The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  He was as aware of our resemblance as I was, I was sure of that, and just as fascinated and mildly disconcerted from the other side of the years between us. Our eyes would meet; as we crossed the time zones, each of us would notice now and then that his double had been regarding him. Immediately we’d turn our eyes away.

  He can’t have found me prepossessing: one more blue-jeaned young American en route home from doing Europe on the cheap, and not much wiser than he’d been before he left. He himself, maybe, had been more of a man of the world at my age. He was a child of the century; his twenties had been the Twenties. What Cunard memories he maybe carried from the North Atlantic’s heyday: his slim, small-breasted fiancée in cloche hat and knee-fringed dress; himself dolled up in John Held, Junior, drag; confetti and champagne at sailing time, and isn’t that the Scott Fitzgeralds yonder across the bar?

  Our situation could generate any number of stories—though I’ve read since that doppelganger tales inevitably end in murder or suicide, if not both. But it generated none. As my double and his double avoided each other’s eyes, we came soon to avoid each other’s presence as well, insofar as that’s possible in a five-day crossing on a large ship. A less myth-driven fellow and his double would quickly have made acquaintance; with a laugh and three clucks of the tongue, we’d have dispelled the spooky little coincidence. One of us—probably the older one—might well have been unaware of any resemblance, as it turned out; he’d think it was all in the younger fellow’s imagination. Then we’d have polled the other passengers at the bar, and some would have been struck by our strong likeness—one would even say she’d thought we were father and son—but some others wouldn’t have noticed. By that time, however, we’d have discovered more things in common: He’d once aspired to write novels, for example, and he’d been Jean Heartstone’s family doctor, of all things, out in Portland, Oregon! Or we might have learned that beyond some similarities of appearance and manner, we had little in common at all: a hard-nosed Republican stockbroker from Scarsdale or Teaneck and a vaguely leftist storyteller from Hoopers Island. Thereafter we’d have saluted each other across the ship’s theater or promenade deck with a cordial small smile or a half-wave of the left hand.

  But this was my double; we never spoke. Was he even American? I can’t say for sure, though he looked it: an upper-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American male, unscarred but not untouched by the cataclysms of his century. I saw him last on the Greek Lines pier in New York, alone and baggageless, waiting erect and without expression for something or someone while we others milled about, collecting our bags and queueing up for customs, reminding one another that in this country one drives on the right, and that the word for “lost” is “lost.”

  My double is an old man now, if not a dead one, this many stories later. That many stories from this one, with luck, I’ll be getting on to his age then. If I were back on that ocean liner, setting out on my night-sea journey, I would be less diffident; I’d be more friendly. Never mind the Myth of the Wandering Hero; to hell with the spell: I would strike up conversation with my old double. I’d explain Jean Heartstone’s Magic Language Theory to him; then I’d ask him whether he’d read any good books lately. And years from now, when the situation is reversed—when I’m in Kennedy Airport at age sixty-five and see myself at age twenty-three alone and bemused among the families and the baggage and the purposeful and the sleek—I’ll know the answer to that question.

  Says Katherine Sherritt That kid will turn out to have been entranced by the later works of his favorite storyteller, Peter Sagamore, beginning with his Tidewater Tales. So are your children, Pins and Needles. See them listening?

  YEAH, WELL.

  Peter is in his story still. He asks his wife Where are we these days? Early on, before Jean Heartstone’s second pregnancy and stoned suicide, sure enough the tale of her called forth a light southwesterly with promise of increase. Despite a twenty-percent chance of afternoon and evening thundershowers, we have weighed anchor and beat out of Rhode River, Katherine steering and navigating in her black beret trouvé while her husband tended sails and went on with the story.

  I would say, says she, we’re off the mouth of South River and done with our separate sex educations. I would say that that is the Thomas Point Light up yonder at eleven o’clock, to port of that old wooden ketch, and that we are probably headed for Slip Thirty-three of Beasley’s Marina in Whitehall Creek, where we began our voyage together.

  What she means, Peter learns over dinner in Annapolis that evening, is that whatever our original motives might have been, the emergent pattern of our ad-lib cruise, if not its organizing principle, seems to have become the touching of bases, personal and narrative. Even sailing whither listeth wind and tide, we need some chapter-by-chapter idea where we’re headed; but knowing where we’re bound requires knowing where we are, which like good navigators we reckon from where we’ve been. For four days now, we’ve taken fixes on the present from landmarks of our past: Howard “Huckleberry” Findley and Heather Foulke-Stoughton, Jean Heartstone and Poonie Baldwin and Marcie Blitz, the Gramercy Park Hotel and the Katherine Anne Porter party, Douglas Townshend and the Doomsday Factor. We now know, about as well as does the reader of these tales, where we are and how we got here. Inasmuch as Annapolis and the Severn River lay ahead when Peter asked his question, Katherine bets that if we’d lashed the tiller, Story would have sailed itself back to Slip 33 in the year 1970 and closed that particular circle.

  Yes, well. Having told that story, however, it seemed to Peter (this was back there in the present, as we and that salty-looking beat-up ketch closed on Thomas Point Light together, lightfoot Story easily overtaking the larger boat), we were free to give our old slip the slip. Too early in the voyage, something told him, for closing circles. Says Kate in the Treaty of Paris Restaurant in the Maryland Inn in Annapolis that evening, I would have thought that according to old Jean Heartstone’s Magic Language Theory, telling the story of Slip Thirty-three would guarantee our spending the night there instead of here. I was game.

  So had been Peter. In his opinion, though, a chief value of recognizing what’s pushing you, and how and why and where, is that it enables you to push back, or to use that push to go off in some other direction. That is some funky old boat, all right, he said back there at the Thomas Point Light, with its ratlines and baggy-wrinkled shrouds and jerry cans and patched-up sails and eyes painted on its bows like those on Iberian fishing smacks. What next? Its name was . . . P steadied his binocular elbow against the companionway hatch, but by the time we were close enough to resolve the lettering, we’d pulled abeam and couldn’t read the narrow stern. A wiry, white-whiskered steersman in Greek fisherman’s cap waved from the tiller. ANTE IV, Pete believes the name was or ended with: As in Time Before, K wonders, which is what our tales have turned and returned to? Or as in Raise the ante, muses Peter, which is what it’s time our story did?

  That is why, when time came this afternoon, we breezed sentimentally into Whitehall Creek after all, kissed each other’s lips, and waved hello with the children to Beasley’s Marina, sine qua non—but then sailed right out again on the same southwesterly (more bracing to beat against than to run before), across and into the mouth of the Severn to always-bustling Annapolis harbor. It is our fourth day out, fifth night: time for a proper shower and a meal ashore, we agreed; a room at the Hilton or the Maryland Inn. Both the track of our voyage thus far and Jean Heartstone’s Magic Language Theory—by which nothing is, but dreaming, reading, or writing makes it so—indicate to Peter Sagamore that because we recognized, there off Thomas Point Light, the need for our story’s ante to be upped, our story’s ante will be upped.

  The predicted possible thundershowers don’t materialize. That weathered old ketch Rocinante IV does; drops its Herreshoff anchor out where Spa Creek meets the Severn, in front of the Naval Academy, as we tie up in a rental slip at Town Dock. The eye on her port bow is painted shut. Havi
ng winked at us, she swings her transom once just enough, before settling down to ride at anchor, for us to make out her full name from the town dock’s end, where we’re busy getting our land legs and watching with the 7 x 50s. Subdued Peter, grinning and sighing, says That does it. Let’s go eat.

  OVER TOURNEDOS ROSSINI WITH OKAY PATE,

  KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE EXPLAINS

  WHAT WE’RE DOING HERE.

  Full many a sailor voyageth in quest of reasons for his/her voyage, is what Kath means by the emergent pattern of this cruise. She’ll have the tournedos Rossini medium rare and house dressing on the salad, she tells the moon-faced young blond St. John’s College philosophy or classics major who has just that minute handed us our menus in the Treaty of Paris and is retrieving the two spare place-settings at our booth for four. Says Peter The same only medium plus the fried potato skins with sour cream and a half carafe of the house red, and we hand her back the menus. My name’s Debbie, the young woman now gets a chance to announce gravely, and I’ll be your waitress this evening. Our special this evening is the prime rib with the au jus. Would you like a cocktail while you’re deciding on your order?

  K asks her husband to remind her to call Nopoint Point before we leave and then reminds him that his often-stated, unfulfilled-as-yet-in-his-opinion writerly ambition is to conjure an image larger and richer than any books-worth of sentences that sets it forth: Scheherazade yarning through the night to save her neck, Odysseus homeward-striving through the wine-dark perils of the sea, D.Q. and Sancho colloquizing across the Spanish plain, Huck Finn araft with Jim down the Father of Waters, et cetera.

  Says Peter There is no etcetera; those are the north east south and west of it. Well, says the sober expression of Debbie bringing us our wine and rolls, what about such other cardinal compass-points as Rip Van Winkle snoozing while the world turns upside down and Ahab-and-the-whale and Robinson Crusoe and Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole and.

  Two of the four we’ve already heard from, Kath continues, and have been counseled by the examples of. Huckleberry Findley down there on the Honga reminded us of the truths Twain tells and the ones he won’t, as well as Sherritt’s Third Law of Emotion, which she just now made up. The psychological physics (she will explain to her all-eared friend when that frowning full moon of a Debbie has retired into the kitchen clouds) that propelled Huck west into the Territory propelled Sam Clemens, as Pete pointed out, from Hannibal to Buffalo to Hartford and points ever east. Ditto P.S. to Portugal, Portland, and the 92nd Street Poetry Center. What she bets is that a corollary physics works the other way: that, the tide of his life having fetched him back to shoal-draft Maryland, when Peter finally clears his throat he’ll people the page not with webfoot rednecks but with some finer-honed, less simple and less marsh-bound specimen than Huck Finn on the Honga, Parts One and Two.

  Enjoy your dinner, Debbie orders us. Go on, says P to K: Ted and Deeahnah? Kath’s been thinking about the Dmitrikakises, all right, all the while we spieled the reader with forest-green Crayolas and Doomsday Factors. Odysseus tells of wonders, is what has occurred to her, but deals in realities, except for his final fling with Nausicaa out of time. We know what Ted and Diana are in our story for, especially coming as they did on the ominous heels of Doug Townshend’s death: Their job is to tempt us to get out, not à la Huck but à la them. Buy a secondhand world cruiser, Peter prompts; there must be a dozen in brokerage right here in Annapolis that we could afford. Let Willy and Poonie and the multinationals and the CIA and the KGB run the world and ruin it, K carries on; we can’t stop them anyhow. The kids join in, AC and DC: Sail us around the world forever! Bring us up out of TV range! Well, we could, working here and there as necessary to pay the bills. No news; no careers; no civic responsibility. Whoopee. Hedonists really do have more fun, and time gets you anyway, as will the Doomsday Factor if push comes to button. The question is whether to ignore them or engage them in losing battle.

  Reader, we could do it: shrug our family shoulders and seize the day. We have seen those salty households sailing by, their faery gold children perched on bowsprits, regarding the shore with clear-eyed wonder as they pass. But to go that route, Kate cautions, is, uh, to reject the community while feeding on its fruits: high-tech materials, gear, medicines; your royalties, unroyal as they are. Does Peter really want to be a nautical Thoreau? Well, she does make it sound appealing. The pâté on these tournedos, by the way, is okay, yes?

  Yeah. See? There are your Balzacs and your Dickenses, in the thick of things, getting it all down. But there are your great isolates, too: Gauguins and Robert Louis Stevensons, reporting to their civilization from outside it. Sherritt’s Third Law tells Kate that Pete’s neither one nor quite the other; that he’ll keep his distance figuratively, but not especially literally, from his material.

  Tell him more.

  Okay: A Sherritt has strong historical ties to citizenship: service to the region of her ancestors, et cet. Even Pig Willy feels those ties, in his crooked way: He may be the death of Talbot County, but Talbot County is his life. A Sagamore feels no such thing: Pete and Jake are immigrants by disposition. Look who’s living in whose home county; look who keeps saying Let’s touch base at Hoopersville but does so as seldom as decency permits. Yet it’s Katherine, finally, who could bid bye-bye for keeps tomorrow to the Pratt Library and Nopoint Point and go bop around Bora Bora till the cows come home; and it’s Peter, we suspect, who could hardly hack hedonism; who needs not only to tell tidewater tales to as many as will hear, but to keep one foot not far from Mother Marsh, whithersoever the other wander. And the reason for this paradox, we explain to Means and Ends (who, while less satisfied than we with Treaty of Paris pâté, are not too young to hear such things), is what we know about each other’s heart of hearts: P’s miniquasar deep in there; K’s excuse the expression petite black hole.

  In short, we decide (along with not to have the Schwarzwäldertorte, Debbie, just one American coffee, black), the lesson of Mark One is this: Odysseus put his house in order before he left it. Let’s have these babies, I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good, and let’s clear their father’s throat—and then let’s see what’s next. L’addition, s.v.p.?

  Moon-faced Debbie’s frown we read as a message from the reader that our bill contains at least one unpaid item: our nonchalance with respect to that extraordinary name (under the circumstances) of that funky sailing vessel out there off the U.S. Naval Academy parade grounds. The St. Johnnie all but stares P down as he fishes out wallet from hind pocket, Visa card from wallet—he registers wistfully that one gets out of this habit, sailing—while K uses the ladies’ and the phone.

  Yeah, well. We’d have thought it clear enough, after the cameo appearances as they say of Huck Finn on the Honga and Odysseus in the Little Choptank, that Jean Heartstone’s ghost has become our cruise director. Out there on that beat-up ketch, somebody is tricked out as The Knight of the Doleful Countenance, ready to up the ante of our erstwhile-aimless odyssey for the third time. No need to dinghy out there to say hello; the bases we need to touch are chasing after us. Nonchalant Pete wouldn’t bat an eye now if his wife found Shahryar’s vizier’s daughter in the Treaty of Paris loo. Hi: My name’s Scheherazade, and I’m your bunk-mate for this evening. May I tell you a story?

  But he’s still waiting for receiptful Debbie when, after an unusual while, Kate herds her belly back to our booth and declares Never mind Don Quixote. I’ve just had the strangest conversation in the universal world with my big pig brother.

  I’ll need your address and phone number on there, Debbie complains.

  Asks grinning Peter How come you were talking to Willy? Take us out of this chapter.

  Katherine’s still amazed. He said he loves me, Peter. Willy Herpes Sherritt actually said those English words into a Chesapeake and Potomac telephone. She gives her strandy hair a shake. Pete pens our Baltimore address on the charge slip and removes the customer copy. Willy says he’s really looking forward to
being an uncle. The moon commands us to have a nice evening. Dazed Kate wonders to herself

  WHETHER HERPES SIMPLEX CAN AFFECT THE BRAIN,

  and aloud to Peter, five minutes later, as we stroll hand in hand down Duke of Gloucester Street to say good night to Story and Don Quixote before strolling over to the dockside Hilton for our night ashore, she wonders it again.

  I mean, that was the single weirdest telephone conversation I ever did have in my one life. She’d scarcely said Hi to her mother and We’re at the Annapolis Hilton and you’re not a grandma yet but Rise and Shine are fine don’t worry, when Irma had said in a peculiar voice Willy and Molly are with us, and a minute later Willy wants to say something, Katherine, and then Willy was on an extension saying Some things are hard to say, Kath, especially to you, but a lot of big changes have changed since you-all’ve been gone.

  Peter wonders Since we-all’ve been gone? Did we cross some time-line like Ted and Diana?

  Says K Me too: The world changed since last Sunday? So Willy goes It’s damn hard to talk to you, Kath, and I say Give it a try, and next thing I know he’s saying how his medical problem, quote unquote, has made him take a hard look at himself blah blah, and the fact is he’s really come to understand what a wonderful person his wife is and things are going to be a whole lot different in their house from now on and he really appreciates me too, he just wants me to know that, he’d even say he loves me, but he knows I’d mock him if he used that word; anyhow he just wants me to know that he and Moll are really really looking forward to having nephews and nieces especially since it looks like they won’t be having children of their own, and get this: He even wonders whether his medical problem isn’t a blessing in disguise, coming right after Poonie’s recent troubles and all—only he didn’t say Poonie, he said Peebie!—and maybe it was all meant to straighten out his head about a few things. Then he goes I’ve said my say; now go ahead and mock.