by John Barth
Et cetera, all which we could no more than half attend. Though George Talbott insisted that unannounced guests were no problem for Cecilia Skinner, we four insisted in our turn on making dinner aboard for five and eating with him at the picnic table down by the pier. But first, glad to stretch our legs, we took a short tour of the immediate grounds. Blam’s two victims—aged, half-dead white oaks—were pointed out where they lay, partly dismembered by Lew Skinner’s chainsaw. Back yonder was Natural Recycling Research, Inc.: more traffic than ever, George declared, and no wonder: Minidumps were popping up all over the Shore like pimples on a high school boy. We did not pursue the subject, then.
Okay: We saw what Lee meant about the house. We wouldn’t choose it either, though it is a far cry from Sagamore Flats, which Peter doesn’t much mind having grown up in.
Over cold rosé and lamb kabobs rolled in cumin, as Judge Talbott inevitably tuned out, we finished the day’s exposition by retailing to Frank and Lee what we knew about Sherbald Enterprises and Breadbasket Inc.: a tale briefly told, as we knew very little. That on behalf of Sherbald (which we’d understood to be no more than a holding company for his real estate and other interests), Willy Sherritt lately made a bid to join his father’s grainland investment program, not only for simple business reasons and, as he declared, to keep the A-rabs off the Shore, but in hope of using some portion of the tilled acreage for Natural Recycling Research’s Frankly Controversial sludge-spreading experiments, and certain of the marginal woodland for other Carefully Monitored Research in the natural detoxification and recycling of dangerous wastes. That John Trippe, still rankled by Poonie Baldwin’s betrayal, as he saw it, of their past political connection, was steadfastly opposed to the proposal, about which Henry Sherritt had mixed feelings and Jack Bass, the other major Breadbasket partner, was shrug-shouldered. As of Blam, last Sunday, that was where things stood.
So what in the world were we four to do with what we now suspected? Nothing, we agreed, till we had slept on it.
Speaking of Jack Bass and telephones: After cleanup, Kath went to the house to call Irma, report our position, and discuss the logistics of an obstetrical checkup sometime the next day: Dr. Jack’s place is one long day’s sail from here, but only half an hour away by car. Frank Talbott and his father lingered at table to speak briefly and amiably, at high volume, of Key Farm matters. Peter, his imagination fast-idling, swam from the dock in the velvety late-evening light. One would have expected a flurry of unloading and unpacking from Reprise, but Leah Talbott changed into her famous maroon bikini and joined him in the river. Too much to be done for her to know where to start, she said; that, too, she would think about in the morning. Franklin likewise; he presently joined the swimmers. Kate came down in the last light with Lew and Cecilia Skinner, whom she had of course befriended in short order up in the house: a weathered white couple in their late sixties. No fair, she complained, and changed outfits and came into the water too. Moon and Sixpence, cued by their parents, cavorted in their birthwaters, too, like a brace of young otters. The older trio lit cigarettes and regarded us benignly from the dock, as if we were teen instead of middle-agers. Giddy. Carefree.
Would you swim in that water, Judge? Lew Skinner loudly asked George Talbott, who replied that he sure used to, once upon a time. Dag if he would, Lew Skinner chuckled, nowadays. But he never was one for swimming.
You didn’t hear that, Katherine said to Alert and Locate. But they did.
HITS
So we agree over Monday breakfast, there on the grandmotherly porch of Key Farm, that it is a whole new ball game. Our civic responsibility, clearly, is to blow the whistle on Operation Bonaparte and to assist Frank Talbott quietly in the further investigation of Natural Recycling Research, Inc., should he decide to resume his Kepone project. Katherine, for one, declares her conviction that not even Willy would sink so low as to—but her declaration rings hollow in her own ears. Is she against the Soviet-Deniston deal, then, Peter asks her, now that we know it’s tainted by the CIA and the KGB? Suppose the little transaction were quashed: Won’t the two superpowers go on with their wretched deadly jockeying and counterjockeying on 1001 other grounds and fronts? Of course they will; all the same, the whistle must be blown and the proposal reconsidered in that light: the light of the . . . sound of our blown whistle.
Lee Talbott in shorts and T-shirt wonders what, after all, blowing the whistle consists of, exactly. Katherine can report to the Deniston board of trustees Carla B Silver’s Bonaparte story, and Lee’s mother will no doubt readily pop over from Fells Point to confirm it; Molly Sherritt can affirm or deny her connection; Willy likewise. The CIA will routinely disavow any involvement or interest in the transaction; the KGB will say nothing. What the school trustees will have is a far-fetched-sounding, secondhand report from an admittedly maverick member of the board, substantiated by a more or less eccentric-looking witness. No doubt Frank’s testimony will help, if he is prepared to make public the Agency’s pitch; but it is to be remembered that the Agency can go to some lengths, overtly and covertly, to discredit Frank’s testimony, as they did upon the publication of KUBARK: Lee imagines that the average Deniston trustee is a patriotic conservative inclined to believe the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency more than its detractors.
You said it. K acknowledges. But the board’s feelings have been mixed about the deal from the beginning. The combined testimony of Carla B Silver and Frank Talbott and Molly Barnes Sherritt—if Molly can be persuaded to speak out—ought surely to carry some weight. Anyhow, our objective is by no means necessarily to quash the sale, which Kath herself supported until our lay day in Annapolis; it is simply to let all hands, including Willy, know what’s going on.
Peter raises the question whether there is danger involved. He detects in Lee’s tone some concern for Frank on that score. Frank Talbott thinks not; as he does not clearly know the stakes of the game, however, he cannot be certain. Messing with New Jersey minidumpers, he imagines, is probably riskier than messing with Langley, Virginia, on this matter.
That unsavory business—NRR’s New Jersey connection—Kate is inclined to go home and raise a shout about at once, whereas Peter thinks it ought to be investigated from outside the family. We presently agree to poke no farther into it, from our side of the table, at least until Sturm und Drang have been safely delivered: not a very long moratorium.
On the obstetrical front, we Sagamores agree, the prudent and responsible course is now to stay put at Nopoint Point until Birthday. Indeed, the sensible thing would be to leave Story where it lies—in nobody’s way, the Talbotts reassure us—and ride on back together to the First Guest Cottage with Irma after K’s obstetrical inspection (all set for 2:00 p.m. today at Jack Bass’s old stand in Easton), and move the boat down a week or so after Birthday, when K & Co. are home from hospital.
That idea once broached, no other course seems reasonable. We have more than once shaken our heads at what we’ve been up to this past week: our voyage into the teeth of common sense. Now that we’re ashore—we mean aShore, unlike our Annapolis lay day—our folly retrospectively astonishes us. Irma is bringing Chip along; we had considered briefly his and Pete’s daysailing the boat home and rejoining Kate tomorrow evening. But even that separation now seems reckless to us: What if K commenced her labor and P were unable to get to her side for six hours? Time to pack it in.
Accordingly, breakfast done, we all return to the pier. The Talbotts desultorily set about the large work of cleaning out and cleaning up their vessel; the Sagamores (after morning exercises) the smaller labor of de-provisioning ours and offloading what doesn’t stay aboard.
At least Katherine sets about these chores, and Frank Talbott. Peter sits at Story’s dinette table for a few minutes to log mnemonic cues to yesterday’s huge exposition: Kepone, KUBARK, Jersey General Hauling, Natural Recycling Research. His sitting there, and the pleasurable kinetics of pen upon paper, put him in mind of yesterday morning in Queenstown Creek a
nd that earlier forenoon in Annapolis, spent making long notes in those agreeable circumstances. Be with you directly, he says to Kate, and makes a sketch of the cove he imagines that ovum and her spermatozoon friend swimming into in Act Three of Frank Talbott’s unfinished play. In Peter’s fancy it is now conflated with Salthouse Cove, except that it needs a sandspit at its entrance and a high bank behind its bit of beach, with cattails and spartina to one side and, let’s see, a couple of abandoned apple trees up on that bank.
Offshore from it should be a stone jetty or breakwater . . . with a flashing light. Be right there, hon. A message light. Now it occurs to him, irrelevantly, that if Scheherazade on the 1001st night presented the king with three sons—”one walking, one crawling, one suckling,” as the text specifies—then her pregnancies must have been spaced about equally through the 1001 nights. 3 x 266 = 798 from 1001 leaves 203 nights before after and between; he wonders whether the number 1001 has a gynecological-obstetrical aspect in addition to its other aspects, and, if so, what the significance of that aspect might be. Arab storytellers, he understands, tend not to wear their formal cunning on the sleeves of their djellabas. Why does Scheherazade stop telling stories exactly when she does, rather than sooner or later? Is there a story in that question?
Peter, Katherine carefully complains.
Be right with you. But though the day bids to stoke up, just now a pleasant light air is moving down the companionway. Leah Talbott, splashing off the pier, calls merrily to Franklin I’m never coming ashore! Come on in here and Merge!
Don Quixote is the least nautical of novels, but Peter remembers that somewhere in it the hero comes across an empty rowboat and immediately presumes, on chivalric precedent, that it is there to fetch him magically to his next adventure. He boards it (With Sancho? Where is the horse Rocinante?), casts himself off but does not deign to pick up the oars, and is carried downstream to . . . the fulling mills, as P recalls. And there is a later interlude aboard a proper ship—¿No?—in harbor at Barcelona, involving Moorish pirates and their Christian captives. Where is Rocinante then?
Have you packed Don Quixote yet? he asks Katherine. I’ve got an idea for a story.
Pregnant as I am, says K—less carefully this time—I’ve packed everything, single fucking handed. But you’ve got to do the lifting, and it’s time to do it.
Says Peter I’ll lift, I’ll lift. But he’s leafing back through Story’s log. He has a problem, only now coming clear. Good Franklin Talbott, he understands, is not an artist. Though the chap might well write a creditable novel one of these days, or a nonfiction book that will do more practical good than all of Peter’s stories put together, the muse is simply not in him; he has not vocation. Whereas vocation is about all Peter Sagamore has, lately, even under that freight of back-dwelling dwarves. Well, it’s not quite all, but . . . He is not ready to get off the boat, he realizes, and helplessly tells Kate. Cannot in fact bring himself to haul himself ashore just yet.
So don’t, our woman says, trying unhappily to be cheerful. We’ll come back and sleep aboard tonight, and you and Chip sail down tomorrow. We’ve pushed our luck this far; she guesses we can risk a day’s separation.
But we have already scratched that idea, at breakfast. P will not hazard being absent on labor day; we must stay together, or within very close reach. At the risk of offending good Hank and Irma, however, he cannot go back to that state of affairs in the First Guest Cottage until his own labor not only commences, but gets vigorously under way. He has just now realized that, to his own surprise; dismay, even.
Katherine sits. What exactly does he mean, “within very close reach”? Uneasy Peter twirls his pen; tells her (pleasantly, but never mind that) that if she really feels it’s best for her to be at Nopoint Point starting today, then unquestionably that’s where she should be. He’ll stay on here at the Key Farm dock and get down to work, a phone call and a half-hour ride from the hospital. He simply cannot yet close our circle, he realizes, as the Talbotts have closed theirs.
Hurt Kate says softly I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Then she gets a touch annoyed. We have humored that tight-ass muse of his for an entire week; at some expense of her comfort and even some risk of safe delivery. This piss-ant cruise was her idea: She set him the task he set her to set, for both our sakes but mainly for his. By sheer good luck, we have come this far unscathed, and the risk looks to have paid off: That logbook there is as loaded as she is. Any minute now, Ding and Ling will push the old button—she almost thinks she just now felt them do it—and this low-level suspense will be done with. In two weeks we’ll be back in our Stony Run apartment if we want to be; never mind Mom’s fancy nursery. Meanwhile, Bobby Henry can tow this boat around today, for God’s sake, behind his johnboat, and we can live aboard in Sherritt Cove, if Peter insists, or just behind Shorter Point if he wants to be out of Hank’s and Irma’s view. Could anybody be readier to go the extra kilometer than she is?
Wait: She’s not done yet. Katherine respects her husband’s deep feeling that while something positive has happened musewise in the past few days, something else has yet to happen: as if . . . as if the sex has taken place, ovulation and ejaculation have occurred in the right firing order, sperm and ovum are separately launched and under way on collision course, but their connection hasn’t yet been made. All the same, she can’t help feeling that now it’s time he gave something up for her, for the kids, for us—above and beyond what we’ve each gladly given up already in the way of individual liberty for the sake of capital-U Us. God damn it, Peter!
Miserable P agrees, agrees—but he can’t go back to Nopoint Point.
K turns up the volume: Read won’t!
Okay: won’t. No, damn it: can’t, any more than Kate can run four miles just now. Why not come back to Story after her checkup?
Kath’s eyes are wet, but she’s really pissed. She calls out the companionway to Lee Talbott, toweling off on the dock, Do you hear what this man’s saying? Nope. K climbs out to declare to the whole Eastern Shore of Maryland that if we happened to be up in the Chester River, all we’d be doing today is sailing this damn boat around, whither the wind listeth, not writing the Great American Nothing. But now the sonofabitch won’t even ride down to Easton with her for her checkup! Protests mortified Peter That’s not true, Kath. Something got going yesterday, and he needs to follow it up: He’ll be ready to ride down to Easton after lunch. But he’s coming back here afterward, and he wishes she’d come too, but he has no right to insist. . . .
See? See?
The Talbotts don’t want to be involved in this—Neither do we!—but with due respect to Peter—and they do respect him, duly and more than duly—they tisk their tongues. Of course, says Frank, his dad’s old Dodge is ours to use—or Peter’s to use, if Peter’s really going to stay here—when it’s not already in use. They sold Frank’s Volvo before they left for the Caribbean, and Lee’s Toyota is decommissioned in the garage. And we really are not in the way here, both or either of us. . . .
But it’s clear they agree with Katherine that our man is being awfully unreasonable. They excuse themselves as soon as they decently can. K won’t stay on the boat another minute; goes with them, up to the house, leaving Peter wretched among our duffel. The thing he has ever hoped wouldn’t happen is suddenly happening: his having to choose between Katherine and what we’re calling his muse, and though it’s clear to him he’ll lose either way, he seems stubbornly to be choosing the latter. Does he follow his aggrieved mate up to the farmhouse? He does not. Appalled at his own ability to write, of all things, in such sore circumstances, he makes furious notes till near noon upon the subject of Rocinante IV, about which who can care at a time like this?
Lunch: P takes two apples from Story’s icebox up to the house, but Cecilia Skinner has already dealt Katherine in on a cold-cut platter. Lee Talbott has fetched her father-in-law off on some errand in the Dodge; Frank has eaten already and is out back recommissioning the Toyota so the
re’ll be two cars available, just in case. Kath has said her good-byes to them all. Cecilia Skinner stays out of our way, but she agrees P’s being a hard-nosed bastard, K lets him know, and won’t eat his apple.
That’s not true, Pete complains. I can’t defend or explain myself, except to say I feel very strongly—Oh shit: I hate this whole scene.
Change it.
No. Stay here.
Damn it! Damn it. She won’t say Damn him, or even Damn his damn writing: Look how reasonable she’s being, even in her distress! Nor will she forbid him to ride with her down to Easton, though she certainly feels like doing so. She’s going to be reasonable all the way, damn her.
And even her reasonableness she doesn’t make a great fake show of, to get at him, does she. When the saddle-brown Cadillac noses up at half past one and all hands have kissed one another hello, she explains to Irma and Chip with minimum fuss and no histrionics that a serious disagreement has unfortunately come up between us, namely et cetera, which we’re sorry to visit upon them, but et cetera, so let’s get on down to Easton, and we’ll be cheerful some other time. She puts it all so fairly that there is nothing for Peter to add. Dolled-up Irm doesn’t get to meet a single solitary Talbott. Shocked Andrew clearly has as hard a time believing what he’s hearing as we do. I’m not going to say a thing, says sensible Irma. Andy doesn’t either. Off we go, on a mighty quiet ride, all windows down because Kate hates air-conditioning and the afternoon is, as it bade to be, steamy and still. She sits up front with her mother; the two males share the backseat, each unhappier-looking than the other.
