The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 13

Mr. Mick Watts

478 Chester Place

Houston, TX 77055

March 13, 2013

Dear Mr. Watts,

Thank you for your invitation to dinner, but ‘no’ is my answer, and you’ll have no choice but to take it. I have alternate engagements on this date. Now that you mention Evansberg, everything falls into place. You should have mentioned the suit at the memorial, and then perhaps I would not have stood staring at you like a glass eyed fish. Of course I remember Evansberg, a two-year plague, and the name M. Watts on every page that came across my desk.

Regarding your remarks on my remarks, firstly, it was a bane to stand up there and speak. Secondly, I don’t see that there is anything terribly unique in what drew me (and, in fact, Guy) to the practice of law. The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order…well, of course it’s appealing. There’s nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white, other than, perhaps, if you are a religious person, which I am, a religious text, but even the Bible puts one into a wretched state of confusion with all of its doublespeak and nuance, if one really gets into it, though with a religious text one is, of course, suspending all disbelief and throwing caution to the wind.

You also asked after the meaning of my practice of letter writing, calling it quaint and impractical (which was more telling of you, Mr. Watts, than it was offensive to me, though it was, still, offensive to me).

Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished! And one day, Mr. Watts, you yourself will be gone. Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you; if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their children will not. They may keep some old photos in a book on a shelf, and perhaps two or three times in a lifetime may turn the page and find your face and think, Ah, yes, doesn’t Jimmy resemble this great-great-grandfather Mick, and continue to turn the page, and so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake, a name plucked from the family tree that has come back in vogue after seventy-odd years as fashionable things tend to do and slapped on a newborn baby who will know nothing of YOU.

And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It’s all the same. I had some notion of this from as far back in my life as I can remember, and I’ve been writing letters out into the world since I could form a sentence with a pen (age nine).

Now I’ve gone on longer than I intended. I wish you a nice visit to the East Coast. Regarding the Evansberg suit: that case was terrific fun, you know, for me. It was those sorts of cases, the ones requiring a bit of sleuthing, I loved best.

Regards,

Ms. Sybil Van Antwerp

Postscript: A good punch line is a good punch line regardless if delivered by a man or a woman. You sound like an old fool with comments like that one.