No sooner had we buried my father-in-law than Trudy fell into a mysterious coma. The doctors informed me that even if she came out of it she would be a vegetable.
Trudy had a living will that gave us permission to pull the plug. My daughter Remi was all for doing it right now.
But I had already witnessed Trudy pull off one miracle. After a long and heated discussion, we decided to keep her on the ventilator for six months. I somehow managed to stay sane, but the time passed with no result.
By this time, Remi was starting to feel sorry for me. She granted Trudy a three-month stay of execution, with the proviso that I take a good long vacation. I decided it was high time for a visit to the ancestral home of Great Bottom.
For the third time in my life, I found myself with Clive the Butler. Clive was now in his seventies. He had spent literally all his adult life at Great Bottom. He never married and very rarely went out, preferring to spend his time in the empty manor among the ghosts of all those who had lived and visited here.
I swear I smelled five centuries of fires in the countless fireplaces. Shakespeare himself had supposedly visited here, sampled the wine from the wine cellars, helped himself to the chestnuts harvested from beneath the trees outside.
Clive directed me to the manor's library. An ancient oil of Isaac Newton, with a web of fine cracks in the finish, graced the wall above the fireplace. Along the other walls hung smaller oils of Charles Darwin, Alexander Pope, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Along the stacks were first editions of their works, with lengthy hand-written inscriptions by the authors.
I picked up Pope’s translation of Homer's Iliad. “We have a very interesting letter from Pope turning down the 9th Earl of Bohner’s very kind offer to provide him with a yearly pension, no strings attached,” Clive let me know. “Pope was a very proud man.”
I picked up a small volume, The Compleat Insect Collector. This, of course, was the work of Joseph, the 8th Earl of Bohner, father of the English Enlightenment.
Clive shot me a conspiratorial look. "Did you know," he said, "that at age 45, Lord Joseph married a 13-year-old mulatto slave girl?” He saw the look on my face. “Ah, obviously you want to know more.”
No question about it. Obama's White House run was at least a year off. I cleared my schedule for the next three months and settled in at Great Bottom, determined to find out everything I could.
I took up a station in the library and read at random anything that Clive happened to dump in front of me. I also went for long walks along the Bottoms, tracing the footsteps of my ancestors and the illustrious company they kept.
Three months went by too fast. Then I was back at Trudy's bedside. By now I had come to terms with the fact that this time there would be no miracle. But then Trudy's condition went political. A media storm erupted. A court issued a temporary injunction.
"You need to get away," my daughter told me, once more.
I went back to Great Bottom. In my absence, Clive had arranged new reading material for me. Plus he had a surprise – a certain Dr Quiggenpoole, a reader in Ruthegonian Studies from the London School of Economics.
Her manner and dress were ho-hum, her scent spectacular. "Call me Sylvia," she said, extending her hand.
Sylvia was researching my grandmother, Margi, the last Ruthegonian. “Did you realize,” she informed me, “that the Ruthegonian tongue bears no relationship whatsoever to any language group on the planet?”
“Do you mean these people just came out of nowhere?” I asked.
“And now they are gone.”
Let’s pause here for a minute. Up to this time, I had simply assumed that the Ruthegonians were part of some larger ethnic group, such as the nearby Magyars. But no, somewhere out of the steppes of Asia, in the sixth century, a band of horsemen suddenly appeared in Central Europe, started kicking the shit out of everyone in the neighborhood, and then settled down.
Against all odds, they survived as a distinct people, complete with their own language and literature and culture, only to be snuffed out in one insane Holocaustic blink of an eye.
And here I am, the last quarter-Ruthegonian.
“How does that make you feel?” Sylvia asked.
Someone had to ask.
Okay, this is how I felt and still feel: Like I want to take out a quarter of my liver and carve it into tiny pieces and plant the pieces on a Central European plateau, and then wait for heads to start sprouting out of the ground. Then whole people, all going about their business, ducking in and out of homes and buildings that look like cuckoo clocks. I want to smell baking bread, I want to hear school children singing. I want to get nearly run over by a bright red trolley.
From inside my genome, I heard the voices of a vanquished people, thousands of years of them, demanding to speak.
It was time for me to retire to my Victorian man cave, which I had taken over from the previous Barkley Bohner. There, sitting on a surprisingly comfortable sofa with three legs and a profusion of horsehair, amid fossils and specimens floating in formaldehyde, I stared into the fire reflected in an upside-down tuba on the floor.
Staring, contemplating, then writing …
Poems, of all things. The words just gushed out, screams into the void, petals ripped off their stems, a rider pulled from his horse. You don’t write poetry. The poetry writes you. Four days later, I had a stack of manuscript on the floor.
I suddenly noticed two voicemails from Sylvia. There was a knock on the door. There she was. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Other than being the last quarter-Ruthegonian, what could I say? She held up two Proms tickets. “Do you like Mahler?”
Mahler only makes sense in light of the fifty to a hundred crazy years that came after him. Requiem for an Extinct People, read the program. Actually it said no such thing. Yet he knew. He knew! It was all there.
You may recall that Barkley Bohner, Man of Action, had developed a very close relationship with Mahler just prior to his untimely death. In tribute, Mahler removed the fourth hammer blow of fate from the final movement of his Sixth Symphony.
So here we were, Sylvia and I, listening to Mahler at the Proms in Albert Hall. Down came the first hammer blow of fate. Then, several minutes later, a second, then a third.
Then a fourth! The conductor had put it back in. Not only that, he turned around as he delivered it, bringing his arm down in an exaggerated motion straight at me – me the last quarter-Ruthegonian!
Sylvia insisted that the conductor did not reinsert that final hammer blow, much less turn around and aim it straight at me, but I know what I heard and saw. I can’t help it if she and the other five thousand in Royal Albert Hall were deaf and blind.
It turned out that aside from her inexplicable failure to recognize the fourth hammer blow, Sylvia was now the only person in the world I could talk to. Likewise, she had a real live quarter-Ruthegonian to share a cheese and sprouts and avocado sandwich with. Soon, she was sharing my bed.
She gave me permission to seek comfort in her. She gave me permission to fall in love.
Three months passed. The political-media storm involving Trudy's condition died down. The court quietly issued the legal go-ahead. It was time to return home. But, of all things, at the critical moment, Remi came down with a bad case of cold feet. We decided to give it one more month.
I returned to Great Bottom. This time, Clive had another surprise. “I’m getting on in years,” he said to me as he dropped a parcel on an adjacent space on my three-legged couch in Barkley's Victorian man cave.
The parcel contained a thousand-page single-spaced manuscript. I read Clive’s cover memo, scanned a few pages, then caught my breath. Over the course of five decades, Clive had had time to think and reflect and connect the dots. He connected them into an astonishing revelation – the Secret Betsy Empire.
His account left no room for misinterpretation – all my life, along with the entire rest of the world, I had gotten reality all wrong.
What was truly mind-boggling was that my mother and my wife – and more lately my daughter – had run the Secret Betsy Empire right under my very nose. Trudy will have to kill me, was my first reaction.
Then again, Trudy was on life support with her time running out. And maybe if I gave my mother and daughter a wide berth I would be okay.
Sylvia, of course, instantly picked up that something was amiss. "A lot of things on my mind," I replied. This could easily be interpreted as having to fly back to the States and attend to Trudy.
"I understand," said Sylvia, rubbing my shoulders. "This has to be extremely stressful."
By now, Sylvia and I were operating on the understanding that we would be spending the rest of our lives together. We didn't parade our relationship in public. We made vague plans for quietly getting married a year or so after Trudy's death.
A few weeks later, I was back in the States, with Remi, by Trudy's bedside. This time, we were both of one mind. I held Trudy's left hand. Remi held Trudy's right hand. I signaled the attending physician.
"Wait!" shouted Remi.
Here we go again, I could only think. Another hold-up. Another stay of execution. But she was frantically pointing. Trudy's eyelids were fluttering. Then her nose twitched. Suddenly, she propped herself into a sitting position.
She focused on the attending physician. "Don't just stand there," she scolded. "It's been ages since I've had something to eat."
Before I could take this in, she swiveled about to me. My face, apparently, was an open book. She only needed one second. "You know!" she said in an accusing voice.
Oh, shit! I thought.