Letters

Which almost, but not quite, brings me to your request. It is not to tease you with off-the-record confidences that I mention my current relations with the surviving Macks. It is to spell out, literally, the implications of your proposal, the better to reach some genuine accord. “You have invited me and engaged to pay me,” Thoreau used to tell his lecture audiences, “and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.” It is Good Friday morning, an office holiday, promising to warm up enough by afternoon for me to turn to a bit of fitting out of my old boat, but meanwhile cool enough to keep me in my room here in the Dorset Hotel — not my sole home any longer as in years praeteritas, but still my Cambridge pied-à-terre and the seat of my ongoing Inquiry—with little to do (that inquiry being presently stymied) besides respond at length, whether yea or nay, to your letter. Henry James, as I remember, used to want not to hear too much of an anecdote of which he wished eagerly to hear a certain amount, for imaginative purposes. But his brother William astutely remarks that to get enough of anything in nature, one has to take too much.

I wonder that your letter makes no mention of New Year’s Eve 1954, inasmuch as two of the three things of some moment that happened to me that night are known to you. Here in my room, around ten in the evening of that day, I finished drafting my memoir about not committing suicide aboard Capt. James Adams’s showboat in 1937—a story I’d been writing since the previous March as one facet of my old Inquiry—and prepared to resume the inquiry itself, together with the even older Letter to My Father of which it is a part. But to reward myself for completing the showboat narrative, I strolled down to the New Year’s Eve party in progress at the Cambridge Yacht Club. The Macks were settled in Baltimore at this time; I never saw or heard from them. But I was delighted to find Jeannine there with her (first) husband, Barry Singer, and I spent some time chatting with them. The marriage had caused a tiny stir in the old Guilford/Ruxton society in which the Macks moved, where anti-Semitism perhaps enjoys a prolonged half-life even today. But Singer was the son of Judge Joseph Singer of the Maryland Appellate bench, who had ruled with the majority in Harrison Mack’s favor in our great estate battle of 1938; Singer was moreover a proper Princetonian, and if his part-ownership of a chain of small-town movie houses was regarded by some as “Jewish,” they were pleased enough to meet at his parties the film and stage people among his friends. Barry himself was an engaging, quiet, cultured chap who should have been a lawyer and who certainly should have chosen a more stable bride, goyish or not.

But he could scarcely have chosen a lovelier. Jane Mack’s daughter was about 21 then and a beauty, with a St. Croix suntan to set off her honey-blonde hair and a smashing backless, nearly frontless gown to set off the suntan. Already she was a confirmed overdrinker (it was Singer who, that same evening, amiably corrected my misapprehension that the Yiddish term shicker described a Jewish man who, like himself, consorted with shiksas) and fatally bitten by the theatrical bug. But the booze hadn’t marked her yet, and given her looks, her youth, and her small connection with the Industry — which was still dominated by Hollywood in those days — Jeannine’s aspirations didn’t seem bizarre, at least at a party. She was happy to remeet her parents’ old and once close friend, the efficient cause of their wealth. She wondered why I didn’t see them more often, and why they chose to stay on in stuffy old Guilford, in broken-down Baltimore. Her own axis was Manhattan/Montego Bay, but they were thinking about chucking “the East Coast thing” altogether and moving to Los Angeles, if Barry could get the right price for his share of the movie-house chain. The Industry itself was no longer running scared about the TV threat, I was to understand, which it had effectively co-opted; but either such news took a while to reach the insular East, or (more likely) prospective buyers were invoking the past to keep the market down: 90 thou was high bid thus far.