Letters

Fictitious forebear, I was about to call you, wondering once again (with Anger, child of Exhaustion and Frustration) whether you ever existed. But of course you did: that your death has proved more important to me than your life — indeed, than my life — argues that you died; that you died (by your own hand, Groundhog Day 1930, dressed for the office but suspended from a cellar beam of our house: just another casualty of the Crash, one was odiously obliged to infer, in the absence of suicide note, ill health, sexual impropriety, or other contraindication) is prima facie evidence that you lived. Fastidious widower. Respected attorney. Survived by one child, then 29, who for nearly ten years already — nearly 50 now! — had been trying to Get Through to you, first by speech, then by endless unmailed letter, to tell you a thing he had been told about his heart: that it might, at any moment, stop. Who on your decease commenced an Inquiry

into its cause, the better to understand himself; closed that Inquiry on June 21 or 22, 1937, with his own resolve to suicide; reopened it a few hours later (and his Letter to the late you) when he found himself for certain reasons still alive; and sustained thereafter, in fits and starts and with many a long pause, but faithfully indeed since March last, both Inquiry and “correspondence.”

Forty-nine years.

The first letter, or first installment of the Letter, is dated September 22, 1920 (I have it before me, with all the others, most of them returned to sender from the Cambridge Cemetery. Its salutation is simply Father: not, like some later ones’, Dear, Damned, Deaf, Dead, or Distant Dad. Just Father). This is the last.

I’m at the cottage, sir: mystified, chagrined, and pooped from a three-week Final Vacation Cruise that turned into a wild-goose chase, followed by a week of fruitless floundering up and down the Atlantic flyway. The weekend forecast’s clear, in both senses; any other year I’d be out sailing. But I’m done with that, as with many another thing. I’ll spend the weekend having done with this.

My last to you (8/8) closed with the phone call I’d been waiting for as I wrote, in my office, having snubbed Polly Lake for reasons you remember and cleared my desk for the Last Cruise of Osborn Jones, only to be delayed by that distress signal from Jeannine. I was impatient: no place for her in 13 R that I could see; my deliberate rudeness to dear Polly was getting to me; Ms. Pond’s insinuations made me cross; and I did not feel up to the three-hour haul to Baltimore or Washington airport and back. Hello. I truly hoped she was in Buffalo, or back in Ontario, her impulse passed. Toddy? But it was an awfully clear connection: I could hear gin, vermouth, and panic, 5:1:5. Where are you, Jeannine?

Just around the corner, it turned out, in the lobby of the Dorset, wondering why in the world she’d come. Sit tight, I told her; but when I got there she was standing loose, looking lost and a whole lot younger than 35: not the fuddled lush I’d feared (though she’d had a few), but a frightened version of the Sailboat Girl in that Arrow Shirt ad, vintage ’21, reproduced on the card Polly’d sent me. Peasant blouse instead of middy blouse, hippie beads instead of black neckerchief, but braless as her predecessor, like her gold-braceleted, her gold curls piled and bound with the same silk saffron. Suitcase at her side; cigarette, in holder, in hand. She started forward uncertainly, eyes welling up (Had she seen me, I tried to recall, since my Sudden Aging?) and hand held out. When I hugged her instead, she let the tears come and wondered chokily again Why the hell et cetera. Marian watched from the check-in desk with interest. Jeannine’s good breasts felt perfectly dandy, Dad, through my light seersucker; my odd response to the push of them — file this under Irony for the sequel — was paternal-tender. I had, after all, very possibly sired them.

But it was her Why’s that changed my cruising plans. She kept it up over dinner — iced tea and crab cakes at a dry establishment across the street, a self-administered test to stay off the juice till her tale got told. Why couldn’t she make a go of it with any of her husbands and lovers? she wanted to know. Why had Prinz dumped her for Mel Bernstein’s slack-assed kid? Why had she ever imagined she had any talent except for drinking and fucking? (I shushed her: family restaurant.) Why couldn’t she control herself? Why was she born? Why go on living?

I sang the next line for her, to turn the edge; the one after we harmonized together, laughing around our backfin crab cakes—

What do I get?

What am I giving?