Letters полностью

The flag was up: outgoing mail. My courage faltered at sight of those four bold letters, so less equivocal than the man they surnamed or the epistles in my briefcase. A lane of boxwoods and azaleas led to a pleasant white frame cottage, its screened porches shaded by sycamores. The lawn continued to a creek or cove, where pleasure craft rode at moorings; from a staff on the T of the laureate’s dock flew the motley banner of the state, bright as racing silks: the Baltimores’ chequered black and orange, the Calverts’ red-and-white cross botonee. I tapped the door knocker, a bright brass crab, and waited, slapping the odd mosquito. My heart misgave me. Hoping to catch him off his guard, I had not rung up ahead or written. Look here, I hoped to say to him, can we not put by all mystification? Let me tell you what I’ve been through these two dozen years at the hands of Castines, Cooks, and Burlingames, and there’s an end on’t! If you and André are not kin; if your son is not my son — let me hear you (and him) tell me so, plainly, fully, amicably, when I shall have told you (ditto) what-all has fetched me to imagine otherwise…

A blank-faced woman opened but did not unchain the door, and through that unfriendly space regarded me. Too well dressed to be a domestic, too old (I judged) to be Cook’s daughter, yet too young to be “Henri’s” mother. A second wife, perhaps? Her nose was soft, but her chin and jaw were hard; her brow was high and fair, her eyebrows were plucked to a sharp line, her lips were thin — well, verbal portraiture is not my forte: sufficient that while in no particular uncomely, her phiz tout ensemble was remarkably empty, like that of a receptionist mildly inclined to mask her essential incordiality and profound uninterest. I identified myself, asked for Mr Cook, was told curtly he was not at home. I had historical papers concerning his family to show him, I declared, certain to be of considerable interest to him. Granted, I’d made no appointment, ought to have done… But these documents were truly remarkable. When was he expected to return? Or had he an office I might stop by, as I was in the neighbourhood?

She had no idea when he would return, tonelessly intoned Ms Blank — I was put in mind of Ambrose’s depiction, no doubt exaggerated, of his ex. He was on a speaking tour of Pennsylvania and upstate New York, but she believed he meant to return in time for the Dorchester County tercentenary celebration in July. She waxed more particular, though no more warm, like an answering service: He had meant to take in, en route, the anniversary commemoration of the Fenian invasion of Fort Erie, Canada, from Black Rock, near Buffalo, in 1866, in which one of his ancestors had played a certain role. He was supposed too to do something at Niagara Falls, she believed, and, later in the month, at the other Chautauqua: the one in west New York spelled with a q. She didn’t know. Something about a movie, she thought.

End of professional grip. The woman neither closed nor unchained the door, but waited for me to turn away. Adieu, sanity! I didn’t think to ask whether she was Mrs Cook; at that point an incordially neutral reply that she was Mme Castine or Mme de Staël would scarcely have surprised me. Numbly recrossing the Chesapeake, I heard reported on ABC News that the American Falls at Niagara was about to be turned off, so that engineers and geologists could examine its fast-receding face and study ways to retard its crumbling: the accumulated rockfall at its base had made the drop less spectacular than that of Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, and what with the U.S. Bicentennial but seven years off… Meanwhile, in the city of Niagara Falls itself (the American, not the Canadian, city), fire had melted the famous wax museum: George and Martha Washington, Abe Lincoln, FDR and JFK and RFK (whose likeness was to have been unveiled on the morrow, 1st anniversary of his assassination) — all had gone up like so many candles, or down into expensive puddles of wax. Nevertheless, the chamber of commerce expected tourist traffic to reach an all-time high this summer: who would not go out of his way to view such wonders as a turned-off waterfall and a melted museum?

God bless America! And spare me.