daughters. Interestingly, it is they, not he, who remain well known today in countercultural circles for leading a small but influential Weather Underground–like feminist group that they founded in 1967. Norton probably had dinner at Smythe’s house shortly after his wife, a poet named Alice Reeve, left him with their children to flee to Canada with her lover, a poetry professor at Radcliffe named Stella Janovic. But that is the stuff of another story.
17 One of the great surgeons and biologists of his time, Adolphus Gustav Sereny (1896–1974) was among the more renowned scientists on the faculty at Harvard Medical School while Perina was a student there. He and Perina would go on to have a fruitful but ultimately contentious relationship, which is addressed later in this narrative.
18 The contact was actually secondhand; one of Tallent’s colleagues at Stanford, not Tallent himself, was friendly with Smythe.
19 Now Kiribati.
20 This popularly accepted myth is probably a conflation of two facts: first, all U’ivuan boys are given a spear upon their fourteenth birthday; second, the first king of the islands, King Ulolo the Powerful—who unified many of the various tribes scattered among the archipelago in approximately A.D. 1645; his work was eventually completed by King Vaka I more than a century later—was said to have killed a wild boar barehanded before his fourteenth birthday. Since then the boar has occupied a central place in U’ivuan life; although it is a treasured hunting companion and a symbol of the culture’s ferocity to the outside world, killing or taming one is also considered a significant accomplishment and proof of the warrior’s strength and bravery. The fundamentally paradoxical nature of the beast’s place in society—both friend and challenge—is not a contradiction that seems ever to have troubled the U’ivuans.
PART III. THE DREAMERS
I .
June was a month unlike any I had experienced, and at the end of each of its days I would go to bed early, if only so I could think for a few minutes about all that I had seen and felt. As it happened, I had skipped my graduation and departed for Hawaii two weeks before I was to meet Tallent. My last night in Cambridge (which even before I left was vanishing from my memory, as cleanly and swiftly as salt in hot water), Owen had come up from New Haven to see me. Our goodbyes had been unsatisfying—he was brusque and seemed obscurely angry with me—but he did agree to keep for me some things (books, papers, my winter coat, heavy as a corpse) that I wouldn’t need on my travels. We agreed to write to each other, but I could tell from his expression that he was as dubious about that ever happening as I was. It was only after we had shaken hands and he had left with a trunk packed with my things to catch the last train back that I thought about what my life would be like so far away from Owen; it was true that we spoke less and less as we grew older (a detachment that seemed as inevitable as it was mysterious), but he was the only one who knew me, who retained memories of me from each year of my life, because it had been half his life as well. But this regret too quickly dissipated, so eager was I to begin my new existence—it was easy then to believe that my life until this point had been only a long, tedious rehearsal, a thing to be impatiently endured and withstood: a simulacrum of a life, not a life itself.
I had a train ticket to California, and from there I took a ship to Hawaii. In those days, Honolulu was still very much a quiet colonialoutpost, with all the attendant flourishes and clichés, and as the boat pulled into harbor, you could see on the dock groups of fat, jolly musicians plucking their plinky songs on their ukuleles, and barefooted boys, half Asian and half something else, smiling and begging for the disembarking passengers to throw them pennies.
It had been arranged that I would stay in a dormitory room at the local
17 One of the great surgeons and biologists of his time, Adolphus Gustav Sereny (1896–1974) was among the more renowned scientists on the faculty at Harvard Medical School while Perina was a student there. He and Perina would go on to have a fruitful but ultimately contentious relationship, which is addressed later in this narrative.
18 The contact was actually secondhand; one of Tallent’s colleagues at Stanford, not Tallent himself, was friendly with Smythe.
19 Now Kiribati.
20 This popularly accepted myth is probably a conflation of two facts: first, all U’ivuan boys are given a spear upon their fourteenth birthday; second, the first king of the islands, King Ulolo the Powerful—who unified many of the various tribes scattered among the archipelago in approximately A.D. 1645; his work was eventually completed by King Vaka I more than a century later—was said to have killed a wild boar barehanded before his fourteenth birthday. Since then the boar has occupied a central place in U’ivuan life; although it is a treasured hunting companion and a symbol of the culture’s ferocity to the outside world, killing or taming one is also considered a significant accomplishment and proof of the warrior’s strength and bravery. The fundamentally paradoxical nature of the beast’s place in society—both friend and challenge—is not a contradiction that seems ever to have troubled the U’ivuans.
PART III. THE DREAMERS
I .
June was a month unlike any I had experienced, and at the end of each of its days I would go to bed early, if only so I could think for a few minutes about all that I had seen and felt. As it happened, I had skipped my graduation and departed for Hawaii two weeks before I was to meet Tallent. My last night in Cambridge (which even before I left was vanishing from my memory, as cleanly and swiftly as salt in hot water), Owen had come up from New Haven to see me. Our goodbyes had been unsatisfying—he was brusque and seemed obscurely angry with me—but he did agree to keep for me some things (books, papers, my winter coat, heavy as a corpse) that I wouldn’t need on my travels. We agreed to write to each other, but I could tell from his expression that he was as dubious about that ever happening as I was. It was only after we had shaken hands and he had left with a trunk packed with my things to catch the last train back that I thought about what my life would be like so far away from Owen; it was true that we spoke less and less as we grew older (a detachment that seemed as inevitable as it was mysterious), but he was the only one who knew me, who retained memories of me from each year of my life, because it had been half his life as well. But this regret too quickly dissipated, so eager was I to begin my new existence—it was easy then to believe that my life until this point had been only a long, tedious rehearsal, a thing to be impatiently endured and withstood: a simulacrum of a life, not a life itself.
I had a train ticket to California, and from there I took a ship to Hawaii. In those days, Honolulu was still very much a quiet colonialoutpost, with all the attendant flourishes and clichés, and as the boat pulled into harbor, you could see on the dock groups of fat, jolly musicians plucking their plinky songs on their ukuleles, and barefooted boys, half Asian and half something else, smiling and begging for the disembarking passengers to throw them pennies.
It had been arranged that I would stay in a dormitory room at the local
Similar Books
