The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  Although Londa was twenty minutes late for class the next morning, she arrived bearing the promised demonstration: the prototype of Largesse, a Monopoly-like game of her own design, complete with tokens, chits, chance cards, a spinner, and a posterboard rectangle on which she’d drawn the continent of Benthamia. Largesse could be enjoyed by two, three, or four players, each of whom assumed the role of a benevolent dictator ruling his own nation-state of nine million citizens. During any given round, the participant made a well-informed and charitable decision that he believed would promote the famous Utilitarian goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” A typical winning ratio: 8,999,985 happy citizens, fifteen unhappy citizens. Another normally successful combination: 8,999,990 happy citizens, ten unhappy citizens. Any monarch who could ultimately claim 8,999,999 happy citizens and one unhappy citizen automatically won the game.

  “Haven’t you left out an important possibility?”

  “Nine million happy citizens on the nose?” Londa replied.

  “Indeed.”

  “Ah, but you see, in the universe of Largesse, there must always be at least one innocent victim. You might say that’s the whole point.”

  We traded acerbic grins. Londa continued to summarize the rules. As the game progressed, each Largesse player-king acquired a hand of cards that specified exactly what those citizens identified as “unhappy” were enduring just then. A person who ended up on the wrong side of charity in a Benthamian nation-state might be a mother lacking the wherewithal to have her son treated for leukemia—or the sick child himself—or a starving alcoholic living in a cardboard box under a bridge—or a slave with an iron manacle around his neck and an overseer’s whip on his back—or a five-year-old girl whose parents had locked her in a freezing woodshed and fed her nothing but sawdust and dog shit. Londa had written one hundred and thirty such scenarios.

  “So, Mason, do I understand your critique of Bentham or don’t I?” she asked.

  “I think you understand it better than I do.”

  “Hedonism, anyone?” Quetzie said.

  “I got the freezing child from Dostoyevsky,” Londa said.

  It occurred to me that, ruthless and unprincipled as the universe of Largesse might be, Edwina had failed to attain even that impoverished plane of morality. The greatest good for the greatest number? Edwina’s demented dream had required for its realization four genetically identical sisters of four different ages, and yet she’d sought the greatest good for only one of those Dasein, herself. As any serious Utilitarian would tell her, it simply didn’t compute.

  Chapter 6

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON Henry appeared at Laguna Zafira driving the most pathetic automobile I’d ever seen this side of a junkyard, its chassis as pocked as Swiss cheese, its engine clattering like a garbage disposal devouring a fork. Evidently it had been a Volvo at one time. Brock lounged in the backseat, reading the Key Largo Times. The miserable vehicle, Henry informed me, was on loan from Edwina, and I immediately recalled an observation once made by my sociology professor at Villanova. In America the transcendently wealthy, the out-of-sight aristocracy—a population to which Edwina clearly belonged—didn’t give a damn what sorts of broken-down cars they drove.

  “You might say our new recruit is on loan from Edwina, too,” Henry said, indicating his passenger, a slender, fortyish, woman of African descent with sculpted features and café-au-lait skin. She flashed me a warm croissant of a smile. Henry elaborated that he and Edwina had been waiting on the pier when Captain López’s cabin cruiser sailed into the Bahía de Flores two hours earlier. Before Jordan Frazier could disembark, Henry had announced that no serious discussion would occur between Edwina and Yolly’s prospective tutor until the latter had spoken with us—unless, of course, Edwina wanted Donya and Londa to learn that their mother was really their twin sister. Edwina had then accused Henry of blackmail, and Henry had replied that blackmail was a very good word for it.

  I welcomed Jordan to my humble cottage, supplied everyone with Mexican beer and Nyonnaise olives, then led the way to the rear deck with its expansive view of the lagoon. The air was stifling and muggy, as if the entire island were suffering from a low-grade fever. Two chubby green frogs responded to our intrusion by croaking indignantly and jumping into the water.

  The more Jordan spoke about herself, the more obvious it became that Edwina could hardly have picked a better mentor for Yolly. A Montreal-born educator with a master’s degree in child development, Jordan had been variously employed as a guidance counselor at a middle school in Alexandria, a riding instructor at a day camp in Silver Spring, and the associate editor of a classy but short-lived “parenting skills” magazine called Wonderkids. She hoped one day to acquire a Ph.D. in “knowledge building,” a discipline that “doesn’t quite exist yet” but whose founding father was her intellectual hero and fellow Canadian, Dr. Carl Bereiter, from whom she’d learned that “whatever the human mind is, it’s not a container.”

  For the next hour, Henry and Brock unspooled the story of Yolly Sabacthani: her passionless conception, mechanized gestation, hothouse education, tabula rasa conscience. Throughout the presentation I scrutinized Jordan’s ever-shifting facial expressions. To judge from her gaping mouth and furrowed brow, the chances of her joining our dubious company lay somewhere between abysmal and nonexistent.

  “So there you have it,” Henry said, squeezing Jordan’s hand. “Nancy Drew and the Secret of Blood Island. What do you think, lovely lady?”

  “What do I think?” Jordan said, narrowing her eyes. “I think your Dr. Sabacthani is a lunatic.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” Brock said.

  “I also think I should take the first boat home,” Jordan said.

  “We’ve all had the same impulse,” Henry said.

  “Hubris Academy, where angels fear to teach,” I said.

  “But I still wish we could talk you into staying,” Brock said.

  “No way,” she said.

  “None at all?” I said.

  “None.” Jordan grinned obliquely and offered us a sly wink. “However, there’s a distinct possibility I can talk me into staying.”

  I laughed and said, “You seem like a very persuasive person.”

  “I’ll bet you could convince Vlad the Impaler to take up knitting,” Brock said.

  “Point one, you folks seem like my kind of oddballs,” Jordan said. “Point two, the city girl is enchanted by these tropical surroundings. Point three, if I were to back out now, Edwina would probably replace me with an incompetent.”

  “An utter doofus,” Henry said.

  “A complete chowderhead,” Brock added.

  “Yolly deserves better,” I said.

  “Okay, gentlemen, deal me in,” Jordan said. “I’ll take the whole damn package. The health plan, the stock options, the Hubris Academy sweatshirt.” She sighed expansively. “The responsibility.”

  “What about the duplicity?” I said.

  “For the time being, I’ll take that, too,” Jordan said. “Yolly’s an amnesiac? Sure, Mom, you’re paying the piper. She doesn’t have any sisters? Fine, Edwina, if that’s how you want it.”

  “You won’t regret this,” Henry said. “Or, rather, you will regret it, but you’ll be among friends when the pain starts.”

  “What matters is that we never forget…you know,” Jordan said.

  “How weird all this is?” Henry ventured.

  Jordan nodded and said, “It would appear that Edwina’s invented a brand-new sin. God’s still trying to figure out a name for it.”

  “She insists that any woman with the right technological resources would have done the same thing in her place,” I said. “Being men, Henry and Brock and I can’t understand her urge to experience motherhood.”

  A skeptical grunt escaped Jordan’s lips. “In my opinion, women don’t need to be mothers any more than they need to be trapeze artists.” She cracked the knuckles of her graceful hands. “So what sort o
f curriculum do we use around here?”

  For the remainder of the afternoon, as the setting sun turned the lagoon into an immense bowl of gazpacho, we described the lessons that had proved effective so far: Kohlbergian drama improvisations for Londa, a steady diet of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Kindness Crusaders for Donya. Jordan said she would probably amalgamate the two strategies, Yolly being “old enough to do role-playing exercises without getting bored, and young enough to watch The Kindness Crusaders without becoming embarrassed,” though she intended to point out that the series was basically “just another opiate of the bourgeoisie.”

  “I’d like to see Edwina’s face when she realizes you’ve turned her daughter into not only a moral being but a moral Marxist,” Henry said.

  Jordan smirked and, furling her tongue, launched an olive pit into the lagoon. “Unless I miss my guess, Yolly is about to become obsessed with horses. It’s practically a stage on Piaget’s developmental profile. Do you suppose Edwina might be willing to get Yolly a horse?”

  “If I know Edwina, she’ll get Yolly a herd,” Henry replied.

  “A toast,” Brock said, raising his Dos Equis high. “To the beautiful children of Isla de Sangre.”

  “To the bewildered faculty of Hubris Academy,” Henry said.

  “To trapeze artists,” I said.

  Our four bottles came together in perfect synchrony. The glassy clatter echoed across the lagoon and decayed in the dusk.

  “Now take me to the kid,” Jordan said.

  THE MOST DRAMATIC SCENE in The Egyptian occurs when Sinuhe, recently returned from self-imposed exile among the Hittites and now enjoying a lucrative private practice in Thebes, is sought out by his old nemesis, the Babylonian courtesan Nefer, whose machinations once prompted him to lose his ideals and betray his adoptive parents. Formerly wealthy, glamorous, and proud, Nefer now creeps through the city like a vision of death, veiled and shrouded. Upon finding Sinuhe, she opens her robe and bares her breast, and he confirms her self-diagnosis: cancer. He proposes to excise the malignancy. “I can save your life,” the physician tells his old enemy, “but I can’t restore your beauty—the trouble has eaten too far for that,” though the expression on Sinuhe’s face suggests that her condition is in fact terminal. As you might imagine, this moment fell upon my preteen sensibility with astonishing impact. I was terrified by the gnawing tumor, appalled by the paradox of a breast that wasn’t beautiful, and moved by the dignity with which the doomed Nefer accepted her fate.

  In the weeks that followed Edwina’s revelations in the conservatory, I gradually and with mixed emotions came to see her as a contemporary equivalent of Nefer. Edwina, too, was under a sentence of death, yet she maintained her regal bearing, head held high, determined to make the best of it. Her devotion to her daughters—and, yes, we’d all acquiesced to that misnomer, daughters—was absolute. Every Monday and Thursday, Lady Daedalus traveled to the Spanish keep, Torre de la Carne, where Yolly was now in residence, and proceeded to favor the newborn eleven-year-old with unqualified adoration. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, it was Donya who became the object of Edwina’s maternal drive. Wednesdays and Fridays belonged to Londa, which meant I was now seeing my pupil only three mornings a week. Given the robust condition of her soul, however, the moral compass she’d acquired by withholding borrowed axes, stealing cancer drugs, and embracing Immanuel Kant, I didn’t regard the abridgement of our studies with alarm. As for Sundays, Edwina had wisely set this day aside for whichever girl seemed most in need of her—normally little Donya, of course, though sometimes the inchoate Yolly received the extra session, and sometimes our moody adolescent.

  Sundays also proved the ideal time for the Hubris Academy faculty to meet and trade notes, usually on my deck, occasionally on the terrace of Jordan’s beach house or the screened porch of Henry and Brock’s bungalow. Donya had made substantive progress of late, even to the point of insisting, as Henry had predicted she might, that the grown-ups stop rigging the croquet games. As for Yolly, after some inevitable experimentation—smashing windows, mutilating furniture, setting fire to drapes, plundering Jordan’s wallet, learning how to make “fuck” function as every part of speech—she now possessed a flourishing conscience. A person would never know she was playing ethical catch-up, so well had she responded to Jordan’s presentations of Kohlbergian dilemmas leavened with The Kindness Crusaders. In short, it seemed that everyone’s superego was developing normally, and so far the children’s Geworfenheit, their thrownness, had not plunged them into a nihilistic vortex or sent them wandering through Dante’s dark wood. Instead of dwelling on deontology, we tutors were now free to discuss the topic that most interested us, our employer’s ostensibly praiseworthy campaign to give her daughters every blessing within her power.

  By Henry’s report, Edwina was having little difficulty connecting with Donya, who always articulated her wish of the moment loudly and unambiguously—cupcake, cookie, hide-and-seek, bedtime story set in Faerie Land or Camelot—subsequently showering a delectable affection on whomever took the trouble to fulfill it. Under Donya’s guidance Edwina had become an expert teller of folktales, a competent flier of phoenix kites, and a welcome guest at tea parties. After a few failed attempts, Edwina had even projected herself into the rarefied world of Donya’s miniature amusement park, learning how to make tiny plastic heroes outwit their pocketsized enemies, who were forever plotting to derail the roller coaster, turn the Ferris wheel into a giant scythe clearing the way for shopping malls, and replace the merry-go-round horses with fiendish robots who routinely abducted their helpless riders and imprisoned them in an evil sorcerer’s castle.

  Yolly, meanwhile, was just now entering the stage at which many parents would like to arrest their daughters’ growth, that interval between ten and twelve when sophistication has not yet allied itself with cynicism. True to Jordan’s prediction, Yolly had become enamored of all things equine, though she was equally enthused about cultivating orchids, reading dopey fantasy novels, and taking music lessons from an itinerant teacher, Pandora Duval, formerly a flautist with the Baroque Ensemble in Seattle, now an alcoholic with the Hog’s Breath Saloon in Key West. Edwina responded to Yolly’s horse obsession not only by giving her dozens of horse books, horse tchotchkes, and horse DVDs, everything from the smarmy My Friend Flicka to the splendid Black Stallion, but also—as we knew she would—by presenting the child with a living, breathing exemplar of the species, a Chincoteague pony. Thanks to Jordan, Yolly learned to saddle and mount the spirited Oyster in a matter of hours, ride him in a matter of days, and ride him skillfully before the month was out.

  Adept with a digital camera, Jordan recorded her pupil’s growth through a series of beautifully composed snapshots, periodically displaying them to the rest of the faculty via her laptop. Each image bore a pithy caption, composed by Jordan. “A Whiff of Heaven” (Yolly smelling an orchid). “Goodness, How Delicious” (Yolly eating a mango). “Morning Swim” (Yolly and Edwina floating on their backs in the Bahía de Matecumba). “Racing the Wind” (Yolly on her pony). “Vivaldi’s Spring” (Yolly playing her flute). “Sun Worshippers of Blood Island” (Yolly and Edwina napping on the beach, dressed in identical green spandex bathing suits). “Harvesting the Tide” (Yolly and Edwina standing on the point, surrounded by a plume of surf ). Far from occasioning anxiety, the child’s thrownness had evidently made her a connoisseur of every imaginable sensory delight. I could only hope that her devotion to the pleasure principle did not portend a disastrous encounter with Dr. Heidegger’s nothingness.

  “Whatever you’re doing with that child, it’s obviously working,” I told Jordan. “My hat goes off to you.”

  Not surprisingly, it was her eldest daughter with whom Edwina had the most trouble connecting. Like the rest of the civilized world’s seventeen-year-olds, Londa had recently discovered that her prime nurturing parent was not in fact a brilliant and omnicompetent demiurge who could do no wrong, but rather just another dreary adult member of the
species Homo sapiens. And like the rest of the civilized world’s seventeen-year-olds, she had grown indignant at this discovery—so indignant, in fact, that a visiting Martian would never have guessed that Londa was herself in danger of one day becoming an adult Homo sapiens.

  Edwina, to her credit, refused to be daunted by the billowing black thundercloud that hovered perpetually above Londa’s head, and in time Londa came to realize that she could have drawn a far worse parent in the great Geworfenheit lottery. By Londa’s admission their regular Wednesday and Friday luncheons boasted a reasonable facsimile of rapport enhanced by incandescent flashes of candor. Particularly gratifying to Londa was her mother’s willingness to give her a plenary sex education. It was one thing merely to read about such bewildering matters as menstrual cramps, yeast infections, the G-spot, birth control pills, STDs, and condoms, quite another to receive such information from a blood relation who by all indices loved you without condition.

  Being older, cannier, and better informed than her sisters, Londa did not for a minute imagine she was living a remotely normal existence on Isla de Sangre. Although Edwina had denied Londa the Internet, she did permit her to receive Up!, a lurid and almost comically materialistic magazine targeted at female adolescents, every issue of which implicitly informed Londa that the gap between Faustino and the outside world was very large indeed. Above all, Up! bespoke a civilization filled to bursting with hip clothing, mesmerizing jewelry, alchemical cosmetics, transformative body-care products, and innocuously transgressive music, and before long Londa had developed a keen interest in the loot that the Western industrialized nation-states and their Asian equivalents were prepared to distribute, for a price, to a demographic apparently willing to remain permanently incurious about the hidden human cost of any particular prize. Every sane young woman wanted her share of the goods, wanted it desperately, and so Londa, always eager to have her mental health corroborated, decided that she must, simply must, become a consumer.