From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Doris
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 11:02:12 -0500

Robert wrote:

>In my original draft of "The Devil His Due" I included a lot of footnotes,
>but later dropped them on subsequent rewrites. It was also here that I
>attempted to elaborate why I thought the evidence was strong that
>Doris-the-carnie was Den Weer's daughter by Sherry Gold.

I know I've refuted this idea before, but maybe it was just to mantis.

Den was five years old when the fake deerskin was painted, nine during the
Year of the Egg Hunt. He met both Lois and Sherry during the Gold Hunt year.
Sherry was sixteen when he met her. He was rich at fifty, poor at forty. The
years these events took place in can be disputed, but not the core "facts".

Lois stated that the fake deerskin treaty had been painted "about" forty
years before she met Weer, and he concurred. That makes him about forty-five
at the time of the Gold Hunt, when Sherry was sixteen. Den, while president,
started to tell the Tilly tale to Bill Batton "thirty-five or forty years"
after the YEH, which would make him age 44-49. Taken together, those two
statements make it clear that Den became president when aged 45-49.

Weer's dialogue with Batton, therefore, took place early in his presidency.
The visits of Bill Batton, Charlie Turner, and Eleanor Bold Porter all
happened on the same day. The first line of Charlie's letter to Weer
indicates that it was written as a "thank you" for his recent visit with
Weer, at which time they discussed Doris over dinner. Internal evidence
indicates that the events described in the letter took place not too long
after Charlie's visit, including the death of Doris. Doris was a minor, but
past the age of puberty. I would guess her age to be about 15-16.

If Weer met the 3 visitors mentioned above within a few years of meeting
Sherry, then any hypothetical child he might have fathered on her couldn't
be much more than four years old. Doris cannot possibly be the child of Weer
and Sherry.

If Weer fathered Doris, then he would have to have done so when he was in
his mid thirties, a decade of his life we know nothing about. And Doris died
while Weer was president, yet he was still poor at forty. So, if Weer
fathered Doris, Sherry can't be the mother.

-Roy


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