French Letters

June, 1965, Arlington, Virginia

“I’ve left them on your desk to look at, Junior . . . if you can read them. I can’t. If they aren’t something we need, destroy them, please.” She had her face set in that “bring me no bad news” way she had about her.

“Yes, Mother. I’ll take care of it.”

I thought my mother was holding up very well, considering what his father had done. That she’d bring the letters up now, well into the reception at her Arlington house after my father’s funeral, made me feel that they were not all that incidental. I wondered why she wanted me to look at them—why she didn’t just toss the letters if she couldn’t read them. They obviously were in some foreign language and I was a linguist, working at the UN now, in New York. She thought they were in French. If so, yes, I could read them.

I’d come home for the funeral and to stay with her until the notoriety had blown over. She was holding up well, considering, though. I could understand why she didn’t want to stay in the house tonight—why she’d being going home with my sister, Susan, to the District, after the ordeal of the reception was over.

“I’m so sorry, Peggy. Please accept my condolences.” Jordan—General Powell—was at our elbows. I’d seen him at Arlington National Cemetery and then earlier, in the house, moving around among the guest like a battleship among rowboats. I knew it was inevitable to see him here. It was what I was thinking about and dreading when I decided to attend the funeral—not for my father’s sake, but for my mother’s.

“Thank you, Jordan,” she said, but added, in the same breath. “There are Denise and Tom; I suppose I must speak with them.” And then she was gone, leaving the hint of her Channel No. 5 behind, leaving me with the general. She had been stiff with him. It was to be expected. Jordan Powell was my father’s friend, not hers—there before her and in straits that she’d never had to experience with Dad. She suspected, I’m sure that he had a hand in all of this. So, I must admit, did I.

“Your mother seemed a bit distressed when I came over,” the general said. “Something about letters?”

“French letters,” I answered.

“Condoms?” he said.

I looked at him, confused. And then I gave a little laugh. I should have known. He—and my father—had been in the war together, in the European Theater. Condoms were called French letters among the soldiers there, in World War II, the war my father and General Powell had fought together, the war that had brought them so close and that had brought the general into our lives, so close into our family.

“No. Letters in French,” I said. “She found them among Dad’s things and can’t read them. She wants me to look at them to determine if they should be kept.”

“Yes, I suppose in the circumstances we need to do some backtracking and checking. We need to protect Edmund. Even now. Probably especially now. Have Dulles’s people made an appointment to go through the house yet?”

“No, not yet,” I said.

“French letters. So, they aren’t the notes?”

“No. I’d found those already. I don’t think either one of them ever found them. They were where I hid them. They’ve been dealt with.”

“Good. I have been worried about that. Everything will be looked at now. I am sorry about your dad, Eddie.”

“He didn’t . . . you don’t think he knew?”

“No, I’m sure he didn’t. It wasn’t about that. I’m sure of it. We were close even toward the end.”

I didn’t doubt that that was true. I think that’s why Mother resented him—and why she had her suspicions.

“What your father did, what drove him to it, was something entirely different, I’m sure. It didn’t have anything to do with you. That needn’t, though—”

“No, please, general. This isn’t the time for that.”

“No, I suppose not. I’ll be in the study.”

And then he left me. Mother and Susan were at the door, Mother’s signal to the well-wishers, I’m sure, that it was time to go. I knew that, with the general here now, she would be at the door, leaving as soon as she could. I don’t think she’d stay here in the house long now, even though, with the exception of Dad’s sunny, glass-walled study that he had spent so much time in, this was her creation, her world, which she formed and decorated and clung too. At least Dad had tried to do that much for her, but the summer house was still too close. At least he hadn’t shot himself in the house. But why, if he didn’t want to take this away from Mother, the world she had created and lived in in Arlington, couldn’t he have gone farther away from here to do it?

All of the guests were gone now—with the exception of General Powell, who was in Dad’s study, opening drawers, checking everything out, reestablishing his control. He wouldn’t go until he was damn well ready to. This had been my mother’s territory, but Dad had vanquished that, with a shot in the summer house. She and Susan were putting their coats on and saying good-bye to me. I had agreed to stay here in the house, to hold the fort down, and to be here when the military intelligence teams came in to dissect our lives—I would hope not before I could erase sections of it.

General Powell was in Dad’s study, going through his papers and drawers. Mother had put the French letters in my old room, on the desk there, she said. I wonder if she had intentionally not left them in the study.

I wouldn’t be missed for a while. I mounted the stairs to the bedroom level. I’d see what was in these letters an determine whether of not Allen Dulles’s researchers needed to see them or if they needed to disappear.

* * * *

As he was undressing and fiddling around with the lube and the condom pack—the French letter, it came to my mind—I turned my head and looked at the wallpaper in my bedroom in the Arlington house. It had been years since I’d slept in here. When I did, as a boy, the wallpaper had always disturbed me and I hadn’t been able to go to sleep until it was dark and I couldn’t see the progression of clowns holding a barrage of balloons of different colors. I was frightened, not amused, by clowns. I’d tried to tell my parents the wallpaper in my room scared me, but they wouldn’t pander to my fears.

“It’s been a long time, Eddie,” General Powell said, as he stood between my spread and bent legs and snapped the condom—the French letter in his wartime parlance—on his cock. He was a big-cocked man, and he was in soldier fit, even in his fifties. I was pretty fit too, and slim. I was able to look down the line of my chest and flat belly and observe him preparing between my spread and bent legs. My feet were pressed into the edge of the foot of my bed. It was just a twin bed, but even though Powell was a large man, we would manage. He would be on top of and inside me, displaying expertise of long practice.

“Yes, yes it has,” I answered. Powell had been another thing I’d tried to tell my parents about—that he’d been fucking me since I was eighteen, but I never directly said it and neither of them wanted to believe it. Powell was a family friend. He’d brought Dad up through the ranks with him from the time they marched from Anzio toward Heidelberg together in World War Two, two decades earlier, the general, as a colonel then, making it to Heidelberg first because my father was wounded on the French-German border. But they’d been reunited in Heidelberg and had been together since, in military intelligence.

“I’ve missed you, Eddie,” he said, as he stepped forward and inserted a finger in my ass, causing me to gasp and elevate my tail more to accept the invasion. He already had been kneeling below me, eating me out, preparing me for the cock as I moaned my surrender. I was ready for him to fuse with me and fuck me. Now he was hovering over me, capturing my eyes with his, inserting a second finger, stretching me for his need. I rocked on the finger, opening to him, not denying him anything. I didn’t respond to his attempt to reconnect emotionally with me, but I couldn’t say I hadn’t missed taking his cock.

And then I was taking his cock. He was crouched over me, cupping my head in his hands once he’d put his cock in position, the bulb just inside the hole. He came in for a kiss on the lips and held me there, his tongue slipping between my lips, as I groaned and jerked a bit at the thickness of his entry.

“Tell me you want it,” he whispered, giving me that “oh so superior” look of his.

“I want it,” I whimpered, ashamed at wanting it but wanting it nonetheless.

He gave me most of the cock and held there, kissing me on the lips and throat as, panting and whimpering, I struggle to open to his demand. When I had, he rose his chest off mine, grasped my knees, and, as he liked to do, churned my bent legs in and out in synch with the in and out thrusting of his cock—pushing the knees apart with the inward thrust of the shaft and bringing them back into his hips with the withdrawal of the bulb almost to the entrance of my channel.

Yes, I wanted it!

He fucked me in long, deep, vigorous strokes—he was virile and vigorous for a man his age, all military precision and command. I gave him everything he demanded of me. I always had. As he fucked me, I stretched my arms out in a cruciform stance of surrender and turned my head sideways and counted the clowns holding balloons on the wallpaper next to the bed. I couldn’t maintain the distance from this, though. This had never all been on him.

“Fuck, yes!” I cried out.

As the fuck got more intense, I clutched at his biceps with my hands, digging the fingernails in, and raised my head to his massive, hard-bodied chest, latching onto his nubs with my lips.

He was raising my pelvis to his angle of thrust with an arm encasing my waist and he got his other hand between us and was jacking me off. As we roared to the point of ejaculation, I arched my back and cried out again, “Yes, yes, fuck me hard. Give it to me!”

And he fucked me hard and gave it to me to our nearly mutual explosion. We’d always been good about coming off nearly together. After we’d come, he brought his lips down to mine to take me in a deep kiss. Coming out of that, he slapped me across the face, one way and then the other. I wasn’t surprised. He was all about command. He wanted me to know who owned who.

Afterward, him lying on top of me, still inside me, and me, not telling him how heavy he was in nearly crushing me—heavier now than he had been five years earlier when he fucked me in the same summer house where my father had just recently blown his brains out—I thought again on the condom he was now sheathed with and had, no doubt filled the bulb of. Powell was a prodigious cum man, and when he’d first taken me, it wasn’t with protection. Thinking on the condom brought the term “French letter” back to mind.

“General,” I whispered. I thought it was telling that he called me Eddie—I was Junior to my dad’s Edmund—but that I couldn’t imagine calling him anything but general.

“Fuck, that was a great lay,” Powell answered. “You are still a sweet lay. Always were.”

That was the problem here. I was always just a lay to the general. It wasn’t more than that. If it had been, I wouldn’t have cared if it had all come out in the open. I would have followed him anywhere. Just as my father had.

“General,” I repeated. “Who is Celestine? You were always with my father. Do you know who Celestine was?”

“Who?” he asked, but not fully convincingly. I had the feeling that the name meant something to him. I felt him tense up a bit.

“Celestine. Those French letters you heard Mother tell me about. I came upstairs and read through them while you were sanitizing my dad’s study.”

“Sanitizing?” he said, and he laughed.

“Yes, just that. I know you came here today to beat the intelligence guys to the study. You were protecting my dad, I know it.” He was protecting himself too, I knew, but I wouldn’t say that. “But Celestine. I know you know the name.”

There was a pause. “You know that a sniper shot your dad in Alsace-Lorraine, on the French-German border as we were marching up from Anzio, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Your father was in a hospital for several weeks before he could rejoin us in Heidelberg, where we end up.”

“Yes, so?”

“Celestine was a nurse in the hospital.”

“The letters. The French letters from this Celestine. They were love letters?”

“Yes, yes, they were,” Powell said. “I would advise you to destroy those letters—and certainly before Dulles’s men show up to tear this place apart. They will be looking for any evidence on why your father chose to end his life. I don’t think you want them to pursue that path.”

It was given more as a command than a bit of advice. But rather than saying anything else, he rose off me, and I lay there, legs still spread and bent, as he stood over me, rolling the spent condom—the French letter—off his cock, tossing the condom deftly into the wastebasket.

I lay there, completely open and vulnerable to him, both of us know that if he wanted another go at me, I was his to be had.

He wanted another go at me. Rolling on another, lubing it up, he barked a command. “Roll over on your belly. I want to doggie fuck you now.”

I did and he did. As he held my hips between his hands and mounted and fucked me from behind, the old military cadence song floated through my head: “Roll me over, in the clover, roll me over, and do me again, do me again.”

Although my face was turned to the wall again, I closed my eyes tight. I didn’t look at the clowns and their balloons. His hand came over my mouth and nose. He would pleasure himself with controlling my breath in the fuck this time, listening to me gasping for air as he plowed me and moved to his release. That was what was important to the general now—his release. Only his release.

I don’t know why I did it unless it was a subconscious gesture of rebellion against “he who must be obeyed,” but I didn’t toss the French letters. I took them back to New York with me and put them in my safety deposit box at the bank. I told my mother they were nothing important and that I’d burned them. She seemed satisfied and relieved—as if she may have known more about what they concerned than she had let on. If so, though, I don’t know why she let me read them—unless she knew more about my relationship with the general than she was letting on too and gave them to me as a warning.

* * * *

August-September, 1944, Alsace-Lorraine, French-German Border

The American motorized infantry regiment under Major Jordan Powell slowed as it entered the village of Riquewihr on France’s border with Germany in Alsace-Lorraine on the afternoon of August 14th. The major, in a jeep driven by Lieutenant Edmund Collier, stopped in the town square in front of an outdoor café. The town was deserted other than that residents could be seen peeking out of windows and doors here and there and a couple of old men and a waiter had been caught unaware at a table at the café and didn’t have time to slink away before the Americans saw them and marked them as friend, neutral, or foe.

It wasn’t exactly the reception that could be expected from a French village that was being liberated by the Allies a day and a half after the occupying Germans had pulled out and back into Germany. Powell’s regiment had the Germans on the run and his instructions were to let them run as long as they were in France and not to engage them until they got on German soil. The French had seen enough of the war if that could be avoided.

Still, the residents of this village obviously were shell shocked and in confusion, not knowing who was conqueror and who was liberator. They would need time to absorb that the Germans were well on their way to being vanquished.

Signaling another jeep, driven by a Captain Jones, to pause beside his to check their maps, Major Powell, looking with hungry eyes at the café in the square said, “Lead the column to about here on map, Jim, and settle the men down there for the night. We’ll cross into Germany tomorrow and speed up to engage whatever German troops running ahead of us we can reach. The men should get a good night’s sleep before we hit the German homeland. I suppose I should ferret out the mayor of this village and tell him he’s been liberated by the Americans. And he’ll tell me how pleased he is whether he is or not.”

As the last of the troop transports drove past the major’s jeep and out of the square toward the border, the major’s driver, Lieutenant Collier, said, “Where do you suppose we can find this mayor, Major Powell?”

“Fuck the mayor,” Powell said. “I want to find out if this café serves real coffee.”

Later, not far out of town, Powell said, “Pull over onto that track and park the jeep behind those bushes in that stand of trees.”

“Have you seen something suspicious?” Lieutenant Collier asked.

“Just do it, Ed.” And when the lieutenant had done it, the major said, “Come back here and suck me off. We haven’t had an opportunity to do it for days.”

Twenty minutes later, completely out of uniform, dog tags swaying on his bare chest, Lieutenant Collier was straddling the major’s hips, the major bare-chested too, but still in his fatigue pants, unbuckled, unbuttoned, and fly flared, as he held the lieutenant’s narrow waist between his hands and helped the younger man rise and fall on his buried cock.

“Take it, soldier. Take it hard!” the major barked, and his sex slave surrendered to whatever his master wanted.

Both of them heard the first misfired click of the old hunting rifle. Collier was the quickest to react, turning toward the threat from the branch of a tree, diving for his handgun, and coming up able to pick out the sniper with his eyes. But then he paused before firing. The rifle shot got him in the thigh. By that time Powell had freed his own weapon and shot. The boy fell out of the tree.

Collier’s thought as he blacked out, explaining why he’d paused long enough to be the one shot, was that it was just a boy. He probably was just confused on who was friend and foe in the armies that had marched back and forth through his village, disrupting and threatening the lives of his family and friends.

When he woke, Lieutenant Collier was in a hospital bed in the larger town of Colmar on the French-German border after a painful stuffing back into his fatigues, the tearing of his pants to hide the fact he wasn’t wearing them when shot, and a harrowing ride to the army encampment and then onward to better medical facilities. A doctor about ten years older than he was and a nurse about his own age were hovering over him. His regiment, under Major Jordan Powell, had moved on into Germany and had reached its destination in Heidelberg.

The leg wound had become infected. After more than a week of trying to save his life and then his leg, he had gotten beyond the danger. By then he was into a routine of nearly 27/7 care by a dedicated nurse, Celestine Langhorne, who looked after his every need, including sponging him off and putting him on a bedpan.

The two became very close, with Celestine able to understand what all of the needs of a twenty-five-year-old American soldier would be. As Collier’s health was regained, with him only bedridden by the recovering leg wound, Celestine developed the routine of closing the curtain around the patient and sitting beside Collier, taken his erection in hand during the daily sponge bath, and giving him relief. As they became more and more comfortable and affectionate with each other, Celestine took the man’s cock in mouth to give him relief. And there came the day when Celestine mounted Collier’s hips and rode his shaft.

When the American officer was well enough to leave the hospital, albeit on a cane, Nurse Celestine continued to take care of him, having made the arrangements to move him to the house of the French doctor who had saved the lieutenant’s leg.

At length, though, now-Lieutenant Colonel Powell became impatient with the time his lieutenant’s convalescent was taking and he dispatched two soldiers back to France to bring Collier to Heidelberg. They arrived during the day when both Nurse Celestine and the doctor were at the hospital and, permitting Collier to do no more than leave a note of thanks and affection for both, the soldiers escorted Collier out of Colmar.

The twenty-year-long exchange of love letters between Edmund Collier and Celestine Langhorne commenced as soon as the lieutenant arrived in Heidelberg. He most often wrote his letters after arising in the middle of the night after having been fucked by Lt. Colonel Powell in his bed as one of the duties the lieutenant, soon to be elevated to captain, as aid-de-camp to Powell, whose unit had been assigned to guard a trove of art housed in Heidelberg Castle and stolen by the Nazis until art curators could arrive to inventory and disburse it.

Collier wrote a lot of letters. Lt. Colonel Powell was a virile, vigorous, demanding, and frequent lover.

* * * *

June 1966, Colmar, France

“Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you but, by any chance, does Celestine Langhorne still live here? I have some letters she wrote that she might like to have back.”

The man who answered the door at the stone house opening nearly directly on the road on one of the older streets of Colmar had once been handsome and straight and tall, but now he had the skeletal look of a long-ill man in his fifties, who was a bit stooped and too dependent on a walking cane. He looked at me at some length before speaking that I, though speaking, I knew, excellent French, as it was one of my professional working languages, thought perhaps the elderly gentleman hadn’t heard me. But he had. He nodded, stepped to one side, and said, “I think you’d better come inside.”

It was a stately house, well appointed inside, and expensively, although sparsely, furnished. It was obvious that the man indeed was unwell and had been for some time, as the furniture in the hall and the parlor in which I followed the man was what was minimally required and spaced to facilitate movement of the wheelchair that sat in the corner. A studio couch, with bedding on it, was located in a bay window on the garden side of the house. There were upper stories here and the man likely lived in the downstairs floor so that he didn’t have to navigate stairs.

“I’m Claude St. Germaine,” the man said when we entered the dimly lit parlor. There was a door on the opposite wall leading to a much better illuminated large room beyond that, I was able to see. Greenhouse glass ran up the garden wall and across the one-story ceiling of that room.

“I’m Eddie Collier, the son of Edmund Collier. Eddie, short for Edmund, to keep us apart in the family,” I said, noting that the man’s eyes flashed a bit when I introduced myself. “I live in New York—in America. But I was in Europe for work and thought I’d return some letters if Ms. Langhorne is still living here.”

This Colmar village house was the return address on all of the love letters to my dad that were in the packet over a twenty-year period. I had been sent to the UN offices in Geneva for a translation project. I’d held on to the letters for a year. Colmar was less than a four-hour drive from Geneva, and I had wanted to do some traveling in the area after my project was finished anyway, so the excuse of that to return the letters seemed natural. I couldn’t say that I wasn’t curious who this Celestine was who had carried on a love affair with my father for so long from afar. I was well past resenting that they had been involved while my father was married to my mother. I had always known there were strains in the marriage but that both of my parents clung to it, and I didn’t consider a long-distance affair as being sexually damning.

“Yes, I knew who you were—or at least whose son you are,” St. Germaine said. You look the spitting image of Edmund when I knew him. That you have the same given name threw me a bit, though.

“My name. Oh, yes. My father and I were always tripping up people with our shared name.”

“Were?” the man said.

“Yes, he died last year—in June.”

“In June?” The man tottered on his cane and I helped lower him into an overstuffed chair. There was one near it, set at an easily-conversational angle, and, as the man gestured for me to be seated, I sat there. I took the small stack of letters out of the briefcase I was carrying. St. Germaine gave that a look and twitched.

“Your father is gone? I’m sorry to hear that. We worked so hard to keep him alive. But that was some time ago, wasn’t it?”

“We?” I asked. “I know, from these letters—sorry, I was asked to read them and to destroy them if they weren’t important, but I thought they might be important to someone—to this Celestine, who wrote them. I understand that Celestine was the nurse who took care of my father when he was wounded near here in the war. You knew him then too?”

“Oh, yes. I knew him. I was his doctor. We had quite a time of it, first keeping him alive from the infection in the leg and then fighting with him to save the leg. I hope he did manage to keep it the rest of his life.”

“Yes, he did. Oh, don’t get up if you don’t—”

But the doctor had already stood from his chair. “May I get you something to drink—wine or coffee. We do need to talk, I think.”

“Water would be fine,” I said. The man obviously wanted to extend hospitality and didn’t want me to think that his disability prevented that.

“I hope you don’t mind if I have a bit of wine. I do this time of day, and this has been a bit of a surprise for me.”

“I’m sorry. If Ms. Langhorne—”

“I’ll be back in a moment.” He walked toward the light, entering the room at the side that seemed to be all glass—or at least all glass on the garden side. The front of the house had all been stone. After he was gone, I stood and roamed around the room, admiring the beautiful things the doctor had accumulated over the years. I stopped and picked up a framed photograph. It was of two men, one significantly younger than the other. The older of the two quite evidently was a younger Claude St. Germaine. Both men were handsome and well formed. They were smiling and their arms were locked together.

St. Germaine returned to the room with my water in a crystal goblet. He had a bundle of envelopes under his arm, which he dropped in the chair he had been sitting in. He handed the water to me. “I’m sorry. I can only carry so much at one time. I’ll be back with my wine in a moment.” He saw that I was looking at the photo on a shelf, but he said nothing and turned and hobbled back into the room of light.

There was something about the room of light beyond this parlor that I found familiar but I couldn’t quite pin that down, and I was concentrating on St. Germaine now. I was very much attracted to the Claude of the photograph and regretted that we were only meeting now.

When St. Germaine returned this time with his wine, he also was carrying another photograph.

“Please sit. I’m afraid I must.” He sat in his chair, pulling the bundle of envelopes out and putting it and the photograph he’d brought in on his lap. Each of the chairs had a small table beside it where we could put our drinks. I sat in the other chair.

“That photograph you were looking at . . . and this one here . . .” Claude handed me the other photograph, “these are of us—the one on the shelf is Celestine and me and this one is of Celestine, your father, and me. I’m sorry if this disturbs you, but Celestine was a nurse, yes, but he was a man, not a woman.”

“A man? Was?”

“Yes, and I’m sorry, but Celestine died . . . last year . . . in May. He had been taking care of me . . . I have a slow-developing cancer . . . but Celestine was the first to go. Somewhat ironic in a perverse way, I think. He always said he planned to visit the States—that he had someone there he wanted to visit. I always thought it was your father he wanted to visit, and I felt guilty that he felt he had to stay here and take care of me instead.”

Yes, it was a surprise to me that Celestine was a man rather than a woman, although, when I thought about it, I realized that Celestine could be a name for either in France and that nurses could be male as well as female. I couldn’t be greatly surprised, knowing my father’s relationship to General Powell, that Celestine was male.

“When again did Celestine die?” I asked, looking at the new photo and having no trouble discerning the affection that all three men had for each other. The photo was taken here in this house, in the glass room beyond this one. I was a bit afraid what the answer to his question, and found no relief.

“Last May. Celestine died from an unexpected heart attack in May of last year. I sent to a letter to your father in Washington on that. I’m sorry if it upsets you that your father had a relationship with another man—or that I did with the same man, but if you’ve read the letters, you already know that. I can’t protect you from that.”

So, I thought, my father received a letter on the death of a former lover shortly before he shot himself. What had happened to that letter? Had the general found it when he was searching the study the day of Edmund’s funeral? That probably wouldn’t ever be known, I thought. The general probably wouldn’t give me an honest answer on that, as intent as he was just to cover it all up. What I did know was that the general had been too much in my family’s life—and had too much control over us. But right now, the doctor seemed concerned that I was upset my father had had an affair with another man, and I felt the need to disabuse him of that notion quickly.

“No, no, that’s no problem—other than I didn’t know that about my father from that early in his life. Not for sure. I suspected. Strongly suspected.” That was putting icing on it. I knew. And I knew that my father was being covered by General Powell, who was also covering me. Not at the same time, I didn’t think. I thought that my father had gotten too old to be of interest to Power before Powell turned to me.

“I’m gay myself . . . and active,” I assured St. Germaine. “You say Celestine died in May of last year?” I couldn’t quite get my mind around this.

“Yes, in May. You’re gay?” St. Germaine looked at me with renewed and unmasked interest.

May, the month before my father shot himself in the summer house at the Arlington house. If I needed an explanation on why my father had done that after receiving a letter that Celestine had died . . .

“This photo. This was taken here, in this house?”

“Yes. When your father left the hospital, he came here for additional recuperation. Celestine already was living with me here. They stayed in the next room. It is outfitted as a separate living space. They loved being in that room—and being with each other. Would you like to see it? It originally was a greenhouse conservatory.”

“Yes, please,” I said. Suddenly I very much wanted to see it. And I teared up when Claude guided me into the space. Now I knew what was familiar about it. My father had built such a room—brick toward the road, but glass toward the garden and half way over the ceiling—at the Arlington house. He used it as his study. He had spent most of his time while at home in that room. There was setting-room furniture in the room as well as a double bed. All of the furniture here was in nearly the same space as the furniture in my father’s study. There was a kitchenette on the front wall and a bathroom beyond.

“You have a bed in the parlor,” I said. “You don’t stay in here? This is so self-contained—ideal for what apparently are your current needs.”

“I couldn’t bear it—at least yet. That was Celestine’s room.”

“I understand,” I murmured.

“Shall we go in the other room? You could read the letters your father sent Celestine, and I think I would like to read the letters Celestine sent Edmund.”

And that’s what we did. We returned to the parlor, exchanged bundles of French love letters, and read them, stopping and discussing them and reminiscing on them for the rest of the evening, broken by sharing a dinner, both of us sharing more wine, growing closer as the evening wore on, leading to embracing, kissing . . . and sharing the studio bed in the bay window, with Claude on his back and me saddled on the older man’s pelvis, riding the man’s cock.

* * * *

October 1966, Colmar, France

When I returned from Claude’s funeral, I made a ceremony of burning the French letters in a barrel in the back garden. There didn’t seem to be a point in preserving them any longer. Claude and I had read and discussed them several times in the months where Claude’s cancer progressed that he couldn’t leave his bed.

As a doctor, Claude St. Germaine had fought to save my dad’s life and he’d had been successful. More important to Edmund Collier’s survival of that wound in World War Two that had allowed him to go on and fight in the Korean War and to rise to rank of brigadier general was the care and the love that the nurse, Celestine Langhorne, had given him. Claude had even had a part in that, sharing his lover, Celestine, and his home with Edmund. It was only right, I thought, that I should give back to Claude by caring for him in his final months. Claude and his doctors had said it wouldn’t be long, and it wasn’t.

Even before I came to Colmar looking for Celestine, the UN had offered me a position in Geneva and I had been considering it. It was mostly translation work in French, German, and Italian that I could do via the Internet, but they also wanted me available on half day’s notice to do direct interpretation for conferences in Geneva, Paris, and Brussels. Colmar was no more than a half day’s drive from any of those.

It was a surprise to me, although Claude informed me a month before he died, that I would inherit the house in Colmar, including the sunny glass room that had all of the amenities and where I happily lived in the waning months of the doctor’s life. I hadn’t had any intention of accepting the Geneva position or living on in the Colmar house until I started getting letters from General Powell, summoning me home to the States in demanding tones.

What I had learned from the letters my father had sent to Celestine that wasn’t reflected in the French letters from Celestine I first read was how much sexual control Powell had commanded over my father. Intellectually, I believed that my father had ended his life because Celestine’s death ended all hope the two lovers could ever be together again. It was a surprise to learn from Claude that Edmund had visited Celestine and him in Colmar three times during the fifties and early sixties. Looking at Edmund’s letters around these times revealed they were his happiest periods. The visits weren’t mentioned in Celestine’s letters, but they were in Edmund’s. Emotionally, I increasingly believed that General Powell had just worn my father down with his domination and demands.

I was determined that the general wasn’t going to do the same to me. So, chances were good, I thought, that I’d remain in Colmar. Besides, I had found another young man here, Jacques, an airplane pilot, who traveled as much as I did.

Our own French letters to each other were scintillating and, when we were able to meet, our lovemaking was explosive. And we used a whole lot of a different kind of French letters.