Letters

— and then I reminded her (she knew the story) that a series of Why’s from her on June 21 or 22, 1937, when she was going on four years old, had led me, age 37, aboard Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, to a clarification of my resolve to end my life. Thence, not long after, to the recognition that, sub specie aeternitatis, there was no more reason to commit suicide than not to.

She was, Jeannine sensibly replied, not me. And she wasn’t really talking about suicide, just wishing she were dead.

Nor was I, I told her (as it here began coming clear to me), really talking about 13 L, which I now explained: that summer day I’d lived programmatically like any other because I meant it to be my last. I was,” I said, really working out for myself a detail of 13 R — which never mind, my dear. Christ, Toddy, she wondered, who’s been on the sauce? And whose crisis was this? And what in the (family restaurant) world was she going to do with her useless self?

She was coming out to Todds Point with me for the weekend, I informed her. To talk things over like, well, uncle and niece. Swap despair stories. Knock back a moderate volume of London gin. Maybe net a few soft crabs and try to swim between the pesky sea nettles. My vacation cruise — and her return to Fort Erie, where they were wondering — could wait till the Monday.

She was delighted; so was I. No great mystery: a relief for her not to have to think in sexual terms, which had become anxious ones; a pleasure for me to be, no doubt for the last time, host to a pretty houseguest for an innocent weekend, uncomplicated by any emotion save mere benevolence and fitly echoing, in this leisurely wrap-up of my life, our father-daughterly excursion back in 13 L.

She was also curious, all the way to the cottage. What was I

in despair about? Could it have to do with her mother, by any chance, or was it just Getting Old? Where did I mean to cruise to, and with whom? She really could use a drink now, if I didn’t mind; wasn’t the old country club somewhere along the way to Todds Point? How many girls did I suppose had like herself been laid on all nine greens of that flat little golf course in a single summer, between their junior and senior years of high school?

Never mind, I said, and it’s about as quick to keep on toward home, as an old regatta sailor like herself should know: just two points farther downriver. Oh wow, said she, she hadn’t done that

in years and years — sailing, she meant. Did I think we could slip out just for a day sail before she left? But she answered herself with tears: Left for where? Not back to that (etc.) Farm: Joe Morgan was too far gone these days in his own hang-ups to do her any good, and all the others were either nuts or feebs. Her brother rightly despised her; her mother didn’t give a damn. Did I know that she didn’t even have an apartment to call her own? She’d made the mistake of letting hers go, a dandy one on the Upper West Side, when she’d moved in with Prinz; her stuff was still there.

Et cetera. All this over Beefeaters and tonic now, here. It excited Jeannine (as it had not Jane) to be back in the cottage she remembered happily from her girlhood. She kept the alcohol intake reasonably controlled; we sat for some hours in the dark on the screened front porch, listening to crickets and owls and ice cubes and each other’s stories, watching the moon track out on the still river where Osborn Jones lay half provisioned. I was pleased with her, that she hadn’t got drunk or hysterical; that she assessed herself and the others fairly; that she tucked her legs under her on the old porch glider and made herself unaffectedly at home with me; that she had the presence of heart to wonder again what was on my mind. I advised her, unless she was broke, to find another apartment, in New York or Los Angeles or wherever; to look very carefully for a serious, conservative, happily married, physically unattractive psychiatrist, preferably female, to help her with the booze and the rescaling of her ambitions; to consider applying some of her energies to something impersonal and citizenly — why not her father’s Tidewater Foundation, for example, which certainly needed its philanthropies reviewed? — et cetera.