Letters

I had meant to bid adieu to certain tributaries of the Potomac — St. Inigoes on the St. Mary, for instance, near where white Marylanders first landed — but I had digressed too long and too far with the heirs of Harrison Mack. Through binoculars I could just make out, as I entered the Bay, Point No Point Lighthouse, ten miles to west-southwestward, and I felt another proper pang, not unmixed with exhilaration, as I turned northwest instead, back up the Chesapeake, toward home. Goodbye, Point No Point, fit title for the story of my life. Good-bye to all things south of Bloodsworth: I shall not pass your way again.

No breeze but what came under the awning from our headway. Trolling a Hopkins Spoon for bluefish (I caught only one; we were moving too fast), I motored all day through glass-calm water, past Hoopers, Barren, and Taylors islands, 30 miles up the Bay and ten more into the Little Choptank to Church Creek, in whose mouth I anchored at sundown. There was neither light nor water enough to go the mile and a half farther to my destination, near the creek’s head; anyhow there were fewer bugs and more air where I was. Perspiring through my insect repellent every hour or so, I spent the evening trying vainly to draw the connections that had teased me through the day’s navigation, and found myself at bedtime with no more than a list of names—Harrison Jane Castine Cook Drew Jeannine Bray—between which I made less meaningful associations than between the dinner entries in my log: cold artichoke broiled bluefish French bread rosé.

After breakfast I dinghied up to Old Trinity Churchyard and said good-bye to that tranquil place (maintained in part by foundation funds) which presently my remains shall say hello to. I will not join the family, Dad, in Plot #1. If I cannot manage to recycle my body to the crabs and fishes on which it has so long and gratefully fed, it will go into this venerable, quiet ground, so near their haunts that I heard the minnows plashing from my grave.

I had dreamed again that night. Through the day — an easy glide on prevailing southerlies out of the Little, and into the Great, Choptank, my river — I mused upon those dreams. They had been local geographical teasers, inspired no doubt by Point No Point. That name figured in them, as did Ragged Point, Cooks Point, Todds Point, which-all I left to starboard during the day: my subconscious is as unsubtle as our Author. There now lay home, so close I could scan the property with binoculars; but I had two bases more to touch, and planned anyhow to end my cruise and the week in Cambridge, with a stop at the office, before coming full circle to Todds Point. The mild breeze died in midriver, at slack tide, just off the Choptank Light. I lowered sail, kicked the engine on, and chugged up the wealthy Tred Avon past Oxford to my parking place: snug and unspoiled Martin Cove, not named on Chart 551.

After shower and dinner, finishing a soft Bordeaux under a fine full moon, I turned last night’s name-list into a list of questions. For what reason could Castine and Drew be friends, who were by way of being rival contenders for Harrison’s money, if not that they were in political collusion to swindle Jane, perhaps Jeannine as well? Did not Drew’s position vis-à-vis “the media”—i.e., co-opting the co-opters — account for his easy new detente with A. B. Cook, perhaps even with me, and his expressed wish, however apparently sincere, for reconciliation with his sister? Disagreeable speculation! But unto death I am a lawyer. How account, though, for Cook’s affability, which seemed to me to go substantially beyond his former and famous mercuriality? Could there be anything to Joseph Morgan’s old supposition, that behind that flag-waving poetaster was a closet radical? How useful it might have been for this old trial lawyer to watch him and Castine together! Could Drew be planning to turn the Fort McHenry film scene into a terrorist demolition stunt? Or could Cook, say (or Castine, for possibly different reasons), be setting Drew up for such a stunt in order to thwart and arrest him? Perhaps Cook, rather than Castine, was an Intelligence Type!