Of the clothing she’d brought with her: six pairs of panties in assorted colors, girdle, three pairs of nylons, three brassieres, two pairs stretch slacks, four half-slips, one black sheath, two summer dresses, half dozen A-line skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, quilted wrapper, baby blue peignoir and old Orlon muu-muu. He might himself have discovered The Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she’d find it. Bitterness could have run that deep in him. He might have written the testament only to harass a one-time mistress, so cynically sure of being wiped out he could throw away all hope of anything more. “Keep it bouncing,” he’d told her once, “ that’s all the secret, keep it bouncing.” He must have known, writing the will, facing the spectre, how the bouncing would stop. Though he had never talked business with her, she had known it to be a fraction of him that couldn’t come out even, would carry forever beyond any decimal place she might name her love, such as it had been, remaining incommensurate with his need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines, personal antagonisms, growth rates into being.

Might Oedipa Maas yet be his heiress had that been in the will, in code, perhaps without Pierce really knowing, having been by then too seized by some headlong expansion of himself, some visit, some lucid instruction? Though she could never again call back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac he’d tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created.

Had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

The crying of lot 49 pages