by John Barth
“Well, now,” her bowled-over husband responded when he could: “As the Bard himself might put it, Wowee, and thankee thankee thankee! Maybe on location we can even nail down the difference between Stratford-upon-Avon and Stratford-on-Avon!”
Itself worth the cost of the expedition, smiling Amanda agreed, but then confessed as we clinked congratulatory wineglasses, “Already did that, actually, on the Web: On is the district in Warwickshire—pronounced Worricksher?—and Upon is the town itself. Okay?”
“Okay! Did Professor Newett mention that he remains the humble and devoted servant of Professor Todd?”
“One suspects he did—and what she requests of said vassal just now is his meticulous review of all the shore-excursion and other cruise-crap stuff that she’ll be dumping shortly on his desk.” Another wineglass clink. “Happy seventy-sixth, Giorgio mio!”
For it was indeed in the near neighborhood of that anniversary, if not necessarily on its very date, that she announced this ambitious project, on which she had been laboring quietly, Amanda-style, for weeks. It would be, as she’d warned, more expensive by far than any previous junket of ours: The cost of its trip-cancelation insurance alone would almost have covered one of our early campground-and-youth-hostel expeditions to Iberia or the Canadian Rockies. But what the hell, we were Tenured or Emeritus Old Farts these days, with who could say how few healthy life-semesters remaining and no offspring to be benefacted. And as he expected, G.’s follow-up review of A.’s extensive research quite supported her enthusiasm for the plan, especially its Stratford-to-Stratford aspect. From StratColl’s “Shakespeare House” (whereof more presently) to the Bard’s actual once-upon-a-time domicile (ditto): Anchors aweigh! PrimeTime Cruise Lines being a justifiably much-indemand operation, we locked in our reservations with a whopping year-in-advance down payment.
Whereupon the goddamn gods, as if to demonstrate yet again that their heavy-handedness knows no limit, exchanged winks at Mandy’s “Giorgio mio” and saw to it just a few weeks later that the seventh named tropical storm of that year’s season—yup, Giorgio—would spin up from the Caribbean and shift from tropical storm to hurricane strength and back as he passed under Puerto Rico, whacked hapless Haiti, crossed Cuba and the Florida Straits, and moved close offshore up the southeastern USA to his next landfall at Carolina’s Outer Banks, thence into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and usward up the Delmarva Peninsula. Where to our premature vast relief he showed every sign of fizzling into mere more-or-less-severe thunderstorms and much-needed rain, the way most of G. I. Newett’s O.F. Fictions fizzle in the second or third trimester of their gestation. Except that (and how G. wishes he could pull off some narratively equivalent surprise, for a change) one of those t-storms, as if to give the finger to us Vastly Relieved Heron Bay Weather Watchers, farted out en passant the afore-noted short-lived but violent F3 tornado that miraculously killed only a couple of our number but quite destroyed the exurban gated community of Heron Bay Estates, including the over-and-under coach homes of its—of our—Blue Crab Bight subdivision.
Our library! Our home-office files and work in “progress,” such as it was! Not to mention furniture and clothing, photo albums, and other irreplaceable souvenirs of our decades together, no more than half of it salvageable (unlike many other buildings in the development, our particular duplex was left standing, but its windows, doors, and half the roof were gone with the wind). Ourselves physically unharmed, we happening to be on campus at the time—Mandy in her office in StratColl’s Shakespeare House, the modest frame-bungalow headquarters of the Creative Writing Program, and Yrs Truly looking up something-or-other in the college library-stacks when shit hit fan—but our so-agreeable routine life kaput.
Not the cheeriest kickoff to one’s seventy-seventh year and the half-time of one’s partner’s sixty-fifth. Through the remainder of that academic semester and into the next (from ingrained habit, we Todd/Newetts think of a year as divided primarily into fall semester, spring semester, and summer break, and only secondarily—or for particular literary purposes—into seasons), as with our fellow Heron Bay refugees we salvaged what we could of our belongings, scrabbled and scrambled to set up housekeeping in new quarters (less of a crisis, though still a major headache, for the more affluent with already-established second homes elsewhere, but a particular problem for us middle-income single-homers, “exurban” to a small college town in a semi-rural county with limited available housing), we more than once considered scrapping our proposed and already down-paymented Stratford-to-Stratford adventure. How afford such an extravagance now with so many unanticipated expenses straining our budget? And what was that costly trip insurance for, after all, if not to cover our butts in unexpected setbacks like this? Wardrobes to be replenished, salvaged possessions to be put in storage until we found new permanent lodgings, insurance adjusters to be negotiated with—and for Mandy, classes to be taught as well, lectures prepared, and papers graded! Not to mention bye-byes to our separate, not-all-that-busy muses. Anchors away (until some next life, maybe)....
But rather to our own surprise, after lucking out of our post-Giorgio motel-squatting into a well-furnished riverfront condo in Stratford (leased from a history-department retiree who’d recently moved with his wife to Florida and might even agree to sell if they decided to remain there) and making shift in office-space at the college—Mandy in her official departmental quarters, G.I.N. at the desk of an ex-colleague on leave—while setting up our new home work-spaces and negotiating a reasonably reasonable insurance payout on our total-loss Blue Crab Bightery, by mid-spring we found ourselves managing not badly, all things considered. Well enough, anyhow, to begin looking forward again to that upcoming September PrimeTime Cruise Lines fling as a welcome, well-earned reward for so much cataclysm-coping. After which—who knew?—we might even get back to doing some Creative Writing ourselves instead of merely supervising its apprentice creation by others. Anchors aweigh? Especially since, as Mandy discovered and reported, trip cancellation because of financial setback resulting from natural disaster was not covered by our travel policy?
Anchors aweigh, and off we by-George went, as aforereported, by car and plane from tidewater Delmarva to Sweden’s handsome capital; strolled same with pleasure until embarkation time, admiring its quaint old Gamla stan byways while giving the figurative finger to its Swedish Academy for never having awarded their Nobel Prize in Literature to such now-late worthies as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino—each of whom would have done at least as much honor to the prize as it to them—while often bestowing it instead upon writers whom even we lit-lovers may scarcely have heard of, and many of whom, to put it mildly, must lose a lot in translation; then boarded that sleek palazzo of a cruise ship and were escorted to our stateroom, duly impressed en route by the elegant atriums, wide staircases, glass-enclosed elevators, and endless amenities, including a bouquet of fresh flowers and an ice-bucket of champagne awaiting with our already-delivered luggage. We unpacked, agreeing that our quarters were every bit as commodious and well-appointed as advertised, and then convened with fellow passengers in the main ballroom for a welcome-aboard orientation/reception (more champagne and hors d’oeuvres) followed by lifeboatdrill and, if not the literal weighing of the vessel’s anchors, the casting off of its mighty dock lines, the revving up of its sundry side-thrusters (no tugboats necessary these days, we were told, in most instances), and the Seven Seas’ departure from Stockholm’s harbor into the Baltic.
The history-drenched Baltic, new to us Newett/Todds, who though no strangers to the Mediterranean, Aegean, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and other European seas and/or seacoasts, had never till now ventured upon this one, a favorite for summertime cruisers. Their typical itinerary, Mandy had explained back home long since, would be from Stockholm to Estonian Tallinn, thence up the Gulf of Finland for an extended stopover in St. Petersburg, then back to Helsinki and other ports, sailing mainly by night and shore-excursioning by day (a welcome respite for cabin s
tewards and suchlike shipboard service personnel) until the voyage’s end in Copenhagen. But pleased as we’d have been to tour the canals and onion-domes of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, she had elected instead to fetch us from Stockholm straight down to Polish Gdańsk (with an interim stopover at the charming medieval island-port of Visby), thence west to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and on to Shakespeare Land.
And that’s enough traveloguing: Suffice it to say that thanks to Mandy’s homework and judicious planning we quickly shed our reverse-snob cruise-ship prejudice and quite enjoyed both vessel and voyage. Disembarked at Dover’s famed white cliffs, vowing to Do This Again Sometime down our road—maybe on the same just-right-for-us ship (neither overwhelmingly large, like some of the super-behemoths one saw in harbor, nor small enough to enforce intimacy with the likes of those Hadleys), maybe from Dover down the coasts of France and Portugal and on around Iberia to Nice or Monte Carlo, once the pair of us were pensioners? Were met dockside by driver prearranged by M. and by him fetched through rolling, sheepflocked Kentish countryside to Canterbury, which Chaucer’s tale-telling pilgrims never quite reach in his uncompleted Tales, but we T/Ns duly did. Regained our shore-legs among the half-timbered houses and the great old cathedral, paying our respects to Geoffrey C. both as poet and as talester: no Failed Old Fart he, despite his failing to fetch his fictive folk to their destination! Then bypassed London, whereto we’d be returning anyhow for the flight home, and contrived somehow by bus, train, and taxicab (ask Mandy) to haul our tandem tushies and assorted luggage up to Warwickshire’s Stratford-on-Avon and Stratford-upon-same, which is where this long-stalled story (finally!) starts....
On a certain mild but drizzly, quite English-feeling late September Saturday morn—first day of fall and seventy-seventh anniversary, as has been noted, of George Irving Newett’s expulsion from maternal womb in Bridgetown, MD USA—he and his soul-mate wake in their somewhat cramped but cozy bedand-breakfast in Stratford-upon’s Bridgetown, make happy birthday love in its (too small for us Amurkans) double bed, “break fast” with good Brit tea and scones, and, thus properly B&B’d, set out under borrowed umbrellas across the B’townto-Stratford bridge into “Upon,” as we’d come to call it. Being us, we decline the “Shakespearience” guided tour of the Bard’s birthplace, later residence, and final resting place in Holy Trinity Church, preferring to touch those bases at our own unsupervised clip. We happen to be, both of us, literal touchers of stuff that we venerate: not paintings, of course, but items unlikely to be damaged (in our opinion, if not that of museumguards and tour-guides) by the odd respectful body-contact. In Spain, for instance, touring the Cervantes residence-museum in Alcalá de Henares some decades past, G.I.N. had presumed actually to sit at what was advertised to be the master’s desk, his butt in the very chair that Don Miguel was said to have honored with his while penning Don Quixote, and had felt as moved thereby as a True Believer might feel at touching the bronze robe-hem of a patron saint’s statue. Likewise Amanda, back there in Canterbury, had caressed the granite walls of the cathedral right through a beautiful Evensong recital, paying homage not to Gee-dash-Dee but to the splendid architecture, music, and other art inspired by His various religions—along with Crusades, Inquisitions, Jihads, and the like. To the objection that even such respectful, reverential touching does damage over time, we reply with what we once overheard a fellow tourist remark at the sight of a famous old crucifix’s marble Jesus-toes worn down by the kisses of the faithful: “If lips can do that to stone, think what stone must do to lips!”
An example of which, changes changed, will now befall (perpend that verb) the writer of these lines. Down Stratford’s handsome Henley Street we make our way, the small rain dampening everything but our spirits, to the large half-timbered house where on or about 23 April 1564 (St. George’s Day, by G.!, though the exact date is uncertain) the Master drew first breath—Mandy per usual missing nothing en route, and her mate per usual busy with the tour-guide reading and travelogue note-taking that in Her opinion distract him from seeing much of what we’re there to see, but in His preserve a range of details for our future reference, from the number of our favorite room in Canterbury Lodge to those musical numbers so beautifully rendered by organ and choir at that aforementioned Evensong. And it comes to pass that with his attention thus divided—one eye as it were on the guidebook page describing the house immediately before them, the other on the object of that description, and his depth perception thereby at least metaphorically impaired—G. I. Newett misjudges the building’s unusually high stone entrance-step, missteps up thereonto, loses his balance, overcorrects, stumbles and slips or stumbles back and down, and then falls forward, map and guide- and logbook flying as he tries in vain to catch himself, and bangs his forehead squarely on that step-edge, incidentally scraping left palm and right elbow, and bending but not breaking his rimless eyeglass-bridge.
Exclamations of alarm from wife, from entryway tickettaker, and from tourists of sundry nationalities before and behind the faller! Who picks himself up, saying, “It’s okay; I’m okay,” while checking with Mandy to see whether in fact he is. Together they discover not only those incidental damages but—of more concern and potential consequence—that his step-banged brow is now bleeding profusely down under his bent eyeglass-frame and over his nostrils to his lips and chin (like many another oldster, G.I.N. takes a blood-thinning daily aspirin along with his vitamin/mineral supplements as a deterrent to clots and strokes, and therefore bleeds more freely from scrapes and cuts than one would otherwise). “I’m okay,” he tries again to reassure her, hoping and more or less believing that he is, on (recovered) balance, or anyhow will be once the forehead-gash, stanched for the nonce with a wad of pocket Kleenex, is properly cleaned and bandaged.
Nothing more than a basic first-aid kit available on the premises, its much-concerned docent informs us, but there’s “a proper chemist just a few squares off.” His assistant fetches the kit, which we make use of in the visitors’ WC while he goes back to ticket-taking and she to tour-guiding. The bleeding retarded but not altogether checked by a couple of gauze pads, and the gash itself not really sterilized, we decide to postpone for a bit our planned salute to Will’s nativity on George’s natal day and detour instead to that pharmacy, whose obliging onduty “chemist” not only sells us a supply of appropriate-sized bandages, but at no charge inspects the wound, cleans it with antiseptic swabs before re-bandaging it himself, and declares that in his judgment it requires no sutures, but offers to direct us to the nearest National Health Service facility if we want it checked out by a regular physician.
“We really ought to do that,” opines Mandy, and George sort of agrees, but really really doesn’t want to: The thing’s not hurting much now; the bleeding seems to be under control; his slightly bent eyeglass-frames prove readily re-bendable almost to their former alignment. Later that day, at their B&B or wherever, we’ll re-clean and re-re-bandage; meanwhile, he’d much rather get on with what we’ve come so far to see and do. Back to Henley Street and environs, okay?
“What do you think?” she asks the so-obliging pharmacist. He cocks head, shrugs, winks, and allows that’s about what he’d do in our shoes, though his missus mightn’t. He warns, however, that serious head-bangs can sometimes have delayed consequences—intracranial hemorrhaging and the like?—and so at any sign of dizziness, headache, whatever, I should get myself promptly to a clinic.
Agreed. And more or less worrisome as is that possibility, we manage after all a most pleasant birthplace/birthday tour, returning to mid-Henley Street’s landmark Jester statue (starting place for most walking tours of the town) and thence to the Birthplace, taking care this time at that high entrance-step. Greeted familiarly by the ticket-chap, who compliments G.’s considerably tidier though already somewhat bloodstained brow-pad, we mount the also-steep staircase to the building’s first floor and tread the very floorboards once toddled by the baby Bard, then move out and on to Bridge, High, and Chapel Street
s, the eight-century-old Old Town, Shakespeare’s grave, and the lovely Avon river- and canal-side walks, pausing here and there to change the bandage, eat lunch, take a piss, or merely be moved by such proximity to the man Mandy calls “King of the Queen’s English” and by the haunts of his erratic domestic life: married at age eighteen to twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway (already three months pregnant), upon whom he fathers two more children and from whom he then flees to make his career in London, but to whom he more or less returns in his prosperous early retirement and famously bequeaths his “second best bed” upon dying on his fifty-second birthday.
Which this present ’umble servant of said sweet language managed not to do on his after-all-well-spent seventy-seventh. Leg-weary but much satisfied with our salvaged day, at its afternoon’s end we return to our modest lodging not far from the bridge to Bridgetown (a very different-looking venue from G.I.N.’s birthplace of the same name in Maryland’s merely 300-year-old Stratford—but then, it too has much changed over the decades since this scribbler drew first breath: from a rough-and-ready watermen’s village squeezed between the riverside crab-picking and oyster-shucking establishments and Stratford’s segregated Negro ward, to a still downscale but gradually integrating sub-community showing such signs of gentrification as a yachting marina, a passable seafood restaurant, and a row of new waterfront condominiums where the old commercial packing-houses used to be). Once again we clean, disinfect, and bandage the still raw and bruised but no longer bleeding brow, then change into warmer wear and stroll to a previously-checked-out nearby pub to raise mugs of good brown ale over shepherd’s pie and suchlike Brit vittles.