Letters (78 page)

I’m at my cottage, Dad, out on my point, at sixes and sevens. It is earlier than I’d thought. I’ve been fretting and fussing about here all day, getting the house ready, getting the grounds ready, getting the boat ready Just In Case, not answering the phone (even though it might be Jane calling off our “date”!) because I’m supposed to be over in Baltimore on business. I am surprised at myself: an emotion I thought I had lost the capacity for.

I, I, I: such self-absorption!

Tomorrow Now
is the new Mack Enterprises slogan, beneath a streamlined logo devised by Jane’s PR folk. No more hands across the years from things past to things to come; no more sailing ships, airliners, smokestacks, hay fields, tractors. Within a circular field, white above and
gules
below, the company’s initials
azure
in a loopy script which also forms the field’s perimeter, so:

Each loop carrying into one moiety the other’s color. The whole resembling, from any distance, a Yang/Yin done by a patriotic Italo-American spaghetti bender and, closer up, evocative of U.S. imperialism and isolationism at once:
US
become
me
and inflated to a global insularity.

So objected Drew, who, though not a director of Mack Enterprises, made plain his sentiments to the board of the Tidewater Foundation, of which he is a member, at our last meeting. He also denounced the firm’s co-opting, and perverting to its capitalist ends, such trendy counter-culturalisms as the Yang/Yin, the call for Revolution Now, and the ignoring of the past (Drew himself is more anti- than ahistorical). This last objection I shared, as the only dissenting director of—ugh!—
me.
Where was that gentle fogey Old Man Praeteritas, father of us all, the Yesterday that will fertilize Tomorrow Today? And of course I deplored the self-circumscribed
me,
the objectified subject, the
I
gestating within that
O
—too close to home for Yours Truly to want it blazoned ’round the world!

But I concede that for Madam President it is not inapt. Her one objection was to the lowercase initials, not as dated Modernist kitsch, but as unsuited to a corporate entity agglomerating like cancer. She yielded, however, to the tactful pitch of her young PR chief: that a subdued but ubiquitous logo better suited the firm’s magnitudinous future than some splashy arriviste hyperbole (he used other language); and that, per slogan, what was right for Tomorrow was right for Now. New logo—and attendant ad campaign—adopted, 11-1.

A week ago, that vote. Just after it, Jane declined, neutrally, my invitation to another sail on
Osborn Jones.
It was Friday 13th, 50 years to the day since another Friday when, upon my discharge from the U.S. Army, I was told of my precarious heart condition—of which you may have heard, Dad? I had thought Jane might be amused by that bit of
praeteritas.
Oh, and I’d thought, if things sailed smoothly, to apprise her of my
new
heart condition, by then four Fridays old; of my growing conviction that our lives are recycling; of my consequent anticipation of #11 R, June 17, Polly Lake’s Fart Day (I grant that the connection is not obvious; I shall come to it), and the unexpected turn its approach had taken only that same morning; of the disorienting revelation that I am in love with Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack, and have been ever since she came to me in this cottage on the afternoon of August 13, 1932. What did I expect to happen next (I’d thought to ask her somewhere out there if the wind was right), after our astonishing shipboard tryst of May, #10 R in last letter’s accounting, Dad? That she would abandon “Lord Baltimore” (or confess him to be the half-fantasized afterimage of some brief adventure with a London gigolo)? That she would
marry,
this late in the afternoon, a cranky, fussy small-town lawyer, part-time celibate and full-time bachelor, who has not been out of the U.S.A. since 1919 and seldom ventures even beyond the margins of Nautical Chart 77:
United States—East Coast—Maryland and Virginia—Chesapeake Bay—Northern Part?

“Sorry, Todd,” she said (neutrally): “No hard feelings about your vote, but I’m meeting my fiancé in New York.”

Two times up, two times out. Just a week after 10 R I’d been permitted to take dinner with her at Tidewater Farms (where she’s seldom to be found anymore) and set forth my sentiments on the matter of her blackmailing: that inasmuch as there had been no subsequent threats after the first letter from Niagara Falls, the investigator recommended to me by legal colleagues in nearby Buffalo had nothing really to proceed upon; he agreed with me that there was little to be done until and unless the blackmailer was heard from again when she filed suit against Harrison’s will. For this opinion—which disappointed her itch to punish—I was thanked. But my after-dinner overture (a mere squeezing of her hand over brandy; an honest declaration that she looked radiant as ever; a head-shaking admission that I was still overwhelmed, overwhelmed, by our unexpected love-making of the week before) was smilingly squelched.

“Don’t forget, my dear: I’m to be married.”

I refrained from asking who had forgotten that detail, or found it irrelevant, out by Red Nun 20 on May 16.

In a word, it would have seemed, even as of yesterday, that that momentous moment was after all to be
inconsequential
—as, after all, our affair of 37 years past had been, except for the clouded paternity of Jane’s cloudy daughter. Nevertheless, it was the only thing that interested me or gave interest to other things. I write these lines to you for no other reason than to speak of Jane. I prepare to defend Harrison’s will against the suits now separately filed by his widow and two children only because their quarrel reenacts an earlier one (“Yesterday Now!” Drew cracked when our paths crossed in orphan’s court); and I am obsessed with this reenactment only because it came to include the aforecelebrated 8 and 10 R. Jane, Jane!

Obsession it is, however. In the five weeks past, I have reexamined like scripture my old Floating Theatre memoir and its subsequent novelization for clues to what might happen next. 11 L (we recall, Dad) read
June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win
Mack
v.
Mack
and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to.
Or, as rendered in that novel:

Et cetera. The work is fiction: It was her pencil, not her handkerchief, Polly dropped. I do not have, never had, a staring-wall in my office. I used and use a window giving upon a mountain of oyster shells from the crab- and oyster-packing plant hard by Court Lane: shells that in those days were pulverized into lime for chicken feed or trucked down-county to pave secondary roads with, but now are recycled back to the oyster beds for the next generation of spats to attach themselves to. But it was in fact that serendipitous crepitation that put me in mind of the late Mack Senior’s bequest of his pickled defecations, and suggested to me that should his widow’s gardener, say, deploy that excrement about the flower beds of their Ruxton property, for example, I might just be able to make a case against Harrison’s mother for Attrition of Estate…

In honor of this anniversary and Harrison’s subsequent enrichment, I had later proposed to the Tidewater Foundation that fireworks be let off from Redmans Neck every June 17th; the motion did not carry, but Harrison seldom failed, except during the period of our estrangement, to drop by the office on that date for iced coffee with me and Polly, who took our teasing tributes with her usual good humor. Even last June, confined to Tidewater Farms, he had delivered to her via Lady Amherst a bottle of good French perfume, the gift card embossed with the old Mack Enterprises slogan, and I’d taken her to dinner as was my custom in honor of her aid in the largest case of its sort we’d ever won.

This year was different. Given 10 R, my reconnection with Jane, I could not make the ritual office jokes as PLF Day approached, lest my new obsession with my life’s recycling disturb the spontaneity of 11 R, which had assumed great importance to me. 10 R had literally refetched Jane into my life, my bed, my heart; though Polly’s famous flatus at 11 L had nothing directly to do with Jane and me, I looked to the character of its recurrence (Literal? Symbolical? Straightforward? Inverse?) for clues to what might follow. Was my future—12 R, 13 R—to be fecundated or stercorated? Was I in for another and final Dark Night of the Soul and Second Suicide? Or would my tremulous vision on the New Bridge in 1967, that Everything Has Intrinsic Value, somehow come to realization—with Jane, with Jane? What dénouement, grim or golden, had our Author up His sleeve?

Since May 16 I had not seen Polly socially, and our office relations, while certainly cordial, were merely official. But as we carried on our business (without once comparing notes on our separate “dates” after my shipboard party: unusual for us), I watched like an osprey from the side of my eye for clues to the reenactment I was confident we approached. In addition to that meeting of the Mack Enterprises Board of Directors where the old
I’
s protest against the new
me
had been outvoted, our business had included the reviewing of those suits filed against Harrison’s will, a quick flight to Buffalo to meet that aforementioned detective and speak carefully with him about Jane’s blackmailer, and a board meeting of the Tidewater Foundation, where among other things we discussed the weighty matter of next September’s cornerstone ceremonies for the Tower of Truth (for the other directors the question was which documents and artifacts best represented 1969; for Yours Truly it was where to lay a cornerstone in a round tower) and passed on the annual applications for foundation grants. Mr. Jerome Bray’s LILYVAC nonsense we have finally washed our hands of, even Drew gruffly acknowledging that its fuzzy claim to radical-political relevance was fraudulent. Ditto the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks, now the king is dead. Reg Prinz’s film, “Bea Golden’s” sanatorium and haven for draft evaders, and the
Original Floating Theatre II
we still contribute to the support of, in various measure.

As my general secretary, Polly was witness to all this. She was as gratified as I by what she took to be Drew’s “mellowing,” especially towards me; we agreed it had nothing to do with the will contest, but could not decide whether it betokened a change of mood among political activists in the last lap of the Shocking Sixties or some personal ground-change in Drew since his father’s death. Together we tisked our tongues at the cost overruns on Schott’s Tower, as well as at certain evidence that the foundation work was not up to specifications and may have to be repaired at enormous expense to the state, since the contractor is filing for bankruptcy. We tisked again at the report (from Drew, via Jeannine) that Joe Morgan, who’d dropped out of sight from Amherst College after resigning his presidency at Marshyhope, has apparently done a Timothy Leary and surfaced as a hippie at the “Remobilization Farm.”

But in none of these witnessings, gratifyings, and tongue-tiskings could I find augury of 11 R. The Bull gave way to the Twins, May to June; PLF Day rushed from Tomorrow towards Now, casting no discernible shadow before it.

Then, on that same unlucky Friday of
me’s
adoption and my rejection by President Jane, Polly pleasantly announced her
retirement,
effective virtually at once! Her replacement she had already selected and trained: the “girl” (37, our age on the original PLF Day; she seems a child!) who’d filled in for her at vacation time for several years and worked half-time for us while raising her children. Polly would stop in on the Monday to insure that all was well; she would stop in from time to time thereafter when she happened to be visiting Cambridge, to see to it I was neither exploiting nor being exploited by her successor. And she would miss me sorely, and the good ship
Osborn Jones,
and dear damp Dorchester, whose Tercentennial festivities she would miss too. But her heart had got the better of her head, she declared, as she hoped for my sake Jane Mack’s would too before very long. She had acceded to the entreaties of her (other) occasional lover of many years’ standing, that gentleman three years my senior whose existence I believe I mentioned in my last: not quite to marry him, as he wished, at least not right away, but to pool her pension benefits with his and retire with him to Florida, the Elysium of Social Security lovers. He’d proposed, not for the first time, after dinner on a certain Friday night last month. She’d reviewed, not for the first time, all the pros and cons, and some days later had said yes.