Letters

A life, at that, lately turned ’round such sharp, improbable corners (even in the little space between my first letter and your reply) that I can scarcely recognise it any longer as my own, far less understand or rationally approve it. For Mme de Staël — I think for history generally — April truly is the cruellest month, as my old friend and fellow cat-lover once wrote: the tumultuous month when Cain slew Abel, when Jesus (and Dante) descended into Hell; when Shakespeare and Cervantes an Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. (and Germaine de Staël’s beloved father) all died; when the Titanic sank and the American Revolution began and Napoleon abdicated and the crew of the H.M.S. Bounty mutinied and all the black slaves in New York rebelled; when both ill-starred Germaines (and “Petit Nous”) were born; and when, in 1794, that other, better Germaine wrote despairingly from Coppet to her lover Narbonne in England: “Apparently, everything I believed I meant to you was a dream, and only my letters are real…”

I am distraught, as even my penmanship attests. You found disconcerting, you say, certain “spooky” coincidences between my first letter to you and your notes toward a new novel. I find disconcerting, even alarming, some half-prophetic correspondences between your reply and the course of my current life: so much so that I am led (yet another manifestation of early middle-aged foolishness, no doubt) seriously to reconsider your proposal, or proposition. I have much to tell, no one to tell it to…

But you must swear to me, by the Muse we both honour, that you are not nor have lately been in communication with Ambrose Mensch, as he has sworn to me he is not with you. Can you, sir, will you so swear? To

Yours sincerely,

Germaine Pitt

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Confessing her latest love affair and the excesses of its current stage.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

19 April 1969

My dear B.,

L Street and its companions — five long vowelled avenues crosshatched through sand and weeds by a score of short consonantal streets — comprise what is euphemistically called, by its “developers,” the residential “development” of a large corn and tomato field belonging to Mack Enterprises, Inc. Lying athwart an ever shallower winding creek midway between Cambridge and Redmans Neck, at the vertiginous “Heights” of five to seven feet above mean low water, it consists presently of the low-rise brick apartment house at 24 L — tenanted by new MSUC faculty, married graduate students, and (as of a few weeks ago) myself — and three prefabricated “model homes,” unoccupied. The rest is scrub pine, weedy drainage ditches, wooden temporary street signs, and advertising brochures. Mrs Jane Mack, whose backward brainchild Dorset Heights is, confidently expects the burgeoning of Marshyhope U., and the consequent demand for low-cost housing in its proximity, to turn this paper polis into a town half the size of Cambridge by 1976 and to swell her already distended fortune: the capital for its next phase of construction she has borrowed against her expectation of a settlement in her favour, rather than her children’s, of her late husband’s disputed estate.