Chimera (17 page)

“It is remarkable,” I’d remark to Philonoë in the royal boudoir, as she kindly tried to rouse me, “what a toll pregnancy takes on teeth and muscle tone.” Her hand would pause—Melanippe’s does, too—for just a moment. Then she’d agree, cheerfully adding varicosity, slacked breast and vaginal sphincter, striation of buttock and thigh, and loss of hair-sheen to the list of her biological expenses in the childbearing way—all which she counted as nothing, since for three such princelets she’d’ve died thrice over. But as I was at it I should add, she’d add, the psychological cost of parentage, to ourselves individually and to the marital relationship: fatigue, loss of spontaneity, diminishment of ardor, general heaviness—a kind of accelerated aging, the joint effect of passing years, increased responsibility, and accumulated familiarity—never altogether compensated for by deeper intimacy. For her part (she would go on—what a wife this was!), she took what she was pleased to term the Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood: reckoning together their joys and griefs must inevitably show a net loss, if only because like life itself their attrition was constant and their term mortal. But one had only different ways of losing, and to eschew matrimony and childbearing for the delights of less serious relations was in her judgment to sustain a net loss even more considerable. Nor, mind, did she regard this perspective (which she applied as well to everything from vacation trips to historical movements) as spiritually negative or bleak: to affirm it was to affirm the antinomy of the cosmos, which antimony she took to be not absurd contradiction but rich paradox, the pity and terror of the affirmation whereof effected in the human soul an ennobling catharsis. I can do it. Assuredly I can do it. That I can do it, I cannot doubt. That I cannot do it; that I can begin to imagine that I cannot do it; that I can begin to wonder whether perhaps after all I cannot do it; that I can begin to begin firmly to believe that I cannot do it; I cannot begin to imagine, I cannot begin to wonder, I cannot begin to begin. Beyond question I can do it. Can I do it? I cannot do it.

Do it.

Pegasus and I flew lower. “You are descended,” I told the children on Hippolochus’s thirteenth birthday, “from a line of half-breed horse traders reaching back through Sisyphus and Autolycus to the shifty centaurs.”

They sat round-eyed; tutors and governesses fled to summon Philonoë, who entered with her knitting and watched their faces as I spoke, but neither protested nor interrupted.

“Your Grandmother Eurymede was a leading member of the Corinthian wild-mare cult,” I declared to them. “She claimed that Poseidon the sea-horse-god had humped her stallionwise one night as she was skinnydipping in the surf during her organization’s annual harvest-moon orgy. But Dad—your Grandpa Glaucus?—accused her of adultery with the stable-master, if not with one of the stallions themselves, and after dragging the former to death behind his racing chariot, he banished male grooms and stonehorses from our spread.”

Hippolochus cried “Hooray!” Isander asked to be given, on
his
thirteenth birthday, a pony. Laodamia climbed into my lap and sucked her thumb. Out in the paddock Pegasus whinnied. Philonoë purled.

“Horses remain a conspicuous motif in my biography,” I guess I said, “beginning with the circumstances of my birth. Assuming Poseidon to be my father, I’ve a deal of actual horse-blood in my veins, and you in yours. Insofar as we’re human, the equine traits may be regarded as recessive, but the chance that one of you may foal a centaur or sire a literal colt, while admittedly small, had as well be acknowledged. My interest in the subject of heredity, which needs no further explanation, has led me to sponsor research in this area, certain findings of which I’ll impart to each of you on your wedding day.”

Laodamia asked where babies came from. Isander decided to have two each of sons, daughters, trotters, pacers. Hippolochus, displeased with his adolescent appearance, hoped he could make use of my research to give his own offspring black manes and tails instead of bay. Philonoë smiled and said, “Bay is beautiful.” What I’m experiencing cannot be called an identity-crisis. In order to experience an identity-crisis, one must first have enjoyed some sense of identity. The tradition of the mad genius in literature. The tradition of the double in literature. The tradition of the story within the story, the tradition of the mad editor of the text, the tradition of the unreliable narrator. “I come now,” how beautifully all this is managed in the
Perseid,
“to the twin-business, how I more or less killed my father and my brother.” Polyeidus, old charlatan, is that your best? No answer. But I know you’re here between the lines, among the letters’ curls and crooks, spreading through me like the water through this marsh. Thank heaven I get to swat you at my peak!

“Bellerus and Deliades,” I’m saying to the children, back in Lycia; “Deliades and Bellerus. From the day we were born, the country quarreled over which of us should succeed to the throne of Corinth, and my brother and I quarreled over it ourselves, for fun and profit, just as you boys will when you drive me out of town.”

O Bellerophon! “Bellerus it was then, and do stop bawling.” All of you. “Twins we were; twin brothers; look-alikes and inner opposites; and Polyeidus was our tutor. Bellerus from toddlerhood passionate, impetuous, Aphrodite’s ardent darling; Deliades circumspect, prudential, in all things moderate, a venerator of Athene. And Polyeidus was our tutor. Everyone thought Deliades legitimate, as he shared the famous gray-green eyes of Glaucus and his forebears; but my earliest memory is of Mom and Dad squabbling in the next bedroom over me, whether I was Poseidon’s son or the horse-groom’s: a bastard to be exposed on the hillside or a demigod destined for the stars.”

Melanippe herself, though she loves her lover and is held to be recording his history faithfully, can be of two minds on this point when she hears him speaking to his children so. Yes, well, even Bellerus has his doubts; but though we teased and contested which was heir apparent, Deliades alone never questioned which was mortal: I liked the kid well enough; he worshipped me.

“And Polyeidus was your tutor,”
the children chorused. I’m sending them supperless to bed: Isander has announced that he hates this story because its words are too big and it lasts too long. Hippolochus has kissed him and promised to repeat it all in little words at nap-time. My curly darling Laodamia sleeps in my lap; Philonoë deftly replaces the thumb with a pacifier. Dead now, all of them: dead and dead and dead! Then do let them stay up awhile, Bellerophon, to hear the Polyeidus part.

“Our tutor he became, Polyeidus, Polyeidus, after being prophet laureate to the court of Corinth. Though featured in several other myths, on the strength of which Dad had hired him, he declared to us he had no memory of his pre-Corinthian past, or any youth. Some said he’d been Proteus’s apprentice, others that he was some stranded version of The Old Man of the Sea himself. At such stories Polyeidus shrugged, saying only that all shapeshifters are revisions of tricky Proteus. But he dismissed the conventional Protean transformations—into animals, plants, and such—as mere vaudeville entertainment, and would never oblige us with a gryphon or a unicorn, say, howevermuch we pled, or stoop to such homely predictions as next day’s weather. For this reason, among others, he was demoted to tutor; and he urged upon us, even as boys, a severer view of magic. By no means, he used to insist, did magicians necessarily understand their art, though experience had led him to a couple of general observations on it. For example, that each time he learned something new about his powers, those powers diminished, anyhow altered. Also, that what he “turned into” on those occasions when he transformed was not altogether within his governance. Under certain circumstances he would frown, give a kind of grunt, and turn into something, which might or might not resemble what if anything he’d had in mind. Sometimes his magic failed him when he called upon it; other times it seized him when he had no use for it; and the same was true of his prophesying. ‘It will be alleged that Napoleon died on St. Helena in 1821,’ he would announce, with no more notion than we of the man and place and date he meant, or the significance of the news; ‘in fact he escaped to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to establish his base for the Second Revolution.’ Most disappointingly to Deliades and me, his transformations were generally into what he came to call ‘historical personages from the future’: this same Napoleon, for example, or Captain John Smith of the American plantation of Virginia: useless to our education. But no sooner did he see this pattern than he lost the capacity, and changed thenceforward only into documents, mainly epistolary: Napoleon’s imaginary letter from King Theodore to Sir Robert Walpole, composed after the Emperor’s surrender; Plato’s Seventh Letter; the letter from Denmark to England which Hamlet transferred to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the Isidorian Decretals; the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion;
Madame de Staël’s
Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau;
the ‘Henry Letters’ purchased for $50,000 by President Madison’s administration from the impostor Compte de Crillon in 1811 to promote the War of 1812; the letter from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British fleet at Halifax, to that same president, warning that unless reparations were made for the Americans’ destruction of Newark and St. Davids in Canada, the British would retaliate by burning Washington—a letter said to be either antedated or intentionally delayed, as it reached its address when the capital was in ashes; the false letter describing mass movements of Indian and Canadian forces against Detroit, planted by the Canadian General Brock so that the U.S. General Hull would discover it, panic, and surrender the city; a similar letter dated September 11, 1813, which purported to be from Colonel Fossett of Vermont to General MacComb, advising him of massive reinforcements on the way to aid him against the Canadian General Prevost in the Battle of Plattsburg: it was entrusted to an Irishwoman of Cumberland Head whom the U.S. Secret Service, its actual author, knew to be loyal to the British; Prevost, when she dutifully turned it over to him, took it to be authentic and retreated into Canada, though no such reinforcements existed. Et cetera. Doctored letters. My brother and I were not very interested.”

“Kill Granddad and Uncle Deliades, Daddy,” Isander begged. His brother shushed him. All dead now, and sent supperless to bed. Hippolochus giddyaps happily upstairs on a fancied flying-horse to do battle with imaginary dragons, declaring to Isander, who gallops beside, that what might seem to be arbitrary and excessive punishment is in fact the stern discipline of mythic herohood, to which I am as lovingly apprenticing them as did Polyeidus me. So their mother has explained to him. Dead.

I want sons, Bellerophon. I want my belly full. Don’t withdraw. I’m tired of Amazoning.

A novel in the form of artificial fragments. A novel in diary form, in epistolary form, in notebook form, in the form of notes; a novel in the form of annotated text; a novel in the form of miscellaneous documents, a novel in the form of the novel. The tradition that no one who believes himself to be losing his mind is losing his mind. The tradition that people who speak much of committing suicide are talking themselves out of committing suicide, or is it into committing suicide. Kill Glaucus and Deliades.

“Our apprenticeship in herohood was real enough—all at Deliades’s instigation, for Bellerus never took it seriously. My brother drew Polyeidus out upon the subject, from love of me, never presuming to the role himself.” My dead son’s candles gutter in the uncut cake; I sit in the palace dark; my wife clicks serenely on; I don’t know who my audience is.

“ ‘Hurrah!’ cried Deliades—the Corinthian equivalent of our
hooray
—after one of Polyeidus’s lectures: ‘We don’t have to hate Daddy any more!’ Using, as usual, Cousin Perseus as his example, Polyeidus had enounced the first several requisites and features of the heroic
vita:
that the circumstances of conception be unusual; that the child be born to royal parents but be alleged to be the son of a god; that an attempt be made on his boyish life either by his maternal grandfather or his mother’s spouse; et cetera. To Deliades, ever a peacemaker, this explained and excused Glaucus’s jealous quarrels with Eurymede, which, as my brother loved us all, had been particularly painful for him to overhear.

“ ‘You merely have to fear him,’ Polyeidus replied, ‘your mother’s father being already among the shades. At least Bellerus does, if we assume he’s Poseidon’s son.’ I remember replying with a merry shrug that I feared no one. We were young men; Deliades was comely in a mortal way, but Bellerus, standing on the Isthmian strand, his copper curls lit by the descending sun—divine!

“ ‘We needn’t fear him either,’ Deliades maintained: ‘You said yourself that the attempted murder never does more than leave a mark, usually on the hero’s thigh or foot, by which he’ll be recognized later in the cycle—and Perseus seems to’ve managed without even that. All we have to worry about is that Dad himself will get killed accidentally when the thing backfires’—as had been the would-be ancestral assassins of Perseus, Oedipus, and countless other heroes, some not to be born for generations yet, with whose biographies Polyeidus documented his point.

“Our tutor smiled. How describe a man who from semester to semester seldom resembled himself? That season, I believe, he was bald, shag-chinned, ill-odored, goatish; season before he’d been leonine; season to come—we’ll come to that. He pointed out that to satisfy the prerequisites of herohood was not necessarily to be a hero; for every young Perseus or Moses boxed and shipped and rescued, scores of candidates must expire in their floating coffins, a menace to navigation and pollutant of the littoral. I hadn’t
proved
I was the sea-god’s son; Glaucus’s attempt on my life might be successful. If it weren’t, and I was a hero after all, the mythographical odds against
his
survival were great indeed: but he might, like Danaë‘s father Acrisius, live a long and useful life before retribution overtook him. For that matter, there was just a chance that the filicidal episode would be purely symbolic, a moment of peril in the company of my progenitor but not at his hands: young Odysseus’s accidental goring by the boar while hunting with his Grandfather Autolycus would be a case in point when it came to pass. All the same, he said, one in my position did well to be wary—as did one in Glaucus’s—especially as the attempt must be expected quite soon. We were well past puberty; actuarially speaking, it was overdue already.