To Sail Beyond the Sunset (33 page)

In time line one, code John Carter, the Democratic nomination went to Paul McNutt…but the election to Republican Senator Robert Taft.

In the composite time lines coded “Cyrano,” Mr. Roosevelt had both a third and a fourth term, died in his fourth term and was succeeded by his vice-president, a former senator from Missouri named Harry Truman. In my own time line there was never a senator by that name but I do remember Brian speaking of a Captain Harry Truman whom he knew in France. “A fighting son of a gun,” Briney called him. “A real buzz saw.” But the Harry Truman whom Brian knew was not a politician; he was a haberdasher, so it seems unlikely that it could be the same man. Briney used to go out of his way to buy gloves and such from Captain Truman. Brian described him as “a dying breed—an old-fashioned gentleman.”

In time line two, code Leslie LeCroix, my own native time line and that of Lazarus Long and Boondock, Mr. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term, in July 1940, then died from a stroke while playing tennis the last week in October, thereby creating a unique constitutional crisis. Henry Wallace, the Democratic nominee for vice-president, claimed that the electors from the states that went Democratic were bound by law to vote for him for president. The Democratic National Committee did not see it that way and neither did the Electoral College—and neither did the Supreme Court—three different points of view. Four, in fact, as John Nance Garner was president from October on…but had not been nominated for anything and had bolted his party after the July convention.

I will return to this subject as this was the world I grew up in. But note that Mr. Roosevelt was stricken “while playing tennis.”

I learned while studying comparative history that in all other time lines but mine Mr. Roosevelt had been a poliomyelitis cripple confined to a wheelchair!

The effects of contagious diseases on history are a never-ending subject for debate among mathematico-historians on Tertius. I often wonder about one case, because I was there. In my time line Spanish influenza killed 528,000 U.S. residents in the epidemic of the winter of 1918-19, and killed more troops in France than had been killed by shot and shell and poison gas. What if the Spanish flu had struck Europe one year earlier? Certainly history would have been changed—but in what way? Suppose a corporal named Hitler had died? Or an exile who called himself Lenin? Or a soldier named Pétain? That strain of flu could kill overnight; I saw it happen more than once.

Time line three, code Neil Armstrong, is the native world of my sister-wife Hazel Stone (Gwen Campbell) and of our husband Dr. Jubal Harshaw. This is an unattractive world in which Venus is uninhabitable and Mars is a bleak, almost airless desert, and Earth itself seems to have gone crazy, led by the United States in a lemminglike suicide stampede.

I dislike to study time line three; it is so horrid. Yet it fascinates me. In this time line (as in mine) United States historians call the second half of the twentieth century the “Crazy Years”—and well they might! Hearken to the evidence:

a) The largest, longest, bloodiest war in United States history, fought by conscript troops without a declaration of war, without any clear purpose, without any intention of winning—a war that was ended simply by walking away and abandoning the people for whom it was putatively fought;

b) Another war that was never declared—this one was never concluded and still existed as an armed truce forty years after it started…while the United States engaged in renewed diplomatic and trade relations with the very government it had warred against without admitting it;

c) An assassinated president, an assassinated presidential candidate, a president seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by a known psychotic who nevertheless was allowed to move freely, an assassinated leading Negro national politician, endless other assassination attempts, unsuccessful, partly successful, and successful;

d) So many casual killings in public streets and public parks and public transports that most lawful citizens avoided going out after dark, especially the elderly;

e) Public school teachers and state university professors who taught that patriotism was an obsolete concept, that marriage was an obsolete concept, that sin was an obsolete concept, that politeness was an obsolete concept—that the United States itself was an obsolete concept;

f) School teachers who could not speak or write grammatically, could not spell, could not cipher;

g) The nation’s leading farm state had as its biggest cash crop: an outlawed plant that was the source of the major outlaw drug;

h) Cocaine and heroin called “recreational drugs,” felony theft called “joyriding,” vandalism by gangs called “trashing,” burglary called “ripping off,” felonious assault by gangs called “muggings,” and the reaction to all of these crimes was “boys will be boys,” so scold them and put them on probation but don’t ruin their lives by treating them as criminals;

i) Millions of women who found it more rewarding to have babies out of wedlock than it would be to get married or to go to work.

I don’t understand time line three (code Neil Armstrong) so I had better quote Jubal Harshaw, who lived through it. “Mama Maureen,” he said to me, “the America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens…which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it…which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

“‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”

Jubal shrugged and looked sad. “Mine was a lovely world—until the parasites took over.”

Jubal Harshaw also pointed out to me a symptom that, so he says, invariably precedes the collapse of a culture: a decline in good manners, in common courtesy, in a decent respect for the rights of other people. “Political philosophers from Confucius to the present day have repeatedly pointed this out. But the first signs of this fatal symptom may be hard to spot. Does it really matter when an honorific is omitted? Or when a junior calls a senior by his first name, uninvited? Such loosening of protocol may be hard to evaluate. But there is one unmistakable sign of the collapse of good manners: dirty public washrooms.

“In a healthy society public restrooms, toilets, washrooms, look and smell as clean and fresh as a bathroom in a decent private home. In a sick society—” Jubal stopped and simply looked disgusted.

He did not need to elaborate; I had seen it happen in my own time line. In the first part of the twentieth century right through the thirties people at all levels of society were habitually polite to each other and it was taken for granted that anyone using a public washroom tried hard to leave the place as clean and neat as he found it. As I recall, decent behavior concerning public washrooms started to slip during World War II, and so did good manners in general. By the sixties and the seventies rudeness of all sorts had become commonplace, and by then I never used a public restroom if I could possibly avoid it.

Offensive speech, bad manners, and filthy toilets all seem to go together.

America in my own time line suffered the cancer of “Bread and Circuses” but found a swifter way to commit suicide. I don’t boast about the difference, as in time line two the people of the United States succumbed to something even sillier than Bread and Circuses: The people voted themselves a religious dictatorship.

It happened after 1982, so I did not see it—for which I am glad! When I was a woman a hundred years old, Nehemiah Scudder was still a small boy.

The potential for religious hysteria had always been present in the American culture, and this I knew, as my father had rubbed my nose in it from an early age. Father had pointed out to me that the only thing that preserved religious freedom in the United States was not the First Amendment and was not tolerance…but was solely a Mexican standoff between rival religious sects, each sect intolerant, each sect the sole custodian of the “One True Faith”—but each sect a minority that gave lip service to freedom of religion to keep its own “One True Faith” from being persecuted by all the other “True Faiths.”

(Of course it was usually open season on Jews and sometimes on Catholics and almost always on Mormons and Muslims and Buddhists and other heathens. The First Amendment was never intended to protect such outright blasphemy. Oh, no!)

Elections are won not by converting the opposition but by getting out your own vote, and Scudder’s organization did just that. According to histories I studied at Boondock, the election of 2012 turned out 63 percent of the registered voters (which in turn was less than half of those eligible to register); the True American party (Nehemiah Scudder) polled 27 percent of the popular vote…which won 81 percent of the Electoral College votes.

In 2016 there was no election.

The Torrid Twenties… Flaming Youth, the Lost Generation, flappers, cake eaters, gangsters and sawed-off shotguns and bootleg booze and needled beer. Hupmobiles and Stutz Bearcats and flying circuses. A joy hop for five dollars. Lindbergh and the
Spirit of St. Louis
. Skirts climbed unbelievably until, by the middle of the decade, rolled stockings permitted bare knees to be seen. The Prince of Wales Glide and the Finalé Hop and the Charleston. Ruth Etting and Will Rogers and Ziegfeld’s Follies. There were bad things about the Twenties but on the whole they were good years for most people—and they were never dull.

I kept busy as usual with housewifely things of little interest to outsiders. I had Theodore Ira in 1919, Margaret in 1922, Arthur Roy in 1924, Alice Virginia in 1927, Doris Jean in 1930—and they all had the triumphs and crises that children have and aren’t you glad that you don’t have to look at their pictures and listen to me repeating their cute sayings?

In February of 1929 we sold our house on Benton Boulevard and leased with option to buy a house near Rockhill Road and Meyer Boulevard—an old farmhouse, roomy but not as modern as our former home. This was a hard-nosed decision by my husband, who always believed in making every dollar work twice. But he did consult me and not alone because title was vested in me.

“Maureen,” he said to me, “do you feel like gambling?”

“We always have. Haven’t we?”

“Some yes, some no. This time we would tap the pot, shoot the works, shout
Banco!
If I failed to bring it off, you might have to go out and pound a beat, just to keep potato soup on the table.”

“I’ve always wondered if I could make a living that way. Here I am, forty-seven in July—”

“Wups! Your age is now thirty-seven. And I’m forty-one.”

“Briney, I’m in bed with you. Can’t I be truthful in bed?”

“Judge Sperling wants us to stick to our corrected ages at all times. And Justin agrees.”

“Yessir. I’ll be good. I’ve always wondered if I could make a living as a streetwalker. But how do I find a beat? I understand that a gal can get her eyes scratched out if she just goes out and starts soliciting without finding out who owns that territory. I know what to do in bed, Briney; it’s the merchandizing of the product that I must learn.”

“Don’t be so eager, slippery bottom; it may not be necessary. Tell me—Do you still believe that Ted—Theodore—Corporal Bronson—came from the future?”

I suddenly sobered. “I do. Don’t you?”

“Mo’, I believed him as quickly as you did. I believed him before his prophecy about the end of the war proved true. Now I’m asking you this: Do you believe in Ted strongly enough that you are willing to risk every cent we own that his prediction of a collapse in the stock market will be right on the button exactly like his prediction of Armistice Day?”

“Black Tuesday,” I said softly. “October twenty-ninth. This year.”

“Well? If I take this gamble—and miss—we’ll be broke. Marie won’t be able to finish at Radcliffe, Woodie will have to scratch for a college education, and Dick and Ethel—well, we’ll cross those bridges later. Sweetheart, I’m into this bull market up to my ears…and I propose to get deeper into it on the firm assumption that Black Tuesday takes place on the dot and exactly as Ted said it would.”

“Do it!”

“Are you sure, Mo’? If anything goes wrong, we’ll be right back to fried mush. Whereas it is not too late to hedge my bets—pull half of it out and stash it away. Gamble with the other half.”

“Briney, I wasn’t brought up that way. You remember Father’s harness racer Loafer?”

“I saw him a few times. A beautiful beast.”

“Yes. Just not quite as fast as he looked. Father regularly bet on himself. Always on the nose. Never to place or show. Loafer usually could come in second or third…but Father would not bet that way. I’ve heard him talk to Loafer before a heat, softly, gently: ‘This time we’re going to take ’em, boy! This time we’re going to win!’ Then later I’ve heard him say, ‘You tried, old fellow! That’s all I can ask. You’re still a champion…and we’ll take ’em next time!’ And Father would pat him on the neck, and Loafer would whinny and nicker to him, and they would comfort each other.”

“Then you think I should bet across the board? For there isn’t going to be any next time.”

“No, no! Shoot the works! You believe Theodore and so do I. So let’s do it!” I added, as I reached down and grabbed his tool, “If it’s fried-mush time again, it need not be for long. You can knock me up, uh, let me see”—I counted—“next Monday. Which would mean that I would unload about”—I stopped to count again—“oh, a couple of weeks after Black Tuesday. Then we will receive another Howard Foundation bonus shortly thereafter.”