Dear Georgette,

When we arrived in Konnarock last Tuesday, I found that
the leak in the water pipe which leads from the well to
the house had become more copious. As soon as I turned on 
the pump, water started to percolate through the gravel 
and trickle down the driveway, if not an emergency, yet a
situation urgently requiring attention. The ensuing days
were consumed with telephone calls to local experts, and
with purchases of flexible pipe, electrical cable and
plumbing fittings.  By Friday, with the help of a village
handy-man, I had installed the new material, pipe and
cable, which now course across the unavoidably unshorn
lawn, waiting for the back-hoe that will dig a trench,
I hope as early as tomorrow, in which the conduits will
be buried. A year or two hence, the lawn will have healed,
and this month's efforts almost forgotten.

Yesterday afternoon, my wife Margaret and I drove again to
the cemetery at the foot of White Top Mountain, where we
buried my parents' ashes and where we propose to do the
same with Margrit's.  It was a bright, cloudless day. 
A brisk breeze swept over the graveyard and the surrounding
fields. The burial ground has been maintained with meticulous
zeal, an immaculately manicured lawn, with many elaborate,
ostentatious monuments, some in deplorably poor taste. 
Many of the names were familiar; classmates with whom I went
to school, one Athern Brown, who had confided to me one
morning in church that he would shoot my father the first
time he encountered him in the woods, a threat which I was
too frightened to report, feeling that if I kept it to myself,
it might not come true.  I found also the grave of Charlotte
Shumate, who had been my first secretary when I started my
Damascus practice in 1956.  I recognized on the gravestones
the names of many patients of my fathers and and some of my
own. The simplicity of my parents' flat inconspicuous markers
is different from the other monuments. To the very end, - and
beyond, - I wanted them to be "etwas Besonderes." 
To facilitate the engraving of a similar stone, I took along
crayons and a few sheets of paper to make a "rubbing" of the
flat 12x24 inch granite slabs that we had placed for my parents.
My father had, in fact, directed that his grave should not be
marked at all, but I disregarded his wishes in favor of Margrit's
who wanted a marked site which as she said "the grandchildren
would visit."  (Understandably indifferent, they have never come.)

My recitation reminds me that both Margrit and her mother were 
disposed to regard themselves as actresses on a social stage.
Benevolently critical of my mother, my father often recited the
advice which one of my mother's coworkers at the bank had given
her some time prior to her marriage: "Fraeulein, Sie sollten ans 
Theater gehen." Margrit's vision of the greatgrandchildren devoutly
visiting our parents' graves, reminds me of the extent to which,
in retrospect, much of Margrit's life seems to have been staged.
Admittedly, to be a person (persona) is to don a mask. I try not
to be critical.  To you, Margrit tried to play the role of a mother.
Among her notes of that fateful trip to Europe on which she set up
a competition between yourself and Billy, I found a ghostscript of
imaginary entries in an imaginary diary, which Margrit had drafted
as if Billy had confided to a diary the feelings and experiences
which she imputed to him as if she were the playwright of Billy's
life.

From your comments, I infer that Margrit's break-up with your
father was consequence of his inability - or unwillingness -
to accept her personality. On the other hand, Margrit's very
sketchy allusions suggested that it was she who broke with him
because of his failure to adapt to the role in their social
existence that she had contemplated.  I am very ignorant. 
Margrit tried systematically to conceal from me the life that
she was living and that she had lived. My situation reminds me
of a passage from Hofmannsthal's "Das kleine Welttheater" in
which a poet refers to a poem:

"Worein ich irgendwie den Widerschein 
Von jenen Abenteuern so verwebe. 
Daß dann die Knaben in den dumpfen Städten, 
Wenn sie es hören, schwere Blicke tauschen 
Und unter des geahnten Schicksals Bürde, 
Wie überladne Reben schwankend, flüstern: 
"O wüßt' ich mehr von diesen Abenteuern, 
Denn irgendwie bin ich darein verwebt 
Und weiß nicht, wo sich Traum und Leben spalten." 

Please let me know when you think it time for another telephone
conversation. My best wishes to you.

Jochen