At the end of one difficult session, when the difference between our assessments amounted to more than eight million dollars, and he was coldly defending his figure, I sought to terminate that part of the discussion on an amicable note, so I said, ‘It’s odd to find an Irishman with the first name Frederick.’ He laughed and said, ‘Not Irish, German. When my great-great-grandfather came over here after the Revolution of 1848 his name was Kohl, but he was afraid Bostonians might think he was Jewish, so he changed it to Cole, and then everybody thought he was Irish, which in those days was worse.’ I laughed, and in his icy way he asked if I would care to have dinner with him that night, so on the spur of the moment it was arranged.
I had assumed that he meant us to drop into some restaurant, but his plans were quite different. He called his wife, told her he was bringing me along and that we’d eat whatever was available. We caught a cab and drove out Huntington Avenue to the more expensive section of Brookline, where we pulled into a garage set among trees and carefully tended shrubs. The white clapboard house had been occupied during the last century by a famous professor at Harvard and had passed through his family to Mrs. Cole, who was apparently of distinguished lineage.
The three of us had barely sat down to a casually prepared meal of beef and potatoes, with New England touches such as spiced crab apple and quince jam on hot rolls, when we were unexpectedly joined by the Coles’ daughter, who was attending Radcliffe College nearby. She was tall, tanned, and with long brown hair which she wore in two braids. Her tweed suit was what we call ‘country expensive’ and her manner was patrician in the best Boston sense of that word. She was extremely quick in her appreciation of situations and knew without being told why I was there. I was not surprised, therefore, when her father said, as she disappeared to wash up, ‘Gretchen’s only nineteen and already has her B.A. summa cum laude from Radcliffe. She’s entering the graduate school in January.’
‘That is,’ her mother said, ‘if we can wean her away from this Senator McCarthy nonsense.’
Gretchen now returned and we had an enjoyable meal, with her making us laugh at stories about how uninstructed most of the kids were at the McCarthy headquarters. ‘They really expect politics to be either 1810 with torchlight parades or 2010 with super intellects reaching super decisions. They have no idea of the grubbiness of 1967, and very little taste for it.’
But it was not the politics of that first night with the Coles that I remember so vividly. After dinner Gretchen was about to run off to a meeting at Harvard—had to be there, she was the lady co-chairman—when her father said, ‘Gretchen, you look tired. Why don’t you relax for half an hour and sing to us?’ Apparently she had inherited her father’s gift of common sense, for she stopped, weighed the proposal for a moment, nodded her head briskly, and said, ‘That’s a damned good idea. I’ve been working all day.’
She threw aside her coat, went to a cupboard and returned with a rather large guitar, which when I first saw it, seemed a trifle too much for her to handle. However, she sat on a low stool, tossed her head so that her brown braids fell out of the way, and said quietly, ‘Child 243.’ I was about to ask what this meant when she strummed her guitar twice and started to play a gentle melody, after which she sang in a good, clear voice the ancient story of a young woman who marries a ship-carpenter after being assured that her betrothed has died in a foreign land. Four years later, when she and the carpenter have three children, the lover returns:
‘ “I might have had a king’s daughter,
And fain she would have married me;
But I’ve forsaken all her crowns of gold,
And all for the sake, love, of thee.
‘ “For my husband is a carpenter,
And a young ship-carpenter is he,
And by him I have a little son,
Or else, love, I’d go along with thee” ’
The lady deserts her husband, flees with her first love, only to discover that he is no longer human but has become a daemon. Gretchen’s voice grew delicate and foreboding as she concluded:
‘ “He strack the tap-mast wi his hand,
The fore-mast wi his knee,
And he brake that gallant ship in twain,
And sank her in the sea.” ’
‘What was the name of the song?’ I asked.
‘Child 243,’ she said, then laughed. ‘That’s the identification we use. Actually, it’s “The Daemon Lover.” The Child number came from an old-time friend of our family.’
Mrs. Cole explained that during the latter years of the last century, in a house not far from where we sat, a famous Harvard professor, Francis James Child, had collected historic ballads which were then disappearing from memory. He had spent nearly fifty years at this task, assembling every known variation of each ballad. Shortly before his death he published his findings in ten large volumes containing the life history of 305 classic ballads.
‘The amusing thing,’ Mrs. Cole said, ‘is that dear Professor Child used to leave Boston each spring to tramp over England and Scotland, searching for his precious ballads. He really spent all his money and energy on the task. But about the same time an English scholar was spending his vacations and his money tramping around the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, collecting precisely the same ballads. Because, as you know, the first English settlers who hid themselves away in our southern mountains brought the ballads with them. Quite often our Kentucky mountaineers preserved them in a purer form than the English did.’
‘Mrs. Cole knows so much about this,’ her husband explained, ‘because Professor Child taught her mother to sing many of the ballads. Right in this room. Gretchen learned them from her grandmother, so the strain is fairly pure.’
‘Could I see one of the volumes?’ I asked.
‘Unfortunately, they’re quite valuable now,’ Cole said, ‘and our family has never owned a set. Gretchen studies her material at the library. Darling, sing us 173.’
I don’t know enough about ballads to say which one is the king. Later I was to hear Gretchen and her friends sing many manly ones about brave knights and doughty sea captains, and some of these old songs were most stirring; but I am quite certain what the queen of the ballads is. It has got to be Child 173. From the first moment that Gretchen strummed her guitar with a set of ominous chords, I was captivated by the story of Mary Hamilton, a country girl who came to Edinburgh to serve as one of four girls named Mary who were maids to Mary, Queen of Scots. Unfortunately, Queen Mary’s husband fell in love with this one and got her pregnant. The tragedy begins with one of the greatest single stanzas of English popular poetry:
Word is to the kitchen gane,
And word is to the ha,
And word is up to Madame the Queen,
And that is warst of a’,
That Mary Hamilton has born a bairn,
To the hichest Stewart of a’.
When I studied this admirable ballad later, I concluded that the progression of those first three lines, the way in which rumor is depicted flying about the palace—gone, to, up—was folk poetry at its best. The entire misery of the ballad is foretold in those breathless lines, and when I heard Gretchen Cole sing them the first time, she imparted a wonderful sense of history to them. Mary Hamilton was a real girl, involved in a total scandal; here was a beginning that could end only upon the scaffold, and such compelling situations are the stuff of poetry.
When Gretchen came to the last verse, as great in its sad way as the first, she sang in a low, heartbreaking manner she had learned from her grandmother, who had got it from the professor; I have never heard a conclusion to a popular song that I have found as totally satisfying as this, perhaps because when I hear it I recall the silence that always filled the room when Gretchen Cole finished singing it:
‘ “Yestreen the queen had four Maries,
This night she’ll hae but three;
There was Mary Beaton, and Mary Seaton,
And Mary Carmichael, and me.” ’
&
nbsp; The first two lines are essence of tragedy, sparely portrayed; the last two, with their beautiful sequence of real names, bring the tragedy down to earth and remind us that it was a real girl who was hanged.
I was therefore startled when Mrs. Cole told me, ‘Whenever my mother sang 173 she would tell us children the true story of Mary Hamilton, as Professor Child had told it to her, and it would make us shiver with fear.’
‘Grandmother told me the story when I was young,’ Gretchen broke in, ‘and even today when I reach the last verse tears come to my eyes. Sometimes people tell me, “You get such emotion into the last verse.” I don’t tell them it’s because Grandmother put it there with her story about the real Mary Hamilton.’
‘Who was she?’
Mrs. Cole replied, ‘Court documents from Queen Elizabeth’s time show that when Mary of Scotland was young and in France she really did have four beautiful attendants, each named Mary. But it wasn’t one of them who was hanged. It was a beautiful Scottish adventuress who went to Leningrad a century later … in the time of Peter the Great. Somehow she got to court, and some accounts say she became Peter’s mistress. At any rate, she had an illegitimate child whom she wrapped in a napkin and threw in a well. She was condemned to death, not because Peter wanted it but because he had recently issued a proclamation decreeing death to women who slew their illegitimate children.
‘The beheading was a notable affair, with Mary Hamilton dressed handsomely in her finest silks. When her head rolled in the street, the Czar picked it up, kissed it twice, then delivered a funeral oration. Then he kissed it again and threw it back into the gutter.’
In early 1968, after hard negotiation, Frederick Cole and I reached an agreement on the Fenway Park project, and to celebrate he invited me back to Brookline for a champagne dinner, to which I brought a special gift that I had picked up in London, but when we sat down to dinner I was much disappointed to find that Gretchen was not to join us. ‘She’s in New Hampshire heading one of the McCarthy offices,’ her mother said with some disgust. ‘She took the slogan “Be Clean for Gene” quite seriously and has hired a barber to give male volunteers free haircuts.’
When I said that I thought it rather refreshing to find young people concerned about politics, Mrs. Cole said, ‘Oh, I don’t mind that at all. Frederick and I are Republicans, of course, and I’m sure you are too, and I admit it seems strange to have our daughter working so hard for a Democrat. But we can adjust to that. What disturbs me is the fact that she’s dropped out of graduate school. Didn’t even attend her first classes. I think that’s a pity.’
‘She’s young,’ Cole said. ‘A year’s more maturity will be good for her.’
So that night I was not able to make my presentation, but when Gretchen came back to Boston after the thrilling McCarthy performance in New Hampshire, the family invited me over again, and I found young Gretchen, now twenty, even more refreshing and provocative than before. She was filled with stories about the New Hampshire primary: ‘President Johnson is definitely through. We’re all going out to Wisconsin … the whole team … you ought to see our spirit. I assure you, we’re going to change politics in this country. No one will ever again be able to start anything like the Vietnam war.’
You ought to de-escalate a little yourself,’ Mr. Cole said. ‘Mr. Fairbanks has a present for you.’
She now became a little girl, excited at the prospect of a gift, and when I showed her a rather large and heavy box, she clasped her fingertips to her mouth and tried to guess what it might be. I am fairly sure she could not have known what it was, for even when she removed the wrapping to uncover the heavy cardboard box inside, she was obviously perplexed. Opening the lid, she encountered wads of tissue paper and cried, ‘What is it? You’re driving me frantic.’
When the tissue was pulled away she saw the ten handsome volumes of Professor Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882–1898, bound in heavy leather by some former London owner. She had nothing to say. These books were not only one of the major accomplishments of American scholarship; they were also the work of a man who had been her grandmother’s neighbor, the inspiration of all the young balladeers in America and England who sang the haunting poetry he had rescued. This was more than a set of ten books; it was a basic testament for Gretchen’s generation.
Choosing one of the volumes at random, she leafed through the pages she knew so well from library study, and cried, ‘Here’s the one I shall sing as my thank-you letter,’ and she brought her guitar into the living room and handed me Volume IV, opened to the last page: ‘Child 113. “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie.” ’
‘It’s quite a name,’ I said.
‘A silkie is a seal.’ When I shrugged my shoulders, she said, ‘A seal that swims in the water. When he comes on land he’s transformed into a man. This seal has had a baby boy by a nursemaid he seduced. He has come to see how his son is doing.
‘ “An it sall come to pass on a simmer’s day,
When the sin shines het on evera stane,
That I will tak my little young son,
An teach him for to swim the faem.” ’
The music that accompanied these strange words was a haunting thing; you could hear the whisper of the cold Scottish sea and the mysteriousness of a time when seals and men interchanged their being. It was the kind of ballad that young people of this generation loved, for it had both the simplicity they longed for and the beauty they respected. I was reflecting on such matters while Gretchen played a minor-key transitional passage on her guitar. She then began the final verse of her song, and I was astonished at its content, quite unlike anything I had heard previously in the ballads. The seal is telling the nursemaid that after he takes his son from land and teaches him to be a good seal, the nurse will find a good life of her own with the gold that he has given her.
‘ “An thu sail marry a proud gunner,
An a proud gunner I’m sure hell be,
An the very first schot that ere he schoots,
He’ll schoot baith my young son and me.” ’
It was as if this very old ballad had foreseen the sense of tragedy that was to overtake the young people of this generation in the United States. There was nothing in the preceding verses of the ballad that prepared one for the seal’s presentiment of his death at the hands of the arbitrary gunner; it burst upon the listener with a kind of divine irrationality. I have often had a similar sense of broken sequences when discussing the draft with young men like Joe or race relations with Cato. Intuitively they perceived aspects of the future that I could not.
In succeeding months, while I worked in Boston getting the project started, I saw a good deal of the Coles, and although Gretchen was often absent working for Senator McCarthy, whenever she was in the area she kept me advised as to what was happening. I found she was a much better singer than I had supposed when I bought her the ten volumes; she sang in coffeehouses and occasionally with groups in set concerts attended by collegians from the Boston area, and whereas the others specialized in songs of protest until you would think that revolution was just around the corner, she kept to the Child ballads and was unquestionably the star of whatever concert she appeared in.
She still wore her hair in braids, preferred low-heeled brown shoes and simple dresses. She had a clear complexion which required little makeup and sufficient beauty to attract attention. Her manner was clean and unaffected; she neither mimicked the illiterate mountain accent then so popular with entertainers nor vulgarized her songs with topical allusions or sex. She kept severely to the Child text, as if the old professor might drop in at any time to check on what was being done to his handiwork. Also, as she told me one night, ‘The further back you go in selecting your words, the more likely you are to be right.’ I asked her what she meant by this, and she showed me one of her volumes. For Child 12, which was perhaps the most popular of the 305—it dealt with Lord Randal, who was poisoned by his sweetheart—there were fifteen distinct versions, inclu
ding a fine one edited by Sir Walter Scott, and she said, ‘If I used the latest, you’d find it had been all gimmicked up with touches that were supposed to improve it. You go back to the earliest version and you always find it stark and harsh and very close to human emotions. I think that’s why the kids dig them so much.’
In time I came to know some of the Child ballads rather well, but the highlight of any performance came when Gretchen announced in her soft voice, ‘I shall now sing Child 173,’ for then the audience would cheer; in the Boston area it was known that her rendition of ‘Mary Hamilton’ was tops. But I preferred Child 113, that haunting ballad of the seal’s premonition of death. She did not sing at every concert, for sometimes the mood of the audience was not right, but sometimes late at night when the crowd was composed mostly of young men worried about the war in Vietnam, she would sing this song, and the strange ending would stupefy the men, as if this clever girl from Radcliffe had penetrated their minds and dredged up the things they had really been thinking about:
‘ “An the very first schot that ere he schoots,
He’ll schoot baith my young son and me.” ’