Letters

by John Barth

  What shall we Serve for hors d’oeuvres? you Wondered. Marsha reminded you that the dining hall menu includes neither hors d’oeuvres nor appetizers nor choice of entrée, only the options of coffee (regular or decaffeinated), tea, milk, or water and, in summer, the first two (or three) of these either hot or iced. It did not Take you Very Long To Decide on the coffee, decaffeinated, iced, for yourself. Marsha chose the water. Your guest the milk. You yourself had Selected Marsha’s dress for the occasion from her considerable wardrobe, in which she took less interest than formerly: a short sleeveless cotton print that set off to advantage, you Felt, her excellent arms and legs, her trim figure generally, and was neither Too Dressy nor Too Casual for the circumstances. Exhaustion. Her hair—no longer the meticulous coiffure of pre-Independence Days, but not the rat’s nest of Comalot Farm, either—was Beyond your Competence: at the last moment you Gently Suggested a kerchief, whereupon Marsha asked, rhetorically, Who gave a fuck?

  The evening was successful, All Things Considered. You yourself Made Frequent Trips to ice-cube bin, water tap, milk dispenser, to keep everyone’s glasses filled. The meat loaf, in your View, was not up to par, and the mashed potatoes had been too long in the steam table. Too, there were perceptible wrinkles in the Fordhook lima beans, from their having been served the previous evening and reheated. But the chef surprised everyone with orange Jell-O! At table the conversation ranged from Marsha’s chain-smoking (which we Agreed Should Be Indulged For The Present) to Marsha’s worrisome intention, which she spoke of as if it were a contractual commitment, to return to Comalot in mid-August for her Final Fix. You Took The Position that such a return would amount to a relapse, unquestionably antitherapeutic. Marsha wittily shrugged her shoulders. Joe eloquently lighted his pipe. Is it a briefer an extended visit you have in mind? you Asked Her As If Jestingly, and she parried, That depends. Joe regarded you both.

  By next afternoon’s P & A, Mariner-6 Mars photos show cratered terrain, Pony-Penning Day on Assateague Island, Va., you were Enough Recovered from the social whirl to Express to Dr. Morgan your Alarm at the prospect of Marsha’s retailing into Bray’s queer clutches. He looked at you. Did it not remind you, he mused, of another woman’s Compulsive Return, should we say, to her seducer, on 9/11, 16, & 25/53? Not greatly, you Retorted, and Seeing Joe’s face darken you Added Sincerely, Except in the hurt: that she should be “intimate” with any other man. He looked at you. It was decided that the Horseback-Riding Lessons of August 1953 (wherein your Relation to Rennie Morgan grew Ambivalently Personal as you Teased her with her husband’s programmatic rationalism and her own apparent self-subjugation), would be echoed most conveniently in Der Wiedertraum, by joint sessions on the Exercycles: you and Bibi every morning that she was present; you and Marsha-as-stand-in-for-Bibi-in-the-role-of-Rennie when (what seemed increasingly the case, to Joe’s annoyance) she wasn’t.

  You Admitted To Some Concern that Marsha might disapprove of your Exercycling Privately with Bibi; nor were you yourself Delighted At The Notion of Marsha in the role of Mrs. Joseph Morgan. Your Audacity astonished you. Joe smiled. Do it anyhow. End of interview.

  It is not working. Marsha’s progress (till today) was unimpaired by Bibi’s return, which indeed seemed to reinspire some degree of her former bitchery; you are still a Couple; she has permitted you Brief Access To Her Vagina on two separate occasions, Lammas and Transfiguration days, without contraceptives, Tombo X having attested with relish your Surgical Sterilization on 10/25/54. But though you are Pleased To Construe Marsha’s renascent vindictiveness as recuperation from her sojourn at Comalot, it does not make your Relationship more easy. And, as Joe grows ever more disaffected with Bibi’s alcoholism (this morning she fell off the Exercycle), Marsha meaningly insinuates that she herself could play the role of Rennie more ably in all respects. Already you Recall With Nostalgia your Idyll in Room 121, Iroquois Motel, Angola, N.Y., 14006, on Gregor Mendel’s and Coventry Patmore’s birthdays. Minatory Chambermaid! Faithful Vending Machines! Only Slightly Malfocused Color TV!

  Then today’s mail, today’s P & A. What Bray has written to smashed Bibi you Would Very Much Like To Know. Marsha won’t tell—can’t, now she’s Honey Dusted. But in their separate oblivions the two women Seem To you to have reached some dark sisterly understanding, just at the approach of fell August’s Ides. And, as if your Woman’s relapse weren’t worry enough, Dr. Morgan all but apprises you that Bibi won’t do. My late wife, Horner, while no teetotaler, was not a drunk. You’ll have to Do Better. Dream Up Something Else. Time is short.

  But your Dreams since March have been all of a kind: a large service handgun on a table midway between Joe, Rennie, and yourself, accessible equally to all. Rennie announcing her uncertain pregnancy and certain resolve to abortion or suicide. Rennie drowned in her own vomitus on the Doctor’s operating table. The only innovations are that since 8/1 it has been Marsha Blank on that table: your Woman, for whom you Care. And the pistol, aimed at a point just above a point equidistant between your Eyes, is in Joe Morgan’s hand.

  U: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His last Progress and Advice session before “Saint Joseph’s” deadline.

  8/28/69

  TO:

  Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  FROM:

  Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  U.S.S.R. acknowledges danger of war with China. Slavery abolished in British Empire. Moon on equator. Last of first 25,000 U.S. troops leaves Viet Nam. Kennedy request for cross-examination of inquest witnesses in Chappaquiddick investigation denied. Civil-rights marchers march on D.C. Happy birthday Leo Tolstoy, Wolfgang Goethe, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Boyer.

  It is your Wish that by thus Turning Backwards that key of keys, Alphabetical Priority, you could Reverse its fellow principles of arbitrary choice: Sinistrality (never mind Sinistrality) and—back! back!—Antecedence. That Der Wiedertraum might never reach Monday next, 9/1, St. Giles’ Day, but run backwards from Horseback-Riding Lessons With Rennie through First Dinner With The Morgans through First Fucking Peggy Rankin In Ocean City Motel through Arrival At Wicomico Teachers College through Remobilization By Doctor through Rescue By Doctor From First Paralysis In Penn Station, Baltimore, March 16, 1951, to the Sweet Void between that date (28th Birthday of Jacob Horner) and your Birth.

  It won’t work, Horner, Joe reminded you this afternoon, in your Last P & A Session before his deadline. You Knew, you Acknowledged: the arrow of time, etc. Only a wish.

  Today is Day 41 of our original Hundred Days, he went on inexorably, ticking his pipe stem upon a square of desk calendar. Tomorrow will be Day 42, not Day 40.

  You Knew.

  And Sunday 8/31 will be Day 44: your and Rennie’s Evening Espial, upon Return From Equitation, of Morgan Irrational: making faces at self in mirror, speaking nonsense aloud to self, springing monkeylike about room, simultaneously picking nose and masturbating.

  You Knew; you Knew. Mme de Staël bears son Auguste to lover Narbonne. 14th Sunday after Pentecost. Queen Wilhelmina, Fredric March, Baron von Helmholtz, Theophile Gautier. Stop that. You Stopped.

  You and Pocahontas will Espy, Joe either prescribed or presumed.

  If that was what he wanted, you Sighed. Though Marsha Blank is not Rennie Morgan. Indeed she is not, agreed your Advisor, unamused. But in default of Bibi, not to mention the original Mrs. Rennie McMahon Morgan, deceased, your Woman will have to do. How is she?

  Very near the end of her Honey Dust, you Replied: that final two weeks’ worth she fetched from Lily Dale just prior to the Great Fort Erie Magazine Explosion, as if in payment for delivering Bibi to Comalot Farm. A using up (that of that supply) that you Looked Forward To with very nearly as much apprehension as to Day 45, with which it might well coincide. She was meanwhile, your Woman, you Reported, principally engaged in composition of a Bombshell Letter, her own description, to her former husband: a Bombshell that, while you yourself Did Not Precisely Know its na
ture, she was pleased to imagine would Knock The Bastard Dead.

  Not visibly arrested by this news, Joe lit his pipe and either inquired in declarative fashion, or asserted, or reminded you: Pocahontas is pregnant.

  So it would appear, you Painfully Acknowledged. Unless, as is by no means impossible, she is experiencing early menopause. Marsha is 39. Has not menstruated since June. Was “due” in mid-July and again in the first half of August. So. Her (possible) pregnancy, however, you Have Reason To Believe—at least this pregnancy—is not the substance of her Bombshell Letter to Ambrose Mensch.

  Joe was not curious about your Woman’s Bombshell Letter.

  The father? he inquired. You Chose Not To Speculate. But not yourself? Not yourself; your Bilateral Vasectomy of October 1954 precluded Parenthood. Hum. But you Are Still, in your Phrase, a Couple? So yourself at least Were Pleased Still To Regard yourselves.

  Hum. Abortion, Horner? Such recourse is not without precedent, you Know, both historical and literary.

  You Knew. You Planned To Discuss that very question with Marsha in September, after Exhaustion Of Honey Dust, Successful Passage Of Deadline, and Unequivocal Determination Of Pregnancy, but before Expiration Of First Trimester Thereof.

  You Speak of Successful Passage Of Deadline, Horner.

  More Wish than Hope, you Admitted; and yet more Hope than Expectation.

  I should say, Joe said. Espial is one thing. You and your Fogged-Out Friend may Dismount from your Exercycles, Finish your Latest Long Conversation about my hyperrationalism and its Pygmalionizing of our marriage, Walk Around to my office window, and Peek through the blind, where you’ll See me behaving as in our novel. Your Pocahontas may then to the best of her limited ability pretend to be Rennie Shocked to the Center of her Soul, whom you will Seductively Comfort with (I believe the script reads) “the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.”

  Well.

  Espial is one thing, Joe repeated. Play it as you Like; I won’t have to watch. But Successful Passage of my Deadline is quite another. Surely you Don’t Expect—when I demand that you Redream History and Give Me Back, alive and unadulterated, my dead wife—to Palm Off as Rennie Morgan your fucked-up, knocked-up Pocahontas?

  Stung as always by his kindless adjectives, but Judging it the part of diplomacy once again to Let Them Pass, you Acknowledged that you Entertained no such expectations. Nor any real hope. Only the wish aforementioned, and that ever more ardently.

  Forget it.

  Well.

  Look here, Horner. You Looked. On September 1, 1953, the day following your original Espial, you Revisited The Doctor at his Remobilization Farm, then in Maryland. Yes. Your Quarterly Visit. Yes. Is the account of that visit in our script a fair approximation of what transpired? Fair. You were “Weatherless.” Mm. But you Tended, in your P & A Session with the Doctor, to a manner more Brisk and Assertive than was your Wont: a manner Imitative, the Doctor immediately guessed, of some New Friend or Colleague of yours at the College. Mm. He chaffed you a bit for the imposture, then spoke at some length of Mythotherapy: the systematic assumption of borrowed or improvised personae to ward off paralysis in cases of ontological vacuity. Mm. He then demanded a response; you Found None To Hand; he demanded more sternly; you Began Slipping Into Catalonia; and he assaulted you, briefly, to bring you to. Pugilistic Therapy, I believe the script calls it.

  Yes. Well.

  Hum. Joe tapped out his pipe, its charge timelily combusted. We’re done, Horner. Given the calendar and my double role in this travesty, we’ll schedule your next P & A for Monday instead of Thursday. Labor Day. Anniversary of that other one, etc.

  You Shrugged your Eyebrows.

  I’ll be bringing an old friend of ours, Joe announced neutrally, and To your Horror drew from the Doctor’s desk (he no longer does the facing-chairs, knee-to-knee routine considered by the Doctor to be essential to Progress and Advice) the very pistol so prominently featured in your Recent Dreams, your Last Letter, and the events of autumn 1953. A Colt .45 for Day 45, he mirthlessly remarked. We’ll combine the P & A Scene of September 1 with the Pistol Scene of October 5, 1953.

  Look here, Joe, you Expostulated.

  You Bring A Friend too, Joe said, not exactly an invitation. My wife. Alive and unfucked by you.

  Joe.

  Maybe I’ll tell you then what my real grievance against you is, Horner.

  You Believed you Could Guess.

  It’s not finally that you Betrayed Our “Friendship,” you Know. It’s not even that you Destroyed My Marriage, possibly Impregnated My Wife, and Contributed To Her Untimely Death.

  Mm.

  Rennie had a hand in all that too. So did I.

  You here Assiduously Kept your Own Counsel, even unto facial expression, twitch of hand, and any other controllable body language interpretable as Yes Well.

  One more thing, Jake.

  That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?

  Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?

  Bring it, too.

  D: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The third posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: the Battle of New Orleans and Napoleon’s surrender to Bellerophon.

  Aboard S.S. Statendam

  Off Bermuda

  Wednesday, August 6, 1969

  Dear Henry:

  Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—

  Je ne sais quoi, particularly given my disappointment of the week before, when, having transcribed at so long length for you Andrew IV’s adventures from the birth of his children through his “death” at Fort McHenry, and posted copies of my transcription to you c/o that novelist I had thought my partner (on the off chance it might be he who’d showed you the “prenatal” letters), I receive from him—crossed in the mails—nothing less surprising than a rejection of my acceptance of his own invitation to collaborate with him on a Marylandiad! And he has returned the four prenatals, which I must now assume will be followed by what followed them.

  He will be sorry. Not because I plan, at least for now, any particular retaliation, but because he has cut himself off (as have you, Henry; as have you) from much that either a novelist or a 2nd-Revolutionary could make use of: the account of our forebear’s “Second Cycle,” of my own, perhaps even of yours. See how drolly, in despite of rude awakenings, I still dream!

  We have, then, you and I, not yet begun to talk. Nevertheless, I shall continue, per program, that series of decipherments and anniversary transcriptions, withholding them from the mails till I shall have your proper address, or find you, or you find me. What’s more, as we are no longer to be monitored by that authorial “third ear,” I shall speak more confidentially: not of Andrew Cook IV, of whom I know only what his wife would have known had she not (like our novelist, but with better reason) declined to read these lettres posthumes, nor—yet—of my own history, but of the circumstances of these transcriptions and what I’ve been up to this past month with my left hand, as it were, while the right transcribed.

  As “Andrew Cook VI” (who I “became” in 1953, nel mezzo del cammin etc.), I spent July preparing for my lectureship this fall at Marshyhope State University, where I have advertised a course in The Bonapartes of Fiction & the Fiction of the Bonapartes (did you know that Napoleon’s brothers Joseph, Louis, and Lucien all wrote romantic novels?). In that same capacity—I mean as the person I am—I have served as historical consultant to Mr. Reginald Prinz’s filming of events from the 1812 War, a project I am turning to our own purposes. I have also monitored, to some extent even discreetly managed, a number of our potential allies or adversaries: Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation, for example; the historian Lady Amherst, whom I’ve mentioned before; and the heirs of the late Harrison Mack, Jr.

&n
bsp; At the same time, as “Monsieur Casteene”—our archancestor’s name, which I have seen fit to use at our Fort Erie base—I have been preparing an eccentric putative descendant of the American Bonapartes (Jérôme’s line, through Betsy Patterson) for a certain role he himself will be unaware of playing. And I have overseen the movement of our people from that base (which is of use to us only as long as the U.S. continues to draft civilians for military service in Viet Nam—another year or less) to “Barataria,” disguised as extras for upcoming sequences of Prinz’s film. My lodge there is our headquarters for the next academic year.

  Finally, as “Baron André Castine”—the man I was until 1953 and in this single capacity am yet—I have been at the most immediately important work of all: the financing of our Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. That is the work that brings me to be “vacationing” here (as of last night, when I flew out from Washington) for a few days with your future stepmother, of whom I also happen to be fond. As we cruise in Netherlandish comfort through the waters where in May of 1814 our forebear—or some ship’s officer—impregnated the hapless Consuelo del Consulado, I make plans with the handsome widow of Harrison Mack for the settlement of his estate, which with certain other sources of revenue should carry us far toward 1976.