Apology seemed but further aggravation; even so, I told her as I rowed that while that had been a sore mistake on my part, her visit had most certainly not been, et cetera. No response. At the dock she clambered out of the dinghy and told me shortly that I was not to follow her into the club, much less (what I’d requested) see her to the airport. Her eyes filled; remorse smote; what’s more, I needed ice. But I let her go, a sorrying figure hauling through the heat, toward that building familiar to her girlhood. I paddled back to the boat and watched dejectedly with binoculars until I saw a cab come and return across the causeway; then I fetched my ice and ascertained at the bar that My Daughter had indeed taxied off to Friendship Airport (Yessiree, the barman said with practiced incuriosity). After washing the weekend off me in the clubhouse showers, I weighed anchor and recrossed the Bay, very alone, to Chester River and snug Queenstown Creek, to sort out my feelings in home waters and try to make peace with myself.
It was not an especially difficult job. I was glad that Jeannine Mack had come to me for counsel, reestablished our connection, gone sailing with me, and listened to my advice. I was surprised and happy to have made love with (oh well, to have got laid by) her, and even now couldn’t manage to feel monstrous or even exploitative except there at the end. I was sorry to have disappointed her; mighty anxious that she’d do herself injury; awfully glad to be by myself again. That was that — and remains so, except that my concern for her welfare mounts with each newsless day.
Oh yes: and I was gratified by her reasonable attitude concerning Harrison’s estate, on which agenda item I was quiet enough of spirit by midnight to focus my attention. I had supped, swum in the silky water, napped for two hours, and come back on deck to try the Perseids again, with slightly better luck. In the trail of one particular dazzler that swept through Pegasus (so our Author would have it), as I wondered whether Jeannine and Polly Lake and Jane Mack might be watching that same meteor, and from where, there came the damnedest, the farthest-fetched, but just possibly the most inspired notion I’d had all year as an attorney-at-law.
It was an open secret in the Tidewater Foundation that Harrison in his last madness had emulated his father’s whim of preserving the products of his dying body, but that in keeping with the times he had caused his excrement to be freeze-dried rather than pickled in company jars. It was no secret at all to me, nor any wonder, that though Jane had humored this aberration (and many another) in her husband, she had refused to let the stuff be stored at Tidewater Farms. One inferred that it was kept somewhere in the plenteous warehouses of Mack Enterprises. It was a conspicuous fact, however, that m.e. was feverishly hatching Cap’n Chick, who so filled the nest of its parent company that other Mack Enterprises were already smitten with sibling jealousy; Jane herself had merrily complained that she might have to convert the Dorset Heights Apartments into an auxiliary Crabsicle warehouse, so pressed was Cap’n C. for cubic footage. Finally, it was a howling obviousness that my own life, like a drowning man’s, had been set since March on Instant Replay…
So where was Harrison’s freeze-dried shit? That Jane herself would reenact her late mother-in-law’s blunder and dispose, before settlement, of an entailed portion of her husband’s estate was unimaginable. But if some middle-management type had quietly done so, thinking thereby to please his boss; and if it could be argued that by the principle of Command Responsibility the president of m.e. was therefore guilty of Attrition of Estate; and if her contest suit could thus be threatened on no less distinguished a precedent than that of the Maryland Court of Appeals in Mack v. Mack of March 1938…
Longest of long shots! Surely, Author, not even You would go so far!
Next morning (Day 4: T 8/12) I reached and ran through soft gray drizzle on a mild southeasterly up the quiet Chester and parked for lunch in Emory Creek off the Corsica River, a fine private place dear to Polly Lake in earlier Augusts. I said my good-byes to it and motored — the breeze had failed, the drizzle persisted: good thinking weather — between narrowing banks and handsome farms to Chestertown, my destination. A whitetail fawn danced on the shore near Devil’s Reach, where the current sweeps so sharply past the outside bend that a 20-foot draft can be carried almost to the beach; the old, soft red and white town was as agreeable a sight as ever to sail up to, even in that weather. But my Terminal Travelogue, then as now, took second place to plot. I tied up at the marina dock, telephoned my office, checked in with Ms. Pond (ignoring her studied incuriosity), and then asked my young colleague Jimmy Andrews to inquire discreetly whether Jane Mack was back in town and where the uninterred portion of her late husband’s remains was stored.
Surely, he said, you do not go so far as to suppose. Of course not, I reassured him. But even so. Okay? Discreetly. I’d call back from somewhere on Friday.
Next I telephoned Fort Erie, Ontario (all this from a pay phone in a wharfside restaurant): that “Remobilization Farm.” Ms. Golden was there, a curt black male voice informed me, but would not take phone calls. “Saint Joe” Morgan would. What on earth, I asked him when he came to the phone, was he doing in that kooky place? He told me calmly that he had his reasons, and hoped I was calling to tell him that Marshyhope’s Tower of Truth had collapsed upon his successor. No? Tant pis. Then maybe I could tell him what had gotten into his patient Bea Golden, who since her return from French leave in Maryland had become even more of a nuisance than before. They were doing their best to keep booze away from her, but like most alkies she seemed to get it somewhere, or manufacture it in her own liver.
Ah? Tell me more.
They gathered that on the rebound from Reg Prinz she had been picked up by somebody down there for a weekend and then been dumped again. I agreed, faint and sweating, that that sounded plausible. I promised to notify the family and authorized Morgan on behalf of the Tidewater Foundation to seek proper psychiatric and medical treatment for her; also to keep my office informed of her condition. I would come up there myself if the situation warranted, or send a representative “if she associates me too closely with her family.” I felt momently more ill; had barely presence of mind enough, before I rang off, to ask Morgan about another patient on the premises: chap named Casteene?
Pas ici, said Joe. His opinion was that the fellow supervised a sort of underground railway for U.S. draft resisters and had gone south to lubricate the wheels. But Joe knew little about him, and was not being particularly forthcoming anyhow, and I was too moved with self-revulsion and concern for Jeannine to draw him out further. I ate lightly, without appetite, there in the restaurant; then to escape the traffic noise from the nearby highway bridge I bid a vexed good-bye to Chestertown and motored back to anchor for the night in Devil’s Reach, using both anchors against the swift current. Three mallards — two drakes and a hen — paddled over for handouts. Sheepflies bit, oblivious to chemical repellent. There would be no meteors that evening, and who cared? I screened the companion way and forward hatches and went to bed early, out of sorts.
Day 5 blew up gray and disagreeable. Above the Chester there was nothing I felt like saying adieu to; I decided to recross to Annapolis and begin working south along both sides of the Bay. But halfway down the river, beating into a rising southwesterly which, should I continue, I’d have to bang through all the way to the Severn, I changed my mind. Foul-weather sailing has its pleasures, but not in foul spirits. I ran north up Langford Creek instead, anchored for lunch off Cacaway Island, another favorite; fidgeted with odd-job maintenance for a while, then out of boredom sailed the five miles up to the head of the creek’s east fork and motor-sailed back, parking early for the night in the same spot. The warm wind had veered west and risen above fifteen knots. I swam in the nettle-free waves (the sky was clearing; there was no thunder) and circumambulated the empty little island. Its name I understand to be corrupted from the Algonquin cacawaasough, or chief, but it spoke to me of Harrison Mack’s freeze-dried feces, their disposition.