“He insisted on wearing them,” she mouthed.
Though she hadn’t talked to anyone in person other than Cal in months, Julia could tell every word she said just by looking at her lips. Still she didn’t smile fast enough. The woman’s face grew pinched, chastened. She looked away.
Cal arrived back at their seats as the house lights flashed, signaling the symphony was about to begin.
“What on earth is everyone in this place wearing,” Julia said to him. “Has the whole world gone batshit crazy?”
He whispered into her ear in his lowest bass tone: “You’re in for a surprise, and a treat.”
Members of the orchestra took their seats onstage. The room filled with the cacophony of strings warming up and being tuned. To Julia it was a mash of sound and the lightest touch projecting onto her skin. But they were sitting so close she could see as the dust of rosin lifted off the bows of the violins. She could feel the low vibrations of the cellos and basses projecting slow and wavy into the crowd on the balls of her feet. The conductor came out onstage. He, too, was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt along with his traditional tuxedo pants. Now it truly felt to Julia as if she was going crazy—in the year she’d been holed up in the house had everyone lost their sartorial minds? She turned to her husband.
“The Dead,” Cal whispered. The strings started in, violins and violas bowing slow and wide from their elbows. The upper registers were a thin syrup too far above her range but after thirty long seconds or so Julia heard, felt, the familiar bassline. Bump-dah, bumba-dah-bum-dah-bum. Bump-dah, bumba-dah-bum-dah-bum.
They were playing “Dark Star.”
Of all things, Cal had taken her to the Meyerhoff to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra play Grateful Dead covers.
Julia drew her right arm in tight to her side so it would not be touching Cal’s. This was at once the worst and the best gift she could have been given. The best because she was out of her house on a Friday night in Baltimore, because she was sitting in a room full of people and not out on an errand and not being forced to think about her son, and she was not feeling the agoraphobia she’d always felt. But it was the worst because she could not think of a cultural event she would rather see less. A symphonic adaptation of the Dead! It was the least revolutionary thing she could imagine. Taking the wild sound out of the wild and trapping it in this spaceship, in this cage—one of her favorite novels of the early seventies referred to museums as “centers of art detention.” Here she was in a center of sound detention. A place where music went to live out its dying days.
“Dark Star” drew into a crescendo she could feel on her skin, the tenor notes like pinpricks all up and down her skin, and she looked behind her. In rows all the way to the back of the Meyerhoff old people—old people! Not aging parents, not youthful middle-agers but old people, people with liver spots on their arms and far more salt than pepper in their hair and their aging beards—bobbed their heads and turned and smiled at each other. Could she give in to the pleasure of it? Could she let Cal have the ease he needed?
For the next couple of songs she did her best. She looked at the woodwinds as they puffed their cheeks out, watched as the indifferent basses took a moment to turn pages and rest their bulging forearms. She tried to forget that they were Grateful Dead covers being played and just allow it to be elemental. Broken down into their component parts these songs were just notes and chords coming together to make a wall of sounds that projected out from the stage and onto her body and for a moment Julia was feeling it, she was moving in time with it, she was overwhelmed by the bass she felt humming in her feet so that she took off her shoes and let the balls of her bare feet rest on the cool floor of the symphony hall and buzz up into her body, and something quieted in her for the first time in as long as she could remember. There was a peace and even an elation that surpassed anything she’d felt when she was down on M Street earlier that week. She couldn’t identify it, couldn’t place it until she realized what it was: she was not thinking about Mark. She was not fretting, she was not worrying. She was not thinking she saw Cassie Black in a Dean and DeLuca’s. She was in an open space, in public, not thinking about her son. She’d returned to the inexorable flow of time.
She turned to Cal and he was bobbing his head now and he turned to her and he mouthed, “‘Scarlet Begonias’!” The song finished and it was quiet in the hall. She could not hear the crinkling of programs and the low hushed chatter of everyone in the room but she gave herself over to it, she awaited the next song.
The violins picked up their bows and the tie-dye-T-shirted conductor lifted his arms, elbows strung up as if marionetted from the ceiling high above them.
The basses and cellos were quiet and the violins bowed their melodies and Julia listened harder than she’d listened in months, in years, and all at once as they played it came over her what they were playing.
She could hear the melody in her head when the chorus hit and the bass started in on its pizzicato and then the words were in her head. Lyrics. She knew them in her heart before they materialized in her mind: a narrator’s lamentation at turning twenty-one in prison, serving the start of a life sentence—and acknowledging all along that his mother had pled with him to do better, to get right. “Mama Tried.” Of all the hundreds of songs the Dead had covered in their career, here it was. It was symphonic, toothless, and interpreted by the BSO, but undeniably they were playing Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”
In her head she could hear Bob Weir singing it. She looked at Cal. She could see he didn’t know what song it was. He was wholly ignorant of what was happening in her mind, what she knew. He bobbed his head like the rest, all around him, this room full of people who were focused on the music and were not focused on her, this room full of not aging hippies but old people, people who had decades before fought their fights and strove their striving and now were in a position to sit in a concert hall on a Friday night in Baltimore and let the teeth be extracted from the music that mattered to them most, the life be extracted from them. Just like the music, they were all going to die one day and be removed from the inexorable stream of time, and she was, too, they were sitting in that hall, many of them retired, at rest, and she figured while she sat there in the Meyerhoff Hall, at rest, too, her husband next to her and her son having been out of her head if only for a moment, in the time they had left they might as well enjoy it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
How lucky to work with some of the finest people in letters. Brettne Bloom is the best agent in the land. She provided invaluable reads over years. George Witte is the most thoughtful, insightful editor a writer could dream up, along with Dori Weintraub and Sara Thwaite.
My colleagues and brilliant students at Bryn Mawr College have provided support and a fertile environment for writing. The folks at the Jewish Book Council have given and given and given. Laura Farmer, Miciah Bay Gault, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, and Eric Rosenblum gave me useful reads, as ever. And of course none of it without all the support from my wonderful wife, Erin Torday.
ALSO BY DANIEL TORDAY
The Last Flight of Poxl West
The Sensualist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL TORDAY is a two-time National Jewish Book Award recipient and winner of the 2017 Sami Rohr Choice Award for his novel The Last Flight of Poxl West. Torday’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, Esquire, and Tin House, on NPR, and has been honored in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. He is the Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Book One
Part One: Cassie
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: Mark
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three: Julia
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Book Two
Fugue: Boomer Missive #1
Part Four: Cassie
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Fugue: Boomer Missive #3
Part Five: Mark
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Six: Julia
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Part Seven: Mark
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Part Eight: Julia
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Part Nine: Cassie
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Part Ten: Counterpoint
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Acknowledgments
Also by Daniel Torday
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BOOMER1. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Torday. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design and illustration by Jonathan Bush
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Torday, Daniel, author.
Title: Boomer1: a novel / Daniel Torday.
Description: First edition.|New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018748|ISBN 9781250191793 (hardcover)|ISBN 9781250191809 (ebook)
Subjects:|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3620.O58747 B66 2018|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018748
eISBN 9781250191809
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First Edition: September 2018