Barkley Bohner, Celebrity Philosopher

Chapter 28

No sooner had we buried my father-in-law than Trudy fell into a mysterious coma. The doctors informed me that even if she came out of it she would be a vegetable.

Trudy had a living will that gave us permission to pull the plug. My daughter Remi was all for doing it right now.

But I had already witnessed Trudy pull off one miracle. After a long and heated discussion, we decided to keep her on the ventilator for six months. I somehow managed to stay sane, but the time passed with no result.

By this time, Remi was starting to feel sorry for me. She granted Trudy a three-month stay of execution, with the proviso that I take a good long vacation. I decided it was high time for a visit to the ancestral home of Great Bottom.

For the third time in my life, I found myself with Clive the Butler. Clive was now in his seventies. He had spent literally all his adult life at Great Bottom. He never married and very rarely went out, preferring to spend his time in the empty manor among the ghosts of all those who had lived and visited here.

I swear I smelled five centuries of fires in the countless fireplaces. Shakespeare himself had supposedly visited here, sampled the wine from the wine cellars, helped himself to the chestnuts harvested from beneath the trees outside.  

Clive directed me to the manor's library. An ancient oil of Isaac Newton, with a web of fine cracks in the finish, graced the wall above the fireplace. Along the other walls hung smaller oils of Charles Darwin, Alexander Pope, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Along the stacks were first editions of their works, with lengthy hand-written inscriptions by the authors. 

I picked up Pope’s translation of Homer's Iliad. “We have a very interesting letter from Pope turning down the 9th Earl of Bohner’s very kind offer to provide him with a yearly pension, no strings attached,” Clive let me know. “Pope was a very proud man.”

I picked up a small volume, The Compleat Insect Collector. This, of course, was the work of Joseph, the 8th Earl of Bohner, father of the English Enlightenment.

Clive shot me a conspiratorial look. "Did you know," he said, "that at age 45, Lord Joseph married a 13-year-old mulatto slave girl?” He saw the look on my face. “Ah, obviously you want to know more.”

No question about it. Obama's White House run was at least a year off. I cleared my schedule for the next three months and settled in at Great Bottom, determined to find out everything I could.

I took up a station in the library and read at random anything that Clive happened to dump in front of me. I also went for long walks along the Bottoms, tracing the footsteps of my ancestors and the illustrious company they kept.

Three months went by too fast. Then I was back at Trudy's bedside. By now I had come to terms with the fact that this time there would be no miracle. But then Trudy's condition went political. A media storm erupted. A court issued a temporary injunction.

"You need to get away," my daughter told me, once more.

I went back to Great Bottom. In my absence, Clive had arranged new reading material for me. Plus he had a surprise – a certain Dr Quiggenpoole, a reader in Ruthegonian Studies from the London School of Economics.

Her manner and dress were ho-hum, her scent spectacular. "Call me Sylvia," she said, extending her hand.

Sylvia was researching my grandmother, Margi, the last Ruthegonian. “Did you realize,” she informed me, “that the Ruthegonian tongue bears no relationship whatsoever to any language group on the planet?”