Letters (110 page)

But our curiosity about these matters is understandably much tempered. Ambrose remains on the company’s payroll (thank heaven), but nothing’s being asked of him beyond his presence on the set tomorrow if our circumstances permit: we’re to hear tonight whether “the set” is Bloodsworth Island or Bladensburg. We’ll decide tomorrow whether to go: perhaps take Magda and Angie with us to distract them, if the news we await from down the hall does not distract us from all distraction.

The other large Meanwhile is that Ambrose, in part to distract himself, has, since rearriving at the Lighthouse, plunged almost fervidly into that new project I mentioned in my last. (Where is his pretty Perseus piece? Medusa’d forever, I fear; and there’s a pity, for I believe us to have been in it, he and I, properly estellated into Art. Moreover, I now trust him to have got us down Right.) What began as rather a joke, not the best joke in the world either, has become, if not a fair obsession, Ambrose’s preemptive literary concern. It will not surprise me, and now shall not you, if he really
does
solicit for his purposes your copies of these weekly letters (by my estimate this is the 22nd consecutive Saturday I’ve addressed you!).

A month ago I’d have been appalled at the notion of his even reading them, not to mention
using
them. Now… I find I don’t really mind. They
do
spell out something of a story, don’t they, with a sort of shape to it? Wanting perhaps in climax and dénouement, but fetching its principals withal at least to this present gravely tranquil plateau.

Yes. I think I’m granting you my permission, who never after the first time deigned to respond to me, to respond as you please to Ambrose, should he in fact make such a request of you. Always assuming that you
received
#‘s 2 through 22 in the first place and (here I complete—and forever put behind me!—my six months’ self-abnegation) perchance preserved them, those epistles from

P.S. (7:00 P.M.): Laboratory and X-ray findings in, and A.‘s lay worst-case diagnosis confirmed in dreadful particular: Paget’s disease, of sufficient standing to have involved pelvic bones, femurs, lower spine, and temporal bone. “Explosive” phosphatase level. Strong roent-genographic evidence of multicentric osteo-sarcoma: apparent lesions at least in right distal femur and left proximal tibia; apparent metastasis already at least to one lung. The doctor will not speak yet of prognosis, but to Ambrose he needn’t: it’s Very Poor indeed, even with massive radiation and radical “ablative operative therapy”—i.e., multiple amputation. In all likelihood, a few hellish months.

O poor Peter! Poor Magda! Poor tumorous humankind!

Friday, August 8, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Old Progenitor,

Events recircle like turkey buzzards, from whose patient orbits—eccentric, even retrograde, but ever closing—we determine their dead sun. Seven weeks have passed since 12 R, my Second Dark Night. A full month since the subsequent illumination of 13 R: my recognition that their target is yours truly. What prompts my pen today is neither another such night nor another such dawning, but a long and oddly clouded afternoon, my last here in the office before my August vacation cruise—an afternoon which I’m moved to prolong yet further by writing you about it, in hopes of glimpsing what’s behind those clouds.

13 L, Dad (see my letter to you of May 16 last), was your son’s resolve on the morning of June 21 or 22, 1937, to live that summer day as routinely as possible and kill himself at its close. Its counterpart in my life’s recycling, 13 R, was what A. B. Cook’s mid-sentence wink—possibly alluding to the Floating Opera?—opened my eyes to, four Fridays past: a replay of 13 L in slower motion (as befits the Suddenly Old), but with a more final finale. Not jubilantly this time, but serenely, I recognized in that Marshyhope committee room what all those goodbyes were about: how my future had indeed been fertilized by my past, attained full growth with but a little cultivation, and was ripe now for harvesting. Instead of a summer’s day, the summer season, lived out as normally as possible in face of such extraordinaries as the loss of Polly Lake and the miraculous regaining (and relosing) of Jane. For the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox should serve, or thereabouts; keep late September clear on your appointment calendar, Dad, for our too long postponed reunion.

In the six or seven weeks till when, I mean to make a final single-handed circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and watch the Perseid meteors for the last time from
Osborn Jones.
I hope too to wind up a deal of unfinished business before my deadline: principally the matter of Harrison’s estate, but also my
Inquiry
into your suicide; my
Letter;
the little mystery of Jane’s blackmailing; and the still-unbridged crevasse, so narrow yet so deep, between me and Drew (who has avoided me entirely since his rare overtures of July).

But I do not conceive 13 R to be necessarily either a detailed rerun of 13 L or a tidy wrap-up of my life. If differences remain unreconciled, distances unbridged, mysteries unresolved, businesses unfinished by (say) 9/21 or 22, so be it, Dad: I’ll keep our appointment.

By what vehicle?
The Original Floating Theatre II
is too obvious to be ruled out, given our Author’s want of subtlety. But I do not consider myself bound to the letter of His crude scenarios; the choice of vehicle I regard as matter of small, if not of no, importance. I shall not, however, attempt this time to take others with me, I think; at least not Innocent Bystanders—though I am unrepentant for having so attempted last time around, and would without compunction destroy certain of the world’s Dreadfuls along with myself if such a happy dénouement could be arranged. Alas, no one conveniently to hand is to my knowledge wicked enough: not even our elected rulers over on the banks of the Potomac. My final crossing, like my final cruise, looks to be a solo voyage.

The matter of means, then, is a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it, the Author of us all and I. Wednesday two weeks past, July 23, was the second anniversary of the other bridge episode in my life—that encounter with Drew and his explosive colleagues on the Choptank Bridge in 1967. I took the trouble that noon to hike out there and fish awhile near the second lamppost from the draw, just to check whether old A. (above) had any heavy ironies up His sleeve (I admit it was sweet to recall the emotion of Courage, too, and bittersweet to recollect brave Polly’s aid, and our little sail after on
Osborn Jones).

He did not. The tide ran. No fish bit.

My sense of the latitude permitted within the general pattern of recurrence was strengthened further by the passage yesterday week, eventless, of another famous anniversary: July 31, when in 1935 (see 10 L) Jane and I resumed our lapsed love affair—in effect shrugging our shoulders, along with Harrison, at the mild question of Jeannine’s paternity. Granted that Jane had 10 R’d me three months since aboard
O.J.
—re-reseduced me, so to speak—she had re-redropped me in the meantime too, and who’s to say those buzzards can’t spiral in for a third, a fourth, a fifth cycle before their dinnertime? Though my heart has truly bid good-bye to her, I went out to the Todds Point cottage, just in case.

Nothing. (Jane is, I understand, off vacationing with her “Lord Baltimore,” whereabouts a company secret. Cap’n Chick is being capitalized as a wholly owned subsidiary of
m.e.,
which is gearing up Now to capacity for Tomorrow’s Crabsicles and Eastern Sho’ fillers and binders.)

We expect no surprises, therefore, on Wednesday next, 8/13, when in 1932 Jane first instructed me in Surprise. I shan’t play the game further, dutifully pretending to catch an afternoon nap out there in the cottage till she comes to me. Indeed, I shan’t be there at all:
O.J.
and I will be at sea (oh well: at Bay).

Presumably alone, as I told Polly Lake just this noon during her (surprise!) visit to A. B. & A. Hot as the dickens on the gulf this time of year! Makes damp old Dorchester feel like Heaven! On her way north to rescue her grandchildren from their parents for a spell; thought she’d better stop by to see whether her successor had quit or taken to drink, etc.

Oh Polly, Polly, you look terrific. Ten pounds younger (she’s become a golfer!), crop-haired and berry-brown, outfitted in trim linen from a good Sarasota shop. Florida agrees with you!

No, no, Toddy, it’s living in sin that does. But
you
look awful! Seriously, have you been sick?

Damn near dead, Poll, since you ran off. You mean to say that rascal hasn’t made an honest woman of you?

Hope he doesn’t till I get down to one-fifteen!

Et cetera. All Office Raillery, Ms. Pond playing Interlocutor to our Bones and Tambo. But as I parried Polly’s real concern, and she my real curiosity, an odd awkwardness developed. It was lunchtime: unthinkable that we shouldn’t go up the street together as always, or down to the boat slip, for a sandwich and ale and more-private conversation. But my head was full of 13 R, Dad, how this surprise visit fit in; it was a season for good-byes, not new hellos, and Polly and I had said our good-byes in June. Nor did I care to account for my Sudden Aging or deal with Polly’s obvious curiosity about Me & Jane, either by lying or by telling the truth.

So I let a real stiffness build, till Ms. Pond got the signal that Polly had got ten minutes earlier but refused to acknowledge, and invited her to lunch, declaring—what was indeed the case, but no excuse—that I’d taken to working through the noon hour in order to clear my desk by vacation time.

Far be it from me then, Polly said, clearly set down. I suppose it
is
getting on to meteor time, isn’t it? We all used to work our fannies off, she assured Ms. Pond, so
he
could set sail by the eleventh.

Then to me, with as forced a breeziness as ever blew through Court Lane: Got your crew lined up?

You understand, Dad. Not in a hundred years could Polly have forgot (what Jane could have in a week) that the Perseid shower was at hand, which many and many an August past, since her widowhood, she had watched with me the night through from
Osborn Jones;
that if we had Worked Our Fannies Off to clear the decks for that celestial anniversary, it was in order to Play Them Off together on those same decks, under the fixed and shooting stars.

Guess I’ll be single-handing it this time, Polly. Back to the old window now. Good to see you.

I felt her stare at me more consequentially by far than I’d likely stare from my staring window at my oyster-shell pile. She even complained to Ms. Pond—good honest Polly!—He makes a girl feel right at home, don’t he?

Sorry, Poll.

Oh, wow! Good-bye, Mister Andrews, and
bon voyage!

Good-bye, Polly.

In forty years of staring from my office window, Dad, at that mountain of oyster shells over by the packing house, I’d never felt so forcefully as now what a quantity of death they represented. Ten thousand bushels of skeletons; two million separate dyings! I tried multiplying by three and imagining each oyster a European Jew, to comprehend the Holocaust; then I divided by 6,000,000 to put in perspective my own quietus. Only the arithmetic worked.

To business, then! If both Jane and Drew were, let’s say, too spooked by my Sudden Aging to relate to me unofficially any further, the contest over Harrison’s Follies would be strictly between me and their lawyers—a litigation that would not even wind up its overture by the equinox. A new tack was called for; but my staring window was too beclouded by thoughts of Polly for clear course plotting, even
before
the phone call came from Canada.

Ms. Pond had returned alone from lunch, her manner a prolonged reproof of my rudeness to her predecessor. I know I’m not supposed to interrupt, she declared icily through the intercom not long after; but there’s a lady on Line One in Fort Erie Ontario Canada who claims to be Family and says it’s urgent. To me she sounds smashed out of her mind, but that’s not my business.

I pushed One and identified myself to the (male) operator placing the call: no doubt our Author, doing a bit of subplotting of His own. For my caller—drunk indeed, alas, or doped, and desperate—was Jeannine! Up at that crank sanatorium that the foundation (I here enter on my agenda of unfinished business) ought to cease philanthropizing. Was she all right? I asked as soon as I heard the lush slur in her voice.

All wrong, said she. High as a kite and low as whaleshit, Toddy-O. Crashing! Got to talk to you.

We talked. The guru of her establishment, I learned, was dead—accidentally drowned a month since while fishing on Lake Erie—and Jeannine feared the institution was disintegrating even faster than herself. She confirmed what I had gathered from other sources: that poor Joe Morgan, late of Marshyhope, was there. Further, that he was no longer a patient but some sort of clinical counselor, to whose unlicensed ministrations she had turned in lieu of her deceased doctor’s. Further yet, that she had never needed help so sorely as now, when her Last Hope to Make It, Reggie Prinz, had dumped her. Did I understand? She was
out of the movie!
Prinz was shacked up in New York City with her own ex-stepdaughter, Mel Bernstein’s kid, and wasn’t that incest or something? But the main thing was, even Joe Morgan (We call him Saint Joe up here, Toddy, he’s such a fucking saint; I mean
literally
a fucking saint, ha ha; we’ve got a little thing going ourselves, or
did
have; part of my prescription) was pissed at her now, ’cause his wife didn’t used to drink, if I knew what she meant, and it looked like she’d worn out her welcome up there even though it was her dad’s money that paid the effing rent. But the main thing was, to hell with telephones: she needed a place to crash and a trusty shoulder to cry on and maybe a little fatherly advice, and she’d always thought of me as being as much her father as her father was, ha ha, and if she could make it to a plane could she come down like right away for a couple of days? At least we could talk about her dad’s estate, and like that.