Barkley Bohner, Celebrity Philosopher

Chapter Three

I was actually present at my mother's initiation as a Secret Betsy, but being age six I failed to grasp the significance. This was 1951.

My father was back in his favorite rainforest. My mother decided this would be a good time to take me across the Atlantic to the ancestral estate of Great Bottom, just north of London. It was here my great-great grandfather, James, 13th Earl of Bohner, used to stroll the Bottoms with his friend, Charles Darwin.

This was a family visit. As I understood it, my mother, technically Lady Bohner, would be paying a call to the Lady Bohner in residence, Margi, widow of Edward, 16th Earl of Bohner, killed during the Battle of the Somme in World War I. 

Try to imagine my dark-skinned mother, looking very much like the kitchen help (albeit in her Sunday best). A young butler named Clive greets us at the door and escorts us to the bottom of the grand staircase. He informs us that Lady Bohner will be with us shortly.

The real Lady Bohner, presumably.

We wait, surrounded by grandeur – shiny marble, gleaming brass, polished wood, textured fabrics – left to contemplate our insignificance. But there is also a damp wood smell to the place, a musty odor no amount of fireplace fires or freshly arranged flowers can mask. I smell sadness, tragedy, grief.

"Ahem." Suddenly we are facing the withering stare of the matriarch of the House of Bohner. There she is in black, a swirling mass of gray hair, wearing a single strand of pearls. I am supposedly too young to appreciate what is going on, but I can definitely feel the frost. I know exactly what is going on.

How dare you presume to enter through the front door rather than the servants' entrance – my grandmother cannot state it more plainly.

My mother, though, isn't putting up with any of this. Not dancing to your stupid white man tune, no way – you can see it in her carriage.

The real Lady Bohner sees it too. Nevertheless, she holds her pose a full second more for effect. Then she melts, beaming with pleasure and relief before engaging my mother in what appears to be some kind of bird-mating ritual – a lot of jumping about and bumping of chests and swirling around and loud screeching, that sort of thing. 

I don't catch everything my grandmother says, but I do recall hearing, "Thank heaven, my son did something right."

Only much later would I appreciate the full import.

The real Lady Bohner, it turned out, was as far removed from traditional noble stock as my mother. This, apparently, was the result of her husband also doing something right. It turns out that our family matriarch was actually a trapeze artist from some central European country that sounded to my six-year-old ear like Frizzlebonia.

No one was supposed to know this, of course. English society simply knew her as Lady Bohner, Duchess of Frizzlebonia (whatever). This kind of passing off was exceptionally easy to do.  

So here were the two improbable Ladies of Bohner – Caribbean singer and Frizzlebonian trapeze artist – carrying on like two long-lost friends. "How many men does it take to change a light bulb?" I heard my grandmother joke.

As I would figure out much later, this was my mother's initiation into the management of the House of Bohner, or, more precisely, the secret society that ran it. The two ladies would spend most of their days on that first visit sequestered in one of the buildings way out back while I had the run of the Manor largely to myself.

You went through two consecutive double doors to get to the cool part of the house, which had a number of adjoining parlors filled with the kind of collectibles a well-travelled Victorian gentleman might be expected to deposit in his home: African masks, dinosaur bones, stuffed animals, pagan statues, on and on.

"Those are finches that Darwin brought back from the Galapagos Islands," Clive, the butler explained, pointing to several stuffed birds in a corner.

But I was more interested in the rifle propped against the adjoining wall. "That was the Winchester that Betsy the Brave used to hold up a stage coach," Clive let me know.

Now we were talking.

He pointed to an old daguerreotype hanging from the wall – a woman in cowgirl clothes brandishing a rifle and a whip, looking like she fully intended to use both. "And there is Betsy," he added.

He pointed to another picture, Betsy in her cowgirl get-up, this time with a set of six-shooters, posing with a very plain old woman. "That is Betsy with Queen Victoria," Clive let me know.

This was the very same Betsy who later hunted dinosaur fossils in Mongolia and who received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University at age 81.

Betsy, of course, was married to my great-grandfather, Barkley, 14th Earl of Bohner, more commonly known as Barkley, Lord of the Jungle, and Barkley Bohner, Man of Action. This was the very same Barkley who died in the Amazon in 1905, a distraught Betsy by his side.

This set the scene for my birth in the same location some 40 years later.

That's right. I owe my existence to Betsy the Brave.  

Clive shot me a knowing look. Later, much later, he would fill in all the details and connect the dots for me. Had he not taken the trouble to do this, I would have lived out the rest of my life in blissful ignorance, never knowing what it was like to flee for my life in my boxer shorts. 

Then again, I never would have picked up the early warning sign of the collapse of the reality field, and we would all be particles of nothing now, all seven billion of us.

I'm assuming that will be the case, anyway. This is the story of my part in what I hope will amount to saving the world, at least for the time being, until reality once more decides to show us who is boss. Somehow, I need to stay alive long enough to accomplish this, before Trudy, the first of my two current wives, finds me and kills me.

My second current wife, Sylvia, may actually want to keep me around, but she is no match for Trudy. As for my daughter Remi – she has always been daddy's girl, but she doesn't dare cross her mother.

The time-honored way of Bohner women disposing of their men, by the way, involves indoor hunting accidents with longbows. I'm sure Trudy has come up with a more modern and efficient alternative. On second thought, I wouldn't put it past her to be taking archery lessons right now.

The last thing I will ever see, I'm convinced, is Trudy, arm outstretched, one eye shut, aiming her longbow directly at me. Oh, the look on her face.