Where Three Roads Meet

by John Barth

  That you were—as one appreciates now but could scarcely then. If things had gone differently, it'd be Alfred Baumann instead of Joseph Campbell whom we'd be watching public-television documentaries about.

  "So it goes."

  So it went, alas, as shall be revealed if Narrator ever gets his act together. Meanwhile, meet Al Baumann, Reader: a gentle and wispy-haired but nonetheless commanding presence, lightly brown-goateed a dozen-plus years before the high sixties brought male face hair back into style, and figured not unlike the instrument he played so authoritatively at Will Chase's side on the bandstand of the Bohemia Beach Club and, subsequently, in what passed for a student hangout at super-serious VVLU—a hangout denominated, by that bass-shaped bassist himself, the Trivium...

  "Because all three curricular roads there met, Reader: the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and what's now called Professional Studies but used to be Business and Education."

  Plus all three campus castes: undergrads, grad students, and the odd junior instructor or assistant prof.

  "Plus our dates, unless we were already-married war vets: the belles of Goucher and dear nearby CONDOM—"

  Their sacrilegious acronym, Reader, for the all-female College of Notre Dame of Maryland: doubly titillating to horny VVLUers inasmuch as contraception in that precinct was an even bigger no-no than premarital sex.

  "As for one's bearded, bass-shaped bassist-buddy: Granted, I was no skinny-assed redneck like some band-mates I could mention. Ate too much dreck, drank too much National Bohemian, smoked too many of the free cigarettes handed out in our student union by tobacco companies looking to get us hooked, and didn't exercise half enough, despite Doctor Dad's tongue-tsking. But 'twas chiefly a product of inherited metabolism—and anyhow none of the above is known to cause leukemia, which takes care of your why-no-PBS-documentaries question. On to Winnie?"

  With pained pleasure, while that so-able and magnanimous rosy-cheeked lass remains freeze-framed back in academic 1948–49, telephone in hand, awaiting the end of this interrupted interruption of Section One, "The Call," of Part One, TELL ME, of our novella-triad Where Three Roads Meet...

  "Your novella-triad, man. I just keep the beat."

  Nope: Al and Will together kept the beat, with a little help from Winnie Stark's left hand, while her right both carried our tune and developed and resolved it. Win is the without-whom-not of this Three Freds combo.

  "Of their combo, maybe; but their story's your baby, excuse the expression. On with it?"

  Only children both; pals and playmates since early childhood; their parents near neighbors in upscale-but-laid-back Roland Park, not far from the campuses of their kids' respective day schools and subsequent colleges...

  "Not that we didn't consider Harvard or Princeton and Radcliffe or Smith after finishing Gilman and Bryn Mawr, mind—just as we'd now and then considered other one-and-onlies besides each other. But as has been mentioned, only VVLU was offering that fast-track Ph.D...."

  And Goucher was the best nondenominational women's college in the same town, and the girl- and boyfriend competition never measured up to what you K–12 sweethearts—K–sixth form?—had become for each other over the years.

  "Reader might as well hear that Win and I were in each other's pants from our let's-play-doctor days through the look-what-I'm-sprouting-down-here and just-got-my-first-period period. Neither of us knows whether I technically deflowered her with my lower-school finger or my upper-school cock, but either way it was at least as much on her initiative as on mine. And we'd been so close already for so long in so many ways that if anything in that line felt naughty to us, it was because we were virtual sibs. Which is how your Chi-anti-bottle buddy managed to score such a doll. Why Win wasn't preggers by age fifteen used to be a mystery to both of us—but I'm getting ahead of your story: Tell."

  So meet Winifred Stark, Reader: ample-figured, chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed strawberry blondie, her dad a mid-scale real estate developer thriving in the postwar housing boom from which many of the city's now-inner suburbs date; her mom a depressive alcoholic, alas, periodically drying out in nearby Sheppard Pratt Hospital between extended listless, even bedridden stretches at home—a woman driven to drink, as Al's dad diagnosed it, by her failures as a wife and mother because driven to drink—and Al's mom, faute de mieux, more a mother to our Win than was her own mother.

  "Which benevolent circumstance, needless to add, made us feel more than ever like brother and sister—especially upon that unhappy woman's demise in Winnie's tenth year, whereafter a series of housekeepers attended her pa while Doc and Miz Baumann embraced his daughter as virtually their own."

  An upbeat, firm-willed, independent-spirited lass, be it said, who welcomed their monitoring, took the loss of her not-much-of-a-mother in stride, comforted her not-all-that-bereft father as best a third- or fourth-grader can, and threw herself into her schoolwork, music lessons, team sports, and bosom-buddyhood with young Al Baumann. To whom she enjoyed mischievously displaying and even offering to his touch the not-yet-budding bosoms that anon would blossom into adolescent splendor.

  "Squeezed and licked into full bloom, we half believed, in our let's-be-naughty sessions in the loft of the Starks' quote Carriage House, as was her playmate's uncircumcised shlong. Not quite your mythic hero's Summons to Adventure, but pretty exciting to us pre-teenies."

  Who then as high-schoolers duly dated others, pour le sport; groped and were groped by same within modest limits, but always with relief came back from these amusing excursions to each other, with whom by then so much went without saying that they could get on with their joint story without forever having to rebegin it Once upon a time.

  "And speaking of which—I mean getting on with one's story...?"

  On with same they got: Went off to their respective college freshman years at campuses less than five miles apart. Promised their respective parents (Win had a stepmom by then, whom, contrary to stereotype, she liked better than she'd ever liked her late mother) that they'd not marry until they'd completed their degrees, nor "live together" in the meanwhile—that being a thing still Not Done, by and large, among people of their sort in those days, although the afore-noted presence on campus of so many married war vets was loosening the old conventions. Dwelt therefore in their respective college dorms for that first year, they did, it being agreed by all hands that Getting Out of the House was a significant part of one's higher education, and then in just-off-campus apartments with same-sex roommates through their second year—each often "sleeping over" in the other's flat. In that year too their growing interest in jazz, especially of the Progressive and then the Cool varieties (an interest that Narrator ought to've re-established two pages ago, but neglected to), led them to exchange their extracurricular hobby of playing chamber music with Win's Peabody pals for working dance gigs with a local non-union outfit.

  "Because as scabs we earned less per job than the union guys in town, but scored more jobs."

  While at the same time, in young Baumann's case, so impressing his VVLU Humanities profs and adviser that by the end of his second college year (one can't, strictly speaking, say "sophomore year," inasmuch as in the university's fast-track advanced-degree program he was already a "predoc," neither an undergraduate nor quite a graduate student) he was invited to enroll in graduate-level seminars the following year and perhaps to be a junior instructor in his department's two-year undergrad survey course called Literature & Philosophy.

  "By which was meant representative classics of both disciplines in Western Civ, Reader, from Homer and the pre-Socratics up to maybe Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, and their arguably reciprocal influence: one major weekly lecture to the whole class by appropriate bigshots on the senior faculty, followed by twice-weekly small-section follow-ups led by us JIs. No better way to study that high-protein stuff than to have to teach it."

  And teach it he did, young Alfred B., to the lucky dozen or so freshmen who happened to draw his section. The particular bl
ank tablet named Wilfred Chase learned more from him in two semesters than he'd learned in two years at Back-Home High—and not just about Lit & Phil, nor only in class.

  "W.C.'s tabula wasn't all that rasa, man—but you're ahead of our story, no?"

  Not really, once Reader is reminded that between Al's and Winnie's second and third college years came that Bohemia Beach Club summer afore-rehearsed, their attendant connection with and befriendment of Adequate Drummer and Strictly Amateur Arranger Wilfred Chase, their persuading him to give college a try despite his less than impressive academic preparation therefor, and their case-clinching invitation to him to be the third Fred in the light-jazz trio they had in mind to play weekend gigs in the new student hangout that they were trying to get renamed the Trivium. All of which came to pass.

  "And more."

  More indeed—such as Will's barely hanging on, academically, through the overwhelmment of that freshman year. Democritus and Lucretius to Hume and Schopenhauer! Euripides and Plautus to Goethe and Molière! Renaissance, Reformation and Counter Reformation! Neoclas-sics and Romantics! Who knew?

  "Well..."

  Patient and bemused A. Baumann did, for one, and lively-friendly W. Stark, who were living together by then in Briarwood 304, but who for the sake of appearances listed that Murphy-bedded studio apartment as hers alone and the one below it, 204, as his and his same-sex roommate's: posh accommodation indeed for a webfoot redneck greenhorn out of his depth!

  "Out of his depth, maybe, but paddling madly and not quite sinking after all, while downloading not only old Lit-Phil One and Two, and Burgundies versus Bordeaux—"

  And trolley cars and taxicabs! Lacrosse and tennis and chess! Frat-house binges and East Baltimore Street burlesque! Also classmates Jewish and Catholic, Asian and Indian, European and Canadian and Latin American—

  "But not yet African American, shame to say, in those still-segregated days. And our Wilfred downloaded not only these exotic marvels, one was saying..."

  But also a much-improved acquaintance with the non-academic world of work—especially after his unimpressive freshman-year grade point average cost him his scholarship. With the best will in the world, excuse the poor pun, Chase père and mère could manage no more than half his VVLU tuition, they having aged parents to help provide for and their own elder years a-coming. The other half, plus room and board and books and spending money, their son had to scramble for, he being by then determined to hang on in that venue at whatever cost, to the end not only of imbibing more Lit & Phil—

  "Not to mention History, Economics, Sciences both Natural and Social, a second language or two, and a few other items—"

  But also in hopes of discovering the True Vocation that music had turned out not to be, nor scholarship either, QED: a calling more specific than the "Humanities" he'd chosen as his faute de mieux freshman-year major. In short, learning who and what he was and deciding who and what to be, in the way Al Baumann knew himself to be a Lit-Phil professor-in-the-works, and Winnie Stark knew she was some sort of librarian-to-be and Al's lifelong soulmate. That pair being, as afore-observed, the sole offspring of better-heeled families, their Three Freds dance gigs earned them spending money over and above their parents' generous provision and Al's junior-instructor stipend. Will, on the other hand, while still beat-keeping for the Freds on weekends, worked another job and a half that summer to support himself and make tuition payments: as a full-time night-shift timekeeper at a steel mill on the city's east side, and by day as a parttime roach-spray salesman in its bug-infested black ghettos, among sundry other pickup employments, all of which enriched his résumé of extracurricular real-world experience beyond high school clerking in his parents' store and musicianing in the (by-then-defunct) Bohemia Beach Club.

  "And taught him, by the way, that the worlds of white-collar office work and product-peddling, like those of store-clerking and the blue-collar trades, were not for him, except as stopgaps. While to the more appealing calls of music and scholarship he found himself no more capable of professional-level response than to that of tennis, say, or chess. But tell me, man: Is this the Three Freds Story, or the one about How Will Chase Found His Voice?"

  Those stories are one story, to which can now be added (what Reader may well have surmised) that for whatever mix of reasons—simple generosity and hospitality, amused fascination with a rustic innocent, reluctance to find and break in a brand-new replacement drummer if the incumbent flunked—

  "All of the above, plus one thing more—"

  Freds One and Two, who had befriended their country cousin on the Bohemia Beach bandstand and coached him (Al especially, but not exclusively) through his freshman-year survival struggles, had by that year's end virtually adopted him. Not as a son, mind, the kid they'd never have...

  "Ouch."

  Sorry there. But more as a not-unpromising but thitherto deprived kid brother, to be gently initiated into assorted mysteries large and small.

  "Not unpromising indeed. The fact is, Reader, that just as Will Chase's first Great Ambition had been music, for which alas he simply hadn't the right stuff or anyhow enough thereof, so Fred One, as I seem to be being designated, had since boyhood more than anything aspired, not to teach Lit and Phil, honorable as that profession is, but to create same—especially the former. For which however alas et cetera? Granted, he might discern precociously the outlines of the Ur-Myth, say, and in order to trace its ubiquity in the literatures of the world he might take unto himself the vast corpus of those literatures, insofar as a brash twenty-one-year-old insomniac can—"

  Which is to say, pretty fucking far.

  "But he would eagerly have swapped all that for the gift of adding even a single small item to the inventory: not a learned commentary, but a capital-T Text! Not one more midrash, but a bit o' Scripture! In that line, however, as in at least one other..."

  Never mind, please. Sufficient to say that said Fred now saw fit to see in his Bohemia gig-mate, later his eagerest student and then his protégé and official-though-not-actual apartment-mate—and moreover to persuade Fred Two that she saw as well—what said gig-mate/student/et cetera would scarcely have presumed to see in himself: the potential for doing, artfully, what his benevolent mentor had so aspired to.

  "Which artfulness, shall we call it, extends to Narrator's keeping Our Winifred, shall we call her, on hold, let's say, for lo these many pages, phone in hand on hand-me-down couch in Briarwood Three-zero-four with Lou Levy on the line, the Triple-F story's Present Action frozen in interrupted mid-interruption while he takes his sweet time and ours filling in the blanks of Background. Far be it from a mere bass-shaped scholar-critic to criticize, but one wonders whether Narrator's artfulness mightn't extend further to wrapping up this extended Exposition and getting on with the effing story, at least Part One thereof, dot dot dot question mark? Tell Me, man!"

  Roger maybeco, old buddy who never had the much-mixed blessing of growing old. The Effing Story is what's getting itself told, believe it or not, in its less-than-straight-forward fashion: a story one of whose apparent meanders fetched us to that spring '49 mid-morning in Briarwood 304 when nineteen-year-old Wilfred Chase, winding up his sophomore year at VVLU and hearing once again his mentor-friend's trademark imperative Tell Me, set about happily reminding all hands of that so-consequential mid-term day in Alfred Baumann's freshman Lit & Phil section when the young instructor had drawn on the blackboard an equiangular Y and said, "Okay, guys: In eight to ten pages' worth of sentences both articulate and legible, tell me before next Friday what this symbol says to you." Which recounting—prompted by Winnie Stark's observation that her gynecologist's wall chart of the Human Female Reproductive System (by her remarked on her recent annual visit to that office), with its bubblegum-pink fallopian tubes converging L & R upon the uterine cervix, was yet another pregnant analogue, so to speak, to the Place Where Three Roads Meet—had been interrupted and remained suspended by what we would learn presently but did not yet know just then to
be a phone call from Louis Levy: proprietor, headmaster, and sole full-time employee of the Levy Preparatory School, a.k.a. the Cheatery.

  The Important Thing, Will had been saying back then, was not that he'd happened in that mid-term essay to mention a number of associations that his so-savvy instructor hadn't thought of, like say the confluence of sperm and egg into embryo, or for that matter of father and mother into child—or, in the other direction, the forking of headwaters into river branches or tree trunks ditto, echoing the Primordial One's self-division, in sundry myths already mentioned in class, into Two and thence into Many; or (reversing Al's analogue of Hegelian dialectic, wherein Thesis versus Antithesis gives rise to Synthesis) the anti-Synthetic process of Analysis...

  "What I had mentioned," put in Al here (back there back then, for Winnie's benefit), "—along with Siamese twins sharing a single lower body, like the mythical Melionides who fought Herakles, and the actual freaks illustrated in Aldrovandi's sixteenth-century Monstrorum Historia— was how at the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, where the green Moselle joins the mud-brown Rhine, one is reminded not only of Hegelian Synthesis but of why Moselle wines come in green bottles and Rhine wines in brown. What F-Three added was that his Chesapeake tidal rivers, like say the handsome Wye (but unlike its eponymous one-way English counterpart), switch from Synthesis to Analysis, or Fusion to Diffusion, every six and a half hours, changing the Place Where Three Roads Meet, or two become one, into the place where one becomes two. But that's not what mattered."

  Yes it isn't. What mattered, as Will was saying to Al and Win (not for the first time) when the phone rang (ditto), was that he'd seen fit to cast these mid-term observations, whatever their merits, into the form of a gloss on Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," et cetera), which the Lit & Phillers had read earlier that semester: more specifically, into the firstperson monologue of a nonconformist spermatozoon swimming alone against the current up a different fork of some dark stream from the one that his countless ejaculation-mates have chosen, and speculating on the overall layout of wherever in the world he is and on the mystery of what it's all about...