“One should not shit where one eats,” my father said.
“Still,” Seana said, “there were those among us who thought it a shame.”
“There can be great pleasures in renunciation,” my father stated, after which he stood, inclined his head slightly toward Seana, and began removing dishes from the table while reminding me that, as he’d mentioned in one of his letters, he was planning a trip to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that he hoped I’d join him. Perhaps Seana would come too.
Seana shrugged, said she preferred not to go home again if she could help it, thank you very much, and her face took on a look of such sudden sadness—her hazel-green eyes going to dark brown, her smile sucked inward—that I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine, tell her that everything—everything!—was going to be all right. My father continued to clear the table while Seana remained where she was, immobile, so I stood and, on wobbly legs, began gathering plates and silverware.
“Please sit,” my father said, after which he announced that it was past his bedtime but that he knew we young people had things to talk about—Seana had so informed him earlier in the day—and that we should leave the rest of the dishes, along with the pots and pans, until morning.
He kissed Seana on the forehead, then came around the table, told me again how good it was to have me home, kissed me on the cheek, and asked me to give serious thought to accompanying him to Brooklyn, perhaps the following week.
“I need to go to Maine first,” I said. “To visit Nick’s parents.”
“Of course,” my father said, and reminded Seana that Nick had been a friend of mine from college who had lived in Singapore—who was responsible for my going there to work—and that Nick had died recently.
“You didn’t like him,” Seana said.
“Correct,” my father said. “I didn’t like him, although I didn’t wish him dead. I found him a somewhat hollow and manipulative young man.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“He was your friend, not mine, and doubtless possessed qualities that made you favor him with your friendship.”
“My father’s right about that,” I said to Seana.
“Right that this guy was an ass?” Seana asked.
“Right that it was because of Nick that I went to Singapore.”
“So?” she said.
“So I’m just setting the record straight.”
“But surely your decision was not based wholly upon your friendship with Nick,” my father said.
“Not wholly,” I said.
“Good,” my father said, “because although Nick and your friendship with him were clearly crucial to your choice, what I’ve preferred to believe is that your primary reason for going to the Far East had to do with your thirst for adventure.”
“That too,” I said.
My father turned to Seana. “I’ll tell you something about my son that, given his often faux-naïf demeanor when it comes to matters intellectual, you might not suspect,” he said. “Charlie was a voracious reader when he was a boy, and the books he loved most were about faraway places with strange sounding names. When he was seven or eight, I started him off with a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy, and while other boys his age were reading The Hardy Boys or sports novels, Charlie was immersed in tales that took him on exotic journeys to the four corners of the world.”
“It’s true,” I said and, hoping to pull Seana out of her gloom, I told her about my favorite author in high school, James Ramsey Ullman, and the book reports I did on his novels—about climbing Everest, going across the Karakorum desert in China, and up and down the Amazon—along with books like Kon Tiki and Green Mansions, and before that—at about the time I was reading Bomba the Jungle Boy—the Tarzan and Doctor Dolittle books.
“When Charlie was eight years old,” my father said, “he came to me at the start of summer vacation with a question he’d been pondering. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, and in the most serious way, ‘that by the end of the summer, I’ll be old enough to go out into the world to seek my fortune?’”
“Oh my,” Seana said.
“And let us not forget Gerald Durrell,” my father said. “Charlie adored Durrell, so that when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say he was going to be an animal trainer and work in a zoo. Gerald—Lawrence’s brother—was a zookeeper at times, you see, as well as a naturalist and environmentalist.”
“I hope he was a better writer than his brother,” Seana said. “Have you ever read those Alexandria novels? Impossibly soppy. Soppy, sloppy, soggy—over-written, noxious, romantic, pretentious…”
“But what don’t you like about them?” my father asked, though when he smiled to show he’d meant his question ironically, Seana didn’t smile with him. “Given the impressions his early reading made on him,” my father continued, “small wonder Charlie has moved around so frequently, and has become so enchanted by the world he’s discovered in the Far East.”
Holding tightly to the stem of her wine glass, Seana leaned across the table. “So tell me something, Charlie,” she said. “Do you enjoy seeing beautiful landscapes despoiled and ravaged? Do you take pleasure in seeing men, women, and children exploited and driven to early graves in order to provide lubricants for our machines, and poisons for our food and arteries? Do you take pride in your portion of responsibility for the deadly conditions that prevail in the enchanted world you’ve been inhabiting?”
“Of course not,” I said, and resisted the urge to start talking about just what I did feel about Borneo and palm oil. “It’s complicated,” I said. “If you’d been there you’d understand that it’s very complicated…”
“What isn’t?” Seana said. “Nevertheless, our conversation has served to put me in mind once again of George Sand, a woman rarely far from my thoughts, and in particular—the obvious inspiration for the accusatory grilling I’ve just subjected you to—of her dying words: Ne détruisez pas la verdure.”
“Do not destroy the greenery,” my father said.
“I don’t need a translator,” Seana snapped. “And ‘greenery’ stinks—doesn’t begin to capture what she meant.”
“When Seana was considering continuing on for a doctorate,” my father explained, “she talked of writing her dissertation on George Sand.”
“On Sand and Eliot,” Seana said, correcting him. “The two great Georges. Gorgeous Georges? Curious Georges? Our own Ms. Oates notwithstanding, George Sand, you will recall—Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and for greater part of her adult life, the Baroness Dudevant—was the most prolific female author in history. Nobody reads her anymore, though I would point out that Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, a man of exceptional erudition and discernment—like you, Professor Max—admired her enormously.”
“As did many men,” my father said.
“Truly and duly noted,” Seana said, her voice slurred. “Pagello above all.” Seana turned to me. “Pagello was an Italian doctor—a country doctor, but not out of Kafka, and he fell in love with Sand, and she transported him with her across Italy and lived with him in Paris, and then she ditched him, and he returned to Venice, where he married and fathered children. He died at the age of ninety-one, nearly sixty years later. Your father once considered writing a novel about him.”
“That’s true,” Max said.
“Actually, I know who you’re