Letters

by John Barth

  Nothing. And during and between these reflections and distractions, as the kids tore up the campuses and the cops and National Guardsmen tore up the kids and the federal government tore up our country and the Pentagon tore up others, I hauled, fitted out, and launched the Osborn Jones for its 69th sailing season: 10th as a pleasure cruiser under my skippership. The prospect, and the work, didn’t please me this time as they usually do. It’s not a handy boat, either for cruising or for living aboard of. Never was meant to be, certainly not for an old bachelor. It’s clumsy, heavy, slow, too laborious to handle and maintain, comfortable but not convenient. The conversion—like my life, I’d been feeling all April—had been competently done but was basically and ultimately a mistake. I’d heard nothing from Jane since the Friday of the Photographs.

  So I decided to have a party aboard: Cocktails for Friends, Suspects, and Women I’d Realized Too Late I Love Only and Always. Last night, 5 to 7. Jane’s invitation urged her to bring Lord Baltimore along, if he happened to be in the neighborhood or was given to flying down from Canada for drinks. I’d like to meet the lucky chap, I wrote, trying to turn the knife in Sentimental Jealousy, which turned it in me instead. R.S.V.P. I left off the Regrets Only.

  She didn’t call. By 4:45, with the deck and cabin Bristol-fashion, hors d’oeuvres out and bar set up, waiter and barkeep standing by, great wind pennant looping in the warm light air, even a gangway rigged between pier and gunwale, and faithful Polly nursing a drink while we waited for the guests, I was the one with regrets only: for having planned the stupid party (which I saw clearly now to be no more than a pretext for seeing Jane again, who was probably up in Canada with her large-tooled lover); for having lived out a life so stupid—no, so stupidly: it hasn’t been a worthless life, just a meagerly lived one—instead of ending it in 1937. At five nobody had arrived yet, of course; I felt like sending home the help and taking Polly for a sail. The movie people, we agreed, would probably show up even later than Regular People. Why had I breathed in and out, eaten and shat, earned and spent, dressed and undressed, put one foot in front of the other, for 69 years? Did you ever—but who knows what you ever.

  At 1704 by the bulkhead clock (which I wouldn’t vouch for over Jane Mack’s watch) I saw her car come ’round the Long Wharf fountain: the only other big black Lincolns in Dorchester County aren’t automobiles. Up rose my spiritual barometer; sank when I saw two people in the back; rose again, part way, when the chauffeur handed Jane and Lady Amherst out. It occurred to me that Germaine Pitt had not been Lady Anything until her marriage—I know little of her background beyond a dim memory of the vita presented by Joe Morgan to the foundation trustees prior to her appointment—but she looked more to the manor born than Jane, if only because she’s so unassuming tweedy English, and My Love so American to the bone. It occurred to me further, as I handed them over the gangway, that Jane hadn’t indicated how confidential was the news of her betrothal and the name of her intended: as she hadn’t told me more than his given name and nom de guerre, as it were, I supposed it still a sensitive matter, and made no mention of it in our hellos. Nor did she in any way acknowledge my note on her invitation. A mad fancy struck me: not only had our interview been some sort of test, but her “Lord Baltimore” did not exist! She was not engaged; it was not Too Late…

  I checked myself. That photo couldn’t have been faked. And for me it had been too late since 1937.

  I introduced the ladies to Polly Lake and showed Germaine about the Osborn Jones, explaining what a skipjack was and how it came to pass that oysters were still dredged under sail in Maryland. She was politely interested: her late husband had enjoyed sailing out of Cowes, she said, in the Solent, but she herself was prone to motion sickness. However, she was mad about oysters: what a pity the season was ended. I thought to pick up on Lord Jeff, try whether I could sound her present feelings about his old affair with Jane; she forestalled me by inquiring about the Osborn Jones, whether I’d named it after the salty old voyeur in the Floating Opera novel or whether the fictional character and the boat were both named after an historical original. Ought she to ask Jane instead? she wondered mischievously.

  I was impressed: a delicate maneuver, as if she’d read my thoughts and was gently reminding me (what in fact I’d forgotten for the moment) that during our trying days together in Harrison’s decline we’d had occasion to compare cordial notes on the apparent obliviousness of our friend Jane, both to the fictionalization of our old affair (which Germaine had heard about but not then read) and to Jane’s later fling with Lord Amherst, which Harrison sometimes alluded to.

  Lucky fellow, Ambrose Mensch: I do like and trust Germaine Pitt. As if on cue, Jane saluted our return from the foredeck to the bar by explaining brightly to her friend that Captain Osborn Jones had been an old dredge-boat skipper whom I’d befriended back in the 30’s and introduced her to. He used to live alone in the Dorset Hotel, she declared, and preside over a collection of similarly aged guests called the Dorchester Explorers’ Club.

  Ah, said Germaine. Even Polly rolled her eyes.

  I pass over my cocktail party, Father of mine, because its radiant, miraculous aftermath so outshines it. Anyhow it was a failure in the sleuthing way, so far as I know; I’ve yet to check with Polly, whose idea of subtle investigation is the Disarming Point-blank Question put by a Fetchingly Candid Elder Lady—a device that not infrequently works, and a rôle she so enjoys playing that it’s scarcely a rôle. I’d told her, more or less, about the photos and the blackmail threat, as about all our office business. She was of course enchanted. In her immediate opinion there were but two imaginable suspects: Reg Prinz if Jeannine in fact contested the will, A. B. Cook if she did not. Therefore we’d invited Cook to the party; but a secretarial voice from his home, over by Annapolis, RSVP’d us his regrets: he was presently out of the country. Polly promised to give me a chance to observe and talk to the guests myself before she took charge of the inquiry. She also informed me (this was in the office, just after Jane’s appointment) that I was in love.

  Absurd, I said. But true, said she. By six everyone had arrived: Mensch (who’s to get the honorary doctorate declined by Cook), Jeannine and Prinz and the movie crowd, Drew and Yvonne, and, for filling and spacing, some Mack Enterprises folk and a few foundation trustees. A ship of fools, Drew declared, and disembarked early: yet he said it mildly, and when Polly asked him whether he’d expected me to invite a delegation of his friends to blow up the boat, he kissed her cheek and said one never knew. Later I heard her asking Prinz whether he’d ever dabbled in still photography—couldn’t catch his answer, if there was one—and later yet I saw her at the bar, deep in conversation with Jeannine, no doubt asking what her plans were regarding her father’s will. Finally, to my surprise, she went about the boat looking at her watch and declaring her astonishment that it was seven o’clock already. Most took the hint. The movie folk had another party to go to anyhow, at Robert Mitchum’s spread across the river; Germaine and Ambrose, too, plainly had other irons in the fire. The Mack Enterprises and T.F. people remembered their several dinner plans; not a few invited Jane, who however declined, and/or their host, ditto, and/or Polly, who responded to some one or another of them that she’d be pleased to join them shortly, as soon as the party was tidied up.

  An odd thing had happened, Dad. From the moment that Lincoln appeared on Long Wharf and Jane issued forth in a handsome white pants suit, blue blouse, and red scarf, I was, as the kids say nowadays, “spaced.” I’d been truly curious to hear what Germaine had to say about Cook’s declining that degree; I wanted to try to talk to Drew about the demonstrations at Marshyhope and Abe Fortas’s resignation from the Supreme Court, as well as about Harrison’s will, and to Jeannine about the progress of the film. But I had the feeling, unfamiliar since 1917 or thereabouts, that if I opened my mouth something outrageous would come out. After that initial tour of the boat with Germaine, I scarcely moved from the afterdeck, merely greeting guests, seeing to their drin
ks, and smiling sappily, while that white pants suit and its tanned inhabitant moved ever before my eyes. Ah, Polly, Polly: yes, I am, and passing odd it is to be, daft in love in my seventieth year!

  Again like an old-fashioned teenager, I’d scarcely talked to Jane all evening, only hovered on her margins as she chatted with all hands back by the taffrail. Now that everyone was gone but her and Polly, I busied myself settling up with the help, excited that Jane had lingered behind, wondering why, still almost afraid to speak, wishing Polly would leave, half hoping she wouldn’t. Jane’s chauffeur came expectantly pierwards. It was still only seven-thirty. Now the three of us were together on the afterdeck with our last gin and tonics, and it occurred to me that Polly had walked down from the office; I owed her a lift home.

  Could we go sailing? Jane suddenly asks. What a good idea! cries dear Polly, utterly unsurprised. We’ve no crew, says I, rattled. Jane guesses merrily she hasn’t forgotten how to sail: don’t I remember their old knockabout from Todds Point days, that we used to sail out to Sharps Island in? You’re hardly dressed for sailing, I point out. Listen to the man, tisks Polly; the best-dressed skipper on Chesapeake Bay. I don’t believe he wants to take us sailing, pouts Jane. Never mind us, says Polly airily: I’ve got me a dinner date, and if you don’t mind I’ll borrow your chauffeur to take me there; it’ll knock their eyes out. She was welcome to him, Jane told her—unless I really was going to refuse to take her sailing. Jane, I said (seriously now), there’s hardly a breath blowing. Very brightly she replies, Maybe something will spring up as the sun goes down. She goes so far as to take my elbow: If not, we can drift on the tide, like the Floating Opera.

  Dear Father: Flustered as I was, I heard her correctly. She did not say Floating Theatre; she said Floating Opera. And thus ends this long recitative and begins the wondrous aria, the miraculous duet.

  But you are wondering about Polly. Polly Lake is no martyr, Dad: no long-adoring, self-effacing secretary. Polly’s her own woman, ten years a widow and no yen to remarry, having nursed a husband she was fond of through a long and ugly terminal illness. Polly has grown-up children and grandchildren who love her, plenty of friends of both sexes, good health and a good job, more hobbies and interests than she can find time for, and at least one other casual lover besides me, who’d love her less casually if she’d permit him to. Polly Lake is mildly abashed that her romantic life is more various and agreeable since menopause and widowhood than it was before. Sex itself she neither over- nor underrates: male companionship without it she finds a bit of a bore. Even when she’s not feeling particularly horny herself, she prefers her male friends to feel a bit that way. The only woman I ever met who finds cigar smoke erotically arousing. So don’t worry about her. Good night, Poll.

  As for your son. Still wondering what on earth is up with Ms. Oblivious, he motors the O.J. from its slip and out of the basin, Jane having neatly cast off the dock lines. She then takes the wheel and heads for the channel buoys, nattering on about bare-boat chartering in the Aegean, while he goes forward to winch up sails. There is a tiny southerly breeze in midriver, just enough to move old Osborn on a beam reach down from the bridge toward Hambrooks Bar Light. Gorgeous as such sailing is, though, Jane declares—the spanking meltemia of the Cyclades; the crystal-clear Caribbean, through which you can see your anchor plainly in five fathoms; salty Maine, where you can’t see your bow-pulpit in the fog—give her the snug and easy, memory-drenched Eastern Shore: cattails and mallards, loblolly pines and white oaks, oysters and blue crabs, shoal-draft sailing, the whole tidewater scene.

  Except in July and August, I amended, when I would happily swap it for Salty Maine etc.; also January through March, when give me that crystalline Caribbean instead of the—memory-drenched, I believe she’d called it? With the motor off, sails (just barely) filled, and water rustling lightly now along the hull, my spirit calmed: I was able to begin to savor my unexpected good fortune, while still wondering what accounted for it. Jane, Jane.

  She turned the wheel over to me, took her ease on the cockpit seat, and named off in order the points between us and Chesapeake Bay—Horn, Castle Haven, Todds, and Cook on the south shore going out; Blackwalnut, Nelson, Benoni, Bachelor, Chlora, Martin, and Howell on the north shore coming back. She guessed she and Harrison had anchored in every one of the creeks and coves between those points, and run aground on every shoal, when they’d first cruised the Choptank back in the early thirties. And before that, before she’d even met Harrison, back in her “Scott Fitzgerald” days, she’d done the regatta circuit from Gibson Island right around the Bay, bringing in the silverware with her Thistle at a time when few women raced sailboats. Let her son think what he pleased, she was glad the rich had bought up all the waterfront property in large holdings before the general prosperity after World War II; otherwise it would be subdivided by now into tacky little hundred-foot frontages, each with its dock and its outboard runabout—her own master plan for Dorset Heights! As it was, she could see on the aerial photos made by her real estate people that many of those coves were as unspoiled now as they’d been when she and Harrison first anchored in them in 1932—indeed, as when the Ark and the Dove reached Maryland in 1632.

  She was being memorious, I affirmed; even historical. That she didn’t choose to live in the past didn’t mean she’d forgotten it, she replied. Her tone was neutral. I was impressed. The little breeze evaporated: the sails hung slack; we began to set gently astern on the incoming tide. Out in the Bay the sunset promised to be spectacular. In a different voice she asked: Can’t we keep right on, Toddy? Let’s motor clear out to Sharps Island again.

  Toddy, Dad. And Sharps Island! Be informed, sir, that Sharps Island is where Jane and I made love for the second time together, on the beach, in the afternoon of 13 August 1932, a Saturday.

  Sharps Island wasn’t there anymore, I reminded her. All washed away: nothing but a lighthouse and buoys to mark the shoal where it used to be. Imagine people outlasting their geography, I added: just the opposite of your unspoiled coves.

  Ah, now she remembered: where the three of us used to tie up the boat and picnic on the beach, the last edition she’d seen of good old Chart 1225 showed only Subm piles. Let’s go to Todds Point then, okay? She’d like to see what I’d done to the cottage.

  #8 L, Dad.

  Not much to see, I said. I’d made a few changes, not many: new kitchen, new plumbing and fixtures. Something between unspoiled coves and Sharps Island, I supposed. I went ahead and said it: Our bedroom’s the same.

  She didn’t respond; seemed truly lost in thought, looking out to westward toward Redmans Neck, where already we could see lights on the steelwork of Schott’s tower. What are we doing here? she wondered presently. I could just hear her; couldn’t judge whether she meant the Choptank or the River of Life.

  Drifting, mainly, Jane, I said. Making a bit of sternway. I’ll kick in the motor if you want.

  She roused herself, smiled, touched my hand, shook her head, stood up quickly. Okay, then, she said, let’s drift. But let’s don’t just drift. Shall I switch on the running lights? Down the companionway went the white suit; from the wheel I could just see it moving about the darkened cabin. She found the switch panel and cut in the running and masthead lights, then went over the AM band on the ship-to-shore till she picked up a D.C. station doing something baroque as their signal faded with the light. Smartly she located their wavelength on the FM band and set the automatic frequency control. I had come up to the companionway to watch her; no need to steer. The white jacket came off. Then the red scarf.

  Then the blue blouse. Was there a hanging locker? she asked with a smile. Fine flash of white teeth, white eyes; white jacket held out by the collar in one hand, the other on the placket of her white slacks. White bra against her dark tan. I came down the ladder and kissed her.

  Goodness gracious me. The main cabin settee of the Osborn Jones makes into a snug double, Dad, but Jane thought it unseamanlike for no one to be on deck. Anyhow
it was balmy and beautiful up there, more like late June than mid-May. We took our time undressing; hung and folded everything. I lit a cabin lamp to see her better. She liked that: let me look and touch all I wanted; did a bit herself. Sixty-three: it was not to be believed. She was the cove, I told her, proof against time. I feared I was Sharps Island. She’d settle for Todds Point, she laughed, and went back up the ladder—calling pleasantly that I needn’t take precautions, as she’d ceased her monthlies some years ago. Jane, Jane! Above the masthead a planet gleamed: Jupiter, I believe. An osprey rose from and returned to her pile on a nearby day-beacon (19A, off Howell Point); a great blue heron glided past us and landed with a squawk somewhere out of sight. Albinoni was followed by Bach on the FM, after a commercial for Mercedes-Benz. Sedately, patiently, but ardently, Jane Mack and I made love. Traffic streamed across the New Bridge toward Ocean City for the weekend, an unbroken string of headlights. Stars came out: Arcturus, Regulus, Pollux, Capella, Procyon, Betelgeuse. Our combined ages are 132 years. Dew formed on the lifelines, gunwales, cockpit cushions.