The Life of Hope (24 page)

After “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” came the nightly news, which we both found a bit boring. Deedee had a very emphatic way of demonstrating boredom: she fell fast asleep. Her mouth fell open and she began to snore, although it was barely audible. Deedee had fallen asleep with a cigarette still burning in her wrinkled claw. I removed it and mushed it into the overflowing ashtray. Then I leaned over and kissed Dierdra Violet Cumbridge on the forehead. “Ah, Deedee,” I whispered, “if only you were seventy-seven years younger.”

Ironically, given the subsequent life of Hope, Ian John Robert McDougall was born in Fredericksburg, Upper Canada, and educated in law at York. But McDougall soon proved himself to be an indifferent advocate. His true interest was ensuring that sinners were punished, not judiciously, but righteously and Biblically, an eye for an eye, maybe two eyes for an eye if McDougall felt lucky, so he abandoned both law and the Northland and went to study Theology at Amherst, New York. Thus, in the year of Our Lord 1850, when Henry David Thoreau met Ian John Robert McDougall aboard a train traveling from Montreal to Boston, the latter insisted on the appellation “Reverend Doctor McDougall, Barrister and Solicitor.” Thoreau nodded, staring out the window, mentioning quietly that he could be called Henry.

“I was visiting relatives,” Rev. Dr. McDougall went on, not that Thoreau had asked. McDougall lit a foul-smelling cigar, which immediately rendered Thoreau many different shades of green. “I reside in palatious New York. But business of a great portentious nature leads me to verdurent Massachusetts.” Rev. Dr. McDougall tilted his head briefly. “What business am I in?” he demanded rhetorically. McDougall pointed to his white collar. “I consider myself a watch dog. My good man, are you aware of the moral imperterpitude extantile upon the face of this land?”

Thoreau looked up, puzzled. “No. Indeed, I was not aware of any such word as ‘imperterpitude.’ ”

“Sadly, I am. I have made it my life’s work. My card.” McDougall reached into one of his many pockets and took out a small embossed card. Thoreau read the card, then looked at the man studiously.

The card, in elegant and curlicued letters, announced:

McDougall was an unpleasant-looking individual. The most unsightly thing about him was his complexion, which was a bright red. As a youth, McDougall had suffered horrendously from acne, and even as an adult he sported pimples as large as silver dollars. McDougall’s hair was also red, but many shades duller than his face. McDougall’s hair was very sparse, a few valiant strands grown to great length and carefully arranged to conceal a bald pate, and McDougall wore no beard, moustache or sideburns. Thoreau suspected that the man’s facial hair simply couldn’t force its way past the swelling whiteheads. (For his own part, Thoreau’s hair tumbled on to his shoulders, and he let his beard grow unhindered.) McDougall was rail-thin, obviously not a man to enjoy food, or anything else for that matter. He had a disconcerting habit of leaning forward and speaking to Thoreau from a distance of three or four inches, pressing his face to the young man, his voice overly loud, his breath hot and fetid.

Henry David Thoreau handed back the card.

“Don’t you wish to keep it?” asked McDougall.

“I hadn’t realized that I was meant to.” Thoreau reaccepted and pocketed the card. He wondered what he would do with it.

“Lust,” said McDougall. “Depravousness. Lubriciousness.” Much of McDougall’s conversation ran along these lines, that is, he gave voice to synonyms, mostly nonexistent, for the moral imperterpitude that was so rampant. Thoreau’s interest, if he had any at all, was on a linguistic level.

“I began my illustrated career,” said McDougall, “by visiting the seraglios of New York City. I was stunned to discover that the women there were both beautiful and elegantily dressed. I
have since visited sundrous establishments. In fact,” McDougall opened a satchel he had resting on his bony knees, “I have listed more than two hundred and twenty such zezanas in Manhattan alone!” He handed Thoreau a small periodical entitled
McDougall’s Journal
. “I have gone so far as to make an exactment of the street addresses,” said McDougall, “so that these particular cantonments might be eschewed.”

Thoreau leafed through the magazine idly. One article caught his eye: “The Maidens of Owahoo; An Investigation into the Diversions of the Yankee Marine Upon Tropical Shores.” The article began:

The article was unsigned, but Thoreau thought the wording was a bit of a giveaway.

“Rampacious uncleanness,” put in McDougall.

Thoreau had spent two years, all alone, living beside a pond near Concord, Massachusetts. Even though it had been three years since he’d left, the young man still had a problem making everyday conversation, especially conversations to which he could ascribe no purpose or benefit. He therefore flipped through the periodical and tried to give the preacher across from him the impression of being engrossed.

Certainly, much of the magazine was interesting in a way. It did, for example, have many pages listing brothels, suggesting in an introductory paragraph that anyone interested in “in-continenciality” and “libertinousness” would be well advised to visit the establishments, simply to see firsthand how disgusting they were. There was an article about the street gangs of New York City.

The article did indeed engross and alarm Thoreau, as he read of the gang wars, the improvised yet terrible weaponry, “blacklegs” and “knucklers.” He wondered if what so many said was true, that the world would never see the twentieth century, that total and utter annihilation was inevitable. Thoreau silently argued against this. Societies might change, he thought, and certainly governments would change (hadn’t Thoreau spent a day in jail for trying to precipitate this?), but the world itself, he reasoned, would always remain, fair and fine. He’d learned that from his pond, and he often wished that everyone might have a pond to learn from.

Henry David Thoreau closed the magazine and read the title page, allowing himself a small, unobtrusive chuckle.

Thoreau handed the magazine back.

McDougall demanded, “Don’t you want it?”

Thoreau shook his head gently.

“Are you not a Good Christian?”

The young man turned and stared out the window. He watched a river that ran beside the tracks, a river full of sunlight and fishes. “I’m a Transcendentalist,” Thoreau said.

McDougall felt a little annoyed. Transcendentalists never did anything; they kept to themselves, smiled a lot, and wrote poetry.

“Just so long as you’re not a Perfectionist!” McDougall roared.

“A which?” Thoreau saw something then. He took out and looked at his pocket watch, and saw that the train had been traveling some five hours out of Montreal. They were still in Upper Canada, then, somewhere to the west of Kingston, east of Muddy York. Henry David Thoreau took note of all this, because he meant to make mention of it in his Journal. What he saw was this: a fish, some five and a half feet long, rise fully out
of the water, flip over as if in ecstasy, then drop back into the water with a glorious rainbowed splash. Thoreau was a knowledgable fisherman, yet he couldn’t recognize the monster’s breed. He had heard that the Northern Maskinonge could attain a great length, but this fish possessed huge eyes, round and silver as the moon.

“The Perfectionists,” McDougall was saying, “are more minatating than Fanny Wright or Robert Owen! The cult has sprang like poisonal mushrooms! First it was confounded to those in Boston and subsequently Lowell, but now sects are exant in all the towns of fair Massachusetts, not to mention Vermont, New York and even Maine! Hope is decidedly evil.”

Thoreau looked baffled.

McDougall spat out the name, “Joseph Benton Hope.” The pimpled man took out a pair of spectacles and fixed them on to his pimpled nose. “I mean to see Hope humiliated,” said McDougall, as he took some handwritten pages out of his satchel. “Allow me to read to you from my condemnationary speech. Ahem. ‘The masterstroke of his Satanic policy …’ I refer to Hope, although others almost as evil abound, e.g., Bryee, Odell, et al. However, I digest. Ahem. ‘The masterstroke of his Satanic policy is to open a floodgate to every species of immoralatious undertaking, and by a refinement of wickedity which puts papacy to the blush, to sanctimonify the very incarnate imperterpitude.”

But Henry David Thoreau didn’t hear. He was thinking about the magnificent fish.

I busted into The Willing Mind and started a sort of Humphrey Bogart/James Cagney impersonation. “All right, youse guys, I scammed it out good,” I told Jonathon, Mona, the Bernies and the Kims. “Here’s what went down. Joseph Benton Hope, practitioner of complex marriage, wilful countenance and stirpiculture, went one step too far. Yeah, that’s right. He spied some little enchilada with a hot chassis and he took her for a little spin, see? Only her old man didn’t like it. So he took Joseph out to the lake, see? And …”

“D’you wanna beer … or what?” demanded Mona. Mona was glaring at me, undeniably and relentlessly. Her enormous hands were buckled on to her hips, and those hips were tossed aggressively sideways. Mona was wearing a light, see-through blouse, and I saw through it. Of course, I didn’t drop the Bogart/Cagney impersonation; I’m the kind of guy who keeps up bad jokes until someone laughs out of sheer desperation. “Yeah, that’s right, sweetheart. A beer.”

“You’re a nerd,” Mona declared, marching off for the draft pump.

I imagined all this petulance was due to the fact that the last time I saw Mona we were lovers, even passionate ones, and on this occasion I had yet to say hello to her. Oh, well. I’d make amends later.

“You. Whitecrow. You were there, weren’t you? Yeah, yeah, sure you were. Come on, tell me everything you know.”

Jonathon stared at me, and his strange silver eyes were crinkled with amusement, although I knew he was likewise not taken with my little act. “Sit down, Paul,” he instructed me, drawing over a barstool. “You’ve been doing some reading, have you?”

“That’s right. Over at Deedee’s place.”

“The library,” Jonathon said.

Suddenly a mug full of beer was dropped on to the counter in front of me. “So you been hanging aroun’ at the lib’ary, huh?” asked Mona.

“Um, yes.” I grinned. “Hello, Mona!”

Apparently I’d left it a little too long. Mona tsked her tongue and in the very act of tsking managed to stick it out at me.

The beer tasted good. I don’t know if it had actually improved in quality or if I’d realigned my tastebuds out of necessity.

“So what happened?” Big Bernie demanded.

“Huh?”

“They took this Bent Hoop and what?”

“Not ‘Bent Hoop,’ jerk!” said Little Bernie. “J. Benton Hope, our founding father.”

“Oh. Anyways, what did they do?”

For some reason the answer required a poor Long John Silver imitation. “They takes him art t’ the warter, and they takes a scabbard, and they cuts arf his …”

“Yes?” prompted Jonathon Whitecrow.

“They cuts arf his whore-pipe! Har-har-har!”

“Kee-rist,” muttered Mona.

“Ooh!” went Big Bernie, and one fat hand flew down to cover his groin. “Ouchie-ouchie-ouchie!”

“But, you must have known that, Bern,” I told him.

“Maybe I heard sumpin’ about it one time,” he recalled.

The Kims, interestingly enough, were not locked in an amorous knot. The boy was staring at me. His acne was getting worse, which is what nonstop dry humping will do to you. “Are you serious?” he asked. “They cut off his cock?”

“That’s how it’s beginning to look, kiddo.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a bunch of like horse hooey!” This came from Mona, who was sitting away down at the other end of the bar. She was reading a biography of General Patton.

“I take it, then, that you have read
The Fish?
” asked Jonathon Whitecrow.

“Sure. But there’s other clues. Everyone around here says ‘Keep your dick in your pants’ whenever anyone goes fishing. Right? And a Hoper looks just like a penis.” It didn’t really, but it certainly looked phallic. I remembered the old fart in Moe’s
Steakhouse and Tavern, and the way he’d made the Hoper stand erect, the senile and swinish way he’d guffawed.

“Isaiah Hope,” said Jonathon, “was a somewhat disturbed young man.”

“I gather that’s true enough.”

“You should write somethin’ about Patton,” said Mona. “Now
that’s
inneresting. Nobody cares about what happened a hunert years ago.”

“Somebody already wrote a book about Patton.”

“So? There are other fuckin’ generals! Jesus, d’you think Patton was the only American five-star general tank commander in the whole fuckin’ continent of Africa?!”