Where Three Roads Meet

by John Barth

  Et cetera? And as for "Georgina"...but forget it, Reader: The above-sketched is Another Story, which you're free to shift roles and take a shot at authoring yourself, so to speak, if something like that's what you'd rather read than this. Having borne with me, however, while I fetched that trio and their formerly three-wheeled whatchacallum from the Place Where Three Roads Meet or Diverge, depending, through the three episodes leading to their apparent present impasse, permit me to declare (what Iz seems to have been quite aware of and Georgina to have come to realize) that while their Dramatic Vehicle has been stalled for many a script page now, "Fred" himself (I mean this I've-Been-Told Story's story) has been moving right along.

  It is, in fact, all but told. For was it not you yourself—I mean, of course, Georgina the Mere but Sharp-Eyed Reader—who pointed out that her sudden appearance (in Part Three: The Third Person) in order to question the relevance of "———'s Story" was itself a complication of Fred's story? And that her subsequently invoking the distinction between Action and Plot, together with her observation that merely chugging westward was not equivalent to Getting Somewhere, was the next complication after that, leading as it did to the Herocycle's immediate out-sputtering and the threesome's (apparent) ongoing impasse, et cetera, et cetera, right through Izzy's revelation of—rather, his leading Georgina to discover for herself—the ever-incrementing nature of their script, even unto the still-moving point of Author's pen? As tidy a series of Complications as ever rode the up escalator toward Finale! There remains only the business of Climax, Denouement, and Wrap-Up to complete the classical curve of dramatic action and Author's self-imposed assignment—a task just at this point interrupted, he imagines, by impassioned female grunts and groans from the rear seat of the Dramatic Vehicle: "Yes. Yes! Yes!" Their source is our Regina (the former Georgina, her name here and now changed by authorial fiat, she being the very Queen of Readers), so excited by the realization that their impasse has been only apparent—that in dramaturgical fact they've been not merely expending Energy but accomplishing Work—that to her happy embarrassment she finds herself climaxing indeed: "Yes!"

  Izzy winks at Fred and with a gesture invites the old warhorse into the back seat with their so-aroused mare. But Author objects to Story's ever taking the back seat in its own Dramatic Vehicle: Instead, with a few strokes of his pen he transports transported Regina into the buggy's front seat with Fred and shifts Izzy-the-Sometime-Teller into the rear beside his authorial self.

  "Yesyesyes!" moans Regina (an ejaculation not easily moaned, but she manages it), and makes to place Fred's gnarled but still handy right hand where her gnarl-free left has been busying itself. Waggish Izzy nudges Author and (behind his own right hand) suggests, "Her mons veneris for his Mysterious Hilltop Consummation? Let's do it!"

  But Author decides to have Fred content himself with declaring to his ardent seat-mate that while her invitation to literal intercourse between Story and Reader flatters and honors him, he in turn honors and respects both her and his patient family back yonder, who have put up with and loyally supported him through the mattersome chapters of his Regnancy, Fall from Favor, and Departure from the City—yea, even unto his fast-approaching Mysterious End. Too grateful is he to all hands to dishonor them and himself as well with Protagonistic infidelity at this late stage of their joint story (as an early Complication, he allows, it might have been interesting indeed—but that would've been Another Story).

  "Ah! Ah! Ah." So moved is Regina by Fred's profession of love for and loyalty to his household (R. is, after all, along with her other adjectives, the Faithful Reader), she finds herself once more auto-orgasming: Climax enough, Author here submits, for this story's story. Sometime-Teller Izzy, while skeptical of that submission, obligingly offers the so-moved Third Person, over the seatback, his own hand for her possible employment. Regina gives him a not-unfriendly mind-your-own-business look—as much as to say, "It's stories that turn me on, buster, not their tellers or authors"—and returns her admiring attention to our Hero.

  Whom, however, she discovers to be no longer in the seat beside her; nor has he shifted to the rear with his Enablers. The Mythmobile's driver's door is open; the driver himself, it would appear, has vanished into the circumambient dark. Her hand still in place but no longer busy, "Fred?" the lady calls plaintively. "Freddie?"

  As if from out of sight on the road's far side, "Gotta go now, ma'am," that old fellow's voice comes back. "Much obliged for the lift, guys. See you around. Maybe."

  "Fre-ed?!"

  But she understands the fitness of it, does our savvy Reader, sweetly disappointed but dramaturgically fulfilled; the fitness too of her not knowing whither trudgeth her aged admiree: back homeward or farther westward, none knows where. Upon that matter, should they discuss it, she and Izzy will disagree, Regina preferring to imagine Fred's ultimate Consummation in the bosom of his family, in the heart of their once-excellent city, Isidore inclining to a more mysterious, indeed unknown and unknowable finale somewhere out yonder—indeed, perhaps not even down the road after all, but off it: somewhere trackless, out beyond that far shoulder whence last we heard his voice.

  Author himself refrains from tipping the scales either way. Enough, in his opinion, to have Regina recollect, aloud, that the Ur-Mythic script includes the possibility of our Hero's being, at the end, not really dead, but rather transmigrated to some Elsewhere—whence, in time, he will return...

  "Isn't that so?" she demands of us back-seaters—and, without waiting for our opinion, calls fretfully across to where she last heard his voice: "Freddie? Isn't it so, hon? That we'll meet again someday, somewhere?"

  To which, from a remove more distant than before, one barely hears his ancient voice reply (by Regina's hopeful account), "So I've been told."

  Or perhaps (as Izzy will prefer to tell it), "So: I've been told."

  III

  AS I WAS SAYING...

  TAPE 1

  ...dear Listener, before Grace noticed we'd forgotten to push the Record button on Junior's machine: This portion of the oral history of Manfred Dickson's famous novel-trilogy—

  "Better say Dickson Senior's trilogy, Aggie. Manny Senior's infamous trilogy."

  —Manfred F. Dickson Senior's once-notorious and controversial but now virtually forgotten masterwork, The Fates, okay? This unofficial contribution to the project (as I was saying, until Thelma interrupted me) will be the collective recollections of the Mason sisters, as recorded in our Bernbridge Manor apartments in Bernbridge, Maryland, on New Year's Eve 1999.

  "Three burned-out former floozies in the Burnt-Bridge Old Farts' Home."

  Have it your way, Thelm. These interruptions, I was saying, are courtesy of our irrepressible sister Thelma—

  "Thalia the Unrepressed to you folks out there in Listener Land: a still-frisky seventy-pluser who likes to tweak her dear doddering elders."

  Kid Sister Thelma/Thalia, all of eighteen months younger than the rest of us...

  Which is to say, folks, just a tad younger than my twin sister Agatha—our Lead-Off Narrator, you might say—and her twin sister Grace (temporarily speaking), who'll transcribe these off-the-record recordings and add her two cents' worth as we go along. Aggie in roman type, Thelma in quotes, and me in italics ought to keep things clear. You were saying, Ag?

  ...Sister Thelma/Thalia, I was saying: still the sharp-tongued wiseass brat of our golden girlhood.

  "Excuse me, sis: I hope and believe I have my head on straight, but my ass was never my wisest part."

  Amen to that, for the three of us. Always remembering, however, girls, that once upon a time it was these tushies of ours that paid our way through college.

  And made us secretly famous, Listener—as it were? Unbeknownst to any except ourselves and a certain ... Señor Senior, shall we call him?

  "If only we could call up old Manny, who made the Mason sisters ... what? Anonymously famous? Temporarily immortal?"

  As maybe we'll be again, less anonymously and tem
porarily, if Manny Junior has his way.

  "Or if we have our way with Junior."

  [Chuckles]

  Imagine that, now: a Three-Way with that uptight little putz! Talk about wise!

  Aggie's pun on Y's lost in transcription, Listener, as it will be in translation likewise (excuse me) if "Junior" 's critical study of his once-fairly-famous dad ever gets written, published, and translated into languages other than English. And hey, girls, we're piling up inside jokes and allusions at such a clip that this oral history of ours is going to need footnotes and commentaries.

  Leave those to Herr Doktor Professor Junior: It's what prissies like him are for, right? He wants oral, we'll give him oral.

  "Plus vaginal and anal! The old Mason-Dixon Three-Way!"

  You wish. But Gracie's got a point there: We probably ought to start over.

  Would that we could. From scratch.

  "As in You scratch mine and I'll scratch yours?"

  Scratch the interruptions, Thal, or we'll never get our effing story told.

  "Our Effing Story..."

  As I was saying, people—or've been trying to get said from Square One? Better yet, Grace: You fill the folks in, orally or otherwise, and then we'll get on with our three-part harmony. Tell 'em where we're coming from, and why.

  "And where all our coming went, and why all those Y's in Manny's Fates..."

  Speaking of Y's, guys—Y's-guys?—Y2K's about to hit Times Square, and how many turn-of-the-millenniums do we Once-and-Future Immortals get to raise a glass to? So be a good sis and pop us some bubbly, Thal, while Aggie fetches the flutes and I slug a fresh tape into Junior's gizmo—

  "Now that sounds like fun."

  —and tomorrow we'll start over.

  "Hah. Spare me."

  What I suggest, Grace, is that instead of us starting a new tape now, you write up some kind of introduction to this big-deal oral history—

  "Right on, Agatha. Grace has always been the family scribbler, see, Listener: term papers for the three of us back in college days; bookkeeping ledgers for our little business; suggestions and corrections for Manny's scripts. Manny-scripts? Not to mention diaries..."

  Not to mention certain better-she-hadn't-kept-'em diaries. But as I was saying: Let's clink glasses now, and then at Happy Hour tomorrow Grace'll read her scribbles and we'll take it from there: Lambda Upsilon! Dining at the Y! The works!

  You'll do the reading, Aggie. I just cook the books.

  [Knowing chuckles. Pop of champagne cork. Strains of Auld Lang Syne from TV coverage of millennial New Year's Eve festivities.]

  So: To inspiration?

  "We all know what that means. Bottoms up!"

  [More chuckles. Clink of glasses.]

  Here's to us, then.

  "To us."

  Us.

  And now it's tomorrow already, everybody—specifically, half an hour and one glass of Mumm Brut into January 1, 2000, which astronomer types tell us isn't really the new millennium's kickoff, but never mind those party poopers—and no need for a new tape yet, 'cause there's room enough left on this one to explain that a letter recently arrived at Bernbridge Manor addressed to Ms. Grace Mason [Forester] (my former married name set like that in brackets) and letterheaded Arundel University, which used to be Arundel State University, which used to be Arundel State College, which used to be Arundel State Teachers College when Agatha and Thelma and I worked our butts off, so to speak, to earn our degrees there back in the fifties. To my less-than-total surprise—and Aggie's and "Thalia" 's when I passed the thing around—it was a very lengthy letter of introduction from one Dr. Manfred F. Dickson Jr., Ph.D., professor of social history at Arundel U. and son of "the undeservedly neglected writer of the same name," whom he understood my sisters and me to have known in his father's "formative years." Perhaps we had heard, the letter went on, that nearby Mason-Dixon University (a considerably more upscale operation, Listener, than our ASTC/ASC/ASU/AU)—Manfred Senior's alma mater, where he'd later taught for a few years while writing the first and second volumes ofThe Fates, and where Manfred Junior had been born and raised until his parents split and the ruckus over those books got his old man sacked—was belatedly and cautiously reappreciating their notorious alumnus, as were some literary historians, and had proposed to name a new classroom building, or at least one of its seminar rooms, in his honor. Not surprisingly, even the more modest of these proposals was meeting with resistance from conservative trustees of the university. The letter writer himself, he would have me know, much respected his father's work despite its "perhaps excessive ribaldry"; in the 1960s, after all, it had been regarded in some quarters as a comic/erotic epic: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. with sex, humor, and "mythopoeic fantasy"; Henry Miller's Tropics in the Age of Aquarius; "an in valuable sociohistorical record of mid-century America." He welcomed any renewed public controversy on the subject, Junior declared, despite the attendant associations with his parents' divorce, his mother's lifelong resentments, and his father's pitiable final years, inasmuch as he himself was at work on a three-volume historical/critical/biographical study of Manfred Senior's life and times, from his Roosevelt-era boyhood and eventual discovery of his vocation after several false starts, through the "mature" period of his fixation on the Heroic Cycle and his composition of the Fates trilogy between 1957 and 1963—the Eisenhower-Kennedy era of America's Korean and Vietnam wars and the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and space race—to his obscure end in the rebellious, counter-cultural high 1960s. Along the way, he declared, he hoped to "address and perhaps even resolve" such "cardinal mysteries of Dickson scholarship" as the author's obsession with threes in general and Y's in particular: obsessions that, together with the notorious Myth of the Wandering Hero, "bind the three otherwise disparate novels into a trilogy." And who, exactly, were the enigmatic "Gracious Masons, who lent me their ears," to whom the monumental work is cryptically thus dedicated (instead of to its author's long-suffering spouse, the letter writer's mother, "who surely deserved that honor")?

  Et cetera, blah blah blah.

  It was in pursuit of this latter question, Dr. Dickson's letter went on (and on and on), that his attention had lately been brought to a more recent work of "experimental" fiction: a novella-length piece called Wye, by one C. Ella Mason (an author previously unknown to him), featured in the Spring 1999 issue of his (and our) university's literary quarterly, The Arundel Review. Ms. Mason's story (as he presumed I knew, its author happening to be my daughter) is a roman à clef concerning the dismissal in 1974 of two respected faculty members of the "Annapolis School for Girls" (a transparent alias for the Severn Day School, Listener, where Aggie and I so loved our years of teaching) on the grounds that twenty years earlier they had worked as prostitutes to earn their tuition at "Wye College," in the course of which enterprise they had met, serviced, and, it seems, inspired a budding young writer named "Fred," of whom more presently.

  The teachers in question are a long-standing member of the "ASG" English Department named "Mrs. Woodsman" and her sister, a more recently hired theater and gymnastics coach; the scandal of their past comes to light when the former's husband discovers, in 1973, diaries kept by his wife from the late 1940s, before their marriage, through the following decade (in the course of which they had wed and bred) and into the early 1960s. They reveal to him not only his wife's shocking premarital past, of which he was altogether unaware, but also that in the seven years from 1955 to 1962 she had "maintained a relationship" (also unknown to him) with the aforementioned "Fred," who by then had blossomed into the up-and-coming avant-garde novelist "Frederick Manson": a period extending from the conception of his controversial erotic trilogy The Graces through its initial publication and its author's termination from the faculty of "Wye College," whereto he had returned as writer-in-residence. The scandalized husband—a conservative country-club-Republican dealer in suburban D.C. commercial real estate named "Ed Woodsman"—successfully presses for divorce and custody of the couple's two late-teenage childr
en despite his mate's honest protestations that her past is past; that throughout her marriage she has been an exemplary wife and mother; that her "relationship" with Adjunct Professor "Man-son" had been exclusively editorial, assisting him with the research and composition of his subsequently world-famous and unjustly maligned masterwork, which in her admittedly subjective opinion bade to be to the century's second half what James Joyce's Ulysses (similarly banned as "obscene" until District Court Judge John M. Woolsey's landmark 1933 ruling to the contrary) was to its first. In sum, that she is reprehensible only in having kept from her husband her early sexual history and her subsequent, altogether nonsexual connection with "Frederick Manson," on the grounds that her dear dour spouse was incapable of understanding, much less of forgiving, those omissions.

  The family court judge (so went C. Ella Mason's Wye novella, insofar as the letter writer could follow its story line through its off-putting postmodernist narrative devices) is unimpressed; likewise the headmistress and trustees of the Annapolis School for Girls, much as they value Mrs. Woodsman's long and distinguished service to that institution and her more recently appointed but comparably popular sister's as well (had they known about Aggie's activities between her college days and her Severn Day School appointment, Listener, there'd have been even more hell to pay!). The two women lose their jobs; the Annapolis School girls lose the best teachers they'll ever know; Mrs. Woodsman loses official custody of her children (but not their love, understanding, and sympathy, declares Wye's first-person narrator); she loses, too, her beloved-though-stuffy husband, first to the divorce that he insists upon, and soon after to his death by suicide, humiliated by the public scandal that he has himself precipitated. American literature, moreover, has by the present time of the Wye story long since lost to alcohol and despair the novelist "Frederick Manson," whose wife divorces him after his sacking from "Wye College." Concerning all which losses, the un- named narrator of Wye asks of herself and of the reader (in a perhaps over-heavy closing-line pun), Why?