by Morris West
‘Easy now Father! It isn’t so important.’
‘You say so! But I tell you it’s the root and core of the matter! I know about mana and the handing down of power. I started from nothing – a Boston Irish kid with the backside out of his breeches. I got my education the hard way: fist fights in the alleys and a black strap around my backside at home. I joined the Society. Suddenly I was a sacred thing – kapu! I couldn’t marry. It was a sacrilege to touch my dedicated person. I studied; knowledge was handed to me, year after year. Then I was ordained…A sacred man, the bishop, who got his mana from the Pope, who got his mana from Peter the Fisherman, who got his from Christ, laid his hands on me, and said, “Now you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech”…Now I’m a big Kapu! I welcome the new-born and send home the dying. I make God out of bread. I remit sins and give rescripts for salvation. Your wife – if you had one! – tells me what she does with you in bed, and I tell her if it’s good or bad. You kill the Dean one fine summer night, and if I judge you’re sorry enough, I send you away, clean in conscience, safe from pursuit by God, and still secret from man. That’s a big endowment. That’s God and Flanagan in a private duet! So what happens to Flanagan? Either he gets so holy and high and mighty that he thinks he’s God himself. Or he can’t take the strain and takes to drink and seducing his female penitents! Or he tries to get rid of the mana altogether – makes himself good-boy-Joe, jolly-club-counsellor, Mr Nobody, so broadminded his brains fall out of his earholes…Don’t laugh! That’s the truth. A fellow like Magnusson, with all his millions, can’t come near that sort of power. So, he tries to buy it with a donation, command it with an exuberance of charity; and I – God help me! – can pretend to share it with him. That’s what he’ll try to do with you. He’ll carry you so far, with money and influence; then one day you’ll find him on your back, like the old man of the sea, begging to be carried just one league further…’
‘And then?’
‘Then you’ll try to do it; because you think the mana is strong enough. But it isn’t – and it can’t be; because the reed is not the wind that blows it and Gunnar Thorkild is just a man, with a failing heart and an overworked prostate and a brain that’s bursting with complications and confusions.’
‘So what are you telling me, Father? Call it off?’
‘You won’t do that, because you’re already committed.’
‘What then?’
‘Gunnar Thorkild, I love you like a son; but I don’t know what to tell you. The mana will come; but you’ll suffer for it. People will lean on you and you will fall under their weight. They will lift you up and you will hate them for the faith they have in you. You will try to flee them; but they will not let you escape. What you do then, God only knows. And you’ll die begging Him to tell you; or you’ll live, begging Him to die, because the burden is intolerable.’
‘Easy Father, easy now! You’re making a big fuss over a very little matter.’
Flanagan made a shaky effort to recover himself. ‘Sure boy! That’s what the doctors told me, isn’t it? I’d have crises and explosions…Pay me no mind. I’m just purging my vile humour on you. You’ll have a wonderful voyage – and I’ll be here to welcome you at the end of it! Take me in now. It’s almost time for chapel!’
The old man’s outburst troubled him. It raised old, haunting memories, spectres out of an antique time. He was glad of the brusque common-sensical reasoning of James Neal Anderson who saw the whole affair as tidy solution to a diplomatic crisis.
‘Frankly Gunnar, I couldn’t be happier. Magnusson’s been a notable benefactor to the University. So it’s easy for me to arrange your study leave without making it appear a sop to your wounded pride…The fact that you’re publicizing the affair as a study cruise, instead of a sensational attempt to vindicate your reputation, also takes the heat out of the campus situation and, quite frankly, puts you in better grace with the administration.’
‘Patronage is a wonderful thing isn’t it James?’
Anderson was relaxed enough to enjoy the joke.
‘Provided you can keep the patron happy. Which reminds me – how are you choosing the students for the cruise?’
‘Equally from both sexes on the basis of scholastic merit, capacity for original research, and ability to adjust to abnormal social situations.’
‘And who’s going to judge that?’
‘I am.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘It’s necessary.’
‘Advice, from a man with scars on his back. You make the decisions; but let someone else take the responsibility.’
‘In this case, who?’
‘The patron – Magnusson.’
‘And how do I get him to do that?’
‘Call for applications; make a short-list of a dozen candidates, pull their records and present them to Magnusson. Make sure he picks the people you want, and then let him announce the chosen.’
‘Great! – if he’ll do it! If he starts to play games – I’m in stuck!’
‘Why would he want to play games?’
‘To teach me my place!’
Anderson laughed immoderately and choked on his whisky. ‘That’s rich…You’re learning at last…I’ve been trying all these years to teach you diplomacy and Magnusson does it in a single lesson! …’
Thorkild gave him a lopsided grin. ‘Let me show you how well I’ve learned it, James! I call for applications. I make the short-list. You, the Dean, choose the final candidates for Magnusson to approve – and you make sure they’re all my nominees.’
‘And why, Professor Thorkild, should I fall for that little ploy? While you’re off cruising happily, I’ll be left here carrying the can with students and faculty.’
He said it with a chuckle but Thorkild was no longer amused. His answer was deliberate and sombre. ‘You’re a good friend James. I don’t want to embarrass you more than I can help. But one way or another I must get the people I want. Why? Because the sea’s big and treacherous; because now that I’m committed, I have to face a tribal mystery that I can’t explain even to myself…I’m afraid of what I’m doing, even while I know that I have to do it. Because I’m afraid, I need all the support I can get – people I know, people I’m fond of and can trust because they’ve stood with me before, in intimate situations. They have to know they’re at risk, even though I can’t tell them what the risks are because I don’t know all of them myself. James, I’m saying this badly but…’
‘You’re hedging.’ Anderson was terse. ‘You owe me better.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. It’s all just a cobweb in the mind.’
‘Tell me about the cobweb then.’
‘I think I’d like another drink.’
‘After you’ve paid for it.’
‘At least make me a promise.’
‘What?’
‘Because it’s a cobweb, and I’m a fool to be afraid, it stays a secret between you and me.’
‘Agreed.’
‘I believe the island exists. I believe, more strongly every day, that we’ll find it. It’s what happens then that scares me.’
‘Why?’
‘Of all the great navigators who have gone to this place, none has come back. That’s all! Period! And if you laugh at me James I’ll break the whisky-bottle over your head.’
‘I’m not laughing. I’m wondering how and when you tell that to the people who go with you…And when you do tell them, how will they take it? And if they take it badly, what will you do with them?’
‘That’s why I need an even chance to choose the right candidates.’
‘You’ve made your point.’
Gunnar Thorkild gave a long sigh of relief.
‘At least you understand.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘God knows. I guess, until now, I’d rather taken you for granted. You were a friend. You were there…I’m sorry.’
‘My wife used to keep a scrap-book.’ Anderson was sudden
ly remote, as if the whole subject had become irrelevant. ‘She used to write down things that interested her. She wrote a beautiful hand, a kind of gothic script. It was a joy just to look at it. When she died, I couldn’t bear to keep the book. I burnt it. I remember things, though, snippets, phrases, a verse or two. There was one she copied only a couple of months before she died. How does it start?…
‘“Strange – is it not? – of all the myriads who,
Before us passed, the door of darkness through …”
… I always liked the phrase: the door of darkness. It seemed to promise a light on the other side. But old Omar didn’t say that at all. The verse ends:
‘“Not One returns to tell us of the road
Which to discover, we must travel too.”…
‘That says it all, doesn’t it?’
‘Not for me, James. Not for my people. The road is known. The place is known. The knowledge is not sent back; it is transmitted from the high gods who are the beginning of everything. It’s the happening which is not told – the afterwards.’
‘The afterwards is what you make it.’ James Neal Anderson was harsh and impatient. ‘I learned that when my wife died. You live one minute after another, one hour, one day. The future is what you dream. The reality is only now – the heart-beat moment. The rest is a cobweb in the mind.’
‘I never knew it had been so rough for you James.’
‘Something else you never knew, Gunnar. I’ve envied you. I still do. In my world we live in plastic capsules, wanting but not daring to get out.’
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ said Thorkild curtly. ‘We’re all prisoners, of our genes, of our history, of our long, ancestral dreams. I guess that’s why I was so eager to have the Chair and tenure. I could escape my past, and shut it out behind a plastic wall. Now I have to confront it, receive it into me like a vapour from an old man’s last breathing…Do I get my drink now?’
‘I’ll join you…And before we both get drunk you’d better write me the names of your candidates.’
There was one more encounter which he had to face; and it was the one for which he was least prepared. James Neal Anderson might live in his plastic capsule; Flanagan S.J. had emerged from his dark country into a twilight of resignation; but Martha Gilman had locked herself in an ice-palace, from which no tenderness and no argument would tempt her. Everything in her life was designed as a defence; her compulsive work, her dishevelled look, her trenchant talk, the rasping discipline she imposed on a rebellious boy child. She endured life like a hair-shirt, a secret penance for the man she had married too soon and surrendered too abruptly to addiction and death.
Yet there was passion in her and a haunted yearning, which made her at times vulnerable and afterwards deeply resentful. To Gunnar Thorkild she had presented herself first as a possible conquest, then as an object of sympathy and only much later, as a companion of quiet hours. Once, only once, had they come near to being lovers; and then it was he who had drawn back, suddenly aware and afraid of the burdens each would lay on the other. She needed to be bound. He had to be free. She demanded to be conquered. He wanted the free-and-easy loving of the island people – moon-games and beach-games and a smile of greeting for the morning. The end of it was a truce, uneasy but tenable, affectionate but always a little abrasive, guarded yet mutually protective.
Martha Gilman forced him to recognize and to value the reality of his other self – the haole half of him. It was she who demanded engagement, a discharge of his contract with the society which paid his stipend and put young minds in his care. What he gave to her was harder to define: a warmth in the ice-palace, a window open to the sun, a wink for the woman hiding in the black armour of the working widow. To the boy Mark, he gave a male companionship, an off hand counsel, an occasional sharp rebuke, which he accepted without resentment. He might have given more; but Martha was swift to reject any intrusion on her authority.
It was an odd relationship, readymade for gossip and party-jokes; but he could not absent himself from it curtly and without a backward look. So, at the end of the day’s lectures he telephoned Martha Gilman and invited her to dinner. She protested, as she always did, and then allowed herself to be persuaded, provided it wasn’t a heavy night or a late one, and there was a number where Jenny could call her if necessary. He swore to all of it, and promised to pass by at seven for a cocktail and allow her to drive if he had one drink too many. Then he telephoned Anna Wei at the Manchu Palace, ordered a private booth and her best dinner – and wondered ruefully why he was taking such a long way round to get a very small clutch of eggs.
It was Jenny who opened the door to him – plump and cosy and domesticated – with curlers in her hair, a chocolate bar in one hand and a paperback in the other.
‘Hi Prof! Come in. Martha’s dressing. Mark’s doing his homework. He doesn’t get to watch television until he’s finished.’
‘How goes it Jenny?’
‘Great, just great – now that I’ve got Martha organized.’
‘Come again!’
‘We’ve got an understanding. I don’t tidy her studio and she doesn’t muss the house. Mark’s mine from breakfast until he’s finished his homework. After that, Martha has him.’
‘Not sorry you came?’
‘Glad. I’ve discovered I’m a domestic cat really. What will you drink?’
‘I’ll get it. How does Mark like the new arrangement?’
‘Fine. I’m big sister. And now that Martha’s given over nagging him, the kid’s showing a brain and he’s much easier to handle. Martha says I can come back here and bring the baby if I want.’
‘And do you?’
‘Maybe. We’ve got a joke going. Two one-parent families make one two-parent house. I – I’m just comfortable, Prof. I don’t want to think too much about the future.’
‘I’ll drink to that, Jenny girl.’
‘Hi Uncle Gunsmoke!’ Mark Gilman marched in with an offhand greeting and held out his exercise book for inspection. ‘Check it, will you Jenny. The programme starts in five minutes.’
Jenny rumpled his hair affectionately.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something, Junior.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, “please Jenny”.’
‘Please, Jenny.’
As he sipped his drink, Gunnar Thorkild watched them, child-mother and boy-child, bent over the book and he felt a sudden lurch of emotion at the sweetness of the moment. Then Martha came in, and he marvelled at the change in her too. Her hair was set in a modish style, her dress was new. The old half-welcoming, half-wary look was gone. There was a softness in her smile and her greeting that he had never known before. She flushed at his stare and said:
‘Well, do you like it or don’t you?’
‘Which? The dress or the girl?’
‘Either.’
‘Both…A drink?’
‘Please!’
He took his time making it, careful lest an off hand word destroy the fragile harmony of the moment. Martha asked him:
‘Where are we going?’
‘The Manchu House. Anna Wei is making us her number one dinner.’
‘What is this – a celebration?’
He raised his glass towards Jenny and the boy.
‘It’s a sort of occasion. You look better than I’ve seen you in years.’
‘Thanks to Jenny – and you.’
‘All part of the service, ma’am.’
‘What about your plans?’
‘Oh, they’re coming along. I’ll tell you later.’
‘Sound mysterious.’
‘No mystery. It’s a long story, easier to tell over a meal. How’s your work?’
‘Still plenty of it – but it’s simpler to handle now. I owe you an apology for the other night, I was rattled and unhappy. I had no right to say the things I did.’
‘I didn’t hear them.’
‘Next time I’ll shout! I’m a woman who demands to be heard.’
&nbs
p; ‘Tonight Martha Gilman you’re going to listen – and if you talk at all, there must be honey on your lips. A promise?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Drink up. Say goodnight to the family and let’s go!’
As they drove through the soft night, she sat, relaxed, eyes closed against the glare of oncoming lights, talking in musing desultory phrases, so alien to her normal fashion that she seemed like another woman.
‘… A funny week altogether…That Jenny, she looked like a nothing, a dumpling; but in one day she took over my life. You don’t think about it, until you see it in close-up…It takes guts for a girl to bear a child without a father…I tried to fight with her, but she faced me down…She wasn’t a waif, she said. It’s such an old-fashioned word! If she wasn’t welcome, she’d leave. If she stayed, she had to work; and she couldn’t work if I kept getting under her feet…She made me laugh. And when I saw her with young Mark she made me cry…When Mark’s father died, I swore I’d never cry for anyone or anything again…I hope she stays. It would be good for Mark to have another child in the house…Me too I guess…I was beginning to feel like the Dragon Lady; but I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know how to…You’ve been a good friend, Gunnar; and I’ve never once said a real thank you …’
‘I’m glad you can cry.’ Gunnar Thorkild mocked her gently. ‘But dry your eyes and powder your nose. Anna Wei is very critical of my women; and tonight I’d like to prove I have good taste.’
The alcove was dim and private. Anna Wei’s dinner was long and leisurely and by the end of it he had told Martha everything about the impending voyage – except his own fears for its outcome. She kept her promise. She listened and said very little until he was talked out. Then she told him, in quiet formal words, that she was pleased for him, and wished him the best of all good luck and that she would miss him when he was gone. She raised her glass and made a toast to the voyage. Then they sat over the last of the wine, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally Martha Gilman said:
‘It’s a crazy thought. But I wish I was coming with you.’
