722: “I wanted . . .”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 38 begins
38
“I WANTED TO KNOW all about it,” she said. “Everything. More than John did. Enough to surprise him, anyway. So I went to the library. I was amazed to see how many books they had about Rarotonga.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “Babbington has one of the best Rarotonga collections in the country. Possibly the best in the country. Certainly the best for a town its size. You know why, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Because generations of Babbingtonians were raised on the legend of the clamdigger who wandered all the way to the South Seas in search of the best clam beds. Do you know it?”
“No,” she said.
“Oh, it’s one of the best clammy legends. A digger is working the bay, and he’s finding it pretty slim pickings—”
“What’s his name?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Peter! It matters.”
“Umm—Mort.”
“Mort?”
“Morty. Short for Mortoni. They called him the Gigantic Mortoni.”
“The Gigantic Mortoni.”
“Mort for short.”
“Sure.”
“So, Mort keeps moving his boat farther and farther from his usual territory, searching for more densely populated clam beds. Suddenly he notices that he’s well out to sea. This, he realizes, is an opportunity. Why turn back? If he keeps on going, he’ll get to see some of the world—news of which has reached him through the almost unbelievable stories of travelers. Why not? A long time passes, and on and on he sails, eventually making his way to dozens of the islands in the Cook and Hospitality groups, including Rarotonga. But then, after a couple of years, he finds that his heart turns toward home—as the heart of every displaced Babbingtonian eventually does. So he makes the voyage back. He’s given a hero’s welcome, and in his declining years he dines out on his stories of that distant part of the world. He has lots to tell about the exotic clams to be found there: Antigona lamellaris, for instance, the lamellate Venus, which seems to be covered with little roofing tiles; Tridacna gigas, terror of the sci-fi movies; and my favorite, Tapes literata, the lettered Venus, the writer’s clam, each shell bearing an intriguing epigraph inscribed in something that looks like Assyrian cuneiform or Anglo-Saxon runes. And of course Mort also had some terrific stories about exotic women—”
“Okay,” she said. “That’s enough.”
“Well, it explains the large collection of books on Rarotonga in the Babbington library,” I said, wearing the self-satisfied grin of the young improvisatore who has begun to feel his oats.
“Yes,” she said, “it does.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 722, Mark Dorset considers Personages: Fictional: The Gigantic Mortoni from this episode.
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