The Drifters (5 page)

At this point the professor asked, ‘Any of you seen Jellinek?’

‘He’s in jail.’

‘Oh my God! What happened?’

‘Tried to wreck the draft board.’

‘Damned inconsiderate. Our delegate from California is heading for Boston, and Jellinek has the name of our contact there.’

‘Gretchen Cole. Plays guitar and sings at the Cast Iron Moth.’

‘The same! I met her when I lectured at Radcliffe. Splendid child. She’ll get you into Canada.’

‘You’re smart to be hauling ass out of this rat trap,’ one of the students said.

It seemed strange to Joe that a group of young people so able should have become so alienated from American life. No one tried to stop him from fleeing the country; he judged from what the students said that the professor who had encouraged him to accept exile was one of the brighter men at Yale; obviously he was one of the most popular, yet he openly espoused flight as the only honorable alternative.

As the night wore on, the professor took Joe aside and said, ‘I just had an idea. It’s not a very good one but it might work. Joe, how tough a man are you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Can you defend yourself? I don’t mean with your fists. Against heroin? Against the whole complex?’

‘I keep my nose clean.’

‘I figured. If you do get to Torremolinos and you’re broke and the police are breathing down your neck and threatening to throw you out of Spain, there’s a name you might look up … at your own risk. Write it down. Paxton Fell. He has money.’

When the time came to leave, one of the students took Joe aside and slipped him a handful of bills. The student said, ‘Good luck,’ and they parted.

He arrived in Boston at sunset, lean and shaggy and ill-tempered. It took him some time to locate the Cast Iron Moth. He had found the address in the phone book but was quite helpless when it came to spotting the street, for
it lay in that maze of alleys off Washington Street and he must have come close to it two or three times without realizing that he was in the vicinity. He had always disliked asking strangers for advice and tried to zero in on his own, without any luck. Finally he had to ask a man where the Moth was, feeling an ass as he pronounced the name, and the man said, ‘You just passed it,’ and there it was.

Joe decided to spend some of the Yale money on a good meal, so he entered as a customer, but he must have been very transparent, for the doorman said, ‘I suppose you want to see Gretchen Cole.’

‘I want to eat,’ Joe said.

The menu was on the expensive side but offered a good selection of seafood, which Joe had grown accustomed to in the Portuguese restaurants of Southern California. He found the meal better than average and did not begrudge the money spent, and when the entertainment began, it consisted of a rock-and-roll band accompanied by a girl singer. Music was important to Joe, and now he responded to its visceral beat; he also appreciated the animal shoutings of the girl, but this night he was looking for a guitar player, and when the band was replaced by a male trio singing folk songs, only a few of which he knew, he grew restless. Toward midnight the folk singers gave way to a different girl with a sensational bellowing voice, and Joe went out on the sidewalk and asked the doorman, ‘When does Gretchen Cole sing?’

‘She don’t.’

‘I came here to meet her.’

‘When you came in I asked if that was it and you said you wanted to eat.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You said you wanted to eat. I should drive away business?’

‘Will she be in tomorrow?’

‘Nope. She don’t sing here no more … after her accident with the police.’

‘Dope?’

‘Not her. Something with the police in Chicago, I think it was.’

‘How can I find her?’

The doorman drew back, studied Joe, and asked contemptuously,
‘You one of them draft dodgers? Borrowin’ money from a girl.’

‘I want to see her.’

The doorman gave him an address and said, ‘Maybe if I was young I wouldn’t have any guts, too.’

The next afternoon Joe found out where the official center was and asked if he could speak to Gretchen Cole. A clergyman said, ‘She doesn’t work here any more.’

‘At Yale they told me to look her up.’

‘Professor Hartford?’ When Joe nodded, the clergyman brightened and said, ‘One of the best. If he sent you, Gretchen’ll want to see you.’ He made a phone call, then handed Joe an address in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. An hour later Joe was walking up to a handsome Colonial-type house set back among trees. He knocked at the door and was met by a girl about his own age. She was not beautiful, but her face was radiant and well scrubbed. She wore her dark brown hair in two braids and her informal clothes looked quite expensive. Joe noticed two things about her: she moved with unusual grace and she was nervous as a hawk.

‘Professor Hartford sent you?’ she asked. ‘Come in.’ She led him into a meticulously arranged living room in which nothing looked conspicuously expensive, yet everything seemed right. The floor was covered by a large elliptical rag rug of a type not known in California but most effective when edged with red-maple furniture. Joe was looking at the rug when the girl said, ‘My name is Gretchen Cole and I suppose you’re heading for Canada.’

‘I am.’

‘Good!’ She became crisp and businesslike, but after a few sentences of instruction she changed completely and became once more unbelievably nervous and insecure.

‘You feel all right?’ Joe asked.

‘Yes … yes,’ she said, blushing from her collarbone to the top of her forehead. ‘Now first thing you must do is get a haircut. You’ve got to look as square as possible, because if the Canadian border patrols catch even a suspicion that you might be a hippie or a draft dodger, they’ll turn you back. You must wear the best clothes you have and see that they’re pressed. And when you enter, you must be extremely careful to maintain the illusion that you are merely a tourist. Do not, and I must repeat this, do not under any circumstances request what the Canadians
call “landed immigrant status,” even though that’s what you want. Wait till you reach Montreal and get safely dug in before you open that can of worms.’ She gave him several more useful hints, concluding: ‘We’re sending a batch of you north with a faculty wife from MIT. She’ll claim she’s a professor of geology leading a field trip. She’ll take you in to Montreal, and from there on …’

There was an awkward pause, and she blushed again, uncontrollably, so Joe said, ‘I thought you were singing at a café.’

It was easy for her to construct the syllogism that had worked its way through his mind: This girl says she sings in public; girl singers don’t blush like teenagers; something’s wrong. She said, ‘I used to sing.’

‘You have trouble with the police?’

Now she blushed furiously, pressing her right hand over her face in an attempt to control herself.

Joe said, ‘They told me at the café. What was it?’

‘Didn’t they tell you that, too?’ Joe shook his head. Then, with an obvious effort to speak normally, she said brightly, ‘I suppose you’ll need some money.’

‘Nope,’ Joe said. ‘As a matter of fact, I was about to ask you to dinner.’

‘Oh, no!’ she cried.

‘Feel my head,’ he said half-jokingly. ‘I had trouble with the police too.’ He reached for her hand, but she recoiled. ‘Take my word for it,’ he concluded lamely.

She showed him to the door, but it was so apparent that she needed counseling more than he that he said impulsively, ‘Miss Cole, I don’t know what’s eating you, but you’re going to have dinner with me tonight,’ and he grabbed her by the arm.

She tensed up, resisted, then looked at the ground and laughed nervously. ‘Do you think I should?’

‘You must.’

She got a coat, and he took her into Boston on the bus and they found a corner bar in no way notable, where they had broiled shrimp and beer and much talk of students and politics and Vietnam.

‘I work at helping you boys get to Canada,’ she said, ‘because I approve of your attitudes. We live in a tragic era and must do what we can to humanize it.’

‘What happened with you and the police?’ he asked bluntly.

She weighed the question for some moments, then said evasively, ‘They did to me what they so often do to you fellows.’

‘You’ve got to decompress,’ he said.

‘I’ll learn,’ she said. ‘But right now I’ve had this scene. I’ve really had it.’

They talked like this for some hours, saying nothing consequential but alluding always to the malaise that infected so many of the best young people of this generation. Then, toward ten o’clock, a group of students from Harvard and MIT dropped in and one of them recognized Gretchen. Quickly they surrounded her table, asking about the police incident, and this caused renewed embarrassment. Sympathizing with her reticence, they switched to lesser gossip, and the young man who had first recognized her said, ‘We miss you at the Moth. You ought to sing again, Gret.’

‘These days are not for singing,’ she said, playing with the ends of her braids.

‘Maybe not in a formal café. But if we find a guitar, will you sing for us? Come on.’

She gave no assent, but one of the students disappeared and after a while returned with a guitar of sorts, which she strummed with a grimace. ‘You expect me to sing with this crate?’ she asked.

Joe noticed that she didn’t play coy. She did not require to be begged; in fact, she rather wanted to sing, as if she sensed that it would be therapeutic. She made herself comfortable on a high bar stool, crossed her attractive legs to form a kind of lap, and strummed the guitar thoughtfully for some minutes. Other patrons in the bar paid no attention; they were discussing the collapse of the Dallas football team and arguing loudly that the commissioner ought to launch an investigation to see if the professional gamblers had organized a fix, but one contentious fellow reasoned: ‘How can you fix the whole team. You fix one man … Don Meredith,’ whereupon the bar in general agreed that Don Meredith could not be fixed, to which the first man said, ‘Well, he sure looked it against Cleveland.’

Gretchen was now playing very softly, approaching a series of haunting chords in a minor key. Above them she announced the title of her song, ‘Child 113,’ and the students, knowing what this signified, applauded. In the ensuing silence she struck a commanding sequence of
notes, then began a totally strange song, an ancient ballad about a seal swimming in the ocean, with the capacity to turn himself into a man when he comes ashore. With a human nursemaid the seal has had a child and now wants to take his son into the sea, for it is time he learned how to be a seal.

It was a silly ballad, Joe thought, until just at the end when Gretchen dropped her voice and to music of heartbreaking loveliness, sang of the seal’s prediction: the woman would forget him, forget her son. She would marry a gunner, who for no logical reason would destroy everything:

On this apprehensive note, with the guitar sounding a series of bitter chords, the strange song ended. The students did not applaud, for the ballad struck much too closely to their own experiences: there was an irrational element in life, something that no man could defend against; some damn-fool gunner always waited in the shadows, eager to take inexplicable pot shots at whatever seals swam in the ocean.

Gretchen would sing no more. This ballad had been her total statement, and the students who knew her appreciated the fact that even this had been difficult for her. They complimented her, asked how things were going at Radcliffe, and drifted away, taking the guitar with them. When they were gone, Joe said, ‘How are things at Radcliffe?’

‘Wretched,’ she said, dropping that subject.

He took her home, and at the door, tried to kiss her goodnight, but this she resisted vigorously. However, she did grasp his hand, asking him to wait while she ran upstairs. When she returned she gave him two hundred dollars … insisted that he take it … insisted that her committee collected funds for this purpose.

‘Where shall you be going?’ she asked.

‘The gang at Yale told me of a place that sounded just about right.’

“Where?’

‘Torremolinos.’

On a gray wintry day in Madrid, Joe caught a ride with a group of rollicking German students heading south, and as they crossed the barren plains of La Mancha they spoke of Cervantes and Goya. They were knowledgeable young men, proficient in both English and Spanish, and were headed for the large German colony in Marbella, not far from the Strait of Gibraltar. From their conversation Joe concluded that their families had been enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler and that the relatives they were about to visit in southern Spain were political fugitives. One of the students told Joe, ‘If you see a very thin, straight old man who ought to walk with a cane but won’t, and if he clicks his heels when you speak to him, that’s Uncle Gustav.’ From what the boys had to say of Uncle Gustav, he had been one of Hitler’s major supporters, but one sardonic fellow added, ‘He lives in Spain because he loves the way American tourists call him Baron and curtsy to the Baroness.’

By the time they reached Córdoba, the chill of Madrid had changed to a welcome sunshine. They stopped to see the mosque, and when they stood in the midst of its forest of pillars, stretching in all directions as far as they could see, one of the Germans said, ‘You can see more of Islam here than you can in Muslim countries like Algeria or Morocco. I spent last vacation in Marrakech— exciting in some ways but never a mosque like this one.’

Joe liked Córdoba and would have been content to linger a few days, but the Germans were eager to meet up with their friends. So they pushed on, and were soon approaching that extraordinary plateau from whose southern rim they would be able to look down upon the Mediterranean. ‘Ah,’ cried the driver as they reached the edge of the cliff from which the city of Málaga could first be seen, ‘this is Spain!’ He pulled the car to the side of the road and pointed out the distant cathedral, the bullring, the esplanade lined with palm trees, the copious harbor, and to the west that chain of marvelous fishing villages which the Phoenicians had known and the Greeks. Costa del Sol, this area was called, and it served as a magnet for young people from around the world.