The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  He opened the shoe box and took out a fifth of Park & Tilford.

  “Call up old Charleyhorse, Julia,” he chuckled to Mrs. Lake. “Come on, there, Harry Bishop; come on, Jimmy boy. We’re drinking the Colonel’s whiskey!”

  The calliope down at the wharf broke into “Out of the Wilderness.” I blushed, replaced the bulky brief of Morton v. Butler in the file, and accepted a drink of Park & Tilford.

  † Formatter’s Note : If the two voices do not display correctly, here are the passages rendered seperately below:

  First Column

  It’s not so difficult, is it, to read two columns at the same time? I’ll commence by saying the same thing with both voices, so, until you’ve got the knack, and then separate them ever so gradually until you’re used to keeping two distinct narrative voices in your head at the same time.

  Ready? Well: when I re-entered my office the clock in the tower of the Municipal Building was just striking two, and as if by a prearranged signal, at the same moment the raucous voice of a stream calliope came whistling in off the river: Adam’s Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera, one could guess, had just passed Hambrooks Bar Light and was heading up the channel to the bell buoy and thence to Long Wharf. For the thousandth rime I blushed at the clumsy ironies of coincidence, for it happened that just as I drew from my files the nearly completed brief of a litigation involving a slight injury to the left foot of perhaps the richest man in Cambridge—who stood to be some fifteen thousand dollars richer if my client lost the case—the calliope broke into “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” and a few minutes later, when I was reflecting on the difficulties my client would have in scraping together that sum, the melody changed to “What You Gon’ Do When De Rent Comes ’Round?”

  In fact, even to think of the name Adam’s Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera—its completely unsubtle significance—when I had before me the extraordinary case of Morton v. Butler, was the greatest of accidental ironies: never did there exist such an unparalleled floating opera as the law in its less efficient moments, and seldom had the law such inefficient moments as those during which it involved itself—nay, diffused, dissipated, lost itself—in Morton v. Butler. Hamlet listed “the law’s delay” as one of the things that could drive a man to suicide. That I don’t accept the Prince’s list, your starboard eye has already observed; that neither Morton nor Butler accepted this particular annoyance as suicidal is evidenced by their both still walking the earth. Let me review the case, a bump on the log of my story:

  Second Column

  It’s not so difficult, is it, to read two columns at the same time? I’ll commence by saying the same thing with both voices, so, until you’ve got the knack, and then part them very carefully until it’s no trouble for you to follow both sets of ideas simultaneously and accurately.

  Ready? Well: you’ll recall that chapter before last I declared to Mister Haecker that anyone who wishes to order his life in terms of a rationale must first of all answer for himself Hamlet’s question, the question of suicide. I would add further that if he wants my respect, his choice to live must be based on firmer ground than Hamlet’s—that “conscience does make cowards of us all”: that to choose suicide is to exchange unknown evils for known ones. This position (like Montaigne’s argument against revolution) is, as the Prince admits, simply cowardly, not reasonable. On the other hand, if one chooses to die, for mercy’s sake let this choice be more reasonably founded than Hamlet’s, too—merely escaping “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” is as cowardly as is fearing dreams beyond the grave. Don’t think I’m an indiscriminating promoter of suicides: I merely hold that those who would live reasonably should have reasons for remaining alive. Reasonable enough?

  But I cannot accept bad luck as sufficient reason for anyone’s suicide, including my father’s. Indeed, it was the absence, in my opinion, of any valid reason for his hanging himself that turned me into a cynic after his death, though I had, no doubt, the seeds of cynicism in me all along. It was a sudden qualitative change, the impingement of the world onto my philosophy.

  Before I tell you more about my reaction to Dad’s death, and about the little adventure that followed it, let me review very briefly the case on which I spent my afternoon hour’s work—what I meant to be my final hour’s work as a lawyer. It will serve as an introduction to Col. Henry Morton, who plays a role in the little adventure, and at the same time keep you from assuming that I simply loafed all afternoon, when in fact I did some fruitful wall-staring. Here’s a resume of the case, a bump on the log of my story:

  XXI. coals to newcastle

  When, as I said earlier, I came home from the office on the afternoon of February 2, 1930, and after searching the house for my father, finally found him in the cellar, one end of his belt spiked to a floor joist and the other fastened around his neck, there was not a smudge of dirt anywhere on him, though the cellar was dusty. His clothes were perfectly creased and free of wrinkles, and although his face was black and his eyes were popped, his hair was neatly and correctly combed. Except that the chair upon which Dad had stood was kicked over, everything in the cellar was in order.

  The same could not be said of his estate. Indeed, as soon became apparent, there was no estate. It is such a commonplace story that I hesitate to tell it—and yet nothing was ever less true or pitiful for its being commonplace. Dad had had a sizable savings account; between the years 1925 and 1927 he increased it by investing in stocks. He didn’t expect the boom to last, and so decided to make one big splash and quit. To make the splash he mortgaged all his property—a summer cottage and lot at Fenwick Island and one or two timber lots down the county—for as much as he could, and sank the whole wad on the market. In early 1929, when the speculative structure began to quiver, and every public official in the country began to assure us that the economy was fundamentally sound, Dad mortgaged the house and lot, borrowed on his life insurance, and contracted private notes from what few of his many friends were able to lend him money. All this, too, went on the market. No, not quite all: five thousand dollars he persuaded Harry Bishop to put in a safe-deposit box, in my name—suspecting, perhaps, that otherwise he’d not be able to resist plunging that, too.

  Then the market collapsed. People were anxious enough to hire lawyers, all right, to collect debts, but they had no money to pay the lawyers with, and most debts had suddenly become uncollectable. Dad had payments falling due on at least four mortgages and countless loans, and no money to meet them with. Foreclosures threatened from all sides, lawsuits from every quarter. He would, it appeared, lose his summer cottage, his timber lots, the family home, the car, virtually everything he owned. His debts amounted to perhaps $35,000. He would have to sleep in the office, walk to court, wear his suits threadbare. Very possibly he would never reach again his former security or regain all his former respect. It was a hard pill to swallow. Instead of swallowing it anyway, he hanged himself.

  Does one’s father hang himself for a simple, stupid lack of money? And is one expected to set up again the chair one’s father has kicked over in his strangling? Can one actually, with a kitchen knife, saw through the belt? Carry one’s father up to the bed whereon one was conceived, and laying him on it, dig one’s fingers into the black and ruptured flesh to release the dead neck from its collar? Reader, I still recall with shudders a summer day when I was five years old. My father (dressed in good clothes) was killing chickens in the back yard. He caught one, and holding it by the feet, laid it on the chopping block, a sawn stump; unruffled by the flailing wings, he raised the old ax, which he held close to the head, and with a soft stroke decapitated the hen. The head still lay on the stump, the little red eyes staring, the beak opening and shutting in soundless squawks. The body, once my father released it, flailed about the yard for thirty seconds and then died. I watched everything with great, uneasy absorption.

  Dad picked up the chicken by its feet again.

  “Will you take this in to Bessie, please?”
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  I held out my hand dumbly. Dad put the feet in my hand—cold, hard, dirty, stringy, scaly, dead yellow feet. I was ill then, reader, and if I think of those feet a minute longer I shall be ill now. But of this matter one can think, if queasily. Is one, then, expected to close the popping eyes of his father’s corpse? Eyes the very veins of which are burst? Surely the dirt of the planet would cry the reason for it, the justification that would brook no questioning. I waited.

  Of course there were debts. The Fenwick place; take it. The timber lots? To be sure. The house? The car? The insurance? Take them, take them. One doesn’t concern oneself with trifles at one’s father’s grave, only with reasons. I waited.

  Back at the office, Harry Bishop gave me the envelope from Dad. I took it eagerly, hoping it would contain the answer, but instead it merely had five thousand dollars in it. There was a note, too, which I must have suppressed—it’s honestly, completely gone from my mind—because it said all the things I certainly didn’t want to hear, in just the wrong language. Is five thousand dollars enough to pay for digging my fingers under that belt? It’s not enough payment even for thinking about it! His debt to me was the last, but hardly the least debt my father escaped.

  If I was demoralized by Dad’s death, I was paralyzed by the five thousand dollars and the note. Certainly I sat in the office for thirty minutes with my jaw slack, staring at the bills as if I’d opened that precious last envelope and discovered inside a handful of dung, the color of a hanged man’s cheeks. Five thousand dollars! After some time I replaced the crisp new thousand-dollar bills in their envelope, which was, after all, unstamped and unaddressed, and thought of all the people I knew.

  The question became ample: Who was the richest man in Cambridge? Col. Henry Morton. I wrote on the envelope Col. Henry Morton, c/o Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, Inc., Cambridge, Maryland, put a three-cent stamp in place, and snuffling like a hobbled race horse, dropped the envelope into a mailbox on my way to lunch. Next day I moved into the Dorset Hotel.

  This was, I believe, in early March 1930. Very soon afterwards I received a call from the Colonel, whom I knew only slightly.

  “Hello? Hello?” he shouted, as though it were not his custom to speak on telephones. “Is this Todd Andrews?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hello? Andrews? Andrews, what’s this money I got from you in the mail?”

  “It’s a gift from me to you,” I said.

  “Andrews? You there, Andrews? What’s going on, eh?”

  “It’s a gift,” I repeated; “a gift.”

  “Huh? What? Hello? Andrews! Gift! Hello?”

  “It’s a gift,” I repeated.

  The day after that, the Colonel came to see me, striding unappointed into my office.

  “Andrews? You Andrews? See here, young man, I don’t know what you’ve got up your sleeve—”

  “It was a gift,” I explained; “that’s all.”

  “A gift? You’re crazy, son! Here, take it back, and no more foolishness!”

  He did not wave anything at me—no bills under my nose.

  “Of course not,” I said. “It was just a gift.”

  “Gift? Well! Gift? What’s up your sleeve, young man? What do you think I’m supposed to do?”

  “Not a blessed thing, sir,” I repeated. “It was a gift.”

  “I won’t stand for tricks,” the Colonel warned. “Here, take it back. No more!”

  Again, he extended nothing toward me.

  “I’ve never been obligated to any man,” the Colonel said then, more calmly. “I shan’t begin now.”

  “No obligation, sir,” I insisted.

  “Hmph! Whatever’s on your mind, you might as well forget it. I can’t be bought! If anybody was to ask me the secret of my success, I’d tell them I was never obligated to any man.”

  “I’d never try to obligate you, sir. It was just a gift.”

  “I’ll teach you a lesson, son.” The Colonel smiled, as though the idea had just dawned on him. “I’m going to keep half your money, and you shan’t get a thing out of me in return.”

  “You must keep it all,” I said. “I don’t take back gifts.”

  “Hmph! You’ve got a lot to learn, boy. A lot to learn! Never obligate yourself to anybody.”

  “I shan’t, sir.”

  “Hard times, Andrews!” the Colonel sputter’ed. “Bad times! Plant’s laying off! A man doesn’t throw his money away! What’s on your mind? Eh? Eh?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing, sir. No explanation.”

  The Colonel stood up suddenly to leave, looking grimly around my office and chewing his cigar.

  “I’ll teach you, boy,” he said. “You’ll wish you had it back!”

  “No, sir.”

  He started out and then grinned back into the doorway.

  “You’d’ve been better off using it to square some of your Dad’s debts!” he declared and, satisfied that he’d demonstrated his independence, left. Mrs. Lake gasped at his remark.

  Some time afterwards a letter came.

  Dear Mr. Andrews:

  By this time you are doubtless of a different mind concerning the transaction of some days ago. I am, however, a man of my word, and intend to carry out my resolution for your instruction.

  Yours truly,

  Henry W. Morton

  I replied at once:

  Dear Col. Morton:

  I have not changed my mind at all. The matter to which you refer was not any sort of transaction, and you are not obliged to me in any way. It was a gift.

  Yours truly,

  Todd Andrews

  Within the month, Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, Inc., became involved in a contractual dispute with a small shipping concern that ferried some of the Colonel’s canned goods to Baltimore. The evidence was all in favor of the shipping company (the suit was an intricate one, and I shan’t describe it here), but the Colonel had never lost a litigation before, and so he determined to spend his way to justice. An executive from MMT, Inc., called on me and announced that the Colonel wanted Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews to handle his defense.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m not interested myself, but Mr. Bishop can take the case.”

  “I believe the Colonel is anxious for you to handle it personally,” the executive said (he was Wingate Collins, a kind of vice-president); “in fact, I’m sure he is. I heard him say so.”

  But I declined. The Colonel took his business to Charley Parks, and ultimately obtained justice in the Court of Appeals.

  Then the drivers of the Morton Trucking Company, a subsidiary of the packing house, went on strike when the Colonel refused to allow the company union to affiliate with the CIO, and Norbert Adkins, of the union, asked our firm for legal counsel. Jimmy Andrews, who had just joined us, was itching for the job, and Mr. Bishop and I saw no reason why he shouldn’t take it. But Wingate Collins gave us a reason.

  “I’ll tell you frankly,” he said, “the Colonel doesn’t want any of his friends to take that job. Your outfit would be pretty unpopular if you fellows took it. You know what I mean?”

  “Cut it out, Wingate,” I smiled. “You’ve been going to the movies too much.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You stand to come into a good thing if you don’t stick up for those strikers. The Colonel’s been unhappy with Matson & Parks lately—just between us, of course—and he’s looking around for another law firm to represent MMT officially. That’s between six and eight thousand a year extra for the firm that gets it. The Colonel’s taken a liking to you, Todd, I don’t mind saying. He thinks you’re a very promising fellow. And I’d bet my bottom dollar you’d get that job if you’ll lay off these strikers. Hell, I know you would—off the record, now—I heard him say as much yesterday.”

  “I guess Jim wants to handle it, Wingate,” I said.

  “You’d better talk to him.”

  “I already did,” Wingate sniffed. “He says he wants the union thing, but it’s up to you and Harry. Harry
says he don’t care one way or the other.”

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  “Well, I frankly think you’re a damn fool, if you’ll excuse me for saying so!” Wingate said heatedly. “The Colonel’ll have a tough time swallowing this, I declare!”

  But apparently he swallowed it. Jimmy counseled the union in the arbitration that followed, and Matson & Parks, next door, counseled the company. It was finally decided that the union would remain “independent,” and, solemnly, that the strikers would pay from their treasury for the damage to six trucks that they’d overturned during the strike.

  During the next year or so, the Colonel approached me, either directly or through his vice-presidents, on ten different occasions with offers of business. I declined to handle any of them personally (they were routine affairs, if lucrative); some he took elsewhere, others he rather reluctantly allowed Mr. Bishop to handle. Whenever I encountered him on the street (he rarely walked), he clapped me on the shoulder, took my arm, invited me for dinner, invited me for cruises on his yacht, invited me to membership in the Cambridge Yacht Club, the Elks, the Rotary, the Masons, the Odd Fellows (the Colonel was a joiner), and the country club (because I sometimes played golf, I was already a member). I declined his invitations politely. He fumed and stewed.

  More offers for legal business came in from Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes.

  “I’ll say quite frankly,” Wingate Collins said, “I think you’re a damn fool. What you got against us? You fellows are passing up the chance of a lifetime. You got more money than you can use? I’ll tell you the Christ truth, Todd, the Colonel’s got ants in his pants about that money you sent him—off the cuff, now, understand. I told him you’re just a damn fool, frankly, but he don’t know you like I do. He can’t understand it. He’s got ants in his pants because he says he don’t want to be obligated to any man. Now, then. You’d make him a lot easier to live with if you’d take some of this business he’s throwing your way.”