Letters полностью

You Do Not Quite Understand what’s going on. You Suspect that in a sense you Are its Focus — read Target — yet at the same time but a Minor Figure in some larger design. You Are Not At All Sure what Reg Prinz is up to, or Casteene — who, it now seems certain, arranged Morgan’s coming here, and possibly prompted his challenge to you. Did Casteene also arrange the appearance last Friday — from Maryland, on the arm of Ambrose Mensch! — of “Lady Amherst,” who as “Lady Russex” came here two years ago for an abortion? Why did that same lady seem both astonished to see him and not quite convinced that she was seeing him? Did Mensch really not know that his ex-wife is a patient here? He seems to suspect Prinz of what you Suspect Casteene of!

Hum.

To carry Implausible Coincidence down from the stars to the spear carriers: it turns out that one Merry Bernstein, whose hippie friends brought her in from Chautauqua last month hallucinating and raving, her backside inflamed with what looks to have been a poisonous snakebite, perhaps a copperhead’s, is our Bibi’s stepdaughter! More exactly, the daughter of Bea Golden’s second husband, one Mr. Bernstein.

Did you Mention that this same Ms. Bernstein (still recuperating, and keeping mum on the nature of her injury) is said by her companions to have been Making It in Lily Dale with that very odd duck, your former night-school student and later fellow patient Jerome Bray? The mere mention of whose name now sends her into hysteria? Did you Mention that his name got mentioned as pilot of the Chautauqua Lake excursion boat that Mr. Prinz chartered two nights ago for the film company’s cast party? And that at this same party Bray is reported to have pursued our Bibi so ardently as to quite frighten her, provoke her other suitor’s jealousy (you Mean Mensch, whom you Described as Lady Amherst’s companion?) and her lover Prinz’s mild amusement, and neglect his piloting duties to the point of being cashiered at the cruise’s end? And that Pocahontas, aboard this same vessel, upon this same occasion, did flirt concurrently with both Prinz and this same Bray, presumably to rouse her ex-husband’s ire? And that the report of this same flirtation has aroused instead, or as well, and altogether unexpectedly, your Own Jealousy, for reasons you Have Not Yet Dared to Begin to Examine? And finally, that the only copperheads you ever Heard Of during the Farm’s residency in the Lily Dale — Chautauqua area were the 19th-century advocates of a negotiated peace with the Confederacy?

Clearly, Jacob Horner, what you are Involved in is no ordinary soap opera: it is Bayreuth by Lever Brothers; it is Procter & Gamble’s production of the Bathtub Ring.

But never mind the Big Picture, which you will likely Never See; or which, if it exists at all, may be like those messages spelled out at halftime in U.S. college football matches by marching undergraduates: less intelligent, valuable, and significant than its constituent units. The movie people have dispersed, to reassemble in Maryland next week. Mensch and Lady Amherst have gone with them. Bibi will leave to rejoin the company (against the Doctor’s orders: how his authority is shrunk!) after tomorrow’s, or Saturday’s, minstrel show, flying back as necessary for her therapy sessions and her role in Der Wiedertraum. Casteene appears, disappears, reappears as always, often taking Pocahontas with him in some secretarial capacity. (You are Jealous. Why are you Jealous?) Even Merry Bernstein, now that she can sit and walk almost normally, speaks of lighting out with her friends to, like, Vancouver? As far from Lily Dale as possible. For dramaturgical purposes, in this corner of the Big Picture only you and Joe Morgan Remain. It is his motive, not Casteene’s or Prinz’s, that truly Concerns and truly Mystifies you.

But now that your Drama has taken prospective shape, Joe will not speak to you again on the subject of you and him and Rennie and the Fatal Fifties “until the time comes”—presumably July 21, when your Wicomico Teachers College Interview, at which you First Met him, is to be reenacted. Or perhaps July 22, anniversary of (among other things) your First Meeting Rennie, with her husband, in your Newly Rented Room, whither they’d sought you out to congratulate you on your Appointment.

“Day Two of your Hundred Days,” is what Joe said, and would say no more.