False Coin: A Novel

1958

chapter one

I THINK I FIRST began to come back to life when I decided to withdraw from it, or at least to cut my commitments. But that’s only one of the paradoxes that I’m continually discovering, and I mention it only because it seems a likely point to begin the telling of what I know about Harmoney Farm, and of what was revealed to me there not just of myself but of the strange life of our time.

What happened was that my former wife died. I learned of her death somewhat belatedly, several weeks after the event as a matter of fact, at just about the time when my musician friends were starting to feed me inflated rumors about the mysterious Pilot Project upstate at Harmoney Farm.

It wasn’t that I cared for Alice any longer, or even liked her. Quite the contrary. But the idea that she no longer existed…the realization that off and on through those weeks after her death I had mentally argued with her, quarreled, complained, when all the time she no longer even existed…You see, we had had an only child, a very lovely girl, who had died of a punctured kidney a few seasons earlier in a senseless skiing accident. In my mind over and over I blamed Alice for letting it happen. But when I learned that Alice too blamed herself, so much so that she had to be hospitalized and kept under sedation for several weeks, I had to absolve her and take some of the blame on myself. Even though we had been divorced for many years, or maybe because of it, she knew that I would try to assess things dispassionately. So naturally the least I could do was to reassure her that no one could possibly charge her with even the littlest kind of parental negligence for the fact that our girl was gone. I had to grit my teeth, but I did it because I saw that it was right. But after that I couldn’t let it rest, I had to keep chewing things over mentally with Alice, things that had been dormant or buried for years—which was, I suppose, the main reason why her death upset me so. That, and the sickening reminder it was of so many other things.

I got the news of Alice’s death on my fiftieth birthday. She had made a fair recovery from her depression after the skiing accident, but when she tried to go back to work (she had a respectable job on the academic fringe of a college town, assistant librarian or maybe it was dormitory house mother) she went into what used to be called a decline, and then just simply died, so quietly that it was only by accident that I learned of it.

You’d misunderstand me if I said that it spoiled my birthday. Birthdays are no fun anyway. Empty, empty, everything seemed empty. No daughter to love, no former wife to bicker with even in my imagination. All I had was my sound studio job—a noisy bore—and a fairly comfortable apartment on East 53rd Street, which I regarded the way you regard an old pair of shoes: comfortable, but when they wear out you throw them away and buy another pair without giving it much thought.

All I mean to show with this maybe too-personal detail about my life is that I was in a receptive mood for anything that would promise forgetfulness, peace and the chance to turn my back on the stupid job and the meaningless routine.

The way the Pilot Project was first put to me, it sounded restful. Just to retreat the sixty-three miles from 53rd Street to Harmoney Farm was tempting. And besides, it was Donald Luunen himself who first sounded me out. You may not agree with the politics of a man like Luunen, you might even think he’s a bit of a stuffed shirt, but when he calls you up himself on the telephone, it does something to you.

Actually, it was his New York secretary, Mrs. Hawkins, who phoned me from her office in the Esso Building. I’d been in that office: it held a change of clothes for Luunen, a hi-fi system, two filing cabinets—one for the diplomatic assignments in which he was increasingly involved, one for business papers relating to industrial transport and shipping—and a secretary for Mrs. Hawkins. She herself was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art, and Sarah Lawrence, and spent at least half her time on matters relative to Vivaldi (Luunen’s secret passion). When things were quiet in the office she played Vivaldi recordings. I liked her.

Mr. Warder? she inquired tentatively, almost shyly.

Speaking. It was Saturday morning, pretty early, and I didn’t place the voice.

Hi Ben, this is Flora Hawkins. Donald Luunen’s New York office.

I enjoyed having her call me by my first name. And I assumed at once that her boss, the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, the high-powered Detroit auto executive, had come upon some more Vivaldiana and was commissioning a recording. What else could he want of me? Besides, this had already happened once, and I had been more than pleased, it had been one of the greatest recording dates I had ever mixed the sound for. Good music, good musicians, not just fiddle scrapers, no pains spared—the sort of thing you wish you could be involved in all the time.

I’ve got a memo here from Mr. Luunen which says, among other things, that I should have you call him collect at this Washington number at the first opportunity. It’s a private line, have you got a pencil handy?

I did, and I took it down. It was an Executive number, naturally. What else would Luunen have?

What’s it all about?

Call him and find out. I’ll give you a negative clue—it’s not Vivaldi. She laughed. How have you been, Ben?

Pretty poor. I could be frank without having her ask why.

We chatted for a while—she didn’t know my former wife had died, what difference would it make to her? and I pretended I hadn’t read the dirt in the Daily News about her divorce from that drunken clarinet player—and then I hung up and called long distance.

Luunen speaking. Live, from Washington, he seemed to be saying.

Mr. Luunen, this is Ben Warder, up in New York. You left word with Mrs. Hawkins…

That’s right, I did. How are you, Ben? There it was again. And here was I, pushing fifty-one, and tickled that a man like Luunen would call me by my first name. I could visualize him easily, cupping the phone to his left ear while he passed the heel of his right hand carefully, tenderly, over his distinguished silver-grey temple; crossing his feet before him so that he could admire his ankles, still trim in their French lisle socks, and the dull glow of his spotless black oxfords.

He was friendly but direct. Immediately after the polite questions about my health and my work, he turned the talk to Harmoney Farm.

You’ve heard about what’s going on up there.

Just vaguely.

It’s not supposed to be public knowledge yet, of course. His voice was smooth as whipping cream, low, friendly, cultivated, even thinned out as it was over the long distance wire. If I hadn’t known that he was the son of a poor immigrant Finn from Upper Michigan, a football scholarship student at a state college, a sales engineering graduate shrewd enough to learn manners and marry the boss’s daughter, I would have sworn he was Eastern prep school and Ivy League with at least four American generations behind him. He went on, The operation is well under way, but we’ve deliberately held off on publicity. Time for that later on. The Pilot Project, Ben, is an experiment in the production and distribution of art to a mass public in an atmosphere freed of commercial pressure.

There was a pause. I gathered that he was waiting for comment, so I said, Isn’t there something about all the art forms uniting under one roof, or one story being used in all the media, from comic books to grand opera?

Luunen chuckled expansively. I expect there’s a good deal of idle banter about rich crackpots and foundationitis. But I’d like you to find out for yourself—I think you’ll agree that I wasn’t hoodwinked. Monk Malony is developing an original story—I’m afraid I can’t spell it out for you yet—but it’s being adapted right at Harmoney Farm, as a play, a musical, an opera, and so on. Rex Rector is already in residence, and I’m inviting you to go on up there and join him in producing the best recorded sound you ever made in your life.

This time when he quit talking I didn’t say anything. I had always regarded Rex Rector as one of the two or three best composers under fifty in the United States. His publicity had been based on extraneous factors—his being black as black can get, little, ugly, and a campy homosexual. As far as I was concerned none of it took anything away from his being an original musician with a big talent. To me that was awe-inspiring. I expect I will never stop feeling that way. As for Monk Malony, I didn’t feel competent to judge his fiction or his criticism, but I knew he was highly regarded by the higher brows; he was also a man who made a thing out of his integrity and his steadfast refusal to sell out. I hadn’t ever met him, but my image was of a dark, skinny, brilliant Irishman, a little too humorlessly combining great sensuality with intense concern about asceticism and the Future of Mankind.

I was thinking about this when I heard Luunen say, The point is simply that the Governing Board of the Farm, of which I am a member, is determined to persuade the very best people in every field to go along with us. From personal experience I know you as just about the best recording engineer in the business, and I would like to urge you to take a year’s leave of absence from that commercial job to establish residence at the Farm, equip the barn up there for the very finest studio and sound stage you can, and go ahead and record the symphonic fantasia, the opera, and the musical Rex is working on now with Malony and Eddie Bedlam.

That was typical of the way the man—or the diplomat—operated, to throw off Bedlam’s name, that ambitious and provocative Broadway and Hollywood director, almost as an afterthought. All I could do was say weakly, Establish residence?

This is not at all a question of one recording date, or even an extended session. The Pilot Project those men are working on right now is only the opening shot of an effort that may extend far into the future. If you want to be a charter member, there’s a one year contract waiting for you on the desks of the responsible heads of Harmoney Farm.

The three minutes were more than up, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of what to say to this proposition; it was as though he’d asked me to come to Washington to work for the government. I’ll tell you, Ben, he said kindly, what you ought to do. Take a ride up to Harmoney Farm, it’s only a hop and a jump from Manhattan, let them show you around, talk it over with Rex and the others, and then make up your mind. Fair enough?

I told Luunen I was very grateful, and flattered too, and that I would probably do just that. It wasn’t until after I’d hung up that I remembered I’d been invited to dinner at the Vollbauchs, who were supposed to be mixed up with the Harmoney Farm operation themselves. Did you ever get the feeling that a net was being tightened all around you, or that you were being worked on from several directions at once? There are times when it’s not unpleasant.

But I think I ought to say something about the Vollbauchs before I get there for dinner. Victor and Vera were my friends, and it’s hard to give an unbiased description of friends. Their unattractive qualities you learn to live with, if you’re going to stay friends; their endearing qualities are usually the very reason for the friendship. Anyway, Victor was a big man in his field, of which I knew little but was dubious about on principle; a leading figure in that new kind of sociology apparently more interested in finding out new ways of measuring human behavior than in coming to conclusions about it. He was squat and leonine, with a bumpy bald head, nose glasses and a solid paunch, but he looked gentler than you’d have expected from reading about him, more like the former altar boy and old Austrian socialist that he actually was. His clothes were sloppy not only because he could afford to wear them that way but because he was incapable of taking care of them. His good knit ties were always twisted around with the label uppermost on his belly like a little red tag identifying not the tie but its owner; usually there was a froth of dried egg yolk on his shirtfront beneath the hand-stitched V V, and his trousers were as wrinkled at the crotch as if he’d had them pressed that way. His graduate students either couldn’t understand his accent, or they adored him, or both. Victor and I had music in common (that was how we had first gotten friendly), and a respect for science and the life of the mind; and he was tolerant, without trying to convert me, of my skepticism toward his professional life of polls, sample studies, and measuring techniques.

As for Vera, I thought of her as more or less the kind of woman I should have married. She was a blonde Polish Jewess who wore her hair in braids, had a real M.D., and had been keeping house for Victor and their kids instead of hanging out her shingle. She was smart and easygoing and hadn’t lost her looks, and for some reason she liked me. I looked forward to her invitations because I knew I was being welcomed into a warm home where nobody every thought of getting divorced or committing adultery, where the cooking was good and the conversation was rapid and guttural as gunfire.

When I got there this evening I could hear the four of them, Victor and Vera, and their kids Thor and Heidi, sawing away at the Schubert Quartettsatz even before Glorious opened the door for me. Glorious Exotic was so old everybody was afraid to ask her age. She staggered when she walked, partly from senility and partly from a disturbance of the middle ear, which caused her to reel a bit now and then. When she let me in she took from me the bottle of wine I had brought as a present and lurched back with it like a movie drunk.

How have you been, Glorious? I asked her.

It’s a black day, she replied darkly, holding her veined old black and pink hands to her face, after she had dumped the bottle dizzily into the well of the umbrella stand. A cold dark day in the city.

This puzzled me, since the weather had been fine for October, and was still pleasant even at twilight. But I knew her well enough to adjust myself to her slow and devious mental processes. While I stood there in the foyer half-listening to the Vollbauchs murdering poor old Schubert, I learned from Glorious that her annoyance was directed not against the weather, but against the meat departments in the supermarkets of the Upper West Side.

Bad enough, she groaned through her heavy bluish lips, that a body can’t get no kosher meat off’n the man that calls himself a butcher. But what I call adding insult to injury is when they mark down the price tags just and only on the pork products. No solid reason to it at all, excepting to tempt the weak to taste of the forbidden flesh.

Glorious had been shopping. Her tirade against the grocers was not at all an outburst of loyalty to her employer. It was in fact Glorious who thought of herself as a good Jewess (of a highly specialized Eighth Day Adventist persuasion) and of Mrs. Vollbauch not merely as a backslider married to a Gentile, but as an active poisoner of her young with the flesh of the uncloven hoof, leading them gulletwise down the path to perdition.

I have to add that aside from this insistence on the superiority of ritually slaughtered cattle and fowl, there was nothing in Glorious Exotic’s aggressive Jewishness that was even remotely recognizable to Vera. It wasn’t, Vera assured me, that she herself had any objection to sharing her proud heritage with this unlikely sister under the skin. At first she had been taken aback at discovering that the only other Jewish belief which Glorious knew was that of the Saturday as the Sabbath, which she observed religiously. For the rest, Vera learned gradually that Glorious’s faith was founded on the eight-day week, the thirty-two-day month, and the three hundred and eighty-four-day year, whose only theoretical virtue seemed to be that it insured twelve months of absolutely equal dimension, and whose only practical virtue, since the whole scheme existed only in the minds of its adherents, was that it provided nineteen more days for the collection of dimes for the mother church.

Glorious’s one interest beyond her church was a niece in Covington, Kentucky, named Exquisite Bliss who lived in periodic squalor with an itinerant salesman of burial insurance, and who communicated with her aunt by means of occasional anguished scrawls, I HAVE HAD ENUF OF THIS BEAST I MAY DIE SOON!! EXQUISITE BLISS. She sometimes showed me these postcards, thus flattering me with the implication that I was nearly one of the family. Glorious was curious about my affairs, but not as curious as she was about the Vollbauch kids, whom she seemed to regard narrowly as one would examine dangerous jungle beasts behind inadequate wire fencing: she fed them and mended their clothes, she reminded them to study, brush their teeth and practice their fiddles, but when they passed her in the narrow hallway she shrank back dizzily against the wall, as if afraid that their touch might transport her to profoundly unappetizing and dangerous regions.

I want to make it clear that Vera Vollbauch didn’t regard Glorious as a Negro and ipso facto an odd bird, but simply as a woman who had always worked hard to support herself and was therefore entitled to her eccentricities. This was mainly because Vera herself had been brought up in Poland not to think of Negroes as frightening, pitiful, or praiseworthy; she had not in fact given them any thought at all before crossing the ocean. Then she came slowly to realize that this question bulked large enough in the lives of the American middle class for it to form a sizable part of their conversational equipment and their literary output. Gradually she learned that her friends were much concerned with matters of guilt and innocence, superiority and inferiority, and so on. For her own part Vera didn’t feel superior to Glorious, simply different; and she didn’t feel guilty at having to issue orders to Glorious. She was willing to grant that vast realms of subtleties were closed to her because of her foreigner’s lack of understanding of the roots of white guilt and Negro aggression; but it seemed to her, as she put it to me, that Maybe I’m better off in my dumbness, not knowing these things, and just going on with Glorious as we always do.

And Victor? The whole thing never came up when he was around. If it had, I know he would have attempted to conceptualize it formally—which means that he would have tried to see it, not as an individual personal problem, but as something he could build a theory about and then devise a test for to check out his theory.

Anyway, when Glorious ushered me in Victor was leading the family quartet as first fiddle, which was only fitting; Vera was doing pretty well by Schubert on the old cello she had schlepped with her from Vienna; Thor was peering blindly at the music on his stand and playing second fiddle to Papa; and Heidi was making vague passes at the viola, which seemed to be growing out of the left side of her neck.

I could tell they didn’t have far to go—the whole Quartettsatz isn’t very long anyway—so I waved to them to finish up while I made myself a drink and settled down in Victor’s favorite easy chair. There was a kind of double fascination for me in sitting there in that comfortable homey apartment, watching and listening to the family make music. I have to admit that it made me a little envious. I never brag about being unmarried; and I do believe that making music at twilight is one of the noblest results of a happy married life blessed with children. Let me add quickly, though, that I have a fairly well-developed ear (partly from my business and partly because I love good music), that it could be painful to hear what the Vollbauchs sometimes did to music that never did them any harm, and that the Vollbauch kids seemed to me then to be two of the strangest children ever produced by the union of two essentially handsome and kindly people.

Thor at this time was seventeen, I think, with overlong sideburns, vague eyes whose protuberance was accentuated by thick-lensed glasses, a lengthy, drooping half-inflated rubber balloon of a nose, and a mouth which obstinately refused to stay closed. As he nodded his head in time to the beat, he revealed a number of triangular, ominously pointed sharklike teeth. He did in fact seem like a kind of composite fish. He was not a boy to excite your sympathy or even your pity, at first meeting; what I felt on the basis of very casual acquaintance might best be described as wonder that he had been born into the wrong order of things and forced to breathe air instead of water. He made up for this odd mischance by immersing himself in a flood of books and magazines on underwater swimming, deep-sea diving, aqualung submersion, pearl fishing, and exploring coral reefs for hidden wrecks and sunken treasures. Ordinarily his well-bitten fingers held one of these books or a catalogue illustrating the latest in plastic eye and nose masks, wrist-strapped oxygen tanks, and rubber fins. With all this, he did seem fairly contented to me.

His sister Heidi held her viola with somewhat more forthrightness, considering she was only fourteen. She wasn’t the least bit like Thor. She was a long, ethereal girl who wore her hair nearly to her waist, in long pastel strands like the trailing branches of a weeping willow. She was as pale as if she had been immured in a mouldering building or blocked up in a dim and dripping cave; the only touch of color beneath her neutral grey eyes was the broad silver band over her upper teeth (she too was a mouth-breather). Her appearance gave you to think that when she actually did get around to speaking, her voice would be an echo of an echo, hollow, toneless and distant. Like her brother, Heidi lived surrounded by an untidy heap of specialized books and journals; more than once I came on her reading the latest number of the Mississippi Valley Speleological Review. Just as her brother was mad about underwater life, so Heidi was gone on cave exploring.

The fact is that I couldn’t make head or tail out of those kids. It’s not that I disliked them or that they disliked me—I flatter myself that they were always mildly fond of me—but rather that people of such an in-between age, neither children nor adults, have always been mysterious to me in their language and folkways.

The family struggled through the Quartettsatz, arriving at the end at roughly the same time, and stacked away their instruments in the big music storage closet. Then Victor replaced the handkerchief at his neck with a napkin, we deployed ourselves around the well-stocked dining-room table, Glorious came staggering in with wienerschnitzel and beer, and between the food and the kids I had no chance to unburden myself.

I was in luck, though, or maybe Vera planned it that way; in any event, Thor disappeared right after dinner. Five minutes later he turned up, briefly, in his swim trunks, modeling the latest in skin-diving outfits. He looked more piscine than ever, floating into that comfortable overstuffed living room like something in an aquarium; nevertheless it was true that beneath that watery face lurked the smoothly muscled sharklike body of a real aquatic expert. His physique was superb. Even his eyes, without those thick-lensed glasses, revealed something of a deep-sunk humanity that might dart to the surface one morning and confound all those who suspected that he’d be better off beneath the water that he loved so much. When I looked into his eyes, I had the uneasy feeling that he wanted to get in touch with someone, and that I was being somehow unjust to him.

You look sharp, I said.

He pulled the breathing bladder out of his mouth and mumbled, Birthday present, pointing to the submersible watch on his left wrist. Will you excuse me? I have to write a paper for English class on buried coral reefs of the Southwest Pacific.

I had no sooner assured him that this was all right with me, when Heidi took off and came back in pajamas and bathrobe, the silver band on her teeth glittering in the lamplight, the corners of her mouth green with crusted chlorophyll toothpaste. Odd strands of her hair stuck up here and there like stalagmites, and she carried a copy of something labeled Les Caveaux de France. Her voice came soft and faint, as though another person had said the words first and she was merely passing them on, or echoing them at the end of a long dim corridor. Good night, everyone. I’m going to prepare a talk for public speaking class on Little-Known Caves of the Loire Valley.

Good hunting, I said, and for one awful moment thought I would get a toothpaste kiss in grateful return. But Heidi was getting a little old for that, and at last I was able to settle down with her folks.

I planted my feet firmly on the Oriental throw rug in front of the couch and said to Vera and Victor, I got an offer to go up to that Harmoney Farm thing today. From Don Luunen himself. He wants me to take a year’s contract and set up a studio and record all the music as Rector finishes it. Frankly, it sounds fantastic. I waited a minute, but the only sound was Victor sucking on his after-dinner cigar. I want to know what you both think.

Vera smiled at me over her Bavarian cup and saucer. I think you ought to find a nice girl and get married.

I’m going to be fifty-one.

She sighed. They tell me there are some very attractive girls there. Victor runs up several times a week, but don’t go by what he says—his taste in women is terrible.

Victor surprised me. This subject is too serious for light comedy, Vera. It’s an important question for Ben to decide.

I think it’s important that he shouldn’t go on living alone the way he does. I’m not just being silly—that’s no life for a person like Ben. If Harmoney Farm was isolated, I’d say he ought to stay here in New York and wait for us to marry him off. But seeing it’s the way it is… Vera left the sentence unfinished.

Victor looked out at me, cagily, from under his eyebrows. I already knew about that phone call from Luunen.

I’m not surprised. I also figured you planned tonight to urge me to take the job.

I still plan on it. You want to know why?

Yes. But my turn first. I’m not in a marrying mood, I’m not even in a girl friend mood. I’m sick of my work, sick of New York, sick of myself. It’s got to do with—oh, Alice, I suppose, and my daughter. Her most of all. What I feel like doing— I looked across at my friends, their faces warm and anxious to be helpful—is getting away, going some place quiet, where I can sit and think for a while.

Harmoney Farm is not like that. Victor spoke positively. And whenever he did, his voice got edgy and his accent sharpened. It is not restful, it is disturbing. I think you need to be disturbed, as much as I think the place needs you. That’s why I agreed to recommend to you that you go.

I’m trying to be humorous, I said a little desperately, and everybody insists on taking me seriously.

Vera laughed in her own contralto tones. She had a charming laugh, frank and full of teeth. What you mean is, we should tell you not to go there, but to quit your job and go to a dude ranch instead.

Either that, or assure me that I’ll have a harmonious time at Harmoney Ranch. Honestly, it doesn’t help any to tell me I don’t know what’s good for me.

Correction. Victor raised his hand like an orchestra conductor. I’m telling you that you don’t know what it’s like at the Farm. You know about Horace Harmon?

Who doesn’t?

He challenged me. Tell me what you know.

Saw him in the elevator with Ed Murrow once in the CBS Building. Half a head taller than me but bald, like you. Permanently tanned. Wears his grey sideburns a little long, surprisingly, because he dresses as conservatively as a corpse. Can’t count his money. Gave part of Harmoney Farm to the State as a game preserve and park, keeps part for his permanent residence because he’s sentimental about family history and because he likes to indulge his cultural hobbies.

Nine thousand acres, Victor put in. With a shock I realized that the tone of his words approached reverence. He took off his nose glasses, blew on them absently, and wiped them carefully with the end of his tie. All his adult life he has been searching for a social use worthy of the land and his responsibility. He’s a fine man, Ben. A little naive, but still a fine example of the best American type—open, generous, receptive to new ideas.

Glorious came tottering in then with a plate of Vera’s strudel for my coffee, so we stopped by mutual agreement while I munched. But as soon as she had left Vera picked up the story, and proceeded with it more sharply than Victor.

Let’s be a little more precise. In the last decade Harmoney Farm has been successively a rest home for the unmarried mothers of the offspring of Coast Guardsmen, Eastern headquarters for a now-defunct group of Action Poets, and the site of an annual gala ethnographic dance festival.

Does that last one still go on?

Raided by the cops, Vera replied, a little coarsely. They were specializing in what they called intricate ventral maneuvers. Poor Horace was very distressed. Every time he has tried to give away the Farm he himself has been part of the bargain, thrown in with the land, the lakes, the manor houses and the stables. That’s part of what Victor means by his generosity—he keeps trying to give himself away too, even though that isn’t necessary for tax purposes. Of course every group that moved in clipped him for extra buildings, like the studios built for the experimental movie crowd that he tolerated for a while. I think probably the one closest to his heart was the summer colony he had, providing free board, lodging, conversation and recreation for properly certified creative people.

I had a girl friend went there one summer, I said. A painter of sorts. It spoiled her a little.

Exactly. He made it so good for the creative people that the other philanthropic havens complained. They couldn’t compete with him by providing pools, hot and cold outdoor showers, breakfast served on bed trays, and God knows what else. Nothing could upset Horace more than a hint that he was trying to outdo those whose good works had preceded his, so he closed out the free colony.