Where Three Roads Meet

by John Barth

  While reserving judgment on the literary merits of Ms. Mason's lengthy short story, Manfred F. Dickson Jr.—the writer of this interminable letter of introduction, in case Listener has forgotten—declared himself to have been struck indeed by the obvious parallels between his father and "Frederick Manson,"as between The Fates and "The Graces," not to mention by the novella's echoing, in its title and in numerous elements of its construction, his father's signature preoccupation with, among other things, Y's. He had therefore promptly sought out its author, herself an adjunct professor of creative writing at a branch campus of the state university on Maryland's Eastern Shore; had introduced and identified himself; and had pressed her for details of the backstory ofWye. No doubt to protect her family's privacy, Ms. Mason—a quite pleasant woman about the same age as himself, he was pleased to report, who asked to be called Cindy—had insisted that her fiction was just that, pure fiction, although she readily acknowledged its echoing of themes and motifs from The Fates. She denied likewise any connection with or knowledge of the "Gracious Masons" of that trilogy's dedication, while admitting that the coincidence of her last name and those dedicatees' had been one inspiration of her novella. Unconvinced, but not wanting to press the subject against her wishes (Ms. Mason having been otherwise most hospitable to him, respectful of his father's literary accomplishment—to which she would not presume to compare her modest own—and particularly sympathetic in the matter of parental divorce and loss of sire), he then took it upon himself to computer-search her background and was not long in tracing her parentage, the essential similarities (but with important differences, Lis- tener) between Mr. and Mrs. "Ed Woodsman" 's history and that of Ned and Grace Mason Forester, and the latter's present address.

  Having discovered which last (right under his nose, it turned out, in the Arundel U. alumni directory!), he earnestly hoped that she might grant him and "contemporary Dickson scholarship" the privilege of an extended interview on the details of her collaboration with his father: nothing indiscreet, she was to understand (the erotic, he declared, was "frankly not [his] cup of tea"), but perhaps the illumination of such questions as those mentioned earlier, and even of such relative details as why Clotho (the first of the Fates novels, dealing with the hero's birth, boyhood, and discovery of his vocation) is emblemized on its title page and chapter headings with an inverted equiangular Y (i.e.,), the second (Lachesis, the saga of the hero's serial labors) with the Y upright, and the third (Atropos, the story of his fall from favor and his mysterious end) with the emblem turned ninety degrees clockwise ().

  Might they, at her convenience, meet and talk? And if so, could she kindly supply him with driving directions to Bern-bridge Manor, as he had tried in vain to find the town of Bernbridge both on his computer and on his AAA map of Maryland/Delaware/Virginia?...

  TAPE 2

  Okay: Press Record now, Gracie.

  Already did that, Ag: The floor's yours.

  "Not to mention bed and couch and any other available surface once upon a time, hey, Aggie?"

  Can it, Thelm. You were saying, Ag?

  ...that meet the little weenie we did, Listener dear, and talked his maiden ears off for two hours straight yesterday afternoon. More than he bargained for!

  "Or could handle. Did you see how he blanched when we solved his little riddles for him in the first half hour, and how he spent the next ninety minutes looking for a way to get his tushie out of here?"

  Well: It wasn't really fair to spring the three of us on him when he was expecting just me. But who could resist?

  His dad sure took it in stride, back in '48. But Manny Senior was a different story.

  That he was: innocent, maybe, but eager to learn, and a very quick study.

  And still in his teens then, Listener, don't forget. Whereas Manny Junior at age—what, mid-forties?—is plenty learned but still innocent, in our judgment, and self-programmed to stay that way. We'd bet he's never been laid in his life.

  "By either sex, was Cindy's guess when she alerted Grace that we might be hearing from him."

  All the same, it was a bit much of us to pile on the Lambda Upsilon details, and offer to demonstrate...

  Like hell it was, Grace. If it's social history the guy's after, he should bring a camcorder instead of just audiotape, and let us show him what we're talking about! And I don't believe for a minute that he really wants three reels of us answering his scripted interview questions, now that he knows what he's gotten himself into. He was just politely hauling ass out of here.

  "Bet he won't even come back to pick up this machine."

  Yes, well, girls: Growing up as our Manny's namesake and only child can't have been a picnic, right? With a mom who felt disgraced by her husband's notoriety and half suspected him of actually doing all the horny stuff he wrote about? Genius can be hard on the home folks.

  "Speaking of hard-ons..."

  Would you quit that, Thal?

  "Nope: In the interest of full and impartial social history, Listener needs to hear that when Aggie fetched out her famous three-in-one Ace of Clubs photo card from back in her 'modeling' days, let's say, old Junie-boy got a boner despite himself. Had to keep his clipboard on his lap to cover it."

  Enough already about Junie-boy: Go back and start at our beginning now, Gracie, before we fill up this whole tape with chitchat. Once upon a time there were these three little sisters— stuff like that.

  As I was about to say, Listener/Junior/Whoever: Once upon a World War Twotime there were three not-so-little Navy-brat teenage sisters in Annapolis EmDee, whose combat-officer dad survived the battles of Coral Sea and Leyte Gulf but not the accidental plane crash en route home after V-J Day, while his daughters were still in high school...

  And whose widow became an acute depressive soon after—as our Thelma/Thalia did not, bless her, after her husband coughed his lungs out a few years ago, nor our Grace when hers unkindly dumped her back in the seventies—per Cindy-Ella's Wye story, but with important differences. Me, if I'd ever found myself a one-and-only and then lost him, I reckon I'd've gone Mom's route. But on with our story, Grace.

  So we saw poor Ma as best we could through her get-me-out-of-here stage, which she abbreviated for us with a handful of sleeping pills enjoyed in the family Chevy idling with windows down in a closed garage while the three of us were out junior-senior promming...

  "Thankee there, Ma, I guess, goddamn you, poor thing."

  Whereafter we managed our own adolescence, as we'd pretty much been managing it already, and not remarkably well.

  But we did by God manage it, folks, on Mom's Navy-widow pension, and decided on our own to go crosstown to ASTC and learn to be schoolteachers or accountants or something, if we could hack the tuition.

  Which of course we couldn't, modest as it was, on our measly summer-job and babysitting wages—

  "Until Socially Active Agatha, let's call her, happened to cross paths in a Georgetown club with a homely-but-rich boy from G. Washington U. who offered her ten for a blow-job, as I remember, or twenty for a backseat shag—good money in those days."

  And said sister being already more round-heeled than well-heeled (she here readily admits), she shucked her last remaining virginity—namely, her amateur status—and came home neither with ten dollars nor with twenty, but with thirty, and an offer of more where that came from if she'd see fit to accommodate a couple of his classmates next time out.

  Which she did, brave girl: half a dozen beer-guzzling undergrads, in the club basement of their frat house...

  Serially, mind, instead of three at a crack, those being my early apprentice days.

  "And came home this time with more than our next month's apartment rent, six times whatever being what it is, and rents back then being what they were."

  And came home also with her mind made up that there was her ticket to higher education: better-paying and less time-intensive than waitressing, and probably not too risky if she took the right hygienic/contraceptive precautions, s
teered clear of pimps and rough neighborhoods, and mainly worked the Washington/Baltimore/Annapolis college circuit.

  "Bit of social history here, if I may? Before and after the time we tell of, hookers in American college neighborhoods would've been a rarity. But in the nineteen-late-forties and fifties, the GI Bill flooded the campuses with older guys who'd been around the block: guys who mightn't have considered college without that free ticket, and whose military service had acquainted them with sex for hire."

  Not that commercial-coital coeds like us were a standard feature of campus life even then, Listener, by any means. But we were imaginable, at least.

  "Never mind imaginable, Aggie: We were real."

  It sure felt real, anyhow, for better or worse. You were saying, Grace?

  . . . that Aggie having blazed the trail, so to speak, and pointed the way to our B.A.s at ASTC, we followed her lead: Thelma less reluctantly than I, I guess, although she was still only seventeen—

  As opposed to our worldly-wise eighteen and a half...

  —but I no less determinedly, since my heart was set on going to college.

  "Gracie being the family scholar, as well as our record-keeper. And mind you, Listener: This particular seventeen-year-old had been around the block herself a few times already."

  So we got down to business—

  So to speak. And did we ever! Separately and together...

  Never on our own campus, for propriety's sake, but working the student hangouts in Annapolis, Georgetown, and College Park—

  Where the big state U. is, Listener, and the take per trick was less than at the private colleges, but the customer-count was higher.

  Mostly war vets, as established, but occasional tenderfeet as well—including first-timers, who were less intimidated by us nice coed types than they would've been by bona fide hookers. And mostly in the guys' cars (the ones who had cars in those days) or off-campus rooms and apartments, but now and then in their fraternity houses.

  "Which brings us...ta-da!..."

  To a certain spring Saturday in '48: Harry Truman winding up his term as FDR's successor and facing Thomas E. Dewey in the upcoming election, which we roundheel coeds weren't old enough yet to vote in. And just as we're finishing dinner and discussing where to peddle our merchandise that evening, and whether Arundel State Teachers T-shirts would be a turnoff or a come-hither on Wisconsin Avenue and environs, we get a call from a very nervous-sounding lad up at Mason-Dixon U.: a turf we'd had our eyes on, it being the most prestigious hereabouts, but hadn't had a shot at yet.

  Here we go: Tell it, Gracie.

  Introduced himself as Manfred Dickson, a freshman at MDU who was pledging Lambda Upsilon fraternity, known for its Hell Week hazing rituals—

  "Such as olive races, where the pledges scramble naked through the house on all fours with olives in their ass-cracks while getting whacked on the butt with pledge paddles by their upperclass brothers, and whoever drops his olive has to eat it? Yuck."

  And their famous scavenger hunt, where the poor fucks draw lots for such tasks as hauling up into Pennsylvania in the middle of the night to steal road signs for the towns of Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, and Blue Ball...

  Or, in Pledge Dickson's case, producing for the brothers' pleasure a woman or women prepared to satisfy for a reasonable fee the carnal appetites of the entire chapter house: a task that he'd've flunked cold, he said, if one of the guys hadn't happened to be an ex-Marine junior-year transfer from the D.C. area who'd gotten our phone number from a Naval Academy plebe bar down our way, where we were sort of famous. And hey, he wanted to know: Didn't I think it meant something, quote-unquote, that my name was Mason and his was Dickson and our paths were fated to cross at Mason-Dixon U.? If, that is, we would please please PLEASE rescue his ass by letting one of his car-owning brothers pick us up pronto and fetch us to Lambda Ups for just a couple of hours at whatever was our usual and regular rate? Which was what, by the way? But not to worry, he'd made them promise to pay cash up front, and they were all really great guys, really: gentlemen and scholars, though tough on pledges and heavy on the brew. And was my first name actually Grace, as in Saving or Amazing? Fact stranger than fiction!

  Et cetera, at a mile a minute, the guy was so nervous and excited and maybe a bit beered-up himself. But he agreed to our fee per head, so to speak, and to my proposal to bring along a couple of my sisters to help service his brothers, if he'd pick us up at nine sharp at the Arundel Club, near the ASTC campus, and have us back by one A.M. latest, as we had heavy studying to get done before our Monday classes.

  And boyoboy, Listener, did that ever turn him on! What were we majoring in? What did we think of our profs at ASTC? Were we taking any literature courses, and what had we read lately that really blew us away? It was all Grace could do to get him off the phone and into his frat buddy's car to come fetch us in time for our date.

  "Which, however, he did, on the dot, with his Marine-vet brother at the wheel; and where that one was all wise-guy winks and raunchy jokes, Pledge Manny was as flustered and courteous as if we were three debutantes being escorted to a coming-out party."

  A lanky, bespectacled, red-haired, and freckle-faced nineteen-year-old he was, Listener, from the western Maryland mountains, on full scholarship at MDU and green as those Allegheny hills in May about most things social, sexual, and even academic. But a quick learner, as Gracie mentioned earlier, with a drunkard's thirst in all three of those departments.

  "Speaking of which—I mean threes?..."

  He was so wowed by there being three of us, and by the Mason-Dixon/Mason-Dickson coincidence, and my being named Grace, that by the time we hit the highway north for MDU he was already calling us his Three Graces—

  Like the ones in the myths, which back then we-all were just learning about...

  —and right away he names Thelma "Thalia" and Aggie "Aglaia," like them, and starts filling our ears with how, in his opinion, the Hell Week pledge tasks, with their go-find-thises and figure-out-thats, are a sort of undergrad version of stuff that the old-time heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas had to do: descents into the underworld, quests and ordeals and like that. And since what those hero types were really after was capital-K Knowledge—like who they truly are, and how to get where they're supposed to go and do what they're destined to do when they get there?—it was sort of appropriate for college freshmen to reenact that Heroic Quest business as they began their own, didn't we think? And please excuse him for rattling on about this Greek myth stuff: It was on account of the coincidence that while he was learning the Greek alphabet, the way all MDU frat pledges had to do, he happened also to be reading Homer and Company in his freshman lit survey courses and getting hooked on all that great stuff, though he hadn't chosen a major yet because he couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to be when he grew up—maybe because he didn't really know yet who he was, you know? And we should forgive him for hogging the mike so, when what he really wanted was to hear about our paying our way through college the way we were, which he thought was twice as heroical as anything he and his Hell Week pals were doing.

  "And didn't he flip when Gracie said he should make that thrice as heroical instead of twice, 'cause she'd noticed in our own lit classes that things in those old-time stories usually come in threes, whether it's the Graces and the Fates and such or the number of heads on that monster-dog Whatsisname, that guards the gates of Hades..."

  Just about creamed his chinos at that, Manny did, and then perched on his knees in the passenger seat like a five-year-old—

  "Like a three-year old—"

  —to talk to the three of us in the back and see how many three-things we could come up with, from Goldilocks's bears to Dante's Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

  Which Listener will remember are the three books of The Divine Comedy, written in three-line stanzas, which Aggie gets the same A-plus for remembering now as Manny gave her for coming up with it then, especially the terza rima bit, all of it echoing the
three-in-one Holy Trinity. Meanwhile, the driver-guy is rolling his eyes and shaking his crewcut head and telling Manny to pass the fucking Budweiser for God's sake and change the subject? By then we're in the city, in the blocks of rowhouses near the MDU campus, which is where most of the students live and the frat houses are, and we pull up to one that has two big Greek letters over the door, the left one like an upside-down capital V—which is actually their L, lambda—and the other like a right-side-up capital Y, which is upsilon, their U.

  As Manny happily explains to us, until smart-ass "Thalia" tells him the lambda looks to her like a pair of wide-open legs, and smart-ass Yours-Truly-"Aglaia" says that if that one has her legs open, the other one must have hers closed, which is no way to make a living. And then our driver—Bob, I believe his name was?—finally joins the fun by saying, "That chick's legs aren't closed; she's upside down with 'em spread wide open," and Manny says, "Welcome to Lambda Upsy-daisy, girls" as he hands us out of the car, and Gracie says, "Ten bucks a head to dine at the Y, guys," and in we go.