The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  IX. the handbill

  I didn’t choose the practice of law as my career, except perhaps passively; it had been assumed from earliest memory that I was to study for the Maryland Bar and enter Dad’s firm, and I never protested. Certainly I’ve never been dedicated to anything, although as with many another thing I’ve always maintained a reasonable curiosity about the meanings of legal rules and the workings of courts.

  May I say that I am perhaps the best lawyer on the Eastern Shore? Perhaps I shouldn’t, for you’ll take the statement as self-praise. If I thought the practice of law absolutely important, then my statement would indeed be as much a boast as a description; but truthfully I consider advocacy, jurisprudence, even justice, to have no more intrinsic importance than, say, oyster-shucking. And you’d understand, wouldn’t you, that if a man like myself asserted with a smile that he was the peninsula’s best oyster shucker (I’m not), or cigarette roller, or pinball-machine tilter, he’d not be guilty of prideful boasting?

  I am the legal equivalent of a general practitioner in medicine. I handle criminal cases, torts, wills, deeds, titles, bonds, articles of incorporation—everything that a lawyer can get his fingers into. I’ve argued in orphans’ courts, circuit courts, federal courts, admiralty courts, and appellate courts—once in the United States Supreme Court. I seldom lose cases; but then I seldom plead a case that I’m not fairly happy about to begin with. I must confess that I pick and choose among my possible clients, not to find easy cases, but to find interesting ones.

  My partners, fortunately for the firm, are not so choosy; they keep fairly busy and earn good incomes. Harry Bishop, of the original Andrews & Bishop, was sixty-three at the time of this story (he died in 1948). He and Dad founded the firm in 1904, when both were fairly young men. Jimmy Andrews—no relation to me—is the other partner. In 1937 he was perhaps twenty-seven or -eight, just beginning his practice, and I’d suggested bringing him into the firm if only for the convenience of being able to use the same letterhead we’d used before Dad hanged himself.

  Our office, whither I went at last after my hour of boat-building, is a little frame building. We each have a private office, but we share the same waiting room, lavatory, and secretary.

  The last-mentioned, Mrs. Lake, a lady of fifty, was typing when I entered and paid my usual respects.

  “No one waiting for me, I suppose?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Mack was in,” Mrs. Lake said.

  “Oh? What for?”

  “She left a note,” Mrs. Lake said. “I put it on your desk.”

  I straightened my tie, using the waiting-room mirror.

  “No word yet from Charley this morning?”

  “Not yet.”

  Charley was Charley Parks, an attorney whose office was next door to ours. He was an old friend and poker partner of mine, and currently we were on opposite sides in a complicated litigation that had developed out of a trifling automobile accident. The suit was several years old already and hadn’t even been tried yet: both parties being wealthy and “litigious,” as we barristers say, Charley and I were having a field day fencing with procedural disputes. I’ll describe the case eventually.

  “How about the pickle barrel?” I asked, stubbing out my cigar in Mrs. Lake’s ashtray and picking up my mail from her desk.

  “I think there’s a letter there from Baltimore,” she said.

  This had to do with my major case at the moment, another venerable one, involving the contested will of Harrison Mack Senior, the pickle king, who had died in 1935. It too was a labyrinthine affair: suffice it for the moment to say that Harrison had retained me to rescue his jeopardized millions (nearly three million, in fact), and that since January things had been looking up for our adversaries, much to Harrison’s concern, if not mine.

  I took my letters into my office then and began my last day’s work at the law. Two of the letters were advertisements; I threw them out unopened. Another was a check for one thousand seven hundred dollars from William Butler, my client in the automobile litigation mentioned before—an installment on his bill. I put it aside for Mrs. Lake to handle. Another was a personal note from Junior Miner, the ex-husband of the girl in Chapter III, whose divorce I’d handled five years before. It read, in part:

  I will kill you m——————g son of a bich if come on Pine street m——————g son of bich you now why. J.M.

  I’ve no idea why Junior deleted that word in his weekly letter to me; perhaps he was prudish. He believed I arranged Dorothy’s divorce in order to make her my mistress, and sent me threatening letters of this sort every six or eight days for a number of years. I put this one aside for Mrs. Lake to file with the others, hoping, as I always did on these occasions, that Junior would not be foolish enough to carry out his threat. Our State’s Attorney, Jarman James, was an avid Negro-hanger, and it would have distressed me to present him with such an easy case. To be sure, if Junior didn’t carry out his threat within the next several hours, he would be safe.

  The next letter I recognized at once from my own handwriting on the envelope—I’d addressed it to myself. It was postmarked Baltimore, and it was, or could be, tremendously important. But I wasn’t ready to read it yet; I propped it against my desk lamp.

  The other letters had to do with various works in progress. I read them, spending some minutes after each to stare out of my window at the county jail and make mental notes. Then I put them aside and read Jane’s message.

  Darling, if you hoped in some way to hurt me again with your note this morning, you failed. I’m not disturbed at all. I will do exactly what you suggest, my dear, if you will see Marvin Rose for a complete physical, to find out why you’re such a pansy. Love, Jane.

  Really, she had come a long way since I first met her. I must explain that Marvin Rose is a doctor and a golfing friend of mine, and that in naming a visit to him as the condition for her granting my request—remember the note I sent her earlier, by way of Jerry Hogey—Jane believed herself safe: not since 1924 had I visited a doctor except socially, and Jane knew that my refusal to do so was no less strong for its being unreasonable.

  Jane’s note, too, I put aside for Mrs. Lake to file, first replacing it in its envelope. I think I may safely suggest, reader, that no one—no one—in Cambridge could bring suit against me with reasonable hopes of winning. In cases where I can’t persuade judge or jury with rhetoric or legal gambit, I usually have something in my files to do the trick as evidence. Certainly I could foresee no circumstances in which this note might prove useful, especially since my slight involvement in the world would be terminated that very day. Despite which fact, I put it aside for Mrs. Lake.

  Then I called the doctor.

  “I’d like an appointment to see Dr. Rose just before lunch,” I told his receptionist.

  “I’m sorry, sir, Dr. Rose will be busy until this evening.”

  “Would you tell him it’s Todd Andrews?” I asked. “I want a physical. Maybe he can look at me during his naptime.” I knew that Marvin was in the habit of napping in his office, on the examination table, before lunch.

  “Hold on.” I heard her cover the mouthpiece and speak to Marvin.

  “Hello? Todd?” It was Marvin who spoke now.

  “Yes. How about a minute of your naptime today, Marv?”

  “What the hell, Toddy, you sick?” he asked incredulously.

  “Nope.”

  “Somebody suing me?”

  “Nope. I just want an examination.”

  He was speechless. For years he and I had argued, at golf or over highballs, about medicine and law, or rather health and justice, and although he had no inkling of my cardiac ailments, he knew that I was unhealthy and that I didn’t care to consult a physician about it.

  “Sure, Toddy, come on up, boy,” he laughed. “Say, are you pulling my leg?”

  “Nope. I want the whole works. Eleven o’clock?”

  “Make it eleven-fifteen,” Marvin said. “I want to sharpen my needles and t
hings. I don’t get you often.”

  We talked for a minute or two of other things, and then I went to my files, got out the dossier on the litigation over Harrison Mack Senior’s estate, and prepared to begin work in earnest

  But again I interrupted myself. I had bitten the end off my third cigar, and finding my matchbook empty, I slapped my coat pockets to search for another. What I found was the handbill I’d pocketed earlier on Long Wharf and had forgotten to read. I unfolded it and spread it out on my desk.

  [On the inside of the folded sheet was more information about the virtues of Adam’s Floating Opera, and a program of the evening’s entertainment.]

  Well. Far be it from me to miss the Wonderful Panithiopliconica.

  “Mrs. Lake,” I called, “will you telephone Mrs. Mack sometime this morning and ask her if I may take Jeannine to see the showboat when it pulls in?”

  “Okay,” Mrs. Lake said. “What time?”

  “Late this afternoon, I guess. About four? Am I supposed to do anything after four?”

  “I’ll look… No.”

  The famous race between the Sternwheelers Natchez and Robert E. Lee. I wouldn’t miss it for anything. But I didn’t keep my eye on the date, as Capt. Adam’s handbill suggested; indeed, I crumpled the bill and threw it away just then, and I’ve never been able to remember whether all this occurred on the twenty-first or twenty-second of June. To be sure, at some time during the nine years I spent recollecting the events of this day, I could with small effort have gone to the files of the daily Banner and dug out the showboat advertisement to fix the date. But I’ve never bothered to. Is it the Navajo Indians who make it a point always to leave in their woven rugs and other artifacts some slight imperfection, an odd stitch or a bump of clay, in order not to compete with the gods? I think it is. Well, I have no gods, and so I can’t justify my shortcomings as do the Navajos. But it has, I must say, seemed unwise to me from the beginning to verify that date. Perhaps I can’t explain why. Indeed, I shan’t try.

  X. the law

  That will-o’-the-wisp, the law: where shall I begin to speak of it? Is the law the legal rules, or their interpretations by judges, or by juries? Is it the precedent or the present fact? The norm or the practice? I think I’m not interested in what the law is.

  Surely, though, I am curious about things that the law can be made to do, but this disinterestedly, without involvement. A child encounters a toy tractor, winds it up, and sets it climbing over a book. The tractor climbs well. The child puts another book here, so, and angles the first. The tractor surmounts them, with difficulty. The child opens the pages of the first book, leans the second obliquely against it, and places his shoe behind the two. The tractor tries, strains, spins, whirrs, and falls like a turtle on its back, treads racing uselessly. The child moves on to his crayons and picture puzzles, no expression on his face. I don’t know what you mean, sir, when you speak of justice.

  It may be that, like Capt. Osborn, you have come to believe that I have opinions about everything, absurd ones at that. Very well. But of most things about which people hold some sort of opinion, I have none at all, except by implication. What I mean is this: the law, for example, prescribes certain things that shall not be done, or certain ways in which things shall be done, but of most specific human acts it has nothing to say one way or the other. Yet these extralegal acts, or most of them, are certainly influenced and conditioned, implicitly, by the laws pertaining to other things. People, for example, aren’t allowed to kill us while we’re performing our extralegal acts. In the same way, though I have no opinion one way or the other on whether suicide, for instance, is a sin, I have certain opinions on a few other things that made it possible for me to contemplate suicide in 1937, and actually to resolve to destroy myself.

  All right. I have no general opinions about the law, or about justice, and if I sometimes set little obstacles, books and slants, in the path of the courts, it is because I’m curious, merely, to see what will happen. On those occasions when the engine of the law falls impotently sprawling, I make a mental note of it, and without a change of expression, go on to my boat or my Inquiry. Winning or losing litigations is of no concern to me, and I think I’ve never made a secret of that fact to my clients. They come to me, as they come before the law, because they think they have a case. The law and I are uncommitted.

  One more thing, before I explain the contest over Harrison Mack Senior’s will: if you have followed this chapter so far, you might sensibly ask, “Doesn’t your attitude—which is, after all, irresponsible—allow for the defeat, even the punishment, of the innocent, and at times the victory of the guilty? And does this not concern you?” It does indeed allow for the persecution of innocence—though perhaps not so frequently as you might imagine. And this persecution concerns me, in the sense that it holds my attention, but not especially in the sense that it bothers me. Under certain circumstances, to be explained later, I am not averse to pillorying the innocent, to throwing my stone, with the crowd, at some poor martyr. Irresponsibility, yes: I affirm, I insist upon my basic and ultimate irresponsibility. Yes indeed.

  It did not deeply concern me, as I said before, whether Harrison received his inheritance or not, though I stood to profit by some fifty thousand dollars or more if he did. In any world but ours, the case of the Mack estate would be fantastic; even in ours, it received considerable publicity from the Maryland press.

  Old man Mack, whom I’ve come to admire tremendously though I never met him, died in 1935, after years of declining physical and mental health. He left a large estate: stock in the Mack Pickle Co. amounting to 58 per cent of the total shares, and worth perhaps two million dollars in fairly good times; stock in various other business concerns, some more prosperous than others; a large house in Ruxton, another in West Palm Beach, and cottages in Nova Scotia and Maryland (including the one I was seduced in); extensive farmlands, especially cucumber farms, the crop from which was bought by the Mack Pickle Co.; perhaps a hundred thousand dollars in cash; assorted automobiles, cabin cruisers, horses, and dogs, and through the majority stockholdings, the potential presidency of the pickle company, which office carried a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year. It was, undeniably, an estate that many people would consider worth going to court about.

  Now of the several characteristics of Harrison père, three were important to the case: he was in the habit of using his wealth as a club to keep his kin in line; he was, apparently, addicted to the drawing up of wills; and, especially in his last years, he was obsessively jealous of the products of his mind and body, and permitted none to be destroyed.

  You perhaps recall my saying that when I first met Harrison Junior, in 1925, he was undergoing an attack of communism, and had been disinherited as a result? It seems that disinheritance, or the threat of it, was the old man’s favorite disciplinary measure, not only for his son, but also for his wife. When young Harrison attended Dartmouth rather than Johns Hopkins; when he studied journalism rather than business; when he became a communist rather than a Republican; he was disinherited until such time as he mended his ways. When Mother Mack went to Europe rather than to West Palm Beach; when she chose sparkling burgundy over highballs, Dulaney Valley over Ruxton, Roosevelt and Garner over Hoover and Curtis; she was disinherited until such time as she recanted her heresies.

  All these falls from the reinstatements to grace, of course, required emendations of Father Mack’s will, and a number of extrafamiliar circumstances also demanded frequent revision of his bequests. His country club admits someone he doesn’t like: the club must be disinherited. A pickle-truck driver runs down a state policeman checking on overloaded vehicles: the driver must be defended in court and provided for explicitly in the will. After the old man’s death, when his safe was opened, a total of seventeen complete and distinct testamentary instruments was found, chronologically arranged, each beginning with a revocation of the preceding one. He hadn’t been able to throw any of his soul-children into the fire.
/>
  Now this situation, though certainly unusual, would in itself have presented no particular problem of administration, because the law provides that where there are several wills, the last shall be considered representative of the testator’s real intentions, other things being equal. And each of these wills explicitly revoked the preceding one. But alas, with Mr. Mack all other things weren’t equal. Not only did his physical well-being deteriorate in his last years, through arthritis to leukemia to the grave; his sanity deteriorated also, gradually, along the continuum from relative normalcy through marked eccentricity to jibbering idiocy. In the first stages he merely inherited and disinherited his relatives and his society; in the second he no longer went to work, he required entertainment as well as care from his nurses, and he allowed nothing of his creation—including hair- and nail-clippings, urine, feces, and wills—to be thrown away; in the last stages he could scarcely move or talk, had no control whatever over his bodily functions, and recognized no one. To be sure, the stages were not dramatically marked, but blended into one another imperceptibly.

  Of the seventeen wills (which represented by no means all the wills Mack had written, merely those written since he acquired his mania for preserving things), only the first two were composed during the time when the old man’s sanity was pretty much indisputable; that is, prior to 1933. The first left about half the state to Harrison Junior and the other half to Mother Mack, provided it could not be demonstrated to the court that she had drunk any sparkling burgundy since 1920. This one was dated 1924. The other, dated 1932, left about half the estate to Mrs. Mack unconditionally and the rest to Harrison, provided it could not be demonstrated to the court that during a five-year probationary period, 1932-37, Harrison had done, written, or said anything that could reasonably be construed as evidence of communist sympathies. This clause, incidentally, ran through most of the subsequent testaments as well.