The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 8

Any boy, like Peregrine, who found himself in an academy not because he had been a rascal but because his father thought military science and Spartan discipline worth knowing was reduced to futile rage. The result of Peregrine’s incarceration was that he, and his eventual bosom chum, Israel Elfers (who, Israel told me, as a New York City Jew, was as much out of place at the Cross as poetry), became young geniuses at defiance and swashbuckling escapades into the surrounding farmland. The headmaster of the Cross, one of Leslie’s comrades-in-arms from the Second World War, Fritz “No-Neck” Fitzgore, thought Peregrine and Israel’s conduct suggestive of wild dogs. Peregrine and Israel came to be called the Bucks County Bowsers. By their seventeenth birthdays, those two knew what there is to know about being on the run.

Yale University did not change them. By 1966, when Peregrine and Israel entered Yale (to their fathers’ relief, to the consternation of Fitzgore, who had written them good recommendations only because it looked good for the Cross), the Vietnam war had transformed all of America into the dynamic of a military academy. A boy was either in his dormitory studying, or he was en route to Vietnam, or he was on the run. Israel told me that he and Father knew the score, and that it was not straight B’s to law school. He said it was run for your life before they ran your life down. At the last, Peregrine did not graduate from Yale, as did Israel. Father committed a wild act of defiant vanity. I think he attacked another student, over a woman I shall soon discuss; he might have attacked the woman; or he might have attacked the police who tried to restrain him; or he might have told the dean what he could do with his presumption to interfere between a man and his woman.

This is not getting closer to Peregrine’s heart. Peregrine was more, and more contradictory, than the sum of his iconoclastic episodes. He was quick-tempered, generous, cantankerous, moody unto black despair, devoted to his loved ones with a passionate steadfastness, and as rational in construction as he was irrational in conflict. He was what Israel said was a full-grown naif. The truth of it might be that he was arrested, fixed in time somewhere between adolescence and manhood by unrequited yearnings.

The pagan Norse would have called Peregrine an unskilled shape-changer. He forgave easily. He apologized quickly, too quickly. He made many mistakes, did not understand that he could atone for them, often suffered foolishly in order to make a show of his remorse. He wept more than one might suspect; he did laugh, not easily. He never forgot a kindness; he could not forget or get over a treachery. He was uniformly suspicious of what he understood as fate, and sometimes spat after hearing the word destiny. His defeatism, as Israel called it (that was encapsulated too neatly with his pet epigram, “It is what it is when it is”), often seemed superficial, reflexive, cosmetic, more a disguise for his moments of panic and frustration.

Peregrine was politically simpleminded. He had cruel opinions. He had a very bad temper. He had wild solutions. Peregrine said that he hated anyone who claimed the right to command him. I think it was that he confused authority with tyranny. Still, he was what the Norse would have called a Dragon-Worrier, which was what we did call him—my influence. Father was never more animated than when recounting to me the biographies of what he called America’s most famous thieves, liars, and mass-murderers, who were also many of America’s most famous statesmen. I often thought, even then, that he and Israel enjoyed defaming their favorite monster, Nixon, more than seemed ingenuous. Over the years, those gloomy hate sessions worried Guy to the point that he stopped participating. Peregrine’s response was to redouble his curses against America and what it had done to him, to puff himself up even more into a self-possessed and angry, angry, angry man.

Father was also a lonely and unhappy man. Peregrine lived day and night, summer and winter, with a heavy heart and a longing that he transformed into a malady. Indeed, overarching sorrow is so much a part of Peregrine for me, I still have difficulty imagining what he must have been like before exile in Sweden, when he swaggered through long, rich American days. He had been a bounder and a lover. Then Charity Bentham, his heart’s desire, had gone forever, and with her, Peregrine’s will to pursue happiness. There were women in his life in Stockholm. I overheard them talking about this or that girl, and there were many nights when Peregrine or Israel or both would stay out all night. But Peregrine never brought anyone home to me, as Israel would let Molly Rogers stay with us. Molly sometimes teased Peregrine about his attitude toward her sisters, and she was not met with playfulness. If and when Peregrine engaged in sexual intercourse, it must have been left at that, eroticism, not intimacy or love. It was as if he believed there was no woman in Sweden for him, because he believed his heart irreparably broken, incapable of loving again. I know it is generally understood that time can heal such wounds. For my father, either this was not the case, or else he chose not only to refuse the cure by pretending to stop time in 1973, at my birth, but also to aggravate his disability by reminding himself, as if with a chant, that he had been wronged, cheated, ill-used—in all, betrayed by fate.

I misunderstood all this discrimination between sex and love and brokenheartedness then, of course, but I perceived the symptoms of love gone wrong. Peregrine had a habit of sighing very deeply of a sudden, like a last breath, of just sitting there watching the sun set and then letting out a groan. He could also lapse into dreadful silences. He often