Letters (90 page)

Whew! As I’ve spent the morning abed in the Scajaquada Motor Inn, penning this and shaking my head over last night, the Author and the Director have been prepping Delaware Park for the Conjockety and Mating-Flight shots (with echoes of Long Wharf and that mike boom business), which I myself am to play some role in later in the afternoon or evening, if I feel up to it.

I find, to my surprise, I rather do. Ambrose was truly tender with me this morning: not a word about my going off to look for André, only concern and—well, love. I may never know what hit me last night in that rose garden, but I know I’m anxious about the coming confrontation between my Author and his adversary, especially if Bea Golden has rejoined Prinz and if Ambrose’s only ally, besides myself, is that erratic—

Omigod.

No. And yet…

No!

No more now!

July 11, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Old Father,

Very hot, still, and airless where I am. How is it with you? Time itself has gone torpid in Maryland since the solstice; summer limps like one long day, my last, after my last Dark Night.

In an eyeblink this mid-morning—in mid-sentence in mid-committee meeting—the clear message of the three weeks past was delivered to me, with its plain postscript
re
the future. It’s a message I ought to have got two chapters ago at least, in May: but never better than late, and I’m as buoyed as the Choptank channel by it.

Where were we? That was Jane, of course, on the telephone back in June, calling my bluff. Ah, so I was back from Baltimore early—or hadn’t I gone? In any case, she’d be a bit late for our evening, was tied up at work. And could we take a rain check on the fish? No no, she wasn’t breaking our date; but she’d spent the whole day on an exciting proposal to extend m.e. (remember
me,
Dad?) into the fast-food-chain business, a real growth venture, wait till I heard; and then she’d happened to learn that Jeannine (Bea Golden) was flying in to open a revival of
The Parachute Girl
on the
O.F.T. II
at 8:30. Why didn’t I meet her at her office at six? We’d have a drink somewhere, catch dinner at one of those Awful Colonel Sanders Things to check them out, and then take in the show?

My pause was not strategic. Hurt to the auricles, I’d’ve begged off, but before I could relocate my voice Jane said (in a much less presidential one of her own): I know, Toddy, you wanted to show me the cottage and all. But I’m really
into
this fast-food thing! Wait till you hear. Maybe after?

Her office, then. Six. I was a dear. No need for me to drive in: she’d send John out with the Continental. Bye. Bye.

There was, in germ, the Message, but I didn’t read it. Among my stillborn preparations I waited with a rye and ginger. Age tinkled my ice (my hands have begun to shake a bit more this year, Dad). To perfect my disappointment, our Author saw fit now to disperse the late-afternoon thunderheads out over the Bay. It was going to be a fine evening.

En route to town I reviewed the hard-crab run with Jane’s chauffeur: still poor in the river, we agreed, but down-county they were getting the big jimmies and the sooks. Not like before, though.

I had been permitted to share the front seat, windows down. Approaching Cambridge, John radioed ahead and was given instructions: he raised the windows, cut in the A.C. to cool the car, and at the
me
parking lot suggested I move to the rear seat while he fetched Miz Mack. I was to help myself from the bar or wait for him to serve me, whichever. But even as I shifted places and he showed me how to work the backseat bar, a second buzzy message countermanded the first: I
must
come up and see the layouts for this newest Mack Enterprise; we could have our cocktails right there.

Jane, Jane. Did Love ever arouse you like the passions of Commerce? Another rye and ginger for me (she made a face); the Usual for her. As John mixed and blended (come
on,
Author: you’ll really have her drink only that Galliano concoction called Golden Dream?!), I was shown how
me
would send Roy Rogers and Colonel Sanders back where they came from:
Maryland
fried chicken,
Chesapeake Bay
fish and chips, oyster(-flavored) fritters—and Crabsicles.

That’s right, Dad. PR wasn’t sure about the spelling yet—
Crabsicles
looked hard to say, and
Crabsickles
had the wrong suggestion amidships—but the Basic Concept looked to Jane like a winner, and it had to be good news on the bottom line that to make a crabcake hold together on a popsicle stick you were obliged to use less crabmeat and more Fillers and Binders.

The key, you see—she explained to me over a tub-o’-chicken in a Route 50 outlet named for a former Baltimore Colts football star—was logistics. Where did Sanders’s East Coast outlets get most of their Kentucky Fried? From the big brooders right here on Delmarva Peninsula! Jane’s idea was to buy into that industry and, by raising her own fryers and exploiting
me’s
existing cold-storage, trucking, and food-processing capacities, lower the unit cost per tub-o’ enough to undersell the other chains in the Middle Atlantic States at least. The Crabsicles and oyster fritters would be low-profit window dressing with high Recognition Value; PR was working up a name for the chain that would sound both salty and southern-fried; something like
Colonel Skipjack
or
Chicken of the Sea. Dive-Inn Belle
had been considered and rejected. The idea was to
sell the Shore.
What did I think of
Cap’n Chick?

I thought, I said, that some combination of Galliano and corporate capitalism must be the secret of eternal youth. Also, that a Mack as enterprising as Jane had no need to go to law over Harrison’s estate: a simple four-way out-of-court split among herself, her two children, and Harrison’s Follies (as we’d dubbed them) would give each a half-million before taxes, enough for her “Lord Baltimore” to buy a chunk of Cap’n Chick before it hatched; her passions thus wedded like fried chicken to Crabsicles, that investment would surely quadruple in value ere the Bicentennial, and she could both
have
her title, her two million, her children’s goodwill, and her oyster(-flavored) fritters, and eat them, so to speak. Finally, that unless she put away her half of our tub-o’-chicken with a celerity more commensurate to that of its preparation and service, we’d miss Jeannine’s entrance.

I was half joking, Dad. And not altogether unbitterly. My feelings were still bruised. Jane’s tirelessness made me tired; the impersonality of her greed depressed me. She
would
sell the Shore if it were hers to sell, and not entirely for the profit—which, given her existing wealth, would be mainly of trophy value—but for the sake of grand and sharp transaction. Moreover, the Ocean City-goers who jammed the place were watching us with interest, assuming no doubt that so elegant and elegantly chauffeured a lady in a fast-food joint must be part of some jokey ad campaign, and where were the cameras? Nor did that traffic itself, swarming bumper to bumper over that particular nearby bridge, cheer me: the Eastern Shore of Maryland was not Jane’s to sell because it had been sold, resold, oversold already.

But she took my utterance as oracular. Polishing off her drumstick-with-thigh-attached and scolding me for scolding her when I’d scarcely touched mine (she insisted on adding it to John’s tub-o’; after all, we’d paid for it), she pressed to know, en route to Long Wharf, whether I really was inclined to an out-of-court division of Harrison’s estate along those lines. More important, did I truly think Cap’n Chick could achieve a four-to-one stock split in seven years? She’d figured maybe
three
to one at best by the mid-1970’s, if indeed she capitalized the venture as a semiautonomous subsidiary…

The Original Floating Theatre II.
I had hoped after all—so I must infer from my disappointment—for some fertilization of our future from our past. It
was,
almost, the solstice, anniversary of a certain corner-turning (13 L) aboard the original
Original
in ’37; a good bit of evening lay yet ahead; nostalgia was the showboat’s stock in trade. I even took Jane’s hand—kept it, rather, after helping her from the cool car into the heated evening. But John returned from the box office with tidings that Miz Golden had had airplane problems (the plot ground, if I remember rightly, of
The Parachute Girl)
and would not be arriving till tomorrow. The minstrel-show half of the evening would be presented as usual; a medley of silent-film comedies would replace the postintermission drama. The management was offering refunds on advance ticket sales.

Oh Toddy, Jane said. I chose to read her tone as rue for having changed my original plan for the evening, but she may have been merely piqued at this thwarting of hers. We stood about for a bit, deciding. Most patrons seemed to be going aboard anyhow. The taped calliope music on the P.A. was “Bye Bye Blackbird,” but again I didn’t get the Author’s message. Oh well, she left the choice to me. I opted, without enthusiasm, to give the
O.F.T. II
a try, if only by way of checking out the foundation’s philanthropies. We could always leave.

We did, after half an hour. The theater was having air-conditioning problems. The emcee-interlocutor, a branch-campus drama major by the look of him, was more Cap’n Chic than Captain James Adams, and the civil-rights ruckus was still too recent history to permit any honest revival of blackface comedy. In its place was a pallid liberal “satire” that neither offended nor entertained anyone save the summer-jobbing students who enacted (and had presumably composed) it. Jane’s mind was mercifully elsewhere—on unit costs per Crabsicle, I supposed, or franchise contracts. Mine, though still blind to the obvious, was on that right-hand column of correspondences set forth some letters back, which I’d lost the key to since Polly Lake failed me on June 17. In midst of some plastic levity between the pale surrogates of Bones and Tambo, I touched Jane’s arm to ask her pleasure; she was out of her seat before I could put the question.

John was napping at the wheel; our Author likewise, or he’d have fetched us straight from Long Wharf to Todds Point and 12 R instead of routing us through the next diversion. Jane had, I now learned, been Thinking. About what I’d said at dinner? Mm. Why
not
wrap up the Whole Estate Thing out of court, and quickly, along some such lines as I’d suggested? Even a three-to-one Cap’n Chick stock appreciation would go far toward compensating for the difference between such a compromise and what she might get for her fiancé by hard-lining it, especially when one considered the reduced legal costs and the advantages of early reinvestment of her share. What’s more, if the will were uncontested she could forget about that blackmail threat, which still distressed her though nothing further had come of it. The nigger in the woodpile, she reckoned (her term, used unabashedly in John’s hearing as we drove into the Second Ward and the diversion now to be recounted), was the willingness of the prime beneficiary to agree to such a division:
i.e.,
the Tidewater Foundation, as represented ultimately by its executive director and counsel. Aha.

But it
had
been my suggestion in the first place, had it not? She would tell me what: Why didn’t we call on Drew and Yvonne then and there and put the idea to them, absolutely unofficially, just to see how it went down? What a pity Jeannine wasn’t with us too! But if three of the four main interested parties seemed to agree that it sounded at least worth considering further, Jeannine would surely not hold out, didn’t I think? She’d never been troublesome
that
way. We could wrap it all up and forget about it in time for her, Jane’s, remarriage…

I saw. And for when, pray, was that last-mentioned transaction scheduled? She patted my hand, smiled girlishly: not till fall. You are wondering, Dad, how it is we were driving already into the Second Ward when Jane impulsively decided to visit her son and daughter-in-law. So was I, until that throwaway announcement, like a casual grenade, disoriented my priorities. She and “Lord Baltimore” each had business to wind up before tying the knot, Jane declared. André was right that that “September Song” business was wrong: the less time left to one, the
more
patient one became about biding it.

Ah, Dad. Never mind the validity of the paradox: that sentiment, so clearly not Jane’s own (who seemed as deaf to Time’s chariots as she was historically amnesiac), stung me to the quick, as unexpected and intimate a revelation of her lover’s reality as that breathtaking blackmail photograph. I was dizzied; wished myself out of there, wished myself—

What
Jane
wished, as we entered the new federal low-rent housing project on the edge of “Browntown,” where the Drew Macks lived, was that
me
had been foresighted enough to see Tomorrow Now in 1967 or before, while all the Trouble was going on in the Second Ward. She could’ve bought out the slumlords for a song when Rap Brown had everybody scared, and never mind that fire insurance didn’t cover riot-related incendiarism: arson was cheaper than professional demolition, and she’d’ve been in on the ground floor of the New Reconstruction boondoggle.

“I’m joking,”
she explained.

We Stock Liberals are not at ease in the Second Ward, Dad, especially exiting from black-chauffeured Continentals. People watched; I waved wanly to a few I knew. What’s more, Yvonne Mack, smashing as always in her hair-scarf and Nefertiti makeup, was plainly edgy about our visit. The kids were away at camp in the Poconos; Drew was at a Big Meeting elsewhere in the project and wouldn’t be back till Lord knew when. Yvonne is normally hospitable, more so than her husband, but we were offered none of the Tanqueray in clear view on her sideboard, for example. Jane sat without being invited to; I waited to be asked and was not. Yvonne popped up and down, sure that Drew would be sorry he’d missed us. Could she take a message for him? Bye, bye, then.