Father and Mother returned safely from Iceland, revealing that there had been as well a detour to the Svalbard Archipelago, on Norway’s arctic coast, with a Boston coal baron named Longyear. Andrew and Alexander came from Sacramento for a short visit to welcome them home, and they were joined a day later by Amelia and the Reverend Ruggles, who had been attending a meeting of President Wilson’s Ecumenical Council. Because Charles no longer lived at the family home, and had not seen anybody in his family for quite some time, he wore the false auburn beard when he came for dinner. Neither Father nor older brothers nor Tom Ruggles, seemed to notice. Amelia pretended not to, and Mother merely watched him, as was now her wont, closely but neutrally. Only the younger brothers, Gus and Tony, saw it for what it was. They laughed hysterically but quietly between themselves, and would not reveal the source of their amusement. The men discussed the trip to Iceland, and Charles pretended to be surprised, even a little ashamed of himself, when he appeared finally to understand that the purpose of the trip had not been sport fishing, that the reference to the tying of flies had been ironic, and that the facilitation and encouragement of negotiations for control of Iceland’s commercial fisheries had been the real activity, along with the study of general opportunities for people with ships, which were carrying mutton and stockfish to Belgium and France, where normal husbandry had been interrupted by the sudden deaths of millions of young men. Iceland was Danish, Father said — as Danish as Mother, whose great-grandparents on her mother’s side had been born, lived, and died in that country — but was seeking its independence. Denmark had, during various decades of the last few centuries, been desirous of, even desperate for, buyers of Iceland, but independence had never entered into it. Now it appeared that the United States might one day not too far in the future consider purchasing the country. That was the kind of place America was now. Just as a rich man might buy himself an island and declare himself king of it, a rich country could buy a poor one and run it like any other business. And while the Icelanders, Father admitted, were experiencing a desire for nationalism that was moving and gratifying to witness, and while they were justly proud of operating the world’s oldest parliamentary republic and causing a society to subsist in which neither a ruling clergy nor aristocracy could find handholds — he wanted very much, and he said this twice, wanted very much for Iceland to understand, yes, first and foremost to understand and then naturally to accept, America’s influence, and, not coincidentally, to prosper as they had never done before. Not ever, he repeated coolly. They had demonstrated perfectly well that the end of communal anarchism — and Charles particularly should understand the term was being used advisedly but pointedly — was poverty. Grinding, centuries-long famine and misery. They take their fish from open rowboats, he said, and so can spend no more than a day at a time on the water, and shallow water at that. Which does not prevent them from drowning at an appalling, not to say incredibly unprofitable, rate. One hundred sixty-five men had been drowned in a single day — which was not only a terrible tragedy but a significant percentage of the country’s male population. Decked ships from England had been fishing Iceland’s waters for centuries, literally centuries, but the new steam-driven trawlers were simply sweeping up everything in their wake. Not because, Father went on with a more pronounced gravity, their captains were heartless sons of bitches or blind idiots, or because their owners were evil villains working hand in hand with corrupt tyrants, but because the world was changing and the English could no more
not fish from their overwhelming trawlers than Charles could not not enjoy, for example, his motorcycle rides now that he had acquired the capability for that powerful — make no mistake about it — thrill.