On Wings of Song
by Thomas M. Disch
Profiscicere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo.
For Charles Naylor
PART ONE
1
When he was five Daniel Weinreb’s mother disappeared. Though, like his father, he chose to regard this as a personal affront, he soon came to prefer the life they led without her. She’d been a weepy sort of girl, given to long disconnected speeches and spells of stifled hatred for Daniel’s father, some of which always spilled over onto Daniel. She was sixteen when she’d married, twenty-one when she vanished with her two suitcases, the sound system, and the silver flatware in a service for eight that had been their wedding present from her husband’s grandmother, Adah Weinreb.
After the bankruptcy proceedings were over — they’d been going on for a good while even before this — Daniel’s father, Abraham Weinreb, D.D.S., took him a thousand miles away to live in the town of Amesville, Iowa, which needed a dentist because their last one had died. They lived in an apartment over the clinic, where Daniel had his own room, not just a couch that made up into a bed. There were backyards and streets to play in, trees to climb, and mountains of snow all winter long. Children seemed more important in Amesville, and there were more of them. Except for breakfast, he ate most of his meals in a big cafeteria downtown, and they were much better than his mother had cooked. In almost every way it was a better life.
Nevertheless when he was cross or bored or sick in bed with a cold he told himself that he missed her. It seemed monstrous that he, who was such a success ingratiating himself with the mothers of his friends, should not have a mother of his own. He felt set apart. But even this had its positive side: apart might be above. At times it seemed so. For his mother’s absence was not the matter-of-fact missingness of death, but a mystery that Daniel was always pondering. There was an undeniable prestige in being the son of a mystery and associated with such high drama. The absent Milly Weinreb became Daniel’s symbol of all the wider possibilities of the world beyond Amesville, which even at age six and then age seven seemed much diminished from the great city he’d lived in before.
He knew, vaguely, the reason she had gone away. At least the reason his father had given to Grandmother Weinreb over the phone on the day it happened. It was because she wanted to learn to fly. Flying was wrong, but a lot of people did it anyhow. Not Abraham Weinreb, though, and not any of the other people in Amesville either, because out here in Iowa it was against the law and people were concerned about it as part of the country’s general decline.
Wrong, as it surely was, Daniel did like to imagine his mother, shrunk down to just the size of a grown-up finger, flying across the wide expanse of snowy fields that he had flown over in the plane, flying on tiny, golden, whirring wings (back in New York he’d seen what fairies looked like on tv, though of course that was an artist’s conception), flying all the way to Iowa just to secretly visit him.
He would be playing, for instance with his Erector set, and then he’d get an impulse to turn off the fans in all three rooms, and open the flue of the chimney. He imagined his mother sitting on the sooty bricks up at the top, waiting for hours for him to let her in the house, and then at last coming down the opened flue and fluttering about. She would sit watching him while he played, proud and at the same time woebegone because there was no way she could talk to him or even let him know that she existed. Maybe she might bring her fairy friends to visit too… a little troupe of them, perched on the bookshelves and the hanging plants, or clustered like moths about an electric light bulb.
And maybe they were there. Maybe it wasn’t all imagination, since fairies are invisible. But if they were, then what he was doing was wrong, since people shouldn’t let fairies into their houses. So he decided it was just himself, making up the story in his mind.
When he was nine Daniel Weinreb’s mother reappeared. She had the good sense to telephone first, and since it was a Saturday when the girl was off and Daniel was handling the switchboard, he was the first to talk to her.
He answered the phone the way he always did, with, “Good morning, Amesville Medical Arts Group.”
An operator said there was a collect call from New York for Abraham Weinreb.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel recited, “but he can’t come to the phone now. He’s with a patient. Could I take a message?”
The operator conferred with another voice Daniel could barely make out, a voice like the voice on a record when the speakers are off and someone else is listening with earphones.
When the operator asked him who he was, somehow he knew it must be his mother who was phoning. He answered that he was Abraham Weinreb’s son. Another shorter conference ensued, and the operator asked if he would accept the call.
He said he would.
“Danny? Danny, is that you, love?” said a whinier voice than the operator’s.
He wanted to say that no one ever called him Danny, but that seemed unfriendly. He limited himself to an equivocal Uh.
“This is your mother, Danny.”
“Oh. Mother. Hi.” She still didn’t say anything. It was up to him entirely. “How are you?”
She laughed and that seemed to deepen her voice. “Oh, I could be worse.” She paused, and added, “But not a lot. Where is your father, Danny? Can I talk to him?”
“He’s doing a filling.”
“Does he know I’m calling?”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, would you tell him? Tell him it’s Milly calling from New York.”
He weighed the name on his tongue: “Milly.”
“Right. Milly. Short for… do you know?”
He thought. “Millicent?”
“God almighty, no. Mildred — isn’t that bad enough? Doesn’t he ever talk about me?”
He wasn’t trying to avoid her question. It was just that his own seemed so much more important: “Are you coming here?”
“I don’t know. It depends for one thing on whether Abe sends me the money. Do you want me to?”
Even though he wasn’t sure, it seemed required of him to say that yes he did. But he’d hesitated, noticeably, so most of the credit for saying the right thing was lost. She knew he was being polite.
“Danny, why don’t you go tell him I’m on the phone?” Her voice was whiney again.
Daniel obeyed. As he’d known he would be, his father was annoyed when Daniel appeared in the doorway. For a while he just stood there. He didn’t want to say who it was out loud in front of the patient in the chair, a fat farmwoman who was getting a crown put on a left upper canine. He said, “There’s a phone call from New York.”
His father still looked daggers. Did he understand?
“A woman,” Daniel added significantly. “She’s calling collect.”
“You know better than to interrupt me, Daniel. Tell her to wait.”
He went back to the switchboard. Another call was coming in. He put it on Hold quickly, then said to his mother: “I told him. He said to wait. He really can’t stop in the middle.”
“Well then I’ll wait.”
“There’s another call. I have to put you on Hold.”
She laughed again. It was a pleasant laugh. He foresaw, though not in so many words, the necessity of keeping her in a good humor. Assuming that she came to Amesville. So, almost deliberately, he added a fond P.S.: “Gee, Mom, I hope it works out so you can come and live with us.” He put her on Hold before she could reply.
Because the plane had come from New York there was a long wait for the passengers and their luggage to be cleared through the State Police Inspection Station. Daniel thought that several of the women who came through the white formica doors might be his mother, but when she finally did appear, all frazzled and frayed, the very last passenger to be processed, there was no mistaking her. She wasn’t the mother he’d imagined over the years, but she was undoubtedly the one he’d tried and never quite managed to forget.