When they met she was taking an Old English course. “Your eyes are Nordic,” she said, winter-cearig” which, roughly translated, meant “winter-sad.” The fact that she found him moody pleased him at the time. He enjoyed being a serious young student.
Jurgen wanted to marry them but Adams refused politely, feeling that to grant him this privilege would be to approve in advance any intervention Jurgen might wish to make in their marriage. Adams hired a Unitarian minister, and throughout the ceremony Pamela’s parents, in the front pew, criticized his performance. “His voice is a little shaky,” Adams heard Jurgen whisper. “Such a monotone,” said Pamela’s mother.
Now, on the phone, Jurgen’s telling him the story of Abraham and Sarah, who survived hardships with unending faith and love and were able to conceive a child even after their bodies were withered and broken.
Whenever Jurgen preaches, he quotes liberally from a variety of sources. Like Pamela, he is proud of his German ancestry, and is particularly fond of Nietzsche and Hegel. He has misconstrued Nietzsche’s Will to Power as “willpower” and erroneously paraphrases him in a Christian context. Hegel pops up in his apocalyptic sermons. “History’s coming to an end,” Jurgen shouts. “The Book of Revelation says so, the great Lutheran thinker Hegel says so.”
Listening to him, Adams loses trust in narrative. In Jurgen’s hands narrative is simply a form of typology, a chain of causality, leaving no room for accident. Adam was the forerunner of Moses who was the forerunner of Christ who became a scapegoat for all mankind… Well, Adams thinks, you see the trouble that’s gotten us into.
He has drawn enough jagged coastlines and isolated islands to be a firm believer in accident.
In sum, he does not get along with Pamela’s father.
The only member of Pamela’s family he enjoys is her uncle Otto. A rounder and a scoundrel, Otto is one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. He quit school in the fifth grade, learned sign-painting, and along with his father designed billboards all over the East Coast. When his father died, he discovered that the old man owned much of the East Coast, though he’d lived like a pauper all his life. Otto inherited so much land that the Army Corps of Engineers had to consult him each time they planned a project in the Delaware basin.
“You can’t really own a piece of land,” he once told Adams. “It’s there for anyone to sleep and piss on. Besides, my inheritance never stopped me from sinking to my proper level in life.” With buckets of silver and buckets of gold he formed images up and down America’s highways, meanwhile accumulating interest on his holdings — money he rarely touched. He didn’t drink much before the age of fourteen, but “did quite a bit,” he said, “after that.” He preferred to live like his father and had no use for the rest of Pamela’s family. “Tight-assed Lutheran Krauts,” he called them.
Adams agreed, but did not want to upset Jurgen any more than the separation already had. He sounded old.
“It’s all for the best, Jurgen. We were going in different directions. Pam’s found a whole new career — ”
“Don’t go blaming Pammy for your oversights.”
“We both made mistakes.”
“Excuses won’t wash with God, Sam. Marriage is a sacred institution.”
“Jurgen, please, I want you to stop worrying about it. Let Pam and me work this out ourselves, all right? In the meantime, you take care of yourself.”
“I’m fit as a fiddle. Don’t change the subject.”
Adams’ family is easier. His mother and father divorced just after Kenny was born. She stays at home with migraines, he runs a miniature golf course on the outskirts of Red Cloud. When she wasn’t in bed with pain, she was arguing with the old man in the clubhouse next to the eighteenth green. The final fairway led to a clown’s face, sad as a frozen dinner, with pointed eyes and a grinning mouth. The tongue was a red slide up which the ball rolled into the hole located just behind the clown’s uvula. Adams remembers sitting on the tongue, watching his parents threaten each other with putters.
Though neither is happy when he calls and tells them his troubles, they listen and forgive.
A note from Mayer: “Re our earlier conversation. Mr. Jordan has been under an intense emotional strain of late, factors having to do mainly with overwork. At my request, Mr. Carter has agreed to allow him some time off. You’ll be happy to know that Mr. Jordan’s problems are not serious. He is not a threat to you, nor has he ever been. I am satisfied you will not be bothered again.”
Part Three
THE pleasure he took in naming his children is the same pleasure he feels in finishing a map. State names, county names, city names. The names of rivers, marshes, fjords. What the seas are called, the continents, the winds hushed deep in coves. The first name of a forest. The original word for a ridge. Irish, Icelandic, Nordic. Indian similes, Eskimo symbology, the nomenclature of the Vikings. Script (so ferociously ornate it reveals the cloistered monk’s distrust of words), bold strokes (the explorer’s hand), primitive type. German, Russian, French.
The world map of John Speede, 1626, revealing in the Southern Unknowne Land the County of Parrots, so named because of the “extraordinary and almost incredible bigness of those birds there.”
Ptolemy, the father of design, advising, “We shall do well to keep the straight line.”
Columbus wrote that the world resembles a woman’s breast, terrestrial paradise flourishing at the spot that corresponds to the nipple.
Adams has mapped amazing ground. Six years ago, on a summer field trip to Mexico, he and his party lodged at a ranch thirty miles south of Mount Ciénega, an active volcano. Lava had altered the face of the landscape, diverting rivers, forcing villages to relocate, contaminating Sonora’s water supply. Adams had been asked to make preliminary sketches for revised maps of the region.
A nearby university used the ranch for agricultural research, but graciously allowed the American party to stay in the main house. Adams’ room overlooked the barn and the smell of rye grass and the chuffing of horses in their stalls reminded him of Red Cloud.
One night, unable to sleep, Mount Ciénega rumbling in the distance, he dressed and walked outside. The mosquitoes were thick; fallen berries snapped beneath his feet. Slapping the back of his neck he entered the barn. It was still. The animals were tense. He waded through the hay and was startled to see, in the corner, a thick white snake wrapped around a cow’s hind legs, its mouth firmly attached to the udder. The terrified cow stared at the slats in the side of the barn.
Pamela has prepared cold zucchini and buttermilk soup. “I’m on a vegetarian diet,” she says. “Did you know that for every sixteen pounds of soy and grain fed to cows, we only get one pound of beef? The Institute for Food and Development says eating meat is like driving a Cadillac.”
Toby won’t touch the food. Neither will Adams. Deidre is eating with a friend.
“I understand you’ve been saying some nasty things to your mother,” Adams says.
“He called me an uncool bitch just before you got here.”
“Is that why you came over?” Toby says. “To yell at me?”