So what happened — if I may, Gracie? — was that when we reached the point where even housekeeping got to be more than the three of us could manage, and we needed ever more looking after, we scouted all the assisted-living kinds of places in the Baltimore/Washington/Annapolis area, and found enough pluses and minuses in every one to make the thing a tossup. So back and forth we went, literally and figuratively, until we were dizzy with indecision and getting on one another's nerves and about ready to just flip a coin, if we'd had an eight- or ten-sided coin. Then one fine day near the start of Bill Clinton's second term, Thelma came to our rescue by announcing… Thelm?
"By announcing, 'None of the above, girls: It's going to be Bernbridge Manor for us, way up in Bernbridge EmDee, where we don't know a frigging soul, and who cares, since most of our old friends are dead anyhow.' "
Thus spake Thalia, and we said, "Bernbridge? What's this Bernbridge? Why Bernbridge?" And she said, "You nailed it, Gracie: Here's the Why." By which she meant both the reason why and the letter Y, as she showed us on the map.
"Because once I'd thought of it, and the three of us, and our connection with Manny, I got as hooked on those Y's as he'd been — to the point where I actually looked to see whether there might be an assisted-living place somewhere on the Wye River, over on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where Clinton and Arafat and Netanyahu signed that Wye River Accord that led to zilch. As did my not-so-Heroic Quest? So then, just to get the damned decision decided, I checked out all such configurations within a fifty-mile radius of Annapolis, and voilà!"
Voilà indeed: the far northeast corner of the Old Line State, where the Mason-Dixon, appropriately, quits running east-west to divide Pennsylvania from Maryland, among other things, and turns ninety degrees south to divide Maryland from Delaware, while the line between Delaware and Pennsylvania shoots off northeastward in a great arc around Wilmington — a sort of loopy-looking lambda, to those inclined to see such things.
More exactly, our Bernbridge sits just a stone's throw from that three-way, on yet another one, where Route 896 drops south from Pennsylvania to the east end of the Mason-Dixon. Just where it crosses that celebrated line at the curious conjunction that Aggie mentioned and continues southeastward into Delaware, a county road forks off southwestward into Maryland: a jim-dandy inverted Y like the one in Clotho, superimposed on that state-line three-way out of Lachesis/ My kids said, "Go for it, Mom/" Who could resist?
And who gave a shit anyhow? Our life stories were all but told by then, through the second half of a century whose horrors we'd been spared, up to the commencement of another, which bids at best to be no better. Each of us had seen and done and been whatever, separately or together, and hadn't seen/done/been what we hadn't, for better or worse. So now we play Bernbridge bridge and bingo while we wait for our systems to finish failing — and who gives a shit, and why should they? What's it all been for?
Well, now, Aggie: pour l'art, maybe? To've added a bit of spice to a certain Controversial Modern Classic and a not-bad-at-all spinoff novella, and now to shed a little light on the circumstances of their composition. Is that nothing?
Yup.
"No! Unless Aggie's reached the point of feeling that capital-C Civilization itself is nothing."
I'm getting there. But I do still enjoy our glass of wine every night with dinner.
Then you're still welcomely on board, sis. And if the tape of our lives has almost run out, that means there may be enough left for a few last words. Your mike, Aggie.
Fuck it. And fuck you, motherfucking Junior, and your fucking father and his fucking hero-myth and his fucking books. Fuck everything — except my sisters.
Good girl, Ag: still aboard, even as our ship goes down. Thelma?
"Just want to add what only now occurred to me: that if we think of Junior's tracking us down here at Bernbridge last month — which Cindy had given us advance warning of, Listener, after he'd tracked her down — as a replay of his father's tracking us down in Annapolis back in the mid-fifties, then that old reconnection with Manny Senior can be called the foreplay of what we're doing now with Junior. Right?"
Amen.
I.e., fucking him over?
"And over and over. Over and out, Gracie."
— as we used to say to our quickie customers back in undergraduate days, Junior, as we rolled over when their five minutes were up. See Lachesis, page something-or-other. Over and out, luv. And then, Next?
So, Junior: Instead of "We who are about to die salute you," as the Roman gladiators used to say, it's "We who are on our last legs give you the finger." Unless, lad — what's too much to hope for, we suppose, but stranger things have happened in the history of inadequate parents and their screwed-up spawn — unless you somehow see fit to include an unedited transcript of these tapes in your big-shit three-decker critical biography of your old man. A kind of appendix, maybe?
"Scratch that, Grace: Appendixes can be surgically removed. What we've laid on you here, Junie, is no appendix: It's the heart and backbone of the story."
Its very cock and balls, if you know what we mean. Take us out, Grace.
Roger wilco. As I was saying—
EDITOR'S NOTE
At this point, the third of the three "Bernbridge" audiotapes — purportedly recorded at my urging by the elderly Mason sisters on 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000 —ran out, and (the ladies evidently not realizing that there was unused footage remaining on Tapes 1 and 2) their scabrous three-way commentary on their alleged association with the late author of The Fates terminates abruptly in mid-sentence: not artfully, like the "ending" of Finnegans Wake, which circles back to its mid-sentence opening to complete the cycle of Eternal Recurrence which is that master-work's Ground Theme, but unintentionally, leaving their potty-mouthed spiel unfinished like the Atropos volume of "my father"'s trilogy. One reasonably wonders why the harpy-in-chief, Ms. Grace Mason Forester, when she rewound, replayed, transcribed, and enlarged upon the trio's recorded conversation, didn't complete her closing statement, whether that statement was to be the sisters' nasty imprecation-in-progress against the present writer or their disillusioned adieu to the only historically significant aspect of their lives: their initial (unintended, accidental) inspiring of "my father" at a formative moment in his literary apprenticeship and their subsequent "input" (and, in Ms. Forester's case, stenographic and perhaps limited editorial assistance, to say no more) in the completion of his chef d'oeuvre—for both of which matters, to be sure, one has only their testimony, the ambiguous evidence of "C. Ella Mason" 's Wye novella, and that obscure, much-puzzled-over dedication of The Fates: "To the Gracious Masons, who…"*
The patient reader of this extended study, and especially of this appendix thereto, will have noted its author-editor's occasional quotation marks around "my father," and may well have inferred their reason. Of my biological parentage I have no doubts: Readers who compare the several photographs herein of Manfred F. Dickson Sr. at his son's approximate present age and the jacket-flap mug shot of myself will not fail to note the unmistakable resemblance. But as prevailingly cordial, or at least civil, as our connection was through my boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood, I never felt loved by the father whom, per Evolution's heedless program, I loved helplessly, and whom I honor yet (as witness this years-long labor, now all but concluded), despite his lifelong indifference to, amounting to virtual rejection of, his only child. As if Oedipus, put out as an infant by his father, Laius, to die lest he grow up as foretold by Apollo to become a parricide, upon encountering years later that road-hogging old Theban at the Place Where Three Roads Meet, instead of killing him to clear his own path, had graciously yielded the right-of-way and then, belatedly realizing who the elderly stranger must be, had hurried after him (as I've done here in three long volumes), crying, like a character out of Kafka, "Father! Look! Your son, alive and well except for an unaccountably swollen foot! Your son, who craves only reunion, reconciliation, and the father I never had! Wait for me! I forgive you everything! Let's go on from here together!" But the oldster's wagon is gone already down that westward road, with not a backward glance from its heartless driver at its heartbroken pursuer. Who, unable despite all to embrace the uncaring sire whose shade still taunts, trudges behind on his own career-long Heroic Quest, from the outset knowing it to be in vain.