John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

And teach it he did, young Alfred B., to the lucky dozen or so freshmen who happened to draw his section. The particular blank tablet named Wilfred Chase learned more from him in two semesters than he'd learned in two years at Back-Home High — and not just about Lit & Phil, nor only in class.

"W.C.'s tabula wasn't all that rasa, man — but you're ahead of our story, no?"

Not really, once Reader is reminded that between Al's and Winnie's second and third college years came that Bohemia Beach Club summer afore-rehearsed, their attendant connection with and befriendment of Adequate Drummer and Strictly Amateur Arranger Wilfred Chase, their persuading him to give college a try despite his less than impressive academic preparation therefor, and their case-clinching invitation to him to be the third Fred in the light-jazz trio they had in mind to play weekend gigs in the new student hangout that they were trying to get renamed the Trivium. All of which came to pass.

"And more."

More indeed — such as Will's barely hanging on, academically, through the overwhelmment of that freshman year. Democritus and Lucretius to Hume and Schopenhauer! Euripides and Plautus to Goethe and Molière! Renaissance, Reformation and Counter Reformation! Neoclas-sics and Romantics! Who knew?

"Well…"

Patient and bemused A. Baumann did, for one, and lively-friendly W. Stark, who were living together by then in Briarwood 304, but who for the sake of appearances listed that Murphy-bedded studio apartment as hers alone and the one below it, 204, as his and his same-sex roommate's: posh accommodation indeed for a webfoot redneck greenhorn out of his depth!

"Out of his depth, maybe, but paddling madly and not quite sinking after all, while downloading not only old Lit-Phil One and Two, and Burgundies versus Bordeaux—"

And trolley cars and taxicabs! Lacrosse and tennis and chess! Frat-house binges and East Baltimore Street burlesque! Also classmates Jewish and Catholic, Asian and Indian, European and Canadian and Latin American—

"But not yet African American, shame to say, in those still-segregated days. And our Wilfred downloaded not only these exotic marvels, one was saying…"

But also a much-improved acquaintance with the non-academic world of work — especially after his unimpressive freshman-year grade point average cost him his scholarship. With the best will in the world, excuse the poor pun, Chase père and mère could manage no more than half his VVLU tuition, they having aged parents to help provide for and their own elder years a-coming. The other half, plus room and board and books and spending money, their son had to scramble for, he being by then determined to hang on in that venue at whatever cost, to the end not only of imbibing more Lit & Phil—

"Not to mention History, Economics, Sciences both Natural and Social, a second language or two, and a few other items—"

But also in hopes of discovering the True Vocation that music had turned out not to be, nor scholarship either, QED: a calling more specific than the "Humanities" he'd chosen as his faute de mieux freshman-year major. In short, learning who and what he was and deciding who and what to be, in the way Al Baumann knew himself to be a Lit-Phil professor-in-the-works, and Winnie Stark knew she was some sort of librarian-to-be and Al's lifelong soulmate. That pair being, as afore-observed, the sole offspring of better-heeled families, their Three Freds dance gigs earned them spending money over and above their parents' generous provision and Al's junior-instructor stipend. Will, on the other hand, while still beat-keeping for the Freds on weekends, worked another job and a half that summer to support himself and make tuition payments: as a full-time night-shift timekeeper at a steel mill on the city's east side, and by day as a parttime roach-spray salesman in its bug-infested black ghettos, among sundry other pickup employments, all of which enriched his résumé of extracurricular real-world experience beyond high school clerking in his parents' store and musicianing in the (by-then-defunct) Bohemia Beach Club.

"And taught him, by the way, that the worlds of white-collar office work and product-peddling, like those of store-clerking and the blue-collar trades, were not for him, except as stopgaps. While to the more appealing calls of music and scholarship he found himself no more capable of professional-level response than to that of tennis, say, or chess. But tell me, man: Is this the Three Freds Story, or the one about How Will Chase Found His Voice?"

Those stories are one story, to which can now be added (what Reader may well have surmised) that for whatever mix of reasons — simple generosity and hospitality, amused fascination with a rustic innocent, reluctance to find and break in a brand-new replacement drummer if the incumbent flunked—

"All of the above, plus one thing more—"

Freds One and Two, who had befriended their country cousin on the Bohemia Beach bandstand and coached him (Al especially, but not exclusively) through his freshman-year survival struggles, had by that year's end virtually adopted him. Not as a son, mind, the kid they'd never have…

"Ouch."

Sorry there. But more as a not-unpromising but thitherto deprived kid brother, to be gently initiated into assorted mysteries large and small.

"Not unpromising indeed. The fact is, Reader, that just as Will Chase's first Great Ambition had been music, for which alas he simply hadn't the right stuff or anyhow enough thereof, so Fred One, as I seem to be being designated, had since boyhood more than anything aspired, not to teach Lit and Phil, honorable as that profession is, but to create same — especially the former. For which however alas et cetera? Granted, he might discern precociously the outlines of the Ur-Myth, say, and in order to trace its ubiquity in the literatures of the world he might take unto himself the vast corpus of those literatures, insofar as a brash twenty-one-year-old insomniac can—"

Which is to say, pretty fucking far.

"But he would eagerly have swapped all that for the gift of adding even a single small item to the inventory: not a learned commentary, but a capital-T Text! Not one more midrash, but a bit o' Scripture! In that line, however, as in at least one other…"

Never mind, please. Sufficient to say that said Fred now saw fit to see in his Bohemia gig-mate, later his eagerest student and then his protégé and official-though-not-actual apartment-mate — and moreover to persuade Fred Two that she saw as well — what said gig-mate/student/et cetera would scarcely have presumed to see in himself: the potential for doing, artfully, what his benevolent mentor had so aspired to.

"Which artfulness, shall we call it, extends to Narrator's keeping Our Winifred, shall we call her, on hold, let's say, for lo these many pages, phone in hand on hand-me-down couch in Briarwood Three-zero-four with Lou Levy on the line, the Triple-F story's Present Action frozen in interrupted mid-interruption while he takes his sweet time and ours filling in the blanks of Background. Far be it from a mere bass-shaped scholar-critic to criticize, but one wonders whether Narrator's artfulness mightn't extend further to wrapping up this extended Exposition and getting on with the effing story, at least Part One thereof, dot dot dot question mark? Tell Me, man!"

Roger maybeco, old buddy who never had the much-mixed blessing of growing old. The Effing Story is what's getting itself told, believe it or not, in its less-than-straight-forward fashion: a story one of whose apparent meanders fetched us to that spring '49 mid-morning in Briarwood 304 when nineteen-year-old Wilfred Chase, winding up his sophomore year at VVLU and hearing once again his mentor-friend's trademark imperative Tell Me, set about happily reminding all hands of that so-consequential mid-term day in Alfred Baumann's freshman Lit & Phil section when the young instructor had drawn on the blackboard an equiangular Y and said, "Okay, guys: In eight to ten pages' worth of sentences both articulate and legible, tell me before next Friday what this symbol says to you." Which recounting — prompted by Winnie Stark's observation that her gynecologist's wall chart of the Human Female Reproductive System (by her remarked on her recent annual visit to that office), with its bubblegum-pink fallopian tubes converging L & R upon the uterine cervix, was yet another pregnant analogue, so to speak, to the Place Where Three Roads Meet — had been interrupted and remained suspended by what we would learn presently but did not yet know just then to be a phone call from Louis Levy: proprietor, headmaster, and sole full-time employee of the Levy Preparatory School, a.k.a. the Cheatery.