VII
After avoiding arrest, and time-wasting drug tests, Maeve and David resumed the 7-hour odyssey to Barnesboro so that Maeve could get treatment from her daddy for a staff infection.
It is not necessary, I will just drop you off in Barnesboro, David had thought to answer coolly if she asked again about his work after she had demanded his identification in the car in South Bend. Her a communicant?, he had laughed bitterly in his mind. From Boonsboro? "Have to get home to daddy" A cloistered Catholic girl all her life traipsing all over the world after the witch? I’ve got too much to do for this. And David was busy. It looked like his sixth sense had failed him with Maeve. The press of her time had perhaps not given him sufficient time to “look her in the eyes” and simultaneously into her soul, and properly assess her. David hated wasting time and once he was convinced he snipped that circle of unpromising and moved on to the next prospective communicant. He had smoldered in the car waiting on this Irish-American princess.
But that was before the laughter on the identification; before the comic road side exercises and the police welfare check. It had been a fun adventure so far, little spicy in a couple places.
"We have a long trip. Could you fill in the blanks in your bio 'without looking me in the eyes'"?, Maeve asked solicitously although she knew as soon as it was out that she shouldn't have added that last dig.
David almost went "It's not necessary” on her. He was this close to giving up. "Without looking me in the eyes." Bitchy thing to say. Alright, you owe her that much. One time. He needed to reset the tone if this had any chance.
"Maybe we could do without the sarcasm."
"Maybe we could," Maeve acknowledged, abashed.
David started fresh, glad to have that concession.
"Everything I have told you so far about my family is totally true."
"...But not the total truth."
"Stop."
Maeve stopped.
"The total truth and totally true both...Well, I guess not totally true if you want all the biographical details, like I have three brothers who manage their branches here and there and are responsible for gaining knowledge of their regions. And I have the usual relatives. We did emigrate from Switzerland in my father's generation. I was born in the States. We do have...You know what I told you about the money. (He didn't want to talk about it.) All true. Father did change the family mission from wealth accumulation without much conscience to wealth accumulation and dispensation with conscience. I am with this reconfigured family mission totally, conceptually. Everything I have told you so far about myself is totally true...But not the total truth."
"I do go to the University of Chicago, of which as you now have confirmation. My father was in town on business, the business is as I told it to you truthfully; we were at Professor Kuhn's lecture as part of the third, language, rung on Diotima's ladder."
"What I have not told you previously is that my personal mission differs significantly from my father's. I don't remember if I told you: Peace, prosperity, education, health?"
"No."
"Okay, those are the four legs of my father's mission. I differ with father on the peace leg on both practical and philosophical grounds. Practical: Father cannot get it through his head that we are one family, we are not a nation-state. We cannot go around practicing foreign policy for real nations. You can get arrested by your country and sometimes executed by the "beneficiary's" country for doing that. It produces resentment. I cannot make father see that, I think because wealth has been such carte blanche for us over the generations. It is in our DNA almost and father cannot see money for what it is, a tool, one tool, with limits on it."
"That concrete difference--to go back to the metaphor of the chair, I cut one leg off and now had a three-legged chair. That led to the realization that there was a grave philosophical difference between us. The whole model, like a three-legged chair, was unstable. Parenthetically, I have kept this ‘total truth’ from my father. He does not know that I so fundamentally, and on different levels simultaneously, reject the peace leg of his conceived mission, the scope of his mission, and hence his mission. Nations make peace, not family foundations, the world has a United Nations body now; capitalism generates prosperity for the greediest and potentially at least for the neediest but the latter is the realm of politics of which we, of Swiss descent, avoid as a third rail. There are colleges and universities in every country of the globe to provide mass education, and we have the Red Cross and the Scandinavian model and so on for health. We also have philanthropic organizations for all, and even for peace theory, although, of course, none of the philanthropic organizations can practice peace-making. Where is our niche?"
It was a rhetorical question and Maeve did not answer.
"Well, it is not going to be doing any one much less all of those things at the macro level. It is impossible in the one and redundant in the others. It is also, and this is my deepest fundamental disagreement, immodest. Immodest," David repeated for emphasis. Rather, it's imperial.
"One of the things I like about America is its modesty of reach. I should say Maeve, I am not enamored of all that is America but for our purposes that is neither here nor there. My father thinks like George III or Milner or Rhodes, he was born on third base, thinks he hit a triple, and thinks he could teach North American colonists, Indians on the subcontinent, Egyptians, and black Africans in Rhodesia and South Africa how to hit triples--when they don't know what baseball is and when you teach them what it is have no interest in such a game."
"I. Am. Not. Doing. That." When my father finds this out he could cut me loose from the family wealth, I don't think he will, but he could, and I am prepared to go my own way.
“Not to be immodest and certainly not to be ingratiating, just full disclosure I am rebellious, it seems a lot of us our age are, and I am a guerrilla rebel, keeping this to myself. And now sharing with you."
"Taking you home is an example of what I do and what I envision doing. It so happened that I ran into you but it could have been anybody, of either gender, of any race or creed, and it has been others. The way that I was raised I envision myself being everywhere and nowhere and I have been a lot of places and none in particular. New York and Geneva I call homes and I have been to the capitals of several European, Eurasian, and Asian countries, to Tel Aviv, Cairo, Tehran, Salisbury and Johannesburg, everywhere we have branches. I have seen the fallacy of father's British Empire emulation. So when you protested that it was too much of an imposition, this is what I meant. This is not imposition but mission. And when I have done this, Maeve, it is the most intensely pleasurable feeling I have ever experienced, better than an orgasm. It is what I mean by the witch."
"When I do what I am doing now with you I am not only looking for opportunities but also communicants: people who can do the same for others. I am not looking for the Hope Diamond, I am looking to seed acres with diamonds, which will then seed more acres and so on."
"So I didn't know, but I was looking, at you as a potential communicant."
An hour had passed. David was speaking with such passion that his voice was rising. He had never shown Maeve this.
He took his eyes off his vision and noticed the gas gauge. "Hey, we have to stop for gas."
And so they stopped.
