Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas

by John Barth

  A luxury we never had as Navy brats, not to mention as womb-mates. And that's our story, folks, except for how we wound up as a threesome here in Bernbridge. Your ship, Thelma.

  "Aye aye, Cap'n. I was the only Gracious Mason not damaged by our undergrad tuition-paying per se or by prick-head Ned Forester's reading all about it in Gracie's fucking diaries, as we call 'em. Between Doctor Sam and me, all that stuff had been a family joke: As I said, he was proud of me for it. And by the time Ned blew his whistle on the three of us, my world had ended twice already, at ages thirty-nine and forty-three: first with Sammy's death in the summer of '69 (wouldn't he have loved the idea of croaking in mid-soixante-neuf!) and then with poor Benjy's wipeout in the spring of '73. I doubt I'd have weathered those losses without my two sisters' support; helping them later through their bad time was downright therapeutic for me."

  By then all three of us were back in the old hometown...

  "Right. Benjy had needed so much looking after that I'd long since quit my job in Sam's office and had tried in vain to turn our son into a responsible kid. After Sammy died, it had been a relief as well as an economic necessity to sell our house in Baltimore, move into a condo, and go back to work for one of his ob/gyn colleagues. Early in '73 the guy shifted his practice down to Bowie, halfway between Annapolis and Washington, and for a few months I made the long commute so that Benjy could finish his senior year at Park School. But when he dropped out of school that February and piled up on the Beltway in March, at Grace and Aggie's urging I swapped the Baltimore condo for one in Annapolis, a quick shot from the new office, et voilà: Unhappy Fate had brought the three Fates happily together again."

  Just in time for you to become the rescuer and us the rescued. Bless you for that.

  Let me add that we were all in our forties by then, like Cindy and Neddie now: happy to be reunited but unhappy to be widows, divorcées, and never-marrieds; banged around by life but kept afloat by Thelma/Thalia's unfailing good humor—and none of us, for our separate reasons, much interested by then in finding another significant other. By the time the Great Diary Fallout was truly behind us, we were turning fifty, content with our new jobs and salvaged life situations, and independent except for our interdependency...

  "A different kind of Three-Way from the classic model."

  And the first Ph.D. dissertations were being written on Manny's Fates.

  To all of which I would add that while Gracie and I especially, now that we were reinstalled at Severn Day, had to be super-discreet in the area of S-E-X, none of the three of us had yet abandoned such pleasures altogether. Had we?

  Well: I had, I guess—except for getting it off now and then with the handy-dandy gizmo that you guys gave me for my forty-fifth. But you had your little sessions with Carol Tucker, didn't you, Ag?

  A very well-to-do former student of ours, Listener, by then a trustee of Severn Day and thus not likely to spill our beans. She and I would get together in her hotel whenever she was in town for a board meeting. Sweet saucy If-You-Can't-Fuck-Her-Suck-Her Tucker: Erato's last stand. Et tu, Thalia?

  "Me? Yes. Well: Widowhood took the zing out of Open Marriage, for sure. And I'm convinced that Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 brought on my early menopause, or at least a total loss of appetite in that department after age fifty. For the next dozen-plus years I got off on tennis and aerobics instead, until my back and knees gave out and I broke my hip in an escalator tumble at our nearby Nordstrom. And so at the tender age of seventy, here we are at Bernbridge-in-the-Boondocks, waiting to die."

  Some of us more patiently than others. And how we wound up here is as follows: Gracie, s.v.p.?

  Got it. As has been told, Aggie's early emphysema and the rest sidelined her circa 1979, when she was just turning fifty. Thelma and I were able to work into our sixties, until her failing joints nudged her into slightly early retirement from her doctor's office job and my reaching sixty-five prompted my very reluctant goodbye to Severn Day. Which life change, I'm convinced, inspired my uterine cancer, cured by the timely removal of all that female plumbing that had so bemused both Doc Sam Weisman and Manny Dickson in their different ways. Have we mentioned, Junior, that LIFE'S A BITCH, as the bumper sticker says, AND THEN YOU DIE, if you're lucky enough to live so long? Meanwhile, however, it does have its moments, and the older and feebler we-all got—me especially, I guess—the more it seemed to us that our college days (you know what I mean) were the most eventful, the most memorable, the most fun time of our lives, in particular those Lambda Upsilon gigs with Manny and all that followed therefrom: his obsession with Y's and threesomes and mythic obstacle courses and scavenger hunts. We've loved our various mates and our children and our students and our work, but what we're most likely to be remembered for, if anything—whether thanks to Junior's biography-in-the-works or despite it—is our inspiration of Manfred Dickson's trilogy and our later input-sessions with him while he was writing it. As my Cindy-Ella of a daughter makes clear (rising from the ashes of her parents' divorce to turn smut into Art), that was our Place Where Three Roads Met.

  So what happened—if I may, Gracie?—was that when we reached the point where even housekeeping got to be more than the three of us could manage, and we needed ever more looking after, we scouted all the assisted-living kinds of places in the Baltimore/Washington/Annapolis area, and found enough pluses and minuses in every one to make the thing a tossup. So back and forth we went, literally and figuratively, until we were dizzy with indecision and getting on one another's nerves and about ready to just flip a coin, if we'd had an eight- or ten-sided coin. Then one fine day near the start of Bill Clinton's second term, Thelma came to our rescue by announcing ... Thelm?

  "By announcing, 'None of the above, girls: It's going to be Bernbridge Manor for us, way up in Bernbridge EmDee, where we don't know a frigging soul, and who cares, since most of our old friends are dead anyhow.' "

  Thus spake Thalia, and we said, "Bernbridge? What's this Bernbridge? Why Bernbridge?" And she said, "You nailed it, Gracie: Here's the Why." By which she meant both the reason why and the letter Y, as she showed us on the map.

  "Because once I'd thought of it, and the three of us, and our connection with Manny, I got as hooked on those Y's as he'd been—to the point where I actually looked to see whether there might be an assisted-living place somewhere on the Wye River, over on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where Clinton and Arafat and Netanyahu signed that Wye River Accord that led to zilch. As did my not-so-Heroic Quest? So then, just to get the damned decision decided, I checked out all such configurations within a fifty-mile radius of Annapolis, and voilà!"

  Voilà indeed: the far northeast corner of the Old Line State, where the Mason-Dixon, appropriately, quits running east-west to divide Pennsylvania from Maryland, among other things, and turns ninety degrees south to divide Maryland from Delaware, while the line between Delaware and Pennsylvania shoots off northeastward in a great arc around Wilmington—a sort of loopy-looking lambda, to those inclined to see such things.

  More exactly, our Bernbridge sits just a stone's throw from that three-way, on yet another one, where Route 896 drops south from Pennsylvania to the east end of the Mason-Dixon. Just where it crosses that celebrated line at the curious conjunction that Aggie mentioned and continues southeastward into Delaware, a county road forks off southwestward into Maryland: a jim-dandy inverted Y like the one in Clotho, superimposed on that state-line three-way out of Lachesis/ My kids said, "Go for it, Mom/" Who could resist?

  And who gave a shit anyhow? Our life stories were all but told by then, through the second half of a century whose horrors we'd been spared, up to the commencement of another, which bids at best to be no better. Each of us had seen and done and been whatever, separately or together, and hadn't seen/done/been what we hadn't, for better or worse. So now we play Bernbridge bridge and bingo while we wait for our systems to finish failing—and who gives a shit, and why should they? What's it all been for?

  Well, now, Aggie: po
ur l'art, maybe? To've added a bit of spice to a certain Controversial Modern Classic and a not-bad-at-all spinoff novella, and now to shed a little light on the circumstances of their composition. Is that nothing?

  Yup.

  "No! Unless Aggie's reached the point of feeling that capital-C Civilization itself is nothing."

  I'm getting there. But I do still enjoy our glass of wine every night with dinner.

  Then you're still welcomely on board, sis. And if the tape of our lives has almost run out, that means there may be enough left for a few last words. Your mike, Aggie.

  Fuck it. And fuck you, motherfucking Junior, and your fucking father and his fucking hero-myth and his fucking books. Fuck everything—except my sisters.

  Good girl, Ag: still aboard, even as our ship goes down. Thelma?

  "Just want to add what only now occurred to me: that if we think of Junior's tracking us down here at Bernbridge last month—which Cindy had given us advance warning of, Listener, after he'd tracked her down—as a replay of his father's tracking us down in Annapolis back in the mid-fifties, then that old reconnection with Manny Senior can be called the foreplay of what we're doing now with Junior. Right?"

  Amen.

  I.e., fucking him over?

  "And over and over. Over and out, Gracie."

  —as we used to say to our quickie customers back in undergraduate days, Junior, as we rolled over when their five minutes were up. See Lachesis, page something-or-other. Over and out, luv. And then, Next?

  So, Junior: Instead of "We who are about to die salute you," as the Roman gladiators used to say, it's "We who are on our last legs give you the finger." Unless, lad—what's too much to hope for, we suppose, but stranger things have happened in the history of inadequate parents and their screwed-up spawn—unless you somehow see fit to include an unedited transcript of these tapes in your big-shit three-decker critical biography of your old man. A kind of appendix, maybe?

  "Scratch that, Grace: Appendixes can be surgically removed. What we've laid on you here, Junie, is no appendix: It's the heart and backbone of the story."

  Its very cock and balls, if you know what we mean. Take us out, Grace.

  Roger wilco. As I was saying—

  EDITOR'S NOTE

  At this point, the third of the three "Bernbridge" audiotapes—purportedly recorded at my urging by the elderly Mason sisters on 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000 —ran out, and (the ladies evidently not realizing that there was unused footage remaining on Tapes 1 and 2) their scabrous three-way commentary on their alleged association with the late author of The Fates terminates abruptly in mid-sentence: not artfully, like the "ending" of Finnegans Wake, which circles back to its mid-sentence opening to complete the cycle of Eternal Recurrence which is that master-work's Ground Theme, but unintentionally, leaving their potty-mouthed spiel unfinished like the Atropos volume of "my father"'s trilogy. One reasonably wonders why the harpy-in-chief, Ms. Grace Mason Forester, when she rewound, replayed, transcribed, and enlarged upon the trio's recorded conversation, didn't complete her closing statement, whether that statement was to be the sisters' nasty imprecation-in-progress against the present writer or their disillusioned adieu to the only historically significant aspect of their lives: their initial (unintended, accidental) inspiring of "my father" at a formative moment in his literary apprenticeship and their subsequent "input" (and, in Ms. Forester's case, stenographic and perhaps limited editorial assistance, to say no more) in the completion of his chef d'oeuvre—for both of which matters, to be sure, one has only their testimony, the ambiguous evidence of "C. Ella Mason" 's Wye novella, and that obscure, much-puzzled-over dedication of The Fates: "To the Gracious Masons, who..."*

  The patient reader of this extended study, and especially of this appendix thereto, will have noted its author-editor's occasional quotation marks around "my father," and may well have inferred their reason. Of my biological parentage I have no doubts: Readers who compare the several photographs herein of Manfred F. Dickson Sr. at his son's approximate present age and the jacket-flap mug shot of myself will not fail to note the unmistakable resemblance. But as prevailingly cordial, or at least civil, as our connection was through my boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood, I never felt loved by the father whom, per Evolution's heedless program, I loved helplessly, and whom I honor yet (as witness this years-long labor, now all but concluded), despite his lifelong indifference to, amounting to virtual rejection of, his only child. As if Oedipus, put out as an infant by his father, Laius, to die lest he grow up as foretold by Apollo to become a parricide, upon encountering years later that road-hogging old Theban at the Place Where Three Roads Meet, instead of killing him to clear his own path, had graciously yielded the right-of-way and then, belatedly realizing who the elderly stranger must be, had hurried after him (as I've done here in three long volumes), crying, like a character out of Kafka, "Father! Look! Your son, alive and well except for an unaccountably swollen foot! Your son, who craves only reunion, reconciliation, and the father I never had! Wait for me! I forgive you everything! Let's go on from here together!" But the oldster's wagon is gone already down that westward road, with not a backward glance from its heartless driver at its heartbroken pursuer. Who, unable despite all to embrace the uncaring sire whose shade still taunts, trudges behind on his own career-long Heroic Quest, from the outset knowing it to be in vain.

  How tempting it has been, through the years of this monumental labor, to settle scores with that father-who-was-no-father—perhaps by repeating in parlous detail my mother's still-festering grievances from the latter years of their "mis-marriage," as she calls it, when she in her way like I in mine was sacrificed to his obsession with The Fates! Or by dwelling, in three-volume detail, upon the undeniable literary shortcomings of that trilogy, whose "controversial" aspects include more than its relentless, hyperbolical, ultimately tiresome eroticism! Or even to make the case that the work's real authorship should be credited (or debited) more to Grace Mason Forester than to M. F. Dickson Sr.—a man so lost in his preoccupations that it is arguably more a matter of his having perversely inspired her (a would-be novelist of sorts like her daughter, perhaps, but obliged to conceal her virtual authorship of The Fates lest her scandalized husband divorce her, as subsequently he did on lesser grounds) than vice versa!

  Or even...(words fail me, as at the unended end of Atropos they failed its author-up-to-that-point)...to take the most sweepingly "Oedipal" revenge of all, by publishing this "appended" tape transcript and its appended Editor's Note separately from the three-volume critical corpus whose (vermiform!) Appendix it was meant to be—indeed, perhaps by publishing it instead of that obese, yet-to-be-completed corpus—and planting in it the seed (or worm) of insinuation that "my father," "Manfred F. Dickson" ("Sr."), and "his" trilogy The Fates are in fact finally fictions, the score-settling invention of a justly aggrieved virtual orphan whose lifelong, single-minded, but altogether futile endeavor to follow in his "father" 's footsteps has deprived him of any "meaningful" companionship except—take this, damned Dad!—playing King Oedipus indeed to a certain long-discarded Queen Jocasta, in a secret, Sphinx-guarded Thebes of our own devising!

  Ha! There is no Clotho, Reader! No Lachesis! No Atropos! No Arundel or Mason-Dixon University, Severn Day School, or Bernbridge Manor! Nor any "Agatha/Aglaia," "Thelma/Thalia," or "Grace Mason Forester"! There is not, nor was there ever, any "M. F. Dickson Senior," nor (ipso facto) any M-F Junior! Figments all! Hollow, pathetic fictions!

  There is only...

  THE END

  No: There is not even that. Not even that!

  As I was saying...

  Copyright © 20?? by "Fred"

  JOHN BARTH is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Sot-Weed Factor, Lost in the Funhouse, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, and the National Book Award winner Chimera. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, an F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fic
tion, and a PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, among other honors. He taught for many years in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

  * * *

  * Just as I've shifted here, with "Izzy"'s indulgence, from Author to Teller du soir (it being now evening) of "Fred"'s Part Four.

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  * A dedication that remains puzzling despite my having identified the (decidedly un-)"Gracious Masons" and included in this appendix their characteristically ribald perversion of the phrase "their ears," since on the evidence of their testimony it was my father who eagerly lent his ears to their naughty glosses on, e.g., lambda, upsilon, and trivium.

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