The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  I’ve got it, Chip then announces: Pete and Kath ride up on K Four in case the babies come early, and Sy and I drive Story together till Reprise makes its pit stop. Then I drop him off and catch up with you. Okay?

  Simon Silver can scarcely believe what he’s hearing. Hey, yeah!

  Peter checks with Hank. Done. Scout the slips at the Sassafras Boat Company if we get separated, and monitor sixteen in case we need to confer.

  So long to May Jump and Carla B Silver, who together board Reprise now, looking couplelike. For being in our Tidewater Tales, our thanks!

  Simon’s standing by already on Story’s bow to unraft. Chip asks Peter Flags?

  P thanks him for reminding us. Fly the whole wardrobe! So the boys run up on our port and starboard flag halyards the nautical Stars and Stripes, the Maryland state banner, two varicolored windsock streamers, a red crab on a white field, an orange Chinese carp, and a white seagull on a blue field reading SAVE THE BAY. Reprise obliges with the USA, Maryland, the old green and white ecology flag of the 1960s, a yellow quarantine flag, assorted national courtesy flags from the Caribbean and the Bahamas, an even larger Chinese carp in blue and white, and a polygonic radar reflector. But as Jack Bass at the helm of Katydid idles up toward its anchor, and Peter on the bow takes in the slackening rode, and Reprise and Story, unrafted, circle in attendance, Henry Sherritt runs up the big ketch’s full-dress regalia: an alphabet of signal flags from the tip of the bowsprit up the headstay to the mainmast truck, aft to the mizzen truck, and down to the outboard end of the mizzen boom. Nor is he done—

  But ta-roo! goes Simon Silver on our conch, and May Jump answers him with Reprise’s freon signal horn: ta-roo! K IV’s anchor’s aweigh; Peter secures it in its bowsprit roller and sluices the mud off while Dr. Jack shifts to Go. Chip drops Story neatly astern of us; Lee Talbott swings Reprise into line smartly astern of him; Joan Bass pops Water Music into Katydid’s stereo cassette player and turns the volume up high. As if in response to G. F. Handel, Kath’s uterus joyously recontracts, and our flotilla steams out of the anchorage at Ordinary Point. Is that smirking Howard Huckleberry Findley among those cheerers on the final raft we pass? Is that an outbound Phaeacian 35 just clearing Back Creek as we leave Knight Island to port en route to Georgetown? Sy’ll swear he saw Chessie the Shoal-Draft Sea Monster tip us a flipper off Old Field Point, unless it was a sperm whale. Hardly enough water over there to float a sperm, chart-minding Chip will remark to himself, much less a whale. But for Simon’s sake he’ll pretend he thought he saw something, too. The anchor work done, Peter rejoins contracting Katherine in her parents’ cockpit and shows her the calendar date on his wristwatch. Sixteen years to the day, he reminds her, since our night in Room One Seven Six of the old Gramercy Park Hotel. Replies sky-high Katie in his arms You’d better set that bezel, hon; I think I’m getting regular.

  And up to Katydid’s starboard main spreader Henry Sherritt now runs

  up to her port main spreader;

  (But they’re going to be born in the other order, predicts Carla B Silver aboard Reprise when her daughter decodes those flags from Chapman’s Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling.)

  A E

  Sturdy little D! Bright-eyed V! Welcome to your garden!

  A E

  M

  THE

  ENDING

  SCHEHERAZADE TUCKS US ALL IN.

  SHAH BETTER, SADAT SAYS.

  Shahryar’s been perkier, too, since his wife rematerialized nine months past on the Persian carpet in her library in their son’s palace in the Islands of India and China. (There, as on the Chesapeake, this Monday evening—last day of “June 1980” by “Djean’s” calendar—is mild and fresh behind the high that blammed and blooeyed us late yesterday afternoon, to which blooeying we shall duly orbit back.) Look who’s here, Shahr said when Scher showed; we were wondering. So was I, said Scheherazade as soon as she’d got her breath. I’ll tell you the whole story—starting tonight.

  But at their age and stage, the old formulas change. No more “retiring to his harem at midnight and doing his will upon the vizier’s daughter”; they split a cozy nightcap and turn in before eleven.

  OLYMPIC SECURITY PERVADES MOSCOW. She’ll explain. What sex there is in the old-folks’ wing of the palace—Once a week? Twice?—happens usually in the morning these days, when husband and wife are at once both drowsy and refreshed. Frisking at bedtime riles them up, blows their sleep. So it’s a glass of red at ten, ten-thirty; then off to bed, and Shahr tucks behind Scher or Scher behind Shahr like two forks nestled in Shmah’s flatware chest, and she takes up where she left off till one or the other of them drifts away. Usually Shahryar ticks off first. No literary criticism there; they’re old friends now at the end of their day, and sex is nice and stories are fine, but both will keep—and if they don’t, tant pis: They’ve had a fair share. Sometimes it’s the teller conks out in mid-sentence, before the told; not at dawn’s early light these days, but on the crest of a night-wave stronger than her story line. Later that same evening, she’ll be saying—and next thing she knows, it’s morning.

  Down to breakfast then with the grandchildren, and on with their personal denouements.

  So: She’s told him what she’s told him, has Scheherazade, re her Month of Mondays and her expedition on the Chesapeake with Djean and Shmah, and her stay in Annapolis with Ms. May Jump, and what happened at that ASPS convention, Kitty Hawk Eleven. Shahryar chuckles and clucks his tongue; hopes she had herself a time; gives her a squeeze or a potch in tuchis and dozes off: the man before whom once all Islam’s daughters trembled.

  But then about eleven p.m., if it happens Shahr’s asleep and Scher’s in a mode between this and that, where distances go strange and she could as well be an eye in the sky as a bag in a bed, she gets a burst transmission from C.B S. that sorts out later in her dreams and that she then re-sorts in her notebook after breakfast, what she can still recall of it. May Jump’s involved in these; so is Djean, she’s ninety percent sure. Though it’s still our story, somehow Djean’s the source; M.J.’s the voice (if you’re getting this message, it’s May you’re hearing, at the end of June); and the indispensable medium is C.B S. (Call Back, Scheherazade!), who adds items of her own to the signal, SHAH BETTER, SADAT SAYS; sometimes just AHA, or OY, or TESTING THE INTERCOM: THREE TWO ONE.

  How’d the woman get home from North Carolina? Take your pick. May Jump says C.B S. reports that Shmah told her that Djean told her that he’d been monitoring his monitor as usual all that weekend, trying to spring, himself and his favorite storyteller out of the pen he’d processed them into, when that picture postcard arrived from K.H.N.C. with the gray granite shaft of the Wright Brothers Memorial on the front and, on the back, Scher’s little diagram of her maiden flight, and something went click. He hoped it was the muse’s key in the lock of his imagination, but in fact it was his new three-thousand-dollar word processor crashing from a local power lapse, and there went his Tale of You-Know-Whom Thus Far, which he had neglected to Save To Disk. Power was anon restored, but not his unfinished story of Scheherazade and her predicament, nor for that matter the word machine: Something had blown.

  As he was set to put his fist through the darkened screen, the Pretty Obvious Possibility occurred to him. But no: A pop ending like that wouldn’t fetch his old friend to Baltimore-Washington International, much less back to her PTOR. Next day, Shmah came home with the sea-snail shell and the osprey-feather quill Scher had sent him as, oh, mementoes of Kitty Hawk Eleven. She found her husband wishing he’d stayed with his sturdy though erratic fountain pen. Said Shmah Your pal says you might try these, and put the quill and snail shell down on the postcard. When last seen, Shmah went on, she was still to be seen at K.H. Eleven.

  This time both of them heard the click, and the box lit up, and as far as they and May can put times together, that was just about exactly when Ms. Scheherazade pffed off from Kitty Hawk and clicked on back home.


  Queries C.B S.: THAT’S AN ENDING? Hold on, girls, says May Jump: It was just then too that friend Djean made some Further Connections—noted them down with the osprey quill in good old messy black ink on paper white as a laundered smock or a fresh T-shirt, scribble scribble—connections between the stuff on that postcard and sea snails and osprey feathers and the Brothers Wright and Kitty Hawk Eleven and the Keyhole Big Bird spy in the sky and keys to the treasure and central intelligence and the omniscopic point of view and Allah knows what else. He embraced his patient wife and said Shmah Yisroel: The story’s done; on with the story.

  So they went sailing.

  But our collective narrator is obliged to add that when C.B S. and May Jump get word of all this a few days from now from Djean and Shmah, whom they happen not to have seen since way back then (that’s last “October”), and they pass the news along later yet—next month, say, or next fall—to us Sherritt-Sagamores in Baltimore, and we pass it along later yet to Andrew Christopher Sherritt, who was present when certain stories got told on certain sailboats, young Chip is going to go clickety buzz himself and come up with the most personal question he has ever put to his sister and his brother-in-law. We’d stayed home from that ASPS get-together last fall, Kath’s told him, ‘cause Pete had seminars to preside over and it was her ovulation time and we were trying as usual to lay the keel for Chip’s niece and nephew, right? Old Yang and Yin there. So excuse him for asking, but he supposes that a lot of love got made in Baltimore, Maryland, that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, no? It did: also at Nopoint Point and aboard the good ship Story, toward that weekend’s end. So, lad? So: Counting back 266 days from our happy birthday yesterday (but it won’t be yesterday by the time Chip gets this news, fingers his brown bead necklace like an abacus, and goes clickety buzz), we get . . . KH11! Columbus Day ± a couple—and not only the eleventh birthday of the ASPS and the tenth anniversary of our first Day Zero in Dun Cove, but just possibly the very moment when the Santa María of Sagamore sperm Land-Ho’d the Hispaniola of Katherine Sherritt’s ovum; when “Fred” and “Mimi” wound up their sex education and commenced to Something Both and Neither, now snoozing happily in their twin cribs.

  Got it?

  Maybe. How does that arithmetic get Scribbler Djean off his plot-hook, P wants to know, and Scheherazade back to the Islands of India and China? Chip says he’s only crunching the numbers; it’s not his story, and we Sherritt-Sagamores are too busy nursing and diapering these days (and easing back into our rent-paying labors while working up our coupled viewpoint for The Tidewater Tales: A Novel) to give it much thought.

  But we’ll give it some, for Scheherazade is in our story as well as in our stories. Whose bracelet was it got Princess Kate lickety-split through her labor, allegro ma non troppo just as C.B S. foretold, all hands delivered safely in the Easton Hospital just before and just after midnight by Doctor Jack Bass, to his happy surprise, and no episiotomy necessary, much less a cesarean? We sense already (P.S. especially, who has piloted such narrative channels before) that you don’t get home free just by blowing horns and running up flags and weighing anchor and chugging off for Georgetown. Mister Djean had only one dramaturgical chestnut to fetch from his fire; Professor P and partner have got a peck of them smoking away like Alert-and-Locate signals, or those slash-and-burn Third World farm-fires that show up at night in satellite photography. (Scheherazade declares she can spy them all the way from her PTOR, via her highest-level keyhole.)

  Through which now a certain late retired Agency consultant named Douglas Townshend observes to Carla B Silver (in one of those Gypsy receiving-modes of hers) that if the key to the treasure is the treasure, then the keyhole must be the treasury. If the key is missing, Doug declares, there’s at least that keyhole to be peeked or whispered through: elementary Tradecraft. His blessings upon the heads of sturdy Pomp and bright-eyed Circumstance, whose godfather he wishes he might have been; upon their mother, to whom he apologizes yet for his contribution to her earlier miscarriage; and upon you, Peter Sagamore, in whom his long-shot investment has paid off: You are writing about the Doomsday Factor, are you not?—or not writing about it, but in a different way, Q.E.D. and auf Wiedersehen.

  Whoa-ho-ho! will protest Peter. There’ll be no spooking off like that, old friend, here in our Ending! Hold that ghost on the line, Carlita, till he answers a few Reallys for us, to help tidy the mess he helped make. Like was that mint tea really spiked, Doug, up there in Carla’s Cavern? And what really happened to John Arthur Paisley aboard Brillig, and to your late friend The P of D aboard Reprise, and to Short Jon Silver, and for that matter to yourself? Loose ends, Douglas, in the argyll sock of our story, which we want knit up—unless the message is too painful for C.B S. to carry.

  What say, May? Tell on, Scheherazade.

  Match-hand shaking, our friend lights up. That particular mint tea was not laced, though folks Doug knows are perfectly capable of such valentines. The antidote Peter swallowed afterward was a nothing, in this instance, though folks Doug knows are not above either poisoning your tea and faking your antidote, or faking your poison and poisoning your antidote, or poisoning both, or (as in P’s case) faking both. The real poison, Doug declares, is the Company we keep, as embodied particularly in F. Mansfield Talbott the Prince of Darkness and his fellows. Do not glorify them, readers and writers. Do not romanticize their exploits. They are an amoral crowd employing immoral means to not especially moral ends: the dirty-tricks department of international grabbiness. A Gypsy curse upon them all.

  You want Reallys? Father and son really did die, not together as in C. B Silver’s rafted dream, but as in its corrective gloss, with one difference: Having learned from fellow spooks that his son had been tortured to death in Chile by low-level operatives of the government brought into power with the Company’s generous assistance, Frederick Mansfield Talbott borrowed his brothers boat for the purpose of reprising J. A. Paisley’s suicide, only without the aid of a nine-millimeter bullet in the brain. His DINA counterparts drowned his son in a prison toilet full of diarrhetic shit; he meant to drown himself in full consciousness, cold sober, with enough scuba ballast to keep him truly down for keeps. But climbing the lifelines with eighty pounds of lead off Bennett Point, where Wye meets Miles, he slipped on the dew-wet deck, conked his noggin hard on the metal toe-rail, and never felt the hypothermic night-sea do its job. His anchor held. He has been long since distributed through the food chain, like Kepone. Not an altogether evil man, Frank Talbott’s brother; good to his family, in his way—but to hell with him, really.

  And Paisley? Q.E.D. And Doug Townshend himself (who now snuffs out his cigarette and signs off)? KGB, very nearly, by another elegant mischance. Operation BONAPARTE having reached a hiatus, in early June Doug was en route to the U.S. embassy in Australia to make contact with a KGB counterpart in the Soviet embassy there whom he had known slightly in other stations over the years. The Russian chap’s principal assignment in Australia was to gather intelligence about U.S. intelligence-gathering in Perth and Carnarvon, in particular the Big Bird’s song; but he had sent equivocal signals to CIA people in the U.S. embassy that could be read as tentative overtures to defection, and therefore retired senior officer Townshend, an expert in such matters, was dispatched from Bethesda to Canberra to encourage him.

  This commission, however, was imperfectly got wind of by another KGB officer back home on the Chesapeake (assigned to monitor and forestall BONAPARTE), who mistakenly believed D. Townshend to have succeeded F. M. Talbott as the Agency’s highest-level Doomsday Factor, and who understood Doug’s mission to be the liquidation, rather than the encouragement, of Colonel Maydonov in Canberra. To protect his fellow officer, therefore, he set about to nail our friend with a dollop of the Komitĕt’s highest-tech cardiac arrestor in the bustle of the baggage-claim carousel in Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport, where one goes through customs and changes planes for the short hop over the mountains to the capital. But as the Qantas
Airways 747 banked over Botany Bay on final approach to Sydney, he was prevented in this design by the rupture of an aneurysm of whose existence Doug himself (lighting his final lifetime cigarette) was unaware. The spook took credit for having completed his assignment, went on to Canberra, reported to Colonel Maydonov that his life had narrowly been saved from a CIA hit, and returned to Washington and Corsica Neck. The colonel, knowing that the CIA had no particular reason to kill him and some reason to keep him alive, took Doug’s “assassination” as a warning from his own colleagues, abandoned therefore his tentative plan to defect, and so energetically rededicated himself to his work that under Yuri Andropov’s future and brief succession of Leonid Brezhnev, he will become one of the Kremlin’s very Commissars of Darkness.

  And that (saith the spook of the spook who once warned Peter Sagamore “We lie and lie and lie and lie and lie”) is the truth.

  Nevertheless, goes on our omniscopic Scheherazade, Operation BONAPARTE will half succeed. During Ronald Reagan’s first presidential year, the Deniston trustees will sell slightly more than fifty percent of the originally proposed wooded campus acreage on Corsica Neck to the Soviet embassy, at the price first offered for the whole parcel. The purchasers, correctly anticipating an end to President Carter’s U.S./Soviet détente, lust for privacy more than ever and dare not hold out for a better deal. John James Deniston would be proud of us, Irma Sherritt will declare. To that sum will be added anonymous donations (laundered from the Agency’s huge new secret budget) in memorial to the late ex-Congressman Porter Baldwin, Jr., always a friend of The Deniston School, and his campaign treasurer William Sherritt, killed with him (together with the pilot and a third passenger) in the crash of that Easton Air Freight helicopter just off Corsica Neck in the wicked late-afternoon thunderstorm of 29 June ‘80, as the party was en route from Queenstown up to the Sassafras River on business. In his excitement at Katherine’s labor and the running up of Katydid’s alphabet flags, Henry Sherritt forgot to VHF his elder son to cancel the Breadbasket granary ceremonies (Willy would have made the flight anyway; Sherbald Enterprises had other bases up that way to touch), and Irma forgot to remind him till the flotilla was halfway to Georgetown. By when, reported Molly then by radio to Irma, her husband had already left home for Queenstown; and thank God he wasn’t the pilot, for he was half-tanked on Sherbrook rye. But she promised to leave word with both Easton Air Freight and Sherbald Enterprises that the festivities were cancelled. Her love to Katie! Even over the airwaves, Irm could tell that Moll had been crying again.