The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  The morning is fine and warm; a light southerly moves over the lawn from the willowed Wye, in whose fork Key Farm is nestled. Homely or not, the property must be worth more than half a million these days, we think. Reprise and Story lie on opposite sides of the old pier, their unequal masts visible above a wall of untended boxwoods. The four of us are subdued: yesterday’s revelations; the Talbotts’ having finally closed the circle of their cruise, with so many questions unresolved; the Sagamores’ decision that we have pressed our luck far enough and had better head back to Nopoint Point and have our babies whether or not the wind thither listeth, as this morning it doth not.

  Mainly, however, it is yesterday’s stories and last night’s confirmations of them that have left us somewhat dazed. We all slept well—sunshine, salt air, the working of the boats down from the Chester to the Wye—but we have much to assimilate.

  THE POINT OF FRANK TALBOTT’S PARABLE OF THAT AIRPLANE

  ET CETERA

  that he laid on us yesternoon in Queenstown Creek is that in worrying about those Doomsday Factors down in D.C. and Langley—as every sensible citizen must, for they are short on integrity, virtually beyond control, and appallingly dangerous—we may be ignoring, fatally, the doomsday factors in our literal backyards.

  OPERATION BONAPARTE?

  Small potatoes, in Frank’s opinion, though his late brother and our late mutual friend Doug Townshend, as Peter can attest, took it seriously enough. Both that bugging operation and its cryptonym (suggested by the Russians’ location on Corsica Neck) were Rick Talbott’s brainchildren. Not impossibly—though improbably, thinks Frank—the deaths of Rick and Doug, maybe of John Arthur Paisley as well, had somehow to do with their involvement in Bonaparte; he did not mean to suggest that the game was inconsequential to its players. They need another Key to plug their Keyhole, had quipped Carla B Silver when Frank returned from Doug’s memorial service in Langley and told her of being pitched to help with BONAPARTE. Witty dialogue everywhere, he had replied: The woman who’d pitched him (they have a few women senior officers down there these days; it’s a very forward looking company) had quipped We don’t begrudge your KUBARK book, Mister Talbott; down here we judge a book by its cover.

  Said Kath Not bad.

  Not bad. The woman then briefed me, in a general way, on the Keyhole Eleven story; all I knew was what I’d read in the papers. She told me why the Russians want more privacy on Corsica Neck and why the Company wants your Deniston School to go ahead with the sale. I told her I was slightly interested for Rick’s sake, but that obviously I’d have to think twice before getting involved with the Agency again. The lady said Speaking of agencies, she understood that my New York literary agent handled some capital-W Writers as well as kiss-and-tell types like me: the Charming Candor gambit. She wondered whether I knew another Maryland writer who had that same agent: a fellow named Peter Sagamore.

  Protested Peter Come on! Katherine was alarmed. Did that mean that the CIA knows about Doug’s telling Peter all that stuff?

  Frank Talbott imagined so (Lee declared They know every damn thing about everybody; I hate their fucking guts); they could be assumed to know at least about Rick’s and Doug’s pitch to Peter in Carla’s Cavern in 1978, which of course Frank himself hadn’t known of last week. Doug would routinely have reported it, whether casual Frederick did or not. But it turns out, Frank said to Peter, it wasn’t you the lady was interested in. She wanted to know whether I happened to know your wife.

  Groaned Katherine Could we please aim these boats at Polynesia right this minute?

  Well. You heard all this in Annapolis from Carla B Silver, right? The Deniston Connection. I told my pitch-lady I didn’t really know you two. She said they’d want me to develop that connection.

  Said pensive Peter So here we are. He’s wondering whether certain extraordinary coincidences in our story maybe weren’t so coincidental after all.

  Not yet, replied Frank Talbott. That had been as far as his recruiter had gone; he had agreed to consider the proposition and get back to her. That night he’d mentioned the matter privately to Carla B Silver—

  Privately, Leah interrupted to explain, because this was our Black Friday.

  Black Friday it was; our air wasn’t clear. Then Carla told me about Rick’s and Doug’s pitching Peter Sagamore there in that room where we were sitting. And she told me more about Operation BONAPARTE, including the KGB girl down in her bar who’d been put there as bait for another guy that both outfits were fishing for.

  Said Kath Oh Jesus.

  Yeah. But the irony was, Frank was ignorant of Katherine’s maiden name—Lee could have told him; she remembered such details; but Lee didn’t hear of all this till later, at mutual-confession time out in mid-Bay—and so when old Lascar there, Carla B Silver’s Rumanian bartender and new boyfriend, had supplied Willy’s name and, next evening, pointed him out in the bar, Willy having become a frequent patron of Carla’s Cavern and a buddy of its bartender, Frank Talbott did not make the Sherritt/Sherritt association. Carla herself could not have made it until she met Katherine at May Jump’s. Only Lee Talbott might have connected the several names, but she didn’t get all this information even when her husband later told her of his being pitched by the Company. Their air, you see, was not clear.

  Sitting there in Reprise’s cockpit over lunch yesterday in Queenstown Creek, we four agreed that the withholding of information between husbands and wives is not only bad marital policy but cheap-shot dramaturgy, and makes for lumpy exposition farther on. E.g.:

  That was all Frank Talbott had known about BONAPARTE until one calm day in his and Lee’s Cacaway Island interlude—last Wednesday or Thursday, he guessed it was—when, for something to do in that calm impasse, they’d put the little outboard on Reprise’s inflatable dinghy and motored the flat four miles from Langford Creek across the Chester to the Corsica, to have a look at Corsica Neck and The Deniston School; had even gone ashore and strolled the wooded grounds in question, chatting together about Frank’s old Kepone project and the Natural Recycling Research scam, of which the patient reader is still ignorant; and Lee Talbott had remembered that Sherritt was Katherine Sagamore’s name, too—the writer’s wife’s—and wondered whether that Willy Sherritt fellow and Katherine Sherritt Sagamore might be related.

  And then—cheap shot!—a day or so later the Sagamores meet Carla B Silver in Annapolis and hear chapter and verse, not only about BONAPARTE, but about Reprise’s Caribbean odyssey and its aborted climax, pardon the expression; and the day after that the Talbotts meet the Sagamores in Queenstown Creek, reading SEX EDUCATION: Play. Get us out of here!

  Not yet, said Katherine Sherritt, yesterday: Wait till you guys hear this; and she laid on them

  THE MYSTERY OF THE BRANDY ROSES,

  laid on us in the Annapolis Hilton by among others an improbably sweetened Willy Sherritt: more precisely, the mystery of Willy’s one-eighty concerning the great Saint Deniston Soviet sellout, which on Poonie Baldwin’s behalf he had so vigorously opposed, and the subsequent clarification of that one-eighty by Carla B Silver, who had informed us that a CIA/KGB infiltrator of the American Association of Eastern-Bloc Exiles and Defectors had given aspiring Congressman Baldwin’s campaign treasurer to understand that the Agency had persuaded the Association that the patriotic thing for the Association to do was to cease its lobbying against the Soviet Union’s dealings with The Deniston School for Girls, never mind why.

  But before that, inexorable Kate explained, according to Carla B Silver, Doug Townshend had recruited my sister-in-law, Molly Barnes Sherritt, to save her husband from the snares of the KGB by standing firm against him in favor of the Russian deal. Molly is also a Deniston trustee, see. So when that KGB girl and that CIA/KGB Eastern-bloc-defector infiltrator persuaded Willy to do a one-eighty, they probably saved his marriage. Another count against secret agents, in our opinion.

  It was then Leah Talbott’s turn to marvel Get us out of here! and
Frank’s to shake his handsome head.

  Said P Not yet. He then proposed, on the basis of no real evidence whatever, that unless life is as impenetrable by art as is the KGB by the CIA, that Eastern-Bloc Exiles and Defectors Association CIA contact who assisted Willy’s one-eighty will have been Carla B Silver’s Rumanian bar-keep, Lascar Woiwod. All the rules of Dramaturgy for Minor Characters demand it. Then the Company paid him off, and he drank too much Premiat Cabernet Sauvignon under the full moon, and his werewolfly aspect got hold of him, and he laid lecherous hands upon Lee’s sister a-scrubbing mussels in Carla’s Cavern’s kitchen.

  Said Lee I could throttle the bastard. Poor Mimsi! But his name isn’t Woiwod.

  Woiwod is his wolf-name, Peter spun on. The other one’s his human cover.

  Frank Talbott said Lupescu. He worked for Rick now and then before he worked for Carla. You may be right. Anyhow, it’s a damned shame. Carla liked him; we liked him.

  Ma warned us he was an ass-patter, Leah explained to Katherine, but supposedly that was just Transylvanian high spirits. I hope he gets herpes.

  Kate assured her that he very well might, if he beds the bargirl who baited her brother. Shall we all up anchor and head for Bora Bora, while there’s still time?

  Franklin Key Talbott said Not yet. Now I have to tell you about

  KEPONE AND KEPONE,

  the former trademarked by Allied Chemical and the latter almost copyrighted by me. The story leads back to your brother again, Kath, I’m afraid.

  Talk about dwarves on the narrative back, said Lee. One more reason for our getaway cruise.

  The afternoon advanced; the light breeze flagged; but Story and Reprise were not about to go their separate ways. On with the story, the Sherritt-Sagamores bid the Silver-Talbotts, and, spelling each other at the helm of it for the next hour, what that couple told this couple was this:

  These waters upon which we yarn and float, reader, are our birthwaters: Katherine’s, Peter’s, Franklin’s, America’s—Leah’s, too, though she came to know them somewhat later than we others did. We are morally obliged therefore to despise the directors of the Allied Chemical Corporation and its relevant subsidiaries, among a lengthy list of others, responsible for knowingly and intentionally polluting, despoiling, and otherwise contributing to our Chesapeake’s ruin in the interest of higher profit. . . .

  Cautioned Kate We mustn’t be sanctimonious: Story doesn’t have a holding tank. The Sagamore poop goes right into the Sagamore birthwaters. She raised her right hand. But we never park in marinas or pump the head in busy harbors. Lee said same with them.

  Said Frank Anyhow, what he really wanted to write after his CIA exposé, as aforetold, was that novel called Reprise; but his appall at that pesticide-dumping case, and a professional pleasure in investigation, led him to imagine a successor to KUBARK called Kepone. There was no CIA connection, as far as he knew: The Agency’s chief poison-supplier was not Allied but Dow Chemical, whose herbicide Dioxin (from the folks who brought you napalm) was the active agent in Agent Orange. But the further revelation in 1976 of the massive toxic dumping at Love Canal in western New York State—carefully concealed from its potential victims in a manner Frank knew well from numerous Agency and Pentagon experiments—suggested a book that would use the Kepone case as illustrative of the enormous general scandal of illegal toxic dumping.

  It was a problem not then large in the public mind—but in itself too large by far, he soon discovered, to be dealt with effectively in a book. The Kepone story, on the other hand, monstrous as it was, seemed too particular for his purposes: one company, one river. How to bring the problem truly home to the average middle-class American, whose backyard is neither a fragile estuary nor a former military-industrial dumpsite?

  Key Farm (one of whose chief crops, Frank Talbott declared, has been the keys to sundry puzzles and problems in his life and work) gave him the answer and his subject.

  A year or so earlier, George Talbott had mentioned to his sons in passing that he had leased a few wooded acres of the property, complete with a gooseblind, a simple cabin, and a dirt access road, to a small New Jersey firm interested in using it as a hunting retreat for its executives. Such arrangements are common among Eastern Shore farmers. The lease fee offered was unusually high, but Judge Talbott had shrugged his shoulders; everybody knows that Delawarians, Pennsylvanians, and New Jerseyites are made out of money.

  What presently aroused his suspicions was the traffic to and from those woods: the occasional Jersey-plated Cadillac or Mercedes, yes, but locally licensed pickup trucks, too, small closed six-wheelers, once even what looked like a septic-tank-pump-out rig, unmarked. Well, live and let live was George Talbott’s philosophy. The rental property was a back corner of Key Farm, its access road not readily visible from the house. The small New Jersey firm had asked for and received his permission to renovate the cabin somewhat, at the firm’s expense, into a proper little cottage; no doubt the vehicular traffic had to do with that renovation. But next they offered him a startling sum for year-round use of the premises: Some of their people wanted to fish and crab as well as shoot Canada geese. And could they fence off the woodlot with chain-link fencing, for general security and privacy?

  George conferred with his sons and said no to both requests. The officials of the small New Jersey firm were unhappy: Look what they had invested already in the place! But they had not been asked to do so; the property was not theirs; when Franklin and Leah Talbott were in summer residence, they sometimes put friends up in that cabin; even Frederick Mansfield Talbott and Carla B Silver used it on occasion. So: No. The small New Jersey firm did not renew the lease; it seemed Key Farm had got a spiffy guest cottage for free.

  But in 1977, a distinguished fellow Wye islander, former U.S. Interior Secretary John Trippe—

  We know John Trippe! cried Katherine Sherritt. I know you do, said Franklin Talbott.

  —had called upon his near-neighbor with alarming news. Among Mr. Trippe’s several business interests in his retirement from public life was a firm called Environmental Research Corporation, which contracted with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to detect and clean up “spot” pollution in the Chesapeake estuarine system. ERC had cause to believe, John Trippe reported, that that small New Jersey firm (with the innocuous name of Jersey General Hauling) was an arm of a larger New Jersey firm in the refuse-disposal business; that the parent firm had created Jersey General Hauling to transport and covertly dispose of particularly noxious industrial wastes. To do so legally is expensive; Jersey General Hauling disposed of a certain amount of its cargo legally, for appearances’ sake, but its profit came from other methods, principally the “minidump”: an out-of-the-way spot where a certain quantity of dangerous material could be covertly buried, spread, drained off, or otherwise surreptitiously gotten rid of over a relatively brief period, literally covered up, and abandoned. One of Trippe’s own woodland holdings, in particular its duck pond, had been thus abused under false pretenses, and ERC was fairly certain that Key Farm had been as well.

  Investigation proved him right. We remembered the case: Owing to the pristine character of Wye Island, in the heart of the Eastern Shore’s Gold Coast—also to the irony of the former interior secretary’s innocent involvement and of Key Farm’s connection with Francis Scott Key—it had gotten brief national and considerable local media attention. A surprising quantity of carcinogenic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, from the oil used to cool certain electrical transformers) had been dumped right into a drainage ditch leading to the river itself; drums of modestly radioactive waste material had been buried in the excavation for an extension to the little cabin, and considerably more in the excavation for its improved septic system. That system itself had been supplied with auxiliary solid-waste tanks, leach fields, and dry wells for the purpose of draining toxic matter into the ground—and similar small dumps were subsequently found elsewhere on the p
eninsula by Environmental Research Corporation, particularly in the large woodlots and remote marshes of the lower Shore. The term minidump entered the ecological vocabulary, and Frank Talbott had the subject he was looking for, for the book he would write if he didn’t decide to try a novel instead.

  As for the Key Farm minidump, it and the one on John Trippe’s property proved so particularly toxic, and their cleanup so problematical, that Trippe’s ERC formed a subsidiary called Natural Recycling Research to investigate ways of containing and detoxifying such minidumps without expensively wrecking and restoring the landscape. Government funding was secured through the ex-secretary’s connections, and both Trippe and George Talbott sold their affected acreage to NRR for the worthy experiment. The little company hired additional specialists in chemical detoxification, built a discreet metal work-building on each of the two properties, and fenced off the areas after all, to protect the unwary from what lay under the ground or in process of experimental neutralization in the buildings.

  The NRR staff became a chief source of technical information for Frank Talbott’s Kepone project, which he carried forward through 1978. With their aid and much legwork of his own, he began to piece together a dismaying picture, not of isolated large-scale insults to the environment like the poisoned James River and Love Canal, but of hundreds and thousands of minidumps in the Middle Atlantic states. Industries uninterested in disposing of their dangerous waste material contracted legally with firms like Jersey General Hauling (whose directors were themselves presently hauled into the state and federal courts) to relieve them of that chore. JGH’s parent company was alleged to be Mafia-controlled, an offshoot of the mob’s general involvement in refuse dumping in the Garden State; its teamsters’ directive was to lose as much as possible of their freight in transit, to “divert” a great deal more, and to deliver the remainder to legal (and expensive) dumping sites. “Losing in transit” meant literally leaking and dumping the poisons along rural roadsides and drainage ditches; “diversion” meant more elaborate repackaging of the contents into smaller, innocuous-looking drums and dumping them cheaply in public disposal areas or offshore from small leased barges—or burying them in minidumps.