Letters

I was incredulous. Jane in tears. It was crazy, crazy, she declared: she’d practically just met the man, though they’d been corresponding ever since he’d traced their distant relations some years before (he was big on family history, on history in general, a kind of hobby). They’d hit it off beautifully from the first, and of course she’d been distraught over Harrison’s condition, that’s why she’d gone abroad. Even so! It must have been the being in London again, with a titled gentleman again; it was even the same hotel, where she’d stopped, not for sentimental reasons, but because it was the one she happened to know best, the Co

My turn now to touch her arm, truly wondering whether she was quite sane. Leaving aside the remarkable assertion that there was anything compromising to have been photographed, I asked her just who was threatening to blackmail her with the supposed photographs, and how. From a slim leather briefcase she drew a Kleenex and a typewritten, unsigned note: “If you contest your late husband’s will, these will be distributed to your family, friends, business associates, and competitors.”

That demonstrative pronoun was the kicker: I’d expected, if there turned out really to be a blackmail threat, some allusion to “certain very compromising photographs in my possession.”

“These?” I inquired.

Out they came, Dad, with another Kleenex, from another partition of her case: two 8-by-10 glossies, one in black and white, the other in color. Unbelievable. Across the desk, Jane covered her eyes. Both photos were sharply focused, well-lighted, clearly resolved, full-length shots, made with a good camera by someone who understood photography. In the black-and-white, taken from the side at waist level, Jane (43) knelt naked on the floor to perform fellatio upon a paunchy but pleasant-faced elder gentleman who — remarkably, considering that her body was as perfect in that photograph as it had been at my last sight of it in 1937, when, aged 31, she’d had the body of a 25-year-old — was not yet roused to erection by her ministrations. His expression was mild, bemused, behind a full blond (or gray) mustache and the eyeglasses he’d not removed; his right, farther hand rested upon her head; his left held a cigar whose ash appeared to interest him more than the fresh-faced, hollow-cheeked (because etc.), crop-curled vision of daintiness who looked up at him with full mouth and bright, expectant eyes. O, O, O. In the other, taken apparently from above, a stocky, well-muscled, bald, dark-body-haired fellow of 50 or so with (I think) a short beard and (I know) a considerable erection was busily “sixty-nining” on a forest-green chenille bedspread with…

Absolutely unbelievable. Not the fact of sex among us healthy sexagenarians; heavens no: I myself now look forward to restful soixante-neuf at quatre-vingt-seize. But the well-dressed woman just across the desk from me there, stretched naked on her side here in living color across that bed, her upper leg raised and bent to accommodate her friend, on whose lower thigh she rested her head as he did likewise on hers — she was beautiful! Not as a well-tended 63-year-old may be, well, well tended; Polly Lake, bless her, is that. No, Dad, I mean she was a smasher, a stu

Jane (I exclaimed when I was able)! You are a smasher, a stu

She thought me not serious, but was heartened enough to scold me, mildly, for reexamining the photographs, which reluctantly I gave back to her. Admiring her vanity along with the rest, I granted that their circulation could be an embarrassment and inconvenience, if not to her affiancement at least to her business and private life. And I seconded her opinion that police and private-detective files were not to be trusted with them: I knew from experience how that brotherhood relishes a good photograph; in any case (so to speak) they were not Sherlock Holmeses or Hercule Poirots, just cops and ex-cops of one sort or another, more or less competent routine investigators.

That was why she’d brought them to me. What should she do? I asked her kindly, Had they really been taken without her knowledge? The lighting and camera angles were so good, and in 1949, especially, the gadgetry of snooping was less exquisite than it had become since. What she’d acknowledged, moreover, about Lord Jeff’s eccentricities…

Okay, it came out then, with more blushes and a couple more Kleenexes: he’d been a camera buff, had set up a tripod and lights and automatic timer himself in their room at the Co

Well. I wondered aloud how she thought to protect herself even if the culprit could be located, since any legal prosecution would necessitate her placing the photographs in evidence; no doubt the blackmailer would publish them anyhow if he or she felt threatened. All business and no tissues now, fair Jane reminded me coolly that as president of a multimillion-dollar corporation and potential contestant of two million dollars’ worth of testamentary articles, she was not naive about industrial spying and counterspying, however i

Quite taken aback, as they say, I asked her what she meant to do if the letter’s author turned out to be Drew or Jea