Letters

Jea

As for Jane, and the first part of 10 R: she will of course contest, she informed me promptly and pleasantly that afternoon, when she came into the office: punctual as always and, as always, handsome, striking, yea beautiful. About the Tower of Truth she had no strong feelings one way or the other, though she opposed the use of foundation funds to supplement the GSD appropriation: let John Schott find his money elsewhere; that’s what college presidents were for. The Loyalist business she regarded privately as more silly than demented; while she was grateful to me in principle for having talked Harrison out of its wilder versions, she meant nonetheless to use those earlier drafts and my revisions to support her contention that he was neither of sound mind nor properly his own man in his later years. A. B. Cook — who I now learned was a distant relative of hers — she regarded as a humbug, to be neither feared, trusted, nor otherwise taken seriously. John Schott was an ass. With Germaine Pitt she had no quarrel; on the contrary; she would not dream of contesting that bequest. The disinheritance of her children was doubtless regrettable but neither surprising, given their “provocative track records” (her term), nor tragic, given their earlier legacies, their present life-styles, the trusts established for Drew’s children (Yvo

All this delivered coolly, crisply, cordially in my office on a spanking early spring afternoon. Since burying Harrison and reestablishing herself at Tidewater Farms, Jane had found time for a week’s rendezvous in Tobago with her new friend “Lord Baltimore” (she would not tell me his name), a French-Canadian descendant of the original Irish proprietary lords of Maryland and (more news) a relative of her relative A. B. Cook—“but not close enough to worry us about the consanguinity business.” Ta

O, O, O pale pervert Proust: keep your tea and madeleine! Give me the dainty oils of hair and skin (for all I know it might have been, both then and now, some suntan preparation) to trigger memory and regain lost time! I had to close my eyes; Jane reached over the desk to touch my arm and wonder if I was all right. I was 69, I replied, and subject to attacks of nostalgia; otherwise fit as a fiddle — and ready to go to court if Harrison’s will were contested. But not, I should apprise her at once, as her counsel in the dispute — or Drew’s or Jea

U

But that was not exactly what she’d come to talk about. She knew me well enough, she hoped, not to expect me to represent her or either of her children against a will I’d drawn for Harrison myself. She thanked me again for my attentions to him and to her through those trying years. I was as trusted a friend as she had; had always been; how fortunate they were, she and Harrison, to have renewed that friendship upon their return to the Eastern Shore! For that, if little else, she thanked Jea

I studied her. Not a trace of irony, Dad; none either of calculation (I mean conscious, calculated calculation). It was the first time Jane had been in that office since June 21 or 22, 1937, when, having slept with me for the last time the night before (my Dark Night), she’d stopped by in the afternoon with 3½-year-old Jea