Where Three Roads Meet

TAPE 1

…dear Listener, before Grace noticed we'd forgotten to push the Record button on Junior's machine: This portion of the oral history of Manfred Dickson's famous novel-trilogy—

"Better say Dickson Senior's trilogy, Aggie. Manny Senior's infamous trilogy."

— Manfred F. Dickson Senior's once-notorious and controversial but now virtually forgotten masterwork, The Fates, okay? This unofficial contribution to the project (as I was saying, until Thelma interrupted me) will be the collective recollections of the Mason sisters, as recorded in our Bernbridge Manor apartments in Bernbridge, Maryland, on New Year's Eve 1999.

"Three burned-out former floozies in the Burnt-Bridge Old Farts' Home."

Have it your way, Thelm. These interruptions, I was saying, are courtesy of our irrepressible sister Thelma—

"Thalia the Unrepressed to you folks out there in Listener Land: a still-frisky seventy-pluser who likes to tweak her dear doddering elders."

Kid Sister Thelma/Thalia, all of eighteen months younger than the rest of us…

Which is to say, folks, just a tad younger than my twin sister Agatha — our Lead-Off Narrator, you might say — and her twin sister Grace (temporarily speaking), who'll transcribe these off-the-record recordings and add her two cents' worth as we go along. Aggie in roman type, Thelma in quotes, and me in italics ought to keep things clear. You were saying, Ag?

…Sister Thelma/Thalia, I was saying: still the sharp-tongued wiseass brat of our golden girlhood.

"Excuse me, sis: I hope and believe I have my head on straight, but my ass was never my wisest part."

Amen to that, for the three of us. Always remembering, however, girls, that once upon a time it was these tushies of ours that paid our way through college.

And made us secretly famous, Listener — as it were? Unbeknownst to any except ourselves and a certain… Señor Senior, shall we call him?

"If only we could call up old Manny, who made the Mason sisters… what? Anonymously famous? Temporarily immortal?"

As maybe we'll be again, less anonymously and temporarily, if Manny Junior has his way.

"Or if we have our way with Junior."

[Chuckles]

Imagine that, now: a Three-Way with that uptight little putz! Talk about wise!

Aggie's pun on Y's lost in transcription, Listener, as it will be in translation likewise (excuse me) if "Junior" 's critical study of his once-fairly-famous dad ever gets written, published, and translated into languages other than English. And hey, girls, we're piling up inside jokes and allusions at such a clip that this oral history of ours is going to need footnotes and commentaries.

Leave those to Herr Doktor Professor Junior: It's what prissies like him are for, right? He wants oral, we'll give him oral.

"Plus vaginal and anal! The old Mason-Dixon Three-Way!"

You wish. But Gracie's got a point there: We probably ought to start over.

Would that we could. From scratch.

"As in You scratch mine and I'll scratch yours?"

Scratch the interruptions, Thal, or we'll never get our effing story told.

"Our Effing Story…"

As I was saying, people — or've been trying to get said from Square One? Better yet, Grace: You fill the folks in, orally or otherwise, and then we'll get on with our three-part harmony. Tell 'em where we're coming from, and why.

"And where all our coming went, and why all those Y's in Manny's Fates…"

Speaking of Y's, guys — Y's-guys? — Y2K's about to hit Times Square, and how many turn-of-the-millenniums do we Once-and-Future Immortals get to raise a glass to? So be a good sis and pop us some bubbly, Thal, while Aggie fetches the flutes and I slug a fresh tape into Junior's gizmo—

"Now that sounds like fun."

— and tomorrow we'll start over.

"Hah. Spare me."

What I suggest, Grace, is that instead of us starting a new tape now, you write up some kind of introduction to this big-deal oral history—

"Right on, Agatha. Grace has always been the family scribbler, see, Listener: term papers for the three of us back in college days; bookkeeping ledgers for our little business; suggestions and corrections for Manny's scripts. Manny-scripts? Not to mention diaries…"

Not to mention certain better-she-hadn't-kept-'em diaries. But as I was saying: Let's clink glasses now, and then at Happy Hour tomorrow Grace'll read her scribbles and we'll take it from there: Lambda Upsilon! Dining at the Y! The works!

You'll do the reading, Aggie. I just cook the books.

[Knowing chuckles. Pop of champagne cork. Strains of Auld Lang Syne from TV coverage of millennial New Year's Eve festivities.]

So: To inspiration?

"We all know what that means. Bottoms up!"

[More chuckles. Clink of glasses.]

Here's to us, then.

"To us."

Us.

And now it's tomorrow already, everybody — specifically, half an hour and one glass of Mumm Brut into January 1, 2000, which astronomer types tell us isn't really the new millennium's kickoff, but never mind those party poopers — and no need for a new tape yet, 'cause there's room enough left on this one to explain that a letter recently arrived at Bernbridge Manor addressed to Ms. Grace Mason [Forester] (my former married name set like that in brackets) and letterheaded Arundel University, which used to be Arundel State University, which used to be Arundel State College, which used to be Arundel State Teachers College when Agatha and Thelma and I worked our butts off, so to speak, to earn our degrees there back in the fifties. To my less-than-total surprise — and Aggie's and "Thalia" 's when I passed the thing around — it was a very lengthy letter of introduction from one Dr. Manfred F. Dickson Jr., Ph.D., professor of social history at Arundel U. and son of "the undeservedly neglected writer of the same name," whom he understood my sisters and me to have known in his father's "formative years." Perhaps we had heard, the letter went on, that nearby Mason-Dixon University (a considerably more upscale operation, Listener, than our ASTC/ASC/ASU/AU) — Manfred Senior's alma mater, where he'd later taught for a few years while writing the first and second volumes ofThe Fates, and where Manfred Junior had been born and raised until his parents split and the ruckus over those books got his old man sacked — was belatedly and cautiously reappreciating their notorious alumnus, as were some literary historians, and had proposed to name a new classroom building, or at least one of its seminar rooms, in his honor. Not surprisingly, even the more modest of these proposals was meeting with resistance from conservative trustees of the university. The letter writer himself, he would have me know, much respected his father's work despite its "perhaps excessive ribaldry"; in the 1960s, after all, it had been regarded in some quarters as a comic/erotic epic: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. with sex, humor, and "mythopoeic fantasy"; Henry Miller's Tropics in the Age of Aquarius; "an in valuable sociohistorical record of mid-century America." He welcomed any renewed public controversy on the subject, Junior declared, despite the attendant associations with his parents' divorce, his mother's lifelong resentments, and his father's pitiable final years, inasmuch as he himself was at work on a three-volume historical/critical/biographical study of Manfred Senior's life and times, from his Roosevelt-era boyhood and eventual discovery of his vocation after several false starts, through the "mature" period of his fixation on the Heroic Cycle and his composition of the Fates trilogy between 1957 and 1963—the Eisenhower-Kennedy era of America's Korean and Vietnam wars and the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and space race — to his obscure end in the rebellious, counter-cultural high 1960s. Along the way, he declared, he hoped to "address and perhaps even resolve" such "cardinal mysteries of Dickson scholarship" as the author's obsession with threes in general and Y's in particular: obsessions that, together with the notorious Myth of the Wandering Hero, "bind the three otherwise disparate novels into a trilogy." And who, exactly, were the enigmatic "Gracious Masons, who lent me their ears," to whom the monumental work is cryptically thus dedicated (instead of to its author's long-suffering spouse, the letter writer's mother, "who surely deserved that honor")?

Et cetera, blah blah blah.

It was in pursuit of this latter question, Dr. Dickson's letter went on (and on and on), that his attention had lately been brought to a more recent work of "experimental" fiction: a novella-length piece called Wye, by one C. Ella Mason (an author previously unknown to him), featured in the Spring 1999 issue of his (and our) university's literary quarterly, The Arundel Review. Ms. Mason's story (as he presumed I knew, its author happening to be my daughter) is a roman à clef concerning the dismissal in 1974 of two respected faculty members of the "Annapolis School for Girls" (a transparent alias for the Severn Day School, Listener, where Aggie and I so loved our years of teaching) on the grounds that twenty years earlier they had worked as prostitutes to earn their tuition at "Wye College," in the course of which enterprise they had met, serviced, and, it seems, inspired a budding young writer named "Fred," of whom more presently.

The teachers in question are a long-standing member of the "ASG" English Department named "Mrs. Woodsman" and her sister, a more recently hired theater and gymnastics coach; the scandal of their past comes to light when the former's husband discovers, in 1973, diaries kept by his wife from the late 1940s, before their marriage, through the following decade (in the course of which they had wed and bred) and into the early 1960s. They reveal to him not only his wife's shocking premarital past, of which he was altogether unaware, but also that in the seven years from 1955 to 1962 she had "maintained a relationship" (also unknown to him) with the aforementioned "Fred," who by then had blossomed into the up-and-coming avant-garde novelist "Frederick Manson": a period extending from the conception of his controversial erotic trilogy The Graces through its initial publication and its author's termination from the faculty of "Wye College," whereto he had returned as writer-in-residence. The scandalized husband — a conservative country-club-Republican dealer in suburban D.C. commercial real estate named "Ed Woodsman" — successfully presses for divorce and custody of the couple's two late-teenage children despite his mate's honest protestations that her past is past; that throughout her marriage she has been an exemplary wife and mother; that her "relationship" with Adjunct Professor "Man-son" had been exclusively editorial, assisting him with the research and composition of his subsequently world-famous and unjustly maligned masterwork, which in her admittedly subjective opinion bade to be to the century's second half what James Joyce's Ulysses (similarly banned as "obscene" until District Court Judge John M. Woolsey's landmark 1933 ruling to the contrary) was to its first. In sum, that she is reprehensible only in having kept from her husband her early sexual history and her subsequent, altogether nonsexual connection with "Frederick Manson," on the grounds that her dear dour spouse was incapable of understanding, much less of forgiving, those omissions.

The family court judge (so went C. Ella Mason's Wye novella, insofar as the letter writer could follow its story line through its off-putting postmodernist narrative devices) is unimpressed; likewise the headmistress and trustees of the Annapolis School for Girls, much as they value Mrs. Woodsman's long and distinguished service to that institution and her more recently appointed but comparably popular sister's as well (had they known about Aggie's activities between her college days and her Severn Day School appointment, Listener, there'd have been even more hell to pay!). The two women lose their jobs; the Annapolis School girls lose the best teachers they'll ever know; Mrs. Woodsman loses official custody of her children (but not their love, understanding, and sympathy, declares Wye's first-person narrator); she loses, too, her beloved-though-stuffy husband, first to the divorce that he insists upon, and soon after to his death by suicide, humiliated by the public scandal that he has himself precipitated. American literature, moreover, has by the present time of the Wye story long since lost to alcohol and despair the novelist "Frederick Manson," whose wife divorces him after his sacking from "Wye College." Concerning all which losses, the un- named narrator of Wye asks of herself and of the reader (in a perhaps over-heavy closing-line pun), Why?

While reserving judgment on the literary merits of Ms. Mason's lengthy short story, Manfred F. Dickson Jr. — the writer of this interminable letter of introduction, in case Listener has forgotten — declared himself to have been struck indeed by the obvious parallels between his father and "Frederick Manson,"as between The Fates and "The Graces," not to mention by the novella's echoing, in its title and in numerous elements of its construction, his father's signature preoccupation with, among other things, Y's. He had therefore promptly sought out its author, herself an adjunct professor of creative writing at a branch campus of the state university on Maryland's Eastern Shore; had introduced and identified himself; and had pressed her for details of the backstory ofWye. No doubt to protect her family's privacy, Ms. Mason — a quite pleasant woman about the same age as himself, he was pleased to report, who asked to be called Cindy — had insisted that her fiction was just that, pure fiction, although she readily acknowledged its echoing of themes and motifs from The Fates. She denied likewise any connection with or knowledge of the "Gracious Masons" of that trilogy's dedication, while admitting that the coincidence of her last name and those dedicatees' had been one inspiration of her novella. Unconvinced, but not wanting to press the subject against her wishes (Ms. Mason having been otherwise most hospitable to him, respectful of his father's literary accomplishment — to which she would not presume to compare her modest own — and particularly sympathetic in the matter of parental divorce and loss of sire), he then took it upon himself to computer-search her background and was not long in tracing her parentage, the essential similarities (but with important differences, Lis- tener) between Mr. and Mrs. "Ed Woodsman" 's history and that of Ned and Grace Mason Forester, and the latter's present address.

Having discovered which last (right under his nose, it turned out, in the Arundel U. alumni directory!), he earnestly hoped that she might grant him and "contemporary Dickson scholarship" the privilege of an extended interview on the details of her collaboration with his father: nothing indiscreet, she was to understand (the erotic, he declared, was "frankly not [his] cup of tea"), but perhaps the illumination of such questions as those mentioned earlier, and even of such relative details as why Clotho (the first of the Fates novels, dealing with the hero's birth, boyhood, and discovery of his vocation) is emblemized on its title page and chapter headings with an inverted equiangular Y (i.e.,), the second (Lachesis, the saga of the hero's serial labors) with the Y upright, and the third (Atropos, the story of his fall from favor and his mysterious end) with the emblem turned ninety degrees clockwise ().

Might they, at her convenience, meet and talk? And if so, could she kindly supply him with driving directions to Bern-bridge Manor, as he had tried in vain to find the town of Bernbridge both on his computer and on his AAA map of Maryland/Delaware/Virginia?…

TAPE 2

Okay: Press Record now, Gracie.

Already did that, Ag: The floor's yours.

"Not to mention bed and couch and any other available surface once upon a time, hey, Aggie?"

Can it, Thelm. You were saying, Ag?

…that meet the little weenie we did, Listener dear, and talked his maiden ears off for two hours straight yesterday afternoon. More than he bargained for!

"Or could handle. Did you see how he blanched when we solved his little riddles for him in the first half hour, and how he spent the next ninety minutes looking for a way to get his tushie out of here?"

Well: It wasn't really fair to spring the three of us on him when he was expecting just me. But who could resist?

His dad sure took it in stride, back in '48. But Manny Senior was a different story.

That he was: innocent, maybe, but eager to learn, and a very quick study.

And still in his teens then, Listener, don't forget. Whereas Manny Junior at age — what, mid-forties? — is plenty learned but still innocent, in our judgment, and self-programmed to stay that way. We'd bet he's never been laid in his life.

"By either sex, was Cindy's guess when she alerted Grace that we might be hearing from him."

All the same, it was a bit much of us to pile on the Lambda Upsilon details, and offer to demonstrate…

Like hell it was, Grace. If it's social history the guy's after, he should bring a camcorder instead of just audiotape, and let us show him what we're talking about! And I don't believe for a minute that he really wants three reels of us answering his scripted interview questions, now that he knows what he's gotten himself into. He was just politely hauling ass out of here.

"Bet he won't even come back to pick up this machine."

Yes, well, girls: Growing up as our Manny's namesake and only child can't have been a picnic, right? With a mom who felt disgraced by her husband's notoriety and half suspected him of actually doing all the horny stuff he wrote about? Genius can be hard on the home folks.

"Speaking of hard-ons…"

Would you quit that, Thal?

"Nope: In the interest of full and impartial social history, Listener needs to hear that when Aggie fetched out her famous three-in-one Ace of Clubs photo card from back in her 'modeling' days, let's say, old Junie-boy got a boner despite himself. Had to keep his clipboard on his lap to cover it."

Enough already about Junie-boy: Go back and start at our beginning now, Gracie, before we fill up this whole tape with chitchat. Once upon a time there were these three little sisters— stuff like that.

As I was about to say, Listener/Junior/Whoever: Once upon a World War Twotime there were three not-so-little Navy-brat teenage sisters in Annapolis EmDee, whose combat-officer dad survived the battles of Coral Sea and Leyte Gulf but not the accidental plane crash en route home after V-J Day, while his daughters were still in high school…

And whose widow became an acute depressive soon after — as our Thelma/Thalia did not, bless her, after her husband coughed his lungs out a few years ago, nor our Grace when hers unkindly dumped her back in the seventies — per Cindy-Ella's Wye story, but with important differences. Me, if I'd ever found myself a one-and-only and then lost him, I reckon I'd've gone Mom's route. But on with our story, Grace.

So we saw poor Ma as best we could through her get-me-out-of-here stage, which she abbreviated for us with a handful of sleeping pills enjoyed in the family Chevy idling with windows down in a closed garage while the three of us were out junior-senior promming…

"Thankee there, Ma, I guess, goddamn you, poor thing."

Whereafter we managed our own adolescence, as we'd pretty much been managing it already, and not remarkably well.

But we did by God manage it, folks, on Mom's Navy-widow pension, and decided on our own to go crosstown to ASTC and learn to be schoolteachers or accountants or something, if we could hack the tuition.

Which of course we couldn't, modest as it was, on our measly summer-job and babysitting wages—

"Until Socially Active Agatha, let's call her, happened to cross paths in a Georgetown club with a homely-but-rich boy from G. Washington U. who offered her ten for a blow-job, as I remember, or twenty for a backseat shag — good money in those days."

And said sister being already more round-heeled than well-heeled (she here readily admits), she shucked her last remaining virginity — namely, her amateur status — and came home neither with ten dollars nor with twenty, but with thirty, and an offer of more where that came from if she'd see fit to accommodate a couple of his classmates next time out.

Which she did, brave girl: half a dozen beer-guzzling undergrads, in the club basement of their frat house…

Serially, mind, instead of three at a crack, those being my early apprentice days.

"And came home this time with more than our next month's apartment rent, six times whatever being what it is, and rents back then being what they were."

And came home also with her mind made up that there was her ticket to higher education: better-paying and less time-intensive than waitressing, and probably not too risky if she took the right hygienic/contraceptive precautions, steered clear of pimps and rough neighborhoods, and mainly worked the Washington/Baltimore/Annapolis college circuit.

"Bit of social history here, if I may? Before and after the time we tell of, hookers in American college neighborhoods would've been a rarity. But in the nineteen-late-forties and fifties, the GI Bill flooded the campuses with older guys who'd been around the block: guys who mightn't have considered college without that free ticket, and whose military service had acquainted them with sex for hire."

Not that commercial-coital coeds like us were a standard feature of campus life even then, Listener, by any means. But we were imaginable, at least.

"Never mind imaginable, Aggie: We were real."

It sure felt real, anyhow, for better or worse. You were saying, Grace?

. .. that Aggie having blazed the trail, so to speak, and pointed the way to our B.A.s at ASTC, we followed her lead: Thelma less reluctantly than I, I guess, although she was still only seventeen—

As opposed to our worldly-wise eighteen and a half…

— but I no less determinedly, since my heart was set on going to college.

"Gracie being the family scholar, as well as our record-keeper. And mind you, Listener: This particular seventeen-year-old had been around the block herself a few times already."

So we got down to business—

So to speak. And did we ever! Separately and together…

Never on our own campus, for propriety's sake, but working the student hangouts in Annapolis, Georgetown, and College Park—

Where the big state U. is, Listener, and the take per trick was less than at the private colleges, but the customer-count was higher.

Mostly war vets, as established, but occasional tenderfeet as well — including first-timers, who were less intimidated by us nice coed types than they would've been by bona fide hookers. And mostly in the guys' cars (the ones who had cars in those days) or off-campus rooms and apartments, but now and then in their fraternity houses.

"Which brings us…ta-da!…"

To a certain spring Saturday in '48: Harry Truman winding up his term as FDR's successor and facing Thomas E. Dewey in the upcoming election, which we roundheel coeds weren't old enough yet to vote in. And just as we're finishing dinner and discussing where to peddle our merchandise that evening, and whether Arundel State Teachers T-shirts would be a turnoff or a come-hither on Wisconsin Avenue and environs, we get a call from a very nervous-sounding lad up at Mason-Dixon U.: a turf we'd had our eyes on, it being the most prestigious hereabouts, but hadn't had a shot at yet.

Here we go: Tell it, Gracie.

Introduced himself as Manfred Dickson, a freshman at MDU who was pledging Lambda Upsilon fraternity, known for its Hell Week hazing rituals—

"Such as olive races, where the pledges scramble naked through the house on all fours with olives in their ass-cracks while getting whacked on the butt with pledge paddles by their upperclass brothers, and whoever drops his olive has to eat it? Yuck."

And their famous scavenger hunt, where the poor fucks draw lots for such tasks as hauling up into Pennsylvania in the middle of the night to steal road signs for the towns of Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, and Blue Ball…

Or, in Pledge Dickson's case, producing for the brothers' pleasure a woman or women prepared to satisfy for a reasonable fee the carnal appetites of the entire chapter house: a task that he'd've flunked cold, he said, if one of the guys hadn't happened to be an ex-Marine junior-year transfer from the D.C. area who'd gotten our phone number from a Naval Academy plebe bar down our way, where we were sort of famous. And hey, he wanted to know: Didn't I think it meant something, quote-unquote, that my name was Mason and his was Dickson and our paths were fated to cross at Mason-Dixon U.? If, that is, we would please please PLEASE rescue his ass by letting one of his car-owning brothers pick us up pronto and fetch us to Lambda Ups for just a couple of hours at whatever was our usual and regular rate? Which was what, by the way? But not to worry, he'd made them promise to pay cash up front, and they were all really great guys, really: gentlemen and scholars, though tough on pledges and heavy on the brew. And was my first name actually Grace, as in Saving or Amazing? Fact stranger than fiction!

Et cetera, at a mile a minute, the guy was so nervous and excited and maybe a bit beered-up himself. But he agreed to our fee per head, so to speak, and to my proposal to bring along a couple of my sisters to help service his brothers, if he'd pick us up at nine sharp at the Arundel Club, near the ASTC campus, and have us back by one A.M. latest, as we had heavy studying to get done before our Monday classes.

And boyoboy, Listener, did that ever turn him on! What were we majoring in? What did we think of our profs at ASTC? Were we taking any literature courses, and what had we read lately that really blew us away? It was all Grace could do to get him off the phone and into his frat buddy's car to come fetch us in time for our date.

"Which, however, he did, on the dot, with his Marine-vet brother at the wheel; and where that one was all wise-guy winks and raunchy jokes, Pledge Manny was as flustered and courteous as if we were three debutantes being escorted to a coming-out party."

A lanky, bespectacled, red-haired, and freckle-faced nineteen-year-old he was, Listener, from the western Maryland mountains, on full scholarship at MDU and green as those Allegheny hills in May about most things social, sexual, and even academic. But a quick learner, as Gracie mentioned earlier, with a drunkard's thirst in all three of those departments.

"Speaking of which — I mean threes?…"

He was so wowed by there being three of us, and by the Mason-Dixon/Mason-Dickson coincidence, and my being named Grace, that by the time we hit the highway north for MDU he was already calling us his Three Graces—

Like the ones in the myths, which back then we-all were just learning about…

— and right away he names Thelma "Thalia" and Aggie "Aglaia," like them, and starts filling our ears with how, in his opinion, the Hell Week pledge tasks, with their go-find-thises and figure-out-thats, are a sort of undergrad version of stuff that the old-time heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas had to do: descents into the underworld, quests and ordeals and like that. And since what those hero types were really after was capital-K Knowledge — like who they truly are, and how to get where they're supposed to go and do what they're destined to do when they get there? — it was sort of appropriate for college freshmen to reenact that Heroic Quest business as they began their own, didn't we think? And please excuse him for rattling on about this Greek myth stuff: It was on account of the coincidence that while he was learning the Greek alphabet, the way all MDU frat pledges had to do, he happened also to be reading Homer and Company in his freshman lit survey courses and getting hooked on all that great stuff, though he hadn't chosen a major yet because he couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to be when he grew up — maybe because he didn't really know yet who he was, you know? And we should forgive him for hogging the mike so, when what he really wanted was to hear about our paying our way through college the way we were, which he thought was twice as heroical as anything he and his Hell Week pals were doing.

"And didn't he flip when Gracie said he should make that thrice as heroical instead of twice, 'cause she'd noticed in our own lit classes that things in those old-time stories usually come in threes, whether it's the Graces and the Fates and such or the number of heads on that monster-dog Whatsisname, that guards the gates of Hades…"

Just about creamed his chinos at that, Manny did, and then perched on his knees in the passenger seat like a five-year-old—

"Like a three-year old—"

— to talk to the three of us in the back and see how many three-things we could come up with, from Goldilocks's bears to Dante's Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Which Listener will remember are the three books of The Divine Comedy, written in three-line stanzas, which Aggie gets the same A-plus for remembering now as Manny gave her for coming up with it then, especially the terza rima bit, all of it echoing the three-in-one Holy Trinity. Meanwhile, the driver-guy is rolling his eyes and shaking his crewcut head and telling Manny to pass the fucking Budweiser for God's sake and change the subject? By then we're in the city, in the blocks of rowhouses near the MDU campus, which is where most of the students live and the frat houses are, and we pull up to one that has two big Greek letters over the door, the left one like an upside-down capital V — which is actually their L, lambda — and the other like a right-side-up capital Y, which is upsilon, their U.

As Manny happily explains to us, until smart-ass "Thalia" tells him the lambda looks to her like a pair of wide-open legs, and smart-ass Yours-Truly-"Aglaia" says that if that one has her legs open, the other one must have hers closed, which is no way to make a living. And then our driver — Bob, I believe his name was? — finally joins the fun by saying, "That chick's legs aren't closed; she's upside down with 'em spread wide open," and Manny says, "Welcome to Lambda Upsy-daisy, girls" as he hands us out of the car, and Gracie says, "Ten bucks a head to dine at the Y, guys," and in we go.

In we went, and out we came by midnight, nearly four hundred to the good, if that's the right word for it, having scored nearly a score of Lambda Upsies at our twenty-dollar group-rate special—

Including a couple of first-timers too nervous to get it up and a couple of old hands too drunk to; but nobody asked for a refund, so we gave 'em rain checks. Gents and scholars indeed, those guys, serenading us from downstairs while we turned our tricks in three separate third-floor bedrooms. Gentleman songsters off on a spree…

"Doomed to get laid by the Graces three?"

Who then gratefully rewarded Pledge Dickson with a freebie Threebie to add to his catalogue of triples: a stunt not to be found in his old-time myths. We improvised it on the spot, as I remember, having had a few beers ourselves by that time.

"And what Manny couldn't manage, we managed for him. Put that in your oral history, Junior, since Cindy saw fit not to in her novella-thing: your pop's first pop."

Which so shot his maiden wad that some other brother — the least plastered one we could locate — drove us home in exchange for another little trick en route.

And tired and sore and two-thirds sozzled as we ourselves were by then, we douched and showered, set the alarm, hit the books bright and early next morning, and got our weekend schoolwork done on time.

Which just about wraps up Episode One of our connection with Manfred Senior as a freshman. Which laid the foundation—

"In a manner of speaking—"

— for all that followed: his whole fucking career, I guess.

Also in a manner of speaking. And since there's not tape enough left on this cassette for us to start the next chapter, let's close this one by adding that Manny and his pals invited us back a few times that semester and the next, separately and together, until MDU got wind of it and cracked down on Lambda Upsilon, and the brothers lost their lease on the row-house. "Dickson's Masons," they used to call us.

And once we'd gotten him started on that business of Threes and Y's, and said what we'd said about those two Greek letters, Manny notebooked everything we told him as if we were one of those whatchacallum oracles. Philadelphic?

"Delphic Orifices, maybe?"

Not only siblings, but sibyls. And this was before the guy had decided or discovered who he was! But in his second year at MDU — and Thelma's at ASTC, and Aggie's and my junior year there — he took up with a girl at Western Maryland College that he'd known from high school: the one he wound up marrying as soon as they both graduated. And since we sibyl types were still paying our freight in our particular way, it's no surprise that he didn't introduce us to his fiancée — that's your mom-to-be, Junior — or seek us out for more input, shall we say.

So we all commenced from our respective alma maters and went our separate if not quite equal ways—

"Some of us even went straight, once our last tuition bill was paid…"

— while some others found ourselves hooked on hookering, faute de mieux. But that's another story.

To be told another time, maybe, on another tape, before Cindy-Ella beats us to it with another novella à clef: how at least one ex-Mason reconnected with a much-changed Dickson. Let's close this one with a bit of oral oracularity for Junior-boy: that famously cryptic dedication of The Fates, which the lit-crit types have read as a salute to everything from the classical Muses as literary architects to the secret fraternal order of Freemasonry.

Try it orally with us, Manny-boy, and one more mystery will be demystified. All together now: one… two…

"To the Gracious Masons, who lent me—"

[End of tape.]

TAPE 3

…their rears: another Dickson triple-entendre lost in transcription, Listener, not to mention in translation.

"Like wise."

At least one of which not even Grace is sure about: that queer Y-on-its-side that marks the last book of Manny's trilogy.

Though she has her hunches. Your dad himself would never talk seriously about things like that, Junior, especially in later years. Depending on his mood — which more and more came to mean his booze intake, after MDU sacked him — he'd say something like, "You and I are the oracles, doll, not the commentators," or "Let's leave footnotes to the kinds of assholes who fired me."

"Like you-know-who, Junie-boy."

Not fair, Thelma: The kid's father gets booted when a conservative English Department finds they've got a nontenured Henry Miller on the faculty. His parents' marriage crashes, and his mom probably fills the kid's ears with made-up tales of his dad's fuck-arounds and orgies, which Manny's not there to deny 'cause he's out wrecking his liver. No wonder the kid's neutered! My Cindy and her brother were luckier, poor kids, having their pissed-off dad conveniently drop dead.

Amen. But "made-up tales," you said?

For the record, Junior, your pa may've been less than a model parent (likewise your ma, I'd bet my butt), but he was neither the big-time cocksman that some of his detractors and admirers alike have made him out to be, nor the fantasizing jerk-off that some others have maliciously proposed. In my own not-uninformed opinion, M. D. Senior was a man of no more than average libido, more curious than lecherous or lustful, and more fixated on his freaking Threes and Y's and capital-Q Quests — not to mention language and storytelling — than on literal cunts and cocks.

"I'll second that."

And I'll third it — though Thelm and I never came to know him the way Gracie did.

"'Came to know him…' Wait'll Junior goes to work on that line!"

What I suspect, girls, is that while J-boy's declared objective is to restore his dad's critical reputation (now that the guy's doubtless long since dead), his actual motive might be to get even with him for not having been a better father. Piss on his ashes, et cet?

"Amen to that, Aggie: Intentionally or not, that's what any quote critical reappraisal unquote of his will likely do, given where its author's coming from."

Ergo, guys, our Corrective Oral Testimony, if we ever get around to it before we've used up all three tapes. That side-wise Y, by the way — that Manny used for space-breaks and such right through the Atropos novel? — might be like scissors, mightn't it, whatever else it stands for? She being the Fate who snips the thread that Clotho spins and Lachesis measures out…

Score another for sister Grace, maybe. I always think of it as some Gracious-Mason type lying on her side and lifting her leg while "lending her rear" — but that's horny old me.

"If a mere former gynecologist's assistant can presume to add her reading to an ex — English teacher's and an ex — porn queen's, I'd say you're both right. The bitch-lady heroine of Atropos figuratively cuts her artist-lover's nuts off, no? Fucks him over till he can't get it up with the muses? Cindy's Wye — story comes close to saying that."

A-plus for Thelma Mason! And now watch us get some history done: Having whored our way cum laude to our bachelor's degrees—

"So to speak."

— two-thirds of us put sex-for-hire behind us after graduation.

Also so to speak — Yours-Truly-Agatha being the naughty third third.

But even she quit being a hooker pure and simple, excuse the adjectives. Having been a drama major and varsity gymnast at Arundel State, she took those talents and her others up to NYC and later out to LA, to try her luck at modeling and actressing…

Where she dropped her drawers in what she hoped were the right talent offices and undressing rooms, and actually managed to score a few photo shoots and bit parts. But then found her true métier — I believe the word is? — in Smutsville.

"You used to tell us it was the gymnastic aspect that appealed to you."

Manny even used that line — somewhere in Lachesis, was it? On with your story, Ag.

What's to tell? Unlike my straighter sisters, I never got to be anybody's wife or mother. Had a couple hundred lovers but never lucked into capital-L Love. Came closest with a more-or-less-lesbian colleague in my more-or-less-lesbian phase, but that didn't last either. Got too old for the porn game and worked as a talent scout for a while, till I learned I was scouting young illegal-immigrant Latinas to be flat-out putas. Put all that behind me in my forties and moved back east, where my better twin steered me to an M.Ed. degree and a job coaching gym and dramatics to the girls of Severn Day School.

Which in its innocence never made a better appointment: absolutely first-rate coach, teacher, and all-'round moral compass for her students.

"Because she'd been around the proverbial block and knew which alleys to avoid. But try to tell that to the SDS trustees, if Gracie's husband had blown the whistle on us as he threatened to."

Not to get too far ahead of our story, while Aggie's off hustling the Big Apple and La-La Land, frisky Thelma finishes her degree, turns a few more tricks to pay for summer-school courses in secretarying, then goes straight and lands a good job as receptionist-slash-secretary-slash-assistant to a handsome young gynecologist in Baltimore…

"A scrupulous practitioner, Listener, who would never think of taking liberties with his patients, but who — like me, once my tush was off the rental market — enjoyed sex with any willing, good-looking, lively, and reasonably discreet non patient, the way some other types enjoy workouts in the gym or Saturday-night dances at their country club."

Read all about it in Clotho, folks, where Manny calls her "Thalia"…

"Within a month after I was hired, Doctor Weisman and I were getting it on (never during office hours), and found we had so much else in common that we got married the following year, with the understanding that in our house, infidelity would mean cheating on one's spouse, not occasional mate-swapping among friends for the fun of it. And fun we had, folks, dear Sammy and I, till our luck ran out in the swinging nineteen-high-sixties. We half believed we were inventing open marriage! And thought it was super-cool for me to keep my maiden name. Tell the rest of it for me, Gracie."

The mercifully short version: Husband dies young of galloping lung cancer (we all still smoked like chimneys in those days), leaving bereft widow with a son, Benjy — slow-witted, obese, resentful, ungovernable, and altogether parasitic, in his outspoken twin aunts' opinion — who makes a misery of his mom's middle years until he piles up her Pontiac in a DUI accident on the Baltimore Beltway, killing himself, two drinking buddies, and the innocent driver he was passing on the right at ninety miles an hour on a rainy March night in 1973.

To which his aunt Aggie would add — if I may, Thelma? — that once our wiped-out kid sister had closed that chapter of her life, she took a deep breath, quit punishing herself for her late son's problems, rediscovered the sense of humor and joie de vivre that'd been in cold storage since her good Doc Sam first took sick, and was a life-saving aid and comforter to Grace and me when our shit hit the fan at Severn Day School in the mid-seventies.

That's the century's mid-seventies, Listener: our mid-forties, when a certain Ned Forester found and read his wife's private diaries from back in her college years — as I believe got mentioned earlier? — and her later notebooks on The Fates.

"Self-righteous asshole."

Pillar of the community, in most folks' opinion, who'd believed his wife to be the same.

Whose wife was the same, we happen to know, for the twenty-plus years of their courtship and marriage, including the period of her reconnection with Manfred Dickson: a totally innocent reconnection, for which her only blame was keeping it secret from her husband lest he misunderstand and disapprove.

"As he damned well would've, for sure. Tell it, Gracie."

If I can, with apologies to my loyal and talented daughter for correcting here her fictionalized version. We lit-teacher types tend to think that the capital-A Authors whose stuff we teach must've been called to their vocation by some life-changing experience like discovering a particular book or mentor who helps them find their voice and their subject matter. And no doubt something like that's the case more often than not (it certainly was with "C. Ella Mason," as shall be seen). Even Manny, remember, when we Three-Wayed him back there at Lambda Upsilon, had been studying with some first-rate profs at MDU and chugalugging literature, history, and philosophy the way he and his frat buddies were downloading kegfuls of Pabst and Budweiser. But when our paths recrossed in '55, half a dozen years after our first get-together, he swore it was that Hell Week scavenger hunt that'd turned Manny the who-knows-what into Manfred F. Dickson the budding novelist. He didn't doubt that we all rewrite our pasts as we go along — maybe professional storytellers especially? But his version of the Story of His Life, he swore, was that the coincidence of us Masons and Dicksons "coming together" at Mason-Dixon, along with the "Mythic Quest crapola," as he himself called it, and all those "Threebies," had so energized and focused his imagination that he'd been churning out paragraphs and pages of scenes and characters and plot situations ever since, as fast as he could hunt-and-peck 'em on his hand-me-down Underwood.

By the time I tell of, when he and I were every bit of twenty-five years old, he was already three years married to Miz Western Maryland aforementioned and had a two-year-old son (named guess what). Like my Cindy all these years later, he'd published a handful of shall-we-say experimental short stories in obscure little lit mags and an unsuccessful "trial-run" first novel, as he called it (already out of print, and its small-press publisher out of business), and had a second one going the rounds in New York that neither he nor his agent was optimistic about. What's more, to pay the rent he was currently adjunct-professoring at… guess where? Arun del State College, as it was calling itself then! In his busyness at discovering and exploring his voice and his medium — plus all the distractions of teaching and husbanding and fathering — the particular circumstances of his original "Summons to Adventure," as the myth people call the Hero's wake-up call, had not been forgotten, by any means, but were somehow sidetracked in his imagination as if waiting to be renoticed and finally Understood. Believe it or not, he told me, it wasn't until he'd wangled that ASC appointment (which took a bit of wangling, as he had neither a Ph.D. nor any scholarly publications to his credit, just those three or four avant-garde stories and that flop of an oddball first novel) that he remembered exactly why those Mason chicks had been doing what they did back in '48/'49, and which institution of higher education they'd been shagging their way through.

"Whereupon… Bingo!"

Whereupon maybe not yet Bingo, but for sure By Golly. And he being just then both between projects and, he strongly felt, between the unimpressive First Phase of his writerly career and what he was convinced and determined would be the literary fireworks of Phase Two, he'd not only dug up and reexamined all the notes (and diagrams) that he'd made half a dozen years past, after our Lambda Upsy-daisy gig, but looked us up in the college's alumni directory (just as Junior did, forty-five years later), resolved to find out what had happened to his Three Graces since then: what we were up to these days, and how we remembered that fateful night.

Note the adjective, folks.

Indeed. Because what Manny was calling his Second Quest, or the search for his Original Muses, was already part and parcel of the magnum opus that was beginning to take shape in his imagination— magna opera, I guess, since he knew already it would be a triple-decker…

"Et cetera. All this, mind you, in a letter, Listener, addressed to Mrs. Grace Forester care of Severn Day, not to intrude on her domestic privacy. It was almost as long a letter as Junior's, but with a different tone entirely."

Courteous and discreet like Junie's, not to embarrass its recipient with past history in her present position. But relaxed, good-humored, and friendly: the voice of a flesh-and-blood human being. Nobody who didn't happen to know that item of our résumé could've guessed it from his letter. Which, by the way, he signed Fred over his typewritten Manfred F. Dickson. An inside joke, we learned later.

Anybody reading that letter would've thought at most that we four must have known one another from college days. And inasmuch as "Fred'"s project-in-the-works had to do with that particular time and place — post — World War Two America, the age of the A-bomb, the wearing out of Modernism, et cet — he had reason to believe that an interview or two with the former Grace Mason (and perhaps with her lively sister-graces "Aglaia" and "Thalia" as well, if I would kindly direct him to them) could be of considerable value to his researches. Might we meet, at any time and place of my convenience? Just say the word, he said, and he would quote "drop everything" unquote…

"Another Manny-tease, obviously. But only a tease, Junior, because when Gracie met your dad for lunch not long after, at what passed for a faculty club in those days at ASC — and then when I did some interview sessions with him a while later, and Aggie some time after that — the Manfred F. Dickson that we re-met was not about to drop his pants, for example, for any of us. Not even when Aggie and I, for old times' sake, as much as invited him to."

Which wouldn't've bothered Thelma's open-minded, open-marriage hubby—

"Don't forget open-flied—"

— which her open-armed and open-ended gynecologist hubby wouldn't've minded at all…

"Sammy mind? He'd've applauded! He knew my whole story and loved me for it, bless him."

And Yours Truly, the Porn Pro, sad to say, had nobody to be unfaithful to. Our point being that while the author of The Fates has been called, with some justice, both an erotomane and an egomane — are those the right terms, Teach?

They'll serve, and I have more to say on that subject. After you.

…he never once, in the seven years of our reconnection, made improper advances to any of the three of us; not even when one or two of us suggested same. And those suggesters never included Mrs. Ned Stuffed-Shirt Forester. Tell it, Grace.

Well: What Junior needs to know (likewise Mason-Dixon U. and Arundel U. and the Library of Congress, to all of whom I'll be sending copies of my transcriptions of these tapes for their M. F. Dickson Archives, present or future, in case Junior tosses or edits the originals) is that his dad's egomania, narcissism, whatever bad name it's called by, was in my humble opinion not self-love at all, but a particular kind of self-absorption fairly common among artist types, though not a vocational prerequisite. Even "self-absorption" and "self-centeredness" are only half accurate (as my daughter will testify from her own experience), since what Manny's "self" was absorbed with and centered on — what for better or worse took precedence over his marriage and family and academic responsibilities, not to mention over friends and community and the wider world — wasn't his ego, in any vain sense of that term: It was his work.

"His fucking work."

Another misleading adjective, Thelm, if Bernbridge Manor's resident authority on that activity may put in a word here about that word. Somebody mentioned erotomania a while ago — me, probably, because what's on my mind is either Gracie's or Manny's reminding us, way back then, that since Erato was the Greeks' muse of love poetry, capital-E Erato-mania can mean being hooked on that muse and her medium, not necessarily on sex per se. Am I being too literary for an ex-pornie?

Maybe, but not for an Arundel State cum laude and ex — Severn Day drama coach. It was the idea of women and their bodies that obsessed Manny: all our little nooks and crannies, what could be done with them and said about them, and what they could be made to stand for—

Or to put up with…

— of which our actual PTTs — pussies, tits, and tushies? — were just inspiring reminders.

"Right on. What it used to remind me of, changes changed, was a certain husband of mine's endless fascination with every aspect of female plumbing, wiring, and the rest: a professional fascination, I was going to say, but it wasn't merely professional, by a long shot. Sammy used to say that he became a gynecologist because he'd liked playing doctor with his little-girl classmates in first grade. So he becomes a top-flight gynecologist who can't keep his fly zipped with any willing, uninfected chick who's not one of his patients. Who's to say what's cause and what's effect?"

While Manny, on the contrary, did keep his fly zipped the whole time we were working together on The Fates. He wasn't interested in committing adultery, either of the Passionate Extramarital Love Affair kind or Doc Sam's General Screw- ing Around. It was the concept of Sexual Infidelity, like the concept of Love, that turned his imagination on. Don't think of him as whacking off with his left hand while scribbling sentences with his right, Junior, or as fantasizing about his fictional heroines while humping your mom—

Which is not to say he mightn't have done both, at least now and then…

"But Gracie's right, as usual: The point is that literal sex was never his point."

Never his whole point, and seldom his main point. Manny just couldn't get over the ingenuity of Evolution, coming up after millions of years not only with sperm and eggs and cocks and cunts, but with peacock tails and seventeen-year-cicada mating swarms, along with love poems, wedding ceremonies, G-strings, and string bikinis—

Named after a certain South Pacific atoll, our younger listeners may need reminding, where the US of A tested nuclear weapons from 1946 right up to the year when Manny published Clotho. You could say that The Fates are a kind of literary fallout from that radioactive period.

"Or that sister Aggie could've been a fine English teach like her twin."

Our point being that there's a shitload more than S-E-X in that trilogy of his.

Amen to that. The great ones in any medium get to the bottom of things through some unlikely doors indeed: Monet's haystacks, Joyce's Bloomsday, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon—

"And M. F. Dickson's Gracious Masons, who lent him their et ceteras."

Meaning truly our ears, Listener, this time around. Especially Gracie's — who'll now maybe homestretch this oral history?

"A-u-r-a-l history? Sorry there, guys…"

Here we go: It's been said already that Manny and I worked closely together from '55 through '62/'63, first while he was part-timing at ASC and then while he was happily doing the same back at his alma mater, on the strength of Clotho's acceptance for publication in '57 but before it became a succès de scandale. I want to get it on record that he did all the composing — in his nearly illegible ballpoint-penmanship on stacks of white legal pads, which I then deciphered as best I could and typed up for him to revise and rewrite: draft after draft, year after year—

With a fair amount of editing by his frustrated-writer typist, over and above her quote-unquote deciphering of his hieroglyphics—

"Not to mention the raw material, excuse the expression, that the three of us filled his eager ears with. We all did our bit."

We did indeed. But let's be clear on that editing bit, Ag: I made comments and suggestions aplenty, some of which he picked up on and others not. But the critics who've claimed or implied that I as much as coauthored Manny's books—

"Not to mention at least one who'd like to believe that you ghostwrote 'em for him—"

— have their critical heads up their professorial asses, and that's the end of that.

But not the end of your story. Our story.

Not quite its end, but its end's beginning. Let Listener be reminded that the Fates novels came out at three-year intervals, commencing with Clotho in '57 and Lachesis in '60—both from a small, notorious English-language press in Paris that specialized in Seriously Naughty Lit — before the complete trilogy was published with much fanfare by a New York trade house in November 1963. The coincidence of its appear- ance and President Kennedy's assassination was a factor in The Fates' becoming one more icon of the Johnson/Nixon/ Vietnam War high sixties in rock-and-roll America, along with sit-ins and love-ins, sideburns and ponytails, bongs and bell-bottoms and the rest. But even before Atropos was in print, Clotho and Lachesis had gotten their author hounded out of academia as a pornographer and divorced by his wife, who moved cross-country with ten-year-old Junior and holed up somewhere out in Oregon. Poor Manny — hailed in some quarters, condemned or merely dismissed in others — ended our seven-year working relationship with not much more than a shrug and a thank-you-ma'am. He holed up in a mountain cabin back in his native western Maryland and commenced his descent into alcohol, drugs, and cranky hermithood like some combination of Jack Kerouac and J. D. Salinger, rumored to be still writing, though no longer publishing, until his mysterious disappearance "out west" at the decade's end.

Which we'll return to, folks — having established, we trust, that while the capital-E Erotic was our "Fred"'s characteristic mode, medium, and material, it was seldom his real subject. The guy was no prude, but that old Lambda Upsy-daisy of ours was a notable exception to a sexually restrained, contentedly monogamous life.

"Poor shmuck — and that's enough about that. Gracie?"

Poor dear shmuck. So he kisses me goodbye in the winter of '62/'63—modestly, mind you, on the forehead — and thanks me for all my help. For which he'd been paying me ten percent of his meager royalties, I should've said earlier: another little secret I kept from my husband, like my notebooks on our collaboration. Then, when the American edition of the trilogy brought in some serious money, Manny's ex claimed most of it as back alimony and child support, and he signed it over to her.

"Shmuck shmendrick shlimazl!"

It's who he was, Thelma, for better or worse.

Following which, he disappears in an alcoholic haze out west…

With Elvis-like reports of his being spotted in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury or some hippie commune in Santa Fe or on the road with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. No trace of further manuscripts in the abandoned cabin, but now and then some lit mag would come out with a Dicksonish piece that it claimed had been sent in under Manny's name from Taos or Tijuana, but with no cover note or street address, and which the critics would then debate the authenticity of. Likewise the occasional fragments and even a couple of whole story scripts that someone would claim to've turned up in a desk drawer at Arundel State or Mason-Dixon U. — a gimmick that Cindy makes good use of in her Wye novella. I could've identified his handwriting right off, but those scripts were always typed (not by me), so who knows? Some of the ones I saw in print sounded less unlikely to me than others — but by the time they surfaced, in the early 1970s, I was busy with my own troubles.

Weren't we all. But yours first, Grace: the non-Cindy-Ella version.

Listener needs to be reminded that when Manny first relocated me back in '55 and asked for my "input" on his project-in-the-works, I didn't mention it to my husband for fear he'd find out how his wife had paid her way through college. When our reconnection grew into a regular working relationship, my line with Ned and our kids was that I'd always secretly aspired to write a novel, and was determined to give it a try in what little time a prep school wife and mother can spare from her main responsibilities. And they were great about leaving Mommy undisturbed when she was typing away in her study or "doing her homework" in the Severn Day or Arundel State libraries. During most of those seven years I was seldom actually with Manny for more than an hour maybe once a week, when either I'd meet him on campus at ASC to pick up his latest batch of scribbling and go through my annotated typescript from the week before, or he'd stop by the faculty mailroom at Severn Day after he'd shifted up to MDU. In the Atropos period, after he'd been sacked by the university but before he holed up in the Allegheny hills, we'd have our little conferences in an Annapolis restaurant booth. And maybe half a dozen times, I admit, I met him in some motel or other where he was camping after his wife threw him out, or just staying over to get some research done.

"Some research…"

Okay, I know what Listener's thinking — same as Ned did when he found my diaries. And I grant it sounds like we were going at it. But as Cindy makes clear in her story, it was really more like modeling for life drawing classes in art school. If Manny's mock — Mythic Hero "Fred," for instance (the male lead in the Fates novels, as in Wye), is having himself an early-midlife crisis — as he does in Atropos after dodging the Korean War draft and realizing that he and his wife are evolving in different directions — and one of his colleagues' wives happens to hit on him, and he's reminded of some crazy sex he had back in college days with a girl who looked like a younger version of this one, and Manny needs to describe exactly how Fred feels being in a motel room at age forty with a thirty-year-old married woman naked on all fours, and worrying that he might not get it up for her because of the novelty of it all, dot dot dot? But I swear on Bill Clinton's testicles that I never had sex with that man: I merely might as well have, since I told my damn diary all about us, chapter and verse.

No comment.

"Ditto — except what if Mister Manny needed to know exactly how it felt to Mister Fred there to ball the lady's brains out?"

No comment. What I want to get said is that after '62, when the Dickson-Mason connection was history, it was a real relief for me to abandon my make-pretend writing ambitions and get back to full-time wifing, mothering, and school-teaching. I loved Ned Forester, damn it, different as we were in too many ways. And our kids meant the world to me.

I beg to disagree with that "make-pretend": Not only did you teach literature and composition for a living, and fill umpteen diaries with your take on everything from losing your cherry at age sixteen to posing bare-assed for Manfred Dickson in a Howard Johnson motel room at age thirty; you also "edited," quote/unquote, every page he wrote for seven years! Thelma and I supplied him with a certain amount of information—

"Not to mention a few demos here and there—"

But you were muse and editor rolled into one.

"So to speak."

So okay, you didn't write Manny's books. But The Fates would never have gotten themselves written without you.

For better or worse, thanks, depending on where you're coming from. Junior himself half wishes he could prove I wrote them, we half suspect, so he could shoot down his big bad daddy's main claim to fame — except that there would go his only fame-claim, too. But my diaries made it clear which of us was the novelist and which the typist/editor, as does dear Cindy's Wye.

"Pity Junie didn't get to read 'em. And the world."

A painful subject, so let's get done with it. I never kept those diaries hidden, Listener: neither the ones that Manny found so useful, from back in our tuition-earning days, nor the later ones from our reconnection. They were lined up on a bookshelf in my study, where anybody from the kids to the housecleaner could pick them up. But they were under lock and key, sort of, because like a lot of schoolgirls I'd started with the kind that have a little locking tab to keep them private, and I kept on using that kind, half out of habit, half as a joke. Ned and the kids used to tease me about "Mommy's deep dark secrets." I even made the little brass keys into a charm bracelet, usually tucked away in my jewelry box, and never imagined that et cetera.

And to this hour I don't know quite what prompted Ned to fish out that bracelet one day in December of1973 and unlock those locks. He'd been in bed for a few days with the flu and got bored lying there alone in the house while the kids and I were in school; said he noticed that key-bracelet on my dresser (possible, but not likely) and thought what the hell, no harm in just taking a peek — and that was that. Just as the Arab oil embargo and economic recession of '73 ended the American sixties, of which The Fates had become an emblem, Ned's reading those diaries was the end of the world as Grace Mason Forester had known and enjoyed it. Twenty years of contented marriage and eighteen of happy motherhood down the toilet, not to mention my job and poor Aggie's at Severn Day.

What happened, Listener — contrary to the "C. Ella Mason" version — was that Outraged Hubby threatened to put those diaries in evidence if Grace contested their immediate separation and divorce — although of course he'd prefer not to, to spare all hands the embarrassment of everybody's learning that nice Missus Forester is an ex-hooker who later shacked up for seven adulterous years with a famous dirty-book writer.

Which I didn't, but who'd believe me?

"I still think you should've called his bluff and said, So go public, asshole. He had as much to lose as you did."

I couldn't do that, Thelm, for the kids' sake. And for Ned's, too. I'd loved him, damn it, and what he'd found out about me cut him to the quick. I didn't want him publicly humiliated too.

So the bastard insists on divorce for irreconcilable differences, full custody of the kids, and Gracie's and my resignation from Severn Day, where he was sure we'd been corrupting our students' morals: otherwise he'd blow the cover on my porn-queen past along with Grace's diaries. But if we agreed to his terms, he promised to destroy the diaries, keep mum about our naughty résumés, and make a generous alimony settlement.

"And Listener should understand that the matter of Grace's visitation rights with their kids was academic anyhow, so to speak, since Ned Junior was about to take off for Princeton and Cindy was a fifth-former already at Severn Day. Even so, I think you should've dared him to go ahead and cover the whole family with shit."

Nope. And as things turned out, I'm glad I didn't — rough as it was for Ag and me to quit teaching, pretending that we were burned out.

Plausible enough for Grace, who'd been at it heart and soul for twenty-plus years. But I was only two years into the best job I ever had! As for how things turned out…

Poor Ned.

"Would you stop it already with the Poor Ned?"

No. What poor Ned had learned about me literally broke his heart. Cindy has him jump out of his high-rise office window — her way of getting even with him, I suppose. But in fact her dad died of a coronary, Listener, the very next year, at age fifty.

"On the fifteenth hole of his club's golf course, and in the opinion of some of us, his coup de grâce, excuse my French, was Tricky Dick Nixon's disgrace and resignation after Watergate, on top of all the rest."

So there went those cushy alimony payments, with which my sweet sorrowful sis had been helping me out while we both scratched around for new jobs. But she regained full custody of two well-off kiddies indeed, with their dad's estate added to their trust funds, and their mom in charge of the show till they reached twenty-one.

By when I'd long since explained to them what Mom and Dad's split had really been about.

"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?

Well: 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. Well: 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.

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—