Where I go and what becomes of me, you will never know. You will wonder after your dear father but the winds shall return no answer where he has gone—the hideous ingratitude of the course you have elected to pursue will arise and point taunting fingers at you. All your joys and happiness shall be blighted. The rain shall patter down and the night winds whine in the casements. And to you they shall say—“I am accursed!” I am accursed! My father has accursed me and nowhere on earth is there peace for my throbbing head!”
Therefore, farewell! When you look into the faces of your children, may your crime and ingratitude sear you to madness. In the midst of your laughter may you be sobered and the nectar of joy in your glass turn to vinegar. And if in the last great day, pursuing my right to happiness, I stumble and fall, on your head be my sin!
Already in the lowest depths of hell (in unhappiness and misery of spirit) I point my awful finger at you and I cry: “Curse you! Curse you! Curse you!”
Good-by forever!
Jonathan Hadley Forge.
Nathan looked through what his father had so dramatically enclosed: A lock of Edith’s baby hair tied with a tiny pink ribbon; a small tintype of himself and Anna Forge taken at some street fair back in the Nineties; two snapshots of Nathan taken the year before moving to Paris from Foxboro Center; a picture postcard of Main Street, Paris—lacking none of the features which had so depressed Madelaine Theddon—a newspaper clipping containing the first of Nathan’s poems copied by the Sunday Globe—the cablegram of Nathan’s last message as Johnathan had received it in Japan.
Nathan soaked a half a doughnut in his lukewarm tea as the pathetic assortment lay before him. Then he read his father’s letter again and smiled. He had to smile.
He gathered up the envelope’s contents a quarter of an hour later. He jogged them together and for want of interest and a better place, slipped them between an ammonia bottle and the wall at the end of the shelf above the kitchen sink.
Next noontime Johnathan Hadley Forge, in the lowest depths of hell, was smeared with copious gobs of whisker-flecked lather from Nathan’s razor.
Nothing else being handy at the moment, Nathan used the letter for shaving paper!