The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 17

As best he could that first morning, Thord pressed his informants in government for details. The newspaper reports were slow in coming and so sensationalized as to be worthless. Also, there were ghoulish rumors on the radio; there was unrestrained slander on the street. And over the next weeks, there followed Byzantine political machinations attendant upon the crime, the trial, and the sentence of life imprisonment without parole. Briefly but devastatingly for all, Sweden became hysterical over the murder in the King’s castle by a so-called alien indigent. It is enough here to say that the remnant of the American exile community that had stayed on in Stockholm through the 1980s (either detained, jailed, or, like my family, wanted elsewhere) was soon to suffer for Peregrine’s crime.

I heard little of the infamy directly, since I left Stockholm the afternoon of my seventeenth birthday, escorted by Orri to the closed-down boys’ camp at Vexbeggar. Israel said it was a precautionary move. It was actually crucial, because the authorities were soon searching Stockholm for “Peregrine Ide’s accomplice.” I was suddenly as much a fugitive as Peregrine had ever been.

Since it seems to me now revealing of itself, I report the following of what happened in that anteroom, on that night, after I left Father. It is fragmentary, pieced together from several sources, only one of whom was an eyewitness (Skaldur, whose statement to the court was surprisingly sympathetic to Peregrine). Peregrine never again spoke of that night. Charity Bentham would not, or could not, talk about it with me.

Cesare Furore had continued making appeals to Peregrine. Peregrine would not respond. I imagine he sulked, as was his way when he had been childish. Charity Bentham asked Cesare Furore to leave Peregrine be, saying that if Peregrine wanted to solve his problems, he was the man for it, that he probably preferred to confront his past by himself. If that is what she said, she was perceptive. Cesare Furore ignored her advice and burdened Peregrine with facts.

Israel had told me only part of the truth. Peregrine and Charity Bentham had married the very same day Peregrine and Israel had fled America; they had consummated their marriage in Charity’s ancient Volvo, parked discreetly in an airport lot. Israel stood watch. Later, Charity’s father, Increase Bentham (who, Israel told me, had detested Peregrine, thought him a fraud and ne’er-do-well) had the marriage annulled. Cesare Furore said that Increase Bentham had bungled the annulment, that he had forced it on Charity while she was on the mend from the news, conveyed in a letter from Peregrine, that he had a bastard son. Cesare Furore explained that he had checked the annulment papers and acted carefully. He instructed his lawyer—after his own marriage to Charity—to have Peregrine cited for deserting his wife. When the suit was brought to the attention of the court, it was possible, though messy, to have Peregrine, as a fugitive from justice, declared no longer Charity Bentham’s husband. I might be conflating legalisms here, confusing one state’s statute with another state’s codicil. It does not matter. Peregrine never contested the annulment, had in fact refused to communicate with Charity after his one confessional letter—in shame, I suppose, for being the father of me. In the end, Cesare Furore thought, as a final security, to remarry Charity Bentham some years later.

Cesare Furore concluded that either way it was argued, annulment or desertion, Peregrine and Charity Bentham were no longer married, had not been married for years, and had possibly never been, legally speaking, more than “unconsummated marriage partners” (the Volvo episode being legally challengeable, something about it not being a place of residence). Cesare Furore promised Peregrine that there had been no acrimony in his legal actions against Peregrine, that he had been acting correctly to protect his wife, his daughter, and all’ their futures.

Peregrine interrupted, “I have no future.”

Cesare Furore answered, “I am sure we can move on that. My brother, as you might know, has served in the Senate. My family is not, and I am not, without influence in Washington.”

Those were said to be Cesare Furore’s last words; this might be apocryphal, a newspaper editor’s idea of drama. Peregrine attacked him. He grabbed him by the throat and hung on. The two wrestled from one side of the room, crashing through the flimsy superstructure and into the promenade on the other. Skaldur ordered his men to get them apart; they were either idiots or impeded by the woodwork. I cannot portray the contest blow for blow. I cannot believe the newspaper reports were anything but lies. It is fair to assume that Cesare Furore did fight back. It is not clear if he knew right away that he was in the death grip of a man made insane by passion, longing, injustice, vengeance, hopelessness, self-hatred. Having seen Cesare Furore just before, I doubt if he understood how sick Father was. He might have thought he was dealing with a runaway child. He actually was baiting and fighting with a man in a delirium of despair and remorse, who felt himself a trapped, mortally wounded animal. More, I argue now that Peregrine was likely so ashamed of what he had done to Charity Bentham on the ramp, of what little he had to show his lost wife for those eighteen desperate years, that he had wanted to destroy himself, and that his self-loathing had been deflected upon the persecutor at hand, Cesare Furore, who had stupidly invoked the idea of “Washington,” Peregrine’s blackest, most fantastic foe. Peregrine hanged a man, yes; he must have also thought he was hanging 1972, Nixon, the Selective Service Act, the Congress, men of property, all that he believed had condemned him unfairly and totally, had left him, as he said, a man without a future.

This is not to excuse Father. He did an ugly and wrong thing, a criminal thing. He suffered for it the rest of his life. He suffered for it immediately as well.