The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  And so—increasingly, unhappily, but determined to work this and other demons honestly through—has he done.

  DONE?

  Done.

  TIME FOR LUNCH

  Skip lunch.

  LUNCH MAYBE; LUNCHTIME NO.

  Willy and Molly Sherritt’s ice-blue Mercedes glides up the drive at lunchtime behind Hank and Irma’s saddle-brown Cadillac, and Kathy loses her appetite. Not to be rude to Irma, we go up and say hello, but, hanging a bum rap on the kids—morning sickness this late in the day, this late in our term?—do not stay for the meal. Peter is excused from tennis; he’ll check out the video intercom instead. Chip Sherritt is excused from ball-boying to assist him. Willy’s Molly asks us can she have a look at Irm’s redoings in the First Guest Cottage. Kate can’t say no, but such is her antipathy for her elder sibling and her exasperated sympathy for his wife, she will permit no further reference in this narrative to the Main House luncheon: only a sketch of Molly and a summary of her visit.

  Molly B. Sherritt was Molly Barnes of Chestertown, Circuit Court Judge and Mrs. Barnes’s only, when she graduated from The Deniston School for Girls a year before our Kate. In those days she was a bright-eyed, apple-cheeked, high-humored girl, ruddy, befredded, and wholesome; sturdy, even a touch thick in body and mind, but of so cheery, energetic, innocent, and kindly a disposition that everyone loved her in what she sees now to have been the happiest years of her life, when she was a three-letter varsity athlete, president of her form, and busy member of a half-dozen extracurricular clubs. From Deniston she went down with a clutch of classmates to a small southern women’s college regarded more for social propriety than for academic seriousness; she left it after two years to marry her girlhood sweetheart, William Sherritt, in a handsome ceremony at the Deniston chapel on a sparkling June blue day, reception after at the Chester River Yacht and Country Club. At that latter rose-and-peony-girt affair, both the bridegroom and his best man—Porter “Poonie” Baldwin, Jr.—got sozzled on the champagne: Poon to the point of stumbling off the club dock en route to take a summer-tuxedo’d swim, Willy less so, but enough to mortify his parents, make the straiter-laced Barneses wonder, and reduce his virgin bride to tears when, having heavily deflowered her some hours later in a honeymoon suite of Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel, he rolled from her flush, still-expectant body into boozy sleep.

  The day proved prophetic. Though their first years together were not wretched, Molly Barnes Sherritt found her husband to be a boorish fellow, an inconsiderate and soon indifferent lover, and a frequent drunk. How had she not seen him so before? Because he was her Willy! cries hapless Moll. His principal interests were and remain the buying and developing of waterfront real estate (through Sherbald Enterprises, his long-standing business partnership with Poonie Baldwin), for which he has a savvy knack; the Frankly Controversial Experimenting with agricultural applications of activated sludge (through a newly acquired firm called Natural Recycling Research, whereof we know little at this stage of our story), in which he professes a Sort of Scientific Interest; playing tennis and golf with his Annapolis business cronies, for which he has aptitude and skill; drinking rye whiskey with branch water; and—particularly in the years since Molly discovered herself infertile—philandering. As Molly once did, many women find Big Will Sherritt attractive. Despite the alcohol intake, which, combined with his fondness for cigars, ripe cheeses, and oversalted food, would one day have felled him with a massive coronary on his backyard tennis court had not this narrative a different fate in store for him, Kath’s elder brother at forty-five is physically powerful, well dressed and groomed, invincibly self-confident. He picks up young women law clerks and dental hygienists in the brass-and-fern bars of Annapolis and Baltimore and spends weekends with them on his Owens sedan cruiser—though he is not above humping in the front passenger seat of that ice-blue Mercedes in one of his Sherbald Enterprises waterfront building lots in broad daylight, his overwhelmed partner’s left heel resting upon the simulated walnut dashboard, her right foot thrust through the open window while he half kneels on the floor before her, slacks and boxer shorts at his ankles, spreads her yet farther, lubricates her with his spittle, and, grunting around his Schimmelpenninck cigar, takes her more carnivorously than his affable barroom manner had led her to expect.

  All this we know because word thereof gets back to Molly from women who know these women—Will neither denies nor vaunts his promiscuity, but he makes no particular effort to be discreet—and because Molly inclines for consolation to her old schoolmate, who however has for fifteen years consistently advised divorce. Molly Barnes Sherritt’s problem is that she loathes the behavior but, despite all, loves the man. Save for the project of “sticking by Willy through thick and thin,” her comfortable life is empty of significance. She wishes too late that they’d adopted children; that she’d learned a profession. She knows herself to be empty-headed, useless, by comparison to her mother-in-law, say, who sympathetically enlists Molly into her own club and committee work. That wifely life-project, while it requires of Mrs. Willy Sherritt little more than self-abnegation and some obtuseness, seems to have drained her once-abundant capacity for other activities: She plays no sports; she organizes nothing beyond her household; she reads Harlequin romances two-thirds through and watches daytime television. Yet, curiously—since Willy abuses her every way except physically—the fidelity at which we shake our heads has in fact given luckless Molly a degree of moral depth that many a happier woman lacks. She does not reason, but she understands. Certain lines of scripture, for example, in a polite Episcopalian Sunday sermon, burn to her heart like a flaming sword; they seem to her to justify her life and affirm her sorority with millions of her predecessors. She needs then tentatively to register this understanding with someone whom, however sympathetically scornful, she can trust: Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore.

  In fact, Molly Barnes Sherritt is still apple-cheeked and befreckled. She is sturdier than ever. Her ruddiness is gone the way of her energy; her eyes are clear and grave now, rather than bright; her high-humoredness is tempered into stoical placidity. She has not been made love to in twelve years and does not expect to be ever again. K likes and pities her and hates having her around; the unfortunate woman can’t look at her sister-in-law’s belly or those double bassinets without tears.

  Not long after this story’s close, Molly Barnes Sherritt will undertake (perhaps even welcome, but that is not for us to say) the even more demanding project of dying for two full years of cancer, originally cervical, without recrimination or even complaint. In the final weeks of her agony, she will sustain herself with two or three psalms, repeated silently and continuously like mantras, and the pages of The Deniston School Yearbook for 1956.

  Her visit with us on this occasion stretches to half an hour, in the course whereof we learn that Willy is being treated for the social disease of our American times, herpes simplex, contracted presumably from one of his brass-and-fern pickups. Less dangerous than syphilis (or than AIDS, which in 1980 has not yet hit the historical fan), less disgusting than gonorrhea or crab lice, it is nonetheless uncomfortable indeed, rampant, and, as of this warm June Sunday, quite incurable. At its most severe, it can make sexual intercourse unendurably painful; obviously, one is supposed to warn potential partners that one has it. Unvindictive Molly reports that she has urged her husband to do so, but Willy knows that if he were to, that would be that. Therefore, like many another herpes simplexer, he simply doesn’t. He wasn’t warned, he complains, and bids his wife mind her own fucking business.

  Kath’s outraged. Peter, perusing the intercom service manual, is bemused, the malady strikes him as so heavily appropriate to our place and time. But his own, nonmedical problem so preoccupies him that he can scarcely concentrate upon the manual, much less be properly appalled at Willy’s callousness.

  I know I should leave him, Molly sighs, and, affirmed, prepares now to leave us. But it happens that both Katherine and Irma Sherritt re
gard her as the very windvane of opinion among rank-and-file Deniston alumnae; Kate doesn’t let her go before trying out on her those Strategies for the Eighties, in particular the matter of selling campus acreage to the Soviets. She is not surprised to learn that her mother has already done likewise with her counterproposals.

  We are surprised, however, to hear that both Molly and Willy not only had been aware of the Soviets’ proposal before Irma mentioned it, but have been arguing about it some while between themselves; that Molly in fact thinks Kate’s idea a good one, despite Willy’s opposition to it. Why does Willy care one way or the other, Katherine wants to know: His only interest in Deniston is that we supply victims for the likes of himself and Poonie Baldwin.

  If it’s real estate, says Molly, Willy’s interested, commission or no commission. But it’s really Peebie and the politics thing: some anti-Russian group. I’m sorry, Kate.

  Of those who grew up in Katherine’s circle and generation, Molly Barnes Sherritt is the only one who calls Porter Baldwin, Jr., by his politer nickname. What anti-Russian group? Peter asks with a certain curiosity, still however reviewing the intercom service manual. We learn that among the cold-warrior organizations willing to support Poonie’s reelection despite his fall from straight sexual grace is an association of Soviet and Eastern European defectors to the United States, who claim anyhow that the congressman was entrapped if not framed by the KGB. Kath begins to hum. Peter turns the pages of the manual.

  I shouldn’t talk about these things in front of you-all, Molly acknowledges. But I think you’re right, Kate: We don’t need all those woods and horse barns. I was sorry to hear about your friend Doug Townshend, by the way. Irma said you went to some kind of memorial service?

  We have not yet even mentioned to the reader our newly late old friend Douglas Townshend, or Friday’s memorial cocktail service for him in Georgetown (the Washington Georgetown, where Poonie’s gay bars are, not the yachty village on the Sassafras), and their bearing upon this Sunday and this book. What is more, despite Molly’s cue we shall not speak for quite a while yet of dear dead Doug. Forget she mentioned him, reader of this sentence: Ignore this sign. Molly Barnes Sherritt guesses she’ll run along now and does, back to poolside with her knitting bag to add a square to our baby-afghan-gift-in-the-works while waiting for Willy to finish his doubles match.

  IN ADVANCED AS IN EARLY PREGNANCY,

  A WOMAN’S APPETITE MAY BE CAPRICIOUS.

  BUT WHY DID PETER SAGAMORE EAT NO LUNCH,

  EITHER IN THE MAIN HOUSE OR IN THE FIRST GUEST COTTAGE?

  . . .

  AH SO. EVEN THE B♭, THEN, AS WE HAD FEARED . . .

  CHECK THE INTERCOM. CHECK THE INTERCOM.

  In a subdued, sober dismay, which we have put off registering though Katherine has been perfectly aware of it, Peter Sagamore turns now with relief to the simple physical-mechanical task set him by his mother-in-law: checking out Buck Travers’s adjustments to the new audio-video installation. The Sunday is stoking up. From across the grounds of Nopoint Point come the pock of hard-hit tennis balls and mature male exclamations of satisfaction or chagrin. How does Willy hack it, P wonders aloud, with a jockful of herpes blisters? Hisses K The swine.

  Peter has dispatched his lieutenant, twelve-year-old Andrew Christopher “Chip” Sherritt, from station to station to transmit and receive while he himself monitors, tinkers with settings, consults the manual, gives instructions from the nursery, and pays attention to his young brother-in-law’s advice. But their program runs afoul of Katherine Sherritt, who, while she appreciates to the marrow, to the heart, to the womb, the delicacy of the hour, not only opposes the whole installation, as has been seen, but has been thinking about our situation in general.

  Her husband has agreed all along that it is an expensive bit of near uselessness, this intercom; but he has shrugged his shoulders, as is his sometimes exasperating wont, and gone along with it for Irma’s sake. Katherine, on the other hand, has declared it from the first and declares it now again an invasion in principle and in fact of both our and the future nanny’s privacy: a fucking spy-in-the-sky. What’s more, while thumbing idly through May Jump’s gift dictionary of gay slang, she has been thinking, about our situation in general. Now in mid-test she rather suddenly takes up a position between the twin cribs, in full view of the ceiling camera, and begins removing her clothes, at the same time reciting spiritedly from the work in hand.

  In most cases, she announces, peeling out of the blouse of her maternity sunsuit, a new young convict’s penis—his Johnson, jock, shovel, or swipe—isn’t given a second look by his fellow inmates. It’s his virgin ass that turns ‘em on.

  Embarrassed Andrew wonders from the poolside station Hey, Kath? We’re testing the system, okay?

  So am I, his sister replies. With a level glance at wondering Peter, she drops her blouse into the starboard crib and, switching the book from hand to hand as necessary, removes the nursing bra she’s been trying on for fit. In prison parlance, the asshole faute de mieux is generally goosehole, Hawaiian eye, ring, or roundeye. If the lad is still a virgin—anally—he is called a kewpie doll, his anus being his bullhead, cherry, or prune. E.g.: Use a lot of spit, man: this guy’s still got his prune!

  Make her stop, Pete, Chip complains. I’m not supposed to hear stuff like that.

  I agree, Peter Sagamore agrees, interested all the same in the information, the show, and the odd resolve in his friend’s expression. But your sister is her own woman. How’s the video from there?

  How’m I supposed to tell? For pity’s sake turn around, Kath, so I can look.

  Says Kathy sweetly Look all you like, Kewpie Doll; that’s what the telly’s for. She steps out of her sunsuit shorts. We hear Molly, at Andrew’s end, giggle and say Kathy Sherritt!

  After he has been opened up, the new prisoner’s ass is referred to as gash, nooky, or pussy. Spread once . . . and he is a marked woman or punk for the rest of his semester.

  Irma Shorter Sherritt now speaks firmly from the glass-enclosed orangery of the Main House: This really is not amusing, Katherine. You’re embarrassing your brother and me too. And people are coming. I’ve always liked that gold chain of yours, by the way.

  You’re getting the idea, folks. K whisks her underpants down and kicks them away. Anybody wants to keep his prune had better over and out. Now she turns quarter turns, striking model’s poses as best she can. The first to gain anal entrance, she declaims, a highly prized honor, is called the welcome wagon. The second in line is sloppy seconds, while the third . . . fucker . . . is bloody thirds.

  Andrew Sherritt says You’re weird, Kath, and clicks off.

  No other slang terms are used after thirds, probably because the prize is such a mess by then. Anybody still there? Wedding bells are composed of the victim’s comments mixed with the squeak of the mattress.

  Mildly but sternly then, when Irma does not reply, Peter says That was a touch much, no? All we have to do is turn the thing off at this end. He turns it off.

  It shouldn’t’ve been put in. Glum now, but still thinking, Kathy sits on the rug, fingers one earring, and flips the pages of that lexicon. What do you guess draw the blinds means in gay talk?

  I don’t care what draw the blinds means in gay talk. Peter closes the intercom manual and sits beside her. Irma meant well.

  Mom always means well. Kath fingers the leg of his corduroy shorts. That was dumb of me. I must be getting my period.

  Me too. Pete busses the belly that rises between us. Metaphor, Metonymy, & Co. kick back. Things come quietly to a head. Steadfastly we have resisted this clear association, reminding ourselves that Less Is More antedates our pregnancy and that there is at least one other factor (some say there are five others) in the calculus of our man’s silence. Steadfastly we have protested to ourselves that P’s impasse is a compression, really. Prolific superminimalism, really. And steadfastly at the same time, and tacitly, we have assumed that it and our pregnanc
y will at worst reach term together. We have been being good-humored and humorous for months about it, years really, but a pressure has been building all the same, and a double fear: for Peter Sagamore’s career and actual sanity, should things go and stay where they’ve clearly been heading; and for the unthinkable burden it will place upon our parenthood if, to our dismay, his art turns out to have been sacrificed partly upon that altar.

  Unlikely! Unprecedented? And yet.

  And yet this state of affairs is truly not the legendary, the celebrated, the unspeakably tiresome Writer’s Block. It isn’t? It isn’t: Otherwise, why would we write about it? P. Sagamore’s muse may be dead or pregnant, but she is not blocked.

  His sigh is like a surfaced whale’s. He flips that manual into the other crib and stands over his distended friend.

  For pity’s sake, Kathy, set me a task!

  KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE CONSIDERS DEEPLY

  FOR SOME MOMENTS,

  THEN SPEAKS TO THAT SAME DISTENSION.

  Take us sailing.

  PETER SAGAMORE CONSIDERS, TOO,