John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"I swear if that ain't O.B.G.'s daughter!" Greene marveled as we crossed the stone courtyard. "Couldn't be two such uppity ones in the entire cottonpicking College!" He prodded an elbow into my side. "Ain't she a hot one, though — what you might say teasewise?"

"Indeed she is not," I said. "Excuse me, but I wonder sometimes about the way you see things."

"You don't believe her, do you?" At my request he forwent the Cut-Out lever so that we could talk as we returned to Great Mall. I replied that the issue of whether or not Georgina was "O.B.G.'s daughter" seemed less to the point in my opinion than his appraisal of her, which struck me as altogether unwarranted.

"A durn floozy's what she is," he insisted. "Tease the bejeepers out of a feller."

"Not sweet and modest like your wife, I suppose."

"I should hope to kiss a pig!"

"And not pure, like Anastasia?"

Greene closed his eyes and bade me please not to speak in the same breath of darky harlots and passèd maiden girls. "Speaking of which," he added slyly, "don't forget what you promised me, Stacey's-motherwise; I'll see if I can fix up Dr. Spielman's prosecutor."

"For pity's sake!" I cried. "Look here, now — " He did, beaming and squinting, and very nearly steered us into a horse-chestnut tree. "No no! Look where you're going!" He returned his attention to the road in time to misread a sign directing us leftwards. He was sure it had pointed right, and turned that way; when I insisted it had pointed left, he reminded me that Stoker was a great hand at altering direction-signs, and that in any case the motorcycle's speed and power would compensate for misdirections. He opened the throttle to demonstrate his point, and cried, "Yippee!" as we swept through a busy intersection. I told him sharply to stop behaving like a kid.

"Dr. Bray says be like a kindergartener if you want to pass," he answered — pouting a little, but to my great relief halving our speed. I pointed out to him that Enos Enoch's advice had been to become as a kindergartener, not to remain one, and that Bray was anyhow wrong to Certify him on that ground.

"You're plain jealous," Greene teased.

"Never mind that," I said. "Whatever it is that's passèd about kindergarteners, it isn't their childishness. Or their ignorance."

Here he grew stubborn, if no less cheerful: "Say what you want how I'm just a simple-head country boy; there's a thing or two I know for sure. I'd rather be me than a educated slicker like Dr. Sear."

I agreed that Enos Enoch might have had in mind a certain kind of innocent simplicity such as Dr. Sear could not be said to share. "But you're not innocent or simple either, it seems to me. You just like to see yourself that way."

"I guess I'm okay," he grumbled. "What the heck anyhow."

"You might be," I declared, "if you'd open your eyes a little. Pardon me for criticizing you like this, but I hate to see everybody believing what Bray tells them."

"It's a free college, George. Say what you want." Now he pouted in earnest, and flushed red as his fresher pimples. "I'm right used to getting knocked, imagewise, by Sally Ann and everybody else." His manner suggested nevertheless that he was curious to hear what I had to say, even eager, though apprehensive.

"Tell me one thing honestly," I said; "you did used to service O.B.G.'s daughter, didn't you?"

He snorted. "Which ain't to say, mind you! Durn uppity woman! Said she'd tell Sally Ann if not!"

"Tell her what?"

"That I'd been in the woods with her." He squinted his eye at me. "Which ain't to say!"

"But you did service her, didn't you? And put her in kid?"

"That don't matter!" He thumped the handlegrip with his fist. "It's the principle of the thing. Could just as well been one of them redskins."

"The ones you let service her, so they wouldn't scalp you?"

He jerked his head. "I soon learnt them a lesson: Only good red's a dead red! Who d'you suppose opened up the New Tammany Forest Preserve?"

"And drove out the redskins…"

"Yeah!"

"And cut down the trees, and ruined the rivers…"

"Say what you want! Say what you want!" I did just that, all the way to Great Mall, but in a cordialer tone. First I laid his hostility by assuring him that unlike his wife and some other of his critics I did not regard him as a hopeless flunker, but rather admired what evidence I'd seen of his magnanimity, industriousness, efficiency, and ingenuity.

"Good old New Tammany know-how," he declared; and as I had expected, once sincerely praised he began to condemn himself: he had done wrong by O.B.G. and O.B.G.'s daughter, especially in terms gone by, and had yet to make right amends; he had laid waste the wilderness, exploited his mill-hands, sneered at book-learned folk and art-majors, been rude to exchange-students, played hooky from school, bribed traffic-policemen and legislators, serviced his private secretary (who however was as flunkèd a durn tease in the first place as O.B.G.'s daughter), subscribed to lewd magazines in plain wrappers, made a fortune in the Second Campus Riot, and cheated on his income tax; and though he'd made efforts lately to redeem in some measure this poor past, he had replaced old failings with new: he manufactured packages intended to disguise and mislead as well as to contain, and plastics designed to break upon the expiration of their guarantee; he spent too much time watching Telerama, for the low quality of which his own Department of Promotional Research was largely responsible; and it was he (that is to say, his staff) who had invented the premium-stamps with which rival departments now lured students into their curricula. But of all the failings for which he had to answer — and he dared say there was no article in the Junior Enochist Pledge that he had left unbroken — he counted none so vile as the desecration of his marriage-vows in the hot-chocolate arms of O.B.G.'s daughter. As well spit on the NTC pennant, become a Founderless Student-Unionist, or be disrespectful of your passèd mother like that immigrant Dean Taliped in the play, as defile purity with impurity! Which, however, wasn't to say.

"That's the only thing keeps Miss Anastasia and me apart, marriage-wise," he concluded.

I was astonished. "You mean she's said she'd let you service her if it weren't for deceiving your wife? Or what?"

"I beg you mind what you say!" he said angrily. What he meant, I discovered, had nothing to do with his wife at all (whose existence, like Stoker's, he seemed unable to keep in mind when his beloved's name was mentioned): he simply felt so unworthy of Anastasia's pristine favors, sullied as his conscience was, that he could not bring himself to speak to her, much less make the proposal he yearned to make.

I bleated with mirth. "Oh, for Founder's sake!"

"Laugh if you want, doggone it," he said. "When a man's sunk down to the likes of O.B.G.'s daughter, it plain unstarches him for good girls like Chickie Ann and Miss Anastasia."

I assumed his tongue had slipped; it turned out, however, that he'd used one of his pet-names for Mrs. Greene. Unlikelihood! But that memory from buckwheat-days made me dizzy. Sorely I was tempted to inquire about Mrs. Greene's tastes in verse; judging from Greene's view of certain people whom I knew also, and my recollection of his tale at the Pedal Inn, I began to wonder whether Miss Sally Ann was quite as guiltless as her husband made her out. But I had no clear evidence, and it seemed more tactful in any case to bring him indirectly to that consideration. Where to begin!

"Do you think Max is innocent or guilty?" I asked him.

He considered for a moment — not at all disturbed by the change of subject — and then replied: "You got to have faith."