Joe Haldeman - Guardian

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Joe Haldeman

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

GUARDIAN

An Ace Book Published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Visit our website at www.penguinputnam .com

Jacket art by Craig White. Jacket design by Rita Frangie. Text design by Tiffany Kukec.

First edition: December 2002 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haldeman, Joe W.

Guardian /Joe Halde an.— 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-441-00977-8 (alk. paper)

1. Women—Alaska—Fiction. 2. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.A353 G83 2002

813'. 54—dc21

2002021444

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to my brother Jay, who (as Jack C. Haldeman II) wrote

eight science fiction novels and over a hundred short stories—and also

dedicated to Alaska, where we had the good fortune to live as children.

The state is calling itself "our last, best hope" now, which may or may

not be true. It is probably the best place to raise a child if for some reason you

want him or her to become a science fiction writer. The beauty and size of it, the

limitless possibilities. The amazing sky.

I also want to thank the Clutes, John and Judith. John, for clueing me in on the

Flammarion novel that eerily parallels this one; Judith, for leading me on a wild

bicycle ride through the labyrinthine streets of London, to their huge book

collection, where we actually found an English translation of it.

One character's name was changed to memorialize Gordon R. Dickson, who

took many of us to places we wouldn't have found on our own.

Prologue

When my father died in 2004, aged 105, he left behind this manuscript, with a letter

saying that I could publish it if I wished to.

I don't see why not, though I will call it a work of fiction, or of wishing, rather

than a memoir. Much of it is impossible to believe, though it is presented as fact. I am of

an age myself, 77 this month, able to appreciate the fact that the membrane that separates

memory from imagination is semipermeable at best.

It's the story of Rosa Coleman, my father's mother, whom I knew as G-ma at the

end of her long life. She was born before the Civil War.

G-ma told me many stories when I was a boy, but never this one. Her son, my

famous father, never mentioned it either, understandably. His great fear was ending his

days in an institution, and that is probably where he would have wound up if he had

presented this as truth.

But Pops thought enough of it to go to some trouble and expense to have it typed

up and carefully preserved.

She was a sweet woman, the joy of my childhood, and I offer her story here with

respect and no further comment. —Blake Coleman

21 March 2005

DECEMBER 29TH, 1952

I have started to write this down many times in the past twenty years—ever since I turned

seventy, and felt that every day of life was a special gift. Like many an old woman, I've

chosen to spend that gift on my grandchildren and their children, with the odd moment or

hour given over to the church, and do not regret any of that.

But last month I had a small stroke and though I have recovered most of my

faculties, it's obvious that I have outstayed my welcome on this world. I do have a strange

story to tell, and have put off telling it for too long.

Parts of the story would be embarrassing to my son, especially in his particular

prominence—so I have agreed to leave this book in his keeping, not to be printed until

after his death, or even after the death of his own son.

Perhaps from that distant perspective, the more fantastic parts of this account will

seem less strange.

During the Depression, I helped support my family by writing stories for the pulp

magazines, under a variety of male pseudonyms. I stopped writing during the War, paper

shortages having closed most of my markets, and never went back to it. But I was skillful

with dialogue in those days, and with the reader's indulgence I will have recourse to that

artifice in this memoir. Of course I don't remember the exact words of conversations

more than a half-century old. I do remember having had the conversations, though, and

trust that I can reconstruct the sense of them.

My son has set me up in this unused parlor with a comfortable desk and chair and

a bookshelf with all of my diaries. I count forty-three of them, most of them covering

more than one year. The earliest starts in 1868, when I was ten, but nothing of much

interest happens in my life until the nineties.

Still, a few things for the record, as they say nowadays. I was born in Helen's

Mill, Georgia, in 1858, on a plantation with slaves. I remember almost nothing of that

except the image of a large Negro woman, who I'm told was my nurse Daisy. I'm told I

played with the slave children.

All of the children (the white children) in the family were sent to stay with

relatives in Philadelphia after Fort Sumter, in 1861. My father correctly divined that the

war would not go that far north. Though Gettysburg was close enough that we knew

people who went out to watch the battle, and hear the speeches afterwards.

Sherman's troops burned our plantation just before Atlanta, and I suppose my

mother and father died during that invasion. We never heard from them again.

There was really no room for myself and my brothers with Aunt Karen and Uncle

Claude, so I was sent to Dorothy Partridge's Boarding School, a strict Methodist place

where I stayed until rescued by Wellesley in 1875.

Some of the girls complained about Wellesley's strictness, but to me it was

emancipation. At Partridge's we had supervised prayer five times a day. Miss Partridge

could read your mind, and she saw nothing there but sin. When we were actually caught

in sin, we were sent to the Forgiveness Room, a dark closet with nothing but a large

candle, a prayer rail, and a chamber pot with no cover. A truly bad sin, like sneaking in

candy, would put you in that room for twenty-four hours, with no food or water and little

air, sore from the switch or the rod. So to me the proctors and housemistresses of

Wellesley were nothing. At worst, they might send me to a detention room, with only a

Bible to contemplate. But that was no punishment at all. I've always enjoyed reading the

Bible, trying to puzzle things out.

At this end of my life, there is much to puzzle over for which the Bible is little

help. But I still read it daily, peering now through a magnifying glass. Even this large-

type version is too difficult for my spectacles alone.

At Wellesley I studied natural philosophy and literature. I suppose it was as good

a preparation as a woman could have, then or now, for the strange trials I was to face

with the Raven.

I shouldn't call them trials, because they were not intended as such. My actual

trials, most of a century's physical and mental pain, have been provided by myself and

other humans, and they have not been as great as most people's.

The odd journey begins.

Wellesley was a gift from my parents and their slaves. Like many people in the South,

they foresaw the end of our "peculiar institution" long before the Emancipation

Proclamation. There was no shortage of investors willing to gamble that they were

wrong, though, and so they sold all of the slaves, and leased the plantation as well. Father

sold all of them as a group, though they would have brought much more at auction. He

didn't want to break up families, and he was disgusted to learn that the babies would not

only be separated from their mothers, but be sold by the pound, like so much beef.

My older brother Roland claimed that at least one of the Negro babies was

Father's own. He was twelve when we came north, so perhaps he was old enough to

know. But he also bore a grudge against Father, because each of us girl children got a

larger stipend than his.

We were lucky to have anything. If Father had delayed the sale another year, he

would have been paid in Confederate currency, ultimately worthless. As it was, he was

paid partly in gold, and hired an agent to bear a small chest of double eagles to a

Philadelphia bank, and there open trust accounts for each of us. We knew nothing of this

until Ronald turned eighteen in 1866, and was granted access to his account, several

hundred dollars, which he spent soon enough, living in a grand style.

By then we were dismally sure that our parents were dead. We had last heard

from them in 1864, a hasty note my mother sent to Aunt Karen. They were abandoning

the general store in Helen's Mill (which they had bought after leaving the plantation),

because Sherman's monsters were only a day away. They moved into Atlanta for

protection.

The Philadelphia paper with Mathew Brady's photographs of the ruins of Atlanta

was kept from me, as I was only eight. Of course, I found them soon enough on my own.

This century's images of Hiroshima and Dresden have a similar impact now. But I knew

no one in those places. The sepia landscapes of Atlanta's ashes are the only memorial of

my parents' time and place of death.

I've visited many places in this world, and elsewhere, but I've never been to

Atlanta. I did drive down to Georgia in the 1920s, to find what was left of Helen's Mill—

not even memories—but managed to do it on dirt roads that didn't go through that

horrible city.

By the time I was seventeen, I believe Dorothy Partridge was as tired of me as I

was of her. I was told that there was a sum available adequate to see me through college,

and I took the examinations for Mount Holyoke and Wellesley.

I passed both, but wound up choosing Wellesley, for various reasons. Both

Boston and Harvard were nearby, and Philadelphia was agreeably distant. It was a new

school then, beginning its fifth year.

Perhaps it was not the best choice for me; perhaps I would not have been an

outstanding scholar anywhere. I made no lasting friendships there, and was an indifferent

student and terrible athlete. We were encouraged to engage in physical activities like

gymnastics and the newly fashionable lawn tennis, which at the time seemed mannish

and unnatural to me. (Could I have foreseen my coarse life to come, in Kansas and

Alaska, I wouldn't have believed it.)

At the time there were critics of female higher education who claimed that

athletics would overexcite us and lead us into unwholesome practices. I found it boring

and tiring—and, I have to admit, more than half believed that overexertion would lead

me into some mysterious nameless state of sin, which terrified me. I knew almost nothing

about sex, except that it was all about sin and shame and pain.

If at any time in my life I needed a friend, it was then. I was surrounded by girls

and young women who were sophisticated and cosmopolitan, who might have brought

me fast into real life. But my background cut me off from them—I was a slow-witted

Southern belle with no social graces and no family connections—and once ostracized, I

tried to make a virtue out of my separateness.

I was also beautiful in those days, at least to people other than myself, which

didn't help. To the boys I was an exotic Southern flower, and I can see now that my terror

of them, and subsequent awkward rejection, made me a valuable prize, and further cut me

off from the other women—who of course saw my clumsiness as shameless and artful

seduction.

So my fondest memories of college are all times of solitude. Reading in the

library or long walks in the woods and fields. When the weather was fine I would paint or

draw, but I enjoyed the walks even when it was storming or I had to pick my way through

the snow. Most Saturdays I would walk unescorted around Boston and Cambridge, which

produced a little tingle of danger.

My original plan had been to study theology, both out of a natural inclination and

a sense that I might eventually do some good with it. But my inability with languages,

which had earned me beatings and confinement at the hands of Mrs. Pattridge, kept me

from that course of study. I had no Latin and less Greek, as someone said. Most of my

classmates had studied both for years. I had just managed to drag my way through

French.

As if in compensation, I discovered an ability with mathematics, losing myself for

hours at a time in trigonometry, geometry plane and not so plain, algebra, and calculus. I

also had enthusiasm for natural philosophy and natural history, both terms subsumed

under "science" long since.

I studied as much biology and astronomy as was offered at the nonspecialist level,

and then pursued astronomy as far as my mathematics would allow. It was a congenial

study for me, solitary under the night sky at the school's small observatory, making

careful measurements, and doing pencil and ink drawings of the moon and planets. I

didn't feel I had the intellect or drive to become a professional astronomer—there were

only two or three women so employed in the whole country—but I did aspire to teach.

(Professor Sarah Whiting was my mentor there, an intense, energetic woman who

wanted more for me than I wanted for myself. The year I graduated, she found her true

protegee in Annie Jump Cannon, who wound up, at Harvard, becoming the first famous

woman astronomer in America. I met Annie some years later, and she confided that her

whole career pivoted on a fluke of fate: she was getting through Harvard working as a

maid, when an exasperated astronomer yelled at his assistant, "My maid could do a better

job than that!" She could indeed, and she got the job.)

Insofar as I could divine my future, I saw a period of teaching in a school for girls

somewhere in New England, eventually to meet a man whom I could tolerate or even

love, and settle into the roles of wife and mother. At Wellesley I fell into church work,

teaching Bible class to children aged six through nine, and I adored it, and assumed that

would continue as well. Of course the only reliable thing that one can say about one's

future is that it will not turn out the way you planned it. People who have no interest in

your future pass through your life and change it forever.

In my case it was nothing so direct and dramatic as Annie Jump Cannon's

exasperated astronomer. I was asked—ordered—to go to dinner and the opera.

Meeting the monster.

It happened to be St. Valentine's Day, and most of the women in my dormitory were

getting ready for a ball at Harvard. The house-mistress came knocking on doors, totally

flustered, asking whether anyone was free—her brother was in Boston on business, and

he needed a companion. He'd accepted an invitation to dinner and the opera with two

associates and their wives, and didn't want to be a fifth wheel, odd man out; whatever it

was we said in those days. I was the only one who had no plans for the evening, so there

was no room for discussion: I was "it."

I didn't much like the housemistress, a prissy stern woman; nor was I in any mood

to be sociable, cross with my flux just starting—

but I agreed sweetly, privately promising myself that I would give her brother an

engagement he would not soon forget.

The evening began impressively. When I came down I found not the usual hired

cab, but a well-appointed Brewster coach, complete with footman. (That would be like a

liveried driver in a Cadillac today.) It was even warm inside, with a brazier.

It was a swift and comfortable ride into the city, but I held on to my resolve to

make this Mr. Tolliver pay dearly for taking me away from my studies. Warned by the

ostentatious coach that he would be wealthy and not modest, I was not surprised when we

pulled up at the Parker House.

A servant led me to a lounge where the great man was waiting with his guests. I

was not immediately impressed. Edward Tolliver was a tall, powerful-looking man,

coarse-featured and loud. He was cordial but stiff with me and the other women; hearty

with the men.

At dinner I was only as ladylike as I had to be, offering opinions more freely than

I normally would do, but he actually seemed to like that, and was amused by my

unladylike appetite. I was starving, hours past my normal suppertime, and had a large

Porterhouse steak and plenty of claret with it—actually one of the most enjoyable meals

I'd ever been served. And one of the best I would ever have, as a human.

He was nine years older than me, too young to have fought in the war. He had a

law degree from Harvard but practiced in Philadelphia, so we did have that in common,

as well as Southern origins, which surprised both of us. Neither of us retained much of

the South in our speech, at least around Northerners; he sounded as Bostonian as any of

the others.

I was afraid that the heavy meal and wine might put me to sleep at the theater,

especially if we rode there in the warm coach, so I asked whether we might walk, and

meet the others there. He readily agreed; it was only a few blocks down Tremont. The

night was brisk and he was much more at ease, witty and almost charming, away from the

others.

I should not have worried about sleeping through the opera, which was Carmen,

new that year to these shores and most exciting. Afterwards, we went back to the Parker

House and had coffee and cakes, and I returned to Wellesley scandalously late, after one

in the morning.

Edward wrote me weekly from Philadelphia, letters that were friendly rather than

romantic, but soon it was obvious what his intentions were, I was afraid that the woman

he was attracted to was not actually me, but rather the consciously forward "modern" girl

I had masqueraded as, and eventually I got up the courage to write him to that effect. He

responded by returning to Boston, ostensibly to meet whoever the actual "me" was.

This was the Easter break of my senior year. We saw each other daily for more

than a week. Savory lunches at the Parker House and other ostentatious places.

In the evenings we had to be chaperoned by his sister, my housemistress, which

was annoying. I felt capable of protecting my own virtue, and besides had had more than

enough of her company.

I might have been grateful for her interference, had I known him as well as I came

to. On the other hand, if he had shown his true colors during that courtship, I never would

have married him.

Sometimes I consider that: what if I had married a nice man instead, and settled

down to a regular life in Boston or Philadelphia, or wherever. The worlds I would have

missed. This world would have been far different, too.

If Gordon had never been born, this world could be a lifeless radioactive ball.

But I didn't have a crystal ball. I was swept away by his attentions and charmed

by his clumsy gallantry—he was much more attractive to me than a more polished, polite

man would have been, with his obvious struggle to do and say the right things, keeping in

check an elemental force that intrigued me.

I was too naive to see that force for what it was: raw sexual desire, and the need

to dominate.

It was an unusually clement spring—I remember a blizzard on Easter morning,

another year—and we ranged all around the area in a nimble calash that he hired and

drove himself. Downtown Boston was a noisome cesspool in the thaw, as always, so

most of our travels were out in the country, going as far as Salem on occasion. We

picnicked and chatted; I learned a lot about the masculine worlds of finance and law, and

he paid polite attention to my ramblings about nature and art and literature.

After ten days, he proposed to me, with a diamond ring that I supposed was worth

more than I owned. He wanted me to come back to Philadelphia with him, right then!—

and was not amused when I was amused, saying that I was not about to go to college for

three and a half years, only to leave with no degree. He argued with some force that I

would never need the degree; I would never need to work. He had come into a fortune at

twenty-one, and it had grown constantly since.

What is clear now is that he wanted to cut short my education so as to limit my

potential for independence. If I could work, I could leave him, though of course in 1879

that would never have entered my mind. Divorce was an exotic thing that degenerate

foreigners did, or free-thinking atheists.

He did grudgingly wait. We were married right after my graduation, in the largest

Episcopalian church in Philadelphia. There were hundreds in attendance, though not a

dozen on my side of the aisle. Most of them were "codfish aristocracy," people who had

actually made money rather than being born into it. (Edward was not Episcopalian, or

anything else. The church was chosen for status and size.)

There were so many flowers that I nearly choked on their cloying ambience. I

managed not to sneeze until we were outside the church.

In retrospect I suppose it was vulgar and dishonest, if honesty mandated mutual

love and respect before holy matrimony. I did love Edward in a naive, schoolgirl way,

and Edward had reached an age and station where not having a wife and family was

considered peculiar. He set out to find an upper-class woman who was both beautiful and

educated. That my "aristocratic" family was a thousand miles away and destitute was a

real advantage to a man who wanted absolute control over his life, and especially over his

wife.

His unspeakable brutality.

Our bridal trip was to the New Jersey shore, which could be beautiful when the wind and

tide cooperated. Otherwise, the detritus of New York City befouled the beaches. It was

too cool for bathing, which I remember as a major physical disappointment—my nuptial

duties, fulfilled frequently and with no patience, left me in a state that Edward laughingly

called "saddle-sore."

I was immediately with child, but lost the little one, my only girl, in four months'

time. My third and fourth pregnancies also ended in miscarriages. It would be fifty years

before medical science Identified the Rh factor, but evidently that was our problem.

Edward blamed it on some female weakness, and I was poked at and peered inside by

specialists in New York and Boston as well as Philadelphia.

My second baby was small, two months premature, but he survived. Daniel was a

charming infant, naturally well-tempered, easily amused and amusing. After a slow start,

he grew fast, and by two was big and strong for his age.

When it became clear that he had a son and heir, Edward stopped having sexual

relations with me, at least of a kind that could result in pregnancy. What he did was

painful and degrading, and I would think a sin, for its unnaturalness. But he said it was

for my own sake, and there was nothing in the Bible about it, unless it were men done

with men.

He only came to me about once a month. He "worked late" often, though, and

gossips told me he was often seen down by Drury Lane at night, an area full of

prostitutes. In 1890 I found out that he had been supporting a mistress for years, keeping

her on the firm's books as an apprentice.

When I confronted him with this, he beat me so soundly that I lost a tooth. I

should have left him then. He apologized, weeping, for his "nature," and bought me a

ruby necklace. We made up an excuse about a carriage accident, and a dentist crafted me

a replacement tooth of porcelain.

I looked back through my diaries and found that he had beaten me fifteen times in

ten years, badly enough for me to record it. I went so far as to talk to my minister about

it, although of course I left out the sexual details.

He was a kindly man, and offered to talk to Edward, but I thought that would

certainly make things worse. He quoted scripture to me, which I already knew, about a

woman's place and obligations.

It was clear in my mind that the church and its ministers were fallible, and I still

might have left him if it were just me. But Daniel loved him madly as a child, in spite of

similar beatings, which at the time we thought were natural between father and son.

Edward spent a lot of time with him when he was growing up, teaching him how to fish

and sail and ride, and practicing sports with him. They laid out a small baseball diamond

in the backyard, and installed a canvas pad in the basement, for boxing and wrestling.

One Sunday in 1894, the servants out of the house, I heard a strange sound from

the basement, a strained whimpering, and I opened the door slightly and peeked down.

There on the boxing mat, my husband had pulled down their garments and was having

his son the way he had me, like two dogs coupling. He had his hand over Daniels' mouth,

but couldn't quite muzzle his agonized grunts.

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JoeHaldemanACEBOOKS,NEWYORKThisisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,places,andincidentseitheraretheproductoftheauthor'simaginationorareusedfictitiously,andanyresemblancetoactualpersons,livingordead,businessestablishments,events,orlocalesisentirelycoincidental.GUARDIANAnAceBookPublishedbyTheBerkleyPubli...

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