Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

by John Barth

  Even to a callow first-grader, the contrast with Narrator’s own family was stark. Fred Newett—sometime insurance salesman, sometime car salesman (he’d arranged the Prospers’ purchase of that LaSalle), and sometime other things—was never an unkind father to his only child, just an impassive, distracted, and not very interested one, no doubt in part because of the double burden of the nation’s economic and his wife’s psychological depression. Aside from whatever might have been Lorraine Irving Newett’s congenital disposition and any marital problems unrecognizable by a six-year-old, she had been much saddened by the stillbirth of her and Fred’s first child (a girl, two years pre-George) and the late-term miscarriage of their third (another girl, two years post-). While declaring herself quite satisfied with her son, she made no secret of her disappointment at not having a daughter as well. “It would’ve been so nice [her signature adjective] if you’d had a sister. Wouldn’t that’ve been nice?” Narrator supposed so; what did he know? The Prosper siblings bickered and teased good-naturedly, and since the boys’ kindergarten friendship they more and more included Narrator in their high-spirited taunts and tussles, which he quite enjoyed. While he didn’t really mind returning home to only-childhood and his comparatively indifferent parenting—Dad buried in his newspapers and desk-business after a long day’s whatever, Mom busy in kitchen or sewing-room or working crossword puzzles in her front-porch rocker and inevitably replying (as when Narrator later recounted to her this adventure-still-in-progress), “Now wasn’t that nice!”—the contrast didn’t escape him. Dave and Mary Prosper were forever attending or hosting dinners, club and church and school events, outings with their friends and their children’s friends; the Newetts, while cordial to their Bridgetown neighbors, had almost no social life.

  “Here’s how we’re doing it, mates,” Dad Prosper instructs them when all hands pile out of the LaSalle at the fenced-in base of the steel-truss watchtower, at least a hundred feet tall, surrounded by pines and underbrush on a dirt-and-oystershell road halfway down South Neck: “How many of us are there in this birthday climbing-party, Nedward?”

  Pretending to count carefully, “One, two, three, four, five!” the birthday-boy replies; then teases, “Unless Gee doesn’t count?” His nickname for Narrator. “Or I count twice?”

  Nay to both propositions, the parents agree, clever Ruthie adding however that if both of those silly propositions were true, the answer would still be five.

  “Attagirl!” applauds Mom, while Narrator is still sorting out the arithmetical logic. And, “Look carefully now, Georgie-boy: How many pairs of platforms must we daring climbers climb before we reach that tower’s top? Count every second platform.”

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten . . . five pairs?”

  “Quite a coincidence, hey? And at each of those second platforms, we climbers are to pause and gather ’round. Am I right?”

  “What for?” wonders Ned. The rest of us grin knowingly and say nothing.

  “And the order of the ascending climbers shall be: First,”—Mr. P. indicating himself—“the heaviest member of the troupe, to make sure the CCC’s construction job is sound. Second, the winner of our hard-fought Cow Poker match, its contestants neck and neck until that Texaco station in Rock Harbor cost the birthday-boy half his herd.”

  “Booo!” jeers the loser, while his sister triumphantly curtsies.

  “Behind and below her, our Guest of Honor . . . ” Ned’s turn to bow. “Followed by . . . our Honored Guest.” I.e., Theirs Truly, honored indeed to be included in that happy clan, though unable to articulate his gratitude. “And tailed closely in turn by the organizer-in-chief of this valiant adventure, whom we here applaud.”

  We duly do, while pretty Ma Prosper mock-curtsies like her daughter and warns us not to count on her to catch us if we tumble, she being an acrophobe who’ll be clinging to the stairrailings for dear life.

  “Acrophobe?” Narrator wonders aloud.

  “Look it up, Dummy,” suggests Ruth.

  “But while you’re looking it up,” Ned adds, “Don’t look down.”

  All hands laugh, Narrator included, who doesn’t yet understand the joke but recognizes that there is one, and does understand his friend’s whispered follow-up advice: “Look up Ruthie’s dress instead!”

  “Naughty naughty!” his sister scolds, who’s anyhow wearing those cold-weather leggings. Her dad having opened the padlock with borrowed key, through the gate and up the first steep flights of metal stairs we go in designated order, gloved hands gripping the stair rails, four-fifths of us rehearsing silently, as we climb, our respective parts in the little five-step ceremony that Ned’s parents have devised without his knowing it. At the first “second platform,” Mrs. Prosper calls out, “Landing Number One!” Then she gathers us together, holds up one forefinger, points the other at her wondering son, and declares in a loud singsong: “When he was one year old, he was wetting the bed!”

  “Was not!” Ned protests, but “Were so,” his sister smugly affirms.

  “Onward and upward, and enough of that,” directs Dad. Pausing us next at “Landing Number Two!” (i.e. platform four) he picks up his wife’s singsong: “When you were two years old, you were walking, Ned!”

  “And talking a blue streak,” adds Mom.

  “And messing with my stuff already,” adds Sis.

  “I think I’m catching on,” the birthday boy groans. “Let’s get this over with.”

  But “Not so fast, young man,” his mother says, and instructs us all to appreciate the changing perspective on our surroundings from the successive platforms. “Like the way we get a better view of things as we grow up,” she explains: “ourselves included.” To which her husband adds, “It’s what’s called an incremental perspective, okay? Try that one on your teachers sometime.”

  And indeed, by the next even-numbered platform—where Ruthie, in her turn, announces, “Landing Number Three!” and then recites to her brother, “When you were three years old, I was six already, so nyah!”—the assembled are approaching treetop height, and Narrator is wondering already whether on Maryland’s table-flat Eastern Shore and in low-rise Stratford/ Bridgetown, where few if any buildings are more than four stories high, he has ever been farther off the ground than he’ll be at . . .

  “Landing Number Four!” he calls out when they’ve climbed there, per their secretly pre-rehearsed program; then adds, in rhyme with the verse before, “When we were four years old. I didn’t know you yet, Neddy.”

  “Boo-hoo,” the Guest of Honor sarcastically responds, whereat Narrator musses his buddy’s cap, and Mr. Prosper instructs us to notice the muskrat houses out in yonder marsh and to appreciate that if the CCC and the Park Service hadn’t recently declared this whole area a National Wildlife Refuge, its valuable wood- and wetlands would be being deforested, drained, and turned into farmland like so much of the rest of our peninsula, without regard to the environmental consequences.

  “The what?” Ned wants to know, and his parents explain.

  “But when you were five years old,” Mrs. Prosper recites at “Landing Number Five!”—the last platform before the tower-top observation booth—“you two were kindergarten friends.... ”

  “And now you’re six years old!” we choristers then proclaim in unison, one of us at each platform-corner and the eyerolling birthday boy at its center. “And here’s how your birthday poem ends:Happy birthday to you,

  Happy solstice day too!

  May you prosper, Neddy Prosper,

  When the winter is through!”

  “Wow,” allows he, quite obviously wowed as his family hugs him while Narrator looks enviously on. Then “Better get ourselves aloft now,” Mr. P. advises, “if we want to see what we’ve hauled all this way to see. Same climbing-order, please, and do be careful”—the final, shorter ascent being no angled stairway, but a vertical metal ladder leading to a narrow walkway around the booth. His sister thus positioned directly above his h
ead as we climb, Ned calls out “We see Christmas!” even though, for the aforementioned winter-wardrobe reasons, we don’t. Nor had Narrator ever, except for a few fleeting instances on playground swings and seesaws, seen up a girl’s skirt to her thusdesignated underpants, not to mention—what Pal Ned claimed his sister had displayed to him more than once, and what in the season to come, up in the Prosper family attic, she’ll offer for Narrator’s Let’s-Play-Doctor examination—the bare-naked Mystery itself.

  “Boys . . . ” tut-tuts Mrs. P.

  “Will be boys,” her husband supposes, standing by at the ladder-top to hand each of us safely up onto the walkway. “Looks like we’re just in time and might even luck out with the clouds. Remember not to look directly at the sun till it’s almost all the way down, okay?”

  Had Narrator ever even seen a proper sunset before? Certainly not such a view of one, from such a viewpoint. The great Chesapeake itself—“Largest estuarine system on the planet,” Mrs. Prosper informs us, having first defined estuarine “for any who mightn’t know”—is visible to westward beyond the snow-patched marsh-grass and loblolly pines; a few last workboats are motoring in toward Rock Harbor, and Maryland’s western shore—which Narrator had seldom set foot on, but the Prospers often ferried over to, to Annapolis, Washington, and Baltimore—can be made out on the far horizon. Toward it the great orange sun has already descended to an altitude of no more than one Solar Diameter (term supplied by Ned, who some minutes later will officially announce, “Lower limb touching!” and bump his left leg against Narrator’s right).

  Despite Dad Prosper’s warning, what youngster could not steal furtive glances aplenty as the grand disk first touches the hazed horizon and then steadily sinks behind and below it, its movement perceptible for the first time in Narrator’s life? “And remember,” Mrs. P. reminds all hands, “it’s not the Sun that’s moving, but us: the Earth spinning on its axis from west to east.” A literally dizzying idea, at that height and in those circumstances: Narrator grips the platform-rail to steady himself as, with parental permission once the sun is two-thirds set, they attend its final disappearance, hoping to see the legendary green flash reputed to occur under just the right atmospheric conditions at sunset’s last moment, but which none present has ever witnessed.

  “I think I saw it!” ventures Ned.

  “Did not,” declares his sister.

  “Maybe on Birthday Seven?” either Mom or Dad offers, and the other says, “Time for us to go down now, while there’s still light to see by. Hasta mañana, O sole mio, and pardon my French.” And on the merry ride back to Bridgetown, amid the back-seat/front-seat banter and more talk of solstices and equinoxes, “Just remember what the Good Book tells us,” Mr. Prosper mock-solemnly bids all hands: “To every thing there is a season.”

  “Ecclesiastes Three,” footnotes his wife, who teaches kids’ Sunday School at Bridgetown Methodist-Protestant Southern.

  2

  winter

  AND THERE ENDED “Gee’s” Solstitial Illumination of Post-Equinoctial Vision #1, as he seems to have dubbed his first-drafting thereof. No green flash at its close, either—when with gratified relief he transferred it from loose-leaf binder to desktop computer, editing as he typed—but an afterglow of further associated memories, not all of them warm. Such a contrast between his old pal Ned’s family life and his own! (“Now wasn’t that nice,” Mom Newett granted, scarcely looking up from her dinner plate of Smithfield ham, steamed kale, and mashed potatoes while he recounted his adventure; and Dad once again disdained such “three-initial make-works” as CCC and WPA: “We Piss Anywhere,” he would sniff at the sight of road- and bridge-builders standing about.) That last line of Ned’s birthday song, When the winter is through, reminded G. now not only of the heavy literal winters of his childhood—snow forts and snowmen and snowball fights under the leafless maples of Bridge Street; the creeks and rivers frozen hard enough for ice-skating, and even the Bay itself ice-locked at times from shore to shore, as almost never happens nowadays; coal bins and coal furnaces in those years before most folks switched to oil or gas; even free-standing wood- and coal-stoves in the houses still without central heating—but also of the long economic winter of the Great Depression, more burdensome to his parents, he came to understand, than to Ned and Ruth’s, who were on the state payroll. As Fred Newett more than once dryly observed, “Schoolteachers mightn’t get paid much, but at least they get paid regular.”

  “And that means something,” G.’s mother would agree, characteristically not troubling to explain to her son just what, in fact, it meant: the security of knowing that however much the family might have to scrimp and save while FDR’s New Deal gradually improved the nation’s general welfare, at least they wouldn’t likely be standing in breadlines or squatting in “Hoovervilles” like so many of their less fortunate countrymen.

  “Et cetera,” G. concluded now to his wife, who supposed she was lucky to have been born twelve years after her spouse—just in time for World War Two?

  “Another grim season,” her husband granted, although he could still hear his father declaring (probably over Chesapeake crabcakes, coleslaw, and iced tea, another favorite Newett family menu) that it sure put the country’s economy back on its feet, their domestic one included, despite wartime shortages and rationing: his insurance business up; people eager to buy new cars—or better used ones, as war production raised farm and factory incomes but curtailed production of nonessential goods.

  “Seasons,” Mandy echoed. We happened likewise to be enjoying crabcakes, made however with blue-crab meat imported from who knew where, the local crabbing season having ended in the fall; and instead of iced tea we sipped jug Chablis and mineral water. “You seem to be hooked on that particular motif lately.”

  Netted by, he guessed he’d say, rather than hooked on, the accompanying victuals being crustaceans rather than fish. But, “I reckon I am: hooked in spades, to mix another metaphor.” Because the more he mused it—which is what he mainly did with his mornings through that January and February and into March, while Senator John McCain won the Republican presidential primaries, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled each other for the Democratic nomination, and things dragged bloodily on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the stock market went down and up and down, but the price of food and fuel went up up up—the more it appeared to him that those ascending levels of the South Neck fire-watchtower, with their “incremental perspective” of the surrounding scene, could be said to correspond not only to the successive years of his and Ned Prosper’s then-so-young lives, but also to the successive stages, or extended “seasons,” of Narrator’s much longer Story Thus Far. The first of which (“Platform Number One!”) might be thought of as the Depression-era “Winter” of their Bridgetown childhood. Ages zero through thirteen, say: birth to adolescence. Or better, kindergarten through “junior high,” as middle school was called back then: the period of “Gee” Newett’s developing buddyhood with (the late) “Nedward” Prosper, whose never-published (because never finished) magnum opus this “seasons” thing ought properly to have been and might somehow yet manage to become, if Ned’s old and still aging pal can bring it off.

  The late . . . We’ll get to that.

  “So you’re hooked. Netted. Hung up. Whatever,” said Poet/Professor/Helpmeet Amanda Todd. “So haul in your catch, even if it’s yourself. As your friend’s parents said back in 1936 and Pete Seeger sang in the 1950s, To everything there is a season, right? Me, I’ve got Shakespeare’s sonnets to teach tomorrow morning and their author to learn from tonight, so if it’s okay by you we’ll do the dishes now and I’ll join you later.”

  We did that, as is our custom: cleaned up together what we’d together prepared and enjoyed, then withdrew to separate rooms, not this time for our usual postprandial hour or so of undistracted leisure reading, but Wife instead to work in Her makeshift home-office workspace, and Hubby—most unusual for him at this hour—to do likewise in His: to make
a few reminder-notes, at least, of some further Kids-in-Bridgetown recollections triggered by his “vision” of that long-ago fire-tower climb. E.g.:

  —Their high-spirited street and sidewalk games: “Gee,” “Nedward,” Ruthie, and a couple of Ruth’s girl friends, maybe. Hopscotch, played with oyster shells tossed onto the chalked diagram. Jump rope: the girls only, as he recollects, but he and Ned sometimes spun the longer rope for them, duly calling “I see Christmas!” if occasion warranted. Kick the Can: rules forgotten, but not the satisfaction of being first to reach the empty quart-sized food tin standing inverted in mid-Water Street (the low-traffic side road on which both families lived, just off busier Bridge Street) and send it clanking down the macadam, sometimes under a parked car. Backyard Hide-and-Seek—or Hide and Go Seek, as they customarily called it, perhaps preferring the rhythm of that extra syllable; or Hide and No Seek, as they’d call it when whoever was “It” decided as a prank to go sit on the front-porch steps and wait with amusement for the hiders to realize that they weren’t being sought—with one of the neighborhood’s great maples (all now dead and gone, like the original residents of its two-storey clapboard houses) designated as Home.

  —Fishing (apropos of his and Mandy’s recent talk of his “being hooked” and “hauling in the catch”) in Avon Creek with Ned and Dad Prosper, off the concrete seawall at the foot of the Bridgetown-to-Stratford drawbridge, a few blocks from their houses. No rods and reels for the youngsters, but long bamboo poles rigged by Mr. P. with hooks, lines, bobbers, and sinkers, and baited with bits of peeler-crab meant to snag, with luck, perch and “hardheads” barely large enough to be Keepers, but sometimes eels (a slimy nuisance to untangle and unhook) or inedible, bait-wasting toadfish, which one simply whacked to death on the seawall-top and tossed back. Although the Keepers generally yielded no more than a few forkfuls each, Mrs. Prosper and even Ma Newett, when not in one of her down spells, would obligingly scale, clean, pan-fry, and serve them up for dinner, typically with cornbread, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and her highest compliment: “Right nice.”