Back home in the 12534-3203 where it has turned quite autumnal in the week that I was gone. Chilly nights, I've tossed on an extra blanket, sleep now in a tee, Claire joining me in the middle of the night for warmth. Here and there maples are turning red, asters are in full ragged force at the conservation area, the apple tree is laden with ripe red fruit, and ornamental grasses in our garden are flowering in long silvered feathery fronds - I'd forgotten they do that, a nice September surprise, along with the autumn sedum which after a long nascence in which it resembled a row of blanched broccoli has finally turned rosy pink.

Before leaving the city on Saturday I did manage to get in one bit of "culture." I stopped by the New York Society Library, located in an elegant limestone manse on East 79th Street (between Madison and Park), to catch the exhibit on the authors Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller, who were married to each other (they wed in 1963; Steegmuller died in 1994). As exhibits go, it wasn't so much of one - four small flat cases, two in an upstairs hall, another pair in an adjoining salon. But I enjoyed it immensely, it was quite transporting, and I was delighted to discover this special library whose secrets I have not begun to plumb, but is one of those magical vestiges of old, genteel, literary New York that I had assumed had long since (in public form, at least) all but vanished.

I examined the cases and jotted a few notes, impressions that registered most strongly. One case displayed a selection of first editions of some of Hazzard's novels, along with well-written curatorial notes that offered interesting tidbits (I think of the Polish word, czekawostki - "interestings"). In The Transit of Venus, for example, Hazzard wrote, "the tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts." Of course I wrote that down. So true, and my problem - precisely.

The tidbits I noted are so random! Francis Steegmuller was a translator and biographer of Flaubert, Guy deMaupassant too I think, and one of the curatorial notes read that deMaupassant (whose stories I haven't read since I was a child) was a disciple of Flaubert's and that he died of syphilis. (Which, knowing nothing of de Maupassant, suggests a profligate lifestyle - but what if it's like a clueless teen becoming pregnant - but we did it only once, standing up.) I think there was also a deMaupassant quote that I didn't jot down, something to the effect of, boy I sure wish I'd had a quarter of the talent of Flaubert. Poor guy, whatever his story is. The exorbitant prices one must pay for kisses. (I myself have been doing without - which exacts an intolerable price of its own.)

Steegmuller, along with his scholarly authorial ventures, also penned mystery novels, and his wife Shirley Hazzard observed, "Francis liked to amuse himself writing mysteries. It was as if he had a secret life." Love the "as if." Reminded me, of course, of you, with your secret life, you fan of Ian Fleming you, whose books, you felt, were more interesting than the recursive movies, and which, looking back, I think inspired you more than I will ever know.

After examining the cases in the dim, shadowed hall (lit as I recall with an ancient ornate fixture that dropped from the ceiling like an enormous spider) I faced the massive dark wood doors to the salon, turned a knob, pushed, and slipped inside, entering a large, light, high-ceilinged room that gave an instant impression of peaceful, opulent elegance. An entire wall was devoted to (unexpectedly I thought) shelves upon shelves of antique porcelain wares. Placed about the room were library tables arrayed with an inviting abundance of journals, magazines, and fresh newspapers, along with a number of comfortable upholstered chairs on a couple of which, in separate corners, napped in dustmoted silence middle-aged poetic sorts (or so I imagined), of pale, sensitive appearance, limbs in elegant fold and drape even in sleep, as if tubercular inmates in a Swiss sanatorium taking the rest cure on this brilliant September afternoon.

Here I marveled at a communication to Steegmuller from William Maxwell, the New Yorker editor - a Western Union message that read, in its entirety, "THE FLAUBERT INTRODUCTION IS A MASTERPIECE OF CRITICAL WRITING." Imagine getting such a telegram. What grand style! Oh what a vanished Atlantis of genteel and utterly fantastic expressive gestures!

What else? There was a letter, by either Hazzard or Steegmuller, elegant notepaper embossed with an East 66th Street address, whatever content beautifully and tangibly having been typed on a manual typewriter - the single filled sheet a lovely object in itself, with mixed indentations of the imprinted keys on the page - so direct, so personal. It instantly called to mind the wonderful correspondence I had with your mother - so literary herself, of course - for some years - how I looked forward to her haphazardly typed envelopes (with my first name too often misspelled - she had her blind spots) - anyway, her letters couldn't have been more charming and amusing (as she was in person - look - she wasn't my mother), and another thought that comes up (as I still have her letters) is - did my side of the correspondence survive? I wonder if she saved my letters (she strikes me as the sort of person, or at least of the era, that saved everything). So I wonder - is such a cache of letters in your possession, perhaps? It's just nice to think that there might be. Those letters were innocent enough, certainly. There were so many love letters from you that I burned, literally, in extreme attempts at wholesale riddance, purification. I burned a pile of them in the blacktopped asphalt lot behind my old elementary school (in broad daylight, on the very spot where in kindergarten I had sat in a circle and played "duck duck goose" hoping desperately not to be the "goose" and wondering what the game meant; a dozen or two feet away from where, a decade and change later, cops had once shined a flashlight into your car on us but blessedly (if pruriently) left us alone). There was a thick stack of them, and I think it was before I had taken up smoking so I was still afraid of matches, but not so afraid that I didn't spread the pages out and light the corners. I was by myself in this vast desolate bleak asphalt near the kindergarten windows (not many windows far from Mrs. Elliott's second-grade classroom either, to whom I had lamented, complaining of Dick & Jane primers, that I was capable of remembering a sentence that began on one page and that might carry over to a next) and as the flames lit and began to burn the papers written front and back in your fine even hand I sat bent on my knees meditating the proper ambivalent devotionals (goodbye once and for all you rotten adored...) and a good friend of my little brother's happened by. I've forgotten his name, but I think he and my brother were in no more than sixth grade or so. He looked at the blaze and at me, wide-eyed. What are you doing?, he queried his friend's older sister. Burning love letters, I replied. I'll never forget the expression on his face - he was very suitably impressed.

Kisses, my Chief Tormentor.

I will let this fly unedited at the moment - please try to imagine it as a letter typed on the exuberant, loving fly on an ancient Underwood...