Remembrance Day

1

A Visionary

Spring 1990

Professor Hengist Morton Embry was at the wheel, gliding along through Fort Lauderdale, pointing out the sights to his English visitor.

‘This is the place if you want to eat fish. Absolutely first rate. I was there two – three nights ago, with Bobby Strawson and her crowd. Try the dolphin. Not the mammal, the fish. Go upstairs for better service. There’s a waitress without a bra, and they serve a good Australian Shiraz.’

Gordon Levine was impressed. He would not have expected such information, so crisply delivered, from an English professor of Stochastic Sociology – even if there was such a thing – in an English town. Embry had facts spilling from his fingertips.

Fort Lauderdale slid by, malls, slummy bits, houses of the wealthy situated on well-tended canals. Levine was paying his first visit to Florida, and liking it. The month was March, the temperature was warm. He had already taken a swim in the hotel pool and exchanged a few words with the influential Bobby Strawson, organizer of the ASSA conference. He was impressed by the air of efficiency and glamour exuded by la Strawson. Equally, he was impressed by the charisma of this important professor, who had taken time out to show a stranger the town.

Embry was the sort of scholar referred to as outgoing, though Levine had glimpsed a more thoughtful person beneath the surface. He had already given Levine some insights into other members of the ASSA, the American Stochastic Sociology Association.

Embry was an untidy man, moderately massive, given to large ties which hung over one shoulder of his cotton jacket like the tongues of wolfhounds. Academically, he was considered brilliant; yet he could schedule a neat eight-stream conference in a matter of moments, totting up all the scholars involved, friend and foe, like columns of figures. So why was this paragon accepting a sabbatical year in England at the Anglia University of Norwich, opening a new department? This was the question Levine put to his companion as they surveyed Fort Lauderdale.

‘This mansion with the laburnums we’re coming to, that’s the Florida home of Jeff Stackpine, the Stackpine Trucks man. You think I’m side-tracking my career trajectory by taking off for a year? I don’t read it that way. The US needs a breathing space from me. I can do wonderful things in England. They’ll name the department after me.’ He ground to a belated halt at a red. ‘Traffic lights always see me coming. When did I last get a green? It’s nature’s way of telling me to slow down, I guess.

‘Now we’re heading for Mount Lauderdale. Have you heard of Mount Lauderdale? It’s the highest point in the city, snow on it in the winter. Coaches lose their way and have to be dragged out.’

Levine expressed surprise. But, just as the Americans had their own views of what English weather was like, he had his views on the extremes of the American climate.

They turned into a less elegant road and were passing the Everglades Motel, faced with fake logs. The sign was supported by two fibreglass alligators.

‘There you see the real unreal America, Gordy,’ said Embry, gesturing. ‘The wish to get on, the wish to get off, the longing to have you on, the longing to have it off. See how one of those gators is female – mammal female, with boobs and blond hair? It represents some sort of displacement in time as well as space. You clear the Everglades, then you fake ’em to get ’em back. Consider the diversity of mentalities in these so-called United States, the sheer diversity of mentalities. Some of us are living, or attempting to live, in the next century, and face up to the demographic conundrums ahead. Others – don’t construe this as an ethnic remark in any way, Gordy, but some of us are still living and thinking last century, and the centuries before that, way back to primitive times, when tribes first wandered into North America.’ He knocked significantly at his forehead.

As Embry exchanged an unscholarly word with a driver proceeding in the opposite direction, Levine said, by way of agreement, ‘I saw in a recent poll that fifty-five per cent of the population believe the sun goes round the earth, rather than vice versa.’

Embry shot Levine a glance, half-smiling, one eyebrow crooked. ‘You mean the other way round, surely? The earth going round the sun?’

‘Fifty-five per cent believe it’s the other way about. Maybe it was sixty-five.’

‘You mean the sun going round the earth?’

‘That’s what fifty-five per cent believe.’

Embry gave a snort and concentrated on the traffic ahead. Levine saw a muscle in his cheek working, one of the muscles he used for talking; maybe it never rested, even when no speech was forthcoming.

Levine experienced a pang of doubt, sudden as toothache. Could it be that Hengist Morton Embry, founder, president, of the ASSA, was himself one of that fifty-five per cent? Or sixty-five? It couldn’t be. Could it?

‘Astronomy was never a subject I specialized in,’ Embry said. ‘But I do know that one American in seven carries a gun in his or her car.’

Levine wanted to explain to him that you did not have to go to university to learn that the earth went round the sun, taking a year to make a complete orbit, because this was one of the known facts you imbibed with your mother’s elderberry wine, if not her milk. That there was a whole raft of things, a skein, a web, a map, a safety net, you absorbed like your native language itself, if you were normal, by the time you made your first date, and that that safety net was an indispensable component of – well, of Western culture. Yet here was this professor of a distinguished Illinois university – a whole lot of them managed to get down to Florida in March – who appeared to have doubts regarding a cardinal fact known to ancient Greeks. Levine had on his safety belt in the Toyota; but in the other world, that great nexus of circumstance we call life, there was no safety belt. He was sitting next to an eminent academic who believed the sun was in orbit about the earth.

‘Right, Gordy,’ Embry said, ‘here’s Mount Lauderdale coming up.’

He gestured grandly and chuckled. The car was heading up a slight incline. There were trees on either side of the road, expensive properties, a neat waterway, and the slight rise in the road.

‘Mount Lauderdale. How d’you like it? All of eighteen feet above sea level. We’re a great country for making mountains out of molehills.’

‘I see.’

Embry chuckled again. ‘Just kidding you before, Gordy. Exercising your British sense of humour … We’d best head back to the conference.’

Embry was a Happy American. It was easy to appear Happy. It was patriotic to be Happy. It was also good business to be Happy. Good business and patriotism went together, and their lubricant was the kind of good humour in which Professor Embry specialized.

Returning to the conference, he drove Levine past The Fronds, a gigantic shopping mall built on adventurous lines, with undulating façades and interior waterfalls. It had been standing half a year, and was due to be pulled down, Embry said, in eighteen months. The carpark beside it was full of cars. Embry took it in with a gesture.

‘See that? The Fronds. A fad of yesteryear, but still making millions for a guy I used to know. Sold wallpaper in Denver. We were talking about people wandering into North America thousands of years ago. That’s what they came for – the shopping.’

He told Levine you could eat a good hotdog in The Fronds. Hotdogs went with the good business and the patriotism; hotdogs marked a guy out as a good, average joe, even if he was a professor and president of ASSA.

Levine asked himself why he was thinking in this vein on this Florida afternoon, when palms waved their leaves against the ever-enfolding walls of commerce. Didn’t I eat hotdogs myself and without being self-conscious about it? Didn’t I succumb to the unconscious pressure of society and present a cheerful demeanour? Wasn’t it true that that demeanour became more and more my real self?

Punching a tape into the radio-cassette player, Embry filled the car with quadrophonic sound. Male voices sang: stately, assured, harmonious.

‘Recognize it?’ Embry asked. ‘My passion! Medieval French Gregorian chant. Latin, as you know. A capella. I bought fifty tapes of the stuff when I taught a semester at Toulouse University, France. Can’t get enough of it. They say the world lost something when instrumental music was introduced into churches, and I believe ’em. Listen to this “Veni, Redemptor” now …’

Levine listened. He knew nothing of the subject, had never specialized in it.

They were back at the Hilton in time for the cocktail reception. Traffic was moving steadily up and down Highway One. Planes were landing on time, bars were doing good trade, yachts were docking in expensive marinas. Barbecues were sizzling in yards, evening soaps bubbling on TV screens. Day’s end was calm, but alert with promise all over the Sunshine State, even in the senior citizens’ condos: time for fun unobtainable in England: the sort of evening you feel you deserve, with the sun skiing through a sky containing only one decorative cloud, positioned so as to grow more golden as the hour slipped by. Happy Hour. Most of the delegates to the conference were already gathering in the pool area, where a quartet discreetly played Mozart and drinks were served by lynx-eyed Hispanic barmen.

Palm trees, music, warmth, light-coloured clothes, Hilton service. No hassle.

Embry was greeted on all sides. A lot of shaking hands and embracing went on. You couldn’t tell when people were not glad to see each other. Levine went along with Embry some way, moving into the heart of the crowd with a glass in his hand, exhilarated. Crazy to exchange all this for England! Here were people he knew, if only by reputation, creative people, alienists, scholars, fermenters of society, men and women, involved in one branch or another of stochastics and/or education.

Hi there to Dale Marsh, plump and genial, wearing only a T-shirt above gaudy shorts, though most of the guests had adopted more formal attire. The legend on Marsh’s T-shirt said ‘Squint when you look at me lest you be blinded by my beauty’. Marsh was English, but had lived eight years in the States, teaching Urban Relationships in an Eastern seaboard university.

Levine was not all that enthusiastic about meeting another Englishman, but stood to chat politely for a minute or two. With Marsh was a pretty blonde woman called something like Polly Ester – Levine did not catch the name and, unlike Americans, was afraid to ask for it to be repeated.

‘Funny Hen Embry should elect to spend a year in Norwich at AUN,’ he said.

‘Is that anywhere near London?’ Polly Ester asked.

‘Not really.’

‘A year out at pasture and he’ll come rushing back Stateside into a government post at zillions per month salary,’ said Marsh, in a lordly way. ‘That’s how it works. That’s how the system works.’

‘Besides,’ said Polly, lowering her voice and sliding a bare arm through Levine’s, ‘Hen’s got big trouble brewing here with the ASSA. It pays him to make himself scarce a while.’ In response to Levine’s surprised look, she whispered into his ear. ‘Cooking the books.’

The phrase, he thought, was like some secret sexual signal, releasing a flush of testosterone through his arteries as he felt her warm aromatic breath in his ear. That sod Dale Marsh had always been known as ‘Lucky’ Marsh. He knew how to pick the birds.

After the reception came dinner. They drove out, a dozen of them in hired cars, to a seafood restaurant someone had recommended up the coast in Boca Raton, where stone crabs were the juiciest.

Embry was in good form throughout the meal, drinking heartily, expounding a blueprint for a better world.

Levine, as a hard-pressed administrator at a university increasingly under financial pressure, did not believe in better worlds. He turned to Marsh, who happened to be sitting next to him, to express his cynicism, expecting Marsh as a fellow Englishman to respond similarly to Embry’s plans.