[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Tonight's reading is the last on the Poetry Center schedule.
I'd like to announce three other special events that
are coming up.
Writers at Work are sponsoring a reading
this Thursday night, November 5 in the junior ballroom.
And the readers will be Mary Carter and Pat Hoctel.
And on November 12, in the afternoon 3 o'clock,
Robert Pack will speak in Student Union 256.
We'll have some posters up about that
to remind you of the place.
The Poetry Center and Writers at Work
are combining forces to bring to campus Mark Strand who
will read with Nancy Mairs in this auditorium two weeks
from tonight, November 17.
I hope you can come to the Student Union following
the reading.
We'll have refreshments in the Junior Ballroom.
The Junior Ballroom is on the third floor
level through that arcade just up above the dining room.
John Barth's most recent novel Letters
was published by Putnam in 1979.
His four previous novels are The Floating Opera,
The End Of The Road, The Sot-Weed Factor,
and Giles Goat-Boy.
He's written a series of short fictions, Lost In The Funhouse,
and a volume of novellas, Chimera,
which is National Book Award winner in 1973.
He's currently on the faculty at John Hopkins
University in Maryland.
It's my pleasure to introduce to you John Barth.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Lois Shelton.
I spent a happy part of this afternoon
chatting with the undergraduate and graduate students here.
And in the course of that chat said the three or four
presumably interesting things that I'm convinced--
I'm convinced that nobody at any one moment in his
her life has more than three or four interesting things to say.
I said them all in the course of-- whether they
are interesting or not, I got them said in that hour.
So tonight I'm not going to chat.
Tonight I'm going to read almost uninterruptedly
for about an hour.
Though I'll interrupt to announce the end of one thing
and the beginning of another.
I've just finished another book and like all good writers,
like all writers, whether they are good or not,
one is very full of the baby that one has just delivered.
And so I will without further comment
begin by quoting the jacket copy for this new novel which,
which Putnam will bring out in the spring of '82.
Sabbatical: A Romance is the story of Susan Rachel Allan
Seckler, a sharp young associate professor
of classical American literature,
part Jewish, part gypsy, possibly
descended from Edgar Allan Poe.
And her husband Fenwick Scott Key Turner,
a 50-year-old ex CIA officer presently between careers,
ardent sailor and husband, lineal
descendant of the author of The Star Spangled Banner.
And himself the author of a troublemaking book
about his former employer.
Fenwick Turner is now an aspiring novelist
who hates spy novels as much as he loves his wife of seven
years, his black eyed Susan.
What Fenn really wants to tell with Sue's collaboration
is their story.
A story that they've lived in part
aboard their cruising sailboat Pokey, Wye Island.
Just completing a nine month sabbatical voyage
from its home port in Chesapeake Bay to the Caribbean and back.
It is a story that involves, among other mysteries,
sinister Key Island, uncharted, smack
in the middle of the busy Chesapeake, put there I
suspect by James Michener.
The unsolved disappearance-- the unsolved disappearance
into that same bay of Fenn's twin brother,
Manfred, also known as the Prince of Darkness.
A fabled sea monster in realistic Tidewater, Maryland.
The vexing possibility that our children
may actually be our grandchildren.
The painful question whether to have
any children at this hour of the world and darkest
mystery of all, but the key to all such mysteries, love.
That key to their story is their story.
With a little help from the author.
Susan and Fenwick write Sabbatical: A Romance.
Now the jacket blurb, which in fact was written by Mrs. Barth,
here dissolves into obligatory hyperbole, which I'll skip.
And simply read you instead a few excerpts
from the story which may illuminate
some of those mysteries aforementioned.
In this first and longest excerpt,
which I'm calling The Cosmos for Lunch.
I find it-- I think it may be an appropriate excerpt
to read here because the novel is largely seaborne.
And here we are in a climate, which somebody told me
a while ago, the humidity level right now is 6%.
So I think perhaps to bring a little humidity in--
well, in fact, I'm going to start
reading not one of the watery parts of the novel
but one of the dry land parts until we can acclimate
to a watery environment.
In this excerpt, we find Fenwick Turner
en route by bus from Solomon's Island,
Maryland, Pokey's temporary mooring, to Washington DC,
to meet an old agency friend and mentor named Dugald Taylor.
Who has invited him to lunch at the Cosmos Club in Washington
to discuss Fenwick brother's disappearance.
Fenwick and Susan you must remember
have just re-entered Chesapeake Bay after a nine month nautical
adventure.
Fenn catches his bus.
Strange sensation to be inland again on wheels, out
of sight of water.
Stuffs his hat into his inside breast pocket,
dons his eyeglasses, and settles down
with notebook and pen for the 60 mile ride.
The reader has seen that Fenwick Scott Key
Turner is a man neither literary nor unlettered.
In his wife's opinion however, and Susan Rachel Allan Seckler
is professionally a literary woman,
he thinks about the medium in a sensible, sometimes original
way.
Unfettered by ideology, conventional preoccupation--
preconceptions or over much sophistication.
Between Solomons and Hollywood, Maryland, for example,
he makes a notebook note on the problem
of the literally marvelous in our story.
A problem he means to review with Susan next time
we are sailing.
Like many of his notes, this one takes
the form of an imaginary dialogue with her.
Its subject is the [? literally marvelous.
?] You and I agree that a story with nothing fantastic in it
lacks something essential.
But how can we stick to the fantastic into the middle
of Chesapeake Bay in the May and June of 1980?
Giant blue crabs, sea serpents.
Of Chessie, the sometimes sighted monster
of the lower Bay, we remain skeptical, do we not?
We do.
[LAUGHTER]
Uncharted islands in familiar waters, which are right.
The mysterious is one thing.
Key Island is mysterious.
Gus's disappearance was mysterious.
Susan I should say, or Susan being a full time
academic, the text of this novel is
spangled with footnotes which I shall
signal during the reading--
[LAUGHTER]
--this way.
Gus's disappearance she said.
Susan's radical younger half brother, Gus Seckler-Turner,
went to Chile in 1973 to help oppose the CIA's and her father
Manfred's successful efforts to destabilize
the legally elected socialist government
of the late President Salvador Allende Gossens.
Since the military coup of that same year,
Gus has been among the thousands of desaparecidos
presumably tortured and executed by the present regime.
The improbable is another thing.
Manfred's doing a John Arthur Paisley on the heels of Paisley
himself is bloody improbable.
John Arthur Paisley is the nonfictional CIA ex officer
and high level consultant who disappeared from his sloop
Brillig into Chesapeake Bay in September 1978,
and floated to the surface a week later
with 39 pounds of scuba weights around his waist,
and a 9mm bullet hole behind his left ear.
Fenwick's brother Manfred, who is also Susan's stepfather,
disappeared similarly the following spring
from Fen and Susan's boat Pokey Wye I,
but has never been found.
But what we're after is the truly irreal,
the literally marvelous.
Can't we just do it, stone wall it?
That's your answer to everything.
Hey, look, there's a sea monster.
There is not.
[LAUGHTER]
Suppose you and I reacted with as much
incredulity as the reader, wouldn't that cover our tracks.
Show me a sea monster see if I'm not incredulous.
Yet, we won't be able to deny it even though we
can't account for the reality of the irreality
would be undeniable.
We're home free.
It won't work.
You can have fabulous sea monsters or sperm
and eggs that talk.
You can have Fenwick and Susan, but you
can't mix the two together.
Scheherazade would, Shakespeare would,
we can do anything we can do, Suse,
and what we can't do as Fenn and Susan, we can do as author.
Let's face it, neither one of us has personally
[? experienced ?] one literally supernatural uncanny moment
or event in our entire lifetime.
It's ecstasy, sure.
Ecstatic, sure.
Uncanny like, sure.
But literally marvelous, no.
Yet, I won't have our story be unadulterated realism.
Reality is wonderful.
Reality is dreadful.
Reality is what it is.
But realism is a fucking bore.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
But we won't stoop to occultism or woozy neo-gothic,
certainly not.
[LAUGHTER]
We have a problem.
Yup.
Odysseus has magic.
Scheherazade has magic.
Dante has miracles.
What do we have?
Well, Don Quixote has only his delusions.
Huck Finn has only his superstitions.
The literally marvelous is what we
want with a healthy dose of realism to keep it ballasted.
But at this hour of the world I guess
we'll take whatever kind of marvelous we can manage.
No compromises, Fenn.
Seems to me it's all compromises in this business.
Realism is the ballast.
I like that.
Thank you.
Realism is your keel and ballast of your effing
ship of stories, Suse.
And a good plot is your mast and sails, but magic is your wind.
Your literally marvelous is your mother effing wind.
Now I'm hooked.
I want to talk to Edgar Poe in our story.
I want Gus and Manfred to come back.
Mainly I want us to love each other forever and never
quarrel, or get old, or die.
I want to be a mother without having children.
No, I want to have had children, to have been a mother.
No, I want to be a grandmother without having had children.
[LAUGHTER]
I'd mess up children.
How did I get on this subject?
We better consult your mother.
Magic is Carmen B Seckler's department.
We'll talk about it when we're sailing again.
I don't want to talk about it.
I mean the problem of the literally marvelous.
So do I. This note made, Fenn notes
that his notes on our story, to which the notebook's
principally devoted, have nearly all
to do with such general considerations
as the foregoing.
Almost none he notes have to do, for example, with description.
No bits of scenic detail.
No faces, gestures, rendered sensations.
He makes a note of this fact.
Here must be his short [? suit ?] as an aspiring
writer of fiction.
Indeed, when somewhere along Maryland 5,
two Porsches pass the bus in quick succession,
one the color of buttermilk and the other of cured tobacco,
Fenn cannot summon better adjectives for them than
yellowish white and brown.
Though the highway at that moment happens to
divide a tobacco from a dairy farm.
[LAUGHTER]
Discuss with Susan next time we're sailing.
The bus makes a stop at Union Station where Fenn gets off.
It's just 11:00 and a fine bright forenoon for walking.
He heads down Delaware Avenue to Constitution,
his heart divided as always at sight of the Capitol.
That edifice too familiar, like the face of a parent,
to be either handsome or otherwise.
Between patriotism and dismay.
Something he happened to read recently at sea together
with Pokeys present berth, puts him
in mind of that summer 166 years ago
when a British fleet sailed up the Patuxent from Solomon's
Island to Benedict.
Unloaded an army, routed the panicky defenders--
among them Fenwick's middle name sake--
and burned the new Capitol and president's house.
Francis Scott Key, Fenn has read,
had had till then little use for his country,
which he thought a vulgar democracy.
But the spectacle of its symbolic destruction followed
shortly after in Baltimore by that
of its symbolic resurrection changed his mind and heart.
More exactly, Fenn should say in Susan's opinion,
its hoped for symbolic persistence.
Key asks the question.
Oh say does that star spangled banner, et cetera,
but does not presume to answer it.
Fenn's own heart is [INAUDIBLE] lifts
at sight of the Supreme Court and the Library
of Congress off to his left.
The complex of museums along the mall.
The memorials to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln
farther on.
It sinks not for aesthetic reasons
at sight of almost all the other federal buildings in view
and positively constricts that thought
of those ill chained dragons across the river in Arlington
and Langley, the Pentagon, and his former employer.
Not to mention the National Reconnaissance Office,
an agency so secret that its very existence
was denied until the 1970s and is still officially classified.
As of our writing this footnote, March 3, 1981,
whose 1980 budget was twice that of the CIA,
in excess of $2 billion concealed
in Air Force appropriations.
And whose activities have included
spying by satellite on US citizens
in their own country such as demonstrators
against the Vietnam War as well as foreigners
in their countries see e.g.
The New York Times, March 1 1980.
He moves off the mall along Pennsylvania Avenue
and detours up 11th Street to Woodward
and Lothrop's department store to look
for something for Susan.
Ends up buying a beret for himself instead,
an Anglobasque boina made in England but it will do.
According to the 1980 census the Washington DC Metropolitan area
is home to more than two million people.
It's visited by more than 50,000 tourists on an average day.
There are two other customers that Woodward and Lothrop
Beret counter.
One, a lady, leaves just as Fenn arrives.
The other, a gentleman, arrives just as Fenn is leaving.
No mathematician, Fenn will nonetheless
calculate once he finds an almanac, that gender aside,
the odds against one of those 2's
being Dugald Taylor are at least 1,025,000 to 1.
Yet the gentlemen arriver as Fenn is leaving
is his old friend and mentor, come
to buy a hat for his impending journey to Australia.
Describe Doog Taylor.
Bald and gray like Fenn, but beardless, smooth,
10 years older, unathletic, more plump than husky.
From an antique Maryland family of Scottish origin,
that's description.
Nearly every male member of which
since 1830 has educated at Princeton
and read law at Virginia, though fewer than half
have practiced that profession more than briefly.
Career civil servants, the most of them.
Chargés d'affaires, assistant attorneys
general, under secretaries of this and that.
A Taylor, Dugald once explained to Fenwick
upon declining a presidential request that he succeed
Richard Helms as director of the CIA,
may wish to be a concertmaster but has
no taste for conducting.
Is that description?
Twinkly, portly, courtly, immaculate, unmarried,
delicately nerved--
Doog.
Fenn.
The men embrace.
Susan tells me, Fenwick tells Dugald,
that improbable incidents may begin a story in as much
as life in fact comprises an occasional unlikelihood.
But to invoke one to wind up a plot
is to invoke the God on wires.
You and I must be beginning a new story together.
Dugald replies at once, or else our world is run by the God
on wires.
Where's my Susan?
She kisses you from Solomon's Island.
You wear boinas now?
Only in the outback, Doog says softly.
Ah so, Perth.
All roads lead to Perth.
Some by design, others by coincidence.
Ours by way of the cosmos.
We're big on coincidence today, Dugald.
Doog buys a Navy blue beret and says,
so is the lowercase cosmos.
Don't knock coincidence.
He checks his pocket watch.
Lets stroll.
The big C won't hold our table long.
They stroll West on G to Lafayette Square and the White
House.
Then take a taxi up Connecticut Circle.
Then stroll again the two blocks out in Massachusetts
to the Cosmos Club.
Did you know for example, speaking of coincidence,
Dugald continues, that one of our senior counterintelligence
people in Western Europe is a man named Goldfinger.
I mean, that is his real name.
Did you know that Arthur Bremer has
a sister who once worked in the same establishment
as Sirhan Sirhan.
You can imagine the FBI'S double take at that particular datum.
But apparently it's pure coincidence.
It's a wise man, Fenn acknowledges,
who knows his Woodward and Lothrop from his Woodward
and Bernstein.
Dugald Taylor, I keep forgetting how young
my audience is sometimes.
Dugald Taylor's topical allusions
in order for readers with short memories or of few years:
the eponymous villain of an Ian Fleming spy novel.
The would be assassin of then-governor George
Wallace of Alabama in Laurel, Maryland in 1972.
The successful assassin of Robert F Kennedy
in Los Angeles, born in 1968.
Fenn is to the then Washington Post investigative reporters
instrumental in exposing the Watergate scandal, which
undid President Nixon.
The Cosmos has held Doog's table.
Over cold cucumber soup and Sancerre,
each man inquires as to the other's heart.
Taylor shares with Turner one serious cardiac episode,
but unlike his protege has not quit smoking.
Both are OK.
It is organ day at the Cosmos Club.
Pink Dugald orders brains.
Brown Fenwick, sweetbread.
They sip the sharp Sancerre.
In reply to his friend's next inquiry,
Fenn briefly describes our sabbatical cruise
and finds himself uncharacteristically
in Dugald's company rhapsodizing tersely--
it can be done--
about the Caribbean.
Susan has taught you to be less cool, Doog remarks approvingly.
My compliments.
Quite permissible for us ex-officers.
Hello there, Henry.
Fenn smiles and waves across the Cosmos to a sharp faced
bespectacled clerky looking chap in three-piece summer worsted,
their mutual former colleague from Branch 5--
the Southern Cone-- of the Western hemisphere division
at Langley.
That fellow, just entering, attaché case in hand,
responds with an almost ballet like expression
of incredulity and contempt followed by a reproving
glare at Dugald Taylor.
Then sets his face and stalks into another room.
Goodness, says Fenwick.
His own face stinging.
I knew which way the wind was blowing but I
didn't imagine it was Force 10.
Dugald says evenly, you know Marcus.
In his heart he's still OSS parachuting
into occupied France.
With you, Doog.
I'm surprised you'll be seen with me, especially here.
Shame on you then, Dugald says mildly.
The rebuke does double duty for Fenwick having published
KUDOVE, the CIA's crypto-name for its client services
division.
Fenn's book concentrates on company operations
in Iran and Chile.
And for his imagining that his friend would
shun him therefore, however much Doog
might deplore the publication.
A Taylor may promulgate the most stinging in-house critiques;
one of Dugald's ancestors on corruption in the US post
office under McKinley is legendary
and is said to have led Theodore Roosevelt to appoint
Charles Joseph Bonaparte to house clean that Bureau.
But one does not go public.
Not so, Fenn insists to himself at the moment,
but to Dugald more than once in time past:
Simply one doesn't go public as a first resort.
You know how my in-house reports fared.
You know how the company tried everything short
of actual dirty tricks to stop Marchetti, and Marks,
and Philip Agee, and Kermit Roosevelt,
and me from going public.
Kermit is the grandson of the aforementioned Theodore,
a former CIA officer and author of Countercoup:
The Struggle For Control Of Iran,
New York, McGraw-Hill 1980.
Review of the roles of the CIA and its British counterpart
in overthrowing prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq of Iran
in 1953 and replacing him with the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Susan thinks Fenn mistaken in his inclusion of Mr. Roosevelt
in this catalog.
According to the New York Times, November 13, 1979.
McGraw-Hill scrapping of the whole first edition
of Countercoup was prompted more by objections
from British Petroleum whom the Times reports
as owning a 40% interest in the Iranian oil consortium.
And who the book alleges provided cover
through its predecessor company, Anglo-Iranian Oil,
for British covert operations in Iran
rather than by direct objections from the CIA.
A better candidate in Susan's opinion
would be the unfortunate Frank Snepp,
author of Decent Interval: An Insider's Account
of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy
Analyst in Vietnam, New York, Random House, 1977.
My book didn't get anybody killed, Fenn says aloud.
If it crimped a few career-- quashed a few operations
so much the better.
Dugald replies, my compliments again on your prose.
You do write well.
How's the novel coming?
Fenn won't have the evasion.
It's not the same thing.
Can we talk here, Doog?
His friend smiles.
That's why I suggested the Cosmos, safest place
in town outside of an embassy code room,
once the entrée is served.
[LAUGHTER]
It is.
The waiter, Argentine-German, urges the young Beaujolais
but the Sancerre is only half gone and will quite do.
Dugald Taylor speaks now at length
quietly over his brains and fresh asparagus.
Beyond doubt Fenn's book and its predecessors
along with the general public and congressional reaction
against our Vietnamese, and Chilean adventures,
and the Watergate fiasco, contributed to the lowering
of agency morale.
And the reining in of its covert operations
in the middle and latter 1970s.
Resignations and early retirements, Dugald's own
included, ran high.
Recruitment of able trainees Marcus [INAUDIBLE]
of these days, grew increasingly difficult
despite the poor national job market for college graduates,
especially in the liberal arts.
The better Catholic universities such as Notre Dame,
and Fordham, which had long since replaced the Ivy
League as prime recruiting ground,
and to which by the middle 1960s were added to better
land-grant universities had themselves
given way, faute de mieux, more and more
to street car Catholic colleges.
Your local Loyolas and Canisiuses,
to branch campuses of the state complexes.
Ogontz, New Paltz, Ypsilanti.
Even to community colleges, Catonsville,
Harrisburg area, West Liberty, where patriotism still
runs high among blue collar children with white collar
aspirations.
But economic inflation, the lapsing of Soviet American
détente.
The convenient bugaboo of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The protracted holding of the American hostages in Iran
and a new post-Vietnam generation of undergraduates
have effectively reversed that trend
both on the campus and Congress.
He, Dugald, does not have to tell Fenwick
that all the half-baked novelists in the land, and not
a few full baked ones, are writing
spy novels, for example.
Many of which, like the latest crop
of tsk-tsk exposes of the agency,
barely conceal their fascination and envy beneath their knee
jerk moralizing against our skullduggery.
Fenn's will not, he trusts, be another CIA novel.
Decidedly not, Fenn promises.
That is almost the only thing he can say for sure about it.
But he cannot promise that the likes of certain of his
colleagues will not drift through it from time to time
on the narrative tide.
Dugald lifts his glass to the metaphor and continues.
In short, the lads in Langley and more and more the lasses,
an important new area of recruitment
as Fenn might have heard, are prospering again,
and gearing up for new covert operations
in the 1980s, whoever wins the November election.
It is Dugald's understanding that both the CIA
and the Pentagon are reviving chemical biological warfare
research, almost dormant since the latter 1960s,
on the strength of recent Soviet applications
of such weapons in Afghanistan.
We are particularly excited, Dugald
uses the pronoun with poker faced irony,
about new developments in molecular biology.
He understands us to be either funding indirectly
or investigating the feasibility of a number of gene splicing
projects to the end of designing viruses for which there
are no antibodies, or for which only we possess the antibodies.
But he cannot vouch for this matter firsthand.
Legionnaires' disease, by Fenn's friend's best information,
was not one of our experiments.
Serious Soviet contentions to the contrary notwithstanding.
Admittedly there would have been a dandy cover.
Who would have suspected even us,
despite the precedence of our spraying San Francisco
with the test strain of respiratory bacillus
in the late '60s?
And of our sundry experiments upon [?
unwed veterans ?] in Veterans Administration hospitals,
of experimenting upon an American Legion convention
in the cradle of liberty, the city of brotherly love.
[LAUGHTER]
To be sure, we shall not employ our patent viruses
for individual assassinations, we
have an ample inventory of devices for that purpose.
Several of them developed since Fenwick's day.
But to eliminate a small cohesive group, an encampment
of guerrillas, say, a properly antibiotic mole
could administer a literal kiss of death.
The wonders of science.
The mention of moles brings Fenwick's erstwhile mentor
over coffee and cigar now to Manfred, who in certain areas
had been his mentor.
He, Dugald, can tell all he knows on this head
without fear of being lip read say, from across the room,
he declares.
For he knows only that there are two schools of thought
among his professional acquaintances
concerning Manfred's Paisley like disappearance
and they are the obvious.
That Fenn's twin accidentally or on assignment
had discovered the [? moles ?] still believed
to inhabit the agency despite operation Kitty Hawk
and had been neutralized by agents either of the KGB
or of the mole him/herself.
Or that Manfred was the mole and had been neutralized
by the team who discovered him so to be,
whether killed or sequestered constituted
two sub-schools of opinion.
It is not generally felt, though Dugald himself does not
dismiss the possibility that John Arthur Paisley's
nautical suicide simply inspired Manfred Turner to follow suit
for whatever reason.
Nautical suicide is Dugald Taylor's term,
he and Fenwick are of the same mind on this difficult matter.
It is a pity that he does not indicate
whether knowledgeable people in the agency
and on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
share their opinions.
I don't dismiss that possibility either, Doog.
You don't.
Do you know of any reasons Manfred might
have had for killing himself?
Fenn recognizes his friend's [INAUDIBLE] to be professional
by replying straightforwardly that he knows of none
but had been distant from his brother
since leaving the company and writing KUDOVE.
Instead of asking whether Dugald is currently an agency
consultant, he signals his understanding and acceptance
of this state of affairs.
Dugald nods, and sighs.
We don't know of any either.
Thanks Doog.
I can't really imagine that Manfred would have used
Pokey to kill himself from.
He knew I loved that boat.
He knew that Susan and I were planning our sabbatical cruise
in it.
I'd have sold the thing after his death
if it weren't the boat Susan seduced me on.
[LAUGHTER]
I see.
Manny could hold a grudge but he wasn't spiteful
and he loved his family.
Either somebody got to him or he drowned accidentally
and happened not to get found like Paisley.
Was he the mole, Doog?
No.
A mole, possibly, though I strongly believe not.
But not the mole.
The reader will have appreciated Fenwick's inflecting
in declaratively Taylor fashion.
Is to be appreciated further that Dugald having replied
unhesitatingly and unequivocally, it
would be improper for Fenn to ask additionally
out of mere curiosity what his friend appears
to know who the mole might be.
Anyone in Manfred's line of work, he remarks instead,
makes serious enemies.
Dugald puffs and nods.
Serious and sophisticated enemies, in our house
and in others.
We believe Dugald Taylor to mean by others,
not the KGB, but the various branches of the US Defense
Intelligence Agency, DIA.
Beside the scale of whose budget and operations
the CIA's are small potatoes.
As I'm sure you know, Manny did not always
delegate his work to agents and cutouts as he should have done.
I know, Doog.
In certain very sensitive areas your brother
was an incorrigible do it himself-er, against all policy.
I know that.
Manny preferred it that way, Fenn, he enjoyed it,
I'm afraid.
Mhm.
[LAUGHTER]
Luncheon is finished, their meeting not.
After a few moments silence the two men exchange a glance.
Dugald says I've signed the chit already.
Shall we stroll.
They do, back toward the Mall.
Splendid lunch, Fenn says.
Wasn't it?
I needn't point out to you, Fenwick,
that your public criticism of us together
with your upcoming academic appointment,
I forgot to congratulate you on that.
Thanks.
I may or may not take it after all or Susan hers.
Really?
We might just chuck everything and sail around the world.
Oh, well, then.
I was going to say, you've got a dandy cover now
for doubling if you were of a mind to double.
Dugald.
For one second it occurs to Fenn to wonder whether his friend
might be the deep mole.
But Dugald goes on to declare in a particular way he
has of speaking of delicate matters
with scarcely a motion of his lip.
That should Fenwick be approached
by foreign agencies or the American agents
of foreign agencies, not the KGB, one would guess.
But some less sophisticated outfits
such as DINA, Directorio Nacional de Inteligencia.
The Chilean secret police responsible e.g.
for the murders in September 1976--
a few blocks from where Fenn and Doog
are strolling-- of the late President Allende's ambassador
to the US, Orlando Letelier, and his young American associate
Ms. Ronni Moffitt.
See Assassination on Embassy Row,
by John Dinges and Saul Landau, New York, Pantheon, 1980.
And should he be inclined to take the pitch,
he, Dugald, is authorized to say that their common former
employer stands ready to forgive Fenwick his trespasses
and assist his presumable search for further information
about Manfred and Gus.
Fenn halts on the sunny sidewalk of Dupont Circle.
Gus.
Yes.
Clearly there's more to come.
Fenn considers the situation for five seconds
and then promises to prepend their former employers office
offer.
They resume their walk.
I should like to ask, Dugald continues affably after a time,
whether you have to your knowledge already
been so approached.
Not to my knowledge, Doog.
But as we know, et cetera.
Of course, Mysterious Agency.
Dugald Taylor was a student of literature
before he went to law school and gravitated into the CIA
by way of wartime duty with the Office of Strategic Services.
His reference here, a standing irony among him, Fenwick,
and their vanished colleague, is to the hero's invocation
of the spirits, which opens Lord Byron's coral tragedy
Manfred, 1816.
The opening words of that play are O mysterious Agency.
What Fenn really knows is that the conversation in progress
may be the very approach Dugald speaks of
and his friend the agent, or the agent's agent.
They wait for a traffic light.
Fenn says as they cross, you mentioned Gus.
I did.
It's come to our former employer's knowledge
that among the anti-government prisoners being
held on a certain island off the southern coast of Chile
there are a number of non-nationals, not all of them
from Bolivia, Argentina, or Cuba.
Dugald.
These non Chilean desaparecidos have not
been terminally disappeared, not all
of them for the usual reason, their families
might be interested in assisting their repatriation
by the customary means.
You'll be interested to hear that your mother-in-law has
already been approached by the agent of a government
friendly to Chile.
Carmen.
Jesus Christ, Doog.
What government?
Fenn points to the ground.
Ours?
Dugald shrugs his eyebrows.
The question is improper.
It has been suggested to young Gus Seckler-Turner's mother.
He continues, then in exchange for her cooperation,
this agent sponsors ascertain at least
whether her son is among those non-Chilean prisoners.
If then a mutually satisfactory further relation
is established, and if indeed Gus is still alive,
she need not abandon hope for his repatriation.
You know how these things go.
Fenwick feels ill.
He takes Dugald's arm, almost seizes it,
and discerns at once in his friend's eyes
that it is not Doog who proposed this familiar extortion.
Fenn does know very well how these things go.
If Carmen B Seckler's first information turns out
to be disinformation, her contact
will regretfully report that her son is dead.
He's relieved to hear now from Dugald
that Carmen's immediate streetwise
reply was exactly what friendly counterintelligence would
have advised.
Prove to me that my son is alive and then we'll
discuss your proposal further.
But what on Earth he wants to know.
Can anyone hope to learn from Carmen B
Seckler in the way of useful classified information,
especially now that Manfred is out of the picture.
Carmen and the neutron bomb.
Carmen and the cruise missile.
Now it's Doog who halts, twinkling,
at the corner of Farragut Square.
How about Carmen and the cruise.
Your cruise.
You.
You're joking.
No.
There's nothing there, Doog.
Listen Gus and Manfred disappeared.
I had a heart attack.
Susan had a paid leave.
We took a long sail.
We had a couple of decisions to make
about what we want to do with the next part of our lives.
There's that Swarthmore job for her.
The Delaware job for me.
There's a novel in the oven.
There's Pokey, and Portugal, and the rest of the globe.
There's other business.
But there's no information.
Some turkey is wasting his time.
Let's stroll, Dugald suggests.
They do, down toward Pennsylvania Avenue.
I believe you, Fenn, of course.
But suppose Carmen were to beg you, for instance,
for her son's sake, to mount a serious campaign to persuade
your son upon completion of his postdoctoral project
to pursue his researches under agency auspices.
Oh, Doog.
Stroll, Fenn.
They stroll, but Fenwick is dizzied.
Or if that friendly government happens
not to be this one, Dugald gestures toward the White
House, you might persuade Orrin--
that's Fenwick son by a previous marriage--
to share his expertise in the gene splicing
way with certain private researchers of that government.
Fenn is incredulous.
Chile?
I didn't say Chile.
I said a friend-- a government friendly to--
I won't do it, Doog.
Gus will have to die if he isn't dead already.
Dugald nods once.
I didn't imagine you would.
And I don't know by the way whether the poor young man's
dead or alive.
Better off dead, I imagine, than in Tejas Verdes or the like.
That's an interrogation camp North of Santiago,
particularly infamous as a torture center
just after the 1973 coup and the establishment of DINA,
whose first chief was also commandant of Tejas Verdes.
See e.g.
The Amnesty International Report On Torture,
New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1975, page 208.
But Carmen might decide to approach your son directly.
The two boys were close I understand.
Orrin won't do it.
He'd fucking better not.
Dugald Taylor who is without profanity
or other casual vulgarity winces slightly
and observes that many a scientist
have been known to rise above his her principles.
Not Orrin, Fenn declares grimly.
To him pure science means morally pure, too.
Doog, I'm flabbergasted.
I'm sick.
Sorry.
No.
I'm grateful to you.
And it goes without saying I know you're clean in all this,
but I'll say it.
His friend's relief is evident.
Thank you, Fenn, I am in fact clean.
But the pitch to Carmen Seckler was serious, I think.
No doubt she'll be perfectly candid about it
with you when you see her.
Dear God.
Well.
The pair have reached the E-Street tangent of the Ellipse
and stand at the zero milestone.
We say goodbye here.
I'm off to Perth on Friday.
Don't ask.
I shan't, Doog.
Friday, is it.
Good journey.
Dugald considers.
We mentioned our episodes, Fenn.
I must tell you that I've heard rumors
which I wish I could refute, that our R & D people
now have in their bag of tricks a fairly effective inducer
of cardiac arrest.
No.
Very possibly it's not so but something just as nasty likely
is.
All the same you may want to confide this rumor
to your doctors.
I've done mine.
Though there's not a thing he can do with the information
medically.
The trigger is alleged to be 100% clean though nowhere
near infallible.
Fenwick Turner's eyes water.
God damn us, Doog.
Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
You, me, Manfred, all of us.
Well, we're not yet a truly wicked government
in my opinion.
But we are sure as hell not poor in wickedness.
Dugald sighs and nods.
We are not poor in wickedness.
Wiedersehen, Fenn.
Good sailing.
Kiss Susan.
Fenwick extends his hand.
And then on a shared if not quite simultaneous impulse
the friends exchange a quick parting kiss themselves.
A young Black man passing by with a radio
the size of a salesman sample case says faggots.
Fenn grins, says God bless America
and squeezes his friends smooth hand.
Dugald twinkles.
This next excerpt which follows immediately but is shorter
is called Fenn: Second Ordeal.
The point of this chapter, I should say
is that Fenn and Susan each have in the same short time
period two ordeals.
The first of which each duly reports
to his her spouse, the other not.
Fenn's second ordeal, the unreported one,
occurs two hours later on the bus ride home somewhere
between Charlotte Hall and Mechanicsville
in Southern Maryland.
He's telling his notebook about Dugald Taylor.
Specifically along this stretch of highway,
he's casting up fake names with a properly Scottish ring
to them, in case Doog winds up on the payroll of our story,
and reflecting as he casts upon their post lunch and talk
and long standing friendship.
When for the second time in half a century
a very large hand inside his chest
clutches and squeezes his heart as he
had squeezed Dugald Taylor's hand.
It's a minor seizure nothing like as
painful or consequential as its predecessor of the year before.
In 90 seconds it subsides.
In five minutes, it's gone.
He loosens his necktie.
His pulse rate continues high, probably from consternation.
He's in a sopping sweat.
The obvious question preoccupies him
through the rest of the bus ride and will
again after the distraction of comparing official ordeals
with Susan.
Likewise some sub or ancillary questions,
perhaps less obvious, such as whether Dugald
could have been the unwitting transmitter of R
and D's rumored infernal new toxin,
and whether its dosage has been refined to the Warning level.
Even whether the rules of dramaturgy permit a scene
that begins with a dialogue on improbable coincidence
to end with an improbable coincidence.
Can a pistol hung on the wall in act one,
he asks his notebook, be fired in act one.
On balance, however, though shaken,
he receives this postscript from his heart
a good deal more calmly than he received the original message.
Evidence he's pleased to infer that the peace he's
made with the prospect of his death is not merely notional.
His concerns for Susan, and for Carmen B Seckler,
who suffered enough bereavement already,
and whose attempted coercing must be dealt with.
My my.
By the time he dis-buses at Solomon's, Fenn's sweat is dry.
His pulse is normal, 60 to the tick.
It is good to be back among the banging halyards and kvetching
gulls.
He removes his necktie, opens his shirt--
it's normal, 60 to the tick.
It is good to be back among the banging halyards and kvetching
gulls.
He removes his necktie, opens his shirt,
lets his eyeglasses hang from their lanyard,
ruefully prepares to conceal from his wife as pointless,
at least for the present, the tidings of this second episode,
and its possible cause.
He will tell her, indeed he'll consult her
about the reported extortion of her mother
and what might be done to end or make use of it
short of his resuming work for the company.
Love for Susan floods Fenwick's soul.
So full of secrets were his latter agency years.
He hates the least lapse of candor in his marriage.
He craves powerfully to talk with her.
Much as he cares for poor wrecked Miriam,
he hopes that she and her brood are gone.
Miriam Leah Poe Seckler is Susan's unlucky [? sister ?]..
A former flower child who was gang raped by a motorcycle gang
in 1968.
Subsequently a political radical like Gus,
she was briefly tortured by SAVAK in Tehran
under the Shah-- one of the few Americans
to have that misfortune befall him/her.
The experience has left her scattered and the mother
of two illegitimate children.
The menage has been visiting Susan aboard ship
while Fenwick has been in Washington.
Apparently they are gone or elsewhere in the village
and Susan with them.
As he reaches the pier wishing he'd found some sort of gift,
Fenn is disappointed to see no sign of his friend on the boat.
His skipperly eye observes at once
that Pokey has for some reason been freshly hosed down
and scrubbed though we did that chore only yesterday.
Moreover the water valves been left on,
the hose is dripping at the nozzle,
and our deck brush and bucket are on the finger pier
where they might easily be knocked overboard instead
of in the lazarette where they belong.
No great matter.
But in the cockpits a more [INAUDIBLE]..
A green bottle of Moselle four-fifths
empty on the cockpit sole.
And one nine-ounce paper cup also not quite empty
in a gimbal drink-holder.
Something has gone wrong.
Fenn steps aboard calling Susan without reply.
Now he sees her prone on the starboard settee in work shorts
and t-shirt, her face swollen from crying.
As he hurries to her, his heart clutched by concern.
She turns her face away.
He touches her.
She shrinks from him and draws him to her.
Holds him desperately.
Weeps again.
In time unfolds the tale of our next short excerpt,
Susan's ordeal.
Miriam and the boys arrive afternoon.
She chain-smoking, crazy haired, leather sandals.
11-year-old Sy, Miriam's child by the gang
rapists, wearing hard soled shoes, black socks,
black Bermudas on his fat legs and unbelievably
smoking a cigarette too.
And 2-year-old Edgar Allan Ho-- her child
by her current lover, a Vietnamese refugee poet.
[LAUGHTER]
Also wearing leather soles and wielding a vintage 1930 metal
toy truck with missing wheels.
A sharp cornered gift from some Fells Point antique dealer
and patron of Carmen's place.
Horrified, Susan makes haste to intercept them.
Can Mimi really have forgotten that leather soles
won't do on wooden decks?
Now, Sy spots his aunt Susie and galumphs toward her,
his belly lopping over the belt of his old man short.
Edgar trots after.
Thin faced Miriam halts to light a fresh cigarette with the butt
of its predecessor.
Don't run, Susan yells.
As if she'd cried "Hit the deck,"
both boys at once go sprawling.
EA Ho has merely lost his balance.
Fortunately, he loses his toy as well
into the harbor before it can damage either Pokey or himself.
He comes up bawling but unhurt except for small splinters
in the heels of both hands.
Heavy Sy however, stubs his black leather toe
on a dock plank and goes down.
Both knees and one elbow skinned.
A wicked brush burn on one forearm.
The bag of fresh tomatoes which Carmen B Seckler has sent down
with the inevitable welcome store of rye bread,
corned beef, lox, and bagels squashed under him
where he clutched it to keep it safe.
Splinters, blood, and tomato pulp from shin to chin.
He rolls onto his back as well as
onto both his lighted cigarette and more tomatoes,
and lets go a heroic caterwaul.
Susan breaks the dock rule herself and runs to help.
EA Ho turning to his mother for succor, trips and sprawls
again.
Miriam surveys the scene impassively,
draws on her fresh cigarette, and flicks the old one
away without looking to see whether it
falls into the water or somebody's cockpit.
It's not the moment to invoke the no hard shoes rule.
Hindsight suggests that Susan might
have made use of the dock hose as both first aid
and preventive medicine.
Removing the boy's shoes and Sy's pulpy--
and washing their cuts before anyone came aboard.
At the time she's too concerned for their hurts
and distracted by their howling to think of it.
And so Pokey is boarded by mother and children.
And on Sue's subsequent conservative estimate,
which Fenn cannot gain say, the ship sustains more damage
in the next 10 minutes than in our entire ocean passage from
the Virgin Islands, including that storm off the Virginia
capes.
And yet more damage before the short visit's
done than in those first 10 minutes.
The bloodstains in the settee fabric
are probably permanent as are the cigarette
burns in the holly cabin sole, on the mahogany chart table
fiddle, on the teak wash stand counter in the head.
The blood and tomato stains and the teak deck planking,
like the shoe leather scratches on the cabin and cockpit,
soles, and companion way ladder will
yield to laborious refinishing next season.
But the custom made cockpit cushion
will have to be replaced.
Little Edgar discovers the galley knife rack
while he holds forth on Susan's moral irresponsibility
in choosing a tenured associate professorship
in an elitist college, over working
with deprived inner city children.
Susan in the head compartment is washing and bandaging Sy.
By the time she sees what's up and shrieks at Miriam
to disarm the child before he cuts himself.
Edgar has blithely slashed the vinyl cushion cover.
Even then it is Susan who must dash through the cabin
and up the companion way to snatch the knife.
Miriam, unmoving, declares that the little fuckers
have to learn from experience that knives are dangerous.
And Fenwick will have to remove, dismantle, reassemble,
and reinstall the marine toilet, itself half a day's messy work.
What a pain in the ass, Miriam remarks,
when Susan, almost in tears, now reminds her
how to pump the thing.
But Mim neglects to mention that she too
is menstruating until she has plugged
the plumbing with a discarded tampon and a filter tip
cigarette.
Susan [INAUDIBLE] has been literally too busy coping even
to kiss her sister hello.
By the time she gets the boys, de-splintered, washed,
disinfected, bandaged, untomatoed, disarmed,
and unshod, she's near hysteria.
The blocked toilet Miriam has shat in it too
and the cigarette burns, of which Sue now
discovers the first on the wash basin
counter while trying in vain to clear the blockage
do the trick.
Nobody wants her crab and avocado salad anyhow.
Mim and the boys tanked up at a Burger King on the drive down.
The visit Susan has for months looked forward to
is over in 30 miserable minutes.
She screams at her sister to get off the boat.
Off.
Cute Edgar Allan is frightened into bawling again.
He has also shat his diaper.
Wide eyed Sy picks his Buddhic nose
and wipes his finger on the settee.
Susan goes clear out of control.
Get off.
Go home.
Jesus, Shushi, Miriam says, laying her cigarette
on the chart table fiddle.
You're tighter assed than ever.
She picks up-- come on Sy, is Fenn
cheating on you or something?
He better not.
Go away.
Weeping [? hoot ?] Susan herds them up the ladder,
out of the cockpit, onto the dock.
Unprecedented behavior for her who normally shrugs off
her sister's familiar criticisms the first 10 minutes
of any reunion and minimizes property
damage by adroit preventive measures,
so that their abiding love and concern for each other
can come through.
Now, on the dock at last she understands
that she must hence forward see Miriam only on Miriam's,
or neutral ground.
And even half hysterical she's saddened by this recognition.
She hugs and kisses her sister, whose
great dark eyes, her sole unravaged feature,
twins to Susan's, at once fill up like Sue's with tears.
And springs back onto the boat, down into the cabin,
out of sight.
I'm sorry Susele.
Miriam calls after her.
Sue is weeping on the stained settee.
Sy hoarsely complains, ain't we going sailing, ma?
[INAUDIBLE] replies, no asshole.
We busted the fucking boat.
[LAUGHTER]
Sy wails, you said.
Said schmed, says Miriam, were going home.
EA Ho joins his half brother's bawling.
The family exits as noisily as it arrived.
Then I scrubbed everything inside and out, Susan sobs.
And I worked, and worked, on the head and couldn't clear it.
And everywhere I looked I saw more gouges, and scratches,
and cigarette burns.
It's all right, Fenwick tells her, it's all right.
So I decided to get drunk but I just gave myself
a cracking headache.
Mims and I didn't even get to talk.
I even forgot to put Ma's lox and corned beef on ice.
I had to throw it out.
How's Doog?
Hold me.
Poor Mimsi.
God.
No real news, Fenn says.
It'll keep till tomorrow when we're sailing.
I'm hungry.
I'm sick.
What shall I make you?
She forgot to give me the mail too and I forgot to ask.
Bring us something from the restaurant.
The mail will keep.
What can you eat?
Susan sits up and pushes her hair back with both hands.
The number three sandwich on wheat toast
with mayonnaise, and chips, and a medium Coke.
I better wash up and go with you, I need to pee.
Poor, poor, Mimsi.
The little marina restaurant is empty.
Navy planes blast in and out of the air station.
Returning from the women's room, Susan
says her face looks awful.
No it doesn't, how is your period?
Her eyes refill.
Mim's wrong, Fenn.
Kids aren't unimportant just because they're well off.
Your sister's nuts.
Never mind that.
Somebody has to teach the Superkids too.
They're important and I'm good at it.
You're the best.
I'm not the best, but I'm good.
And what I do for bright kids is important.
They're important.
Gifted kids are precious.
We have explored these waters together
many times before but Fenwick understands
that they must be cruised through
once again for Susan's solace.
It is not that the inner city deprived
don't matter, we re-agree, or the rural deprived, or the old,
or refugees, or recidivist criminals, or who have you.
There's to be found among them the occasional diamond
in the rough and no lack of lesser minerals, and honest--
but the excellent and privileged matter also.
Diamonds in the smooth, Sue calls them.
And if she's less anti populist than Leonardo da Vinci who
dismissed the mass of humankind as mere fillers up of privies
she's unabashedly more so than her sister who will not
acknowledge that a young Mozart is in any consequential way
more valuable than a semi retarded and pregnant
14-year-old escapee from an institution for wayward girls.
Between ourselves all this is preaching to the converted.
But though the sisters had no time to talk this afternoon,
we know also that there's another aspect
to Miriam's loving criticism of us, less easily countered,
however much the critics own current life might
fail to exemplify.
For more than half a year we have not been.
And just possibly for a considerable while
to come yet we shall not be teaching the gifted
or exposing the misdeeds of the CIA,
or doing any other socially useful thing.
We have been in the main indulging ourselves,
amusing ourselves.
We have been playing.
Over the third quarter of her club sandwich,
Susan lays that term on the table.
Fenn knows what it be tokens.
His wife's dark sometimes feeling that our years
together, precious as they've been to both of us--
are themselves a kind of playing,
not finally serious as the lives of Susan's child raising,
house buying contemporaries might be said to be serious.
Fenn won't have this, not tonight.
You're wrung out, hon.
We haven't been just playing.
We've been also playing.
We're on a well-earned sabbatical leave,
my first since Spain.
Your first since kindergarten.
Things have happened in our lives.
We have decisions to make.
The idea of sabbaticals is to catch your breath,
take stock, get perspective.
That's what we've tried to do.
We've read a lot.
We've fought and talked as we've sailed.
We've made notes.
That reminds me.
Never mind.
Not everybody has to be DH Lawrence or Dostoevsky,
thank heaven.
You can be morally earnest without being morally afire.
You can be serious with a smile.
You can even be dreamy and self-indulgent
in your personal life, which we aren't as a rule,
and still get terrific things done.
Susan knows all this and more but appreciate hearing it.
And she is wrung out.
Everything will have to keep until tomorrow.
And unlike the lox and corned beef it will.
Time to end this long chapter.
We talk better when we're sailing.
Don't forget to use the head while we're here.
Susan climbs out of the booth.
Do you have $0.15?
I want to call Mimsi.
Of course, you do.
What about that other ordeal, the author asks.
Susan's private one, counterpart to Fenwick's cardiac news
report on the bus.
Now-- OK.
I'm running a hair over.
I'll ask you to bear with me.
I like everything to stop at 60 minutes on the tick.
But I haven't read some of this before and it's short.
So I'll try it with your indulgence.
Because I think that perhaps the short final excerpt from later
in the novel will give a hint about that
second unreported ordeal of Susan
then wind up a few of the pistols I've hung on the wall.
If you can wind up pistols I figure [INAUDIBLE]..
[LAUGHTER]
It takes place a few days later when the couple have repaired
Pokey's storm damage, sailed a bit farther, re-provisioned.
Sailed a bit farther up the Chesapeake
to a certain cove off Gibson Island
harbor below Baltimore, from where
they mean to do certain unspecified business
in that city, Baltimore.
It's late in the day.
It's been implied already as you've heard
that Susan is menstruating.
Perhaps that fact contributes to her grouchiness
in this episode.
Now that they've weathered another sudden Chesapeake
thunderstorm, anchored safely, and are discussing
what they call their story.
This excerpt begins with the subtitle minor characters,
other subtitles quickly follow.
Fenwick remarks, vis a vis Susan's
Jewish gypsy mother Carmen B Seckler,
the owner of Carmen's Place in Fells Point,
Baltimore, that as yet we have a [INAUDIBLE] in our story.
And I go to the text now.
Little more than her name and some non dramatic exposition
and long distance dialogue by radio telephone.
In our present mood, Fenn wonders either aloud
or to his notebook whether formidable [INAUDIBLE]
and earning her keep in our story.
The artist Claes Oldenberg once bought a pencil drawing
by the artist Willem de Kooning, erased the drawing,
and exhibited what was left under the title Erased de
Kooning by Claes Oldenberg.
[LAUGHTER]
If Carmen B Seckler isn't going to do
more than she's done so far towards advancing our action
or percolating our plot, Fenn thinks maybe we
ought to erase even what little we have of her in the story
thus far.
Drop her from the payroll even though she's
Susan's mother, Manfred's ex-common law wife,
and one of Fenwick's favorite people.
Go ahead, says sullen Sue.
This is a zero based budget story.
[LAUGHTER]
No hitchhikers, agrees dour Fenn.
No freeloaders, no featherbedders.
Gas, grass, or ass, growls Susan.
Nobody rides free.
[LAUGHTER]
Fenn begs her pardon.
That's what the initials stood for on Junior Parsons's crash
helmet when he gave me a lift on his Harley Davidson
from Swarthmore to Baltimore when
I was hitching home 1964 or '65, my sophomore year.
Fenwick says, pause.
Says Susan he had crapulous skin and smelled like asafoetida,
but he was kind of cute.
Junior Parsons's GGANRF...
says Fenwick.
I bought him two gallons of regular.
[LAUGHTER]
Sigh of relief, says Fenwick.
Well, let's give you my other due process
before we delete her.
I'll call her up on the radio telephone and tell her
we'll be in town tomorrow and ask her what's new.
We introduced her in act one.
If she advances the action here in act two then
Dr. Seckler rule of thrice for minor characters
will oblige us to bring her on again in the last act.
Let me call grandma first, says Susan.
Why don't you go on up on Pokey's front porch
and get some air and rig the anchor lights so grandma
and I can talk.
Next little section is called Smelt. Fenwick comes back
below when he hears Susan over and out on the radio telephone.
So what did you talk about?
Despite worrisome half thoughts of his son
Orrin, of Orrin's pregnant wife, Julie.
Susan, it's been pleasant sitting up
on the floor deck in the mild spring
evening drizzle watching ground fog form around Red House Cove
and listening to what little he can
hear of Susan's conversation with Havah Moscowitz Seckler up
in Pikesville.
He's gratified to see that as almost always after talking
to her grandmother, his friend is in much better humor.
Smelt. Excuse me?
Grandma couldn't remember smelt. I was trying
to get her to remember smelts.
Ah.
We haven't made smelts in 100 years.
So I thought while we're doing our business in Baltimore
I'd stop by Lexington market and buy smelt.
But I've forgotten how grandma used to fix them.
So I asked her but she couldn't remember what smelt meant
and I couldn't remember the Jewish word for them
because smelt sounds Jewish already.
And besides the hearing aid thing on her phone
isn't working too well and there was
some noise on the radio channel and I forgot
to twiddle the squelch knob.
Poor grandma, she was so weak and tired.
Pleased, Fenn strokes his chin.
Your second conversation with your grandmother
in nine months and you talk for 10 minutes about
smelts to get her to remember the word.
I don't want grandma to forget things.
It was hard getting through to her.
She's so weak it wears her out to pay attention then
she starts worrying she's senile.
But boy, oh boy did she ever come
to life when she realized it was smelts I was asking about.
She calls them shmelts, like melted schmalts.
No wonder I thought the word was Jewish.
[LAUGHTER]
But then she says, uh-huh.
shmelts.
Do I know shmelts.
And off she goes.
You take a little this, a little that.
Did I remember Liebermans on Park Heights Avenue
where she used to get her smoked whitefish and her carp
for gefilte fish and her shmelts before the neighborhood changed
and by Lieberman was Ravitz the tailor where grandpa Allan had
his suits made.
And on and on she goes, every store
on the old block, how much for chicken livers in 1950.
Fenn kisses her forehead.
So how do we smelt smelts?
Susan slumps.
It doesn't matter.
[LAUGHTER]
Suse?
Oh, basically, you fry the little fuckers.
The point is grandma's got smelts to think about now
till she sees me tomorrow.
Call Ma, OK?
This last is entitled Carmen B Seckler Stays in the Story
For Sure But Has Trouble with the Facts of Life.
OK.
Do we tell her she's on notice in our story or not?
Not.
Fenwick places a call through the Baltimore marine operator
to Carmen's place on Aliceanna street in Fells Point.
The weather is uncertain for barbecuing off
our stern pulpit, but Susan has already
thought a small pork tenderloin roast since noon,
we'll take the chance.
She fits the charcoal grill into its bracket, starts the coal.
Uncorks a Sonoma Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, Pokey's house red,
for us to sip in lieu of cocktails
while her husband and her mother talk.
In five or seven gravelly sentences
depending on punctuation, loudspeaker from the VHF,
Carmen B Seckler pays her dues.
Fenwick, where the hell are you going?
Gibson Island harbor more or less, over.
I sort of thought you were headed straight here.
Did you see today's papers?
Nope.
Get a drink I was trying to reach you.
Bad-- Fenn and sue fearing different things
exchange a glance.
What's up Carmen?
Dugald Taylor died of a heart attack in Sydney, Australia.
Susan makes a sound.
Fenwick closes his eyes.
It happened on a Qantas Airways 747, actually.
No other details.
Over.
Save the paper for us, Carmen.
I did already.
You're coming in tomorrow.
Early.
Fenn shakes his head hard trying to register the news.
I haven't checked the buses, before noon I hope.
What do you mean the buses?
I'll pick you up at 10:00.
We'll be staying a few days, Carmen, you got room?
Where to a goyishe question.
What a Yiddish answer.
[LAUGHTER]
Did Doog have a history, Fenn?
Heart stuff, not really.
Yeah, one episode, milder than mine.
Carmen pauses.
So it happens.
I'm sorry to bring the bad news.
Drink a drink Fenwick.
Let me talk to Susele.
Over.
Susan, tears streaming, shakes her
head no, but takes the microphone Fenn and hands her.
He sits on the settee berth, stunned.
Susan wipes tears and swallows red wine and talks and listens.
Conversation with Carmen B Seckler takes odd turns.
Via life and death, and smelts again.
And the confirmation of some appointments in town,
hairdresser, gynecologist.
Their talk comes to the elementary processes
of sexual reproduction.
All children, Carmen B Seckler declares, apropos something
or other, are actually grandchildren.
All parents are actually grandparents.
Over.
Susan blows her nose on a tissue.
What?
What's more in Carmen B Seckler's opinion, men
and women, and men don't actually reproduce sexually.
This truth has always given her trouble, she reports.
She thinks it insufficiently appreciated,
especially by a country that talks about nothing
but sex, sex, sex.
Over.
Ma, you sound half smashed.
Dugald was my friend too, you know.
Half smashed.
But you listen to what I'm saying about sex, Shushi.
Human beings are only make pretend sexual.
And like begets like only an alternate generation.
Susan gives it all three syllables.
Ma, these radio calls are expensive.
So bill me, I'm going to tell you what I mean.
I think of it a lot when I'm missing Manfred and Gus,
and I'm thinking about your father too.
And you, and Miriam, and Fenn.
You listen now, you'll see it has to do.
Susan only half believes in telepathy,
extrasensory perception and the like
by all which her mother swears.
Fenwick, not even half.
But both appreciate from frequent past experience
an uncanniness in Carmen B Seckler, that might as well be
called psychic.
And she does not speak irrelevantly, ever.
What she means in this instance is reconstructed some while
after in Fenwick's notebook for our story.
Is that a woman's true children are not her human daughters
and sons, but the 400 or so over which she produces
involuntarily and without male assistance
in the 30 odd years from her menarche to menopause.
A man's, the billions of spermatozoa
he generates also asexually in the 60 plus years from puberty
to death.
These are our children, says Carmen B Seckler,
whom we never know, nearly all of whom die without issue.
Among a man's in particular, the mortality rate
is brutally high exceeding even that of striped bass.
[LAUGHTER]
The normal mortality rate of striped bass or rock
fish between the gamete and the fingerling stage
is estimated at 99.99%.
Were it a few tenths of a percent lower,
the Chesapeake Bay would be overrun with rock fish.
Were it one hundreds of a percent
higher as it presently bids to become there would be none.
But if a man produce only 60 million sperm per ejaculation,
the middle range of human male fertility,
and ejaculate on the average of thrice weekly
for 60 years between puberty and death, dysfunction,
or disinterest.
And if with those 374,400, 000, 000 million he fathered two
children, the mortality rate of his spermatozoa is on the order
of 99.9 to the 11th power percent.
Or 187,200,000, 000 dead for each survivor.
[LAUGHTER]
Confronted with these calculations
Carmen B Seckler will remark that
by comparison to such odds, the Jews' deportation
to the Nazi death camp look like a minor hazard.
[LAUGHTER]
Though she alone of her entire neighborhood survived it.
Fenwick will ponder the irony that such
is the power of numbers.
If a man despite these odds, decide in normal circumstances
to father two children, he probably will.
Susan will say, let's change the subject.
Given the rare chance however, Carmen goes on.
These offspring of ours are truly and totally sexual.
Contrary, they come together not in the pseudo sexual way
of their parents, one little pot stuck briefly
into another little pot, and presently withdrawn.
But literally heaps never to be their separate selves again
but to become something both and neither,
something unlike sperm or egg, but much
like the parents of sperm and eggs.
Something that in turn, but asexually
may generate the likes of them.
The Aristophanes of Plato's symposium in Carmen B Seckler's
considered opinion was almost, but not
quite right when he declared that erotic love is
our vain search for our missing other half, ditto
the unitary impulse, the mystics craving to be one with God.
What both reflect, in fact, insists Carmen B Seckler,
is not our sense of being the sundered fallen half
of a primordial whole, but rather our unconscious memory
of having been sexually conceived
by the absolute union of contraries.
We are not fallen, Susele.
We are literally transcendent.
But our non-human parents achieved what by mere sex
we can never and that is the reason whether they know it
or not, why all animals are sad after coitus.
Over.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm not sad after coitus, Susan reports.
As a rule.
Neither is Fenn.
We're more often hungry, or thirsty, or sleeping than sad
after.
Over.
Don't change the subject.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I've never understood that proverb, Ma.
Maybe it applies to one night stands
but I've enjoyed those too, haven't you?
None of your business and don't change the subject.
What are you quoting Plato's symposium anyhow?
What are you pulling your rank?
Nobody reads a book but you PhDs?
I'm sorry, Ma.
Manfred told me all that, but he was talking about being twins.
Him and Fenwick, you and Miriam.
The children stuff's mine.
Don't change the subject.
Over.
What's the subject?
The subject, whether what you just
heard on your expensive radio has to do.
It has to do.
I love you, Ma.
I love you, Suse.
I'll see you in the morning.
Kiss Fenn.
Don't worry.
Poor Doog.
I should say so, poor Doog.
Out, Ma.
Fenwick is up under the boom tent using up Kleenex.
Susan slips her left hand down inside the front of her jeans
and underpants and presses her belly between navel and pubic
hair, pours herself another glass of red,
fetches the last of the bottle upstairs to Fenn.
We speak gravely together of Dugald Taylor,
hairless, of possible memorial services, of other things.
Presently we make dinner.
Subdued Fenwick decides not to tell her now.
Subdued Susan decides not to tell him now.
[APPLAUSE]