In honor of this anniversary and Harrison’s subsequent enrichment, I had later proposed to the Tidewater Foundation that fireworks be let off from Redmans Neck every June 17th; the motion did not carry, but Harrison seldom failed, except during the period of our estrangement, to drop by the office on that date for iced coffee with me and Polly, who took our teasing tributes with her usual good humor. Even last June, confined to Tidewater Farms, he had delivered to her via Lady Amherst a bottle of good French perfume, the gift card embossed with the old Mack Enterprises slogan, and I’d taken her to dinner as was my custom in honor of her aid in the largest case of its sort we’d ever won.

This year was different. Given 10 R, my reconnection with Jane, I could not make the ritual office jokes as PLF Day approached, lest my new obsession with my life’s recycling disturb the spontaneity of 11 R, which had assumed great importance to me. 10 R had literally refetched Jane into my life, my bed, my heart; though Polly’s famous flatus at 11 L had nothing directly to do with Jane and me, I looked to the character of its recurrence (Literal? Symbolical? Straightforward? Inverse?) for clues to what might follow. Was my future—12 R, 13 R — to be fecundated or stercorated? Was I in for another and final Dark Night of the Soul and Second Suicide? Or would my tremulous vision on the New Bridge in 1967, that Everything Has Intrinsic Value, somehow come to realization — with Jane, with Jane? What dénouement, grim or golden, had our Author up His sleeve?

Since May 16 I had not seen Polly socially, and our office relations, while certainly cordial, were merely official. But as we carried on our business (without once comparing notes on our separate “dates” after my shipboard party: unusual for us), I watched like an osprey from the side of my eye for clues to the reenactment I was confident we approached. In addition to that meeting of the Mack Enterprises Board of Directors where the old I’s protest against the new me had been outvoted, our business had included the reviewing of those suits filed against Harrison’s will, a quick flight to Buffalo to meet that aforementioned detective and speak carefully with him about Jane’s blackmailer, and a board meeting of the Tidewater Foundation, where among other things we discussed the weighty matter of next September’s cornerstone ceremonies for the Tower of Truth (for the other directors the question was which documents and artifacts best represented 1969; for Yours Truly it was where to lay a cornerstone in a round tower) and passed on the annual applications for foundation grants. Mr. Jerome Bray’s LILYVAC nonsense we have finally washed our hands of, even Drew gruffly acknowledging that its fuzzy claim to radical-political relevance was fraudulent. Ditto the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks, now the king is dead. Reg Prinz’s film, “Bea Golden’s” sanatorium and haven for draft evaders, and the Original Floating Theatre II we still contribute to the support of, in various measure.

As my general secretary, Polly was witness to all this. She was as gratified as I by what she took to be Drew’s “mellowing,” especially towards me; we agreed it had nothing to do with the will contest, but could not decide whether it betokened a change of mood among political activists in the last lap of the Shocking Sixties or some personal ground-change in Drew since his father’s death. Together we tisked our tongues at the cost overruns on Schott’s Tower, as well as at certain evidence that the foundation work was not up to specifications and may have to be repaired at enormous expense to the state, since the contractor is filing for bankruptcy. We tisked again at the report (from Drew, via Jeannine) that Joe Morgan, who’d dropped out of sight from Amherst College after resigning his presidency at Marshyhope, has apparently done a Timothy Leary and surfaced as a hippie at the “Remobilization Farm.”

But in none of these witnessings, gratifyings, and tongue-tiskings could I find augury of 11 R. The Bull gave way to the Twins, May to June; PLF Day rushed from Tomorrow towards Now, casting no discernible shadow before it.

Then, on that same unlucky Friday of me’s adoption and my rejection by President Jane, Polly pleasantly announced her retirement, effective virtually at once! Her replacement she had already selected and trained: the “girl” (37, our age on the original PLF Day; she seems a child!) who’d filled in for her at vacation time for several years and worked half-time for us while raising her children. Polly would stop in on the Monday to insure that all was well; she would stop in from time to time thereafter when she happened to be visiting Cambridge, to see to it I was neither exploiting nor being exploited by her successor. And she would miss me sorely, and the good ship Osborn Jones, and dear damp Dorchester, whose Tercentennial festivities she would miss too. But her heart had got the better of her head, she declared, as she hoped for my sake Jane Mack’s would too before very long. She had acceded to the entreaties of her (other) occasional lover of many years’ standing, that gentleman three years my senior whose existence I believe I mentioned in my last: not quite to marry him, as he wished, at least not right away, but to pool her pension benefits with his and retire with him to Florida, the Elysium of Social Security lovers. He’d proposed, not for the first time, after dinner on a certain Friday night last month. She’d reviewed, not for the first time, all the pros and cons, and some days later had said yes.

The short notice to me? To give herself ample time to chicken out before Going Public, and no time to do so having Gone; also to give me less time to talk her out of her resolve, which she hoped I cared enough for her not to try, lest I succeed. On the Tuesday they would fly from Baltimore down to Tampa for a “honeymoon” of real-estate prospecting and trying each other out as living-companions; assuming all went well, they’d be back in Maryland in August to wind up their affairs here and move south for keeps.

I didn’t try to dissuade her, Dad. Was too entirely stunned to. After 35 years, half a day’s notice! Yet she was quite right: Ms. Pond (dear God, God, have You no shame?) had all the skills, knew the office pretty well, was not disagreeable to work with; the rest there was no replacing, however long the notice. But (I wondered silently, terrifically) what about 11 R?

Good as her word, she came in on the Monday. Bon voyage gifts were laid on, jokes made about Florida, about septuagenarian lovers. Embraces, tears, laughter. Polly looked fine. Her friend was in good health, a gentleman, well enough off; they would be all right. How I envied them! She wished me the best; half her life was in that office; we’d done remarkable things together. She paused. She didn’t believe history really repeated itself. There were echoes, of course, if you listened for them, but the future — what there was of it for people our age — was new, and lay ahead, not behind us. All very well, I thought; yet what about…

But as if by tacit agreement, no allusion whatever was made to…

And so Tuesday the 17th came and went in thunderous silence, as if Polly’s flight laid an antisonic boom along the Eastern Shore. From 9 to 5, whenever Ms. Pond was in the office, I managed to drop things: my pen, my iced-coffee spoon; she must think me senile. But they were gracefully and soundlessly retrieved, a young woman picking up after an old codger with a sudden unquenchable thirst for iced coffee and a queer predilection for staring out the window at a certain oyster-shell pile.

Nothing — unless indeed opposites, negatives, count, in which case perhaps the entire absence of Polly Lake, and a fortiori of her etc., might betoken at the least my loss of the pending contest over Harrison’s will, and at the worst… Nonsense: 11 R didn’t happen, not on PLF Day or the next, or the next, by when in my frustration I was not fit society. For if time is not circling ’round, then 8 and 10 R, Jane’s return to me in the evening of our lives, that wondrous O out by Red Nun 20… portend nothing. My inchoate vision on the New Bridge was a delusion, and Now will be Tomorrow and Tomorrow: empty.