The Drifters (50 page)

The guests applauded and demanded more songs, so in the interval of noise and chatter I went to Gretchen and suggested that she sing either ‘Mary Hamilton’ or that noble song about the seal, but she placed her hand on my arm and said, ‘You would not waste the best on such an audience,’ and she launched instead into a rowdy Scottish ballad I had not heard before. She told us the Child number, but I forget what it was.

The song was well chosen. It contained a rollicking chorus which Gretchen tried to teach the guests, but they could not catch its intricacies and mangled it at the end of every verse. The villagers, on the other hand, seemed to understand its broken rhythms and nonsense words instantly, so that they tore into it with admirable gusto whenever Gretchen pointed the fingerboard of her guitar at them and belted out the first words:

We got a pretty good idea of what his tooran nooran was supposed to be from some of the lusty verses Gretchen sang with a high-school innocence; they dealt with a supposed beggar who stops by a farmhouse near Aberdeen, seduces the oldest daughter in the middle of the night, and disappears with her before morning. Seven years later he returns as a beggar once more, and the good wife castigates him for having stolen her daughter, whereupon he throws aside his tattered garments and discloses himself as a prince. The rowdy verses dealt with what transpired prior to the flight:

This ballad was a notable success, and the guests demanded more, but Gretchen had sung enough. Returning the guitar to its owner, she thanked the musicians for their support and wandered into another part of the marble room. Several aging gentlemen tried to engage her in conversation, but she drew away.

Paxton Fell served his dinner at twenty-three minutes past one in the morning, not unusually late for a Spanish meal, and as the night progressed, his customary guests, one by one, began to show signs of drunkenness. Since none had jobs and would be able to sleep as late as they wished, not rising till three or four in the afternoon, they were prepared to drink enormously; amounts that would have put an ordinary man under the table seemed to affect them little, but by three in the morning they had consumed so much, and so uninterruptedly, that even they began showing signs of collapse. When incapacity overcame them, they quietly moved away from the table and fell asleep in some chair, or stretched out along the edge of a carpet. There was no boisterousness, only the sound of musicians playing in the background and the subdued chatter of voices around the big table.

During this part of the night I lost sight of the six young people; they were with the two young Germans somewhere else in the lavish quarters, so that I was left with the older group, and as I watched them gliding gracefully toward oblivion, continuing to drink when they had no further need or desire for alcohol, I reflected that every age produces its drop-outs, every nation. The percentage remains constant; it is only the manifestation that varies.

The people around Paxton Fell had dropped out of normal competition as surely as the most bearded young
man from Oklahoma who despised Tulsa and believed that he had found a superior alternative in Haight-Ashbury. These elders had despised Berlin and Brussels; they were expatriates from London and Paris; they used cocktails the way the younger group used marijuana, and with identical effect. The Nazi general had been forced into exile; had he stayed in Germany he would have been executed by a Russian court-martial. The others had abandoned their societies willingly and had dropped out from their normal responsibilities. Only their good fortune in having had wealthy uncles and indulgent fathers permitted them to live as they did. Even now Laura, speaking in her rough voice, was telling some amusing incident that had happened on the plains of West Texas … how far away it seemed, how impossible those bitter winters in Dalhart.

But it was not only this conspicuous group of expatriates that I compared with the drop-outs of the younger generation; it was also those sturdy, cautious types I had known as a boy in Indiana. Of a hundred average young people I had grown up with, a good forty had dropped out from all reasonable competition by the time they were twenty-five. Some, of course, had become town drunks or obvious wastrels; a few had stolen money and gone to jail; one or two of the girls had become prostitutes of a more or less genteel type, slipping into hotel rooms or staying with businessmen when their wives were absent on summer vacations. It was not these inevitable drop-outs that I referred to in my estimate of forty per cent; it was, rather, that constant group of Americans who avoid difficult tasks and grab onto the first job offered, clinging to it like frightened leeches for the remainder of their unproductive lives. It was the girls who marry the first man who asks them, building families without meaning or inspiration, producing the next cycle of drop-outs. It was the adults who surrender young and make a virtue of their unproductivity, the miserable teachers who learn one book and recite it for the next forty years, the pathetic ministers who build a lifetime of futility on one moment of inspiration entertained at the age of nineteen. These were the drop-outs that concerned me most.

Paxton Fell’s group, now amiably incapacitated and waiting the dawn, did little harm to themselves or society,
just as the wilder young people we saw passing through Torremolinos accomplished little that was reprehensible; it was the great silent minority that aspired to nothing and achieved less that worried me. There must have been, that night when the guests were falling asleep around the table, a hundred thousand or more young college students throughtout the United States who were gradually dropping out from any meaningful role in their society—but they were not people like Cato Jackson, who had taken a stand, however misguided, at the church at Llanfair; they were not the brilliant young girls like Gretchen Cole, who had tasted the core of a system and found it unpalatable; they were not young men like Joe, who found his nation conducting itself immorally and could no longer support it; nor were they men like Yigal Zmora, who saw the contradictions of two societies so clearly that he was incapable of bringing them into balance—not yet, not at eighteen, but perhaps later, if he maintained his questioning.

I liked the young drop-outs I was with in Torremolinos, and when the last of Paxton Fell’s older group had quietly fallen asleep or had retired to unaccustomed partners in unaccustomed beds, I looked for my companions. I found them clustered together in a far corner of the garage. They were with the rustic musicians, and Gretchen was singing softly her ballad of the silkie, that overwhelming song of a man trapped in inescapable contradictions. Britta stood with the villagers, interpreting roughly the words Gretchen was singing, and I thought how appropriate that was, for the song must have originated with the ancient Norse invaders who had stormed the coasts of Scotland.

I was surprised at how easily they understood this rather difficult song, for when Britta explained to them that the seal had taken back his son and predicted that the boy’s mother would marry a huntsman who would one day shoot both the seal and her son, the villagers nodded. To them such outcomes seemed logical.

It was Britta who suggested that Gretchen bring her guitar to the Alamo and offer regular programs as respite from the incessant records. ‘I know the customers would appreciate the music. Remember those Spaniards the other
night. And they couldn’t even understand the words.’ Since Jean-Victor was still absent in Morocco buying marijuana, the only one who had to be consulted was Joe and when he heard of the proposal he said, ‘Why not?’

I was present at Gretchen’s first appearance. Some of the soldiers grumbled at this type of interruption to the usual records, but after the first strong chords on her Spanish guitar they paid attention, and before many days had passed they were making their requests by yelling out the Child numbers.

This was made easier when one of the soldiers stole the paperback reprints of Professor Child’s volumes and donated them to the bar. On each inside cover was stamped:
This book is the property of Morón Air Base
, but in my opinion the books were doing more good in Torremolinos that they would have at the air base; at any rate, whatever I know about the Child ballads I learned thumbing these volumes while Gretchen sang in the Alamo.

Which ballads did the soldiers prefer? They never tired of ‘Barbara Allen’ and would yell ‘Child 84’ four or five times a day. ‘She just sang it,’ one of the men would tell a newcomer, who would yell, ‘Well, let her sing it again.’ I think the young, men relished the idea of a faithless girl dying of a broken heart, for when Gretchen sang this perennial favorite, I would see the soldiers nodding complacently.

‘Mary Hamilton’ had no charm for them; apparently her tragedy was one that older people related to. But they loved ‘The Twa Sisters,’ with its haunting refrain ‘Binnorie, o binnorie!’ This ballad related events that developed when a young man courted an older sister but ran away with a younger; again the soldiers could identify with such an impasse, for all of them, apparently, had at one time or other wooed one girl while keeping an eye on another.

They also liked Child 12 very much, the account of a gallant knight who was poisoned by the girl he was proposing to marry. To watch the nods of approval when Gretchen sang this ballad, one would have concluded that such poisonings were commonplace and that the soldiers had been lucky to escape. But the song that seemed to strike the most responsive chord was ‘The Prickly Bush,’ for its moist sentiment reflected their own sense of morality:

The singing of the ballads had one consequence that I should have anticipated but didn’t. When Gretchen placed herself on the high chair, twisted her left foot around a rung and crossed her right knee over, she formed a most appealing picture, and with her braided hair about her shoulders and her bright eyes flashing, it was not surprising that many of the casuals who drifted into the bar should have been attracted to her. In fact, barely a day passed without some man asking her to dinner, or to a drive down to Marbella, or a swim; but she rebuffed all invitations with an iciness that frightened or perplexed them. Habitués, having repeatedly tried to lure Gretchen to their flats, passed the word that she was frigid, or a lesbian, or weirdo. Interesting speculations circulated, with the men occasionally bringing Joe and Cato into their seminars.

‘What’s with Miss Boston?’ they asked.

‘She’s okay,’ Cato reported.

‘What goes on in the yellow pop-top?’

‘She sleeps there,’ Joe said.

‘I know that. But with who?’

‘With herself. And you lay off. When she sends out the message that she needs a companion, you’ll be the last to get an invitation.’

‘What bugs me,’ one of the Americans said, ‘is that in a place like Torremolinos, where girls go nuts looking for dates, this one is no-no.’

‘Maybe she feels no-no,’ Cato suggested.

‘There you’re wrong. Because I look at her when she sings, and those songs come from the heart. She lives them.’

‘All you look at is her legs,’ Cato said.

‘How else would you know what a girl’s thinking?’ the soldier asked.

And then Clive flew in from London, and the music changed, and for two weeks the Alamo was bewitched, for Clive brought with him such a compelling sense of this day, this generation, that everyone had to listen.

I was sitting in the bar one afternoon, waiting for instructions from Geneva as to what I must do next with
the fractious Greeks, when a soldier who was gazing aimlessly into the alley suddenly leaped from his chair and shouted, ‘It’s Clive!’

I looked into the alley and saw standing there, with sunlight on his face, a most unusual-looking young man. He was in his early twenties, tall and slim in a soft, effeminate way. He wore his hair long, and had a beard much like Christ’s, above which peered the biggest, most limpid eyes I had ever seen in a man. He was dressed London style, in a velvet jacket that was obviously expensive; and around his neck he wore a heavy Renaissance chain from which dangled a large flat metal disk on which had been engraved the copy of a Verrocchio head. He created an impression of a young faun, lacking only horns and a wreath of olive.

The American soldiers jumped toward the door, shouting, ‘It’s our boy!’ They reached out, grabbed him by the arms, and hauled him into the bar. He responded by kissing each one on the cheek and saying to those he remembered from previous visits, ‘Dear boy, it’s ripping to have you back.’

‘You’re the one who was away,’ one soldier said.

‘Darling boy,’ Clive protested, ‘I am never far from here. Sink of Torremolinos, Mecca of the world, I bow three times,’ and carefully handing me an article he was holding, he threw himself prone upon the floor, knocking his head thrice against the boards. ‘I am overjoyed to be here,’ he said from his reclining position, blowing kisses to everyone, ‘and the good things I’ve brought you! Oh, oh!’

I now had time to notice that he had handed me a large flat carpetbag, purple in color, with two leather handles. It was about twenty-six inches long, thirteen high and not more than six inches thick, but it was heavy. Before he recovered it from me he moved about the bar, embracing all his old friends and pausing to inspect the three girls. ‘You are a glorious addition,’ he told Britta. Kissing Monica on the cheek, he said, ‘Ah, that English complexion! Tend it with Pond’s cream or it’ll go to hell.’ He tried to kiss Gretchen too, but she drew back in such a way as to indicate that she did not intend to participate in such nonsense. To her surprise, he grabbed her left hand, pressed it passionately to his lips, and cried, ‘You can always tell a lady. She keeps her knees together.’ Before
Gretchen could protest, he was standing before me, saying, ‘And now, my good man, you can hand back the jewels,
s’il vous plaît.
’