four songs he recommended a jail break, the blowing up of a bank, the seduction of two fourteen-year-old girls, and an extended heroin binge. It was a powerful brew that such singers concocted, and I could understand how Gretchen, weaned on such sentiments plus her old ballads that recounted similar stories of their day, had decided that she must support draft dodgers and army deserters.

I was relieved, therefore, when she took the stand to offer a simple love song: Child 84. It told the story of Barbara Allan, who with icy heart rejected the love of a young man:

I laughed at the incongruity of this line, but the solemn young people around me stared as if I had committed a sacrilege, so I put my hand over my mouth and listened.

It occurred to me, as she ended this lament, that I had never seen her with young men except in a group, and I wandered why an attractive girl, with so many talents, did not have a young man for herself. It was almost as if she were the heroine of one of her ballads; cold-hearted Barbara Allan, or perhaps the young girl in love with a daemon.

As I sat speculating on these matters, Gretchen joined me, and while we were finishing our drinks—she took ginger ale—a professor from Harvard stopped at our table to say, ‘Thanks, Gret, for helping those two boys. They told me before they started north.’ She nodded, and for some time that was the last I knew of either her or her problems, because on the next day I received a cable from Sir Charles Braham in Vwarda, asking me to locate
a school in England that might enroll his daughter. I flew off to discharge that pleasant obligation.

In March, Gretchen drove west with her troupe of students to help Senator McCarthy in the Wisconsin primary, and it was while working at the Milwaukee headquarters that she heard an older woman tell a group of volunteers, ‘If the Senator does get the nomination, he ought to appoint someone like Gretchen Cole to head a nationwide committee of Young Republicans for McCarthy,’ and one of the college students cried back, ‘Committee hell, she should be in the cabinet,’ and the older woman explained, ‘Heading a committee now is how you get into the cabinet then.’

At any rate, in Wisconsin they took her seriously, and on the night when President Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the Presidential race, the young people had a noisy celebration, for they deservedly felt that at last they had influenced national politics. ‘Johnson knew what he was doing,’ excited young men said. ‘We were going to take his pants off in this primary … Oregon and California, too.’ Toward morning, when the crowd had thinned out, two young men from Berkeley took Gretchen aside and warned, ‘The real test comes in California. Bobby Kennedy will want to make a strong showing, now that Gene has flushed Johnson out. The Kennedys will pour money into our state like it was water.’

‘Do you think Gene will have to take California to stay alive?’ she asked.

‘Definitely. You better move your whole gang out … and fast. Can you get hold of any real money?’

‘No, but I can find kids who’ll do the work.’

‘Be there.’

So in late April, Gretchen and fifteen other girls from the prestigious colleges of the east got hold of some cars and drove cross-country to Sacramento, where they hooked up with the Californians who were backing McCarthy, but in this campaign they were faced by a new element. Bobby Kennedy was a most attractive young man, with ideas they could subscribe to, and whereas it had been easy to oppose President Johnson when it looked as if he were the one that McCarthy had to defeat, it was not so clear-cut
when Kennedy was the enemy. In fact, two of the girls switched their allegiance when they came in contact with the Kennedy charisma.

Consequently, many of the young people around Gretchen experienced ambivalent feelings when Kennedy defeated McCarthy in California. They had begun to suspect that McCarthy might not be able to go the whole distance, that in the end powerful forces would conspire to deny him the nomination, and they were prepared to have some drab and ordinary politician steal the prize. They were therefore relieved when Kennedy loomed as an alternative. ‘I could accept Kennedy,’ many of the young people reasoned, consoling themselves in advance for what boded to be a McCarthy debacle.

Not Gretchen Cole. She had the gift for single-minded commitment which one often found in New England, especially among women of good education. By a process of hard thinking she had reached the conclusion a year before, when others had barely heard of McCarthy, that he was the quiet man who could bring sense into the maelstrom of our times, and with rare single-mindedness, had clung to that position; when McCarthy won in New Hampshire and Wisconsin she felt confirmed in her early judgment, and was so heartened that she could now absorb the temporary setback in California. Bobby Kennedy impressed her as a fine young senator but never could she think of him as the moral equivalent of Eugene McCarthy.

After the defeat she stayed in California to work with various McCarthy groups, making preparations for the big push at the Chicago convention, and she was at the Los Angeles headquarters, now quiet and nearly empty, early that Wednesday morning when a confused Arab got it into his head that he could solve his region’s problems by shooting one of the men best calculated to decipher them. Gretchen was at a desk, working over a list of names, when a boy from Brigham Young University burst into the room, shouting, ‘They’ve shot Kennedy!’

Other crowded into the headquarters from the street, and till well past midnight there was pandemonium as one rumor after another flashed through the room. A portable radio was produced and the long vigil began. A man who knew Kennedy, and who had been at the scene of the attempted assassination, came on the air to reassure everyone: ‘Bobby Kennedy will be playing touch football again,’
and the McCarthy supporters cheered, but on the Wednesday evening broadcast, a brain specialist from New York, diagnosing the case from three thousand miles away, warned, ‘With the kind of brain damage reported from Los Angeles, if he does survive, it can only be as a vegetable,’ and the horror of the situation deepened.

It was two o’clock Thursday morning when the desolate word came: ‘Senator Kennedy has died.’

A sense of terrible despair settled over the McCarthy camp, for the irrational, against which they had fought, had once more triumphed, bearing with it an indefinable premonition of collapse on all fronts. The honorable alternative, if McCarthy had to lose, had been snatched away. Gretchen stayed at her desk, her head lowered over a pile of address cards, and it seemed as if something vital had been drained from her, something to do with idealism and the hope for a saner world.

She stayed in California, watching on television the Mass for the dead at St. Patrick’s in New York, and that night the McCarthy volunteers gathered with some college students who had worked for Kennedy. They went to a beer parlor at one of the distant edges of Los Angeles, where they would be left alone, and in bleak misery reviewed the situation. The young man from Brigham Young said, with some prescience, ‘It looks to me as if the Kennedy people will not rally behind McCarthy, so the whole thing goes down the drain,’ but a clever chap from the University of Virginia argued, ‘What we’ve got to do is everyone get behind Teddy Kennedy right now. Listen to me, with him we can stampede the nomination at Chicago. And he can go on to win.’

‘I would not want Teddy Kennedy,’ Gretchen said.

‘Why not?’ the Virginian demanded.

‘Because I know him, and he’s too young. In 1972 or 1976 I’ll support him—1968, no.’

They inspected one fruitless possibility after another, always with a deepening sense of gloom, and finally one of the Kennedy men said, ‘Gretchen, you have tears in your eyes!’ She lowered her head. They pressed her to explain, and she said quietly, ‘A very good man has been taken from us. He wasn’t my man, but he was a hope. And when that happens, tears happen.’ No one spoke, for she had said what they all felt. The man from Virginia blew his
nose, then said very brightly, snapping his fingers, ‘Didn’t someone tell me you were a singer, Gretchen?’

‘She’s great,’ one of the McCarthy people said. ‘The ballads.’

‘By God,’ the Virginian cried, ‘this is the night for a ballad. Haunted moors and lovers on horseback. Come on.’

Gretchen explained that she could not sing without a guitar, and a vigorous effort was made to find one, without success. She smiled, shrugged her shoulders, and said, ‘It’s quite useless,’ but one of the McCarthy people said, ‘I think it’s important, Gretchen. You don’t need a guitar.’

A place was made for her, and she looked into the faces of the leaderless Kennedy people, the faces of the McCarthy cohorts who sensed defeat, and she said, quietly, ‘Child 181.’

‘There could be no better,’ a girl from Wisconsin said.

And Gretchen began, in her clear, steady voice, that great lament for the Earl of Murray. It was one of the powerful death songs, the equal of ‘McCrimmon’s Lament’ or the slow movement of the
Eroica
or the funeral procession of Siegfried winding through the forest, except that it was so rough and so much of the earth that it seemed to speak of a real man whose death could ill be spared, whereas the others were songs to death in the abstract.

As her voice died to a whisper, the young people sat in silence; more than anything that had happened since the assassination, this timeless lament for the fair one who might have been king summarized their grief. Something good and powerful had been stolen from American life, and its absence left a harrowing gap.

When Gretchen returned to Boston her manner became even more grave than before, and her parents were distressed that she felt the assassination of young Kennedy so bitterly. She did not care to discuss the matter with them, but one night at dinner she did say, ‘Now it’s imperative that we nominate McCarthy. I’m going to Chicago and we’ll need all the money we can get our hands on.’ And she looked steadily at her father, until he asked, ‘What are you suggesting?’ and she said, ‘Next year when I’m twenty-one I begin my allowance from grandfather’s estate. Could you …’

‘Give you an advance? No! One of the most immoral things in the world is to anticipate an inheritance.’ He threw down his napkin, the sign among Boston bankers that a particular line of inquiry is blocked.

‘Father!’ she pleaded, but he said, ‘Fools and people of no responsibility borrow against inheritances. I’m sure there are scoundrels in Boston who would lend on prospects—at twenty-five per cent—but we don’t patronize them. Not in this family.’