Letters

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?