Where was she now? She'd died at about seventy-seven after a long and painful siege of stomach cancer. But he'd seen photographs of her when she was twenty. A petite blonde whose eyes looked a lively blue, not the washed-out red-veined things he remembered. The mouth was thin and tight, but all the adults in her family were grim lipped. Those brown-toned photogravures displayed faces that looked as if they 'd had a very tough time but would never break under the strain.
The Victorians, judging by their photographs, were a hard-nosed, stiff-spined lot. His German grandma's family had been made of the same stern stuff. Persecuted by their Lutheran neighbors and the authorities because they had converted to the Baptist church, they left Oberellen, Thuringia for the land of promise. (Peter's family on both sides had always opted for the religion of the minority, usually a somewhat crank religion. Maybe they were trouble seekers.)
After years of moving from one place to another, never finding a single street paved with gold, after backbreaking labor, soul-searing poverty, and the deaths of many children and finally of parents and grandparents, the Kaisers had made it. They had become well-to-do fanners near, or owners of machine shops in, Kansas City.
Was it worth it? The survivors said that it was.
Wilhelmina had been a pretty, blue-eyed blonde of ten when she had come to America. At eighteen she had married a Kansan twenty years older than she, probably to escape poverty. It was said that old Bill Griffiths was part-Cherokee and that he had been one of Quantrill's guerrillas, but there was a lot of malarkey in Peter's family on both sides. They were always trying to make themselves look better, or worse, than they really were. Whatever old Bill's past, Peter's mother never wanted to talk about it. Maybe he was just a horse thief.
Where was Wilhelmina now? She'd no longer be the wrinkled, bent old women he'd known. She'd be a good-looking, shapely wench, though still with the vacuous blue eyes and still speaking English with a heavy German accent. If he should run across.her, would he recognize her? Not likely. And if he did, what could he find out from her about the traumas she'd inflicted on her infant grandson? Nothing. She wouldn't remember what would have been minor incidents to her. Or, if she did, she surely wasn't going to admit that she had ever mistreated him. If indeed the dark deed had ever been done.
During a brief stint of psychoanalysis, Peter had tried to break through the thick shadows of repressed memory to the primal drama in which his grandmother played such an important role. The effort had failed. More extended attempts in dianetics and scientology had resulted in zilch also. He had kept on sliding past the traumatic episodes, like a monkey on a greased pole, on past his birth and into previous lives.
After being a woman giving birth in a medieval castle, a dinosaur, a prevertebrate in the postprimal ocean, and an eighteenth-century passenger in a stage coach going through the Black Forest, Peter had abandoned scientology.
The fantasies were interesting, and they revealed something of his character. But his grandmother evaded him.
Here, on The Riverworld, he had tried dreamgum as a weapon to pierce the thick shadows. Under the guidance of a guru, he had chewed half a stick, a heavy load, and dived after the pearl hidden in the depths of his unconscious. When he woke from some horrible visions, he found his guru, battered and bloody, unconscious on the floor of the hut. There was no mystery about who had done this deed.
Peter had left the area after making sure that his guide would live without serious aftereffects. He could not stay in the area nor could he feel anything but guilt and shame whenever he saw his guru. The fellow had been very forgiving, had, in fact, been willing to continue the sessions-if Peter was tied up during them.
He could not face the violence that he felt dwelt deep within him. It was this fear of violence in himself that made him so afraid of violence in others.
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in our lousy genes. Or in failure of one's conquest of one's self. The fault, dear Brutus, is in our fear of knowing our self. The next, almost inevitable, scene in this drama of recollection was the seduction of Wilhelmina. How easy to think of this fantasy as potentially real, since it was possible that he would meet her. After some mutual questioning, they would discover that they were grandmother and grandson. Then the long talk with her telling what had happened to her daughter and her husband (Peter's father) and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-greatgrandchildren. Would she be horrified when she found that a great-granddaughter had married a Jew? Undoubtedly. Anyone of rural stock born in 1880 was bound to be deeply prejudiced. Or what if he told her that his sister had married a Japanese? Or that a brother and a first cousin had married Catholics? Or that a great-granddaughter had converted to Catholicism? Or that a great-grandson had become a Buddhist?
On the other hand, The Riverworld might have changed her attitudes, as it had done to so many. However, many more were as psychologically fossilized as when they had lived on Earth.
To get on to the fantasy.
After a few drinks and long talk, bed?
Rationally, one could not object to incest here. There would be no children.
But when did people ever think rationally in such situations?
No, the thing to do would be to say nothing about their relationship until after they'd been to bed.
The construction crumbled then. To reveal that would make her grievously ashamed. It would be cruel. And no matter how much he wanted revenge, he could not do that to her. To anyone. Besides, it would be revenge for some act that he only thought might have been committed. Even if it had occurred, it might have been something only a child would have thought terrible. Or something misinterpreted in his infant mind. Or something that she, being aproduct of her times, would have thought only natural.
It was exciting to think about laying your grandmother. But, in reality, it just wouldn't happen. He was sexually drawn only to intelligent women, and his grandmother had been an ignorant peasant. Vulgar, too, though not in an obscene or irreligious way. He remembered when she was eating with the family on a Thanksgiving holiday. She'd sneezed, the snot had landed on her blouse, and she had wiped it off with her hand and deposited it on her skirt. His father had laughed, his mother had looked stricken, and he had lost his appetite.
There went the whole fantasy, dissolved in disgust.
Still, she might have changed.
To hell with it, he told himself, and he turned on his side and went to sleep.
29
Drums beat, and wooden trumpets blew. Peter Frigate woke up in the midst of another dream. It was three months after Pearl Harbor, and he was an air cadet at Randolph Field being chewed out by his flight instructor.
The lieutenant, a tall young man with a thin moustache and big feet, was almost as hysterical as Grandma Kaiser.
' "The next time you turn left when I tell you to turm right, Frigate, I'm bringing us in right now, cutting the goddamn flight, and I'm refusing to go up with you! You can get an instructor who doesn't give a shit if his dumb student kills him or not! Jesus Christ, Frigate, we coulda been killed! Didn't you see that plane on your left! Are you suicidal! That's all right with me, but don't take me and two others with you! And do it on your own time, off the field, and not with government property! What the hell is the matter with you, Frigate! Do you hate me!"