The Golden Dream by Stephen Birmingham

Author:Stephen Birmingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504041065
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

13

Three Ryes

In Rye, New York, on a balmy June night, the students of Rye High School were presenting Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. The auditorium was filled with proud and expectant friends and parents. The boys and girls had worked hard on their material, and had rehearsed for many weeks. So had the stage and lighting crew, and the musicians. The members of the football team had been convinced that it was not effeminate to serve as male dancers and chorus boys. A white girl had been persuaded to accept a black youth as a dancing partner, though not without difficulty. She seemed to feel that she had been singled out for an unpleasant task, and that the assignment carried with it a certain loss of social status. Still, as she danced she smiled bravely.

The sentimental and familiar music and lyrics (“Climb ev’ry mountain … ford ev’ry stream …”) contained no surprises, the voices for the most part were thin and untrained, and the performances were decidedly amateurish. And yet the youth and good looks and innocent enthusiasm of the performers on the stage—the pink-cheeked boys, and the girls with their clean, swinging hair—managed effortlessly to create the illusion that one was seeing and hearing something wonderfully fresh and new. It was as though the musical had finally, and quite accidentally, found the perfect cast and company to perform it. By the time the curtain fell on the first-act finale, the audience was moved to tears and the houselights came up with such a golden rush that it was possible to be suffused with a feeling of awe and faith in the promises and prospects of today’s young people.

During the intermission, however, excited whispers brought news of an episode that had taken place during the performance, and within fifty feet of the auditorium. A thirteen-year-old girl, taking advantage of her parents’ absence at the play, had pinched a bottle of vodka from their liquor closet, drunk most of it, and then passed out in the grass. A group of high school boys, who had also been drinking, had taken this opportunity to unbutton her shirt and pull down her jeans and panties. They had not raped her, exactly. They had “fiddled” with her, and finally, tiring of this, they had run off and left her, unconscious and half naked, lying under a bush. There a cruising policeman had spotted her and transported her to a hospital where she was being treated for alcohol poisoning and was having her stomach pumped out.

Immediately, the girl’s distraught parents left the auditorium for the hospital (which was able to release her the following day). The news had an unsettling effect on the rest of the audience as it lingered in the lobby waiting for the bell to signal the beginning of the second act. Most of them knew the girl and her parents. Her parents were not quite of Rye’s elite, but ranked socially somewhere between the elite and the middle class. They were, as they say, people who were known.

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