The Drifters (52 page)

He borrowed the Child volumes and studied them, asking Gretchen her opinion on which the good numbers were. Like her, he found the lament for the Bonny Earl of Murray among the finest, but it was ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’ that showed him how delicate an interpreter she could be.

‘You must come to England!’ he cried. ‘The record companies would flip over what you’re doing … absolutely flip.’

Gretchen had no ambition to make recordings, professionalism of that sort had never appealed to her and she would have been embarrassed to find her photograph on the jacket of a record, but she did enjoy talking music with Clive and they were together a good deal in those sun-filled days of mid-spring, but more than talk she did not care to do.

One day Clive asked me, ‘What’s wrong with Gret?’ and I said, ‘Maybe she finds it distasteful that you keep the pop-top filled with other young ladies … her pop-top, that is.’

‘Oh!’ With his autonomic charm, he laughed at me and said, ‘Really, girls these days aren’t put off by that. Those kids in the car … who worries about them, truthfully?’

‘I mean …’ I tried to say something relevant about love’s being a permanent thing that did not fluctuate too much with contemporary style, that any self-respecting girl would object to being courted by a man who was living with another girl—with a string of them, to be exact—but my words sounded so old-fashioned that when Clive poked me and said, ‘Really, old chap …’ I shut my mouth.

‘Fact is,’ he said, ‘it’s not me at all that puts her off. Something quite ugly disturbs her. When she sings she’s a different girl—all poetry and zest for horses riding over the moor. She’d be great as one of the Brontë sisters. But when she puts down the guitar the dream evaporates. You can see it vanish in the last three chords.’

Clive’s presence in Torremolinos had a consequence of which he remained unaware. He and Monica had been talking about old acquaintances in England for the better part of an afternoon, when Yigal came to my table and said, ‘I left Canterbury much impressed with England. I liked those girls at the English hotel and was beginning to think I might become an Englishman. Now I’m beginning to have doubts.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been watching Clive and Monica. What I mean is, I’ve been listening. They use such an exaggerated vocabulary … such an inflated one. Everything’s hideous or excruciating or delicious or simply awful.’

‘Don’t get put off by style,’ I said. ‘American vocabulary is just as bad in its way.’

‘I don’t mean anything trivial,’ Yigal said. ‘Fundamentally, I’m a Russian Jew. When I look at the sun, I want to see the sun as big as it is, and no bigger. I want to live in a prosaic world of known causes and effects. Great Britain is excellent if you’re Clive or Monica, if you can construct your own fairy-tale world, but it would be hell for an ordinary Russian Jew who doesn’t see things as horrible or devastating or simply gorgeous.’

‘Your reaction surprises me,’ I protested. ‘You’re making a serious judgment on irrelevant grounds.’

‘They may be fundamental,’ he said. ‘Israel and America are pragmatic … we see things as they are … grapple with them as best we can. I’m that kind of person.’

‘What did you think of Churchill?’ I asked.

‘Very inflated, from what I read. The theatrics weren’t necessary, not really. He had to use them because he was speaking to Clive and Monica. It’s their world, not mine,’ and in the days that followed, I could see that he was evaluating his three passports.

Clive exerted other influences on all of us who came in contact with him. For example, he was addicted to picnics, but only in the French style. ‘We’re going up into the mountains tomorrow,’ he would announce, and Joe would arrange for one of the soldiers to mind the bar till dusk.

Clive’s picnics were an artful combination of the crudest country food plus whatever
haute cuisine
he could obtain by cajolery rather than a large outlay of money, and when he opened the baskets in some mountain glen, with Spanish mountains looking down upon us with their faces crisscrossed by the trails that smugglers had been using for the past five hundred years, we were never sure what we would find inside, but of one thing we were certain: each participant would receive his own small ramekin containing some delicious concoction. ‘I abhor picnics that consist of sandwiches,’ he said, and would allow none to be made while he was in charge.

One afternoon, as we sat on a hill overlooking Gibraltar, with the shores of Africa outlined in the distance and shepherds gathering their flocks ahead of us, he suddenly cried, ‘Tomorrow let the bombs fall on Gibraltar. Today, by God, we had a feast.’

At his picnics he always invited Gretchen to sing, and he would sit near her and whisper the words to himself, and it would be spring and the sea would be gray-blue and hawks would wheel overhead and we could hear the bleating of newborn lambs above the soft words that Gretchen sang:

One day, because of an especially long session with the Greeks, I did not reach the Alamo until mid-afternoon, and I found an unusual woman waiting for me. Why do I term her unusual? For one thing, she did not seem excited about having made it to Torremolinos, and for a good-looking young woman of twenty-six, that was exceptional. She was a spare, intense person with sharp eyes and a dedicated manner of speech, as if she had only a few days in which to accomplish a mission of some magnitude. But what alerted me most was a silly thing—her insistence upon using her full name, something rarely done in Torremolinos where I never did learn Joe’s last name, or Clive’s, or the names of any of the pretty girls who climbed in and out of the pop-top.

‘I am Susan Eltregon,’ she said, shaking hands with me in a businesslike manner. ‘I was told I might find Cato Jackson here.’ When I nodded, she said, ‘And Gretchen Cole.’

‘She sings here at five.’

‘Is there any way I could see them now?’

‘They come and go. They’re in town, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen them today.’

‘And who are you?’

‘George Fairbanks. World Mutual.’

At my mention of the Geneva firm, she tensed. I was sure she had heard of us and that what she had heard was unpleasant to her, but she betrayed nothing except this intuitive loathing. ‘Can I wait?’ she asked.

‘It’s a bar,’ I said. I didn’t like her and I suspected she knew it, but she sat down at my table. When I asked, ‘What brings you to Torremolinos?’ she reflected on the question for some time, then decided that I would probably ask around till I found out. ‘Haymakers,’ she said.

I had heard of this group only from stories which had appeared in the
Paris Herald Tribune
, but my frown must have told her that I had read some such material, for before I could respond, she said, ‘We are everything the stories say.’ She clipped her words, giving them emphasis, and for some reason I could not have explained I said, ‘That’s an expensive outfit you’re wearing,’ and she
snapped, ‘Revolutionaries do not have to be paupers,’ and I growled, ‘They rarely are.’

For some moments she looked at me coldly, then said, ‘I have no quarrel with you, Mr. Fairbanks … except that when reason rules, outfits like yours will be liquidated first. You are a group of international bloodsuckers and you must go.’

‘Right now I’m engaged in a deal in which we’re trying to suck some blood, and I’m getting nowhere. Would you care to help me?’

‘I am here to see Cato Jackson and Gretchen Cole.’

‘How could you possibly be interested in them?’

‘You mean how could Haymakers be interested? Jackson and Cole are Haymakers. They do not realize it yet, but they are Haymakers.’

‘They will be surprised when you tell them.’

‘Their experiences have made it inevitable. All they need is the awakening.’

‘They’re a pair of born daydreamers, eh? And you’re here to awaken them?’

‘Events awaken them. I am here to point out the events.’

‘Are you an officer in Haymakers?’ I asked.

‘We don’t bother with such frivolity,’ she snapped.

The Haymakers had taken their unusual name for three reasons. It carried the image of a roundhouse blow that would knock out the Establishment. It also had the connotation of clever people taking advantage of the current situation—making hay while the sun shone. And, finally, it bespoke rural life and avoided the stigma of being a city movement, which it was.

The Haymakers, most of them under thirty, were committed to the total destruction of American society, nothing less. Their program was simple: move into every disturbed situation, exacerbate it, allow it no time to stabilize, sponsor anarchy, and rely upon the resulting turmoil to radicalize the young people. When a sufficient cadre of able young people had been converted into dedicated revolutionaries, large mass movements would be initiated to tear down the social structure: banks would be discredited, the National Guard immobilized, universities destroyed, and the usefulness of social agencies like newspapers and television stations neutralized.

When total disruption had been achieved, the Haymakers
planned to move into the chaos and—with their directed cadres—immobilize the police, the army, the school systems and the municipal governments. If at that late and disorganized date resistance was met, there would have to be fighting in the streets, but even if such fighting did not develop, the old-fashioned holders of power would still have to be liquidated. One of the recurring phrases used by the Haymakers was, ‘He’s a Kerensky and he must go.’

If such a program were to succeed, potentially disaffected persons of ability—like Gretchen Cole, who had tangled with the police, and Cato Jackson, who had lugged guns into a white church—had to be conscripted; Cato was doubly inviting as a target since he was also a Negro, and one of the basic tenets of the Haymakers was that Negro dissent must be converted into revolution.

In order to enlist Gretchen and Cato in this revolution, Susan Eltregon had been dispatched from St. Louis, where the Haymakers were currently headquartering. She was the daughter of a druggist in Denver; she used the phrase, ‘I used to be the daughter of a pair of reactionaries in Colorado,’ as if she had, by an act of will, dissociated herself from them shortly after the moment of birth. Her parents had saved money to send her to college in Montana, but that experience had been a shattering one; she found the college unbelievably dull and the professors pathetic. With a group of students from states like California and Massachusetts, she had started a committee for the overhaul of the curriculum, the method of choosing the faculty and all systems of grading and discipline. This placed her athwart the purposes of the school, which longed for peace and the opportunity to graduate students who would become teachers and bookkeepers, so at the end of her freshman year Susan was asked not to return.

She ignored the suggestion, moved into a rooming house at the edge of the campus, drew about her a group of similarly inclined drop-outs and began a program of harassment that ended with a campus-wide rebellion against the athletic coach and the burning of a science hall. Montana police invaded the rooming house, but Susan and her friends were gone, leaving behind what luggage they had. ‘The pigs drove us out,’ they reported in New York.

Prior to Susan’s arrival in New York, the Haymakers had established a precarious foothold in that city. Their
organizing leader was an assistant professor at one of the local colleges; because of his irritating attempts to improve the curriculum of his institution and to force the admission of blacks and Puerto Ricans, regardless of high school grades, he had been denied a permanent appointment to the faculty. He then launched a wild series of confrontations to protect his employment, and although he failed, he did radicalize seven undergraduates, who dropped out of college to work with him, and this formed the nucleus of the movement. But its real force—its tremendous capacity for capitalizing on disturbances and enlisting young people who were offended by them—developed only with the arrival of a group of former students from the midwest.

These were tough, hard-nosed revolutionaries who had matured in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Terre Haute and Gary. They found no hope for the United States as it now existed and were determined to tear it down. Susan Eltregon found a place in this leadership group, for she understood their derivations and approved their commitments. One of the midwest leaders had proposed as the rallying cry of the movement, ‘Everyone in authority must go,’ and it was the latter concept that now motivated the group.

The Haymakers enrolled many brilliant young people, and in the St. Louis office these plotters and planners kept track of any incident across the nation calculated to produce disaffected students or workmen who could be approached. It was a girl drop-out from Smith College who in the course of clipping newspapers for the Haymakers spotted the names of Cato Jackson and Gretchen Cole. Operatives in the Philadelphia and Boston areas were asked to track them down, and first reports were disappointing: ‘Gretchen Cole has disappeared from the University of Besançon. Whereabouts unknown.’—‘Jackson flew the coop. Believed to be in Detroit.’

But after further investigation, the Boston people found that Gretchen had sent a postcard to a girl at Radcliffe, telling her, ‘You ought to come over here.’ And a Mr. Wister of Philadelphia, who was supplying Cato Jackson with funds, disclosed that the young man had asked that his check be sent to Torremolinos.

‘You must go to Torremolinos,’ the high command in St. Louis ordered Susan. ‘There’s an army base of some
kind near there. You might do some real good, even if you don’t find Jackson and the Cole girl.’

So Susan underwent the indignity of writing to her parents in Denver for money: ‘I think that if I go to Europe and see the Netherlands, if I see where grandfather came from and what life is like in his country, I may find myself. At any rate, it will not hurt to try and it may do some good.’