John Barth - Letters

“Sorry, Todd,” she said (neutrally): “No hard feelings about your vote, but I’m meeting my fiancé in New York.”

Two times up, two times out. Just a week after 10 R I’d been permitted to take dinner with her at Tidewater Farms (where she’s seldom to be found anymore) and set forth my sentiments on the matter of her blackmailing: that inasmuch as there had been no subsequent threats after the first letter from Niagara Falls, the investigator recommended to me by legal colleagues in nearby Buffalo had nothing really to proceed upon; he agreed with me that there was little to be done until and unless the blackmailer was heard from again when she filed suit against Harrison’s will. For this opinion — which disappointed her itch to punish — I was thanked. But my after-dinner overture (a mere squeezing of her hand over brandy; an honest declaration that she looked radiant as ever; a head-shaking admission that I was still overwhelmed, overwhelmed, by our unexpected love-making of the week before) was smilingly squelched.

“Don’t forget, my dear: I’m to be married.”

I refrained from asking who had forgotten that detail, or found it irrelevant, out by Red Nun 20 on May 16.

In a word, it would have seemed, even as of yesterday, that that momentous moment was after all to be inconsequential —as, after all, our affair of 37 years past had been, except for the clouded paternity of Jane’s cloudy daughter. Nevertheless, it was the only thing that interested me or gave interest to other things. I write these lines to you for no other reason than to speak of Jane. I prepare to defend Harrison’s will against the suits now separately filed by his widow and two children only because their quarrel reenacts an earlier one (“Yesterday Now!” Drew cracked when our paths crossed in orphan’s court); and I am obsessed with this reenactment only because it came to include the aforecelebrated 8 and 10 R. Jane, Jane!

Obsession it is, however. In the five weeks past, I have reexamined like scripture my old Floating Theatre memoir and its subsequent novelization for clues to what might happen next. 11 L (we recall, Dad) read June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win Mack v. Mack and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to. Or, as rendered in that novel:

I have in my office, opposite the desk, a fine staring-wall, a wall that I keep scrupulously clear for staring purposes, and I stared at it. I stared at it through February, March, April, and May, and through the first week of June, without reading on its empty surface a single idea.

Then, on the very hot June 17th of 1937, our Mrs. Lake, who is as a rule a model of decorum, came sweating decorously into my office with a paper cup of iced coffee for me, set it decorously on my desk, accepted my thanks, dropped a handkerchief on the floor as she turned to leave, bent decorously down to retrieve it, and most undaintily — oh, most indecorously — broke wind, virtually in my coffee.

“Oh, excuse me!” she gasped, and blushed, and fled…

Et cetera. The work is fiction: It was her pencil, not her handkerchief, Polly dropped. I do not have, never had, a staring-wall in my office. I used and use a window giving upon a mountain of oyster shells from the crab- and oyster-packing plant hard by Court Lane: shells that in those days were pulverized into lime for chicken feed or trucked down-county to pave secondary roads with, but now are recycled back to the oyster beds for the next generation of spats to attach themselves to. But it was in fact that serendipitous crepitation that put me in mind of the late Mack Senior’s bequest of his pickled defecations, and suggested to me that should his widow’s gardener, say, deploy that excrement about the flower beds of their Ruxton property, for example, I might just be able to make a case against Harrison’s mother for Attrition of Estate…

In honor of this anniversary and Harrison’s subsequent enrichment, I had later proposed to the Tidewater Foundation that fireworks be let off from Redmans Neck every June 17th; the motion did not carry, but Harrison seldom failed, except during the period of our estrangement, to drop by the office on that date for iced coffee with me and Polly, who took our teasing tributes with her usual good humor. Even last June, confined to Tidewater Farms, he had delivered to her via Lady Amherst a bottle of good French perfume, the gift card embossed with the old Mack Enterprises slogan, and I’d taken her to dinner as was my custom in honor of her aid in the largest case of its sort we’d ever won.

This year was different. Given 10 R, my reconnection with Jane, I could not make the ritual office jokes as PLF Day approached, lest my new obsession with my life’s recycling disturb the spontaneity of 11 R, which had assumed great importance to me. 10 R had literally refetched Jane into my life, my bed, my heart; though Polly’s famous flatus at 11 L had nothing directly to do with Jane and me, I looked to the character of its recurrence (Literal? Symbolical? Straightforward? Inverse?) for clues to what might follow. Was my future—12 R, 13 R — to be fecundated or stercorated? Was I in for another and final Dark Night of the Soul and Second Suicide? Or would my tremulous vision on the New Bridge in 1967, that Everything Has Intrinsic Value, somehow come to realization — with Jane, with Jane? What dénouement, grim or golden, had our Author up His sleeve?

Since May 16 I had not seen Polly socially, and our office relations, while certainly cordial, were merely official. But as we carried on our business (without once comparing notes on our separate “dates” after my shipboard party: unusual for us), I watched like an osprey from the side of my eye for clues to the reenactment I was confident we approached. In addition to that meeting of the Mack Enterprises Board of Directors where the old I’ s protest against the new me had been outvoted, our business had included the reviewing of those suits filed against Harrison’s will, a quick flight to Buffalo to meet that aforementioned detective and speak carefully with him about Jane’s blackmailer, and a board meeting of the Tidewater Foundation, where among other things we discussed the weighty matter of next September’s cornerstone ceremonies for the Tower of Truth (for the other directors the question was which documents and artifacts best represented 1969; for Yours Truly it was where to lay a cornerstone in a round tower) and passed on the annual applications for foundation grants. Mr. Jerome Bray’s LILYVAC nonsense we have finally washed our hands of, even Drew gruffly acknowledging that its fuzzy claim to radical-political relevance was fraudulent. Ditto the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks, now the king is dead. Reg Prinz’s film, “Bea Golden’s” sanatorium and haven for draft evaders, and the Original Floating Theatre II we still contribute to the support of, in various measure.

As my general secretary, Polly was witness to all this. She was as gratified as I by what she took to be Drew’s “mellowing,” especially towards me; we agreed it had nothing to do with the will contest, but could not decide whether it betokened a change of mood among political activists in the last lap of the Shocking Sixties or some personal ground-change in Drew since his father’s death. Together we tisked our tongues at the cost overruns on Schott’s Tower, as well as at certain evidence that the foundation work was not up to specifications and may have to be repaired at enormous expense to the state, since the contractor is filing for bankruptcy. We tisked again at the report (from Drew, via Jeannine) that Joe Morgan, who’d dropped out of sight from Amherst College after resigning his presidency at Marshyhope, has apparently done a Timothy Leary and surfaced as a hippie at the “Remobilization Farm.”