Letters (139 page)

Oh yes: and I was gratified by her reasonable attitude concerning Harrison’s estate, on which agenda item I was quiet enough of spirit by midnight to focus my attention. I had supped, swum in the silky water, napped for two hours, and come back on deck to try the Perseids again, with slightly better luck. In the trail of one particular dazzler that swept through Pegasus (so our Author would have it), as I wondered whether Jeannine and Polly Lake and Jane Mack might be watching that same meteor, and from where, there came the damnedest, the farthest-fetched, but just possibly the most inspired notion I’d had all year as an attorney-at-law.

It was an open secret in the Tidewater Foundation that Harrison in his last madness had emulated his father’s whim of preserving the products of his dying body, but that in keeping with the times he had caused his excrement to be freeze-dried rather than pickled in company jars. It was no secret at all to me, nor any wonder, that though Jane had humored this aberration (and many another) in her husband, she had refused to let the stuff be stored at Tidewater Farms. One inferred that it was kept somewhere in the plenteous warehouses of Mack Enterprises. It was a conspicuous fact, however, that m.e. was feverishly hatching Cap’n Chick, who so filled the nest of its parent company that other Mack Enterprises were already smitten with sibling jealousy; Jane herself had merrily complained that she might have to convert the Dorset Heights Apartments into an auxiliary Crabsicle warehouse, so pressed was Cap’n C. for cubic footage. Finally, it was a howling obviousness that my own life, like a drowning man’s, had been set since March on Instant Replay…

So
where was Harrison’s freeze-dried shit?
That Jane herself would reenact her late mother-in-law’s blunder and dispose, before settlement, of an entailed portion of her husband’s estate was unimaginable. But if some middle-management type had quietly done so, thinking thereby to please his boss; and if it could be argued that by the principle of Command Responsibility the president of m.e. was therefore guilty of Attrition of Estate; and if her contest suit could thus be threatened on no less distinguished a precedent than that of the Maryland Court of Appeals in
Mack
v.
Mack
of March 1938…

Longest of long shots! Surely, Author, not even You would go so far!

Next morning
(Day 4: T 8/12)
I reached and ran through soft gray drizzle on a mild southeasterly up the quiet Chester and parked for lunch in Emory Creek off the Corsica River, a fine private place dear to Polly Lake in earlier Augusts. I said my good-byes to it and motored—the breeze had failed, the drizzle persisted: good thinking weather—between narrowing banks and handsome farms to Chestertown, my destination. A whitetail fawn danced on the shore near Devil’s Reach, where the current sweeps so sharply past the outside bend that a 20-foot draft can be carried almost to the beach; the old, soft red and white town was as agreeable a sight as ever to sail up to, even in that weather. But my Terminal Travelogue, then as now, took second place to plot. I tied up at the marina dock, telephoned my office, checked in with Ms. Pond (ignoring
her
studied incuriosity), and then asked my young colleague Jimmy Andrews to inquire discreetly whether Jane Mack was back in town and where the uninterred portion of her late husband’s remains was stored.

Surely, he said, you do not go so far as to suppose. Of course not, I reassured him. But even so. Okay?
Discreetly.
I’d call back from somewhere on Friday.

Next I telephoned Fort Erie, Ontario (all this from a pay phone in a wharfside restaurant): that “Remobilization Farm.” Ms. Golden was there, a curt black male voice informed me, but would not take phone calls. “Saint Joe” Morgan would. What on earth, I asked him when he came to the phone, was he doing in that kooky place? He told me calmly that he had his reasons, and hoped I was calling to tell
him
that Marshyhope’s Tower of Truth had collapsed upon his successor. No?
Tant pis.
Then maybe I could tell him what had gotten into his patient Bea Golden, who since her return from French leave in Maryland had become even more of a nuisance than before. They were doing their best to keep booze away from her, but like most alkies she seemed to get it somewhere, or manufacture it in her own liver.

Ah? Tell me more.

They gathered that on the rebound from Reg Prinz she had been picked up by somebody down there for a weekend and then been dumped again. I agreed, faint and sweating, that that sounded plausible. I promised to notify the family and authorized Morgan on behalf of the Tidewater Foundation to seek proper psychiatric and medical treatment for her; also to keep my office informed of her condition. I would come up there myself if the situation warranted, or send a representative “if she associates
me
too closely with her family.” I felt momently more ill; had barely presence of mind enough, before I rang off, to ask Morgan about another patient on the premises: chap named Casteene?

Pas ici,
said Joe. His opinion was that the fellow supervised a sort of underground railway for U.S. draft resisters and had gone south to lubricate the wheels. But Joe knew little about him, and was not being particularly forthcoming anyhow, and I was too moved with self-revulsion and concern for Jeannine to draw him out further. I ate lightly, without appetite, there in the restaurant; then to escape the traffic noise from the nearby highway bridge I bid a vexed good-bye to Chestertown and motored back to anchor for the night in Devil’s Reach, using both anchors against the swift current. Three mallards—two drakes and a hen—paddled over for handouts. Sheepflies bit, oblivious to chemical repellent. There would be no meteors that evening, and who cared? I screened the companion way and forward hatches and went to bed early, out of sorts.

Day 5 blew up gray and disagreeable. Above the Chester there was nothing I felt like saying adieu to; I decided to recross to Annapolis and begin working south along both sides of the Bay. But halfway down the river, beating into a rising southwesterly which, should I continue, I’d have to bang through all the way to the Severn, I changed my mind. Foul-weather sailing has its pleasures, but not in foul spirits. I ran north up Langford Creek instead, anchored for lunch off Cacaway Island, another favorite; fidgeted with odd-job maintenance for a while, then out of boredom sailed the five miles up to the head of the creek’s east fork and motor-sailed back, parking early for the night in the same spot. The warm wind had veered west and risen above fifteen knots. I swam in the nettle-free waves (the sky was clearing; there was no thunder) and circumambulated the empty little island. Its name I understand to be corrupted from the Algonquin
cacawaasough,
or chief, but it spoke to me of Harrison Mack’s freeze-dried feces, their disposition.

A long, finally calming late afternoon and evening: smoked oysters and lumpy pina colada in the cockpit, followed by cold sliced ham and a 1962 Argentine Cabernet Sauvignon that cheered me right up. It was, damn it, Jeannine who had propositioned
me.
No doubt I ought to have declined, but the woman is 35, not 25 or 15, and I am 69. Not keeping her with me was the “error,” if anything; but I had my needs, too. Away with such
caca!
Mrs. Golden needed residential psychotherapy, not a cruise on
Osborn Jones.
Despite the fact that that day was the anniversary of my first seduction by Jeannine’s mother, in the Todds Point cabin in 1932—an anniversary whereof I was exquisitely mindful—I slept dreamlessly and well.

And woke refreshed and rededicated to 13 R! A fine breezy morning—wind still SW 18+—but I was in the mood for a brisk day’s work. Bye-bye, Cacaway! Bye-bye, mild Chester: may you flow as handsome, and less polluted, for generations after me! Given the wind, I was obliged to motor down the first nine miles from Langford Creek, straight into it with the dodger up to break the spray, before I could turn west enough to make sail and shut down the engine. A good fast reach then up out of the Chester’s mouth and around Love Point, the top of Kent Island, and we were in the open, whitecapped, serious Chesapeake. Our destination lay almost in the eye of the freshening wind, but no matter; so many tidewater August days are swelteringly still that it was a pleasure, and cathartic, to reef down, close haul, and bash through it all that bright brisk Thursday—
O.J.
for the most part steering himself with a little sheet-to-wheel tackle while I took bearings, checked charts, and trimmed sail. A five-mile port tack due west, back toward discomfiting Gibson Island; then a six-mile starboard tack therapeutically south, under the Bay Bridge, past tankers and container ships plowing up to Baltimore; west again then another five miles into the mouth of the Severn, up to the Naval Academy and Annapolis Harbor. The only entries in my log for that day, apart from sailing data, are two questions:
If Jane’s Lord Baltimore is André Castine, who is Joe Morgan’s “Monsieur Casteene”? For that matter, who is André Castine?

But I had things to say good-bye to, including (next day) Annapolis itself, where also I needed supplies; so though it was still midafternoon I made but one quick pit stop for ice, water, and fuel and then threaded through the yachts from everywhere, up through the Spa Creek Drawbridge and the creek itself—-jammed with condominiums and expensive racing machines, yet invincibly attractive withal—to my destination, near its head. “Hurricane Hole” is a spot both snug and airy, open enough for summer ventilation yet sufficiently sheltered by trees and high banks so that
Osborn Jones
and his fellow oyster-dredgers were wont to retreat there from Annapolis, in times gone by, to ride out the fall hurricanes. The houses are less crowded that far up, and though one needs a suit for swimming, the moored boats are far enough apart for comfort, the surroundings are still and graceful, and the dome of the old State House rises pleasingly above the farther trees. My notion was to clean the boat inside and out and make final peace with myself concerning Jeannine. I did the first in a leisurely two hours: everything from scrubbing the waterline to sweeping the carpets and airing the bedsheets. The second I found required no further doing. My regret was real and mild; my concern for the woman equally real, but on balance no greater than before she’d come to see me. It could wait. BBQ filet mignon, a cold fruit mold, and a not-bad-at-all Sonoma Pinot Chardonnay.

Next morning, Friday, in hazy sunshine, I tied up at the Annapolis Town Dock and did business: laid in a week’s groceries, restocked the wine locker, found a laundromat, phoned the office. Mack Enterprises, Jimmy confirmed, was preparing for Tomorrow Now by disposing of all old preserved-food inventory to make room for Crabsicles and the rest. No solid word yet on the whereabouts of Harrison’s “remains,” but inasmuch as Jimmy’s own wife worked in the m.e. accounting office, we were in good position to pursue the inquiry. Discreetly. Mrs. Mack was back in town and at work—full speed ahead with Cap’n Chick—after a short Bermuda cruise with her gentleman friend, whose appearance and full correct name no one in the company seemed to know.

Mm hm. Though there was no
particular
reason for doing so, I decided that A. B. & A. should invest in an investigator—that same apparently reliable fellow in Buffalo who had drawn a blank, but competently, in the matter of Jane’s blackmailing—to look into the coincidence of the names Casteene and Castine: the one (I explained) borne by a former patient at the Remobilization Farm, the other supplied me by a present patient there, Mrs. Mack’s daughter. Whose condition was also to be reported, in my name, to Mrs. Mack. Discreetly. I was mighty anxious; didn’t know exactly what I was searching for; trusted my hunch that the search was worth considerable expense; but was beginning to begrudge these impingements on 13 R. I would not call again, I decided and declared, for a week. ’Bye.

That week I’ll sail through swiftly, though sailing through it slowly was the heart of my enterprise. From Annapolis I reached seven miles up the high-banked Severn to Round Bay, thence into Little Round Bay, past St. Helena Island (where lay a fine new motor yacht whose name—
Baratarian
—reminded me of Jane’s crank cousin A. B. Cook and of the film from which Jeannine had been dropped.
Nota bene,
Dad), to my Favorite Anchorage on that splendid, busy river: Hopkins Creek, snug, private, still unspoiled. No swimsuit needed; few nettles that far upriver; mild phosphorescence when I swam that night. Incest be damned, I wished Jeannine were there again! Next day out through the Sunday mob—wall-to-wall sails in Whitehall Bay! Adieu, Annapolis!—and down to the next river, the South, itself less imposing than the Severn but with finer creeks and coves. Rode out a thundersquall in perfect peace, all alone in a certain nameless, turtled cove off Church Creek: chicken breast with wild rice, a light cucumber-and-onion salad, and a bargain Lalande-de-Pomerol, steady as the eponymous church while the crashing storm merely cooled the cabin. Good-bye Church and Harness creeks, twin beauties! Down to Rhode River’s single spot worth a farewell visit: the anchorage behind Big Island
(Sunset like a Baroque Ascension. Fluted jazz on the FM. Shrimp w. cashews & Beaujolais—no ice to spare for chilling white wine),
airy but secure, where handsome Herefords graze down to the waterline. Straight across then to Eastern Bay and my Eastern Shore to say goodbye to its sweetest pair of rivers, the Miles and its sister the Wye: five full days required of sun and rain, wind and calm, to touch only my favorite places therealong! Tilghman, Dividing, Granary, Skipton, Pickering, Lloyd, Leeds, Hunting! Sweet bights and creeks and coves, deer and ducks and herons, gulls and cormorants and ospreys, blue crabs and bluefish and rockfish and oysters and maninose—good-bye!

Now it is Friday again, Day 14, August 22. From Hunting Creek I reach down the Miles
(up
on the chart) to St. Michaels for provisions, laundry, lunch ashore, good-bye to that dear town and harbor, and a 10 A.M. phone call to the office. Which I log, ponder, and relog thus:
1330: HM’s shit nowhere to be found. Could Jane be staging a diversion? Pursue, discreetly. Her fiancé: one Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred, Ontario, 1/2-brother (so Buffalo reports) of A. B. Cook VI! May be involved in C.I.A. or counter-C.I.A. activity! Foreign? Domestic? Interagency? Buffalo doesn’t know: was “seriously warned off by C.I.A./F.B.I. types.” Reports Castine “somewhere in west N.Y.” since Bermuda cruise. Cook himself at home at Barataria Lodge, B’wth I.
Hunch:
check out that Bray fellow in Lily Dale, N.Y. “Casteene” of Ft. Erie may be unrelated to Jane’s friend: name not uncommon in Quebec, though usually w. the “Baron’s” spelling. Too much coincidence: inquire further. Jeannine has left Ft. Erie; whereabouts uncertain; no one seems to care. Inquire, inquire! Buffalo suspects “drug tie-in”: C.I.A. people moving dope under pretext of monitoring V.N. war resisters, instead of vice versa. A very big fish, which he hopes he has not hooked and refuses to reel in, even discreetly.