world's most oblique spoiler

(The possible spoiler is for a secondary plot point in one of the later Kate Ross novels.)


I don't know why a parent would object to a young teen reading _Asimov's_. It seems relatively wholesome. The winter I was 14, I was reading as many Jerzy Kosinski novels as I could find in the library (and understanding more than when I discovered _Cockpit_ at 9). It was pushing my buttons and pointing me towards Dostoyevsky, among other things.

I remember walking with my father on an afternoon like this past Sunday: a glittering hard frost after a late winter thaw. I had been up far too late Friday and Saturday night for a debate tournament (rather than for Boskone.) But the feel of the Sunday afternoon was almost the same...almost exhausted, not quite, almost talked-out, not quite. This time, I came home and flopped on the couch to finish a Kate Ross novel. 20 years ago, with a teenager's stamina, I had a bowl of soup and went right out again in wet boots.

Back then, Da was teasing me about my newfound interest in Russian novels, warning me about the staggeringly complicated romance plots. I could keep up with romantic complications! I was in high school already! I wasn't in any of the inner circles for gossip, but I had managed to learn *something*. He started talking about scoundrels and rakes seducing girls and tricking them into false marriages (in retrospect, I'm not sure his concern was specific to Russian novels so much as to novels set in the 19th century.) I didn't understand. Wasn't the whole point of a ballad that a rake seduced a girl into bed without marrying her? (Otherwise, you wouldn't call him a rake, would you?) The idea of a false marriage, with a defrocked priest, was so far over my head I couldn't hear the *whoosh* of scandal as it went by. We were both laughing, there in the cold and the sunshine, at how impossible it was for a sensible person to make head or tail of such a thing, even as a plot device.

"A defrocked priest is best, so he'll have the outfit." "But doesn't defrocking mean they take away the outfit?" I was imagining a fake wedding, like something I'd once seen rehearsed with a chuppah in a courtyard, everyone dressed up and making a grand fuss, with photographers telling them to go through it over and over, reminding them that tonight didn't really count. "Who could fake being a priest? An actor?" "No, no...someone who used to be a priest, but was thrown out for being too corrupt. They call it 'defrocking,' but let them keep the outfit." Oh... (I heard the *whoosh* of a different scandal in the distance.)

Now, all of a sudden, it seems like everyone is talking about marriage. It's a hugely fraught symbol in a public policy debate that's blown up so big that even the overworked geeks with their heads buried in the startup sands are noticing it. My brother called on Sunday, as the sun was setting, to announce his engagement. And of course, it's still a popular plot device. (Does anybody read regencies as serious whodunits, for the sake of being surprised by every twist of the plot?) So when I got to the marriage related bit in the novel I was reading Sunday evening, what my father had been trying to explain 20 years ago finally fell into place for me. Click-click-click like the tumblers of a lock. Two pages later, I had to put the book down and laugh until it hurt. THAT is what mattered so much? That's what this huge scandal of false marriage was supposed to be?

Thank you, Kate Ross.
Thank you, Margaret Marshall.
Thank you, Wordweaverlynn.
Thank you, Richard Daley.