My dear Bobby, I am sorry I could not talk with you when you called but I had a client here and was with her in a trance reading then. You should have called back later. I guess you didn’t have your phone and cannot call back so easily. Call again and if you call between 8 a.m. and noon you will be able to talk with me. I hope you like the new Chopin nocturne I sent you and I trust the piano is still able to play. Tell me if it isn’t and we will get help to fix it right.
I have bad news to tell you.
My daughter Mary murdered her best girlfriend three Mondays ago at midnight and now Mary has to stand trial and may go to a women’s prison for life. I have a good defense attorney hired and he is going to have her plead temporary insanity, then she will go to a state mental hospital for the mentally ill for five to ten years. It is a sad story of a girl who has been on drugs for these last four years and an alcoholic for eight years before that. Mary weighs less than one hundred pounds now and has no desire to live anymore. She knows she has wasted her life and all my money for the past fourteen years. I’m broke now. I have gone through two hundred and fifty-four thousand dollars in that time, trying to make something of her, but she didn’t want to be anything, and has been my enemy.
So now the preliminary comes up August 15 and we shall soon see what they decide to do with her after much psychiatric evaluation with three psychs. This is the angelic-looking little girl you used to jiggle on your knee. I saw this tragedy all coming a long time ago and warned her to quit that girl. Mary is a lesbian and this was a sordid type of affair with a cheap whore girl. Mary got tired of her but the girl wouldn’t let go of her and asked Mary to kill her rather than ever leave her. Mary obliged and shot her four times.
I haven’t been hardly able to play at all since this happened on the ninth of this month. I did manage to finish the “Etude in D Minor” I subtitled “The Warlock,” meaning male witch. It is in Gould’s style. You will like playing it and I will send you a new copy of it as soon as I have my little copyist run off some copies for me. I have three more piano solos to write yet and then all I have heard from the piano spirit is completed, and I will make a piano album of twenty piano works. Then I shall go on writing another symphonic suite I have written around Mary’s life story, entitled “The Mary Magdalene Suite.” It is beautiful. It tells of her birth, her school days, her ballet lessons, her tragic life of drugs and booze, her loves, her career as a writer, and now her final incarceration. It is so gorgeous in melodic line you wouldn’t be able to keep from crying when you hear it. If I come and get you in my car someday soon, will you come over and spend one day with me, dear Bobby? I need you near me now to comfort me in my time of heavy sorrow. We shall play music, and comfort one another. Call me and tell me what day you can come. Saturdays are good for me. Through the week is hard as I read people all day for my living, etc. So I shall await your call real soon now and long to visit with you again.