Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas

by John Barth

  In we went, and out we came by midnight, nearly four hundred to the good, if that's the right word for it, having scored nearly a score of Lambda Upsies at our twenty-dollar group-rate special—

  Including a couple of first-timers too nervous to get it up and a couple of old hands too drunk to; but nobody asked for a refund, so we gave 'em rain checks. Gents and scholars indeed, those guys, serenading us from downstairs while we turned our tricks in three separate third-floor bedrooms. Gentleman songsters off on a spree...

  "Doomed to get laid by the Graces three?"

  Who then gratefully rewarded Pledge Dickson with a freebie Threebie to add to his catalogue of triples: a stunt not to be found in his old-time myths. We improvised it on the spot, as I remember, having had a few beers ourselves by that time.

  "And what Manny couldn't manage, we managed for him. Put that in your oral history, Junior, since Cindy saw fit not to in her novella-thing: your pop's first pop."

  Which so shot his maiden wad that some other brother—the least plastered one we could locate—drove us home in exchange for another little trick en route.

  And tired and sore and two-thirds sozzled as we ourselves were by then, we douched and showered, set the alarm, hit the books bright and early next morning, and got our weekend schoolwork done on time.

  Which just about wraps up Episode One of our connection with Manfred Senior as a freshman. Which laid the foundation—

  "In a manner of speaking—"

  —for all that followed: his whole fucking career, I guess.

  Also in a manner of speaking. And since there's not tape enough left on this cassette for us to start the next chapter, let's close this one by adding that Manny and his pals invited us back a few times that semester and the next, separately and together, until MDU got wind of it and cracked down on Lambda Upsilon, and the brothers lost their lease on the row-house. "Dickson's Masons," they used to call us.

  And once we'd gotten him started on that business of Threes and Y's, and said what we'd said about those two Greek letters, Manny notebooked everything we told him as if we were one of those whatchacallum oracles. Philadelphic?

  "Delphic Orifices, maybe?"

  Not only siblings, but sibyls. And this was before the guy had decided or discovered who he was! But in his second year at MDU—and Thelma's at ASTC, and Aggie's and my junior year there—he took up with a girl at Western Maryland College that he'd known from high school: the one he wound up marrying as soon as they both graduated. And since we sibyl types were still paying our freight in our particular way, it's no surprise that he didn't introduce us to his fiancée—that's your mom-to-be, Junior—or seek us out for more input, shall we say.

  So we all commenced from our respective alma maters and went our separate if not quite equal ways—

  "Some of us even went straight, once our last tuition bill was paid..."

  —while some others found ourselves hooked on hookering, faute de mieux. But that's another story.

  To be told another time, maybe, on another tape, before Cindy-Ella beats us to it with another novella à clef: how at least one ex-Mason reconnected with a much-changed Dickson. Let's close this one with a bit of oral oracularity for Junior-boy: that famously cryptic dedication of The Fates, which the lit-crit types have read as a salute to everything from the classical Muses as literary architects to the secret fraternal order of Freemasonry.

  Try it orally with us, Manny-boy, and one more mystery will be demystified. All together now: one ... two...

  "To the Gracious Masons, who lent me—"

  [End of tape.]

  TAPE 3

  ...their rears: another Dickson triple-entendre lost in transcription, Listener, not to mention in translation.

  "Like wise."

  At least one of which not even Grace is sure about: that queer Y-on-its-side that marks the last book of Manny's trilogy.

  Though she has her hunches. Your dad himself would never talk seriously about things like that, Junior, especially in later years. Depending on his mood—which more and more came to mean his booze intake, after MDU sacked him—he'd say something like, "You and I are the oracles, doll, not the commentators," or "Let's leave footnotes to the kinds of assholes who fired me."

  "Like you-know-who, Junie-boy."

  Not fair, Thelma: The kid's father gets booted when a conservative English Department finds they've got a nontenured Henry Miller on the faculty. His parents' marriage crashes, and his mom probably fills the kid's ears with made-up tales of his dad's fuck-arounds and orgies, which Manny's not there to deny 'cause he's out wrecking his liver. No wonder the kid's neutered! My Cindy and her brother were luckier, poor kids, having their pissed-off dad conveniently drop dead.

  Amen. But "made-up tales," you said?

  For the record, Junior, your pa may've been less than a model parent (likewise your ma, I'd bet my butt), but he was neither the big-time cocksman that some of his detractors and admirers alike have made him out to be, nor the fantasizing jerk-off that some others have maliciously proposed. In my own not-uninformed opinion, M. D. Senior was a man of no more than average libido, more curious than lecherous or lustful, and more fixated on his freaking Threes and Y's and capital-Q Quests—not to mention language and storytelling—than on literal cunts and cocks.

  "I'll second that."

  And I'll third it—though Thelm and I never came to know him the way Gracie did.

  "'Came to know him...' Wait'll Junior goes to work on that line!"

  What I suspect, girls, is that while J-boy's declared objective is to restore his dad's critical reputation (now that the guy's doubtless long since dead), his actual motive might be to get even with him for not having been a better father. Piss on his ashes, et cet?

  "Amen to that, Aggie: Intentionally or not, that's what any quote critical reappraisal unquote of his will likely do, given where its author's coming from."

  Ergo, guys, our Corrective Oral Testimony, if we ever get around to it before we've used up all three tapes. That side-wise Y, by the way—that Manny used for space-breaks and such right through the Atropos novel?—might be like scissors, mightn't it, whatever else it stands for? She being the Fate who snips the thread that Clotho spins and Lachesis measures out...

  Score another for sister Grace, maybe. I always think of it as some Gracious-Mason type lying on her side and lifting her leg while "lending her rear"—but that's horny old me.

  "If a mere former gynecologist's assistant can presume to add her reading to an ex–English teacher's and an ex–porn queen's, I'd say you're both right. The bitch-lady heroine of Atropos figuratively cuts her artist-lover's nuts off, no? Fucks him over till he can't get it up with the muses? Cindy's Wye -story comes close to saying that."

  A-plus for Thelma Mason! And now watch us get some history done: Having whored our way cum laude to our bachelor's degrees—

  "So to speak."

  —two-thirds of us put sex-for-hire behind us after graduation.

  Also so to speak—Yours-Truly-Agatha being the naughty third third.

  But even she quit being a hooker pure and simple, excuse the adjectives. Having been a drama major and varsity gymnast at Arundel State, she took those talents and her others up to NYC and later out to LA, to try her luck at modeling and actressing...

  Where she dropped her drawers in what she hoped were the right talent offices and undressing rooms, and actually managed to score a few photo shoots and bit parts. But then found her true métier—I believe the word is?—in Smutsville.

  "You used to tell us it was the gymnastic aspect that appealed to you."

  Manny even used that line—somewhere in Lachesis, was it? On with your story, Ag.

  What's to tell? Unlike my straighter sisters, I never got to be anybody's wife or mother. Had a couple hundred lovers but never lucked into capital-L Love. Came closest with a more-or-less-lesbian colleague in my more-or-less-lesbian phase, but that didn't last either. Got too old for the porn game an
d worked as a talent scout for a while, till I learned I was scouting young illegal-immigrant Latinas to be flat-out putas. Put all that behind me in my forties and moved back east, where my better twin steered me to an M.Ed. degree and a job coaching gym and dramatics to the girls of Severn Day School.

  Which in its innocence never made a better appointment: absolutely first-rate coach, teacher, and all-'round moral compass for her students.

  "Because she'd been around the proverbial block and knew which alleys to avoid. But try to tell that to the SDS trustees, if Gracie's husband had blown the whistle on us as he threatened to."

  Not to get too far ahead of our story, while Aggie's off hustling the Big Apple and La-La Land, frisky Thelma finishes her degree, turns a few more tricks to pay for summer-school courses in secretarying, then goes straight and lands a good job as receptionist-slash-secretary-slash-assistant to a handsome young gynecologist in Baltimore...

  "A scrupulous practitioner, Listener, who would never think of taking liberties with his patients, but who—like me, once my tush was off the rental market—enjoyed sex with any willing, good-looking, lively, and reasonably discreet non patient, the way some other types enjoy workouts in the gym or Saturday-night dances at their country club."

  Read all about it in Clotho, folks, where Manny calls her "Thalia"...

  "Within a month after I was hired, Doctor Weisman and I were getting it on (never during office hours), and found we had so much else in common that we got married the following year, with the understanding that in our house, infidelity would mean cheating on one's spouse, not occasional mate-swapping among friends for the fun of it. And fun we had, folks, dear Sammy and I, till our luck ran out in the swinging nineteen-high-sixties. We half believed we were inventing open marriage! And thought it was super-cool for me to keep my maiden name. Tell the rest of it for me, Gracie."

  The mercifully short version: Husband dies young of galloping lung cancer (we all still smoked like chimneys in those days), leaving bereft widow with a son, Benjy—slow-witted, obese, resentful, ungovernable, and altogether parasitic, in his outspoken twin aunts' opinion—who makes a misery of his mom's middle years until he piles up her Pontiac in a DUI accident on the Baltimore Beltway, killing himself, two drinking buddies, and the innocent driver he was passing on the right at ninety miles an hour on a rainy March night in 1973.

  To which his aunt Aggie would add—if I may, Thelma?—that once our wiped-out kid sister had closed that chapter of her life, she took a deep breath, quit punishing herself for her late son's problems, rediscovered the sense of humor and joie de vivre that'd been in cold storage since her good Doc Sam first took sick, and was a life-saving aid and comforter to Grace and me when our shit hit the fan at Severn Day School in the mid-seventies.

  That's the century's mid-seventies, Listener: our mid-forties, when a certain Ned Forester found and read his wife's private diaries from back in her college years—as I believe got mentioned earlier?—and her later notebooks on The Fates.

  "Self-righteous asshole."

  Pillar of the community, in most folks' opinion, who'd believed his wife to be the same.

  Whose wife was the same, we happen to know, for the twenty-plus years of their courtship and marriage, including the period of her reconnection with Manfred Dickson: a totally innocent reconnection, for which her only blame was keeping it secret from her husband lest he misunderstand and disapprove.

  "As he damned well would've, for sure. Tell it, Gracie."

  If I can, with apologies to my loyal and talented daughter for correcting here her fictionalized version. We lit-teacher types tend to think that the capital-A Authors whose stuff we teach must've been called to their vocation by some life-changing experience like discovering a particular book or mentor who helps them find their voice and their subject matter. And no doubt something like that's the case more often than not (it certainly was with "C. Ella Mason," as shall be seen). Even Manny, remember, when we Three-Wayed him back there at Lambda Upsilon, had been studying with some first-rate profs at MDU and chugalugging literature, history, and philosophy the way he and his frat buddies were downloading kegfuls of Pabst and Budweiser. But when our paths recrossed in '55, half a dozen years after our first get-together, he swore it was that Hell Week scavenger hunt that'd turned Manny the who-knows-what into Manfred F. Dickson the budding novelist. He didn't doubt that we all rewrite our pasts as we go along—maybe professional storytellers especially? But his version of the Story of His Life, he swore, was that the coincidence of us Masons and Dicksons "coming together" at Mason-Dixon, along with the "Mythic Quest crapola," as he himself called it, and all those "Threebies," had so energized and focused his imagination that he'd been churning out paragraphs and pages of scenes and characters and plot situations ever since, as fast as he could hunt-and-peck 'em on his hand-me-down Underwood.

  By the time I tell of, when he and I were every bit of twenty-five years old, he was already three years married to Miz Western Maryland aforementioned and had a two-year-old son (named guess what). Like my Cindy all these years later, he'd published a handful of shall-we-say experimental short stories in obscure little lit mags and an unsuccessful "trial-run" first novel, as he called it (already out of print, and its small-press publisher out of business), and had a second one going the rounds in New York that neither he nor his agent was optimistic about. What's more, to pay the rent he was currently adjunct-professoring at ... guess where? Arun del State College, as it was calling itself then! In his busyness at discovering and exploring his voice and his medium—plus all the distractions of teaching and husbanding and fathering—the particular circumstances of his original "Summons to Adventure," as the myth people call the Hero's wake-up call, had not been forgotten, by any means, but were somehow sidetracked in his imagination as if waiting to be renoticed and finally Understood. Believe it or not, he told me, it wasn't until he'd wangled that ASC appointment (which took a bit of wangling, as he had neither a Ph.D. nor any scholarly publications to his credit, just those three or four avant-garde stories and that flop of an oddball first novel) that he remembered exactly why those Mason chicks had been doing what they did back in '48/'49, and which institution of higher education they'd been shagging their way through.

  "Whereupon ... Bingo!"

  Whereupon maybe not yet Bingo, but for sure By Golly. And he being just then both between projects and, he strongly felt, between the unimpressive First Phase of his writerly career and what he was convinced and determined would be the literary fireworks of Phase Two, he'd not only dug up and reexamined all the notes (and diagrams) that he'd made half a dozen years past, after our Lambda Upsy-daisy gig, but looked us up in the college's alumni directory (just as Junior did, forty-five years later), resolved to find out what had happened to his Three Graces since then: what we were up to these days, and how we remembered that fateful night.

  Note the adjective, folks.

  Indeed. Because what Manny was calling his Second Quest, or the search for his Original Muses, was already part and parcel of the magnum opus that was beginning to take shape in his imagination— magna opera, I guess, since he knew already it would be a triple-decker...

  "Et cetera. All this, mind you, in a letter, Listener, addressed to Mrs. Grace Forester care of Severn Day, not to intrude on her domestic privacy. It was almost as long a letter as Junior's, but with a different tone entirely."

  Courteous and discreet like Junie's, not to embarrass its recipient with past history in her present position. But relaxed, good-humored, and friendly: the voice of a flesh-and-blood human being. Nobody who didn't happen to know that item of our résumé could've guessed it from his letter. Which, by the way, he signed Fred over his typewritten Manfred F. Dickson. An inside joke, we learned later.

  Anybody reading that letter would've thought at most that we four must have known one another from college days. And inasmuch as "Fred'"s project-in-the-works had to do with that particular time and place—post–World
War Two America, the age of the A-bomb, the wearing out of Modernism, et cet—he had reason to believe that an interview or two with the former Grace Mason (and perhaps with her lively sister-graces "Aglaia" and "Thalia" as well, if I would kindly direct him to them) could be of considerable value to his researches. Might we meet, at any time and place of my convenience? Just say the word, he said, and he would quote "drop everything" unquote...

  "Another Manny-tease, obviously. But only a tease, Junior, because when Gracie met your dad for lunch not long after, at what passed for a faculty club in those days at ASC—and then when I did some interview sessions with him a while later, and Aggie some time after that—the Manfred F. Dickson that we re-met was not about to drop his pants, for example, for any of us. Not even when Aggie and I, for old times' sake, as much as invited him to."

  Which wouldn't've bothered Thelma's open-minded, open-marriage hubby—

  "Don't forget open-flied—"

  —which her open-armed and open-ended gynecologist hubby wouldn't've minded at all...

  "Sammy mind? He'd've applauded! He knew my whole story and loved me for it, bless him."

  And Yours Truly, the Porn Pro, sad to say, had nobody to be unfaithful to. Our point being that while the author of The Fates has been called, with some justice, both an erotomane and an egomane—are those the right terms, Teach?

  They'll serve, and I have more to say on that subject. After you.

  ...he never once, in the seven years of our reconnection, made improper advances to any of the three of us; not even when one or two of us suggested same. And those suggesters never included Mrs. Ned Stuffed-Shirt Forester. Tell it, Grace.

  Well: What Junior needs to know (likewise Mason-Dixon U. and Arundel U. and the Library of Congress, to all of whom I'll be sending copies of my transcriptions of these tapes for their M. F. Dickson Archives, present or future, in case Junior tosses or edits the originals) is that his dad's egomania, narcissism, whatever bad name it's called by, was in my humble opinion not self-love at all, but a particular kind of self-absorption fairly common among artist types, though not a vocational prerequisite. Even "self-absorption" and "self-centeredness" are only half accurate (as my daughter will testify from her own experience), since what Manny's "self" was absorbed with and centered on—what for better or worse took precedence over his marriage and family and academic responsibilities, not to mention over friends and community and the wider world—wasn't his ego, in any vain sense of that term: It was his work.