The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  This whole idea was a mistake. We shall go back to Nopoint Point as soon as weather permits. Would we were home in our Stony Run apartment right this minute, so light, uncluttered, the awesome responsibility of parenthood not upon us. Friends, readers: The world is done for. Let’s tell one another a few last stories to while away what time remains. A daughter, a son—who wants them now?

  Well, he does, mightily, really. But!

  Out on the sprit again, changing headsails in that evil chop. The bow pitches and plunges, Pete hates this part, carrying him wave by wave from near-zero gravity to half again his actual weight while he wrestles in the spray to douse a wet 150-percent genoa that seems that same percentage larger than its sailbag. Two hands for the ship, one armpit for himself, in which he clutches the bow-pulpit rail, and there’s that light again, steady and clear now, at once a mile away and just a few feet before his eyes.

  Wind snaps, wind whistles through the vowels and consonants of Annapolis and rattles the plate-glass balcony doors of our room. The red message light is on, on the telephone, on Katherine’s side of our bed. Peter checks his luminous watchdial: 4:45. Naked in bed has been the custom in this relationship since Night 1 in the Gramercy Park: pj tops and uphauled nighties allowed in chilly weather, but nothing below the waist until we get up in the morning. That is the message light over there, and it is, oddly, on. P needs to pee. He slides over to Katherine, whose back is to him, snugs himself under her backside, parks his penis between her buns, gives it a flex to test whether she’s awake, and lightly takes her upper breast. She moves his hand down to her belly, where Chessie and Peek are doing laps, breathing nicely underwater. K chuckles as she wakes the rest of the way up, thinking Well of course there is no Mister Florence Halsey!

  Pete’s asleep again already. In our house it’s Kate who takes night phone calls, for example, because she wakes in full possession of her wits, able to weigh alternatives and make consequential decisions while Peter’s still recollecting who he is. That is not El Misterioso calling, she understands now; it is the message light on our hotel-room telephone. If it were an emergency, the caller or the desk clerk would have rung us. It’s merely a message of some sort, awaiting our pleasure. Let it wait.

  THE MESSAGE LIGHT IS ON,

  Peter murmurs into her shoulderblades two hours later, when we rewake; it’s been on. Says Kate she knows, and explains why we needn’t be concerned. Listen to that wind, one of us bids the other. We allow as how that wind blew through our dreams. That message light was in them, too. It will be P who says Sounds like no sailing today; Kath leaves such matters to him, as he leaves tactical-logistical ones to her. Bets Pete It’s Scheherazade calling from the Islands of India and China, to tell the kids their bedtime story that they didn’t get told last night. Bets Katherine It’s Don Quixote on the ship-to-shore, reminding you that his author mainly futzed around till he was D.Q.’s age: in his fifties. Yes, well, Peter sighs.

  He’s still piss-proud down there, poking in. Kinky Katherine shifts a bit, lifts her upper leg, wets us with two fingersworth of spit, and bids him help himself while she takes the message; she finds such little incongruities a turn-on. Though he is not horny, P holds her by the hips and gently obliges, stuffing her but barely thrusting while she rings the front desk. There are flowers waiting for us, she is told, with love from the folks at Nopoint Point, wired in through one of those twenty-four-hour florists with instructions that they be delivered along with breakfast in our room when we’re ready to order. Says Kath We’re ready to order, and with erected nipples requests from room service one order of eggs Benedict, two grapefruit juices, two coffees, two plates, one Coke, and ketchup: our traditional hotel breakfast.

  Sometimes the sweetest sex is by-the-way. Peter ejaculates thinking not really of his friend at all but of that wind out there, of his dream, also of death and Don Quixote. Inasmuch as we’ve never in our years together been obliged to use a condom, Katherine feels the warm squirt of him for the thousandth-plus time, but her mind is busy with Willy and Molly, with Florence Halsey, bless her heart, with El Misterioso, which reminds her now of something else. Back whispers They’re at it again. Says little Forth Shh: That’s how we got here.

  To the bathroom. Then Peter slips into pajama bottoms in time to admit room service and sign for the order: a breakfast cart big as a hospital gurney, with a centerpiece of handsome Brandy roses. K comes from the bathroom in a sunshine-yellow cotton nightie, looking like a knocked-up schoolgirl. We congratulate Irma on her floral restraint—only nine roses, moderate of stem—and read the card: Mom, Dad, Molly, Willy, Chip, Olive and Lester Treadway, Bobby and Ruthie Henry. We slug fruit juice and divide eggs Benedict. We swap dream accounts, Peter censoring the darker footage of his: By sunny day, that wind’s just wind, too rough for sailing in our condition, but not scary. He’ll check the forecast presently. We’ll see.

  Kath’s recounting of her Misterioso dream has reminded her of two other things entirely. If it weren’t for Florence Halsey, she tells the children, sipping her Coke and seeing how they take to sauce hollandaise, you might have had a different daddy. Appalled, One and Only clutch each other. She quickly explains that Mrs. Halsey loved books as books almost as much as she loved literature, and that, in consequence, generations of Denistonians, whatever their social standing, wound up as book-drive organizers for any charitable purpose; as Friends of the Library, any library; as volunteer book-cart pushers in their local hospitals; as rare-book collectors or dealers; as neighborhood-bookshop owners or supporters. A fair number, like Katherine, went into library science or editing and publishing; a few became English teachers; at least half a dozen became writers—of children’s books, mainly, but also of local history, of regional poetry and fiction. It’s Katherine the oralist who’s the bookish one in our house; she reads promiscuously, unlike Peter, who reads rather little but intensely. The final trouble with al-Din, Fish, Aiquina, and Jump was that they were in the wrong line of work—even Yussuf, who scorned the whole corpus of Western lit. To Florence Halsey goes part of the credit for Kate’s profound initial and persisting attraction to Peter Sagamore, writer of books, is what she means, she says. And little skinny-assed stories don’t do me, she reminds him: four pages here, three pages there, like Yussuf’s mean little “switchblade poems.” A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!

  Muses Peter What I’ve done is what I’ll do. That sounds like death to us. What was the other other thing entirely that your Dewey Decimal dream reminded you of? There’s no such thing as that secret tenth category and that red-light system, yes? Me and the kids think not.

  Katherine Sherritt declares with professional dignity, while whapping ketchup onto the plate beside her egg Benedict, that the science of libraries is a vast and multifarious science, with its high technicians and its esoterics and its old guard and avant-garde. The guild secrets and ground mysteries of library science are not for bandying with the unborn and the uninitiate over breakfast. Says Peter Sorry there. But her other other thing entirely that K’s library dream reminded her of, she says, slugging Coke as she did at our first breakfast together, in the Gramercy Park Hotel, is her celebrated Enoch Pratt Library Bookmark Exhibit, which Peter has heard about, and how it led to ASPS and ASPS led to HOSCA and HOSCA led the FBI and maybe the CIA into the margins of the story of her life before Douglas Townshend and Peter’s Prince of Darkness ever came along.

  BOOKMARKS

  Kath thinks she’s probably never told her husband this story in all our married life. It’s coming on to nine. Do we want to catch WYRE?

  But in this fancy hotel room there’s no AM radio for tuning in the marine Accuweather forecast between pop recordings on the Annapolis station. Peter resigns himself to blowing a buck or more to ring up the Baltimore weather number and hear an odd-voiced lady tell him less than he wants to know, but Katherine points out that he can dial the big marine supply
store right next door to the Hilton and get the detailed Chesapeake forecast from any salesclerk worth his/her salt, as it were. She’s right, too, and while a buck is but a buck, this sort of imaginative quick good judgment is one of the things P prizes in the woman. The boy who answers at Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc. has not in fact heard a weather report this morning, but at his elbow is one of those little weatherband jobs. He flicks it on and sets the phone beside it. A strong high-pressure system moving east from the Ohio Valley will keep the day fine, high-seventyish, and gusty; winds northwesterly at thirty-plus knots till evening, then westerly ten to twelve. Small-craft advisory in effect. A lay day, Peter declares. You were saying.

  Kate says okay but remind her to call Mom and May Jump after this story, would he? Which is this: The American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling was founded on a chilly mid-October evening in 1969 around a campfire in Deep Creek Lake State Park in western Maryland by Katherine Sherritt and May Jump and a number of their library science and backpacking friends, half as a joke, in the following wise: The United States of America were in spectacular disarray just then by reason of our war upon Southeast Asia and the rise of our domestic “counterculture.” Lyndon Johnson had vacated the presidency, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, the ghettos were on fire, the campuses were trashed, Richard Nixon had been elected—we’ll explain all that to you guys when you’re old enough. The McLuhanite reaction against poor old print-oriented, book-biased Western civ was also at its underwhelming peak: It was the era of mass poetry readings, street theater, the electronic global commune, oral history, anticopyrightists, the domestic samizdat, fringed miniskirts, macramé, lysergic acid, alfalfa sprouts, and the idea that virtuosity is a form of totalitarianism except maybe among rock stars. Between ourselves, happily, all this goes without reminding; otherwise that perfectly good room-service breakfast would go down the tubes.

  Now, then! Librarians, despite their etymology, divide first into the book-oriented and those more attracted to audiovisuals, computers, oral ethnicity, and the like; second into the community service-oriented, who want to get the library out into the streets and countryside and vice versa, and the museum-oriented, who gravitate to Special Collections, Acquisitions—anywhere but Circulation. Young Katie Sherritt had been bibliophiliac if not from the first then at least from the second Mrs. Halsey got hold of her, as we have seen. In 1968, fresh from graduate library school, her black-militant poet and Hasid chamber-musician behind her, her Chilean Marxist just entering her life, she began work at the Pratt in Circulation, became fast friends with May Jump and friends with May Jump’s fast friends, and threw herself ardently into the community-service camp. Her enthusiasm for books did not diminish, but she learned from May to appreciate the role of the oral in the library’s services to the ill-lettered.

  Among her new friends were several mostly young women whose shared interests went beyond library science to backpacking, canoeing, environmentalism, and feminism. Though a few were lesbian, most had, like Kate, male lovers, and some had husbands and children. Even the straights, however, enjoyed leaving their men behind for occasional camp-outs with the group, and it was at one of those, the following October, that Katherine mentioned the extraordinary bookmark she’d found that morning in Books Returned: a paper tampon-wrapper, marking the pages of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Immediately a high school librarian rejoined that she’d once got the tampon itself, in a copy of The Second Sex; another, that she was still scratching her head over a secondhand condom she’d found years before in Little Women.

  Since nearly all present had done time in Circulation, the list of remarkable bookmarks quickly grew: IBM cards, clip-on sunglasses, a single sock, dental floss, laundry and grocery lists, blank and canceled checks, parking and theater tickets. May Jump strummed her guitar: paper money, paper clips, love letters, business letters, pressed flowers, autumn leaves, postcards, greeting cards, playing cards, calling cards. Right ‘round the campfire now, in turn. Strum: a Mason-jar ring, uh, hairpins, hair ribbons, prize ribbons. Strum: a broken drive belt, a black lace garter, a knitting needle, a 500-lire note. Strum: Band-Aids fresh and used, a dried strip of lean bacon, a whole fried egg.

  Said Kath when they got hold of their mirth, We should make an exhibit, and found herself elected on the spot to do so. The group would pass the word around among their colleagues; the list would grow; they would assemble for display in the Cathedral Street windows of the Pratt either the items themselves—all but the X-rated ones—or duplicates and replicas. No exaggeration permitted; each item to be labeled as to source and, where possible, title of book thus marked. Pensive May Jump then wondered aloud What exactly is it we’re laughing and shaking our heads at, sisters? What about these crazy bookmarks? One woman ventured It’s a mad mad world out there. Thoughtsome Kate went further: Those bookmarks, she said in effect, remind us that beyond the orderly world of the library—the “book museum,” as some of her higher-tech data-retrievalists scornfully called it—lies the disorderly world of the World, where, despite the age of electronics, books are yet read (at least opened, marked, and closed) by all sorts of people in all sorts of human situations. Her actual words were Those bookmarks are the people’s loan to the lending library.

  Growled May Jump Bravo, and more or less fell in love with Katherine Sherritt then and there. Bravo, says Peter Sagamore now, and would do likewise had he not long since done.

  Three things ensued. First, back at the Pratt in the weeks thereafter, more and more involved with Jaime Aiquina, Katherine did indeed mount that bookmark exhibit (which came to include a whole windowful of “UFOs”: unidentifiable flat objects). Subtitled “The Public’s Gifts to the Public Library,” it was such a hit in Baltimore that it subsequently traveled around the Maryland county library system and was much imitated by libraries in other states. Assembling it brought K and May Jump closer—they became apartment-mates—and led Katherine, in May’s words, out of Circulation and into circulation: out of the bookstacks into the world of oral history and inner-city folktale-collecting, though she never lost her love of books.

  Second, out there that night on the pine-girt shore of Deep Creek Lake, the women’s talk turned from stories about extraordinary bookmarks to stories generally; thence to stories about women as traditional tellers of stories, especially to children (the bardic tradition, they acknowledged, was principally male, and the present-day professional Arab storytellers, like African grizots, are exclusively male; but then there is Scheherazade, there is Socrates’s Diotima, there are Hawthorne’s “damn’d scribbling women,” who dominated the popular novel almost from its inception and continue to do so); thence to stories about women as storykeepers (three-fourths of Katherine’s newly ordained fellow M.S.’s in Library Science were Ms.’s).

  Well. Among the group’s other ties turned out to be a shared pleasure in sharing these stories, and so—third—before the weekend ended they’d invented the American Society for the Preservation of Storytelling, with Scheherazade as its proposed patronne. Right on, cheered one of May’s girlfriends: Beguile the pigs and save our sisters. Replied nettled Katherine Scheherazade saved the king, too, and bore him three children and married him besides. Cracked May And look where Muslim women have been ever since.

  In the event, they dropped both Scheherazade and Cleopatra (suggested by their acronym) as inappropriate totems for an American society; but a line was drawn already which only Kath’s and May’s friendship kept amicable for the next few years, and which eventually threatened to split the organization: the line between those who, like May Jump, wanted to keep things not only female but feminist, and those who, like Katherine Sherritt, wanted the society open to all storytellers, regardless of sex. In fact, the complexion of the ASPS (in whose organizing May Jump found her true vocation) was unmistakably feminist, from the name to the thrust of its leading spirits; but K’s camp managed to keep its membership and most of its activities
open to men as well. That original meeting was called DC-1, after Deep Creek Lake, and for publicity purposes each subsequent annual convention was similarly initialed and numbered.

  In 1976, when May left the Pratt to become full-time director of what by then had become a genuinely national organization, she made the mistake, in Katherine Sherritt’s judgment, of moving the ASPS central office to Washington (till then she’d been running it out of their old apartment and a cubbyhole in one of the Pratt’s branch libraries) and herself to Annapolis. In Kate’s view—particularly given that a number of current ASPS officers were also National Organization for Women people—seating the society in the capital would decisively shift its concerns from storytelling to sexual politics.

  May had shrugged: Let it. Sure enough, by the end of the 1970s, ASPS was overshadowed by NAPPS (the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling), a purer outfit, with headquarters in eastern Tennessee and a strong Appalachian/Ozark flavor. See? had said Kate. Never mind, had said May, whose counterposition was that most U.S. storytelling in fact gets done in cities, because Number One that’s where most people are, Number Two that’s where most nonreaders are (May will not use the term illiterates), and Number Three that’s where most oral-culture ethnic concentrations are, including previously rural blacks and hillbillies and excepting really only Amerindians and Eskimos. Katherine couldn’t disagree with that argument, and in fact ASPS stayed alive and not exclusively feminist by emphasizing its urban/ethnic flavor. The charter members, it is true, are still inclined to get together around Blue Ridge and Allegheny campfires; but enough of those women are, like Katherine, happily bonded to their men—some of those men first-class storytellers themselves—to preserve a measure of hormonal balance in the society inspired by a tampon wrapper in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.