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918 Iowa Ave.

Iowa City, Iowa

Nov. 4, 1969

Mr Cuthbert Bennett

Caretaker/The Pillsbury Estate

Mad Indian Point

Georgetown, Maine

My Dear Couth:

In the afterglow of your nice phone call, Biggie and I are sitting up tonight, spending imaginary fortunes and considering the alternative: a hara-kiri duet. See the two of us, squatting across from each other on the newly waxed linoleum floor. Biggie is carving out my stomach with the bread knife; I prefer the steak slicer for disemboweling her. We're quite absorbed in our work. We're being careful to smother our screams, not wanting to wake up Colm.

Colm, we agree, will go to Biggie's good parents in East Gunnery, Vermont. He'll grow up to be a skier and a wood-chopper, ruddy and craggy and so strongly mired in his New England nose-tones that he'll never care to trouble himself with another language - like Old Low Norse. The mumbled tongue of his ancestors, close and far.

It's not that I don't agree with everything Biggie told my father. It's only that I wish she hadn't blown her tact. Because I fear my father has to be treated like a Pope before he'll bestow blessings, and if you call the Pope a prick, will he still pray for you?

In the meantime, Biggie and I sit tracing her letter eastward. I see Biggie's blunt truth tilting a mail van in Chicago, her heavy message felling a postal employee in Cleveland. An ember of its heated feeling cools in the sea breeze on the coastal route between Boston and Great Boar's Head, where our mail is invariably delivered in the early afternoon. My mother will be home to open it, but Biggie swears it was addressed to my father alone, not to Dr & Mrs, in which case, recalling my mother's awe of the good doctor, she will not open it. She'll lay it on the counter below the liquor cabinet.

My father will come home at four, having just removed a bladder spigot or told some octogenarian that such an operation is advisable; having just fussily shaved himself in his tidy office-bathroom; having removed from his hands all traces of the surgical powder that helps the gloves slide on and off. He will allow my mother to peck his clean-shaven cheek; he'll fix himself a neat Scotch - after holding up the glass to light, to make sure it's been properly washed. Then he'll see the letter. He'll pinch it around, to see if there's a check enclosed, and my mother will say, 'Oh, no dear. It's from Iowa City. It's not a patient; it's from Fred, don't you think?'

My father will take off his suit jacket, loosen his tie, meander through the den to the sunporch window and remark on whether the tide is high or low, as if, mystically, it will influence where he sits. It never seems to.

He'll sit down in the same red-leather throne, crush the same hassock under his heels, sniff his Scotch, sip it, and then he'll read Biggie's letters.

If it went out in the noon mail yesterday, it's at least past Chicago today, if not already through Cleveland, and through Boston by tomorrow, and in Great Boar's Head tomorrow or the day after.

At which time, Couth, if you'd be so kind, please enter your darkroom and print two absolutely solid photographs, one all-white and one all-black; one is hope and the other is doom. Mail both to me. I will return to you the one that doesn't suit my occasion.

Wishing you, Couth, infinite varieties

of Hope and Freedom

from the Fear of Doom.

Love,

Bogus

Imagining good Couth by the rainy sea, his wild hair sailing in a nor'easter blowing Bar Harbor to Boothbay. Couth with one of his fuddy sea prayers for my letter held aloft, the empty Pillsbury mansion behind him, a ramble of rooms for his lonely play.

I remember the end of that one funny summer when we moved into the boathouse with its crammed little bunk beds.

'Top or bottom, Big?'

'Get up there ...'

While Couth lolled in the Big House after the Pillsburys had gone home for the fall.

Some younger son phoned to say he might be coming. 'My mother gone, Couth?'

'That's true, Bobby.'

'Aunt Ruth won't be there, will she?'

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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