The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  I could think of nothing to say or do.

  “You’re what, twenty-five?” she said. “Surely I’m not the first anorexic nudist you’ve ever seen.” She turned and padded to her room while I went into the bathroom and closed and locked the door.

  By the time I had composed myself enough to go back downstairs, Bethany was dressed and sitting on the sofa with her mother and Rachel. Hans was in his study. “So, Rachel tells me you’re a Catholic prude like Mom,” Bethany said.

  “It isn’t prudish to think that it’s wrong to walk around naked in front of your sister’s boyfriend,” Myra said.

  “I think it is,” Bethany said. “Rachel, he looked at me as if he thought I should have numbers on my arm.”

  “That’s not funny, Bethany,” Rachel said.

  Myra earnestly explained to me that, convent raised, she was long past the point where she could be cured of her shame about her body. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t see the folly of raising her daughters the way the nuns had raised her. So, though she dressed and undressed and bathed behind closed doors, the rest of the family passed back and forth naked in front of each other through what they called the Bare Area, the landing onto which the bathroom and the bedrooms opened.

  “It saves time,” Bethany said. “We don’t have to put on a towel in the bathroom and then take it off two seconds later in our bedrooms. We each use one less towel that way, too.”

  “Professor van Hout—” I began.

  “Yes,” Myra said. “Hans, too.”

  Bethany laughed at the look on my face and said that Hans bathed without closing the bathroom door. She’d seen him once, standing in the bathtub, bent over and scrubbing away as soap bubbles formed and broke in the crack of his behind. All five of them crossed paths when they were getting ready to go out somewhere, the girls nude but for the towels on their heads, Hans but for his glasses, his penis flopping up and down as he dodged his daughters, who found the sight of him hilarious.

  Rachel, crimson-faced, looked at me as if she hoped the Bare Area hadn’t put me off but had merely reinforced the view I surely held by now that the van Houts were eccentric. I managed to smile at her.

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  BETHANY (1976)

  (Addressed to her but never read

  upon the Ballad Bed to three—

  read only to my Rachel Lee.)

  What will I do with Bethany?

  I used to call you Number Three.

  “Please pass the butter, Number Three,”

  I’d say when you sat next to me.

  One day you called Her Minus One

  and said that I was Number None.

  Soon, laughing uncontrollably,

  you seemed to slither from your chair

  beneath the table, disappear.

  I raised the tablecloth to see

  you looking, baffled, back at me

  as if you’d never laughed before

  and couldn’t laugh a second more

  because your belly was so sore.

  Hysterical upon the floor,

  you suddenly began to cry—

  you couldn’t stop, I don’t know why.

  “What’s wrong, my little Number Three?”

  I said, but you just stared at me

  as if you couldn’t stand some pain

  you didn’t know how to explain.

  You never seemed the same to me.

  I never called you Number Three,

  though She was often Minus One

  and I was often Number None.

  We pretended not to hear you say

  the things you said ten times a day.

  You used to act so playfully—

  now everything was irony.

  You wished that you were never born

  but said it with such witty scorn

  that even doctors didn’t know

  how much was real, how much was show.

  If we had known what was to come—

  but what could anyone have done?

  If we’d been able to foresee—

  but all of it was new to me.

  As for the cause, it seems there’s none;

  as for a cure, there isn’t one.

  There is much in the Land Without

  that no one knows a thing about.

  Things the doctors call obsessions

  seem a lot more like possession.

  Those who think this superstition

  haven’t been in my position.

  To watch a child as things run wild

  in her body and her mind

  is something only heard about

  in this forsaken Land Without.

  I swear that some pernicious elf

  turned Bethany against herself.

  You shed your body bit by bit—

  you cannot stand the sight of it.

  Psychiatrists will never find

  the demon that controls your mind.

  To satisfy this evil thing

  you must get rid of everything.

  The more of Bethany is lost,

  the more must go, at any cost.

  The more I try to disabuse you,

  the more the risk that I will lose you.

  The more you think (you can’t refuse),

  the more you think you need to lose.

  It seems to you that up is down

  and truth is nowhere to be found.

  The doctors think they know what’s true:

  they think the truth’s inside of you.

  CAPE TOWN

  (1985)

  WADE

  In the next few weeks, Hans and Myra did the reverse of what they had done when they moved from South Africa to Canada. They sold all the furniture, which, having been so expensive in the first place, might have fetched a good price had it not been so badly maintained. They had a yard sale for the smaller items, including every South African knick-knack in the house. They got five dollars for the black-and-white aerial photograph of Table Mountain and the City Bowl that had hung for years on the wall above the sofa. They were in such a hurry to get rid of the house that they got far less for it than they should have.

  “I’ve arranged for my diaries and my collection of Het Achterhuis to be kept in a storage unit until we come back,” Rachel said, as I helped her clean out her bedroom. “It costs next to nothing, and I’ve been assured that the books will be as safe as they would be in a bank vault. When we were standing around the barrel in your parents’ backyard, I thought about burning both my collections, every volume of my diary and every copy of Anne Frank’s. Obviously, I chickened out.”

  “Good,” I said. “You would have regretted it.”

  “Well, I’m taking a couple of copies of Het Achterhuis to read while we’re away.”

  * * *

  —

  Fritz and Carmen stayed at the house on Freshwater Road the night before we all left on the midnight plane to London, the first leg of our journey. To my relief, they lay low in their room, from which the smell of hash wafted downstairs. Rachel and I sat about in the front room while her parents and Bethany confined themselves to the kitchen. Rachel told me that the flight to Cape Town would take twenty-five hours, counting stopovers, one hour, Rachel said, for every year of my life. “You never know,” she said, “you might have a fear of flying. In that case, each hour might take a year off your life.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But it can’t be worse than bobbing up and down in a dory on a stormy day at sea. I spent my childhood doing that.”

  “Turbulence,” she whispered in my ear. “You’ll love it. You might get to be a member of the mile-high club if you play your cards
right.” I looked askance at her. “You’ve never heard of it?” I shook my head. When she told me what it was, I said, “Really?”

  She burst out laughing. “Really. Gloria and Max are members in good standing.”

  Even as we spoke, a phrase from The Great Gatsby kept running through my mind. Nick Carraway, near the end of the book, wrote of being free of his “provincial squeamishness” forever. I wondered if I would ever be sufficiently rid of mine to write about it, but I also couldn’t put aside my feelings of apprehension, of being in over my head with a family as odd-seeming as the van Houts. I thought of my encounter with Fritz and Carmen and of Hans and Myra’s surprise visit to my parents’ house and of all the things Rachel had told me in the first few months after we met. Because of our encounter in the Bare Area, Bethany had called me a prude and Rachel hadn’t come to my defence. I was beginning to wonder if my notions of normalcy seemed as odd to the van Houts as theirs did to me. If they were typical of the greater world, I had more to learn about it than I’d suspected, things that I would never find in books of the kind that I had set myself to read, or in any other kind. I thought of the many hours I’d spent alone in my apartment, hunched over the card table and some massive book. Hans had lived through things about which massive books were written, but there was not a book to be seen in his house besides Het Achterhuis and the many volumes of The Encyclopediary of Rachel van Hout.

  We would soon be bound for a continent that figured in none of the big books I had read or had planned to read. I felt unsure of almost everything except that I was in love with one of the van Houts, a family like none I had ever met in life or in books. Was I finally seeing with my own eyes things that were worth writing about? I’d long ago made up my mind that my first book would, like Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, be heavily autobiographical, a barely fictionalized account of my life to date, a coming-of-age novel by a person who, I was beginning to suspect, had yet to come of age. Rachel hugged my arm and pressed her forehead hard against my shoulder. I remembered how I’d felt when I read Rachel’s Dear Wade letter, when I’d assumed that she had gone on knitting for me even after she had taken up with someone else. I felt something like that now—uncertain, foolish, toyed with, overmatched. For a moment, I had the same, sick, falling feeling, as if everything on which my life was built had been ripped out from beneath me.

  Rachel’s life insurance policy and my savings were not enough to pay the entire cost of what we’d decided would be a six-month stay, so she had convinced her parents to contribute what they could and Gloria and Max to cover the rest. It felt strange, as if Hans was giving me money to make it possible for me to sleep with his daughter. I felt sheepishly beholden to him, and to Rachel, Max and Gloria, as if Rachel and her father and her sister and her brother-in-law were pooling their resources so that she, at age twenty-three, a young woman still recovering from a breakdown, could share a bed with a sexual freeloader who would spend his days writing, or trying to write, or pretending to write, a novel. Earlier in the evening, Hans and Myra had looked at me as if to say they had higher hopes for their youngest daughter than the sort of provider a would-be writer who was not allowed by law to hold a job in South Africa was ever likely to become. They knew I had been a reporter with a newspaper that, even in St. John’s, was looked down upon by all. I was a young Newfoundlander who had quit his low-paying no-status job to write novels full time for no pay at all while on a kind of furlough in my girlfriend’s native country. To make matters worse, their daughter believed he would be a huge success someday. I fancied I would not have looked more like a poseur if I had been wearing a cape and a beret and sporting a cigarette holder.

  * * *

  —

  We flew to London on Air Canada, where we connected at Heathrow to South African Airways for our flight to Cape Town. The SAA flight attendants wore light-blue tunics over white blouses, the tunics belted and double-breasted. Around their necks were scarves that bore the colours of the South African flag: red, white, black, green and yellow. Slightly aslant on their heads were pillbox hats with a large, round button on top that looked like the head of a spike that kept the hat in place. All of them were darkly tanned, almost all of them blond. They were all fluent in English, Dutch, German, French and Afrikaans. “You could be an SAA flight attendant,” I said to Rachel, but she seemed unamused. “One in the family is enough,” she said.

  We landed in Tel Aviv, the last refuelling stop before the long flight down the African continent to Johannesburg. South African Airways had had its landing rights in the rest of Africa revoked years before. Rachel told me that Israel and South Africa saw each other as allies of a kind—renegade nations.

  “Well, we’re on our own now,” Rachel said when we took off again. “No legal place to land from here to Jo’burg.”

  “What will they do if something goes wrong?” I said.

  “I suppose one of the African countries would let us land if it was a matter of life or death. I guess this is why South African Airways is cheaper than all the others. You get a kind of suspense discount. And they make it up to you. They pamper you from start to finish.”

  She was right about that. From Tel Aviv to Johannesburg, it was like the flight attendants were serving the consecutive courses of one long meal, food and drink coming at us at a rate we couldn’t keep up with. Bethany, sitting in front of us, accepted everything she was offered, then handed it back to me without a word.

  Every announcement was made in English and Afrikaans. This was not Myra’s Afrikaans, but harsher, more guttural, far more emphatic—something like German as it might be spoken by some profoundly exasperated parent. It seemed odd coming out of the mouths of these young, ever smiling, ever indulgent flight attendants, who, when they spoke English, sounded faintly like the Australians I’d heard on TV.

  No one objected when Rachel curled up on the floor between our row and the one in front, her hands joined palm to palm beneath her head. Despite the incessant noise of the servers, I managed to get to sleep about three hours after she did.

  When I woke, she was reading her daily quotient of Het Achterhuis, so I looked out the darkened window, hoping to make out something of the earth below, but there were only occasional lights, the first lights I had ever seen that were not those of Newfoundland. The continent was just six miles below but I couldn’t see it. It seemed right that I couldn’t, that I not be fooled into thinking I had seen it just because I had flown over it, looking down from thirty thousand feet.

  * * *

  —

  While we waited on the runway in Johannesburg for the other passengers to board the flight to Cape Town, Rachel told me that, in June 1976, she and Carmen and their parents had been on this very runway waiting for a flight to London as smoke from the Soweto uprising rolled like fog across the tarmac. “I was terrified,” she said. “We thought a revolution had started. Dad kept glancing over his shoulder and looking out the window. You could actually smell the smoke inside the plane. I thought we’d never get out of here. Dad said the riots were proof that the blacks were uncivilized and impossible to educate, so they should never be allowed to vote or to mix with whites.”

  “Your parents—”

  “It’s hard to say what they really believe.”

  RACHEL

  As a child, I didn’t think of Cape Town as being part of South Africa, or of South Africa as being part of Africa. There was only Cape Town, every square inch of which existed absolutely independently of the rest of the world, about which I knew nothing except that it was there. This would be my third sojourn in Cape Town. I’d barely survived the second. No one but my doctor in St. John’s knew it, but I had a year’s worth of lithium in my luggage in case I needed it—though I’d cut back to a pill every other day when Wade agreed to go with me to South Africa. Lithium dulled everything, sex especially, so I hoped I wouldn’t need to take it more often. But it helped to know that I wouldn�
��t have to go to some well-meaning doctor in Cape Town who might insist on me seeing a therapist, which, even if I could afford it, would be hard to do without someone finding out. “You’re taking on a lot all at once,” my doctor had said. “Sharing your life with someone else. Not living with your parents. Going back to where, I’m guessing, not all your memories are pleasant ones.”

  * * *

  —

  As we began our final approach to Cape Town International Airport, the sky was full of seaward-racing clouds, the sea a mass of white-crested waves. “I’ve never seen seawater of that colour,” Wade said as we vied for space at the window. “What is it, turquoise? It doesn’t look like the sea.”

  I took his hand. “You know, in the shallows, when it’s sunny, seawater takes on the colour of the ocean bottom,” I said. “A bottle of seawater from here and one from Newfoundland would look pretty much the same.”

  “Really?” he said in mock surprise.

  “Really,” I said, and gave him a long kiss.

  “Rachel,” he whispered, “if I go through customs standing at attention, I’m taking it out on you.”

  I lightly bit his ear. “Promises, promises,” I said.

  As the plane banked sharply, I pointed at things in the distance. “That’s Paarl Rock,” I said. It looked like a single massive boulder, a beige behemoth that seemed incongruous among a grove of trees and shrubs. “Paarl city,” I said. “Wine country. Pretty boring unless you like wine more than we do. It’s too bad that we came in from the north like this. Look, though, see there.” I pointed out the window. “That’s the side of Devil’s Peak, and I can see the back of Table Mountain.” I looked at Wade and realized that he wasn’t seeing discrete landmarks but a blur of colours called South Africa. I wondered what he was thinking. I felt a rush of guilt. “Just wait until we get to Cape Town,” I said, holding his arm. “It’s so beautiful. We’ll go see everything, Lion’s Head, the Twelve Apostles—they’re sort of mountains—Cape Agulhas—that’s the southernmost point of Africa, and the Cape of Good Hope, which everyone thinks is the southernmost point.” He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ground below, lips moving as if he was talking to himself.