The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  The skipper of Rocinante IV makes a final pass in our direction as, having gotten his wife’s signal that he had better shelve his outrage and hear what Mrs. Doomsday Factor has to say, Peter buttons Story up and reluctantly helps K into the woman’s car. We both sit in the back; Katherine takes Peter’s hand to calm him. The old sailor calls Carla B Silver? Our driver lowers her electric window. Some other time, Don, okay? I got a fare and the meter’s running.

  I haven’t seen you in two hundred years, Capn Don complains, shaking hands with her but looking also at us and winking like his boat.

  Stop by Fells Point and catch me up. We got to run now, Skipper. Carla B Silver is cordial but firm; he’s crestfallen; she raises her window and backs out of the parking slot, muttering Jee-sus to the backseat. Amused Kath asks Is his name really Don?

  But her husband says We’re not going to talk about that now and demands of the Carla B Silver person What are you in our story for? He doesn’t know why his question came out like that, quite; it upped and did. Katherine protests She’s told me, honey. Don’t be so hostile. I’ll explain it all later. Insists hostile Peter Sagamore—not hostile to Kate, mind—

  I WANT EVERYTHING EXPLAINED RIGHT NOW.

  The Carla B Silver person says Damn it, then, all right, and whips the Jag over to the nearest painted curb and turns to face us, resting her chin on the back of her hand on the back of the front seat. The long version takes sixty years to tell and isn’t finished yet; I’ll give you the short version.

  And for the next some hours she does, beginning there in the car at the curb, then over club sandwiches upstairs in the Hilton restaurant after we check out—Peter is dehostilized already by that time, partly by reason of what his wife has told him alone in our room as we collected our stuff—finally back aboard Story, the three of us sitting in the cockpit, friends by then, Carla B Silver (as we shall now regularly call her, as she calls herself) holding in one hand a cigarillo in a cigarillo holder and in the other the spike-heeled pumps she has properly removed to come aboard. No sign of old C.D.Q. Sure, she knows him; Carla B Silver knows a lot of people; he ties up at Fells Point now and then and stops by her place for a beer, Dos Equis. She wishes her daughter Lee could meet him; Leah Talbott knows Cervantes and that crowd the way Carla B Silver knows the Maryland State Liquor Control Board, and Capn Don really does pretend to believe he’s Whatsisname. There is more to it and to him, but that’s another story. The main one told, CBS. goes down into our cabin to pee. I’d get claustrophobia in one of these, she says afterward, meaning small cruising sailboats, but it must be something just to let go the ropes and sail off, the way my Lee did with her Frankele. Maybe one day.

  Says Katherine, holding Peter’s hand, It’s the best there is.

  We are subdued. Now that he can regard her with dehostilized eyes, Peter sees that May Jump’s new girlfriend’s mother is a mighty fine-looking sixty, trim and dark and seasoned, womanly and tough. A bit much for his taste in the makeup and jewelry way, but she wears them well. He says, and means it, I hope we’ll cross paths again with your daughter and your son-in-law. Brother-in-law?

  Carla B Silver says wryly Son-in-law by law and common-law brother-in-law, lighting another cigarillo downwind from Katherine. Fred and I never got around to marrying.

  Fred is her name for Frederick Mansfield Talbott, we have learned: her disappeared Prince of Darkness; father of her disappeared grown son, Jonathan, but not of her daughters, Leah and Marian, a.k.a. Mim, the fruit of an early and short-lived marriage terminated thirty years since by auto crash. Carla B Silver, we have learned, was born in Europe of Rumanian Gypsy and German Jewish parents—unlikely match, but such things happen—both of whom died in the Nazi camps that she herself survived, she won’t say how. The surname is her late American husband’s, himself of German Jewish extraction. To him and to the non-Rumanian side of her own ancestry, Carla B Silver credits her head for business: Only twenty when Allan Silver died, she successfully managed his Baltimore row-house real estate interests, most unGypsy, and eventually opened her Fells Point bar, most unJewish, which now she hopes to expand ambitiously into Baltimore’s Harborplace. Back in her row-house realty days, we have learned, she took in a Johns Hopkins undergraduate named Frederick Talbott, five years her junior, who subsequently joined Allan Dulles’s CIA and became Douglas Townshend’s protege; by him she had the aforementioned son (whom Kath now remembers having met, in fact, at a Baltimore HOSCA gathering in ‘74!), and with her lover’s loyal if peripatetic assistance, raised all three children while overseeing her business interests. She is, as afore-established, in Annapolis today not mainly to say hello to her currently lesbian space-cadet daughter (but wait till Peter hears, Kath cautioned him early in this history) but to lobby and dicker with some statehouse types concerning Carla’s Inner Harbor. She may well be about to become a wealthy woman.

  But none of this is why she’s in our story. How her devoted-but-often-absent young common-law covert-operations husband grew up to be the veritable Prince of Darkness, Carla B Silver cannot herself quite say—other than that, as Doug Townshend once attested to Peter Sagamore, the chap found in himself a great natural talent for Prince-of-Darknessing, and great natural talent is not easily suppressed where there is ample inducement to its exercise. C.B S. herself, we have learned, is politically indifferent except on the subjects of free enterprise, upon which she thrives, and German nationalism, which not surprisingly gives her the heeb-jeebs. But her lover, whose politics were the Agency’s, and her children, whose politics ranged from mild socialism (academic Leah) through Sandinista-style Marxism (blue-collar Jonathan) to countercultural commune-ism (frazzled Marian), all held one another and Carla in loving high regard despite their strenuous disagreements. Jonathan Silver Talbott, we have learned—outraged by our government’s role in the subversion of Chilean democracy and by the likelihood that his father’s team had been involved—went down there in 1977 to join the anti-Pinochet underground and, like Jaime Aiquina before him, promptly joined the desaparecidos as well. Frederick Mansfield Talbott took his son’s disappearance even more to heart than did the young man’s mother, if that is possible; so much so that Carla B Silver had been at first convinced that her Fred’s Paisleylike vanishment last year from brother Franklin’s sailboat in the mouth of the Wye River was a painful but somehow necessary cover for his ransacking Chile’s political prisons in search of their son.

  But none of this, too, either, is why the woman is in our cockpit, in our story. If from her German Jewish side came Carla B Silver’s ability to carry forward her business successfully, not only in midst of these personal calamities but as therapeutic respite from them, to her Rumanian Gypsy forebears (we have learned) she credits among other things her dreams, which have the authority of revelations. Uh-oh, thinks skeptical Peter—or so thought when we learned this. For three years the family strove tirelessly in Washington to keep Jon Talbott’s case alive, in case the boy should be. Well after Fred’s disappearance—when Frank and Lee Talbott, exhausted by the search for information and convinced both men were dead, had set out upon a year-long sailboat cruise to restore themselves—Carla B Silver had clung still to the possibility, ever more a hope than a belief, that her son survived upon some wretched prison island in Chile’s frigid southern archipelago, the mere map of which breaks the heart to contemplate, and that his devious and formidable father was down there, incognito, cunningly arranging the young man’s rescue. In this loyal hope, though the circumstances of their son’s loss had caused a breach between his parents amounting virtually to estrangement, Carla B Silver had put off, like Odysseus’s Penelope, the advances of a Rumanian friend and business associate—until, on the anniversary of Frederick Talbott’s disappearance into Chesapeake Bay, his ghost had imperiously come to her by night; had certified the fact, though not the particulars, of both his own death and their son’s; had made his peace, mourned with, and comforted his widow; had commended her suitor, Lascar Lup
escu, and advised her to accept him as her lover; and then with his own breath had blown out his Yahrzeit candle.

  Ghosts have breath? asked Peter Sagamore. By this point in her narrative, we had sense enough already of Carla B Silver to ask such questions freely. At once, with a flashing Bizet smile, she replied How else could they talk? and informed us further that this particular ghost, at least, was also better in bed than some living men of her experience.

  I do remember your son! said Katherine, touching Carla B Silver’s arm. A short, heavyset fellow, but gentle-mannered, right? May called him Short Jon Silver. He hated Henry Kissinger and ITT.

  Also Anaconda Copper, Carla B Silver affirmed. Jon was a plumber—a real one, not the Nixon kind. But installing copper pipe gave him political trouble. He was the only left-wing plumber in Fells Point, and it was a happy day in our house when PVC piping came along.

  In any case (we have learned), she had followed Fred Talbott’s ghost’s advice; and the circumstance that ghosts, while real, are not infallible advisors, we have learned to be the immediate though not the final cause of her presence in our story. Her friend Lascar was a handsome and popular fellow, an able manager of her restaurant, and a capable lover, but given to drink and, in his cups, sometimes to inappropriate sexual overtures to other women. Just a short while since, fired by an excess of Premiat Cabernet Sauvignon, he had made one such to of all people Marian Silver, so spectacularly inappropriate that that young woman had renounced heterosexuality and moved in with her friend May Jump—another HOSCA connection—while Carla B Silver had not only dismissed Lupescu from her bed and business with a Gypsy curse, but threatened to put out a contract on him if she ever saw him in Fells Point again.

  All very well: But why do we spend our lay-day afternoon, nearly the whole of it, sitting in Story’s cockpit at the Annapolis Town Dock with a virtual stranger, in the middle of our little cruise and our tidewater tales, and near the end of our pregnancy, tisking tongues at the spectacularity of the inappropriateness of the man Lascar’s drunkenly embracing Marian Silver from behind as she scrubbed mussels for steaming in the kitchen of Carta’s Cavern and grabbing the nub of a breast with his left hand while fishing down the front of her running shorts with his right and growling some Rumanian endearment into the nape of her traumatized neck? Not because his victim was his lover’s (and employer’s) daughter; not even because, as the fellow must have known, Mim Silver was uncommonly vulnerable, though that vulnerability merits a tongue-tisk, all right. Had he so seized her sister Lee, their mother attested, he’d have found himself sucking the mussel brush and clutching his Transylvanian crotch. But Marian, though a sexual activist from early high school days, an occasional bisexual for the past ten years, and the mother of a twelve-year-old child—that is to say, though a woman far from inexperienced—had had a mis-fortunate psychosexual history, as follows:

  Never as stable as her mother and siblings, in the druggy High Sixties Mim had dropped out of college and drifted about our troubled republic. In the late summer of 1967, we have learned, hitchhiking up the East Coast from Ocean City, Maryland, to points north, she had the bad luck to be kidnapped, raped, and otherwise mistreated for three full days by a large and hairy Pennsylvanian in a black Chevrolet van somewhere in the dunes above Fenwick Island, Delaware. The experience so scarred her, literally and figuratively, that when she subsequently found herself also impregnated by it, she was unable to muster the resolve either to abort the pregnancy, to relinquish its issue at birth for adoption, or on the other hand to mother it properly. The rapist was never caught. His victim delivered Simon Silver at a North Carolina ashram whereto she had drifted in May 1968, brought him back to Fells Point, and spent the next decade in and out of therapy groups and communes of sundry flavors. She worked for half a dozen liberal and radical causes—HOSCA included—and at the same time, by some logic, for antiabortion groups, leaving Sy’s care largely to his inexhaustible grandmother.

  Short Jon Silver’s disappearance in Chile so discomposed Mim’s psyche—both of his half-sisters adored him, we have learned—that she had to be confined to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital for a year, to the end of recomposing it. In 1978 (not long before Peter Sagamore’s tête-à-tête with the Prince of Darkness) she was released into her parents’ care and made uneasy peace with her stepfather, who seemed truly to be turning inner Washington upside down in search of news of his son. Frederick Talbott’s own disappearance, on the vernal equinox of ‘79, set her back into residential therapy.

  It was under these among other clouds (we have learned) that Franklin and Leah Talbott cast off, late last June, upon the sailing voyage they had long been planning for Lee’s sabbatical year. Exhausted by the serial catastrophies and concerned for Marian and Carla, they were inclined to cancel it, but Carla B Silver had prevailed upon them not to. There was really nothing further they could do for lost Jonathan and his lost father; Mim was in competent hands and wanted them to go; Simon would be looked after as he had always been, by his grandma; and with the help of her able new Rumanian assistant, it would be business as usual at Carla’s Cavern. Moreover, they’d have to wait another seven years for Lee’s next sabbatical leave (she was changing jobs); and the author of KUBARK was at a certain fork in his own road; and the couple had a certain problem of their own to come to terms with. So go, Carla B Silver had insisted: Maybe she and Sy and Mims would rendezvous with them somewhere in the Caribbean next spring. Maybe Fred and Short Jon too; she hadn’t quit hoping.

  Next year in St. Croix!

  So they went, Leah and Franklin (we have learned), and Earth contrived yet another orbit without blowing up, and Marian Silver was once again discharged into her busy mother’s care, and on the anniversary of the P.O.D.’s disappearance, his ghost advised Carla B Silver as aforetold. She agreed to take his advice under advisement and flew with daughter and mustachioed grandson not to St. Croix, quite, but next door to Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., thence to St. John, where Frank and Lee and their sturdy cutter, having circuited the Caribbean, were resting and reprovisioning for the long ocean passage home. The couple were all right, C. B Silver divined in two glances, but their great sabbatical questions—whether or not to beget children, and what exactly to do with the next part of their life together—had not been resolved by their year afloat.

  She put forward to them her late Fred’s dream-recommendations concerning Lascar Lupescu and herself. All hands approved, and after a short stay in the islands (during which Marian Silver seemed more nearly normal than at any time since her three-day rape a dozen years past) the Fells Point contingent flew home. Carla B Silver promoted her business associate to bedpartner and was glad, though thoughts of her missing son still tormented her. Marian struck up a new romance, almost normal, with the young West Indian bartender hired by Lascar Lupescu as his replacement, now that he was busy with higher-level work. C.B S. pursued her plans for Carla’s Inner Harbor.

  This was the hopeful scene (we have learned) that Frank and Lee Talbott found upon the successful completion, just last week, of their blue-water passage from the Virgin Islands to the Virginia capes and Chesapeake Bay. What was more, Carla’s formidable intuitions told her that Professor Leah Allan Silver Talbott, now thirty-five, was pregnant at last, for the first time, by her strapping fifty-year-old husband! But as there’d been a cloud upon their childlessness, so C.B S. divined a cloud upon this belated early pregnancy, which she sensed had in fact not yet even been acknowledged between the parents.

  With Joblike swiftness then (we have learned, back over those club sandwiches in the Hilton), there came to Carla’s Cavern a new series of misfortunes. For private reasons that even her prescient mother could not quite divine, Lee Talbott had aborted that pregnancy; had done so, in Baltimore, on the very Friday 13th that Frank Talbott was attending Doug Townshend’s in-house memorial service at CIA headquarters in Langley and we were attending the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady’s memorial cocktail par
ty for him in Georgetown. C. B Silver, too, mourned her old friend’s equivocal death, but her sorrow was overshadowed by concern for Frank and Lee’s marriage and for Marian’s horror at Leah’s abortion (Mim looked to her healthier sister to turn out normal grandchildren for their mother, Jonathan being desaparecido and herself more or less non compos mentis). She reapproached the verge, did Marian Silver, of freaking out altogether, said Carla B Silver, and approached that verge more closely yet when her Barbadian lover now quit both her and his job on the unflattering grounds that Mini would neither use contraceptives herself nor permit him their use. and—a man of conscience—even though she had assured him that any consequences were hers alone, on the basis ol her relation to Simon Silver he judged her unfit for motherhood and did not want her to bear his seed.

  And at that spectacularly inappropriate juncture (supreme!) patient reader of this lay-day-long exposition)—Frank and Lee Talbott having returned, vacuum-aspirated, to their boat, to cross the Bay from Baltimore to Wye Island, the starting place of their year-long odyssey—Lascar Lupescu had made his drunken foray under the T-shirt and into the running shorts of mussel-scrubbing Mim.