by John Barth
6. I don’t know. June 21 or 22, 1937, when I close the Inquiry (see #13, below left)? June 22 or 23, same year, when I reopen it? I think fall, 1956, when publication of The Floating Opera novel prompts me to buy the Macks’ old summer cottage down on Todds Point, virtually move out of the Dorset, and abandon both the Inquiry and the Letter, from the emotion of boredom. Damn you.
7. 1930-37: My long involvement with Col. Morton of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, who cannot understand why I have made an outright gift, to the richest man in town, of the money you left me upon your death. Money! O you bastard.
7. 1955: My direction, for Mack Enterprises, of the purchase of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, which, following upon my remeeting Jeannine on the New Year’s Eve (#2 right, above), and followed by the appearance of that novel, led to my reassociation with Harrison and Jane: his madness, her enterprises.
8. Aug. 13, 1932: I am seduced by Jane Mack, with Harrison’s complaisance, in their Todds Point summer cottage, and learn—well, to the vesicles—the emotion of surprise. Sweet, sweet surprise.
8. May 16, 1969: We shall come to it. Same emotion, not surprisingly. O, O, O.
9. Oct. 2, 1933: Jeannine Mack, perhaps my daughter, is born, and the Mack/Mack/Andrews triangle is suspended.
9. Jan. 29, 1969: Harrison Mack, perhaps her father, dies, and the royal folie à deux at Tidewater Farms is terminated.
10. July 31, 1935: The probate case of Mack v. Mack begins in earnest, and Jane resumes our affair.
10. Mar. 28-May 16, 1969: Another Mack v. Mack shapes up. And O…
11. June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win Mack v. Mack and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to. Of this, surely, more anon.
11.
12. June 20 or 21, 1937: My dark night of the soul, when a combination of accumulated cardiac uncertainty (cf. #4 left, above), sexual impotency (cf. #5 left & right, above), and ongoing frustration (cf. #6 left, you bastard), led me to
12.
13. June 21 or 22, 1937: My resolve to commit suicide at the end of a perfectly ordinary day, in the course of which I take breakfast coffee with Capt. Osborn Jones’s geriatric company in the Dorchester Explorers’ Club, pay my room rent for the day, work on my unfinished boat, drop in at the office to review cases in progress and stare at my staring wall, submit to a physical examination by Marvin Rose, take lunch with Harrison Mack, premise that Nothing Has Intrinsic Value, escort little Jeannine on a tour of the Original Floating Theatre, decide to employ its acetylene stage- and house-lights to my purposes that evening, take dinner with Harrison and Jane, am amiably informed that our affair is terminated (they being about to take off for Italy), resolve Mack v. Mack in their favor by a coin flip, return to the Dorset, close my Inquiry into your suicide, which I mistakenly believe I now understand, stroll down to the showboat, attempt my own, fail, and observe that I will in all probability (but not necessarily) live out my life to its natural term, there being in the abstract no more reason to commit suicide than not to. Got that, Dad? Inquiry reopened; Letter to you resumed; Floating Theatre memoir—and Second Cycle of my life—begun.
13.
Okay, the correspondences aren’t rigorous, and there are as many inversions as repetitions or ironical echoes. The past not only manures the future: it does an untidy job. #11, #12, & #13, which happened back-to-back 1st time around, are yet to recur, unless we count Polly’s airhorn work on the New Bridge in July 1967 as 11 R, and my subsequent vast suspicion (that Nothing—and everything else!—has intrinsic value) as 12 and 13 R. But now that I have perceived the Pattern—and just barely begun to assimilate 8 & 10 R—my standards of praeterital stercoration have been elevated. I now look for Polly to fire a literal flatus at us 32 days hence (or, like a yogi, take air in). It will no longer do that I have in a sense, via the foundation, already reconstructed the showboat I tried and failed to destroy in 1937 (Nature had a hard time of it, too: the O.F.T. sank three times between 1913 and 1938, was each time raised and refitted, was finally sold for scrap in ’41, but burned to the waterline off the Georgia coast en route to the salvage yard. Were the Author of us all a less heavy ironist, one would suspect arson for insurance; but I believe He managed spontaneous combustion in the galley, under the stage, where I and the acetylene tanks once rendezvoused). A second Dark Night clearly lies ahead for me, this June or next, followed by another Final Solution—and, no doubt, somebody’s second first novel, or first last!
Meanwhile, back at 8 and 10 R…
Seven Fridays ago, the last of March, I saw her name on the appointment calendar, not in my foundation office out at the college, but in my law office on Court Lane. She’d reserved a full hour of the afternoon. I wondered what exactly for, and asked Polly; she wondered, too. Harrison’s will, we grimly supposed.
I had drawn and redrawn it for him a number of times, and was named his executor. I did not much approve of its provisions; had striven earnestly, in fact, with some success, to persuade him to alter a number of them in the interests both of equity and of maintaining the appearance of mens sana. I didn’t relish the prospect of its execution, but meant to see it through unless the will should be seriously contested, in which case I would probably disqualify myself as executor in order to defend (again with little relish) the interest of the foundation, his chief beneficiary. Thus he had stricken from his copious drafts, at my urging, all references to the flooding of England, to Her Majesty the Queen, to his disaffected American colonies, to “meae dilectissimae Elizabethae,” and the rest. The sum settled on Lady Amherst for her pains was scaled down to noncontroversial size (she deserved more); ditto the executor’s share, embarrassingly generous. And for appearances’ sake Jane was given a cash bequest in addition to the considerable jointly owned property (including Tidewater Farms) which became hers automatically by right of survivorship. Finally, I had persuaded Harrison to put in trust a sum for each of his two grandchildren. But to Drew and Jeannine he would not leave a penny, and only with difficulty had I prevailed upon him not to denounce as well as disinherit them. His share of Mack Enterprises and his other stock holdings, as well as real property inherited from his father and not jointly owned with Jane—that is, the bulk of his bequeathable estate and more than half of his net worth—were to pass to the foundation, along with the benefits of his several life-insurance policies. Especially considering how much Harrison had put already into the original endowments of the foundation and of Tidewater Tech, this bequest came to a very great deal of money: more than two million dollars. Half was to be added to “our” endowment, where it was to be vested in a contingency fund until Marshyhope College’s “Tower of Truth” was completed; should further cost overruns or budget cuts by the State General Services Department (with whom “we” have a complex relationship in such special projects) threaten to truncate the tower, it was to be rescued with this money, which otherwise would revert to the foundation’s general fund, its income to be used as we saw fit. The other half was to be divided equally into two trusts: one for establishing, furnishing, and maintaining a Loyalist Library and Reading Room in that same tower, another for founding an American Society of British Loyalists under the directorship of A. B. Cook, the self-styled Maryland Laureate.
These last were the only overt testamentary evidences of Harrison’s grand delusion. While much toned down from his original proposals (e.g., a Society for the Reunion of His Majesty’s American Colonies with Mother England), and altogether more interesting than John Schott’s tower, they remained the obvious openings for any contest of the will. Were I Jane Mack, certainly if I were Jeannine, most certainly if I were Drew, I’d contest.
And it seems they all more or less intend to. Unselfishness takes many forms, Dad: had you noticed? Drew wants his father’s entire estate returned to The People, from whom he maintains it was wrongfully wrested by two generations of capitalist-industrialist Macks. This end he would effect, not by retroactive refun
ds to all purchasers of Mack Pickle Products since 1922, but via free day-care centers for blacks, improved living facilities and organizational muscle for migrant farm workers, and other, more revolutionary, projects. He is neither hurt nor surprised by his disinheritance: father-son hostility he regards neither as an Oedipal universal nor as an accident of temperaments, but as “inherent in the dialectic of the bourgeois family.” He acknowledges that his father was deranged, but believes (correctly, in my opinion) that the derangement accounts only for certain of his benefactions, not for the disinheritances. He will of course have to argue otherwise in court.
Jeannine is hurt but not surprised. I do not think either the Macks or the Andrewses greatly capable of loving. Affection, loyalty, goodwill, benignity, forbearance, yes; and these are virtues, no doubt about it. But love… Yet the more imaginative of us (you listening, Dad?) can sharply wish we had that problematical capacity, which cares enough to hassle where we will not bother, to cry out where we are stoical, to treasure another quite as much as ourselves. And even the less imaginative of us can wish to be loved, and fancy ourselves capable at least of reciprocation, or heartfelt echo. Jeannine believes (I gather) that inadequate fathering doomed her to a promiscuous and unsuccessful search for substitutes. What about adequate daughtering? I ask her. She’d’ve been a good daughter, she replies, if her father had been etc. Should she contest (she’s presently too scattered to decide), it will not be simply to enrich herself—she and Drew both have trust income from their grandparents, adequate to subsist on, and there is alimony from “Golden Louie,” as she calls her last ex—it will be for reparation. And to enable Reg Prinz to produce as well as direct his next film.
As for Jane, and the first part of 10 R: she will of course contest, she informed me promptly and pleasantly that afternoon, when she came into the office: punctual as always and, as always, handsome, striking, yea beautiful. About the Tower of Truth she had no strong feelings one way or the other, though she opposed the use of foundation funds to supplement the GSD appropriation: let John Schott find his money elsewhere; that’s what college presidents were for. The Loyalist business she regarded privately as more silly than demented; while she was grateful to me in principle for having talked Harrison out of its wilder versions, she meant nonetheless to use those earlier drafts and my revisions to support her contention that he was neither of sound mind nor properly his own man in his later years. A. B. Cook—who I now learned was a distant relative of hers—she regarded as a humbug, to be neither feared, trusted, nor otherwise taken seriously. John Schott was an ass. With Germaine Pitt she had no quarrel; on the contrary; she would not dream of contesting that bequest. The disinheritance of her children was doubtless regrettable but neither surprising, given their “provocative track records” (her term), nor tragic, given their earlier legacies, their present life-styles, the trusts established for Drew’s children (Yvonne, thank heaven, could be depended upon to educate them Sensibly), and the Reasonable Provision she herself was making for Drew and Jeannine in her own will. She herself of course was well off even without all that jointly owned property, and very well off with it; she would bear Harrison no grudge even if he’d been quite sane when he made his last will. Nevertheless, two million was two million: since she had no particular fondness for the Tower of Truth, the cause of British loyalism, or Mr. A. B. Cook, she meant to sue for as much of it as she could get. She quite expected Drew and Jeannine to do the same; would urge them to, if they bothered to ask her opinion.
All this delivered coolly, crisply, cordially in my office on a spanking early spring afternoon. Since burying Harrison and reestablishing herself at Tidewater Farms, Jane had found time for a week’s rendezvous in Tobago with her new friend “Lord Baltimore” (she would not tell me his name), a French-Canadian descendant of the original Irish proprietary lords of Maryland and (more news) a relative of her relative A. B. Cook—“but not close enough to worry us about the consanguinity business.” Tanned, fresh-eyed, wrinkled only as if by too much outdoor tennis, Jane looked younger and livelier than Lady Amherst: a vigorous 45 at most—certainly not 55, most decidedly not 63! And from her I caught, among the pleasant fragrances of wools and suedes and discreet perfume, a tiny heart-stinging scent from #8 L, 37 years and several pages past: a scent of salt spray and sunshine on fresh skin, in clean hair, as if she’d just come in from small-boat sailing on a summer afternoon.
O, O, O pale pervert Proust: keep your tea and madeleine! Give me the dainty oils of hair and skin (for all I know it might have been, both then and now, some suntan preparation) to trigger memory and regain lost time! I had to close my eyes; Jane reached over the desk to touch my arm and wonder if I was all right. I was 69, I replied, and subject to attacks of nostalgia; otherwise fit as a fiddle—and ready to go to court if Harrison’s will were contested. But not, I should apprise her at once, as her counsel in the dispute—or Drew’s or Jeannine’s, both of whom I told her had approached me informally on the subject since the will was read. As Harrison’s executor on the one hand and executive director of his Tidewater Foundation on the other, I was clearly caught in a division of interest (I had urged him, vainly, to name Jane his executrix, as she well knew). As his friend, I would have to decide which role to abdicate and which to act in, the better to see his wishes carried out. As her friend, I’d be happy to recommend to her the estate lawyers I’d least like to cross swords with.
Unnecessary, she responded cheerfully: she knew scads of lawyers, bright young ones as well as sly old ones. And she had Harrison’s crazy early drafts, and letters he’d written as George III dating back to 1955, and the testimony of two psychiatrists, and enough Georgian costumery to outfit the staff of Williamsburg (where in fact she was negotiating its sale), and innumerable eye-witnesses to the long-running royal charade at Tidewater Farms—including a videotape made with Harrison’s consent by Reg Prinz only last Guy Fawkes Day. Not to mention certain freeze-dried items in safe deposit with Mack Enterprises, of demonstrated efficacy in the proof of unsound mind. No doubt whatever that she could break at least the two “Loyalist” articles in the will and, at least, divide that million with Drew and Jeannine, on the grounds that Harrison’s mad identification of them with Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, and Princess Amelia, respectively, accounted for their disinheritance. Moreover, she was reasonably confident that a separate action could establish that in her own case it was only the invidious historical identification, not any blameworthy conduct of hers, that had done the trick, whereas his disaffection with Jeannine and Drew antedated his madness and marked his lucid as well as his demented intervals. She had not yet decided which tack to take.
But that was not exactly what she’d come to talk about. She knew me well enough, she hoped, not to expect me to represent her or either of her children against a will I’d drawn for Harrison myself. She thanked me again for my attentions to him and to her through those trying years. I was as trusted a friend as she had; had always been; how fortunate they were, she and Harrison, to have renewed that friendship upon their return to the Eastern Shore! For that, if little else, she thanked Jeannine, whose warm report of her encountering me at the Yacht Club’s New Year’s Eve party in 1954 had reopened the door between us, so to speak. Poor Jeannine: Harrison hadn’t been the best of fathers, she supposed; it did not surprise her to hear that her daughter had sought me out in the matter of the will; little as she knew me, Jeannine had always had a daughterly sort of feeling for me. Even Drew, for all his rough edges and thin-skinned radicalism, trusted me, she knew, as he never trusted his own father…
I studied her. Not a trace of irony, Dad; none either of calculation (I mean conscious, calculated calculation). It was the first time Jane had been in that office since June 21 or 22, 1937, when, having slept with me for the last time the night before (my Dark Night), she’d stopped by in the afternoon with 3½-year-old Jeannine, whom I’d promised to take on a tour of Captain Adams’s Floating Theatre. I was smitten, nearly ov
ercome by associations: sweet, painful, in any case poignant, and given resonation by that fragrance of sun and salt I’d first scented on her on the day—O my! I had forgotten nothing: my bones, my muscles, the pores of my skin remembered!
But for Jane the place had evidently no associations at all. We could have been talking across my bed in the Dorset Hotel, it seemed to me, or in the Todds Point cottage, and she’d have made no connection. But if such remarkable obliviousness (which I acknowledged might be unsentimentality instead; I’d never tested it) was characteristic of her, oblivious digression was not. I observed to her that she seemed reluctant to state her business.
“I am!” She laughed, much relieved—and then coolly stated it, as if reviewing in detail for her dermatologist the history of a skin blemish the more vexing because it was her only one, and small. Believe it or not, she said, love and sex and all that had never been terribly important to her.
She’d enjoyed her life with Harrison until his madness, which after all marred only the last 10 years or so of the 40 they’d had together. She’d enjoyed her children when they were small. If she didn’t feel close to her grandchildren, the distance seemed to her more a matter of political and social class distinctions, insisted on by Drew, than of racial bias on her part. But never mind: if family feeling was not her long suit, so be it. And she’d always liked having money, social position, and excellent health to enjoy them in: people who turned their backs on such pleasures—like Drew and to some extent Jeannine—were incomprehensible to her.
I agreed that it was better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.
