John Barth - Letters

But I have not quite lost my professional grip: had not, anyroad, as of Thursday last, the day before yesterday, when I bethought me to drive across the Bay “to Annapolis, maybe even Washington,” beard A. B. Cook VI in his den, have done with mysteries, confront him with (copies of) the letters, and pin him down once for all on his relation to “Henri Burlingame VII.” The film company have finished the first round of location shooting in Cambridge and “Barataria” on Bloodsworth Island, and are dispersed, to regroup next week on the Niagara Frontier for the second round (Where do the Falls figure in your fiction? I had thought it all set in Maryland or in Nowhere); Ambrose was busy with slide rule and mechanical-drawing instruments — strange tools for a man of letters! So I slipped out of 24 L with a briefcaseful of proper attire, endured the smirks of attendants at the first service station on Rte 50 (who surely took me for a superannuated whore) in order to fetch the key to the Ladies and change from mini to midlength, do up my hair, harness in the old tits and turn — what relief! — and, for the first time since the weekend, look my proper self (the chap checked my credit card as if for fraud). Then over the bridge to Chautaugua, Md, on the south shore of the Magothy, and up a certain shrubberied drive to a letterbox marked COOK.

The flag was up: outgoing mail. My courage faltered at sight of those four bold letters, so less equivocal than the man they surnamed or the epistles in my briefcase. A lane of boxwoods and azaleas led to a pleasant white frame cottage, its screened porches shaded by sycamores. The lawn continued to a creek or cove, where pleasure craft rode at moorings; from a staff on the T of the laureate’s dock flew the motley banner of the state, bright as racing silks: the Baltimores’ chequered black and orange, the Calverts’ red-and-white cross botonee. I tapped the door knocker, a bright brass crab, and waited, slapping the odd mosquito. My heart misgave me. Hoping to catch him off his guard, I had not rung up ahead or written. Look here, I hoped to say to him, can we not put by all mystification? Let me tell you what I’ve been through these two dozen years at the hands of Castines, Cooks, and Burlingames, and there’s an end on’t! If you and André are not kin; if your son is not my son — let me hear you (and him) tell me so, plainly, fully, amicably, when I shall have told you (ditto) what-all has fetched me to imagine otherwise…

A blank-faced woman opened but did not unchain the door, and through that unfriendly space regarded me. Too well dressed to be a domestic, too old (I judged) to be Cook’s daughter, yet too young to be “Henri’s” mother. A second wife, perhaps? Her nose was soft, but her chin and jaw were hard; her brow was high and fair, her eyebrows were plucked to a sharp line, her lips were thin — well, verbal portraiture is not my forte: sufficient that while in no particular uncomely, her phiz tout ensemble was remarkably empty, like that of a receptionist mildly inclined to mask her essential incordiality and profound uninterest. I identified myself, asked for Mr Cook, was told curtly he was not at home. I had historical papers concerning his family to show him, I declared, certain to be of considerable interest to him. Granted, I’d made no appointment, ought to have done… But these documents were truly remarkable. When was he expected to return? Or had he an office I might stop by, as I was in the neighbourhood?

She had no idea when he would return, tonelessly intoned Ms Blank — I was put in mind of Ambrose’s depiction, no doubt exaggerated, of his ex. He was on a speaking tour of Pennsylvania and upstate New York, but she believed he meant to return in time for the Dorchester County tercentenary celebration in July. She waxed more particular, though no more warm, like an answering service: He had meant to take in, en route, the anniversary commemoration of the Fenian invasion of Fort Erie, Canada, from Black Rock, near Buffalo, in 1866, in which one of his ancestors had played a certain role. He was supposed too to do something at Niagara Falls, she believed, and, later in the month, at the other Chautauqua: the one in west New York spelled with a q. She didn’t know. Something about a movie, she thought.

End of professional grip. The woman neither closed nor unchained the door, but waited for me to turn away. Adieu, sanity! I didn’t think to ask whether she was Mrs Cook; at that point an incordially neutral reply that she was Mme Castine or Mme de Staël would scarcely have surprised me. Numbly recrossing the Chesapeake, I heard reported on ABC News that the American Falls at Niagara was about to be turned off, so that engineers and geologists could examine its fast-receding face and study ways to retard its crumbling: the accumulated rockfall at its base had made the drop less spectacular than that of Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, and what with the U.S. Bicentennial but seven years off… Meanwhile, in the city of Niagara Falls itself (the American, not the Canadian, city), fire had melted the famous wax museum: George and Martha Washington, Abe Lincoln, FDR and JFK and RFK (whose likeness was to have been unveiled on the morrow, 1st anniversary of his assassination) — all had gone up like so many candles, or down into expensive puddles of wax. Nevertheless, the chamber of commerce expected tourist traffic to reach an all-time high this summer: who would not go out of his way to view such wonders as a turned-off waterfall and a melted museum?

God bless America! And spare me.

Ambrose did not. I drove home too dazed by all these obscure comings-together to bother rechanging into go-go garb. My lover was cross, unreasonable. Of course I might go where I pleased — to Chautaugua, to London, to Hell — but why hadn’t I notified him? He was not at all surprised that A. B. Cook might be involved in Prinz’s film, inasmuch as your Sot-Weed Factor novel involves the Cookes and Burlingames, and the film has a retrospective as well as a prospective aspect. What did surprise him was that I would be as it were unfaithful to him with “old Cook.” Never mind the accident of Cook’s not being there: I had slipped out, slipped into my Old Lady clothes, slipped across the Bay on pretext (at best a pretext to myself) of verifying those patently concocted letters, to a chap whose obvious interest to me was his possible connexion with my erstwhile lover…

Jolly enough of that! I shot back. That day’s driving had been a shlep, not a slip, and made for good if futile cause. Those letters were not obviously false, though very possibly tampered with. Those Old Lady clothes were a welcome respite for this old lady, in whose neck moreover that A. B. Cook had been almost as considerable a pain as present company. And even if I had pursued him for his connexion with the grandest pain in the arse of all, my erstwhile lover, lifetime tormentor, and father of my lost child — even if I’d bedded the bloke in hopes of solving that nasty little riddle — well and bloody good, and he Ambrose ought to bloody aid and pity me instead of bloody banging a weary old lady on the head with his bloody mad jealousies and petty despotisms, et farking cetera!

In short, a little lovers’ quarrel. It did not last long. I was weary; am; and Ambrose knows how to play me. Under my fatigue I liked it that he was jealous; knew he knew I liked it; even liked knowing he knew, etc. God and my sisters forgive me!

He made me doff the O.L. oufit instanter; tupped me a good one. As I lay propped after for the sake of his low-motiles, he announced more agreeably that whilst I’d been taking French leave that morning, he’d solved with his diagrams a tricky problem in the plan of his Perseus story, and authorised me to pass the info on to you if I was still writing these weekly one-way letters. I begged him fill that blank another time; I was too weary. And speaking of blanks, I mentioned my blank informant at Chautaugua. Ambrose was not interested.