MILLS

SUMMER MAKES ME RESTLESS- especially these clear, blue postcard days when the Chrysler Building rises in the 43rd Street canyon like a finger beckoning east toward Europe. But it isn’t Europe I’m restless for. There’s a cigarette ad I see in the subway showing a dazzling white terrace and a beautiful blue sea that I take to be the Aegean, and I can imagine draping myself and my skinny red swimsuit across a wicker chair in the sunshine of Greece and sipping a glass of retsina, and then I imagine sitting and looking across the blue and feeling restless. So Europe isn’t the answer for this, any more than cigarette smoking would be. It’s simply the old summer restlessness, which goes back to school days when I sat trapped in the classroom as innocent June lay nearby and murmured in the sunshine in the far-far-left margin of the English exam and its stupefying questions about Richard Cory and why he shot himself. He just did, that’s all, and who can say why? The world is full of sadness. Being rich and thin isn’t everything. I don’t feel like talking about it now.

Restlessness makes me think about taking a white 1960 Cadillac convertible that I don’t have and driving eighty-five miles an hour across the George Washington Bridge and into the Pocono Mountains with a can of Schlitz in one hand, the top down, and the radio playing C & W songs, and, when I come to the most beautiful stretch of blue-green forest, throwing the beer can into the trees. I have never dropped any trash anywhere—not on purpose—out of respect for others and also because I was afraid that if I did Thoreau would appear and pick up my jujube wrapper and put it in his pocket and say, his large, sad eyes meeting mine, “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?” I don’t know the answer to that one, either.

Restlessness leads me over to the office window, where there is nothing new to look at, and that makes me restless to find a new window. I take the long walk to the end of the hall, drink a drink of water, and come back, hoping the exercise will shake down this looseness and jumpiness, and I sit again. But on one long walk last Monday I turned right and rode the elevator down to the ground and hit the street. I walked west toward the river and angled south and got my car out of storage. It runs pretty well, considering that I haven’t driven it more than ten miles in the past three months. I aimed it toward the West Side Highway and up the Taconic State Parkway with the radio on. I have a license to drive, and on Monday I just felt like using it. Heading up the graceful old Parkway, its progression of sensuous turns and dips shaped in an era when driving was considered romantic and fun, like dancing, I was feeling considerably calmer when the Mills Brothers came over the air singing “Gentle on My Mind.” In a bright tempo, their inimitable honey-tone voices sang, “It’s knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk that makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch.” Except for the lyrics, it sounded like a swing standard from 1936.

Thinking of the four stately black gentlemen in their shiny show-suits, their hair slicked back with pomade, swaying and snapping their fingers, their steady smiles and smooth voices, I had trouble imagining that any of the Mills Brothers had ever owned a sleeping bag, let alone stashed it behind somebody’s couch. Their lives always appeared to be sedentary and committed lives, devoted to entertaining us. No Mills ever shared his problems with us on stage or his concerns about the environment. No Mills gave an interview in which he confessed a dread of fame, a confusion about his musical goals, or a fear that his vision had gone stale. When they sang on the Perry Como show, they never struck me as the least bit restless or dissatisfied, any more than Perry himself did. So it was revealing to hear them sing about not being “shackled by forgotten words and bonds and the ink stains that have dried upon some line” and the verse about wandering across the wheat fields and junkyards and highways and the train yards and the back roads. They made restlessness sound like a song they had to sing in order to have the album seem contemporary enough to satisfy their record producer. Hunkering in a train yard feeling free and waiting for a freight to come along was not part of the Mills Brothers’ mystery of life, which had little to do with highways, either, and much to do with standing in a close semicircle and making pure four-part harmony. Same here, I thought. Restlessness doesn’t suit me, either. I like to be squeezed a little, like a middle Mills, and hear my voice gently throbbing and bending in long, tender parallels with the others, not out here on a limb alone. An hour’s run up the Taconic seemed to settle me down pretty well, and I turned around and came back to the beautiful city.