by John Barth
“No no no,” he insisted, more cheerfully. “You’re quite right; the cancer’s beside the point; you must help me teach Hedwig that. So, you have a prescription for me, do you? A tip for the Finals?”
I saw he was ironical, but set forth anyhow a notion that had occurred to me when I considered his Certification in the light of the others I’d challenged. It came to this: that so long as he relished his self-loathing and found his failings piquant, he was by no means being “nothing ignorant”; on the contrary, his failure to see the vital difference between Gynander and himself—between the mantic and the connoisseur—argued to me that he was after all naïve.
“Naïve!” He very nearly tapped his cigar into his coffee-cup. “Naïve!” He could say no more. I blushed, but insisted on the term. What fundamentaller innocence was there, I asked him, than the inability to distinguish passage from failure? Hadn’t he himself alluded, in the Amphitheater, to those verses in the Old Syllabus condemning fallen studentdom to “knowledge of truth and falsehood”—which was to say, awareness of their failure? Yet he still believed—naïvely, in my opinion—not only that total awareness of failure was somehow tantamount to passage, but that experience was synonymous with depravity. In short, he confused innocence and experience, self-knowledge and self-delusion, passage and failure.
“I see,” Dr. Sear said coolly. “And how do you suggest I correct this lamentable ingenuousness?”
What I suggested, stubbornly, was that he learn to loathe his self-loathing in fact, and not just in the voluptuous way, by taking true measure of his perversion …
“Ah,” he said, brightening up at once. I hastened to add that what I had in mind was no elaboration of his usual amusements; depravity à quatre was not perverser than depravity à trois, I argued, any more than voyeurism by fluoroscope was naughtier than Eierkopf’s night-glass watches. No, the consummate perversion for a man of his temper, as I saw it, lay on the opposite hand: let him eschew the piquant and exotic, if he would taste the full flunkèdness of his life; let him pursue instead the humblest and most commonplace of satisfactions …
“What do you mean, exactly?” he demanded. “Eat my beef well-done? Drink beer from a can with dinner? Watch Telerama-shows all evening?” Even as he told over these suggestions I saw his fine nostrils begin to quiver, and was the more persuaded of my good judgment. I shook my head.
“It’s your sex-life I had in mind, sir. I believe you should freshen Mrs. Sear.”
He had been going to sip his coffee, and looked up with the cup poised before his mouth. “I beg your pardon?”
“Service Mrs. Sear yourself, sir, in the ordinary way. Breed her again. She’s not past bearing age, I suppose?”
He was too astonished to reply, but as I was considering whether I’d possibly got the terms wrong for human husbandry, Anastasia came exclaiming from the hallway.
“That’s a perfect idea!” she cried, and made it so with a kiss on my temple. “It’s just what Hedwig needs, Kennard! Especially now!”
Dr. Sear scoffed: his wife’s infirmities, her imminent widowhood, her beginning menopause—not to mention the parlous state of the University, ever worsening, and the general absurdity of existence … Anastasia clung to his arm, nestled into his shoulder, clasped his dry hand for very rapture at the thought of procreation; for such a coaxing I’d have studded Mrs. Sear myself, and I knew as well—so transparent to me now was My Ladyship—that Anastasia would gladly have taken the man’s seed into her own unfruited womb, from sheer access of solicitude, or permitted any husband or most-treasured lover of her own to impregnate Mrs. Sear, if the doctor could not.
“Just imagine, Kennard!” she fairly wept; “a baby for Hedwig!” She rushed to me again; her excitement stirred even Peter Greene to grunt through his stupor. I drew her boldly to my lap this time, confident in my knowledge; sure enough, she let herself be set upon me, as she would upon any other who knew how to touch her, and my heart flagged even as my blood bucked at the feel of her.
Dr. Sear put down his cup with a clatter and strode this way and that.
“Ridiculous! It’s unthinkable!” He laughed harshly. “Why do you suppose we’ve had no children all these years, for pity’s sake? Besides—but what difference does it make! Absurd!” So he expostulated, slapped his arms to his sides, sniffed and fulminated, laughed and adjusted his spectacles atop the little bandage, while Anastasia wept and hugged me for delight: quite the most reaction I’d provoked thus far by my Tutoring (for Tutoring it was, I recognized now with a stir of awe, that I’d been at since Scrapegoat Grate, no less than completing my Assignment).
“Mom and Dad Sear!” he snorted, and bit on his foreknuckle.
“Yes!” Anastasia clapped her hands. “It’s the absolute answer! You’re a genius, George!”
Sear stopped pacing and narrowed his eyes at me with whimsical respect. “He’s a tougher man to please than Harold Bray, I’ll vouch for that. Hedwig and I!”
At every such allusion to my proposal, Anastasia bounced; I was relieved now that Peter Greene showed signs of rewaking, for had she not got off me (anxious to begone lest the sight of her do him further harm), I must soon have bespermed myself. She would telephone her husband from downstairs, she said—should have done earlier, he’d behaved so queerly at lunch—and either hail a taxi or wait for a Powerhouse-guard if Stoker cared to dispatch one to the Infirmary. Dr. Sear, it was hurriedly agreed, should keep Greene under his surveillance, either there or at home, until the man’s trauma could be assessed and directed to the positive end of mature self-knowledge.
“Nothing à trois, I promise,” he said to me, and shook his head once more in dismay at what I’d proposed. “You’re quite welcome to spend the night too, you know; we never did get to talk about Max and the rest, and I want to look at that mad Assignment you mentioned … or were you going with Stacey?”
I had not of course considered my next move, much less where I’d spend the night; a clock on Dr. Sear’s wall showed seven, my own watch six—in either case it was early evening, and tired as I was there were tasks remaining to be accomplished. I stood up and fished the Assignment from my purse.
“There are some important things I want to discuss with you,” I told Anastasia. “Very important. Let me see what’s next on my list … It says Re-place the Founder’s Scroll. Have they lost it, do you suppose?”
Dr. Sear and Anastasia agreed that the so-called Founder’s Scroll (a recently-excavated assortment of Old- and New-Syllabus fragments presented to New Tammany by the Chancellor of New Moishe College, where the parchments had been discovered, in gratitude for the help New Tammany’s Moishians had given their symbolic alma mater) was not to their knowledge missing from its temporary display-case in the Central Library. Dr. Sear, however, remembered having read that the Cataloguing Office was experiencing some difficulty in the matter of filing it permanently: CACAFILE, WESCAC’s automatic classification and filing facilities, he recalled, which operated from definitions originally programmed into it by various scholars and then improved by its own self-scanning techniques, could not decide (as it were) whether the precious relic should be classified under Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Archeology, Art, or History—each of which departments claimed it. When Library officials had presented it physically to the CACAFILE as a last resort, hoping to force a mechanical arbitration, the Scroll had disappeared for some anxious hours into the automatic bookstacks and been finally returned as unclassifiable.
“Yet it says re-place, doesn’t it?” he mused. “Not just place. Intriguing task.” His mind was not much on the matter, I perceived; though he remembered to give me the Clean Bill of Health I’d asked for, and suggested to Anastasia that she direct me to the Library on her way out, it was my advice that still absorbed him.
“Have a nice weekend,” Anastasia bade him pointedly as we left.
His vellum cheeks actually colored. “Ridiculous!”
“Please, Kennard: Heddy’d love it, I know!�
� Even more, I saw, would she, who as our lift came was inspired with a further proposal: “Take her to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, Kennard!”
“Oh, Stacey!” He turned away and closed the office door, for Greene was stirring loudly now. But even Anastasia acknowledged with a giggle that his impatience with us was of the embarrassed kind, and that what disconcerted him was his real fascination with the idea.
“You’re a darling to think of it!” she said, and hugged my arm. Her plain amusement did nothing for my buckly cramps of love; but though I re-entered the lift more gimpish than I’d left it some time earlier, I rejoiced at being two steps nearer Commencement Gate.
5.
Once we were alone in the little compartment her self-consciousness returned: she let go my elbow and turned her eyes from the poked-out front of my gown. To put her at ease I said, “Pardon my erection,” and assured her that despite my obvious desire, to which Love must positively now be added, I did not intend to mount her.
“Don’t talk that way!” she pleaded.
“There’s no help for it,” I declared sadly; “in fact, I doubt very much that we’ll ever mate again. Not because you’re married—I haven’t decided quite what to make of marriage yet. But I think we might be brother and sister, so we probably shouldn’t copulate.”
I had been going to recommend in addition that she forsake all other bedmates as well, in order to remove any doubts about the motives of her famous sympathy; but she paled so at mention of our possible relation that I judged it prudenter to postpone further counsel. Her lovely face was stricken; with welling eyes she heard WESCAC’s account: that inasmuch as she was Virginia R. Hector’s daughter, if I was truly the GILES we must have the same mother; and that if, as was the common report, Miss Hector had had but a single accouchement, we were actually twins.
She clutched the handrail and shook her head. The door opened upon a virtually empty lobby. I was obliged to lead her from the lift, and we stood uncertainly under the eyes of a distant receptionist and two orderlies at the revolving exit-door. Unease dispelled my cramps and detumesced me.
“Mind,” I said to reassure her, “the only thing that’s certain is that I’m the Grand Tutor and you’re Miss Hector’s daughter. All the rest, even this GILES business, is only conjecture.”
“Oh, George, this is awful!” Her voice was faint with horror; yet even on the verge of swooning she evidently saw how my expression clouded—as I feared, against my better judgment, that she might be simply loath to own a goat-boy for a brother—and she begged me to believe that it was purely the memory of our public “union,” as she called it, that appalled her. “All those people!”
I thought it perceptive of me to observe: “If I understand human propriety, they’re scandalized already by our Memorial Service, aren’t they? A little extra scandal won’t much matter. Besides—I don’t want to sound vain, but I am the Grand Tutor …”
Her eyes swam now with appreciation of this comfort, instead of shame. Warmly she said—and I thrilled to hear it—that she could think of no man on campus whom she’d prefer as a brother, though she knew herself unworthy of sistership to a Grand-Tutor-to-be … I bade her end such deprecation of herself; of course she was worthy, I insisted—or would be if she’d but accept from me a single bit of Tutelage; to wit: let no man, woman, or other beast mount her or in any wise know her carnally, not even her husband, from that hour forth, that no invidious double-entendre be read into the motto on her spurious diploma: Love thy classmate.
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t include your husband,” I said, as if I dispensed such prohibitions daily. “But your marriage is such an … unusual one that your motive in mating with him might be the same as your motive in mating with Croaker, or Mrs. Sear, or—or Harold Bray, for all I know …”
This last I tossed in off-handedly, but I was unspeakably pleased to hear her protest that she had not “united” with Bray even once, whatever he might have said to the contrary.
“He hasn’t said anything, as far as I know,” I confessed.
“He’d better not. I know he’s a great man and all, but ugh!”
I was emboldened to add, less from vanity than by way of firming my own resolve, that even if I should summon her myself, in my capacity as Grand Tutor of the Western Campus, and bid her conceive a child by me, say, to carry on my work when I should pass away—even then, and knowing as she must that such undergraduate whimsies as the incest-taboo were void before that grand imperative, she was to refuse me.
Wide-eyed she whispered: “Okay.”
“I do love you, you know, Anastasia,” I said, not at all abashed now. “And I’m not a bit sorry about the Memorial Service in the Living Room …”
“You aren’t?”
“Of course not. You were perfectly beautiful, I thought; and, needless to say, it was delightful to climb you. It doesn’t matter whether Stoker was baiting me or not, or whether we’re related: we were innocent. I swear to you as Grand Tutor: it was an okay service.”
The color returned to her face now; she dabbed with a tissue at her eyes and thanked me wholeheartedly for clearing her conscience on that point. I admitted to her finally that, being above human prejudices by virtue of my calling as well as my background, I could not but continue to lust for her on sight, as the most serviceable lady girl I’d ever seen; at the same time I judged it improper for a Grand Tutor to play favorites among his Tutees—as my becoming her particular lover would surely be interpreted. Therefore I welcomed, albeit with a pang of regret, the possibility of brotherly love between us, and the added constraint that siblingship would impose (however artificially) upon our intercourse.
Anastasia listened with glowing eyes. “You’re sweet,” she murmured, and rising impulsively on tiptoes, bussed my cheek. “I’ve needed a brother to straighten me out, from the beginning!”
The prospect which had so alarmed her only a few moments previously seemed now to delight her quite as much as that of Dr. Sear’s connubial husbandry. “I can’t wait to see Mom!” she exclaimed. “I’ll make her ’fess up this time!” Her face was alight. “I know what! Friday’s her night to work: I’ll go with you to the Library, and we’ll kill two birds with one stone!” Her mother, she reminded me, was an assistant director of filing and cataloguing in the Central Library: an office she’d attained on her own merits before the misfortune of her illegitimate pregnancy and subsequent instability, and held since as a kind of sinecure thanks to the influence of her father, the ex-Chancellor. Thus it was she whom I’d be applying to in any case for authorization to re-place the Founder’s Scroll. Anastasia proposed to accompany me there and take the opportunity to “get to the bottom of this sister-thing,” as she put it. Already she was a-bubble with questions and conjectures: if we were twins, or even just siblings, she couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t been raised along with herself; how could anybody not want their own little baby? On the other hand, if something had “taken me away” at birth (of one thing Anastasia was certain: it could never have been our mother’s wish), that circumstance went far, she thought, to explain Virginia Hector’s subsequent lapses of reason, and even her rejection of Anastasia—by what mechanism of psychology I did not grasp. But why had “Uncle Ira” and “Grandpa Reg” never mentioned a brother? And if, as it now appeared, neither Dr. Spielman nor Dr. Eierkopf was our father, who on campus did I suppose was? And whatever could have happened to spirit me away?
“Let’s hurry, George! Aren’t you thrilled to pieces? Oh, darn …” She snapped her fingers. “I really must call Maurice. Only take a sec.”
She hurried off to telephone the Powerhouse from the receptionist’s desk, and I availed myself of the respite to herd my scattered thoughts and address them to the work at hand—more important by far, to my mind, than the details of my genealogy. Mother or no mother, sister or no sister, I had Finals to pass, an impostor to rout, and studentdom to tutor from its error. Re-place the Founder’s Scroll. With humble pride, not unmixed with awe, I r
emarked how clearly each new task, so far from exhausting me, left me stronger for the next; how, for the man of sure vocation, nothing is gratuitous, and the merest happenstance is fraught with meaning. Dr. Sear’s observation about the Library’s classification-problem, now I considered it, pointed clearly to the sense of my task—a sense altogether harmonious (as Sear could never have guessed) with the rest of the Assignment. What had my day’s work proved, if not the necessity of clear distinction? And what were my labors but a series of paradigms, or emblems of this necessity? To distinguish Tick from Tock, East Campus from West, Grand Tutor from goat, appearance from reality (or whatever contraries were involved in seeing through My Ladyship)—all these tasks, like my sundry concomitant advisings, were but ways of saying, “Passage is Passage, Failure Failure: let none confuse them.” All that was wanted to put the Founder’s Scroll in its place was sharper definition, I was confident—and eager to tackle the problem, I grew impatient at the little delay, for it began to seem not impossible that I might request Examination that same evening, and thus complete my Assignment in a single day—as close to “no time,” surely, as anyone could demand!
After a few minutes Anastasia reported, with some concern, that Stoker had not appeared at the Powerhouse all day, nor had his new secretary at Main Detention seen him since mid-morning; the former office was particularly alarmed because of some threatening situation in the Furnace Room—I trembled to imagine it—that required his management. At least, however, she was free to go with me; we left the Infirmary after a brief dispute with the orderlies (who wanted proof of my discharge from custody and only reluctantly accepted my Clean Bill of Health and Anastasia’s endorsement in lieu of the regular form), and as we rode Librarywards in a double-sidecar taxi, Anastasia explained what had disturbed her at luncheon.
