SEGMENT ONE,
[OLD PI S]

Dearest Sophie,

    Thank you for having such a kind funeral for Llyman. I’m sure he would have passed on long since without the long felicity of your companionship.

    I regret that I took your inquiry so ill. You were right to say your peace, for I will not have the good of your concern forever. You are the unrivalled authority on simmering infections and matrimony.
    My dear and venerable Sophie, you are the sibyl of our lives.  It was so lovely in your big-treed garden. The April showers and May flowers portrayed the Earth as a bejewelled paradise. The birds and the bees seemed determined to turn my mind out of it’s usual useful course, and toward the further reproduction of my species.  

It is my opinion that without restraint, we space creatures will go on using war and disease to limit our numbers like too many rats confined in a cage.  What cannot be accomplished by the conscious mind is taken up as the gruesome work of the collective subconscious. Malthus is right.  Malthus is my hero.
 
    Josie has been such a friend. How I do wish that she would not go to Willie.  It will ease the burden on Sampson as he ages to have his wives living on the same block,  but I am sure we will see him less.  Peg is more upset than I.  Having no mortal tie to him, and being ill, she fears that she will never see him again at all. Surely he loves Peg as he loves you. Our families are like redwoods grown together, now death is making a change. I doubt it will seem long before we are together again on the other side of the fence. I wish death were less daunting. Is there anything that makes it less so–I mean the physical process, you who have seen it thousands of times.  Will I be brave, will I even see it coming. Curse the boys with their isotopic toys. They have set off so many bombs.  They seem driven, but by what/
        I understand those that have doubted Peg’s love for Sampson. I heard a member of the kitchen staff say she divorced Sampson and married Llyman for his monet. While Peg was never a royal cadre of the retrenchment society,  I think that those who believe her to have married for money or fashion, cruel.  She had never been one to swim upstream .  When the church stopped contracting new plural marraiges abroad, it left women of Peg’s sort dangling.  She was never politically astute and could not understand the cessation as political compromise rather than a moral statement.  She wanted to know that what she was doing was all right with absolutely everybody. Sampson had sufficient money, it might have been for position in part. 
    As for Allie I am quite satisfied with living at the ranch and teaching school.  I seldom think of myself as ill here–now that Harlan and Loretta have learned to leave me alone.  I just cannot do ranch work.  They may have every centavo I earn for my trabajo.  

I would like to go back home with Josie, but once there I should always feel my physical inadequacy and guilty for being unable to help more, as it is now at Harlan’s. It is counted as discourtesy at best and I truly do feel rude to decline any kind of work at all and people are always shorthanded these days.  People know that I once could do a good day’s work, and their alarm at the difference is as upsetting as the umbrage or indifference others demonstrate.
    Josie thinks I ought to have another beau to keep me from loneliness when she and her brood are gone.  Since she was standing by us when you asked me if I ever had strong feeling for a fellow, she wasted no time, once we were home.  She raided my address book and called Dan’s mother with over my protestations in the background. Has he any matrimonial persuasion.
    Dan isn’t married. He is teaching in a li town called Prattsburg, near where the church was formed in 1830. One thinks of that part of the world as being very beautiful in the Spring, as we are so near the anniversary of the birth of our Lord. The prophet Joseph had his first vision there.  We sing a song about it. ‘Oh how Lovely was the Morning’ about it, and always in the spring. I will not damn the project of writing Dan from it’s inception.
    I do not often take a shine to a person the way I did to Dan and it was so lovely to give him those two lovely shiners in front of the Trib. You were right in suggesting that first love often cuts the deepest. It was disapointed love at the time. One begins to learn sad lessons after first love, and can learn so many, that it quite puts you off. AH, the sad wisdom of observation.
    I called Nan with the intriguing news. It’s her opinion that High School English Teachers, ought to marry other High School teachers and beget more of their species–as wolves, coyotes and foxes do.
She thinks that there can be thus an intensification of linguistic talent.
     
Nan wished that I would go back to Utah with Willie and Josie, so she can more easily retire there.
    I am glad that you have Lizzy and the Matheson there, so Mariah can more freely make her decision about retirement. Nan says she would be more decided if she had shared the common perception of Sampsons’ ability to enthrall.
    I have a letter from your principle up there in Willits that I keep close at hand if I am needed. Evey has said that she would be glad to move with me if we are needed there. We surely love you and Mariah and Lizzy.
            Forever Your Friend,
                      Allie

Dear Allie,
    I was pleased to reicieve your letter today. Peg read it out to me at breakfast, her eyes are better than mine. In strength we are now about the same. Lizzy took to flipping coins over us this morning to see which of us will be the next to go. She won, two times out of three,and I was jealous. It seems unfair,sometimes, to be the last of ones friends’ to go. Other times, the morning seems fine and fair, and it is easy to hope that ones’ own lot will be to savor life in the world beyond the span of ones’ companions’.

Extreme age is good while life is sweet.

Moriah says that she shall stay here until the Matheson passes. She has promised Peg and Llyman this. With Josie and Willie together, Sampsons time here will be cut. She still has him to herself, while he is here. He will be well tended there by Willies’ children.

Mariah has had this promise of them.
   
If you once loved this fellow in Kerns, and he disapointed you in the way you discribed to me, he may not have fallen short in the way of love as you then thought. We are satisfied here, so do not feel hindered by us in finding your own sweet tide. Each of us has found it, and if you have not, then do go on dear and write the man.  One never knows what will come of such a letter.
               Your Friend,
                Sophie

        Dearest Rachel,

    I am writing to tell you that our friend Peg has died.  It being almost a year from Lyman’s death, she would think it a suitable demise for a devoted wife who loved her husband.  We put in an obituary today. She is down in Santa Rosa currently with some poor mortician laboring over her in the attempt to restore the appearance of youth to her moribund form. 

    There is not much to say about how she died.  She thought autopsies undignified, and so we did not ask for one.  She and I were sharing the biggest bedroom at Lymie’s house.  I woke at first light and looked over at her.  She looked dead.  She would not have looked dead to the average person, but she did to me.  This being the case, I thought to wait until the house was up to put on my bathrobe and hobble over.  I am seldom wrong about such things, so Mariah helped me dress and we rang up the doctor, Lizzie, and the cornorer.  Mariah rang up the hired girl to make up  suitable refreshments for callers.  Then Mariah,  and Lizzie and I laid her out in the old fashion. I’m sure Peg’s fancy mortician will do a better job.  I wondered if we ought not to touch anything at all and wait for Scotland Yard.  Mr. Mathieson said that they might be slow to come to California.He said, for himself, he would prefer a yard of Scotland.   It would probably arrive in an entirely prompt fashion.
   Peg wants Sampson to come,and take her to put her in the ground in Utah. I think she just didn’t want to be a bother.Llyman and Sampson both want to be buried in North Umberland. I have asked Sampson to take me too,and Samantha.I like to think of resting there beside Mary,at Lilligingford. The ground is waiting for us all, there.
   I am glad school is out.  Could you ask Allie to come?  Evie would suit as well, as would the two of them together. 

                Your Friend,
                Sophie

Dear Violet,
    I have a favor of some delicacy to request of you. I have a dear friend, the daughter of my sisters’ neighbor. Her constitution was injured by a fever when she was still young. This forced her to turn to rustic occupations, to the study of the fine arts. She lives in Palo Alto and teaches high school there as a teacher of English literature and composition. She lives with the wife of my half brother Sampson. You will remember him as the one who got sophisticated London conections by arranging to be born to my mother on the wrong side of the blanket. The house we stayed at in London was that of his father, though he prefered to say only that my mother had been their nursery maid. My brother is known as the son of his step-father, relations of the people we stayed with when we visited the Scotch Highlands, after the war.
    My young friend’s name is Allie. We believed her to never have formed a strong emotional bond to an individual of the sterner set. My brother’s true father has died. He resided with my mother, or I should better say, she with him. You must have recieved the anouncement of my marriage to that funny Matheson man who was our companion and guide when we went to Sutherland.    He does not seem nearly so old now as he did then. I then regarded him as positively ancient . Lord Jeff wished I could have been able to make a stronger declarations of my feelings in 1913 so he could have kept me with him instead of sending me to the front with his other recuited Mustanges. Iknew what to expect through the Matheson s croud . FEW other Britsh Amercan s did . I might better say that those who did know flew from the Inland . Sampsy thought it bitter irony to be asigned a cavalry Regiement .Know man let alone horse could hawve stood against a gatling gun . Samson little loves putting down horses. He could not even access his horses to put them down .

    Mr, Marshall wrote me that there is a national consciousness in Nations without Empire that looks only to interanal governments for its standing in the world . Satisfied or unsatisied in this regard . These look to Gods and Kings or fate for ther security . If missfortune befals ‘ even in the form of the incomprehen  marshal  engineering .they are likly to beleive the cause to be some flaw in spriuta performence ‘ some laxity in attention to detail . Perhaps so many French feel with their mounts because theie plumage was insuffient to ward off the bullets from the gatling guns . The French Crown should have invested a greater portions of it s revenues in mustach wax.
    Our friend Llyman has died. During the festivities, subsequent to his funeral, my mother took Allie aside in an extended close conversation. Mother is one hundred and three, with an incisive intelligence that is still formidable.

    She elicited from Allie the intelligence that indeed there had been a man. she even secured the phone number of the man’s mother from Allie, who had kept it in her address book all these years. I have said nothing, but was delighted to learn that the man is unmarried, and teaches English in your own Prattsburg. His name is Mr. Dan Hughes. I wondered, remembering that you have a nimber of children who have settled locally, whether you might harbor among your progeny, one or more students of the said Mr. Hughes.
    Allie has said that our efforts on her behalf, are all very intriguing .  She has assured us that she is not the sort of woman to write Mr. Hughes herself. She may cave in if we may learn more of him.
    I am afraid that I still think of you often. I have no choice, for I still have nightmares about the trenches, and the boys we dragged out of them, and you are often there with me. I think to write you, but am somehow too affected by these dreams to think of anything so mundane as a common letter.
            Your Friend, Lizzy
   
    Dear Mother,

        I have been given the assignment of writing you to inform you that our offspring has been wrapped in swaddling clothes. 

Two heads.  I suppose I should have written to warn you.  Nan looked at me right in the eye while feeling Allie’s belly  and said in a tone as honest and forthright as ever a doctor did, and said, “Two Heads.  I feel two heads.”  I looked and I saw two heads right where she said they were.  For the first time I was really afraid, as Allie has been afraid.  I suppose there were people around where we worked.  Aside from the girls we didn’t think about too much.  I thought more than most I think.  Mother, I can see you.  You are sitting down staring at this letter.  Our offspring have four hands, four feet, with two heads I mentioned before, and are not conjoined in any way.  Multiple births tend to run in the families of exposed girls said the smiling physician,  who really has moved in.  I was ready to pack Allie up and head for the city, but she really is not going to go back down there unless we are married.  Today she says that will be never. 

    I suppose you met the relations.  The would-be centogenerian love birds, Mariah and Sampson plan to spend a year in North Umberland, or thereabouts.  The occupants of one of the coffins has a disused house there, and they plan to see to it before they come back.  We will hire a girl to take the guestroom, and may just stay on to save the expense of transportation.  Two of Sampson’s other wives are living.  They’ve had him mostly to themselves while she took care of Sophie here.  They are younger than Mariah by about fifteen years.  If he survives her,  and can stand the return trip, I suspect they’ll have him back.  Other than the two heads our children seem to be normal.  I think past a certain point, there is only graveyard humor.  Forgive me Mother, I do not want to seem crude.
    Enoch and Rachel are here.  I like them, and they have tried to put me at my ease.  Even the more so to make up for Allie.  Enoch’s son and his friend Saddan is here.  This is the Tibettan son whom Enoch fathered after he bailed out of his P-26, the evening primrose.  He has English manners and seems extremely educatable.  Rachel’s family has some real estayte in the city and she’s invited me to rent it.  If Allie will marry me, we can have a cute little place across from her brother’s pharmacy and she will take her mother’s old place downstairs.  The boys can take rooms in the neighborhood and ride to school with me.

    She says the business with Allie is the sort of thing that probably won’t work unless it is made to work.  If Allie can get a job teaching in hte city and her principal will not faint when Rachel brings the baby to nurse, we may come to some agreeable conclusion of the affair.  Violet Pratt will then come to live with Lizzie and help her with the Matheson, which is what they call Lizzie’s husband.  I told them it sounds medieval and the Matheson said it was medieval, and entirely rotten, to boot.  His father was a feudal Lord, a tradition imported from Britian and to no Scott’s good.
    The pretty Evie will go down to help her sister Loretta with the children so she can ranch cattle and horses.  I will not marry her.
    Rachel says thet she has seen Allie’s sort of rage in high caste Hindu women married to British colonists.  Muslim wives seem to do better or to have no more problems than one would expect, since the men must convert in order to gain their hands from their fathers, if consent is required.  She has seem some reasonable matched with Jewish women since, by tradition, the children are Jewish.      To return to the most relevant instance, high caste Hindu women feel insulted by the British presence and the obligation, by their civility, to make the occupation invisible.  Add some further insult like the continued persecution of polygamous and the nuclear contamination, and the situation in Allie’s case could prove intenable in the end.  On the other hand it could save me from the marital boredom which is the sort of thing I would most fear in my own marital competence.
    Perhaps I dare tell you the true story of the decking I got from Allie in Salt Lake.  Besides a few brave souls who looked out the window and saw the altrecation, this is the first account I’ve given of it.
    Mother, I contributed my cartoons to the Salt Lake Tribune. I didn’t know how much the Mormon people hated it, and hated its cartoons.  The regular cartoonist said that my cartoons wern’t good enough, though I was given to believe that they were good enough by the head mucky-muck there.  They fashioned the cartoons that went in the paper in my image and I did sign them. They said that the ones that I drew show too little sensitivity to nuance.  I had some in my briefcase that had never even heard of nuance. Forgive me , Mother, for what follows but you told me that I should always tell you everything, and so I will.  It was you yourself; that made me promise it.  When I was but a lad given the blush by my confirmation robe.
       
  If I have ever broken my promise, I will not do so here for Allie’s sake.  I made a parody of the Mormon polygamist wives complete with a comparison to the virgin mother of God, I furthermore attributed the tolerance of polygamy to the entire north american continent.  I did largely work at the Tribune.  It was for the purpose of going in and out of the building that I wanted the raincoat.  It was an ordinary black raincoat.  I saw no harm in it.  I saw somewhat more harm in the constant perfidious suberterfuge of my position.  I did work at Kearns sometimes, so it was easiest to say that that is what I did.  I even worked at the uranium processing plant across from Allies back door. You did not teach me to lie and I have tried never to learn anything that you or the nuns did not teach me.
 Allie followed me after a luncheon date at the Desert Fountain.  She saw me go into the building and so was waiting when I came out.  Her employers offered her a baseball bat.  She did not think she would need one.  They let her off work early just to make sure she could catch me.  I did exit the building to find a sort of tornado waiting for me as I neared my car.  I like tornados when they are friendly.  She was not friendly that day.  I thought I could get out of it by openning up my briefcase to reveal only cartoons in the creation.  Mother, I was young and stupid.  I thought talent alone could get me anything or anyone I wanted.  It was only when I found myself on my butt on the ground that I realized that I was in a state, really a kind of theocratic republic of people with feelings.

    I sat there in the mud and looked up at Allie in astonishment.  She told God to damn me.  I thought at first she was taking the dear Lord’s name in vain.  She assured me that she was not.  My Allie gives instructions to the Allmighty, and supposes herself to be likely to be obeyed.  I knew I had to say something, or  all I would ever see of her would be her receeding back, and more than admirable hindquarters.  I reflected that I had not heard that Mormons believed in hell.  I said that where came from when people had religious differences, they attempted to keep one another better informed.  (Perhaps it is that they already are better informed). 

    Allie said that I personally believed in hell since all Catholics believed in hell that notall Irishmen do.        There is bad blood between the orange and the green .’, wars in Irleeand and brawls,  obviously  over here. Ally said, it was not at allobvious. Whatever Iwas she was not a protestant. She said If I thought she was orange Iwas misstaken . She was red as red at ever having been seen with me.,  We have wars about that sort of thing in Ireland,and brawls in America  if not in Utah.  Allie observed that she and I were having a war at the moment.  I said that it was a sort of slow war in which most of the blows were the kind she had given me.  I told her that she might have waited and decked me in private.  She said that that would have given her less satisfaction.  She assured me that if she ever decked me again, it would similarly not be in some lone and desolate place to which I had led her innocent and unawares.  I did not try to explain my blooming blue jaw to anyone.  They waited for Allie’s belly to swell, but it didn’t. Not then anyway.
        They did not like us in Utah with asmouldering obeiscience  I smelled smoke ofteen.                 There wre the mushroom clouds to stand in for that kind of fire . The rasentment was like that , insidious and pernicious .                                                     we stayed at one of Ally s cousins houses in Mt. pleasant .                                                         we had been out star gazing is what theyn call it.in Utha . I was sitting on the stoop , which is what we call it in Brooklyn . A dustder rose out of adust puddle and spun a box a good 30 feet in the air . It gave me the heebeegeebees .

       Willliams Carlos Williaams came out to a writters conference , not long after the fling withAlly came to it s first ignoble end. This , I think to be second.     He read  Pounds’ latest Canto and wanted to know what we thought about the camps and atrocities in  Europe, the nature of  treason and duress. I was timid about venturing on campus but a lecture on Pound  by Williams was too strong a draw.
There was to be a lecture by Pound’s psychiatrist, that I particularly wanted to hear . I took my black raincoat and went to a writers conference at the University of Utah. He was there with another psychiatrist from New York and a woman who looked a great deal like one of Allies mothers friends that I had met at Cousin Junes. I thought it could not be she because she was holding hands with the psychiatrist.
    It did not seem to me that the assembled writers believed that treason, however defined, was necessarily a moral evil.

    As one aspicant to the Laurel crown said  “We must at least learn  from this war that nations, as well as individuals may develop psycopathology. Jesus, the man said, failed to collaborate, so died.
    The line between collaboration and treason is salient in the Pound case. Thank you so much for the clips that you have sent me. Likewise your letters about visiting him to discuss your Dante book.
   
    Treason, he thought, much more common than any penalty for it- he wished. ….. had been left to his gate as an Italian – his citizinship reached in abstention. Nothing in the news at all- why give the man a platform?
    Facism, the fellow believed right to be, with its component, a crime in peace or war. The doctor asked him what he thought of banks and the notion of their abolition.
    Pound was trying to convince Mousallini and Hitler that the essence of facism was the absolution of banks and the post war detention of the chief arms manufactures’. He aslo preached against the gold and silver standard as a tactic to put a little bit of bread and sugar on the table without the women in the family having to sell themselves in the streets.
    His psychiatrist maintained that if accused of actual facism or verilent anti semitism he goes off his nut. He certainly has said a lot of strange things for someone who is neither. He has a love of namecalling as a form of real social discourse that one often finds in grade schools. He has in fact tried to raise it into a high art and nationality, religion and occupation have pride of place in his tirades.
        He has never gotten over the death of, ironically, a Jewish sculptor with out means, who died very senselessly and early in the war.

      I will henceforth  always
refer to Enoch as Allie’s dad.  I swear never again to observe that  he was out of the country at the time of her birth. I furthermore have promised never again to observe in public or private  that her actual father is Raymond, alias Uncle Raymond.  I have promised this not for my own sake, not by my own intelligence,  but on Rachel’s  excellent and well-informed advice.   We must Mother, henceforth, regard Rachel as Allie’s stepmother.  We will do this not upon our own advice, but upon the advice of the family anthropologist.  It is his high-born oxfordian opinion that it has something to do with the idea that Enoch was better than his brother because he had given up polyogamy and returned to the service of uncle sam for his reclamation. While Raymond is patriotis enough and has supported in his family in his long absense he has never been one tio turn to him for family advice.

One must not underestimate Allie and the town’s desire to conceal what sems to me the conspicuously obvious: that she and her siblings had different fathers.Over time, the neglecting of prevailing dictum can, the family cosulted warens, produced an unrecoverable error has already been comited and there is no return.You simply can’t go home again, Ally would change the locks.
        Much of what the good doctor said made some sense to me. Ally was the child her father might never see paticularly during the early second war. It seemed certain that she would never see Enock again. She, in her beguiling and innocent way, had sacraficied for her country as much as anyone had or would. The means by which children are conceived are often not confided to young girls in Utah until after marriage for fear of their wanting to make use of them.  The soldiers who came during the war proper were obliged and their children were accepted into the communities easily. After the war this hospitality was firmly withdrawn. The did not want us near their girls though they are not a sort of people to make unequivocable demands upon the young.  The atomic project was not without civilian casualities. Very young children were the hardest hit. Lukemia is a monsterous disease. The people began to feel that we had drained them dry and had no intent of offering them reprieve.
   
Bitterness set in and they are bitter. I will have to be show a kindness that is beyond my nature if I am ever to have anything more of Ally. I think to keep her I would have to be able to retrace my steps to that day at Abercromber & Fitch when I bought the raincoat to cover my uniform. We have offspring now to bear sad witness to their parents falling. I prefer to exhibit my stupidity unobserved. I’m afraid I deserve a standing ovation.  
                    Your Son,
                        Dan

CHAPTER ONE, 
WATCH OUT FOR TWINS

Dearest Mother,
     My Allie is peeved because I have not written you. She would think it reprehensible if I were not to tell you myself that you are to be a grandmother and to give an elaborate account of my contrition and to present an adequete defense if possible. She claims that I could not begin to do so. 
       Mother, you have long known that I am an unsurpassed apologist for my behavior.   Foresooth, dear Mother, I have not written to tell you of your luck because I am too lazy. You are to be a grandmother. Do you wish further detail? Indeed, Mother, I am heir to Adam’s fall. Ally, who rejects the notion of original sin,  considers me a worm. 
The unhappy product of the well-intended meddlers and meddling here.These did not bring me to the Pacific California shore where I have been parading my biceps. There is poetry in San Francisco. Our great country does not often provide soil for poetry. And when a poet hears of some he is likely to go and plant himself hoping there to take root.

 I am  sorry about Ally but I do like North Beach where there is no sand. I do like Teaching at State. 
       I do not want you to think me entirely consigned to a literary circle of hell.  My Ally, then being a sort of intimate Vergil–a scrouge whose purpose being to explain the exact nature of my degeneracy to passers-by.

There is more congenial company in Ally’s circle here. Though rich in years they do not consider my errors to surpass those of their youth. They are poor in adviCe. They say Allie is likely to be breathing fire until the fruit of my loins actually takes up residence outside of her outraged body. It is not for any failure in their hospitality that I have not asked you not to come.

Ally  crackles with hostility  and I am afraid you will stray onto subjects that will set her off .  I know you will because she will set traps for you. She is as nice a girl as as agrizzly bear can be, but is angry now.

She beleives that women suffering from cronic complaints out not have children.  The house medical staff is in condensus–these types of maladies run in families.  Have you, mother, ready for a second motherhood?  I think Allie will mellow with time as the common wisdom is shown to be in error. Not, I fear, in my arms.
 
I could bring the two of them home and we could raise them together.
I could go back to teacing at the Highschool and hand the youngsters off during the day.

I beleive the subjects of abortion and adoption to be absolutely taboo. You are to be a grandmother. If you write my formidible female, I suggest you send the letters to me first. 

I will pass them round for comments and suggestions.
    Abortion simply has never crossed anyones mind saving my own reprobate one. Ally is too old to be that embarrased and is very fond of all children. She says they just don’t adopt babies out that much back home, except maybe up North , (S.L.C) where there are infidels. Ally indexes her thoughts and behaviors to those in her native Southern Utah almost without exception. This is among the many things I did not know about her. Though some good fellow did attempt to warn me of her Southern Utah proclivities at the fountain called Deseret (SLC0.

She says they don’t adopt babies even up North except when the girl is  young, or the case more than ordinarily unfortunate.  If a woman fails to conceive, she can usually find such a baby through the grapevine. Such a Hannah wouldn’t consider ours. Allie would be thought too old to start over again anyway.
       
        We are at Ally’s friend Lizzy’s

 large house.   Lizzy’s mother was Ally’s neighbor for some years. Her name is  Sophie and she was a homeopathic nurse given to foreign travel. She lost track of her controversial husband in about 1913.  He turned up again with his bobhaired Chinese mistress in tow  in about 1928, just in time for the depression.

Fortunatly John Marshal’s Mother hung on with the dogged determination that typafied her life until the servants mellowed enough to show him the place in the wardrobe where the old woman had hidden the jewelery from her first widowhood.

I just missed the oportunity to know the old gentleman by a few years, but  I am employed by his widow and the consort/valet of her stepbrother Lyman who I also just missed.  I am left in a caverous room called in Brish fashion the library.  Their remains.

   Sophy’s husband, the federal Marshal, was studying Chinese calligraphy and collecting ancient manuscripts, while reviewing the young women of China for one to take as his consort.  He found a nice one and brought her home to his wife who did not expect ever to see him again and was glad to have him back on any terms.  Lizzy, Ally and I had dinner with her, her son and her grandchildren last week.  The habit of old men taking up young women is an advantage when remembering the dead. We spent a great deal speaking of Mr. Marshall and his travels in China. He was an engineer who had a strong interest in Taoism and spent years attempting to prepare the Chinese for a future conflict with Japan he belived inevitable. When we began sending parts to China he translated the order forms in Chinese which meant creating characters to use in the description of engine and other parts. Traditional Chinese was well suited to religion, poetry and bueracracy. There was no idiogram for carburators.
       Lizzie was born to a Scot polygamist in 1885.  Soon afterwards he was arrested and spent the next four years wearing striped pajamas.  Sophie was with him when he died in 1923.
       I spend most of my time with Lizzie’s second husband who everyone calls  ‘the Matheson’ . I do not mean that she has two husbands simultaneously.  If I were determined to shock you, I might tell you that her first husband painted ostrich eggs in the European style.  She has a son the colour of bittersweet chocolate who finds America and Americans morally degenerate.  I expect this will shock you and that you would not wish to spend much time gaining a closer understanding of his opinions.  I am more inclined to require extended explanation.  His name is Kenny and he is a doctor and helps the Matheson keep me from despair at Ally’s contempt for me. My friends are very impressed with me that I have a new girlfriend though he is more an Englishman than he is anything resembling am American Negro. American Negros are necessarily slavish and he believes himself possessed of a superiority that they do not own. My research has not found this  to be universally true. He says that most of them were already slaves in Africa and brought their lowered eyes with them from that continent. His family has trouble keeping him here. They do it for the money. They all have jobs but his is the most lucrative one and many of them work for him. In a way they keep him almost as a slave. The same could be said of many white fathers. I am awaiting the crowning of the head of my slave master. The ladies are insisting that I attend the birth. Ally thinks that fathers get off too easily in hospitals, lounging around the corridors and passing out cigars. She delivered her first calf at the age of four and considers paternal squeamishness ridiculous.
      The Matheson, my chief supporter here, having sewn his wild oats in his time, is a genteel  Highland  son of a high bred cuckoo.  He was sent to public school in Britain by his father’s family at ten for the sake of his willing and expansive mind .  He was born in 1878.   His mother, who was known as a fine singer of Highland song was married to the steward of the clachen turned deerpark.  He is broadly educated and widely informed on London and Londoners, particularly on the American emigre community who were most of what was happening in English poetry on either continent.  He had heard too much of human woe to be much interested in Freud and his unflaggingly bourgeous concepts of the human body.  He was more taken with Jung and used his artistic analyses where he could as a model for his paintings.  He was quite close to Kevin, Lord Llyman’s principal heir, who is a psychiatrist of the Jungian school, Kevin brings Donald, which is the Matheson’s name, many drawings for his interest.  People say that you are only born once.  The Matheson said at breakfast that he will  be sorry if it is true and I agreed.  I will be sorry also.  One may far exceed four-score-and-ten and leave much undone. 
        While I am thusly entertained, Allie is helping her friend Mariah pack up her belongings.  Moriah was born in 1873.  My impregnated Allie does not surround herself with youngsters. 
       There is an exception:   Allie is moving her friend Evie into Mariahs’ previous apartments.  I do not know exactly when Evie was born, but I think it to have been circa 1938.   Evie plans to rattle around with Allie and my offspring in Mariahs’ rooms, doing little but entertaining the onlooker with her comeliness and porcelain doll frame.  I find it improved by the addition of a book and when I seek her out I find her so improved.
       I am sure you will be more interested in Moriah for I know Prattsburg will be dissappointed if you have no gossip about polygamy.  It is only thought suitable here to gossip about the old.  Mariah’s husband is a polygamist of above ninety years.  He was fathered by a young lord, on the wrong side of the blanket.  Both he and the mother, whose youngest daughter is now married to Donald,  were exceedingly young, and it was so long ago that they were both acquainted with  Queen Victoria.  Being a mother and having caught the scent, I am sure you would much rather talk about Evy.  I will return to the gossip if the dinner bell is not rung too soon.
    Evy and Ally are cousins (this means that they were born within a hundred miles of one another.)   Evy is endeavoring to admire, love, and respect me so that everything will all come out right in the end like a fairy tale.  I do not see this as my purpose as a he man.  I have warned her that Allie is not the first woman I have dissappointed.  Alie says Evy is a born lemming.
       Evy is a cowgirl like out of a wild west show, but says she attempts to conceal it in the presence of anyone who might care.    This dissappoints my friends but not me.  The privy in our circle is authenticity.   Donald once told me that my pockets were not bulging with the stuff.  I asked the resident psychiatrist, Kevin, if he thought that were true and he did.  He said that I should content myself that Evy is well read, spirited, and unlikely to bore me.  
      My friends are so determined to lose all affectations that if they were boys, you would be constantly fining them for improper use of language.  My friends are busy learning to speak like negros and mixing it up with a kind of language that they are making up on their own.  They say that Allie and Evy are sure in good digs.  They come here not infrequently to hear talk of the old London days and because no one offers them such good Scotch in San Francisco. 
      Since the dinner bell has not yet rung, I will return to the kind of talk the average Prattsburg inn might find handy at the Prattsburg General Store.
  
        The British peer, who, with his valet, built our houses, moved here in from Morrocco about 1940 with his wife, Peg, and two adopted American children.  They were his illegitimate grandchildren.  The children were both married.  Kevin was married to a bohemian cousin of Allie’s who sought Lizzie out when she lived in Morrocco.  This was an excuse.  She was really looking for Allie’s neighbor Enoch who was in the Navy air corps and soon to be transferred to China.  Kevin was home from Oxford on holiday.  There were some long strolls by moonlight, that sort of thing, and the two got hitched, as Evy would say.

    Here it gets complicated.  Ally’s grandmother is the mother of the young man Collie saw in Morrocco.  This is the man Allie calls Dad and who is father to her brothers and sister.  These became connected to the family of the peer when the mother of the illegitimate son and her children rented a house from Allie’s family on their ranch.   The son and his mother were taken up by a Scots Mormon cattlebuyer and storekeeper. They lived for some years in Salem, Utah and settled just before the first warin the southern highlands of the state.

       The families were as close in California  as they had long been.  Sophie and Llyman shocked whoever there was to shock here in Willets by spending the extremity of their dotage together. 
     They had, after all, borne together a son named Sampson.  Mariah is Sampson’s first living wife.  He,  in his adopted country,  that would be Utah, had four wives. The eldest of these, Peg, later married the Brittish Peer. Yes mother, he married his sons wife, and legitimated his own grandchildren, securing his inheritence to them. Emily and Kevyn are thus simultaniously his children and grandchildren. They and their proginy live nearby, but have deigned to move in to the paternal mansion.

     Sophies husband was, like me, a federal employee sent out to make some sense of the egregious customs common in the state of Utah. At his death,Sophie came to live with the companion of her youth and his wife, a companion of his later youth. Peg, who married Llyman in his age, was the sister of Sampsons Aunt Amy and also the half sister of Mariah, who we are packing up. She and Sampson are still alive. and are preparing to accompany a bunch of elegant family caskets to the family seat at North Umberland, where they are to be deexhumed into their natal soil.The reasons for their doing so are obscure to me.
     As you know, Mother, I have again entangled myself in the ancient, intractable, and mysterious affairs of Mormons.
 
    Ally and Moriah are of one soul, and the younger will keen at the elder’s death. Particularly if it occurs at a distance. After the birth, Mariah nonetheless intends to flit off to Britain with the husband of her youth.  Sampson’s temple has lost not a few of its pillars.  It has however, retained enough upon which to stand into, as it would seem, its’ second century.  He is but a few years shy, being but one year older than Mariah.  They were childhood sweethearts whose parents or grandparents were born in Northumberland.  Mariah’s health is robust for her advanced age, and they intend to fly to Britain.  It would be more romantic if Sampson were not leaving his other two wives behind.  They are younger and both working and hope Sampson will survive to return.

     You may notice some slight discrepency here.  I said that Sampson had four wives.  His first attracted some attention in her youth for her devotion to elaborate costume and her flaunting her resistance to the Puritanical strain in Mormonism by making fashionable dresses for other girls.  She was an avid reader of Eastern magazines and even a reader of the London Times.  There was a suscriber in her village and the paper was well worn when it had finished spreading sedition in the neighborhood only to be replaced by the next available issue.  Lord Llyman turned his thoughts to matrimony at the age of sixty.  Sampson, with an eye to an easy bargain, sent his first wife, Peg, off to see whether she might try to love his father and his two eldest children.  The idea of becoming a Peeress and having various of the aristocracy at her wedding was a quick-sell.  Still it took her about a year in England to make up her mind.  She was happy in her new life.  Sampson stayed by her for a while to tutor his children, then returned.  Since Anglican marraiges end at death and are followed by a somewhat amorphous afterlife, and Mormon marraiges are thought to continue on, Sampson thought he’d gotten himself quite a bargain.  The chief beneficiary is my chess partner Kevin–Sampson’s son by Mariah and Lord Llyman’s principal heir.  Since Llyman’s mother was an American heiress, Mother, my dear sainted mother, this is the least I can say of them–these folks ain’t broke.
      Ally is respectable and comfortable in her financial affairs and was not yet born when the London expatriots rented  a farmhouse from her grandmothers, Maudie and Rachael, and started calling her father Enoch “Knockknock”.  This was long for Enoch.  He is the retired and disabled  Flying Tiger whose appearance Ally is fond of comparing to a beat up alley cat. 
     To simplify the manner of Ally’s family’s British neighbor’s relations, imagine two houses in the northern Utah town of Salem, a misnomer due to the federal anti-polygamy campaign, particularly active there.  The dwellings were scarcely a quarter mile apart, separated by stand of silver beeches, and less elegant trees, and alfalfa fields sown with clover. In the one house, lived a Highland Scot, with his two wives, his wife Mary’s north country mother, and the lad Sampson, the adopted son of the British Peer. In addition there were three girls, Mavis, Laura, and the infant Lizzy.  The year would have been 1888.

    In the other, dwelt a sea captain, retired, his numerous sons reared under ships’ discipline, and the worse for it.  He harboured there his three fond aquaintances and  esteemed daughters with whom he was companionable and as indulgent as he dared.   Mariah said she never felt her father’s rod.  Her mother was responsible for the discipline of the girls and was given to the light use of the willow switch and gentle persuasion.   Mariah is actually the daughter of a second wife, married at sea.  She vanished like a silkie when her daughter was born and just beginning to walk.  Ally would think me inordinately contrite if I tried to tell this tale here.

       Amy, the eldest, is the full sister of Peg, the youngest.   There was a third wife with nine children inherited from a fiddler.  She was a Scot and her brood was much loved for their music and their skill as ranch hands and drovers.  Fergus, the Scot, and Paul, the old man of the sea, were partners in a variety of businesses and speculations.  It is whispered that these have their base in funds sent quietly along with Sampson, his mother being American, felt freer to love her son than might a British Lady.

      Amy died in 1909 of the pox while attempting to save the district from an epidemic of the same. This was occasioned by the fleeing of American refugees from the early Mexican Revolution.  The Mormons were in tight with Poncho Villa, who wanted their money. That is, they did not flee in 1909.  The relations of the Scot fled in 1909 and Peg with them, feeling that it was more frugal to do all things in good time. This included the plan to court Llyman the Peer, and to secure his fortune.

    Fortunately, Mother, these people left letters which I am reading over and over while claiming to be editing them. This, I am doing in the library of Lizzy’s husband, usually referred to here as The Matheson. I am deciding which letters can be left out without confusing the reader, and finding very few. It is a popular idea here that they should eventually find their way into a book.  Sophie left behind a sum of money for this purpose, which I hope to collect, as it has been promised to me.

    I am sorry to have missed Sophie’s oral account of the circumstances of the letters. She was an admirable but complicated woman. She was twice married and never fully divorced, either fom the Scot, or from the Marshall. She was long separated from the latter and then reunited with him. She was never a Mormon, but like me, simply a sort of running dog or fellow traveler. Sophie was a woman of considerable medical talent and so was her circle.   There will be three nurses and a doctor present at the birth of my wee beastie. All possess hair of grey.
    They spurn the idea of a hospital. There are sorts of doctors whose services they all decline and these are more often found in hospitals lacking as it is sometimes said here, the confidence and competence to practice alone.  Doctor Nan, who is using Ally’s confinement as an excuse to retire, will no doubt officiate at the birth of my child.  Ally is very keen on her help.  They are old friends. 

Ally is neither well nor unwell, having a condition which sometimes occurs where there have been one or more nuclear explosions.  My old Matheson has warned me never to tell her to drop dead.  There have been near mishaps of this sort.  This is why I am not going to walk off and leave my offspring to their mother’s sole care.  If they are to be dropped off at my doorstep at some future time, they ought to know who I am.  The disease is similar to lupis erymatosis, a disease which takes its’ name from the eery disonance which creeps in when a piano is tuned too precisely to the bottom of its’ range and then tuned again.  The disease is real, demonstrable.  And as of yet not fully understood.  It is a great disappointment to Ally who only wanted to be a cowgirl.  The poor girl has had to take to teaching English instead.  She would have preferred to marry a rancher, but never found one who would consider her a useful wife.

    I have much admired the letters of Sophie’s second husband. In her defense, she was seperated from him by a continent from the Scot when she married him.

     Sophie’s second husband, was a retired US Marshall,  who attended West Point. He died  more than ten years ago.  Among his family it was the long custom to call him Marshall Marshall.  This doubling of his name began in derision, but was done for a much longer time in fun.  He married one of his captives.  I fear that yhou will not believe me, but it is true. This is  why I  never tried to write you long letters from Utah when I was stationed there.  It was an odd place with an odd god and even egregious people, particularly the girls.   If I had told you the truth you would have accused me of lying.   I thought the short letter best. Or the poem.  Now I give you the girl. 

    It has not worked to try to woo the girls with poems.  I tried writing something sloshy for my unborn son.  Another girl might have received it as one might accept a bouquet.  It contained the word ‘womb’.  Allie marked out the “W’, and typed in a ‘B’.  She left it in the typewriter spurning poem and poet.  Today she is threatening to keep it only if it is a girl.

     Mormon females prefer to reproduce their own kind. When I asked Allie why, she said it is because girls are  better behaved and better company.  She insists it is because after carrying the wee wean, as men never have to do, she has the right to her preferences.  Girls pick their husbands, and can do so for their qualties, while boy babies seem, in her, sometimes in a fit of pique.  She suspectgs that is how yoiu got me.  I wonder whether I was conceived on a Saturday before you went to confession, or on a Monday afterwarads.   Allie suspects me of being conceived on the first Sunday of the month.  Mormons do not even kikss on the first Sunday of the month, or at least that’s how they do it in her family.  She mentioned this custom to Mariah and Mariah l;aughed.  Mormons do not eat on the first Sunday of the month in order to give the food to the poor.  But what about the kisses? 

     When having lots of girls, is always is good luck. When I asked Allie why she didn’t want a boy, she said that it was because of the BOMB. When I asked her if this was a reference to the poem, she said “No”. She meant the Atom Bomb.  A boy would be more likely to look like me and remind her of why it was that Uncle Sam sent us to what some regard as a territory.  One of Uncle Sam;’s bastard stepchildren.  On the other hand, given that the atom testing cannot ever be undone, it is better to have boys because they don’t have a lot of extra biochemical equipment, and so are more robust.  She would not like to have a baby suffer.  
   
    Allie is insistent upon knowing exactly what the circumstances in Utah were.  She was miffed that I was never at the plant at Kerns when the other girls picked up their boyfriends to show them a good time after work.  She rankled that I was always late to dinner at Cousin June’s when I was suposed to be working just across the way.  What was she ever to tell her poor cousin June? Cousin June could see the plant  out of her window.  She knew that I carried a blue briefcase when I met her  at Ambercrombie and Fitch to take her to lunch.
My knocked-up girlfriend has been furious  with me  for nigh onto seventeen years because she once caught me entering the Trib  building  with my mysterious briefcase.  Are not all newspapers called the Tribune inherantly respectable?   Allie thought not.

    Evie, who has more reason to care, is not to know anything about the incident with the blue briefcase.  Allie wants me to marry Evie. I do know why.  When a Mormon girl decides she does not want you, she always wants to pick your next girlfriend.  This is particularly true when they are pregnant.  A few of the fellows got caught out in this fashion when I was in the service and were assigned their future wives.  I do not approve of arranged marriages.  Whatever I do about Evie, fatherhood impends.

    Doctor Nan who will be here tomorrow, thinks it would be nice for me to marry Evie.  Evie is pretty and sweet and can quote a hell of a lot of poetry off by heart.  She says she wouldn’t mind marrying me too much if I wouldn’t mind.

    I think I ought not to mind.   Why have I allowed myself to become obcessed with this bombastic bundle of angst whose contents currently include my spawn.  

    What ever the case, I think it better that you do not try to come for the birth itself.  Allie needs no help. If she allows Nan to help I will be surprised.

    Mariah’s departure has led to a flurry of activities at the Willet’s cemetary to turn from honorable mention of one end of life to the other.  They are exhuming the peer next week.  At least Mariah, who has been a nurse for more than seventy years, says it will be next week. They will then do the same to the same with that of his lover.  They will sand and revarnish their last habitations which are of finely worked redwood. A carload of young relatives intend to accompany the old couple in their elopement—- Sophie’s leaving her husband behind in a graveyard in California.  They will then bury the old people together while staying in the inn in the family seat.  The elder peer and peeres will join them in the ground there with Sophie’s friend Samantha who is being brought up from Morocco with the elder Peeress, Llyman’s mother.  His father and sister Mona are already there, as is Sophie’s friend,  Mary.

    Mavis, Laura, and Lizzie, Sophie’s daughters,  will be flying to England with Mariah.  You will hear more of Lizzie because she and her husband, a Scot of the noble class named Matheson, are Allie and Evie’s neighbors here.   The mourners,  will throw a big bash at the inn.  Anyone willing to say that they are  relations will be sent bidding letters in red and black in the tall and lower script.  Regreting his age, Mr. Matheson will see to it that there is another hack anthropologist there to see to the details.

    My dear modern girls have been singing a song over the babe’s belly which I think must date from before the advent of Our Lord.  I have inscribed here the words:

    An elfin knight
    stands on yon hill
    Ba ba ba Lilly ba
    He blaws his horn bath
    loud and shrill
    the wind shall not blaw
    my plaid away
   
    My plaid away   
    My plaid away
    and owwer the hills
    and far away.

    And far away to Noraway.
    The wind shall not blaw
    my plaid away
   
    I would not quit
    my plaid for my life
    Ba ba ba Lilly ba
    I need it to cover
    my bairns and my wife
       
    The wind shall not
    blaw my plaid away
    Chorus.

    I would that knight
    were in my kist
    Ba ba ba Lily Ba
    and the elfin knight
    in my arms niest
    the wind shall not
    blaw my plaid away.

    This is their favorite lullaby in both their families, which is to say, in the one family if you go back very far.  For instance back past when the gentry burned most of the Matheson houses for sheep lawns and took  the name upon themselves in order to be more respectable in London.   To further improve their impression they adopted the kilt for formal occasions.  Lizzie and the Matheson say that the girls’ lullaby  was revived in resistance to the british.  A Quaker industrialist provided the House of Lords with the monetary incentive to ban the wearing of the scotch plaid.   So highland mothers  had a new excuse to sing the song.  I protested at dinner that surely it must have been older than that.  The Matheson, who is a recognized british authority on the subject, indeed,  he is  probably an old embroglio of Lord Lyman—This is why Lizzie was not married by him when she was young enough to be a great deal more fun. 

Fun with Lizzie was not what Lord Lyman wanted.  Sophie’s procurment by Lyman’s mother dated from the days when educated and concerned british matrons were procuring girls in defense of their virtue and adding them to their households.  It was more than the good lady could do to defend Sophie’s virtue from Lyman.  I hear tell that since they were the same age, she just didn’t worry about it so much.  Lyman and his mother were great philanthrapists and champions of the poor and depressed in every nation, including Utah.  That is why Sophie was dispatched by the family with her syphiletic friend Mary, and Mary’s syphiletic mother to send back report.  Do you think, Mother, that I will ever see my ambition to be the president of Utah fullfilled?  Would Allie or Evie make a better showing at state functions.  I will send you a picture after the bairn is born.

    Do you think my perspective relatives respectable?  They are rich and intend to hire a car and motor up to see you when in New York.  They are rich.  If you do not want to receive them at home,  Violet Pratt, a World War I pal of Lizzie’s, intends to receive them at her house. Where she will put them I do not know, so it would be kind if you would consent to receive them.  She says she may just run over to see you about it her own self.

    Allie has demanded to know what I have told you the truth in this letter.   I said that forsooth I have not lied.  Would you have preferred me to lie? 

            In contrition, your Son,
                Danny

    Dear Mother,

        Have been given the assignment of writing you to inform you that our offspring has been wrapped in swaddling clothes.  Two heads.  I suppose I should have written to warn you.  Nan looked at me right in the eye while feeling Ellie’s belly  and said in a tone as honest and forthright as ever a doctor did, and said, “two heads.  I feel two heads.”  I looked and I saw two heads right where she said they were.  For the first time I was really afraid, as Allie has been afraid.  I suppose there were people around where we worked.  Aside from the girls we didn’t think about too much.  I thought more than most I think.  Mother, I can see you.  You are sitting down staring at this letter.  Our offspring have four hands, four feet, with two heads I mentioned before, and are not conjoined in any way.  Multiple births tend to run in the families of exposed girls said the smiling physician,  who really has moved in.  I was ready to pack Allie up and head for the city, but she really is not going to go back down there unless we are married.  Today she says that will be never. 

    I suppose you met the relations.  The would-be centogenerian love birds, Mariah and Sampson plan to spend a year in North Umberland, or thereabouts.  The occupants of one of the coffins has a disused house there, and they plan to see to it before they come back.  We will hire a girl to take the guestroom, and may just stay on to save the expense of transportation.  Two of Sampson’s other wives are living.  They’ve had him mostly to themselves while she took care of Sophie here.  They are younger than Mariah by about fifteen years.  If he survives her,  and can stand the return trip, I suspect they’ll have him back.  Other than the two heads our children seem to be normal.  I think past a certain point, there is only graveyard humor.  Forgive me Mother, I do not want to seem crude.
    Enoch and Rachel are here.  I like them, and they have tried to put me at my ease.  Even the more so to make up for Allie.  Enoch’s son and his friend Saddan is here.  This is the Tibettan son whom Enoch fathered after he bailed out of his P-26, the evening primrose.  He has English manners and seems extremely educatable.  Rachel’s family has some real estayte in the city and she’s invited me to rent it.  If Allie will marry me, we can have a cute little place across from her brother’s pharmacy and she will take her mother’s old place downstairs.  The boys can take rooms in the neighborhood and ride to school with me.
    She says the business with Allie is the sort of thing that probably won’t work unless it is made to work.  If Allie can get a job teaching in hte city and her principal will not faint when Rachel brings the baby to nurse, we may come to some agreeable conclusion of the affair.  Violet Pratt will then come to live with Lizzie and help her with the Matheson, which is what they call Lizzie’s husband.  I told them it sounds medieval and the Matheson said it was medieval, and entirely rotten, to boot.  His father was a feudal Lord, a tradition imported from Britian and to no Scott’s good.

    The pretty Evie will go down to help her sister Loretta with the children so she can ranch cattle and horses.  I will not marry her.
    Rachel says thet she has seen Allie’s sort of rage in high caste Hindu women married to British colonists.  Muslim wives seem to do better or to have no more problems than one would expect, since the men must convert in order to gain their hands from their fathers, if consent is required.  She has seem some reasonable matched with Jewish women since, by tradition, the children are Jewish.     

To return to the most relevant instance, high caste Hindu women feel insulted by the British presence and the obligation, by their civility, to make the occupation invisible.  Add some further insult like the continued persecution of polygamous and the nuclear contamination, and the situation in Allie’s case could prove intenable in the end.  On the other hand it could save me from the marital boredom which is the sort of thing I would most fear in my own marital competence.
    Perhaps I dare tell you the true story of the decking I got from Allie in Salt Lake.  Besides a few brave souls who looked out the window and saw the altrecation, this is the first account I’ve given of it.
   

CHAPTER  KABLOOEY

Mother, I contributed my cartoons to the Salt Lake Tribune. I didn’t know how much the Mormon people hated it, and hated its cartoons.  The regular cartoonist said that my cartoons wern’t good enough, though I was given to believe that they were good enough by the head mucky-muck there.  They fashioned the cartoons in my image and I did sign them. They said that the ones that I drew were too hot.  I had some in my briefcase that were even hotter than they.  Forgive me , Mothe, but you tola me that I should always tell you everything, and so I will.  It was you yourself; that ma;de me ;promise it.  When I was kb;ut a lad giving the blush to my confirmation robe.  If I have ever broken my promise, I will not do so here for Allie’s sake.  I made a parody of the Mormon polygamist wives to the virgin mother of God, and I a;ttributed the tolerance of polygamy to the entire North American continent.  I did largely work at the Tribune. 

It was for the purpose of going in and out of the building that I wanted the raincoat.  It was an ordinary black raincoat.  I saw no harm in it.  I saw somewhat more harm in the constant perfidious suberterfuge of my position.    I did work at Kearns sometimes, so it is easiest to say that is what I did.  Allie followed me after a luncheon date at the Deseret Fountain.  She saw me go into the building and so was waiting when I came out.  Her employers offered her a baseball bat.  She did not think she would need one.  They let her off work early just to make sure she could catch me.  I did exit the building to find a sort of tornado waiting for me as I neared my car.  I like tornados when they are friendly.  She was not friendly that day.  I thought I could get out of it by openning up my briefcase to reveal only cartoons in the creation.  Mother, I was young and stupid.  I thought talent alone could get me anything or anyone I wanted.  It was only when I found myself on my butt on the ground that I realized that I was in a state, really a kind of theocratic republic of people with feelings.

    I sat there in the mud and looked up at Allie in astonishment.  She told God to damn me.  I thought at first she was taking the dear Lord’s name in vain.  She assured me that she was not.  My Allie gives instructions to the Allmighty, and supposes herself to be likely to be obeyed.  I knew I had to say something, or  all I would ever see of her would be her receeding back, and more than admirable hindquarters.  I reflected that I had not heard that Mormons believed in hell.  I said that where came from when people had religious differences, they attempted to keep one another better informed.  (Perhaps it is that they already are better informed). 

    Allie said that I personally believed in hell since all Catholics believed in hell. I added the information that all Irishmen do.  We have wars about that sort of thing in Ireland, if not in Utah.  Allie observed that she and I were having a war at the moment.  I said that it was a sort of slow war in which most of the blows were the kind she had given me.  I told her that she might have waited and decked me in private.  She said that that would have given her less satisfaction.  She assured me that if she ever decked me again, it would not be in some lone and desolate place to which I had led her innocent and unawares.  I said I would try never to do that, and she did not believe me.  I did not try to explain my blooming blue jaw to anyone.  They waited for Allie’s belly to swell, but it didn’t.   

      I will henceforth  always
refer to Enoch as Allie’s dad.  I swear never again to observe that  he was out of the country at the time of her birth. I furthermore have promised never again to observe in public or private  that her actual father is Raymond, alias Uncle Raymond.  I have promised this not for my own sake, not by my own intelligence,  but on Rachel’s  excellent and well-informed advice.   We must Mother, henceforth, regard Rachel as Allie’s stepmother.  We will do this not upon our own advice, but upon the advice of the family anthropologist for whom Allie’s dad works.  It is his high-born opinion that it has something to do with the idea that Enoch was better than his brother because he had given up polygamy, and Allie and the town’s desire to conceal the conspicuously obvious: that she and her siblings had different fathers.
                    Your Son,
                        Dan

( THIS IS WHERE THE B/C COPY ENDS. WE HAVE LEFT THE ADDITIONAL LETTERS FROM DAN HOME FOR THE SAKE OF CONVENIENCE IN EDITING SHOULD IT PROVE CONVENIENT)
    Dear Mariah,

        We miss you here terribly and hope Cranford knows how to properly appreciate you.  Have you found a girl to help the two of you?  It sounds terribly romantic.  Do you plan to die in bed, or simply go and lie in the churchyard when it is time?  We all think you should come back after a suitable interval.  Do not pull Sariah’s trick and get preggies on us.  Sampson is already the father of nations. 

        Allie is not going to marry Dan, though they have twins together.  She says she is far too old to think of marriage, and has told him so.  He has been half-crawling about the place on his knees, his hands clasped beneath his chin, and it makes Allie sick.  He has taken quite a shine to the children.  They are one boy and one girl.  He calls them his two-headed offspring.  Allie says that if he is really that fond of them, she supposes she’ll keep them.

        The Matheson thinks that Dan is a nice enough chap, and is quite impressed with his poetry.  Allie finds it insulting.  That is because he puts her in it.  I think he is sincere.  Rachel thinks that he will be a lot of work, and would prefer Allie to find someone of her own kind.   Enoch is philosophical about the match.  Dan keeps calling him Dad.  Uncle Raymond and Ellie sent quite a nice check.  Ellie thinks she can see her way clear to come next week.  For the time being the plan is for me to take care of the babies, and for Ellie to return to teaching as an elderly virgin.  I will take up a quiet existence here as an infamous and shameless woman.  I do wish I could find a man I like well enough to marry.  I’ve never cared about being first, but I tend to find men rather disappointing. 

        Lizzie has distracted Dan by contributing the letters she wrote to her mother while in Africa.  It sounds like her husband was quite a nice man.  Sophie seemed to think that Lizzie gave him syphillis.  I am glad that at least one of the children shared Lizzie’s resistance to it.  Lizzie is missing her grandchildren, and wants to go back to Juarez.  The Matheson is unenthused about a Mexican journey.  She is trying to get William to move his children north.  He does not want to come because he and the children are so dark.  The people there just take them for indians.  That has never been easy, but it is easier than all of the race hatred here. 

        The Matheson, as always is trying to buy them.  He has offered him a practice in Willits.  I think it very unlikely that anyone would go to a black doctor here.  Lizzie told him so, and thinks that he should move closer to Oakland.  It is so smoggy and horrible there.  The Matheson would get them a house in the hills.  We are afraid someone would burn him out, or that it would be almost that bad.  The only black people living in white places here are navy.  He probably could be taken for a navy doctor. Your Loving,
 Evie

            Dear mother,
Dan is going to marry Evie, he still claims he wants to marry me, but I do not believe him. I think it is just that Benjamin has given him the apartment you and dad and Ferron lived in after the war for a song. He is living in it with—-__________and   ________

in return for giving them a ride to school and helping with their English. _________ still translates from Tibetan in his head, it seems like you are speaking English with him,  but you are really speaking Tibetan. This is a very hard problem to solve.

            Evie is staying with Rachel during the week. We are trying to ween them for sure now. We have said we were trying for a long time, the probem is that no one loses their milk in one week. The babies come up for the weekend and than I am just too soft hearted. It is a joke at school. The last English teacher they had was not a very good teacher, and everyone was very frustrated with her, or some high toned lady would have ousted me.
  
             I try to look like I am picking up something off the floor whenever I have to hold one of my breasts to keep the milk from letting down. I also have to go to the bathroom a lot to change shields. We have a seperate bathroom for teachers or I would meet one of my students there doing the same thing . They want to stay in school but don’t have the money for  formula for their babies at home.

    I like my girls.  If I had ever spoken the English that they speak in Palo Alto I would have lost my position.  The Matheson says that there are people in Britian who think it is immoral to speak in a burr — as though it were fornicatiion or something.  He says he has heard it argued that it impedes the progress of the common people in the cities.  He thinks that for that reason the more stay home. These girls know standardized English only as the English that the bosses speak in the forest and in the fields.  I want to teach them to learn to love to read, and then hope that they can become better aquainted with the higher forms of English through their reading.  The ones who want to go on will know that it is what they speak in colleges and speak it.  This is what you and I both did, and I have told them that.  I have to think to speak that way, and it is hard to do it when no one else is thinking of it.  I am thinking of it now, but I don’t like to think of it.  I would rather just say what I feel.  I am glad I didn’t get married at sixteen like so many girls do back home, and never see anything of the world.

      Some of the girls here get married at 13 or 14, not all of them are pregnent their parents just think they will be if they don’t tie the knot. Back home for these girls is usually Oklahoma or Arkansas. There are a lot of Cherokee indian girls and then there are the local indians. They had forest here to hide in, so they didn’t get killed so much as in rest of California. There were massacres in Ukiah  because of the railhead being down there, like Hanuns  Mill.  It was the same rough element Rachie had to deal with when she was a girl.  So sad that the government spent so much tiem worring about polygamy and worried nothing at all about many hundreds of thousands of people and animals being shot like ducks in a shooting gallery or worse things done.  I”m glad John Marshall tired to understand it.

    There will be a school named John Marshall school down where Lizzie’s son is going to live.  He is not particularly dark.  His wife is an indian and is very dark.  There has been some trouble in the ward down to Oakland over the business about him a son of Ham.  It makes him want to go back to Mexico.  Lizzie’s Matheson has started up a mortgage for him on a very nice house.  The neighborhood he lives in is negro with very big, nice houses.  His office is neither very nice or very rundown as a lot of things are in Oakland.  He and Nan visited the offices of some other negro doctors and decided on what he should have in his office.  Nan is going to go down to work with him one day a week.   She sold her building in San Jose to go in on the practice.  He worked very hard in Mexico, but the people didn’t have much money and he didn’t either. 

        We knew about the neighborhood, which is up by Noland Park and zoo because Charlie works at the school.  They had him at a school where the people didn’t have so much money, and he got in trouble there.  Enoch says he is a negro-phobe.  There are still a few white schools in Oakland, but Charlie dosen’t have the senority for them.  Charlie almost wants to lower his eyes to the parents at this school.  People are always lowering their eyes to Lizzie’s son.  The light-colored negros expect his wife to lower her eyes to them because she is dark, and she will not.  This makes them angry.

  Kendrick and Angelina are not sure they want to stay in America for the rest of their lives.  Lizzie had aged like her mother, that is, not in any great rush to show her years.  When she is gone they will probably go back to Mexico.  They are both quite religious, and have taken the business with the ward very hard.  Sometimes I don’t like Mormons any better than people who aren’t.  I don’t think I could ever marry anyone who wasn’t Mormon — not after the mess with Dan.  It has just been too hard.

       
The Matheson had asked Dan to stay in  San Francisco, I had to do a lot of talking to get him to do it, he doesn’t understand about Evie, Evie has the babies and is in love with Dan. More is the pity for her, she is just the sort of sweet girl that he would like. He thinks he likes me but really he likes to fight with me, I’am always the one with the quick and witty  reparte.  This keeps Dan going and he is satisfied to call it love, because he thinks to get the better of me between the sheets.

            It is like you and Dad were. You are better off with uncle Raymond,  and so are we all.  Rachel is so good with him, but that is better to.  People should marry someone they admire.   Evie admires Dan. She almost worships him which I find silly. I love you Mama. Do say hello to Maudie. I”m sure she misses Rachie and will be glad to see her when she parts the veil. I’m sorry that she is suffering now. Most people don’t get out of the world easy. I am glad you are there with her and can see to the ranch.  Davy’s kids were never lazy. I am glad his family is there to help you.   The range down to Short Creek will be going fallow. I will be glad when they all get to go home, so ours can have a rest. I suppose there is nothing for it, but for the  people  to go to the cities. The ground cannot support so many. 

                                          Love, Allie.
                    
                        
        Dear Bubba,
            I have enclosed one letter, a copy of an original, prominently written in the hand of my knocked-up[ girl friend, elaborately and with great sensitivity, detailing her own sad demise at the hand of fate.  She is dead.  The poor girl is dead and wishes no further inquiries on my part.  Obviously I will not be invited to the funeral.  Even the signature, a sloppy non-facsimile of the John Henry of her friend,one of the real Nancy Elicotts is in Allie’s handwriting.  I am to be a good boy and marry her friend Evie.  Tennessee might call Evie pretty enough for any honest p;;urposes.  She is sweet, well-read in a unfashionable sort of way, an very good with my twins who are going to be two before I inow it.  Babies sure don’t stay babies for very long.  Soon they will be a little boy and a little girl.  The Jains would have married them off to one another in order kthat they might acheive perfect marital bliss.  The caul was over them both I am sure for if there is any suggrestion that Ido or may withhold anything from them because their mother would not marry me, I am in serious trouble with everyolkne here.  I would try to forget entirely about them, men do leave babies sprinkled about here and there.  The trouble is that their grandfather had a sufficient interest in some property in a really sweet  North Beach location.  I would feel very sophisticated if I were not being dreaggred into an arrangement that seem medieval at best.  The missive follows anon:

    Dear Dan,

    It is with the deepest regret that I write you this evening.  Allie died at two=thirty this afternoon so far as I was able to determine.  If I had been with her, she would not have died.  I carry basic equipment for dealing with any repetition of the fatal pharangitis  she suffered in college.   We do not discuss it and have always known that it might occur in a time or place where I could be of no use to her.

        When the babies are here she enjoys walking with them up along the creek.  She has been sketching an old redwood that is just downhill from a rock where she likes to sit.  Allie is stubborn and she had wanted to draw the thing until she gets it right.  There is a corw’s next that she likes to watch through her binocula;rs.  The baby corws are out now but have not flown yet.

        When they did not come home, Evie and I went looking for them.  The babies had come to no harm.  Little Harlan complained that his mother was alseep and would not wake up.  They had got her shirt open and were frustrated that in her helpless condition she could provide them with no more nourishment.  Tjhey were glad to see us in hopes of getting better grub.  The coroners at first usspec;te;d foul play.   I assured him that it was not necessary to look any farther than his nose for an expla;n;ation.  Evie and I told them to stay by M;ama and went off a little ways to cry.  They at least suffered no shock.  I think Allie loved you.  She just prefers to be an old maid school teacher, at least for the present, and any future that one might forsee. 

        Always your friend,

        Doctor Nancy Elicott

Dear Loretta,

    I feel bad that I haven’t been down to see you.  The twins are hellions, and I tell myself every day that this is the day that I will drive down and surprise you, and then I don’t.  Dan bought them a new stroller.  It is hard to get through doors, but theyh surely look cute in it
and it means that he dosen’t have to push a stroller.  It makes him feel silly to push a stroller, being an unwed father and all.  I just say that they are my cousin’s babies and don’t feel silly at all. 
    I suppose you have heard about Allie’s gaffe on Dan.  I don’t know whether it’s mean or not.  She says it’s mean of him to keep after her when she said no.  She wants me to marry Dan, but he’s such a darn gentile that it’s hard to think of it.  Rachel says that I may know him too well to marry him.  She says I like him as well or better than most married people like the people they’re married to.  He’s nice enough in his way, and I”m sure I do love him.  It’s just that Allie drives him to distraction and brings out the worst in him.

We went up to Willits last weekend and had a really fine time.  Kendrick drove over and we took the boys up.  Dan wanted to go but we said the car was too full. It is a station wagon and had a good deal of trouble getting up the grades. 
  
 I never knew how mean people are about color.  Back home people are only one color.  They could be better to the indians, but I”ve never seen anything like the faces and gestures people made when they passed us.