“I have to think, Gideon. I need time.” Without waiting for his response she went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
GIDEON LEFT on an early morning plane for Tucson. Hannah took him to the airport and saw him off in near silence. He had spent the night on her sofa, alone. That morning he had been as silent as she, as if he knew there was nothing else to be said. In the departure lounge he suddenly hauled her close and kissed her hungrily.
“I’ll give you a little time, Hannah, but not much.”
“Why are you so impatient, Gideon? Because you’re not accustomed to a woman having doubts? She’s supposed to leap at the chance of having an affair with you?”
“I’m impatient because I’m scared of losing you. That should be simple enough for you to understand. Goodbye, Hannah.”
She watched at the lounge window until the jet lifted into the sky and then slowly turned and made her way out of the airport. Interstate 5 was crowded on the trip back into the city. The congestion made her uncomfortable. She seemed overly conscious of the small spaces between the Toyota and the rest of the cars around it. Alertness on the freeway was one thing: paranoid nervousness was another. She had been regaining her self-confidence in driving, Hannah thought, but there were times when she seemed to be having a relapse. When she happened to glance to the side while driving over an interchange she felt a moment of queasiness. It was a long way down if one went through the guardrail.
Deliberately she pulled her imagination back from the brink and concentrated on watching for the proper exit as the downtown highrise buildings came into view. After a moment or two she had herself back under control.
When she reached the street where her apartment building was located she parked the Toyota with a sense of relief, the same relief she always experienced these days after finishing a trip in the car. Then she made her way up the stairs, trying to take satisfaction from the fact that she hardly needed the cane at all.
The apartment seemed very empty. Hannah locked the door behind her and set down the cane. For a few minutes she stood gazing out the window. Gideon was gone again.
This time she could have gone with him. The choice had been hers. Hannah didn’t doubt that he wanted her with him for the summer. But, then, she hadn’t doubted that he had wanted her on Santa Inez.
Elizabeth Nord’s journal still lay on the desk. Slowly Hannah wandered over and sat down in front of it. Somehow, she felt certain, the answers all lay within the old, leather-bound volume. Somewhere in this book was the key she needed to make the choices that lay ahead of her.
Going with Gideon would have foreclosed on some of those choices. Hannah knew that with a sure instinct. She would not be free to choose while he was around. Gideon would fill up too much of her life, demand too much of her attention, and force her to concentrate too much on him. Nord had been right to refuse “Dear Roddy’s” proposal of marriage. Whoever Roddy was, he would have trapped her and used her. Gideon wouldn’t use Hannah in the same way, but he would use her, nevertheless.
Hannah looked down at an entry dated early in the year of 1942.
The war is coming close. I know I shall have to leave soon. But I desperately need more time here. I am beginning to worry about some discrepancies, which are occurring in the information my informants are giving me. They’re relatively minor and probably aren’t significant, but they are starting to become a concern. Why does Laneoloa give me one explanation for tasting the menstrual blood of a new cult initiate while Kanaea provides a different reason? Also, I’m beginning to doubt the emphasis on lesbianism among the group’s members. When I expressed great interest in it at the beginning of my studies, my informants gave me a tremendous amount of detailed information about the female sexual rites practiced during certain ceremonies. Yet I saw no indication of such sexual practices during the ceremony last night. I don’t understand why certain details are not coinciding properly.
The next entry was dated three days later. It read:
The islanders have decided to abandon the village and the island. I have explained to the women that there is every possibility the Japanese will be landing soon. Preparations are being made tonight to hide the sacred vessel. My informants have told me that it must not leave the island, and in this the men seem in agreement. I have recommended that it not be hidden in the village as there is too much likelihood of looting. Tonight, during a special ceremony, a location will be chosen. Damn this war. There is so much to be learned here on Revelation and I am so afraid that afterward all will be changed. Men and their idiotic notions of settling conflicts. What have they done to us this time?
The next entry was written hastily and dated a few days later:
I am on a ship headed for Hawaii. The islanders have gone their own way and I hope they will be safe. The navy has provided me with transport. I am told the Japanese took Revelation Island this morning. A few minutes ago a young man who looks as though he has already seen too much war approached me. It seems that military intelligence would like a firsthand report of the terrain on Revelation. Their information is sketchy and comes from old atlases. I suppose this means that an attempt will be made to take Revelation back from the Japanese. I cannot bear to think of the slaughter that must ensue. My poor island will be bathed in blood. I will tell this young man who already has so much age in his eyes what I can. I fear it will not do much to lessen the carnage.
Hannah stared at the page in front of her, imagining her aunt’s feelings as she had sat jotting the notes in her journal. Elizabeth Nord had known even then that nothing would ever be the same on Revelation Island. All the data she would ever have for writing The Amazons of Revelation Island was in her hands at that point. A small, unique culture would be lost to the world from that moment on, recalled only in the text of Amazons.
There were further notes, mostly hurried observations and a few last-minute recollections that Nord had obviously wanted to get down on paper before she forgot them. Hannah read them quickly, looking for the time when Nord had decided to write the book. When she found it several pages later, Hannah slowed her reading once more.
I have been going through the elaborate notes I made regarding the initiation ceremony. There is no longer any doubt in my mind about the discrepancies. At least two of my informants have given me differing explanations of the portion of the ritual in which the young girls are initiated into the cult. Is it possible they have lied to me?
Hannah skipped ahead a few paragraphs and found another notation of a discrepancy in the explanations of Nord’s female informants. It was a small point having to do with a matter of dress but it was clear that it had bothered Nord.
There is so much information to be considered. I suppose it is not at all strange that I have gotten a few things mixed up, but it is so unlike me to make a mistake of this kind. Yet why would my informants deliberately mislead me?
Time slipped past in the journals as Nord made the decision to write her book and began putting the extensive data into order. “I have come across a particularly valuable reference,” she wrote late in 1942.
It is a missionary’s journal from the last century and contains some notes on the people of Revelation Island. I am ecstatic over the discovery. Perhaps I will find information that will help substantiate some of my own findings. There may also be some details that will help me clear up some of the curious discrepancies I have noted recently.
The next entry was of a different nature:
Roddy stopped by to see me this afternoon. He has changed little during the past few months. He has made it plain that he thinks I made an error in turning down his proposal of marriage. I, on the other hand, have never been so glad of a decision in my life. He is also convinced I have wasted my time on Revelation Island.
In an entry dated the following day Hannah could almost feel the concern underlying the sentences.
I have been through the missionary’s journal and have found it most upsetting. The Reverend Helmsley als
o noted some odd discrepancies in the explanations given to him by the Revelation Islanders. His informants were all male, of course, but he speaks of his wife having made contact with some of the women and of their accounts differing markedly. I have begun to realize that because I was a woman, I did not communicate well with the men of the island. I relied heavily on the women for information. A pattern is emerging here and it makes me uneasy.
Three days later, after what was obviously intensive study, the pattern became clear to Elizabeth Nord. Hannah read the relevant passages with stunned amazement.
There is no longer any doubt. I have been a victim of my own bias. The record left by Reverend Helmsley has removed the last of my doubts. The islanders have deliberately deceived me on several occasions. I do not think it was maliciously done. Rather it is as if they simply make a practice of telling outsiders what they think they wish to hear. I was a woman who wished to find the power structure on the island centered around the females. It was probably easy enough for my informants to figure out what I wanted to hear. They then took pains to exaggerate their explanations. It is not an unheard-of phenomenon in fieldwork. I should have been alert to it. My notes are not all lies and nonsense by any means, but I am forced to reconsider my conclusions concerning the basic role of women in the social structure of the islanders. It would appear that it is not all that different from the role of women on neighboring islands. While unique in some respects, it is fairly traditional in many others.
Hannah read further, suddenly growing afraid of what she would find next.
I fear that I am faced with a decision. I can write Amazons as I originally intended, describing a fascinating culture based on female power, or I can write what appears to be the truth. If I do the latter, my book will merely be one more in a long line of studies concerning South Pacific island societies, adding little that is new or illuminating. But if I write the book as I originally intended, a great deal of good might be accomplished. I will provide a whole new view of human nature, especially the nature of women. It will astound anthropologists as nothing else has done in recent years except for Mead’s work on Samoa. Perhaps it will cause the so-called male experts to reevaluate their own biases and to view the women of other cultures with new eyes.
The decision, Elizabeth Nord concluded, was truly hers. By the end of 1943 Revelation Island had been retaken from the Japanese. As Nord had predicted, there was little left to disprove her conclusions. The islanders were scattered now, their culture forever destroyed by the forces of modern civilization. Even if they could all be successfully brought back to their village at the end of the war, there would be no way to undo the influences of modern life to which they had been exposed. Another unique pattern of society had been wiped out. That meant, as Nord realized, that no one would ever be able to contradict what she chose to write.
It is my chance to force a new view of culture into the field of anthropology. My chance to shake old beliefs and prejudices concerning the supposedly subordinate role of women in primitive societies. I am going to seize the opportunity. Once The Amazons of Revelation Island is in print no professional student of human beings will be able to take for granted that the role of women in society is a biologically determined one. This glaring exception must always give the student pause, force him or her to question his assumptions about the nature of power in any society, cause questions to be asked concerning the roles of the sexes. Once questions are being asked, all things are possible. I will write the book the way I want it written.
Hannah closed the journal with a feeling of disorientation. Elizabeth Nord had lied. She had deliberately skewed her findings to establish an anthropological myth that had lasted for years and was still in existence. And in the process she had established herself as a giant in her field.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
YOU HAD TO hand it to Aunt Elizabeth, Hannah decided, even her deceptions were practiced on a larger-than-life scale. The enormity of the Nord lie was awesome. Hannah sat stunned in the fanback chair, gazing unseeingly across the room. The journal still lay on the desk where she had left it when she’d gone to fix herself a cup of coffee.
It wasn’t coffee she needed but it seemed indecently early in the day to be pouring medicinal scotch.
The whole underlying premise of The Amazons of Revelation Island was a fabrication. For generations of college students it had been required reading, the landmark book of one of America’s most eminent anthropologists. Elizabeth Nord’s stature had been of such towering height that the carping criticism of people such as “Dear Roddy” had been generally dismissed.
Whatever had happened to poor old Roddy? Hannah thought about the man and wondered anew what he must have been like. There was no doubt that in the beginning of his association with Nord he had been a typically condescending, overbearing, patronizing male of the species academius. He had probably been intelligent enough to see the brilliance in his young associate. At first he had apparently treated her the way he would treat a precocious child. But when the child began to surpass him in accomplishments and publications, that condescending attitude had shifted into something else. He had become resentful, petty, and critical. He had even gone through a stage of trying to appropriate her future for himself by asking her to marry him. In the end Dear Roddy had drifted into relative obscurity, just one more anthropologist in an overcrowded field.
The fact that he had been right about Elizabeth Nord’s interpretations of the social structures of Revelation Island was an ironic twist of fate. Hannah wondered how he had felt as he watched Nord’s position in the academic world become unassailable.
She got up from the chair, suddenly consumed with a desire to know more about Dear Roddy. Hannah wondered how he had coped with his bitterness and the knowledge that Nord’s greatest claim to fame was based on a lie. Yanking a World War II-style bomber jacket out of the closet, she grabbed her cane and headed downstairs to the street. She needed the resources of an excellent academic library, a library that would be much more comprehensive than the one belonging to the small college where she worked.
She would take the bus to the University of Washington, Hannah decided. It was much more economical and efficient to use public transportation. The fact that it gave her an excuse not to drive the Toyota was not lost on her but she didn’t dwell on it. Driving back from the airport had been enough of an adventure for one day.
Two hours later she sat in a study carrel piled high with old anthropological journals and collected readings in the field. With the help of a reference librarian she had tracked down the scattered essays and papers that had dared to criticize Elizabeth Nord. There weren’t a great many of them that had been published since World War II but the pre-war materials provided richer digging. Finding Dear Roddy in the pile was going to take some work, but Hannah knew that at one point at least he had been associated with the same university as her aunt. In the early days they had actually collaborated on some papers.
The first reference that looked positive was a short paper done by Roderick Hamilton and Elizabeth Nord for an obscure journal that had long since ceased publication. It was a discussion of certain aspects of the building of ceremonial canoes on a small South Pacific island.
Roderick Hamilton. Sure this was “Dear Roddy,” Hannah continued her quest, finding other papers that had been published over the years. Shortly before the war her aunt’s name stopped appearing under Hamilton’s. Her own publications became more frequent while his became less and less so.
There were a couple of stinging critiques of Nord’s work by Roderick Hamilton in the 1950s, but none of them seemed to have inspired much controversy. By the late sixties there were a few pedantic pieces by him, mostly rehashes of his pre-war work. By 1970 there were no further citations.
The man had been right about Elizabeth Nord but no one had listened. Hannah could just imagine how that would have grated on him. She closed the last journal and walked back to the reference desk.
; “I’d like to see if there is an obituary of Roderick Hamilton,” she explained to the librarian. “He was an American anthropologist.”
“What university was he affiliated with?”
Hannah told her the name of the school that had been listed in Hamilton’s last paper. The librarian began reaching for several reference books on academic personnel. Ten minutes later she found the obituary. Hannah turned the book around on the desk so that she could read the short entry. There wasn’t much to it. Roderick Hamilton had died ten years earlier after a long career in anthropology. Some of his early works were cited as having been influential. None of his later work was mentioned. His greatest claim to fame was that he had collaborated with Elizabeth Nord at one time. Hamilton had been a widower when he died. He was survived by a daughter. Hannah stared at the name: Victoria Hamilton.
It was too much of a coincidence. Victoria Hamilton had to be Victoria Armitage. Frowning, Hannah went after the information she needed. It wasn’t hard to find. Victoria Hamilton had graduated with honors and the results of her early fieldwork started making its way into print shortly after she married Dr. Drake Armitage.
Good old Drake, Hannah reflected. No wonder Vicky stuck with him. He knew how to play the academic game, how to get the right kind of attention, how to make certain people know how brilliant Vicky was. He had known how to get her published. Unlike Elizabeth Nord, who had refused to ride to fame on the coattails of a husband, Vicky had chosen to marry a man who could smooth the way for her.
But, as far as Hannah knew, Victoria Armitage hadn’t resorted to creating a myth in order to establish her name.
Twist of Fate Page 25