John Barth: Where Three Roads Meet

"So it goes."

So it went, alas, as shall be revealed if Narrator ever gets his act together. Meanwhile, meet Al Baumann, Reader: a gentle and wispy-haired but nonetheless commanding presence, lightly brown-goateed a dozen-plus years before the high sixties brought male face hair back into style, and figured not unlike the instrument he played so authoritatively at Will Chase's side on the bandstand of the Bohemia Beach Club and, subsequently, in what passed for a student hangout at super-serious VVLU — a hangout denominated, by that bass-shaped bassist himself, the Trivium…

"Because all three curricular roads there met, Reader: the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and what's now called Professional Studies but used to be Business and Education."

Plus all three campus castes: undergrads, grad students, and the odd junior instructor or assistant prof.

"Plus our dates, unless we were already-married war vets: the belles of Goucher and dear nearby CONDOM—"

Their sacrilegious acronym, Reader, for the all-female College of Notre Dame of Maryland: doubly titillating to horny VVLUers inasmuch as contraception in that precinct was an even bigger no-no than premarital sex.

"As for one's bearded, bass-shaped bassist-buddy: Granted, I was no skinny-assed redneck like some band-mates I could mention. Ate too much dreck, drank too much National Bohemian, smoked too many of the free cigarettes handed out in our student union by tobacco companies looking to get us hooked, and didn't exercise half enough, despite Doctor Dad's tongue-tsking. But 'twas chiefly a product of inherited metabolism — and anyhow none of the above is known to cause leukemia, which takes care of your why-no-PBS-documentaries question. On to Winnie?"

With pained pleasure, while that so-able and magnanimous rosy-cheeked lass remains freeze-framed back in academic 1948–49, telephone in hand, awaiting the end of this interrupted interruption of Section One, "The Call," of Part One, TELL ME, of our novella-triad Where Three Roads Meet …

" Your novella-triad, man. I just keep the beat."

Nope: Al and Will together kept the beat, with a little help from Winnie Stark's left hand, while her right both carried our tune and developed and resolved it. Win is the without-whom-not of this Three Freds combo.

"Of their combo, maybe; but their story's your baby, excuse the expression. On with it?"

Only children both; pals and playmates since early childhood; their parents near neighbors in upscale-but-laid-back Roland Park, not far from the campuses of their kids' respective day schools and subsequent colleges…

"Not that we didn't consider Harvard or Princeton and Radcliffe or Smith after finishing Gilman and Bryn Mawr, mind — just as we'd now and then considered other one-and-onlies besides each other. But as has been mentioned, only VVLU was offering that fast-track Ph.D…."

And Goucher was the best nondenominational women's college in the same town, and the girl- and boyfriend competition never measured up to what you K–12 sweethearts — K—sixth form? — had become for each other over the years.

"Reader might as well hear that Win and I were in each other's pants from our let's-play-doctor days through the look-what-I'm-sprouting-down-here and just-got-my-first-period period. Neither of us knows whether I technically deflowered her with my lower-school finger or my upper-school cock, but either way it was at least as much on her initiative as on mine. And we'd been so close already for so long in so many ways that if anything in that line felt naughty to us, it was because we were virtual sibs. Which is how your Chi-anti-bottle buddy managed to score such a doll. Why Win wasn't preggers by age fifteen used to be a mystery to both of us — but I'm getting ahead of your story: Tell."

So meet Winifred Stark, Reader: ample-figured, chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed strawberry blondie, her dad a mid-scale real estate developer thriving in the postwar housing boom from which many of the city's now-inner suburbs date; her mom a depressive alcoholic, alas, periodically drying out in nearby Sheppard Pratt Hospital between extended listless, even bedridden stretches at home — a woman driven to drink, as Al's dad diagnosed it, by her failures as a wife and mother because driven to drink — and Al's mom, faute de mieux, more a mother to our Win than was her own mother.

"Which benevolent circumstance, needless to add, made us feel more than ever like brother and sister — especially upon that unhappy woman's demise in Winnie's tenth year, whereafter a series of housekeepers attended her pa while Doc and Miz Baumann embraced his daughter as virtually their own."

An upbeat, firm-willed, independent-spirited lass, be it said, who welcomed their monitoring, took the loss of her not-much-of-a-mother in stride, comforted her not-all-that-bereft father as best a third- or fourth-grader can, and threw herself into her schoolwork, music lessons, team sports, and bosom-buddyhood with young Al Baumann. To whom she enjoyed mischievously displaying and even offering to his touch the not-yet-budding bosoms that anon would blossom into adolescent splendor.

"Squeezed and licked into full bloom, we half believed, in our let's-be-naughty sessions in the loft of the Starks' quote Carriage House, as was her playmate's uncircumcised shlong. Not quite your mythic hero's Summons to Adventure, but pretty exciting to us pre-teenies."

Who then as high-schoolers duly dated others, pour le sport; groped and were groped by same within modest limits, but always with relief came back from these amusing excursions to each other, with whom by then so much went without saying that they could get on with their joint story without forever having to rebegin it Once upon a time.

"And speaking of which — I mean getting on with one's story…?"

On with same they got: Went off to their respective college freshman years at campuses less than five miles apart. Promised their respective parents (Win had a stepmom by then, whom, contrary to stereotype, she liked better than she'd ever liked her late mother) that they'd not marry until they'd completed their degrees, nor "live together" in the meanwhile — that being a thing still Not Done, by and large, among people of their sort in those days, although the afore-noted presence on campus of so many married war vets was loosening the old conventions. Dwelt therefore in their respective college dorms for that first year, they did, it being agreed by all hands that Getting Out of the House was a significant part of one's higher education, and then in just-off-campus apartments with same-sex roommates through their second year — each often "sleeping over" in the other's flat. In that year too their growing interest in jazz, especially of the Progressive and then the Cool varieties (an interest that Narrator ought to've re-established two pages ago, but neglected to), led them to exchange their extracurricular hobby of playing chamber music with Win's Peabody pals for working dance gigs with a local non-union outfit.

"Because as scabs we earned less per job than the union guys in town, but scored more jobs."

While at the same time, in young Baumann's case, so impressing his VVLU Humanities profs and adviser that by the end of his second college year (one can't, strictly speaking, say "sophomore year," inasmuch as in the university's fast-track advanced-degree program he was already a "predoc," neither an undergraduate nor quite a graduate student) he was invited to enroll in graduate-level seminars the following year and perhaps to be a junior instructor in his department's two-year undergrad survey course called Literature & Philosophy.

"By which was meant representative classics of both disciplines in Western Civ, Reader, from Homer and the pre-Socratics up to maybe Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, and their arguably reciprocal influence: one major weekly lecture to the whole class by appropriate bigshots on the senior faculty, followed by twice-weekly small-section follow-ups led by us JIs. No better way to study that high-protein stuff than to have to teach it."