The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Kathy Sherritt knows who she is. She does? She does. With the strength of a certain WASP cultural tradition behind her, of which she largely but not uncritically approves, she relates easily to others who know who they are, however foreign: an asset in her ethnic-oral-history work. She would hit it off with a Masai chieftain or the Baal Shem Tov. Homosexual men are not uncomfortable in Kathy’s company; straight women like her; lesbians are powerfully drawn herward, Q.E.D., as are heterosexual men of various classes, races, ages.

  Katherine, Kathy, Katie-Kath-Kate! He’s drawn to you, too, who just now helped draw you! Lucky the man whose woman is Katherine Sherritt.

  NOW DO THE MAN.

  With pleasure: Lucky Katherine, in her and this narrative’s opinion, to have for the man of us good Peter Sagamore. That surname is Algonquian for “minor chieftain”—we remember Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill, up in Oyster Bay—but “Captain” Fritz Sagamore was a German immigrant carpenter’s son. The word is not given in our German-English dictionary: Sage mehr (“Say more”), we wonder, metamorphosed by some immigration clerk like many another new American’s name? Zage mir? Nobody knows. Capn Fritz felt more or less German, but was never taught the tongue; the Sagamores presume themselves a line of sturdy Kraut carpenters going back forever and take no interest in family history. Transplanted to Hoopers Island, on the Chesapeake side of lower Dorchester, Fritz’s father enlarged his trade to include boat carpentry, in which the son specialized; Fritz established himself in time as a regionally famous builder of Chesapeake Bay workboats—especially those long, narrow oyster-tong boats with inverted, “duck’s-ass” transoms—and, toward the end of his career, small wooden cruising sailboats built “by rack of eye,” without full-scale laid-out plans. Our Peter and Jacob, his older brother, even their mother and Sue-Ann, their younger sister, all worked about the yard and became adept with the boatwright’s tools—joinery and brightwork were adolescent Peter’s special skills—but only Jake took up the trade. Some voice spoke to Peter Sagamore early on, who knows whose in those trackless wetlands, saying Honor thy father and thy mother and thy place of birth, but put kilometrage as soon as possible ‘twixt thee and them.

  Pete’s parenting was benign but inattentive. Lapsed Lutherans, Fritz and Nora always smiled, never quarreled, but were too busy and indifferent to do more than work, eat, sleep. P felt affection for but not much kinship with his mother: A good-natured, rawboned farm woman used to self-sacrifice and hard work without complaint, she’s in a down-county nursing home now, senile early, cheerful, deaf, incontinent. All day long she drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes (it is not a strict nursing home), turns the television up too loud but doesn’t look at it, and makes pencil drawings that her attendants can’t decipher but her children recognize at a glance to be of the wooden parts of her late husband’s boats: knees, stemheads, keelsons, bitts. P respected and felt kinship with but not much closeness to his father: a sound craftsman; an honest businessman with little head for business; an energetic and incorruptible citizen who served term after term as county commissioner in addition to running the Sagamore boatyard; a shrug-shouldered father like his father, who never disciplined and almost never rebuked his children because there was almost never need to, but who did not talk or do much with them, either. Peter sees Fritz Sagamore now as having been a principled, benevolent, hardworking, un-adventurous, good-humored, civic-minded, rather shy and selfish fellow who made the best of his limitations without complaint and mildly left his children to their own devices. Pete misses him, honors his memory, wishes they two had been able to converse and do more of the usual father-son things, wonders whether Capn Fritz felt the same about his father, and finally shrugs. He worries that for want of better models, experience, and genes he’ll be no closer to our children, despite his resolve to be, than his father was to him. Don’t worry, says his wife, but sometimes she does too.

  So how does a lower-middle-class, unaffluent, semirural, semiredneck, semicivilized, semieducated boy make his way out of the salt marsh into the corridors of literature? He bloody doesn’t, as a rule: not into literature’s or any other profession’s corridors. If he does, it will likely be by accident and indirection. What your Sherritts take for granted, he’ll pay for with his youth. Though he may outstrip, he’ll never catch up. Though he scale in his lifeswork the high, dry summit of Parnassus, he’ll go to his grave almost as wet behind the ears as if he’d never crawled out of the marsh. He will? He will. He had better therefore make a virtue of this limitation, become a hedgehog as he’ll never be a fox. He will stumble into some university on scholarship, nearly drown there but not quite, and learn to float if never swim in the academic enterprise. Coming from no very defined cultural tradition, he will have not only all civilizations to discover, but Civilization. Having unlike Kathy no very defined self, he will grope his way into art with the one advantage of being unable, ipso facto, to practice it as self-expression; he will be free therefore either to invent himself in and for his stories or—what in his opinion comes to the same thing—to efface himself in his invention. Because he has everything to learn, he’ll approach the medium without preconceptions, and this innocence may not be altogether a liability. Because he does not quite know who he is, he may never quite learn what he cannot do, and this ignorance, if it does not ruin him, may be his strength. This sounds more like the man of us talking than the woman; let her have her say.

  Okay: On the cusp of forty, Peter Sagamore is a handsome U.S. six-footer, lean and healthy, even athletic, with curly hair the color of his woman’s and skin to match its darker locks; some south European input into that lost line of carpenters gave all the Sagamores mahogany eyes and permanent suntans. He wears no mustache, beard, or eyeglasses. When he takes his clothes off later in Day Zero and stands in Story’s cockpit wearing only wedding band, wristwatch, and brown bead necklace, you’ll see long flat swimmer’s muscles under more of that permanent tan, body hair barley-gold and fine but for the tobacco-brown bush of underarms and pubes, the latter fleecier than Kathy’s tight-curled nap but identical in color. Exercise and a lucky metabolism have kept P. Sagamore almost as trim as a healthy thirty-year-old. The skin that girdles his butt and gut is less tan than the rest; Katherine Shorter Sherritt’s pleasure is to kiss right ‘round those borders when on warm weekends we’re sailing stripped and out of ready view: more particularly if, as happens, her friend is steering momentarily with the tiller-tip squeezed between his buns while trimming Story’s mainsheet or making entries in the log. His genital equipment—there it hangs, mildly curious reader—is circumcised, normal in magnitude, reliable in function. Inasmuch as husband and wife, neither either green or jaded, are satisfied quite with each other as sexual partners, an aspect of our life together that we enjoy as much as any other, there’ll be little more to say in our story upon this head, though there may be some.

  When our chap wears clothes, they’ll generally be in the khaki-slacks/navy-blazer/madras-shirt category on teaching days, the jeans-and-rugby-shirt on others, cutoff denims and deck moccasins in summer. Except in town and on special occasions, he wears neither shirt nor socks from Flag Day to Labor Day. We dislike air-conditioning and are fond of skin; we are neither exhibitionists nor voyeurs, but nudity comes as easily to us in humid tidewaterland as to north Europeans on a south European beach.

  All right. Some things Peter Sagamore is not, in his wife’s opinion, are colorful, eccentric, high-energetic, very outgoing, Romantic, religious, politically enthusiastic, vain, gregarious, affected, promiscuous, devious, personally subtle, and ideological, though he sure does have opinions. Some things he is are personable, introspective, vigorous, unassuming, mild-mannered, stoical, prevailingly serene and good-humored, moderate in his habits, well organized, firmly principled, rational, virile (though forty is not twenty), patient with himself and others, a touch absentminded and forgetful, a touch passive in his dealings with the world and therefore dependent in many ways upon Kathy—and immune
to doubts about his vocation, though not about his accomplishment. His personal culture is less broad than Kath’s, though she finds it deeper. He reads not widely, massively, or systematically, but what he reads becomes a working part of him; he has a gift for language, none for languages; neither a scholar on the one hand nor a primitive on the other, he is an okay instructor in the art of literature from its manufacturers’ point of view and a first-rate coach and critic of apprentice writers. Fairly said. As a writer himself . . .

  That is another story, ever shorter. Enough here to establish that while our woman, who is without invention, can recount spellbindingly anything except her husband’s stories, which must come silently from the page through the eye and mind into the soul, our man can recount nothing to good effect; can’t even tell a joke. He merely and strictly invents, sets down. And that for this inventing and setting down, the fellow trains, like a spiritual and physical athlete. Mens sana in corpore sano: All that swimming, running, stretching exercise and the rest are not just for his physical well-being, any more than his memory-, breathing-, concentration-, and relaxation-exercises are merely for his psychological well-being. They are to bring him to the mark—the last mark he put upon yesterday’s white page—in both Olympic and Olympian condition.

  Henry and Irma Sherritt, it goes without saying, had early trouble with this connection of Princess Kate’s and even now are less than perfectly easy with it. But they are chastened by their former advocacy of Poonie Baldwin, Jr., and they cannot but like Pete personally and approve his character. They respect the chap’s integrity, and so far from perceiving him as a threat to their conservative values, with Kathy’s help they see him as a moderating influence upon their daughter: His politics, for example, are more skeptical and middle-of-the-road than hers. If he were more famous, they’d be less uneasy; if he were less so, they’d be more. Not only The New York Times, after all, but even The Wall Street Journal has assured them that their laconic son-in-law is something different: a writer’s writer’s writer?

  The writer Peter Sagamore: That sums him up. As another, asked what he is, might say, “I’m a black militant poet,” “I’m a fifty-year-old divorced chamber musician with grown-up Hasidic twin daughters,” or “I’m a Chilean Marxist on the staff of Orlando Letelier, Salvador Allende’s ambassador to the U.S.”; as Henry Sherritt would say, “I’m a Republican businessman Episcopalian Sherritt,” and Irma, “I’m Mrs. Henry Sherritt,” and Katherine, “I’m Kath”; so Peter Sagamore would answer I’m a writer. And it is because this writer, honed to this edge, had been these several seasons ever more distracted by seven several circumstances from writing, and especially this fortnight pent on Nopoint Point like a Preakness thoroughbred stuck in the gates at Pimlico, that in the sultry mid-afternoon of 15 June ‘80 Peter Sagamore cried out to Katherine Sherritt in the First Guest Cottage For pity’s sake, Kathy, set me a task!

  Thereby setting her one.

  TAKE US SAILING.

  Katherine Sherritt Sagamore considers. We are sitting on the newly carpeted floor of the second bedroom of the First Guest Cottage, a complete small house done tastefully in the Gloucester clapboard style Kath calls Seafood-Chain Traditional and Peter calls Neo-Captains Courageous, designed to contrast with the Maxfield Parrish Georgian of the main spread. Irma redid in May the whole bedroom and its adjacent bath into a much more elaborate nursery than her first grand-offspring will have at home: Kate Greenaway-figured wallpaper, Laura Ashley curtains and drapes; a pair of eighteenth-century cribs cunningly modernized for comfort and convenience without disturbing their original design, and a matching rocker for nursing; a state-of-the-art double bassinet, double perambulator, and built-in baby bath; closed-circuit television for monitoring cribs and bassinet from all the principal rooms of the cottage, including the nursemaid’s room (which now adjoins the nursery on the side opposite the main bedroom), as well as from selected locations about the Main House and grounds; and a related, very high-tech audio intercommunication system out of which the bugs have not all been got.

  Here’s how that Sunday’d gone. A light rainshower woke us early; savoring the sound of it, we embraced a bit while the next generation played tag between us. Then we slipped into cotton nightclothes to greet the day. Fresh strawberries, croissants, iced coffee. For a while we exercised together, Pete his daily dozens and Kath her pelvic workouts to the roll call (hers) of Santa’s eight tiny reindeer, the twenty-three several counties of the Old Line State, the itemized list of my true love’s gifts to me on the twelfth day of Christmas. Next Peter ran laps around the rainsweet grounds of Nopoint Point while Katherine did her Kegels and her antivaricose elevations. We took the kiddies—Hop, Skip, and Jump—for a quick dip in the pool, no one else about yet, and at nine Peter went to his worktable in the nursemaid’s room: Since March he’s been putting in an hour or two even on weekend mornings, to maintain pressure on his muse. Kath hauled into a maternity sunsuit, fixed herself another iced decaf, and took up station in an Appalachian rocker on the cottage porch to do work of her own and to shortstop visitors.

  The day was forecast hot and muggy, but its a.m. was still fresh. Red-winged blackbirds rasped in the reeds. Blue herons squawked in for gawky landings on Shorter Point, across Sherritt Cove, from which rose wraiths of mist. Resting her feet on a footstool and a clipboard on her belly, Kath gave the next half-hour to another sort of exercise: First-Level Improvisation from a drill book prepared for her by May Jump. The woman of us has no wish to be a writer of stories; but that her best talent should be for their mere collection, her second best (under May’s close and ardent tutelage) for their mere recitation, reminds Katherine Shorter Sherritt disagreeably of the homunculus theory of reproduction, which held the female role in that familiar drama to be no more than the reception, nurture, and delivery of the life thrust into her by the male, rather than the creation of one of the two actors as well as the theater of their Aeschylean play. Having warmed up with Dancer and Prancer, pear-treed partridges, Dorchester Talbot and Kent et cet, she now First-Levels into last lines for May’s three-quartered quatrains and limericks four-fifths limned:

  A wise old owl sat in an oak.

  The more he saw, the less he spoke.

  The less he spoke, the more he heard.

  .

  Which sort of reminded her of Peter. And

  A certain gay black-belt balladist,

  Not content to be merely tribadist,

  Making love in the tub,

  Told her friend, “There’s the rub:

  .”

  She attempts next, for a quarter-hour only, a much higher degree of improvisation: reading her husband’s latest story: “B♭.”

  B♭OVERTURE

  Once upon a time there was a storyteller who hit the ground running in his twenties with a fine fat novel of the sort blurb writers describe as “sprawling with life,” “teeming with characters,” “overflowing with narrative abundance,” as if the book were a sloppily topped-up petri dish. Never mind what it was about: It happened to be set mostly in Katherine Sherritt’s home waters, but she read it while jobbing in New York City in midst of divorcing Poonie Baldwin, and she was so taken by it that when she heard its author was visiting that town, she sought him out at a public reading at the 92nd Street Poetry Center, introduced herself, and began a conversation which to the surprise of both parties went on till morning, though the verbal part of it was largely done by midnight. Indeed, Peter Sagamore’s re-creation in that novel of the place where she’d grown up, and which she rather felt she’d put behind her though she still revisited it often, so engaged Katherine Sherritt’s imagination that instead of pursuing her advanced degree in library science at Radcliffe as she’d planned, she moved back to Maryland and raised her parents’ eyebrows by matriculating at the state university: the first Sherritt in history ever to attend a public educational institution.