To Sail Beyond the Sunset (30 page)

“What do you mean ‘No’? No rules. Relax.”

“No, sir. You don’t trust and I don’t promise. The situation is unchanged.”

I was ready to burst into tears from sheer exasperation. Men’s minds do not work the way ours do and we will never understand them. Yet we can’t get along without them.

I was saved from making a spectacle of myself by a knock on the door. Nancy. “May I come in?”

“Come in, Nanc’!” Briney called out. “Come in, dear,” I echoed.

She came in and I thought how lovely she looked. She was freshly shaved that morning, in preparation for a swap that Nancy and Jonathan had asked for—Jonathan into my bed, Nancy into Theodore’s. Theodore had hesitated—afraid of hurting my feelings—but I had insisted, knowing what a treat our Nancy would be for Theodore (and Theodore for Nancy!) (and Jonathan for Maureen; I was flattered enormously that Jonathan had suggested it).

Father had taken the rest of my zoo to the Al G. Barnes Circus, playing in Independence—all but Ethel, too young for the circus, too young to notice; I had her crib in my bathroom, safe and in earshot.

That playful swap had gone beautifully and made me think even more highly of my prospective son-in-law. About three o’clock we four, Nancy and Theodore, Jonathan and I, had gathered in “Smith Field,” my big bed, mostly to chat. As Briney often said, “You can’t do it all the time, but there is no limit to how much you can talk about it.”

We four were still lounging in Smith Field, talking and necking, when Brian telephoned—he had just arrived in town, on leave. I told him to hurry home and cued him in family code as to what he could expect. Nancy understood the coded message and looked wide-eyed but said nothing.

Thirty-odd minutes later she closed her eyes and opened her thighs and for the first time received her father—then opened her eyes and looked at Jonathan and me, and grinned. I grinned back at her; Jonathan was too busy to look.

What this world needs is more loving, sweaty and friendly and unashamed.

Then the children had gone downstairs; Nancy had sensed that I wanted time alone with my two men. She took the telephone with her, long cord and all. Now she stood by the bed and smiled at us. “Did you hear the phone ring? It was Grandpa. He said to tell you that the zoo wagon will arrive—that’s your car, Ted-Lazarus darling—will arrive at exactly six-oh-five
P.M.
SO Jonathan is bathing and I wanted him not to use all the hot water. He left his clothes up here; I’ll take them down to him, then I’ll bathe and dress up here. Ted-Lazarus dear, where are your clothes?”

“In the sewing room. I’ll be right down.”

“Cancel that,” Brian said. “Nancy, fetch Ted’s clothes when you come up, that’s my sweet girl. Ted, in this family we spit in their eyes and tell ’em to go to hell. You don’t need to dress until we do, after the doorbell rings. A husband is all the chaperon a wife needs, and I don’t explain to my children why we choose to have a guest upstairs. As for
mon beau-père
, he knows the score and is our shut-eye sentry. If Carol guesses, she won’t talk. Thanks, Nancy.”

“
Pas de quoi, mon cher père.
Papa! Is it true that Ted doesn’t have to go back tonight?”

“Ted goes back with me, Sunday night. Special duty, assigned to me-and I sold him, body and soul, to your mother, who may kill him by then—”

“Oh, no!” Both my daughter and I said it.

“Or not, but she’ll try. Now get along, darling, and set that door to latch as you close it.”

Nancy did so; my husband turned to me. “Flame top, it is now five-forty. Can you figure out a way to entertain Ted and me for the next twenty-five minutes?”

I took a deep breath. “I’ll try.”

Black Tuesday

WORLD-AS-MYTH Much as I love Hilda, much as I love Jubal and respect his analytical genius, World-as-Myth doesn’t explain anything.

As Dr. Will Durant would put it, it is an insufficient hypothesis. I studied philosophy under Dr. Durant in Kansas City in 1921 and ’22, not long after he left the Catholic Church—and turned agnostic, socialist, and benedict, all through sniffing a fourteen-year-old girl half his age.

Dr. Durant must have been a disappointment to Mrs. Grundy—he married his jailbait sweetheart and stayed married to her till his death in his nineties, with never a breath of scandal. For Mrs.Grundy it must have been a case of “Some days it is hardly worthwhile to listen at keyholes.”

The Church’s loss was the World’s gain. A horny young teacher’s inability to keep his hands off a pretty, smart, and nubile student gave several universes a great teacher in history and philosophy…and gave Maureen her introduction to metaphysics—my greatest intellectual adventure since Father introduced me to Professor Thomas Henry Huxley.

Professor Huxley introduced me to the fact that theology is a study with no answers because it has no subject matter.

No subject matter? That’s right, no subject matter whatever—just colored water with artificial sweetening. “Theo-” = “God” and “-logy” = word(s), i.e., any word ending in “-ology” means “talk about” or “discussion of” or “words concerning” or “study of” a subject named in the first part of the word, whether it is “hippology,” or “astrology,” or “proctology,” or “eschatology,” or “scatology,” or something else. But to discuss any subject, it is first necessary to agree on what it is you are discussing. “Hippology” presents no problem; everybody has seen a horse. “Proctology”—everybody has seen an arsehole…or, if you have been so carefully brought up that you’ve never seen one, go down to your city hall; you will find the place full of them. But the subject tagged by the spell-symbol “theology” is a horse of another color.

“God,” or “god,” or “gods”—have you ever seen “God”? If so, where and when, how tall was She and what did She weigh? What was Her skin color? Did She have a belly button and, if so, why? Did She have breasts? For what purpose? How about organs of reproduction and of excretion—did She or didn’t She?

(If you think I am making fun of the idea of a God fashioned in Man’s image or vice versa, you have much to go on.)

I will agree that the notion of an anthropomorphic God went out of fashion some time ago with most professional godsmen…but that doesn’t get us any nearer to defining the English spell-symbol “God.” Let’s consult fundamentalist preachers…because Episcopalians won’t even let God into His sanctuary unless He shines His shoes and trims that awful beard…and Unitarians won’t let Him in at all.

So let’s listen to fundamentalists: “God is the Creator. He Created the World. The existence of the World proves that it was created; therefore there is a Creator. That Creator we call ‘God.’ Let us all bow down and worship Him, for He is Almighty and His works proclaim His might.”

Will someone please page Dr. S. I. Hayakawa? Or, if he is busy, any student who received a B+ or better in Logic 101? I’m looking for someone able to discuss the fallacy of circular reasoning and also the concatenative process by which abstract words can be logically defined by building on concrete words. What is a “concrete” word? It is a spell-symbol used to tag something you can point to and thereby agree on, e.g., “cat,” “sailboat,” “ice-skating”—agree with such certainty that when you say “sailboat” there is no chance whatever that I will think you mean a furry quadruped with retractile claws.

With the spell-symbol “God” there is no way to achieve such agreement because there is nothing to point to. Circular reasoning can’t get you out of this dilemma. Pointing to something (the physical world) and asserting that it has to have a Creator and this Creator necessarily has such-and-such attributes proves nothing save that you have made certain assertions without proof. You have pointed at a physical thing, the physical world; you have asserted that this physical thing has to have a “Creator” (Who told you that? What’s his mailing address?
Who
told
him?
). But to assert that something physical was created out of nothing—not even empty space—by a Thingamajig you can’t point to is not to make a philosophical statement or any sort of statement, it is mere noise, amphigory, sound and fury signifying nothing.

Jesuits take fourteen years to learn to talk that sort of nonsense. Southern fundamentalist preachers learn to talk it in a much shorter time. Either way, it’s nonsense.

Pardon me. Attempts to define “God” cause one to break out in hives.

Unlike theology, “metaphysics” does have a subject, the physical world, the world that you can feel, taste, and see, the world of potholes and beautiful men and railroad tickets and barking dogs and wars and marshmallow sundaes. But, like theology, metaphysics has no answers. Just questions.

But what lovely questions!

Was this world created? If so, when and by whom and why?

How is consciousness (“Me-ness”) hooked to the physical world?

What happens to this “Me-ness” when this body I am wearing stops, dies, decays, and the worms eat it?

Why am I here, where did I come from, where am I going?

Why are you here?
Are
you here? Are you anywhere? Am I all alone?

(And many more.)

Metaphysics has polysyllabic words for all of these ideas but you don’t have to use them; Anglo-Saxon monosyllables do just as well for questions that have no answers.

Persons who claim to have answers to these questions invariably are fakers after your money. No exceptions. If you point out their fakery, if you dare to say aloud that the emperor has no clothes, they will lynch you if possible, always from the highest of motives.

That’s the trouble I’m in now. I made the mistake of flapping my loose lower jaw before learning the power structure here…so now I am about to be hanged (I hope it is as gentle as hanging!) for the capital crime of sacrilege.

I should know better. I didn’t think anyone would mind (in San Francisco) when I pointed out that the available evidence tended to indicate that Jesus was gay.

But there were cries of rage from two groups: a) gays; b) non-gays. I was lucky to get out of town.

(I do wish Pixel would come back.)

▣

On Friday we got my daughter Nancy and Jonathan Weatheral married. The bride wore white over a peanut-sized embryo that qualified her for Howard Foundation benefits, while the bride’s mother wore a silly grin that resulted from her private activities that week and the groom’s mother wore a quieter smile and a faraway look in her eyes from similar (but not identical) private activities.

I had gone to much trouble to slide Eleanor Weatheral under Sergeant Theodore. To their mutual joy, I know (my husband says that Eleanor is a world-class mattress dancer), but not solely for their amusement. Eleanor is a touchstone, able to detect lies when she is sexually linked and
en rapport
.

Let’s go back two days—On Wednesday my “zoo” got home from the circus at 6:05
P.M.
; we had a picnic dinner in our back yard at 6:30, the exact timing being possible through Carol’s having prepared it in the morning. At sundown Brian lit the garden lights and the younger ones played croquet while we elders—Brian, Father, Theodore, and I—sat in the garden glider swing and talked.

Our talk started on the subject of human female fertility. Brian told Father that he wanted him to hear something Captain Long had said about the matter.

But I must note first that I had gone to Father’s room the night before (Tuesday) after the house was quiet, pledging him a King’s X, then told him about a strange story Sergeant Theodore had given me earlier that night, after that silly unplanned visit to Electric Park, a story in which he claimed to be Captain Lazarus Long, a Howard from the future.

Despite my promise of King’s X, Father left the door ajar. Nancy tapped on it and we invited her in. She perched on the other side of Father’s bed, facing me, and listened soberly to my repetition.

Father said, “Maureen, I take it you believe him, time travel and ether ship and all.”

“Father, he knew Woodrow’s birth date. Did you tell him?”

“No. I know your policy.”

“He knew your birthday, too, not just the year, but the day and the month. Did you tell him?”

“No, but it’s no secret. I’ve set it down on all sorts of documents.”

“But how would he know where to find one? And he knew Mother’s birthday—day, year, and month.”

“That’s harder. But not impossible. Daughter, as you tell me he pointed out: Anyone with access to the Foundation’s files in Toledo could look up all of these dates.”

“But why would he know Woodrow’s birthday and not Nancy’s? Father, he came here knowing quite a bit about all his ancestors—those he claims as ancestors—that is to say, Woodrow and his ancestors but not the birthdays of Woodrow’s brothers and sisters.”

“I don’t know. If he did have access to Judge Sperling’s files, he could have memorized just those data needed to back up his story. But the most interesting item is his assertion that the war will end on November eleventh, this year. I would have guessed sometime this summer, with bad news for Britain and worse news for France, and humiliation for us…or not earlier than the summer of 1919, with victory for the Allies but a horribly expensive one. If it turns out that Ted is right—November 11, 1918—then I’ll believe him. All of it.”

Nancy said, suddenly, “I believe him.”

Father said, “Why, Nancy?”

“Grandpa, do you remember—No, you weren’t here. It was the day war was declared, a year ago. Papa had kissed us good-bye and left. Grandpa, you went out right after Papa left—”

Father nodded. I said, “I remember.”

“—and, Mama, you had gone up to lie down. Uncle Ted telephoned. Oh, I know that he telephoned later and you talked to him, Grandpa. You—You were mean to him—”

“Nancy, I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, that was a misunderstanding, we all know that. This was before he talked to you, maybe an hour before, maybe longer. I was upset and crying a bit, I guess, and Uncle Ted knew it…and he told me to stop worrying about Papa, because he—Uncle Ted, I mean—had second sight and could tell the future. He told me that Papa would come home safely. And suddenly I quit worrying and have not worried since—not that way. Because I knew that he was telling the truth. Uncle Ted does know the future…because he is from the future.”