Letters

by John Barth

  Trappe Creek, Dad, is the favorite of my favorites on the Chesapeake. (Did you ever see it, I wonder? You never spoke of what you loved.) The placid essence of the Eastern Shore: low but marshless banks, a fringe of trees with working farms behind, houses few but fine, clean sand beaches here and there, and two perfect anchorages: the large unnamed cove to port behind the entrance point, sheltered from the seas but open enough for air on muggy nights; and, a mile farther up, also to port, magic Sawmill Cove: high-banked, entirely wooded, houseless, snug, primeval. There I went, never mind the humidity, to close another circle on my Last Night Out: it is where I spent my first youthful night aboard a boat (someone else’s), sleepless with excitement at the contiguity of the world’s salt waters, yearning to go on, on, to Portugal, to Fiji! I shall not ever see those places; have long since (i.e., since 1937) put by such yearnings. But Sawmill Cove is still a place to make one miss the world.

  Ordinarily. This night too it did its part—bluefish thrashed after minnows in the shallows, great blue herons stalked and clattered, ospreys wheeled, raccoons scrounged along the low-tide flats, crows and whippoorwills did their things, turtles conned and glided in the moonlight, there was not one human sound—but I could not do mine. Good-bye, good-byes! On, not to Portugal, but to the end! I began this letter, to say good-bye to you; put it by after an hour’s sweaty scribbling. Too much to tell; too much of consequence not yet tellable. To bed, then, to get on with it, on with it.

  In the early hours my sleep was broken by a shocking noise: from somewhere alongshore, very nearby, as feral a snarling as I’ve ever heard, and the frantic squeals of victims. A fox or farm dog it must have been, savaging a brood of young something-or-others. For endless minutes it went on, blood-chilling. Insatiable predator! Prey that shrieked and splashed but for some reason could not escape, their number diminishing one by pathetic one! I rushed on deck with the 7x50’s, shouted out into the pitch-darkness (the moon had set), but could see and do nothing. The last little victim screamed and died. Baby herons? Frogs? Their killer’s roaring lowered to an even growl, one final terrible snarling coup de grâce, then almost a purr. There was a rustling up into the woods, followed by awful silence. Long moments later a crow croaked; a cicada answered; a fish jumped; the night wood business resumed.

  I stood trembling in my sweat. Nature bloody in fang and claw! Under me, over me, ’round about me, everything killing everything! I had dined that evening on crabs boiled alive and picked from their exoskeletons; as I ate I’d heard the day’s news: Judge Boyle denies Kennedy request to cross-examine Kopechne inquest witnesses; last of first 25,000 U.S. troops withdrawn from Viet Nam; U.S.S.R. acknowledges danger of war with China. And Drew would become a terrorist, only accidentally killing others. And you, sir, killed yourself, the only lesson you ever taught me. Horrific nature; horrific world: out, out!

  Come misty morning I rowed ’round Sawmill Cove and found nothing. Trappe Creek and all its contents were dewy, fresh, innocent, almost unbearably sweet. Oh, end it! I felt heart-haggard as the Ancient Mariner; looked as zombieish as on the morn of June 22 last. End it. A northwesterly sprang up in time for me to leave cove and creek silently, under sail, as I’d hoped. No good-bye; just out, out. In the river I passed without emotion Red Nun 20. By midmorning Osborn Jones was in his Cambridge slip, fit with reasonable maintenance to sail to the end of the century; but I left him without a qualm, almost sorry I had yet to sail back to Todds Point, so done was I with what had been for 30 years my chiefest pleasure—and with having done.

  I walked up hot High Street to the hotel for a shave, shower, and change of clothes; snatched up the accumulated mail without sorting through it; went over to the office to see what was what. Hello, Ms. Pond and partners. Pleasant enough, thank you. Get Buffalo on the phone, please. Come again, Buffalo? No “Monsieur Casteene” to be found in Fort Erie? No one home at Jerome Bray’s establishment (Comalot, you say? Is that first o long or short?) except a family of goats and a crazy lady who calls herself Morgana le Fay? Who you what? Have reason to suspect might be Harrison Mack’s daughter? By all means investigate further! And now, Ms. P.: Joseph Morgan, please, in Fort Erie. Not available? Your name is what? Jacob Horner, administrative assistant? Ms. Bea G., please—Bibi, I believe you call her… Not there? Since 8/14? Never mind whose birthday! Presumably with Mr. Bray in Lily Dale?

  Oh, Polly, where are you to advise me? I asked your successor now to get Jane herself on the phone, thinking to share with her my concern for her, our, daughter and perhaps (discreetly) to signal my apprehensions about her fiancé. While Ms. P. dialed I leafed through the mail; saw your dear handwriting on one envelope; tore into it in the dim hope that whatever it contained might invite my apology for so rebuffing you—and found the announcement of your wedding on the 21st.

  A wedding performed, you kindly explained on the back of the announcement, after that last desperate visit to Cambridge three weeks since, when—hoping against hope I’d welcome you home, order you to stay, propose marriage on the spot to the woman who’d left me only to prod my sluggish heart—you’d been coldly turned off instead; and even so, madly imagining I might just be ill or distracted, madly praying that one last word might drop the scales from my eyes and heart and prompt me at last to say Come, Polly, Come with me and old Osborn Jones, let’s sail together to the end of the chapter… you called; you telephoned me at Todds Point in the middle of the night, cursing and loving me, hoping and praying; called to propose flat out to me what, decades since, I ought to have proposed to you. And your call was answered by a sleepy young woman’s voice, and for the last time you swallowed your pride; rang off without a word; went home to Florida; said yes at last to your patient friend, and to me a hurt but even yet loving last good-bye.

  Good-bye, Polly.

  Cancel that call, Ms. Pond. Cancel everything. No, nothing wrong; everything is right, and full to overflowing with intrinsic value, except that I remain alive.

  Back aboard the boat I sat for some time stunned, then made a certain codicil to my will regarding the posthumous disposition of my “personal papers,” including this. Home next day to Todds Point, where I spent the Labor Day weekend considering, among other things, Tomorrow Now. Why await the equinox, or the winding up of business, or the illumination of mysteries, before ending, ending, ending it? Was there any reason at all not to have done?

  One. In the office on Tuesday morning last, September 2, I found Buffalo on Line One, calling me before I could have Ms. Pond call him. Nothing new on “Morgana le Fay” (which was all I cared about), but all was chaos at that other crazy place, the one across the river in Canada. As of yesterday, Labor Day, Joe Morgan was dead, an apparent suicide; all the white patients and staff were being evicted by the blacks—no Bibis or Bea Goldens or Jeannine Macks among them. Should he continue to keep an eye on things, discreetly?

  Sure, but not at the expense of A. B. & A. In my capacity as executive director of the Tidewater Foundation I retained him to investigate and report the goings-on at the Remobilization Farm, from which we ought probably to withdraw our benefaction. Then, discretion be damned, I called Jane directly and told her everything I knew, suspected, or feared about Jeannine, Drew, André Castine, and, alas, poor Morgan—everything except my quasi-incest of three weeks since.

  To my surprise, she was unsurprised. Her “own people” had already informed her of all those things, Jane declared coolly, including Morgan’s regrettable suicide, and other things besides, which, given the pending litigation, she was not at liberty to share with me. My retention of a private investigator on behalf of the foundation she did not disapprove; that was my business. Her fiancé’s background, on the other hand, was not; she would thank me to cease my prying thereinto, or at least my bothering her with my “discoveries.” The blackmail threat I could forget about, as she intended to. It was nothing: it had been dealt with, or was being, or would be, by her people. As for Jeannine and Drew: she had already made clear to me her sentim
ents, which were unchanged. But I was to understand that that business of my possible paternity of her daughter was a fiction which she Jane had never seriously entertained. She regarded it as one of the several, should we say idiosyncratic, obsessions with which I amused myself. Now, if I didn’t mind…

  Where is Harrison’s shit? I demanded. Jane chuckled: She would leave it to me in her will. ’Bye.

  I telephoned Drew, thinking to go with him at once to Buffalo, Lily Dale, Fort Erie, in search of his sister. Yvonne answered, even chillier than Jane: she was sure she didn’t know where her estranged husband was; their house was hers until the end of the week, when she was leaving Red-neck Neck forever. ’Bye.

  So far as I knew, Joe Morgan had no living relatives except his college-age sons. I asked Ms. Pond to make me air reservations to Buffalo for next morning and to have the foundation arrange a memorial service at the college for its first president. (In the event, when I met and conferred with the Morgan boys in Fort Erie yesterday, we arranged the funeral too, to be held in Wicomico the day after tomorrow.)

  Wednesday, then, I flew to Buffalo, in pursuit of my shall-we-say-idiosyncratic-et-cetera, consulted and terminated our investigator (nothing new), hired a car, and drove down alone to Lily Dale, to “Comalot.” A ramshackle farmhouse and outbuildings; there were the goats, a rangy Toggenburg buck and two mixed-breed nans, one pregnant. No sign of Bray, but as I drove up, a wild-haired, scowling, long-skirted, granny-glassed young woman came from the barn, already shaking her head at me. The Bernstein girl! What on earth was she doing there? None of my business. Where was “Bea Golden”? Come and gone. Gone where? Didn’t know and didn’t care. Jerome Bray? Hard at work with “Lilyvac II”; couldn’t be interrupted. Might I inspect that machine and arrange a conversation with its owner? I might f–—g not; if the f–—g Tidewater Foundation wouldn’t put up, it could f–—g shut up and get off the premises. She had spoken to me at all, declared Ms. B., only because I’d once arranged bail for her with those red-neck pigs; but that gave me no f–—g permanent claims. There might be a police search, I informed her, if Bea Golden didn’t soon turn up. Ms. B. replied sweetly: Till f–—g then. As she strode away I called after: Was she also known as Morgana le Fay? Without turning, she hitched up her skirt and flashed her (bare, white, uncomely) bottom. When she reentered the barn she closed the door behind her.

  I considered waiting them out, or driving away for an hour and then returning unexpectedly, or concealing myself in the nearby woods and watching for Bray or Jeannine. But the detective had done all that, without success, and my rights in the matter, as no more than a concerned friend of the family, were tenuous. Back to Buffalo.

  Thence (yesterday) over the Peace Bridge to Fort Erie and the “Remobilization Farm.” Sure enough, a general exodus of whites was in progress, ordered by a young black chap who but for his green medical tunic might have passed for Drew’s late friend Tank-Top. He called himself Doctor Tombo X; he was the son of the late owner of the establishment; he was surly; and he was perhaps quite within his rights (in the absence of either a will or a board of directors) to evict whom it pleased him to, though I warned him not to expect further support from the Tidewater Foundation. I spoke as aforementioned with Morgan’s sons: stalwart, taciturn, capable boys who however welcomed my offer of legal and funerary assistance. In an hour we’d made arrangements for interment on Saturday in Wicomico, where their mother was buried. About their father’s “freaking out” they were reticent, whether from lack of information or a wish for privacy. No doubt his defeat by the Schott-Cook party at Marshyhope, plus the general upheaval and antirationalism of this wretched decade, repotentiated Morgan’s distress at the loss of his wife, which he had never truly got over. But such dramatic metamorphoses as his are always as ultimately mysterious as is, for that matter, their absence.

  Finally I interrogated Mr. Jacob Horner, an odd duck indeed, and his female companion, whom he called Marsha and the others called Pocahontas. I could make little sense of his account of Morgan’s death (Horner I gathered was a long-term “patient” at the Farm as well as some sort of administrator, and an old acquaintance of Morgan’s), but inasmuch as he’d been in the room when Joe either deliberately or accidentally shot himself—indeed, it seems there had been a scuffle between them: an inquest was being considered—I advised him to retain a local lawyer and requested from him, “for the foundation,” a copy of the account I urged him to set down for that lawyer.

  On the subject of Jeannine they could or would say no more than I’d been told already: she’d come back “from Maryland” much distressed on August 11th, lingered unhappily at the Farm for two days, then gone with this “Pocahontas” person to visit Bray at Lily Dale for unspecified reasons (I suspect narcotics). Pocahontas had returned on the 15th; Jeannine had voluntarily stayed on. When I declared that she appeared to be there no longer, and that Miss Merope Bernstein was there instead, they shrugged. Perhaps “Bibi” had gone back to Reg Prinz? Such things happened.

  Well. This Marsha-Pocahontas woman struck me as a bit evasive, but she might merely have been stoned, or drunk: she had the voice and manner of an old lush, not unlike Jeannine’s, but acerbic. The similarity made me weary, even cross. That Jeannine would have substantially mended her life if I’d kept her with me was neither impossible nor likely; I pitied her, hoped she was “all right,” and doubted either that she was or that if she wasn’t it was owing to foul play. Chances were she was boozing it up in New York City or Los Angeles. I had done enough; I was tired. Even so, I filed a missing-person report with both the Ontario Provincial Police and the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s office (whose jurisdiction includes Lily Dale) before returning that night exhausted to Baltimore, to Cambridge, to the Dorset Hotel.

  “This morning” (I mean Friday, but time has passed), from the office (nothing new), I tried to reach Prinz, Drew, and A. B. Cook by telephone—that last to ask exactly when and how Bray had turned up from the Prohibited Area and what he knew about Merope Bernstein and Jeannine, No answer at Drew’s house. No listed number in Manhattan for Prinz. Ditto for Cook or anyone else on Bloodsworth Island, where the operator doubted there was even telephone service. I gave up. Left the office. Came out here. Rebegan this letter around lunchtime. And have kept at it unremittingly through the weekend, pausing only to eat and sleep, determined to have done with it, with you, before turning my attention for the last time to myself.

  There I have succeeded: my one success in recent weeks. It is Sunday forenoon now, September 7. Bishop Pike’s body has been found in the deserts of Israel; Joseph Morgan’s will be memorialized a few hours from now; Jeannine’s is still missing. Just time to wind this up, or down, and drive over to Marshyhope for Joe’s service—where, not quite done with guilty interest, I hope to press all relevant mourners for more information about What in the World Is Going On.

  Did you expect a climax, Dad? A surprise ending, a revelation? Sorry. I here close my Inquiry for good, first opened 49 years ago this month. As you did not deign to let me know why you turned yourself off, I shall not tell you this time (as I did in 1937) how, when, and where I mean to do likewise. Commence your own Inquiry! Begin, what in your life you never once began, a Letter to

  Your Son.

  I: Draft codicil to the last will and testament of Todd Andrews.

  Morgan Memorial Tower

  Marshyhope State University

  Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

  Friday, September 26, 1969

  I, TODD ANDREWS, a resident of Dorchester County, state of Maryland, being of sound & disposing mind, memory, & understanding, do hereby make, publish & declare this instrument of writing as & for a Codicil to my Last Will & Testament, supplementary to my Codicil of 9/1/69 comprising Article Sixth of my Last Will & Testament aforesaid. To wit:

  SEVENTH: I give and bequeath to my Literary Trustee named in my Codicil of 9/1/69, in addition to my Letter to My Father, my Inquiry into his suicide, and the Log of the Skipj
ack Osborn Jones, this Codicil itself, if it survive the imminent demolition of the structure wherein I draft it and of myself, and whether or not it be completed, signed, and legally witnessed.

  I write this by full-Harvest-Moonlight, almost bright enough to read by (but I brought with me a red-lensed pocket chart-light from the boat, along with pen, trusty yellow legal pad, and my 7x50 night glasses), in the locked & bolted Observation Belfry of the Morgan Memorial Tower, variously & popularly known as the Schott Tower, the Shit Tower, and the Tower of Truth. Drew Mack and some surviving fellow terrorists—dressed and painted as Choptank Indians to dramatize Redskin Rights in the event of apprehension—got in like burglars a few hours ago to do their work, mugging the night watchman for his keys and his watch-clock. But I entered, not long past midnight, as befits the Tidewater Foundation’s executive director & former counsel to MSU: with a gold-plated passkey presented symbolically by John Schott at last evening’s ceremonial dinner to me, to my counterpart on the State University’s Board of Regents, and to the governor of Maryland as represented by the comptroller of the treasury. A souvenir Key to Truth, which, broken off in the lock cylinder, insures my privacy to write and my freedom from rescue.

  By this gorgeous light I can see clear across campus to the Mack mansion, where Jane is once again in mourning. Since her own—no doubt her first—Dark Night, Wednesday week last (9/19), when the yacht Baratarian was found derelict & half scuttled, with specimens of Harrison’s freeze-dried droppings aboard, and charts of the Mexican Caribbean, and very little else, Jane has suddenly looked her age: a metamorphosis more spectacular by far than mine because she had looked so inordinately youthful. I have done what I can to comfort her, without impressive success, and learned in the process that in fact she & Castine had concealed her late husband’s leavings lest I try to “pull another fast one” in the will case “as I did before.” And that the cache had nonetheless been stolen just prior to the Fort McHenry action—evidently but unaccountably by her fiancé! Whatever for, since her loss stood to be his? Neither Jane nor I can imagine. We rule out collusion with Drew as pointless and out of (Drew’s) character, whatever other connections the pair might have had. And we do not know what became of the crew & cargo of Baratarian. Jane declares herself inconsolable, and may be so. But I rather suspect that the opening next month of the first Cap’n Chick franchises and the early, favorable settlement of Harrison’s estate (now that the Tidewater Foundation is about to lose its director, and given Jeannine’s continued disappearance & Drew’s amenability to an out-of-court settlement) will go far towards consoling her; farther at least than my heartfelt but unavoidably detached solicitude.