The third play in Schiller's trilogy, The Death of Wallenstein, profoundly affected my husband. He regarded the play as equal to any of Shakespeare's and a whole lot better than most. Moreover, no one had read it-at least insofar as he could tell-except himself. To him, Wallenstein loomed as one of the ultimate enigmas of Western history. Jeff noted that Hitler, like Wallenstein, relied in times of crisis on the occult rather than on reason. In Jeff's view this all added up to something significant, but he could not fathom just what. Hitler and Wallenstein had had so many traits in common-Jeff maintained-that the resemblance bordered on the uncanny. Both were great but eccentric generals and both had utterly wrecked Germany. Jeff hoped to do a paper on the coincidences, extracting from the evidence the conclusion that the abandoning of Christianity for the occult opened the door to universal ruin. Jesus and Simon Magus (as Jeff saw it) stood as the bipolarities, absolute and distinct.
I couldn't have cared less.
You see, this is what going to school forever and ever does to you. While I slaved away at the law office and candle shop, Jeff read everything in the U.C. Berkeley Library on, for instance, the Battle of Lutzen (November 16, 1632) at which time and place Wallenstein's fortunes were decided. Gustavus II Adolphus, king of Sweden, died at Lutzen, but the Swedes won anyhow. The real significance of this victory lay, of course, in the fact that at no time again would the Catholic powers be in a position to crush the Protestant cause. Jeff, however, viewed it all in terms of Wallenstein. He reread and reread Schiller's trilogy and tried to reconstruct from it-and from more accurate historical accounts-the precise moment when Wallenstein lost touch with reality.
"It's like with Hitler," Jeff said to me. "Can you say he was always crazy? Can you say he was crazy at all? And if he was crazy but not always crazy, when did he become crazy and what caused him to become crazy? Why should a successful man who holds really an enormous amount of power, a staggering amount of power, power to determine human history-why should he drift off like that? Okay; with Hitler it was probably paranoid schizophrenia and those injections that quack doctor was giving him. But neither factor was involved in Wallenstein's case."
Kirsten, being Norwegian, took a sympathetic interest in Jeff's preoccupation with Gustavus Adolphus' campaign into Central Europe. In between telling Swede jokes she revealed great pride in the role that the great Protestant King had played in the Thirty Years War. Also, she knew something about all this, which I did not. Both she and Jeff agreed that the Thirty Years War had been, up until World War One, the most dreadful war since the Huns sacked Rome. Germany had been reduced to cannibalism. Soldiers on both sides had regularly skewered bodies and roasted them. Jeff's reference books hinted at even more abominations too dreadful to detail. Everything connected with that period in time and place had been dreadful.
"We are still paying the price today," Jeff said, "for that war."
"Yeah, I guess it really was dreadful," I said, seated by myself in a corner of our living room reading a current issue of
Howard the Duck.
Jeff said, "I don't think you're particularly interested."
Glancing up, I said, "I get tired from bailing out heroin dealers. I'm always the one they send over to the bail bondsman. I'm sorry if I don't take the Thirty Years War as seriously as you and Kirsten do."
"Everything hinges on the Thirty Years War. And the Thirty Years War hinged on Wallenstein."
"What are you going to do when they go to England? Your father and Kirsten."
He stared at me.
"She's going, too. She told me. They've got that agency set up, Focus Center, where she's his agent or whatever."
"Jesus Christ," Jeff said bitterly.
I went back to reading Howard the Duck. It was the episode where space people turn Howard the Duck into Richard Nixon. Reciprocally, Richard Nixon grows feathers while addressing the nation on network TV. Likewise the top brass at the Pentagon.
"And they're going to be gone how long?" Jeff said.
"Until Tim figures out the meaning of the Zadokite Documents and how they pertain to Christianity."
"Shit," Jeff said.
"What's 'Q'?" I said.
"'Q,"' Jeff echoed.
"Tim said that preliminary reports, based on fragmentary translations of some documents-"
"'Q' is the hypothetical source for the Synoptics." His voice was brutal and rough.
"What are the Synoptics?"
"The first three Gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke. They supposedly come from one source, probably Aramaic. Nobody's ever been able to prove it."
"Well," I said, "Tim told me on the phone the other night while you were in class that the translators in London think that the Zadokite Documents contain-not just Q-but the material Q is based on. They're not sure. Tim sounded more excited than I ever heard him sound before."
"But the Zadokite Documents date from two hundred years before Christ."
"That's probably why he was so excited." Jeff said, "I want to go along."
"You can't," I said.
"Why not?" Raising his voice, he said, "Why don't I get to go if she gets to go? I'm his son!"
"He's straining the Bishop's Discretionary Fund as it is. They're going to be staying several months; it's going to cost a whole lot."
Jeff walked out of the living room. I continued reading. After a time, I realized I was hearing a strange sound; I lowered my copy of Howard the Duck and listened.
In the kitchen, in the darkness, by himself, my husband was crying.
One of the strangest and most perplexing accounts I ever read concerning my husband's suicide was that he, Jeff Archer, Bishop Timothy Archer's son, killed himself because he was afraid he was a homosexual. Some book written a number of years after his death-after all three of them had died-mangled the facts so thoroughly that, when you had finished reading it (I don't even remember the title or who wrote it) you knew less about Jeff and Bishop Archer and Kirsten Lundborg than before you started. It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.
Jeff held two mutually exclusive views toward his father's mistress. On the one hand she sexually stimulated him, so he felt strongly but wickedly attracted to her. On the other hand he loathed her and hated her and resented her for-he supposed-replacing him in terms of Tim's interest and affections.
But it did not end even there ... although I didn't discern the rest until years had passed. Beyond and above being jealous of Kirsten, he was jealous of-well, Jeff had it all screwed up; I can't really untangle it. One has to bear in mind the special problems in being the son of a man whose picture has appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek and who gets interviewed by David Frost, shows up on the Johnny Carson program, gets political cartoons in major newspapers devoted to him-what in Christ's name do you do, as the son?
For one week Jeff joined them in England, and regarding that week I know little; Jeff came back mute and withdrawn, and that was when he headed for the hotel room in which he shot himself in the face one late night. I am not going to go into my feelings about that as a way of killing yourself. It did bring the bishop back from London within a matter of hours, which, in a certain sense, the suicide was all about.