Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Текущая страница: 68 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

Since August 13, 1932, Dad (8 L), I have not easily been taken by surprise. Jeannine surprised me. If you saw “incest” in the offing pages since, it’s because I did too, this time around, recording her visit from log notes and memory. But at the time, though I’d certainly and clearly enjoyed Jeannine’s nudity, my pleasure was half impersonal and half the finally innocent admiration of a father for his mature and seasoned, still-attractive daughter. The sight of her, and our frisking about, had unquestionably reminded me of the pleasures of sex; but those were memories, not anticipations or desires. Or, if there was after all a mild touch of the latter, it was the wistful wish that she were not probably my daughter, possibly an adversary in the upcoming will dispute, and surely not interested in sex with a 70-year-old friend of the family. I was surprised.

But not out of my wits. Jeannine was sober; I too. Her possible motives, the possible ill consequences and other objections to our “going below” I believe I saw clearly, along with the great So What (and all the lesser Why Nots) in the pan. A lawyer is a lawyer; an old one even more so. Now Jeannine, I said, as neutrally as possible: that old chap there is semiretired.

She moved her fingers. Let’s un-retire him, Toddy. I’m feeling happy and horny. No obligations. No problems. Feel.

Well. We went below, took turns going down, managed a fairly routine coupling in the missionary position, but with her legs over my arms. No special frisson. We cooled down awhile then in our sweat, and later made omelettes for dinner with the last of the Caprice des Dieux and a cold Moselle. Not much talking. The Trout Quintet, agreeably, on the FM. Both of us, in modest reaction, wearing shorts and tops now. After cleanup and bed-making we finished the Moselle out in the dew-soaked cockpit, regarding Andromeda and her friends, wishing we could take a final swim but not caring to be stung in the dark. The air was balmy, the forecast fine; even so, Jeannine prudently queried me about our anchor-scope before we went back below. We changed chastely into our nightclothes, brushed our teeth, washed up, and with a friendly good-night kiss turned in, me to the double berth forward, she to a settee-berth in the main cabin.

When the lights were out and we’d soaked in for a few minutes the sweet creaks and chuckles of a boat swinging gently at anchor, Jeannine asked, mildly, Should she come sleep up there with me? Had she said Could she, I’d’ve said Sure. As was, it seemed both more prudent and more comfortable to say Too sticky. Then I added, only partly lest she feel rejected: But we could visit in the morning. She’d like that, said my daughter.

I reminded her she’d forgot to ask her question. The one back there in the cockpit?

Oh, that. Her voice was sleepy and amused. She’d only wondered, when she saw for the first time her mother’s old lover’s cock and balls, whether she herself had sprung from there in – let’s see – January of 1933?

Perfectly likely, I acknowledged at once. And just as likely you didn’t. Does it matter a great deal to you?

She considered. Nope. It would, she guessed, if she were 17, or even 25. But after 35 years and three failed marriages, her legal father dead and her mother happy with a new lover, the question didn’t strike her as particularly important. And it wasn’t why she’d propositioned me, or, she imagined, why I’d responded. Was it?

I laughed: Not particularly. She laughed too: Just normal depraved curiosity. One more taboo over the side. See me in the morning?

I was put in mind again of her mother and of Polly; now that everything was still I saw the questionable assumption in my thinking about the previous night’s phone-caller, that it had been a man. But Jeannine’s breathing indicated that she was asleep already; I’d ask her in the morning whether she was quite sure, etc.

End of Day One. (Almost. I never sleep soundly the first night out. When a tiny southeasterly swung us about at 3 A.M., I woke at once and went on deck to see how we all looked in our new positions. Half a dozen other skippers moved about with flashlights, doing the same: checking scope and anchor set and clearance from neighbors. En route back through the cabin I inspected my young friend; she appeared to be sleeping soundly, but when I bent and kissed her forehead she smiled and said wryly, Thanks, Daddy-O.)

Next morning, however, she declared she hadn’t slept so well in ages. She rose at first light and got right to it: peed, skipped out of her shorty pajamas, and piled headfirst into my berth, down under my sheet – cool and dry now in the fresh morning air—69’ing us before I quite realized what was what. Her thighs were sweet, her labia dainty-fresh beneath a faint sharp trace of urine; we tongued and tumbled for a spell, which with one fingertip (mine, right fore-) in her rectum brought Jeannine to a fine yelping orgasm. First woman I’d ever known personally to get there upside down, Dad. But old John Thomas would not stand so soon again; such things happen. Jeannine tried awhile longer, giving me the pleasure of her buttocks and belly as she scolded the Old Pensioner for not rising to his own past performance (the idea did titillate her, then) and threatened to swallow him whole if he would not Come Full Circle, her term. No use. Oh well, she sighed presently: it’s a better day for sailing than for incest.

It was: a perfectly dandy sailing day, best of the cruise. The night’s southeasterly shifted with the tide to a spanking west-southwesterly, perfect for a long reach up and across the Bay. We took a quick wake-up swim, got nettle-stung on calf (mine) and shoulder (hers), made short work of breakfast, and were first out of Dun Cove. It pleased me that when, as we lotioned each other’s welts, I kissed her from nape of neck to crack of ass, she said Let’s sail now and play later, okay? For the sport of it we sailed our anchor out and threaded wing-and-wing through the fleet, Jeannine at the helm while I secured the ground-tackle and cleaned up the foredeck. She’d lost none of her racing skipper’s sang-froid about tight clearances. Once we’d beam-reached down Harris Creek we cut in the engine, doused the jib, and let the main luff while we powered through Knapp’s Narrows and into the Bay. The waves were coming dead at us from the mainland, a foot and a half high already and lightly crested; we felt the old excitement you never knew, Dad, of leaving sheltered for open waters; we called things happily back and forth to each other as we reraised the foresail, lowered the centerboard, and sheeted in close. We were just able, by dint of some “pinching,” a push from the motor, and a little help from the ebbing tide, to clear Poplar Island on a port tack (Yesterday today! Jeannine cried merrily); then we set our course for 015°, a broad reach straight toward the Bay Bridge, fourteen miles up. On that point of sail, with the tide against us, it would be fairly slow going and seem even slower – faithful to his origins, Osborn Jones carries no spinnaker, but there’s a lot of off-wind push in that big, low-aspect mainsail. So much the better: we lashed the wheel, trimmed centerboard and sheets for balance, broke out some iced tea (the air was 80ish already and close, especially off the wind), and let Captain Osborn virtually sail himself up the Bay while we relaxed – tops off now, but bottoms on for comfort, and hats and lotions against the sun – and got some talking done.

I was more and more pleased. Not only was my girl (excuse me: the woman) in apparent control of her drinking; she was making sense right down the line. The will case: She wasn’t interested in litigation; she’d loved her father despite her well-merited later rejection by him. On the other hand she wouldn’t settle for nothing; she needed some money to start a new life with, especially since she had no professional skills and had ceased to badger Louis Golden for unpaid alimony. The split I’d proposed to Jane suited her fine, if her mother and brother were agreeable; otherwise she guessed she’d file suit in probate and take what she could get. Her personal survival might be a cause less worthy than Drew’s revolution, but she reckoned it at least as defensible as her mother’s wish to enrich a future husband.

That fellow: Nope, she hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting “Lord Baltimore,” whose real name however she understood to be André Castine. There was, coincidentally, a “Monsieur Casteene” at the Remobilization Farm, but he spelled it differently, nobody knew his first name, and anyhow he was at the Farm, not with her mother. In any case, Jeannine wished them well and hoped that what was left of her own good looks would last half as long as Jane’s. One day, perhaps, she and her mother could be friends again, if she ever got herself straightened out.

Her parentage: Could I tell her what her mother’s and my affair had been like, back in the ’30’s? Had it been a ménage à trois, or what? She couldn’t imagine Mom letting her hair down so – though there had been that later fling of hers, with that English Lord. The month when she herself had been conceived, for example, was her mother putting out pretty regularly for both Harrison and me? How much truth was there in that novel that people used to tease her with, that was supposedly based on my life?

Some, I acknowledged. That part of it was a reasonable approximation, except that for purposes of plot it made Harrison Mack into a weaker and simpler fellow than her father had ever been. But her mother and I had indeed been lovers, with her father’s knowledge and complaisance, for two separate periods, totaling more than three years and including the date of Jeannine’s conception, when the odds on her biological siring were, by my best guess, about 50–50. I did not mention 10 R, our evening sail on Osborn Jones in mid-May of this year.

Our own copulation: It still didn’t bother her, either in principle or in fact. In Jeannine’s mind, Harrison Mack was 100 % her father, and I was 100 % her oldest friend (in both respects) and the only man she’d ever been the least close to who hadn’t wanted something from her. No doubt that that, along with simple gratitude and a touch of the old Kinky, was what had turned her on last night (she’d’ve laid me in the cottage, she confessed now with a grin, if she hadn’t feared I’d think she was a pervert, or ulteriorly motivated, and refuse to take her sailing). It still turned her on, she didn’t mind telling me; anytime Old John got his act together again, she was ready. As Kinky went, this struck her as pretty harmless; she wouldn’t be bearing me any two-headed children, or grandchildren. Could she have a beer with lunch?

Why not. The day grew fairer by the hour. As the tide slackened and the temperature rose, the wind freshened to twelve knots and veered to west-northwest, putting us on a dandy beam reach that both felt and was faster; cooler too. O.J.’s favorite point of sail. I was growing absentminded, though I’ll plead exhilaration: not till Jeannine came up from the galley with two cans of National Premium and an ad-lib antipasto of sardines, fresh cherry tomatoes, red onion slices, peperoncini, and wedges of caraway Bond-Ost (hungry, Dad?) did I remember to ask her, apropos of Friday evening, whether our crank or inadvertent phone-caller had in fact not uttered a sound.

Aha, she teased: so I did have something going. Nope, sorry, not a sound or syllable. She put a hand on my knee: Had she screwed something up for me, answering my phone in the middle of the night?

No, no, no. I had nothing “going,” more’s the pity. And now I did dismiss the matter from my mind. No question of stopping for a swim or letting O.J. self-steer: we spanked across the wind, taking the seas just forward of our port beam with a satisfying smash of white water. The old hull seemed happy as I was; we sprinted (for us) up the Bay like an elder porpoise bestrode by a fresh sea-nymph, Jeannine and I spelling each other hourly at the wheel. Faster and flashier boats sailed over to have a look, their crews waving and grinning appreciation of O.J.’s traditional lines, its Old Rake of a Skipper’s white hair, and His Chick’s terrific tits. Bloody Point light, off the southern tip of Kent Island, slid by to starboard at noon; Thomas Point light, off the mouth of South River, to port before 1300; the Bay Bridge overhead as we changed tricks at 1400—a steady five knots under beautiful cumulus clouds in perfect midsummer weather, with Handel’s Water Music piping in from Baltimore!

Off the mouth of the Magothy, sailboat traffic thickened to the point where Jeannine put her T-shirt on, lest among the whistling sailors be clients of mine or old friends of the Macks’ from Gibson Island. We left Pavilion Point to starboard about three o’clock, tacking into the river between bright spinnakers running out; by four we had close-reached up between Dobbins Island and the high wooded banks of Gibson, through Sillery Bay and Gibson Island’s perfect harbor, and dropped our hook in Red House Cove: the only boat there.

That was, perhaps, a pity, as things turned out – the early anchorage after a dandy seven-hour sail, the unexpected privacy and free time in a lovely swimming place relatively free of sea nettles – but it certainly seemed otherwise at the moment. We stripped and dived in fast to cool off, then put a proper harbor-furl in the sails, rigged the awning to shade cockpit and main cabin and a windsail at the forward hatch, and went back in for a long leisurely swim, spotting nettles for each other as best we could in the clouded, bath-warm water. After an hour of paddling and floating with only one minor sting between us, as I hung at the foot of the boarding ladder to rest, Jeannine wound herself smilingly around me, kissed my face several times, and directed my free hand to her clitoris while she fondled me. No erection, to my mild disappointment – I haven’t successfully copulated in the water since my twenties, Dad; have you? – and she couldn’t get it off either; so we scrambled aboard, toweled off on deck, then went below to do things right. Much easier with each other this time, we managed a sitting position, face to face, my favorite, on the port settee. Jeannine had a practiced little hip-action, delicious, and liked to work on herself while I reached ’round and—

Enough pornography, Dad: it wets my pants and compounds my felony to record it. But at my age and in my situation, every erection, penetration, thrust, and ejaculation, every touch of nipple, stroke of cleft – there I go; here I came – has the special extra pleasure of its being very possibly my last. (These were, it turns out, my next-to-last; one more to go, and I’ll make it briefer, which it was.) My “daughter,” sir, is now a Missing Person, and it may well be just here, as I seize her buttocks, press my face between her breasts, and squirt what feels like an entire Chesapeake of semen into her, that I begin to send her down whatever path she’s gone. On the other hand (I must tell myself) she might have taken that path sooner, or some worse one later, but for her pleasure in my company thus far.

Done. We opened more beer at her request and lay sipping happily in our perspiration, letting the slight air current from the windsail play over us. Jeannine spoke quietly of how much the weekend had done for her. She felt a real person again, authentic. No doubt her being on an old boat with an old friend in these old haunts was responsible; she didn’t feel obliged to prove herself. Maybe New York or L.A., where she’d always had to prove herself and had always proved herself inadequate, would be a mistake; maybe she ought to begin a new life right here in Maryland, doing what I’d mentioned with the Tidewater Foundation, perhaps directing shows for the O.F.T. II. She had a knack for directing amateurs, she believed. It had been so restorative, these two days: out of the sexual rat-race, away from the crazies. She hadn’t even been tempted to get drunk. (We opened another: her suggestion – announcement, rather. I began to wonder.) I shouldn’t worry that our little sex thing might be bad for her. It had been as relaxing as the rest: like a nice fatherly pat on the ass, only better. She truly believed that if she could stay with me to the end of my cruise – even for just the first week of it – she’d have a bit of an anchor to windward, a little foundation to start building something new and modest and real upon…

I’d seen this coming. Reading these lubricious pages, Dad, you may imagine that the prospect of nineteen more days of the foregoing would appeal to me, especially with the added sweetening of their being therapeutic for Jeannine. Her visit had been an unexpected little bonus; possible incest or not, I could muster no more guilt about her seducing me than a small salt of extra pleasure. If the past two days had been good for Jeannine, they’d been as good for me: a chance to bid leisurely good-bye to her and to another of life’s delights. At 69, however, I am not imperiously sexed; what’s more (for Jeannine would no doubt be willing to dispense with our copulation), I looked forward already to solitude. There were other last things to think of. The fact was, I’d had about enough.

Then how to set her down gently? I kissed her (on the behind: she’d stood to wipe my leaking semen off her with a Kleenex, and perhaps to not watch my expression as she wound up her plea) and asked her to give me overnight to think about it. I really did have my reasons, I reminded her, for planning a solitary cruise; on the other hand, she was a terrific pleasure and a great convenience to have aboard. Let’s sleep on it.

Through dinner she was subdued (lamb chops barbecued off the taffrail, Caesar salad, and a young Beaujolais, which she put away most of). After cleanup we swam again under the first stars – no nettle stings, but no noctilucae either – while lightning from a distant local thundershower flickered southwest of us. The night was stiff and sticky, the cabin uninviting. We sat up late on deck, stripped to our underpants for comfort and sprayed with Off, sipping gin and tonic and tisking tongues at our unexpected privacy: I’d rigged the anchor light, but it was apparent that no other overnighters were going to join us in Red House Cove. Though it was a touch early and partly cloudy, we looked for Perseid meteors, but saw only two in an hour. Jeannine seemed to be holding her liquor and tactfully did not reraise her proposition; her self-control encouraged me to hope that she might after all “settle down” into a more meaningful life in the plenty of years ahead for her. We spoke little, enjoying the stillness and the dew. When the latter finally chilled us (just as Perseus himself rose out of the Bay), I took her hand and led her below.

In fact, sleepy from alcohol and the long day outdoors, I was simply saying Let’s turn in, but she understandably mistook my gesture: once in the cabin she slipped to her knees and popped Old John into her mouth. I stroked her hair and let her go at it for a while, half wishing the chap would stand lest she feel rejected, half hoping he wouldn’t so she’d get the message, and mainly hankering for sleep. She scolded him playfully, tried a few testicular and rectal accompaniments; neither he nor I could’ve been less interested. I raised her up, chuckled something about old folks needing their sleep. She tensed in my arms, first time since the Dorset lobby, and turned her face away when I said good night.

Not much sleep. I heard her drinking and smelled her smoking cigarettes in her berth off and on through the night: two Verbotens on my boat, but there was no point in making a fuss. I wished heartily our berths were reversed; tried to stay awake lest she go up on deck without my hearing her; but fatigue overcame me. Near dawn I woke alarmed that she might have gone overboard, deliberately or accidentally. On pretext of using the head I got up to check and found her heavily asleep, a full ashtray and the empty gin bottle (it had been only a quarter full) on the cabin sole beside her. She’d turned in naked; the cabin air was wet and chill, the sky gray in the first light, my head dull with solicitude and short sleep. I drew her bedsheet up, disposed of the butts and bottle, turned off the anchor light, and went back to my own berth, wondering what I’d have to deal with later in the morning.

But to my great relief, she behaved herself. We stayed abed late for two old sailors; at nine I heard her pumping the head and took the opportunity to enter the cabin, discreetly pajama-bottomed, and light the stove for coffee. She stayed in there awhile, but there are no toilet secrets on a small boat: I was gratified to hear no vomiting, just the cozy sounds of female urination and, more and more cheering, the turn of magazine pages. I put out apple juice and aspirin; put the aspirin back as too obvious. Let her ask for them. She asked instead, from the head, neutrally, for her blouse from the hanging locker and clean underpants from her bag, also a cigarette from her purse if I didn’t mind. When I handed the items in to her, she herself suggested, without looking up from her magazine (an old New Yorker) that I radio the yacht club about cabs and flight times; she had an open ticket, and was sure they wouldn’t mind calling the airline and radioing back the information. That way we wouldn’t have to rush. But she’d like to get started as soon as possible. Never mind breakfast for her; all she wanted was coffee.

I made the call; no need for her to leave the island before noon. Jeannine came out, looking not very fresh-faced, and began stripping her bed and assembling her gear. The sky refused to brighten; the air was clammy; there was nothing to say. I went up the companionway in my shorts, swabbed the deck, and took a swim to ease the strain, proud of her and a bit ashamed of myself. Presently Jeannine came on deck too – the air temperature was shooting up – still in her blouse and panties, another cigarette in one hand and a beer can in the other. She considered for a while, then flicked away the butt, skinnied out of her clothes, and let herself carefully down the ladder, not to get her hair wet.

Now, Dad: your old son is a prevailingly benevolent, even good man. But he has never presumed to moral perfection. My relief and pleasure in Jeannine’s behavior, together with the knowledge that upon her departure (in an hour) I would not likely see her again – and the further knowledge that the comely woman before me was the last unclothed female I’d likely ever lay eyes upon – inspired me to a lust that was undeniably, though not altogether, perverse. As, our positions reversed, I stood dripping in the cockpit now, a towel around my waist, and watched her paddling glumly, cautiously, pinkly astern, I not only desired Jeannine one last time: I desired her specifically a tergo, puppy-dog style, the way I’d first seen myself in the act of coition, in the mirror of my bedroom in your house, with Betty June Gunter, on March 2, 1917, the day that young woman relieved me of my virginity.

I plead by way of extenuation only that, had Jeannine genuinely protested, I would not only not have insisted; I’d’ve been quite unable to carry through. But when she came unsmiling up the ladder – and, as she’d left her towel below, I removed mine, began drying her with it, then embraced her from behind, pressing into her cleft my half-erection – she only stiffened, gave me one sharp and tight-lipped look, then let me have my way. Which was to lead her below, return behind her, draw her down to hands and knees on the cabin sole, apply saliva in lieu of more natural lubrication, rise to a full, fine, and culpable hard-on as I entered her, and bang in six or seven deep strokes to ejaculation: the last sex in this letter and my life.

I held her a few moments by the hips, Dad, breathing hard and wishing mightily to fall atop her; then withdrew, postcoital remorse surging in like the tide through Knapps Narrows, and rose to wipe myself on our beach towel. Jeannine lingered discomfitingly on all fours, her hair loose and head and shoulders down, a smear of semen across one prominent buttock and along the back of one thigh. I would get the dinghy ready, I murmured: easier to row over to the club than to unanchor Osborn Jones. I slipped into go-ashore shorts, shirt, and boat shoes and fussed about on deck, wondering what to do if she simply stayed where she was, arse to the breeze, a wordless reproach to my abuse of her. But just as time began to grow tight she came up with her purse and flight bag, dressed as when she arrived, but with disheveled hair and tear-swollen face. My practice has included legal counsel to the recently raped. Jeannine looked recently raped.

Apology seemed but further aggravation; even so, I told her as I rowed that while that had been a sore mistake on my part, her visit had most certainly not been, et cetera. No response. At the dock she clambered out of the dinghy and told me shortly that I was not to follow her into the club, much less (what I’d requested) see her to the airport. Her eyes filled; remorse smote; what’s more, I needed ice. But I let her go, a sorrying figure hauling through the heat, toward that building familiar to her girlhood. I paddled back to the boat and watched dejectedly with binoculars until I saw a cab come and return across the causeway; then I fetched my ice and ascertained at the bar that My Daughter had indeed taxied off to Friendship Airport (Yessiree, the barman said with practiced incuriosity). After washing the weekend off me in the clubhouse showers, I weighed anchor and recrossed the Bay, very alone, to Chester River and snug Queenstown Creek, to sort out my feelings in home waters and try to make peace with myself.

It was not an especially difficult job. I was glad that Jeannine Mack had come to me for counsel, reestablished our connection, gone sailing with me, and listened to my advice. I was surprised and happy to have made love with (oh well, to have got laid by) her, and even now couldn’t manage to feel monstrous or even exploitative except there at the end. I was sorry to have disappointed her; mighty anxious that she’d do herself injury; awfully glad to be by myself again. That was that – and remains so, except that my concern for her welfare mounts with each newsless day.

Oh yes: and I was gratified by her reasonable attitude concerning Harrison’s estate, on which agenda item I was quiet enough of spirit by midnight to focus my attention. I had supped, swum in the silky water, napped for two hours, and come back on deck to try the Perseids again, with slightly better luck. In the trail of one particular dazzler that swept through Pegasus (so our Author would have it), as I wondered whether Jeannine and Polly Lake and Jane Mack might be watching that same meteor, and from where, there came the damnedest, the farthest-fetched, but just possibly the most inspired notion I’d had all year as an attorney-at-law.

It was an open secret in the Tidewater Foundation that Harrison in his last madness had emulated his father’s whim of preserving the products of his dying body, but that in keeping with the times he had caused his excrement to be freeze-dried rather than pickled in company jars. It was no secret at all to me, nor any wonder, that though Jane had humored this aberration (and many another) in her husband, she had refused to let the stuff be stored at Tidewater Farms. One inferred that it was kept somewhere in the plenteous warehouses of Mack Enterprises. It was a conspicuous fact, however, that m.e. was feverishly hatching Cap’n Chick, who so filled the nest of its parent company that other Mack Enterprises were already smitten with sibling jealousy; Jane herself had merrily complained that she might have to convert the Dorset Heights Apartments into an auxiliary Crabsicle warehouse, so pressed was Cap’n C. for cubic footage. Finally, it was a howling obviousness that my own life, like a drowning man’s, had been set since March on Instant Replay…

So where was Harrison’s freeze-dried shit? That Jane herself would reenact her late mother-in-law’s blunder and dispose, before settlement, of an entailed portion of her husband’s estate was unimaginable. But if some middle-management type had quietly done so, thinking thereby to please his boss; and if it could be argued that by the principle of Command Responsibility the president of m.e. was therefore guilty of Attrition of Estate; and if her contest suit could thus be threatened on no less distinguished a precedent than that of the Maryland Court of Appeals in Mack v. Mack of March 1938…

Longest of long shots! Surely, Author, not even You would go so far!

Next morning (Day 4: T 8/12) I reached and ran through soft gray drizzle on a mild southeasterly up the quiet Chester and parked for lunch in Emory Creek off the Corsica River, a fine private place dear to Polly Lake in earlier Augusts. I said my good-byes to it and motored – the breeze had failed, the drizzle persisted: good thinking weather – between narrowing banks and handsome farms to Chestertown, my destination. A whitetail fawn danced on the shore near Devil’s Reach, where the current sweeps so sharply past the outside bend that a 20-foot draft can be carried almost to the beach; the old, soft red and white town was as agreeable a sight as ever to sail up to, even in that weather. But my Terminal Travelogue, then as now, took second place to plot. I tied up at the marina dock, telephoned my office, checked in with Ms. Pond (ignoring her studied incuriosity), and then asked my young colleague Jimmy Andrews to inquire discreetly whether Jane Mack was back in town and where the uninterred portion of her late husband’s remains was stored.