Letters полностью

My pause was not strategic. Hurt to the auricles, I’d’ve begged off, but before I could relocate my voice Jane said (in a much less presidential one of her own): I know, Toddy, you wanted to show me the cottage and all. But I’m really into this fast-food thing! Wait till you hear. Maybe after?

Her office, then. Six. I was a dear. No need for me to drive in: she’d send John out with the Continental. Bye. Bye.

There was, in germ, the Message, but I didn’t read it. Among my stillborn preparations I waited with a rye and ginger. Age tinkled my ice (my hands have begun to shake a bit more this year, Dad). To perfect my disappointment, our Author saw fit now to disperse the late-afternoon thunderheads out over the Bay. It was going to be a fine evening.

En route to town I reviewed the hard-crab run with Jane’s chauffeur: still poor in the river, we agreed, but down-county they were getting the big jimmies and the sooks. Not like before, though.

I had been permitted to share the front seat, windows down. Approaching Cambridge, John radioed ahead and was given instructions: he raised the windows, cut in the A.C. to cool the car, and at the me parking lot suggested I move to the rear seat while he fetched Miz Mack. I was to help myself from the bar or wait for him to serve me, whichever. But even as I shifted places and he showed me how to work the backseat bar, a second buzzy message countermanded the first: I must come up and see the layouts for this newest Mack Enterprise; we could have our cocktails right there.

Jane, Jane. Did Love ever arouse you like the passions of Commerce? Another rye and ginger for me (she made a face); the Usual for her. As John mixed and blended (come on, Author: you’ll really have her drink only that Galliano concoction called Golden Dream?!), I was shown how me would send Roy Rogers and Colonel Sanders back where they came from: Maryland fried chicken, Chesapeake Bay fish and chips, oyster(-flavored) fritters — and Crabsicles.

That’s right, Dad. PR wasn’t sure about the spelling yet—Crabsicles looked hard to say, and Crabsickles had the wrong suggestion amidships — but the Basic Concept looked to Jane like a winner, and it had to be good news on the bottom line that to make a crabcake hold together on a popsicle stick you were obliged to use less crabmeat and more Fillers and Binders.

The key, you see — she explained to me over a tub-o’-chicken in a Route 50 outlet named for a former Baltimore Colts football star — was logistics. Where did Sanders’s East Coast outlets get most of their Kentucky Fried? From the big brooders right here on Delmarva Peninsula! Jane’s idea was to buy into that industry and, by raising her own fryers and exploiting me’s existing cold-storage, trucking, and food-processing capacities, lower the unit cost per tub-o’ enough to undersell the other chains in the Middle Atlantic States at least. The Crabsicles and oyster fritters would be low-profit window dressing with high Recognition Value; PR was working up a name for the chain that would sound both salty and southern-fried; something like Colonel Skipjack or Chicken of the Sea. Dive-Inn Belle had been considered and rejected. The idea was to sell the Shore. What did I think of Cap’n Chick?

I thought, I said, that some combination of Galliano and corporate capitalism must be the secret of eternal youth. Also, that a Mack as enterprising as Jane had no need to go to law over Harrison’s estate: a simple four-way out-of-court split among herself, her two children, and Harrison’s Follies (as we’d dubbed them) would give each a half-million before taxes, enough for her “Lord Baltimore” to buy a chunk of Cap’n Chick before it hatched; her passions thus wedded like fried chicken to Crabsicles, that investment would surely quadruple in value ere the Bicentennial, and she could both have her title, her two million, her children’s goodwill, and her oyster(-flavored) fritters, and eat them, so to speak. Finally, that unless she put away her half of our tub-o’-chicken with a celerity more commensurate to that of its preparation and service, we’d miss Jeannine’s entrance.