“Odysseus is kind of obnoxious,” Maura observed. “He manages to get away from Polyphemus and instead of being, I don’t know, grateful, he’s got to stand on his ship and call him a ‘shameless cannibal’ and a ‘coward.’ No wonder the poor thing decides to hurl half a mountain at him. And then Poseidon makes him get lost for another ten years or whatever?”
“Hubris,” Jacob said. “Arrogance. Pride. Everybody’s got a bit of it in them somewhere.”
Maura looked as if she might prefer to just jump into the duck pond. Jacob had never paid much attention to her before, but she was a sweet kid, shyer than Ella and twice as anxious.
“Well, think about it this way,” he said. “If Odysseus hadn’t been so high on his own superior intelligence, he’d have gotten home to Ithaca in weeks, not years. He wouldn’t have lived with the sorceress Circe or seen the land of the dead or bested Scylla and Charybdis. That’s half the story, and the better half too. Literature is really just the documentation of human struggling.”
This seemed to perk her spirits up more than a little. Jacob was happy to be outside, talking about poetry. The ducks hadn’t yet flown south, and the boys across the way were running comically in place, cotton socks pulled up to their knees. Thanksgiving was coming up. He couldn’t believe it had been a year already.
“I wish we still had gods,” Maura said eventually.
“I’ve never been very religious myself,” Jacob admitted.
“No, I mean gods, plural. What I love about this book is that there’s all these monsters just sort of going about their evil business. And there are twelve gods running around up there on Mount Olympus, fighting, getting in each other’s way, hopping down to mess with the mortals whenever the mood strikes them. It all just makes a lot more sense to me. None of them are all-powerful or all-knowing, not even Zeus. They’re constantly getting stuff wrong. It explains all the evil stuff that gets missed, like these monsters on their islands. Makes more sense than there being just this one God up there, supposedly completely understanding everything and intending everything — even, like, plagues and assault rifles and starvation and AIDS and homeless veterans and just plain old sadness.”
Jacob tried to step in, but Maura wasn’t nearly finished.
“And, like, everyone seems to think that this must be proof that there is no God. Or that if there ever was a guy up there smiting sinners and sending angels off to grace the faithful, He’s packed his bags and headed off for greener pastures. But what if the Greeks had it right, and there are just too many of them. Bumping around up there, trying to get things right and not always doing such a great job — forgetting monsters, getting too drunk, and running off with the wives of other gods, but still coming through with a nice miracle now and then? I think we need more gods. That’s what I think. One isn’t enough.”
Jacob clapped. It was a rant he’d be proud to call his own.
Maura grinned. “Oh, by the way, I got a letter from Ella last week! She’s making the dean’s list at school and dating some new guy named Fred. Seems nice, if you like guys named Fred. Everything’s going really well. She asked about you.”
Jacob looked off at the lake. He wondered how a diaper had managed to get in there, and he watched as the bloated, grimy thing floated back and forth in the breeze. “You know, before The Odyssey, before the Trojan War even started, Odysseus didn’t want to go?”
Maura shook her head.
“He didn’t want to be a hero or get into a huge war over Helen of Troy, even though he’d sworn an oath to Menelaus that he would. The poor guy just wanted to stay home. So he pretended he’d gone insane, thinking it would get him excused from military service. He ran around plowing his fields, day and night, with salt instead of grain and, I imagine, ranting and raving like a lunatic for any and all to see. And everybody bought it — he almost got away with it. But then Agamemnon came by and decided to test Odysseus to see if he was truly crazy. He put Odysseus’s infant son down in the field in front of the plow. He reasoned that if Odysseus were really insane, or really wanted to stay safe at home, he’d plow right over his son. But of course, he didn’t.”
“What a jerk,” she said. “The other guy, I mean.”
“Oh, well. He gets hacked to death later on,” Jacob grinned.
This didn’t seem to comfort her as much as it did him.
“My point is that Odysseus knew he had to choose,” he said. “He knew that even though the gods favored him, they weren’t going to get him out of the jam. He knew he was going to have to stop pretending and get out there and fight, not just because he loved his son but because he had made an oath and was bound to keep it. And so he went off to the longest, bloodiest, most absurd war that had been fought in the history of mankind. And he was the one who cleverly dreamed up the Trojan horse and finally ended it.
“If he had never gone — if he had stayed home with his son as any sane man would want to do — well, who knows? For sure, Homer wouldn’t have written one book about him, let alone two, and half of Western literature wouldn’t have been based on the trials and tribulations of this crafty, arrogant guy and all the good and all the evil he saw. This guy who won a war and spoke to gods. This guy who dined at distant palaces and sailed to corners of the globe that no one had yet set foot on. This guy who crossed over into the land of the dead and returned to tell about it. There wasn’t a man alive then who’d seen so much of the world as Odysseus, good and bad, and that is the point.
“You’ve got to entrust yourself to the waves, lash yourself to the mast, pray the gods are on your side, and rely on cunning to survive the rest. The seas are full of forgotten monsters, yes, but they’re full of forgotten glories too. And the people who stay home and sit out the war never get to see them. That’s what I think, anyway.”
Maura beamed up at the clouds rolling busily across the wide gray sky. And for a little while, until the November chill won out, they both believed there was a heaven out beyond them where a pantheon of gods and goddesses still did their occasional best to keep tabs on a world that had only gotten larger since everyone in it had stopped believing in them.
DECEMBER
It wasn’t clear who found out about Oliver and Sissy. Certainly Jacob hadn’t told anyone. But the rumor spread overnight, until everyone had heard the news. Allegedly the board was upset. Sissy was Oliver’s direct report, and one or the other of them would have to go. Word was that Sissy was taking this as her chance to leave and go out West, with icy streams in summer and horseflies and grand plateaus and blackbirds and whatnot.
Oliver called Jacob into his office that afternoon. He kept the door shut and spoke in whispers, as if he might somehow get in more trouble. “Jacob, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but obviously—”
Jacob stood back and raised his arms dramatically. “I’m shocked—shocked! — to find out that there is gambling going on in this establishment.”