Letters полностью

We expect no surprises, therefore, on Wednesday next, 8/13, when in 1932 Jane first instructed me in Surprise. I shan’t play the game further, dutifully pretending to catch an afternoon nap out there in the cottage till she comes to me. Indeed, I shan’t be there at all: O.J. and I will be at sea (oh well: at Bay).

Presumably alone, as I told Polly Lake just this noon during her (surprise!) visit to A. B. & A. Hot as the dickens on the gulf this time of year! Makes damp old Dorchester feel like Heaven! On her way north to rescue her grandchildren from their parents for a spell; thought she’d better stop by to see whether her successor had quit or taken to drink, etc.

Oh Polly, Polly, you look terrific. Ten pounds younger (she’s become a golfer!), crop-haired and berry-brown, outfitted in trim linen from a good Sarasota shop. Florida agrees with you!

No, no, Toddy, it’s living in sin that does. But you look awful! Seriously, have you been sick?

Damn near dead, Poll, since you ran off. You mean to say that rascal hasn’t made an honest woman of you?

Hope he doesn’t till I get down to one-fifteen!

Et cetera. All Office Raillery, Ms. Pond playing Interlocutor to our Bones and Tambo. But as I parried Polly’s real concern, and she my real curiosity, an odd awkwardness developed. It was lunchtime: unthinkable that we shouldn’t go up the street together as always, or down to the boat slip, for a sandwich and ale and more-private conversation. But my head was full of 13 R, Dad, how this surprise visit fit in; it was a season for good-byes, not new hellos, and Polly and I had said our good-byes in June. Nor did I care to account for my Sudden Aging or deal with Polly’s obvious curiosity about Me & Jane, either by lying or by telling the truth.

So I let a real stiffness build, till Ms. Pond got the signal that Polly had got ten minutes earlier but refused to acknowledge, and invited her to lunch, declaring — what was indeed the case, but no excuse — that I’d taken to working through the noon hour in order to clear my desk by vacation time.

Far be it from me then, Polly said, clearly set down. I suppose it is getting on to meteor time, isn’t it? We all used to work our fannies off, she assured Ms. Pond, so he could set sail by the eleventh.

Then to me, with as forced a breeziness as ever blew through Court Lane: Got your crew lined up?

You understand, Dad. Not in a hundred years could Polly have forgot (what Jane could have in a week) that the Perseid shower was at hand, which many and many an August past, since her widowhood, she had watched with me the night through from Osborn Jones; that if we had Worked Our Fannies Off to clear the decks for that celestial anniversary, it was in order to Play Them Off together on those same decks, under the fixed and shooting stars.

Guess I’ll be single-handing it this time, Polly. Back to the old window now. Good to see you.

I felt her stare at me more consequentially by far than I’d likely stare from my staring window at my oyster-shell pile. She even complained to Ms. Pond — good honest Polly! — He makes a girl feel right at home, don’t he?

Sorry, Poll.

Oh, wow! Good-bye, Mister Andrews, and bon voyage!

Good-bye, Polly.

In forty years of staring from my office window, Dad, at that mountain of oyster shells over by the packing house, I’d never felt so forcefully as now what a quantity of death they represented. Ten thousand bushels of skeletons; two million separate dyings! I tried multiplying by three and imagining each oyster a European Jew, to comprehend the Holocaust; then I divided by 6,000,000 to put in perspective my own quietus. Only the arithmetic worked.

To business, then! If both Jane and Drew were, let’s say, too spooked by my Sudden Aging to relate to me unofficially any further, the contest over Harrison’s Follies would be strictly between me and their lawyers — a litigation that would not even wind up its overture by the equinox. A new tack was called for; but my staring window was too beclouded by thoughts of Polly for clear course plotting, even before the phone call came from Canada.

Ms. Pond had returned alone from lunch, her manner a prolonged reproof of my rudeness to her predecessor. I know I’m not supposed to interrupt, she declared icily through the intercom not long after; but there’s a lady on Line One in Fort Erie Ontario Canada who claims to be Family and says it’s urgent. To me she sounds smashed out of her mind, but that’s not my business.

I pushed One and identified myself to the (male) operator placing the call: no doubt our Author, doing a bit of subplotting of His own. For my caller — drunk indeed, alas, or doped, and desperate — was Jeannine! Up at that crank sanatorium that the foundation (I here enter on my agenda of unfinished business) ought to cease philanthropizing. Was she all right? I asked as soon as I heard the lush slur in her voice.