Hawaii - James Michener [488]
Hoxworth slumped in his chair. "This boy has a diseased mind," he groaned. "Now he's getting clinical!" Hoxworth was right: young Bromley had produced all sorts of hilarious statistical tables and at one point had fortified them with resounding rhetoric: "I think I may be allowed the privilege of at least taking into consideration the theories lately advanced by His Holiness in the Vatican, which theories establish beyond much doubt the fact that for the human female there is a period which the ecclesiastics designate as 'safe,’ and although it is naturally repugnant for me, a Congregationalist, to rely upon the word of a Catholic dignitary in discussing the secret lives of a gang of Calvinists, and although the nicety of the situation is not lost upon me, nevertheless . . ."
The phone rang, the first of many calls that were to be made that night. It was Hewlett Janders and he was screaming, "Did you see that goddamned photograph that your goddamned son had of my daughter . . ."
"Don't roar, Hewlett! I just got the wretched thing."
"Have you finished it yet, Hoxworth?"
"No, I'm only on page five."
"Then you haven't got to the part yet where he says, and listen, Hoxworth, I'm quoting your son. He adds up the total number of acts of sexual intercourse . . . Goddamn it, Hoxworth, what kind of monster have you reared?"
Later, after a dozen similar interruptions, Hoxworth reached his son's first conclusion: "So if we consider all these facts, which I hold to be statistically incontrovertible, we find that the brig Thetis, for sure, and all the other missionary ships probably, were not the angelic torture barges we have been taught, but--and I use the phrase literally--floating hells of concupiscence."
"No wonder they've been phoning," Hoxworth moaned. But his cup was far from running over, it had, in fact, reached not much over the sugar line in the bottom, for in succeeding pages Bromley discussed the heart of his investigations and shared his findings.
"What has always intrigued the scientific mind regarding the mission ships is the cramped nature of the staterooms. Again and again we have evidence that four men and four women, most of them married less than a week before entering the ship, and all of them total strangers, lived together in what could best be termed a rabbit warren. We know from incontrovertible testimony that months went by without either husband or wife ever removing his long red-flannel underwear, and we know that the heads of one couple had to be less than two feet from the heads of three other couples, with only a flimsy cloth barrier separating one family from another. Furthermore, as the following picture amply proves, an average-sized man could not stretch out full length . . ."
In anguish Hoxworth Hale turned to the picture, and his suspicion was correct. The average man whose knees were plainly doubled up was he, caught with a silly look on his face by young Whip Janders and his Leica.
Mercifully, the phone rang before he could digest the full ridiculousness of his situation. It was the headmaster at Punahou: "I suppose you've seen it, Hoxworth."
"How could such a thing have happened, Larry?" Hale groaned.
"We can never probe the minds of adolescents," the headmaster confessed.
"Does it seem as bad to you as it does to me?" Hoxworth asked.
"I haven't the time to judge degrees, Hoxworth. You realize, I'm sure, that this means . . ."
"He's got to go, Larry. I realize that."
"Thank you, Hoxworth. The important thing is, he's got to get into Yale. I've taken the liberty of dispatching