Letters

Sharon’s husband-on-the-way-out, I learned, was the actor Melvin Bernstein. His real name had been Mel Miller; as an apprentice borscht-circuit comic he’d changed it to sound more Jewish; later, when he moved into “straight” acting, he regretted not having kept the low-profile original, but couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice the small and no longer quite appropriate celebrity of his stage name. To the consequent ambiguity of his scope and unambiguity of his name he attributed his failure to succeed as a leading man; but his career as a character actor was established in New York, and he was begi

Well.

About your Floating Opera novel, which appeared the following year, I understandably have mixed feelings. On the one hand it was decidedly a partial betrayal on your part of a partial confidence on mine, and though you altered names and doctored facts for literary effect, some people hereabouts imagined they saw through to the real thing, with consequent minor inconvenience to my law practice and my solitary life. It was not long after, for example, that I exchanged my regular room in the Dorset for a certain goose-hunting retreat out on Todd’s Point, down the river, and commissioned a local boatbuilder to convert me a skipjack to live aboard in Cambridge in the summer, when the hotel gets too warm. On the other hand, my old love of fiction, aforementioned, was gratified to see the familiar details of my life and place projected as through a camera obscura. What’s more, Harrison Mack read the novel too, found in it more to praise than to blame despite the unflattering light it cast him in, and was prompted to reopen a tentative correspondence with me, which soon led to the chaste reestablishment of our friendship and my retention as counsel for Mack Enterprises on the Eastern Shore. For this indirect and unintended favor, I’m your debtor.

The company had bought out old Colonel Morton’s farms and ca

Under Jane’s direction, Mack Enterprises throve and prospered. From chemical fertilizers and freeze-dried foods they branched into certain classified research in the chemical-warfare way, over the protests of myself (by then a stockholder) and son Drew, a political science undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. The Macks bought, built, and moved to Tidewater Farms; I became a trustee, then executive director of their Tidewater Foundation; Jea

I’m ahead of myself. Lord and Lady Amherst stopped at Tidewater Farms in 1961 and were, excuse me, royally entertained by the Macks, whether because Harrison and Lady A. knew nothing of Jane’s old affair (Jane herself, I am bemused to learn, has a positive genius for repressing unwelcome memories), or because Harrison’s royal delusion by then insulated him from jealousy (George III never wondered about Queen Charlotte). More likely, bygones were simply bygones. It was during this visit that Harrison first associated Germaine Pitt Amherst with the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Elizabeth Spencer: a new and fateful stage of his madness, partly responsible for her later invitation to MSUC. I first met her then, too, and liked her better than I liked her husband.

Meanwhile, up in Waltham, Mass., Andrews Mack has become fashionably but by no means insincerely radicalized. Having disappointed his parents in the first place by choosing Hopkins and Brandeis as his soul mothers rather than Princeton and Harvard, he now quite exasperates them by dropping his doctoral studies in ’63 to assist in the Cambridge (Maryland) civil rights demonstrations — quite as his father had picketed his own father’s pickle factories back in the thirties. When the July 4th fireworks were canceled that year on account of the race riots, Harrison followed the family tradition of disowning his son, though not by formal legal action. Drew responded by promptly marrying one of his ex-classmates, a black girl from Cambridge.

I do not suggest that he married her solely as a gesture of protest: Yvo