GGP(A)

B: Todd Andrews to his father. The death and funeral of Harrison Mack, Jr.

Dorset Hotel

SUNY/Buffalo

Dear Mr B.:

No!

I am not Literature! I am not the Great Tradition! I am not the aging Muse of the Realistic Novel! I am not

Yours,

Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

…left alone, my Captain straightway set to work upon the eggplant, in the strangest manner I ever did behold. Forsooth, I was that amaz’d, that even some weeks thereafter, here in Jamestown, what time I set to recording this narrative in my Journall-booke, it was no light matter to realize it was true. For had I not observ’d it my owne self, I had never believ’d it to be aught but the lewd construction of some dissolute fancie. Endlesse indeed, and beyond the ken of sober and continent men, are the practices and fowle receipts of those lustfulle persons, the votaries of the flesh, that stille set Venus & Bacchus over chast Minerva, and studie with scholars zeal all the tricks and dark refynements of carnallitie! I blush to committ the thing to paper, even to these the privie pages of my Journall. W^ch it is my vow, that no man shall lay eyes upon, while that I live…

& cetera. The writer was the 1st Henry Burlingame, his journal the Privie Journall of his capture, with Capt. John Smith, by Powhatan’s Indians in 1608. And what that old arch-hypocrite blusht to commit to paper — and forthwith went on so to commit — was the “Mystery of the Sacred Eggplant,” with the aid of which Smith had deflower’d Pocahontas & saved their necks: an encaustic, aphrodisiac decoction of Nux vomica, “Zozos,” oil of mallow, & the rest, stuft into a cored aubergine into which, in turn—

But no matter. We have the Journall: the “fowle receipt” shall be yours, when & if! Burlingame I made use of it to beget on Pokatawertussan, Queen of the Ahatchwhoops, the Tayac Chicamec (Henry Burlingame II), to whom the Journall (and its author’s justified Anglophobia) pass’d. Ebenezer Cooke discover’d its existence during his own Indian captivity at the hands of Chicamec in 1694; Burlingame III resorted to it to engender Andrew Cooke III on Ebenezer’s sister the following year. And then the Journall—together with Smith’s Secret Historie—disappear’d from sight.

“ ’Twas the dying wish of the whore Joan Toast, Ebenezer Cooke’s wife,” Mag Mungummory explain’d to the lovers, “that the receipt not be made public, lest we poor women be done to death. For what will turn your minnow into a buck-shad, will turn your buck-shad into a shark. Mister Ebenezer was all for destroying it, but his sister takes pity on the Burlingames to come, & on the Anna Cookes that love ’em — which is to say, the likes of Miss Nancy McEvoy! So they give both books to their old friend Mary Mungummory, as the trustiest judge o’ their application; and Mary gives ’em to her Mag; and Mag gives ’em to you.”

She did, and the lovers gratefully retired, with receipt & necessaries, into the gossamer woods. There Jove straightway descended in a shower of golden leaves, and Yours Truly was begot. What’s more, the rest of that same Privie Journall convinced my father, not only that the 1st Henry Burlingame had turn’d his back upon his English heritage & become an Ahatchwhoop Indian, but that Henry Burlingame III, encountering that record of his grandsire’s conversion, must surely have similarly so turn’d, being half Indian to start with! All hesitation then was purged from his own mind, which had anyhow never misdoubted its tendency, only its tactics: if the Appalachians were to dam the white invasion, either the “Continentals” (as the rebels now call’d themselves) must be supprest, or their “republic” kept weak & hemm’d round by territories of the Crown — especially by the Canadas, the key whereto, as always, was Niagara. And the key to Niagara was the allegiance of the Iroquois…

For all this, my mother’s testimony. She & Father wed on New Year’s Eve day in Old Trinity, the church after which Church Creek is named, and in whose yard a pair of nameless millstones mark the grave of Henry Russecks, Nancy’s grandfather. Whilst their vows are exchanging, Arnold, Burr, Montgomery, & Allen make their belated joint attack on Quebec: a debacle in which Montgomery is kill’d & one of Joel Barlow’s brothers so severely wounded that he dies in the retreat.

It had been my father’s plan to go north early in the spring and try to persuade his friends to reconsider their positions, even perhaps to join him in a different kind of thrust along the Mohawk Valley. But by then I had made my existence known, and both Burr & Arnold (in response to discreetly worded postal inquiries from Church Creek) reaffirm’d their patriotism, tho readily acknowledging their disillusionment & the justice of Father’s earlier cautions.

He linger’d on therefore in lower Dorchester, as I linger now at Castines Hundred; and whilst like you I slept towards birth, he associated himself with the Marshyhope Blues, a militia company charged with protecting the rebel citizenry against Lord Dunmore’s flotilla, then in the Chesapeake; also against the Loyalist “Picaroons” assisting that fleet, and in particular against the depredations of one Joseph Whaland, a rogue who piloted British vessels up the estuaries of the County & made foraging raids with his own boats, which then struck their masts & hid in the labyrinth of the marsh. My father’s actual purpose (Mother said) was to keep this Whaland safely inform’d of the militia’s movements & of the several attempts to intercept him at sea. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Whaland and his picaroon schooner were captured in the lower County, where they had thot themselves perfectly secure.

“Your father was barely able to talk him out of prison,” my trusting mother said.

He was not pleased by the coincidence of my birth (a little premature) and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. I was duly dubb’d Andrew Cooke IV and charged to redeem that name: a great charge, my mother thot, for so delicate a babe.

The truth was, I was not expected to survive. When Washington lost Long Island in August & evacuated New York, my father decided he must tarry no longer: Burr had distinguisht himself in the retreat from Long Island by saving a brigade from capture (young Joel Barlow, on vacation from Yale, was in that brigade), but he had been obliged to disobey his superiors to do it, and they were not pleased. Arnold had had to withdraw from Montreal, so expensively won, and was building a flotilla on Lake Champlain to meet the superior British force there. Guy Johnson (Sir William’s nephew & successor as His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New York, whom Father had befriended at Castines Hundred) wrote that the Six Nations had so far been successfully bribed into neutrality, but were “spoiling for action.” That their likeliest leader, Johnson’s Mohawk secretary Joseph Brant, was so gone into English scholarship & English religion that nothing could rouse him from his translation into Mohawk of the Book of Common Prayer. The iron was hot, Father declared, and must be struck ere it cool’d: he bade Mother join him at Castines Hundred as soon as she was able, “with or without the child, as fate will have it,” and went on ahead to stir this Joseph Brant to action, whose motives he believed he understood.

Against all odds, Mag Mungummory & her clever company kept me this side of death, even nurst me toward robustness, but we were obliged to remain in Maryland thro the winter. In October Father wrote (in the family cipher, here decipher’d): “B[enedict] A[rnold] has lost, albeit brilliantly & against great numbers, the 1st naval engagement betwixt Crown & Continentals. I am stirring up charges against him of misconduct in Montreal, to incline him uswards.” In January: “A[aron] B[urr]‘s disgust with Washington is dangerously weaken’d by C[ornwallis]‘s defeat at Princeton, alma mater to us both and, to B, pater as well.” (Burr’s father was its 2nd president.) In March, as we were leaving for the hazardous journey north: “Cannot stir B[rant] from his books. He is much like Yrs Truly of a few years back, discovering his other self, & hates the memory of having fought in ’63 with the renegade Iroquois against Pontiac, whom too late he much admires. His sister Molly is the warrior in the family: B & I are like as twins, she declares, and she urges me to do in his name what he will not.”

That name, in Mohawk, was Thayendanegea. The deeds associated with it, and their attributions, are a house built on the sands of my mother’s love for & faith in my father, whom she saw thenceforward rarely, and always in equivocal circumstances. Hers was a harder fate than Anna Cooke’s, I think, whose Henry Burlingame never convincingly reappear’d to her. If Father’s letters are to be believed — I mean the letters in his hand, over his initials, which, never doubting them herself, Mother kept at Castines Hundred with the Journall & the Secret Historie—on my 1st birthday anniversary he assumed the role of “Joseph Brant” to head 500 Senecas & Cayugas in the St. Leger expedition against Fort Stanwix on the Mohawk, a siege not unlike the one of his boyhood. It was a siege soon lifted, not by the battle at Oriskany (which, tho costly to both sides, was indecisive), but by secret agreement between my father & the leader of the Continental relief force sent up after that battle: “Major General B[enedict] A[rnold] is still embitter’d that his new commission came so tardily, after the promotion of his juniors & inferiors & so many brave exploits of his own. Only Washington’s personal entreaties keep him in the rebel service. By giving him the victory at Stanwix (at small expense to us), I have put his dunderhead superior in such a passion of jealousy as B will find intolerable — when we shall meet again.”

Another letter has him rejoicing at “A’s” being relieved of command by that same jealous superior, General Gates. He laments the staunch, “misguided” patriotism that leads his friend to serve bravely even so, without command, at the 2nd Battle of Saratoga. He rejoices again when in June ’78 Washington puts Arnold in command of Philadelphia, “where everyone that matters, save Ben Franklin, is a Loyalist.” Burr too, he complains, “is grown a hopeless patriot since last winter at Valley Forge. The pass he guarded was the very door to the place, and for all his old contempt for Washington, he would not tender us the key. Now he fights like the Devil in New Jersey. With the British out of Philadelphia, and the French (thanks to Franklin) assembling a fleet at Newport to move against us in Canada, our position is not as certain as it was last year. ’Tis time my Mohawks bloodied their hatchets.”

They did, on my 2nd birthday. Sweeping down into Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, John Butler, “Joseph Brant,” & Molly Brant, with the Butler Rangers & the Brant Mohawks, join’d forces with a 2nd great Amazon, “Queen Esther” Montour, to capture Forty Fort. The massacre was egalitarian as their leadership: above 300 men, women, & children were tortured & kill’d by the “Devils of the Mohawk.” In August & September they burnt German Flats & other “Continental” settlements in the Mohawk Valley; in November, having captured the fort at Cherry Valley, my father & his warriors alone murder’d 30 women, children, & old people. When “her husband” return’d to her that winter at Castines Hundred, “hardly recognizable” in his Mohawk paint & dress & haircut, my mother ask’d him hopefully, Whether these atrocities were meant to avenge Lord Amherst’s smallpox campaign against the besiegers of Fort Pitt in ’63? Not particularly, he admitted: their fourfold object was to rouse the real Joseph Brant from his studious reclusion (alarm’d at my father’s excesses, Brant had indeed assumed command of the Mohawk warriors; hence Father’s return to us); to recommit the Iroquois to their traditional ferocity; to provoke enough indiscriminate reprisal to bring the more neutral of the Six Nations into the war — and to slake the personal bloodlust of Molly Brant and Esther Montour, whose appetite for mutilation, disembowelment, impalement, flaying, cannibalism, & the like was truly savage.

Our host, Baron André Castine II, observed that Madocawando’s Tarratines, while brave, had been peaceful trappers & hunters, like most Indians north of the St. Lawrence & the Lakes, who fear’d & despised the barbarous practises of the Iroquois. All he himself could say in defence of such barbarisms was that the Iroquois themselves had not perpetrated them wholesale until prest by the economics of the French & English fur trade, which had turn’d them into greedy, alcoholic middle-men. But tho savagery was savagery, the Baron maintain’d that all were not tarr’d with the same brush. Loyalists imprison’d by the Continentals in the Connecticut copper mines were being beaten & tortured about the privates in the customary ways; British regulars were stifling & abusing Continentals in the infamous jails & prison-ships of New York. Neither were yet routinely dismembering & flaying alive, or prolonging torture for the sake simply of extracting the greatest possible pain from a living body, or tying live people to trees by their own entrails, or impaling children on pointed stakes — had not so done, routinely, since the Middle Ages. Differences in degree were important; this was the 18th Century, not the 12th; the fragile flower of humanism, of civilization—

“It is your 18th Century,” my father is said to have replied. “We do not reckon time from the same events, or by the same units.”

We Princeton alumni, the Baron politely inquired, or we Yale tutors? Or perhaps we child-murderers?

“We Ahatchwhoops,” said my father, “who ever regarded the Tarratines as a tribe of old women.”

The Baron replied with a sigh that according to his grandmother, Princess Madocawanda, it was the elder women of the tribe who, like Molly Brant, were always the most ferocious when unleasht. Their conversation then ended uncomfortably, if short of an outright break in the family. And it seems not to have been without effect on my father, who soon after shaved his scalp-lock, doft his paint, beads, & buckskins, & donn’d a short wig & English dress — nor, to our knowledge, ever took a full-fledged Indian role thereafter. Unless it was he who sat for Romney’s portrait of Joseph Brant in ’86.

Thro that winter & spring (the last extended period when my mother knew fairly that the man representing himself as her husband was truly the man she’d married), he was in close communication by letter with Loyalist leaders in Philadelphia, certain British officers in New York, & the staffs of Canadian Governor Haldimand and Sir Henry Clinton. His friend Burr, now commanding the Continental line above New York from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound, was on the verge of resigning & taking up his interrupted study of law: his health was not the best, his competency as an officer had not been duly rewarded, and he was bored. In Philadelphia, as Father had hoped, Arnold had found the most agreeable & civilized society amongst the old Tory families of the city; he was already betrotht to the daughter of one of their number, and was being accused in Congress by the Executive Council of Pennsylvania (on information from anonymous sources) with eight items of misconduct. In April, four of those charges were actually referr’d to court-martial; furious, Arnold married the Tory heiress and demanded immediate trial to clear his name. But the court found reasons for delay, and my father cheerfully bade us goodbye, promising to write from New York.

“André,” he said to my mother. “Remember André.”

She thot he alluded to the Baron’s mild reproof. But cipher’d letters, in a style very like Father’s, exulted not long thereafter in his new connection to Major John André, a young adjutant of Sir Henry Clinton’s in New York who in ’75 had been imprison’d by the “Americans” (as the Continentals now began to call themselves), and exchanged in ’76. “A[ndré] is a civilized fellow,” Father wrote, “with a better talent than J[oel] B[arlow]‘s for comical verse, in the refinements whereof I am become his tutor. He & I are like enough for twins — save that, tho brave, he has no stomach for intrigue. There also I am his tutor, inasmuch as poor B[enedict] A[rnold], in a rage over the lingering insult of his court-martial, has on his bride’s advice begun a secret correspondence with us, concerning a commission in His Majesty’s service. And C[linton] has delegated A[ndré] to pursue the matter.”

He reaffirm’d his hope to bring “A” & “B” together to “his” side. The tide had turn’d severely against the Iroquois. In reprisal for the massacres of Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, the “Americans” in May burnt the castles of the Onondagas. In August the Butler Rangers & the Mohawks were badly beaten at Newtown, near Elmira. And in the autumn, “American” troops swept thro the Finger Lakes & Genesee Valley country, destroying the castles, livestock, & orchards of the Cayugas & the Senecas, some 3,000 of whom, including the Brants, fled to Fort Niagara for refuge. The only hope now for the Six Nations, in Father’s view, was absolute British control of New York from Long Island to Lake Erie. And the best way to that control was the capture of the American post which dominated the Hudson Valley: West Point. But the post was heavily defended, if indifferently commanded; Clinton was sensibly reluctant to try it by storm…

Burr’s loyalty proved, if not unshaken, still immoveable: if he felt any attraction at all to the British side (so he replied to my father’s inquiry) it was the chance to live in New York with such clever company as Major André, the comical poet; but he expected to be able to move there as an American before very long. Arnold, on the other hand, was altogether disaffected when the court-martial, tho dismissing all the substantive charges, directed Washington to reprimand him on the two smallest counts, not to offend the Executive Council of Pennsylvania. As hundreds of Iroquois starved at Niagara, and as my father & Major André together readied for the New York press a topical parody of the old Scottish ballad of Chevy Chase (call’d “The Cow-chase”), my father was urging Arnold to demand from General Washington command of West Point by way of vindication of his honor, and negotiating with André, on Arnold’s behalf, the terms of that post’s betrayal!

By summer, when Arnold took command, the three of them had workt out the details of the proposal; little more was needed save signatures on the relevant documents & ground-plans of the fortifications.

A meeting was arranged at Haverstraw on the night of the autumnal equinox. John André, fetcht to the site on a British vessel, met Benedict Arnold under a flag of truce, deliver’d to him safe-conduct papers to New York, letters of commission, & details of the British attack to be made within a few days; he received from Arnold the plan of the fortress and disposition of the garrison. Before he could return to his ship, it was fired upon desultorily in the dark; my father, who had come ashore with André, signal’d the captain to drop downriver & await them; that worthy mistook the signal & return’d toward New York, leaving the two men stranded behind American lines. My father left André with Arnold & went ahead to scout safe passage overland. Next day the Major set out, in civilian disguise, carrying a false passport given him by Arnold. He got as far as Tarry town, almost out of danger, when my father, hurrying to rendezvous with him, fell in with two American militiamen on routine highway-watch, and to cover his own identity was obliged to show forged papers establishing himself as a New York state militiaman, one Van Wart. Minutes later they spotted André and, despite my father’s encouraging them to let the stranger pass, decided on a thoro search. In his stockings they found the incriminating plans.

The best Father could do was insist on taking the papers immediately to General Arnold, “to warn him of the impending attack.” Major André, no hand at intrigue, doubtless assumed that Father would destroy the evidence en route and thus put Arnold in position to order him releast. He did not betray “Van Wart’s” identity even when, to their chagrin, the militiaman in charge decided to hold the papers himself whilst my father notified General Arnold of the spy’s capture & the plann’d assault. He could then do nothing for poor brave André, only make good his own & Arnold’s escape to the British sloop-of-war Vulture.

When the treason came to light, Washington, embarrast by his earlier defence of Arnold, felt obliged to show no mercy to André, who was hang’d as a spy on 2 October. The whole British army went into mourning; in recognition of his poetical talents, a plaque in André’s honor was placed in Westminster Abbey. Joel Barlow, the newly-ordain’d Chaplain of the Massachusetts Brigade, preacht a fiery sermon on the treason of his former acquaintance, a sermon so aflame with patriotic indignation & literary ambition that its author was invited to witness his fellow poet’s execution at West Point on the following day and, shortly thereafter, to dine with General Washington & his staff. Of André, Barlow wrote in a letter home that he had never seen “a politer gentleman or a greater character of his age,” and that the Major died “with an appearance of philosophy & heroism.” But he was altogether more moved by the literary prospects which his chaplaincy appear’d to be opening: he seized the occasion of Washington’s dinner to lay upon the company Book I of The Vision of Columbus & a prospectus of the books to come.

I mention this coincidence, & this letter, because it argues against the notion entertain’d in some humors by my mother: that the man hang’d as John André was Henry Burlingame IV. Mother came to this notion out of mere despair, for we had no word from Father for a long while after André’s capture. Indeed, our subsequent communications were all of a less reliable character than those before; likewise Mother’s testimony, as unhappiness took its toll upon her judgement. Soon after Major André’s execution, the picaroon Joseph Whaland reappear’d down in the Maryland marshes and renew’d his piratical depredations on behalf of the British. We went down there in ’81 and ’82, my 6th & 7th years, and sometime during our stay my mother was visited by this Whaland. Him too she imagined in some weathers to be her lost husband. But Joseph Whaland, while elusive, resourceful, & ubiquitous, was more uncouth than Pontiac and could scarcely read, far less make verses. If he was perhaps my mother’s occasional lover, he was not her husband.

A likelier candidate is the anonymous author of the “Newburgh Letters” of 1783. Cornwallis had surrender’d at Yorktown; we had lost the war to the Americans; the two armies had disengaged whilst Ben Franklin negotiated with George III’s ministers in Paris. Burr had married the widow of a British officer and was preparing to move his law practice from Albany to New York as soon as the British evacuated that city; General Arnold, having burnt Richmond & attack’d New London for his new employers, was isolated & unhappy in England; Barlow, married & settled in Hartford, was grinding out Columbus’s vision and, having the good business sense to dedicate it to Louis XVI, was successfully drumming up an eminent list of subscribers. The back of the Iroquois was broken: they linger’d hopeless about Niagara, waiting for permission to relocate in Canada. Only Whaland’s picaroons, marauding freely all over the lower Chesapeake, still fought the war. Washington’s army, which he was holding in the Hudson Highlands until New York had been evacuated, was restless. The war was over; their pay was in arrears; Congress had no money; the Constitution had not yet been written; the political situation was in a flux. Colonel Nicola, in army headquarters at Newburgh, had already suggested that Washington assume the title of king, and the General’s famous letter of rebuke (27 May 1782) assured his leadership of whatever form of government the new nation adopted. Then appear’d in print, also at Newburgh, two unsign’d letters exhorting the army to depose Washington, march on Philadelphia, force Congress to pay their arrearages, & establish a triumvirate of military officers to govern the country.

The prime mover of this call to sedition was that same General Horatio Gates who had so tried Arnold’s patriotism after the victory at Fort Stanwix; Gates had delegated to his aide-de-camp, John Armstrong, the drafting of a call to mutiny. But Armstrong was no penman, and the texts of the letters are replete with signals from his & Burr’s old friend from Princeton, Henry Burlingame IV. And while Joseph Whaland’s last-ditch piracies cannot be construed in any way as strategic (on the contrary, they led Maryland gunboats into Loyalist hideouts on Tangier & Deal Islands, and dangerously close to Bloodsworth Island), the Newburgh proposals, regardless of their issue, were clearly in keeping with Father’s declared strategy of dividing & weakening the infant nation. Unfortunately, Washington exercised restraint, declared his sympathy for the grievances voiced in the letters, declined to seek out & punish their author & instigator, and successfully persuaded his officer corps to patience until the army could be demobilized.

Mother heard no more from Joseph Whaland after the Treaty of Paris was sign’d in the autumn of ’83. In lower Dorchester, the watermen still report hearing screams & gibbers across the wastes, and to this day attribute them to Whaland, gone mad in his solitary hideaway, wandering the marsh like Homer’s Bellerophon, “far from the paths of men, devouring his own soul.” We return’d to Castines Hundred. Thousands of dispossest Loyalists, refugee Iroquois, & escaped or manumitted Negroes were swarming across the river from New York into Canada to avoid reprisals by the “Americans,” amongst them Joseph & Molly Brant and “Queen Esther” Montour; “Upper Canada” was founded as their temporary homeland until the new Union of States fell apart & they could safely return. Against that happy day, Governor Haldimand declined to surrender Britain’s Great Lakes forts (he call’d them Canada’s Great Lakes forts) to the Americans, as stipulated by the Treaty of Paris. The Baron’s estate was a refugee campground, his house a waystation, where Mother hoped in vain my father might turn up. Burr (now a state assemblyman in New York) was sympathetic, but had no news. Arnold, idle & brooding in London, was not answering his mail. Barlow, by this time an establisht “Hartford Wit,” was preening on the subscription list for his still-unfinished Vision: King Louis, 25 copies; General Washington, 20; M. Lafayette, 10; B. Franklin, 6; A. Burr, 3; & cet. The Union of States was unfinisht, too, tho already a convention in Annapolis was calling for a larger one in Philadelphia to write a constitution & select a national President. White settlers freely crost the Appalachians and prest toward the Mississippi: the Joseph Brant who stopt at Castines Hundred was not my father, but a white man’s Indian playing peacemaker for the Six Nations by urging them to sign away most of their homeland to the Americans, who occupied it anyhow. Not even my mother could imagine that he was her husband. In 1785 she told me that my father must surely be dead, and herself donn’d widow’s weeds.

We linger’d here thro that winter. Then in ’86, having just begun to reconcile herself to her bereavement, Mother received from London a remarkable love-letter from the man she mourn’d! To be sure, the letter was sign’d B, not H.B. IV, and declared itself to be from “Joseph Brant,” in England officially to raise money for the erection of an Episcopal chapel in Upper Canada. But it was so “unmistakably” my father’s epistle — his early handwriting, his pet names for her, allusions to their brief time together, inquiries after me — that we set out at once for London.

The prospect of “reunion” with the shadowy figure I had scarcely met & never known, & who had caused my mother such distress, gave me no pleasure. My uncle the Baron was all the father I needed, Castines Hundred the one real home I’d had. Only the sea-voyage, and the anticipation of a foreign land, reconciled me to the journey.

Sing now, Calliope, in minor key, & Clio in mournful numbers, our shock & confusion when, having settled in a boarding house in King Street, London, on my “father’s” written instructions, we discover’d that the “Joseph Brant” being given a Captain’s commission (and pension) by the Court, & received by George III, & painted by Romney, and feted everywhere, was neither the pusillanimous prayerbook-scholar of Canajoharie & Upper Canada, nor the “Devil of the Mohawks” who had butcher’d Forty Fort & Cherry Valley, nor yet the New Haven tutor who had begot me in the Maryland marshes with the Secret of the Magic Eggplant, but an icy & indifferent stranger who scarcely acknowledged our existence face to face (and never deign’d to sleep in King Street), whilst sending us the warmest letters in the post, with money for our support & my education: letters whose authorship this same “Joseph Brant” neither admitted nor denied!

Unhinged, Mother fled for comfort across town to our old acquaintance Benedict Arnold, who sympathized but could not help us. He made plain, however (just before leaving London for Canada to try the West Indies trade again), his conviction that Father had betray’d him into betraying Washington & himself. He declared further — planting in my boyish mind a seed which was to bear much subsequent fruit — that this betrayal had been not in the interest of the Crown at all! On the contrary: having arranged for him to betray West Point to the British, Father had (so Arnold swore) then betray’d him & Major André to Washington, to shock the emerging republic into unity and weaken the hand of Washington’s rivals, such as General Gates! The Newburgh Letters, he avow’d “on good authority,” had been dictated by my father to John Armstrong with Washington’s approval, for a similar purpose. Letters! It was those that kept us in London, even after “Joseph Brant” departed to claim his new estate on Lake Ontario. They still arrived, almost regularly, at King Street; but in 1788 they began to be deliver’d from Paris, and tho the initial was the same, the name it named was now Joel Barlow’s!

He was just arrived in France, these letters said, on secret business involving Louisiana, “which must not fall into American hands.” The “Joseph Brant” subterfuge, they said, had been a heartbreaking necessity to disguise from Parliament his dealing with George III’s ministers; thank heaven he could now put it by, “at least for the most part,” and come to us in propria persona…

In July we were paid a call by Mr. Barlow, who turn’d out to be — Joel Barlow! He had indeed come from Hartford to Paris less than a fortnight past, he confirm’d, on behalf of the Scioto Company, speculators in Ohio real estate. He acknowledged further that he had encounter’d his old tutor Henry Burlingame IV at dinner at the Marquis de Lafayette’s a few days since, whither he’d gone with the American minister Mr. Jefferson; and he was come to us at King Street at that gentleman’s request, to urge us to join him, Burlingame, at his Paris lodging. But he disclaim’d with alarm having written any letters to us over his name, and trusted we would not excite the jealousy of his own wife (whom he was entreating to leave Hartford & join him) with that story. Could Burlingame’s letters be going to Mrs. Barlow & his to us? My mother produced one: the handwriting was not Barlow’s. He left as dismay’d as we, promising to press Burlingame on the matter when his business in London & the Low Countries was done & he return’d to Paris. Mother took to bed.

More letters came, all in the same hand, all tender, solicitous, intimate: from “Brant” in Upper Canada, from “Barlow” in Antwerp, from “Benedict” in St. John’s, even from “Burr” in New York, now attorney-general of that state. In the spring of ’89, after a particularly touching letter from “Barlow,” we removed to Paris: not only did the author of The Vision of Columbus deny writing the letter; he inform’d us, astonisht, that Burlingame had left Paris for Baltimore some months hence, presumably to rejoin us there!

In 1789 Nancy Russecks McEvoy Burlingame was still scarcely 30, and — to her son’s eyes, at least — still beautiful, if much distraught. She had taken one or two lovers over the years & yet remain’d faithful to her faithless husband, whom she thot Joseph Whaland & those others to have been. But this last shock undid her judgement: she came to believe that virtually everyone with his initial was Burlingame, regardless of station, appearance, or attitude. The letters still came, & the money: from Baltimore, from Canada, sometimes from Barlow’s own hotel. We took lodging there. Barlow’s land business was going badly; he miss’d his wife; they had no children; he was kind to Mother & me. She call’d him “Henry”…

Her story ends in 1790, when Ruth Barlow was finally persuaded to cross the ocean. Just before the storming of the Bastille the year before, I had been put into a boarding-school at the Pension Lemoyne, across the street from Mr. Jefferson’s house, along with another ward of Mr. Barlow’s. Not long after, Mother inform’d me that I might expect a younger brother or sister by summer. Barlow was doubly desperate: an ardent supporter of both revolutions, he nonetheless hoped to save the floundering Scioto venture by selling large pieces of Ohio to refugees of the ancien régime; a devoted husband, he nevertheless install’d Mrs. Barlow in our lodgings in London & kept her waiting there a full month until my mother was brot to childbed in mid-July. Surely now, I thot, my father will appear. I had got a letter & a cheque from him on my 14th birthday, over the initial of an obscure young Corsican sublieutenant of artillery in Auxonne…

On July 10^th, 1790, just before joining others of the American community in Paris in a congratulatory address to the French National Assembly, Mr. Barlow inform’d me that he had made plans, on my father’s written instructions, for returning us to Canada as soon as Mother was able to travel. On the 1st anniversary of Bastille Day my sister was born, dead; Mother died a day or so later of childbed fever. That same day a letter was deliver’d to me by a servant of Madame de Staël, a friend of Barlow’s, whom I did not know. But I had come to recognize that penmanship. The letter purported to have been written from a place call’d the Bell Tavern in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. It declared that no force on earth could have kept the author from my mother’s side at the birth of their poor daughter, except the same historic affair that had obliged him to leave her soon after begetting that child: a business involving the reversal of both the American & the French Revolutions! I was to come to him at once, to Baltimore; his friend Mme de Staël would see to the arrangements. And once with him at last, I would see “the pattern & necessity of [his] actions, so apparently heartless, over the years: the explanation & vindication of [his] life, the proper direction of [my] own.” It was sign’d, Your loving Father, Henry Burlingame IV.

I tore that letter to pieces, burnt the pieces, pisst upon the ashes. And there commences — or shall commence when I next find leisure to write you, who will perhaps by then have commenced your own life story — the no less eventful history of

Your loving Father,

Andrew Cooke IV

P.S.: But there is a curious, painful postscript to that letter, the last I ever had “from him.” Back in his tutoring days at Yale (so he confest to Mother, who recorded the anecdote in her diary), Father had briefly courted & made verses with an intelligent young woman named Elizabeth Whitman, and had stopt short of matrimony only on account of the same infirmity that had made him so shy in Church Creek. Miss Whitman subsequently was courted by Joel Barlow, who however prefer’d & eventually married Ruth Baldwin, & by yet another tutor at Yale, who too saw fit not to wed her. She withdrew from New Haven to Hartford to live with her mother & to languish on the margin of the Hartford Wits. Early in 1788 she found herself pregnant, and in June of that year, under the assumed name of Mrs. Walker, she left town to have the baby. In July the child was stillborn, like my sister; like my mother, Betsy Whitman died a few days later of childbed fever. She left only a letter, addrest to “B,” the lover who had abandon’d her: “Must I die alone? Why did you leave me in such distress?” & cet.

It could have been Joel Barlow: he was in Hartford at the time, studying for his bar examination, involving himself in the Scioto swindle, & satirizing with his fellow wits, in the Anarchiad, Daniel Shays’ admirable rebellion. It could have been Joseph Buckminister, the other Yale tutor amongst Betsy’s former beaux. But the town to which she fled to hide the scandal was Danvers, Massachusetts; and the hostelry in which “Mrs. Walker” & her baby died was the Bell Tavern — where, she declared to the end, her husband would be joining her promptly…

Inspired by that fateful letter (and by the success in America of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa), a relative of Betsy Whitman’s named Hannah Foster turn’d her story into a romance on the wages of sin call’d The Coquette (1797): the 1st American epistolary novel. Inspired by that later epistle from the Bell Tavern, your father stay’d in Paris to join in the Terror & to applaud the guillotining of the whole paternal class. But that is matter for another day, sweet child, another letter.

A.B.C.

R: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Reviewing Year O and anticipating LILYVAC II’s first trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES. With an enclosure to the Author.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

Some fifteen years ago, when I was 24 and 25 (Eisenhower! Hurricane Hazel!), I wrote my first published novel, a little tidewater comedy called The Floating Opera. It involved, among other things, a showboat remembered from Aubrey Bodine’s photographs and an imaginary 54-year-old Maryland lawyer named Todd Andrews, who once in 1937, when he was 37, cheerfully attempted to blow himself up together with the Floating Opera and a goodly number of his fellow Eastern Shorers. You may have heard of the story.

At that time, as a budding irrealist, I took seriously the traditional publisher’s disclaimer—“Any resemblance between characters in this novel and actual persons living or dead,” etc. — and would have been appalled at the suggestion that any of my fictive folk were even loosely “drawn from life”: a phrase that still suggests to me some barbarous form of capital punishment. I wanted no models in the real world to hobble my imagination. If, as the Kabbalists supposed, God was an Author and the world his book, I criticized Him for mundane realism. Had it been intimated to me that there actually dwelt, in the “Dorset Hotel,” a middle-aged bachelor lawyer with subacute bacterial endocarditis, who rented his room by the day and spent his evenings at an endless inquiry into his father’s suicide…

No matter. Life is a shameless playwright (so are some playwrights) who lays on coincidence with a trowel. I am about the same age now as “Todd Andrews” was when he concluded that he’d go on living because there’s no more reason to commit suicide than not to: I approach reality these days with more respect, if only because I find it less realistic and more mysterious than I’d supposed. I blush to confess that my current fictive project, still tentative, looks to be that hoariest of early realist creatures, an epistolary novel — set, moreover and by God, in “Cambridge, Maryland,” among other more or less actual places, and involving (Muse forgive me) those most equivocal of ghosts: Characters from the Author’s Earlier Fictions.

There, I’ve said it, and quickly now before I lose my nerve, will you consent, sir, to my using your name and circumstances and what-all in this new novel, clearing the text of course with you before its publication et cetera and for that matter (since other “actual persons living or dead” may wander through this literary mail room) to my retaining you, at your customary fee, for counsel in the libel way?

Cordially,

P.S.: Do you happen to know a Lady Germaine Amherst (Germaine Lady Amherst? Germaine Pitt Lady Amherst? Lady Germaine Pitt-Amherst?)? What about a nut in Lily Dale, N.Y., named Jerome Bonaparte Bray, who believes himself to be the rightful king of France, myself to be an arrant plagiarist, and yourself to be his attorney?

H: The Author to Todd Andrews. Accepting the latter’s demurrer.

Department of English, Annex B

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday, 17 May 1969

Dear J.,

Mirabile, mirabile, mirabile dictu! Three miracles in three days! The plot of our lives as turned and returned as a baroque novel’s!

1. Mr A. B. Cook VI — to the entire astonishment of our ad hoc nominating committee and the great but discreetly concealed delight of two-thirds of its membership (i.e., myself and Ms Wright of the French Dept: a far cry from dear “Juliette,” but worlds away withal from Harry Carter: “Mr Wrong”) — thanked us by letter three days ago for the honour of our invitation… and declined!

Declined, John! Oh, that I were after all a writer, or had had Reggie Prinz’s cameras, to catch forever Harry Carter’s crestfall when I read that letter aloud! Which he must then inspect with his own eyes, hold to the light, examine the blank verso of, the signature, the return address, the postmark and cancelled stamp on the envelope (CHAUTAUGUA MD, spelled with a g where yours is q’d; and an American Legion commemorative), as if looking for some clue that the laureate’s no was a cyphered yes, or that I’d forged the letter. Ms Wright at last crisply opined that, given the lateness of the season, we had better propose Mr Mensch’s name at once to President Schott, and hope our colleague would not follow your and Cook’s example.

A fortnight earlier, at the crest of our “Second Stage,” I’d have blushed, if not dismissed the idea outright. But Ambrose and I had been that fortnight sexless, as you know, and while my heart had in large measure taken over from my orifices the labour of his admission and receipt, so that now I loved where then I’d merely lusted, the complete propriety of this “Third Stage” lent me sufficient “cool,” as the students say, to pretend to consider the matter for some moments before seconding his nomination. Ambrose had been of considerable assistance in containing the late demonstrations, and his presence on the platform might just discourage the activists’ turning our commencement exercises into yet another, as has been happening elsewhere. The modesty of his literary credentials is attributable in some part to his avant-gardism: “concrete narrative” is not poured out ready-mixed by the cubic yard! And if I myself remain less than utterly convinced that such desperate innovation as his is “the last, radical hope for the profession of letters,” I can in good conscience at least honour that apocalyptic argument.

I called for the question: two-nothing in Ambrose’s favour, Harry Carter abstaining in the spirit of a diplomatic emissary awaiting instructions from his government. Considering the date, I proposed we ring up at once both Mensch and Schott to insure their informal agreement before sending our formal invitations. Carter telephoned our acting president (to whom, a subscript apprised us, Cook had sent a copy of his letter); I telephoned Ambrose at the Lighthouse — a.k.a. Mensch’s Castle, his brother’s house — and heard for the first time, with a proper pang of jealousy, the voice of Magda Giulianova Mensch. Did it catch at the accent of my own, which she too was hearing for the first time and must surely recognise?

“I’ll call him,” she huskily intoned. What a vulnerable, what a stirring, what a sexual voice! Which then called, “Ambrose? Telephone,” up some nearby flight of stairs which I had yet myself to see, but which l’Abruzzesa had doubtless many times ascended, crooning Ambrose? in even sultrier tone. I heard children’s voices in the background — no, one child’s voice, his backward daughter’s, to be sure; her normal twins would be at school, or at work. I was smitten with envy, jealousy, rekindled desire — the objective, no doubt, of our Third Stage abstinence. When she said, “He’s coming”—her voice as throaty as if she were — my “Thank you” was gruff and mannish as John Bull. And when Ambrose, fetched from his writing desk, dully hello’d me, I found myself declaring despite myself, for the first time to him, and in a lump-throated whisper, not “acting Provost Pitt here,” but “I love you.”

! (As my lover would put it in his own style of dialogue.) Fortunately I had withdrawn from the conference room to my inner office to make the call; Carter to Ms Wright’s, hard by, to make his (Miss Stickles, who would normally have placed both, was out to lunch). When we reconvened, we were both somewhat disappointed: Carter because Schott now warmly ratified our nomination, hoping only that, in reciprocation of the honour and in gratitude for Cook’s gracious deferral thereof, Ambrose would consider the incorporation into his screenplay of some Splendid Ideas that Cook had proposed to Schott in a handwritten postscript to his copy of the letter to our committee: ideas concerning not only the Tower of Truth, but the burning of Washington and the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812… and I because Ambrose, so far from immediately accepting, in whatever spirit, our nomination (for first proposing which, sir, I am as grateful to you now as my thanks are belated), was stipulating that the honorary doctorate be awarded to his nom de plume “Arthur Morton King”! I could not imagine Schott’s welcoming so irregular a proviso, any more than Ambrose would welcome those “splendid ideas” of A. B. Cook’s (There is nothing in your fiction, is there, of Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake expedition in 1812?). Where would we turn next with our wretched degree? Finally, some intuition told me that Mrs Peter Mensch had forgiven her intermittent lover his affair with me. Ambrose was telephoning Schott directly and promptly, at his own insistence, to spare me the brokering of their respective stipulations and to expedite, on the committee’s behalf, his decision. He would ring back promptly. I was relieved but pessimistic — and disappointed yet further, I realised as we adjourned, that he had not accepted the bloody distinction simply as a loving favour to yours truly.

The good news came, however, from Schott himself, not a quarter hour after we’d glumly gone our professorial ways: Great guy, this Mensch! Had welcomed Cook’s suggestions, ever’ doggone one! Thought he might even find a part for Mr Cook himself in the movie, how ’bout that! As for the pen-name business, damn good idea! Gave the whole show more class, if you asked him; made it more what you might call literary? And that was the name of the old ball game, right?

Thus our ad hoc committee came at last ad hoc, and is no more: on 21 June our friend “Arthur Morton King” becomes Marshyhope U’s first Doctor of Letters! How came this miracle to pass? Wherefore this sudden deference of A. B. Cook’s, this sweet rage for accommodation of John Schott’s and Ambrose’s? I burned to know; but my curiosity must itself needs be deferred when Miracle One was yesterday eclipsed by

2. A warm mid-May evening: Friday, thank God, and the last day of classes for the spring semester. A week-long “reading period” has begun (Is there a research library on the boardwalk at Ocean City? For thither have flown the student body), to be followed by final examinations and, three weeks after that—when nine-tenths of our students and staff will surely have scattered for the summer — our belated commencement ceremonies. The official reason for this delay is to combine the awarding of degrees with the cornerstone laying of Schott’s Tower of Truth, far behind the schedule of its construction. It is an open secret among us administrators, however, that the real reason is Schott’s fear of activist disruption: he has anxiously enquired of Ambrose whether “the right camera angles” can make his minions into a multitude. But I digress, savouring the anticipation of what’s next to write as I savoured the anticipation of my lover’s visit, who had rung back after all in the evening of that eventful Wednesday to invite me to cocktails aboard Todd Andrews’s ancient sailboat, moored in the municipal harbour, and dinner afterwards somewhere across the river. We were, he felt, at the end of our Third Stage and the commencement of our Fourth: he much wanted to talk to me on that mysterious head, bring me up to date too on his adventures with Prinz and Co., and speak of Other Things — his past and our future — which his preoccupation with movie making had kept him from communicating to me till now. Have I mentioned that in the six weeks since he mailed me that abortive confession of “Arthur Morton King’s,” ostensibly addressed to an anonymous Yours Truly and sent floating down the tide, I’ve received no further “love letters” from him? And that with the close of our seminiferous Second Stage he ceased reading these weekly letters to you?

He offered to fetch me in from 24 L; I decided to drive instead, I’m not sure why: the portentous announcement of an impending change in our connexion, perhaps, however cheerily put, suggested the precaution of vehicular independence. As it turned out I rode in in Jane Mack’s chauffeured limousine, seldom seen in Dorset Heights since Harrison and I vacated Tidewater Farms. Jane too was to be Mr Andrews’s cocktail guest; she and “dear Toddy,” she apprised me en route to Cambridge, were old old friends, dear dear friends; I wasn’t to be fooled by his down-home manners and modest law practice into underestimating his professional ability: a first-class legal mind, whose counsel she’d prefer in really thorny matters to that of Mack Enterprises’ whole legal department. Did I know that it was his adroitness in the probate courts, some thirty-odd years since, that had rescued her late husband’s inheritance and made possible the firm’s expansion from mere pickle pickling to its present conglomeration of enterprises?

What could I say, John? As levelly as possible I acknowledged that I had read something to that effect somewhere; couldn’t quite recall where. “Fortune magazine, most likely,” Jane asserted; “they ran a feature on us ten years ago, when we first got into freeze-dried foods, and of course they looked around for anything to liven up the story. We thought of suing, but Todd advised against it.” The “we,” we note, is corporate, not familial — and while I feel, in this place among these people, more like an “extra” from your early fiction than the protagonist of my own life story, she has repressed your novelisation of her youth as completely as her middle-aged amour with my Jeffrey! Freud, Ferenczi, you are right: our choice of vocations may be symptomatic as any other of our choices. That chilling woman is your proof, her beauty as frostily preserved as her late husband’s excreta; who rejects from her Deepfreeze of a memory all “unwholesome” items (you may be sure she remembered the volume and number of that magazine, whose publicity had been good for business) as systematically as her quality-control inspectors purge poor peas from prime in her frozen-food factory. Even when the Tidewater Foundation was debating the subsidy of the Original Floating Theatre II, Todd tells me, she batted not an eye at either the paradox or the allusion, which latter made even the proponents of the showboat uncomfortable. Au contraire: she froze them all with embarrassment by merrily demanding of Todd Andrews whether he remembered the fine old times they’d all had back in the thirties on Captain Adams’s floating theatre — and then got briskly down to cost accounting!

So Andrews told me shortly after, amused but still impressed, at the bar set up on the cabin roof of his converted oyster-dredging boat. But remarkable as may be such expurgation, it is not our Second Miracle, no. Neither is the gloss supplied by Ambrose (over breakfast this morning) to his oral memorandum last evening (over martinis on Andrews’s foredeck) when I’d asked sweetly what all this stage-of-the-affair claptrap was about: that in the second postscript of his initial letter to me — a declaration of love with no fewer than seven postscripts — he had remarked that they corresponded not only to the stages of his love for me thence far, but to the predecessors of that love, five in number. At the time of that P.P.S., he declared (This is still the memorandum, not the gloss, and most decidedly not the miracle. We are on said freshly scrubbed and painted foredeck, “wet martinis” in hand — Ambrose and I share a fondness for good vermouth — admiring the balmy evening, the spiffy restoration and conversion of our host’s old skipjack, the dashingly turned-out film contingent among the guests, and each other, whom we have not seen since early in the week. My lover is tanned already from his new medium, which has kept him largely out of the Lighthouse and in the daylight of Ocean City and “Barataria,” the set being built down near Bloodsworth Island. He wears a light-blue denim jacket and trousers over an open-necked madras shirt; he looks boyish, healthy, handsome, American. He is in good spirits. I desire him, can scarcely keep myself from touching his sleeve, his hair), these correspondences were but a glancing whim: he had felt Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for me; he’d found our conversation Be-ne-fi-ci-al; after Harrison’s funeral he had offered me Con-so-la-ti-on and made that surprising Dec-la-ra-ti-on of his feelings for me; followed with an Ex-hor-ta-ti-on to me to reciprocate them and get on to For-ni-ca-ti-on, just as he had admired, benefited from, consoled, etc., other lovers in the past. Not till the coincidence of my recentest menstruation (which had divided Stages Two and Three, as the one just prior had divided One and Two) and certain other happenstances had he recognised a deeper pattern in our progress. Having recognised it, he could no longer honestly distinguish cause and effect: whether the pattern was determining his feelings and thus the “story of our affair,” or our affair innocently rehearsing the pattern. For this reason, among others, he was inclined just now to trust my feelings above his own, and he put me this question, to be responded to at dinner: Having come, in fish-cold March, to making love, and humped all over horny April, and chastely stopped for breath into sweet mid-May… what ought we now? Whither our connexion, if it were my “say-so” and if our inclinations (he knew his own) should agree?

Prinz was aboard in his displaced-person getup, Jane Mack’s daughter in what I believe the children call a “grannie” dress: the former glassless, the latter taking on gin and tonic by the imperial pint as she traded “wisecracks” with the barkeep. Indeed, but for the presence of a few film extras, and the absence of John Schott and A. B. Cook… and his son… we were February’s mourners reconvened in May: a fair season here indeed, when the mosquitoes have yet to hatch, the stinging sea-nettles yet to foul the estuaries, the heat and damp of summer yet to pressure-cook the peninsula. Everywhere flowering dogwoods, tulips, crab apples, lilacs, japonicas, and brilliant azaleas, the bougainvillaea of middle latitudes. But if there was tension among the gathered then, it was between Jane and me on the one hand, and within myself with respect to my “son” on the other: now it was visibly between the Macks mère et fils, who (rumour had it) were about to litigate over Harrison’s estate. Where “Bea Golden” stands in the matter I don’t know, unless the family’s disposition on deck was a bit of symbolical choreography: Drew and Yvonne Mack stood as far forward as one could without climbing out upon the bowsprit, Jane was on the extreme afterdeck with a little group of Tidewater Foundation trustees (and the steering wheel), and Ms Golden square amidships. There too, of course, was the bar, crossed by neither mother nor son; and thither strayed from time to time my lover’s eyes, not necessarily in search of drink.

This much I remarked, with a small pang like the Wednesday’s on first hearing l’Abruzzesa’s voice. But I did not remark much more, for Ambrose’s query and his portentous Deeper Pattern, together with the tale of his week’s adventures with the film crew, quite preempted my attention. What ought we now? With spring so gorgeously exploding in every bush, the very air a scented kiss, the intemperate sap full-risen to green the temperate zone, what ought we now? The only question was, Why had he put it as a question, if not that to him the answer was not obvious? And if it wasn’t… had Bea Golden of Marshyhope Productions (Prinz’s paper corporation for receiving Tidewater Foundation subsidies) turned his head? Or was his erstwhile leading lady, Magda Giulianova Mensch (whose initials just now roar out at me from this page), making a comeback for “Arthur Morton King’s” sake?

What was clear to me after all, then, was merely what I would, not what I ought. I ought… never to have left Castines Hundred and my baby in 1940; never to have gone to Paris in ’39 to sit at the feet of Stein and Joyce; I ought never to have been begot by those dreadful fuddling dears my parents, thanks to whom the very enterprise of letters will ever in my memory’s nostrils redole of green tea, stale tobacco, book dust, and damp woollens in untidy flats. Ambrose — sweeper-away of all this, together with Yours Truly — I love you! God help me — and God knows what we ought!

Presently we disembarked from cocktails and motored over the creek bridge and the “New Bridge” to reembark at our restaurant: a large ferryboat lately beached on the river’s north shore and converted for dining. I remarked upon the American passion for conversion wondering whether it stemmed from the missionary energies of the early Puritans and later revivalists or the settlers’ need, born of poverty and dearth of goods, to find new uses for things worn out or obsolete — a need become mere paradoxical reflex in a people notorious for waste. Ambrose pleasantly replied that while the practice was in his opinion not particularly American — Orientals were even more ingenious about it, for example, and the Spanish, Greeks, and Germans were no slouches either — the inclination to see in it a national trait, especially one to be criticised, was American indeed. He pretended to fear for my cultural identity; he reminded me (taking my hand across the table) that it was in my “full Britannic aspect” he had come to love me…

I thought to tell him I did not care to rule the waves just then, but ride them with him. Skin, skin! His hand restirred the juice of April in me, when I’d have freely bid us abandon both of these vessels-going-nowhere and stand full sail bedward. But his damned question, What ought we now? — that he had put it put me off, stayed my hand from more than meeting his.

And so we sat through the rites and trappings of a typical C-minus U.S. restaurant — stupid puzzles on the place mats, mindless jokes on the napkins, sugar in paper packets depicting ill-coloured birds of America, little sealed containers of “non-dairy creamer,” dime-store candles in painted glass, plastic roses, butter in paper pats, tired salad from a tiresome self-service salad bar, crackers in cellophane, store-bought rolls, the inevitable menu of tinned soups and vegetables, thawed appetizers and entrees, everything (except the boring, inevitable beefsteak) breaded and deep-fried, baked to death, steam-tabled to a mush, or otherwise overcooked as well as overpriced and overdescribed, no fresh fruit to be found or fresh vegetables or fresh anything (How did we English get our reputation as the world’s worst cooks?) — saving one item which saved the meal: a pencilled-in Friday-night special of broiled fresh rockfish from the Bay, which Ambrose identified as striped bass in its local denomination. He ordered it solo unhesitatingly for the two of us, insisting our plates not be defiled with stale French fries, bulk packaged cole slaw, white potatoes baked in Reynolds Wrap, and the rest; just fresh fish, fresh lemon wedges, and tomatoes filched fresh from the salad bar, please. And mirabile (but this is not yet our Second Miracle), we had only to send back the first burnt offering on its cold platter to achieve on second try a quite lightly broiled filet of that admirable beast the Chesapeake rockfish, which we washed down with draft beer in default of pale ale, not to mention white wine — and spoke of the film in progress.

The 1812 War, the sack of Washington and bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour, the pirate Jean Lafitte’s assistance of Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans and his subsequent involvement in one of the several harebrained schemes to spirit Napoleon from St Helena to America — none of these “splendid ideas” of A. B. Cook’s, I understand from Ambrose, is to be found in your fiction. Yet the single set Reg Prinz is causing to be constructed for his film is “Barataria”: a suggestion (Ambrose’s inference, from Prinz’s hums and tisks) rather than a replication of Lafitte’s pirate village in the Mississippi delta, itself named for Sancho Panza’s make-believe island in Don Quixote. Prinz’s point, Ambrose imagines, is not only that the fictional original inspired or called forth its factual counterpart (itself become legendary), but that even in Quixote Sancho’s island is a fiction precipitated out of fable and realised as deception, a kind of stage set elaborated by the Manchegan lords and ladies to make sport of Sancho Panza. In other words (ours, not Prinz’s, for what we take to be Prinz’s principle, not ours), the relation between fact and fiction, life and art, is not imitation of either by the other, but a sort of reciprocity, an ongoing collaboration or reverberation. Did this imply that you would now include the Baratarians in some future fiction, as the apostles say Jesus performed certain miracles in order that the prophecies might be fulfilled which held that the Messiah would do thus-and-so? We were uncertain. You have in any case considerable latitude, as Prinz’s “Barataria” is to be a general-purpose set (indeed, no more than a lane of clapboard shanty-fronts on or near Bloodsworth Island, if he can secure permission from the U.S. Navy, who use the place for gunnery practice) for scenes of domestic early-19th-century destruction: the burning of Washington, Buffalo, York, Newark, St Davids — even Barataria — some or all whereof may be included in the film!

Emblems, emblems all, said Ambrose (no dessert cheese on the menu, no brandy for our coffee, no espresso; Charon’s ferry will have better fare); for what Prinz truly wants to record the destruction of is not any historical city, but the venerable metropolis of letters. If he has hit upon the 1812 War to evoke his foggy “Second Revolution,” it may be for no better reason than that it affords him the reenactment of “our” burning of “your” Library of Congress and National Archives, or Admiral Cockburn’s revenge upon the National Intelligencer (delivered regularly to his flotilla in the Chesapeake) for its unflattering accounts of him: having ordered his men to pi the paper’s type, Cockburn first had them pluck out and destroy all the uppercase C’s, to hamper the impugnment of his name in future. A destruction-of-the-capital within a destruction-of-the-capital, Ambrose puts it, and recounted to me further — what it would take too many words fully to rerecount here — Prinz’s “victory” over him earlier in the week (the first intimation I’d had that their connexion was become an open contest): the filming of an “unwritable scene.”

Briefly: my lover dates his erratic and problematical career in letters from his receipt, at age ten, of a cryptic message in a bottle washed up on the Choptank River shore near his present odd establishment. You know the story: Ambrose even told me — in a 100-page enclosure in the second of his two letters thus far to “me”—that you wrote the story, anyhow rewrote and published it with his consent: how on 12 May 1940, as an overstrung, underconfident, unhappy preadolescent yearning for reassurance from the Wider World that a life lay ahead for him less crabbed (let’s say) than that of backwater Dorset, he’d come across that bottle, fished forth eagerly its communique, and been dismayed to the bottom of his soul to find only a salutation at the head (“To Whom It May Concern”) and at the foot a close (“Yours Truly”). No body; no signature! Monday last happening to be the 29th anniversary of this non-message’s delivery, and the company having filmed on the Sunday certain sequences at Ocean City in which Ambrose took the role of an author rehearsing the boyhood of one of his principal characters, it was decided to include a scene suggestive of that water message. But instead of the seven words of the original (per “Arthur Morton King’s” fictionalization of the event, which also included the surprising, by a group of schoolboys, of a pair of lovers more or less in the act in the gang’s makshift clubhouse, with attendant lower-form dialogue), Prinz suggested there be either an entirely blank sheet or a considerable manuscript in the bottle, which latter would however wash to illegibility even as the camera — and before the anxious protagonist — scanned it.

Left sleepless anyroad by the Sunday’s shooting (in which — the thought gives me vertigo — Bea Golden appears to have acted a role something like the young Magda Giulianova!), Ambrose had spent most of the night in his boardwalk hotel drafting a scenario: on Prinz’s instructions, the fellow on the beach was to be the Author—i.e., a ten-year-old “Ambrose” nearing forty and recollecting his boyhood; the couple in flagrante delicto were to be a youthful sweetheart of this Author’s (l’Abruzzesa, played by Bea Golden? I didn’t ask) and her current lover, a filmmaker no less, played of course by R.P. Never mind why they’d gone under the boardwalk for this coupling — the mise en scène was changed to Ocean City, “to tie in with the Funhouse sequence”—when all those hotels stood ready to hand. Then mirabile (but not ours, not ours) dictu—better, mirabile obtuear, marvellous to behold, for there were no words in this enactment save the dissolving ones of Ambrose’s text: on the strand next forenoon, the company assembled, Prinz’s first act is to make the written scenario itself the water message! As the cameras roll, he stuffs into a bottle half full of ocean Ambrose’s rendering of the scene to be played and tosses it into the surf, as if to punish the Author for having intruded on his amours (his fly is open; Bea Golden wears only a beach towel; the Marshyhopers still in attendance are agog)! Ambrose is aghast, then furious to the point of literally clenching fists… then thrilled, his very adjective, as he believes he begins to see the point: Prinz, having mouthed something soundless at him, strides into the cold surf, retrieves the bottle, fetches out the marinated, washed-out script, presents it with a smile of triumph to the Author, then stands by expectantly, his arm around Ms Golden, as if awaiting direction.

The point, my lover now concluded, was precisely the inversion, in this double reenactment, of the original, historical state of affairs (the Author, grown, relives his boyhood experience; the wordless film reiterates the written story). The World having given “Ambrose” a tantalising carte blanche when he most craved specific direction, “Arthur Morton King” had vainly striven for nearly three decades to fill that blank. Now, before his and the camera’s eyes, his scenario of this predicament’s reenaction — itself the latest of those strivings, and nothing but direction—is washed away. Things have come full circle; the slate is clean; he is free!

And, for the moment (as the movie moves on), he is also immobilised, speechless, unable to direct either the Director or himself. Then he laughs; he finds his first words (“I see…!”) and is interrupted by Prinz’s “Cut.” To which is presently appended a directive to the sound man, to make Ambrose’s laugh echo that of “the Laughing Lady in the Funhouse sequence.” Prinz then turns his back and strides hotelwards with the shivering heroine, leaving the bested Author as stranded as our ferryboat restaurant, which we now prepare to leave.

“It was simply brilliant,” Ambrose declared. “And the most brilliant thing about it, its final point, was… exactly what I can’t put into words,”—and what you will therefore excuse my having lost in this retelling! — “that the whole scene was not only nonverbal, but unwritable. Proof against literary rendering! A demonstration; a visual tour de force. What shall we do now, Germaine? You and I?”

My turn for speechlessness? For Words fail me, or Dumbstruck by his sudden change of subject, I could not at once nor can I now… that sort of thing?

Not a bit of it! Somewhere amid rockfish and recountment I had got a quiet message from my own Yours Truly, the genuine Germaine. While I found Ambrose’s story interesting enough, I had not been by it diverted, not for a moment, from the question posed on Todd Andrews’s foredeck. As if its reposing now were no non sequitur but the obvious close of his “unwritable sequence,” like a ready player at her cue I replied at once: We ought to tip the waitress moderately; we ought unhurriedly to recross the bridges to 24 L; there we ought leisurely to disrobe and temperately come together. If our fortnight’s abstinence was neither the effect nor the cause of a waning of his affection for me, as it certainly was not of mine for him, and if his inclination (which he’d said was clear to him) corresponded to mine, we ought at once to resume our sexual connexion, but less frenetically than before. That’s what I thought we ought; what thought he?

And now I bring this chronicle at last to bed with Miracle #2, so long in utero: He thought the same, exactly! 10 % for the waitress, whose fault the place was not; a decorous disembarkation (but his hand on my arm, his beaming smile, his instant wordless rising from table, belied his composure); 50 mph across the moonless, still Choptank (where Andrews’s skipjack sat becalmed now in the channel, sails raised and slack, drifting on the tide in the last twilight) as we spoke — warmly, quietly, but neither urgently nor lightly — of how we’d missed one another’s persons, and had rather savoured that missing, and would be pleased now to have done with that savour. In April we’d have gone to it in the car; we tuned in the ten o’clock news instead and smiled together at the announcement that Venus-5, the Russian space probe, had successfully soft-landed on its target and begun, presumably, to probe. By half-past — serenely, surely — so had Ambrose.

He declared (calmly) he loved me. I replied, less calmly, I had liked him in March and craved him in April, and believed I now loved him too. He declared his wish to spend most nights with me; I replied that that was my wish also. We agreed however that some discretion should be exercised (more than we had done in April) to avoid unpleasantness in a small, conservative community; his daughter, too, posed something of a problem. In any case, there were more or less definite plans to shift the film company to the Niagara Frontier for ten days or so in June, which happened to fall between MSUC’s final exam period and commencement ceremonies: he hoped I would go with him; that we could as it were elope, “honeymoon” at the Falls…

“Stage Four” of our affair, then, I gather, will be the sweet extension — long may it extend! — of Miracle Two: this… this spouselike intercourse (he insisted I wear a nightgown: I am to help him shop for spare pajamas, a bathrobe, carpet slippers, to keep at 24 L!), which I find seizes me with a strange, helpless ardour. Poached eggs and tea! The morning newspaper! How far this delightful husbanding? Will it come to pipe and dog and bumbershoot? Am I to play at wiving even to the point of—

But now words fail me, anyhow falter, as they did not at Miracles One and Two. Last night, postcoitally, I’d reminded Ambrose of his promise to elucidate that Deeper Pattern he’d perceived in our relation. He pled fatigue, pledged a full account at breakfast, and proffered for the meanwhile only that our April binge had reminded him of the one other such sexual marathon in his life, twenty years previously, at age nineteen. It had been his second romance, if the term could be applied to an altogether physical connexion. Inasmuch as his first love had been hopeless (a prolonged boyhood admiration for his older brother’s girl, our friend Magda Giulianova), the uncomplicated sexual release of this second affair had been of great benefit to him. His partner, however — he would tell me tomorrow; I would be amused — a nymphomaniac of sixteen, had moved on after an exhausting summer to fresher fields, and in the ensuing season of involuntary chastity he had consoled himself (but not sexually) once again with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch, whom he found himself this time loving but not desiring. Thus his first three “affairs”: recollected in this manner, they’d put him in mind of both that curious alphabetical list from the New England Primer and, mutatis mutandis, the progress of our own affair, which for better or worse bid to recapitulate his carnal biography. He had not however (he admitted with a drowsy chuckle) got the correspondences quite worked out: we were at Stage Four in the recapitulation, but Letter Seven of the Primer’s list…

A restless night for me: the novelty of a bedpartner; certain private memories of my own associated with Ambrose’s mention of the Niagara Frontier; half-impatient speculation on these rôles I was being cast in willy-nilly. If l’Abruzzesa (as it appeared) had been both #1 and #3, and I myself was #6, it wanted no great inductive prowess (from the chaps who brought you Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie) to guess that Magda had also been #5, no doubt this time sexually: the ménage à trois from which Ambrose had come to me with his talk of beggared Dido and an Aeneas who would not weigh anchor and run for Rome. Ergo, #4 will have to have been… his ex-wife: that obscure Marsha, of whom Ambrose never spoke; of his marriage to whom I knew little more than that at one point it had made him suicidally unhappy and that it had been terminated not very long since.

Also, perhaps unfortunately, that it had not been fruitless. The “dear damaged daughter,” as Ambrose called her, of whom the mother had evidently washed her hands, and l’Abruzzesa taken charge…

Now, I had not forgot that mad string of postscripts to his first letter: the G that followed For-ni-ca-ti-on was not Germaine…

Nor was the Third Miracle a proposition of marriage. Ambrose slept soundly, as I did not, and woke refreshed and roused. I was headachy, anxious (forty-five needs its sleep, and I now confess to you, for good reason, a small vain lie in last month’s letters: I am not forty-five, but… a touch older); made the fact known when he essayed his “A.M. quickie,” or second probe of the Venusberg. Unperturbed, he reminded me that on May Day I’d found orgasm a pleasant palliative for menstrual cramps: ought we not to give it a go for simple headache? His bedside manner was so good-humored, I agreed to try his prescription if I might take two aspirins first. He popped up to fetch them for me. Aussi mon pessaire, I called after him: from its case in the medicine cabinet, just above the aspirin; I had neglected to deploy it last night.

He came back with two aspirins, a paper cup of water, an almost undiminished erection, a grave smile… and no diaphragm.

Let’s take a chance, says he. No thank you, says I: it’s smack in the middle of my month. As it was last night, he reminds me. My own recklessness, says I: it’s being late-fortyish I was taking a chance on. Germaine, says he, and takes my hand (I’ve downed my aspirins), and his voice goes thick…

3. And here is our Third Miracle, too flabbergasting for exclamation marks: A. wants us to forgo all contraception. He wants his seed in me. He wants me pregnant, impregnated, preggers. He wants to get a child on me, to get me with child. He wants us to make a baby: my old egg, his sluggish swimmers. Conceive: he wants me to conceive by him, conceive a new person, our chromosomes together, his genes and mine, the living decipherment of our mingled codes. That’s what he thought we ought.

I write this sunning by the newly dug pool of Jane Mack’s apartment complex, where I’ve basked and written all afternoon whilst my lover confers with his brother on some new crisis in the family firm. The Dorset Heights pool is empty; Germaine Pitt’s depths are full to overflowing, despite the best efforts of her vaginal sphincter. His stuff is in there, pooled with mine: I sit on it as I did first in our ad hoc committee chamber; for all I know, the flailing Ambrosian beasties have done their work already upon the ultimate Amherst ovum.

Surely I am quite crackers! I feel my life profoundly changing, and half hope it is my change of life. Even were we wed, two such poor track records as his and mine should not be bred. What imbecile child will be our “Petit Nous’”? And yet I love him, this odd Ambrose, for pressing me to this unthinkable thing — which I must pray will not come to pass!

Do you pray too, silent author of the novel I am still in midst of, and which still pleasantly distracts me when I am less distraught. Pray that your friend will not conceive the inconceivable upon your poor

Germaine!

P.S.: #2, I learned at breakfast (the mistress, not the miracle), was none other than our Bea Golden, then sixteen and busily about it under her “maiden” name, Jeannine Mack: all over the back roads of Baltimore County, the back rooms of yacht clubs right ’round the Chesapeake regatta circuit, the back seats of autos at 60 mph on the highway or parked on the roads aforementioned or garaged or driven into drive-ins or en route across the water aboard that same ferryboat (then unstranded, as the Bay was then unspanned; this was 1948-49) whereon I’d ventured over rockfish what we ought. Bea was a fresh young woman then; A. a freshman at the university: by the time their rut had run its alphabet he had gone from A’s to F’s in half his courses, and she was being serviced by upper-class underclassmen up and down the Ivy League. They had scarcely seen each other in the twenty years since, until Harrison’s funeral in February. Her rearrival here with the film company this month, coinciding as it did with the close of our own salty Second Stage, Ambrose found (and I quote) “piquant”: as if our recapitulating coupling had reconceived and rebirthed her. I find myself piqued that he finds it so, and I review uneasily his growing involvement in Prinz’s film. That water-message sequence on the beach: it seemed in his telling rather a rivalry, and she the prize. Did Dante’s Beatrice, I wonder, lay for the part? Is Ambrose really in conference with his brother as I sit here on his sperm?

P.P.S.: Shame on me: if I am mad, let it not be with jealousy. He has just telephoned (I’m back indoors now), not from his camera obscura but from the county hospital next door. The crisis, it develops, is not alone with Mensch Masonry, Inc. — which however is beset by problems enough — but with Ambrose and Peter’s mother, who underwent mastectomy last year but whose cancer has evidently metastasized and brought her down again, in all likelihood terminally. It is time, he suggests, I met what remains of his family: he has spoken of me to his brother, to l’Abruzzesa, to the D. D’d D. He would have his mother meet the potential mother of a grandchild she will never see (May she live forever and not see it!). Tomorrow, as Apollo-10 takes off to orbit the moon, I am to visit the hospital, then take lunch en famille at Mensch’s Castle! I am nervous as a new bride; they will think me too old for him; it is all madness.

P.P.P.S.: Bent on locking the barn door after the horse is stolen, I go belatedly to douche — and find as it were the barn door stolen too! My pessary of pages past (I believe you call them diaphragms?) is vanished from its perch above the aspirin, nor can I find it anywhere upon the premises. What amorous tyranny is this? And why does it excite (as well as truly annoy) your surely (but not yet entirely) demented

G.?

E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her introduction to the Menschhaus.

24 L, 24 May

J.,

Even as I imagined this time last week, A.‘s #4 was his ex, present whereabouts unknown, mother of the d. d’d daughter, for whom I gather she shucked responsibility two years past when they shucked their marriage. Who am I to criticise, who did not assume my own responsibility in the first place? Nor shall I presume to judge the marriage: not only is one chap’s meat another’s poison, but what nourishes at twenty may nauseate at forty, and vice versa.

It was her name, Ambrose now maintains, most drew him to her twenty years ago, when he was an undergraduate apprentice and she a young typist at his university. Marsha Blank, mind and character to match, descended from a presumably endless line of Blanks going back to nowhere. So declares our not entirely reliable narrator, adding that she was possessed of a fetching figure and a face with the peculiar virtue of being so regularly, generally pretty as to defy particular description, even by a young writer whose then ambition it was to render the entire quotidian into prose. A. claims he cannot so much as summon her features to memory; never could in their seventeen years together; that her comeliness was at once considerable and, precisely, nondescript. And her personality matched her face; and there she sat, nine-to-fiving those reams of empty paper through her machine day after day, like a stenographic Echo, giving back the words of others at 25¢ the page plus 5¢ the carbon. Thither strayed my lover, who claims to have set himself even then the grand objective, since receipt of that wordless message nine years previously, of filling in the whole world’s blanks. In hand—longhand — was his virgin effort in the fiction way: the tale of a latter-day Bellerophon lost in the Dorchester marshes, “far from the paths of men, devouring his own soul,” who receives a cryptic message washed up in a bottle…

Voilà: a marriage made in the heaven of self-reflexion. Our Narcissus claims to have glimpsed at first sight of her the centre of this typist’s soul, unconscious counterpart of his conscious own: what nature abhors and “Arthur Morton King” finds irresistible. But we remember too that this was 1949: my lover has wound up — better, has been wound down by — his sexual calisthenics with young Jeannine Mack and is endeavouring to curb, for his brother’s sake, his reawakened love for l’Abruzzesa, now wed to Peter Mensch and big with the twins she will give birth to ere the year is out. Harry Truman is back in the White House (and Jane Mack is misbehaving with my Jeffrey in Paris, whilst I finish my edition of Germaine de Staël’s correspondence and am flirted with by Evelyn Waugh); American college campuses are burgeoning with married veterans of the Second War, educating themselves and supporting their families in prefab villages on the G.I. Bill of Rights: they set the style, for younger male undergraduates like Ambrose, of marrying very early, at eighteen and nineteen and twenty, and promptly engendering children upon their late-adolescent brides…

But why am I telling you this, who not only were there then but had been my lover’s fellow labourer upon the Lighthouse project that same sexual summer? Because, of course, it’s all news to me, disclosed since Sunday last, when I met the Mensch ménage “on location”: i.e., in that same Lighthouse — now cracked as the House of Usher and out of plumb like the Pisan campanile — and the adjacent county hospital, where the last of the pre-Ambrosian generation of Mensches lies a-wasting of the family cancer.

To deal first and lightly with that pitiable person, whom nature is dealing with so hardly: Andrea King was her maiden name; she descends from the King family of nearby Somerset County, whose ancestors a century and a half ago conspired on behalf of their friend Jérôme Bonaparte to spirit Napoleon from St Helena to Maryland. From her (and the possibly fancied ambiguity of his siring) Ambrose takes his fanciful nom de plume, as well as his love for word games. From her the surgeons last summer took the seventy-year-old breast my lover once suckled beneath a swarm of golden bees. Andrea herself made this connexion, remarking further (which delighted Ambrose) that just as all the bees but one had been removed by Grandfather Mensch on that momentous occasion, and the one he’d missed had stung her, so now etc., and here she was: it took only one. Did I happen to know the British word for the terminal character of the alphabet, three letters beginning with z?

That was about the limit of her interest in Yours Truly, for which (limit) I was grateful. She had been something of a beauty, Ambrose told me; several men besides his late father had loved her. A neighbour had driven himself to drink on her account; her husband’s brother — Ambrose’s late Uncle Karl — had perhaps slept with her (intramural adultery seems a family custom!), was not impossibly Ambrose’s begetter, or his brother Peter’s… All dead now: the neighbour by his own hand, the uncle of liver cancer, the father — who on an evil day first proposed the Tower of Truth to Harrison Mack and John Schott — of a brain tumour. And their femme fatale now potbellied, shrunken, half deaf, gone in the teeth — a sweetless hive of swarming cells, not expected to survive the summer. Crude and blasted as she was, I rather liked her: some tough East Anglian country stock showed through. She was in pain; feared she’d need drugging before she finished the puzzle in that day’s Times.

“Zed,” her son suggested.

We then adjourned to Mensch’s Castle, Folly, Leuchtturm, whatever, where I was to meet and lunch with his brother, with his twin niece and nephew, with his dear damaged daughter, and with the first, third, and fifth loves of his life: Magda Giulianova. I was in no great haste, am in none now, to get to her, whom I fancied watching us through that camera obscura as we crossed from the hospital toward the Menschhaus. We toured the grounds, yclept Erdmann’s Cornlot after its former use and owner: a square of zoysia grass landscaped with azaleas, roses, mimosa, weeping willows, and well-tended grapevines, fronting on the Choptank. Where once had been a seawall on the river side is now a brand-new sandy point, whereof here is the sorry history:

Were you aware, when you worked that summer for Mensch Masonry, of the fraud Peter Mensch’s house was being built on? The poor chap had been left a small sum by another uncle (cancer of the skin) and resolved to build a house for the family, whose fortunes were as always parlous. He bought Erdmann’s Cornlot, went off to war, and left the job of construction to the family firm — which is to say, to the liver-cancered uncle and the brain-tumoured father, who (the latter in particular was, it seems, a cranky rascal) proceeded to shortchange their benefactor at every opportunity. The seawall had been protected by riprap of quarried stone: this they removed to complete the repairing of the hospital’s seawall, itself crumbling because some years earlier they’d removed its riprap for other purposes! The footings for Peter’s house were laid to skimpier specifications than he’d called for; the mortar you mixed that summer was systematically overloaded with sand, to save money; the stone used for construction was that same riprap removed from before the hospital wall, still too barnacled and mossed to bond properly with the mortar, especially with that mortar. Ambrose knew of these things (which he now candidly rehearses as we stroll the grounds) and loved his brother, but could not protest—did not protest — because of his own sore culpability: his virgin tryst and subsequent occasional coupling with La Giulianova, which he believed Mensch père to have espied!

Thus did they all take ill advantage of the earnest young man they all professed devotion to and acknowledged as the pillar of the clan; who so loved them that upon his return to firm and family, when his mason’s eye must have detected straight off the adulterated mortar if not the dittoed fiancée (whose adulterator I begin to write like), he said not a word, but went on cheerfully with the construction and the marriage. In ’49, house and tower were complete; the newlyweds moved in, the twins were born. In ’54 Ambrose and wife Marsha came down from Baltimore and moved in too, he having given up teaching to try his fortune as a free-lancer. In 1955 (birth year of the damaged daughter) major cracks first appeared in both the masonry and Ambrose’s marriage; by ’56 several doors had to be shaved and sashes rehung: Ambrose and Marsha shifted to a flat near the boat harbour, the liver uncle went to his reward, and Peter assumed direction of Mensch Masonry (“the family infirm,” my lover calls it). By 1960 the Menschhaus was measurably out of plumb, as were Ambrose’s marriage and career alike: Ms Blank, not regarding herself as empty, resented his efforts to fill her in: his major literary endeavour (a chronicle of the sinking family) was bogged in bathos. He half attempted suicide — and, he declares, half succeeded. Traditional narrative he gave up for “concrete prose” (the mason in him, one supposes) and occasional retaliatory adulteries: for some time, it seems, his had not been the only filler in the Blank. The celebrated seawall, meanwhile, had quite collapsed: the directors of the hospital were justly incensed; Erdmann’s Cornlot was washing rapidly into the river; once again Mensch Masonry verged upon bankruptcy.

This last in part because Hector Mensch, P. & A.‘s father, had also retired from the county school system by this time (the tumour was enlarging) and turned all his ruinous energies to the firm; also because Peter would no more acknowledge that the man was crackers (and ignore his business advice) than that his house’s list was owing as much to bad foundations as to bad ground. The company did foundation work at Tidewater Tech in ’62 and ’63, in the course of which Hector made the acquaintance of Harrison Mack; John Schott he already knew from his alma mater, Wicomico Teachers College. Among the three of them was somehow hatched, in 1966, the notion of Marshyhope College’s Tower of Truth.

Which fetches us to our literal point, whereon my friend and I still strolled as he regaled me with this exposition. MSUC is built on the drained and filled marshes of Redmans Neck; as Joe Morgan had warned, high-rise construction on that ground was at best problematical. Contractors’ bids on the tower were correspondingly high; it seemed almost as though “we” might win the day by default. Alas, it became Hector Mensch’s strategy to save the company by underbidding all competitors for the foundation work, even if that meant doing the job at a considerable loss, thereby so inclining John Schott in their favour (by thus abetting his campaign against Morgan) that when Schott became president and launched the great expansion of MSU, Mensch Masonry’s fortunes would be made at last. And so far has this strategy succeeded that while Harrison Mack and Hector Mensch now sleep six feet under the loam of Dorset, poor Peter toils in it sleeplessly deeper each semester. The tower’s foundation is laid, almost a year behind schedule and at enormously greater cost than originally estimated, thanks both to inflation and to the ground situation at Redmans Neck. Mensch Masonry’s Dun & Bradstreet has sunk lower than the piles Peter had to drive to find bedrock. Ambrose is persuaded that, like the Menschhaus, the Tower of Truth is rising from a lie: that among their father’s last official acts on behalf of the firm — whilst contracts were still being negotiated with the state, and various political campaign funds still being contributed to — was the falsification of certain crucial test borings supposedly taken at the site, to persuade Peter that the project was less unfeasible than it seemed. The tower is presently scheduled for completion next year (just enough of it is raised at this writing to permit next fall the cornerstone ceremonies originally scheduled for next month); by 1976, Ambrose maintains, it will have to be abandoned, if not dismantled.

Meanwhile, to bail out the firm, appease the directors of the county hospital, and delay the disappearance of Erdmann’s Cornlot, Peter contracted with a firm of engineers dredging out the ship channel into Cambridge Creek to dump the dredge spoil, thousands of cubic yards of it, before those two properties — especially the Cornlot, which is now enlarged by more than an acre. The seawall that founded the foundered firm is buried beneath this as yet uncharted point (“Cancer Point,” Ambrose has dubbed it), and the Lighthouse lists and settles some hundred yards farther from the water than when you helped build it.

We approach the house. I have glimpsed it before, from the distances of Long Wharf and the Choptank River bridge. From closer up it is less prepossessing than its builder, who now strolls out with the d.d.d. to greet us as we stroll in from the point.

One would not take Peter and Ambrose Mensch for brothers. Handsomer but coarser than my lover, Peter Mensch is dark-eyed and — browed, swarthy, massive, older-looking than his forty-some years: raw Saxon-Thuringian peasant stock, says A., direct from Grandmother Mensch, unleavened by the wilier Rhenish genes of her husband and the English DNA of the Somerset Kings. His voice is surprisingly high and gentle, his speech full of broguish right smart’s and purt’ near’s. His movement, too, seems gentle, considering his weight and apparent strength; he is not fat, but thick, heavy, powerful-looking: no doubt he still cuts and hefts the stone himself. He shakes my hand elaborately, right pleased to meet me. He has just returned from Bible class at the nearby Methodist church and is still dressed in shiny blue chain-store suit and black shoes, but in deference to the warming day has loosened his two-dollar tie, held in place with a gilt crab tie-tac. He is sorry that the twins won’t be home for dinner: young Carl and his girl friend are surf-fishing “down to Ocean City”; young Connie is helping her husband-to-be, a local farmer, set out tomato plants. It ain’t no keeping um home at their age.

We would be five, then.

I had expected to feel some contempt for a man so readily gulled; but my strong and immediate intuition, in Peter’s presence, was that he was not gulled, only endlessly patient of exploitation by those he cared for. A change of clothes (and barbers) and he could be physically most attractive. And his great unclever easiness, his guileless goodwill… I liked him.

So too, clearly, did Damaged Angela, who leaned against him as against a building whilst we spoke, her brown eyes never moving from my face. Unions are undone; their fruit remains and grows, for better or worse. Ambrose’s angel is a heavy, dim fourteen, short and thick, big-breasted already. There is no visible trace of my lover in her, nor (he replied to my later question) of La Blank, who was slender, fair, and hazel-eyed. Peter thinks her the image of a dear late aunt of theirs; Ambrose shrugs. She is alleged to have made great progress under Magda’s patient tutelage; Peter too spends hours with her — and they both claim (but I’m ahead of myself) that it’s Ambrose who’s responsible for her advancement from virtually autistic beginnings. An eighth grader by age, she does fifth-grade work in the sixth grade amongst twelve-year-olds in the local junior high school. Her nubility is a problem: moronic young men roar past the Lighthouse in horrid-looking autos for her benefit, and she grins and waves. The Mensches fear she’ll be taken sexual advantage of, and wish there were proper special-education facilities in the county; they weigh the possible advantages of residential therapy in Philadelphia against its shocking cost—$12,000 a year and rising annually — and the negative effects of her separation from them.

We are introduced. To my surprise Angie is quite friendly, at once shy and inquisitive: like a young primitive she fingers my costume jewelry, holds onto my hand after we shake, remarks smilingly on my “accent.” She has indeed been done well by; there is even a chance she may be able to lead a reasonably independent life. “Don’t want her to git too independent,” Peter teases, “or we won’t have nobody to warsh dishes.” The brothers are gentle with each other, gentle with her; there is much touching, taking of arms.

I am touched, too: I see my lover’s reclusiveness and mild eccentricity in a different light. Great reserves of patient energy must have gone into this girl’s raising, of a sort that comes less naturally to him than to his brother, perhaps to his brother’s wife. Lucky unlucky Angela! I cannot imagine her better off in any other situation — yet find myself curbing my skepticism of expensive “residential therapy situations” except where the home life is poisonous or the patient unmanageable. I am not the self-sacrificing sort, and in our new “Stage” I am protective of my lover’s freedom. Not to mention the guilt I feel in face of so much ungrudging responsibility!

We approach the house; we approach the house. Angela still grasps my hand (I can’t use the ironic epithet any longer) as if I were an old and trusted friend of the family. On this soft ground my heart sinks, too. Peter wants to show me the camera obscura yet before dinner; Angela has been promised I will inspect the family totem, a certain German Easter egg with a scene inside. The house is suddenly intimidating as a castle indeed: the Misses Stein and Toklas scarcely inspired such trepidation in me as does the prospect of its mistress…

“This here’s Maggie,” Peter says of her who now comes from kitchen to foyer; and to her, in a mock whisper: “Turns out we call her Germaine, like anybody else.”

What had I expected? L’Abruzzesa is just past forty, younger than her husband and older than her erstwhile lover, now mine. She looks not of this century, really: her face is round and rather pale for one not naturally fair-skinned, perhaps in contrast to her dark eyes and her hair, worn up in a bun. It is a good face: the skin is fine, the eyes are large and clear and liquid, the nose and chin are delicate. Dear “Juliette” taught me to appraise women sexually: she would admire Magda Giulianova’s lips, meant for sucking kisses, and her fine long neck, the nape especially provocative with its soft hairs curling from below the bun. Good shoulders, good arms (she wore a sleeveless top), good full small breasts (no bra) — one would never suppose her to have suckled twins now twenty years old! The rest was less troubling: heavy hips and slack behind; legs scarred from shaving but stubbled nonetheless; clothes ill chosen from the local shops. I am no beauty (and have raised no children), but I think myself more trim at the end of my forties than she at the commencement of hers, and better turned out too.

Finally, if Ambrose has found her “primal”—and I see what he means: the heavy grace, the husky somnolent voice, the intense serenity; she is awfully female — I fear I found her, like some other primal things, rather dull. No doubt I looked to; no doubt too the visit was a strain for her as well as me. I’m sure I “came on” too donnishly about camerae obscurae as Ambrose demonstrated the one they’d turned the tower into some years since — but then I happen to know something about them! (Theirs is mechanically interesting, I might say here, with its rotating vertical ground-glass screen; but on the whole I prefer the flat circular detached-screen type like the one above the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, where visitors stand in a ring about the scene and need not move as the picture moves. The main drawback to the Mensch instrument, however, is not the projection arrangement but the scenic material: the county hospital is no Edinburgh Castle; the Choptank River, its low bridge and flat environs, are not the Firth of Forth and its dramatic ditto. In any case, the list of the tower is already binding the mechanism so that only with difficulty can it be moved past the empty spread of new sand where once the seawall was. The device will be out of commission before it pays for itself.)

“Anyhow,” says Peter, “that’s a right pretty sight, all them sailboats.” And so it was. I took my lover’s arm, pointed out “our” restaurant across the river, where Stage Four had been initiated. Magda gravely reported that the management was looking to sell the place. Angela named all the sails on (all) the sailboats and scored respectably on Ambrose’s quiz upon their points of sailing: which were beating, which reaching, which running. I compared the general scene and situation — innocently, I swear, though there may have been unwitting mischief in the impulse — to that famous passage in book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid where the hero, still in the midst of his adventures, finds their earlier installments already rendered into art: Dido’s Carthaginian frescoes of the Trojan War, in which Aeneas discerns the likenesses of his dead companions and (hair-raising moment!) his own translated face.

“Is that a fact, now,” Peter said. I felt a fool, then a bitch as I recalled Ambrose’s comparison of Magda to luckless Dido. He glanced at me—quizzically, I believe you writers say. I did not score well; in my embarrassment I gushed fulsomely over the celebrated Easter egg, fetched down now by Daughter Angela on its carved wood stand: a battered, faded brummagem, nothing special to begin with, mere family junk or joking relic. I could see nothing inside.

“No castle?” Ambrose demanded, I could not tell in what spirit. “No Lorelei?” I mumbled that microscopes and telescopes never worked for me either. Already in retrospect this moment seems to me a signal one. Something disquieting announced itself here: not a Fifth Stage, but (I fear) the true aspect—a true aspect — of the Fourth. I shall return to it.

Rather, proceed to it, for there is little more of pertinence to tell of my introduction to the Mensches. Magda’s dinner was a surprise: I had expected the relentlessly plain cuisine that American countryfolk take such pride in: baked ham, fried chicken, mashed white potatoes, lima beans, and ice water — your spiceless, sauceless English Protestant heritage. But La Giulianova knew her way around both Italian and German cookery: a fish soup called brodetto was followed by an admirable Wurst-und-Spätzle dish (Himmel und Erde, I do believe), a Caesar salad, home-baked sour rye bread, and an almond sweet called confetti. Cold Soave with the soup, dark Lowenbrau with the sausage, espresso and Amaretto with dessert. My best meal since Toronto: unpretentious, perfectly done, served without fuss, and all of it delicious. No cook myself (and still overcompensating for my earlier gaffe) I rained compliments upon the chef. Peter beamed; Ambrose smiled a small smile; Magda quietly remarked that good ingredients were not easily found so far from the city. I supposed that she had learned her art from her parents and the elder Mensches? Another faux pas.

“Ma never cooked worth a dime,” Peter scoffed cheerfully around his cigar. “And Mag’s mother didn’t know what good Eyetalian cooking was till Mag taught her. This here’s out of the Sunday Times magazine, I bet.”

Magda shook her head, but was pleased. Angela peered into the egg. I was smitten with jealousy; found myself (at nearly fifty!) wishing my breasts were less full, my features softer, my voice less assertive. What rot, the old female itch to be… not mastered, God forfend, but ductile, polar to the male, intensely complemental. Lord! Am I to come off my loathing of D. H. Lawrence?

The talk at dinner, between my nervous panegyrics, was of dying Andrea and the disposition of the original Menschhaus up the street, now vacant and fast deteriorating. My lover (I heard for the first time) was toying with the idea of remodelling and moving into it himself! I found that notion both appealing and appalling: out of the ménage à trois et demi, yes, but why into a drab frame house on a dreary street in a dull provincial town (excuse me)? Why not Rome, Paris, London, New York? At least Boston, San Francisco, even Washington or Philadelphia, even Baltimore! Who ever spun the globe around and, having considered Lisbon, Venice, Montreal, Florence, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Madrid — the list is endless! — put his finger on marshy Dorset and declared: “That’s for me”?

Well, Ambrose, for one. My only comfort was the chilling one that he was not yet after all proposing that I move in with him, if indeed he makes the move at all, and the somewhat warmer one that the measured tone of his consideration of the idea, and of Peter’s and Magda’s responses, suggested that they understood Ambrose and me to be a couple, or on the verge of becoming one, and that they accepted, if not quite embraced, the idea. Peter was full of hearty instructions to his brother and his wife: Tell her ’bout the time you got lost in the funhouse and come out with that coloured boy. Tell her how Pa used to try and cut stone with one hand and one foot. Tell her ’bout Grandma seeing Uncle Wilhelm’s naked statues. Magda quietly “expected I’d heard all that”; Ambrose quietly affirmed that I had. No one solicited counteranecdotes from me: How I Was Deflowered With a Capped Fountain Pen; My Several Abortions and Miscarriages; The Amherst Phallic Index to Major British and Continental Novelists of the Early 20th Century, With Commentary.

I was reluctantly permitted, at Ambrose’s insistence, to help the other womenfolk clear table and do dishes whilst our men continued the conversation; my own proposal — that the chef alone be excused from scullery work in gratitude for her earlier labours — was passed over like an embarrassing joke. And I found myself perversely aroused to be doing Woman’s Work with the woman I’d displaced in my lover’s bed. His daughter asked me what a Lady was. “Angie,” Magda quietly reproved her. In my case, I declared, a Lady was simply a lady who married a Lord. Then would Daddy be a Lord one day? “Angie!” And to my surprise, l’Abruzzesa (no, I can’t use that ironic epithet any longer, either) then gave me so understanding a smile, warm and droll and — and womanly, all together, that I wanted to kiss her; did in fact touch her arm, as the Mensches seemed forever to be touching one another’s. Dear “Juliette Récamier” seems to have started something: it’s still men I crave (one man), but I am learning, late, truly to love my fellow woman. I kissed Angela instead, and said, “Don’t bet on it.” (But they are, properly, never ironic with her: my reply was explained straightforwardly to mean that my title would not pass to a second husband, should I take one.)

Ainsi man dimanche. After dinner A. drove me back to 24 L, filling in what I took to be the last remaining blanks in his psychosexual history. No doubt, he averred, his deep continuing attraction to Magda in the 1950’s, albeit entirely chaste and largely unexpressed, had got his marriage off to a lame start, so that by the time it had been quite supplanted by commitment to his wife, her resentment was past mollifying. And they never had been more than roughly suited: two healthy young provincial WASPs of the middle class playing house in the Eisenhower era. He did not believe, in retrospect, that they had deeply loved each other. Neither had had the requisite emotional equipment; call it soul. But they had surely liked each other until their separate adulteries poisoned their connexion; the failure of their marriage had been a considerable shock to his spirit as well as to his ego…

Egad, you Americans! The most sentimental people in the history of the species! Can one imagine a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Welshman, a Sicilian, a Turk carrying on so? (I hear Ambrose saying, “Sure.”) To change the subject somewhat, I registered my favourable impression of his brother, of Magda, of his daughter; my relief that they had seemed not to dislike me. I ventured further to express my particular gratification at that one smile of Magda’s in the kitchen: the acceptance I thought I saw in it of our situation.

A. considered this. She was in truth a great accepter, he replied: had for example accepted in 1955 the news, confessed by Peter, that Marsha’s list of conquests included himself, who that same year, in an unguarded hour, had permitted himself to fall under the sway of her vindictiveness: she was “getting even” for Ambrose’s obvious feeling for Magda, which Peter knew in his bones to be innocent. Not to keep her husband unfairly in ignorance, Magda had then confessed what otherwise she’d not have troubled him with, since it had no bearing on her love for him: that at one point, when he was overseas and she very lonely, her affection for his younger brother had departed from its prior and subsequent innocence. Not impossibly Ambrose had reported this bit of past history to his wife (but Magda could not imagine why: what was one to do with such information? I quite agreed with this position, as Ambrose reported it; so did he, but he acknowledged that he had made a foolish “clean breast of things” to his bride) and so prompted her retaliation. Magda had then assured Peter of her confidence in his love and advised against his confessing the adultery to Ambrose, for the sound reason aforestated. But Marsha herself, a great exacter of retributions, made her own “confession” and insisted they remove from the Lighthouse, which they did. These several sordid disclosures left no lasting scars on either Peter and Magda’s marriage or the brothers’ affection for each other; but the rift between Ambrose and Marsha became a breach never successfully closed thereafter.

And why, I enquired, was I being thus edified? Was Ambrose still subject, twenty years later, to the twenty-year-old bridegroom’s impulse to make a clean breast of things? Quoth my lover: “Yup.”

And then I saw the darker question raised by his confession. This was 1955, he’d said? Yup. The year in which (truly) dear (and not too awfully) damaged Angela had been begot and brought to light? Yup.

Then just possibly…?

Yup. Adultery in early Pisces; birth (premature) late in Virgo.

And the odds? Unlikely, unlikely. These were pre-Pill days, to be sure, and Marsha (like myself) was not always beforehand with pessary and cream; but she was a diligent spermatocidal doucher. What was more, they had resolved upon pregnancy that year, and so against this single furtive illicit coupling stood a great many licit ones. In which, admittedly, contraception had been forgone. And which, admittedly, had borne no fruit in the several months prior, nor would bear any after (the low motility was revealed in the early 1960’s, when in a spell of reconciliation they strove vainly to conceive again). But I was to bear in mind that he was not (quite) sterile; he was simply not vigorously fertile, though vigorously potent. Whereas good Peter — but that was another story. In any event, he’d never seriously doubted his daughter’s paternity; and he would feel no less her father even if it were proved that he was not her sire. Between him and Peter the matter had not once been alluded to; between him and Magda once only, and that en passant and indirectly. Equally, however, knowing his brother, he did not doubt that Peter and Magda’s dedication to the child, and Peter’s urging him to move “back home” two years ago, “for Angie’s sake,” when Marsha kicked over the traces, and went north with a new boyfriend — not to mention what must have been Peter’s complaisance in the ensuing ménage à trois—stemmed in part from a good bad conscience.

Hum. Nay, further: ho hum! We are by now chez moi, late afternoon and warm; the pool is finally filled at Dorset Heights; Ambrose proposes a cool dip; he has a swimsuit in the trunk of his car, which he’d as lief leave at 24 L for future use. All this matter of contraception and pregnancy has stirred me: I readily assume that his cool dip will be preceded by a warmer; indeed, when we step inside to step out of our step-ins, I am stripped and waiting before he has his trousers down, and the only question in my mind is whether to bring up the Case of the Expropriated Pessary before or after. The man disrobes: I admire as ever his youthful body; am excited in particular by the white of his well-shaped buttocks against the tan of the rest of him, and the tidy cluster of his organs in repose. I am in no danger of lesbianism! Hither, hither…

But lo, my white, my tidy, where is he gone? Into blue boxer swimtrunks, their owner already halfway to the door. Ambrose? A sheepish headshake from my erstwhile ram: too tired. Bit of a drain, he guesses, the family thing, his mother’s condition. Anyroad, we’d “made it” only the morning before. Chop chop now; into my suit if I was going to; he’d meet me à la piscine.

Well! That “morning before” was the 17th, last Saturday. Today is the 24th. We have been together at least part of every one of those seven days and nights, which in lusty April would have seen our bacon bumped a dozen times over — and we have congressed exactly thrice, counting the morn of the confiscated contraceptive! Once on the Tuesday, once yesterday; and I mean once. They were firm, they were ardent enough, those couple of couplings, if not exactly passionate; they were… conjugal, yes. And they were two in number, not counting the aforementioned Saturday.

They were also, both of them, uncontracepted. Sir, I am no longer urged against precautionary measures: I am enjoined from them! Let the odd monsignor, even archbishop, soften his line on contraception; my lover is become intransigent as the pope. Birth-control devices are prohibited at 24 L St! Tyranny! And who’s more daft: he for demanding a bastard from his aging moll, or she for acquiescing to his daft demands? For his interdiction of condom, pill, and intrauterine gadgetry was not the sum of his despotism, no: on the Tuesday I was made to put two pillows under my arse and hold my legs high; on the Friday, knees and face down on the bed, tail high in the position Lucretius compares to that of ferarum quadrupedumque: wild quadrupeds in rut. And both days, my master’s shot once fired, I am held in place a full fifteen minutes whilst his LMS’s make their feeble way wombwards with gravity’s aid; nor may I even then expel those swimmers from my pool, but must lie boggy in the bed till the hour is run.

I jest, but am truly somewhat disquieted, not alone at the possibility of my actually conceiving again, with whatever consequences, but equally at this not altogether playful domination by my lover — that inclination I noted pages back, at dinner, to have me submit. Both times, it irks me to confess, whilst being thus held I climaxed. This pleased milord much, he having read that the vaginal contractions attendant on female orgasm give the sperm a peristaltic boost, “like sailing in a following sea”; and his pleasure excited me further. But it was, exactly, a perverse excitement at the novelty, quite normal and decidedly passing: submission as a way of life is not my cup of tea!

Ambrose is, I trust I made clear, not boorish in all this, but Quietly Firm, like an Edwardian husband. If our Fourth Stage corresponds to his 4th affair—i.e., his wooing and wedding of Marsha Blank — then I infer of that alliance that she was the more ardent partner, he the more dominant. I reflect on the course of their connexion (not to mention its issue) and am not cheered.

Well!

G.

P.S.: A long letter, this. I remember, wryly, how in the years when I aspired to fiction I would sit for hours blocked before the inkless page. And my editorial, my critical and historical writing, has never come easily, nor shall I ever be a ready dictator of sentences to Shirley Stickles. Even my personal correspondence is usually brief. But this genre of epistolary confession evidently Strikes some deep chord in me: come Saturday’s Dear J., my pen races, the words surge forth like Ambrose’s etc., I feel I could write on, write on to the end of time!

E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Not pregnant. The “prenatal” letters of A.B. Cook IV.

24 L Street

31 May 69

John,

End of May, Ember day; full moon come ’round again. My calendar dubs it the Invasion Moon, no doubt because a quarter-century ago it lit the beaches of Normandy. I was 24 then: had been Jeffrey’s mistress in Italy and England; had conceived André’s child in Paris and borne it in Canada; had had done with Hesse and aborted his get in Lugano; was chastely waiting out the war near Coppet, researching the life of Germaine de Staël. It seems ages past, that moon: my uterus is an historical relic! But ember as in Ember days means recurrent, not burnt to coals: what’s waned will wax, waxed wane…

Well, I’m menstruating. No Johnstown Flood, but an unambiguous flow. Astonishing, that old relic’s new regularity; you could correct your calendar by it. What to think? Ambrose is almost angry at this repulse of his wee invaders. I would remind him that who menstruates a fortiori ovulates; my plumbing’s in order, let him look to his! But on this head he is not humorous. Indeed, he has turned a carper: my outfits lately are too old-fashioned; my manners date me; my way of speaking rings of middle-aged irony. I reply: Well might they so be, do, ring; 650 moons is no “teenybopper.” Would he trick her old carcase out in bikinis and miniskirts? Have her “do grass,” “drop acid”? Pickle her fading youthfulness in gin like his old (and new) friend Bea Golden? He does not reply: I fear I have invoked that name to my hurt, as one does a rival’s. Yet I think I’d know if she had truly reentered his picture as they fiddle together with Prinz’s, for my “lover” virtually lives with me now…

Dear Reader: I am a mite frightened. My calendar (the one on my desk which names the full moons, not the one in my knickers that marks them) notes that in France on this date in 1793 the Reign of Terror began — though the Revolutionary Tribunal had been established in the August of ’92, and my eponym had nearly lost her head in the September. If Ambrose should become my Robespierre, who will be my Napoleon?

Add odd ironies: my master’s master’s essay was entitled Problems of Dialogue, Exposition, and Narrative Viewpoint in the Epistolary Novel. You knew?

On the Monday and the Thursday since my last, he and I made love: both times in bed, in the dark. Tomorrow’s, I’ll wager, will be forgone as pointless. In April it would not have been. Tomorrow’s! We are come to that!

Well: with so much unwonted free time on my hands, I have at least finished your Sot-Weed Factor novel. Mes compliments. Since my friend and I these evenings read even in bed, I look to dispatch with more dispatch your other “longie,” #4, the goat-boy book. Of SWF I will say no more, both because my monthly flow cramps my verbal, and because while I am done with your words I am not with your plot. Rather, with your plotter, that (literally) intriguing Henry Burlingame III. By scholarly reflex, even before Monday’s momentous special delivery was delivered to 24 L, I had “checked out” enough of your historical sources in the regional-history section of the Marshyhope library (its only passable collection) to verify that while the name Henry Burlingame appears on Captain John Smith’s roster of his crew for the exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608, there is no further mention of him in Smith’s Generall Historie, and none at all in the Archives of Maryland, through which bustle the rest of your dramatis personae. I therefore assume — with more hope than conviction — that “Henry Burlingame III,” his protean character and multifarious exploits, are your invention; that the resemblance between this fictitious 17th-Century intrigant and the Burlingame/Castine/Cook line of 20th-century Ontario, Annapolis, and Everywhere Else is either pure coincidence or the impure imitation of art by life. I entreat you, sir: break your silence to tell me that this is so!

This letter will not be long. I’ve scarcely begun to assimilate, and am still entirely distracted by, that aforementioned special delivery: a packet of four very long letters, plus a covering note. The mails, the mails! The packet is postmarked Fort Erie, Ontario, 21 May 1969 (a Wednesday); the cover note is dated Wednesday, 14 May, same year; the letters proper are dated 5 March, 2 April, 9 April, and 14 May — but all Thursdays—and all in 1812! 157 years from Castines Hundred (so all are headed, in “Upper Canada”) to Dorset Heights: a very special delivery indeed!

4½ bolts from the blue. They are, of course, the letters André promised when the time should be ripe for us to make a “midcourse correction,” as the Apollo-10 chaps say, in our son’s career, by control at least as remote as theirs (and far less reliable). The letters are — read “purport to be,” though to my not inexpert eye they seem authentic — in the hand of one Andrew Cook IV, André’s great-great-grandfather, who at the time of their alleged composition was 36 years old and taking refuge at Castines Hundred from the furore over his latest ploy in the Game of Governments. They are addressed to his unborn child, then gestating in the womb of his young wife. The texts are too long and too mattersome to summarise: their substance is the history of the Burlingame/Castine/Cook(e)s, from Henry Burlingame I of Virginia (John Smith’s bête noire, as in your version) down to the “present”: i.e., Andrew Cook IV on the eve of the 1812 War. This Andrew declares, in effect, that the whole line have been losers because they mistook their fathers for winners on the wrong side; he announces his intention to break this pattern by devoting the second half of his life to the counteraction of its first, thus becoming, if not a winner, at least not another loser in the family tradition, and preparing the road for his son or daughter to be “the first real winner in the history of the house.”

Here my pen falters, though I am no stranger to the complexities of history and of human motives. What Andrew Cook IV says is that he had grown up believing his father (Burlingame IV) to have been a successful abettor of the American Revolution, and had therefore devoted himself to the cause of Britain against the United States. But at age 36 he has come to believe that his father was in fact an unsuccessful agent of the Loyalists, only pretending to be a revolutionary — and that he himself therefore has been a loser too, dissipating his energies in opposition to his father’s supposed cause and therefore abetting, unsuccessfully, his real cause. “Knowing” his father now to have been a sincere Loyalist in disguise, he vows to rededicate himself to their common cause: the destruction of the young republic. “My father failed to abort the birth he pretended to favour,” says A.C. IV. “We must therefore resort to sterner measures. For America, like Zeus, is a child that will grow up to destroy his parents.”

In that loaded metaphor, precisely, is the rub: supposing the letters to be genuine, one may still suspect them to have been disingenuous. Had Andrew IV really changed his mind about his father’s ultimate allegiances, or was he merely pretending to have done, for ulterior reasons? Was his avowed subversiveness a cover for subverting the real subversives? And might his exhortation to his unborn child have been a provocation in disguise? So at least, it seems, some have believed, notably the author of the cover note…

John: that note is in “my André’s” hand, and in his French! It is addressed to me. It is written from Castines Hundred. It is headed “Chérie, chérie, chérie!” It alludes tenderly, familiarly, to our past, to my trials. It explains that “our plan” to insure “our son’s” dedication to “our cause” (by my publishing these letters, and others yet to come, in the Maryland and Ontario historical magazines) had to be thus delayed until “our friend the false laureate” had been “neutralised”—an event that has presumably occurred, and whereof (it is darkly implied) his declining the M.S.U. Litt.D. is the signal. We may now proceed: Given “our son’s” background and professional skepticism, it will not do to present to him directly these documents, the truth of his own parentage, and the misdirection hitherto of his talents for “Action Historiography”: I am therefore to publish the letters as my discoveries, with whatever commentary I may wish to add; the author of the cover note will then clip and send them to Henri (professing astonishment, conviction, etc.) together with “certain supplementary comment,” including the story of Henri’s own birth and early childhood, the whole to be signed “Your loving, long-lost father, André Castine.” The “false laureate” once revealed to be not Henri’s true father, we will assess the young man’s reactions and, “at the propitious moment, may it come soon,” reveal to him that the responsible, respected, impersonal historian who brought the letters to light is in fact his long-lost mother! End of cover note. Its close is two words, in two languages: Yours toujours. It is signed… Andrew!

I shall go mad. I shall go mad. Why should not Ambrose (who shall not see the cover note) turn out to be André? Why should not you? Why should not my dear daft parents, decades dead, drop by for tea and declare that I am not their daughter, Germaine Necker-Gordon? Then God descend and declare the world a baroque fiction, now finally done and rejected by the heavenly publishers!

Madness! And in these letters (which you may presently read in print, for I shall do what that hand bids me, with every misgiving in the world) I perceive a pattern of my own, A.C. IV’s and V’s and VI’s be damned: It is the women of the line who’ve been the losers: Anne Bowyer Cooke and Anna Cooke, Roxanne Édouard, Henrietta and Nancy Russecks, Andrée Castines I and II and III — faithful, patient, brave, long-suffering women driven finally, the most of them, to distraction.

And of this sorry line the latest — unless she finds the spiritual wherewithal to do an about-face of her own with what remains of the second half of her life — is “your”

Germaine!

1. Mar. 2, 1900: I am born.

Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

Comrade:

St. Elret, patron of cipherers, be with you as with yours truly. Death to Jacobins, usurpers, anti-Bonapartists. The King is dead; long live the 2nd Revolution. Beware Todd Andrews, agent of the pesticide cartel. Excuse our longhand. May we together RESET

Our spring work period here at Lily Dale is at its peak. LILYVAC II is on-line and programmed to capacity. Ditto our comrade associate Ms. Le Fay a.k.a. Merope Bernstein see below at our new base in Chautauqua. Things are buzzing buzzing. We must scratch out this report by hand no time for epistolary printouts but you would be surprised what LILYVAC can RESET

We last met in February at the funeral of H.R.H. your father H.M. II G. III R.I.P. when you questioned us closely as to the practicality not to say the authenticity of LILYVAC’s Novel Revolutionary program RN for which you had twice loyally arranged support from the Tidewater Foundation. At one point you even declared straight out your suspicion that it and we were pure humbird. We do not doubt that you were distracted by your grief we ourself are an orphan have never known our dear parents were raised in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge and RESET

As for us we could scarcely have responded properly to your unexpected though perfectly justified interrogation. It was the last-but-one and deepest month of our winter rest period. Snug as a bag in a rug off-line and dreaming of the revolutionary title NOTES read out by LILYVAC at the midpoint of Year V a.k.a. T a.k.a. 12/21/68 vide infra we could have been roused at all by nothing less momentous than the death of your father the most trusted the most RESET

This letter is to allay your skepticism to report to you personally as we can no longer trust the Tidewater Foundation per se the setbacks and successes of our spring work period and to warn you against the aforementioned T.F. Executive Director T.A. He shall RESET

On Tuesday March 4 Feast of Purim Full Worm Moon we authorized said A to institute certain plagiarism proceedings as part of our general campaign to neutralize anti-Bonapartist counterrevolutionaries. No reply. On April 1 St. Elret’s Day on the eve of LILYVAC’s 1st trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES we took time to write him again confiding the results of our fall work period and our hopes for the spring e.g. our initial concern at LILYVAC’s entitling the project not NOVEL but NOTES our wondering whether therefore we were in Year T rather than Year V see RESET

In the same letter we urged him to reply to ours of 3/4 and move against B whom also we rewarned to make reparation by Doomsday i.e. 6:13 PM PST 4/4 or RESET No RESET We are going to have to reprogram LILYVAC not to RESET

That same Tuesday 4/1 overcast and chilly here in west NY rain in the PM ☾ on Equator ☌♃☾‧☌☾ U.S. to reduce B-52 raids Gas explosions seal Mexican coal mines 145 feared dead Eisenhower funeral train goes to Abilene China convenes 9th National Congress Mao in complete charge Cultural Revolution accomplished 2nd Revolution waiting to be RESET Full of that weary exultation which only true revolutionary lovers can RESET We toasted the moment with cordials of apricot nectar and pushed the Printout button for the 1st trial draft of the RN NOTES a 1 and a 2 give us an N give us an O No no whats this a 1 and a 14 and a 1 and a 7 and an 18 and a 1 and a 13 12 5 1 6 25 et cet exclamation point

I.e., no NOVEL no NOTES but a swarm of numbers exclamation point Merope and we looked into each other’s RESET On and on 13 1 187 1 1256 1 25 then a string of 55’s and 49’s alternating page after page after RESET Not got all the chinks out of the ointment 17 rules for the comma et cet push PUNCT Point No Stop No

? Yes. Check:,!()? OK, OK.

Words cannot describe our dismay, sir, faithful Merope’s and ours. Numbers! Scrambled integers, not even binary! We were still weak: last summer’s gassing, the interruptions of our winter’s rest. The printout went on, reams and quires of single and double digits. We stood by numb, rudderless, like a man-of-war whose T has been crossed. At midnight LILYVAC tapped out a string of 26’s and fell silent. Dialogue. Maybe Doomsday’s early this year, said Merope, and led us to bed.

That was Tuesday. Thursday 4/3 was Maundy Thursday, also Nisan 15 and 1st night of Passover. Description. The sky cleared over Lake Cassadaga; the air was mild along the Niagara Frontier. As we took our constitutional about the grounds of Lily Dale, where a few early spiritualists raked their yards and spruced their cottages for the coming season, we could see clearly atop the hills on the farther shore the low buildings of the Pope John XXIII Retreat. At Merope’s direction, and to distract us from our gloom (the great pile of printout lay still untouched at LILYVAC’s feet), we vowed to put all numbers out of our minds until the Friday, just as LILYVAC avoids all references to, whether by deletion or by artful substitution, e.g. bean for bean. We had searched and destroyed on the Wednesday night all leavened bread in our cottage against the 7 days to come. Now toward sunset she arranged on the Seder tray the 7 symbols: matzo, baked egg, lamb’s bone, haroseth, karpas, hazereth, and fillet of a fenny snake. She lit the 2 candles, filled the 2 wine cups, and bid me begin the 15 stages of the service. We drank our 4 cups of wine, asked and answered the 4 Questions, recited the story of the 70-year bondage of the Israelites, discussed the 10 Plagues and Rabbi Judah’s coding them by their initials; BFL, BMB, HLDF (Blood Frogs Larks, Beasts Murrain Boils, Hail Lilies Darkness 1st-Born-Slaying); we sang the 14 verses of Dayenu and the 10 of An Only Kid; we remarked upon the reckoning of climacteric years in the Hebrew calendar

also its designation of sabbatical and jubilee years, the 7 days of Levitical purifications and of 2 of the 3 major Jewish feasts, the 7 weeks between the 1st and 2nd of the latter, and the 7 years of Nebuchadnezzar’s beasthood and of Jacob’s service with each of his wives; we were reminded of the Hebrew tradition that the 7th son of a 7th son has a special destiny; that God is called by 7 names and created Creation in 7 days; that Solomon had 700 wives and 7 seals, and his temple 7 pillars; that Balaam would have 7 bullocks and 7 rams sacrificed upon his 7 altars; that Naaman was commanded to dip 7 times into the Jordan; that 7 priests with 7 trumpets marched daily for 7 days around the walls of Jericho, and 7 times on the 7th day; that Pharaoh dreamed of 7 kine and 7 ears of corn; that Samson’s wedding feast lasted 7 days, on the 7th of which he told Delilah the secret of his strength, whereupon she bound him with 7 withes and shore him of 7 locks of hair; that Salome danced with 7 veils. That Mary Magdalene was exorcised of 7 devils. Dialogue. Never mind the goyishe stuff, Merope protested, before I could mention the 7 deadly sins and cardinal virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost and Champions of Christendom and years of their ordeals and joys of Mary and sorrows of RESET Sayings on the cross holy angels churches of Asia parts of the Lord’s Prayer, also the candlesticks stars trumpets spirits horns vials plagues monster-heads and lamb-eyes in the Book of Revelations. Back to the Hebes, then: that their very verb to swear means to come under the influence of 7 things; and that the Torah itself, according to one Kabbalistical tradition, had been a heptateuch before it was a pentateuch, 1 of its books having disappeared entirely and another shrunk to 2 verses (#35 and #36) in the 10th chapter of the Book of Numbers.

Dialogue. Next year in Jerusalem! You know, said Merope, that reminds me of LILYVAC’s printout. Oh? All those numbers. Ah. Remember back in Year O, she went on, 1967/68, when we programmed LILYVAC II with Thompson’s Motif-Index to Folk-Literature plus the fiction stacks of Lily Dale’s Marion Skidmore Library plus Masterplots plus Monarch Notes and like that? Yes. Plus everything we could think of that comes in 5’s, such as the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and Dr. Eliot’s shelf of classics, the tones of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of China, the bloods of Ireland, the (original) Nations of the (noble) Iroquois, the divisions of the British Empire, the books of the Pentateuch, the weekdays of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus’s last voyage as retold by Dante, the stories framed by Scheherazade’s Tales of the Porter and the 3 Ladies of Baghdad, and a few non-serial odds and ends such as quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet, and E-string, inasmuch as NOVEL is a 5-letter word and our plan is a 5-year plan? Yes. Well: remember back there in all that fiction a tale by E. A. Poe called The Gold Bird 1843 in which William Legrand finds a message spelled out in numbers and deciphers it from the hypothesis that if the numbers stand for letters and the coded message is in English then the most frequently recurring number probably stands for the 5th letter of our alphabet E et cetera and he drops the bird through the eye of a skull that he finds on the 7th limb of a tree I forget why and it leads him to Captain Kidd’s treasure I forget how? Gee whiz, Merope, are you suggesting dot dot dot? Yes, well, we Jews, you see, are Hebrew? And our alphabet, like the Greek, served in olden times for counting as well as for spelling out words? So when an old-time Jew looked at words on a page he also saw a string of numbers? So it’s not surprising that among the mystical traditions associated with the books of the Kabbalah, a Hebrew word meaning “tradition,” is the tradition of Gematria, the manipulation of the numerical equivalents of the letters? Et cetera. Hum, we expostulated, by gosh Merope, we believe that you have found the hidden matzo, the Afikomen in the ointment, the nigger in the woodpile that is the key to the treasure. Grace. Hallel. Accepted.

Narrative. That day we reclined no more. We now pass over our night-long ardor in the workroom among those sheaves of numbers, every one of which, aha, was under 27 except the 55’s and 49’s — no problem there, 5 5 is the letters of our NOTES and the years of our plan, and 4 from 9 is 5, right, E, our prime letter and the year to come. But it were too much to expect a 1-to-l correspondence (1 to 1 = A to A, a mere tautology; we gave it a go anyhow, why not; the 1st dozen letters came out MARGANAYFAEL, forget it).

Thus the Thursday. Next day, Friday, 4/4, St. Ambrose’s Day, beware him, Comrade, Reg Prinz too, they will RESET Good Friday for the Christians Day of Adam’s creation for the Mohammedans 2nd of Pesach for Merope and 3 of her comrades who now swarmed in from their colleges and communes Canada to reduce NATO forces Looting and rioting in Chicago after M. L. King memorial service Doomsday RESET Understandably her young friends did not at 1st quite trust ourself despite Merope’s assuring them that under our cape we were not the creepy WISP we might appear but a sort of 3rd Worlder plus a bona fide 2nd Revolutionary, 3 plus 2 = et cetera. Dialogue. Come off it. Narrative. But we were patient, and altogether too preoccupied with the search for a base-5 key to the cipher to share our Merope’s distress at their youthful jibes. 5 5 5 5 5: we suggested to LILYVAC that the key to those numbers was that number; at 6:13 PM PST (9:13 at our meridian) we all gathered round for the 1st 5 trial translations of the NOTES numbers into letters (i.e., 1 = A, 2 = A, 3 = A, etc.). Ourself held Merope by the fingers of her hand; Rodriguez-from-CCNY held the other; on my right black Thelma and her lover Irving from Fort Erie smoked cannabis. 1: MARGANAYFAEL, then nonsense; 2 ditto; also 3 4 5. Fooey, said Merope. Inverse order of frequency, then: 1 =E et cet.? MARGANAYFAEL + nonsense. Sheesh, said Merope. Inverse order of frequency: 26 = E et cet.? It is written in the Zohar, offered Rodriguez, that just as the initial letter Aleph is the male principle and proclaims the unity of G_d, so the 2nd letter, Beth, is female; together they postulate the alphabet, alpha plus beta, get it? But B is the instrument of creation, the mother of letters and of the world Amen.

Wow, said Merope: Let’s try that, Jerry. Hum, well, OK, here goes: MARGANAYFAEL + nonsense.

Elsewhere in the Zohar, vouchsafed Thelma, or is it the Sepher Yetzirah, it says how Yodh, the 1st letter of the Tetragrammaton, is the Father, He the mother, Vau (W) the Son, and the 2nd He the Daughter? Also how Yesod is the sacred phallus and Zion the sacred yoni? Try them ones.

Right on, said Merope. Hum, well, OK, here goes: MARGANAYFAEL. Your turn, Irv. I’m a Catholic myself, confessed Irving, but Mister Horner over at the Farm, who sends his regards, showed me an old-time hornbook in which was written AEIOU His Great Name doth spell; Here it is known, but is not known in Hell. Play that on your calliope.

MARGANAYRESET Margana y who? inquired Rodriguez. You’re cute, you are, Merope volunteered. They chatted on, the 4, of other traditions from the Kabbalah, explaining to Irv that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had originally refused to submit to the spelling out of a Torah which dealt in commandments and prohibitions; that just as the primordial universe of the Greeks was a Chaos of atoms which later formed themselves into the Cosmos, so the primordial Torah was a jumble of letters which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events they set forth came to pass; that at the Diaspora the letters of the Holy Name were separated, male from female, like YHWH from the Shekinah. Matthew Arnold somewhere remarks, rejoined Irv, that God puts a heap of letters into each man’s hand, for him to make what word he will. They went out then to stroll in the balmy PM, leaving ourself alone to brood upon our scrambled NOTES as Maimonides affirms that the Holy One (Blessed be He!) before Creation was alone with the letters of His name.

Holy Saturday ☌♆☾ 4/5! Nixon intensifies secret Viet negotiations Antiwar march in NYC USSR presses criticism of Tito and Czechs 25,000,00 °Chinese being sent to farms from cities Man goes berserk on Pa. Turnpike kills 3 + self Dante & Virgil finish descent through Hell Danton guillotined 4th Lord Baltimore dies! Thelma, Irving, and Rodriguez planned to spend the weekend secretly filling the water coolers in the Buffalo offices of certain large industrial corporations with polluted Lake Erie water; they urged Margana to leave me behind to crank out more mishmash with my big dumb toy and come with them. She hesitated loyally a moment before saying yes. Dialogue. What’s this Margana, she inquired. Why, chortled Thelma, ’tis short for Margana le Fay, like LILYVAC say. Tut and fie, suggested Merope: if I am Margana le Fay, then Jerome is Merlin. Arthur, Arthur! teased Rodriguez. We urged them, if they craved a holiday from the serious work of finding the key that will turn LILYVAC’s numbers into revolutionary letters, to devote their youthful energies while in Buffalo to the neutralization of that “Author” who mimics ourself as the wily Schizura unicornis mimes, not the flawless hickory leaf (never found in fact), but, flawlessly, the flawed and bitten truth of real hickory leaves. What in the name of crucified Christ is he talking about? cheerfully interrogated Irving. O that’s J, Merope reassured them: any reference to B and he’s off. You ask me, Thelma said, he’s out of his motherfucking carton. I propose, proposed Rodriguez, that we leave him alone with his jumbled letters, as Maimonides and the pre-Zoharic Jewish mystics maintain that YHWH RESET Merope smartly reminded them that we had fought the good fight against DDT and were still to some degree a casualty of that battle, hence our twitches, but it was her conviction that each must make the Revolution in his/her own way, Don’t Bog Thy Neighbor et cet. And she kissed us good-bye on the cheek and said Hasta la vista Pops Don’t forget to feed the goats Ta-ta, and Irving joshed Feed them the numbers, man, and Thelma enounced Some eats um some plays um hee hee.

Hum. Off they went in our faithful VW blank, leaving us alone with our RESET They were gone 2 weeks, I began to wonder, Dante climbed Mount Purgatory said good-bye to Virgil and ascended to the Earthly Paradise, Jesus rose from the dead, Cain was born, Abel slain, Passover ended, Napoleon abdicated, Lincoln was shot, the Titanic sank, Sirhan RESET Paul Revere rode, we tried key after ditto after same: MARGANAYFAEL. Where was our Merope?

Despair, Comrade Mack. When on the 19th they returned after all to Lily Dale to celebrate the 194th anniversary of the 1st American Revolution, i.e., the skirmish at the Old North Bridge in Concord and the battle of Lexington Snow on the ground U.S. fleet heads for Korea patrol Blacks seize Cornell Student Union — we tearfully embraced our Merope’s proffered cheek and declared: Dialogue. My dear, our scrambled NOTES are turned to stone. Hoo, exclaimed Thelma, we stoned too. Jeez, marveled Irving, he really is still at it. I have something painful and difficult to tell you, Jerome, declared Merope. Cool it, Marg, suggested Rodriguez, he’ll learn it himself soon enough. Did you bring us a surprise, we inquired of the smiling youthful 4some. Sort of, teased Irving: like, we checked that hornbook business up at the Farm, OK? And this cat Morgan that’s up there these days, that’s got all kind of smarts? He told us how AEIOU is an anagram for IEOUA, dig? Which is sort of a nonconsonantal counterpart, if you follow me, to the vowelless Tetragrammaton YHWH, a.k.a. Jehovah, get it? It was further suggested by Monsieur Casteene, added Rodriguez, who I must say has got a proper Yiddishe Kopf on his shoulders if I ever saw one, that the so-called “Faithful Shepherd” book of the Zohar declares, Not as I am written [i.e., YHWH] am I read. Casteene feels this to be an allusion to — he had better said a vindication of — the Kabbalistical practices of Notarikon and Themurah, which with the aforementioned Gematria comprise the 3 principal approaches of the Kabbalists to Scripture-regarded-as-cipher. Gematria, you will recall, is the search for meaning in the numerical values of the letters: thus MARGANA, for example, has a value of 55 (13 +1 + 18 + 7 + 1 + 14 + 1), and LE FAY, a.k.a. YFAEL, 49. Thus far Casteene, with whom we young 4 agree that Notarikon is unlikely to be of help to you: it consists of regarding the letters of a word as an acrostic for a sentence or vice versa (e.g. the closing paragraph of V. Nabokov’s story The Vane Sisters, which also mentions en passant the Fox sisters of Lily Dale: The narrator, puzzling over his dream of the 2 dead sisters Cynthia and Sybil, writes: I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies — every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost. He does not see what your adept of Notarikon perceives at once, the teasing message from the sisters spelled out by the initial letters of those words. But I digress, like an old-time epistolary novel by 7 fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual). MARGANAYFAEL and the rest not being words, no acrostic can be legitimately extracted, and to regard the whole printout as itself the acrostic for a much larger text — that were madness, no? No, it strikes us that Themurah, which is to say anagrammatical transposition, is the key to the treasure, Jerome old sport: a key 1st hit upon by good Thelma here when she turn YFAEL into LE FAY, and echoed by your scrambling of NOTES into stone. What you have here, friend, what your LILYVAC hath wrought, is a leafy anagram of monstrous proportions, beside which the runes scribbled on the Sibyl’s oak leaves and scattered by the wind in Virgil’s Aeneid were no tougher than an acorn to crack than the Sunday crossword. To it, old man, to it! Steer terse RESET through that dense foliage till that thou comest to the golden bough or flawless hickory leaf never found in fact but RESET Only grasp it and RESET Meanwhile we got other fish to fry, unfinished business as it were, ha ha, Margana too, how you gonna keep a chick down in Paree after she’s seen that Farm. We all off to Chautauqua where the action is.

End monologue Dialogue Thus crumbleth the matzo ball, Jer, said Merope/Margana tenderly: Each must revolt in his/her own RESET I’ll stop by de vez en cuando to do a leaf or two with you. St. Elret smile upon you, Irving intoned, and upon your leafy anagram Amen Bye.

Exposition complication climax dénouement. Comrade Mack, we are ready. That was 3 weeks 3 days ago. Since then Daylight Saving Time has begun, de Gaulle has lost his referendum and retired, the Bounty crew has mutinied, General Proctor and Tecumseh have besieged Fort Meigs, Mayday Mayday, Louis XVII has been restored to the throne of France, and Napoleon has given out the fiction of his death on St. Helena, vive le RESET Peter Minuit has bought Manhattan, and LILYVAC and we, vouchsafed this astonishing illumination from Comrades Rodriguez Thelma and Irving, blessed and inspired by Merope/Margana who drops us the odd wish you were here from Chautauqua Institution or the Remobilization Farm where she is making the Revolution in her own RESET Alone here with the letters of our amen we have found the treasure; we have found the lock; nothing is wanting save the key for LILYVAC’s unscrambling of the LEAFY ANAGRAM. And while funding is available to us from many sources, the voice of History tells us to RESET This is the final battle On Wisconsin Off the pigs Hail to the chief O say can you see any bedbirds on me Today is Tuesday the 13th Jamestown founded U.S. declares war on Mexico Riots at SUNY/Stony Brook Arson at Brooklyn College Nixon urges draft reform Sunny and mild here in Lily Dale then cloudy and showers We are floating like a butterfat stinging like a key to the RESET Complimentary close Hold on just an adjective minute A modest supplementary grant, Comrade, from the Tidewater Foundation or perhaps from the legacy of His Majesty your father if his will has been done would surely do to work the last remaining monkey wrenches out of the ointment of this flawed leafy RESET Next thing we know it will write in longhand and even fill in the blanks in its own armor like a simile Having a wonderful time wish you were RESET 10 2 2

H: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. A reflection upon History. His defeat by the Director at Ocean City: an Unwritable Sequence. Magda celebrates a certain anniversary.

The Lighthouse, etc.

Ontario, Canada

14 June 1969

Dear J.?

It’s eerie, right enough: this foul and ghostly lake that must once have been so fair, but now regurgitates dead smelts and ripe green eutrophy; bleak, blasted Buffalo across the way, coughing up steel and cars and breakfast cereals in clouds of smog; flat frozen Canada, just now blanketed in flowers — how all countries except yours glory in flowers! — but ever mindful, in its dour domestic architecture and glacier-scraped terrain, of the cold that never leaves this dominion, but only withdraws a bit, and briefly, to its northern reaches.

Eerier yet your absence — as well say nonexistence! — and my presence here amid the caricatures of your characters. I have not read all your works, sir; I begin now to think I shan’t, lest I find myself cast up for keeps upon this charmless shore with the other flotsam; doomed like the skeletal constellations to a reiterative danse macabre, a spooky rerun — ever less intelligible — of the story of my life. Somewhere over there you plug away at your trade, stringing letters into words, words into sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. Between us the international boundary surges past to flush itself over Niagara Falls, called by Canadians the toilet bowl of America.

Where are you? Where am I? What am I doing here in the Erie Motel, Ontario, Canada? I’ll tell you what.

On Sunday last, the 8th (when in 1797 my luckier namesake bore her 4th child, Edwige-Gustavine-Albertine de Staël, her daughter by Benjamin Constant), mio maestro and I flew up to Buffalo. I proposed he call you from the airport. Ambrose wasn’t interested; said you and he were not “that sort of friends.” Out of curiosity I checked the directory: no listing. The university was of course closed — with relief, I’m sure, after this dreadful year of tear gas, “trashings,” truncheons. We hired a car, drove up the parkway to Niagara Falls, N.Y. (I was mildly interested in reconnoitering your campus; Ambrose wasn’t; we didn’t), and registered in a nameless, featureless motel. The clerk smirked. In my costume — I cannot think of these skimpy outfits as clothes—I felt like an old Lolita; once the door was shut, the spread drawn down against crab lice, and the six o’clock news tuned in, my humbug Humbert duly humped me. No surprise: it had been three days.

Maryland had been muggy; at the Falls it was overcast and mild. We dined at a nameless, featureless restaurant and then strolled the tacky town, the melted museum, the ubiquitous and awful souvenir shops…

Enough of this. You know Honeymoon City better than I; even if you didn’t, I’ve no business “writing” to a writer, especially one who doesn’t write back. Job enough to report the news! Next morning (and all the mornings since), Ambrose worked on his Perseus story whilst I lay about with the Times, too embarrassed to go out alone in my costume. His unusual absorption in “Arthur Morton King’s” composition reminds me again that my current lover, like my more eminent earlier ones, is after all a Writer, as I once aspired to be. Surely the length of these letters to you has been a relapse into that aspiration — from which your silence, Doctor, bids to cure me. Whether Reg Prinz’s contemptuous casting of him into that rôle (with the uppercase W) has reenergised Ambrose’s muse, or whether on the contrary Ambrose’s rediscovery of his writerly powers has inspired Prinz to escalate his half-improvised, ad hoc hostility, I don’t venture to guess. But I report that both proceed apace.

Over the next couple days the “Baratarians” assembled: the technicians, I mean, for (except for some unrehearsed “rehearsal” sequences at the Remobilisation Farm, to be duly reported) Prinz seems not ready yet to deploy his actors on these locations. On the Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday (bright, mild, pleasant) they shot footage of the Falls, as if the film were to be a remake of Niagara minus Joseph Cotten, Marilyn Monroe, and any connexion whatever with your work! Having shared blind Joyce’s interest in the cinema, and that of most of the other European writers I’ve had to do with, I do not especially share my lover’s mystification of that medium, his mythicised antithesis of Image and Word. I watched with crowds of others; sure enough, the American Falls was half shut off by a temporary dam above the rapids… But stop: you’ve no doubt been up to view it; may even have been among the throng of camera-clicking tourists who photographed with equal interest the Falls, the non-Falls, and the film crew photographing both and them.

On the Wednesday (at first bright, then turning muggy) the Baratarians and I “did” Queenston Heights across the river, where good General Brock won the battle but lost his life in 1812; Fort George, captured, lost, and burnt by the Americans in 1813; and handsome Fort Niagara, taken at night by bayonet from the Americans that same year, by Canadians who then swooped down with the Indians to burn Buffalo. If the “2nd War of Independence” is not yet in your fiction, you’d best see to putting it there, for it is most certainly in the film!

Ambrose played with his logarithmic spirals till noon and then joined me, as we’d planned, at the Rush-Bagot Memorial near the French Castle, on the Lake Ontario rampart of the fort. In the crowd I felt slightly less ridiculous; moreover, three days had passed (and, I learnt shortly, the episode he’d been drafting all morning was erotic): he was horny; I likewise, and only in that humour did his petty despotising arouse me. If I have given the impression in recent letters that our friend has been merely insufferable, I here correct it: insufferable indeed have been the matters I’ve complained of (and suffered him to lay upon me), but he has not even now lost his engaging, affectionately attentive side; had not in particular in the three days of our visit thus far, when his work was going well and neither Bea Golden nor Magda Giulianova Mensch nor starlets nor coeds were on the scene. We watched the “Baratarians” at work for a while, especially fascinated by Prinz’s inarticulate communion with his technicians when cinematography alone, without actors and story, was the business at hand (he began, I now recall, as an avant-garde documentarist). But we were “turning on”; could not leave off touching each other; people were beginning to look at us. Prinz wanted us all to move before dinnertime from the mouth of the Niagara River to its head: specifically, back across to the Canadian shore and down (on the map, but upriver, most confusing) to Fort Erie, to the motel on whose stationery this is written, which he’d reserved for the next five nights. There was to be a “general story session”—filmed, of course — in the evening, after he’d inspected the locations at Old Fort Erie and the Remobilisation Farm, where most of the rest of the cast would rejoin us.

Touching, gripping, squeezing arms and hands, we hurried back to make love in our “old” motel before packing and checking out to move to the new. I wept a bit; was given permission (I hadn’t sought it) to pick up a midlength skirt for morning wear if I wished to explore “the Cook/Castine business” whilst he was writing. Ambrose was tender; it was love we made. We have not since, may never again, though I have been inseminated daily in the three days since (it’s ovulation time), despite my being shut off and dry as the American Falls.

Then we passed through customs and across the Rainbow Bridge to Canada again, around the Horseshoe Falls and down (up) along the flowered margin of the dominion to that less prepossessing other fort — captured, recaptured, rerecaptured, leveled by accidental explosions, rebuilt, releveled by Lake Erie storms, rebuilt, de- and re-lapidated, restored — near where I write this; across the river from where you write whatever you write as I write this.

Near the Erie Motel is a dull Chinese-Canadian restaurant. There we dined, joined towards the end of our Moo Shoo pork by Prinz, who managed to say as I opened my fortune cookie…

Oh God, enough of this writing! It is all insane, and for all I know you may be quite apprised of, may even be party to, the madness. We inspected Old Fort Erie, Prinz framing views with his fingers and murmuring things about the light. On 4 July 1814, 38th birthday of your republic, an American general with your initials recaptured the fort first captured in May of the year before. Six weeks later the place exploded as the Canadians attempted to retake it (“Takes and retakes,” Prinz murmurs happily), either accidentally or because a U.S. lieutenant fired the magazine, blowing himself and two dozen others to kingdom come and repulsing the assault. “We” are to replicate that explosion on 15 August, its 155th anniversary. Indeed, it seems there is to be a series, a montage of bombardments, fires, explosions from the period: red rockets will glare and bombs burst in air this season, not only here but at Fort McHenry in Baltimore and at Washington, all which got theirs in the busy summer of 1814. The last big bang at Fort Erie — indeed, the last on the Niagara Frontier — came in November of that same year, when General Izard, withdrawing his American garrison back to Buffalo, blew up what was left standing after the August explosion.

As we dutifully reviewed this noisy history, Ambrose took my elbow and informed me that Prinz had just that day informed him that the “patients” at the Remobilisation Farm, apparently under the direction of Bea Golden (one of their number, you know, from time to time, when under the nom de guerre Bibi she dries out between failed marriages), were involved in some sort of ongoing recapitulation of your End of the Road novel, which either inspired or was inspired by the original farm for remobilising the immobile, down in Maryland. Thus there is a black doctor in chief known simply as the Doctor, and a half-patient, half-administrator who goes by the name of Jacob Horner and is even thought by some to be the original of your soulless anti-hero. A patient known as “St Joseph” plays or lives the role of poor Joseph Morgan; “Bibi” herself has assumed the part of Rennie Morgan (Sexual Therapy, no doubt), caught between her rationalist husband and antirationalist “lover”… All very convenient for “our” film, of course, as I would soon see, in keeping with Ambrose’s (and presumably Prinz’s) notion of echoes and reenactments significant in themselves, without necessary reference to their originals. (Did you know that Reg Prinz has “kept his imagination pure” by not even reading your books, any of them, so that viewers of his film won’t have had to either? How I wish, in my ever rarer moments of relative calm, that I were outside this madness enough to savour its paradoxical aesthetics!) What was more — and what Prinz had evidently told Ambrose only over the fortune cookies, as I braved the stares of proper Ontarians to make my way to the Ladies’—the Doctor having declined for one reason or another to play himself in this psychodramatical masquerade, his role had been assumed by a patient known as “Monsieur Casteene.”

I do not reenact, here in this letter, my reactions to this news there on the twilit, Buffalo-facing rampart of Fort Erie. I do not even call to my aid my trusty suspension points, that have got me out of many an epistolary paragraph heretofore. I merely report to you this initial detonation. Still holding my arm, Ambrose regarded me. We turned to a nearby whir: Prinz with his “hand-held,” photographing my reaction, Ambrose’s indignation.

Separate cars to the Farm. Did Prinz “set us up,” Ambrose wonders, for that shot? Perhaps even fabricate the “Monsieur Casteene bit” for that purpose? He offers to return me to the motel; but of course I must investigate for myself. On the farther, downriver (up-map) side of the town of Fort Erie, past the old fortification and the Peace Bridge, I recognise the Victorian white frame, half nursing home, half hippie sanctuary, the freaks and geriatrics rocking in their separate fashions on the porch. No suspension points. I hold my friend’s arm, as I hold now onto my syntax and, less certainly, my reason. The Baratarians have preceded us; we are “shot,” en passant, coming up the walk, mounting to the porch — not so unremittingly as to make clear that we are the stars of the scene, but the angry set of Ambrose’s mouth is not missed, nor are my too bared legs, Ambrose wonders What the Hell; makes to let Prinz know he’s going too far. But here to greet us comes “Bibi,” drawn and severe-looking (and more attractive, alas) without makeup, and wearing a simple shift, her “Rennie Morgan” getup. Lights. Here is lean “Jacob Horner,” nondescript in clean white shirt, straight-leg chinos, and saddle oxfords: clearly caught in an early-Eisenhower time warp but for his lined face and graying hair. Cameras. Then come in fast succession three more explosions, not bursting in air but whumping deep like depth charges or, better, underground tests.

“Joe Morgan,” played by… Joe Morgan! To be sure, “much changed,” as our correspondent A.C. IV would say — the careful, conservatively dressed ex-college president now a benignly grizzled guru, beaded, bearded, bedenimed, barberless — but unquestionably Joe Morgan! He smiles at us in quiet unsurprise, greets us both by name from his rocker, and believes we “both know Monsieur Casteene, the Doctor.”

Boom. Whir of camera. “I am the Doctor only when we rehearse,” intones with the faintest accent (bit of a zed on ze definite article; emphasis evened out over ze sýl-á-blés) no dash no suspension points some cordial amalgamation, much changed, of the Maryland Laureate and my André. Then, in flawless Canadian French: “Le Médecin malgré moi, eh? But just now we are not acting.”

He takes our hands; makes the slightest bow. André’s bald spot; A. B. Cook’s salt-and-pepper hair. Moustache rather like André’s, but no beard. André’s dentures, possibly, but no eyeglasses. Contact lenses, I believe, can be tinted? Ambrose squeezes my arm. No action, no reaction; what a slow movie it’s going to be! I begin to mumble something like Thanks for the nice letters and My but isn’t Guy Fawkes Day early this year when Boom comes the third explosion, so deep and quiet I don’t even hear it. A plain-faced sharp-jawed firm-voiced (trim-figured) middle-thirtied woman stands nearby: Horner’s? Casteene’s (she could be the sister of that blank-phizzed unreceptionist chez Cook at Chautaugua)? Morgan’s perhaps, if her incongruous Indian headband means anything (otherwise she looks about as Indian as the woman on the Land O Lakes butter box)? No: plainly her own woman, this “Pocahontas”—so “Casteene” introduces her, with the smiling flourish of a magician introducing his assistant — though from the particularly disagreeable smirk with which she appraises me, and from Ambrose’s sudden lividity, his appalled, exasperated “Jesus Christ,” I begin to infer that she once was

Bang bang bang. Observe that I do not whimper; I merely report the news from across the Peace Bridge. It is now three days later, Saturday morning, 14 June, today. My inseminator scratches away at his tale of Perseus and Andromeda’s failed marriage, the problem of addressing the “Second Cycle” of one’s life. My Toronto newspaper reports Nixon’s claim to broad new “bugging privileges” against political radicals; also that the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Evans by collision with an Australian aircraft carrier was not the Australian skipper’s fault, and that Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is still seaworthy despite an unexpected waterlogging to starboard. What are you up to over there this mild muggy morning, I wonder, and where are you up to it? It is “Jacob Horner,” no doubt, from whom I have this almaniacal reflex: he has apprised me that the steamy St Barnabas evening aforereported — Kamehameha holiday in Hawaii, birthday of John Constable, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Strauss, and Mrs Humphry Ward — when I re-met Messieurs Morgan and Casteene, and my would-be impregnator re-met his ex-wife Marsha Blank, was the 198th anniversary of the day when Goethe’s young Werther first met his Charlotte at the hunting lodge in Wahlheim.

The debris from those three explosions is still falling; Damage Control has yet to complete the assessment of our condition, but all the evidence is that we are sinking fast. On Thursday 12th, John L. Lewis died and the Niagara Falls shutoff was completed; convinced though he is that Reg Prinz knew in advance “Pocahontas’s” identity and “set him up” for that dismaying surprise (duly filmed, of course), Ambrose “kept his cool”: one would never have guessed, from his energetic flirtations with “Bibi” as the Baratarians filmed the unfailing Falls (at whose base one well-rinsed human skeleton has been discovered), that he had spent the night pounding the mattress in his rage at “them”—Mr Prinz, Ms Blank — and at his incomprehension of their motives and connexions. No good my advising him, from my rich experience of Them, that there is no They, only a He: André/Andrew Burlingame/Cook/Castine, whose motive, while doubtless unknowable, certainly looked a lot like plain old sadism, wouldn’t he say? It was too much, he exploded (the last detonation of that day): all those people in one place! Horner (A. knew him in graduate school days, hadn’t seen him since)! Morgan (What in the world had flipped him out so?)! Castine (I really couldn’t tell? A third half-brother, maybe?)! And Marsha (Jee-sus)! Put it in a novel, your editor would throw the script back over the transom! Where was Giles the Goat-Boy, whilst They were at it? Where were my long-lost son and Ambrose’s old high school English teacher, if Prinz was going to play This Is Your Life?

All this in fury in the Erie Motel on the Wednesday and again on the Thursday night, Ambrose having in between played Cotten to Bea Golden’s Monroe all over Goat Island (we looked: no Giles) and the sprinklered escarpment of the Falls (having turned the rapids off, the engineers must keep a spray of water on the Rochester shale, lest it dry and crumble even faster). Freud observes that the sound of falling water is aphrodisiac: rain on the roof of the gamekeeper’s cottage; Dido and Aeneas in their cozy cave. Ambrose had earlier invoked Freud’s observation to explain the attraction of Niagara Falls to honeymooners. I submit that the sound of the Falls not falling has an even more powerful effect upon our friend, though not upon the writer of these lines. Too, Ms Blank’s disconcerting smirk at her ex-husband’s new Old Lady, together with “Bibi’s” Rennie Morgan look of exhausted strength, inspires him to ever more ardent pursuit of Bea (Prinz doesn’t seem to mind; photographs it all), ever more humiliation of myself. Every day I’m screwed, both ways, and whilst I leak his stuff into my scanties, he chases after her.

The news, the news. Our “Jacob Horner” is a spook, a vacuum, an ontological black hole. In his presence (the word is perfectly inapposite) I feel my hold on myself, my sense of me, going the way of my sanity. “Are you actually the original of the Jacob Horner in the novel?” I ask him, and he answers, seriously: “In a sense.” Marsha Blank, on the other hand, seems no blank at all, but a cold-souled, calculating — okay, empty-hearted — embodiment of small-minded WASP vindictiveness who — whoa there: that’s Jealousy talking, and Desperation chiming in with modifiers. But what on earth did Ambrose once see in her? In their reenactment of The End of the Road she will take the role of your sexually exploited high school English teacher, Peggy Rankin (a role better suited to myself, I should think; no one would get away with exploiting Ms Blank a second time!). That Prinz himself seems fascinated by her is no surprise: she flirts with him in the full sly ignorance of an insurance company clerk-typist flirting with, say, Andy Warhol — no doubt in part to make Ambrose jealous — and Prinz indulges her, with as it were an anthropological curiosity. Between her and Ambrose the vibrations are murderous (Peggy Rancour, he has dubbed her): nothing in my own experience compares with it. And Bea Golden, stung (sorry; let’s say miffed) by Prinz’s sufferance of Blank’s rude overtures, responds now, out of spite, to Ambrose’s. God help me!

Upon this tawdry diagram of forces, “M. Casteene” and “Saint Joseph” smile benignly, though with different interests. What Casteene’s are I shall not even speculate (I cannot call him André; he is not A. B. Cook; he is to both what Marsha Blank is to the doorlady of Chautaugua, an imperfect clone; yet he alludes knowledgeably to the letters of 1812 and hopes to discuss their publication with me “fully,” together with “our larger strategy,” tomorrow, when the Baratarians are on holiday! John, John!). He is the courtly master of ceremonies, the Spielman; the low-keyed but high-geared tummler of the Remobilisation Farm, and director of the Wiedertraum (his term, I gather) that is The End of the Road Continued.

On that little psychodrama, too, I shall not speculate, except to say that it seems to me potentially as explosive as the Old Fort Erie powder magazine. And that, as it is being reenacted on a sort of anniversary schedule, with your novel as the basis of their script, the next episode will not occur until 20 and 21 July, when Horner (having been instructed by the Doctor on 1 June to take up grammar teaching as an antidote to his paralytical tendency) is to be interviewed by “Dr Schott” (also played by Casteene) and “Joe Morgan,” played by:

Joe Morgan. Oh, John: much changed! And yet, plus ça change… Whether he is “your” Joe Morgan is not for me to say — my sense is that it were dangerous, not to mention tactless, to press that question; nobody here does, either with “St Joe” or with any of the others — but he is most certainly “mine,” under howsoever altered a complexion: the courteous, intense, scholarly, boyish intellectual historian (in both senses) who so aided my researches at the Maryland Historical Society and later hired me at Marshyhope. Then, his simplicity, lucidity, and energetic gentleness covered (as we thought) a complexity, a mystery, perhaps even a violence: a darkness obscured by light, for which your tale of adultery, abortion, and death provided at least a fictive explanation. Now things seem reversed: the gentleness is still there, but it seems fierce; the mystery, irrationality, even mysticism, are on the surface; he has “done” the heavy psychedelics; his mind is “bent,” by his own admission (but not “blown”) — yet his account of his motives, his “reappreciation of the secret life of objects,” his “delinearisation of history,” all seem (at least when he’s speaking of them) as pellucid as William James’s rational chapter on the mystical experience, or Morgan’s own essay on Cheerful American Nihilism. His defeat last year by John Schott at Marshyhope must have been the penultimate straw; I gather something snapped at Amherst, and his friend “Casteene” arranged his coming to the Farm. I would not care to be in Jacob Horner’s saddle oxfords.

Being in my sneakers and penny loafers is no picnic, either. So many words, so many pages (Werther’s longest letter, that one of 16 June 1771 describing his introduction to Charlotte on the 11th, is a mere nine pages), and even so I’ve not mentioned “U.U.,” the Underground University of Senior Citizens and draft evaders organised at the Farm by Morgan and Casteene, in which Jacob Horner will presumably teach when the time comes. Or the minstrel show (based dimly on your Floating Opera!) rehearsing under “Bibi’s” direction for performance a week hence — by when, God willing, Ambrose and I will be out of this madhouse, with whatever scars; away from this eerie powder keg of cross-purposes and unsettled scores; back home (so it seems already; I would never have supposed!) to dear damp Marshyhope and our late commencement exercises.

But next Saturday’s Doctor of Letters has just put down his pen for the day. I must therefore put down mine: close my letter, open my legs: then out to the Fort, the Farm, the Falls, and whatever further setups and put-downs the afternoon holds for your

Germaine

P.S.: Prinz and Ambrose be damned, I intend of course to seek you out whilst we’re filming at Chautauqua and Lily Dale next week, if the post office will tell me where on that rural delivery route your cottage is. I promise not to be a nuisance — you’re not the first writer I ever met! — but we really should talk, don’t you think?

S: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her conversation with “Monsieur Casteene.” A fiasco on Chautauqua Lake. A Visit to Lily Dale, N.Y., Spiritualist Capital of America.

24 L St, Dorset Heights

Saturday, 21 June 1969

John,

So: back in Maryland, on the morning of the year’s longest day, and thoroughly alarmed, confused, distressed. I shan’t degrade myself further by enlarging for you upon my week, since clearly you do not wait for these reports with bated breath — perhaps not even with tempered curiosity. From Monday through Thursday last I was on and about your Chautauqua Lake, in weather as gray and chill as northern Europe’s: not like our proper Maryland Junes! On the Sunday prior, at Fort Erie, I’d had my remarkable conversation with “Monsieur Casteene,” in course of which he retailed to me such an astonishing and unexpected history of his connexions with yourself that on the Monday, when Ambrose and I were installed in Chautauqua’s old Athenaeum, I got your number from the operator and straightway rang you up. No answer, then or later. On the Tuesday — whilst Ambrose scribbled at his Perseus story and counterplotted against Reg Prinz within the ad libitum plot of their screenplay — I drove our hired car around the lake to your cottage, aided by directions from the rural postman. It was Chautaugua all over again, minus Mr Cook’s blank receptionist: the modest cottage, the tidy grounds, the seawall and dock, boats tethered at their moorings — and no one at home.

I took the liberty of asking your neighbours; they said you “came and went.” I waited an hour; strolled out on your dock in the crisp breeze from Canada (Monday and Tuesday were the only clear days all week, and both cool as March); the lake too seemed abandoned, but for a few muskellunge fishermen standing and drifting in their skiffs. As I left, much frustrated (there are things you don’t know about “Casteene”!), I caught sight of your postbox in a row of others and took the further liberty of peeking in, simply to assure myself that mail was indeed being delivered to you there. And I found… mine of Saturday last, postmarked Ft Erie, Out., 14 June 1969!

I could have wept for exasperation. I snatched it out, vowing to destroy it and write not another word to you. But an elderly lady watched me from her little jerry-built nearby; anyroad, what was writ was writ. And there was other mail waiting for you; no doubt you had business up in Buffalo, or were simply away from home for a few days. I rang you up again on the Wednesday, on the Thursday; hadn’t the heart to check whether my 18-pager still repines there with its two ounces of cancelled 1st-class postage. Friday forenoon we flew home.

Now I read in this morning’s Baltimore Sun that tornadoes struck your region last night, sparing the old Chautauqua Institution but causing a million dollars’ damage elsewhere about the lake, parts of which have been declared disaster areas. Which shall I hope?

Oh well: I hope that you and your property (my letter included) were spared, and that there is excellent reason, other than indifference on your part, why mine of the 14th lay unopened in your box, and why its troubled, sometimes anguished, often urgent predecessors have gone unreplied to, even unacknowledged, since March. Thomas Mann liked to say that with utter disgrace comes a kind of peace: no need for further striving to keep up appearances! I feel intimations of that peace. And I understand, better than formerly, Ambrose’s letters to the outgoing tide; anybody’s epistles to the empty air.

Now it’s Saturday again, a few hours from the commencement ceremonies which I suddenly have dark misdoubts of. Ambrose is at the hospital with his mother, whose dying suddenly accelerated in midweek… and I need once more to write to you, not only whether you reply or not, but whether or not you even read my words.

Here is what “Monsieur Casteene” told me six days ago, in the voice described in my last: almost too ready with his inside information to be believed, and so confiding that though I cannot refute a single of his details and must admit the total accuracy of everything he recollected (much more than I!) concerning our old connexion, I distrusted him absolutely. I take a deep breath; I plunge in:

The man declares himself to be indeed, though Much Changed, the André Castine who first got me with child thirty years ago in Paris and again two years since at Castines Hundred. He declares that the high-spirited, loving disagreement with his apparently ineffectual father (Henri Burlingame VI), which I so well remembered from 1940, was in fact their ongoing cover throughout the war period for close cooperation, not on behalf of the Japanese and the Nazis — I didn’t ask him about those pre-Pearl Harbor messages to me from the Pacific — but on behalf of the U.S.S.R., whose alliance and subsequent rivalry with the U.S. they foresaw. More exactly, on the ultimate behalf of the Communist party in North America, and to the ultimate end of a Second Revolution in the U.S., which they saw more hope for if the war were less than an unconditional Allied victory.

I simply report the news.

Thus they were involved in attempts to sabotage the Manhattan Project, which they also opposed on general humanitarian grounds. Indeed, Deponent testifieth that his father was vaporised at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on the morning of 16 July 1945, in a last-ditch effort to thwart the detonation of the first atomic bomb: a martyrdom unknown to this day to any but “wife” and son, and now me, and now you. Thereafter, Casteene claims to have been involved in the supply of “atomic secrets” to the Soviet Union in the latter 1940’s and, in the early 1950’s, with the supply of compromising data to Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunters (to the end of “purging the C.P. of leftover liberals from the thirties” in preparation for its “new and different rôle in the sixties,” so declareth etc.). In 1953, a pivotal year, he comes to believe that his father’s beloved project has been misconceived; that political revolutions as such are not to be expected or even especially wished for in the overdeveloped countries at this hour of the world; that Stalinism is as deplorable as Hitlerism; etc. The 2nd Revolution, he decides, in American anyroad, will be a social and cultural revolution in the decade to come (i.e., the 1960’s); the radical transformation of political and economic institutions will either follow it in the 1970’s or become irrelevant. M. Casteene’s personal target date for the whole business, I simply report, is 1976.

Still listening, John? Well: about that same time — I mean the middle 1950’s, while dear old Mann is telling yours truly in dear old Switzerland about the liberating aspect of utter disgrace — Deponent moveth to Maryland and setteth up as an arch right-winger named Andrew Burlingame Cook VI, which name is in fact as officially his from his father as is the name André Castine from his mother. He modifies his appearance (He can do it almost before one’s eyes, but never quite perfectly; then when he “returns” like Proteus to his “true” appearance, that’s never quite what it was before, either!); he pretends to be a blustering patriotic poetaster of independent means; he befriends Harrison Mack, claims distant cousinship to Jane Mack. He ingratiates himself with right-wing political figures in Annapolis, in Washington; he goes so far as to call himself the Laureate of the Old Line State — and is threatened with lawsuit, to no avail, by the actual holder of that post. He affiliates himself in various ways with Mr Hoover’s F.B.I, and Mr Allen Dulles’s C.I.A. That portion of the general public aware of his existence (and both his visibility and his audibility are as high as he can manage) take him for a more or less pompous, more or less buffoonish reactionary. A few — Todd Andrews, for example — believe that underneath the flag-waving high jinks is a serious if not sinister cryptofascist. And a very few—e.g., Joe Morgan, as I believe I reported some six or seven Saturdays past — suspect that in fact his reactionary pose is a cover for more or less radical left-wing activities. But only his son, Henri C. Burlingame VII — and now myself, whom alas he has had to keep too long and painfully in the dark — know that “A. B. Cook” and “André Castine” are, under contrary aspects, the same Second-Revolutionist.

We are not done.

In his latter thirties, Monsieur Castine/Cook researches the history of his forebears — those Cooks and Burlingames alternating back through time to the original poet laureate of Maryland and beyond — and prepares to draft a mock epic called Marylandiad, after the manner of Ebenezer Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor poem. His motives are three: to reinforce his public cover; to gratify his genuine interest in that chain of spectacular filial rebellions; and to introduce “our” son properly to his paternal lineage. His researches are mainly on location at Castines Hundred, and inasmuch as he divides his time, with his identity, between there and the province of the Barons Baltimore, he avails himself also of the Maryland Historical Society — where, we remember, yours truly was first by A. B. Cook dismayed in 1961—and thus becomes acquainted with its then officials, one of whom he will subsequently recommend to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech and later yet connive with John Schott to unseat from Marshyhope.

You are yawning? You shall yawn no longer. “Cook” comes to know Mr Morgan’s background, the unfortunate events leading to Mrs Morgan’s death and Joe’s “resignation” from Wicomico Teachers College: information he will later make use of. Indeed, he discovers in 1959 that it has perhaps already been made use of, in a just-published and little-noticed novel by a young erstwhile Marylander now teaching in Pennsylvania. The plot thickens: Cook draws Morgan out on the parallels between His curriculum vitae and certain events and characters in The End of the Road. He learns that Morgan, a rationalist but nowise a quietest, is indignant to the point of seriously contemplating vaticide (if that term may be extended to cover fictionists as well as poets); what stays his hand is no scruple for his own well-being, for which he cares nothing since his wife’s death, but the possibility that after all the author may be innocent.

Do I have your attention now?

Cook scoffs, but Morgan stands firm; he and you have never been introduced. Despite the undeniable and disquieting parallels, in most ways your fiction doesn’t correspond to the actual events, not to mention the characters involved. Its author is not known to be either a dissembler or a brazen fellow: yet the one crossing of your paths had occurred right there in the Historical Society library, just a few months ago! Morgan, appalled, had recognised you at once; the recognition was apparently not mutual. You worked busily there half an afternoon. With the worst will in the world, Morgan could detect not the slightest indication that you knew who the grim-faced official was who passed by you, ostensibly on errands of business, several times. If he had (so detected), he declared calmly, he’d have done you to death on the spot with his bare hands.

Does Cook find such an unlikely coincidence hard to swallow? Then let him chew on this at-least-as-farfetched: a check of your table immediately upon your leaving it disclosed to Morgan that the subject of your researches was evidently the same as Cook’s own! There lay sundry volumes of The Archives of Maryland; facsimile editions of The Sot-Weed Factor and Sot-Weed Redivivus; divers other primary and secondary texts in the history of 17th-Century Maryland…

Intrigued, our master intriguer volunteers to find out discreetly for Morgan, if he’s interested to know, whether you are guilty or innocent in the matter of your sources for The End of the Road, as he means to approach you forthwith to compare his information on Ebenezer Cooke & Co., and his literary project, with yours. Morgan shrugs: nothing will restore his late wife to him, and you had nothing to do with her demise. As good as his word (sic, sir, sic), Cook drives up into Pennsylvania and invades your undergraduate classroom on pretext of soliciting poetry readings in the area and meeting “fellow Maryland writers”; he distributes self-promoting handouts to your students, who are half amused, half annoyed by the blustering disruption — and after class, evidently in a different humour, he discusses with you the backgrounds and sources of your then two published novels and your work in progress. Returning to Baltimore, he reports to Morgan your claim to have derived the story line of The End of the Road from a fragmentary manuscript found in a farmhouse turned ski lodge in northwestern Pennsylvania. Cook himself is unconvinced: the anecdote is as old as the medium of prose fiction; surely you are pulling his leg, or covering your tracks.

At this point in “Casteene’s” narrative I recall Morgan’s having remarked to Todd Andrews and myself that A. B. Cook had once offered to arrange a murder for him; that he had declined the offer but been enough convinced of its seriousness to believe Cook a genuinely formidable man with underground, perhaps underworld, connexions, the nature of which however was unclear. Had that offer been serious? I asked Casteene now.

He smiled handsomely, almost like André: Such a thing is easy to arrange, my dear, the easiest thing in the world. In fact he had been, let us say, half serious: he was seriously exploring Morgan’s character, as a possible candidate both for the presidency of Tidewater Tech and, perhaps, for a certain role in the Second Revolution. But he had found the man not yet ready for that latter, and was in any case finally disinclined to your doing in, given your then current project. This project he regarded as of sufficient usefulness to persuade him to forgo his Marylandiad in its favour (he was anyhow too immersed in “action historiography” to bother seriously with composition) and bestow upon you his researches. Your Ebenezer Cooke, he declared, like the original sot-weed factor, needed a foil to his gullibility, a counter to his innocence, to heighten the comedy and deepen the theme: he made you a gift of his “cosmophilist” ancestor Henry Burlingame III, together with Captain John Smith’s Secret Historie and the Privie Journall of the first Henry Burlingame. In return, unwittingly, you would provide him with a point de départ for some future counterdocument to assist in the delicate conversion of “our son” to “our cause.”

I conclude. Deponent sweareth that he has had no contact with you since that day in 1959. That he enjoyed your rendering of his material, but on the whole prefers actions to words. He regrets having later had to support ridiculous John Schott against Morgan in the Marshyhope power struggle (it had to do, as what has not, with the preservation of his precious cover), and is gratified at least to have been able to arrange (in his “Monsieur Casteene” aspect, under which he does whatever it is he does at the Farm) Morgan’s invitation to Amherst and subsequent enrollment in the cause of the Second Revolution. Even more, it Went Without Saying, he regretted—

But no: I will not entertain you with the song and dance of this man’s regrets concerning my ordeal since 1940. He professed to be delighted at my new connexion, in whose favour he had been happy to have “A. B. Cook” decline the M.S.U. Litt.D. Further, he made bold to venture that Ambrose’s energetic flirtation with “Bibi,” at the Falls and the Farm, was owing to his unexpected rencontre with his ex-wife. Casteene counselled patience, even indulgence on my part; he would not, for example, in my place, attempt to compete for Ambrose’s favour by dressing beneath my age and dignity…

Speaking of lovers: he trusted I would not mistake his own little arrangement with “Pocahontas” (he tisked his tongue at the outrageous smallness of the world) as anything but a physical-clerical convenience: what passed for his heart, I might be assured, was mine toujours, but he would never again presume any claim upon me after that painful reenactment, in 1967, of our original star-crossed intimacy. We were no longer young, n’est-ce pas? By the projected date of his life-work’s completion he would be nearly 60. And aside from the annotation and publication of those letters of Andrew Cook IV’s — his discovery of which, in Buffalo two years past, he regarded as both the unlikeliest and the happiest coincidence in a life fraught with improbability — he would ask nothing further from me ever.

Here he brightened. “But we haven’t said a word about notre fils! Le Burlingame des Burlingames!”

I stopped him. Indeed, at this point I put an end not only to our interview, but to our remaining connexion. Had the man been unequivocally André (but when was André ever so?) or unequivocally A. B. Cook, or unequivocally neither… But he was equivocal as those letters — which now, upon a sudden, strong, heart-heavy, but unequivocal impulse, I returned to him. Whoever he was, I told him, he was not who he’d been, nor whom I’d loved even as late as two years ago. And whoever, wherever our son was, he was as dead to me as my André, surely in part by my own hand. I did not share what seemed all about me to be an epidemic rage for reenactment. The second half of my life, or third third, I must hope would be different indeed from what had so far preceded it! I had no more to say to him; at this point I would have nothing to say to our son either, a 29-year-old stranger, should he be “restored” to me: such reconnexion must be principally an embarrassment to all parties. As he had observed, I was in love again, no more happily than before, but at least my troubles were of a different sort. Whatever the future held for me, it did not promise to be a recapitulation of the past, and I was prepared to settle for that.

He bowed, kissed my hand. Thus we parted, I trust forever — though I quite expect some version of A. B. Cook to appear at this afternoon’s festivities, disclaiming any connexion with M. Casteene or involvement in the foregoing conversation. The gentleman was not pleased. In particular he bade me reconsider the matter of the letters: if neither our past intercourse nor our son retained importance for me, would I not at least abet in this small way a cause larger than either, the cause of the Second Revolution? In which Henri, if things were managed skillfully, might well play a major rôle?

Bugger your Revolution, I’m afraid I said, and got out of there — that dreadful, spooky Farm, where the chief crop raised is ghosts of the past — and back to the Erie Motel.

And, I wish I could say, back to my understanding and sympathetic Ambrose. But though my lover affirms with each insemination his resolve to marry me once I’m preggers and The Movie Thing is done, this past week has been the hardest of our history. On the Monday and the Tuesday, making the most of the rare sunshine, Prinz shot footage of the Chautauqua Institution, the lake itself, and the vineyard country round about, though Ambrose acknowledges that nowhere do these appear in your writings. Bats figured as prominently as actors, flitting around the Miller Bell Tower, the cupola of the old Athenaeum, and (I ventured to suggest) the belfries of Reg Prinz and Ambrose Mensch. The former had been enchanted by the latter’s passing mention of the obscure, winged ascent of the villain “Harold Bray” at the end of your Goat-Boy novel; and though I can attest that as of where I am therein (halfway through) it is nowhere suggested that that charlatan is Batman, so he seems to be becoming in the film. Prinz himself rappelled down the tower by Monday’s twilight in cape and domino to carry off Bea Golden (aptly cast as your nymphomanic heroine Anastasia) and make threatening squeaks at Ambrose in the role of, near as I can guess, Himself playing the Author dressed as Giles the Goat-Boy: sheepskin vest and a horned helmet borrowed from the Chautauqua Opera Company’s prop room, Wagnerian section.

Perfectly preposterous, of course, and as aggressively unfaithful to the novel as Ambrose endeavours to be to me. I cannot make myself recount his pursuit of “Anastasia,” which, with Prinz’s obvious consent, no doubt even at his instruction, Bea permits, nay encourages, but does not (I believe, who am ready to believe the worst) yet reward. It is All Part of the Movie: but inasmuch as there is no discernible boundary between that wretched film and our lives, Ambrose’s conquest of her, when and if it occurs and whether on or off camera, will be Part of the Movie too, as is my ongoing humiliation. I hate it!

On the Tuesday evening a cast party was organised which culminated in a triumphant fiasco, enlarged the cast by at least one lunatic more, and altered the direction of the movie’s “plot.” Prinz chartered the Chautauqua excursion yacht Gadfly III; caterers provisioned it with bar and buffet; the Baratarians — augmented by musician friends from the resident theatre troupe, all there for preseason rehearsals — piled merrily aboard, and we set out from the institute dock in the last light (swallows, bats, cameras!) for a nautical carouse. Imagine Our Surprise when we discover our skipper for the evening to be Someone We’ve Met Before: no, not André-Castine-Andrew-Burlingame-Cook, at least not apparently, but a chap whom Ambrose tells me I should remember from Harrison Mack’s funeral (my mind was on other things), which Mr Bray attended as a beneficiary of the Tidewater Foundation’s misguided philanthropy.

One Jerome Bonaparte Bray of Lily Dale, N.Y., surely the original of your goat-boy’s nemesis. But your “Harold Bray” is only abstractly sinister, a sort of negative principle. The original, while of a lesser order of magnitude, is ever so much more alarming because he’s real, he’s mad as a hatter, and he is — or was—in charge of the bloody ship!

We suspected something was amiss when an old Volkswagen beetle drove erratically up to the dock a quarter-hour late (the college lad who was the crew had allowed, with a roll of the eyes, as how his skipper “went” more by the sun and stars than by the clock) and, like a little circus car disgorging a large clown, gave vent to a great lanky chap wearing sunglasses, sea boots, a Lionel Barrymore sou’wester out of Captains Courageous, and, of all the landlubberly incongruities, a cloak and kid gloves. We thought him part of the entertainment; the Baratarians cheered, whistled, and straightway dubbed him Batman. So far from replying in like humour, the man seemed particularly offended by the name; he drew his cloak ’round him as he hustled through us to the wheelhouse, then turned at its door to declare in an odd mechanical tone that his name was Captain Bray, and that while as an employee of the ship’s owners he could forbid neither our lawful presence aboard the vessel nor the evening’s debauchery we were clearly bent upon, as the ship’s master he insisted we not address him by that obscene sobriquet, attempt to enter the wheelhouse, or otherwise interfere with his management of the vessel.

We were abashed. The Baratarians assumed he was joking and applauded his speech; he slammed the wheelhouse door and started off almost before the boy could let go our lines. Bea Golden, looking slinky despite her new rôle, wondered around her drink whether he was For Real. Ambrose clapped his brow, took the opportunity to take her arm, and made the connexion: between the chap at her father’s funeral who’d claimed to be doing something revolutionary with computers; the celebrated assemblage of spiritualists at Lily Dale, home of the Fox sisters, near Chautauqua; and that ambiguous humbug villain whom George Giles, Grand Tutor and Goat-Boy, supposes in your novel to be as necessary to himself as Antithesis to Thesis. Prinz hummed, narrowed his view-finding glasses, dispatched an assistant for camera and sound gear.

And so we steam down past the state fish hatchery towards the narrows where Chautauqua—French voyageur spelling of an Indian word supposed to mean “bag tied in the middle”—is tied in the middle by the old car-ferry. Regardless of us merrymakers, our captain is delivering the routine tourist spiel on the ship’s P.A., with what sound like embellishments of his own, in a voice that seems itself pieced together by computer in the days when such artifices were still recognisable. The boat, we are informed, is named after his Iroquois father. All of this was Iroquois country, he declares, and by rights ought still to be, unpolluted by the white man’s DDT and marijuana and purple martins and bats (!)… The Baratarians whistle and turn up the rock music. Bray escalates his own amplifier to full volume: Our elevation is 2,000 feet above sea level, 700 feet higher than Lake Erie. A raindrop falling into Lake Erie, 8 miles to northwest of us, will make its way over Niagara Falls, through Lake Ontario, and up the St Lawrence Seaway to the North Atlantic; one falling into Chautauqua Lake will exit via Chadakoin Creek (a variant English spelling of the same noble Indian word) into the Conewango, the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, then into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, itself a great Bag Tied in the Middle by its “narrows” at the latitude of the equator, where South America once fit into Africa…

Hoots and bravos; louder music. It was to be observed that these two raindrops between them traced the boundary of New France, or Upper and Lower Canada, the latter following the route marked in 1749 by Céloron de Blainville, or Bienville, “discoverer” of Chautauqua Lake, with lead plates bearing the coat of arms of the house of Bourbon, that dynasty deposed by the Revolution to make way for the Emperor Bonaparte…

Curses, muttered Ambrose: foiled again. He had it seems posted overboard one of those bottled epistles he indites from time to time to “Yours Truly” (which in a happier season were declarations of his love for yours truly; God knows what they declare these days, and to whom) on the ebbing tide. This one, he’d believed and hoped, could nowise return to him; now he quite expected it to round Florida and run north on the Gulf Stream, work its way past the Virginia Capes and up the Chesapeake, and Return to Sender on the river shore by Mensch’s Castle.

The liquor flowed; the duel of decibels or battle of the amplifiers continued as we circuited the dusky lower lake and headed back by starlight for the upper. Prinz and Ambrose, therefore Bea, put by their partying (if not the latter two their drinking) to improvise an episode out of the situation. Ambrose briefed Prinz on the characters and plot of your Goat-Boy novel, consulting my more recent if incomplete memory thereof; the object became to lure our Bray into playing yours. For reasons unclear to me, Bea was pressed into service to pantomime a moth or butterfly in distress: to the strains of the pas de deux from Swan Lake, a tape of which fortuitously appeared and was substituted for the rock music, she fluttered fetchingly about the foredeck, in full view of the wheelhouse. Prinz went into his Batman/Count Dracula act to menace her, with much baring of teeth and flapping of arms; Ambrose into his Giles-cum-Siegfried antics, loping about in postures of attempted rescue or countermenace.

Well, the woman is not without talent; ditto Prinz. My lover’s abilities lie elsewhere than in ballet-pantomime. The Baratarians fell to, some pressing the ship’s lights into service, others manning the camera and microphones, still others miming outraged or horrified bystanders. At length the poor hapless Whatever-She-Was was caught: to no avail her pathetic wing-beats; her averted face only exposed the more her slender throat to Prinz’s fangs, which now with great rollings of his eyes to the wheelhouse he made ready to have at her with, maugre the bleats and caperings of her would-be saviour (who stands en garde with fountain-pen for foil). The music soars. We repass the car ferry, reenter the S-shaped narrows.

Now, I myself had a drop or two in, depressed and anxious over Ambrose’s late behaviour, the whole unswallowable “Casteene” business, my frustrating attempts to communicate with you. But if what I and the others saw next was the effect of some common delirium tremens, the camera shared and recorded it. From the wheelhouse suddenly sprang—sailed, flew, whatever! — Captain Bray: an astonishing feat, as if his Phantom-of-the-Opera cloak were the wing membranes of a flying squirrel. With a frightful buzz that carried through Tchaikovsky like the artillery at the end of his 1812 Overture, the man traversed as if in one bound the half-dozen metres from wheel to foredeck. Prinz was knocked heels over head, his eyeglasses were sent flying; Ambrose stood open-mouthed in mid-caper; the Baratarians’ consternation was no longer feigned. For by some second marvellous gymnastic our mad captain rebounded from the deck to the forward railing with Bea Golden under one arm, drew his cloak about her, and stood holding onto the bow flagstaff and threatening us with further sound effects from his repertoire. Incroyable!

All this in three seconds, John, by when Poor Butterfly got her breath and, far from doing a Fay Wray faint, screamed bloody murder and laid into her fetcher-off with proper hysteria. Confused, he set her down; backed off a step (I mean up, onto the rail again) when valiant Ambrose hurried to her rescue—i.e., snatched her arm and yanked her away from there.

Who is piloting Gadfly III this tumultuous while? Why, no one at all: Joe College stands agape with the rest of us, and having traversed, during the above, the nether bend of the S, with no one to swing her to port our craft ploughs now smack into Long Point, where the state park is. I mean literally into the point, which must have considerable water right up to shore. There is a mighty bump; now we all go pitching forward, with shouts and shrieks and tinkle of gin-and-tonic glasses. We are a miniature Titanic—but in lieu of iceberg chips there are maple leaves fluttering to the deck, from the trees into which our bow has driven as into an arbor; and instead of sinking we are as hard aground as if dry-docked, or beached like that ferryboat restaurant in which, a century ago, my Ambrose initiated this miserable “4th Stage” of our affair.

Bar and buffet are all over the decks. In creepy silence we pick ourselves up out of Swedish meatballs and spilt soda water: the fall has cut Tchaikovsky off in mid-climax; the ship’s engines gurgle to a stop when the crewboy finally betakes himself to the throttles. There are exclamations among the passengers regaining their feet, some cries from far down shore (the state park is closed at night: the only such depopulated stretch around the lake, I think), the whine of a couple of outboard-motor boats — determined fishermen — heading our way. Otherwise silence, echoed as it were by the absolute motionlessness of the ship and made spookier by the illuminated leafy canopy over our bow.

Remarkably, no one seems injured. Reg Prinz finds his eyeglasses and calls for his cameraman. Ambrose is comforting Bea excessively where they have fallen together against a spilt stack of folding chairs. I myself had clutched the railing in amazement at Bray’s behaviour and at sight of the fast-approaching shore, which evidently no one else remarked, and so I only laddered my panty hose against a stanchion at the crash, but did not fall. Therefore I was also perhaps the only one who saw Bray spring into the bower of branches a moment after, and hang there easily awhile by one hand like a — well, what: gibbon? fruit bat? Tarzan of the Apes? — surveying the chaos with great frightened eyes which he shaded with the other hand. By the time folks are on their feet he has dropped noiselessly to the deck and stands blinking as if about to weep or swoon. Prinz approaches him cautiously, cameraman at his elbow. Men with electric torches are running toward us along the shore now, calling ahead…

But I shan’t write, not to you; only summarise. The Gadfly was fast; when reversing her engines failed to pull her off, it was decided to leave her there till morning, when the situation and damage to the hull could be better assessed. (She was “kedged off” next day without difficulty, as fortunately undamaged, except cosmetically, as ourselves.) Meanwhile, state police cars, park police cars, sheriffs’ cars, ambulances, volunteer firemen, and hosts of Chautauquans assembled to witness and assist: we were handed down ladders from bow to beach — rather, from bow to woodland path — questioned, examined for injuries, and led through the flashing lights and milling curious to a bus sent over from the institution (The Spirit of Chautauqua) to fetch us, finally, home, after Prinz and Ambrose had got all the footage — I should say mileage — they wanted from the scene.

All this, I daresay, you will have read in your Daily Chautauquan or the Buffalo press, together with the news that while no charges were placed against “Captain” Bray — who plausibly maintained that he had sprung to save Ms Golden from what he took to be assault by a drunken passenger — he was peremptorily sent packing. We were apologised to, offered another excursion gratis at our pleasure (no takers), instructed to send our dry-cleaning bills to the little company for reimbursement. It was explained that the vessel’s safety record was thitherto unblemished; that Bray was not a regular employee but a part-time standby pilot called on only for unscheduled occasions when the regular skipper was unavailable, et cetera.

What was not likely in the news reports is that Prinz, and Ambrose too, were delighted with their episode and fascinated by their Mr Bray — who, when he learned that we were Only Acting, wept with humiliation at his disgrace (I think he had cause to be indignant at us, madman or no). Indeed he went upon his knees to ask our pardon, in particular Ms Golden’s, for whose sake he disquietingly declared himself ready to kill or die. And when these effusions were accepted by A. & P. (if not by Bea, who uncharitably bade him Fuck Off Already and called for a drink), he declared himself egregiously misled about our characters and intentions by “agents of the anti-Bonapartist conspiracy” and begged us to permit him to make amends. Specifically, in the name of our mutual benefactor His Majesty the late Harrison Mack, he hoped we would call upon him next day in nearby Lily Dale, where he invited us to photograph a ruin infinitely more consequential than that of a paltry excursion boat: he meant the failure of “LILYVAC II,” his “computer facility,” and with it the wreck of his “Novel Revolution” (or revolutionary novel, I never got it straight which), sabotaged by those same conspirators who had undermined the Tidewater Foundation and the world’s best hope for — here he looked worshipfully at Bea — a new Golden Age.

Certifiable lunacy! Which of course enraptured Ambrose, especially the “computer-novelist” business. Back at the Athenaeum at last, well past midnight, I tumbled straightway into bed and sleep. Before my lover joined me (and woke me for my nightly seeding) he and Prinz had made plans for an overland excursion on the morrow to Lily Dale, to Wrap Up That Part of the Story on location before returning to Maryland.

Thither we trekked next day, through heavy clouds and chilling rain, up into the hills to that smaller version of Chautauqua Lake and seedier replica of the institution: just the four of us, plus the cameraman and one all-purpose assistant. Bea Golden had at first refused, having suffered Transylvanian nightmares till dawn; she was at last, alas, persuaded by her shipboard hero, whose actions of the previous evening had clearly scored him a few points. Ambrose even invited Prinz to record their conversation in the car; he offered to reenact with Bea, at our destination, “the Author’s growing ascendancy over the Director in their symbolic rivalry for the Leading Lady.” Prinz declined with a tiny smile and shake of the head.

We wound through tacky lanes of spiritualists’ cottages, each with its shingle advertising “readings,” to a little farm overlooking Cassadaga Lake, just below a Catholic retreat house on the hilltop. Goats grazed in the meadow: footage. Bea thought the kids just darling, how they cavorted and banged heads. Ambrose cavorted with them to amuse her, till the nannies moved him off. Footage.

Ex-Captain Bray came out to greet us, at once obsequious and somehow menacing. I don’t like him! Now that the conspiracy had turned Drew Mack and the Tidewater Foundation against him (for which, he muttered ominously, They Shall Pay), and his services were no longer desired by the Gadfly company, his sole support must be the modest income generated by those dairy goats: their milk he sold to a commercial fudge maker in Fredonia, their hides to artisans on the nearby Seneca Indian reservation, who turned them into “Spanish” wineskins for sale at Allegheny ski resorts. Upon such shifts did the Revolution wait! And it must break our hearts to see to what pass LILYVAC II had come, sabotaged by Her whom he had judged of all humans the least corruptible. Et cetera. We exchanged surreptitious glances. He took us to the computer facility, at one end of the milking shed. Footage. Absolutely crackers.

Ambrose presumed, innocently, that our host was acquainted with the fictional George Giles, Goat-Boy and Grand Tutor, if not with the author of his adventures on “West Campus.” Dear me, sir, you are not held in universal admiration! First M. Casteene’s casual report of his offer to arrange your assassination for Joe Morgan, and now such a diatribe as should have warmed my heart if I truly bore you a grudge for not acknowledging these confessions written at your own solicitation. But surprising, yea alarming, as was the vehemence of Bray’s fulmination (you may thank us for not telling him you live within daily sight of the Gadfly; he believes you a Buffalonian tout court), it was upstaged by yet one more Uncanny Coincidence that came to light in course of it. To summarise — for why should I write? — it very much appears that Bray’s trusted “assistant” (she seems to’ve been his sort-of-lover too, repugnant as that notion is) in his woozy radical-political-literary-mathematical-ecological enterprises, who he came to feel was seduced by “anti-Bonapartist” elements into sabotaging his computer, and whom I gather he then assaulted in some fashion, was a certain hippie-yippie young woman from California by way of Brandeis U. named Merope Bernstein. Not only does our Bea Golden, with a Thrill of Horror, now understand her to be the same girl fetched hysterical to the Remobilisation Farm in May by her far-out friends (who thought she was “freaking out” on an overdose of something ingested back at their Chautauqua pad), but… ready? Brandeis, he said? Bernstein, Merope? From California originally? Omigod, cries Bea (and staggers for support, not to her Reg Prinz, but to my Ambrose): It’s Merry! I didn’t even recognise her! What did he do to her? Why didn’t she tell me who she was? I haven’t seen her in six years, since she was fifteen!

At length we got it sorted out: In an earlier incarnation, Bea Golden was Jeannine Bernstein, wife of a minor Hollywood character actor, himself much married and divorced. Bray’s allegedly perfidious assistant (but now he was calling her Morgan le Fay — altogether bonkers!) was this chap’s daughter by a prior mating. Hence…

Jee-sus! Ambrose exclaims.

Your wicked stepdaughter ha ha! Mr Bray cries feverishly to the recoiling Bea, with whom he is clearly smitten and whom he fears he has alienated. Footage. He didn’t hurt Ms Bernstein, he swears now; he only sort of spanked her for ruining his life’s work; put a bit of a scare into her, don’t you know. After all, she did save his life once; no doubt she was led astray in good faith; oh, they shall pay! He shall not rest till he has made it up to her — to Bea, for whom now he openly declares his adoration — for having chastised her ex-stepdaughter, however deservedly. They must go together, at once, to the Farm: he is a friend of Mr Horner there; he will declare to Ms Bernstein in her former stepmother’s presence that though with the best of intentions she has blighted his life and at least postponed the New Golden Age, and though he durst never trust her again with the LILYVAC programme, he harbours her no ill will and in the blessed name of her (ex-)stepmother forgives her his irreparable betrayal.

I summarise. With the greatest difficulty we got out of there — never did see the famous “printout” Bray claims to have been spoilt by Ms B. — back to Chautauqua; thence, Ambrose and I on the Friday, back Home. I do not envy Bea Golden her new admirer! Bray declares he will Put Things Right for her sake; that he will follow her to Fort Erie, to Maryland, anywhere she goes, let the goats fend for themselves; that with her aid and inspiration he may yet solve the Riddle of LILYVAC II and get the 5-Year Plan back on schedule before the “Phi-Point” of his life…

Ambrose finds him both frightening and fascinating: the Phi-Point, did he say? Point six one eight etc.? Bea finds him merely frightening, and threatens legal action if he attempts to follow her across either Peace Bridge or Bay Bridge. She was never close to Mel Bernstein’s daughter, she tells us now, whose mother of course had the custody; she thinks it possible Merry doesn’t even recognise her with her new name, any more than she Bea recognised her; but she cannot account for the coincidence. Ambrose cannot either, and worries for the ladies’ safety.

Castine, Castine, I assure him: there is the very god of Coincidence. Bea has but to place herself under his ubiquitous protection, as “Pocahontas” has evidently placed herself under “M. Casteene’s.”

He will thank me, says Ambrose, not to speak of his own prior incarnation. Jee-sus, what a week! And though it included that dismaying reencounter with Marsha (Did I see what he’d meant? Those thin-plucked eyebrows; the cold eyes under them; the mean turn of her jaw; the featureless regularity of those features he’d once thought attractive, then come to find empty of character, and now saw as the very stage mask of Vindictiveness… I said nothing), not to mention the grave tidings from Magda re his mother — despite all, it had been a long while since he’d felt so potent…

Oh really.

Yes, well, he meant that way too, and we’d see, we’d see. But what he really meant was Musewise: the Perseus story was clipping along in first draft; he was delighted with the conceit, equally with the execution; it made him feel Writer enough to more than hold his own with Reg Prinz, whose movie he thought he now quite understood and rather relished. He took my arm (we were on the United flight down from Buffalo to Baltimore): no doubt it had been a rough week for me, on more than one front. Aye, said I. He daresaid there would be rougher weeks ahead. O joy, said I. What he meant was that his new “ascendancy,” whether real or set up by Prinz, would doubtless provoke an escalated retaliation. He told me frankly then what was pretty obvious anyroad: that while he regarded our connexion as Central, and central to it his desire not only to impregnate but to wed me straightway thereupon, he was determined by the way to make conquest of Bea Golden if he could. It was a kind of craziness, no doubt (Yup, says I), a playing of Prinz’s game. Just for that reason he meant to do it; beat the man at his own game; out-Prinz him.

Hum, says I. You could help, you know, says he. Forget it, says I: I’m sorry your mum’s dying; I’m happy you’ve done with that Marsha Blank, and happier yet your muse is singing along. If that gives you a leg up on Prinz and his nutty movie, well and good. But I shan’t pat you on the head for making a fool of me, with Bea Golden or generally; and to suggest I pander to your billygoatery is bloody sick if you ask me.

He liked that: put a great load in me directly we got back to 24 L, another this morning early before he took off for the hospital. But last night it was Bea, Bea, Bea. The Original Floating Theatre II is in Cambridge for the weekend; B.G. was to have flown down yesterday to open in their revival of The Parachute Girl, but stayed behind to do her “Minstrel Show” at the Remobilisation Farm. She’ll arrive today, worse luck, if Mr Bray hasn’t flown away with her; the rest of the Baratarians too, to recommence the movie after Marshyhope’s commencement. Big things are planned for the 4th of July, but Ambrose hopes to Make His Next Move even before then.

Andrea King Mensch is indeed terminal. Ambrose is taking it hard. La Giulianova is Right There, of course and thank God, ministering to her and being very real and strong and Mediterranean about last things. I must hope — and a slender hope it is — that the Litt.D. business this afternoon will put my friend in mind of our old connexion, in better days, on the Ad Hoc Committee for Honorary Doctoral Nominations.

Time now to robe for the ritual consummation of that committee’s work, which I approach with considerable misgivings — indeed, in a flat-out funk that I’ve tried in vain to smother under these many pages. I haven’t even mentioned that John Schott and Shirley Stickles, when I stopped at my office yesterday, were thick as thieves in hers, and saluted me stiffly indeed, very stiffly.

Hm!

Must run. Jee-sus!

G.

T: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Marshyhope commencement debacle, and its consequences.

Office of the Provost

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Marshyhope State University

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Friday, August 8, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Severn River, Md.

August 13, 1969

Dear Henry,

Round Bay is a handsome widening of the Severn five nautical miles above Annapolis, itself some 125 up the Chesapeake from the Virginia Capes. Off Round Bay, on the river’s southwest shore, is Little Round Bay, in the center whereof lies a small high wooded pleasant island named after Napoleon’s exile place in the South Atlantic, some 7,000 sea miles hence.

This local St. Helena Jane Mack is of a mind to buy for our weekend exiles, as more comfortable and convenient than my Bloodsworth Island, and more private and spacious than my cottage on Chautaugua Road, not far away. Imagine an island of some dozen acres within twenty miles of both Washington and Baltimore! It is presently owned by acquaintances of Jane’s, with whom she is negotiating purchase, and who have kindly permitted me to tie up at their dock for the night. As a honeymoon house and vacation retreat it will quite do, though it is too much in view of the mainland (half a mile off all around, and thickly peopled) to serve your and my other purposes. We shall hold onto our marshy, inconvenient “Barataria.”

From a week of dolce far niente aboard the Statendam—a sort of final trial honeymoon itself, altogether successful — we flew home yesterday, Jane to return to her métier and truest passion, Mack Enterprises; I to take delivery in Annapolis of her birthday gift to me: the sturdy diesel yacht from whose air-conditioned main cabin I write this. All day the builders and I put Baratarian through its sea trials, as successful as Jane’s and mine; tomorrow or next day I shall return it to the boatyard for certain adjustments and modifications (I feign a sudden addiction to deep-sea fishing) to be made while I check out our human Baratarians. On the ides of August, Napoleon’s birthday, I shall fly briefly north to see how things go at Lily Dale and Fort Erie. I had considered a side trip to Chautauqua as well, to confer with my quondam collaborator there; but I now believe he knows nothing of you and is without interest in the Second Revolution. On or about St. Helena’s Day (the 18th) I shall go up to Castines Hundred (our ancient caretakers have retired; I have engaged new ones through the post), whence I shall return, ere the sun enters Virgo, for a more considerable trial run: the first real test of our operations for the coming academic year. Will I find you there, Henry, poring through our library like your ancestors, determining for yourself what I have been at such futile pains to learn, to teach?

Andrew IV never did return there, except in dreams and letters. The next to last of his lettres posthumes was written aboard Lafitte’s schooner Jean Blanque in “Galvez-Town, or New Barataria,” on August 13, 1820—five years and a week since its predecessor. Like yours truly, he is about to commence on the ides of August another journey: one by his own admission “more considerable but less significant” than the one he ought to make instead, to Castines Hundred. Still curst by what I had thot long exorcised, he confesses to Andrée, I shall sail 9,500 miles in the wrong direction, from Cancer down to Capricorn, to “rescue” against his will a man the world had better not seen in the 1st place, rather than fly north to the seat & bosom of my family, beg your pardon for my errancy, put by for good & all my vain dream of 2nd Revolution & Western Empire, and spend content in your arms what years remain to me.

He refers, of course, to Jean Lafitte’s expedition to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena — the expedition which, in his last, he had hoped to expedite before the island’s defense could be organized. What has he been at for half a decade?

Rushing to Plymouth from Tor Bay [so he begins this letter, with a 4)?(, a HSUR, a rush, as if no more than a page-turn separated Bellerophon from Jean Blanque, 1815 from 1820], I found a fast brig just departing for Bermuda, where I took a yet faster packet to New Orleans. By mid-September, a full month ere Cockburn reacht St. Helena with his prisoner, I was back in Conti Street with Jean Lafitte, asking for news of you & the twins.

There is, we know, none. I could only conclude my letters & entreaties were unwelcome at Castines Hundred; else the Mississippi, whose navigation from Great Lakes to Gulf of Mexico was secured now to the U. States, had borne you long since hither.

And why does he not straightway bear himself thither, to make certain those “letters & entreaties” ever reached their address? ’Twas not the current of the Father of Waters I shy’d from breasting, he declares, not quite convincingly, but the current of your disfavor, both of my long absence [three years by then, eight by “now”!] and of what I had accomplisht. Where was our free nation of Indians, Habitants, & liberated slaves? Even New Orleans I found more “American” than I had left it, and with the Union at last secured & at peace — tho set fast forever, as wise men had fear’d, with a standing Army & Navy — I could feel the country catching its breath, as ’twere, before plunging to the western ocean. There was no time to lose, or all would be lost.

But the Baratarians have more practical business on their minds. The Italian captains — Vincent Gamble, Julius Caesar Amigoni, Louis Chighizola — ever more barbaric and less “political” than their French counterparts, have openly returned to buccaneering and are already embroiled with U.S. gunboats and Federal Grand Jury indictments. “Uncle Renato” Beluche, covertly supported by the New Orleans Mexican Association (merchants and lawyers in favor of Mexican independence from Spain for reasons of trade), is running the Spanish blockade of Cartagena with provisions for Bolivar’s patriots; his new mistress is rumored to be pregnant by the Liberator himself. And the brothers Lafitte, while still interested in the St. Helena venture, are too busy with “Louisiana Projects” of their own to pursue it immediately: the reorganization of the French-Creole Baratarians at Galveston and the assistance of the new wave of Bonapartist refugees pouring into New Orleans and Champ d’Asile. One look at their charts of the island persuades even Jean and Pierre that while St. Helena’s precipitous sea cliffs, limited anchorages, and existing fortifications make it all but impregnable to armed assault, even to covert approach, it can be readily infiltrated under some pretext or other, regardless of the defenses. Wherever there are local fishermen, Jean declares, there is “local knowledge” of ways to land and take off items, for a fee, without the inconvenience of passing through customs. Let the emperor have a taste of confinement while his place is prepared; it will dispose him the more toward America.

Most immediately interested in Andrew’s plan (to rescue Napoleon; he does not mention the Louisiana Project) are Nicholas Girod, the mayor of New Orleans; Jean Blanque, the state legislator; and a curious fellow named Joseph Lakanal — former regicide, defrocked priest, Bonapartist refugee, and newly appointed president of the University of Louisiana. Andrew spends the next year and a half employed jointly by them and by Jean Lafitte as a kind of liaison, project manager, and investigator of rival schemes — of which, he comes to learn, there are a great many.

Napoleon and his party reach St. Helena and are established temporarily at The Briars and then permanently at Longwood; the amiable George Cockburn is replaced in 1816 with a stricter warden, Sir Hudson Lowe, who sees rescue plots even in the planting of green beans instead of white in the kitchen garden (white being the color of the Bourbon livery, green the Bonapartist); the emperor begins his memoirs. James Madison is replaced in the presidency by his protégé Monroe; Beluche and Bolivar sail from Haiti with seven little vessels to commence the liberation of South America; Mine de Staël, back at Coppet, tries to mend a marital quarrel between her guests Lord and Lady Byron, and is charmed (as are-Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, von Humboldt, and the Duke of Wellington) by Jérôme’s cast-off American wife, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, now 31 and touring Europe while her son “Bo” attends school in Maryland — especially when, “out of loyalty to her name,” Betsy declines an invitation from Louis XVIII himself. News of this gesture precedes her return to Baltimore late in the year and disposes Joseph Bonaparte in her favor. Having experimented with rented estates on the Hudson palisades and in Philadelphia, Joseph has built elaborately at Point Breeze, on the Delaware near Bordentown, New Jersey, and is buying vast tracts of upstate New York to house his newest mistress, a young Pennsylvania Quaker. He invites Betsy and Bo to visit; there, early in 1817, she remeets the man who’d been dispatched too late by Napoleon to dissuade Jérôme from contracting any “entangling amorous alliances” in America, and who later had agreeably shown the young bride and groom around Niagara Falls.

Andrew is there on business (so to be sure is Betsy, whose regnant passion is to establish the legitimacy of her son): General Lallemand — one of Napoleon’s party aboard Bellerophon who was exiled to Malta instead of St. Helena — freed from his detainment, has lately arrived at Champ d’Asile with the news that Andrew’s “Tor Bay” plan may have succeeded too well: according to reports reaching Malta from St. Helena, the emperor is so taken with the publicity value of his “martyrdom” that he would now refuse rescue if offered it! Girod and Blanque want Joseph’s opinion on this subject, as well as his blessing upon their scheme: to design a vessel especially for the rescue, commission “a suitable captain and crew” to man it, and raise a house in New Orleans for Napoleon’s residence. They also suspect their colleague Lakanal of unreliability, and want Joseph’s estimation of him.

On the first matter the ex-king of Spain has no opinion, though he reports with pride (and, it seems to Andrew, relief) his brother’s refusal of his own offer to join him on St. Helena. But on the character of Lakanal he is vehement: the man is as desperate a charlatan as the “Comte de Crillon”; very possibly in the pay of Metternich or the Bourbons to implicate Joseph in a rescue scheme that will make his presence embarrassing to the U.S. government. As Andrew reads Joseph’s character, the man is truly but mildly sympathetic to his brother’s situation and does not object to its ameliorating, but has no political ambitions himself: he is primarily concerned with his enormous private pleasures and fearful of anything that may imperil them. His brother Lucien’s suggestion, for example, that the three of them conquer Mexico, appalls him; he wishes he were not the focus of every harebrained scheme to exploit his famous name and Napoleon’s exile. Betsy thinks him a coward, like her ex-husband. If she were a man, she declares privately to Andrew, she would have had the emperor in America long since; it wants only a bit of audacity! To Joseph, Andrew offers to expose and discredit Monsieur Lakanal in a way that will publicly absolve Joseph of any connection with the rescue plan. He volunteers further, if the business is executed to Joseph’s satisfaction, to serve him as he is serving Girod and Blanque (he does not mention Lafitte): as monitor, evaluator, and coordinator of all rescue proposals, encouraging whichever seem likeliest and seeing to it that the others come to nothing. For not only will ill-managed attempts increase the difficulty of a well-managed one, but the emperor may as likely be kidnapped by some exploiter or well-meaning crank as rescued by his friends or (what Betsy fears, having heard such rumors at Mme de Staël’s) secretly poisoned by the British to end the expense of confining him and the risk of his returning to power in Europe.

Joseph agrees, and authorizes Andrew in this capacity; their conversation turns to lighter matters. Did Mr. Cook know, Joseph asks with amusement, that while his brother was on Elba, the aforementioned Mme de Staël had descended upon himself in Geneva with information of a plot on Napoleon’s life? He had been breakfasting with Talma, the tragedian; to punish Germaine for the interruption he had had the would-be assassins arrested by the local police instead of authorizing her, as she wished, to carry her warning directly to the emperor. Magnificent lady! Who also was reported to be in fast-failing health.

Andrew notes that each mention of Mme de Staël brings a blush to Betsy Bonaparte’s cheeks. He tests the observation: does the Comte de Survilliers (so Joseph has named himself in New Jersey) happen to recall meeting in Bordeaux a fellow novelist named Consuelo del Consulado, whom Andrew had recommended also to Mme de Staël? Joseph does not; Betsy’s face is aflame.

In the following months he sees her several times more, at her or his instigation, in Bordentown or Baltimore, and both confirms this curious connection and improves his acquaintance. He had imagined Mme B. might be having or planning an affair with Joseph, if only to further her son’s interests; now he perceives her to be, despite her beauty, quite devoid of sexuality. Or almost so: she reddens so astonishingly when, in August, he reports to her the news of Germaine de Staël’s death on Bastille Day last, that he is moved to exclaim: “Madame, one could believe that you have either un secret suisse or un suisse secret!” “If I do, sir,” Betsy replies, “it shall remain, like Swiss bank accounts, a secret.”

But she is not offended; on the contrary, in “this slough, this sink, this barbarous democratical Baltimore,” she is entertained by Andrew’s tales of the Revolution, of his intrigues with John Henry and Joel Barlow. And she is so pleased, as is Joseph Bonaparte, by his handling of “l’affaire Lakanal” that when Joseph engages him in the fall to serve as his clearing agent for all rescue proposals, Betsy volunteers her assistance as well “in any noncompromising way.”

Lakanal had had to be managed in three stages. Joseph’s opinion of him, which Andrew promoted from hearsay to firsthand knowledge, was enough to persuade the embarrassed trustees of the university to ease him out of office, and Girod and Blanque to ease him out of their plan. Andrew then advised Lakanal to petition Joseph Bonaparte directly, and, “as one close to that worthy,” told him how best to couch his appeal: the ex-king, he declared, is still secretly flattered to be addressed by his former title, and even enjoys conferring Spanish distinctions upon his favorites, though he cannot legitimately do so; at the same time, his two new passions are the Indians of his adopted country — even his “wilderness mistress” is named Annette Savage — and cryptology. If Lakanal could appeal to all these interests at once (every one of which, excepting Miss Savage, is in fact foreign to Joseph), while specifying that the emperor’s brother was not himself to have anything to do with the rescue, he could be assured of a favorable reading and an invitation to Point Breeze.

Lakanal dutifully prepares and mails a packet to Bordentown, which the U.S. Secret Service — tipped off by Andrew Cook “on behalf of [his] employer, Joseph Bonaparte”—promptly intercepts and passes on to President Monroe. It contains a cipher designed to make French and English messages look like prayers in Latin, a vocabulary of the Caddo language, a request for 65,000 francs for expenses to bring Napoleon to Louisiana and a Spanish marquisate if he succeeds, a catalogue of north Louisiana Indian tribes, and a vow that “le roi luimême” shall have nothing to do with rescuing the emperor. Monroe transmits his thanks to Point Breeze for Joseph’s loyal cooperation; for a time there is consternation in both the American and the French ministries of state; then the President dismisses the “Lakanal Packet” as the work of an utter and impotent madman. The secret service and Andrew agree to exchange information on other rescue attempts so that appropriate measures may be taken, and Andrew turns Lakanal off with a scolding for having been “so vulgarly beforehand” with that request for money, “as who should demand a boon ere it can be freely given.” The would-be conspirator is reduced to dirt farming.

With Girod and Blanque’s blessing then — and Jean Lafitte’s, who with a thousand followers is now established in Galveston and back to large-scale privateering — Andrew moves for the next two years between Louisiana and New Jersey. More bad news comes from St. Helena: convinced that Napoleon will dictate memoirs forever, Count de Las Cases has arranged his own deportation from the island, smuggling out with him the manuscript of his Memorial de Sainte Hélène; he quotes the emperor as declaring, “If Christ had not died upon the Cross, He would not have become the Son of God.”

Nevertheless, a dozen rescue plans go forward. Two freebooters of Philadelphia, Captains Jesse Hawkins and Joshua Wilder, propose to fit out a brace of clippers and a landing craft, register them for a tea voyage to Canton, and make for St. Helena instead. Stephen Decatur, the hero of Tripoli, together with Napoleon’s exiled General Bertrand Clauzel, proposes a similar scheme, worked out in knowledgeable military detail: the general has his eye on Mexico. In Britain, a certain Mr. Johnstone, admirer of both Napoleon and the late Robert Fulton, is testing a submarine for the purpose; and a Mme Fourès in Rio de Janeiro, who had been the emperor’s mistress in Egypt in 1798, is devoting her fortune to a plan involving several large sailing ships each carrying a small steamboat for fast night landings. The wealthy Philadelphian Stephen Girard, formerly a sea captain from Bordeaux, who helped Madison finance the War of 1812, is interested; so again is Jean Lafitte, who now proposes a quick operation by the whole New Baratarian navy. Girod and Blanque, impatient, have ordered construction of their ship in Charleston, South Carolina, safely away from their base, and are raising the imperial dwelling. Even Betsy Bonaparte acknowledges privately to Andrew that she has on her own authority approved an offer from the King family of Somerset County, old friends of hers and Jérôme’s, of the use of their remote mansion in the Eastern Shore marshes as a temporary hideout for the emperor until the excitement of his rescue shall have died down. She herself plans another extended visit with her son to Europe, where in course of frankly ingratiating herself with the other Bonapartes, she intends to enlist their aid in the project.

Andrew has his hands full. Joseph cautiously inclines to some combination of the Girod-Blanque scheme (as the most practical of the nonmilitary ones) and that of his friend Stephen Girard, whom he seeks not to disoblige, and who like Mayor Girod aspires merely to relieve Napoleon from so isolated and humiliating a confinement. But he will permit no expedition actually to sail until he is assured that his brother wants rescuing. He wonders vaguely whether their mother and their sister Pauline, both now luxuriously established in Rome, have better information on that score. In January of 1820, however, his Point Breeze mansion inconveniently burns to the ground, and he is too busy rebuilding it (on an even larger scale) to make inquiries of them.

Most of the proposals Andrew can deal with by simply refusing Joseph’s subsidy: thus the Hawkins-Wilder and the Decatur-Clauzel projects. A few he scotches by tips to the appropriate governments (Mr. Johnstone is arrested in the Thames and his vessel confiscated for examination by the Admiralty) or the planting of exploiters-by-delay, who like medieval alchemists turn the credulity of their patrons into gold (Mme Fourès’s steamboats need repeated and expensive redesigning). Bad luck and bad management take care of some others: a tornado destroys half a dozen of Jean and Pierre Lafitte’s vessels; Commodore Decatur is killed in a duel with a fellow officer at Bladensburg; the Champ d’Asile colonists are too busy saving themselves from crocodiles and dysentery to save their fallen emperor from St. Helena.

There remain the schemes that Joseph favors. Andrew delays them with overpreparation and cross-purpose (it is his idea to have Nicholas Girod’s Séraphim built inconveniently in Charleston, and to send Stephen Girard’s Philadelphia vessel to New Orleans to await sailing orders) until his own plan is ready, which his dealings with all these others have convinced him is likeliest to his purpose: at an appropriate moment, he will disappear from Bordentown, slip off secretly with Jean Lafitte on the fastest of the Baratarian vessels (the schooner named, as it happens, Jean Blanque), and do the job himself.

What job, exactly? Nota bene, my son: to no one more than to the author of a long-term project does the double edge of Heraclitus’s famous dictum apply: he cannot step into the same stream twice because not only the stream flows, but the man. The Andrew Cook who writes these lines, Henry, is not the same you last graced with your company in February; nor is the Andrew Cook who wrote on this date in 1820 the Cook of 1815. Events have at least thrice modified his original ends and means.

At first he wants merely to snatch Napoleon from the Allies and fetch him to Louisiana, let the international chips fall where they may. Then, in the spring of 1819 (Mississippi and Illinois have joined the Union; Alabama is about to; Monroe is buying Florida from Spain; Ruthy Barlow has joined her husband and Toot Fulton in the hereafter; the Atlantic has been crossed by steamship; the U.S.Canadian border is established at the 49th parallel), Betsy Bonaparte makes a curious report from Baltimore: she has it from friends in Rome that a German-Swiss clairvoyant, one Madame Kleinmüller, has become spiritual advisor to Napoleon’s mother (“Madame Mère”) in the Palazzo Rinuccini and has gained increasing influence over both the old woman and her brother, Cardinal Fesch. On January 15 last, according to Betsy’s sources, no less an authority than the Virgin Mary disclosed to Mme Kleinmüller, in a vision, that the British have secretly removed Napoleon from St. Helena and replaced him with an impostor; his jailers oblige his aides to write as if their master were still among them, but in fact he has been spirited by angels to another country, where he is safe and content! Mme Mère and Cardinal Fesch are altogether convinced. Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese is not: in a letter to Joseph soon after, she confirms Betsy’s report, deplores their mother’s gullibility, and declares her suspicion that Mme Kleinmüller is a spy for Metternich. Andrew himself dismisses the vision but changes his plan to include the planting of just such an impostor, to facilitate Napoleon’s removal, delay the search for him, and forestall international turmoil until the Louisiana Project is ready.

And he is interested in Betsy’s sources; the more so when, a few months later, she follows this report with another, also subsequently verified by Pauline: so entirely are Napoleon’s mother and uncle under that clairvoyant’s sway, they reject as forgeries letters from the emperor himself, in his own hand, complaining of his failing health and requesting a new doctor and a better cook! Persuaded that Napoleon is no longer on St. Helena, they have sent out a party of incompetents as a blind; Fesch has taken to discarding the emperor’s letters, and Mme Kleinmüller to forging happy ones from “some other island.” Pauline is furious. Andrew, still wondering about Betsy’s information, asks disingenuously whether she knows that a penitential procession by this same Cardinal Fesch was described ironically by Mme de Staël in her novel Corinne. Mme B. duly blushes.

Andrew then inquires, on a sudden impulse: has she considered remarrying? Crimson, she asks him why he asks; it is her son she cares about, not herself. Perhaps Andrew has his employer in mind? If so, forget him: Joseph is a sot, a lecher, and a coward, like Jérôme; the only male Bonaparte with spirit is the one on St. Helena. And does she know, Andrew next wonders aloud, that in some quarters there is doubt as to the validity of Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, who in any case has no wish ever to see her husband again and would welcome a divorce? I do, replies Betsy, and Andrew divines with excitement that she has anticipated the next modification of his scheme, of which therefore he prudently says no more on this occasion. What better way for her to secure young Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte’s legitimacy — even his possible accession! — than to marry the emperor himself, as a condition of rescuing him? And how better for Andrew to finance the Louisiana Project than with the combined fortunes of the Bonapartes and one of the wealthiest families in Maryland?

In my mind & in my cyphers, Andrew writes, I had for convenience number’d these alternatives A-1, A-2, & A-3, as they all involved rescuing Napoleon & fetching him 1st to the Maryland marshes, thence to New Orleans, & thence west to our future empire. Two obstacles remain’d: the difficulty of finding someone able enough at mimicking the Emperor to fool his own wardens, at least for a time; and the possibility, reconfirm’d in June of this year (1820) by Mme B., that Bonaparte preferr’d to consummate his “martyrdom” on St. Helena. A letter from Baron Gourgaud, intercepted by Metternich’s agents, declared that the Emperor “could escape to America whenever he pleased,” but preferr’d confinement like Andromeda on that lonely but very public rock. His young son loom’d large in these considerations. “’Twere better for my son,” Betsy quoted Metternich quoting Napoleon from Gourgaud’s letter. “If I die on the cross—& he is still alive — my martyrdom will win him a crown.”

To deal with these obstacles Andrew devises Plan A-4, with which he ends this letter. But first, nothing having come of his indirect inquiries, he asks Betsy frankly how she hears of these things before Napoleon’s own family, especially now that Mme de Staël — who had always been au courant on such privy matters and might imaginably have been in correspondence with Mme Bonaparte — is dead.

She blusht & reply’d, She supposed I had meant to say “before the rest of Napoleon’s own family,” whereof she consider’d herself as rightful a member as any not of the Corsican’s very blood. As for her sources, she would say only that I might rely upon their veracity, & that I was not the only American player at the Game of Governments.

She then apprised me of her intended move to Europe in the Autumn, to reacquaint her son, now 15, with his relatives. While there she would determine & report to me the truth of Napoleon’s circumstances & desires — for no one need tell her that Metternich might have fabricated that “intercepted letter” to discourage rescue attempts. And she would advise me then whether to proceed with the Girod/Girard plan or bid Joseph order it cancel’d, as against his brother’s wishes.

Much imprest by her determination & her canny sense of the world, very rare in so handsome & handsomely fixt a woman, I thankt her. But privately I thot of any such report from her, what she thot of Metternich’s; & so I determined Jean & I should make ready & sail as early as possible, not apprising Mme B. or Joseph or any soul else of our journey until its object was attain’d, when they would surely put their houses & other facilities at our disposal. On the Solstice, therefore, I vanisht from Point Breeze; on my 44th birthday I was in Galvez-Town, where I found Jean bored with his New Barataria & ready for adventure. The more so when I described & demonstrated to him what, after much soul-searching, I had resolved upon: Plan A-4.

It is, briefly, to determine Napoleon’s sentiments regarding rescue, not in Rome or Paris or London, but on St. Helena itself, by sailing directly to that island, slipping ashore with the aid of that “local knowledge” Lafitte is so confident the fishermen will sell him, and infiltrating Longwood. Then, if the emperor should in fact prove more interested in inventing le bonapartisme on St. Helena than in forging a new empire in the American southwest, to drug and abduct him secretly from the island, leaving an impostor in his place. Once whisked to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he could not return to St. Helena without publicly pleading for reincarceration, which would reveal the inauthenticity of his “martyrdom.” They would offer him either a life of anonymous freedom or the directorship of the 2nd Revolution, with or without Betsy Patterson Bonaparte as his consort.

But what impostor?

That was the question that had most vext me since A-2, our ancestor writes. Napoleon was 7 years my senior, several inches shorter than I, and gone rather potbelly’d, but the fact was I could take him off to a T, down to his Corsican accent, his walk, & his table-manners. I could not hope to fool his aides, whose consent & cooperation therefore I would have to enlist (I had a plan for doing so); but I was reasonably confident I could fool the British, whom Bonaparte had rarely dealt with in person even before his health declined — which last circumstance I could also employ to aid the imposture. And so, having searcht in vain for alternatives, and daring wait no longer lest Mme B.‘s people or someone else’s get to St. Helena before me, I shall sail with Jean two days hence, on the Emperor’s name-day, to take his place in captivity until (the final article of A-4) I can with the assistance of Napoleon’s suite feign illness & death, and then disappear among the fishermen till Jean comes back to fetch me from a disarm’d St. Helena.

’Tis a considerable risk: if I am found out, either before or after N.‘s removal, the British will clap me in jail forever; and my rescue depends on Jean’s good seamanship, good faith, & good luck. But if all goes per plan, by the time the meteors next shower out from Perseus (which are showering over Jean Blanque’s yards as I pen this letter), I shall have died again & been re-resurrected, to take my place beside the man whose place I took, at the head of our 2nd Revolution.

Will you be there with me, long-lost wife? Whether or no, may you hear from me next August of the success of another plan, whereof I have spoken not even to Jean Lafitte, & cannot yet speak to you: I mean Plan B, and bid you adieu.

He closes and, on August 15, sails. I likewise, Henry, and on 8/15 will fly in pursuit of an “A-1” of my own: not without a “B” up my sleeve, or in my bonnet, learned from our forebear’s final lettre posthume. And when I take my place, dear son, at the head of our etc., will you be with me?

Whether or no, this time next week you shall hear again from

Your father

E: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fifth and final posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: Napoleon “rescued.”

Castines Hundred