Letters

by John Barth

  Too slick! It is one thing for Drew Mack (pulled injured from the flaming cottage by Todd Andrews—what is he doing there?) to accuse the navy of deliberately targeting what they knew was a headquarters of the antiwar movement: Rodriguez, Thelma, and the other chap under arraignment would doubtless have said the same had they survived the crash; Reg Prinz’s position we shall never know. But Andrews himself—no radical, surely, and a man not given to paranoia—agrees that the pilotless aircraft, which he caught sight of from where B. and B. were poised, and pointed out to them, neither swerved nor faltered nor “flamed out,” but zipped as if on wires out of nowhere (read Patuxent Naval Air Station), unaccompanied and unpursued, straight into Barataria Lodge.

  Four killed. Three others badly burned. Drew Mack slightly so, and ankle-sprained. About half of the Frames footage (and History’s pen, and Fame’s palm) destroyed in the fire along with the Director; the rest salvaged by B. & B., who, with Mr Andrews and now with horrified Ambrose and others, pull the injured from the flames.

  Fishier yet, you may have read Andrews’s contention that the film shot by Bruce and Brice of the event itself ought to attest, if not the navy’s culpability, at least the fact that the drone did not “unaccountably swerve off course” as reported by a government spokesman—but the film has been impounded by the Pentagon on the grounds that the craft was a prototype of a classified experimental weapon, unauthorised photography whereof is strictly verboten. They will Thoroughly Investigate the Regrettable Accident; they stand ready to compensate where compensation is called for, including the estate of the late A. B. Cook; but the film is classified material. Andrews intends to file suit for the victims and will attempt to subpoena the film. B. & B., for their part, mean to do their best to complete Frames, reenacting where possible and necessary the missing scenes. But their budget, like the decade, is about exhausted: they plan for example to film the dedication of the Tower of Truth next Friday, but given Nixon’s announcement today of “at least” 35,000 more U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam by year’s end, no student demonstrations are anticipated.

  Slick, slick, slick! Then yesterday the literal slick of diesel oil in the Atlantic off Ship Shoal Inlet (another Restricted Area!), in midst of which the Coast Guard finds at last the derelict Baratarian. All hands missing and presumed dead. Hijacking by narcotics runners Considered Unlikely But Not Ruled Out. Nothing material aboard except, mirabile dictu, a letter from the late Andrew Burlingame Cook VI to his son, dated 17 September 1969 (i.e., four days after the so-called Key Letter bestowed upon Ambrose and then purloined; but—witness my last to you of “13 September”—letters can be postdated)… the contents whereof the U.S.C.G. is withholding pending the location of Mr Cook’s next of kin!

  We are more or less stunned. Jane Mack, understandably, is beside herself—indeed, she is in shock and under sedation. Todd Andrews does his best to console her (there, in my strangely tranquil but not tranquillised view, would be a good match; but I am no matchmaker). Everybody is Investigating.

  Everybody, that is, except Mr & Mrs Ambrose Mensch, who, come Tuesday, have a different matter to investigate. Then autumn will commence, and our 7th Stage; by the light of the (full Harvest) moon we shall see… what we shall see. Perhaps one day I shall tell Jane Mack about her, my, our André Castine; perhaps not. (Perhaps one day I shall learn the “truth” about him myself!) Meanwhile…

  My husband loves me devotedly, I believe. And I him, though (since my little Vision) with a certain new serene detachment, which I can imagine persisting whatever Dr Rosen finds on Tuesday.

  That “vision”: I cannot say whether it is the cause of my serenity or whether it was a vision of serenity. Doubtless both. Should Ambrose one day cease to love me; should he go to other women, I to other men; should our child miscarry or turn out to be another Angela—worse, another “Giles” like Mme de Staël’s, an imbecile “Petit Nous”; should my dear friend come even to deny (God forfend!) that he ever loved me, even that he ever knew me… I should still (so I envision) remain serene, serene.

  As I remain—though, you having after so long silence spoken, you shall hear no more from me—ever,

  Your Germaine

  F: Todd Andrews to his father. His last cruise on the skipjack Osborn Jones.

  Todds Point, Maryland

  September 5, 1969

  Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

  Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

  Cambridge, Maryland 21613

  Father.

  Fictitious forebear, I was about to call you, wondering once again (with Anger, child of Exhaustion and Frustration) whether you ever existed. But of course you did: that your death has proved more important to me than your life—indeed, than my life—argues that you died; that you died (by your own hand, Groundhog Day 1930, dressed for the office but suspended from a cellar beam of our house: just another casualty of the Crash, one was odiously obliged to infer, in the absence of suicide note, ill health, sexual impropriety, or other contraindication) is prima facie evidence that you lived. Fastidious widower. Respected attorney. Survived by one child, then 29, who for nearly ten years already—nearly 50 now!—had been trying to Get Through to you, first by speech, then by endless unmailed letter, to tell you a thing he had been told about his heart: that it might, at any moment, stop. Who on your decease commenced an Inquiry into its cause, the better to understand himself; closed that Inquiry on June 21 or 22, 1937, with his own resolve to suicide; reopened it a few hours later (and his Letter to the late you) when he found himself for certain reasons still alive; and sustained thereafter, in fits and starts and with many a long pause, but faithfully indeed since March last, both Inquiry and “correspondence.”

  Forty-nine years.

  The first letter, or first installment of the Letter, is dated September 22, 1920 (I have it before me, with all the others, most of them returned to sender from the Cambridge Cemetery. Its salutation is simply Father: not, like some later ones’, Dear, Damned, Deaf, Dead, or Distant Dad. Just Father). This is the last.

  I’m at the cottage, sir: mystified, chagrined, and pooped from a three-week Final Vacation Cruise that turned into a wild-goose chase, followed by a week of fruitless floundering up and down the Atlantic flyway. The weekend forecast’s clear, in both senses; any other year I’d be out sailing. But I’m done with that, as with many another thing. I’ll spend the weekend having done with this.

  My last to you (8/8) closed with the phone call I’d been waiting for as I wrote, in my office, having snubbed Polly Lake for reasons you remember and cleared my desk for the Last Cruise of Osborn Jones, only to be delayed by that distress signal from Jeannine. I was impatient: no place for her in 13 R that I could see; my deliberate rudeness to dear Polly was getting to me; Ms. Pond’s insinuations made me cross; and I did not feel up to the three-hour haul to Baltimore or Washington airport and back. Hello. I truly hoped she was in Buffalo, or back in Ontario, her impulse passed. Toddy? But it was an awfully clear connection: I could hear gin, vermouth, and panic, 5:1:5. Where are you, Jeannine?

  Just around the corner, it turned out, in the lobby of the Dorset, wondering why in the world she’d come. Sit tight, I told her; but when I got there she was standing loose, looking lost and a whole lot younger than 35: not the fuddled lush I’d feared (though she’d had a few), but a frightened version of the Sailboat Girl in that Arrow Shirt ad, vintage ’21, reproduced on the card Polly’d sent me. Peasant blouse instead of middy blouse, hippie beads instead of black neckerchief, but braless as her predecessor, like her gold-braceleted, her gold curls piled and bound with the same silk saffron. Suitcase at her side; cigarette, in holder, in hand. She started forward uncertainly, eyes welling up (Had she seen me, I tried to recall, since my Sudden Aging?) and hand held out. When I hugged her instead, she let the tears come and wondered chokily again Why the hell et cetera. Marian watched from the check-in desk with interest. Jeannine’s good breasts felt perfectly dandy, Dad, through my light seersucker; my odd
response to the push of them—file this under Irony for the sequel—was paternal-tender. I had, after all, very possibly sired them.

  But it was her Why’s that changed my cruising plans. She kept it up over dinner—iced tea and crab cakes at a dry establishment across the street, a self-administered test to stay off the juice till her tale got told. Why couldn’t she make a go of it with any of her husbands and lovers? she wanted to know. Why had Prinz dumped her for Mel Bernstein’s slack-assed kid? Why had she ever imagined she had any talent except for drinking and fucking? (I shushed her: family restaurant.) Why couldn’t she control herself? Why was she born? Why go on living?

  I sang the next line for her, to turn the edge; the one after we harmonized together, laughing around our backfin crab cakes—

  What do I get?

  What am I giving?

  —and then I reminded her (she knew the story) that a series of Why’s from her on June 21 or 22, 1937, when she was going on four years old, had led me, age 37, aboard Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, to a clarification of my resolve to end my life. Thence, not long after, to the recognition that, sub specie aeternitatis, there was no more reason to commit suicide than not to.

  She was, Jeannine sensibly replied, not me. And she wasn’t really talking about suicide, just wishing she were dead.

  Nor was I, I told her (as it here began coming clear to me), really talking about 13 L, which I now explained: that summer day I’d lived programmatically like any other because I meant it to be my last. I was,” I said, really working out for myself a detail of 13 R—which never mind, my dear. Christ, Toddy, she wondered, who’s been on the sauce? And whose crisis was this? And what in the (family restaurant) world was she going to do with her useless self?

  She was coming out to Todds Point with me for the weekend, I informed her. To talk things over like, well, uncle and niece. Swap despair stories. Knock back a moderate volume of London gin. Maybe net a few soft crabs and try to swim between the pesky sea nettles. My vacation cruise—and her return to Fort Erie, where they were wondering—could wait till the Monday.

  She was delighted; so was I. No great mystery: a relief for her not to have to think in sexual terms, which had become anxious ones; a pleasure for me to be, no doubt for the last time, host to a pretty houseguest for an innocent weekend, uncomplicated by any emotion save mere benevolence and fitly echoing, in this leisurely wrap-up of my life, our father-daughterly excursion back in 13 L.

  She was also curious, all the way to the cottage. What was I in despair about? Could it have to do with her mother, by any chance, or was it just Getting Old? Where did I mean to cruise to, and with whom? She really could use a drink now, if I didn’t mind; wasn’t the old country club somewhere along the way to Todds Point? How many girls did I suppose had like herself been laid on all nine greens of that flat little golf course in a single summer, between their junior and senior years of high school?

  Never mind, I said, and it’s about as quick to keep on toward home, as an old regatta sailor like herself should know: just two points farther downriver. Oh wow, said she, she hadn’t done that in years and years—sailing, she meant. Did I think we could slip out just for a day sail before she left? But she answered herself with tears: Left for where? Not back to that (etc.) Farm: Joe Morgan was too far gone these days in his own hang-ups to do her any good, and all the others were either nuts or feebs. Her brother rightly despised her; her mother didn’t give a damn. Did I know that she didn’t even have an apartment to call her own? She’d made the mistake of letting hers go, a dandy one on the Upper West Side, when she’d moved in with Prinz; her stuff was still there.

  Et cetera. All this over Beefeaters and tonic now, here. It excited Jeannine (as it had not Jane) to be back in the cottage she remembered happily from her girlhood. She kept the alcohol intake reasonably controlled; we sat for some hours in the dark on the screened front porch, listening to crickets and owls and ice cubes and each other’s stories, watching the moon track out on the still river where Osborn Jones lay half provisioned. I was pleased with her, that she hadn’t got drunk or hysterical; that she assessed herself and the others fairly; that she tucked her legs under her on the old porch glider and made herself unaffectedly at home with me; that she had the presence of heart to wonder again what was on my mind. I advised her, unless she was broke, to find another apartment, in New York or Los Angeles or wherever; to look very carefully for a serious, conservative, happily married, physically unattractive psychiatrist, preferably female, to help her with the booze and the rescaling of her ambitions; to consider applying some of her energies to something impersonal and citizenly—why not her father’s Tidewater Foundation, for example, which certainly needed its philanthropies reviewed?—et cetera.

  I did not mention the will case; seemed inappropriate. Or her chain-smoking, which stank up the sultry air. Of my own situation, not to be unfairly reticent and because it was agreeable to have that auditor in that ambience, I volunteered the vague half-truth that my health was uncertain and the truth that a 69-year-old bachelor whose accomplishments have been modest and whose relations with women have been more or less transient and without issue has sufficient cause both for occasional despair and for looking unmorbidly to last things. Handling that big boat alone, for example, was getting to be a bit much, but I’d never enjoyed vacationing in male company, had run out of companionable and willing female crew, and was no longer interested enough in the sport to swap O.J. for a smaller and more manageable craft. Thus my decision to make a final solo circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and then pack it in.

  I said nothing about suicide, of course. But I realized at once I’d said too much about female crew. Jeannine became her-mother-back-in-May all over again, when I’d first felt my life’s odd recycling. O Jesus, how she’d love to see Dun Cove again, and Queenstown Creek, and What’s-its-name Cove off Gibson Island Harbor—Red House! Red House Cove! And I shouldn’t forget how she’d raked in the silverware back in her dinghy-racing days against the best Hampton One-Design skippers on the circuit; and she remembered how to read charts and take bearings and play the currents and handle lines. Couldn’t she for Christ’s sake pretty please go along with me, if I hadn’t a full company lined up? At least for a few days? She’d cook, she’d crew, she’d drink no more than I, she’d smoke downwind of me and the sails, she’d stay out of my way, she didn’t mind mosquitoes, she loved foul weather, she’d never been seasick in her life, she even had shorts and sneakers in her bag, though alas no jeans or swimsuit, but who cared, she’d use Off in the evenings and swim in her shorts and T-shirt when there were People around. I could put her ashore whenever I tired of her company. Please say yes, Toddy! Unless you’ve got something else going?

  It was no time to lay another rejection on her. The notion even sounded agreeable. To’ve had a son to sail with is a thing I’ve often wished; to’ve had a daughter, even more so. But I didn’t trust Jeannine’s sobriety—alcoholics don’t reef down that readily—and had no use for a drunk on board. And I did (this much I told her) want not only privacy but some solitude on my Last Go-‘Round. I felt her tensing for my no: the stab of her cigarette, the swish of her drink. Let’s take a shakedown sail tomorrow, I proposed. Dun Cove for the night; Gibson Island on Sunday if we still like each other. You can get a cab to the airport from the yacht club there, and I’ll go my solitary way.

  It took her a hurt half-second to remuster her enthusiasm; then she was all aye-aye sir and asking like a kid could she go to bed now so the morning would come sooner, or was there work she ought to do first?

  Yes to the first and no to the second: it was near midnight. I showed her the shower (my addition), put out sheets for the hide-a-bed, and turned in, not without noting the level in that Beefeater bottle, which I deliberately neglected to put away. Jeannine gave me a daughterly kiss good night and thanked me without fuss. She doubted she’d go back to that Farm except to collect her belongings; she had no fu
rther use for Reg Prinz, she thought; she would consider my other advice seriously.

  I fell asleep listening to her shower and thinking, inevitably, of Jane. Some time in the night the telephone rang me up from sweet depths; before I was collected enough to get it (I’d not bothered to move it from the living room to the bedroom jack), Jeannine had answered and been hung up on. Not a word, she said from her bed edge, fetching in her summer nightie, her hair unbound. She’d lit a cigarette, but I was pleased to see that the bottle hadn’t been moved or, evidently, touched. Some fucking drunk, she guessed with a wry chuckle: many’s the time. Nighty-night.

  Next morning was a bright one, unusual for August, a good dry high come down from Canada with a light northwesterly. More and more pleased, I found Jeannine up and perky, in cut-off jeans and T-shirt, the hide-a-bed stripped and stowed, the gin bottle unselfconsciously returned to the bar cabinet, its level undisturbed (of course I hadn’t checked the other bottles), coffee brewed and breakfast standing by. She gave the skipper a good-morning peck, asked him how he liked his eggs, predicted that the breeze would freshen enough by noon to make even that clunker of a skipjack move, and declared that such late-night no-response phone calls made her homesick for NYC: nothing missing but the heavy breath. Did they happen often?