Congressman Jepperson pecked away: “It is the general rule among policy makers to insist that America must never leave a mission unaccomplished, no matter how wrongheaded or ill thought through. Indeed, the more wrongheaded and ill thought through, the more imperative it is to remain and see it through to its dismal and inevitable end.”
He reread the paragraph, smiled, and thought, Not bad, old bean. It was an op-ed piece that he would send to The New York Times on his return from Bosnia. He knew that, really, he should wait to write it after his fact-finding mission to Bosnia. He hushed his offended conscience by making a deal with himself that he’d take out the sentences if he saw anything that changed his mind. (Not likely.) He closed the lid of the laptop as the wheels of the large cargo plane announced with a squeak and puff of vaporized rubber that he was now in the Balkans. Randy liked these jaunts. They were his foreign policy credentials, all part of the Grand Plan.
Randolph Kumberling Jepperson IV was a blue blood in a red meat business. His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granduncle had signed the Declaration of Independence. The family referred privately to their ancestor as “G- 7” and to the sacred document as “the Dec.”
G-7’s great-great-nephew was the aforementioned General John Sedgwick, distinguished veteran of many Civil War battles, esteemed and beloved comrade of General Ulysses S. Grant, and now a Trivial Pursuit subject, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his demise. The family referred to him as “Elephant Man” or “Poor John.”
Randy’s great-grandfather (on the maternal Kumberling side) had been governor of Massachusetts in the 1880s. His paternal grandfather, Josephus Agrippa Jepperson, enlarged the already considerable family fortune by cornering the world supply of feldspar just as demand for aluminosilicate was peaking. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed him U.S. ambassador to Belgium at an especially tense time in U.S.-Belgian relations. His intervention in the Fleming-Walloon crisis of 1938 proved critical. He donated the opulent Palais Feldspar outside Genk, with the stipulation that the Flemings and Walloons must stop their feuding, which he termed “surely the most pointless squabble in all Europe.” He was knighted by King Leopold III and received the title of Chevalier des Pantalons Blancs (Knight of the White Pants), one of the most sought-after honorifics in Belgium.
The mantle of family greatness rested uneasily on the shoulders of Randy’s father, Minturn Jepperson. He experienced his first nervous breakdown halfway through a lackluster academic career at Harvard and one night set fire to the history section of the Widener Library. The episode was covered up, and a new history section was donated by the Jepperson Foundation.
Minturn was sent off to a Swiss sanatorium for a cure consisting of aggressive colonic irrigation and primal screaming. (The two therapies rather complemented each other.) It was on his return by ship to the United States that he met and fell in love with Adelaide Pankhurst Pitts, only daughter of Henry Hootz Pitts, chairman of Great Lakes Everything, which, true to its name, controlled more or less all commerce on the lakes. Minturn’s parents tried to discourage their son’s affection for “Addie” on the grounds that Hootz “sounded Jewish.”
When Minturn refused to break it off, the Jeppersons quietly hired a team of genealogists to find out if their potential in-laws were in fact of the tribe of Abraham. When the genealogists reported that the aboriginal Hootz (Gotmunder Von Hutz, 1436-1491) was not only not Jewish, but a direct lineal descendant of the Holy Roman Emperor Odobard II, they breathed a quiet sigh of relief and allowed nature to take its course. It didn’t hurt that Addie stood to inherit her father’s fortune, estimated at over $800 million, no small sum in the late 1940s.
Minturn and Addie married and spawned three children, the first of whom they named Randolph IV. (Randy’s siblings called him “Intra-Venous.” The Jeppersons, like many aristocratic families, were keen on nicknames.) Minturn had more “episodes” (eventually diagnosed as atypical psychosis or bipolar disorder). He developed a morbid horror of rushing water and loud noises, thought to trace to his stay in Switzerland. He also took to making strange birdlike sounds, often at inappropriate moments-in the middle of dinner with important guests, in church, at board meetings. But it provided his wife with a cue by which to explain his increasing absences owing to more stays at various psychological institutions. “Daddy’s gone bird-watching again, darling.”
Despite all this, Addie provided her children with a normal-for-that-era New England WASP upbringing, nourishing them on bland, overcooked food, hiring German nannies who spanked them at every opportunity, and packing them off to grim, Episcopalian boarding schools at the age of eleven. With the children gone, Addie settled down to a life of bridge, committee meetings, and gin and tonics. She became a pillar of Boston society, dowager and standard-bearer of the long Jepperson line.
Such were the strands of Randolph K. Jepperson IV’s DNA.
Whatever skeletons rattled about in the family closet-or foyer, for that matter-Randy had a sunny disposition, though in times of stress he sometimes made a low humming noise that sounded like Mmmmmmm.
“ Randolph,” his mother would command, “stop making that preposterous noise!”
Randy went to Harvard. He studied hard, got good grades, and was popular, especially with women, owing to his good looks and easy laughter. The Porsche convertible and cigarette boat he kept at a marina on the Charles River didn’t hurt, either, along with the picnic hampers packed with Champagne, foie gras, and the very best Moroccan hashish. He never dropped the family name; he comped the Crimson, became editorial page editor, and wrote well-regarded denunciations of President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. In a development that caused a huge fracas in the family, he turned down the prestigious AD club on the grounds that it was a “marble shithouse.”
After graduating, Randy spent a year in the Peace Corps trying to interest Peruvians in water purification and crop rotation, but for the most part snorting an Andean-size mountain of high-quality and inexpensive cocaine. He stayed up until dawn in his rented villa writing letters home to half a dozen girlfriends, hinting that he was actually in the CIA and tracking Abimael Guzmбn of the Shining Path.
When he came home at the end of that snowy Wanderjahr morose, he was unrecognizable. He had long, not very clean hair and a beard. A year of stimulants had left him with an involuntary humming that was now incessant. His conversation, once bubbly and witty, was now less than scintillating. He talked of returning to Peru to “finish the job,” which didn’t really convince anyone. His girlfriends made excuses not to see him. His mother threatened to cut off his allowance.
Appearing downstairs one afternoon after sleeping until five p.m., he was confronted by his mother, who said to him, “You’re too young to have a midlife crisis. Pull yourself together. If you continue at this rate, you’ll end up in the loony bin like your father. Or being born-again. I don’t know which is more boring. And will you stop making that appalling sound!”
One day, on the way into Boston to see a psychiatrist that his mother had insisted on-it was either that or leave the house and no more allowance-Randy dropped three hits of windowpane.
It was a peculiar way of striking back at his mother-seeing her shrink while tripping on a monster dose of LSD-but it had a kind of logic to it. Navigating on the highway into Boston became, well, complicated. At one point he looked up, and there, among the strange giant birds that were circling and trying to eat him, he saw, off Exit 15, the John F. Kennedy Library, its I. M. Pei design doing…whoa…amazing things. It occurred to him, through the tsunami of hallucinations, that he had never actually been inside. Carpe diem! It was much more alluring than the prospect of freaking out in front of Dr. Goldberg, so he turned off onto the exit-a breathtaking and very nearly life-ending maneuver. His parking was irregular and attracted the interest of several security guards, but he managed to ditch the car and make it inside without being arrested.