John Barth - Letters

A restless night. O.J. pitched a bit in a surprise southerly that fetched across the low-lying island and the open harbor; I was on deck every few hours to check for drag by taking bearings on the “clubhouse” lights, which for some reason burned all night. In the morning, a fresh pretty one, the air was back where it belonged, NNW 5–7. My head was muzzy; Todds Point was but a quick eleven-mile run through Knapps Narrows and across the mouth of the Choptank; I could eat lunch in my cottage, put the cruise away, and hit the office fresh after the weekend. Heads I keep going — to certain haunts on Patuxent and Potomac, to Smith and Tangier islands, then home to my dearest and closest, the Tred Avon and the Choptank — tails I pack it in. I flipped my nickel and got, not “the skinny-assed, curly-tailed buffalo” who in ’37 had bid me chuck certain letters into Cambridge Creek (concerning Harrison Mack Senior’s pickled poop) and let the Macks go whistle for their three million dollars, but that buffalo’s ’69 counterpart: Monticello.

Home, then.

But I am, Dad, and will be for some days yet, Todd Andrews, and this is 13 R: no more to be dictated now than then by a “miserable nickel” (worth, three decades later, half as much as its Indian-headed, buffalo-tailed predecessor). I upped anchor, bid good-bye to Poplar Island and Whatever Goes On There, and set my course for 200°: an easy, lazy, self-steering all-day run straight down the Chesapeake, wing and wing under O.J.‘s long-footed main and jib, whisker-poled out. Past the nothing where Sharps Island used to be, on whose vanished beach Jane Mack and I once coupled (Restricted and Prohibited areas to starboard: Naval Research Lab firing range); past vanishing James Island off the Little Choptank, where some 1812 invaders once came to grief and where Polly Lake and I, many Augusts, came to joy; 30-odd gliding miles down through a hot late-summer Saturday, listening to the Texaco opera (Tosca) and rereading the story of my life in The Floating Opera; to where (in this nonfictional rerun) the Coast Pilot turns into a catalogue of horrors— 204.36: Shore bombardment, air bombardment, air strafing, and rocket firing area. U.S. Navy. 204.40: Long-range and aerial machine-gun firing, U.S. Naval Propellant Plant. 204.42: Aerial firing range and target areas, U.S. Naval Air Test Center. 204.44: Naval guided missiles operations area… Air Force practice bombing and rocket firing… Underwater demolitions area, U.S. Naval Amphibian Base… Air Force precision test area —and where I turned into the Patuxent, seven peaceful hours later, and anchored for the night behind Solomons Island, intending to say goodbye next day to Mill and St. Leonard creeks.

Instead of which, I said hello to Jane Mack and Baron André Castine. It being the weekend, a great many yachts were in the anchorage already, large and small, power and sail — so many that I had my hands full finding a spot with room to swing, running forward to drop the hook at the right moment and then back to set it with the engine full-reversed. I had of course conned the anchorage first, and had vaguely noted, among several other yachts I’d crossed wakes with in the two weeks past, the big Trumpy-built trawler I’d seen up in Little Round Bay. Indeed, I’d moored O.J. between her (Baratarian, remember?) and a 50-foot ketch from Los Angeles, both of which rode on plenty of scope, rather than going in among the cluster of smaller boats. When I shut down the engine and went forward to adjust my rode, rig the anchor light, and watch how we swung, Jane Mack merrily called my name across the space between us.

That is, a lean tanned lady in fresh white linens did, from Baratarian’s afterdeck, where she sat with a less tan but equally turned-out gentleman, sipping something short. I waved back, then recognized her with a proper pang and wondered whether… But now her voice came amplified through a bullhorn brought her by a white-uniformed crewman. Toddy. Just in time for dinner. Come on over and meet André.

Small world, I megaphoned back from O.J.‘s bows. Let me wash and change.

I cannot say even what my feelings were, except that if not self-canceling they were anyhow canceled from the future, 13 R’s end, and meanwhile overriden by shrug-shouldered curiosity. I washed the day’s salt sweat off, dinghied over in my go-ashore seersucker, and was introduced to André, Baron Castine: a mustached, ruddy, virile fellow in his mid-fifties, with a broad smile, good teeth, an easy winning manner, and a fine cultured baritone voice softly accented a la Quebec (though the family estate was in Ontario). What they sipped was cold Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, fetched up by their steward in buckets of ice, along with caviar-and-cream-cheese canapés, from the air-conditioned galley. Jane as always was utterly at ease, as if we hadn’t humped aboard O.J. in May and again in the Todds Point cottage in June; as if I hadn’t seen those photos of her and her friend in spectacular flagrante delicto. Castine as well, with better reason: an immediately likable chap, who indeed looked to me less like the fellow in those photographs than like a better-bred relative of A. B. Cook (as Buffalo had reported).

Ah, well: people change. Their ease put me at mine. Castine informed me that the yacht was Jane’s gift for his 52nd birthday (younger than he looked, then); that he thought it a bit, ah, baronial, and was unfortunately prone to mal de mer —he’d even missed a few meals aboard the Statendam in Bermudian waters! But he was determined for her sake to acquire sea legs, and so had committed himself to the sport of deep-sea fishing. Was I an angler?

Toddy always has an angle, Jane declared, not especially meaningly. He’s probably been following us to see whether we deep-six Harrison’s merde.

I was astonished. Castine asked about the verb “to deep-six,” but clearly understood the general sense of Jane’s allusion. That tone prevailed through dinner (I surprised myself by accepting their invitation; all envy, guilt, and jealousy slipped away in their easy company, lubricated no doubt by the fine champagne; and after two near-solitary August weeks afloat, the air conditioning and the company were irresistible. Fresh roses on the table! Conversation! A steward to cook and serve!): the good-humored implication that they knew more about certain of our common interests than they were telling. I asked where in fact that minor but notable item of Harrison’s estate reposed. Jane was (smilingly) damned if she knew, and damned if she’d tell me if she did; things were too hectic at m.e. for her to bother with such foolishness until my subpoena, which she quite anticipated, obliged her to. Castine asked my opinion on the danger of being hijacked in these waters, or on the Intracoastal Waterway, by narcotics smugglers: one heard rumors of piracy and of Coast Guard cover-ups. We all doubted there was any danger. I inquired about his vessel’s name. Both his own forebears and Jean Lafitte’s, he declared, were Gascon; perhaps he would take up piracy himself if Mack Enterprises fell upon hard times and if he could learn to do without Dramamine. Did I know Longfellow’s poem about his (Castine’s) progenitor?

Artichokes vinaigrette. Escalope de veau and fresh asparagus, perfectly steamed. Had I heard anything from her wayward daughter? Jane wondered mildly. I considered; then reported my understanding that Jeannine had broken off with Reg Prinz and left the film company; that she was unhappy with the Fort Erie establishment and frequently disappeared from it; and that she was drinking too much. Castine tisked his tongue and regarded his fiancée. Without looking up from her sauce bearnaise Jane declared crisply that she knew all that; but Jeannine was her own woman and must find her own way. She Jane had been rebuffed too often by both of her children to do more than wish them well and hope for the best.