The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Katherine followed these stories with avid appall and wondered why her husband had apparently lost interest, particularly as she knew he knew more than the reporters knew about the case. Thanksgiving Day, which normally we divide between Nopoint Point and Hoopersville, we spent in our Baltimore apartment so that Peter could tell his wife everything we’ve now told here. Two weeks later, at the end of her second trimester, she spontaneously aborted our child.

  We made certain New Year’s resolutions.

  Peter Sagamore’s muse, however, did not change her tune. Take it out; less is more. We had, then, it seemed, lost both ways. Grim Kath conferred with Jack Bass; we went on the Pill. The Senate committee’s investigation of the Paisley case bogged down and was given over to the Justice Department, who gave it over to the FBI, who submitted a twelve-page report reaffirming the Maryland State Police ruling of probable suicide. Maryann Paisley wrote a long letter to Admiral Stansfield Turner, demanding that the Agency vindicate her late husband by acknowledging the secret and dangerous work which had culminated his long career of service. In a brief reply, Admiral Turner (who had by no means necessarily been lying to that Senate commitee: Agency chiefs can report only what their aides tell them) expressed his regrets at the cloud still hanging over Mr. Paisley’s death, but pointed out that the Agency had no jurisdiction in the matter and must properly defer to the Maryland State Police. The Agency put its Choptank River safe house, on Ferry Neck, back on the market. Said glum Katherine, reading the Baltimore Sun over breakfast, Let’s both of us become spooks; we’re spooks enough already since last Thanksgiving. Said glum Peter I’m free to say no.

  More tea?

  Then in late March 1979, Frederick Mansfield Talbott disappeared, Paisley-style, from his younger brother’s cruising cutter, Reprise, on which he’d been taking an early solo sail from his parents’ farm on Wye Island. The cutter was found lightly aground in Eastern Bay, not far from the mouth of the Wye, but the missing man’s body was never located. As might be expected, the media gave much play to the similarity of the two cases; some even picked up on the cutter’s portentous name. In April, the Senate intelligence committee declared its dissatisfaction with the FBI’s report and reopened its Paisley investigation: a delicate business in view of President Carter’s preparations-in-progress for the SALT II negotiations with the Soviet Union. We read that Frederick Mansfield Talbott had probably been despondent over the disappearance of his radical son Jonathan in Chile. In May, the insurance companies Mutual of New York and Mutual of Omaha both announced that they were withholding payment to Maryann Paisley of the death benefits in her husband’s policies, citing their doubts about the identification of the body. The flamboyant lawyer Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., hired by Mrs. Paisley to investigate her husband’s death or disappearance, declared to reporters that Paisley had been, among other things, the CIA’s liaison with ex-President Nixon’s Watergate “plumbers,” one of whom Fensterwald had also represented.

  Douglas Townshend telephoned us once, just wondering.

  No, Peter said to Katherine. Katherine said to Douglas Townshend Peter says No. Quite so, said Doug: Only wondering. In June, Attorney Fensterwald arranged a press conference on Solomons Island, at which that deputy Calvert County coroner and that marina operator declared their shared conviction that Mr. Paisley had met with foul play. Said Eddie Paisley This removes any doubt that my father did not kill himself. Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., agreed, but the state medical examiner scoffed. Reporters speculated that Fensterwald had staged the conference for the benefit of the insurance companies, who did indeed subsequently pay off; but a spokesman for the Maryland State Police pointed out that cause of death was not an issue with the underwriters, as there were no suicide clauses in the policies. At Jack Bass’s instruction, we now went off the Pill and onto a fertility drug; a few months later, Peter’s sperm came through as his muse would not, and by the autumnal equinox Henry Sherritt reinstated that trust fund.

  Maryann Paisley—$235,000 wealthier, minus attorney’s and private investigator’s fees—disclosed to reporters in November 1979 that CIA files on her late estranged husband, which she had acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, showed fifteen years of his Agency career blacked out. He had been, she was now convinced, while overtly Overt, covertly Covert, and at the time of his death was in all likelihood eavesdropping from Brillig upon a mole transmitting KH11 data from the Hoopers Island safe house up to the KGB installation on Corsica Neck. At the same time, now that the insurance companies had paid off, she reaffirmed her conviction that the body in the Bay was not her husband’s. The state medical examiner, she revealed, had showed her photographs of the corpse. Its nose was not her possibly late estranged husband’s nose.

  In January 1980, ex-Congressman Porter Baldwin, Jr., formerly of St. Marys County in southern Maryland, announced his complete rehabilitation from both alcoholic and homosexual tendencies and his intention to run again for Congress from his new base in western Maryland. The Moral Majority withheld its support, likewise the Caucus for Gay Pride, but others cheered his announcement. Maryann Paisley reported that her home in McLean, Virginia, was broken into while she was out with friends, and that though apparently nothing was stolen, her possibly late estranged husband’s effects had been strewn about in an obvious attempt to frighten her: His scuba gear, for example, had been hauled out of storage along with a marine radio and placed prominently upon a workbench, as if by its owner’s ghost. Her attorney, Mr. Fensterwald, opined that the break-in was in all likelihood a scare tactic by the Central Intelligence Agency to dissuade her from pursuing her Freedom of Information suit to recover all documents pertaining to Mr. Paisley—a suit Fensterwald expressed little confidence of winning, the Agency being the Agency. Of Frederick Talbott, whose loss we could not bring ourselves to grieve, there remained no trace, no news; his son, too, remained desaparecido, swallowed up in the Southern Cone with the thousands of others. And from Peter’s muse, as our new and apparently redoubled pregnancy approached its term, there was likewise no report.

  We moved to Nopoint Point in June to await parenthood.

  On Tuesday, June 10 last, the newsdealer in Easton happening to be sold out of the day’s Wilmington paper, Henry Sherritt picked up along with his Wall Street Journal a copy of The Washington Post, though he himself does not at all care for that newspaper, and dropped it off at the First Guest Cottage for his daughter and his son-in-law, who he knows rather do. Among the obituaries was Douglas Townshend’s: The retired CIA officer had died of a ruptured aneurysm aboard an airliner en route from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, whence he was bound for Canberra and Perth on business as a government consultant. Though we know no other members of his family, shocked Katherine set to work on the telephone, which is to her as is his flute to Jean-Pierre Rampal. By the time shocked Peter finished his distracted morning’s toil upon a draft of “The Magnificent B♭” she was able to report that both the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady and the widow of that once-eminent author of hardboiled-detective novels (who had gone to his own denouement) were persuaded—on no particular evidence that Kath could coax from them—that the Central Intelligence Agency had done in our erstwhile elder friend. Indeed, inquiring of a sister of Doug’s about memorial services, the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady had met with a cynical hostility reminiscent of John Paisley’s sister’s, which she duly reported to Katherine: The Company killed him, Kate quoted the A.R.L. lady quoting Douglas’s sister: Go to their memorial service.

  There were, it turned out, at least three such services: a small funeral ceremony, restricted to the family of the deceased, when his body was returned from the Antipodes to the Townshend family graveplot in Baltimore County; a full-fledged in-house memorial service at CIA headquarters in Langley, arranged and attended by Doug’s former colleagues; and a small informal memorial cocktail party in Georgetown for his non-Agency friends, hosted with dignity after all by the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady on Friday, 13
June, and attended, our fingers crossed, by us. At the door, our hostess said to Katherine’s belly Good Lord look at you, but that was that. She acknowledged that she was probably handing the Agency a bum rap; we agreed that its covert operations arm well deserved any raps and charley horses the likes of us could hand it, for so often turning paranoid speculation into understatement. Katherine took the two sips of memorial champagne permitted her by Jack Bass and then drank tonic water with lime. Peter endeavored to maintain the Tragic View of clandestine operations on the part of governments equipped to destroy the world many times over; indeed, of governments period. We had rather expected to see Franklin and Leah Talbott among the guests; would have been pleased to, within the limits of our strained attention, for we had admired Frank’s KUBARK exposé and had enjoyed both husband and wife. They had gone off on a Caribbean sailing trip, we were told, in part to recover from the shock of Frederick Mansfield Talbott’s presumable death and to escape the attendant publicity. That matter, too, was by some at the party attributed with knowing tisks and shrugs to the Agency; by others just as knowingly to the KGB. There had been a rift, some said, between the brothers upon publication of Franklin Key Talbott’s book. There had been no rift, said others: The expose was in secret fact orchestrated by the CIA itself, to throw the KGB off track in certain matters. Et cetera. A memorial cocktail party, we decided, is not a wonderful idea.

  There fizzles out the chronicle of our only brush to date with Doomsday Factors. A proper novel, we agree, would know what really happened to John Arthur Paisley, to Frederick Mansfield Talbott the Prince of Darkness, to Douglas Townshend. But these are mere tidewater tales, wending whither listeth wind and water no matter how seasoned the tiller-hand, or almost no matter. The reader understands now what final strain was in the First Guest Cottage and upon our discourse on that Saturday and Sunday, 14 and 15 June 1980, when Peter Sagamore wrote his final version of “B♭” by deleting all that remained of it: its abbreviated title. That ultimate kenosis, so long in the works of his works, was thus completed as Katherine’s filling was all but fulfilled. The latter vessel stood ready to be emptied, the former to be replenished, when pent Peter said Set me a task! and careful Katherine Take us sailing, and both vessels ventured out upon a third.

  Between you and us now, also, reader, as between ourselves, there remain, despite certain mysteries, no further secrets. Bunk to bunk through Story’s cabin next morning, behind Big Island on Rhode River, Peter asks Katherine Shall we get on with it. His inflecting that question as a statement is his salute to the late Doug Townshend. I mean now that we have everything on board we need. Or shall we sensibly go home and have our babies. Replies wakeful Katherine, as promptly and soberly as if waiting to be asked, Let’s take us sailing.

  DAY 4:

  RHODE RIVER TO

  SEVERN RIVER

  But to sail wants wind; this mild June Thursday morning there is none where we are. New rioting in South Africa leaves forty-two more blacks dead. Decline of U.S. “smokestack” industries continues. People on engine-less small sailboats had better be fair-weather friends as well as foul. To wait out the calm, after breakfast Kath baby-sits on Story’s front porch, reading Charles F. Chapman’s Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling while doing delivery exercises. She practices reciting, to herself and to Odds and Ends, the thirty-two points of the compass until she can do it at patter-song clip both clockwise and counterclockwise, but she cannot come up as could May Jump with a melody to fit. She tries unsuccessfully to dismiss from mind the memory of being forcibly sodomized, seventeen years since, by her former husband, former Congressman Porter Baldwin, Jr.; her Let’s take us sailing was said soberly because for two nights in a row now she has redreamed that disagreeable episode. Down in the cabin, her incumbent spouse does isometrics and remarks to Story’s log that

  THE FOREST-GREEN RECRAYONING OF MRS. PORTER BALDWIN, JR.,

  was to have been told the reader yesterday but wasn’t because Day 3 was overlong already by the time we got the hook down behind Big Island; he goes upstairs to entertain K with the story of his meeting himself forty years later in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean seventeen years since: the same year she got herself recrayoned.

  Poonie Baldwin, Katherine Sherritt had told Peter Sagamore in Dun Cove sometime during our first nautical night together after the Katherine Anne Porter party in 1970, was no villain. Her new lover had known, since our busy stay in the Gramercy Park Hotel six years before that, that she had been married and to whom, but hadn’t yet heard the tale of that match’s end. She was telling him it now (ten years ago) because at her climax-time in our then latest shipboard coupling, which happened to wind up with her atop him, he had happened lightly to press a helpful fore-fingertip into his new woman’s rectum. Instead of revving up her joy, the friendly move had caused her to cry out into his open mouth (we were kissing), snatch his hand away, and bound off him in mid-orgasm, bumping her head hard on the cabin headliner. She apologized at once, before he could—and only then he remembered a similar push-of-the-wrong-button that energetic night at 2 Lexington Avenue; a similar apology. Though his erection was entirely spooked, she insisted upon remounting him and upon his replacing his fingertip in that touchy socket. No go: He’d felt her tighten up all over. For pity’s sake, he’d suggested; let’s leave the poor thing alone. There’s so much else. But she wanted him to have the works; demanded that he lead her gradually in our nights and years to come to enjoy even occasional anal copulation with him, not to mention the odd friendly goose—We’ll see, said Peter—and told him the story of her forest-green recrayoning.

  He was only a weakling, old Poonie, and, I understand in retrospect, a disoriented boy in matters sexual. His nickname you’ll have guessed to be the affectionate diminutive for “poontang,” a then-popular slang term for the main thing you men were alleged to want from us women. Said Peter I know what “poontang” means; I was there. Went on fascinated Kath It’s a peculiar class of partitive, no? Some nooky; a little poontang. Not Let me see your nooky, or I’m going to stuff my putz into your poontang.

  Affirmed Peter Sagamore Poontang is never the female genital qua genital, but the female genital sexually delivered or claimed. You were saying.

  Willy gave him that nickname when he and Poonie were first learning naughty language, and it stuck. A funny thing about naughty nicknames is that they’re just as tenacious as clean ones even though they can never be used publicly. Poonie’s parents probably still don’t know that that’s what nearly everybody who knows their celebrated son calls him among themselves. Most of the Upper Shore upper-crusties sent their kids to the same private lower schools and dancing and riding classes and one another’s parties, and so even though the Baldwins lived two counties up from the Sherritts, Willy and Poonie were best friends from kindergarten on and spent lots of time at each other’s houses. Poon was always hanging around me and my girlfriends, pestering and teasing us when Willy was with him and wheedling in on our games when he wasn’t. I might mention that your public-school type of intersexual bullying was rare in our crowd, and that even back in the late forties and fifties, the cruder sorts of gender distinction were frowned upon, though plenty of less crude ones operated full force. Few of my little girlfriends played with dolls or did needlework, nor did the little boys go in for Cowboys and Indians or GIs and Japs. What we played was sports sports sports, and while the team sports were always segregated and never played outside school, things like tennis and riding and sailing and swimming we were encouraged to do together, as part of our general social training.

  All that, said Peter Sagamore, is as foreign to what went on on Hoopers Island in my day as would be the court of Louis Quatorze to New Guinea bushmen.

  Said naked Katherine as we gently perspired together in 1970 there on Story’s settee berth, she fiddling bemused with her new lover’s now flaccid penis, I mention it in order to establish that even Willy kept a foreskin of public manners over the glans
of his essential swinery, and that Poonie Baldwin was as charming when he wanted to be, which in fact was most of the time, as he was deceitful and weak and kinky whether he wanted to be or not. I happen to believe that there are unfortunately bad-charactered children who really take pleasure in doing bad things, and okay-charactered children who try out bad things but then feel properly ashamed even if they’re not caught, and some really good-charactered children who can rarely be tempted even to experiment with bad things, because they truly dislike them. They think the bad things are bad.

  Well, now, said Peter.

  By bad, his new friend hastened to explain, she didn’t especially mean stuff like You show me yours and I’ll show you mine—although that particular category of naughtiness was in fact rare in her childhood circle. What she meant was, you know, lying, stealing, cheating (like maybe not showing you mine after we’d agreed and you’d shown me yours), and, let’s see, gratuitous cruelty to our fellow animals and so forth. Said Peter I was your middle kind: okay-charactered et cet. Said Katherine So’s my kid brother, Chip, whom I’ll be glad when you meet: a normal first-rate kid who experiments carefully now and then with the limits and makes the right moral inferences from his experiments. But you’re both firm-charactered fellows. Peebie Baldwin—his official nickname, made from his initials—was a weak-charactered middle kind turned into a baddie by his internal contradictions and the intuitive exploitation thereof by Willy Sherritt, himself a baddie at least from the hour of my birth. Yours truly (K was obliged to establish for the purposes of this narrative) was a ninety-nine-percent goodie. To overtease or take unfair advantage of another kid or lie about anything significant seemed as creepy to her as shoplifting or torturing a pet cat.