John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

Just in time for you to become the rescuer and us the rescued. Bless you for that.

Let me add that we were all in our forties by then, like Cindy and Neddie now: happy to be reunited but unhappy to be widows, divorcées, and never-marrieds; banged around by life but kept afloat by Thelma/Thalia's unfailing good humor — and none of us, for our separate reasons, much interested by then in finding another significant other. By the time the Great Diary Fallout was truly behind us, we were turning fifty, content with our new jobs and salvaged life situations, and independent except for our interdependency …

"A different kind of Three-Way from the classic model."

And the first Ph.D. dissertations were being written on Manny's Fates.

To all of which I would add that while Gracie and I especially, now that we were reinstalled at Severn Day, had to be super-discreet in the area of S-E-X, none of the three of us had yet abandoned such pleasures altogether. Had we?

Well: I had, I guess — except for getting it off now and then with the handy-dandy gizmo that you guys gave me for my forty-fifth. But you had your little sessions with Carol Tucker, didn't you, Ag?

A very well-to-do former student of ours, Listener, by then a trustee of Severn Day and thus not likely to spill our beans. She and I would get together in her hotel whenever she was in town for a board meeting. Sweet saucy If-You-Can't-Fuck-Her-Suck-Her Tucker: Erato's last stand. Et tu, Thalia?

"Me? Yes. Well: Widowhood took the zing out of Open Marriage, for sure. And I'm convinced that Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 brought on my early menopause, or at least a total loss of appetite in that department after age fifty. For the next dozen-plus years I got off on tennis and aerobics instead, until my back and knees gave out and I broke my hip in an escalator tumble at our nearby Nordstrom. And so at the tender age of seventy, here we are at Bernbridge-in-the-Boondocks, waiting to die."

Some of us more patiently than others. And how we wound up here is as follows: Gracie, s.v.p.?

Got it. As has been told, Aggie's early emphysema and the rest sidelined her circa 1979, when she was just turning fifty. Thelma and I were able to work into our sixties, until her failing joints nudged her into slightly early retirement from her doctor's office job and my reaching sixty-five prompted my very reluctant goodbye to Severn Day. Which life change, I'm convinced, inspired my uterine cancer, cured by the timely removal of all that female plumbing that had so bemused both Doc Sam Weisman and Manny Dickson in their different ways. Have we mentioned, Junior, that LIFE'S A BITCH, as the bumper sticker says, AND THEN YOU DIE, if you're lucky enough to live so long? Meanwhile, however, it does have its moments, and the older and feebler we-all got — me especially, I guess — the more it seemed to us that our college days (you know what I mean) were the most eventful, the most memorable, the most fun time of our lives, in particular those Lambda Upsilon gigs with Manny and all that followed therefrom: his obsession with Y's and threesomes and mythic obstacle courses and scavenger hunts. We've loved our various mates and our children and our students and our work, but what we're most likely to be remembered for, if anything — whether thanks to Junior's biography-in-the-works or despite it — is our inspiration of Manfred Dickson's trilogy and our later input-sessions with him while he was writing it. As my Cindy-Ella of a daughter makes clear (rising from the ashes of her parents' divorce to turn smut into Art), that was our Place Where Three Roads Met.

So what happened — if I may, Gracie? — was that when we reached the point where even housekeeping got to be more than the three of us could manage, and we needed ever more looking after, we scouted all the assisted-living kinds of places in the Baltimore/Washington/Annapolis area, and found enough pluses and minuses in every one to make the thing a tossup. So back and forth we went, literally and figuratively, until we were dizzy with indecision and getting on one another's nerves and about ready to just flip a coin, if we'd had an eight- or ten-sided coin. Then one fine day near the start of Bill Clinton's second term, Thelma came to our rescue by announcing… Thelm?

"By announcing, 'None of the above, girls: It's going to be Bernbridge Manor for us, way up in Bernbridge EmDee, where we don't know a frigging soul, and who cares, since most of our old friends are dead anyhow.' "

Thus spake Thalia, and we said, "Bernbridge? What's this Bernbridge? Why Bernbridge?" And she said, "You nailed it, Gracie: Here's the Why." By which she meant both the reason why and the letter Y, as she showed us on the map.

"Because once I'd thought of it, and the three of us, and our connection with Manny, I got as hooked on those Y's as he'd been — to the point where I actually looked to see whether there might be an assisted-living place somewhere on the Wye River, over on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where Clinton and Arafat and Netanyahu signed that Wye River Accord that led to zilch. As did my not-so-Heroic Quest? So then, just to get the damned decision decided, I checked out all such configurations within a fifty-mile radius of Annapolis, and voilà! "

Voilà indeed: the far northeast corner of the Old Line State, where the Mason-Dixon, appropriately, quits running east-west to divide Pennsylvania from Maryland, among other things, and turns ninety degrees south to divide Maryland from Delaware, while the line between Delaware and Pennsylvania shoots off northeastward in a great arc around Wilmington — a sort of loopy-looking lambda, to those inclined to see such things.

More exactly, our Bernbridge sits just a stone's throw from that three-way, on yet another one, where Route 896 drops south from Pennsylvania to the east end of the Mason-Dixon. Just where it crosses that celebrated line at the curious conjunction that Aggie mentioned and continues southeastward into Delaware, a county road forks off southwestward into Maryland: a jim-dandy inverted Y like the one in Clotho, superimposed on that state-line three-way out of Lachesis/ My kids said, "Go for it, Mom/" Who could resist?

And who gave a shit anyhow? Our life stories were all but told by then, through the second half of a century whose horrors we'd been spared, up to the commencement of another, which bids at best to be no better. Each of us had seen and done and been whatever, separately or together, and hadn't seen/done/been what we hadn't, for better or worse. So now we play Bernbridge bridge and bingo while we wait for our systems to finish failing — and who gives a shit, and why should they? What's it all been for?

Well, now, Aggie: pour l'art, maybe? To've added a bit of spice to a certain Controversial Modern Classic and a not-bad-at-all spinoff novella, and now to shed a little light on the circumstances of their composition. Is that nothing?

Yup.

"No! Unless Aggie's reached the point of feeling that capital-C Civilization itself is nothing."

I'm getting there. But I do still enjoy our glass of wine every night with dinner.

Then you're still welcomely on board, sis. And if the tape of our lives has almost run out, that means there may be enough left for a few last words. Your mike, Aggie.

Fuck it. And fuck you, motherfucking Junior, and your fucking father and his fucking hero-myth and his fucking books. Fuck everything — except my sisters.

Good girl, Ag: still aboard, even as our ship goes down. Thelma?

"Just want to add what only now occurred to me: that if we think of Junior's tracking us down here at Bernbridge last month — which Cindy had given us advance warning of, Listener, after he'd tracked her down — as a re play of his father's tracking us down in Annapolis back in the mid-fifties, then that old reconnection with Manny Senior can be called the fore play of what we're doing now with Junior. Right?"