The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  So? So? What Peter meant, still up there in the Hilton restaurant overlooking the harbor, was that all that’s a pity, for sure; more than a pity: a secondhand horror show. But so?

  So, he learned, that is how Marian Silver became May Jump’s roommate. just last Sunday, with Carla B Silver’s weary blessing. The two had known each other casually from certain sapphic hangouts in D.C. during Marian’s bisexual interludes: they had renewed their acquaintance through Jonathan Talbott’s involvement in HOSCA. and had closened it in the three years since Short Jon’s disappearance. May Jump had taken a kindly interest in unlucky Simon Silver, who one had to wish had never been born: she had become acquainted as well with Carla B, each appreciative of the other’s strength. Declared Carla to Katherine At least May won’t knock the poor girl up. She herself, she added, had profoundly had it with men for a while. though she couldn’t warm up to the alternative.

  All right! That is how May Jump came to be behind the wheel of that nifty silver Jaguar this morning with that Carol Kane look-alike in the backseat and that twelve-year-old mustachioed son of an anonymous Pennsylvania sadist in the front, and that’s what Carla B Silver is doing in Annapolis besides stroking certain state officials connected to the Baltimore Inner Harbor development. And all right: Ms. Silver’s friend Fred once gave the man of us as evil a quarter-hour as he has passed in his life to date, up there above Carla’s old Cavern in Fells Point: a quarter-hour that put him off mint tea and Doomsday Factors presumably forever. But what are you back in our story for, C.B S., lumping the smooth sauce of our lay day with these flour-balls of exposition? Whatever happened to Less Is More?

  The afternoon’s half passed. The wind is moderating. We return to the HOSCA connection. After the murder of Salvador Allende Gossens in the Chilean coup of 1973 and the subsequent orgy of torture and killing up and down that attenuated country. Jon Silver Talbott had spoken calmly but bitterly to May Jump—perhaps even to Katherine Sherritt: Kate can’t quite remember—of his father’s senior officerhood in the Agency and likely involvement in recent Chilean history. May even recalls wondering whether the young man was perhaps an Agency plant, since both the ASPS and HOSCA were on our government’s surveillance list. But she was persuaded by the sincerity not only of his indignation but also, paradoxically, of his respect for Frederick Mansfield Talbott: the same painful mixture of emotions she had encountered in Marian Silver. These were the early years of the Sagamores’ involvement with Douglas Townshend; it is even possible that Katherine mentioned the sturdy Fells Point plumber to Peter. It is equally possible, in that period of our less-than-total secret-sharing, that she did not. When had Peter first spoken to her of the Prince of Darkness and of Doomsday Factors? 1975? 1977?

  In any case, Kate spent this lay-day morning with May Jump and Marian Silver and Simon and Carla B remembering all these connections and remourning Jaime Aiquina and Short Jon Silver, while Peter lingered fathoms deep in the Cave of Montesinos. When it was established who all hands were and by what several paths they had fetched up at the same Annapolis apartment, tough Carla B Silver had permitted herself, briefly, to weep: not for the loss of her parents and the Six Million (and the five million who were not the Six Million), not for the loss of her first husband and her sort-of-second and their grown son and her latest lover (whom she really had quite liked) and her daughter Marian’s emotional balance and promising new West Indian companion; but for the loss of Leah and Franklin Talbott’s aborted child-in-the-womb, whereof K’s full-blooming belly put her strickenly in mind. Such a wunderkind that one would have been! Such a mother, her Leahle; such a mensch, that Frank! Such a Friday Thirteenth, with poor dead Doug on top of all!

  So you knew Doug? had asked rattled Kath up in May’s apartment, adding at once Well of course you must have. The least superstitious of pregnant thirty-nine-year-old upperclass college-educated American women, she was nonetheless disquieted these days by any mention of abortion, miscarriage, or congenital defect; and her disquiet was as nothing beside little Chesapeake’s and Potomac’s down there.

  Said Carla B Silver I should hope I did. And

  HERE, READER, IS WHAT THIS WOMAN IS IN OUR STORY FOR:

  Matter of fact, I killed him, I guess. Fred too.

  Oy Ma, had complained Mim Silver, who was sharing a cigarette with her son. Replied unfazed Carla Oy Ma all you want; it’s the Christ truth.

  Quiet there, Amos; calm down, Andy. Syntactical Katherine queried—playing for time and looking to May Jump for assurance that she and our children shouldn’t clear out of that apartment pronto—you killed Doug and your husband, or you and your husband killed Doug?

  Said Carla B Silver levelly Both. Plus Fred killed Jack Paisley, and Doug and I each killed Fred, and I had some help with Doug, too. You start messing with Doomsday Factors, it’s a regular can of worms.

  Peter Sagamore agrees, in Story’s cockpit, It is that. Says Carla Well, you wanted everything explained right now. There it is.

  But now by now is that second part of this afternoon, wind dropping, by when P has learned that what the woman meant back there in May’s apartment, while May and Marian Silver and blackshod flatfoot Sy, at her suggestion, went for a nice walk outdoors, was that, as a practicing Gypsy, Carla had, upon her son’s disappearance in Chile, laid a general mighty curse upon the Latin American branches of the covert operations wing of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and more specific weighty curses upon then Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger (who reads these lines at his peril, such is the operation of Gypsy curses) and upon her lover-husband, whom however she did not cease to love merely because she now also cursed him. To that contradiction in her heart, plus the circumstance of her being after all no more than half Gypsy, Carla attributed the fact of a whole season’s passing before the curse came down upon Frederick Mansfield Talbott, and her hope even then that it had only seemed to work. As for Douglas Townshend: It was Carla B Silver’s belief that it had been Doug’s belief that Frederick Talbott believed John Arthur Paisley to have been a freelance double agent passing as a triple (do not ask us to follow such multiple inversions), and had arranged Mr. Paisley’s termination with extreme prejudice off Hoopers Island Light to prevent his revealing to the KGB up at Corsica Neck the exact extent of the Keyhole-11 reconnaissance satellite’s compromising by the loss of those technical manuals to the Soviets, as aforenarrated. Doug Townshend then, C.B S. regretfully believed, in his capacity as freelance neutralizer of Doomsday Factors, had regretfully done in her Fred; the Paisley termination and the mint-tea caper had convinced Townshend that the Prince of Darkness had become a loose cannon on the pitching deck of the ship of state. This conviction Carla shared, and so Doug’s hit of his erstwhile protégé and closest associate had been aided not only by certain of Rick Talbott’s best enemies within the U.S. intelligence community (and covered by their counterparts on Corsica Neck to settle the score for their loss of Paisley) but by Carla B Silver’s mighty curse as well. All the same, her Fred was her Fred, to whose memory she owed it regretfully next to lay a like curse upon the man she all but knew to have been his killer, dear as Doug had for decades been to her and her family. She imagined he would understand. Thus that ruptured aneurysm on that Qantas Airways 747 on final approach to Sydney, Australia, which (the ruptured aneurysm) even knowledgeable, conservative Franklin Key Talbott mistakenly suspected to have been induced by some Agency potion rather than the fifty-percent-Gypsy variety.

  Mm hm. And why was she laying all this on Peter Sagamore’s wife and children? And why do we sit together cordially, if not quite calmly, on little Story now, whiling our lay day into history and in no hurry at all to get on to Captain Donald Quicksoat, sooner or later no doubt to Scheherazade, to the upper Severn maybe, and on to wherever else listeth wind and tide till our water break and our labor come upon us?

  To have told so much and not yet told a thing! The real mickey in our man’s mint tea (we here expostulate) was one he had got bombed on
once before, with Douglas Townshend: We mean knowledge, secrets, the secret knowledge of What’s Going On Around Here, particularly with respect to Doomsday Factors: a knowledge that Doug believed some American writer had better drink deep of, as of an elixir, whatever the cost, instead of hunt-and-pecking like all the other chickens in the python’s cage. P.S.’s imagination is still hung over, still acrack from chugalugging that elixir. Get them out of our story, out of our Chesapeake, out of our heads, those triliteral curses: CIA, DIA, NRO, NSA, FBI, KGB! What has the art of literature to do (we here expostulate) with them? The motions of the human spirit, the passions of the human breast, the possibilities of human language—those are what your proper storyteller craves inside info on, not the back alleys of international pushiness. Leave them to the cloak-and-dagger groupies, the thrillerinos. Clear your head, Peter Sagamore!

  But the Doomsday Factor is among other things a tar baby, reader, which, once brushed against, et cetera. To it, then: Why is C.B S. aboard our Story?

  Because in the first half of our century the Russian revolution replaced czarist tyranny with Soviet tyranny (the Evil Empire, Carla calls it). Because after disposing of Nazi Germany, Eastern-bloc communism and Western-bloc capitalism perceived each other not only as natural enemies but as mortal ones. Because by the time both blocs regained their breath from the catastrophe of World War II, the phenomenon of thermonuclear weaponry kept the warfare between them cold instead of hot. Because the profound reciprocal distrust, not unjustified, of the U.S. and Soviet governments, together with the natural propensities of their military-industrial establishments, led in the second half of our century to the most ruinous armaments competition in history and, in consequence, to the gravest potential danger that human civilization has known since its beginnings and that life on Earth has faced at least since the pre-Cenozoic Great Death of 65,000,000 years ago. Because this grand wretched global competition between political-economic systems which in fact are natural rivals, and between peoples who have reason to be natural friends, manifests itself in a hundred thousand matters, of every magnitude, from Western civ’s loss of Eastern Europe and the devastation of Southeast Asia and the butchering of for example Chilean democracy, down to the death or disappearance of spooks and counterspooks like Captain Nicolas Shadrin and John Arthur Paisley and Frederick Mansfield Talbott and Douglas Townshend, down farther to innumerable big and little pressures and counter-pressures: promises and threats and lies; baits bribes bugs and blackmails; sniffs, snoops, snares.

  Because the “stagflationary” American economy of the 1970s happened to leave most minor U.S. private boarding schools, including The Deniston School for Girls, in parlous financial shape, in many instances kept alive only by the least admirable of causes: their students’ parents’ fear of racially integrated public schools, together with the indisputable mediocrity of most U.S. public education. Because, especially after the Paisley affair, the Soviet embassy in Washington craved even greater privacy from the local CIA for its local KGB, and desired therefore to expand its vacation-facility acreage on Corsica Neck, the estate of the late archcapitalist John James Deniston, where the tranquil Corsica joins the stately Chester, across and up the Chesapeake Bay from Washington, and, in pursuit of this objective, quietly offered to purchase contiguous wooded land from The Deniston School Corporation at top-dollar price and then some: top dollars badly needed on Deniston’s bottom line. Because, given the grand demonology of our century, that quiet proposal was vociferously opposed by many of the few who got wind of it (e.g., Irma Shorter Sherritt and, at the outset, her son Willy), and reluctantly to positively favored by a few others of that same few (e.g., Katherine Sherritt Sagamore), and by others yet (e.g., Molly Barnes Sherritt, at the outset) viewed with mixed feelings.

  Because while the staunchest of the opposers were your archconservative Sovietophobes and macho rednecks, not a few of whom would approve severing diplomatic relations with the Evil Empire altogether, among the staunchest though invisible supporters of the transaction, unknown to Katherine, was our CIA, for reasons startlingly set forth to Peter Sagamore by Frederick Mansfield Talbott over mint tea above Carla’s Cavern in late 78, was it, just a handful of months before the Prince of Darkness Paisleyed out. Because Willy Sherritt now and then, in his own words, drank drinks and scouted pussy in the Fells Point bars, including Carla’s Cavern, as well as in flossier watering-and-scouting establishments. Because Porter “Poonie” Baldwin Jr.’s desperate attempt at congressional comeback, after the homosexualcohol scandals that defeated him in 78, led his campaign treasurer to seek out and accept contributions without excessive scruple as to their source, so long as they were not directly from distilleries, gay-rights organizations, or the KGB itself. Because while Poonie and his campaign strategists routinely sniffed around the Corsica Neck question, along with many another question, to see whether it was worth taking a strident stand against, his campaign treasurer was being routinely watched and diddled by the Komitĕt Gosudarstvĕnnoi Bezopasnost’i, not for the first time, without his knowing who was watching and diddling him. Because the CIA in this instance knew what Willy Sherritt in this instance did not, and was not only watching the KGB watch and diddle Porter Baldwin Jr.’s campaign treasurer, but doing a bit of counterdiddling of its own.

  Et cetera. Some hold the world to be a seamless web; we aboard Story find it seamy. But a web it is, wherein Byzantine centuries of czarist feudalism inspire a revolution that inspires a cold war that inspires a thermonuclear arms race that inspires high-tech snoopery and countersnoopery by and upon sundry Doomsday Factors, and which entangles—that web, we mean, in its common seams—Ivan the Terrible, John Arthur Paisley, and . . . Molly Barnes Sherritt.

  Yup: old Molly there. What happened, see, was that among the several Political Action Committees cautiously supporting P.B. Jr.’s reelection, even as we sit here in Story’s cockpit, is a sort of American Association of Eastern-Bloc Exiles and Defectors (not its actual name), who patriotically, if that is the right adverb, overlook Poonie’s peccadillos in the light of his famous cold-warriorism, and originally pressed him, through his campaign treasurer, to oppose the Corsica Neck/Deniston School transaction (as they had opposed the original Soviet vacation establishment itself)—not knowing that the CIA supported it. Thus Willy’s vain efforts to persuade his sister to soften her support of that real estate deal, and his astonishment at his own wife’s late unprecedented opposition to his opposition to anything: an opposition that baffled us as—at first—it outraged him.

  But what happened, see, was that after Jonathan Silver Talbott’s disappearance in Chile and Frederick Talbott’s into the Chesapeake estuarine system, Carla B Silver became a dedicated foe of all spookish hugger-mugger, as anti-CIA in this respect as she remained anti-Soviet in general. One of the last covert Agency suboperations she had wind of, via close-mouthed Fred and Doug, was code-named BONAPARTE: the proposed deep-bugging of Corsica Neck through its Corsican neighbor, The Deniston School for Girls—especially that undeveloped acreage under quiet discussion of sale. With her own hands, Carla B Silver had poured scotch upon the rocks for Willy Sherritt in her Cavern, while Willy not only scouted pussy but was by pussy scouted: a KGB-paid puss who thought herself CIA-paid and would in fact have been, had not Frederick and Douglas known that the KGB was paying her already. Why waste the taxpayers’ money? (That unwitting double agent deserved double time; she has by now, we presume, got galloping herpes simplex. But Willy will get the final bill, complex, for what he gave her.) It did not please fairly decent Doug to see the brother of his young friend Katherine Sherritt (and brother-in-law of his literary repository, Peter Sagamore) become unknowingly ensnared in Bonaparte; but Willy was in the unusual position just then of innocently opposing, on behalf of the Political Action Committee of that American Association of Eastern-Bloc Exiles and Defectors, a move that both the CIA and the KGB, for contradictory reasons, favored.

  Carla herself, at the time, shrugged her should
ers and tended her bar: What she disapproved of was hired B-girls in her Cavern, no matter how classy; but her friend the Prince of Darkness suggested, in a way she understood, that she let this one do her thing. Even more, as we have seen, did it displease Doug to hear the P.O.D.’s half cynical, half serious mint-tea pitch to Peter Sagamore to recruit Katherine and Irma Sherritt in support of the Deniston land sale, which K already supported for non-political reasons. At this suggestion too, when she later learned of it, C.B Silver shrugged her shoulders. Of what consequence to her were these goyishe-gorgio Gold Coasties?

  Came then however down upon her Fred, belatedly, her curse; and whether or not Doug Townshend was, as she believed, its agent, and despite her extension therefore of the same curse to him, for a time those two in their sore sorrow were as close as old friends can be who are not lovers and who have between them, like the sword between Isolde and Tristan, a fifty-percent-Gypsy curse. In that peculiar intimacy, Carla B Silver learned from Douglas Townshend this detail: that in pursuit of BONAPARTE—his and Rick Talbott’s last cooperative venture, having little to do directly with Doomsday Factors—and in lieu of that intractable young fellow Peter Sagamore, he had reluctantly recruited—with her full knowledge—Willy Sherritt’s long-suffering wife, whom Doug had met in sunnier seasons upon his several visits with us to Nopoint Point. He had seen an opportunity, had demidecent Douglas, to do the Sherritt family a minor service in return for what troubles he had occasioned the crew of Story.

  Kath had cried in May Jump’s kitchen earlier today upon receipt of this tiding For pity’s sake spare us favors from the CIA! Wait till Peter hears!

  Yeah. What Doug knew, see, was that that AAEBED group, the exiles and defectors, was for obvious reasons substantially infiltrated by the KGB. Some of its members had posed as defectors for that purpose; others were bona fide seekers of political asylum who however had family back in Mother Russia and were thus exposed. Those infiltrators, Doug Townshend happened to know, would presently whisper into the ear of P.B. Jr.’s campaign treasurer (by now roundly laid and secretly photographed at his rutting, for insurance purposes) that the Association’s leadership had, at the confidential urging of the Central Intelligence Agency, abdicated its stand against the Corsica Neck/Deniston School negotiations; they would appreciate it munificently if aspiring congressman Baldwin would do likewise. In this whisper-to-come (Doug had told Carla, who had told Katherine, who had told Peter), the KGB was correct, but did not know itself to be. At least not for certain; their people took for granted the likelihood of Frederick Mansfield Talbott’s deep-bugging scenario, but craved that acreage anyhow, and were as reasonably confident of their deep-debugging technology as was the Agency of its deep-anti-debugging technology.