Three Continents Read online

  Grandfather was sitting a little apart from the rest of us. We were as usual down on the grass, some cross-legged, some with our knees drawn up, facing the Rawul, who sat on a chair to address us. As a special courtesy to Grandfather and Sonya, two more chairs had been placed at the outskirts of our circle opposite the Rawul. Grandfather made no fuss about occupying his, but Sonya wouldn’t dream of it—she at once placed herself in the front of our group and even managed to get into a cross-legged position. Seated thus, her hands folded in her lap, she looked up at the Rawul, ready and eager to be inspired. Grandfather, although directly facing the Rawul and on the same level with him, did not look at, but away from him, across the lake; only sometimes he shot him a quick glance from under his brows, before at once resuming his faraway gaze over the water. The Rawul appeared to be addressing him more than anyone else, but I wasn’t at all sure that Grandfather was listening—except for the times he said “Hm,” though that too might have been at his own thoughts; he often did that, commenting to himself in his own mind.

  Afterward he asked to speak to Michael and me. He came up to Michael’s room. It was strange to see him there—I mean, I was used to seeing Grandfather at some great carved desk under the American eagle, not having to perch on the edge of Michael’s narrow bed; but there was no chair, only the bare floor where Michael and I sat side by side listening to him. He asked us were we sure about donating Propinquity. Michael said yes at once, but added that I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I felt a bit—I don’t know, weak or mean-spirited, in the face of his absolute certainty. But it was always like that: Michael strong and certain and looking straight ahead, while I vacillated and saw all sorts of obstacles right and left preventing me from making up my mind. And when Grandfather turned to me, to ask what held me back, there was nothing definite I could say; and Michael spoke up for me, that I still needed time to think. When Grandfather asked him was he sure that he had thought enough, he said of course; and when Grandfather persisted, he became impatient and asked had Grandfather ever known him not to be absolutely certain, and Grandfather had to admit that no, he had not. Then there was a silence between them—not a hostile one, but because Grandfather respected Michael too much to attempt to argue with him. It had been like that ever since Michael was little. Even at that time he had been very definite and decisive in everything he thought and did, and Grandfather treated him as though he were absolutely equal in experience and authority with him. Grandfather loved him very, very much and was proud of him: perhaps also in reaction to Manton, of whom he wasn’t proud at all, and I’m afraid he didn’t love or even like him either; it was a great relief to him to have a grandson as different from his son as Michael was from Manton.

  Grandfather asked me, “If Michael is so sure, why aren’t you?”

  “I told you,” Michael put in, more impatiently. “Harriet’s still thinking it out.”

  Grandfather smiled a bit. He always liked it when Michael was assertive with him; he liked it in general that Michael had an assertive character. He turned to me again: “Even your mother it seems has thought it out.” We didn’t have to comment on that. We were aware he was speaking ironically, or even cynically. Everyone knew that Lindsay never thought, let alone thought out, but did what she wanted from moment to moment, the same way as Manton. Whenever I heard Grandfather speak about our parents to Sonya—he never mentioned them to anyone else—it was always as “Those two fools,” and he could pack an awful lot of expression into it; if we were nearby, Sonya would say warningly, “Les enfants, darling.”

  But now Grandfather didn’t want to speak about Lindsay and her motives, or even about Michael’s and mine. He launched off into a sort of soliloquy of his own, sitting there on Michael’s bed and the two of us looking up at him as if listening to some ancient mariner’s tale. Grandfather was in appearance not unlike an ancient mariner, with his big weathered bulk and his white brows beetling over his keen seafarer’s eyes. He had a deep, slow voice that he never had to raise much, people always being prepared to listen to him attentively. His accent and speech were educated, upper class, but running underneath the surface was an American sort of burr that got stronger as he got older and was redolent of the locality of his childhood. This is more or less what he said, and it was so unusual for him to speak to us at such length, and so intimately, that I can still remember it almost word for word after these many years. There was a special-occasion feeling among the three of us. I had never before felt so strongly how he was our grandfather, transmitting to us his own experience and what he had himself received from those who had gone before us:

  “You could say it’s none of my business what you do with your inheritance from your mother’s side of the family. It’s for you to dispose of as you think fit. But I’ve been thinking lately about inheritance in general and what it means; what it entails. I’m aware that nowadays young people, people like you, Michael and Harriet, prefer to travel light. You prefer to be rid of those properties, privileges, and responsibilities that we were taught to take good care of. Well I’m not saying we’re right and you’re wrong; no I’m not saying that; I’m only trying to tell you how it was when I was your age and my father might be talking to me like I’m talking to you now. As you know, my father was in the government, as was his father before him. Public service was expected in our family. That goes right back to the first Wishwell to come to this country. Born an Irish soldier, he turned himself into an American farmer to till this land for his American family—he married first Augusta Linfield and after her demise her elder sister Miss Louisa; and when it came time to fight the British army, he went right back to being a soldier again. Well, when they hanged him for a rebel, it was up to Louisa Wishwell to raise her own and her sister’s children, fourteen of them altogether. Nine of them survived and spread all over the country, some as farmers, some as traders, and lawyers, and a preacher too; every kind of trade and profession. I guess we’ve got family all over, some rich and educated, some plain and poor. Our own branch of Wishwells—and we’re the only ones to pronounce it Witchell—goes back to Henry, who returned to Concord in the 1830s after an unsuccessful spell of growing oranges in Louisiana. He started his own newspaper, The Fighter, and went to jail three times for his radical activities; and once he had to be hidden away by the marshal from an antiabolitionist mob. His sisters and his daughters were not far behind him—we’ve always had strong women in our family, Harriet, ready to stand up first for the slaves and then what they called the other slaves, that is, their own sex. I don’t need to remind you of Harriet Wishwell, the first female president of the Anti-Slavery League, or of Maria Wishwell Knox, the author of Let Us Be Sea-Captains! I still remember that other great reformer and suffragette, my great-aunt Harriet Wishwell, who lived up to the age of ninety-eight. It was about her Commodore Dewey said he would rather face the entire Spanish navy than one Harriet Wishwell. These matrons brought up their sons the way the Romans did, and there was never any question in our family of not serving the country in which we had the good fortune to be born. My grandfather, Michael, born 1849, enlisted in the 44th Massachusetts, pretending he was sixteen when he was thirteen, lost a foot at Appomattox, graduated from Harvard College in 1870, set up as a lawyer, made money, bought land, went to Congress, lost an election, made more money, went to the Senate and became secretary of the interior under Teddy Roosevelt. My father, your great-grandfather—more or less the same career except he fought not in the Civil but the Spanish-American war, and in the navy not the army, bought not farmland but urban property and, for himself and his family, the place on the Island. That brings us up to me, and you know all about that.”

  He was silent for a while, maybe to let Michael and me recollect what we knew about him. We knew him partly as our grandfather and partly as a public figure, and in both aspects he was a sort of monument to us. We also had some sense of his earlier years, from photographs we had seen—as a very handsome Harvard undergraduate; as a bridegroom outside
Trinity Church with his tall fair bride and surrounded by his own and Grandmother’s family, who looked just like them, bred from the same stock; as a young congressman in Washington; in Paris on his first international assignment; windblown on the Island, in white ducks and yachting cap, having lost an election; with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park; being entertained by Nehru in New Delhi as a member of the Peace Commission.

  Then Grandfather challenged Michael: “Just tell me why you want to give the house.”

  I can’t think of two people more different from each other than Grandfather and Michael: physically for one thing, Grandfather with his great hulking figure, and Michael slight and slender; and also in their ideas. And yet they did have something in common-—if only the way they both spoke very slowly, so that you knew whatever they said came out of their own deep, careful thinking. Manton was more like Grandfather in appearance, but somehow he had less of Grandfather’s air or ambience than Michael. All three of them had the same seafarer’s eyes—except that Michael’s seemed not to be looking outward over limitless oceans but inward, to whatever oceans lay there.

  Grandfather and I waited respectfully for Michael to get his thoughts together; and when he had done so, this is what he finally came out with: “I guess I’m impressed with the whole thing; the whole idea: making a new world based on everything that is best in previous worlds. It sounds suspect when you say it straight out like that, but you have to think of everything that’s behind it. All the civilizations, all the ideals. And the Rawul and everyone with him, they really believe the way no one else I’ve ever met does; and as you both know, I’ve spent my time looking around for something I can believe in, and commit myself to it. That’s not so easy nowadays, not so straightforward and plain cut as when you tell us about the earlier Wishwells. Or maybe it wasn’t that straightforward for them either—how do we know they didn’t have the same kind of seeking and inquiring to do before they committed themselves? I’m sure they were serious people who didn’t just jump in anywhere; but once they did, they were ready to give everything-—a foot at Appomattox, or whatever. So in face of all that, the house doesn’t seem such a very big deal, does it.” He reflected awhile and we knew he had more to say, and we waited. “Let me put it another way,” he said. “When Grandmother used to take me to church sometimes, she gave me a silver dollar for when they came around with the collection. She’d watch me like a hawk to make sure I threw it in, and even then I hung on to it till she had to pinch my arm a bit. I didn’t see any sense in throwing that dollar; I knew there were a lot better things I could do with it. But I can’t think of anything better I can do with this house than throw it in for the Rawul, and no one has to pinch my arm to make me because I’m ready and willing and glad to do it.”

  Grandfather waited to hear if there was any more coming, and when there wasn’t, he said “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all,” Michael said, without stopping to think this time.

  “You’re sure that’s all?”

  Michael was sure. Grandfather nodded and appeared satisfied; he believed him. But I’m not sure that I did, as totally and absolutely as I usually believed Michael. Of course I knew him to be completely altruistic and idealistic—but in the present case, weren’t there also his feelings for Crishi? I’m not saying they were responsible for his decision, but hadn’t they contributed at least something to it? If I had asked him outright, he would have denied it; though not the feelings themselves—he was quite frank and open about those. For me, the fact that he had them, was weakened by them, was not so much a flaw—Michael had no flaws for me—but a mystery in him; as were Grandfather’s feelings for Sonya, which were so different from the rest of him. Perhaps Grandfather was thinking about that very same thing, for he remained sitting on the side of Michael’s bed with the same sort of soft smile around his hard mouth that he had when he spoke to or of Sonya; and he said in the ruminative way people have when they are speaking to themselves as much as to anyone else: “We all like to think we’re in charge of our decisions, but who knows what else there is, what moods and weathers we have that make us do what we do and be what we are: yes, even two Wishwell men like you and me, Michael,” He smiled down at us in the same sweet, loving way he had with Sonya, enfolding us. I don’t think he could really see us because the room was in shadow, certainly down on the floor where we were, though we could still see his face lit by the twilight coming through Michael’s uncurtained windows.

  Grandfather also spoke to Lindsay about the house, and this was unfortunate because it upset both of them. It says a lot for Grandfather’s sense of duty that he opened the topic with her at all, went out of his way to do so, for usually they avoided speaking to each other beyond the most common and banal generalities, and not even those, if possible. Only to see Lindsay irritated Grandfather, and he couldn’t stand to hear her deliver her opinions in her little-girl voice. But he always controlled himself and said nothing either to her or about her, except maybe privately in a sardonic aside to Sonya; but Lindsay of course voiced her opinion of him for anyone to hear. After their interview about the house, I saw Grandfather walk away in grim silence, while she, gasping for breath, uttered indignant half-sentences such as “Can you imagine” and “This is really” and “I must say.” She didn’t like him for himself, and she detested him for being Manton’s father; and nothing could have confirmed her resolution to give away Propinquity more than his suggestion that she should have second thoughts about it. She was so upset that Jean could do nothing for her and had to appeal to Sonya; Lindsay’s feelings for—or rather against—Manton’s family did not include Sonya, whom she liked. She felt that Sonya understood her, and Sonya said she did—“I understand you, darling, completely,” she said, even when Lindsay was what she herself called “just out of my mind,” after her interview with Grandfather.

  The way Sonya excused or explained Grandfather to Lindsay was to say “But darling what do you expect—he’s a Taurus.” Sonya herself was a Capricorn, which made her highly idealistic and open to new ideas. She was certainly open to the Rawul and his movement—she ran around the house stirred up and excited, talking to everyone, including the followers, whom the rest of us ignored. She felt that it was the beginning of a new era in our personal history as well as that of mankind; and she and Else Schwamm spent many hours down in the kitchen poring over their tarot cards, of which both were skilled exponents. Sometimes they were joined by the Rani, and when the three of them were huddled together over the kitchen table, it was as if some mysterious rite were taking place in the bowels of the house that would spread an influence over all our lives.

  Around this time there were some unpleasant incidents involving the Rawul’s followers and some young people of the neighborhood. Although the grounds and the lake were private property, the local boys had always taken it for granted that they could come to fish there in the summer and skate in the winter and for occasional picnics and parties. If they left too many beer cans littered about, Jean would get after them and make a fuss, ending in nothing more than they would have to come help sweep the leaves or cut the grass. But after the Rawul’s followers took charge of the maintenance of the house and grounds, they were stricter about trespassing and put up POSTED signs all over the place. The local boys did not feel these applied to them and kept right on coming in, and this led to arguments between them and the followers. The followers were sort of schooled in patience and self-control; but the boys were some of them quite rough, and certainly weren’t going to be pushed around, they said, by a bunch of weirdos. They kept right on coming as before, fishing and drinking beer. But one evening two of the followers came out to draw their attention to the POSTED signs; and when the boys laughed at them, they returned with some more followers, so that the boys, greatly outnumbered, had to pack up and leave. A few hours later they returned, with reinforcements; they brought pizzas and six-packs and started a party down by the barns. It was late by then, and many people
had gone to sleep but woke up again with all the noise.

  Michael and I had been swimming by the waterfall with Crishi. I ought to say that we did this every night and we stayed there many hours before slowly trailing back to the house; sometimes we lay down in a field for a while and looked up at the moon. When we came back that night, we were surprised to see the lights on in the house and everyone woken up, with the boys having their party. By that time Jean had emerged in her robe and slippers and was reading what she called the riot act to them; but they just invited her to join them, and one of them put his arms around her and made her dance with him. She pretended to be angry but couldn’t help laughing; it was all quite good-natured, and some people in the house had stuck their heads out the windows and were enjoying what was going on.