I’m at my cottage, Dad, out on my point, at sixes and sevens. It is earlier than I’d thought. I’ve been fretting and fussing about here all day, getting the house ready, getting the grounds ready, getting the boat ready Just In Case, not answering the phone (even though it might be Jane calling off our “date”!) because I’m supposed to be over in Baltimore on business. I am surprised at myself: an emotion I thought I had lost the capacity for.

I, I, I: such self-absorption!

Tomorrow Now is the new Mack Enterprises slogan, beneath a streamlined logo devised by Jane’s PR folk. No more hands across the years from things past to things to come; no more sailing ships, airliners, smokestacks, hay fields, tractors. Within a circular field, white above and gules below, the company’s initials azure in a loopy script which also forms the field’s perimeter, so:

Each loop carrying into one moiety the other’s color. The whole resembling, from any distance, a Yang/Yin done by a patriotic Italo-American spaghetti bender and, closer up, evocative of U.S. imperialism and isolationism at once: US become me and inflated to a global insularity.

So objected Drew, who, though not a director of Mack Enterprises, made plain his sentiments to the board of the Tidewater Foundation, of which he is a member, at our last meeting. He also denounced the firm’s co-opting, and perverting to its capitalist ends, such trendy counter-culturalisms as the Yang/Yin, the call for Revolution Now, and the ignoring of the past (Drew himself is more anti- than ahistorical). This last objection I shared, as the only dissenting director of — ugh! — me. Where was that gentle fogey Old Man Praeteritas, father of us all, the Yesterday that will fertilize Tomorrow Today? And of course I deplored the self-circumscribed me, the objectified subject, the I gestating within that O—too close to home for Yours Truly to want it blazoned ’round the world!

But I concede that for Madam President it is not inapt. Her one objection was to the lowercase initials, not as dated Modernist kitsch, but as unsuited to a corporate entity agglomerating like cancer. She yielded, however, to the tactful pitch of her young PR chief: that a subdued but ubiquitous logo better suited the firm’s magnitudinous future than some splashy arriviste hyperbole (he used other language); and that, per slogan, what was right for Tomorrow was right for Now. New logo — and attendant ad campaign — adopted, 11-1.

A week ago, that vote. Just after it, Jane declined, neutrally, my invitation to another sail on Osborn Jones. It was Friday 13th, 50 years to the day since another Friday when, upon my discharge from the U.S. Army, I was told of my precarious heart condition — of which you may have heard, Dad? I had thought Jane might be amused by that bit of praeteritas. Oh, and I’d thought, if things sailed smoothly, to apprise her of my new heart condition, by then four Fridays old; of my growing conviction that our lives are recycling; of my consequent anticipation of #11 R, June 17, Polly Lake’s Fart Day (I grant that the connection is not obvious; I shall come to it), and the unexpected turn its approach had taken only that same morning; of the disorienting revelation that I am in love with Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack, and have been ever since she came to me in this cottage on the afternoon of August 13, 1932. What did I expect to happen next (I’d thought to ask her somewhere out there if the wind was right), after our astonishing shipboard tryst of May, #10 R in last letter’s accounting, Dad? That she would abandon “Lord Baltimore” (or confess him to be the half-fantasized afterimage of some brief adventure with a London gigolo)? That she would marry, this late in the afternoon, a cranky, fussy small-town lawyer, part-time celibate and full-time bachelor, who has not been out of the U.S.A. since 1919 and seldom ventures even beyond the margins of Nautical Chart 77: United States — East Coast — Maryland and Virginia — Chesapeake Bay — Northern Part?

“Sorry, Todd,” she said (neutrally): “No hard feelings about your vote, but I’m meeting my fiancé in New York.”

Two times up, two times out. Just a week after 10 R I’d been permitted to take dinner with her at Tidewater Farms (where she’s seldom to be found anymore) and set forth my sentiments on the matter of her blackmailing: that inasmuch as there had been no subsequent threats after the first letter from Niagara Falls, the investigator recommended to me by legal colleagues in nearby Buffalo had nothing really to proceed upon; he agreed with me that there was little to be done until and unless the blackmailer was heard from again when she filed suit against Harrison’s will. For this opinion — which disappointed her itch to punish — I was thanked. But my after-dinner overture (a mere squeezing of her hand over brandy; an honest declaration that she looked radiant as ever; a head-shaking admission that I was still overwhelmed, overwhelmed, by our unexpected love-making of the week before) was smilingly squelched.

“Don’t forget, my dear: I’m to be married.”

I refrained from asking who had forgotten that detail, or found it irrelevant, out by Red Nun 20 on May 16.

In a word, it would have seemed, even as of yesterday, that that momentous moment was after all to be inconsequential—as, after all, our affair of 37 years past had been, except for the clouded paternity of Jane’s cloudy daughter. Nevertheless, it was the only thing that interested me or gave interest to other things. I write these lines to you for no other reason than to speak of Jane. I prepare to defend Harrison’s will against the suits now separately filed by his widow and two children only because their quarrel reenacts an earlier one (“Yesterday Now!” Drew cracked when our paths crossed in orphan’s court); and I am obsessed with this reenactment only because it came to include the aforecelebrated 8 and 10 R. Jane, Jane!

Obsession it is, however. In the five weeks past, I have reexamined like scripture my old Floating Theatre memoir and its subsequent novelization for clues to what might happen next. 11 L (we recall, Dad) read June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win Mack v. Mack and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to. Or, as rendered in that novel:

I have in my office, opposite the desk, a fine staring-wall, a wall that I keep scrupulously clear for staring purposes, and I stared at it. I stared at it through February, March, April, and May, and through the first week of June, without reading on its empty surface a single idea.

Then, on the very hot June 17th of 1937, our Mrs. Lake, who is as a rule a model of decorum, came sweating decorously into my office with a paper cup of iced coffee for me, set it decorously on my desk, accepted my thanks, dropped a handkerchief on the floor as she turned to leave, bent decorously down to retrieve it, and most undaintily — oh, most indecorously — broke wind, virtually in my coffee.

“Oh, excuse me!” she gasped, and blushed, and fled…

Et cetera. The work is fiction: It was her pencil, not her handkerchief, Polly dropped. I do not have, never had, a staring-wall in my office. I used and use a window giving upon a mountain of oyster shells from the crab- and oyster-packing plant hard by Court Lane: shells that in those days were pulverized into lime for chicken feed or trucked down-county to pave secondary roads with, but now are recycled back to the oyster beds for the next generation of spats to attach themselves to. But it was in fact that serendipitous crepitation that put me in mind of the late Mack Senior’s bequest of his pickled defecations, and suggested to me that should his widow’s gardener, say, deploy that excrement about the flower beds of their Ruxton property, for example, I might just be able to make a case against Harrison’s mother for Attrition of Estate…