Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 69 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

Surely, he said, you do not go so far as to suppose. Of course not, I reassured him. But even so. Okay? Discreetly. I’d call back from somewhere on Friday.

Next I telephoned Fort Erie, Ontario (all this from a pay phone in a wharfside restaurant): that “Remobilization Farm.” Ms. Golden was there, a curt black male voice informed me, but would not take phone calls. “Saint Joe” Morgan would. What on earth, I asked him when he came to the phone, was he doing in that kooky place? He told me calmly that he had his reasons, and hoped I was calling to tell him that Marshyhope’s Tower of Truth had collapsed upon his successor. No? Tant pis. Then maybe I could tell him what had gotten into his patient Bea Golden, who since her return from French leave in Maryland had become even more of a nuisance than before. They were doing their best to keep booze away from her, but like most alkies she seemed to get it somewhere, or manufacture it in her own liver.

Ah? Tell me more.

They gathered that on the rebound from Reg Prinz she had been picked up by somebody down there for a weekend and then been dumped again. I agreed, faint and sweating, that that sounded plausible. I promised to notify the family and authorized Morgan on behalf of the Tidewater Foundation to seek proper psychiatric and medical treatment for her; also to keep my office informed of her condition. I would come up there myself if the situation warranted, or send a representative “if she associates me too closely with her family.” I felt momently more ill; had barely presence of mind enough, before I rang off, to ask Morgan about another patient on the premises: chap named Casteene?

Pas ici, said Joe. His opinion was that the fellow supervised a sort of underground railway for U.S. draft resisters and had gone south to lubricate the wheels. But Joe knew little about him, and was not being particularly forthcoming anyhow, and I was too moved with self-revulsion and concern for Jeannine to draw him out further. I ate lightly, without appetite, there in the restaurant; then to escape the traffic noise from the nearby highway bridge I bid a vexed good-bye to Chestertown and motored back to anchor for the night in Devil’s Reach, using both anchors against the swift current. Three mallards – two drakes and a hen – paddled over for handouts. Sheepflies bit, oblivious to chemical repellent. There would be no meteors that evening, and who cared? I screened the companion way and forward hatches and went to bed early, out of sorts.

Day 5 blew up gray and disagreeable. Above the Chester there was nothing I felt like saying adieu to; I decided to recross to Annapolis and begin working south along both sides of the Bay. But halfway down the river, beating into a rising southwesterly which, should I continue, I’d have to bang through all the way to the Severn, I changed my mind. Foul-weather sailing has its pleasures, but not in foul spirits. I ran north up Langford Creek instead, anchored for lunch off Cacaway Island, another favorite; fidgeted with odd-job maintenance for a while, then out of boredom sailed the five miles up to the head of the creek’s east fork and motor-sailed back, parking early for the night in the same spot. The warm wind had veered west and risen above fifteen knots. I swam in the nettle-free waves (the sky was clearing; there was no thunder) and circumambulated the empty little island. Its name I understand to be corrupted from the Algonquin cacawaasough, or chief, but it spoke to me of Harrison Mack’s freeze-dried feces, their disposition.

A long, finally calming late afternoon and evening: smoked oysters and lumpy pina colada in the cockpit, followed by cold sliced ham and a 1962 Argentine Cabernet Sauvignon that cheered me right up. It was, damn it, Jeannine who had propositioned me. No doubt I ought to have declined, but the woman is 35, not 25 or 15, and I am 69. Not keeping her with me was the “error,” if anything; but I had my needs, too. Away with such caca! Mrs. Golden needed residential psychotherapy, not a cruise on Osborn Jones. Despite the fact that that day was the anniversary of my first seduction by Jeannine’s mother, in the Todds Point cabin in 1932—an anniversary whereof I was exquisitely mindful – I slept dreamlessly and well.

And woke refreshed and rededicated to 13 R! A fine breezy morning – wind still SW 18+—but I was in the mood for a brisk day’s work. Bye-bye, Cacaway! Bye-bye, mild Chester: may you flow as handsome, and less polluted, for generations after me! Given the wind, I was obliged to motor down the first nine miles from Langford Creek, straight into it with the dodger up to break the spray, before I could turn west enough to make sail and shut down the engine. A good fast reach then up out of the Chester’s mouth and around Love Point, the top of Kent Island, and we were in the open, whitecapped, serious Chesapeake. Our destination lay almost in the eye of the freshening wind, but no matter; so many tidewater August days are swelteringly still that it was a pleasure, and cathartic, to reef down, close haul, and bash through it all that bright brisk Thursday—O.J. for the most part steering himself with a little sheet-to-wheel tackle while I took bearings, checked charts, and trimmed sail. A five-mile port tack due west, back toward discomfiting Gibson Island; then a six-mile starboard tack therapeutically south, under the Bay Bridge, past tankers and container ships plowing up to Baltimore; west again then another five miles into the mouth of the Severn, up to the Naval Academy and Annapolis Harbor. The only entries in my log for that day, apart from sailing data, are two questions: If Jane’s Lord Baltimore is André Castine, who is Joe Morgan’s “Monsieur Casteene”? For that matter, who is André Castine?

But I had things to say good-bye to, including (next day) Annapolis itself, where also I needed supplies; so though it was still midafternoon I made but one quick pit stop for ice, water, and fuel and then threaded through the yachts from everywhere, up through the Spa Creek Drawbridge and the creek itself – jammed with condominiums and expensive racing machines, yet invincibly attractive withal – to my destination, near its head. “Hurricane Hole” is a spot both snug and airy, open enough for summer ventilation yet sufficiently sheltered by trees and high banks so that Osborn Jones and his fellow oyster-dredgers were wont to retreat there from Annapolis, in times gone by, to ride out the fall hurricanes. The houses are less crowded that far up, and though one needs a suit for swimming, the moored boats are far enough apart for comfort, the surroundings are still and graceful, and the dome of the old State House rises pleasingly above the farther trees. My notion was to clean the boat inside and out and make final peace with myself concerning Jeannine. I did the first in a leisurely two hours: everything from scrubbing the waterline to sweeping the carpets and airing the bedsheets. The second I found required no further doing. My regret was real and mild; my concern for the woman equally real, but on balance no greater than before she’d come to see me. It could wait. BBQ filet mignon, a cold fruit mold, and a not-bad-at-all Sonoma Pinot Chardonnay.

Next morning, Friday, in hazy sunshine, I tied up at the Annapolis Town Dock and did business: laid in a week’s groceries, restocked the wine locker, found a laundromat, phoned the office. Mack Enterprises, Jimmy confirmed, was preparing for Tomorrow Now by disposing of all old preserved-food inventory to make room for Crabsicles and the rest. No solid word yet on the whereabouts of Harrison’s “remains,” but inasmuch as Jimmy’s own wife worked in the m.e. accounting office, we were in good position to pursue the inquiry. Discreetly. Mrs. Mack was back in town and at work – full speed ahead with Cap’n Chick – after a short Bermuda cruise with her gentleman friend, whose appearance and full correct name no one in the company seemed to know.

Mm hm. Though there was no particular reason for doing so, I decided that A. B. & A. should invest in an investigator – that same apparently reliable fellow in Buffalo who had drawn a blank, but competently, in the matter of Jane’s blackmailing – to look into the coincidence of the names Casteene and Castine: the one (I explained) borne by a former patient at the Remobilization Farm, the other supplied me by a present patient there, Mrs. Mack’s daughter. Whose condition was also to be reported, in my name, to Mrs. Mack. Discreetly. I was mighty anxious; didn’t know exactly what I was searching for; trusted my hunch that the search was worth considerable expense; but was beginning to begrudge these impingements on 13 R. I would not call again, I decided and declared, for a week. ’Bye.

That week I’ll sail through swiftly, though sailing through it slowly was the heart of my enterprise. From Annapolis I reached seven miles up the high-banked Severn to Round Bay, thence into Little Round Bay, past St. Helena Island (where lay a fine new motor yacht whose name—Baratarian—reminded me of Jane’s crank cousin A. B. Cook and of the film from which Jeannine had been dropped. Nota bene, Dad), to my Favorite Anchorage on that splendid, busy river: Hopkins Creek, snug, private, still unspoiled. No swimsuit needed; few nettles that far upriver; mild phosphorescence when I swam that night. Incest be damned, I wished Jeannine were there again! Next day out through the Sunday mob – wall-to-wall sails in Whitehall Bay! Adieu, Annapolis! – and down to the next river, the South, itself less imposing than the Severn but with finer creeks and coves. Rode out a thundersquall in perfect peace, all alone in a certain nameless, turtled cove off Church Creek: chicken breast with wild rice, a light cucumber-and-onion salad, and a bargain Lalande-de-Pomerol, steady as the eponymous church while the crashing storm merely cooled the cabin. Good-bye Church and Harness creeks, twin beauties! Down to Rhode River’s single spot worth a farewell visit: the anchorage behind Big Island (Sunset like a Baroque Ascension. Fluted jazz on the FM. Shrimp w. cashews & Beaujolais – no ice to spare for chilling white wine), airy but secure, where handsome Herefords graze down to the waterline. Straight across then to Eastern Bay and my Eastern Shore to say goodbye to its sweetest pair of rivers, the Miles and its sister the Wye: five full days required of sun and rain, wind and calm, to touch only my favorite places therealong! Tilghman, Dividing, Granary, Skipton, Pickering, Lloyd, Leeds, Hunting! Sweet bights and creeks and coves, deer and ducks and herons, gulls and cormorants and ospreys, blue crabs and bluefish and rockfish and oysters and maninose – good-bye!

Now it is Friday again, Day 14, August 22. From Hunting Creek I reach down the Miles (up on the chart) to St. Michaels for provisions, laundry, lunch ashore, good-bye to that dear town and harbor, and a 10 A.M. phone call to the office. Which I log, ponder, and relog thus: 1330: HM’s shit nowhere to be found. Could Jane be staging a diversion? Pursue, discreetly. Her fiancé: one Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred, Ontario, 1/2-brother (so Buffalo reports) of A. B. Cook VI! May be involved in C.I.A. or counter-C.I.A. activity! Foreign? Domestic? Interagency? Buffalo doesn’t know: was “seriously warned off by C.I.A./F.B.I. types.” Reports Castine “somewhere in west N.Y.” since Bermuda cruise. Cook himself at home at Barataria Lodge, B’wth I. Hunch: check out that Bray fellow in Lily Dale, N.Y. “Casteene” of Ft. Erie may be unrelated to Jane’s friend: name not uncommon in Quebec, though usually w. the “Baron’s” spelling. Too much coincidence: inquire further. Jeannine has left Ft. Erie; whereabouts uncertain; no one seems to care. Inquire, inquire! Buffalo suspects “drug tie-in”: C.I.A. people moving dope under pretext of monitoring V.N. war resisters, instead of vice versa. A very big fish, which he hopes he has not hooked and refuses to reel in, even discreetly.

Nor can I blame him, Dad. These placid Maryland waters, these mild English-looking swards and copses, are too close to Our Nation’s Capital not to have been the secret mise en scène of fearsome hugger-mugger since well before C.I.A. and O.S.S. – back at least to 1812. The very charts I navigate by reflect it: Restricted Area, Prohibited Area, NASA Maintained, Navy Maintained. Our gentle Chesapeake is a fortress camouflaged, from Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Grounds at its head to Norfolk Navy Yard at its mouth, with Andrews and Dover air force bases on either side and God knows what, besides Camp David, in the hills behind. Nerve gas, napalm, nukes; B-52’s above, atomic submarines below, destroyers, missile frigates, minesweepers, jet fighters, and every other sort of horrific hardware all about – and these but the visible and declared! While in the basements of certain handsome Georgetown houses, or on horsey-looking farms along the Rappahannock, even in the odd Wye Island goose blind for all I know, the real dirty-work is done, authorized by some impeccable Old Boy in a paneled office in Arlington or Langley. We do not blame you, Buffalo, for saying good-bye to that fish before he says hello.

But oh my: those of us who happen to have reached our story’s last chapter anyhow, or its next-to-last – did we ever want to get back to our office now and play Deep-Sea Angler, as we could not from any literal Osborn Jones! I sailed the sixteen miles from St. Mike’s (’bye) out of Eastern Bay and down to Poplar Island, a good spot from which either to end or to continue the cruise. Here in 1813 the British invasion fleet gathered in the fine natural harbor (deeper then) for provisioning raids and repairs; Franklin Roosevelt used to cruise over in the Potomac for weekends with his cronies in an old Democratic club on one of the three islands. All are uninhabited now except by snakes, turtles, seabirds, and a crew of biologists (one hopes and supposes; there is a NASA beacon off to westwards…) from the Smithsonian, which now owns the place and maintains a “research facility” in the former clubhouse. For all one knew they might be counterespionagists, interrogating spies whisked in from Embassy Row or the other side of the globe…

But bye-bye, paranoia. They truly could be something sinister, those young neat-bearded chaps who waved from their dock as I anchored in the clean sand bottom of Poplar Harbor; Jane’s fiancé, likewise, truly could be something other than what he represented himself to be – and very probably they and he were not. They were biologists. He was a Canadian gentleman of leisure. Buffalo’s “C.I.A./F.B.I. types” were part of our government’s paranoia about the antiwar movement and the traffic of disaffected youngsters across the Peace Bridge into Ontario. And Harrison Mack’s freeze-dried feces would turn up in an office safe or the archives of Marshyhope State. Time to shorten scope on my imagination; in the morning I would flip a coin (as I did once on the Cambridge Creek Bridge on June 21 or 22, 1937, very near the end of 13 L) to decide what to do.

A restless night. O.J. pitched a bit in a surprise southerly that fetched across the low-lying island and the open harbor; I was on deck every few hours to check for drag by taking bearings on the “clubhouse” lights, which for some reason burned all night. In the morning, a fresh pretty one, the air was back where it belonged, NNW 5–7. My head was muzzy; Todds Point was but a quick eleven-mile run through Knapps Narrows and across the mouth of the Choptank; I could eat lunch in my cottage, put the cruise away, and hit the office fresh after the weekend. Heads I keep going – to certain haunts on Patuxent and Potomac, to Smith and Tangier islands, then home to my dearest and closest, the Tred Avon and the Choptank – tails I pack it in. I flipped my nickel and got, not “the skinny-assed, curly-tailed buffalo” who in ’37 had bid me chuck certain letters into Cambridge Creek (concerning Harrison Mack Senior’s pickled poop) and let the Macks go whistle for their three million dollars, but that buffalo’s ’69 counterpart: Monticello.

Home, then.

But I am, Dad, and will be for some days yet, Todd Andrews, and this is 13 R: no more to be dictated now than then by a “miserable nickel” (worth, three decades later, half as much as its Indian-headed, buffalo-tailed predecessor). I upped anchor, bid good-bye to Poplar Island and Whatever Goes On There, and set my course for 200°: an easy, lazy, self-steering all-day run straight down the Chesapeake, wing and wing under O.J.‘s long-footed main and jib, whisker-poled out. Past the nothing where Sharps Island used to be, on whose vanished beach Jane Mack and I once coupled (Restricted and Prohibited areas to starboard: Naval Research Lab firing range); past vanishing James Island off the Little Choptank, where some 1812 invaders once came to grief and where Polly Lake and I, many Augusts, came to joy; 30-odd gliding miles down through a hot late-summer Saturday, listening to the Texaco opera (Tosca) and rereading the story of my life in The Floating Opera; to where (in this nonfictional rerun) the Coast Pilot turns into a catalogue of horrors—204.36: Shore bombardment, air bombardment, air strafing, and rocket firing area. U.S. Navy. 204.40: Long-range and aerial machine-gun firing, U.S. Naval Propellant Plant. 204.42: Aerial firing range and target areas, U.S. Naval Air Test Center. 204.44: Naval guided missiles operations area… Air Force practice bombing and rocket firing… Underwater demolitions area, U.S. Naval Amphibian Base… Air Force precision test area—and where I turned into the Patuxent, seven peaceful hours later, and anchored for the night behind Solomons Island, intending to say goodbye next day to Mill and St. Leonard creeks.

Instead of which, I said hello to Jane Mack and Baron André Castine. It being the weekend, a great many yachts were in the anchorage already, large and small, power and sail – so many that I had my hands full finding a spot with room to swing, running forward to drop the hook at the right moment and then back to set it with the engine full-reversed. I had of course conned the anchorage first, and had vaguely noted, among several other yachts I’d crossed wakes with in the two weeks past, the big Trumpy-built trawler I’d seen up in Little Round Bay. Indeed, I’d moored O.J. between her (Baratarian, remember?) and a 50-foot ketch from Los Angeles, both of which rode on plenty of scope, rather than going in among the cluster of smaller boats. When I shut down the engine and went forward to adjust my rode, rig the anchor light, and watch how we swung, Jane Mack merrily called my name across the space between us.

That is, a lean tanned lady in fresh white linens did, from Baratarian’s afterdeck, where she sat with a less tan but equally turned-out gentleman, sipping something short. I waved back, then recognized her with a proper pang and wondered whether… But now her voice came amplified through a bullhorn brought her by a white-uniformed crewman. Toddy. Just in time for dinner. Come on over and meet André.

Small world, I megaphoned back from O.J.‘s bows. Let me wash and change.

I cannot say even what my feelings were, except that if not self-canceling they were anyhow canceled from the future, 13 R’s end, and meanwhile overriden by shrug-shouldered curiosity. I washed the day’s salt sweat off, dinghied over in my go-ashore seersucker, and was introduced to André, Baron Castine: a mustached, ruddy, virile fellow in his mid-fifties, with a broad smile, good teeth, an easy winning manner, and a fine cultured baritone voice softly accented a la Quebec (though the family estate was in Ontario). What they sipped was cold Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, fetched up by their steward in buckets of ice, along with caviar-and-cream-cheese canapés, from the air-conditioned galley. Jane as always was utterly at ease, as if we hadn’t humped aboard O.J. in May and again in the Todds Point cottage in June; as if I hadn’t seen those photos of her and her friend in spectacular flagrante delicto. Castine as well, with better reason: an immediately likable chap, who indeed looked to me less like the fellow in those photographs than like a better-bred relative of A. B. Cook (as Buffalo had reported).

Ah, well: people change. Their ease put me at mine. Castine informed me that the yacht was Jane’s gift for his 52nd birthday (younger than he looked, then); that he thought it a bit, ah, baronial, and was unfortunately prone to mal de mer—he’d even missed a few meals aboard the Statendam in Bermudian waters! But he was determined for her sake to acquire sea legs, and so had committed himself to the sport of deep-sea fishing. Was I an angler?

Toddy always has an angle, Jane declared, not especially meaningly. He’s probably been following us to see whether we deep-six Harrison’s merde.

I was astonished. Castine asked about the verb “to deep-six,” but clearly understood the general sense of Jane’s allusion. That tone prevailed through dinner (I surprised myself by accepting their invitation; all envy, guilt, and jealousy slipped away in their easy company, lubricated no doubt by the fine champagne; and after two near-solitary August weeks afloat, the air conditioning and the company were irresistible. Fresh roses on the table! Conversation! A steward to cook and serve!): the good-humored implication that they knew more about certain of our common interests than they were telling. I asked where in fact that minor but notable item of Harrison’s estate reposed. Jane was (smilingly) damned if she knew, and damned if she’d tell me if she did; things were too hectic at m.e. for her to bother with such foolishness until my subpoena, which she quite anticipated, obliged her to. Castine asked my opinion on the danger of being hijacked in these waters, or on the Intracoastal Waterway, by narcotics smugglers: one heard rumors of piracy and of Coast Guard cover-ups. We all doubted there was any danger. I inquired about his vessel’s name. Both his own forebears and Jean Lafitte’s, he declared, were Gascon; perhaps he would take up piracy himself if Mack Enterprises fell upon hard times and if he could learn to do without Dramamine. Did I know Longfellow’s poem about his (Castine’s) progenitor?

Artichokes vinaigrette. Escalope de veau and fresh asparagus, perfectly steamed. Had I heard anything from her wayward daughter? Jane wondered mildly. I considered; then reported my understanding that Jeannine had broken off with Reg Prinz and left the film company; that she was unhappy with the Fort Erie establishment and frequently disappeared from it; and that she was drinking too much. Castine tisked his tongue and regarded his fiancée. Without looking up from her sauce bearnaise Jane declared crisply that she knew all that; but Jeannine was her own woman and must find her own way. She Jane had been rebuffed too often by both of her children to do more than wish them well and hope for the best.

Then she brightened. As for that movie: that’s what they were doing there! Shooting was already in progress farther up the Patuxent, it seemed, and tomorrow Prinz & Co. were going to “burn Washington” on Bloodsworth Island – but André must explain; she had no head for history.

The baron explained that before they’d learned (on their return from Bermuda) of “Bea Golden’s” falling out with Mr. Prinz, they’d agreed for a lark to ferry the film crew tomorrow from Benedict, sixteen miles upriver – where footage was being shot of the British invasion of August 1814—down the Patuxent and across the Bay to Bloodsworth Island, a 40-mile trip. There Prinz had built a set for the Burning of Washington, 155 years to the day from that regrettable event. They had expected, of course, that Jane’s daughter would be there; in any case her son would be, who with his radical friends (and, presumably, the director’s consent) was using the occasion to protest U.S. “involvement”—Castine’s tactful euphemism – in Southeast Asia.

Come with us, Toddy! Jane cried with imperious enthusiasm. Drew made her nervous with his childish politics; André could talk to him, but she’d feel better yet if I were there too; Drew had always respected me. I must come. She herself would miss the Sunday night fireworks – she had to get back to Cambridge and Cap’n Chick – but André or Buck (their combination captain, cook, and steward) would be happy to redeliver me to my boat on the Monday morning.

His pleasure, Castine assured me. Peach sherbert and Armagnac. “Heat lightning” to north of us, from where now stirred a rain-smelling breeze. I had a number of questions yet to work diplomatically into our talk – the baron’s relation to A. B. Cook, for instance; “Buffalo’s” mention of the F.B.I.; maybe even the matter of the blackmail photographs – but the evening was evidently over, and I was sleepy from the long day’s sail and the champagne. Jane politely invited me to use the guest stateroom, but – among other reasons for declining! – I wanted to be aboard O.J. if a squall blew through. As for the trip upriver, I’d let them know in the morning. My own Patuxent destination was only half a dozen miles up, where I had certain bases to touch. On the other hand, I was powerfully curious to see a bit more of my old love’s new lover, now that my heart was proven truly clear of her. We’d see.

Sunday dawned hot, hazy, and still. 70 % chance of late-afternoon or evening thunderstorms. Knowing that the anchorage would soon be empty, I paid out plenty of scope, battened everything down, and made ready after all to go aboard Baratarian. But the baron, smiling cleanly, dinghied over with a different plan: they had radiotelephoned Mr. Prinz at Benedict after I left them, and mentioned my presence; he was particularly anxious to film Baratarian en route to “Barataria,” and though period detail was irrelevant to his production, it would please him too to film Osborn Jones coming downriver under sail. What’s more, they could use the extra deck space. I would of course be remunerated; and Jane – whom Castine understood to be “entirely familiar” with my vessel – had volunteered to serve as my crew. He himself, alas, could be of small assistance. We were to rendezvous off Benedict at noon, where Prinz was filming the Withdrawal scene.

Mm hm. I agreed, but urged Castine to ride up with us as well. Surely he wished to be with his fiancée? The baron’s expression fairly twinkled: they had just returned from the recentest of a series of honeymoons, and would soon be married; knowing how much Jane esteemed me, he would sacrifice for a few hours the joy of his friend’s company in order to catch up on various business in the air-conditioned comfort of his yacht.

So: less was accomplished than I’d hoped, yet more than I’d have expected before that weekend. Jane, as I anticipated, was all impenetrable good cheer as we motor-sailed upriver on a medium reach in the wake of Baratarian. I complimented her on her fiancé and learned without pain that they planned a late-September wedding. Um… his relation to A. B. Cook? Oh, well: André claimed it and Cook disclaimed it, neither militantly. Their mother Jane believed to have married twice; the family had been either scattered or peripatetic; perhaps there was some ill feeling, but it was as much a joke as anything. Relations between the two men Jane understood to be civil but not close. I did not risk mentioning the C.I.A., but asked whether the baron practiced any profession. Jane answered easily that he had worked in some capacity for the Canadian and British intelligence communities during and for a while after the Second World War, and had at various times tried his hand at novel-writing, without success. But the management of his inherited property, and latterly the courtship and entertainment of herself, were his principal and painless occupations.

Ah. We passed the mouth of St. Leonard Creek, where Polly Lake and I – but good-bye, good-bye! Experimentally I announced that Jeannine had been aboard two weekends since. Really! Jane hoped she’d behaved herself. What had she wanted? Just to go sailing and talk things over, I said; but she’d seemed amenable to an out-of-court settlement of her father’s estate. Jane’s tone grew brisk: Oh, well, that. Where had Jeannine been when she’d felt like being reasonable? Now she wasn’t sure what she meant to do, exactly – but we oughtn’t to talk business, okay?

That was that. Even at half-throttle Baratarian soon disappeared ahead; Jane asked no further questions about her daughter; I mildly regretted this excursion. I shall pass over the movie-making, Dad, which I have little comprehension of or interest in. God knows what the foundation is getting for its money: Prinz maintains that he makes his films as much in the editing room as on the set with the camera, and often doesn’t know clearly himself, until he reviews the “takes,” what his shooting is about. So reported one of his assistants, who seemed to Jane and me to be more in charge of things than the director himself. There was a box-lunch affair ashore, itself filmed. Prinz was on hand with the Bernstein girl, who does appear to have supplanted Jeannine. There indeed was red-faced Drew, surprised to see us but warily cordial; no sign of Yvonne, and Drew’s face purpled when I asked whether she was about. He seemed to know and be on good terms with André Castine; with his mother he was reserved, and she cool with him. No sign either of Ambrose Mensch, who I had thought was involved in the project.

There was a postluncheon Withdrawal scene of all hands to our boats; good Buck saved me the trouble of making a fuss about hard shoes by demanding that everyone not wearing sneakers come aboard barefoot. We counted out life jackets; cameras on each vessel filmed the other, and the flotilla of water-skiers and buzzing runabouts as well. No one seemed to be delivering lines or acting out business, and don’t ask me what any of it had to do with the War of 1812 (except that I was invited, and declined – on camera – to take the role of Dr. Beanes, the fellow whose arrest led to the composition of “The Star Spangled Banner”). Movies aren’t what they used to be, Dad.