Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth Read Free Book Online

prostrate with pain. Aunt Rosa fetched cold compresses, aspirins, and the family doctor, who after examining the wound prescribed aspirins and cold compresses.
    “And do your nursing on the porch,” he recommended. “Goodness gracious.”
    But Andrea had no further use for that aspect of motherhood. Though the doctor assured her that the swelling would not last more than a few days, during which she could empty the injured breast by hand and nurse with the other, she refused to suckle me again; a diet free of butterfat was prescribed to end her lactation. As of that Sunday I was weaned not only from her milk but from her care; thenceforth it was Rosa who bathed and changed, soothed and burped me, after feeding me from a bottle on her aproned lap.
    As she went about this the very next morning, while Mother slept late, she exclaimed to her husband, “It’s a bee!”
    Uncle Konrad sprang from his eggs and rushed around thetable to our aid, assuming that another fugitive had been turned up. But it was my birthmark Rosa pointed out: the notion had taken her that its three lobes resembled the wings and abdomen of a bee in flight.
    “Oh boy,” Konrad sighed.
    “Nah, it is a bee! A regular bee! I declare.”
    My uncle returned to his breakfast, opining that no purple bee ought to be considered regular who moreover flew upside down without benefit of head.
    “You laugh; there’s more to this than meets the eye,” his wife said. “All the time he was our
Honig
, that’s what drew the bees. Now his mark.”
    Grandfather entered at this juncture, and while unable to share Aunt Rosa’s interpretation of my birthmark, he was willing to elaborate on her conceit.
    “
Ja
, sure, he was the
Honig
, and Andy’s the queen, hah? And Hector’s a drone that’s been kicked out of the hive.”
    Aunt Rosa lightly fingered my port-wine mark. “What did Willy Erdmann mean about the
Honig
was a drone-bee?”
    “Never mind Willy,” Konrad said. “Anyhow we poor worker-ones have to get to it.”
    But all that forenoon as he plied his wrench and dinged his forks he smiled at his wife’s explanation of the swarm; after lunch it turned in his fancy as he pedaled through West End on behalf of
The Book of Knowledge.
By suppertime, whether drawing on his own great fund of lore or the greater of his stock-in-trade, he had found a number of historical parallels to my experience in the hammock.
    “It’s as clear a naming-sign as you could ask for,” he declared to Andrea.
    “I don’t even want to think about it,” Mother said. She was still in some pain, not from the venom but from superfluous lactation, which her diet had not yet checked.
    “No, really,” he said. “For instance, a swarm of bees lit on Plato’s mouth when he was a kid. They say that’s where he got his way with words.”
    “Is that a fact now,” Aunt Rosa marveled, who had enlarged all day to Mother on the coincidence of my nickname, my birthmark, and my immersion in the bees. “I never did read him yet.”
    “No kid of mine is going to be called Plato,” Andrea grumbled. “That’s worse than Christine.”
    Uncle Konrad was not discouraged. “Plato isn’t the end of it. They said the exact same thing about Sophocles, that wrote all the tragedies.”
    Mother allowed this to be more to the point. “Tragedies is all it’s been, one after the other.” But Sophocles pleased her no more than Plato as a given name. Xenophon, too, was rejected, whose
Anabasis
, though my uncle had not read it himself, was held to have been sweetened by the same phenomenon.
    “If his name had been Bill or Percy,” said my mother. “But
Xenophon
for Christ sake.”
    Grandfather had picked his teeth throughout this discussion. “A Greek named Percy,” he now growled.
    Aunt Rosa, whose grip on the thread of conversation was ever less strong than her desire to be helpful, volunteered that the Greek street-peddler from whom Konrad had purchased her a beautiful Easter egg at the