Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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E: Todd Andrews to his father. Further evidence that his life is recycling: 11 R.

Todds Point, Maryland

Friday, June 20, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear dead Dad,

Even as declared beneath the old Mack Enterprises trademark (about to be retired by majority vote of the directors), Praeteritas Futuras Fecundant. If I am no longer interested in your ancient suicide, I’m presently more involved than ever in the recapitulation of my past. My Todays, since Jane Mack reseduced me five weeks ago today, are spent in watchful anticipation of Tomorrow’s reenactment of Yesterday. What praeteritas will be fecundated next? So my interminable Inquiry sleeps (inconclusive but, I think, done with) while my Letter to you flourishes as never since I commenced it in 1920: three installments already since Groundhog Day, and the year’s calendar but half turned!

I’m at my cottage, Dad, out on my point, at sixes and sevens. It is earlier than I’d thought. I’ve been fretting and fussing about here all day, getting the house ready, getting the grounds ready, getting the boat ready Just In Case, not answering the phone (even though it might be Jane calling off our “date”!) because I’m supposed to be over in Baltimore on business. I am surprised at myself: an emotion I thought I had lost the capacity for.

I, I, I: such self-absorption!

Tomorrow Now is the new Mack Enterprises slogan, beneath a streamlined logo devised by Jane’s PR folk. No more hands across the years from things past to things to come; no more sailing ships, airliners, smokestacks, hay fields, tractors. Within a circular field, white above and gules below, the company’s initials azure in a loopy script which also forms the field’s perimeter, so:

Each loop carrying into one moiety the other’s color. The whole resembling, from any distance, a Yang/Yin done by a patriotic Italo-American spaghetti bender and, closer up, evocative of U.S. imperialism and isolationism at once: US become me and inflated to a global insularity.

So objected Drew, who, though not a director of Mack Enterprises, made plain his sentiments to the board of the Tidewater Foundation, of which he is a member, at our last meeting. He also denounced the firm’s co-opting, and perverting to its capitalist ends, such trendy counter-culturalisms as the Yang/Yin, the call for Revolution Now, and the ignoring of the past (Drew himself is more anti– than ahistorical). This last objection I shared, as the only dissenting director of – ugh! – me. Where was that gentle fogey Old Man Praeteritas, father of us all, the Yesterday that will fertilize Tomorrow Today? And of course I deplored the self-circumscribed me, the objectified subject, the I gestating within that O—too close to home for Yours Truly to want it blazoned ’round the world!

But I concede that for Madam President it is not inapt. Her one objection was to the lowercase initials, not as dated Modernist kitsch, but as unsuited to a corporate entity agglomerating like cancer. She yielded, however, to the tactful pitch of her young PR chief: that a subdued but ubiquitous logo better suited the firm’s magnitudinous future than some splashy arriviste hyperbole (he used other language); and that, per slogan, what was right for Tomorrow was right for Now. New logo – and attendant ad campaign – adopted, 11-1.

A week ago, that vote. Just after it, Jane declined, neutrally, my invitation to another sail on Osborn Jones. It was Friday 13th, 50 years to the day since another Friday when, upon my discharge from the U.S. Army, I was told of my precarious heart condition – of which you may have heard, Dad? I had thought Jane might be amused by that bit of praeteritas. Oh, and I’d thought, if things sailed smoothly, to apprise her of my new heart condition, by then four Fridays old; of my growing conviction that our lives are recycling; of my consequent anticipation of #11 R, June 17, Polly Lake’s Fart Day (I grant that the connection is not obvious; I shall come to it), and the unexpected turn its approach had taken only that same morning; of the disorienting revelation that I am in love with Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack, and have been ever since she came to me in this cottage on the afternoon of August 13, 1932. What did I expect to happen next (I’d thought to ask her somewhere out there if the wind was right), after our astonishing shipboard tryst of May, #10 R in last letter’s accounting, Dad? That she would abandon “Lord Baltimore” (or confess him to be the half-fantasized afterimage of some brief adventure with a London gigolo)? That she would marry, this late in the afternoon, a cranky, fussy small-town lawyer, part-time celibate and full-time bachelor, who has not been out of the U.S.A. since 1919 and seldom ventures even beyond the margins of Nautical Chart 77: United States – East Coast – Maryland and Virginia – Chesapeake Bay – Northern Part?

“Sorry, Todd,” she said (neutrally): “No hard feelings about your vote, but I’m meeting my fiancé in New York.”

Two times up, two times out. Just a week after 10 R I’d been permitted to take dinner with her at Tidewater Farms (where she’s seldom to be found anymore) and set forth my sentiments on the matter of her blackmailing: that inasmuch as there had been no subsequent threats after the first letter from Niagara Falls, the investigator recommended to me by legal colleagues in nearby Buffalo had nothing really to proceed upon; he agreed with me that there was little to be done until and unless the blackmailer was heard from again when she filed suit against Harrison’s will. For this opinion – which disappointed her itch to punish – I was thanked. But my after-dinner overture (a mere squeezing of her hand over brandy; an honest declaration that she looked radiant as ever; a head-shaking admission that I was still overwhelmed, overwhelmed, by our unexpected love-making of the week before) was smilingly squelched.

“Don’t forget, my dear: I’m to be married.”

I refrained from asking who had forgotten that detail, or found it irrelevant, out by Red Nun 20 on May 16.

In a word, it would have seemed, even as of yesterday, that that momentous moment was after all to be inconsequential—as, after all, our affair of 37 years past had been, except for the clouded paternity of Jane’s cloudy daughter. Nevertheless, it was the only thing that interested me or gave interest to other things. I write these lines to you for no other reason than to speak of Jane. I prepare to defend Harrison’s will against the suits now separately filed by his widow and two children only because their quarrel reenacts an earlier one (“Yesterday Now!” Drew cracked when our paths crossed in orphan’s court); and I am obsessed with this reenactment only because it came to include the aforecelebrated 8 and 10 R. Jane, Jane!

Obsession it is, however. In the five weeks past, I have reexamined like scripture my old Floating Theatre memoir and its subsequent novelization for clues to what might happen next. 11 L (we recall, Dad) read June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win Mack v. Mack and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to. Or, as rendered in that novel:

I have in my office, opposite the desk, a fine staring-wall, a wall that I keep scrupulously clear for staring purposes, and I stared at it. I stared at it through February, March, April, and May, and through the first week of June, without reading on its empty surface a single idea.

Then, on the very hot June 17th of 1937, our Mrs. Lake, who is as a rule a model of decorum, came sweating decorously into my office with a paper cup of iced coffee for me, set it decorously on my desk, accepted my thanks, dropped a handkerchief on the floor as she turned to leave, bent decorously down to retrieve it, and most undaintily – oh, most indecorously – broke wind, virtually in my coffee.

“Oh, excuse me!” she gasped, and blushed, and fled…

Et cetera. The work is fiction: It was her pencil, not her handkerchief, Polly dropped. I do not have, never had, a staring-wall in my office. I used and use a window giving upon a mountain of oyster shells from the crab– and oyster-packing plant hard by Court Lane: shells that in those days were pulverized into lime for chicken feed or trucked down-county to pave secondary roads with, but now are recycled back to the oyster beds for the next generation of spats to attach themselves to. But it was in fact that serendipitous crepitation that put me in mind of the late Mack Senior’s bequest of his pickled defecations, and suggested to me that should his widow’s gardener, say, deploy that excrement about the flower beds of their Ruxton property, for example, I might just be able to make a case against Harrison’s mother for Attrition of Estate…

In honor of this anniversary and Harrison’s subsequent enrichment, I had later proposed to the Tidewater Foundation that fireworks be let off from Redmans Neck every June 17th; the motion did not carry, but Harrison seldom failed, except during the period of our estrangement, to drop by the office on that date for iced coffee with me and Polly, who took our teasing tributes with her usual good humor. Even last June, confined to Tidewater Farms, he had delivered to her via Lady Amherst a bottle of good French perfume, the gift card embossed with the old Mack Enterprises slogan, and I’d taken her to dinner as was my custom in honor of her aid in the largest case of its sort we’d ever won.

This year was different. Given 10 R, my reconnection with Jane, I could not make the ritual office jokes as PLF Day approached, lest my new obsession with my life’s recycling disturb the spontaneity of 11 R, which had assumed great importance to me. 10 R had literally refetched Jane into my life, my bed, my heart; though Polly’s famous flatus at 11 L had nothing directly to do with Jane and me, I looked to the character of its recurrence (Literal? Symbolical? Straightforward? Inverse?) for clues to what might follow. Was my future—12 R, 13 R – to be fecundated or stercorated? Was I in for another and final Dark Night of the Soul and Second Suicide? Or would my tremulous vision on the New Bridge in 1967, that Everything Has Intrinsic Value, somehow come to realization – with Jane, with Jane? What dénouement, grim or golden, had our Author up His sleeve?

Since May 16 I had not seen Polly socially, and our office relations, while certainly cordial, were merely official. But as we carried on our business (without once comparing notes on our separate “dates” after my shipboard party: unusual for us), I watched like an osprey from the side of my eye for clues to the reenactment I was confident we approached. In addition to that meeting of the Mack Enterprises Board of Directors where the old I’s protest against the new me had been outvoted, our business had included the reviewing of those suits filed against Harrison’s will, a quick flight to Buffalo to meet that aforementioned detective and speak carefully with him about Jane’s blackmailer, and a board meeting of the Tidewater Foundation, where among other things we discussed the weighty matter of next September’s cornerstone ceremonies for the Tower of Truth (for the other directors the question was which documents and artifacts best represented 1969; for Yours Truly it was where to lay a cornerstone in a round tower) and passed on the annual applications for foundation grants. Mr. Jerome Bray’s LILYVAC nonsense we have finally washed our hands of, even Drew gruffly acknowledging that its fuzzy claim to radical-political relevance was fraudulent. Ditto the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks, now the king is dead. Reg Prinz’s film, “Bea Golden’s” sanatorium and haven for draft evaders, and the Original Floating Theatre II we still contribute to the support of, in various measure.

As my general secretary, Polly was witness to all this. She was as gratified as I by what she took to be Drew’s “mellowing,” especially towards me; we agreed it had nothing to do with the will contest, but could not decide whether it betokened a change of mood among political activists in the last lap of the Shocking Sixties or some personal ground-change in Drew since his father’s death. Together we tisked our tongues at the cost overruns on Schott’s Tower, as well as at certain evidence that the foundation work was not up to specifications and may have to be repaired at enormous expense to the state, since the contractor is filing for bankruptcy. We tisked again at the report (from Drew, via Jeannine) that Joe Morgan, who’d dropped out of sight from Amherst College after resigning his presidency at Marshyhope, has apparently done a Timothy Leary and surfaced as a hippie at the “Remobilization Farm.”

But in none of these witnessings, gratifyings, and tongue-tiskings could I find augury of 11 R. The Bull gave way to the Twins, May to June; PLF Day rushed from Tomorrow towards Now, casting no discernible shadow before it.

Then, on that same unlucky Friday of me’s adoption and my rejection by President Jane, Polly pleasantly announced her retirement, effective virtually at once! Her replacement she had already selected and trained: the “girl” (37, our age on the original PLF Day; she seems a child!) who’d filled in for her at vacation time for several years and worked half-time for us while raising her children. Polly would stop in on the Monday to insure that all was well; she would stop in from time to time thereafter when she happened to be visiting Cambridge, to see to it I was neither exploiting nor being exploited by her successor. And she would miss me sorely, and the good ship Osborn Jones, and dear damp Dorchester, whose Tercentennial festivities she would miss too. But her heart had got the better of her head, she declared, as she hoped for my sake Jane Mack’s would too before very long. She had acceded to the entreaties of her (other) occasional lover of many years’ standing, that gentleman three years my senior whose existence I believe I mentioned in my last: not quite to marry him, as he wished, at least not right away, but to pool her pension benefits with his and retire with him to Florida, the Elysium of Social Security lovers. He’d proposed, not for the first time, after dinner on a certain Friday night last month. She’d reviewed, not for the first time, all the pros and cons, and some days later had said yes.

The short notice to me? To give herself ample time to chicken out before Going Public, and no time to do so having Gone; also to give me less time to talk her out of her resolve, which she hoped I cared enough for her not to try, lest I succeed. On the Tuesday they would fly from Baltimore down to Tampa for a “honeymoon” of real-estate prospecting and trying each other out as living-companions; assuming all went well, they’d be back in Maryland in August to wind up their affairs here and move south for keeps.

I didn’t try to dissuade her, Dad. Was too entirely stunned to. After 35 years, half a day’s notice! Yet she was quite right: Ms. Pond (dear God, God, have You no shame?) had all the skills, knew the office pretty well, was not disagreeable to work with; the rest there was no replacing, however long the notice. But (I wondered silently, terrifically) what about 11 R?

Good as her word, she came in on the Monday. Bon voyage gifts were laid on, jokes made about Florida, about septuagenarian lovers. Embraces, tears, laughter. Polly looked fine. Her friend was in good health, a gentleman, well enough off; they would be all right. How I envied them! She wished me the best; half her life was in that office; we’d done remarkable things together. She paused. She didn’t believe history really repeated itself. There were echoes, of course, if you listened for them, but the future – what there was of it for people our age – was new, and lay ahead, not behind us. All very well, I thought; yet what about…

But as if by tacit agreement, no allusion whatever was made to…

And so Tuesday the 17th came and went in thunderous silence, as if Polly’s flight laid an antisonic boom along the Eastern Shore. From 9 to 5, whenever Ms. Pond was in the office, I managed to drop things: my pen, my iced-coffee spoon; she must think me senile. But they were gracefully and soundlessly retrieved, a young woman picking up after an old codger with a sudden unquenchable thirst for iced coffee and a queer predilection for staring out the window at a certain oyster-shell pile.

Nothing – unless indeed opposites, negatives, count, in which case perhaps the entire absence of Polly Lake, and a fortiori of her etc., might betoken at the least my loss of the pending contest over Harrison’s will, and at the worst… Nonsense: 11 R didn’t happen, not on PLF Day or the next, or the next, by when in my frustration I was not fit society. For if time is not circling ’round, then 8 and 10 R, Jane’s return to me in the evening of our lives, that wondrous O out by Red Nun 20… portend nothing. My inchoate vision on the New Bridge was a delusion, and Now will be Tomorrow and Tomorrow: empty.

I missed Polly. There was no Jane. I was a fool.

At half past three yesterday I left the office, saying truly I felt ill and meant to rest up in the country till Monday. The afternoon was airless; I’d left my car back at the cottage: I motored O.J. out from Slip #2 and downriver to its Todds Point dock. As I left the Howell Point day beacon to starboard, I saw the Original Floating Theatre II chugging out of the Tred Avon into the Choptank, en route from Oxford to Cambridge for the weekend (unlike the original Original, the replica is self-propelled). I kept my eyes on it, not to glimpse a certain red buoy to port, the sight of which just then would have undone me. Docked, I took a swim (no sea nettles yet) and lingered on deck for cocktails; even made dinner aboard, to put off entering this cottage too crowded with ghosts. Over the last of the wine, by the light of citronella candles in the cockpit (but there are no mosquitoes yet either, to speak of), I read the Evening Sun and wondered how the prospecting was in Florida.

The phone fetched me in just after dusk, when the swifts had given way to the swallows and the swallows to the bats. It’s me, she said: Jane.

I replied: I resist the obvious reply.

What? O.

Say that again, please.

What? She was in Dorset Heights. Might she stop by at the office tomorrow?

She didn’t sound entirely official. I took a breath, and a chance. Here I am at the cottage, I said: why not make Tomorrow Now?

She couldn’t, possibly, much as she’d like to see the place again. She had a dozen things to do before bedtime. Didn’t I have a minute tomorrow?

Another chance: I’m in Baltimore tomorrow till three, I lied; then I plan to drive straight back here for the weekend. Will you meet me here at six for dinner, or shall I pick you up and fetch you out? Grilled rockfish with fennel and rémoulade, a house specialty.

She hesitated; my heart and history likewise.

Well… okay. She’d drive out. Make it six-thirty? Bye.

No matter that her hesitation, I was quite confident, had to do with the logistics of her business day and not the implications of revisiting me in situ where the world began. She was coming!

Is coming, Dad, and your antique son is going bananas in anticipation. Since breakfast I’ve been at it, a superannuated Jay Gatsby awaiting his Daisy’s visit: the maid fetched in to reclean the place she cleaned only Tuesday, the gardener to trim the beds he wasn’t to bother with till Thursday next and prune every dead blossom from the tea roses and climbers. Osborn Jones cleaned out, swabbed down, and Bristol fashion, just in case. Anchovy paste, chervil, and capers at the ready for the sauce, fennel and lemon and brandy for the fish. No Pouilly-Fuissé available, alas, but a perfectly okay little Chablis from of all places western Maryland, and champagne in the fridge just in case. Roses mixed with cuttings from the last of the azaleas on the screened porch, in the living room, in the bedroom. Fresh sheets, of course, just etc. Everybody out by four; an anxious eye on the thunderheads piling up across the Bay, where I’m supposed to be returning from Baltimore; nothing further to be done but wait and keep some hold on my heart. Hence this letter.

But the telephone! Haifa dozen times it’s rung already, the last two since the maid left (who loyally reported me not at home), and I can’t answer lest I betray my childish fib. It’s Jane, canceling our date at Lord Tarzan’s jealous insistence. It’s the Muse of History, calling to explain what happened to 11 R. It’s Jane, wondering whether I’m bespoken for the rest of the weekend. It’s you, suggesting I just phone you instead of writing these asinine letters. It’s Jane.

If it rings again, I’ll not be able not to answer. How goes it with you, Dad? And did you ever, even at twenty-nine, have these Scott Fitzgerald moments, these—

Excuse me: the phone.

T.

T: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. Der Wiedertraum under way.

6/19/69

TO:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

FROM:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

To Pier Angeli, Charles Coburn, Edgar Degas, James I, Wallis Warfield Simpson Windsor: happy birthday. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico has been executed by the Juarez party. Israeli warplanes used napalm today on Jordanian-Iraqi artillery positions while police battled students in Ann Arbor. Representatives of seven northeastern American colonies are meeting in Albany with sachems of the Six Nations to plan campaigns against New France. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg have been electrocuted at Sing Sing, and Texas has been annexed by the Union. The U.S.S. Kearsarge has defeated the C.S.S. Alabama off Cherbourg. The Duke of Wellington and Benjamin Constant are dining in Paris with Mme de Staël in celebration of yesterday’s Allied victory at Waterloo: it is Day 97 of the Hundred Days.

And your Drama, Der Wiedertraum, is under way. Starring “Saint Joseph” as Joe Morgan, “Bibi” as Rennie Morgan, and “yourself,” in a sense, as the Interloping Jacob Horner. Reluctant cameo appearances by the Doctor as Himself. Also featuring “Pocahontas” as the Sexually Exploited High School English Teacher Peggy Rankin (a bit of miscasting) and “M. Casteene” as President Schott of Wicomico Teachers College. With a supporting cast of dozens: draft refugees and their girl friends – those willing to regroom themselves – in the role of Wicomico College freshmen of 1953; the patients as the Patients. Still wanting are actresses for the bit parts of Mrs. Dockey, the Mannish Head Nurse, and Shirley Stickles, Dr. Schott’s Waspish Secretary, who misinformed you as to the date of your Job Interview in 1953 and would not acknowledge her error when you Presented yourself in her office on July 20, Petrarch’s birthday and a day early. Ideal roles, either of those, for Pocahontas; but she demands a bigger piece of the action. Produced by Saint Joe. Directed, more or less, by Casteene. Increasingly frowned upon by the Doctor, who fears things will get out of hand. Followed with intermittent interest and filmed in part by Mr. Reg Prinz for possible incorporation into his film in progress, which, it turns out, is not entirely about the War of 1812. Script adapted from the novel adapted from your Scriptotherapeutic narrative adapted from the events leading to Rennie Morgan’s death from aspiration of vomitus in course of illicit surgical abortion October 25, 1953. Road not to end that way this time, on Producer’s orders, or else.

There is no rush to fill the vacant roles, inasmuch as your Drama, like soap opera, is being reenacted in real time. Hence Prinz’s and Ambrose Mensch’s interest, depite the cast’s including Mensch’s ex-mistress and ex-wife and Prinz’s current mistress. On June 1, Trinity Sunday, as the Fenians began their invasion of Ontario from Black Rock and Captain Lawrence aboard the Chesapeake enjoined his crew not to give up the ship and President Madison read his 2nd War Message to the U.S. Congress, the Doctor once again prescribed in the Progress and Advice Room that you Enter the Teaching Profession as therapy for your Seizures of Immobility.

“There must be a rigid discipline,” he quoted himself from the script, “or else it will be merely an occupation, not an occupational therapy. There must be a body of laws… Tell them you will teach grammar. English grammar… You will teach prescriptive grammar. Now really, Horner: is that your Idea of Plausible Dialogue?”

The next scene will not occur until July 19, a full month hence, when Generalissimo Franco will take Cadiz, Cordova, Granada, Huelva, and Seville while the German army begins its retreat from Belgium and you Leave Baltimore for the Eastern Shore to Look for a Room in Wicomico and Prepare yourself for the Interview which you Innocently Believe to be scheduled for the following day.

Meanwhile, things have not been standing still at the Remobilization Farm. How Drive from Baltimore next month across the Chesapeake to Wicomico without leaving Ontario? Why, by magicking the P & A Room from the one into the other, as the wizards of Stratford magic a bare arena stage into Windsor Castle or Prospero’s Island. And how Reenter the Teaching Profession while in residential therapy? Why, by mobilizing the Farm into the Niagara Frontier Underground University! The dropouts – a touch homesick, it may be – had proposed to Saint Joe a free school: he is obliging them, in his capacity as U.U.‘s unofficial chancellor and history department, with seminars in U.S. Hawkery from 1812 to the present; in the 19th-century American Counterexpansionists; in the Role of Upper Canada as a Haven for Loyalists, Escaped Slaves, Secessionists, Indians, Conscientious Objectors, and Other Refugees from U.S. Violence. Casteene is conducting private tutorials in something called the Game of Governments. Tombo X is teaching karate. And to mollify the geriatrics, who have pressed for straightforward continuing education in the manner of their beloved Chautauqua Institution, you yourself are Offering “far-in” counter-countercultural drills in Prescriptive Grammar, or Repressive English. Restrictive clauses. Close punctuation. The Wave of the Past.

And “Rennie Morgan”—as Bibi/Bea Golden/Jeannine Mack now calls herself even offstage, as it were – in her new capacity as U.U.’s faculty of drama, is producing a small theatrical of her own, a replay-within-the-replay: some sort of “radical minstrel show” inspired by her tidewater Maryland connections, by Mr. Prinz’s unexplained wish to include some showboat footage in his film, and by her desire to demonstrate to her lover that she is possessed of an awakening social consciousness. You and Morgan are to play in blackface Bones and Tambo, respectively, the End Men. The Doctor (pace Jean Genet) is to be coaxed into whiteface to take the part of Mister Interlocutor. Tombo X will perform poorly on both the tambourine and the bones, to demonstrate that he has no sense of rhythm whatever, either natural or acquired. Casteene will do a series of impersonations. Pocahontas, you Suppose, will sing “Indian Love Call.” And “Rennie” will play “Bea Golden” playing “the Mary Pickford of the Chesapeake” as on Captain James Adams’s old floating theater. Performance scheduled for tomorrow night, or the one after, to coincide with the Sun’s entry into Cancer (and the birthdays of Errol Flynn and Jacques Offenbach, and the Black Hole of Calcutta atrocity, and Lord Byron’s first meeting Mme de Staël at Lady Jersey’s salon in London, and the Tennis Court Oath, and the U.S.A.’s adoption of the Great Seal, and West Virginia’s admission into the Union). You have Suggested it be called A Midsummer Night’s Mare.

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?