Page 28 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“No tambourines.” Nathaniel has nothing against tambourines in other people’s music, but he needs to draw a line. He’ll associate freely with long-haired radicals, but the tambourine is a line he won’t cross.
“I’m so insulted that you think I own a tambourine,” Susan says.
“Darling,” Nathaniel says, “you have a harmonica. Get off your high horse.” He’s flat on his back and alarmingly high, high enough he can say things likedarlingand not worry about anything other than how he’s ever going to get off this sofa. Somewhere else in the room, Patrick laughs, thrilled as ever by Nathaniel’s bitchy turns. He’s a terrible influence.
“What’s even left for the two of you to play?” Patrick asks.
During Nathaniel’s first year of undergrad, his roommate—currently an executive with an insurance firm in Hartford—had a collection of folk music records that Nathaniel was rather appalled to discover he enjoyed. He suspects Susan had many of the same records.
“Murder ballads,” Nathaniel suggests.
“Murder ballads!” Susan agrees. “Oh my god, murder ballads.”
“Do I even want to know what a murder ballad is?” Patrick asks. Nathaniel forces his head to turn to the side. Patrick is sitting cross legged on the floor, the baby chewing on his sleeve.
Susan’s strums a few chords and begins singing about a murderer who lives in the moss and whose gruesome misdeeds are meticulously detailed in rhyming couplet. Nathaniel’s never heard this one before.
“There’s blood in the kitchen. There’s blood in the hall,” Susan sings. “There’s blood in the parlor where my lady did fall.”
Nathaniel listens as Susan sings through a few verses, then picks up the harmony. It turns out he can play the violin while lying down. Every teacher he ever had would weep at the sight of him, but he isn’t playing for the Philharmonic, and everybody who isn’t in this room can rot.
Susan plays the song through, then makes an infinitesimal change that transforms the ballad into something deliciously creepy. Nathaniel gets goosebumps.
When he saw Susan’s name on that file, he never wondered what her music might sound like. The only songs of hers that he’s heard are what Patrick played for him on the jukebox. The music she’s playing now is the chiaroscuro counterpart to those bright, sunlit songs. It takes all his meager skill just to keep up with her. Frankly, he’s a little starstruck. At least once a day he wants to tell her that she might be a genius, but she plays like someone who already knows.
Over the next hour, Susan replaces half the original lyrics with her own grisly descriptions of what some elfin troublemaker called Lord Lankin will do to you if you chance upon him in the long grass or let him into your mead hall. Her voice—ethereally lovely, clear as a bell—contrasts eerily with the gruesome murders she’s singing about. The ballad shifts from folk music to protest music.
“He’ll burn up your bones and he’ll cut off your head,” Susan sings. “He’ll scoop out your eyeballs and…” She strums along, obviously trying to come up with a rhyme.
“And leave you for dead?” Nathaniel suggests.
She sings it again with the completed verse while Nathaniel fiddles along, as softly as possible.
“And the thing is,” Susan sings, reaching the chorus. “You don’t get to complain.”
“Well, no,” Nathaniel adds, his bow still moving, “you’re dead.”
Susan laughs, then writes something down on the pad of paper she keeps on the end table. Nathaniel takes advantage of the pause to reach for the joint that’s balanced on the edge of an ashtray on the coffee table.
Nathaniel’s started writing things in his own notebook, one of those ten cent affairs you can get at any corner store, but which Patrick had to buy for him because Nathaniel can still barely leave the fucking building. The most recent page reads: Frosted Flakes, Eleanor’s little shoes, Captain Kangaroo (in color), pizza. It’s either a list of things Nathaniel likes enough that he won’t deliberately fling himself into the abyss, or it’s a list of pleasures Nathaniel in no way deserves. Sometimes he pores over list like he’s cracking a code, trying to decide which it is, but the key is his own warped psyche.
“Let’s do the song about the nightingale,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick hauls himself to his feet, keeping Eleanor against his shoulder. Nathaniel misses a note, momentarily flustered by the sight of the tiny baby cradled in huge arms, one of Patrick’s big hands on the back of her head. Since when does Nathaniel even care about men’s hands? (Since 1945, if he’s being his most truthful self, which, unfortunately, seems to be the case these days.)
He lets himself watch as Patrick fixes another bottle. When Patrick returns to the living room, Nathaniel bends his knees, making room on the sofa. Patrick takes the hint and sits. The cushions shift under Patrick’s weight. Nathaniel can feel it, the next best thing to actual contact.
After a lifetime of extinguishing that kind of thought, he feels a nauseous little thrill letting it linger in his mind. It’s a lit match, but instead of dropping it to the ground and crushing it underfoot, he’s holding it between two fingers, watching it burn. He keeps waiting for something terrible to happen.
All that happens is that Patrick looks at Nathaniel’s sneaker and sighs. “Tie your fucking shoe,” Patrick says. “You’re high as a kite and you’ll break your neck.” When the baby is done with her bottle, Patrick lays her across his lap and ties Nathaniel’s shoelace himself.
* * *
“You still shouldn’t have thrown it back!” Iris yells at her brother. “We could’ve gotarrested.”
The Valdez twins walked out of school to protest the war. All spring, kids have been walking out of high schools and colleges across the country and around the world.
“This wouldn’t have happened a year ago,” Susan says. It’s the third or fourth time she’s said it, and she’s probably right. It seems that, finally, the doomed nature of this war has become glaringly obvious, even to people who initially supported it. Patrick says that every time he walks past Washington Square Park, somebody’s burning their draft card.
