CHAPTER ELEVEN
Head over Heels
Prissi had two surprises when she arrived home for Spring Break.
The first surprise was discovering two immense shipping crates sequestered behind their cyclone fenced storage area in the basement of the Gramercy Arms. Her father obviously had let go of his notion about leaving their African past behind.
When Nora Langue had died, Beryl Langue’s immediate response had been to cut and run. He locked up his lab, asked friends to pack up their furnishings and, within a day of Nora Langue’s ashes being scattered onto Lake Tanganyika, he and Prissi were crossing that same lake in the first leg of their sojourn. A week later, they entered Costa Rica through a back door encumbered with a total of three suitcases and two paks.
Now, almost three years after her mother’s death, Prissi had the opportunity to be re-connected with her past through the collection of boxes spread across the storage area floor. Prissi couldn’t wait to see what might have been saved of their lives in Burundi, but she realized that her second surprise might cut into her time to explore the first.
Dr. Smarkzy had sent her the contact numbers for his friend, Pequod Jones, at the New York Public Datarium. He EMed that if Prissi wanted to travel down The Lost Path, she could have no better cicerone than the curmudgeonly Pequod Jones. In addition, Smarkzy himself was going to take advantage of his break, to which he could attest faculty anticipated more than students, to see if he could find some things from the GOD that could help the cause. Prissi assumed that the good old days referred to Smarkzy’s time at Cold Spring Harbor.
Despite the romantic allure of The Lost Path, Prissi probably would have spent much more time in her apartment building’s basement going through her past rather than at the NYPD if it had not been for a piece of very bad luck.
In homage to her favorite teacher, Prissi flew up Fifth Avenue late in the afternoon of her first day home. She met Pequod Jones, who proved to be anything but a curmudgeon. Jones, a ruddy-faced old man with a beach ball belly and flailing arms, let her know that he was breaking the rules by allowing her to look through the Fflowers collection…and that he was taking great pleasure in doing so. He told her that he was compelled to break the rules because he was a scientist first and a datarian second.
Prissi spent two hours going through a miniscule portion of the archives Joshua Fflowers had donated to posterity. She skipped through paper, disk, stick, bubble and liquid memory of Fflowers early years as a scientist, entrepreneur, executive, and philanthropist looking for material relevant to delayed fledging. She found little enough of that; however she did discover that the company that Smarkzy recalled his friend working for was named Centsurety. Of the small amount of material that did seem relevant, almost all of it was either so stupefyingly dull or so obtuse that Prissi’s lids drooped within seconds of beginning her work.
When Jones bounced by to ask Prissi about her progress, Prissi, being a Dutton student, was compelled to tell him the truth. It was drudgery. Eyes bright and head bobbling, the datarian smiled as he said, “Science, small s is,” and walked away.
Prissi, who had worked long enough not to feel guilty but had found so little to pique her interest that she couldn’t convince herself to stay another minute, was paking up when her bad luck arrived in the guise of an old pix presented to her by Pequod Jones.
“Maybe it will make it more interesting if you can see with whom you are dealing.”
The large pix Jones held out to the teener was a group-shot of a dozen, mostly young, men and women loosely clustered around a couple of picnic tables.
Dr. Jones pointed out Joshua Fflowers and then named three other people he knew. He ended with a pudgy finger touching a widely smiling dashing young man raising a bottle in toast to the unseen photographer.
“The rightly revered Dr. Vartan Smarkzy.”
Prissi’s head was nodding but she failed to hear any more of Jones’ words. Her brain was processing the face of someone he hadn’t named. What had Prissi poring over the ancient pix was the face of a young woman holding hands with a tall, crane-legged man in khaki shorts. The woman in the lo-def pix had an eerie resemblance to some of the pixs in a flashbook her mother had sometimes showed her that that held images of LBP, Life Before Prissi. Her mother had worked for Joshua Fflowers? On The Lost Path? Nora Elieson, oatmeal cookie and butterscotch brownie maker, queen of guina fowl life cycles,had had an exciting life that she hadn’t told her daughter about? Suddenly, Prissi couldn’t wait to get home to go through the boxes in the basement. A mystery within a mystery. That notion was irresistible to the teener, far better than reading another CRN.
Prissi began packing her kanga. Pequod Jones was right and wrong. The pix did energize Prissi, but not because of some scientific mystery. It was what the possibilities might be for her own history that inspired her.
Prissi had never felt especially close to her father. He was over seventy when she was born. He was a very good, but not a very warm person. It wasn’t that he was cold; rather, he seemed to be perennially distracted. Prissi knew that her father’s work with regenerative chickens and guinea fowl had helped thousands upon thousands of Africans lead a better life; however it was the science and not the savings in misery that seemed to hold his attention. When villagers tried to thank him with a smile, words or a small gift for designing a bird whose wings could be removed for meat and, then, grown back to be harvested again, he always looked like he was about to bolt.
Despite Beryl Langue’s undemonstrative nature, Prissi knew that her father adored her. In return, she held her father in high esteem for his rationally-bounded caring, good works, and forthrightness. From all of the CRNs she had consumed, Prissi knew that Beryl Langue would have made a horrible lover, but a perfect 1950s father.
In Prissi’s estimation, her mother was her father’s complement. Nora Elieson was fun. Despite being in her late eighties, she had been as much a pal and fellow adventurer as a parent. When the family spent the too short weeks of summer school vacation east of the Rift in Karuzi province, Prissi and her mother would quietly sneak around the mud and wattle camp in pre-dawn dark paking picnics and gathering gear to take to their blind by the waterhole, where they would spend hours watching the animals come to drink. They had rolled and cut cookie dough into lions, tigers and wildebeest with wooden cutters carved by an old blind man in the village. They had produced plays with tribal masks and paper cutouts with the village children on a powdery red clay stage. They had whispered secrets to each other as a harsh dry wind punched at their hammock. Even when it was time to leave the highlands so that Prissi could return to school, the adventures didn’t end. The mother and daughter had explored most of Bujumbura, sometimes even without their guard.
Those memories were her parents. More than once Prissi had heard her mother’s tale of the chance meeting between two middle-aged scientists outside a Global Nations conference room, of how that led to love and how their love for one another gave birth to Prissi. So who were these two in the picture with their shoulders touching, eyes slightly squinting, glorious teeth backlighting theatrically wide smiles? There didn’t seem to be too many GN aid recipients in the picnic picture. Who was the man holding her mother’s hand, who, assuredly, was not her father? Who were all these people who weren’t in any of the stories her parents told? What romance and mystery was Prissi holding in her hand?
Prissi didn’t think asking Pequod Jones about the couple would do her any good. As garrulous as he was, if he had known more, she was sure he would have told her. She considered sending an EM to Dr. Smarkzy, but held back for a reason she couldn’t quite explain. Looking again at the pix, Prissi was sure she was looking at her mother. Prissi prided herself that after almost two years of boarding school she could smell a secret a kilometer away. What was before her was less than a half-meter away and it smelled to high heaven. She was absolutely sure she was looking at something she wasn’t supposed to know, but, as a budding scientist, but she wasn’t going to c
onfront her father until she had amassed more information.
When she got back to the apartment that night, Prissi smiled brightly at her father’s muted welcome and curbed her impatience when he told her he wanted to eat at Fraunces Tavern, the oldest restaurant in New York. Instead of having the hissy fit that welled within her from being put off the track, she smiled again at her father as she whispered to herself, “Science, with a small s.”
Fraunces Tavern, which had been built in 1719, had been moved from its location on Pearl Street when the waters began to rise around Manhattan. As she and her father entered the columned door fronting on Madison Square Park, Prissi could tell from the lack of noise that the restaurant was mostly empty. Although Beryl Langue tried to appear engrossed by Prissi’s answers to his questions about her life at Dutton, it was obvious that her father was sad. Prissi guessed it was his response to the arrival of the crates. To Prissi, it seemed that the longer her mother was dead, the harder it became for her father. It had gotten so much worse in the last year that there were times when Prissi thought that there must be something more than the death of his mate pulling her father down into such despondency.
During their dinner, just the two of them sitting at a table for four in the dim yellow light of the colonial-era structure, they vacillated between staring at one another and speaking in non sequitors. Her father drank two glasses of Danish chardonnay before their dinner arrived. He drank another glass with dinner and after dinner alternated sips of cognac and coffee. Prissi watched him as he blinked his eyes to keep back what she guessed might be tears.
As they walked back downtown toward Gramercy Park, Beryl Langue told his daughter that he had been thinking about his life, what he had accomplished and what he had not. He paused, as though choosing his words carefully, before telling her that his life had been both too long and too short. When Prissi, being dutiful, asked him what he meant, her father said that he had lived long enough to make many mistakes, but that he didn’t think he would live long enough to rectify them. Prissi stayed quiet until they got through the door of their Gramercy Arms apartment, then, having decided that the time was not appropriate for her questions, she hugged her rigid armed father until he made a noise she wished she had not heard.
Once in her room, Prissi resumed work on her mystery. She sat on her bed with her puter balanced on her crossed legs to continue her ogle, but she soon found that the evening with her father had paralyzed her for much beyond rumination.
Prissi was grateful that she didn’t have to live with this morose man, and she was grateful that he paid her way to Dutton, but those feelings were tempered with a bruising guilt.
After they left Africa, Prissi and her father had spent six weeks in Costa Rica looking at bird farms, and another two months in Cuba. When they left the fifty-second state, they took a boat to Miami, then, took their time driving north to New York City in a rented van.
It seemed to Prissi during that time of transition that every time they moved, they left more things, excluding memories, behind. The farther from Africa they got, the more pensive her father became. But, when she asked him what he was thinking about, he never would say.
They had arrived in New York City in October of 2094 and settled into a non-descript flat in the run-down area surrounding Gramercy Park. Until he found a job with a small company that massaged data for the GN, her father stayed in the darkened apartment during the day hunkered over his puter and took long walks in the evening.
Having arrived in New York after the fall semester had begun, Prissi’s only option was public school. She started eighth grade at a dilapidated concrete box in the shadow of the FDR levee without protest. The teachers were dull, but not as mind-numbing as those she’d had in Africa. The material was mostly useless, boring or both. But the kids—speaking a Babel of languages, with erupting skins of every hue, playing music she’d never heard before—were great. The thirteen-year old pushed Africa away and welcomed all the variety to be found in fading fin de siècle New York.
Other than being a bit surprised, Prissi didn’t think much about it when, in early November, her father told her that he wanted her to take the PSB, the Private School Boards. Before her mother had died, the question of sending Prissi out of Africa to go to school had come up at the dinner table many, many times. Back then, Prissi had complained bitterly that she wasn’t challenged in school, and, the older she got, the worse it became. People said how hard it was to be stupid in a smart world, but the frustrated girl told her parents that it was much worse to be smart in a stupid world. She had given her parents two choices. They could send her off to school—England, Gerance, China, Noramica or Japan—she didn’t care which. Or, they could give her a lobotomy.
Ever Prissi’s defender, even though she admitted it would break her heart, Nora had argued that she and Beryl would be the prime beneficiaries from sending Prissi away since everyone knew that one of the world’s most dangerous creatures was a bored teenage girl. But, her father repeatedly had rejected those plaints and pleas. They were a family. Families stayed together. England, with its war with Scotland, was too dangerous and Japan or China were too far away.
Suddenly, after less than a month in New York, her father had been insisting that she take the exam. He told Prissi that he just wanted to see how she compared with other kids.
That answer came back loud and clear with her PSB results. Even though the schools she had gone to in Africa had been very bad, the tutoring she had received from the parents, especially in math and science, and the constant reading she had done must have been very good as Prissi placed in the ninety-eighth percentile of those tested.
It was not until Prissi’s scores came back that Beryl Langue began to talk about schools. When he did, Prissi tuned out. She liked where she was and whom she was with. New York City might be a century past its prime, and certainly offered no academic competition to Hong Kong, Addis Ababa, Montreal or Beijing, but it was far better than the dust, dirt and sudden death of Bujumbura. While Beryl Langue insisted that Prissi needed more of a challenge than she was getting in a New York public school, Prissi thought that the truth was that her father wanted less of a challenge than he was getting at home.
Prissi had ignored her father and the whole idea of going off to school until he rented a car, took her out of school for three days and drove them to Connecticut to visit Choate, then up the road to Dutton and Bissell. In Western Massachusetts, they looked at Deerfield, after which they drove north to St. Paul’s and Exeter in New Hampshire. On their way back south, they stopped In Massachusetts again to visit Andover and Middlesex.
Prissi could not believe how beautiful the schools were, but she was slow to accept giving up the scary thrill of New York. Her father pushed. He assured her that even though the setting was very different, she would keep the same mix of kids as were in her present school. The only difference would be the high probability that the boarding school kids would be smarter, more talented and more competitive.
Finally, Prissi wrote the essays and filled in the forms for her top five choices. And hunkered down for the interminable wait. Would a 98th %-ile PSB score, good soccer goalie, tri-lingual, African-born girl get through the narrow gate?
The answer was yes and no. In March, she found out that she wasn’t good enough for Andover, St. Paul’s and Deerfield, but Exeter and Dutton had accepted her.
Given that her father had become even more depressed and distracted over the intervening months, Prissi was happy to have an opportunity to escape. She decided that she would go to Exeter. It had the advantages of being not only a bigger but a far richer school than Dutton. It also was much farther away from Beryl Langue. Beryl Langue, however, insisted that Prissi matriculate at Dutton.
Prissi arrived in Waterville, Connecticut reluctantly. However, by the end of her first week, Prissi Langue was in love with Dutton and her roommate Nancy Sloan, and the pond, her soccer-mates, and the emerald green perfectly limed soccer fields, and the m
eatburgers and fries at The Jig and even Mrs. Mallory, who hovered around the juice and espresso dispensers in Mullen Hall dispensing motherisms.
After massaging her stomach to move more than memories of Fraunces Tavern into the past, Prissi fell asleep feeling exhausted and very sad that, after a half-day at home with her father, she was wishing she were back at school.