The races were still mixed in prisons throughout the country. When I later went to work at Athena, though, there was nothing but people who had been classified as Black in there.
My motherin-law did not turn around to see the smoking van and all. She was obsessed by what might happen at any moment at the other end of her flshlme. But Margaret and 1 gawked. For us back then, pnsoners were like pornography, common things nice people shouldnt want to see, even though the biggest industry by far in this valley was punishment.
When Margaret and I talked about it later, she didnt say it was like pornography. She said it was like seeing animals on their way to a slaughterhouse.
We, in turn, must have looked to those convicts like people in Paradise. It was a balmy day in the springtime. A sailboat race was going on to the south of us. The college had just been given 30 little sloops by a grateful parent who had cleaned out the biggest savings and loan bank in California.
Our brand-new Mercedes sedan was parked on the beach nearby. It cost more than my annual salary at Tarkington. The car was a gift from the mother of a student of mine named Pierre LeGrand. His maternal grandfather had been dictator of Haiti, and had taken the treasury of that country with him when he was overthrown. That was why Pierres mother was so rich. He was very unpopular. He tried to win friends by making expensive gifts to them, but that didnt work, so he tried to hang himself from a girder of the water tower on top of Musket Mountain. I happened to be up there, in the bushes with the wife of the coach of the Tennis Team.
So I cut him down with my Swiss Army knife. That was how I got the Mercedes.
Pierre would have better luck 2 years later, jumping
off the Golden Gate Bridge, and a campus joke was that now I had to give the Mercedes back.
So there were plenty of heartaches in what, as Ive said, must have looked to those 3 convicts like Paradise. There was no way they could tell that my motherin-law was as crazy as a bedbug, as long as she kept her back to them. They could not know, and neither could I, of course, that hereditary insanity would hit my pretty wife like a ton of bricks in about 6 months time and turn her into a hag as scary as her mother.
If we had had our 2 kids with us on the beach, that would have completed the illusion that we lived in Paradise. They could have depicted another generation that found life as comfortable as we did. Both sexes would have been represented. We had a girl named Melanie and a boy named Eugene Debs Hartke, Jr. But they werent kids anymore. Melanie was 21, and studying mathematics at Cambridge University in England. Eugene Jr. was completing his senior year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, and was 18, and had his own rock-and-roll band, and had composed maybe 100 songs by then.
But Melanie would have spoiled our tableau on the beach. Like my mother until she went to Weight Watchers, she was very heavy. That must be hereditary. If she had kept her back to the convicts, she might at least have concealed the fact that she had a bulbous nose like the late, great, alcoholic comedian W.C. Fields. Melanie, thank goodness, was not also an alcoholic.
But her brother was.
And I could kill myself now for having boasted to him that on my side of the family the men had no fear of alcohol, since they knew how to drink in moderation.
We were not weak and foolish where drugs were concerned.
At least Eugene Jr. was beautiful, having inherited the features of his mother. When he was growing up in this valley, people could not resist saying to me, with him right there to hear it, that he was the most beautiful child theyd ever seen.
I have no idea where he is now. He stopped communicating with me or anybody in this valley years ago.
He hates me.
So does Melanie, although she wrote to me as recently as 2 years ago. She was living in Paris with another woman. They were both teaching English and math in an American high school over there.
My kids will never forgive me for not putting my motherin-law into a mental hospital instead of keeping her at home, where she was a great embarrassment to them. They couldnt bring friends home. If I had put Mildred into a nuthouse, though, I couldnt have afforded to send Melanie and Eugene Jr. to such expensive schools. I got a free house at Tarkington, but my salary was small.
Also, I didnt think Mildreds craziness was as unbearable as they did. In the Army I had grown used to people who talked nonsense all day long. Vietnam was I big hallucination. After adjusting to that, I could adjust to anything.
What my children most dislike me for, though, is my reproducing in conjunction with their mother. They live in constant dread of suddenly going as batty as Mildred
and Margaret. Unfortunately, there is a good chance of that.
Ironically enough, I happen to have an illegitimate son about whom I learned only recently. Since he had a different mother, he need not expect to go insane someday. Some of his kids, if he ever has any, could inherit my own mothers tendency to fatness, though.
But they could join Weight Watchers as Mother did.
Heredity is obviously much on my mind these days, and should be. So I have been reading up on it some in a book that also deals with embryology. And I tell you:
People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened I are right to be. I have just had my mind blown by an essay on the embryology of the human eye. No combination of Time and Luck could have produced a camera that excellent, not even if the quantity of time had been 1,000,000,000,000 years! How is that for an unsolved mystery?
When I went to work at Athena, I hoped to find at least 1 of the 3 convicts who had seen Mildred and Margaret and me having a picnic so long ago. As Ive said, I took 1 of them to be a White, or possibly Hispanic. So he would have been transferred to a White or Hispanic prison before I ever got there. The other 2 were clearly black, but I never found either of them. I would have liked to hear what we looked like to them, how contented we seemed to be.
They were probably dead. AIDS could have got them, or murder or suicide, or maybe tuberculosis. Every year, 30 inmates at Athena died for every student
who was awarded an Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree by Tarkington.
Parole.
If I had found a convict who had witnessed our picnic, we might have talked about the fish my motherin-law hooked while he was watching. He saw her rod bend double, heard the reel scream like a little siren. But he never got to see the monster who had taken her bait and was headed south for Scipio. Before he could see it, he was back in darkness in another van.
It was heavy test line I had put on the reel. This was deep-sea stuff made for tuna and shark, although, as far as we knew, there was nothing in Lake Mohiga but eels and perch and little catfish. That was all Mildred had ever caught before.
One time, I remember, she caught a perch too little to keep. So I turned it loose, even though the barb of the hook had come out through one eye. A few minutes later she hooked that same perch again. We could tell by the mangled eye. Think about that. Miraculous eyes, and no brains whatsoever.
I put such heavy test line on Mildreds reel so that nothing could ever get away from her. In Honduras 1 time I did the same thing for a 3-star General, whose aide I was.
Mildreds fish couldnt snap the line, and Mildred wouldnt let go of the rod. She didnt weigh anything, and the fish weighed a lot for a fish. Mildred went down on her knees in the water, laughing and crying.
Ill never forget what she was saying: Its God! Its God!¨
I waded out to help her. She wouldnt let go of the rod, so I grasped the line and began to haul it in, hand over hand.
How the water swirled and boiled out there!
When I got the fish into shallow water, it suddenly quit fighting. I guess it had used up every bit of its energy. That was that.