The Drifters (49 page)

‘I’m looking,’ he said.

Monica knew well what he was looking for, but about this delicate subject she did not joke. Like all of us, she respected Yigal and approved of his sober approach; if he was infatuated with Britta, he was handling himself well.

Gretchen posed a different problem. By her manner she warned young men that she was not interested in their approaches, and if someone did try to pick her up in a restaurant or bar, she denied him permission to walk home with her, so that there would be no problem of keeping hopeful lovers out of the pop-top. With the three men in the apartment she was proper, more inclined to listen than to talk. She would sit on one of the beds for hours and encourage Cato or Yigal to tell her of his experiences. Joe, of course, said little, and she made no serious effort to pierce his reserve.

I wondered then, as I have often wondered since, why at my age I bothered with this curious group. At the time I reasoned that it was because the recalcitrant Greeks were keeping me imprisoned in Torremolinos: If it weren’t for the Greeks, I’d be out of here in a shot. But looking back on the matter, I doubt that I would have. Certainly the fact that later in the summer I dug up excuses to visit them in various places betrayed a desire on my part to keep close—to see what would happen to them.

But deeper than that was the unspoken feeling that at my age of sixty-one, this would be the last young group I would ever associate with; my own son was lost to me through bitter misunderstandings and I felt the need of comprehending what the youth of this age were up to. I saw in them the only hope for the future, the vitality of our society, and I approved of much they were attempting. When I thought of the dreadful loneliness I had known as a young wanderer through Europe—how fearful a place Antwerp could be for a young man from the University of Virginia who judged himself shy and unprepared—I much preferred the present mode which enabled a chap like Yigal to go to the Arc de Triomphe and find himself any number of lively young ladies prepared to make love in Belgian, Dutch, Italian or Danish, with sometimes no words needed in any language. This was preferable.

As for the young people, I discovered one afternoon at the bar what they thought of my presence. I was in the back room helping check a delivery of orange soda when I heard a soldier ask Monica, ‘Why do you bother with that old geezer?’ and she said, ‘Fairbanks? He’s a harmless old fart.’ From the serving counter Britta said, ‘He’s dreadfully square but he doesn’t hurt anybody.’ Cato volunteered, ‘You’ve got to say this for him. Not once has he mentioned the depression,’ to which Monica added, ‘We put up with him because … well, you have a feeling that if somebody had got to him early enough, he could have been saved.’

So that was it. The new generation was so convinced of its values that it judged us older people not by our standards but by their own. I was a flop, but if they had got to me forty years ago I might have been redeemed. This attitude angered me, because although I saw their manifest weaknesses, I never felt that if they had had my education they might have been saved. They needed desperately some of the things I had acquired; surely Joe’s
problems would have been simpler had he seen history as I did, and Cato would never have invaded the church had he acquired my attitudes toward social change, but never in my arrogance did I believe that I could have saved these young fellows—or Monica or Gretchen either—by training them in my pattern. It was this arrogance of youth, this precious insolence that set them apart. I think now that even if the Greek shipowners had settled their finances promptly, I would have remained in Torremolinos that spring, for there is nothing in the world more promising than the unfolding of youth, and I was privileged to witness it, even if the youth I was watching did consider me a harmless old fart.

They had several reasons for considering me a square. I kept asking questions about their music, and irritated them when I pointed out that their musicians seemed deficient in skills. ‘They simply don’t know how to end a composition. Listen to how many of your records trail off with the crude device of repeating the last phrase while the engineer turns down the volume. Listen to the inept manner in which you transpose from one key to the next. Where’s the modulation that makes a song palatable?’

‘We want it to be crude,’ Monica said as Yigal applauded. ‘The old tricks of da-da, dum-dum, dee-dee and you’re off in a new key are for the birds. You want a shift? Shift.’

They were also irritated, I think, because I refused to adopt their terminology and call them kids. Even Gretchen used this juvenile description: ‘Hi, Uncle George. You know where the kids went to dinner?’ Or, ‘The kids are throwing a picnic in the hills. Want to come along?’

I pointed out that young people their age were not kids, but I noticed that her group used the word even for people in their thirties, so long as the men had long hair and the women wore sandals. They insisted upon being kids—the gang, the mob, the girls, the boys—as if growing up were an ugly thing and responsibility something to be deferred as long as possible.

But mostly they thought me square because I would not join them in their marijuana. Cato and his black friends in Philadelphia had forced me to smoke that morning, and I had frequently sat with the group while they shared a round, but if they asked me, I never refrained from telling them that I disapproved. ‘You one of them cats who
think that grass leads to heroin?’ Cato asked me late one night.

‘Yes.’

This caused an explosion, with Monica and Britta especially vocative in citing studies which proved that marijuana was neither habit-forming nor escalatory.

‘Do you reject such studies?’ Monica demanded.

‘Yes, because they refer only to chemical and physiological facts. I’m thinking of psychological.’

‘Meaning what?’ Cato asked with contempt.

It was not contempt for me, because he had worked with me long enough in the Philadelphia slums to know that I was not an automatic do-gooder. ‘Meaning that marijuana itself may not be escalatory, but the milieu in which it’s smoked is. The general social atmosphere of this room, for example.’

‘Leads to heroin?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Unquestionably,’ I said.

‘You mean,’ Joe asked slowly, that you expect one of us to move on to LSD?’

‘I do.’

‘But why?’ he asked. ‘We’ve proved it isn’t habit-forming.’

‘But Torremolinos is. You stay in this room long enough, or in this town …’

Monica got up and came to where I was sitting. She carried a fat lighted cigarette, which she handed to Britta, then asked me, ‘You think one of us in this room is going to try heroin?’

‘Without question.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Because we’re all going to try it.’

For a moment no one spoke, then Gretchen said, ‘All but one,’ and Britta added, ‘Make that two.’

Monica turned to survey the room and said brightly, ‘Uncle George, it looks like I’ll have to make another bet. Everyone in this room will try heroin before the year’s out. And I’m including you, you dirty old man.’

Paxton Fell sent his Mercedes-Benz plus an English limousine to pick up his guests. Of course, the two cars couldn’t enter the alley leading to the Alamo, but a liveried
chauffeur did walk down to the bar to announce that the cars were waiting in the public square. Joe threw his keys to one of the soldiers and we set forth.

It was a gala evening. Only Cato was familiar with Fell’s establishment, so that when we saw the graceful bovedas, creating the illusion of an endless heaven, we cheered. Monica cried, ‘This is the way to spend money … if you have it,’ and Fell’s other guests applauded.

Laura, who owned the castle at the water’s edge, was among them, no longer in tweeds. She wore an elaborate evening gown, as did an assortment of princesses from various defunct royal houses. An ex-Nazi general was in attendance; everyone called him ‘My General’ and bowed. There were also two barons, garnering their own bows, and an English baronet who had never heard of Sir Charles Braham, or Vwarda either, for that matter.

Among the five young people who were seeing this austere pleasure palace for the first time, reactions were varied. Monica took one swift survey of the statues and adopted the place as her own. Throwing herself into a deep chair, she accepted a Scotch-and-soda and told one of the barons, ‘It’s rather homey … with just a touch of …’ She shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

Britta was impressed by the expensiveness of everything, but she was determined not to show it. With quick glances she made appraisals of all the furnishings and the guests; she recoiled from the Nazi general but accepted the others with a kind of Viking superiority. She did not sit down, but moved slowly from one vantage point to another, apparently unaware of the magnificent pictures she was creating with her Nordic beauty set against this southern stone.

Joe was dumbfounded. Since that first meeting with Fell on the afternoon of his arrival in Torremolinos, he had often speculated on what life with the aging sybarite would be like, but his imagination had produced nothing like this. He was repelled, yet fascinated by the luxury, the sensuous perfection of the place. ‘Living here would be easy,’ he whispered to me as we looked out across the garden to where cargo ships were sailing toward the coast of Africa.

Yigal was not affected. He had seen more luxurious homes in Grosse Pointe, more stunning views from the hills in Haifa. To him the Nazi general was merely a
military man who had lost his war, while the barons seemed less imposing than the presidents of the motor companies in Detroit. He was not even impressed when the general sought him out and said in good English, ‘So you are the brave young Jew who fought the tanks at Qarash!’ They talked amiably for some minutes, during which Yigal said that when the Egyptians found good leadership they were going to be formidable to which the German responded, ‘In the past it was the English and the Germans who monopolized stalwart leadership. Landed gentlemen, you know. But in the last war the Russians showed us how a group of peasants—lower-class stock, if you will—could also master the tricks … by sheer force of courage. You Jews did the same in Sinai. But what has the Egyptian to offer, I ask you? What tradition to rely upon? I’ve been there, Nasser invited me down. And what straw did I find to build my bricks? None. The country has neither gentlemen nor an educated lower class. You Jews are safe for another forty years.’ He bowed and passed on.

It was Gretchen who sensed most accurately the quality of this extraordinary room. ‘When do the revels begin?’ she whispered in the first moments. With growing distaste she inspected the furnishings and the posturings of the guests. One of the rewarding aspects of growing up in Boston was that one acquired unconsciously a sense of what was proper and distinguished, and when measured against this austere norm, much of the nonsense that one encountered elsewhere fell into place. She knew intuitively that several of the women who surrounded Laura did so because they were dependent on her wealth. She also guessed that the two handsome young Germans with broad shoulders would not be interested in either her or Britta … not while Paxton Fell was watching. And she knew without being told that Cato had once lived in this house as those two young men were now living, and that he was being brought back as a kind of exhibition, the way Radcliffe College brought back graduates who had written books or done well in New York. ‘Is this what the young people around here aspire to?’ she asked me in a low voice.

‘You don’t. And Britta doesn’t. And surely Joe doesn’t. Yigal? Look at him fending off the barons.’

‘Did you ever have this as your ideal, Uncle George?’

‘The luxuriousness, yes. The sense of delightful depravity,
yes. I’ve thought about it, but never strongly enough to inspire action.’

‘You’re a fraud! You find this as ridiculous as I do.’

Paxton Fell had imported from one of the mountain villages a group of singers, who now appeared in rough country costume, accompanied by a guitarist, and the lights playing upon the bovedas were extinguished and the guests lowered their voices as the singers took over. They were a lively lot and gave a good performance, but while they rested, I had an idea that turned out well. I said, ‘You know, Mr. Fell, one of your young ladies has talent with the guitar.’

This occasioned much chatter, during which I projected Gretchen into the area where the singers were collected, and after much urging from the guests, she took the guitar, asked for a high chair, and played a few proficient notes. The guitarist applauded, which encouraged her to play an intricate number for him alone; he seemed to be honestly impressed by her skill. Then he took the guitar to show her what he could do. After some flashy passages, he returned the guitar, and she strummed softly, saying in a quiet voice, ‘Child 209.’

I was apparently the only one in the audience who knew what this signified, for most of Fell’s guests were either European or too old to understand what had been happening in American music. Cato knew nothing of the ballads, and while Joe had heard Gretchen sing once in Boston, he knew little of her music. And even I did not know what she was about to sing, for I knew only two of the Child numbers, 173 and 113.

Gretchen had chosen wisely, for ‘Geordie’ dealt with a young wife whose husband has been caught poaching sixteen of the king’s royal deer, and for this crime, must hang. She has come to the judge to plead for her husband’s life, and her words convey powerful emotion:

The judge looks over his shoulder, can find no reason for clemency, and Geordie hangs.

Gretchen sang with such a combination of intensity and
authority that the crowd fell silent; the diverse group had to listen because the strongly played guitar commanded their attention and her lovely voice their interest, but none attended to her words with more obvious appreciation than the Spanish singers, who could understand none of them, except that in some curious rural way they understood them all. When she finished, the musicians clustered about, asking many questions, which Britta translated.