Educated

him three mains would be enough, but he winked and said money was not a
problem. It seemed the news of my father’s miraculous healing was
spreading, earning them more and more customers. Mother’s products were
being sold by nearly every midwife and natural healer in the Mountain West.
We waited for the food, and Dad asked about my classes. I said I was
studying French. “That’s a socialist language,” he said, then he lectured for
twenty minutes on twentieth-century history. He said Jewish bankers in
Europe had signed secret agreements to start World War II, and that they had
colluded with Jews in America to pay for it. They had engineered the
Holocaust, he said, because they would benefit financially from worldwide
disorder. They had sent their own people to the gas chambers for money.
These ideas were familiar to me, but it took me a moment to remember
where I’d heard them: in a lecture Dr. Kerry had given on The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, published in 1903, purported to be a record
of a secret meeting of powerful Jews planning world domination. The
document was discredited as a fabrication but still it spread, fueling anti-
Semitism in the decades before World War II. Adolf Hitler had written about
the Protocols in Mein Kampf, claiming they were authentic, that they
revealed the true nature of the Jewish people.
Dad was talking loudly, at a volume that would have suited a mountainside
but was thunderous in the small restaurant. People at nearby tables had halted
their own conversations and were sitting in silence, listening to ours. I
regretted having chosen a restaurant so near my apartment.
Dad moved on from World War II to the United Nations, the European
Union, and the imminent destruction of the world. He spoke as if the three
were synonyms. The curry arrived and I focused my attention on it. Mother
had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad to talk about something else.
“But the world is about to end!” he said. He was shouting now.
“Of course it is,” Mother said. “But let’s not discuss it over dinner.”
I put down my fork and stared at them. Of all the strange statements from
the past half hour, for some reason this was the one that shocked me. The
mere fact of them had never shocked me before. Everything they did had
always made sense to me, adhering to a logic I understood. Perhaps it was the
backdrop: Buck’s Peak was theirs and it camouflaged them, so that when I
saw them there, surrounded by the loud, sharp relics of my childhood, the
setting seemed to absorb them. At least it absorbed the noise. But here, so
near the university, they seemed so unreal as to be almost mythic.