John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

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."