4

October 20, 1961

Dearest Harry,

While I cannot know how much has happened to you in the last year, the denouement of Pigs must have taken its toll. A good part of you so identifies with your work that each Agency mishap must come as a personal loss.

Of course, I am thinking of the old model Herrick Hubbard, circa 1959, and we have been out of touch. For that matter, I do not want you to picture me as I was after that awful morass in Paraguay.

I’ve changed. So much as one can change profoundly in a couple of years, I would say that I am not at all the same. Do you know that with the exception of a monthly visit from Hugh, and four stints a week of cleaning and Christopher-watching from a good Maine housekeeper, I was alone at the Keep, worked on my book alone, and took care of my son for over a year?

Living all-but-alone in Maine through a winter, is equal, I think, to being suspended in a diving bell. You do scrape bottom on the underwater ledges, but you’re awfully strong when you come up. I was. I had a curious year. I developed a momentous psychological theory. (Momentous for me. Might be modestly useful for others.) I don’t want to describe it to you in too much detail at this point, but can say that two of the most unresolvable problems in psychoanalysis today are narcissism and psychopathy. No one knows how to treat such conditions. The Freudians are comparable on these matters to fourteenth-century cartographers who left vast empty spaces on their maps of the world.

Well, Alpha and Omega, if one accepts the premise, does offer a good grip on the matter. I don’t feel enthusiastic enough at this moment to give you a once-over-quickly on the theory, so, will only indicate that trying to develop a book out of the above wore down my literary spirit, such as it is. Day after day, for a year, I struggled at it, and discovered that I was out beyond my powers. I have simply not had enough personal life to illumine my thesis with the thousand everyday examples it demands. I wanted to come forth with a magnum opus full of intellectual charisma, but had to recognize once again—I am simply one more bright girl too soon married, too soon motherized, my backside on the bank and one toe in the career-river. You don’t shape history with that posture.

Now about this time (which brings us close to a year ago), Hugh began to importune me to come back to Washington. Up till then, it had been a contest between his will and mine. We were both suffering acutely but not confessing to one bleat of discomfort. Finally he said, “I want a marriage. I have spent my life trying to escape the inevitable. I don’t want to end up in a monk’s cell.”

I was awfully moved. You know he adored his mother and in fact even slept in the same bed with her until he was ten years old. I suspect it was a way she had of keeping his father at arm’s length. Then, the disaster occurred. Hugh, at the age of eleven, not only had a dead father but was obliged to live with the dire possibility of a murderous mother. He drew very much away from her and spent his adolescence as a solitary. His rock climbing started then. Can you conceive of it? This private and very young adolescent off on solo hikes in the Rockies, climbing freestyle before there was a word for it. One must be in awe at the depth of the desperation that he actually managed to get under control through this drastic cure of taking great risks. Suddenly, after all our years of marriage, my husband was awfully real to me, and I was prodigiously moved.

By half. My Alpha was molten. My Omega rock-hard. I amazed myself. I understood for the first time how hard I am down at Omega-core. I wrote to him that I would return only if we could shift the basis of our marriage. I would not go back to the isolation of being kept just about completely out of his work. He may not have understood in the past, but one reason I always became so feverish-minded at the Stable was that too great a need had grown up in me to find excitement and satisfaction in social relations—those vetting dinners, for instance, where we looked for a replacement for Allen. What foolishness! That could not be enough.

What did I want, then? It was to share his work. In fact, his secrets. He couldn’t agree to that, he tried to explain—I was asking him to rupture his vow. Your vow be damned, I told him. Our marriage is a sacrament. That is a deeper vow.

He agreed finally to let me in. I came back not only to Washington, but to his work. Not even to most of it, of course, but he would empower me (his term!) to collaborate with him on one or two of his projects. (Which he calls pieces.) I discovered Hugh’s skill at negotiation—I ended, you may be certain, with less than I could have obtained. No matter. What I have gained is fascinating enough. I am now his junior partner, and it is sweet to sup on a couple of the secrets. I believe he even enjoys revealing the top-drawer manifestations of his mind. Domestic tranquility threatens to lap at our feet.

Not too seriously, however. We’re still combatants. This last November, for example, we had a horrendous row. I had not even been back in Washington for more than a month when my old friend Polly Galen Smith was at the doorstep. Now, I know you remember her as our epistolary cut-out between Washington and Montevideo, but I can’t remember how much else I told you about Polly. Her husband, Wallace Rideout Smith is no longer at State but has transferred over to the Agency and is now one of our muckamucks at the other end of things—Administration. And a duller man never walked a Company corridor. Did I write to you about them once before? Polly, as I believe I’ve told you, has been deliriously unfaithful to Rideout Smith for years—not in quantity, but she does take abyss-jumper risks. I think it’s just as simple as that she enjoys men the way all of you men are supposed to enjoy us.

At any rate, Polly and I get along famously because we are so different. She came to me again about a month before the presidential inauguration to ask “one hell of a favor.” Would I let her use the Stable for an hour early Wednesday afternoon while Hugh was away working and I might be shopping? She had a friend who lived two blocks to one side of me in Georgetown, and there was Polly three blocks on the other side. Her friend was the busiest man in Christendom right now, but they had “absolute grabs” for each other. Well, who was he? State secret, she answered. Impossible, I said, there’s Christopher to think of, and the maid. Not so, she said. Christopher is still in nursery school at 2:00 P.M., and the maid has Wednesdays off. She had cased my situation.

I won’t say yes until you let me in on who the man could be, I told her.

Can’t be done, she said. In that case, I responded, you and your buddy-buddy will just have to find a motel.

Oh, God, no, Kittredge. Well, why not? Too prominent, the man is too prominent, she kept saying. At last I dragged forth the name. Her beau was none other than her old senatorial pal of two years ago, now our presidential jock-elect, Jack Kennedy. The reason they needed a place just so convenient as mine involved the concerns of the Secret Service. Told in advance, they will remain a discreet half block away. Moreover, Jack can duck out of his house on N Street between meetings, then slip back without raising a stir about sizable gaps in his schedule.

I had one instant of revelation: snobbery, property, propinquity, and good old droit de seigneur revealed their trusslike interrelations in me. Harry, I had to say yes. I wanted the President-Elect of the United States infusing my rooms with his carnal presence. I think I became aware at that moment what a slut I could have been with another kind of upbringing.

How I envied Polly. Envy is mean! I found myself insisting on a particular payment. I wasn’t going to have Jack Kennedy investing my linens with his spoor when I hadn’t even met the man.

Polly protested as if I’d broken a bottle of stink, but she had to give in. So commenced their Wednesdays. They were going to love Wednesdays at the Stable, she said, even if the whole thing was going to take up no more than thirty minutes—an item I was to discover when we arranged how the encounter would take place. I was to pretend to come home unexpectedly, but on the minute. “If you’re two minutes late, he’ll be gone, and if you’re five minutes early, you will walk in on the finishing touches.” Polly, you can see, is to the point, and that, I comprehended, is exactly why they got together in the first place. I have not met a man who is more to the point than Jack Kennedy, unless it is his brother Bobby. (Of course, their father, I hear, leaves them both in his wake.)

At any rate, I saw him. Even as I turned my key and came through the door to my own parlor, my heart fluttered twice—once for history and once for the person. He is awfully attractive and I think it is because he is not out of measure. I was talking to a man to whom I felt equal, which I must say is bottomlessly agreeable. And he’s so direct and sure of himself that it comes off as a natural quality rather than arrogance. He is nice. And so amoral. And so unflappable. Polly was trying to keep from guffawing, which was forgivable—two of her best friends, after all, were meeting, and he—whether or not she had told him—seemed not at all surprised by my supposedly unexpected entrance. (Perhaps she did tell him in advance and he had worked it out with the Secret Service. Indeed, on reflection, they had to have done just that.)

“Do you know,” he said for greeting, “you and my wife have a slight resemblance to each other. It’s uncanny.”

I thought of Jacqueline Kennedy’s father, Black Jack Bouvier. Then I had to compare him to my father and I said, “Oh, dear, next to your wife I’m dry-as-dust,” and felt shabby suddenly, a most unexpected feeling for me, but it is all genes, isn’t it? Folio dust was coming out of my pores by way of my father’s pores. Or so I felt! “Dry-as-dust,” I repeated when he just kept smiling, considerably more comfortable in my parlor than I was.

“Oh,” he said, “we will see about that,” and offered a glint of a very good smile.

“Ho, ho, curfew,” said Polly Smith, and Jack gave a small salute and was out the door, leaving Polly behind. “Till next Wednesday,” he said.

Polly stayed for tea, and I began to feel disloyal to Hugh. I was so avid to hear about Jack.

By the time Hugh came home, I was in a confessional mode. I said nothing before we went to sleep, and nothing again on the next night, but, I was beginning to feel those unruly intimations of dread that I call “the dark wobbles.” I can’t suppose you don’t remember. They were touched off in me once by that awful brooch you sent from Montevideo. Well, it was coming on again, and I knew I had to tell Hugh. He couldn’t have taken it worse. “I feel sullied by it,” he said. Then he said, and you don’t know how much this is out of character for him, “I couldn’t feel worse if that fellow Jack Kennedy had buggered me!” Can you conceive of Hugh speaking like that?

“It was Polly, not I,” I said to him, “who was in the receiving position.”

“That will be the last time she receives in our house,” he answered. “No,” I said. “I can’t do that to her.”

“It pollutes everything here, including the child. Can you make no distinction between the relatively sacred and the wholly profane?”

Well, I was going to strike my colors. He was right, after all, and I knew it; I have also learned, however, that Hugh has no respect for you if he wins too quickly, so I thought I’d hold out till the Tuesday before the next Wednesday and let him think he’d won a major match.

Talk of presidential timing. I’m beginning to see how Jack got where he is. I did not say a word to Polly but on Monday an invitation was delivered by hand. Could Mr. and Mrs. Montague come to dinner on N Street Tuesday night?

I must say that Hugh went through a major stomach upset. I have never known him to throw up in such manner before. And I realized what it was about. He was dying to go to N Street. He wanted to be familiar with Jack Kennedy, oh, how he wanted that. If for nothing else, then for the Agency. But be damned if he was going to have his home tom-catted up. Yet, if Polly were cut off before Wednesday, wouldn’t dinner be rescinded for Tuesday? Of course, we could go and then cut the lovers off. No! You didn’t do things like that to the President-Elect!

All this is speculation, mind you; Hugh was vomiting so audibly that I would have held his head if I dared, but then he emerged from the loo long enough to say, “It’s clear to me. You call Polly now, or I will.”

I had to love him even if I couldn’t bear the thought of giving up dinner with Jack, but who can deny characterological integrity when it is on that scale? I called Polly. I was able to say no more than, “Hugh’s on to the game.”

“Oops,” she said, “are sirens ringing?”

“No. But cancel your venue for Wednesdays.”

Do you know, the dinner invitation was not rescinded, and Hugh, to my surprise, had a hell of a time, and I got along with Jackie Kennedy satisfactorily. Under all that false innocence, she’s awfully sensitive to what’s wrong in people and she knew there was something just a little off in me vis-à-vis her husband. Still, we got on. She knows a good bit about eighteenth-century Piedmont and Charleston cabinetwork, and had a special little slave tale to tell. It seems one of the greatest furniture makers in Charleston—Charles Egmont—was a former slave whose liberty was given to him by his owner, Charles Cawdill, who set black Charles up in his own shop and they split the profits. She tells such tales with great intimacy, as if with some maidenly pain she is offering you one of her jewels. But, oh, Harry, that’s a complex and troubled woman!

Meanwhile, Hugh and Jack were certainly getting along. At one point, Jack confessed to Hugh that it was a pleasure to meet “the mythological Montague.” “Mythological?” says Hugh, his mouth all twisted up as if he’s being asked to kiss a turkey’s tucker.

“Let’s say the apocryphal Montague,” says Jack.

“I’m only a minor factotum in the Department of Agriculture.”

“Come off it. I’ve heard about you for years.”

Well, I could see them cooking up some special understanding. Hugh was brilliant once he got going on Soviet skills at disinformation. To my horror, he started to give the President-Elect and his wife a lecture; to my large pride, he brought it off.

Now, since the inauguration, we get invited back from time to time to the White House. To the more intimate White House dinners, mind you. At the last soirée, Jack chose, while dancing with me, to ask about Polly.

“She pines for you,” I said.

“Tell her I’ll call one of these days. It’s not out of my mind.”

“You are awful,” I said.

He got that glint in his eye. “Do you know, for a beautiful woman, your dancing is a hint stiff.”

I wanted to cream him with my evening bag. Alas, I didn’t dare. He’s not that splendid a dancer himself, but oh so schooled. Like a rider with a cultivated seat who doesn’t really take to horses.

All the same, we get along. I think he’s wary enough of Hugh not to entertain notions about me, but we do have the next best thing—promise.

Later

I don’t want to exaggerate. We’re invited to sup with them at their House perhaps not more than once a month. And on one occasion, they came to the Stable. Relationships, however, do deepen. Between Jack, that is, and myself. Jacqueline Kennedy and I are on a plateau—awfully equal stuff passes back and forth between us, and I respect her because she does not wield rank over me any more than is implicit in the rich-mouse country-mouse syndrome, but, then, that is the price you pay for such entrée. Meanwhile, Hugh and Jack are off in a corner. You know Hugh—at his best when one on one. And Jack, no matter how furious over the Bay of Pigs, is fascinated with cloak-and-dagger and smart enough to know that Hugh is the saucier in that kitchen. And, of course, as laid out above, Jack is chummy with me.

I never realized how much this was disconcerting Hugh until one day this summer, toward the end of July, he suddenly put the BLUEBEARD dossier in front of me. “Here’s another side to one of your friends,” he said. I think he expected me to be put off by the contents, but I wasn’t; I know Jack’s nature: Promiscuity is the price he pays to open the gates to his other skills. Jack Kennedy is like a child that way. Must have his daily reward, and it’s in the forbidden jam. Good for him, I say, so long as I’m not part of the private preserve. If he can do a little more good than harm, God will doubtless forgive him for all the girls whose hearts he jiggled and juggled. I’m sure he sees it that way.

But I did lose a bit of respect for Hugh. He should not have handed me the file. In truth, I wouldn’t forgive him if it were not for Ty Cobb’s death on July 17.

Hugh once remarked that your father broods over the obituary columns instead of enjoying them, but Ty Cobb is a signal figure in the Montague arcana. After all, Ty Cobb’s mother killed his father in much the same way that the Montague family tragedy enacted itself. So, when Cobb died (of prostate cancer, by the way—poor man—once so fleet on the base paths!), Hugh took a tumble, and finally handed over the BLUEBEARD file.

As you may expect, I was riveted to it. Of course, I kept wondering whether anyone but you could be Harry Field. (Hugh wouldn’t relinquish that morsel.) And yesterday, receiving verification, I confess that I went through a turn.

Well, I not only have digested your reports, but some later BLUEBEARD transcripts you have not seen, and I’m worried, as is Hugh. He’s been doing his subtle best to get our young President to recognize what an incubus is J. Edgar Buddha on any administration, especially this one, but in the interim, I don’t believe Jack comprehends how many pressure points are being handed over to Hoover. That man could end with a total choke on the Kennedy windpipe. Modene is so fabulously indiscreet. I am not going, as you did, to memorialize her meanderings with her friend, Willie, which I find misleading since under the guise of telling nothing, she tells her friend (and J. Edgar) all, even if it takes too long to find out! I am going to summarize what I have learned and save you the time you did not save me.

In brief, Modene suffered the lacerations of the abandoned during Jack and Jacqueline’s visit to Paris at the end of May. Do you recollect? Our First Lady was a sensational success in Paris. Jack even said, “My real mission in Paris is to escort Jacqueline Kennedy.” God, how all that must have been etched into your poor girl’s brain. And, of course, our ogrish Sam G. couldn’t resist twitting her on the raw nerve. “Are you jealous, Modene?” he kept asking. “Not at all,” she kept replying. In recounting it to her stalwart Willie (whom, I must say, I picture as post-deb, blond, and seriously overweight—did you ever obtain a description?) Modene does, however, burst into tears. It comes out that earlier in May, before the trip to Paris, Jack had Modene in bed at the White House. Can you imagine? After a surprisingly dreadful lunch of cold soup and ketchup on the hamburgers—Irish!—Jack took Modene from the family dining room on the second floor to a bedroom, same floor, with a commodious bed. There, they consummated their reunion. She is madly in love again. Or so she will tell Willie that night.

This transcript does happen to be worth offering for flavor.

WILLIE: Wait a minute. The guards just allowed you to walk into the White House?

MODENE: Of course not. I had to go through the gate, and then there was a short, well-built little man named Dave Powers who came down to meet me. He had a twinkle in his eye, permanently, I think. Looked like a troll. The President, he said, was having a swim and would be by soon. Dave Powers kept saying, “the President” with a high hush in his voice as if asking you to kneel in church. Of course, he left as soon as Jack came in to lunch. By then Dave Powers had gotten it across to me that he’s the fellow who wakes Jack up every morning and tucks him in at night. He certainly makes you feel you are in the White House.

WILLIE: It’s not a very sexy place, is it?

MODENE: I would say it is like the inside of a Quaker church, only heavier. Sacred trust sort of feeling. I never wanted a bourbon so much. It was early Saturday afternoon, the place was deserted, and I kept having the feeling I would never get to see Jack. After Powers took me upstairs to the family quarters, though, it was less uncomfortable—I was familiar with all that N Street furniture they had moved over to the second floor.

After lunch, they journey to the bedroom. Following the preliminaries, Jack receives her on his back. Which French king was it who used to greet his mistresses in that manner? Louis XIV, perhaps, given that pampered look. In any event, as Modene explains it, Jack’s “lumbar condition” has grown worse. “Cares of office.” She is happy to serve the master, but a nugget of discontent remains. “I don’t mind which position is chosen. Different positions bring out different sides of me. Only I prefer to get to them on my own.”

Mind you, all this while, through a window near the double bed, she can see the Washington Monument.

Dear man, I have to wonder what your reactions must have been while reading the earlier transcripts. I hope I understand you well enough to assume that such perusal spurred you on to greater heights with Modene—or was it faster flats? We do want to shine in the eyes of the Immortal Race Steward.

Oh, Harry, is all this due to the teasing I was never able to give to that younger brother I never had?

I return to the essential. Despite Jackie’s triumphs in Paris, Jack does get in touch with Modene again early in June, and all through the summer, on fearfully hot, deserted, dog-day Saturday afternoons in Washington, he keeps bringing her to the same double bed. They used to say of Joe Kennedy that the longer you were in a business deal with the man, the more he took from it, and the less you brought home. Something of that lament creeps into her conversations with Willie. All the same, she finds justifications for Jack. “He is so tired. He does have many concerns to deal with.”

It is a most peculiar period for our BLUEBEARD. She is based now in Los Angeles. She is actually sharing an apartment in Brentwood with four other stewardesses. Hardly the Modene you knew! From this base, however, she keeps waiting for the next summons to Washington. Meanwhile the Brentwood apartment is a focus for parties. Actors, marriageable young corporate types, a couple of professional athletes, one or two fringe film executives, and a prodigious amount of drinking. I’m not familiar with evenings of this variety, but gather there’s a great deal of dancing and a fair amount of marijuana. Then she’s always ready to fly to Chicago or Miami to spend a weekend with RAPUNZEL. Yet—her steadfast claim—there is “no sexual link.” I won’t bore you with Willie’s doubts about this.

What speaks loudly is dissipation. Modene keeps gaining weight, and is drinking so much that she actually goes “as a tourist” to an AA meeting, but is “appalled by the gloom.” She is also taking stimulants and depressants. Her hangovers are described as “calamities.” A tennis game outside her window sounds “like an antiaircraft barrage.” She keeps referring to “a crazy drunken summer.” When working, she suffers “as never before.” She calls Jack frequently. Apparently, he has given her a special number to reach one of his secretaries. According to Modene’s account, Jack does call back when not immediately available. And she has offered hints that last summer she did carry a manila envelope from IOTA to RAPUNZEL. All the same, Jack keeps teasing her. “Don’t,” says Jack, “let it get too personal with Sammy. He’s not a fellow to trust with the collection plate.”

Hugh, in one surprising moment of candor, said to me, “I suspect this has to do with Castro. Under it all, your Jack has an IRA mentality. Trust that Mick instinct. He wants to get even. Get even and you can enjoy your old age.”

I find the most curious feelings in me. I’ve always thought of myself as ruefully patriotic, that is, I love America, but it’s like having a mate whose gaffes keep you exclaiming, “Oh, my God. He’s done it again.” I am outraged, however, that this man Castro, who is probably more qualified to be captain of a pirate ship than a head of state is now gloating over us. It does bother me. And I know it rests like a thorn in the Kennedy heart. With his love of intrigue, it might not be unlike Jack to pick such an outré back channel as Sammy G.

Toward the end of August, our girl is invited once again to lunch on Saturday in the small second-story dining room. This time, however, Dave Powers is invited to eat with them.

MODENE: At the end of the meal, Jack said to me, “Modene, I am picking up a few tales out of school.” “Tales?” I asked. For the first time since I knew him, I didn’t like his tone. Not at all. He said, “Did you ever say to anyone that I tried to get you to accept another girl to go right in there with us?”

WILLIE: He spoke in such manner right in front of Dave Powers?

MODENE: I think he wanted a henchman there for the record.

WILLIE: Maybe you were being recorded?

MODENE: Don’t say that. It’s offensive enough already. I certainly had the feeling that he was doing it for Dave Powers’ benefit. As if to announce: “Well, here is this unlikely tale, but were you, Modene, malicious enough to go around spreading it?”

WILLIE: You must have been furious.

MODENE: I don’t make a habit of swearing, but instinct told me to get downright coarse. So I said: “If you ever tried something so low as hoping to put another girl into the sack with you and me, I sure as hell would be the last one to run around with that story. It’s an insult to me.”

WILLIE: You did tell him off.

MODENE: He had transgressed the line of privacy.

WILLIE: I appreciate what you are saying.

MODENE: Yes.

WILLIE: Except you did tell it to me.

MODENE: I did? .  .  . Yes, I did, didn’t I? But you don’t count.

WILLIE: Did you tell anyone beside me?

MODENE: I may have told Tom. I can’t remember. Do you know, I really can’t remember. Do you suppose pot and alcohol if taken with sleeping pills might injure a person’s memory?

WILLIE: Yes.

MODENE: Well, I do remember telling Sam.

WILLIE: Oh, no.

MODENE: I couldn’t stew in it alone.

WILLIE: What happened after you told him off?

MODENE: I kept on the high road. I asked him how he dared to discuss something that personal in front of a third party? Jack must have made some signal then, because Powers left the room. Then Jack tried to make amends. Kept kissing me on the cheek and saying, “I’m awfully sorry. But a story did get back to me.” I told him if he didn’t like tales out of school, maybe he ought to comport himself in another manner. And then very suddenly I said, “Let’s break it off.” I couldn’t believe I had said it. He tried to get me to stay. I think, after all this, he still wanted to get me in bed. Men are single-minded, aren’t they? I finally had to say, “You are insensitive. I want to leave.”

WILLIE: You just took off?

MODENE: Oh, no. He wouldn’t permit that. Dave Powers had to take me on a tour of the White House.

WILLIE: I’m sure they wanted to check on whether you were under control. All they needed was some mad beauty running out of the White House and ripping off her clothes on Pennsylvania Avenue.

MODENE: You are particularly humorous today.

WILLIE: Sorry.

MODENE: The tour was painful. Dave Powers had done it so many times before that I wanted to scream. I felt as if I were working an all-seats-occupied flight. Dave must have taken forty-five minutes guiding me through the Green Room and the Red Room and the Oval Room and the East Room.

WILLIE: Do you remember any of it?

MODENE: Don’t I just? “Elegance is the fruit of rationality.”

WILLIE: What?

MODENE: “Elegance is the fruit of rationality.” That was in the East Room. Dave Powers kept talking about the noble proportions of the East Room. When we got to the Oval Room, he had to say, “It’s traditionally employed for White House weddings.” Then he began to describe all the shades of blue that the Oval Room has seen. Originally, under President Monroe, it was crimson and gold, but Van Buren changed it to royal blue, then President Grant made it violet-blue, and Chester Arthur’s wife altered it to robin’s-egg blue. Mrs. Harrison picked out a cerulean blue.

WILLIE: There is nothing wrong with your memory.

MODENE: Thank you. Mrs. Harrison’s cerulean blue was a figured wallpaper.

WILLIE: Thank you.

MODENE: And then Teddy Roosevelt made it steel blue. Harry Truman altered it back to royal blue.

WILLIE: Amazing.

MODENE: I was sick. I wanted to get out of there.

I can feel for Modene. Men don’t understand how much importance women attribute to composure when they are feeling nothing but emotional debris. The moment Modene does get back to her hotel, she packs her bags and catches a flight to Chicago.

It is here, I must tell you, that she begins her affair with Sam. However, I don’t feel ready to write to you about that today. I would feel more secure if you would answer this letter first.

Yours provisionally,

Eiskaltblütig

P.S. Can you believe it? That is one of Hugh’s nicknames for me. I, who am as unformed and overheated within as Lava Inchoate.