The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Alas, Marge Shorter loved her Parker Pink, and Parker Pink, alas, loved the color of his surname. The major seat proved to be no tasteful red-brick Georgian or beige half-timbered Tudor, but an ostentatious pink and white stucco pile in the very worst of taste: a marriage of Andalusia and early Florida presided over by Cecil B. De Mille. Tiles, turrets, Moorish arches! Fountains and terraces stepping down to the illuminated dock—at which there steamed in one day to its new home berth, to complete the rape of Sherritt Cove, neither a natty sailing yacht nor a gleaming cabin cruiser, but—how to utter it?—a huge houseboat, done in the colors of the castle and named . . . Pink Lady II . . . complete with tender named . . . Pinkie Too . . .

  On the scale of human misfortunes, the loss of a view from one’s mansion’s eastern windows cannot be ranked high, even when that view had been undisturbed since the last ice age. But in the emotional economy of a happy family, it may loom larger than the death of certain loved ones. Samuel Sherritt lost a brother in Belgium in World War I and both parents to Talbot County natural causes; another son would die at Iwo Jima in World War II. Such losses are irreparable; the death of those young men, in particular, caused deep mourning on Nopoint Point and for years subdued the pleasures of the family. But they were understood to be and accepted as casualties of major history, as the death of elder parents is accepted as natural loss. The atrocity on Shorter Point was of a different order, actually much harder to accept: an awful caprice, a galling fluke, a permanent affront. The Sherritts could neither bear to look across Sherritt Cove nor avoid doing so. They could not come and go in their cars and boats, or work or play on their estate, without having their noses rubbed in the works and pleasures of Parker Pink. The man was gregarious; the man was loud. He entertained copiously in his castle, on his grounds, aboard his houseboat—which was equipped with horns, a siren, even an amplified electrical calliope. Two likewise loud and grown and rufous sons he had by his first marriage, who raced powerful speedboats in and out of Sherritt Cove, and gave high-decibel parties of their own, and stood to inherit, with their new half-sister, Shorter Point.

  The Sherritts took to traveling; but even in the Cotswolds and Provence, young Henry’s mother would fall despite herself to stifled sobs, his father to snuffled Episcopalian curses, at recollection of what had befallen their eastward view. Dorothy Sherritt came to seriously begging Samuel to sell the place: an idea as unbearable to him as living across from Parker Pink. Their excellent marriage suffered; on their return from Europe, Dorothy took to bed. Too late Sam saw that he should have mortgaged every Sherritt asset, if need be, to make John Shorter Jr.’s widow an irresistible purchase offer upon her first husband’s death (he had in fact made a generous one, but, not wanting to intrude upon her bereavement, had accepted her plea for time to think it over, and had neither raised nor pressed his offer). Too late now; too late forever. And terrible Parker Pink climaxed his vulgarity by more than once advertising his awful spread for sale, at inflated prices, as if to taunt his neighbor—half a million, when such properties went for a quarter-million; a million, when they went for half—for he was one of those people who, whether they love what they have or not, need always to know what they could get for it in the market, and who if their inflated asking price were met, their half-bluff called, might in fact sell without regret, but would more likely back off without compunction and next time raise the price.

  There was moreover in the distress of the Samuel Sherritts yet another factor, which may literally have turned the loss of their eastern view into the death of both of them. When Marge Pink had been Marge Shorter and John Shorter, Jr., was still alive, both families smiled with favor upon the childhood friendship, early romance, and not-unlikely eventual marriage of Henry Sherritt and Irma Shorter, as uniting two so-long-cordial neighbor clans. For Samuel Sherritt, in particular—Irma being his friend’s only child and thus the likely sole inheritor of still-pristine Shorter Point—the match bid to consummate a family dream. But with the advent of Parker Pink, the Pink Palace, Pink Lady II, and that brace of strapping, high-volume, hydroplaning Pinksters, Henry’s and Irma’s affiancement became a bone in the Sherritt throat. No matter that they loved Irma like a daughter and that the young woman herself quite deplored the Pinking of Shorter Point: She honored her mother and was therefore a polite stepdaughter and half-sister in her new house. It followed that Henry, as a gentleman, would be obliged to be a polite stepson-in-law and half-brother-in-law; that there would be not only a marriage but a wedding, and no doubt a showy wedding reception on Shorter Point, with attendant and ongoing social obligations between the two houses: the iron fist of propriety gloved in pink velvet. No Sherritt would have it otherwise, but for Henry’s parents the prospect was literally unendurable. Shortly after the engagement was announced, Dorothy Sherritt was absolved by a paralyzing stroke; a second killed her before the wedding. Broken Samuel did his duty, but withdrew thereafter to the west wing of the Main House, closed every window blind and drapery on the Sherritt Cove side, and forbade his maid to open them while he lived. The newlyweds set up housekeeping in the town of Easton and visited their families with a discretion amounting almost to surreptitiousness, especially in the outdoor season.

  A few years later, in 1942, Samuel Sherritt took perhaps the sole un-fastidious action of his life: He committed suicide with his favorite goose gun, a twelve-gauge Remington, long unused. Nopoint Point passed equally to Henry and his older brother, who together maintained the property but closed the house and went off to war. Thus Samuel did not live to see one of Parker Pink’s sons and one of his own killed in military combat, the other Pink son move to California, and Henry and Irma and their two children to Nopoint Point. Parker Pink succumbed to a galloping melanoma; and his widow, who had loved the man but not his works, decided to put Shorter Point up for sale, but, discovering a lymphatic cancer of her own, gave the property to her daughter and her son-in-law instead.

  Relieved of the burden of buying Shorter Point, Hank and Irma Sherritt were enabled to spend a small fortune restoring it to pre-Pinkhood. Though two-thirds of their affluent friends, nine-tenths of ordinary Eastern Shore folk, and their own son Willy thought them deranged, at huge expense they razed the Pink Palace; removed the dock, fountains, terraces, walls, landscaping, even the heavy stone rip-rap along the shore; filled the excavation and regraded the land to its original contours. Working from old photographs and advised by botanists from College Park, they reforested the cleared land, not with saplings, but with large-caliber trees of the same varieties felled by Parker Pink—and not fine nursery-grown specimens, such as one would ordinarily choose who could afford the tremendous cost of transplanting and reestablishing mature trees, but lean and scruffy oaks, pines, and ashes dug from actual woodlands and replanted in their natural crowded state. It was an operation unprecedented in the experience of Eastern Shore landscapers, even those used to catering to the whims of rich “Come-Heres” (the locals’ term for nonlocals who “come here” to retire). The state university’s botany people took such an interest in the project—especially when the Sherritts insisted that even the scrubgrowth be “landscaped” in, down to briars and creepers—that three doctoral candidates did their dissertation fieldwork there.

  Last of all, the access road was de-paved, de-ditched, replanted, and narrowed to a weedy footpath leading to a modest gooseblind: Parker Pink had long since replaced John Shorter Jr.’s sturdy blind with a huge heated and plumbed affair, which the Sherritts razed along with his other improvements. Irma first proposed buying or building a ruined blind for the old site, but upon reflection she agreed with ten-year-old Katherine that that idea was a touch tacky. In John Shorter Jr.’s honor, then, they replicated his, and used it every hunting season.

  Not surprisingly, given the scale and nature of the enterprise, a number of those trees died. But they do that in nature, too, and nature quickly took over where art, science, and money left off, building osprey nests in those dead trees, modu
lating the ecosystem in a hundred small ways from expert artifice and cunning approximation into the real thing. By 1955, only a sharp-eyed botanist could have guessed that Shorter Point had once been Pinked; by 1965, only an archaeologist. And if earlier Sherritts had enjoyed their eastern view across Sherritt Cove, their enjoyment was as nothing beside Hank’s and Irma’s, who many and many a time still in 1980, as we tell this story, catch themselves gazing bemused at Shorter Point. They smile; they touch hands or lips or wineglasses with unspeakable satisfaction.

  Now: Just as Shorter Point Restored was to their happy Sherritt eyes a different bit of geography indeed from the all but pristine Shorter Point that Parker Pink “improved,” so the story P. Sagamore was to publish in 1970 as “Part of a Shorter Work” was very different from the story “The Point,” which had ballooned into the novel Shoal Point, which was then ablated down to “Part of a Shorter Work.”

  THE POINT

  had had nothing to do with Shorters and Sherritts and Parker Pink, for though at the time of its composition our man had met Katherine Shorter Sherritt that evening in New York City and spent the night with her, and had in fact enjoyed from her, in course of that night, that story, told apropos of something or other in the tumid darkness of Room 176 in the Gramercy Park Hotel, and had even remembered it long after, “The Point” was a realistic midsize conventional tale inspired by Jacob Sagamore’s sale of Sagamore Flats on Middle Hoopers Island to the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The family property—which, with the two other siblings’ agreement, had been bought by their older brother upon Fritz Sagamore’s death and Nora Sagamore’s decline—did in fact include, though it was not built upon, a point, called Shoal Point. A reedy, sandy, and finally muddy spit, Shoal Point projected maybe ten feet into the Chesapeake at high water, when most of the point became Shoal Point Shoal; as much as two hundred feet at low water, when most of that shoal became Shoal Point—this though the tidal range at Hoopers Island, as throughout the Bay, seldom exceeds two feet.

  This property of the Sagamore property was not the point of “The Point,” though it was to become part of the point of “Part of a Shorter Work.” What Peter Sagamore’s original story concerned itself with was Elder Brother’s indifference, quite like Jacob Sagamore’s, to the possibility guessed early on by Younger Brother: that the federal agency outbidding a retired New Jersey dentist for Sagamore Flats under Department of the Interior cover was in fact the CIA. The Come-Here dentist, Peter Sagamore had argued by telephone from Boston, would likely restore and improve the house and grounds, which were in some disrepair, and use them for the unobjectionable purpose of retirement residency. The CIA would not only use the property for who knows what unsavory business (only their counterintelligence and clandestine-services people would have any use for it at all), but might to that end disfigure it with e.g. chain-link fencing, a helipad, big radio antennae—might perhaps even raze it and replace it with some nonresidential structure more to their purposes.

  Jacob Sagamore—who with his sister, Sue-Ann, was still sorting out their late father’s affairs, settling their mother into a nursing home, and reorganizing the Sagamore Boatyard—replied from Hoopersville that his brother was once again talking more like an Outside Agitator than like a good American; that a government operation on Sagamore Flats might benefit lower Dorchester’s chronically depressed economy; finally, that if Peter wasn’t happy with his management of Sagamore Flats, the Sagamore Boatyard, and their Sagamore mother, Jacob would be happy to turn over their management to him and go off on extended holiday in his brand-new Winnebago RV, as he planned to do anyhow before long. The truth was, Jake declared when the discussion heated up, he had spent his whole life down in dear damp Dorchester and paid his dues in spades while Younger Brother gallivanted around Europe and Yankeeland writing stories about webfoot rednecks on the good ol’ Eastern Shore. It was Jacob’s intention to convert the Sagamore yard away from workboats and sailboats, away from wooden boats entirely, to build for a few years a line of flashy-looking cheapo plastic runabout hulls under subcontract to a Pennsylvania firm, and then to sell the whole shebang, take the money, and run to Florida. If Peter didn’t like it, he could lump it.

  Peter lumped it. Sagamore Flats was sold to that “government operation,” and in the story, as in fact, paradox ensued. The disappointed New Jersey dentist bought a similar property just upshore, on Taylors Island, which included farm and woodland acreage. Soon after, in partnership with two fellow retired Come-Heres, he caused the farmhouse to be razed, the woods cleared, roads run in, and the acreage developed into one more low-budget residential subdivision, Bayside Estates—which however failed to attract the anticipated out-of-town buyers and was soon rezoned into a mobile home park. That park was then promptly singled out for wreckage by a small spring twister, as such places are, and only partially rebuilt by the developers, all of whom had moved on to Florida. The CIA, on the other hand, while they gutted the Sagamore Flats house to a clapboard shell and redesigned the inside entirely for its new functions (in Peter’s story, the “heavy interrogation” of Soviet defectors suspected of being KGB double agents, and the electronic reception of transmissions from certain of our “spy in the sky” satellites—though most of that latter activity is the business of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office), carefully preserved the exterior and grounds as an innocuous, perfectly unremarkable waterfront farm, indistinguishable from its appearance in Fritz Sagamore’s best days. Elder Brother gloats off to Fort Myers in his Winnebago; Younger Brother is morally perplexed up there in Transcendentalist country. “The Point” closes with Y.B.’s being politely but unequivocally warned away by a very nonlocal fellow when, on an impulse, he drives south, charters in Annapolis a sailboat of his late father’s manufacture, crosses the Bay, and sails up to the old family dock beside Shoal Point.

  Or so it was meant to close. But as its narrative tide ran, “The Point” enlarged and lengthened into a bulky, unSagamorian saga whose working title was

  SHOAL POINT.

  Every successful writer, early on in his/her experience, develops a more or less characteristic matter, manner, and method, which thereafter he departs from at his risk and persists in equally at his risk. The latter risk is staleness, self-parody: a dead marriage between the artist and his art. The former is regression to novicehood, as when a woman long and faithfully wed loses her spouse to death or divorce, begins after due mourning to “date” again, and feels and acts at forty-five as awkward as the green teenager she once was. Between these poles, among artists as between spouses, is mature development; but its course is neither always clear nor, when clear, always followable nor, when followable, always smooth. Peter Sagamore once tried for half a September afternoon in Story to fetch through the bridge at Knapps Narrows on Tilghman Island, playing a fluky fair wind against a steady foul tide in his engineless boat, by turns as amused and exasperated as was the bridge-tender. That worthy quite understood the situation and several times halted traffic and obligingly opened the draw as Story broad-reached to within fifty feet of it or less, only to be blanketed by the bridge piers or the bascule span itself and carried back by the tide despite P’s sculling. Rather than tie up at a pier for three hours till tide-turn (by when the daylight and probably the breeze as well would fade), he reversed course and sailed the long way around, under the island, from the Bay into Choptank River: ran out of light and air anyhow, miles from any proper anchorage; was then “caught out” by a rare Chesapeake fog as a cool front glided in over the still-warm water; missed one mark after another that he would have sworn he could find even without a compass; and wound up sculling blindly till past midnight to find what he had to hope in his then entire disorientation was safe anchorage till morning. Whew.

  Dissatisfied with the point of “The Point,” Peter watched uneasily as it grew toward novel size, and not his kind of novel at all: talky, loose, expansive, humorless—even politically and socially
concerned! But some imp of the perverse bade him scull on: The antipathy between the brothers was elaborated far beyond the mostly cordial distance between himself and Jacob. The moral paradoxes were extended back into U.S. history: The CIA’s often illegal activities were shown to have a provenance back to Thomas Jefferson, even to George Washington, and to pale before the rape of the land and the near or total obliteration of species (not excluding whole nations of Indians), at the hands less often of Come-Heres than of established settlers and their local descendants down to the present, who incline to resist any curbing of their exploitation, who market whatever resource is marketable as nearly out of existence as they are able and then move on to some other marketable resource or shrug their shoulders in the manner of mining or utility companies and move away.

  Shoal Point’s epigraph Peter took from the nineteenth-century Maryland writer George Alfred Townsend:

  And the county clerk will prove it by the records on his shelves:

  That the fathers of the province were no better than ourselves.

  The protagonist-narrator, a local himself, born into a family of Hoopers Island watermen, grows up with their values in the first four chapters: He is more or less contemptuous of the Come-Heres, whose money however is never refused; of conservationists and other experts from across the Bay; even of recreational sailors, who use wind and water for mere sport. In Chapters Five through Eight he becomes the first of his family to leave the county and attend a university; his perspective enlarges to the point of distancing him from his family, not alone on matters environmental: These are the years of the black civil rights movement, of which Cambridge, in Dorchester County, becomes one stormy focus. A tumultuous scene (Peter wrote it in Portugal, in a pousada in Sagres, near Cape St. Vincent) finds the narrator there on Race Street, fresh from a year’s European excursion, in the midst of an incendiary riot, confronting his redneck brother across a police barricade. . . .