Final Fridays Read online

  Rescue Fire Company, Cambridge, MD, 1938.

  —Doctor to patient: Your check came back. Patient: So did my arthritis.

  —honeybee & horsefly / turnip in mouth / chicken with legs crossed / shad roe

  My siblings and I, alas, never got to see our father do his number. Nor did he often tell jokes at home, where our conversation was typically good-humored but, owing at least in part to his deafness, seldom extended or really “personal”: witness those unasked questions about his nickname and his dropping out of high school. It was only as we went through his effects post mortem, in our middle age, that I found two small notebooks of handwritten joke-cues and 14 age-browned Whitey’s Candyland envelopes containing more of the same on notepad-sized separate sheets and bearing the month and day, but seldom the year, of an upcoming gig and its location: C’bge RFC, Taylors Island, Hoopers Island, Church Creek, Lakes & Straits, Neck District. Some held a single sheet of perhaps nine cues; others five or six sheets with as many as 45 cues, occasionally annotated with a check, an X, or the word used. At times, evidently, he would “go around the table,” naming his firehouse comrades and addressing a joke to each (name followed by cue). In all, more than 200 jokes, fewer than half of them written out in full. While free of profanity, about three-quarters of them by my rough count are more or less ribald teasings of romance, courtship, marriage, infidelity, divorce, male and female anatomy, or some other aspect of sex (though a man of impeccable virtue, the Judge was not strait-laced): —“Am I the first man to sleep with you?” “If you doze off, you will be.”

  —Mouse gets pregnant in A&P; didn’t know about Safeway.

  —Girdle: keeps stomach in, boys out.

  —2 old maids: 1 trying to diet, 1 dying to try it.

  About one in 10 is “ethnic” or otherwise minority-directed, their targets most often African-American (always by cue only, for some reason)—cats on fence; colored woman

  —baptize darkie; last thing remembered

  —canning house; sleep with darkie

  but also including Native Americans (Indian says, “Chance.” Woman: “I thought all Indians said ‘How.’” Indian: “I know how; just want chance.”), Chinese (Chinaman, food, flowers)[?], Scots (Scotsman comes to U.S.; has 1st baby; wants to tell folks back home. Cablegram = 4 words for $8; he writes “Mother’s features, father’s fixtures.”), Jews (Jewish couple, Abe & Becky, married 50 years, in bed), and gays (homosexuals & hemorrhoids = queers & rears = odds & ends). The rest tease more “neutral” targets: doctors, judges, mechanics, farmers, animals, kids and parents, mothers-in-law. Offensive as one may find those “darkie” jokes in particular—told, one presumes, prior to the Cambridge civil rights riots of the late 1960s, with its attendant sit-ins of Whitey’s Candyland (an obvious target) and other segregated businesses—it’s worth remembering that they’re an extension of the blackface minstrel, Amos ’n’ Andy tradition popular among many blacks as well as whites from the 19th century to the mid-20th, and that unlike most other Southern eateries, Whitey’s risked offending its white customers by serving blacks at least at the candy showcases and the soda fountain, as long as they didn’t presume to sit down: the aptly named “Vertical Negro” policy, easy to tsk at from this remove, but considered liberal in that place and time.

  Where did all those jokes come from? Nowadays one’s e-mail is awash with them, forwarded by friends from friends of their friends: a high-speed electronic Oral Tradition. Back then, my guess is that they came from bantering exchanges with friends and customers, from vaudeville acts (even small towns like Cambridge had live vaudeville into the 1930s: touring road companies and the celebrated Adams Floating Theatre), from radio shows like the aforementioned Amos ’n’ Andy, and perhaps from the odd joke book in the Candyland’s magazine rack or paperback bookshelf. Not impossibly Dad made up a few of them himself; if so, it’s a talent that his son (like him, the younger of two) didn’t inherit. (While I’m sometimes described as a comic novelist, the only joke that I can recall ever having invented I literally dreamed up, and was surprised not only to remember upon waking but to find not unamusing: Restaurant waiter serves wine in glass with stem but no base. “How’m I supposed to set this glass down while I eat?” “Sorry, sir: We don’t serve customers who can’t hold their liquor. ”)

  More to the point, what about all these jokes and joke-cues? Their most-often-fragmentary nature—prodigal son / fish heads / rabbit sausage—reminds me not only that I never got to see and hear the fellow do this particular one of the numerous things that he evidently did well indeed, but that in this as in who knows how many other ways I never got to know him: that to a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them. For better as well as worse, perhaps: Just as well not to know all those “darkie” jokes, although in the context of that time and place they’d have been as inoffensively entertaining, at least to his all-white audience, as a burnt-corked Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” All the same, leafing through those time-browned, age-crisped cue sheets, like looking at his and Mother’s photographs on my bookshelves (younger then than their son is now) or his Orphans Court name plaque on the shelf above my word processor—John J. Barth, Chief Judge—inevitably makes me think, as the old Irish song laments, “Johnny, we hardly knew ye!”

  Nor you me, Dad, really; nor most of us one another, finally, beyond what souvenirs we’ve been given to imagine from, and what imagination we can bring to them:—nude sunbather on skylight over dining room

  —birth control; shower / ice: 400 lbs

  —Better try a different speaker next time: Even a rooster gets tired of chicken every night.

  Judge John J. “Whitey” Barth, circa 1950.

  Eulogy For Jill

  A final farewell—this one for Joan Derr Barth Corkran (May 27, 1930–August 7, 2009): my twin sibling Jill. Her German middle name was the maiden surname of our paternal grandmother, Anna Derr; my own Scotch-Irish middle name (Simmons) was our maternal grandma’s married name (we kids never knew “Mommy Nora’s” husband, nor to this day do I know what her maiden name was). Our nicknames—see below—were laid on us before our official given names, John and Joan. Given the circumstance of being a twin born under the zodiacal sign of Gemini and named after a nursery rhyme, it’s to be expected that the motif of twins, doubles, alter egos, and the like may be found here and there in my fiction.

  FOR THE FIRST nine months of our joint existence, my twin sister and I were womb-mates. Conceived just before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and waiting to be born in the first dark spring of the Great Depression of the 1930s, we were blissfully unaware of everything except, I suppose, each other’s presence in that warm dark comfortable space. Even that double presence was somewhat more than our mother and her doctor were aware of in those days before ultrasound scans: Having delivered her of a healthy baby girl and thinking both his and her labors done, the doc checked out—and to all hands’ surprise, an hour and twenty minutes later an also-healthy baby boy followed, delivered by whoever happened to be on call.

  Sister first, brother second: I’ll come back to that.

  When the news was announced to our three-year-older brother Bill that he was no longer the family’s only child, he gamely replied, “Now we have a Jack and Jill!”—and much followed from that. Having been womb-mates, for the next ten or twelve years my twin sister and I were roommates (in twin beds, appropriately) and though less genetically close than identical twins—indeed, no closer genetically than any other pair of siblings—I’d say we were otherwise about as close as non-Siamese twins can be. From kindergarten through elementary school in Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, we attended the same classes, had the same friends, and were each other’s best friend. We endured plenty of teasing from classmates about the “Jack and Jill” thing (including some memorably naughty versions of the nursery rhyme), bu
t got used to it. When we took piano lessons, our teacher inevitably assigned us duets, wherein Jill always played the upper-keyboard melody part (Primo, considered appropriate for the girl, I guess), and Jack played Secondo, the lower-octave harmony-and-counterpoint part. Fine by me: It felt more manly down there in the bass clef.

  By high school, of course, our hormones had kicked in and we’d begun to go our ever-more-separate ways: separate bedrooms, friends, and high-school curricula. But we remained in close harmony both literal and figurative. We organized a successful little jazz group, for example, called the Swingtette—Ms. Primo on piano, Mr. Secondo on drums, and a couple of our friends on sax and trombone—and played regular Saturday-night dances at the Cambridge Country Club through our junior and senior years. After graduation, however, our paths diverged indeed: Jack crossed the Bay to university, and for the next forty years returned to Cambridge and the Eastern Shore only to visit; Jill went to business school in Wilmington, returned to work in a bank in Cambridge, met and married one of her customers (Bob Corkran of nearby Hurlock), and happily went into the accounting business with him there.

  Over the ensuing decades, Jack’s life had the wider radius, but Jill’s had much deeper roots: The Corkrans seldom left the Eastern Shore even on vacation, but they maintained warm connections with old friends, enjoyed golf games, crab feasts, weekend evenings at the American Legion hall, and raising their daughter Jo. Jill went from being named the Delmarva Poultry Festival’s “Chicken of Tomorrow” back in her teens to becoming Hurlock’s First Lady when her husband was elected mayor of that small town. And when Bob was sadly and prematurely taken from her by cancer while only in his fifties, Jill soldiered on: She taught my non-Maryland wife Shelly how to cook a softcrab and roast a goose; she presided over her daughter’s wedding and spoke fondly of her son-in-law; she oversaw end-of-life care and funeral arrangements for our parents and other elderly relatives (with a little help from her far-flung brothers and their wives, but Jill carried most of the load, and carried it ably indeed); she enjoyed her granddaughter’s talents and triumphs—and then bravely and cheerfully, when the time came, she made her own move from her house in Preston (not far from Hurlock and Cambridge) to a “continuing care” establishment in also-nearby Easton, where she lived out her final life-chapters, her accountant daughter presiding over her as Jill had done for her parents.

  My closing, warmest memory of my twin is from not long after she made that move. In the summer of 2002, the Cambridge High School Class of 1947 celebrated its 55th reunion with a sunset cruise aboard a paddlewheel tour-boat from Suicide Bridge (yup, that’s its name), up near Preston, down the Choptank River to Cambridge and back, with dinner and dancing to live music. Much as my wife and my sister enjoyed each other’s company, Shelly had other commitments that day, and so I picked up Jill at her assisted-living place and we two enjoyed a lovely evening together with old school chums, reminiscing about (among other things) our long-ago Swingtette jazz combo. The high point of that evening, for me, was when one of those good buddies, whom I’d reminded that our group’s theme-song had been the smooth old 1930s ballad called Moonglow, passed that info along to the band without telling us. Next thing we knew, they were playing it for us—first time I’d heard it in maybe half a century! My old womb-mate and I set down our wineglasses and danced—not for the first time, certainly, but for the first time in too long a time, and for the last time, alas.

  I can hear it now:

  It must have been moonglow,

  Way up in the blue....

  Moonglow it was, Jill, on that moonlit river, our tidal birth-water—and moonglow it remains. Your old ex-wombmate and ex-roommate is in no hurry to become your tombmate; but it’s poetically appropriate, I suppose, for Ms. Primo to lead the way in our tale’s last chapter, as she did in its first.

  Rest in peace, dear Sis.

  Notes

  Foreword

  1 New York: Putnam, 1984.

  2 Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

  3 See “Keats’s Fears, Etc.”, the lead-off piece in this collection.

  4 The Development: 9 Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).

  5 Literally (which is to say, figuratively) “being breathed into again”: the CPR of artists in any medium.

  Keats’s Fears, Etc.

  1 As of 1997; another thousand-plus over the decade since. Scribble scribble scribble!

  2 As of the date of this essay: Miller died in 2005.

  State of the Art

  1 xx:2, Spring 1996

  2 Now defunct, alas.

  3 See the essay “The Inkstained Thumb,” to follow.

  4 Indeed, novelists such as Richard Powers and my former Hopkins coachee Vickram Chandra use everything from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Project logistics programs to voice-recognition software for organizing and composing their novels: See Rachel Donadio’s essay “Get With the Program,” New York Times Book Review, June 10, 2007.

  5 See “The Accidental Mentor,” my 80th-birthday tribute to him, in the latter section of this volume.

  6 For more on “Serial,” see the essay “‘In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night’” farther on in this collection.

  7 Coover himself, though a professor of e-lit, inclines to the p-variety for his own abundant and lively productions.

  Two More Forewords

  1 The five novels were The Floating Opera and The End of the Road (first published in 1956 and 1958, respectively, but reprinted in a single volume), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1965), and Lost in the Funhouse (1968).

  2 Thor Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 439 U.S. 522.

  3 In his knowledgeable and perceptive Reader’s Guide to Barthbooks (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993).

  4 The War of 1812, which to us children of the Chesapeake ranks as high as the Revolutionary War because so much of it was fought in our home waters, was even at the time often called the Second American Revolution. It is this second, more than the first, that figures in the historical portions of LETTERS. And those who lived through the American High Sixties will remember the apocalyptic air of “Revolution now!” that hung like tear gas over our university campuses especially.

  “In the Beginning”

  1 New York: Anchor, 1996.

  2 Subsequently published as Genesis: A Living Conversation (New York: Doubleday, 1996).

  3 More precisely, I’m told, it means “In the beginning of.” Its deployment sans object in Genesis 1:1 is linguistically odd enough so that disagreement among Biblical commentators begins, appropriately, with this initial word of scripture. See, e.g., Robert D. Sacks, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1990), pp. 2–3.

  4 In fact, some such English adverb as Beginningly or Originally would be the formal-metaphoric equivalent of Bereshith. But beginningly, alas, is an over-selfconscious coinage, and originally is both forceless and inexact, implying some subsequent re-creation, as in “Originally the story began here, but later . . .” et cetera. An analogous problem faces English translators of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: That monumental novel about time opens with the word Longtemps, famously rendered and vitiated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff as “For a long time,” which moves the key word to fourth place. The poet Richard Howard’s version makes an ingenious restoration: “Time was . . .” (in the sense “There was a time when . . .”). See the essay “‘In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night,’” farther on in this volume.

  5 E.g., separation of the four elemental forces, prodigious inflation, reciprocal but not quite equal annihilation of subatomic particles and antiparticles, “quark confinement,” and the commencement of nucleosynthesis, all within the initial second of Planck Time.

  6 Some commentators judiciously prefer “the sky and the earth,” inasmuch as the theological connotations of heaven play no part in this part of the creation-story. See Sacks, p.
4.

  7 A history which itself rebegins in Chapter Five—“This is the book of the generations of Man,” et cetera—with its recapitulation of Man’s creation on Day Six of Chapter One and again in Verse Seven of Chapter Three.

  8 Act Three—when, as Chekhov reminds us, all the pistols hung on the wall in Act One must be duly fired—will not be addressed in this essay: Armageddon, Judgment Day, the end of the created world in the Big Crunch of Apocalypse.

  9 Notably the Weak, the Strong, and the Participatory, more or less advocated by such distinguished physicists as, respectively, Brandon Carter, Stephen Hawking, and John A. Wheeler.

  10 Joseph Heller declares that he begins his novels by writing their last chapter first, after which he invents a sequence of events that necessitates that ending. (See the essay “‘All Trees Are Oak Trees . . . ,’” farther on in this collection.)

  11 Concerning biological evolution, for example, as well as human history, Stephen Jay Gould remarks, “History can be explained, with satisfying rigor if evidence be adequate, after a sequence of events unfolds, but it cannot be predicted with any precision beforehand” (“The Evolution of Life on Earth,” Scientific American, October 1994).