The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 7

which, being kind, American, and frozen in boyishness by an accident of history, mitigated my infidel urges actually to go Viking. In my daydreams, I plundered Faeroe Islands merchantmen, razed Saxon farmsteads from John O’ Groats to Land’s End. But daylong, I was obliged to endure Earle’s opera records, Guy’s stories of dashing French triumphs, Israel’s Socratic philosophizing about things in general, and Peregrine’s reading aloud of the great and, as he said, “correct” novels of the world. Sometimes it sounded like D’Artagnan playing Twenty Questions with Huck Finn (the most Norse of American heroes), but I did acquire a wider view of life than permitted by Icelandic sagas. In all, my family tried to culture me. I think now they probably pushed me further into my fantasies. They thought me too much fun to control with measured strokes. And once I had acquainted them with my grandest notion, they readily cooperated, helping to transform me into a chubbycheeked, ruddy-faced, curly-locked miniature of Beowulf Himself, slayer of Grendel and mother, hero of Viking heroes. If I seem less than a twenty-first-century man than should be the case, if I seem one whose thought is quaint, anachronistic, misinformed, out of step, I reply that I learned how to shape a short sword on an open forge before I learned how to work a telephone, that I charted the exploits of the Norse from Scandinavia to Iceland, Greenland, Markland, Helluland, and Vinland before I learned that Christopher Colombus was a Jew (according to Israel). And thinking back now, there was a most fortuitous result to my eccentric education: it was that during my Norse studies I tentatively solved the puzzle set by Mother—whom none of us then knew or knew whereof—when she exclaimed, at my conception, the Norse name “Skallagrim Strider!”

The boys’ camp closed. Sadder, Earle, badly injured in a fist-fight with the Trondheim Trolls, had to miss three seasons. Eystein did not believe in sick leave. At home, Earle was vexed by his back and disconsolate with Guy away for weeks at a time; he calmed himself by teaching me everything he knew about ice hockey. My passion for the Viking Age was displaced by the thrill of learning how to handle a two-on-one breakout, when I was the one defenseman and the two were twinkle-toed Canucks, the only people besides the Norse who live for ice hockey. I was growing quickly, developing to Earle’s delight along the lines of a bulwark defenseman—trunk-legged, wide-hipped, long-armed, supple and very solid on ice. Earle trained me exhaustively. He said he thought he had discovered the answer to the right and left wings of the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL, a supreme compliment. It frustrated him hard, then, that I could not live on ice. We were pressed for funds, despite Thord’s munificence, and I had to work parttime jobs with Peregrine and Israel. Guy was our only reliable provider, and it was never quite sufficient, what with Earle’s physical therapy expenses. Guy was selfless; his money could not lift his despondency. Even given that he could not make the overseas road trips with the Berserkers, it was the rare month that he could spend a fortnight with us and Earle. It was true that Guy loved Earle above all things temporal, and that Earle loved Guy above all things temporal. I say this because it was not for many years that I learned their love was considered by polite society (not us, to be sure) to be unnatural. When I did discover—from other boys at pickup hockey games—that love between men, homosexual love, is considered sick, I was confronted by one of my first adult mysteries. Nature is creation, I argued with Peregrine and Israel, and creation is all there is, so how can what is be unnatural? Peregrine would shake his head and Israel would laugh.

I must speak of Peregrine before I get on. Father was another of the mysteries for me as a child. Israel told me that no man sees his father clearly, because he himself stands in the way. In other words, I should look to myself to see Peregrine. This might be the whole of it. A few facts will help. Peregrine was born the eldest son of a professional soldier, Leslie Ide, who was himself the son of a clerk for a railroad. Peregrine’s mother, Jane Peregrine, was an Irish Protestant, a younger daughter of a Londonderry haberdasher, who met and married Leslie during the Second World War, soon after the Allied invasion of France. Peregrine and his several brothers spent their earliest years moving from army base to army fort from northern Europe to North America. The boys were excessively attached to their mother, since Leslie was much away at war, or somesuch, and since the family moved to a new home every two years. Peregrine’s earliest loyalty was to what he called a “wee bit of Eire” and to Jane’s imagination, which was energetic. Jane wrote women’s romances for an American publisher. The one I recall best concerned a three-hundred-year-old Irish witch who attempted to assassinate every English oppressor of the Irish from Oliver Cromwell to Winston Churchill, failed each time, was gruesomely executed for her daring, and was then reincarnated in another beautiful, sinister Irish patriot. It was brutal for a romance. Israel told me the mind doctors in New York City would have made much of Jane’s influence on her eldest child, my father. I note that Peregrine could chat with a lovely blarney, and he truly believed that if not for misfortune, he would have no fortune at all.

Peregrine was shaken when Leslie enrolled him in a military school, Washington Crossing Military Academy, on the upper Delaware River between New York City and the state of Pennsylvania. I doubt the Cross, as he called it, was as draconian as he remembered. His problem was that, in America, military academies were considered places of last deposit for the delinquent sons of the well-to-do.