"And they were totally cool with it, bless 'em! Sort of proud of their mom and dear aunties for having worked our way through college the way we did. They even thought it was cool that Aunt Aggie had been a porn star: 'No wonder she's the best gym coach ever!' Cindy told me: 'All those acrobatics!'"
And young Neddie — who'd switched his major at Princeton from Business to Art History as soon as his dad wasn't around to say no — was as wowed as his kid sister by the news that their mom had not only known the late, great Manfred F. Dickson, but had actually worked with him on The Fates for all those years! That news was what turned Cindy-Ella into a writer.
Into a commercially unsuccessful writer, she likes to say, who refuses to write "chick lit" and who defines the novella, her favorite form, as a story too long to sell to a magazine and too short to sell to a book publisher, bless her. Anyhow, the coast being clear, Ag and I were of course eager to get back to our teaching, both to pay the rent after my alimony stopped and because we were teachers to the bone. But our slots at Severn Day had been filled by young replacements whom we didn't want to bump, and we didn't have the Education credits that public school systems are fussy about. So in '761 went to work as assistant librarian at Severn Day and then as head librarian when my boss retired: a post 1 held happily indeed for the next eighteen years, till I retired at age sixty-five and my health gave out, as if on cue. As for Aggie... she'll speak for herself, and then Thelma likewise, before we're out of tape. Ag?
Not much to tell. Less blessed in the résumé way than my twin, when Ned forced us out of teaching I supported myself with pickup jobs — like selling cosmetics and jewelry at Kmart and J. C. Penney — until Grace was reestablished at Severn and eased me back in to help coach drama, dance, and gym. When arthritis and emphysema sidelined me for keeps, we shared a nice apartment in Annapolis, not far from where we'd grown up, and I played housekeeper as best I could to earn my room and board till Gracie retired. It was like being kids again, only with separate bedrooms for us and a sleep sofa for overnight guests like Gracie's grownup youngsters.
A luxury we never had as Navy brats, not to mention as womb-mates. And that's our story, folks, except for how we wound up as a threesome here in Bernbridge. Your ship, Thelma.
"Aye aye, Cap'n. I was the only Gracious Mason not damaged by our undergrad tuition-paying per se or by prick-head Ned Forester's reading all about it in Gracie's fucking diaries, as we call 'em. Between Doctor Sam and me, all that stuff had been a family joke: As I said, he was proud of me for it. And by the time Ned blew his whistle on the three of us, my world had ended twice already, at ages thirty-nine and forty-three: first with Sammy's death in the summer of '69 (wouldn't he have loved the idea of croaking in mid-soixante-neuf!) and then with poor Benjy's wipeout in the spring of '73. I doubt I'd have weathered those losses without my two sisters' support; helping them later through their bad time was downright therapeutic for me."
By then all three of us were back in the old hometown…
"Right. Benjy had needed so much looking after that I'd long since quit my job in Sam's office and had tried in vain to turn our son into a responsible kid. After Sammy died, it had been a relief as well as an economic necessity to sell our house in Baltimore, move into a condo, and go back to work for one of his ob/gyn colleagues. Early in '73 the guy shifted his practice down to Bowie, halfway between Annapolis and Washington, and for a few months I made the long commute so that Benjy could finish his senior year at Park School. But when he dropped out of school that February and piled up on the Beltway in March, at Grace and Aggie's urging I swapped the Baltimore condo for one in Annapolis, a quick shot from the new office, et voilà: Unhappy Fate had brought the three Fates happily together again."
Just in time for you to become the rescuer and us the rescued. Bless you for that.
Let me add that we were all in our forties by then, like Cindy and Neddie now: happy to be reunited but unhappy to be widows, divorcées, and never-marrieds; banged around by life but kept afloat by Thelma/Thalia's unfailing good humor — and none of us, for our separate reasons, much interested by then in finding another significant other. By the time the Great Diary Fallout was truly behind us, we were turning fifty, content with our new jobs and salvaged life situations, and independent except for our interdependency…
"A different kind of Three-Way from the classic model."
And the first Ph.D. dissertations were being written on Manny's Fates.
To all of which I would add that while Gracie and I especially, now that we were reinstalled at Severn Day, had to be super-discreet in the area of S-E-X, none of the three of us had yet abandoned such pleasures altogether. Had we?
Welclass="underline" I had, I guess — except for getting it off now and then with the handy-dandy gizmo that you guys gave me for my forty-fifth. But you had your little sessions with Carol Tucker, didn't you, Ag?
A very well-to-do former student of ours, Listener, by then a trustee of Severn Day and thus not likely to spill our beans. She and I would get together in her hotel whenever she was in town for a board meeting. Sweet saucy If-You-Can't-Fuck-Her-Suck-Her Tucker: Erato's last stand. Et tu, Thalia?
"Me? Yes. Welclass="underline" Widowhood took the zing out of Open Marriage, for sure. And I'm convinced that Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 brought on my early menopause, or at least a total loss of appetite in that department after age fifty. For the next dozen-plus years I got off on tennis and aerobics instead, until my back and knees gave out and I broke my hip in an escalator tumble at our nearby Nordstrom. And so at the tender age of seventy, here we are at Bernbridge-in-the-Boondocks, waiting to die."
Some of us more patiently than others. And how we wound up here is as follows: Gracie, s.v.p.?
Got it. As has been told, Aggie's early emphysema and the rest sidelined her circa 1979, when she was just turning fifty. Thelma and I were able to work into our sixties, until her failing joints nudged her into slightly early retirement from her doctor's office job and my reaching sixty-five prompted my very reluctant goodbye to Severn Day. Which life change, I'm convinced, inspired my uterine cancer, cured by the timely removal of all that female plumbing that had so bemused both Doc Sam Weisman and Manny Dickson in their different ways. Have we mentioned, Junior, that LIFE'S A BITCH, as the bumper sticker says, AND THEN YOU DIE, if you're lucky enough to live so long? Meanwhile, however, it does have its moments, and the older and feebler we-all got — me especially, I guess — the more it seemed to us that our college days (you know what I mean) were the most eventful, the most memorable, the most fun time of our lives, in particular those Lambda Upsilon gigs with Manny and all that followed therefrom: his obsession with Y's and threesomes and mythic obstacle courses and scavenger hunts. We've loved our various mates and our children and our students and our work, but what we're most likely to be remembered for, if anything — whether thanks to Junior's biography-in-the-works or despite it — is our inspiration of Manfred Dickson's trilogy and our later input-sessions with him while he was writing it. As my Cindy-Ella of a daughter makes clear (rising from the ashes of her parents' divorce to turn smut into Art), that was our Place Where Three Roads Met.