by James Morrow
“‘Know your own wonder—worship it with me,’” he recited, addressing Chloe, then turned to Malcolm and said, “A great responsibility lies upon your shoulders, Reverend. You are charged with making your bride know her own wonder.”
“I already know it,” Chloe protested.
“My darling, you know the marvel of the theatrical arts and the magnificence of the Tree of Life,” said Malcolm, “but your own wonder still eludes you.”
Solange cupped Chloe’s jaw in her hands and administered her most piercing sea-witch gaze. “I hereby require you to have an exceptionally happy life, Mrs. Chadwick, though I suspect you will remain an object of my adoration for many years to come.”
* * *
Like a ray of pure and perfect possibility streaming forth from Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, a glorious realization flowed into Granville Heathway’s brain. By his calculation, young Bertram would arrive forty-eight hours hence, on the 5th of September, the very day that the dear boy had come into the world. Moreover, the perfect birthday gift lay to hand: eight gifts actually—the pigeon missives Bertram had sent from Constantinople and Paestum, each destined to become a chapter in an enthralling memoir, irresistible to any serious publisher in London or New York.
On the pretext that he wished to write a treatise preserving the ornithological knowledge he’d acquired whilst turning his pigeons into circus performers, Granville cajoled a stack of foolscap from Dr. Earwicker, then sat down at his escritoire and got to work. Hour by laborious hour, he transmogrified the dispatches, converting them from his son’s infinitesimal scrawl into his own neat hand, sustaining himself throughout the arduous task by eating the Book of Genesis.
Shortly after ten o’clock on the morning of the fifth, he copied out the final sentence, “Schopenhauer took leave of me, being much in need of sleep.” According to Bertram’s last communiqué, he would be in Warwickshire by five o’clock, which meant that the boy would indeed receive the gift on his twenty-sixth birthday. In considering what to call the book, Granville rejected Mustafa Reshid’s playful confection, Hookahlucinations (too pleased with itself) and also Teilhard’s poetic phrase, The Axis of Eternity (hopelessly obscure). Eventually he settled on Decrypting the Descent of Man.
“Happy birthday, son!” declared Granville as a youthful figure (more weathered than when he’d left for Constantinople but still unmistakably Bertram) strode into the cell. “On the morning you came into the world, I felt blessed by every angel in Heaven.”
“Dearest Father, how gratifying to see you looking so well!”
Granville and Bertram indulged in a prolonged embrace.
“I must credit my vigor to Scripture,” said Granville. “Two days ago I started at the beginning, eating my way from Eden to Jehovah’s curse on Ham—Ham the son of Noah, I mean, not the pig meat, though evidently our Creator is equally contemptuous of swine flesh and Ham’s descendants. This morning I consumed Leviticus.”
“If you want me to have a happy birthday, Father, you must promise to drop God from your diet.” Bertram gestured towards the dovecote. “Eight birds, splendid—all my messages got through. At the end of the week I shall travel to Oxford, there to present Lord Woolfenden with Doktor Schopenhauer’s letter.”
“Tell me, Bertram,” asked Granville, “when on Crete did you perchance encounter the Minotaur?” Apprehending his son’s woebegone face, he added, “They’re everywhere, you know, Minotaurs. We’ve got one in the cellar.”
“Please, sir. Mother will stop visiting if you persist in saying things like that.”
Granville frowned, inflating his lower lip into a pout. “I have a gift for you!” Retrieving the manuscript from its hiding place behind the dovecote, he deposited all seventy-two pages, plus the title sheet, in his son’s hands. “Voilà!”
“Well, well, what have we here?” said Bertram with affected delight. “It seems to be a book. Decrypting the Descent of Man. My, my.”
“It’s your book, son. I transcribed all eight messages, so they might be read without a quizzing-glass. I daresay, you’ll find a publisher in a trice.”
Perplexity shadowed Bertram’s face. “I sent you no more than two hundred words altogether. This stack contains dozens of pages.”
“You wrote in the tiniest hand imaginable.”
“How could my brief messages undergo so spectacular a transformation?”
“Don’t you like your gift, son?”
“I like it, Father, but I don’t understand it,” said Bertram, leafing through the manuscript. “What’s this business about a monk named Mendel?”
“You don’t remember Gregor Mendel? He traveled to the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin from the year 1864.”
“During my sojourn I occasionally visited Yusuf Effendi’s establishment, but I met no monks there, certainly none from the—uh—future.”
“What about a twentieth-century scientific mystic called Teilhard de Chardin?”
“The name is not familiar to me.”
“The British crystallographer Dr. Franklin? She made daguerreotypes of God’s ideas, hence the helices on my wall. She was dying of a malignancy. You grew fond of her.”
“Your helices are beautiful. I had no such encounter.”
Granville sucked the insides of his cheeks, drawing the spongy tissues into the void above his tongue. Slowly he paced his cell, following an ellipse marked by Bertram at one focus and the dovecote at the other. “I shall never get well,” he moaned, tears coursing down his face. “I shall never be more than my disease.”
“Oh, my poor distracted father.” Now Bertram, too, was weeping. “Know that in your time you brightened the lives of countless parishioners. You visited them when they were sick, clothed them when they were naked, fed them when hungry, cheered them when despondent.”
“Someone should start a religion based on such principles.”
“Tell me more about your Minotaur.”
“He’s really not so terrible a creature,” said Granville, daubing his tears with his sleeve. “He’s merely lonely. My fellow madmen are loath to befriend a pagan chimera.”
“Then we shall become the Minotaur’s friend.”
“Do you mean that?”
Bertram said, “Quite so. I’ll ask Dr. Quelp to let us visit the cellar—unless you fear we’d get lost in the labyrinth.”
“That maze is devilishly complex,” sighed Granville, nodding. “We’d best avoid it. The Minotaur will understand. Happy birthday, son. Or did I say that already?”
* * *
What most astonished Chloe about Algernon’s choice of Oxford abode was its general want of luridness and its marked deficiency in the grotesque. Given her twin’s affection for decadence, she thought perhaps he’d purchased an abandoned brothel on the outskirts of the city or a shuttered abbey frequented by itinerant vampires. Instead Three Manor Place proved to be a staid and respectable town house situated on the banks of the Holywell Mill Stream. Were it not for Algernon’s membership in the Shelley Society, just around the corner, she might have worried that his environment had become so wholesome that his health would deteriorate, shocked by this assault on his customary dissolution.
Stomach a-flutter, she strolled through the garden gate, Malcolm at her side, and rapped on the front door. When this gesture met with neither footfalls, voices, nor barking, she proceeded to the back lawn, a grassy tract hedged with boxwood and bathed in the beams of a surprisingly warm September sun. Algernon and Papa were engaged in a croquet match, along with two Oxonians already known to Chloe—Lord Woolfenden and his mistress, Lady Isadora—plus a sunburnt young man and a plump cleric, the latter being, of all people (or so Malcolm asserted), Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
The instant Chloe saw her father’s aged but agile form staring in bewilderment at his recently roqueted ball, she knew that the Transmutationist Club’s odyssey from the docks of Plymouth to the gaming tables of Manáos—that farrago of angry protestors, tropical hurricanes, rickety bo
ats, suffocating heat, nasty sand flies, and voracious mosquitoes—had been worth every attendant hardship. As she and Phineas embraced beside the mill stream, tears rolling down their cheeks like raindrops healing a parched farm, it seemed to her that (per Mr. Browning) the lark was on the wing, the snail on the thorn, the hillside dew-pearled—and a great deal was right with the world. Should Phineas ever again find himself incarcerated in a workhouse whilst facing debtors’ prison, redeemable only at a cost of £2,000, she would immediately look about for a band of rakehells offering a large cash prize to anyone who could prove the Earth flat, the moon inhabited by Epicureans, or everyone in Lord Russell’s cabinet a werewolf.
“Praise Heaven for my daughter’s love of adventure and my son’s luck at cards,” said Phineas, addressing Chloe in a hoarse but cheery voice. His hands, though callused, were free of workhouse blisters, and he’d gained at least a stone in weight. “My dear children have snatched me from the depths of Perdition and deposited me on the shores of Elysium.”
“From which place, Papa, you must promise to go a-wandering no more.”
Brother and sister were equally forthcoming in their sentiments, Algernon extolling Chloe for her choice of spouse and also her decision to withdraw from the contest. They broke their embrace, then drifted towards a freshly painted wooden pavilion, where Papa was taking tea with Bishop Wilberforce, Lord Woolfenden, Lady Isadora, and the sunburnt young man. Drawing within earshot of a conversation between her husband and her father, Chloe overheard Malcolm apologize for not obtaining Phineas’s permission ere marrying his daughter.
“But with the Apogee’s company in so festive a mood,” said Malcolm, “and Captain Pritchard eager to perform the ceremony, I decided that the apple of opportunity was too ripe to leave unplucked.”
“Although I never imagined Chloe being plucked by a vicar, you seem a decent enough chap to me,” said Phineas. “Welcome to that consortium of dreamers and zounderkites called the Bathurst family.”
“Actually, I’m an ex-vicar,” said Malcolm. “The horrors of Amazonia took half my faith away, and the other half succumbed to a treatise concerning descent with modification.” He turned to the bishop and said, “I knew that my gamester brother-in-law had joined the Shelley Society, but I never imagined you becoming a rakehell, Sam.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Wilberforce. “But now that the contest is over, I see no reason we Oxonians can’t all be friends.”
“It’s over?” said an astonished Chloe.
“Hello there, Mrs. Chadwick,” said Wilberforce. “We meet at last. By Hallowborn’s account, you went down with the Equinox. I’m pleased to infer he was misinformed.”
“It’s over?” persisted Chloe, touching Wilberforce’s sleeve.
“Hallowborn returned from the Encantadas bearing a startling theological insight,” the bishop continued, ignoring her question. “Contrary to the General Synod’s original speculations, the archipelago boasts a peculiar harmony. It’s not the Garden of Eden, but neither is it Satan’s pied-à-terre.”
“Over?” wailed Chloe. “As of when? Who won?”
“During the past three months my friends and I could not but notice that the competition no longer enthralled us,” Lord Woolfenden explained. “Then Mr. Dalrymple told us he’d failed to find the ark, which further dampened our spirits. Finally, three days ago”—he indicated the young man—“this splendid fellow arrived bearing a message from the world’s greatest philosopher. Thanks to Doktor Schopenhauer’s arguments, we now understand that the God question cannot be resolved rationally, and so we ended the game.”
“What about the ten thousand pounds?” asked Chloe.
“We’ll spend it on ourselves,” said Woolfenden. “With each passing year, depravity grows more costly to sustain. Later this month I’ll summon that Popplewell fellow from the Evening Standard and tell him God’s been reprieved. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you.”
“And I’m sure I won’t want to talk to him,” said Chloe.
“Did you return with any animals in tow?” asked Lady Isadora. “I’m afraid they won’t do you much good. Bobo and I apologize for whatever inconvenience we may have caused you.”
“The Apogee arrived in Plymouth sans reptiles and birds,” said Chloe, “but I did bring back a superb specimen of husband.”
“So you found no creatures illustrative of your theory?” asked Woolfenden.
“Au contraire, Your Lordship, Galápagos offers an embarrassment of such riches. But after deploying the Tree of Life by way of preventing a mad American expatriate from hanging two of my friends, I realized I’d grown sick of the whole wearisome business of killing God.”
“That is not a sentence one hears every day,” noted the mysterious young man, bestowing an elfin smile on Chloe. “Will someone accord me the pleasure of an introduction?”
“Bertram, meet Mrs. Chadwick, formerly of the Albion Transmutationist Club,” said Algernon. “Chloe, meet Mr. Heathway, late of the Mayfair Diluvian League.”
“Delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Chloe as she and Mr. Heathway shook hands. “Do I correctly surmise that last spring found you scrambling up Mount Ararat?”
“I was obliged to remain in Constantinople,” Mr. Heathway replied, “smoking hashish whilst dispatching homing pigeons to my poor lunatic father—formerly a Down Village parson, presently a resident of Wormleighton Sanitarium.”
“That, too, is not a sentence one hears every day,” noted Chloe. “Are you now an Oxonian?”
“At some point during my absence, my employers at St. Giles Grammar School began to despair of my return, so they gave the post to another,” said Mr. Heathway. “On the bright side, the Shelley Society was so grateful to have their disenchantment vindicated by Doktor Schopenhauer’s essay, they have granted me rooms at Alastor Hall until I find employment.”
“My generosity has its limits,” said Woolfenden to Chloe. “Having abandoned your quest in medias res, you owe the Shelley Society three hundred pounds.”
“The very sum you owe me from last night’s game,” said Algernon, pitching Woolfenden a grin.
“Then we shall consider your sister’s debt settled,” said Woolfenden.
“Tell me, Mr. Heathway, do you expect your father will ever be released from the madhouse?” asked Chloe.
“Alas, I see no cure on the horizon,” said Bertram.
“A Down Village parson, was he?” said Chloe. “It happens that I once worked as zookeeper to a County Kent landholder. My employer’s wife was in your father’s congregation.”
“You speak of Mrs. Darwin,” said Mr. Heathway. “She was forever trying to get her husband to attend Sunday services at St. Mary’s.”
“No, her name was Mrs. Caedmon,” said Chloe, offering the young man a furtive wink.
“Finished!” cried Phineas, indicating the spire he’d just constructed from a dozen lumps of sugar. “And lo, the ants of Albion built a great altar to their candied god, higher even than the Tower of Babel.”
“Most amusing,” said Wilberforce, unamused, before turning to Chloe. “There’s a question I’ve always meant to ask a transmutationist. Do the apes generally appear on the grandfather’s side of a person’s family or on the grandmother’s side?”
“I’m bored, Bobo,” said Lady Isadora to Woolfenden. “Everyone here is so tediously droll.”
“You’re always bored.”
“To begin with, Your Grace,” said Chloe to Wilberforce, “as with every other creature on planet Earth, my descent involved four grandparents, not two. When I look back further, I find eight ancestors, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. It all gets very complicated very quickly, until we’re knee-deep in that stew of relentless pressures, incessant couplings, and incalculable quantities of death that makes evolution by natural selection so plausible a hypothesis.”
“So you say,” grumbled Wilberforce.
“For what it’s worth, Your Lordship,” said Malcolm
to Woolfenden, “I disagree with Schopenhauer that the God question cannot be resolved rationally. Now and forever, Mrs. Chadwick’s theory remains the bête noire of theism.”
“Oh, so it’s still Mrs. Chadwick’s theory, is it?” said Wilberforce. “As you may recall, Malcolm, I’ve always been a skeptic on that point.”
“I shan’t pretend the Tree of Life sprang full-blown from my brow,” Chloe told the bishop, “but I’m not at liberty to divulge my collaborator’s identity.”
“With the contest now defunct, the point is moot,” said Wilberforce, lathering his hands with phantom soap. “Malcolm, I assume that, given your present godless state, you have no desire to mount the pulpit again. Please know that, should your faith ever return, I shall help you find a new parish.”
“If that offer is your way of suborning me from telling all I know about the Great Winnowing, I shan’t swallow the bait,” Malcolm informed the bishop. “That said, I’m willing to ascribe your plot against Galápagos to a momentary lapse in judgment.”
“Thank you,” said Wilberforce with appreciable chagrin. “You are a gracious atheist indeed.”
“I know little of graciousness, but I fear my atheism is a permanent condition.”
“Since you’re evidently leaving the clergy for good,” said Phineas to Malcolm, “it behooves me to ask how you intend to support my daughter.”
“In fact, I have a scheme,” said Malcolm. “It involves not only myself but also my dear wife and, if he’s amenable, Mr. Heathway here. My education equipped me with a grasp of Latin and Aristotelian logic. Mrs. Chadwick, meanwhile, speaks a passable French and knows a thing or two about zoology. As for young Bertram”—he fixed his gaze on the former ark hunter—“evidently he’s no stranger to the classroom. You can all imagine what I’m about to propose.”
“That we start a school?” said Bertram.