The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  They swim again and then talk for a while about food: pesto, pâté hoisin, sushi. About their parents and siblings. About having and not having babies. About contemporary writers they admire and do not admire. Lee enjoys being Jewish, but is uncomfortable except in an ethnic-cultural mix; Katherine enjoys being what she is, but seldom thinks of that as upper-caste WASP, though it is. Both women are temperamentally secular; neither believes in God or any literal afterlife, though Lee wishes she could, because she and Frank got a late start and because she misses her half-brother and her stepfather. There was more to Frederick Mansfield Talbott, evidently, than the unpleasant fellow Peter met. Lee is of a prevailingly pessimistic temper, not without reason: The actuarial prospect of a long childless widowhood so repels her that she assumes she’ll take her own life not long after Frank dies—fifteen or twenty years at most, she reckons. That prospect so distresses her, when she thinks about it, that her irrational impulse at times is to end things now; hence her flirtation with the Virginia professorship and separation: a sort of trial suicide. Kath is prevailingly optimistic despite that black hole at her core: Though she allows notionally for very bad luck, she assumes as Leah Talbott would not that our children will be born healthy and normal and that we two will enjoy a robust longevity. Her fears are on the national, international, and global scale: She worries about the survival of the manatee, the dugong, the Chesapeake rockfish, and the world’s rain forests; also human liberty, the dignity of the individual, the smog-eaten Parthenon.

  They discuss clothes, San Francisco, G. F. Handel, diaphragms, Cimabue, D.C. dim-sum restaurants, Edgar Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Portuguese pousadas, cellulitis, analogues of the Bitch-and-Pepper motif in contemporary urban folktales, breast-feeding as a natural form of birth control, Horace’s odes, the flavor of human male semen, the preparation of fresh asparagus. And were either of them to be interrogated upon this conversation a year from today, she would remember nearly everything the other had said.

  Asks Peter, coming up for air at half past eleven, So what did you and she talk about?

  Oh, stuff. But can you believe it, I forgot Operation BONAPARTE. We’re rafting up for lunch, okay?

  BOMB IN ATTACHÉ CASE

  Okay. As skippers of the smaller boat, we decide to unanchor Story and scull downwind to Reprise. Peter asks Katherine, who says Yup, whether she’s been wondering about Molly and Willy and worrying a little about Chip. We think maybe this cruise of ours is about over. For one thing, we have pressed our obstetrical luck beyond all reasonableness. We’ll maybe start moseying southward this afternoon, yes? With any breeze at all, we can be at Nopoint Point and in Jack Bass’s hands by tomorrow evening.

  K puts out fenders; P hoists anchor and sweeps us expertly alongside the cutter. Lee and Frank Talbott take our lines, and we make and share a light lunch under cockpit awnings. The air is low-eightyish, the sun bright, the breeze gentle but usable. The Talbotts guess they’ll move on down to Key Farm on Wye Island, where Frank’s old father lives alone, and close the circuit of their year-long voyage at last. Why not sail down together? Reprise can tow Story through the Kent Island Narrows if necessary, where the tidal current runs strong at the highway bridge.

  Frank says to Peter I spent half the morning thinking over what you said to Lee about that cove in Act Three: making it less uterine and more estuarine. I might give it a try.

  Says Katherine God knows this creek is uterine. And Salthouse Cove is downright vaginal. Just as she is about to bring up the subject of Operation BONAPARTE, Lee reminds Peter that he promised last night to tell them a story about coincidences even less likely than our finding both of those Alert-and-Locate flare canisters.

  Right. Not to seem to be the moderately successful writer dropping names upon the moderately unsuccessful one, P omits the acknowledgment that he first heard this story from the author of the novel Catch-22; anyhow, it has been altered by much retelling. Once upon a time there was an IBM executive whose job involved frequent airplane trips. The time that this was once upon was the middle Nineteen Sixties, when there happened to have been a rash of commercial-airliner bombings by crazy-desperate people who insured themselves heavily and then blew up themselves and their fellow passengers with homemade bombs concealed in their attaché cases. No baggage inspection in those days. The IBM executive’s wife was alarmed: Suppose her husband had the bad luck to board a flight with one of those crazies?

  The IBM executive tried to jolly his wife out of her fears by telling her the joke about the rabbi and the priest who both survived the same airplane crash, but she’d heard that joke already. Therefore, more seriously, he had his office run a computer program to calculate the odds against there being, on any given scheduled domestic airline flight, one of those lunatics with a bomb in his attaché case. The odds were gratifying: Let’s say about a quarter-million to one.

  But the IBM executive’s wife was not consoled. The odds against any given human spermatozoon’s fertilizing an ovum, she pointed out, are tens of millions to one, and yet most people who want to get pregnant get pregnant, along with plenty who don’t want to.

  Ouch.

  Sorry. Who’s to say, said the IBM executive’s wife, that you won’t just happen to board that one flight in a quarter-million on which there is a lunatic with a bomb in his attaché case?

  Well, the IBM executive sympathized with his wife’s alarm, but he really couldn’t not take his business trips. So after giving the matter further executive thought, he ran a program to calculate the odds against there being, on any given scheduled domestic airline flight, two people with bombs concealed in their attaché cases. The results were consoling indeed: hundreds of millions, maybe billions to one. In fact, unlike human conception, which happens all the time, or the finding of two Alert-and-Locate canisters with playscripts in them, which has happened at least once, the two-bomb coincidence had never happened in the history of aviation, so far as anyone knew.

  Thereafter, therefore, in order to be perfectly safe, the IBM executive never boarded an airplane without carrying a bomb in his attaché case. Okay? Sorry about the sperm business; I was thinking of Frank’s play.

  Lee Talbott tells him he’s forgiven. What she likes best about that story is the construction “Thereafter, therefore.” These artichokes are spectacular, Kath.

  May Jump gave them to us in Annapolis. These crab fingers are terrific, too. What I like best about that story is that it got told by my very own dwarf-infested husband without a hitch. You should have heard us a week ago, down on the Tred Avon.

  Yes, well, says Peter Sagamore, but that’s because this one’s secondhand. All I added was the sperms and eggs, which I shouldn’t’ve, and the business of the two flare canisters, which was the point. Plus “Thereafter, therefore,” thanks.

  We slide artichoke petals and crab fingers through our teeth and carpet Queenstown Creek with biodegradable discards; also sip iced tea. Boina’d even under Reprise’s awning, Franklin Talbott nods appreciatively but pensively. We wonder whether Peter’s allusion to pregnancy has offended him; in fact, he will say presently, he admired the tie-in. Percipient Katherine, who also wants to lead our conversation to Operation BONAPARTE, says to him How about that pretty-good CIA story you owe us?

  He smiles at her: It’ll keep. Her insides tingle at the voice and smile. He then goes on to say, surprisingly—surprisingly even to his wife, it seems to us—I’ve got so much to tell you people that I hardly know where to start. Will you come down to Key Farm with us tonight? We’ll all sleep aboard at our dock.

  We check with each other. Why not? Kath can telephone Nopoint Point, and Jack Bass will be twenty minutes away by car. But why, exactly?

  I didn’t work on that play this morning, Frank Talbott declares, though I did think about it, and I might go back to it one of these days. There’s a whole other book in the works that I haven’t told you about, that I want to tell you about this evening. Nonfiction. I started
it after KUBARK and set it aside for that Reprise novel, and I decided this morning that I’m going on with it. I was thinking of our conversation last night about Doomsday Factors and Operation BONAPARTE—

  Katherine exclaims. Frank Talbott says We didn’t mention BONAPARTE yet? Well, we will, tonight, at Key Farm. And many another thing. BONAPARTE has certainly been on my mind; it’s what they pitched me for down in Langley after Doug Townshend’s memorial service. But we’re getting close to home, no? Peter’s bomb story sort of went off in my head just now, ‘cause I spent this morning making up what I guess you’d call a parable, which also involves bombs and airplanes.

  Writers, Lee Talbott says: I swear.

  Unlikely coincidence is what Katherine Sherritt swears.

  Says Peter Shoot.

  THE PARABLE OF THE AIRPLANE WITH TWIN BOMBS ON IT

  Franklin Key Talbott strokes his beard once between brown thumb and forefinger.

  There is a bomb aboard the plane. No: There are two bombs on the plane, as in Peter’s story. The highly unlikely has after all come to pass.

  So long as neither of the bombs explodes, the passengers and crew are normally safe. If either of them explodes, they’re all dead. There is no intermediate state, and nobody can leave the airplane, ‘cause it’s in midair over midocean. Any attempt to defuse or otherwise disarm the twin bombs may very well set them off. . . .

  Blam.

  Blooey.

  Yeah. Anyhow, the company can’t agree how to proceed: Fly on? Turn back? Crash-land in midocean? Take a chance on fiddling with the bombs? There are serious and reasonable objections to every proposed course of action, as well as ignorant objections and bad-faith objections. Also ignorant proposals and bad-faith proposals.

  So: Much gets discussed, and little or nothing gets done, with excellent reason. But in their anxiety over the situation, the passengers smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol and eat food laced with pesticides and artificial preservatives and radioactive isotopes, not to mention sugar, salt, and grease, and they drink water contaminated with Dioxin and heavy-metal residues, and they breathe air polluted with this and that.

  The twin bombs don’t go off. The plane lands safely after all, at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and the passengers and crew go home and eat and drink and breathe some more. Over the years, they get cancers and have heart attacks and give birth to defective children.

  I guess I’ll stick to nonfiction, Frank Talbott says.

  There’s still enough breeze to sail, Frank Talbott says, if we want to.

  Frank Talbott shrugs. Want to?

  OUR STORIES:

  THE CLOTHES’

  NEW EMPEROR.

  DAY 8: WYE 1.

  A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

  In Katherine’s belly in Katherine’s berth aboard Story at the Talbotts’ dock at Key Farm, Wye Island, Maryland, in the small hours of Monday, June 23, small Blam pouts to his sister It’s a whole new ball game out there, and now we’ll never get to tell our story of The Swan Prince of Queenstown Creek, which I think is as nifty a tale as some of theirs even though we haven’t got it quite licked into shape yet.

  Blooey counsels patience. Young as she is, she has remarked that in this neighborhood, stories have a way of getting told, sooner or later. That Franklin Key Talbott person, for example, has yet to come up with that pretty-good CIA story he’s been promising; but no doubt he will, by and by. He has certainly been forthcoming on other fronts.

  Blam wants to know Are we going to be born defective, like the children in that airplane story?

  Bloo wishes she could reassure her brother on this point, concerning which, however, she is not entirely easy in her own unborn mind. In the prologue to our story, she reminds him, Mom made Dad promise we’d be okay when the time came: The Ordinary Point Delivery Story. But that was make-believe.

  What’s this Key-Key-Kepone they’ve been going on about between chapters?

  You slept through the explanation. Kepone is the Allied Chemical Corporation’s trade name for the pesticide they were convicted of dumping copiously, knowingly, and illegally from one of their manufacturing subsidiaries into the James River, down the Bay from here, through the Nineteen Seventies, effectively poisoning that once-noble estuary much more than not, our parents agree, and rendering its marine inhabitants unfit for human consumption—so it was ruled, for a time, over the protests of local watermen. The company was fined; the ban on fishing and shellfishing in the birthwaters of colonial America was presently lifted, over the protests of concerned ecologists; and the river—so toxified that scientists at first estimated its cleanup time in generations at least—dropped from the news.

  Oh.

  But we may assume that those Keponed fish and shellfish, unfit for human consumption and ignorant of human politics, were consumed in the natural way by other fauna, and that the poison thus accessed, as they say, the general Chesapeake food chain, of which you and I and Mom are high-ranking members.

  Daddy too.

  Dad too. That’s what worries me, Brother Blam: Our parents love seafood. You and I are practically made out of seafood. So God only knows how we’re going to come out. Stop sniffling.

  I’m not sniffling.

  Kepone was also the working title of that nonfiction book that that Frank Talbott fellow that Mom swoons over was researching before he switched to novels and plays, which he’s now switching back from. That’s where you woke up.

  Says Blam Our daddy is a better writer than that Frank Talbott fellow.

  Bloo loyally grants that likelihood, but thinks the comparison inexact: The art of fiction, she has heard, is not the art of the high-minded expose. Blam says I’ve sure got me one smart sister, but then Blooey asks What’s a ball game?

  Her brother doesn’t know either. He happened to hear his father say that: Boyoboy, it’s a whole new ball game, et cetera. Do we think Mom and Dad are going to have recreational sex with those Talbotts?

  Blooey primly opines that this is not that kind of story. Their parents she declares to be neither prudes on the one hand nor swingers on the other. Nor are Mr. and Mrs. Talbott, in her mom’s opinion. They are all of them simply vigorous heterosexual adult human animals enjoying one another’s physical presences along with other things. Anyhow, if things get sticky we can always push the Launch button and start our own story.

  Blam eggs her: Do it.

  Dare me?

  He dee-double-diddly-die dares her.

  Not yet. It’s a whole new ball game out there.

  K strokes her belly but does not waken. Her husband snores lightly in his quarterberth: deviated septum. The children soon rejoin their parents in sleep, the last easeful night any of us four will enjoy till midweek at the earliest.

  Sleep, Tick; sleep, Tock. Peter Sagamore and Katherine Sherritt, sleep. Not least because our plot requires it, we are about to surprise ourselves with as sore a day as we have suffered in our decade as a middle-class American loving couple.

  IT BEGINS SERENELY ENOUGH.

  We breakfast early with the Talbotts—Frank, Lee, and Frank’s father, George, a hale and wiry, half-deaf widower, eighty, who reminds us of the late Fritz Sagamore—on the screened front porch of the Key Farm farmhouse. George’s late wife, Virginia Key, inherited the place from her family; the Prince of Darkness dead, it must soon pass to Franklin Talbott. Lee is not keen on living here: She likes old George; she enjoys Wye Island in spring and fall; she understands Frank’s attachment to his boyhood home—but except in summer she prefers cities, and through most of the summer the Wye River, like Sherritt Cove, is sea-nettle infested. The house, moreover, is what Lee calls a Grandmother House: white clapboard tidewater gothic, homely to view and costly to maintain, buried in overgrown spirea, hydrangea, lilac, wisteria. Yet it is prime Chesapeake waterfront acreage and one of the very few houses on Wye Island; she’d like to sell it and buy on Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard.

  We chat about thi
s over eggs scrambled and served by George Talbott’s housekeeper. Cecilia Skinner’s husband tenant-farms the corn and soybean lots, mows the lawn, and does light maintenance on the main and tenant houses, the outbuildings and machinery; Cecilia does the cleaning, cooking, marketing, and laundry, and sees to it that George takes his digitalis and folic acid. Lee Talbott wonders who’ll be her Cecilia Skinner in her childless widowhood, if the courage to kill herself fails her upon Frank’s death.

  As Peter’s father was, old George Talbott is gregarious, hospitable, good-humored, clear-minded, and much handicapped by his late deafness but unable to abide a hearing aid. Liver spots. Chronic sinusitis. On the strength of several terms in the county Orphans Court, he is called Judge, even by his housekeeper, though his trade was first farming and then dealing in John Deere farm machinery. Every day for the last forty years, regardless of the temperature and even in his retirement, he dons a fresh white long-sleeve shirt and a necktie. As Fritz Sagamore used to do, he tells anecdotes because he can’t follow conversation; he makes a show of flirting with the women, but directs his talk to the men. Now he’s telling Peter that he not only knows Katherine’s father and mother but knew their parents, too; now he tells his son a version of the saga of Parker Pink and Shorter Point. Presently—though father and son had not seen each other for a year until last night—he withdraws to his Baltimore Sun.