Letters

by John Barth

  “That’s right!” Jane said, seriously. But more than her married life, family life, and social life, she went on, she enjoyed the business life she’d taken up since Harrison’s decline. It was a passion with her, she admitted, her truest and chiefest; she regarded herself as having been neither a very good wife and mother nor a bad one, but she knew she was a good businessperson, and she loved the whole entrepreneurial-managerial enterprise more than she’d ever loved any human being, think of her what I would.

  I thought her lucky to both know and have what she loved, and said so. But what about “Lord Baltimore”? Those trysts in London and Tobago?

  She poofed away the word trysts. She and André (aha, we have milord’s first name) didn’t much go for that sort of thing—not that they just played bridge and tennis, I was to understand! But the pleasure they found in each other’s society, and the basis for their (still confidential) affiancement, was the pleasure of shared tastes and objectives, together with compensatory desires, with which sex had little to do. Think what I would of Betsy Patterson, Wallis Warfield Simpson, Grace Kelly; like them she had always hankered after a bona fide title; would almost rather be Baroness So-and-so or “Lady Baltimore” than be rich! As for “Lord B.,” never much interested in business and virtually dispossessed by Canadian social welfare taxes—he would rather be rich than titled. Why then should they not both be both, since they so enjoyed each other otherwise?

  She knew what I must be thinking, Jane said here, especially as her friend was some years younger than she. But suppose he were a fortune hunter in the vulgar sense, as she was confident he was not: she was a businesswoman, and had no intention of endowing him, unless in her will, with more than the million or so (minus inheritance taxes, gift taxes, and lawyers’ fees) she hoped to win from the will suit. A windfall, really, costing her no more in effect than her title would cost him. Now, she was no child: she’d had his credentials and private history looked into, and was satisfied that he was what he represented himself to be: a middle-aged widower of aristocratic descent and reduced means (like her friend Germaine Pitt), who truly enjoyed her society and candidly wished he had more money to implement his civilized tastes. But even if she turned out to be being foolish, it was a folly she could afford.

  I agreed, my heart filling with an odd emotion. But she had mentioned sex?

  Would I believe it? she wondered, blushing marvelously. She was being blackmailed! Or threatened with blackmail. About… a Sex Thing! A Sex Thing?

  Out of her past, she added hastily. Mostly. Sex Things that she herself had completely forgotten about, as if they had never happened.

  Ah. Uneasily, but with sharp interest, I wondered whether… But no: 20 years ago, it seems, she had been briefly swept quite off her feet by another titled gentleman, now deceased: friend of the family, delightful man, I’d know his name if she told me, but a perfect rakehell; she couldn’t imagine what on earth had attracted her so, or how she’d let him talk her into doing the mad things they did. Maybe it was change of life: she’d had a hysterectomy the year before, and was taking hormones, and feeling her age then much more than now. Maybe it was that Jeannine was turning into such a little tramp already at sixteen, or that she and Harrison weren’t as close as they’d been before…

  Lady Amherst’s husband? I asked, and identified my old emotion: simple jealousy. Jane nodded, smiling and tisking her tongue. It seemed a hundred years ago; she and Germaine had never even mentioned it since the latter’s return to Maryland. She doubted Germaine even remembered; it hadn’t seemed to bother her at the time, though it had upset poor Harrison. She herself had just about forgotten it, it was at once so crazy and so inconsequential. And it was immediately afterwards that she became so absorbed in business that nothing could have tempted her That Way again, not even to a flirtation, much less—she closed her eyes, breathed deeply.

  Well. I had gathered, sketchily, from Harrison in his decline, that there had been some such affair, in London and Paris in the autumn of 1949, with someone they’d met in their prewar travels. And it had “upset” him, much more than Jane’s only other known adultery—her long-term affair with me in the 1930’s—because, while briefer and less serious, this one had taken place with neither his complaisance nor, at first, his knowledge. He himself, I believe, had never been unfaithful except for infrequent one-nighters with expensive call girls when he was out of town on business. He admired his wife above all other women he knew; sexual self-confidence was not his strongest trait, but it seemed to me he had a healthy, shrug-shouldered understanding of whatever in his character had once indulged our ménage à trois, and had “outgrown” it, neither repressing his past like Jane nor dwelling on it. A pity indeed, if Jane’s uncharacteristic last fling with Jeffrey Amherst (whom I never met) turns out to have been among the causes of Harrison’s madness—in which, it occurred to me suddenly and sadly, he had at once insulated himself from her rejection of him by seeming to reject her, and bestowed upon her the highest title in the book.

  But as she said, I said now, that was over and done 20 years ago, and both her then lover and her husband were dead. How could she be blackmailed? Surely her new Canadian friend would not be much bothered to hear she’d once had an extramarital fling?

  How warmly our cool Jane blushes. It wasn’t just hearing, she informed me. That darned Jeffrey (Jane has never used coarse language) had had the naughtiest mind of any man she’d ever met! He’d made her do crazy things! And there were pictures…

  Aha. Which someone had somehow got hold of, I suggested, and threatened to show to friend André? But what difference could they possibly make?

  “Toddy,” she said, in a tone I hadn’t heard for 30 years; Sentimental Jealousy would surely have taken its place with Mirth, Surprise, Fear, Frustration, Despair, and Courage in the gallery of Strong Emotions I Have Known, had it not been largely displaced a moment later by pure Gee-Whizment. For (she now revealed) it was not only the past that had been recaptured by some voyeuristic Kodak, and it was not André she feared would see the photos. André was in one… taken in London… well after Jeffrey’s death… in fact, just a few months ago…

  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 Connaught. And the darned thing was, sex wasn’t really a big thing with them; this must have been about their first or second time in bed; she doubted they’d ever done such things since. And how in the world anybody could take their picture without their knowing it!

  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 photog
raphy. 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 stunner, a knockout. Where were the varicosities, striations, liver spots? The thickened waist and slacked behind and fallen pectorals? The crow’s-feet, jowls, and wattles of latter age? Jane’s hair is perfectly gray; her face is delicately seasoned rather than dewy fresh (as it had still been at 43!); her skin all over, and her musculature, also has that slightly seasoned cast. Otherwise… Fifteen years younger-looking than her inverted lover, for example, a healthy specimen himself. No question about it, she is a physical freak. But there are freaks and freaks; if this is arrested development, let them throw away the key.

  Jane (I exclaimed when I was able)! You are a smasher, a stunner, et cetera! How could these photographs possibly do otherwise than delight you as they delight me, as they must be the delight of any family member, friend, enemy, business associate or competitor whose eyes are privileged to rest upon them? As they must delight God himself, whom I suspect of snapping that full-color overhead? Blackmail indeed! Have them enlarged and framed on your office walls, reproduced in the brochures of all Mack Enterprises, direct-mailed to preferred stockholders and to every senior citizens’ organization in the republic!

  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 Connaught back in ’49. But there’d been nobody on the ceiling last January! And it was still to be explained how naughty Jeff’s photo (which she’d never even thought of since, or seen a print of till now) came into someone else’s hands 20 years later. And whose? Would I please, as one of her oldest friends and the most trusted, try discreetly to find out who had sent her that note (from Niagara Falls, N.Y., 14302, on St. Patrick’s Day, the envelope revealed, with a 6-cent Cherokee Strip commemorative), so that she could protect herself and “Lord Baltimore” from further invasion of their privacy and proceed to contest Harrison’s will if she saw fit?

  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 innocent she might have been about lewd invasions of personal privacy. She had a fair idea of what sufficient money could hire done. If I would help her find the guilty party, the rest could be left to her.

  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 Jeannine? For while I couldn’t quite imagine Drew’s highly principled illegalities extending so far, two million was a lot of bread for the Revolution, and it seemed not unimaginable that his hand might be forced by some less scrupulous comrade. As for Jeannine, I had no notion whatever of what moral lines she drew, if any, but I couldn’t imagine her standing up to, say, Reg Prinz’s silent suasion. In any event, both could surely be said to have the motive for blackmail, if not the means or, on the face of it, the disposition. So too could her cousin A. B. Cook VI, a much likelier candidate now that I thought about it. Germaine Pitt, on the other hand, would seem to have readier means, at least for having somehow come across the earlier photograph among her late husband’s memorabilia; but she had truly cared for Harrison, and I couldn’t fancy her suing for a larger bequest, much less resorting to vulgar blackmail. For that matter, as representative of the major loser in a successful action on Jane’s part, I myself ought properly to be among the prime suspects, ought I not?

  Death to all of you, Jane said affably. I was in her element now—sizing up the competition—and she had of course reviewed the lot of us plus other direct and indirect beneficiaries of the will as possible authors of that letter. That she’d then come to me spoke for itself, she declared. She suspected Prinz, whose scruples were dubious but whose photographic expertise was not, or some unknown colleague of Drew’s, certainly not Yvonne. In either case, Jeannine and Drew might well know nothing of it, and need never. Would I help her?

  I told her I was afraid to say no. Was she truly capable of “putting out a contract” on the person responsible? That was not what she’d said, she said: there were surely more ways than one to neutralize a threat, once the threatener was identified. Photographic negatives could be located and destroyed; effective counterthreats or other checkmates could be devised. Where was my imagination? Meanwhile, she assumed I had other appointments that afternoon, as she did, and there was no particular hurry about this inquiry, since no payment was being demanded or deadline set. Why didn’t I think about it for a while? And would I agree at least not to rush the will into orphan’s court until I had so thought, and we’d talked again about it?

  When Jane is being Madam President, her briskness is a little false, at least professional, as it surely wasn’t back there with the photos and the Kleenex. She was so pleased to have had our chat; we didn’t see nearly enough of each other since Harrison’s death; we must get together socially, and soon. I tried the most obvious double entendre: Indeed it had been a joy to see her again, so little changed since old times…

  Well, she declared: we’ll certainly get together. Soon. Toodle-oo now.

  Ta-ta.

  I wanted to believe her so unrufflable that, perfectly aware of my irony, she declined to acknowledge it because she found it vulgar, at least inappropriate. Similarly, that she quite remembered her past visits to my office, and to my room, and simpl
y saw no reason to acknowledge the memory. But my whole sense of her told me she was oblivious to both.

  Now I’m less certain. (It’s Saturday sunrise. I fell asleep over the chart table. I’m sore in every joint. We 69-year-olds can’t do the Dear-Diary thing all night like a teenager after a big date.) Of anything. Except that, as best we wretched Andrewses can love, Todd Andrews loves Jane Mack; has never ceased loving her since 1932; has never loved anyone else. How stupid my life has been, old man: empty, insignificant, unmentionable! How full hers, however “oblivious.” And who am I to speak of her obliviousness, who scarcely realized until last night that I’ve been in love with that astonishing woman for 37 years?

  As Jane suggested, we got together. Not exactly “soon”: seven Fridays later, yesterday. I’d thought about those photographs in the meanwhile; had seen a bit of Lady Amherst and Ambrose Mensch (who seem to be a couple these days; lots of horny gossip; more power to them) out at the college, where things have been popping. Watched Drew and Reg Prinz in action out there too, and reinforced a few tentative conclusions. Germaine’s a stable, decent woman in an unstable situation: I see in her neither cupidity nor vindictiveness. If she’s involved in anything like blackmail, it’s against her will, so to speak. Mensch is an enigma to me: erratic, improvisatory. I can imagine him, as Lady A.’s younger lover, obliging her to do something uncharacteristic—but I daresay they’re more likely candidates for prurient photography than purveyors of it. And what would they gain? Drew is, as ever, more principled than effectual. His surviving black colleagues haven’t been in evidence in the Marshyhope riots: either they have other fish to fry or he’s still on the outs with them since the bridge business. And he’s too aboveboard about his probate challenge-in-the-works to be feasibly underhanded. Prinz is a cipher, “Bea Golden” a blank—who, however, commutes between here and that quack sanatorium of hers up in Canada, not far from Niagara Falls. Of Cook I’ve seen and heard nothing except that he has declined without explanation an honorary degree from Marshyhope this spring, one which he’d previously either been pressing for or been being pressed for by John Schott. A minor mystery, from whose rough coincidence with the blackmail business I can make no plausible inferences. That Niagara Falls postmark had led me to consider also, fruitlessly, certain recipients of and rejected applicants for Tidewater Foundation grants up in that neck of the woods: no dice, except that at least one of the latter strikes me as a certifiable madman. Then there was Jane’s “Lord Baltimore,” who dwells somewhere in those latitudes: I even considered the possibility that the threat was bogus, some bizarre test of Yours Truly, administered—but what in the world for, unless to try whether his famous old heart is breakable at last?—by the Widow Mack herself.