The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  So goes that wretched, that smug and sordid, that staggeringly expensive business, patient reader. But what Douglas Townshend knew was that the erstwhile apple-cheeked Molly Barnes Sherritt remained loyal to her undeserving, herpes-blistered spouse, her more or less deserving country, and her pretty much deserving school, and might even be willing to risk Willy’s initial displeasure by opposing his stand against the Corsica Neck deal: a stand, Doug gave her correctly to believe, which was leading her husband unknowingly into the clutches of the KGB. Her job was courageously to tip the balance saleward among Deniston trustees; at least to keep the issue alive. Her husband would be indignant; so Doug surmised and shuddering Molly knew. But very shortly, decent Doug declared, as surely as the sun sets west and rises east, the man would do a one-eighty, for reasons Doug was not at liberty to disclose to Molly. He would even assist the transaction’s progress, would Willy; lubricate its consummation with his considerable real estate savvy and plenteous connections. Moreover, he would then praise his wife for having shown him the path, Corsica Neck-wise; and she would have done him, her marriage, her alma mater, and her country all together a small but serious service, for which her country, at least, would make its gratitude discreetly known to The Deniston School.

  Molly Sherritt!

  These things Doug knew, see, reader, as he took off for Sydney, Australia, to address some other of the Big Bird’s droppings, of a nature known to none of us here at the Annapolis Town Dock, on our lay day. What he did not know was that for one reason or another, as his Qantas 747 banked into final approach and he glimpsed from his window seat the glass-and-concrete sails of the opera house giving back the afternoon sails in Sydney Harbour, he would suddenly next see red and presently nothing again ever; or that Carla B Silver had by then become so anti-cloak-and-daggerish as to resolve, so far as in her lay, to expose expose expose, as Franklin Key Talbott’s KUBARK book had done, everything she knew the Agency to be up to that in her judgment it should not be. The trouble was that about the only thing Carla knew that hadn’t been somewhere exposed already was these nickel-and-dime details of BONAPARTE: Rick and Doug were not loose talkers. Even so, she resolved to seek out and apprise this Mr. and Mrs. Willy Sherritt, for example, of what has here been lengthily set forth. She had meant to speak of it to her best surviving friend (and brother-in-common-law and son-in-law), Frank Talbott, when he and Lee sailed into Baltimore from the Caribbean last week. But then, all in a few days’ space, while decent dead Douglas was being memorialized, her Leah had chosen abortion; her Mims had refreaked and sought sexual asylum with May Jump; and Carla had had to dump genuinely remorseful Lascar Lupescu and somehow still get her Inner Harbor business done and manage Carta’s Cavern and keep an eye on Marian plus poor gross Simon there and check out May Jump again in this new connection. A busy week. She had therefore put off her tattling expedition to the Eastern Shore, which on second thought she had little taste for anyhow—it was really not her business, was it, and it seemed, as such things go, pretty small potatoes and more or less benign on its bottom line. Bugs shmugs, as long as the KGB-girls stay out of her Cavern. But then to May Jump’s flat had come this morning that call from Kiss Who? Kiss Sherritt: Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore, May’s good buddy from across the Bay—and two plus two achieved their customary sum.

  Thus was our Katherine’s lay-day morning eye-openingly spent. Despite her residual Episcopalian Gold-Coastity and Carla B Silver’s La Habañeraismo, the two women took a quick liking to each other. They rapidly found more in common, as May suspected they would, than either might have supposed. And thus was passed our lay-day afternoon, once Peter had climbed out of the Montesinos cave.

  Thus too was sort of solved the Riddle of the Roses, posed only last night and delivered this morning by message light: Willy’s one-eighty on the weightsome issue of The Deniston School’s bridle-path-and-woodlot divestiture; his semidemidisingenuous sucking up to Molly and Kath. And here in June’s late sunshine we three-and-then-some sit, the breeze really quieting now but Story still Annapolized, while in bleak gulags hopeless people suffer and die, in Pinochet’s prison islands, in Khomeini’s Evin Prison, bloody as the shah’s, and there and there and there, enough to drive one shrieking mad. We tisk our tongues: tisk, tisk. We two, who have seen little; Carla B Silver, who has seen much (and Pulvis et Umbra, who have seen nothing yet)—we shake our several heads in wonder that the world does not between subject and predicate explode, or, with the tortureds’ last groan, at any verb collapse. There now, Peter Sagamore: It took a while, but all has been explained.

  OUR NEW FRIEND CARLA B SILVER

  FIRES UP A FINAL DOWNWIND SHIPBOARD CIGARILLO,

  READS OUR MINDS, MAKES A SPEECH, UTTERS PROPHECY.

  I didn’t get out of Birkenau a virgin girl, but I got out. Wits? Guts? Dumb luck is what it mostly was. Where guts come in handy is in going on with it after.

  I had my two baby girls before that semi trailer creamed Al Silver’s Cadillac in Forty-nine, and I nursed and weaned them and watched them grow different as night and day. I still can’t say which one I love more: my Mim that needs it or my Lee that deserves it. Never mind. Then I had my Jonathan, by the man I loved most and longest, and I nursed and weaned him, and such a mensch that one grew up to be! But did that save him from the butchers? Every morning I read the newspapers, I have to spit. Thff!

  We know what Carla B Silver means, and Amnesty Internationalist Katherine has to spit too, neatly to leeward. Thff!

  I know you want to get on with your sailboat ride, and you’re right to do it, too. Look here: Relax and don’t worry. It’s going to be a girl and then a boy, with all their parts right and plenty upstairs. Don’t I wish to Christ they were Frank and Lee’s? But that’s water under the bridge.

  Well, she’s not to feel guilty for turning it off, my Leahle. The world is wrecked and poisoned, friends: just about done with. But you guys are right to go on with it, all the same. Look at the pair of you! Look at that afternoon out there! So you’ll be A-one parents, and they’ll be dynamite kids! That can hurt the world?

  Pretty soon you’re going to meet Frank and Lee out there in some creek or other, and the four of you’ll hit it off. Tell them Mim and Sy are okay; not to worry. Your friend May Jump has her head on straight and her heart in the right place; they shouldn’t come running. For Christ sake don’t feel sorry for their not having kids, Lee and Frank; but don’t wonder about yourselves, either! It drives my Lee-Lee right up the wall when I talk like this. But what: You shouldn’t have a Gypsy blessing with a little kosher sweet-and-sour? Besides, I see things, friends. Maybe I’ll catch a ride up there and deliver you myself when your time comes. Who knows.

  But that won’t be tomorrow or the day after. So enjoy.

  Stories. I could tell you stories.

  Give me a hand off here, would you, skipper?

  Drew and Lexie is what Frank and Lee were going to call theirs, if they’d had a boy and a girl: Andrew and Alexa. Sounds goyishe-chic to me, but that’s why they make different-color neckties. You people behave yourselves now.

  So today’s the what: Friday the Twentieth? Last day of spring?

  Hum.

  I’ll put my money on the Twenty-ninth.

  DAY 6:

  SEVERN RIVER TO

  CHESTER RIVER

  To let the world into your life is easy: Step ashore and stand still a minute. To clear your decks again . . . another story.

  GET US OUT OF HERE,

  we say to one another, not in words, while waving bemused auf Wiedersehens to Carla B Silver’s silver car. Out of here, off the madding land, away from Disasterville (we don’t mean you, Annapolis), back to our Story.

  She puts her money on the Twenty-ninth, Ms. Silver there? We are new to being prophesied at.

  The purpose of Maryland’s mainland, where one lives and works, is to yearn one toward its Eastern Shore, where one plays and dreams, makes babies, sails here and ther
e gestating Irony and Pity and awaiting their delivery. Let’s get over there ASAP.

  So: Auf Wiedersehen, Carla B Silver; au revoir, May Jump & Co.; may things work out for you and your ménage. May’s going to be good for that Simon Silver boy, Kath declares: our first, spell-breaking words after the Jaguar tools away. Peter doubts it, but agrees; she’ll be a lot better than nobody. Who is he to say for certain what we both suspect: that that blackshoed, butt-smoking, mustachioed fatso child’s a lost cause, the mother more so? Look what the likes of C. B Silver have survived, con brio! We look—and what we mainly see is the difference.

  Then we demesmerize, we re-ice, we top up the ship’s stores with this and that from the Front Street Market, and at afternoon’s end we slip through Annapolis Harbor out into the mouth of the Severn on a ten-knot westerly. K’s wearing her pet found hat. No sign of Rocinante IV: Capn Don has given up on us. Were the wind from another quarter, the hour less late, we would bear some miles upriver to a proper parking place; there are one or two left on this still-lovely, far too crowded river. As is, we merely cross the Severn’s mouth and poke into despoiled Mill Creek, behind the forest of U.S. Navy radio towers across from the Academy. Wall-to-wall houses and docks, Mill Creek, and talk about message lights! Every one of those giant towers is not only red-warning-lit but strobed; we imagine their twenty-four-hour traffic with the Pacific Fleet, the Mediterranean Fleet, the Caribbean Fleet; with satellites, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers as big as islands and much faster.

  But us, we’re growing babies at 2100 hours on 1980’s next-to-longest day; in the twilight of our century we’re charcoaling ground-veal patties with rosemary and dry vermouth and chutney bananas in aluminum foil. Peter stands on the aft cockpit seat to mind the grill, flashlight in one hand, patent patty-turner in the other, water pistol at the ready to cool our coals. Grease-drips poof and flare like little bombs. The odd spark flies downwind, over the dinghy, and blinks out in Mill Creek. He thinks Doomsday Factor thoughts while checking the bezel of his watch: turning time. Kath sips Beaujolais Nouveau below, just a sip, and slices cucumbers, tomatoes, red onion. Life, she thinks, handing Pete pitas to pop onto the grille while he hands her down the patties and foiled bananas on a plate: Boyoboy. We eat indoors, not saying much, by the light of an amber-glassed patio candle netted like a fisherman’s float. While in Chile’s Dawson Island prison, down by Magellan’s frigid straits, and in Moscow’s Lefortovo and Lubyanka, and in other of Mother Earth’s plenteous holes of Hell . . .

  Waiting for the ten-o’clock Accuweather, we catch the headlines: Carter arrives in Europe for summit talks with Brezhnev. U.S. okays nuclear-fuel sale to India. Social Security’s future called fragile. But tomorrow’s Chesapeake weather’s to be fine. We have anchored alee of that antenna city, not to be bothered by those strobes; through Story’s open companionway, all we can see are beaucoup house-lights across Mill Creek and the running lights of jetliners gliding up to Baltimore, down to Washington. The p.m.’s bugless. We’ll get an early start, we agree, if there’s any breeze to start with: up under the twin Bay bridges to the Chester, maybe, or whithersoever listeth et cet, but eastward if possible, over to the Shore. And we’ll stay over there, we agree, until this cruise is cruised.

  In fact, however, we sleep till eight, late for summer sailors, dreaming midsummer eve dreams: P’s back in the Cave of Montesinos, beside a stream meandering through grazed meadow that looks to us more like upland Pennsylvania or Turgenev’s rural Russia than like La Mancha: black willows, rock outcroppings, vetch. K argues her older brother’s case with a stolid but not uncivil officer of the Komitĕt Gosudarstvĕnnoi Bezopasnost’i; she wakes with tears in her eyes, not for Willy but for the beauty of the tongue of Pushkin and Chekhov.

  Gorgeous morning. Sweet-cool but going to warm up; fresh, delicious. Pete’s up; so are Rough and Ready. Kath dries her tears on her bedsheet, smiling. No sex this morning, just a buss on her buns as she peels off her nightie, a kiss in his hair as he primes the alcohol stove for coffee water. Says NOAA Northwest ten to twelve, full sun, air dry by local standards and eightyish: a perfect summer-solstitial day. Croissants. Pineapple juice. Rapid Soviet buildup reported, Afghanistan. Predicts Peter It’ll be their Vietnam, but Katherine switches at once to Telemann on DC. public radio. Let this be a day of delicious and/or entertaining matters only.

  Up anchor and out, then, to a splendid, restorative sailboat ride. Once clear of the neighborhood and in open water, we confirm that the day’s best course is exactly where we had in mind to go: a long morning’s port tack up and across the Bay to Love Point and the Chester; a run and a reach then thereinto, to someplace snug and private enough to give birth in. We lay the tack, not quite close-hauled. Story takes the breeze in her bobstay (she’s female this a.m.), leans into it, surges up toward hull speed. Good boatwright Charlie Bunting, in your grave now, who designed these planks and supervised their fastening; presumably good John Basel, now in yours, prior owner and meticulous upkeeper of our craft: Rest you well, chaps; the old girl still steps along.

  Now that we know where we’re headed, K radiotelephones Nopoint Point. BONAPARTE, we have agreed, shall not be mentioned via wire or wireless, nor shall any three-letter outfits nosier than the Environmental Protection Agency. The NSA just over yonder (don’t mention it), may be presumed to monitor not only any but damned near all domestic as well as international traffic, its scanners programmed to prick up their computerized ears at every such cue. So it’s pretty standard Irma-Katherine talk. We have been out for going on a week, and Irm and Hank have been being good about it. Don’t we think we’d better mosey on home? Soothes Katherine Sure we do, Mom; Peter especially. He’s just humoring me and the kids. We’re going to park tonight somewhere in the Chester; if the breeze is right tomorrow, maybe we’ll cut down through Kent Narrows and head home. We’ll call. How’s Chip? Olive Treadway’s driving him in to Radio Shack for something that he needs to fix her CB; then he’s racing his Sunfish this afternoon and tomorrow in the Oxford series. Does Katydid remember how she used to bring home the silverware in her canary-yellow Lightning, and in her Penguin before that? And in Irma’s day, Stars and Thistles. Now it’s all Sunfish and Windsurfers and Hobie Cats and Lasers, except for the old log canoes, and even some of those ancient craft are using Sunfish rigs for maintopsails. Sometimes Irma wonders.

  Katherine assures her it’s okay, this particular aspect of the march of time. We are privately relieved to hear that Chip is busy at such immemorial Sherritt pursuits as sailing regattas. Over and out, now; we’re coming up on the bridge, and Kath wants to say hello to it.

  Hello, Chesapeake Bay Bridge, always a tickler of the family adrenals to sail under. The erstwhile literary artist Peter Sagamore is having himself a mid-morning second breakfast of pepperoni Slim Jims and canned iced tea while stretch-exercising in the cockpit, steering Story through the Saturday crowd, and listening in on Kath’s conversation. Now he lifts his Lipton’s on behalf of the lot of us to the paired suspension spans as we head under them for the who-knows-how-manyeth time. But it’s the kids’ first trip; though they can’t see, they feel their mother tingle and maybe hear the high roar of eastbound traffic headed for the ocean resorts. Katherine explains to them, not in words, that this four-mile-narrow place in our estuary, while actually three-quarters of the way up its 200-mile length, divides the Lower Bay (much larger, less polluted, and saltier, kids, but sea-nettle-infested and therefore virtually unswimmable) from the Upper (much smaller, more polluted, but fresher and therefore nettle-freer; plenty clean enough to swim in on the Eastern Shore side, and let’s get over there and get you people wet). That to pass under it, therefore, in either direction, on a cruise, like passing either way between Bay and Ocean or for that matter between Sherritt Cove and Goldsborough Creek, affords one of your cruising sailor’s two chief rushes: the thrill of leaving open for secluded waters and vice versa. In your parents’ case (little Donner und Blitzen, little Port and Starboa
rd)—as we summerly sail from the nettled Choptank and Tred Avon up to the Chester or the Sassafras, depending on the state of the season and the year’s precipitation, till we reach the fatal threshold of five parts salt per thousand of water and can shuck our duds and go over the side—passing under these bridges from south to north means heading out for Hedonia, as the reverse means back to responsibility. To sail up under just now, on the year’s longest day and one of its meteorologically jim-dandiest, through a troupe of spinnakers bellying our way like pregnant clown giants—about to give birth ourselves and as Irma said winding up a full week out, a week really quite full—is a high, children. As we look for more baroque, now that the bridges are astern, WGMS says Major heat wave sizzles Texas; U.S. to let Cuban boatlift people stay six months. Et cetera and enough: Today we’re being carefree chickens on the python’s back, cluck cluck. Here’s something nonproblematically Caribbean: a little reggae to carry us—