Sharon’s husband-on-the-way-out, I learned, was the actor Melvin Bernstein. His real name had been Mel Miller; as an apprentice borscht-circuit comic he’d changed it to sound more Jewish; later, when he moved into “straight” acting, he regretted not having kept the low-profile original, but couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice the small and no longer quite appropriate celebrity of his stage name. To the consequent ambiguity of his scope and unambiguity of his name he attributed his failure to succeed as a leading man; but his career as a character actor was established in New York, and he was beginning to pick up similar roles in films. He was compulsively promiscuous, Sharon testified, and addicted to anal copulation, which she found uncomfortable and distasteful as well as, on the testimony of her proctologist, conducive to hemorrhoids. Hence the action for divorce, despite Mel’s engaging to offer to lubricate his vice with shmaltz. I was to muse upon this information six years later, when Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer, still the hopeful pre-starlet, flew out to Los Angeles via Reno to become the next Mrs. Melvin Bernstein.

Well.

About your Floating Opera novel, which appeared the following year, I understandably have mixed feelings. On the one hand it was decidedly a partial betrayal on your part of a partial confidence on mine, and though you altered names and doctored facts for literary effect, some people hereabouts imagined they saw through to the real thing, with consequent minor inconvenience to my law practice and my solitary life. It was not long after, for example, that I exchanged my regular room in the Dorset for a certain goose-hunting retreat out on Todd’s Point, down the river, and commissioned a local boatbuilder to convert me a skipjack to live aboard in Cambridge in the summer, when the hotel gets too warm. On the other hand, my old love of fiction, aforementioned, was gratified to see the familiar details of my life and place projected as through a camera obscura. What’s more, Harrison Mack read the novel too, found in it more to praise than to blame despite the unflattering light it cast him in, and was prompted to reopen a tentative correspondence with me, which soon led to the chaste reestablishment of our friendship and my retention as counsel for Mack Enterprises on the Eastern Shore. For this indirect and unintended favor, I’m your debtor.

The company had bought out old Colonel Morton’s farms and canneries, including the Redmans Neck property, and was replacing the tomatoes with more profitable soybeans. Harrison was just beginning to fancy himself George III of England and Jane to display the business acumen of her forebear and ideal, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. I did not know then — what I learned only last month — that Jane’s managerial activity, doubtless like Betsy’s, coincided with the termination of her menses by hysterectomy and, by her own choice, of her sexual life. Just prior to her surgery, in 1949, Jane had permitted herself the second extramarital affair of her biography, this time without Harrison’s complaisance: a brief wild fling in London and Paris with Sir Jeffrey William Pitt, Lord Amherst, now deceased, then husband of that same Lady Amherst you mention in your postscript and descendant of the Lord Jeff of French and Indian War celebrity. More anon.

Under Jane’s direction, Mack Enterprises throve and prospered. From chemical fertilizers and freeze-dried foods they branched into certain classified research in the chemical-warfare way, over the protests of myself (by then a stockholder) and son Drew, a political science undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. The Macks bought, built, and moved to Tidewater Farms; I became a trustee, then executive director of their Tidewater Foundation; Jeannine married Mel Bernstein; Drew scandalized his parents by going off to do graduate work at Brandeis, along with Angela Davis, under Herbert Marcuse. The Tidewater Foundation implemented, in addition to Tidewater Tech, dozens of lesser Mack philanthropies, some whimsical, not all with the unanimous consent of the trustees: a quack health farm in west New York and Ontario, not unlike the one described in your End of the Road novel (I opposed it; Jane and Harrison approved it for the sake of Jeannine, a sometime patient there); the Jerome Bonaparte Bray Computer Center at Lily Dale, N.Y. (he’s the crank you ask about in your letter, whom also I opposed; but both Macks were impressed by the Bonaparte connection, and Drew, to their surprise, also approved the project, for reasons not entirely clear); the Annual Greater Choptank July 4th Fireworks Display (this was a prickly one, as it offended both Harrison in his George III aspect and Drew in his radical antichauvinism. We pacified the father with a private Guy Fawkes Day display out on Redmans Neck; Drew’s demand for an equal-candlepower May Day celebration was then outvoted). Among our current unanimous beneficiaries are the upcoming Dorchester Tercentenary and a floating summer repertory theater on the Cambridge-Oxford-Annapolis circuit: a larger replica of Captain Adams’s showboat, it bears the paradoxical name Original Floating Theatre II. Never mind that Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, (as of 1963, when she left old Mel for Louis Golden, a producer of B — and blue — movies) exploited this charity to play roles she never could have won on her own: the productions, alternating with old flicks, are by far the best in the area, and this venture led the foundation into other cultural philanthropies: a media department at Tidewater Tech (now Marshyhope College), for example, and the subsidizing of young artists dealing with the local scene. E.g., as perhaps you know, “Bea Golden’s” latest lover (Louis having gone the way of his predecessors in 1968), the formidable Reggie Prinz, whose film-in-the-works of your new book is partially backed by foundation money.

I’m ahead of myself. Lord and Lady Amherst stopped at Tidewater Farms in 1961 and were, excuse me, royally entertained by the Macks, whether because Harrison and Lady A. knew nothing of Jane’s old affair (Jane herself, I am bemused to learn, has a positive genius for repressing unwelcome memories), or because Harrison’s royal delusion by then insulated him from jealousy (George III never wondered about Queen Charlotte). More likely, bygones were simply bygones. It was during this visit that Harrison first associated Germaine Pitt Amherst with the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Elizabeth Spencer: a new and fateful stage of his madness, partly responsible for her later invitation to MSUC. I first met her then, too, and liked her better than I liked her husband.

Meanwhile, up in Waltham, Mass., Andrews Mack has become fashionably but by no means insincerely radicalized. Having disappointed his parents in the first place by choosing Hopkins and Brandeis as his soul mothers rather than Princeton and Harvard, he now quite exasperates them by dropping his doctoral studies in ’63 to assist in the Cambridge (Maryland) civil rights demonstrations — quite as his father had picketed his own father’s pickle factories back in the thirties. When the July 4th fireworks were canceled that year on account of the race riots, Harrison followed the family tradition of disowning his son, though not by formal legal action. Drew responded by promptly marrying one of his ex-classmates, a black girl from Cambridge.

I do not suggest that he married her solely as a gesture of protest: Yvonne Miner Mack is a striking young woman, Brandeis-bright, less radical than her husband but well to the left of Bobby Kennedy, for example, in whose office in the Justice Department the Cambridge riots were temporarily adjudicated; Drew loved her and had been living with her for some time. But unlike his friend and apparent mentor “H. C. Burlingame VII” (don’t ask), young Mack is simplistic by policy as well as ingenuous and sincere by nature, and lives largely in ardent symbols. Moreover, he’d been opposed to marriage thitherto on the usual radicalist grounds. They have two sons now: bright, handsome little chaps whom Drew instructs in their African heritage and Yvonne takes to hear Leonard Bernstein’s children’s concerts. Sinistral but nowise sinister, long-haired and ascetic, Drew Mack looks to me less a hippie than a Massachusetts Minuteman in his denims, boots, and homespun shirts, his hair tied neatly back with a rubber band. I would bet my life on his integrity; not a nickel on his subtlety or diplomacy — and I think the Established Order has more to fear from him than from all the H. C. Burlingames and A. B. Cooks together, for he lives his beliefs down to the finest print he can understand.