Free Equal Affections by David Leavitt Page B

away as fast as he could.
    And soon enough there was another boyfriend, this time named Karl Mathias, and another manager, a professional with offices in a skyscraper in San Francisco. The manager was named Tina Tompkins, and under her tutelage April got gigs at big music festivals, sharing stages with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. She traveled to Indochina on tour. The family could hardly keep up with her successes. Still, her attempts to get a contract with a major recording company persistently failed.
No More Vietnams,
her first album, was finally released by a near-bankrupt independent studio that operated out of someone’s garage. Louise and Nat had to lend money to the producers to pay the final bills. For months that year Louise had to park her car on the streetbecause their own garage was filled with boxes and boxes of the album; Danny would walk up and down the streets of the neighborhood, selling it door to door to neighbors, ex-teachers, April’s friends from high school. It was a shoddy-looking thing, with a badly angled blackand-white photograph of April on the cover, but even Aunt Eleanor said the songs were wonderful.
    Danny was, by this time, becoming more and more involved in April’s career, skipping school (to his parents’ chagrin) so that he might attend her concerts. Often he’d help out backstage, and late at night, at parties, smoke marijuana with April and her ever-increasing retinue of musicians, technicians, boyfriends, and of course women friends who worshiped her, who wanted more than anything to be like her. Another album—
Freedom
—was released, and this time it easily earned its keep; with great ceremony, April presented Nat and Louise with a check reimbursing her old debt from
No More Vietnams
. She was at her peak.
    And yet, somehow, she was also too late. Danny thought, in retrospect, that they all suspected this, at those late-night parties after the concerts. It was by now 1977; the war was finally over—Danny remembered Louise crying over the baby lifts—and with its ungraceful conclusion, the spirit, the energy seemed somehow to have been sucked out of the protest movement. Had she begun two or three years earlier, perhaps, April could have been a mainstream star on a par with Joan Baez, say, or Joni Mitchell. But she was born late for that; her committed audience, even in 1977, was beginning to abandon her, retreating to business schools and law schools and medical schools. Finally she was left with a following that was loyal but terribly small—the fierce, diminishing nucleus of revolution, the truly committed few who had long before pledged themselves to the hard work of keeping up the light through the dark period many were already predicting ahead. The vision of these people was essentially fatalistic; revolution for them was hard work against terrible odds; there was nothing fun about it. Real revolution, they believed, occurred underground, in corners, during the dark night of oppression.
    So, with the end of the war and the days of Berkeley glory, these hardy souls returned to the woodwork within which they had always functioned best, and were in truth probably relieved to do so. They specialized not in promoting mass revolution, but in small-scale advocacy of social change. This was April’s audience, and as a rule it was nota very glamorous bunch: sallow-faced men with black-framed glasses and long, thin ponytails the color of wine falling down their backs; and their women—hale, wiry-haired, with scarves tied around their heads like Bulgarian peasants. They had babies with names like Justin or Molly, not Rainbow or God, and they carried them in slings worn over their breasts, and breast-fed them till they were six. They were not particularly interested in music as art, only as propaganda, only as an instrument of social change. The wild parties that had always followed April’s concerts gave way to quiet potluck dinners in