I took the liberty of asking your neighbours; they said you “came and went.” I waited an hour; strolled out on your dock in the crisp breeze from Canada (Monday and Tuesday were the only clear days all week, and both cool as March); the lake too seemed abandoned, but for a few muskellunge fishermen standing and drifting in their skiffs. As I left, much frustrated (there are things you don’t
I could have wept for exasperation. I snatched it out, vowing to destroy it and write not another word to you. But an elderly lady watched me from her little jerry-built nearby; anyroad, what was writ was writ. And there was other mail waiting for you; no doubt you had business up in Buffalo, or were simply away from home for a few days. I rang you up again on the Wednesday, on the Thursday; hadn’t the heart to check whether my 18-pager still repines there with its two ounces of cancelled 1st-class postage. Friday forenoon we flew home.
Now I read in this morning’s Baltimore
Oh well: I hope that you and your property (my letter included) were spared, and that there is excellent reason, other than indifference on your part, why mine of the 14th lay unopened in your box, and why its troubled, sometimes anguished, often urgent predecessors have gone unreplied to, even unacknowledged, since March. Thomas Mann liked to say that with utter disgrace comes a kind of peace: no need for further striving to keep up appearances! I feel intimations of that peace. And I understand, better than formerly, Ambrose’s letters to the outgoing tide; anybody’s epistles to the empty air.
Now it’s Saturday again, a few hours from the commencement ceremonies which I suddenly have dark misdoubts of. Ambrose is at the hospital with his mother, whose dying suddenly accelerated in midweek… and I need once more to write to you, not only whether you reply or not, but whether or not you even read my words.
Here is what “Monsieur Casteene” told me six days ago, in the voice described in my last: almost too ready with his inside information to be believed, and so confiding that though I cannot refute a single of his details and must admit the total accuracy of everything he recollected (much more than I!) concerning our old connexion, I distrusted him absolutely. I take a deep breath; I plunge in:
The man declares himself to be indeed, though Much Changed, the André Castine who first got me with child thirty years ago in Paris and again two years since at Castines Hundred. He declares that the high-spirited, loving disagreement with his apparently ineffectual father (Henri Burlingame VI), which I so well remembered from 1940, was in fact their ongoing cover throughout the war period for close cooperation, not on behalf of the Japanese and the Nazis — I didn’t ask him about those pre-Pearl Harbor messages to me from the Pacific — but on behalf of the U.S.S.R., whose alliance and subsequent rivalry with the U.S. they foresaw. More exactly, on the ultimate behalf of the Communist party in North America, and to the ultimate end of a Second Revolution in the U.S., which they saw more hope for if the war were less than an unconditional Allied victory.
I simply report the news.
