Shall I tell you of the scores of people (Sereny, Esme, the entire Stanford University Anthropology Department, Harper’s Magazine) who made me their enemy, who accused me of, variously, withholding the truth, distorting the truth, ruining a civilization, and ruining mankind’s hopes?75 Shall I tell you how bad followed bad to Ivu’ivu, how after the pharmacists flew out for the last time, they were replaced with fleets of missionaries, who were this time able to accomplish what their predecessors could not? Shall I tell you of the hundreds who were converted, how the remaining villagers on Ivu’ivu, their forests denuded and trampled and shorn, were taken over to U’ivu in boatloads to live in a tin-and-wood village on the eastern side of the island built by a particularly energetic group of Mormons from Provo?76 Shall I tell you how, when one of those transplanted villagers — the chief’s proxy — tried to initiate the a’ina’ina ceremony, he was put into jail (a structure that had never existed until then, the U’ivuan king preferring more straightforward punishments such as abandoning the miscreant or casting him out to sea)? Shall I tell you how it was rumored that after Ivu’ivu had been picked clean of its wonders and exhausted of all its plants and fungi and flowers and animals and was left with only its beauty and mystery, the United States military — no, the French; no, the Japanese — was using it to test nuclear warheads? Shall I tell you how the king’s son, Crown Prince Tui’uvo’uvo, now the king himself, was whispered to be a puppet of some foreign military and how he took to strutting about U’ivu in an epaulet-trimmed wool jacket that he wore atop a sarong, his face vivid with sweat? Shall I tell you how there are really no new stories in cases like these: how the men turned to alcohol, how the women neglected their handiwork, how they all grew fatter and coarser and lazier, how the missionaries plucked them from their houses as easily as one would pick an overripe apple from a branch? Shall I tell you of the venereal diseases that seemed to come from nowhere but, once introduced, never left? Shall I tell you how I witnessed these things myself, how I kept returning and returning, long after the grant money had disappeared, long after people had lost interest, long after the island had gone from being an Eden to becoming what it was, what it is: just another Micronesian ruin, once so full of hope, now somehow distasteful and embarrassing, like a beautiful woman who has grown fleshy and sparse-haired and mustached?
Shall I tell you of how in the end the only person with whom I could chart the island’s changes — each, inevitably, an insult — was Meyers, the only other person who, like me, kept stubbornly going back, first with funding and then with his own money? Shall I tell you of one day in the spring of 1968 when we were walking through Tavaka (now a miserable, cluttered little town and renamed Tui’uvo, after the new king) and two small children — one a boy, one a girl, obviously siblings, the boy about five (or so I thought at the time) and watchful, the girl around three and giggly — began following us around? Shall I tell you of how Meyers and I bought them manamas, speared on a stick and rolled in grainy sugar, that were being sold by a deflated-looking woman from her tin-tabled stall, and watched as they devoured them, the sugar stubbling their faces like beards? Shall I tell you how day after day they trailed us, as close as hens, and after we had returned from an exhausting, depressing trip to Ivu’ivu (coming back in the boat, which now had such a powerful motor that its nose heaved up from the water at a terrifying angle before smacking back down into it, we had avoided looking at one another, for to look would be to see our own sadness mirrored), they were there waiting for us, crouching on the dock like bookends? Shall I tell you how, after asking person after person who cared for these children — the girl Makala, the boy Muiva — and receiving nonanswers, or no answers at all, Meyers and I, almost as a whim, an impulse acquisition, took them back to the States with us?
Shall I tell you how Muiva was my first child, although of course I did not think of him at the time as my first, simply as my only, and my own? And how even after I learned that he was not five but seven, and even after I learned how much I had to teach him — how to eat, how to use the toilet, how to speak English; he was not unlike Eve in certain ways — I loved him anyway? Shall I tell you of what a sweet boy he was and what joy he brought me, and how the dream I had had on Ivu’ivu of carrying a sleeping child to bed was just as satisfying as I had hoped it might be, so satisfying in fact that I began to want to repeat it again and again? Shall I tell you of how I began to adopt other children — how once I began to pay attention, I found there were dozens, scores, who were parentless or as good as, their parents were so useless, so lost to alcohol and God — initially only boys, because I thought I could relate to them more easily, but then girls as well? Shall I tell you how Uva’s son brought me his own toddler, a two-year-old named Vaia, and asked me to take him with me? Shall I tell you of how when Meyers died in 1977, after a very quick bout with stomach cancer, I took Makala into my house as my sixteenth child, and, I thought, my last? Shall I tell you of how I was wrong, and then wrong again, and with each trip I made back to U’ivu — a biannual event that I had learned to dread even as I had accepted that it was inevitable — I would find myself returning with another child? Shall I tell you how I always looked for those two boys — now men, now undoubtedly with boys of their own — who were lost to me, the one from the a’ina’ina and the one who would lean against me and doze, and how I searched for and hoped for something of them in every new child I collected, how I wanted to see the same steadiness in their eyes, feel the same trust as they leaned against me? Shall I tell you how with each new child I acquired, I would irrationally think, This is the one. This is the one who will make me happy. This is the one who will complete my life. This is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking.
Shall I tell you how I was always wrong — eighteen, nineteen, twenty times wrong — and how although I was always wrong, I didn’t stop, I couldn’t stop, I was searching, searching, searching.
Or shall I perhaps tell you of a trip I made in 1980, the trip that, although I was not to know it, would eventually destroy my life?
By this time I had twenty-six children in my care — more than I needed, of course, and more than I wanted. By now the public perception of my extravagant collection had altered considerably and in certain quarters had become yet another measure of my monstrousness. When I first began accumulating my children, I was of course treated as something of a hero — an odd hero perhaps, barely on the right side of eccentricity, but a hero nonetheless. I was a single man, I was a noted scientist, and yet here I was, opening my house (an eight-bedroom Colonial just outside town that I had bought with some of my inheritance) to these undernourished and primitive orphans, whose pitiable state was compounded by their being dark-skinned and flat-nosed and completely uneducated.
I would estimate that my heroism ran out after I brought back my ninth child. Suddenly, as if a bulletin had gone out to the brayers and opinion-sharers and women of the world generally — for it was women who seemed to have the strongest feelings about my personal doings, as women often do — I was an object of suspicion. Why did I need all those children? Why did I have all these children and not a wife? What exactly was I trying to do? There was something unhealthy about it all, wasn’t there? The suspicions never morphed into outright accusations, but I could feel them there, held just under the tongue like a dissolving cube of sugar. I am convinced that even Mrs. Tomlinson, a local woman I had engaged to serve as a housekeeper-cum-nanny (I hired her on the basis of her looks alone: she was dense and sturdy and florid, a Dickensian scullery maid grown up and out and come to life in modern-day Maryland), who liked to ostentatiously share with me the many times she had defended me to her girlfriends and sisters-in-law, doubtless shared her theories with those same girlfriends and sisters-in-law: Well, what does he need with all those children, after all? (At the time they were easy to dismiss, but in retrospect, I would agree with them: there was something fevered and grotesque, alarming even, about the rate at which I adopted these children.)