I was half joking, Dad. And not altogether unbitterly. My feelings were still bruised. Jane’s tirelessness made me tired; the impersonality of her greed depressed me. She would sell the Shore if it were hers to sell, and not entirely for the profit — which, given her existing wealth, would be mainly of trophy value — but for the sake of grand and sharp transaction. Moreover, the Ocean City-goers who jammed the place were watching us with interest, assuming no doubt that so elegant and elegantly chauffeured a lady in a fast-food joint must be part of some jokey ad campaign, and where were the cameras? Nor did that traffic itself, swarming bumper to bumper over that particular nearby bridge, cheer me: the Eastern Shore of Maryland was not Jane’s to sell because it had been sold, resold, oversold already.
But she took my utterance as oracular. Polishing off her drumstick-with-thigh-attached and scolding me for scolding her when I’d scarcely touched mine (she insisted on adding it to John’s tub-o’; after all, we’d paid for it), she pressed to know, en route to Long Wharf, whether I really was inclined to an out-of-court division of Harrison’s estate along those lines. More important, did I truly think Cap’n Chick could achieve a four-to-one stock split in seven years? She’d figured maybe three to one at best by the mid-1970’s, if indeed she capitalized the venture as a semiautonomous subsidiary…
The Original Floating Theatre II. I had hoped after all — so I must infer from my disappointment — for some fertilization of our future from our past. It was, almost, the solstice, anniversary of a certain corner-turning (13 L) aboard the original Original in ’37; a good bit of evening lay yet ahead; nostalgia was the showboat’s stock in trade. I even took Jane’s hand — kept it, rather, after helping her from the cool car into the heated evening. But John returned from the box office with tidings that Miz Golden had had airplane problems (the plot ground, if I remember rightly, of The Parachute Girl) and would not be arriving till tomorrow. The minstrel-show half of the evening would be presented as usual; a medley of silent-film comedies would replace the postintermission drama. The management was offering refunds on advance ticket sales.
Oh Toddy, Jane said. I chose to read her tone as rue for having changed my original plan for the evening, but she may have been merely piqued at this thwarting of hers. We stood about for a bit, deciding. Most patrons seemed to be going aboard anyhow. The taped calliope music on the P.A. was “Bye Bye Blackbird,” but again I didn’t get the Author’s message. Oh well, she left the choice to me. I opted, without enthusiasm, to give the O.F.T. II a try, if only by way of checking out the foundation’s philanthropies. We could always leave.
We did, after half an hour. The theater was having air-conditioning problems. The emcee-interlocutor, a branch-campus drama major by the look of him, was more Cap’n Chic than Captain James Adams, and the civil-rights ruckus was still too recent history to permit any honest revival of blackface comedy. In its place was a pallid liberal “satire” that neither offended nor entertained anyone save the summer-jobbing students who enacted (and had presumably composed) it. Jane’s mind was mercifully elsewhere — on unit costs per Crabsicle, I supposed, or franchise contracts. Mine, though still blind to the obvious, was on that right-hand column of correspondences set forth some letters back, which I’d lost the key to since Polly Lake failed me on June 17. In midst of some plastic levity between the pale surrogates of Bones and Tambo, I touched Jane’s arm to ask her pleasure; she was out of her seat before I could put the question.
John was napping at the wheel; our Author likewise, or he’d have fetched us straight from Long Wharf to Todds Point and 12 R instead of routing us through the next diversion. Jane had, I now learned, been Thinking. About what I’d said at dinner? Mm. Why not wrap up the Whole Estate Thing out of court, and quickly, along some such lines as I’d suggested? Even a three-to-one Cap’n Chick stock appreciation would go far toward compensating for the difference between such a compromise and what she might get for her fiancé by hard-lining it, especially when one considered the reduced legal costs and the advantages of early reinvestment of her share. What’s more, if the will were uncontested she could forget about that blackmail threat, which still distressed her though nothing further had come of it. The nigger in the woodpile, she reckoned (her term, used unabashedly in John’s hearing as we drove into the Second Ward and the diversion now to be recounted), was the willingness of the prime beneficiary to agree to such a division: i.e., the Tidewater Foundation, as represented ultimately by its executive director and counsel. Aha.
