The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  the happy prospect of dinner and a night aboard. Solipsisme à deux. As usual at the bottom of Story's boarding ladder in the north fork of Dun Cove with Katherine Sherritt in his lap, Peter Sagamore erects. Says K For heaven's sake Do it. I don't know, says P; but she knows, and does it for him. Again she's right. In antiphonal murmurs we recite our memorized litany from The Merck Manual:

  P: Oh, my. Normal activities and customary exercise may be continued throughout pregnancy.

  K: Swimming and mildly strenuous sports are permissible comma and . . . there is no reason a pregnant woman cannot ride horseback or engage . . . in similar vigorous activity if she is accomplished at it and is cautious.

  P: You're accomplished; I'm cautious. Many women find . . . that their sexual desire is changed . . . parenthesis increased or decreased close parenthesis . . . during pregnancy.

  K: Not mine. Sexual intercourse . . . is permissible . . . throughout pregnancy.

  P: But should be prohibited if there is any vaginal bleeding, pain, or leakage of amniotic fluid. . . .

  K: There's none! There's none. Several . . . maternal deaths have been reported from blowing air into the vagina during cunnilingus Amen.

  Says Peter Amen and holds us in place like pintle and gudgeon so that Katherine with her free hand can now leisurely assist herself to orgasm's edge. Her dear sound crossing it—and our recollection of P's pleased surprise at her similar self-ministration ten years ago in this same place—does him as well. Still connected, now we float, he holding her breasts raised by the ski belt as by an eighteenth-century bodice and soothing their erected nipples.

  Tell Gudgeon and Pintle about it, their mother murmurs. Their father vows he shall, one day. It will be called

  DAY ZERO IN DUN COVE,

  and that story, reader, subject to later trimming and tidying, will go something like this: Hot young writer having met warm young reader in 1964 after cool young fiction reading up at the 92nd Street Poetry Center, and they having spent steamy young New York night together down at the old Gramercy Park Hotel—God, remembers Katherine: We were twenty-four, and you were already there, and I wasn’t anywhere. A fucking failure.

  Only your marriage was, protests Peter.

  We didn’t fail that night, for sure. To our children, K explains He was the first man I’d ever slept with, guys, except my unmentionable first husband aforementioned. Your mom was wowed.

  Writer and reader (P.S. would say if we went on telling this tale in this fashion) agreed that that Gramercy Park June night was a success indeed. But so used were both of us to successes hard and easy, considerable and inconsiderable, that, alas, nothing therefore followed from this one. She finished shucking old Poonie Baldwin, Jr., and went back to Maryland and to graduate school; he went writer-in-residencing about the U.S. of A. We did not remeet until an early-autumn evening six years later, at a party in College Park, Maryland, given in honor of Ms. Katherine Anne Porter.

  In which interval, would say Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, a lot of water went under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

  In which interval, agrees Peter, our brackish Chesapeake, like a Rive Gauche tart, douched herself with four thousand tides from the great bidet of the North Atlantic. But we can’t go on telling this story like this.

  Katherine arches at least one eyebrow. The father of her children has known Rive Gauche tarts?

  One, once. That tart, however, happened to remark We French wash only one thing, monsieur, but we wash it constantly. Such a remark is hard to forget. Tidy Thérèse. But look here: You tell your water under the bridge, I’ll tell mine, if we’re really going to do this. It should be a team effort, like pregnancy.

  Says Kath We are really going to do it. We’re going to crank your motor till it catches and goes. Her water, she declares to Dun Cove, bore off her Black Panther poet, her Hasid violist, and her Chileno foreign service officer, good men all, plus lesser flotsam whom she may have neglected to mention, just as Peter neglected to mention Tidy Therese. Such things happen. Having mastered the science of libraries at the U. of M.—where by the way she’d come to know Ms. Katherine Anne Porter on the strength not only of writer-reader bonding but of some relation between the Porters of O. Henry/Sidney Porter fame, cousins of K.A.P., and the Shorters of Irma Shorter fame, mother of K.S.S.—she was in place, as they say, at the Pratt. But she came down from Baltimore for that party that night with her new roommate, also a great fan of Ms. Porter.

  People don’t talk like this, Kath.

  Do it.

  Well. Her new roommate, children . . .

  You had your well-washed Left Bank tart; I had my Brandeis balladeuse, at that time only a green-belter, under whose spell I had certainly fallen and to some extent respectfully remain, but into whose bed I had ventured, though pleasurefully enough, one night only, not long before this party we’re making our separate ways to. Partly in the spirit of the High Sixties, kids, which we’ll get to another time. But not entirely. In any case, that’s water under the bridge—in Nineteen Seventy still a single span rather than a twin. Over?

  Water under the nation’s bridge. Peter Sagamore was at that party more out of respect and protocol than out of literary enthusiasm, though the respect was real enough. K.A.P. was the U. of M.’s senior literary ornament; young Sagamore was their tenured new associate professor of Where It Allegedly Is At. A bold appointment, in the department’s view, since where it’s at is famously subject to argument and change, but tenure is forever. And no small step on P.S.’s part, in his view, since his early vows to the muse enjoined him from, among other things, marriage and tenured academic appointments. But like K. S. Sherritt, he was at a fork in his road.

  The difference, in Kath’s opinion, is that P thought he’d just made a major sexual-emotional-personal career decision, whereas K thought she had one imminently to make: May Jump was stepping up the pressure. We were both partly right and partly wrong.

  Right.

  To Tweedles Dum and Dee, Katherine declares It wasn’t just New England your father put behind him when he swapped the Charles for the Chesapeake.

  It was not. After Portugal, he’d winged it for some while along the cerebral cortex of our republic, the River Chuck, with one of those Briggs-Copeland lectureships at Harvard and similar plums for promising young transients. What had fetched him there—as to Portugal, Paris, and Portland, Oregon—was his deep wish not to become a marshy Mark Twain, a Faulkner of the Free State fenlands.

  But what kept him there, longer than in those other places . . .

  Pete Sagamore sips his Chandon brut; Kate her Perrier. We have disconnected, climbed Story’s transom ladder, slipped into our dry swimsuits: we are taking now our narrative ease before firing up the barbecue. How much of this do we literally say, in this articulated wise? When old intimates rehearse what between them goes without saying, they do it with cues as brief as recent-Peter Sagamore fiction. The old Gramercy Park, Room One Seven Six. That Katherine Anne Porter party. But we know what has us by the larynx; we do our best to do it. Whatever our actual words, we rehearse as if to our unborn this chapter of our actual story: the first Day Zero in Dun Cove.

  What kept P there in lively Beantown was as serious a connection as he’d enjoyed in his three decades on our planet, with an able ex-Swarthmorean who at twenty-nine was already an assistant producer at WGBH-TV and clearly going places in her medium. Their relation, of some two years’ standing, had taken a curious turn: Though he had no interest in parenthood, Peter Sagamore was prepared to marry the lively, the befreckled Marcie Blitzstein, had she been inclined to marry. Ms. Blitz (her professional self-abbreviation), on the other hand, had no interest in matrimony, but awfully wanted children once her career position was secure, if ever: so much so that she was prepared to have shiva sat upon her by her steadfastly pious family, whom she loved and honored, for having a child out of wedlock by her goyishe lover, who didn’t want one, had he wanted one. A sad impasse, since they c
ared about each other, and it was at first complicated but ultimately resolved by another problem, one of temperamental chemistries, which both parties were experienced enough to recognize: Much as they admired, respected, enjoyed each other, each was finally more in love with his/her calling than with their life together. Such things happen.

  At the same time, even in his recent “Portuguese” and “Boston” stories, even in his more recent and shorter and less realistical ones, there kept appearing the marshes, tides, and webfoot passions of our author’s youth. His fancy fed still upon Chesapeake seafood. The question posed itself whether, recognizing this circumstance, he were better off musewise to shrug his shoulders and stay put, or go back down there and live on location for some years at least, as the state university had in fact invited him to do, and either sink for real into the bog of literary regionalism or work through to more transcendent terms with those staples of his imagination.

  Not a heart-stopping problem, niños, on the scale of human problems, but for an artist—for this artist—a fundamental problem nonetheless, and given resonance by his and Marcie Blitzstein’s troubled love.

  On a certain fine May weekend at this juncture, they happened to cruise from Scituate Harbor down Massachusetts Bay and through the Cape Cod Canal with another couple, aboard that other couple’s fancy sailboat, and to pick up a mooring at lunchtime on the second day in Marion Harbor, off Buzzards Bay, where, to his happy surprise, Peter Sagamore saw riding at another mooring nearby a small wooden sloop unmistakably of his father’s manufacture: Broad-beamed, hard-chined, bowspritted, barn-door-ruddered like a miniature oyster-dredging skipjack, it looked as mislocated in New England waters as a Chinese junk. What’s more, life had imitated art to the point of naming that sailboat Story, after a similarly named vessel in Peter Sagamore’s fat first novel.

  Well! The foursome chuckled and clucked tongues over the coincidence. Dinghying ashore for a lunch of lobster rolls, they circled that Sagamore 25 and saw it to have been handsomely maintained. A hunch warned Pete to let the coincidence lie; it was the tireless, the enterprising Marcie Blitz who insisted they make a little project of tracking down Story’s owner before returning to the city. Their first inquiry revealed the boat to be in brokerage: Its owner had unexpectedly died; the widow hoped to sell while the boat was in its freshly recommissioned state.

  Incomprehensibly to Marcie Blitz, her friend shrugged his shoulders. Back in Boston on the Monday, she took it upon herself to telephone the widow, represented herself as a prospective buyer, and along with more pertinent matters, inquired into the craft’s odd name. She then reported to her lover that Story’s late owner, while no fan of Peter Sagamore’s newer fiction, had been an ardent admirer of his earlier—just the reverse of Marcie’s own, high-tech sentiments. John Basel had bought the boat secondhand in sorry shape on Chesapeake Bay because he recognized it to be one of Fritz Sagamore’s; he had restored it and named it Story out of admiration for his favorite contemporary author. So much had Mrs. Basel and her late husband enjoyed sailing it together, she could not bear the thought of sailing it without him; moreover, while still physically able, she was too old to manage without an engine, and to hang an outboard on Story’s virgin transom would offend her purist husband’s memory. The vessel was for sale otherwise “fully found,” in excellent condition, reasonably priced and ready to go.

  Said Peter Sagamore in effect Mm hm and went back to work. He could not much longer stall both College Park and Boston U., which had also offered him a residency. As is sometimes his way with a difficult decision, he pretended to turn his back upon it and lose himself in his fiction, while actually monitoring that fiction with a certain third eye for clues to where his heart of hearts inclined. Like his apparent indifference to the Story coincidence, it was a habit that drove forthright Marcie up the wall.

  The piece under his hand happened to be that pivotal one long since aforementioned, which had begun as an average-size short story entitled “The Point” and then had mushroomed, to its author’s disconcerted surprise, into four or five drafts of an attempted novel, but which would wind up published as a very short story indeed, entitled

  PART OF A SHORTER WORK.

  Once upon a time, across Sherritt Cove from Nopoint Point, there was a handsome, low, wooded headland, “unimproved” but for a collapsing gooseblind on its Goldsborough Creek side and a path to that blind from the county road through becreepered stands of oak, ash, and pine. Three generations of Sherritts coveted that headland, called Shorter Point, to complete their ownership of all the property bordering Sherritt Cove and thus to forestall the construction of any houses thereupon besides their own. But the Talbot County Shorters, while less rich, are as old a clan as the Talbot County Sherritts, and as confirmed in the place’s pleasures: Successive senior Sherritts made their bids to buy—handsome bids in the dollars of their day—and were refused by successive senior Shorters, farm folk mainly, each of whom declared his intent to use Shorter Point for goose hunting only, but to use it for goose hunting forever. Nor were they lured by Sherritt proposals with explicit goose-hunting easements: Shorter goose rights guaranteed in perpetuity. They vowed they had no particular mind to build there, but it was their pleasure to walk through Shorter woods on Shorter Point to reach the Shorter blind.

  Thus endured an uneasy peace punctuated by small and large alarms, for the view of Shorter Point is the very centerpiece of the Sherritt Cove flank of Nopoint Point, from every principal window of both Main House and First Guest Cottage. Merely to see a Shorter over there at any time other than goose season, or in that season doing anything but gunning geese, called forth binoculars and consternation across the cove. Who was that other man walking the shore with old John Shorter? Why did he point at that loblolly pine, that stand of cordgrass, if not to suggest what might be cleared to make way for a fine house, two fine houses, maybe two not-so-fine houses, maybe even a grain dryer, a chicken ranch, a whole residential subdivision with attached marina?

  Henry Sherritt’s grandfather, who had himself caused much of Nopoint Point to be selectively cleared for additions to the Main House and construction of the First Guest Cottage (then called the Guest Cottage), was therefore in his elder age as fearful for the health of his Shorter counterpart as for his own, lest that patriarch’s heirs be moved to build, or to sell Shorter Point to any save himself. He did not trust John Shorter, Jr.—his own son’s age—precisely because the two younger men were fast friends since boyhood and equal enjoyers of the life of Sherritt Cove. Surely John Junior would buy out his siblings’ interest in Shorter Point when the time came; he would fell trees, raise a modest clapboard house, run out a dock, keep one of those gasoline yachts that everybody nowadays was buying—and there would go the eastward view from Nopoint Point. But those Shorters who left the county or otherwise evinced little interest in Shorter Point were no less dangerous, should John Junior die or in some other wise be unable to buy them out: Surely they would sell to the highest bidder without regard for the future of the property, and even the Sherritts might not be able, merely to protect one of their views, to outbid a syndicate of real estate developers with plans for a Shorter Point Estates, a Shorter Village.

  Both gentlemen went to their rewards, the reigning Sherritt a touch before the reigning Shorter. Despite the Great Depression or because of it, John Shorter, Jr., was in fact able to buy out his siblings’ interest in Shorter Point, and for a day in 1932 it seemed to Henry Sherritt’s father, Samuel—whose inherited and growing concern for the fate of his eastern view had gradually distanced him from his old friend—that the worst had happened. Workmen appeared across the way; a piledriver was towed into Sherritt Cove! It seemed incredible to Sam Sherritt that he had not the right to forbid entry upon that water which bore his name; but even a Sherritt owns, even of Nopoint Point, only down to the mean high-water line.

  Two hours passed, a pile was driven, before he could set down with shaking hand his father’s old Zeiss b
inoculars, which rested always ready in their mahogany holder on the seat of a central bay window in the library of the Main House—and row across the cove in the tender of his new gasoline yacht to verify his ex-friend’s perfidy. Even as he rowed, he expected at every stroke to hear behind his back, between the guillotinelike slams of the piledriver, the crash of falling trees.

  It turned out that John Shorter, Jr., was merely building a better gooseblind to replace the collapsed one, with access by a short pier instead of by skiff. Not a tree was topped, much less felled; the new blind was an aesthetic improvement upon the old; the two men gunned geese in it together, their friendship restored. Even their wives took up the sport.

  Some goose seasons later, however, John Junior succumbed in middle age to a coronary, leaving his wife and their only child, a daughter. On Nopoint Point, the familiar alarm resounded, especially when the widow Shorter remarried: Her new husband was a rich Philadelphian! Goose-hunting enthusiast! And, though only late-fiftyish, retired!

  His name was Parker Pink, and within a season of his taking Marge Shorter to wife, the direst Sherritt fears were realized. As Mr. and Mrs. Sam Sherritt watched and listened helplessly from across the cove—he clutching the Zeiss binoculars, she weeping on his arm—crews of men and machines assaulted Shorter Point. Saws, axes, bulldozers, backhoes, stump grinders, a piledriver with a whole bargeload of piles. Two weeks later, half the trees were gone, the underbrush was cleared, the footpath widened to a road and ditched; piles were driven for a hundred-foot lighted dock with two slips and a cross-T; excavation was completed for what was clearly to be a substantial house; and a natural prospect that had altered little in the last ten thousand years was gone. Even before a check of building permits in the Talbot County Courthouse confirmed the fact, young Henry Sherritt reported to his father that young Irma Shorter had reported to him that her mother, of whom she was fond, and her stepfather, of whom she was not, were selling the old Shorter farm and farmhouse and building a major seat on Shorter Point.