From: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey@stic.net>
Subject: (urth) PEACE Office, Dishes,Smokes
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 00:49:08 

It occurred to me that there should have been no duplicate office in Den's
museum-roomed house. There seems to have been one, as real as any of the
others, but I still have a problem with the fact that there was. There
shouldn't have been, not if he was still using the one at the plant. The
other museum-rooms, with the exception of that of his old apartment, all
dated to his youth; they no longer existed in the real world, which is why
he had them recreated.

This leads me to suspect that Den may not have used the office at the plant
because he _couldn't_, that he was not the CEO of the plant for long, at
least not in terms of overseeing the daily operations of the plant. He may,
like Blaine, have ceased to function as president but remained the Chairman
of the Board, for health reasons which may have been related to a stroke. In
fact, he may not have died after hearing the Sidhe story, just had another
"attack", which he survived, but which left him incapacitated enough that he
retired to his crazy house, perhaps living for years longer than we thought.
This may or may not be related to the fact that he did not live entirely
alone there.

When his mother died, Den mentioned going through her things and finding a
photograph of Mab Crawford and his grandfather. Speaking of Mab, he wrote:
"She had something then of the appearance of a nurse, very much a nurse
chosen to please an old man, a nurse who could giggle and pout until he had
taken his medicine, a sort of walking regret. I cannot imagine her last
illness, or someone taking care of her." (27-28) Immediately before this he
wrote: "And now that I am older--myself as old now, I suppose, as he was
then . . ."

Well now, Den is an old man comparing himself to his ailing grandfather, and
he had a few walking regrets himself. He claims to have woke up the morning
after Sherry died with his stroke symptoms. Hmm.

Who was living in Den's house? I mean, Den certainly had servants in his
mansion, at the least, but there was someone else, too. Someone wondered
here recently about Den possibly living with some female, though he never
married. There is only one fairly oblique clue in the text, on page 11: "I
don't think I have ever seen anyone wash dishes in our kitchen. There is a
dishwasher there--they always used that, scraping the plates first into the
sink, to go down the disposer, making the sink a kind of garbage can."

Two pages earlier he was talking about Princess Foaming Water, Hannah,
washing dishes in the kitchen of his mother's house, so he was not talking
about that house. The pronoun "they" almost certainly refers to servants,
but what of the plural possessive pronoun "our"?

A less solid clue is his reference to the few articles in the drawers of his
desk in his duplicate-office room (162). Among them are "a few stale
cigarettes". Den admits to smoking an occasional cigar (108), and there is a
picture of Dan French giving him a cigar lighter for his 50th birthday (79),
but Den never mentions smoking cigarettes. In fact, I recall him mentioning
only two people who did, Olivia and Louis Gold. So, whose cigarettes were
they?

If Den had a stroke related to Sherry's death, after becoming president,
where was Sherry that he would even know of it? And why should her death
provoke a stroke? She was about 25 years younger than him; did she die of
natural causes? Was she in his home the night she died, living there in much
the same capacity as Mab served his grandfather?

Roy



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