Letters

Given my age and recent distress — and the prompting of “Juliette,” who had already left her menses behind — I was inclined to believe myself entering the menopause. By the time my condition became undeniable the pregnancy was well established, and I had not seen André for at least two months. I was not disposed to tell him about it, much less seek his advice or help: I spent some time verging upon relapse; then got hold of myself and set about to arrange the abortion. “Juliette” scolded me: it was the father’s child, too; he had the right to be consulted, and to be permitted to assist if our judgements concurred. Only if they did not should I do on my own as I saw fit. For her part, she thought it would be charming for “us” to bear and raise the child; she’d always wanted to be a father.

André appeared straight off, of course, somehow apprised of the situation (I had ceased to be curious whether “Juliette,” or half the world, was in his confidence). Had he wished me to carry, bear, and raise the child, I should certainly have done so. As he graciously deferred to my wishes in the matter, I asked him without hesitation to find me an abortionist willing and able to deal with so advanced a pregnancy.

Not surprisingly, he knew of one. Just across the Niagara from your city, in the little town of Fort Erie, Ontario, is an unusual sanatorium financed in part, so André told me, by the philanthropy of my friend Harrison Mack, with whom André just happened to be acquainted. Things could be arranged with the supervising physician there, a competent gentleman. I would be distressed, by the way, to hear that Monsieur Mack’s spells of delusion had become more frequent and, one might say, more thorough since Jeffrey and I last visited him in ’62: one wondered if it were not some long-standing attraction to me that led him to fancy himself British?

I reminded André (we were driving down the Queen Elizabeth Way) that I was only half British; he reminded me that George III had been scarcely that. Did I know the Macks’ daughter, the film starlet “Bea Golden”? I did not. Just as well, inasmuch as she was recuperating under an assumed name, at this same sanatorium, from abortion-cum-delirium-tremens-cum-divorce-cum-nervous-breakdown. André himself, he volunteered, did not know the Mack family socially; but their son Drew was a coordinator of the Second Revolutionary Movement on American college campuses (indeed, the sanatorium, unknown to its administrators, was a training base for such coordinators); André’s “brother” was a familiar of the Macks; and André himself owned stock in Mack Enterprises.

Really?

Quite. Ever since the days of Turgot and the physiocrats — upon my article on whose connexion with Mme de Staël, his compliments — his family’s income had been from sound investments in the manufacturers of dreadful things: Du Pont, Krupp, Farben, Dow. The drama of the Revolution would be less Aristotelian, he declared, its history less Hegelian, never mind Marxist, if the capitalists did not finance their own overthrow. “We” had bought into Mack Enterprises when they got into defoliants and antiriot chemicals. Did I know that Harrison Mack, Senior, the pickle magnate, had in his dotage preserved his own excrement in Mason jars? And that his son “George III” had begun causing his to be freeze-dried? Freud had things arsy-turvy: there was the pure archival impulse, not vice versa! Did I know, by the way, the Latin motto of Mack Enterprises?

I did not, and was not to learn it for some while, for just here the present importunes to soil past and future alike. I was no stranger to clinical abortion; the “sanatorium” was peculiar (so had been the one in Lugano) but not alarming; the doctor — an elderly American Negro of whom I was reminded by the nameless physician in your End of the Road novel — was stern but not discourteous. I do not hold human life to be sacred, my own included — only valuable, and not always that. To have borne and raised that child would have been an unthinkable bother, an injustice to the child itself under the circumstances, an unreasonable demand on André’s part — which of course he did not make. I resist the temptation to say, in sentimental retrospect, that with all my heart I wished he had made exactly that unreasonable demand. But half my heart, one unreasoning auricle at least…

Instead, as I recuperated next day from the curettage, he made another. I was still groggy with anaesthesia; an important question had occurred to me just before our conversation on the Q.E.W. had been interrupted by our arrival at Fort Erie; I wanted urgently to recall it now, and I could not — would not, alas, until too late — even when that finest of male voices asked his pauvre chérié whether she remembered an historian named Morgan, formerly of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, currently president of a little college down that way endowed by Harrison Mack?