I must speak of Peregrine before I get on. Father was another of the mysteries for me as a child. Israel told me that no man sees his father clearly, because he himself stands in the way. In other words, I should look to myself to see Peregrine. This might be the whole of it. A few facts will help. Peregrine was born the eldest son of a professional soldier, Leslie Ide, who was himself the son of a clerk for a railroad. Peregrine’s mother, Jane Peregrine, was an Irish Protestant, a younger daughter of a Londonderry haberdasher, who met and married Leslie during the Second World War, soon after the Allied invasion of France. Peregrine and his several brothers spent their earliest years moving from army base to army fort from northern Europe to North America. The boys were excessively attached to their mother, since Leslie was much away at war, or somesuch, and since the family moved to a new home every two years. Peregrine’s earliest loyalty was to what he called a “wee bit of Eire” and to Jane’s imagination, which was energetic. Jane wrote women’s romances for an American publisher. The one I recall best concerned a three-hundred-year-old Irish witch who attempted to assassinate every English oppressor of the Irish from Oliver Cromwell to Winston Churchill, failed each time, was gruesomely executed for her daring, and was then reincarnated in another beautiful, sinister Irish patriot. It was brutal for a romance. Israel told me the mind doctors in New York City would have made much of Jane’s influence on her eldest child, my father. I note that Peregrine could chat with a lovely blarney, and he truly believed that if not for misfortune, he would have no fortune at all.
Peregrine was shaken when Leslie enrolled him in a military school, Washington Crossing Military Academy, on the upper Delaware River between New York City and the state of Pennsylvania. I doubt the Cross, as he called it, was as draconian as he remembered. His problem was that, in America, military academies were considered places of last deposit for the delinquent sons of the well-to-do. Any boy, like Peregrine, who found himself in an academy not because he had been a rascal but because his father thought military science and Spartan discipline worth knowing was reduced to futile rage. The result of Peregrine’s incarceration was that he, and his eventual bosom chum, Israel Elfers (who, Israel told me, as a New York City Jew, was as much out of place at the Cross as poetry), became young geniuses at defiance and swashbuckling escapades into the surrounding farmland. The headmaster of the Cross, one of Leslie’s comrades-in-arms from the Second World War, Fritz “No-Neck” Fitzgore, thought Peregrine and Israel’s conduct suggestive of wild dogs. Peregrine and Israel came to be called the Bucks County Bowsers. By their seventeenth birthdays, those two knew what there is to know about being on the run.
Yale University did not change them. By 1966, when Peregrine and Israel entered Yale (to their fathers’ relief, to the consternation of Fitzgore, who had written them good recommendations only because it looked good for the Cross), the Vietnam war had transformed all of America into the dynamic of a military academy. A boy was either in his dormitory studying, or he was en route to Vietnam, or he was on the run. Israel told me that he and Father knew the score, and that it was not straight B’s to law school. He said it was run for your life before they ran your life down. At the last, Peregrine did not graduate from Yale, as did Israel. Father committed a wild act of defiant vanity. I think he attacked another student, over a woman I shall soon discuss; he might have attacked the woman; or he might have attacked the police who tried to restrain him; or he might have told the dean what he could do with his presumption to interfere between a man and his woman.
This is not getting closer to Peregrine’s heart. Peregrine was more, and more contradictory, than the sum of his iconoclastic episodes. He was quick-tempered, generous, cantankerous, moody unto black despair, devoted to his loved ones with a passionate steadfastness, and as rational in construction as he was irrational in conflict. He was what Israel said was a full-grown naif. The truth of it might be that he was arrested, fixed in time somewhere between adolescence and manhood by unrequited yearnings.
The pagan Norse would have called Peregrine an unskilled shape-changer. He forgave easily. He apologized quickly, too quickly. He made many mistakes, did not understand that he could atone for them, often suffered foolishly in order to make a show of his remorse. He wept more than one might suspect; he did laugh, not easily. He never forgot a kindness; he could not forget or get over a treachery. He was uniformly suspicious of what he understood as fate, and sometimes spat after hearing the word destiny. His defeatism, as Israel called it (that was encapsulated too neatly with his pet epigram, “It is what it is when it is”), often seemed superficial, reflexive, cosmetic, more a disguise for his moments of panic and frustration.
Peregrine was politically simpleminded. He had cruel opinions. He had a very bad temper. He had wild solutions. Peregrine said that he hated anyone who claimed the right to command him. I think it was that he confused authority with tyranny. Still, he was what the Norse would have called a Dragon-Worrier, which was what we did call him—my influence. Father was never more animated than when recounting to me the biographies of what he called America’s most famous thieves, liars, and mass-murderers, who were also many of America’s most famous statesmen. I often thought, even then, that he and Israel enjoyed defaming their favorite monster, Nixon, more than seemed ingenuous. Over the years, those gloomy hate sessions worried Guy to the point that he stopped participating. Peregrine’s response was to redouble his curses against America and what it had done to him, to puff himself up even more into a self-possessed and angry, angry, angry man.
Father was also a lonely and unhappy man. Peregrine lived day and night, summer and winter, with a heavy heart and a longing that he transformed into a malady. Indeed, overarching sorrow is so much a part of Peregrine for me, I still have difficulty imagining what he must have been like before exile in Sweden, when he swaggered through long, rich American days. He had been a bounder and a lover. Then Charity Bentham, his heart’s desire, had gone forever, and with her, Peregrine’s will to pursue happiness. There were women in his life in Stockholm. I overheard them talking about this or that girl, and there were many nights when Peregrine or Israel or both would stay out all night. But Peregrine never brought anyone home to me, as Israel would let Molly Rogers stay with us. Molly sometimes teased Peregrine about his attitude toward her sisters, and she was not met with playfulness. If and when Peregrine engaged in sexual intercourse, it must have been left at that, eroticism, not intimacy or love. It was as if he believed there was no woman in Sweden for him, because he believed his heart irreparably broken, incapable of loving again. I know it is generally understood that time can heal such wounds. For my father, either this was not the case, or else he chose not only to refuse the cure by pretending to stop time in 1973, at my birth, but also to aggravate his disability by reminding himself, as if with a chant, that he had been wronged, cheated, ill-used—in all, betrayed by fate.
I misunderstood all this discrimination between sex and love and brokenheartedness then, of course, but I perceived the symptoms of love gone wrong. Peregrine had a habit of sighing very deeply of a sudden, like a last breath, of just sitting there watching the sun set and then letting out a groan. He could also lapse into dreadful silences. He often walked out of the cinema, especially during motion pictures that Israel characterized as exploiting the trivialities of romance. I recall once, while Peregrine was reading aloud to me one of the nineteenth century’s most accomplished sentimentalists, perhaps Thackeray, perhaps James, that Peregrine dropped the book and fell down in front of me, as if in great pain, but without a sound. He lay there, tears streaming down his face, soaking his beard. It was the worst spell he ever had in front of me. It scared me badly. I ran for Israel in the kitchen; and he coaxed Peregrine upright again, then took him for a walk along the canals. I was not invited along, watched them from the window: spindly Israel supporting burly Peregrine as a nurse might assist an invalid. Israel told me later, “Forget it, kid.”
I did not, nor
should I have. Peregrine did seem to improve over the years, as if he had made peace with his condition. That was no truce. That was a devastation. He quit trying, a man who came to prefer the malady to health. He forgot humor, self-respect, hope, a better day, the gift that was his life. He only wanted to remember, and to torment himself with his memory of, that long-lost American woman named Charity Bentham.
Though it was over forty years ago, and half a world away from me now, that woman’s name still stirs and saddens me. Charity Bentham. If this is credible, she was my father’s heart. For me, she is the crossroad where my own story parts from Peregrine’s. It is of Charity Bentham, and of her violent entrance into my life, that I now must speak at length.
The Nobel Prize Ball
IT WAS the eve of my seventeenth birthday, as burning cold and still as the Norse creation, when my life, as well as the lives of all those I held dear, changed irreparably and forever. It was also the night that it was revealed clearly to me for the first time that my family was accursed with exile, and that for such people, outlawed and outlanded, there can be no going back, there can too readily be bitterness and more defeat.
I assumed that Peregrine, Israel, and I were lucky to have obtained temporary jobs as servants’ servants for the Nobel Prize Ball to be held that evening in the King’s castle. Twenty-five hundred very important celebrants were expected in the Great Hall by 10:00 p.m. Ours was heavy and dirty work. I thought Peregrine’s mask of dread was due to our labor. In truth, his mind was his face, as the Norse said. No one had told me Charity Bentham was to be there. I thought, in my childish way, that Peregrine could have been more festive; but it was not like me to resent Father’s moods, since he changed them as often as his caps. I was happy. Earle, home again at midseason with his bad back, had promised me a surprise birthday present. More, Israel compensated for Peregrine’s surliness by outdoing himself with anecdotes about “the good old counterculture days” when “clowns were kings,” and with jokes about the King’s new castle then still under construction on the exact site of the burned-down Royal Palace. Israel mocked it as “quick-dry Baroque.”
Our gang-boss kept us busy hauling furniture and carpets up from the storerooms to the Great Hall, so there was no time to coddle Peregrine. We had been hired for our brawn. Israel, who knew what deeply hurt Peregrine, was preoccupied with the extra weight he had put on his belly over the years. We did bear up better than most. We really needed the money.
By the time we stopped to change into our livery for the ball, we were giddy with aches and sweat. Israel and I shared a bottle of Norse brew and examined our foolish party clothes, black frocks and waistcoats with shabby white linen and silly ties. Israel and I looked sober in comparison to Peregrine. Father’s pants were inches too short, and with his full red beard, his shoulder-length hair, and his fixed scowl, he appeared ridiculous. I started to tease Peregrine. Israel shushed me.
One of the King’s retainers, a fat man named Rinse, did taunt Peregrine as we filed into the service assembly room. Peregrine reacted out of proportion to the offense. He turned dark, shook, muttered. He grabbed his stomach the way he did when overwhelmed by temper. Rinse backed away. Peregrine seemed a man in an insane rage. Israel reached to calm him. Peregrine tossed him off with one backhanded sweep, as if he did not know him, as if he did not know what he had become in his fury. I saw murder in my father’s eyes. It made no sense to me. I moved to offer love. Israel pulled me away. We stood apart from Peregrine, who, alone in the midst of several squat oafs from Stockholm’s simpleton population, seemed to talk to himself. I watched him yank a blue booklet from his frock, roll it into a tube, tap it against his breast.
I could not ask Israel for an explanation, because the Nobel people burst in to line us up and read instructions for the evening. They were officious and overbearing. Israel smirked at them and got a withering stare from a small, unattractive overseer, Mrs. Bad-Dober, who persecuted us the rest of the night. Since we were separated from Peregrine, Father was assigned to the cloak room in the entry hall, while Israel and I were sent to the Great Hall. We were to heft trays of food and drink from the dumbwaiters to the King’s retainers, who were the only ones meant to circulate among the guests.
Later though, at the edge of the Great Hall, our gang got a rest break because the dumbwaiter lines fouled. The ball was in symphonious progress, and we crowded into an alcove to listen. I was tired and content, and idly pressed Israel about Peregrine. He looked at me sadly, took a big breath, flicked his gray beard, and told me part of the truth.
Back in America before I was born, Israel said, Peregrine had been very much in love with Charity Bentham. They had met at Yale University and continued their romance while Peregrine and Israel dodged the draft for two years. She was good to them, wayfaring youths, and permitted them to stay with her, feeding them, loving them. When the decision was made to flee rather than be arrested for draft evasion, Peregrine had to leave her behind. She drove them to the airport. It was Christmas 1972, and Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed the total destruction of the American bombers on the Vietnamese. It was a time of colossal abandonment. Charity wanted to escape with them, but they did not know where they were going. Israel said, “It was tough on her, since she and your Dad, they were very very close.”
Once Peregrine was in Stockholm, he and Charity corresponded every day. They telephoned once a week. Peregrine’s family, at the direction of his enraged father, had cut him off, as if he did not exist, and Charity was Peregrine’s only hold on his history. Nevertheless, Peregrine insisted Charity carry on with her life. She returned to Chicago and entered graduate school. They made plans for her to join them after her degree.
“Then I came along and ruined it,” I said.
Israel said, “No! Peregrine loves you more than himself, more than he ever loved Charity. It would hurt him if he heard you say that. It’s why he’s never told you this. You changed plans. That’s the truth. Without you, we’d’ve gone all the way down. Always remember that. Peregrine and Charity, it was rough, but it never would have worked after we ran. I don’t care what Guy says. Not on this planet. She was a good woman, but people change. She couldn’t have made it here. You know your Dad, the original pilgrim. He stuck it out. He’s a real hero. He never would deal with those people, though he wanted to because of her. Oh, yeah, he loved her, and she loved him. They were young. They got caught in a war.”
I asked Israel if this was why Peregrine cried so much. Israel said that Peregrine had not yet worked out his sadness, that it was frozen in his heart. Israel said that Peregrine had not done anything wrong, and yet he had lost a woman he loved a great deal. “I’ve been hoping he was through it,” he said, “no, I guess I knew he wasn’t. He’s still fighting. I don’t know if I could take what he’s had to.”
I asked Israel what happened to Charity Bentham. He again told me part of the truth, and not nearly enough for me to see the danger ahead. He said Charity Bentham had earned herself a happy life. She married a man who was a classmate of Israel’s and Peregrine’s at Yale. His name was Cesare Furore; he became a rich and powerful architect and builder. Charity graduated with a prestigious degree in economic science and became a famous professor in Chicago. “She writes megabooks,” he said, “does television, dines at the White House, which is as white as ever. Old Charity, she’s hot. If she’s been smart, she’s forgotten Peregrine. I figure she hasn’t thought of him in a decade. Oh, maybe now and then, when she speaks at Yale or flies out of Kennedy Airport. All the people we knew, not just Charity, they stayed with it back home. They belong. We got lost—me, Peregrine, Guy, Earle, all of us.”
I told Israel hesitantly that I did not understand. It seemed like such a long time ago. It explained some things about Father, his depressions, why he never talked about women as Israel did, but it seemed to say nothing about Peregrine’s anger that night. I was frustrated. I guessed, “Is she here, at the ball?”
Israel sighed. “You want life to
make sense? You want it fair? Yeah, I guess you do. Me too. It’s this.” Israel averted his eyes and continued, as if talking to himself. “Old Charity, she played it big. She went and got herself elected a guest of honor tonight. She finally made that trip to Stockholm. Peregrine and her ought to have some kind of reunion. I hope he handles it well down in the cloakroom. Maybe nothing will happen. It’ll be some scene, though; she hands him her sable and he hands her a check. Peregrine’s told me he’d never do anything to hurt her. What a life!” He turned back to me, touched my shoulder, said, “You see, Grim, Charity once did something that wasn’t right, a long time back, but it sticks in the gut. It was cruel, considering how bad we had it. I think I understand why she did it. It could have been handled better. Peregrine didn’t act all that well either. How can I say this? How can I tell you? He’s your Dad!”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 3