Letters

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T: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Third Stage of her affair with Ambrose Mensch. Her latter-day relations with André Castine.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday, 3 May 1969

My dear B. (or, Dear Diary),

Thanks, I think, for not responding to my last two “chapters.” You understand why, even as I made to slip last Saturday’s into the drop box (such odd-shaped ones over here!), it occurred to me to post it on the Monday by certified mail instead: having seen fit to comply with your request, I need only some confirmation that these letters are being received, and by the addressee. Your “John Hancock” on the receipt is my “Go now and sin some more.”

I should prefer not to. I am not heartily sorry—au contraire—but I am heartily weary of things sexual. By Ambrose’s count (leave it to him) he had as of April’s end ejaculated into one or another of His Ladyship’s receptacles no fewer than 87 several times since the month — and the “Second Stage” of our love affair — began. More precisely, since the full Pink Moon of 2 April, when the onset of my menses so roused him that I had to take it by every detour till the main port of entry was clear (A’s analogy, tricked out with allusions to American runners of the British blockade in “our” wars of 1776 and 1812). Which comes, he duly reported two days ago, to three comes per diem.

Thank God then it was Thursday, I replied, and April done, for my whole poor carcase was a-crying Mayday. The cramps were on me again, breasts tender, ankles swollen, I was cross and weepy: all signs were (he’d be glad to know) that douche and cream and pessary had withstood his “low-motile swimmers.”

As if I’d spoken by chance some magic phrase, my lover’s humour changed entirely. He removed his hand, rezipped his fly, asked me gravely, even tenderly, was I quite sure? I was, despite the irregular regularity of it: by next night’s full moon — which he told me was the Flower Moon — his overblown blossom would close her petals for a spot of much needed rest. He kissed me then like (no other way to say it) a husband, and left my office, where, not long before, our committee had delighted John Schott by proposing after all, alas, A. B. Cook for the Litt.D. (We could delay no longer. What’s more — but I shall return to this. Would you had said yes! Failing that, would it could be Ambrose!) That day, like a played-out Paolo and Francesca, we made love no more, just read books.

Yesterday too. Sweet relief! A. stopped by early; let himself through the front door of 24 L before I was up, as he sometimes does. I took for granted it was the usual A.M. quickie, as he calls it, and as I had indeed begun flowing that night like a little Niagara, I rolled over with a sigh to let him in the back door and begone. But lo, he was all gentle husband again: had only stopped to ask could he fetch me a Midol? Make tea? He jolly could, and jolly did. I was astonished, mistrustful. Some new circus trick in the offing? Or l’Abruzzesa… No, no, he chided: merely in order to have “run in a month’s glissando the whole keyboard of desire” (his trope), he hoped we might add one last, 88th connexion to the score we’d totted up between Pink and Flower Moons; but he vowed he was as pleasantly spent as I by our ardent April, and would be pleased to shake less roughly, and less often, his darling bud in May.

So I blew him, whilst our Twining’s Earl Grey was a-cooling. He even tasted different: something has changed! Last evening we made sea trout au cognac together, spent the P.M. (a longie) with books and telly; then we slept together, like (quoth he, after Donne) “two-sevenths of the snorting Sleepers in their Caves.” Slept, sir, so soundly that Yosemite’s Tunnel Sequoia, which I read this morning fell last night, could have dropped on 24 L and never waked us. Now he’s back to his strange screenplay; I to my novel-of-yours-of-the-month. Our “2nd Stage,” it would appear, is over; not without some apprehension I approach the 3rd, whatever in the world it may prove to be. Meanwhile, I read and bleed contently — and am informed by my tuckered lover that, this being the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, phials of the blood of martyred St. Januarius in the reliquary of the Naples duomo are bubbling and bleeding too. Tutti saluti!

The book I’m into, and look to be for some while yet, is, per program, your Sot-Weed Factor. But how am I to bring, to the enterprise of reading it, any critical detachment, when I am busy being altogether dismayed by the Cooke-Burlingame connexion and the Laureate of Maryland business in your plot? Ambrose and the meagre Marshyhope library have confirmed the existence of an historical Ebenezer Cooke in the 17th and 18th Centuries, his ambiguous claim to laureateship, and his moderately amusing Sot-Weed Factor poem from which your story takes off. And Cook Point on the Choptank, of course, is not far from Redmans Neck. But John (if I may now so call you?): what am I to do with these “coincidences” of history and your fiction with the facts of my life, which beset, besiege, beleaguer me in May like Ambrose’s copious sperm in April? Never mind such low-motile hazards as my opening your novel at random to find a character swearing by “St. Januarius’s bubbling blood”: I quite expect to meet Ambrose himself on some future page of yours; perhaps even (like Aeneas finding his own face in Dido’s frescoes of the Trojan War) Yours Truly bent over the provostial desk with him in flagrante delicto…

No more games! You know, then, of an original “Monsieur Casteene,” Henry Burlingame, and Ebenezer Cooke: what I must know is their connexion, if any, with “my” André, and with those nebulous name-changers at Castines Hundred in Ontario, and with that alarming Annapolitan to whom we’re surrendering our doctorate of letters. Not to mention… my son! I have chosen to trust you as an author; I do not know you as a man. But I know (so far as I know) that I am real, and I beseech you not to play tired Modernist tricks with real (and equally tired) people. If you know where André Castine is, or anything about him, for God’s sake tell me! If A. B. Cook and his “son” Henry Burlingame VII are pseudonymous mimics of your (or History’s) originals, tell me! I believe “our” Cook to be dangerous, as you know. Am I mistaken? What do you know?

I feel a fool, sir, and I dislike that not unfamiliar feeling. It isn’t menstruation makes me cross, but being crossed and double-crossed.

Damn all of you!

By which pronoun I mean, momentarily I presume, you men. Not included in last Saturday’s roster of my former beaux was the one woman I’ve ever loved, my “Juliette Récamier”—a French New Novelist in Toronto whose meticulous unsentimentality I found refreshing after Hesse and my British lovers — and before it was revealed to be no more than increasingly perverse and sterile rigour. Yet I recall warmly our hours together and rather imagine that, had she not long since abjured the rendering of characters in fiction, she alone of my writer-friends might have got me both sympathetically and truly upon the page, with honour to both life and literature, love and art. Lesbian connexions have not appealed to me before or since: I mention my “Juliette” for the sake of completeness, and at the risk of your misconstruing her (as Ambrose does) into allegory. It is men I love, for better or worse, when I love; and of all men André, when he sees to it that our paths cross.

I think I pity the man or woman whose experience does not include one such as he: one to whom it is our fate and hard pleasure to surrender quite. We are not the same in our several relationships; different intimacies bring out different colours in us. With Jeffrey (and Hermann, and Aldous, and Evelyn, and the rest, even “Juliette”) I was ever my own woman; am decidedly so even with Ambrose, except that the lust we roused in each other last month truly lorded it over both of us. To André alone I surrendered myself, without scruple or consideration, almost to my own surprise, and “for keeps.” Nothing emblematic, romantic, or sex-determined about it; I have known men similarly helpless, to their dismay, in some particular connexion. It is an accident of two chemistries and histories; while my rational-liberal-antisentimental temperament deplores the idea as romantic nonsense, there’s no dismissing the fact, and any psychological explanation of it would be of merely academic interest.

Toronto: I spent the summer and fall of 1966 there, lecturing at the university, consoling myself with “Juliette” (their novelist in residence) for the loss of my husband, and waiting in vain, with the obvious mixture of emotions, for some word from André, who I assumed had arranged my lectureship. November arrived, unbelievably, without a sign from him. On the 5th, a Saturday, unable to deal with the suspense, I drove out to Stratford with my friend to see a postseason Macbeth at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre. Between Acts III and IV as I stepped into the lobby for intermission, I was handed a sealed envelope with my name on it by one of the ushers. I was obliged to sit before I could open it. The note inside, in a handwriting I knew, read: “My darling: Dinner 8 P.M., Wolpert Hotel, Kitchener.”

No signature. That little town, as you may know, is along the dreary way from Stratford to Toronto. I have no memory of the rest of the play, or of the ride back. My friend (who like Juliette Récamier had the gift of inferring much from little, and accurately, in matters of the heart) kindly drove me to that surprising, very European old hotel in the middle of nowhere, tisking her tongue at my submissiveness but declaring herself enchanted all the same by the melodrama. She waited in the lobby whilst I went up the stairs, literally trembling, to (what I’ve learned since to be) the improbably elegant German dining room on the second floor. The hostess greeted me by name. I saw him enter, smiling, from across the room, unmistakably my André: handsomer at fifty than he’d been as a young man! My heart was gone; likewise my voice, and with it my hundred questions, my demands for explanation.

“Your friend has been informed. She understands,” he assured me in Canadian French, as he helped me into a chair — none too soon, for the sound of that richest, most masculine of voices, the dear dialect I’d first heard in Gertrude Stein’s house, undid my knees. “I urged her to have dinner with us, but she wanted to get back to Toronto. Charming woman. I quite approve.”

I am told we had good veal and better Moselle: André prefers whites with all his meats. I am told that I was not after all too gone in the head to protest the impossibility of our dining and conversing together as if no explanation, no justification were needed. I am told even that I waxed eloquent upon the outrageous supposition that his smile, his touch, the timbre of that voice, made me “his” again despite everything, as in the lyrics of a silly song. Where was our son? I’m told I demanded. What could possibly justify my being quite abandoned but never quite forsaken, my wounds kept always slightly open by those loving, heartless letters? And finally — I am told I asked — how was I to get home that night, when this absurd rendezvous was done and I’d regained my breath and strength?

What I did not question until later, to André’s own professed surprise, was his authenticity. Appearances and mannerisms are easily mimed: did I need no proof, after all those years, that he was he? Well, I didn’t; didn’t care (at the time) even to address so vertiginous a question. If, somewhile later, I began to wonder, it was because for the first time since our parting he had come to me in the role of himself: had he posed as another, I’d never have doubted at all.

We stayed at the Wolpert until Monday, scarcely leaving André’s room except for meals. He was obliged, as I stood about dazed, to undress me himself. When he first entered me — after so many years, so many odd others — I became hysterical. From Kitchener he took me back to Castines Hundred, where I enjoyed something of a nervous collapse. It was as if for twenty-five years I had been holding my breath, or an unnatural pose, and could now “let go,” but had forgot how. It was as if — but I can’t describe what it was as if. Except to say that for André it was as if our quarter-century separation had been a month’s business trip: a regrettable bother, but not uninteresting, and happily done with. Good to be back, and, let’s see, what had we been discussing?

Sedatives helped, prescribed by the Castines’ doctor. Arrangements were made at the university to reschedule my lectures after my recovery. André too, I learned (now Baron Castine since his grandfather’s death), had been briefly married — a mere dozen years or so, as it were to mark time “till my own marriage had run its course”—and had sired “one or two more children,” delightful youngsters, I’d love them, off in boarding schools just then, pity. Had I truly borne no more since ours? Dommage. Now that chap, our Henri, yes: chip off the old block, he: more his grandfather’s son, or his “uncle’s,” than his father’s: at twenty-six a more promising director of the script of History than either of them at his age, busy redoing what he André had spent half a lifetime undoing. Crying shame he wasn’t at Castines Hundred then and there: it was high time we approached the question of revealing to him his actual parentage…

Tranquillisers. And where might the lad be? Ah, he André had hoped against hope that I might have had some word from him: the boy was at the age when certain of his predecessors had revised their opinion of their parents, and was skilful enough to discover them for himself. Last André had heard, Henri was underground in Quebec somewhere, playing Grandpère’s nasty tricks on the Separatists, who took him for their own. So at least he’d given out. Before that he’d been working either with or against the man he understood to be his father, down in Washington. But his track had been lost, just when André much desired to find it. Of this, more when I was stronger, and of his own activities as well: a little bibliography of “historical corners turned” that he was impatient to lay before me, “like the love poems they also are.”

He had of course followed with close interest my own career: he commended my articles on Mme de Staël (whom however he advised me now to put behind) and my patience with my late husband Jeffrey’s later adulteries. He informed me, in case I should be interested, that Jeffrey had been infertile if not quite impotent after the 1940’s, but had honoured paternity claims against him rather than acknowledge his infirmity. My essay on Héloïse’s letters to Peter Abelard, he said, had been heartbreakingly sympathetic, yet dignified and strong as poor Héloïse herself. Had I read any good books lately?

By the beginning of the new year I was, if not exactly recovered (I never shall be), at least “together” enough to return to the university and to “Juliette,” with André’s approval — which I hadn’t sought — and with three other souvenirs, two of which I had sought.

The first was that promised account of his activities since 1941. On that head I am sworn to secrecy; you would not believe me anyroad. But if even a tenth of what he told me is true, André has indeed “made history,” as one might make a poem — and to no other end! Little wonder I have difficulty accepting any document at all, however innocuous, as “naive”: I look for hidden messages in freshman compositions and interoffice memoranda; I can no longer be at ease with the documentary source materials of my own research, which for all I know may be further “love poems” from André. A refreshing way to view Whittaker Chambers’s “pumpkin papers,” or Lee Harvey Oswald’s diary! And both enterprises, I need not add, had kept him away, “for her own protection,” from me as well as from the woman he’d married “as a necessary cover” at that aforementioned turning point in his life. (He’d also been fond of her, he acknowledged, even after “her defection and subsequent demise.” I didn’t ask.)

The second souvenir was the news that our son had been raised to believe himself an orphan, the son of André’s “deceased half brother and sister-in-law!” What’s more, it now turns out (read “was then by him declared”) that he did indeed have a half brother, quite alive, “down in the States”—or half had a brother, or something. “All very complicated,” he admitted: the understatement of the semester. And his “necessary ruse” (for the boy’s own security, don’t you know) bid fair to backfire; for the evidence was that our son had located either this half brother or his semblable, accepted him as his father, and was doing the man’s political work, the very obverse of André’s own.

And, pray, what was that work? For André (since 1953) it was “the completion of his and his family’s bibliography”: the bringing to pass within his lifetime, in North America at least, that Second Revolution which, in his father’s lifetime, had been thwarted “by Roosevelt and World War II.” Did he mean an out-and-out political revolution, like the French, the Russian, the original American? Well, yes and no (André’s reply to everything!): that’s what his father, Henry Burlingame VI, almost unequivocally had meant, and had failed like so many others to bring about. What he André had in mind was something more… shall we say, revolutionary? Never mind. Immediately, his task was to make an ally of our son, by the most complicated means imaginable, which I shall return to. Suffice it here to say that “our” first problem in that line was the question whether, left to himself, the boy would spend his maturity working for or against his “parents.” If for, then we should reveal ourselves to him without delay; if against, he should be left in his present error.

Mightn’t it depend, I managed to wonder, on who those parents were? André smiled, kissed my hand: Absolutely not.

The third souvenir I took without knowing it, either during my recovery or in the weeks thereafter, when André would drive over to Toronto or I revisit Castines Hundred, with or without “Juliette.” I was well into my forties, John: a widow beginning a new life in the academy, much shaken by my history and slowly rebuilding after my “collapse.” I had learnt that I still loved André enormously, but no longer unreservedly. I believed what he reported to me, but suspended judgement on his interpretations and connexions of events, his reading of motives and indeed of history. I was in fact no longer very interested in those grand conspiracies and counterconspiracies, successful or not. I understood that I was his when and as he wished; I would do anything he asked of me — and I found myself relieved that he didn’t after all ask that I marry him, and/or live with him at Castines Hundred, and/or devote myself to his ambiguous work. It was therefore disturbing, in subtle as well as in the obvious ways, to discover myself, in the spring of 1967, once again impregnated!

Given my age and recent distress — and the prompting of “Juliette,” who had already left her menses behind — I was inclined to believe myself entering the menopause. By the time my condition became undeniable the pregnancy was well established, and I had not seen André for at least two months. I was not disposed to tell him about it, much less seek his advice or help: I spent some time verging upon relapse; then got hold of myself and set about to arrange the abortion. “Juliette” scolded me: it was the father’s child, too; he had the right to be consulted, and to be permitted to assist if our judgements concurred. Only if they did not should I do on my own as I saw fit. For her part, she thought it would be charming for “us” to bear and raise the child; she’d always wanted to be a father.

André appeared straight off, of course, somehow apprised of the situation (I had ceased to be curious whether “Juliette,” or half the world, was in his confidence). Had he wished me to carry, bear, and raise the child, I should certainly have done so. As he graciously deferred to my wishes in the matter, I asked him without hesitation to find me an abortionist willing and able to deal with so advanced a pregnancy.

Not surprisingly, he knew of one. Just across the Niagara from your city, in the little town of Fort Erie, Ontario, is an unusual sanatorium financed in part, so André told me, by the philanthropy of my friend Harrison Mack, with whom André just happened to be acquainted. Things could be arranged with the supervising physician there, a competent gentleman. I would be distressed, by the way, to hear that Monsieur Mack’s spells of delusion had become more frequent and, one might say, more thorough since Jeffrey and I last visited him in ’62: one wondered if it were not some long-standing attraction to me that led him to fancy himself British?

I reminded André (we were driving down the Queen Elizabeth Way) that I was only half British; he reminded me that George III had been scarcely that. Did I know the Macks’ daughter, the film starlet “Bea Golden”? I did not. Just as well, inasmuch as she was recuperating under an assumed name, at this same sanatorium, from abortion-cum-delirium-tremens-cum-divorce-cum-nervous-breakdown. André himself, he volunteered, did not know the Mack family socially; but their son Drew was a coordinator of the Second Revolutionary Movement on American college campuses (indeed, the sanatorium, unknown to its administrators, was a training base for such coordinators); André’s “brother” was a familiar of the Macks; and André himself owned stock in Mack Enterprises.

Really?

Quite. Ever since the days of Turgot and the physiocrats — upon my article on whose connexion with Mme de Staël, his compliments — his family’s income had been from sound investments in the manufacturers of dreadful things: Du Pont, Krupp, Farben, Dow. The drama of the Revolution would be less Aristotelian, he declared, its history less Hegelian, never mind Marxist, if the capitalists did not finance their own overthrow. “We” had bought into Mack Enterprises when they got into defoliants and antiriot chemicals. Did I know that Harrison Mack, Senior, the pickle magnate, had in his dotage preserved his own excrement in Mason jars? And that his son “George III” had begun causing his to be freeze-dried? Freud had things arsy-turvy: there was the pure archival impulse, not vice versa! Did I know, by the way, the Latin motto of Mack Enterprises?

I did not, and was not to learn it for some while, for just here the present importunes to soil past and future alike. I was no stranger to clinical abortion; the “sanatorium” was peculiar (so had been the one in Lugano) but not alarming; the doctor — an elderly American Negro of whom I was reminded by the nameless physician in your End of the Road novel — was stern but not discourteous. I do not hold human life to be sacred, my own included — only valuable, and not always that. To have borne and raised that child would have been an unthinkable bother, an injustice to the child itself under the circumstances, an unreasonable demand on André’s part — which of course he did not make. I resist the temptation to say, in sentimental retrospect, that with all my heart I wished he had made exactly that unreasonable demand. But half my heart, one unreasoning auricle at least…

Instead, as I recuperated next day from the curettage, he made another. I was still groggy with anaesthesia; an important question had occurred to me just before our conversation on the Q.E.W. had been interrupted by our arrival at Fort Erie; I wanted urgently to recall it now, and I could not — would not, alas, until too late — even when that finest of male voices asked his pauvre chérié whether she remembered an historian named Morgan, formerly of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, currently president of a little college down that way endowed by Harrison Mack?

She did: he had invited her to a visiting lectureship there, which invitation she had declined.

“He has invited her de nouveau,” André proudly informed me. “And this time she must accept.”

Must she now. And why should she exchange the civilisation of Toronto’s Yorkville Village and Bay-Bloor district for what had impressed her as the, let us say, isolated amenities of Tidewater Farms and vicinity? Eh bien, for the excellent reason that while we had lost one child, we had, if not regained, at least relocated another. Henri was alive and well! And doing the Devil’s work with his “father” in Washington, D.C., so effectually that if he were not checked there would very possibly be no Second Revolution at all in our lifetimes; whereas, were he working as effectively for “us,” things might just possibly come to pass by “our” target date, 1976. Perhaps I remembered André’s own dear father’s spanning with thumb and forefinger the easy distance from D.C. across the Chesapeake to the marshes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, whence he had hoped to infiltrate and undermine the bastions of capitalist imperialism (or their infiltrators and underminers, depending on whether one credited the declared intention or the consequences of his actions)?

Tearfully — though just then D.C. suggested to me neither District of Columbia nor direct current, but dilation and curettage — I did remember those nights of love and happy polemic at Castines Hundred in 1940, while Europe burned.

Then I was to understand that a certain secret base in these same marshes, not very far from Marshyhope State University College, was the eastern U.S. headquarters for the Movement: Maryland and Virginia were peppered with their secret bases; that’s why ours was safest there. From the vantage point of a visiting professorship at Marshyhope, I could observe and reacquaint myself with Henri, at first anonymously as it were, and then, if all went well…

His plan will keep till next Saturday’s letter: it was as baroque as the plot of your Sot-Weed novel promises to be (at the time I said “circuitous as Proust,” and André kissed my forehead and replied, “Voilà ma Recherche, précisément”), which for all I know may be itself a love letter from him. God knows it bristles with his “signals”! Did you write it? I grow dizzy; grew dizzy then, no longer just from Sodium Pentothal.

But when the time came I went, with a sigh and no false hopes, as I would have gone to the University of Hell for my novelist of history, had his plot and precious voice demanded. Adieu, chère “Juliette”: you I traded — when André bid me au revoir for the last time to date, a few days and much further instruction later — for unfortunate Mr. Morgan, mad King Harrison, contemptible John Schott… and Ambrose Mensch.

Who has filled me full, if not fulfilled me, as I’ve filled these pages Like she-crab or queen bee after mating season, I luxuriate, squishy and replete, in this sexless interval. May it last a few days more!

What have I forgotten? That I remembered, too late, who it was I’d met on the day Joe Morgan mentioned Turgot and the physiocrats in the library of the Maryland Historical Society in 1961: our nominee-by-default for next month’s doctorate, for whom Schott even now will be at composing a treacly citation. I last remet him three months ago, at poor Harrison’s funeral, with… “his” … “son.”

Vertigo! Who is whose creature? Who whose toy? Help me, John, if you have help to give a still-dismayed

Germaine

P.S. Whilst City College, Colgate, Harvard, Illinois — yea, even Oneonta, even Queens — are torn asunder (per program?), all is uneasy calm at Marshyhope. More interest here in Derby Day than in Doomsday!

I: Lady Amherst to the Author. More trouble at Marshyhope. Her relations with the late Harrison Mack, Jr., or “George III.”

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

10 May 1969

Mon cher (encore silencieux) B.,

I write this — sixth? eighth? — letter to you once again from my office, once again more or less besieged by the “pink-necks.” Shirley Stickles wonders why I do not dictate it to her; I wonder, not having heard from you on the then urgent queries in my last, why I continue to write, write, write, into a silence it were fond to imagine pregnant. And I know the answer, but not what to make of it.

A difficult season, this, for Shirley Stickles. She cannot understand (I cannot always either) why the students who seize and “trash” Columbia, extort ransom for stolen paintings from the University of Illinois, force the resignation of the presidents of Brown and CCNY, commit armed robberies at Cornell, and more or less threaten MSUC, are not even expelled and sent posthaste to Vietnam, far less put to the torture as she recommends. And the sudden transvaluation of Ambrose Mensch, whom she despises, in the eyes of John Schott, whom she adores, baffles and troubles her like yesterday’s unsainting by Pope Paul of Christopher, Barbara, Dorothy, et alii.

What has happened is that my lover (so he remains, more tender and solicitous than ever, though our respite from sex is of a week’s duration now) has for the second time come to the rescue, more or less and altogether cynically, of Marshyhope, and so further endeared himself thereby to our acting president as to lead that unworthy to wonder aloud to me this morning, in S.S.‘s presence, whether, “if it should happen that Mr Cook is unable to accept our invitation,” we mightn’t extend it after all to Ambrose! Schott trembles now, you see, for the success of his Commencement Day exercises, so vulnerable to disruption, when the state comptroller will be present to accept our maiden doctorate of law. Much as his instincts (and ex-secretary) warn him not to trust Ambrose, with Cook’s consent he would “sacrifice” the Litt.D. — which, like the doctorate of science, has small political utility — to insure the peace of the ceremonies and, incidentally, to bring Reg Prinz’s cameras back on campus.

They were the instrumentality of Ambrose’s triumph yesterday. The week has been unseasonably warm here, more like midsummer than like the gentle Mays of my (and your Ebenezer Cooke’s) Cambridge. The students, impatient to get out of their clothes and onto the ocean beaches, lolled and frolicked in the quad with Frisbees, guitars, transistor radios, and sun reflectors, ever more restless and boisterous as the week went on. Drew Mack’s disciples in the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (“Marshyhope Maoists” is Ambrose’s term) scolded them daily through bullhorns for not emulating their brothers and sisters to the north and west. The usual list of nonnegotiable demands was promulgated, the ritual denunciations made of the administration (all fairly just, in this case, but not different from those being lodged against the ablest college officials in the land), the de rigueur student-faculty strike proclaimed. But in such sunshine, with the sparkling Choptank so close at hand and the season’s first Ocean City weekend coming on, who wanted to be cooped up in an occupied building? Besides, it was reported that a bona fide film company was arriving in Cambridge, complete with actors, directors, and cameras, and might visit the campus en route to “location” farther down-county. If the weather held, we all agreed, we would probably be spared.

Alas, yesterday dawned cool, windy, overcast; at noon it began to drizzle, though the forecast for the Saturday remained fair. It is our ill fortune, under the circumstances, that while the majority of our students, being from the immediate area, go home on weekends, the activists cannot conveniently do so, being most of them from “Baltimore or even farther north.” In short, enough support was mustered from the bored and frustrated to threaten a second takeover of Tidewater Hall, this one determined to “succeed” where the first, a fortnight since, had failed. And again we administrators, our number augmented by Ambrose and Mr Todd Andrews, debated whether calling in the state police would intimidate or aggravate our besiegers. Most of us were confident that Drew Mack and his comrades would welcome the provocation as a chance to rally moderates to their cause, especially if the troopers could be incited to swing truncheons or make arrests. Schott and Harry Carter wondered nevertheless whether a firm, quick, “surgical strike”—the academic expulsion and physical removal from the campus of all the known organisers of the rising — was not our last hope of avoiding embarrassment in June.

The rain stopped, but the sky remained cloudy, the air chill. Ambrose then proposed that Reg Prinz and company be invited at once, as a diversion, to do certain on-campus footage more or less called for by his screenplay, which was flexible enough to include, at least tentatively, impromptu performances by the student activists themselves. The move might buy us time for the weather to clear; the medium being cinema instead of television news reportage, there would be no particular provocation in the presence of the cameras. And the rumour could be circulated that the filming would continue over the weekend at Ocean City (there is boardwalk “footage,” I understand, in your book Lost in the Funhouse, which I’ve yet to read; Prinz is apparently working it into the film).

Schott and Carter, while they had no strong objections to this stratagem, had no great confidence in it either, not having met Prinz except by the way at Harrison Mack’s funeral last February. But I had got, if scarcely to know him, at least somewhat to appreciate Prinz’s peculiar, unaggressive forcefulness and inarticulate suasion, during my stay at Tidewater Farms, where he was a special sort of visitor. And so while trusting the man would be like trusting a wordless interloper from outer space, I could second Ambrose’s proposal, from my own experience, as more likely than it might seem. Mr Andrews, who also knew the chap slightly, concurred. We were given shrug-shouldered leave to try it.

Have you encountered Mr Reginald Prinz in the flesh by this time, I wonder? And are you apprised of his odd notions about making a movie from your work? As it is that curious personality, and by extension those curious notions, which made Ambrose’s plan successful (and make our presence here today mainly precautionary), I shall digress for a space on that head, and at the same time complete for you the Story of My Life Thus Far.

Of a woman widowed by cancer, whose worse fate it subsequently was to be twice remarried to apparently healthy men and twice rewidowed by wasting diseases, Freud somewhere facetiously remarks that she had “a destiny compulsion.” The term haunts me. I seem to myself afflicted with at least three separate compulsions: to fall in love with (and more often than not conceive by) elderly novelists; to fall in love with and conceive (and be dismissed) by André Castine; and, like Freud’s patient, to wait upon the terminal agonies of lovers who do not fit those categories. That Jeffrey, whose unspeakable cancer I’ve spoken of, was a legitimate lord, and Harrison Mack, to whom I now come, a self-fancied monarch of the realm, makes me tremble at André’s half-legitimate baronetcy, not to mention Ambrose Mensch’s nom de plume! I left Toronto for Marshyhope in August ’67 at André’s bidding, and to some extent to do his inscrutable work: when I should come face-to-face with the Enemy (his “half brother” A. B. Cook) and our son — an encounter I was not to arrange myself — André would deliver to me certain letters he had discovered, written by one of his ancestors, which had radically altered the course of his own life. I was to publish them as my own discoveries in the Ontario or Maryland historical magazines, where Henri would come across them, etc., etc. The strategy would be madness if it were anyone else’s; may be madness even so. In any case, though I saw my son, unequivocally, three months nine days ago today (and have not been myself since), I have seen no letters. For all I truly know to the contrary, André may be dead or crazy — may have been since 1941! Since my visit to Fort Erie, as I explained in my last, I have resisted the need to try to comprehend that man and our relation — though he or his palpable semblance could still summon me in midsentence, and I would put by pen, paper, professorship, Ambrose, and all and (not without a sigh) hie wearily himward.

I wrote ahead to the Macks and received from Jane a crisp but courteous invitation to be their guest until I found lodgings. She also confirmed André’s report of her husband’s decline since ’62, and hoped my conversation might amuse him. But except in his ever less frequent intervals of true lucidity, she warned (when he knew he was Harrison Mack, who in his madness fancied himself George III), and his ever more frequent intervals of second-degree delusion, as it were (when he fancied himself George III mad, fancying himself Harrison Mack sane), I must be prepared to hold onto my own sanity, so entirely did he translate Tidewater Farms into Windsor Castle, or Buckingham Palace, or Kew, or Bath. Only her deliberate and entire immersion in business affairs, for which she had found she had talent, preserved Jane’s reason. She declared herself sorry to hear of my own bereavement — but I could hear envy in her phrasing, and I sympathised. She kindly sent a car to fetch me from Friendship Airport in Baltimore to her office at the Mack Enterprises plant in Cambridge, where I admired — a shade uneasily, I confess — her extraordinary physical preservation, whilst she completed her forewarning of what I must expect out on Redmans Neck.

There Harrison was gently but absolutely confined, in a kind of ongoing masquerade. One of his psychiatrists, it seems, had attempted to render his delusion untenable by quizzing him in detail on Georgian history, of which he was innocent. A second, opposed in principle to the first, had thought to undo his colleague’s mischief by providing Harrison with the standard biographies and textbooks on the period, including studies of George’s own psychopathology. The patient blithely played the second against the first by sophisticating his derangement on the one hand whilst on the other attributing any gaps in his historical information, or discrepancies between the Georgian and Harrisonian facts, to his madness, to the fallibility of historiography, or to the misguided though doubtless well-intended masquerading of his courtiers!

“He calls himself a Don Quixote inside out,” Jane declared — and I observed to myself (a) that it bespoke a wistful detachment on Harrison’s part to see himself so, and (b) that it would have to be he, or some literate doctor, who so saw, since Jane herself carried no freight of literary reference. What I could not appreciate at second hand was the aptness of Harrison’s self-description: not only did he (so he was persuaded) mistake, in his “enchantment,” giants for windmills and soldiers for sheep, instead of vice versa — that is, he madly imagined that in “his” (George III’s) madness, Windsor Castle looked like Tidewater Farms, and the royal coach-and-four like a Lincoln Continental — but he informed me, in our first extended conversation, that “George Third the First” had actually made notes on Don Quixote at Windsor during his first mature seizure, in 1788, when also he had remarked to William Pitt (my husband’s ancestor, by the way) that having been disgracefully defeated in his first American war, he must needs be “a second Don Quixote” to involve himself in another.

Thus he could cast Jane, unflatteringly, in the role of homely Queen Charlotte, whilst “in his madness” perceiving and relating to her as Jane Mack, a handsome creature from another life in another time and place. Their son the vicious ingrate Prince of Wales, to spite and shame his father, carried on as a radical commoner named Drew Mack, wed to a “toothsome blackamoor wench”; their daughter Princess Amelia had not only died, but scandalously gone on stage under false names afterward to conceal the fact, etc. Only two people in the court were exempt from this double identity: His Majesty’s old friend Todd Andrews, whom he compared explicitly to Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, and his new friend—“the son [he] should have had,” his “Duke of York,” the “proper Prince Regent, when it comes to that”—who “never humoured [his] madness, because he shared it”; an “18th-Century courtier trapped in 20th-century America”…

Reg Prinz. Todd Andrews declares the name is, if not its bearer’s “real” one, at least an alias well antecedent to Harrison’s: a coincidence doubtless turned to account, but not an ad hoc imposture. Its young bearer had an established early reputation as an avant-garde cinéaste before his application to the Tidewater Foundation for subsidy; as he was not given to conversation, and spoke cryptically when at all, the most he could be taxed with was his not vigorously denying a role he most certainly did not “play.” For some reason Harrison had been taken with him on sight, and Jane acknowledged that while Prinz readily accepted all proffered support for his cinematic activities, he could not be accused of exploiting Harrison’s esteem. His visits to Redmans Neck were in part as a planning consultant to Marshyhope’s Media Centre, the directorship of which he had declined; and in part out of an apparent interest in Harrison himself.

I met His Majesty that same evening, Mr Prinz not till several months later. The original George III in his distress was often physically out of control; required constant attendance by Dr Willis and company; often needed restraining by strait-waistcoat (Willis calls it in his journal “the &c”; George himself referred to the restraining chair as his “coronation chair”); and suffered concomitant bodily infirmities. Harrison, until the twin strokes that blinded and killed him, was in rosy health and amiable temper, a little heavy but by no means obese, withal rather handsomer at seventy than he’d been in his forties, when I first met him at Capri — though not, like Jane, preternaturally youthful. And he was as entirely in control of himself as his complex dementia allowed: certainly in no way dangerous to himself or others, and inclined more to manic fancies than to manic projects. Therefore he needed very little supervision; his company was agreeable, and his conversation, if often saddening, was civilised and frequently clever. Not to disgrace, by his ubiquitous “delusions” (e.g., that Cambridge, England, was Cambridge, Maryland, or that his ministers were trustees of the Tidewater Foundation), the monarchy he held in such esteem, he ventured off the “palace grounds” only reluctantly and never unaccompanied. The “affairs of the realm” he gladly turned over to the queen and ministers aforementioned, though he still opposed the idea of installing Drew as prince regent. And since, “in his madness,” those crucial affairs were translated into such hallucinations as Marshyhope State University College, His Royal Highness into a minor American industrialist named Harrison Mack, Jr., he conscientiously attended to what was represented as the news and business of those hallucinations, and could talk as knowledgeably about Lyndon Johnson’s administration as about John Adams’s and Napoleon’s.

From all this one might imagine that, pragmatically speaking, he was not mad at all. But though his conduct of affairs “in this world,” as he put it, was in the main responsible and judicious, his identification with mad King George was more than an elaborate, self-cancelling whimsy. Harrison suffered from the duplicity of reality, as it were; events and circumstances that he could not “decipher” into Georgian terms, and thus deal with on their own, alarmed him, lest he mishandle them. And if his nightmares (and infrequent daytime seizures) were learnt from the history books — like George, he fancied he had seen Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; imagined London flooded, and would rush in the royal yacht to rescue “certain precious manuscripts and letters”; signed death warrants for “all six of [his] sons,” etc., etc. — the terror and anguish they caused him were heartfelt.

My own knowledge of the period was cursory at that time, but I remembered that Fanny Burney had held some post in the royal household (she was in fact 2nd Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte) and that, about the time of the king’s first major attack and the publication of her epistolary novel Evelina, she’d commenced a diary of her observations and reflections on the grave event. It was my thought to represent myself, if Harrison should press for such representation, as Mrs Burney: I knew her writings only slightly, but Harrison (and G. III) in all likelihood knew them not at all — Cervantes and Fielding were their only novelists — and the role seemed congenial enough. I suggested and explained it to Jane; she approved, but hoped no fiction would be necessary, as she’d alerted Harrison to my coming, and he’d remembered me affectionately.

We arrived at that great gracious house on its point of hemlocks and rhododendrons, as if one had driven into a Maxfield Parrish print, and were directed by the costumed maid and nurse (Dr #2’s idea) to His Majesty in the music room. Harrison, comfortable in navy blazer and white ducks, rose beaming from the harpsichord — he’d become, predictably, a great lover of Handel, and was playing Delilah’s mad-song from Samson—bowed slightly to Jane, whom he addressed as “Madame,” turned then to me, and, as I wondered fleetingly whether to curtsey, raised my hand to his lips and fell to his knees before me! Tears of joy started down his plump tanned cheeks; he cried passionately: “Sanctissima mea uxor Elizabetha!”

Jane was as startled as I, whose career as 18th-Century novelist (like my career as 20th-) died a-borning. When we got the man off his knees and back into English — which he spoke now as rapidly as his prototype — we learned to our dismay that while his madness made him confuse me with Germaine Pitt, a dear this-worldly friend of his whose husband had been an even dearer friend of Jane’s, he was unspeakably happy to be reunited with his precious… Lady Pembroke! Had we known then what I took the first opportunity to learn from the royal library and apprised Jane of forthwith, we’d have been even more dismayed: Lady Elizabeth Spencer, Countess of Pembroke, had been Queen Charlotte’s Lady of the Bedchamber; her husband the count was George III’s lord of the same and son of his Vice-Chamberlain of the Household. Originally a Marlborough, she and the king had been childhood sweethearts, and she had remained close to the royal family ever after, though she was never among the king’s few mistresses (like Harrison, George was disinclined to adultery) and was a faithful attendant of the queen. But during the attack of 1788—by when she was past fifty, and a grandmother — even more so in his subsequent seizures, George persuaded himself that he had always loved her, and her only…

Harrison got hold of himself soon enough to be unembarrassing, even charming, through aperitifs and dinner, when he pleasantly set forth to “Jane” and “Germaine” what Charlotte and Eliza already knew: the biographical facts above, minus his obsession. He condoled more genuinely than Jane the death of my Jeffrey; he recounted in amusing circumstantial detail anecdotes of Capri in the late 1930’s and of Cheltenham in the 1780’s, and complained good-humoredly of the side effects equally of Tincture Thebaicum (prescribed by Dr Sir George Baker against the wishes of Dr Willis) and of Parnate (prescribed by Shrink #1 against the wishes of Shrink #2). He respectfully disagreed with Dr Alan Guttmacher of Pikesville, Maryland — an acquaintance of the family and author of America’s Last King—that “it is the total absence of pathological abnormal ideas that distinguishes the healthy from the morbid mind”: a question-begging definition, in Harrison’s view, though he was surely not claiming his own mind to be healthy. And he could not but wonder whether Guttmacher’s own psychoanalytical thesis—“George III feared that, like the Colonies, his thirteen children would revolt and break away from him one by one”—would not have been adjudged pathological by the royal physicians: not because he Harrison had only two children (and was certain of the paternity of but one of those, he added meaningly), but because his thirteen American colonies had broken away all together, not one by one, and because by his own best insight his troubling identification had not been loss of colonies with loss of children, but loss of colonies with loss of college: i.e., the “loss” of Tidewater Tech to the state university system a year since, from which his most conspicuous mania dated. He went on to praise “Jane’s” business sense, beauty, and patience (she hadn’t batted a cool blue eye at that reference to uncertain paternity; but it seemed to me she was not so much patient as invulnerable even to comprehension of such allusions); then he rewelcomed me to Windsor with another toast in fluent and rapid Latin, which he reported later to have been to the health “conjugis meae dilectissimae Elizabethae: praeteritas futuras fecundarant.”

Within the fortnight it took me to find decent lodgings in Cambridge, the alarming depths of Harrison’s obsession with me — rather, his new obsession with George III’s old obsession with Lady Pembroke — became clear, as did its complexity. In his most lucid moments (from our point of view), for example, he would tenderly explain that “Harrison Mack’s” attraction to “Germaine Pitt” had no doubt been occasioned by His Majesty’s mad passion for Elizabeth Spencer, but that he had been secretly fond of me ever since Capri, and I was not to imagine that he did not love the hallucinated “Lady Amherst” in her own right. I urged Jane to permit me to break off all contact with him; she assured me that his madness was too complete, as was her preoccupation with Mack Enterprises, for his ravings (sic) to bother her at all; if they made me uncomfortable, I should do as I saw fit. Accordingly, I busied myself at the college, making ready for the fall semester and confirming, with sinking heart, how far from Toronto — not to mention London and Paris! — I had come.

Marshyhope’s library was a bad joke; its faculty would not have been hired by a good private high school; its students would be drawn from the regional public ones… I reminded myself that I had not come there to further my professional career, and that the Library of Congress was a mere two hours away by bus; and I consoled myself with the one bright feature of the intellectual landscape, Joe Morgan, a man I quite admired and could easily have more than admired had he shown the slightest personal interest in me. The fellow of that name in your End of the Road was a rationalist Pygmalion, a half-caricature, sympathetic only by contrast with the narrator; if he was the prototype of my new employer, time and bereavement had much improved him. President Morgan was intelligent, learned, and intense, but not obsessive. He took his administrative duties seriously and discharged them efficiently, but he was in no way officious or self-important. Roughly my coeval, handsomer now than when I’d met him five years since, he was as alone and isolated on Redmans Neck as I. One might have imagined…

But hospitable as he certainly was, cordial, sympathetic, free of “hang-ups,” as the children say, and neither unmasculine nor cold of manner, his emotional life remains a closed book to me: either he was without physical desires, or he gratified them with such utter discretion that even his enemies could find no ground for innuendo in that line. I wonder, as I write, where Morgan is now; whether his disappearance from Amherst College has anything to do with the failure of some exquisite self-control he had not even suspected himself of having tightly exercised for a dozen years, since his young wife’s death from an experience I am too familiar with!

Well. He was wearily amused at Harrison’s delusion that he Morgan had betrayed Tidewater Tech into the state university system; he explained to me (what I set forth in the postscript of my first vain letter to you) his worthy ambitions for the place and his confidence that, unless Schott and company carried the day, Marshyhope could become, not just another third-rate community college, but a quite special and admirable research centre. But (unlike the priggish fellow in your novel) Morgan had what amounted to a tragic, if not an altogether pessimistic, view of his aspirations: he would not be surprised, he told me, if Harrison’s association of Marshyhope with the mutinous American colonies had been inspired and encouraged by A. B. Cook, in John Schott’s behalf. Nor was he very sanguine of prevailing against them in the matter of the Tower of Truth. But he was not certain of defeat, either, and on that basis (I have not even mentioned his quite Jeffersonian respect for the net good judgement of ordinary people) he proceeded.

Half jokingly he suggested that I exploit in the college’s behalf my new role as Lady Pembroke. So the “Duke of York,” without especially intending to, had done: Morgan showed me the just completed and as yet unstaffed media centre, remarking with a smile that state legislators were ever readier to subsidize an impressive physical plant than an impressive faculty. Had I met Reg Prinz?

In early November I finally did. To spare myself (and, as I imagined, Jane) Harrison’s displays, I’d used my opening-of-semester business to excuse myself from visiting Tidewater Farms except rarely, despite Jane’s urgings. His fixation on “Lady Pembroke” was undiminished, she reported: he had annulled by royal decree all marriages contracted before 1 August 1811, and vowed to become a Lutheran in order to marry me; he swore repeatedly on the Bible to be faithful to his dear Eliza, who had been faithful to him for fifty-five years; he proposed to establish a female equivalent of the Order of the Garter, whereof I was to be the first elect; he nightly imagined me in his bed, and daily threatened to come for me in the royal yacht, crying “Rex populo non separandus!” when his male nurses (whose attendance was now required) restrained him. She found it hard to imagine that my actual waiting on him would make matters worse, and rather imagined it might temper his fantasies, which were truly becoming difficult for her to live with: so much so that, since she could not bring herself to have him “committed” (and since he had better residential care at Tidewater Farms than any institutional facility could provide), she had taken to spending more and more of her own nights at an apartment in Dorset Heights, and was contemplating an extended business-vacation trip to Britain.

It was true that in my presence Harrison behaved agreeably, spoke temperately and rationally more often than not, and made no amorous overtures. Even so… And I did have other things on my mind, including André’s business (of which nothing so far had come) and the approach of a certain fateful anniversary. For this last reason especially, I was disinclined to accept Jane’s invitation to dinner on the first Sunday in November, until she added not only that it was to be by way of being a bon voyage party for herself, who was indeed off to London for a while, but also that the annual Guy Fawkes Day fireworks would be let off at Redmans Neck after dinner, courtesy of the Tidewater Foundation, and that a number of their particular friends would be there, including Messrs Andrews from Cambridge and Prinz from New York, whom she believed I had not met, and Mr Cook from Annapolis, whom she understood I had?

I went, trembling. Harrison was all charm and gallantry, and so apparently the master of his mania that one could easily have taken the George-and-Eliza business as a standing pleasantry for the occasion. Your Mr Andrews too proved a civilised surprise: a handsome, elderly bachelor, he held forth amusingly on the C.I.A.‘s three-million-dollar involvement in the National Student Association, recently disclosed, and chided Drew Mack (in absentia) for not making our local chapter of the S.D.S. menacing enough to attract some of that money to Marshyhope. In other circumstances I’d have taken less distracted pleasure in meeting him: it pleased me, for example, that he freely broke Jane’s prohibition, “for Harrison’s sake,” of our mentioning their son “the Prince of Wales,” and that Harrison seemed unperturbed thereby; for I was disinclined myself to walk on eggs with his eccentricities as did Jane (and Doctor #2). But of course it was Andrew Burlingame Cook whom I had come there tremulously to inspect, whose reintroduction to me, on that date of all dates, it was impossible to ascribe to coincidence… John: the man cannot be André Castine. How could he be André? André is heavyset, swarthy, brown-eyed, bald, trimly moustached and short-bearded; he wears eyeglasses, can’t see without them, and partial dentures, of which he is self-conscious — and his accent is French-Canadian in all of his several languages. The “Poet Laureate” is of similar build, but his hair is thick, curly, salt-and-pepper-coloured, his eyes are hazel, he wears neither beard nor moustache nor spectacles, his teeth are his own and boldly gleaming, and while his voice admittedly has something of André’s sexual baritone, his accent is as echt “Mairlund” as Todd Andrews’s. He is not André!

Nor is he, by his own assertion, André’s half brother, though it could be held that they resemble each other as siblings might. Indeed, when I pressed him on that head (immediately upon remeeting him; he had not forgotten our previous encounter), he denied ever having heard the name Castine except in the history books and the “Student’s Second Tale” in Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. He had a grown son, he acknowledged, by his late wife — who like himself had worked with the U.S. Office of War Information in London during World War II, and who (like Jeffrey’s first wife!) had been killed in an air raid there in ’42. The boy’s name was Henry Burlingame VII, sure enough — Henry Burlingame Cook, legally, but it had been the unofficial custom of the family for generations to alternate the surnames of their two chief progenitors… He was a dandy fellow, Henry, but completely wrongheaded in the political sphere, thanks in some measure to the influence of such Commie acquaintances as Drew Mack and Joseph Morgan. Presently he was in Quebec somewhere, inciting the Canucks against queen and country, God forgive him and save all three. For he was a good lad at heart, was son Henry, and believe it or not he Cook himself had undergone a brief attack of Whiggery in his twenties — from which he had recovered with such antibodies as to have been spared the least twinge of recurrence, he was happy to report. He greatly feared (this after dinner now, as we sipped cognac and watched skyrockets from the terrace in the mild autumn night, through which sailed also incredible hosts of wild geese, chorusing south from where I wished I were) I was the butt of some silly practical joke, and expressed chivalrous indignation that “a lady of my quality” should be so used.

He was, well, charming: not at all the blustering boor of the Maryland Historical Society — except (and here too he is at least in spirit my André’s kin) in the company of “adversaries” such as Morgan, who joined us after dinner, or when the conversation turned to politics. Then he became the loud Poetaster Laureate of the Right: encouraged Harrison’s conviction that the Russian embassy had not leased waterfront acreage in Dorchester County merely for the summer recreation of their staff, as they claimed, but to spy on Mack Enterprises and “other operations in the area.” (Nonsense, Jane crisply replied, they were a Mack enterprise: she had leased them the land herself.) He declared to His Majesty that Schott’s proposed Tower of Truth would make Marshyhope “independent enough to secede from the state system”—a loaded illogic that Harrison good-naturedly reproved him for. And I could not judge, much as I needed to, how seriously he took his professed Toryism — but I believed Joe Morgan’s grim reply (since borne out) when I asked him that question: “Only half seriously, Germaine. But he would destroy us half seriously, too.”

So. The only unattached lady among so many charming, unattached gentlemen, and too unfortunately distracted to enjoy their gallantries. Or properly to acquaint myself with the youngest member of our company, the most detached certainly, if not unattached, who hovered in the margins of the evening as of this letter. “And I believe you’ve not met Mr Prinz,” Jane said at the end of our cocktail introductions, as I attempted dazedly to measure A. B. Cook against André’s depiction. In the following year, last year, when I found myself de facto mistress of Tidewater Farms, playing “Esther” to Harrison’s “Ahasuerus” (his conceit, after one of George III’s) whilst “Queen Vashti” refreshed herself at the real Bath and Cheltenham, I had occasion to re-view Reg Prinz — else I’d be unable to describe him now, so distraught was I and evanescent he that November evening. The “son [Harrison] should have had” is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht’s and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose’s phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation, or a long-term convict just released with the warden’s good wishes and a new suit of street clothes. He neither smokes nor drinks nor, so far as I could hear, speaks. It is said that he comes from a wealthy Long Island Jewish family and was educated at Groton and Yale. It is said that he “trips” regularly on lysergic acid diethylamide and other pharmaceuticals, but deplores the ascription to them of mystic insight or creative vision in their users. It is said that he is a brilliant actor and director; that he has absorbed and put behind him all the ideology of contemporary filmmaking, along with radical politics (he thinks Drew Mack naive, we’re told, but is “interested” in Harrison and A. B. Cook as “emblems,” and “admires” Henry Burlingame VII) and literature, which he is reputed to have called “a mildly interesting historical phenomenon of no present importance.” One hears that he is scornful of esoteric, high-art cinema as unfaithful to the medium’s popular roots, which however bore him. Political revolutions, he is said to have said, are passé, “like marriage, divorce, families, professions, novels, cash, existential Angst.”

Do not ask me where, when, or to whom the young man has delivered himself of these opinions, most of which I have at at least second hand from Ambrose. I have indeed, on occasion since, heard him speak, in a voice almost inaudible and invariably in ellipses, shrugs, nods, fragments, hums, non sequiturs, dashes, and suspension points. Ambrose declares that his immediate presence (I must add “except at formal Guy Fawkes Day dinner parties”) is uncommonly compelling; that in it most “issues” and “positions” seem idly theoretical, or simply don’t come up however much one had meant to raise them; that the most outrageous situations are acquiesced in and seem justified by “the wordless force of his personality.” I deny none of the above — though I suspect my lover of some projection! — and I do indeed find Prinz a quietly disquieting, inarticulately insistent fellow: a sort of saxifrage in the cracks of the contemporary, or (to borrow one of Ambrose’s tidewater tropes) a starfish on the oyster bed of art. But one wonders—this one, anyroad — whether that vague antiverbality proceeds from (I had almost said bespeaks) a mindless will or a mere vacuum; whether the man be not, after all, all surface: a clouded transparency, a… film.

If the last, I’d have graded him B at best that November evening, which we are now done with. Today — I don’t know. I left Tidewater Farms no wiser than I’d arrived, but sorely troubled. To Joe Morgan and Todd Andrews, of course, I could say nothing of my deepest concerns; but in the car back to Cambridge from Redmans Neck (Morgan kindly returned us to our addresses) I learned that while my two pleasant bachelor companions agreed that A. B. Cook was an enigma and a charlatan, more subtle and sophisticated than the role he played with Schott and Company, they did not (then) agree on what if anything underlay the oafish masquerade. Andrews was inclined to think him a wealthy, eccentric, heartfelt reactionary whose support (both financial and poetical) of certain Dixiecrat politicians was legitimate if lamentable; whose friendships with Harrison and other civilised right-wingers were genuine, his relations with vulgar red-necks like Schott merely expedient. And his duplicity, in Todd Andrews’s opinion, was probably limited to loudly supporting in the crudest fashion a famously conservative gubernatorial candidate so that a lesser-known but even more conservative could run against him on what pretended to be a liberal platform, and the Tories win in either case. The rest, he declared — Cook’s rumoured paramilitary “club” on or near Bloodsworth Island, his rumoured connexion with the Baltimore chapter of the American Nazi party (all news to me) — was mere liberal-baiting panache.

Morgan disagreed. Through his activities with the historical society he’d had frequent dealings with Cook, who’d been the first to propose him to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech, as he’d been the first subsequently to propose his resignation from Marshyhope in favour of Schott. Quite apart from any grudge against the man for whatever harm he might do the college (it is a mark of Morgan’s tact that he didn’t mention Cook’s slanderous resurrection, so to speak, of his late wife’s death), Morgan believed him genuinely menacing and perhaps psychopathological. What’s more, he believed there might be some truth in a body of rumour that was news to Mr Andrews as well as to me: that Cook was literally sinister, a threat not from the right but from the left! On this view, his public connexion with right-wing extremists was for the purpose of sabotaging their activities with ostensibly favourable publicity and establishing a creditable “cover” for his real connexions with — not the Far Left, exactly, but a grab bag of terrorists: the F.L.N., the I.R.A., the P.L.O., the Quebec separatists, the farther-out black and Indian nationalists — all of whom, of course, had operatives in Washington.

“Once, ten years ago,” Morgan told us matter-of-factly, “when I first got to know him, Cook offered to arrange a murder for me. Said it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t take him up on it, but I didn’t have the impression he was boasting, either.”

We didn’t press; perhaps Andrews, like me, wondered uncomfortably whether the victim was to have been the late Mrs Morgan or someone involved in her death. Given the whispering campaign against him, Morgan’s remark seemed ill-considered — but I took it as a mark of his trust, and was in any case more interested in Cook’s possible connexions with André, perhaps via the Free-Quebec people. And Morgan was so healthy-looking, so cheerfully normal, even boyish of face, it was impossible to imagine him involved in anything clandestine, much less violent. Todd Andrews dismissed the whole “Second Revolution business”—which he assumed was what the rumoured leftism added up to — as another of Cook’s cranky red herrings, and wished only that he wouldn’t feed Harrison’s folly with it. Morgan agreed that it might well be mere crankery, but considered it dangerous crankery withal. And so the evening ended, Andrews remarking as he bade me good night that in his opinion my own unexpected role in his friend’s delusion was more therapeutic, at least palliative, than not. He hoped I would indulge poor Harrison as far as my discretion permitted.

Given two so agreeable alternative candidates, why did I, a month or two later, become Harrison Mack’s mistress? To begin with, after Fort Erie I had resolved, as I’ve explained, to try to put André behind me, for the sake of my own sanity, though of course etc. And I have never been given to celibacy! Had either Andrews or Morgan shown particular interest — but they didn’t. Morgan was perhaps the likelier possibility, though rather young for my taste (i.e., about my own age); but before we came to know each other well enough for me to tell him about André, for example, and explain his relationship to Cook, Morgan had resigned, gone to Amherst, “freaked out,” and disappeared. Andrews I found (and find) attractive too, despite the Eastern Shore brogue and Southern manner; we became and remain affectionate friends. But though a confirmed bachelor, he has, I gather, other, more established female friendships, and in his late sixties is no libertine.

With his urging joined to Jane’s and Doctor #2’s, I spent much time at Tidewater Farms after Jane left, when too Harrison’s manner somewhat altered. As his general condition rapidly declined, he grew at once madder and more lucid. The wife he’d had “when he was in the world,” as he came to phrase it, he pitied, admired, and understood well, in my estimation; he hoped “the real George III” had been as fortunate, on balance, with Queen Charlotte. He was glad Jane was not present in his “final stages,” for both their sakes; they had loved each other, he was certain she still wished him well, as he did her, and he had no doubt that widowhood would be a relief for her. He knew now, more often than not, that he wasn’t “really” George III—“any more than George III was, in his last years”: that he was the victim of a psychopathological delusion, whose cause and possible cure remained mysterious and were of no further interest to him. The world of Harrison Mack, Redmans Neck, 20th-century America, caused him great pain; the world of George III, Windsor, early 19th-century England, was somehow soothing, never mind wherefore. An inoperable patient, he craved now only palliation. With Jane’s long-distance consent we discharged Doctor #1, and left #2 on call merely in the event of some unforeseen lapse of control. He was summoned only once thereafter.

Harrison begged me to move into the house: it was convenient to the campus; it was big enough so that I need endure his company no more than I wished; his own library was as good as the college’s; I wouldn’t need to bother with marketing, cooking, housekeeping. Even the masquerade would not be very tiresome (no costumes required!), since we could freely discuss anything so long as he could speak of me as Lady Pembroke: I could leave it to him, as he left it to his madness, to do the complicated translation. From London, Jane seconded the motion. I consulted Andrews, who warmly approved.

If I never loved His Majesty, I truly liked him, and never simply pitied him. I meant to move out as soon as Jane returned, but she stayed on, somehow managing Mack Enterprises by remote control. In the first half of ’68, especially, Harrison was a delightful companion: witty, generous, thoughtful. In my absence, so the house staff reported, he gave free rein to his follies: that we must fly to Denmark to escape the deluge; that we were aboard Noah’s ark; that it was not too late to undo the fiasco of the American War. Directly I returned, the George/ Elizabeth business became little more than an elaborate (if unremitting) way of speaking. Somewhere along the road our good friendship came to include sleeping together: my memory is that one snowy night in January, as I read student essays and sipped brandy by the fire and Harrison played Jephthah’s lamentation on the harpsichord, he suddenly said: “Let’s redo history, what?” And then proposed that, since the king and Lady Pembroke never did get to bed together, and since we weren’t really they, we improve the facts by doing what they didn’t.

“Dear Germaine,” he concluded, “I should enjoy that very much.” Had he not used, that once, my real name…

My person and modest competency never so gratified a man, before or since. You will want details: there are none, particularly. Seventy is not impotent, except as alcohol, illness, or social conditioning have made it so; it has no stamina, loves its sleep, will not stand without coaxing, draws aim more often than it fires — but it will go to’t, smartly too, with the keener joy in what it can no longer take for granted. Harrison relished each connexion as he relished fine days and dinners, knowing he had not a great many left. Jane had put sex behind her years since; the chap was starved for it, and knew what he was about. I have made sorry choices in my life: becoming Harrison’s Lady Elizabeth was not one. A pleasurable semester.

During the which, whilst I waited word from André or a fair glimpse of our son, and endeavoured to impart to my Marshyhopers some sense of what is meant by the terms Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism (but how, when almost nothing their eyes fall upon was there the day before yesterday?), and watched poor embattled Morgan yield at last on the misbegotten Tower of Truth, and confirmed my addiction to oysters in any form, I tried in vain to mend the old quarrel between Harrison and his son, whom I came to know and rather like. (The daughter Jeannine—“Bea Golden”—was another matter: between drying-out visits to that Fort Erie “sanatorium,” she was busy divorcing her third husband out in California and — what we didn’t know at this time — attaching herself to Mr Prinz.) On this subject my friend was truly deluded: he believed his son an unprincipled weakling and Reg Prinz, for some reason or other, a scrupulous fellow, when from all I could observe Drew Mack was, if somewhat gullible, the very soul of moral principle, pursuing ardently what he believed just and good, whereas Prinz (whom too I saw once or twice more that year) has I daresay no principles at all except cinematographic, and even those he seems to improvise on the run. Suffice it as illustration of their scrupulosity that Drew — who had no salary, worked without pay for his liberal causes (to which he also donated his trust income), and frankly coveted his parents’ wealth for the sake of these same causes — never to my knowledge imputed mercenary motives to my liaison with his father, whom he was gratified to see so happy in my society. Whereas Prinz, in a rare burst of sustained verbality, advised me one evening in June, just after Harrison’s great seizure: “If he leaves you a bundle, put it into the flick. Double or nothing.”

I had thought to travel that season; north from the Chesapeake at least, whose muggy summer nights I had sampled in September. Perhaps to France, to visit “Juliette.” But word came from Jane, of the most unexpected and circumlocutory sort, that “interests of a personal nature” were holding her in Britain; apprised that her husband of some forty years had taken a turn for the worse, she satisfied herself by transatlantic telephone that he was not dangerous or dying, authorised me and Doctor #2 to take whatever measures we thought necessary to provide for his comfort, hoped we would inform her at once of any crises, and begged me to stay on at Tidewater Farms at least for the summer “in my supervisory capacity,” at a salary of, say, $500 a month “over and above”!

I declined the salary for myself, looked about tor someone else to hire with it, found no one even remotely suitable except Yvonne Mack, Drew’s wife, who refused unless her father-in-law, “crazy or not,” recanted his racism and fully reinstated his son and herself in his favour. Alas, Harrison was beyond doing so. To him she was the cast-off Princess of Wales, “hot for the king’s John Thomas, what?” No lucid side to his hallucinating now: Harrison believed us seventeen years old and immortal; he declared he’d raised his daughter Amelia from the grave (and conversed touchingly with the ghosts of Drew and Jeannine Mack when they were babies); he dressed in white robes and let his beard grow. He took his bed to be “the Royal Celestial Electrical Bed of Patagonia in the Temple of Health and Hymen on Pall Mall,” and guaranteed me a healthy child if I would make love with him in it. Dr #2 (whom I fetched in, who could do nothing) became “Dr James Graham, M.D., O.W.L.” (O Wonderful Love), the inventor of that same bed, a Scottish quack who claimed to have learnt electricity from Ben Franklin and herbal medicine from the Indians; “George III the First” had declined his offer of treatment in 1788, but by charging £50 a night for the use of his famous bed and attracting to his temple such worthies as the Scotts of Edinburgh (who brought young Walter there in vain hope of restoring his withered leg), the good doctor had earned almost as much as our #2. I declined: he seldom knew me now even as Elizabeth.

I “supervised” Harrison through the fall — no labour, only a sadness — when too, after Morgan’s departure, I assumed the real labour of the acting provostship at Marshyhope. This for the reasons set forth in my first letter, plus one other, which you will now understand: unbelievably, on Guy Fawkes Day, beyond Hubert Humphrey’s defeat by Richard Nixon… nothing happened! I had scarcely doubted that this was the date André had waited for; was cross in advance with his damned rituality. Schott had won the field at Redmans Neck; had already made his unexpected offer (perhaps at Cook’s inscrutable prompting?), and I’d asked for a week to consider it — actually to learn whether André wanted me elsewhere. I had no other invitations or income. Lyndon Johnson had vacated the presidency, Robert Kennedy and Martin King had been assassinated, the Democratic convention in Chicago disrupted; the Left was everywhere in disarray; it was past time for André to make whatever grand moves he had in mind. We’d even cancelled our fireworks (Harrison no longer followed the calendar anyroad), lest they be mistaken for a premature Republican celebration on the one hand or an armed student rising on the other. I sat up past midnight with the dreary election returns on the telly, waiting for the phone, the doorbell, a special-delivery letter at the least — His Majesty beside me clucking his tongue at what his mutinous colonies had come to.

Nothing! In a state of mild shock I accepted Schott’s “promotion”; prepared to stay on, out of dull necessity, where I had no wish nor other reason to be; notified Jane that I would be moving out of Tidewater Farms before the spring semester in any case, as Harrison needed his Lady Pembroke no longer, only his trained nurses (he was making his own floods by this time, in the Royal Celestial Electrical Bed of Patagonia — and, yes, ordering his feces freeze-dried by Mack Enterprises, to “fertilise the hereafter”). On 14 January — anniversary for me of Germaine Necker’s marriage to the Baron de Staël in 1786; for Harrison, of Congress’s ratification of the Treaty of Paris two years earlier — he suffered the stroke that blinded and half paralyzed him. Jane flew home; I withdrew to the flat I’d scarcely tenanted since hiring it. A fortnight later the second stroke killed him.

Among the mourners at my friend’s funeral were Prinz — whose mistress Jeannine Mack now openly was — and Ambrose, already engaged by him to write the screenplay from your fiction. Have I told you that Harrison never knew it was a story of yours that Prinz meant to film? (The foundation’s subsidy was for an unspecified film project set in the tidewater locale.) That he lent his support to a medium whose novelty he disliked, only when Prinz assured him that the film would “revise the American Revolution” and “return toward the visual purity of silent movies”? (George III was very big on purity in his latter days.) I myself was at the time unaware of and uninterested in the nature of his and Ambrose’s project, and cannot tell you whether Harrison and Jane ever read the novel in which you feature them: Tood Andrews has done, and seems to hold no grudge. He, Jane, Drew, Yvonne, Ms Golden, and John Schott were there, others I didn’t know… and A. B. Cook… and with him an impassive, reticent young man whom he introduced as his son Henry Burlingame.

I don’t know, John. He seemed about the right age. He could be said to resemble either Cook or André or me at least as much as “Bea Golden” resembles Harrison or Jane (or Todd Andrews). He spoke — when at all — with a slight Québécois accent, but spelled his name with a y and made no reply to Cook’s stage-whispered tease that the accent was affected. In the same mock whisper Cook declared to me that he’d asked his son on my behalf about the impostor I’d mentioned at our last meeting — that chap who claimed to be a relative? And that Henry had denied having ever heard the name Castine except, like himself, in the annals of colonial America. But who knew whether to believe a cunning rogue like his son? And he supposed we oughtn’t to mention colonial America in the house of the late lamented, what?

So I don’t know. If Cook had whipped off a wig, changed teeth and voice, donned eyeglasses, declared himself André Castine, and proposed marriage on the spot, I still wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have known (though I’d no doubt have said yes).

Will you believe that whilst I waited for a sign from heaven, tried to hold onto what reason remained to me after so long, so much, so many — half of my belongings still upstairs in Jane’s house! — I traded polite condolences with the company, approved the gentle ironies in Todd Andrews’s eulogy (a gloss on the motto of the college: Praeteritas futuras fecundant, “The past fertilises the future”), made sarcastic quips with Ambrose about Cook’s funeral ode, and said nothing to the young man whom perhaps I carried in my womb for nine months and five thousand miles, brought into the world, have scarcely seen since (and have not seen since)? I… had not the strength, have not, to beard the lion (and eyeglass him, etc.) in his den; to lay siege to Annapolis, Bloodsworth Island, Castines Hundred; to press, press until no mysteries remain. Because… what then? I had abandoned the boy-child; what claim had I on the man?

Ambrose, till then an affable colleague merely, saw me home and did me some services after at Tidewater Farms; our closer connexion dates from there. Clearly André has abandoned me for good. I am endeavouring to make it so: for good. This confession — whose readiness you now understand, whose prolixity you pardon, as I trust you now understand (no pardon called for) my susceptibility to the blandishments of Ambrose Mensch — this confession is the epilogue to the story, finally done. When I report to you that my “love” (oh bother the quotation marks!) for your erstwhile friend, especially since this chaste Third Stage of our affair commenced, grows determinedly, you will know what I mean. My whole romantic life, I am trying to persuade myself, has, like the body of this letter, been digression and recapitulation; it is time to rearrive at the present, to move into a future unsullied by the past.

It is time, most certainly, to end this endlessest of my letters (I’ve long since been back at 24 L; all’s apparently calm at Marshyhope; I am alone; it’s near midnight). But now the history is done, I must finish the tale of Prinz and Mensch it interrupted. After Prinz’s two-word rejection—“too wordy”—of Ambrose’s nearly wordless draft of the screenplay opening, it was decided between them (with your approval, I hope and presume) that since the text in hand was in itself essentially noncinematic, they would, if not quite set it aside altogether, use it merely as a point de départ for a “visual orchestration of the author’s Weltanschauung”: Ambrose’s deadpan phrase, in his explanation last night to the Marshyhopers of the sequence they were about to appear in. They will therefore freely include not only “echoes of your other works” and (don’t ask me) “anticipations of your works in progress and to come”—things you may not even have thought of yet, but “feasibly might, on the basis of etc.”—but anything Ambrose might think suitable in his new capacity — you’re aware that he’s an actor in his own script now, hired to play the role of Author? — or Prinz in his double aspect of director and, as it were, Muse. (He too is on both sides of the camera!) Still myself only halfway through your Sot-Weed Factor novel, for all I know to the contrary there may be in your works yet for me to read a Rip Winklish narrator who lives the first half of his life in the years 1776–1812 and the second half from 1940 to 1976, with a long sleep between in the Dorchester marshes. Or is he among those “anticipations”?

In any case, I know for a fact that what ensued was their improvisation. This anonymous or polynomial narrator — Ambrose, half jestingly, calls him by his own nom de plume, “Arthur Morton King”—in his movement from the First through the Second Cycle of his life (it is not clear, to me, whether in 1969 he is 29 or 65 years old), comes upon the student activists preparing to seize the administration building of a college built on what he remembers to have been an Indian burial ground, a Loyalist hideout in the Revolutionary War, and the site of a minor skirmish with Admiral Cockburn’s fleet in the War of 1812. Stirred but puzzled by the youthful call to arms (as I am puzzled by his puzzlement: is he not alleged to have been awake since 1940?), “Arthur” would join the students, but first asks them to explain who “our” enemy is, and what we mean to do with the college after we seize it. He insists likewise on hearing out the spokesmen for the administration…

It would not have worked at Berkeley or Buffalo; not even at College Park across the Bay. To give my pink-necks their due, it would not likely have worked here either, had Drew Mack been on campus, and had Ambrose not further disarmed the skeptical by instructing them to be skeptical; to suspect him of being planted by the F.B.I., or the C.I.A., or at least the administration; and to hoot down any attempt by Todd Andrews (who volunteered to act as the acting president’s spokesman) to reply to their harangues. But the chief strategy — Ambrose’s, not Prinz’s, who somehow made it clear to the students that he didn’t care one way or the other how the scene ended — was the grand diversion of cameraman, audio and lighting technicians and equipment, interruptions to reposition, rephotograph, rerecord, reconsider; Prinz’s vertiginous insistence that these repositionings and such be themselves photographed, not to falsify “on the ultimate level, you know” the cinéma vérité; Ambrose’s sudden inspired order to a young woman shouting obscenities, “Now! Now! Take off your clothes!” and to a dazed campus cop, “Now you pretend to arrest her!” and to the students who then pummelled the cop, “Cut! Cut! That’s great! Let the camera close in on her now!” Whilst Prinz hand-signalled quite different instructions to his crew, and the second camera filmed him so doing. “Now you decide we’re co-opting you!” cries Ambrose. “Somebody ask whether there’s even any film in the fucking cameras! Easy, those mothers are expensive. Now you chant ‘Off the media! Off the media!’ while we retreat! Tomorrow in Ocean City, south end of the boardwalk, got that? South boardwalk, by the funhouse! ‘Off the flicks! Off the flicks!’ “

Et cetera, until half the kids are laughing, most of the rest too confused to get their indignation organised, and the handful who try to storm Schott’s office easily stopped in the corridors, out of view, by the main body of campus police, who then usher them out a rear door, lock the building for the night, and patrol its vicinity till today.

When, I daresay — tomorrow too if the weather holds fine — my lover, the author turned actor, will have improvised, may be even now improvising, “the Funhouse Scene” at Ocean City, with his nondirective director, his cast of ex-activist amateurs, and his professional (if not expert) co-star…

But here my pen falters, and not only from writer’s cramp. A tiny—yes, jealousy—keeps me from sleep, though it’s now the first hour of, ah, the 11th. Of that painful American invention, Mother’s Day. I return now, for comfort and solace, to your hapless virgin poet Eben Cooke and his too-familiar mentor Henry Burlingame III, wearily wondering whether your novel is not some enormous coded reply-in-advance to these letters. What turns lie ahead in its plot? In mine? What have you in store for your exhausted

G.?

M: Lady Amherst to the Author. Three miracles in three days. Ambrose’s adventures with the film company. The Fourth Stage of their affair begins.

24 L Street

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!

~ ~ ~

S: Todd Andrews to his father. His life’s recycling. Jane Mack’s visit and confession. 10 R.

Skipjack Osborn Jones

Slip #2, Municipal Harbor

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

11 P.M. Friday, May 16, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

O dear Father,

Seven decades of living (seven years more than you permitted yourself), together with my Tragic View of Order, incline me on the one hand to see patterns everywhere, on the other to be skeptical of their significance. Do you know what I mean? Did you feel that way too? (Did you ever know what I meant? Did you feel any way?)

So for example I did not fail to remark, on March 7 last, when I wrote my belated annual deathday letter to you, that it was occasioned by the revival of events that prompted my old Letter in the first place; but having so remarked, I shrugged my shoulders. Even seven weeks ago, when the dead past sprouted to life in my office like those seeds from fossil dung germinated by the paleontologists, I resisted the temptation to Perceive a Pattern in All This. I mean a meaningful pattern: for of course I noticed, not for the first time, that Drew Mack and his mother were squaring off over Harrison’s estate quite as Harrison and his mother had once done over Mack Senior’s. But I drew no more inferences from that than I shall from the gratuitous recurrence of sevens above; I merely wondered: If (as Marx says in his essay The 18th Brumaire) tragic history repeats itself as farce, what does farce do for an encore?

Then came, on April Fool’s Day, a letter from the author of The Floating Opera novel, inquiring what I’d been up to since 1954 and whether I’d object to being cast in his current fiction. I obliged him with a partial résumé—in course of which I began to see yet further Connections — then not only declined, at least for the present, to model for him, but observed that his project struck me as the sort conceived by an imagination overinclined to retracing its steps before moving on. I even wondered whether he might not be merely registering his passage of life’s celebrated midpoint, as I once did.

I’ve not heard from him since. But I withdraw that pejorative merely, and I am at once chastened and spooked by that clause as I once did. O yes: and at age 69 I’m also in love, Dad. Whether with a woman or a letter of the alphabet, I’m not yet certain.

Something tells me, you see—lots of things — that my life has been being recycled since 1954, perhaps since 1937, without my more than idly remarking the fact till now. The reenactment may indeed be fast approaching its “climax”; and as I made something of a muddle of it the first time around, I’d best begin to do more than idly remark certain recurrences as portentous or piquant.

Item: the foregathering, in Cambridge and environs, of Reg Prinz’s film company, to shoot what was at first proposed to be a film version of some later work by the author of The Floating Opera, but presently intends to reprise at least “certain themes and images” from that first novel — and which features “Bea Golden.” Will she play Jane Mack?

Item: in the morning’s mail, notice of two scheduled visits to Cambridge this summer of “our” showboat replica, The Original Floating Theatre II, about which Prinz had inquired of me only last Friday, in his fashion, whether it would be putting in here during the July Tercentennial celebration. He was interested in using it as a ready-made set for “the Showboat sequences”—should he have said sequel? — in his film.

For as it turns out (so I reported to him up on deck some hours ago), the O.F.T. II will play at Long Wharf not only during the week of July 18–25, but on the third weekend in June as well: 32nd anniversary of that midsummer night when I tried (and failed) to blow its prototype, myself, and tout le monde to kingdom come. Heavy-footed coincidence! God the novelist was hard enough to take as an awkward Realist; how shall we swallow him as a ham-handed Formalist?

Well, that production-within-a-reproduction must sink or swim without me; I shan’t be going. But since Harrison’s funeral on your 39th deathday; since my own 69th birthday and my letter to you; since my new association with Jane Mack, even with Jeannine — to get right down to it, since this evening’s cocktail party aboardship and subsequent sunset sail with one of my guests, since whose disembarkation I’ve sat here at the chart table drawing up parallel lists and exclaiming O, O, O — I’ve been feeling like the principal in a too familiar drama, a freely modified revival featuring Many of the Original Cast.

In the left-hand column (from early work-notes for my own memoir, drafted between 1937 and 1954, of Captain James Adams’s original Original Floating Theatre), the cardinal events of my life’s first half, as they seemed to me then and still seem today, 13 in number. On their right, more or less correspondent events in the years since. To wit:

1. Mar. 2, 1900: I am born.

1. June 21 or 22, 1937: I am “reborn” (you know what I mean) after my unsuccessful effort to blow up the O.F.T.

2. Mar. 2, 1917: I definitively lose my virginity to Betty Jane Gunter, R.I.P., upstairs in my bedroom in your house, puppy dog-style on my bed, before the large mirror on my dresser, and learn to the bone the emotion of mirth.

2. Dec. 31, 1954/Jan. 1, 1955: I definitively lose my middle-aged celibacy (also, one idly remarks, after 17 years, and also on a Friday) to Sharon-from-Manhattan, after a New Year’s Eve party at Cambridge Yacht Club, thence to Tidewater Inn, Easton, where I relearn, if not mirth, certainly amusement. And refreshment!

3. Sept. 22, 1918: I bayonet a German infantry sergeant in the Argonne Forest, after learning to the bone the emotion of fear.

3. July 23, 1967: I forestall Drew Mack & friends from blowing up the New Bridge, and in the process learn to the ventricles the strange emotion of courage.

4. June 13, 1919: I am told of a cardiac condition that may do me in at any moment, or may never. I begin, not long after, the attempt to explain this state of affairs to you in a letter, of which this is the latest installment.

4. End of June, 1937: I am told by my friend the late Marvin Rose, M.D., R.I.P., that in my place he would not worry one fart about a myocardium poised for so many years on the brink of infarction without once infarcting. Never mind the discrepant chronology, Dad; my heart tells me that here is where this item belongs. I perpend Marvin’s opinion, in which I have no great interest since my “rebirth,” and resume both my Inquiry and my letter to you, of which etc.

5. 1920-24: My Rakehood, or 1st sexual flowering, during which I also study law and learn of my low-grade prostate infection. Followed by a period (1925-29) of diminished sexual activity, my meeting with Harrison Mack, and my entry into your law firm.

5. 1955—?: My 2nd and presumably final sexual flowering, altogether more modest: prompted by #2 above; aided by a prostatectomy too long put off, which relieved a condition both painful and conducive to impotence; principally abetted by dear Polly Lake. An efflorescence with, apparently, a considerable half-life: there is evidence that that garden is even yet not closed for the night. O yes, and I remeet the Macks, reinvolve myself in their Enterprises, and largely put by the profession of law for directorship of their Tidewater Foundation.

6. Groundhog’s Day, 1930: Your inexplicable suicide, which teaches me to the bone the emotion of frustration, and remains to this hour by no means explained to my satisfaction. I move into the Dorset Hotel; I pay my room rent a day at a time (see #4 left, above); and I open my endless Inquiry into your death. O you bastard.

6. I don’t know. June 21 or 22, 1937, when I close the Inquiry (see #13, below left)? June 22 or 23, same year, when I reopen it? I think fall, 1956, when publication of The Floating Opera novel prompts me to buy the Macks’ old summer cottage down on Todds Point, virtually move out of the Dorset, and abandon both the Inquiry and the Letter, from the emotion of boredom. Damn you.

7. 1930-37: My long involvement with Col. Morton of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, who cannot understand why I have made an outright gift, to the richest man in town, of the money you left me upon your death. Money! O you bastard.

7. 1955: My direction, for Mack Enterprises, of the purchase of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, which, following upon my remeeting Jeannine on the New Year’s Eve (#2 right, above), and followed by the appearance of that novel, led to my reassociation with Harrison and Jane: his madness, her enterprises.

8. Aug. 13, 1932: I am seduced by Jane Mack, with Harrison’s complaisance, in their Todds Point summer cottage, and learn — well, to the vesicles — the emotion of surprise. Sweet, sweet surprise.

8. May 16, 1969: We shall come to it. Same emotion, not surprisingly. O, O, O.

9. Oct. 2, 1933: Jeannine Mack, perhaps my daughter, is born, and the Mack/Mack/Andrews triangle is suspended.

9. Jan. 29, 1969: Harrison Mack, perhaps her father, dies, and the royal folie à deux at Tidewater Farms is terminated.

10. July 31, 1935: The probate case of Mack v. Mack begins in earnest, and Jane resumes our affair.

10. Mar. 28-May 16, 1969: Another Mack v. Mack shapes up. And O…

11. June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win Mack v. Mack and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to. Of this, surely, more anon.

11.

12. June 20 or 21, 1937: My dark night of the soul, when a combination of accumulated cardiac uncertainty (cf. #4 left, above), sexual impotency (cf. #5 left & right, above), and ongoing frustration (cf. #6 left, you bastard), led me to

12.

13. June 21 or 22, 1937: My resolve to commit suicide at the end of a perfectly ordinary day, in the course of which I take breakfast coffee with Capt. Osborn Jones’s geriatric company in the Dorchester Explorers’ Club, pay my room rent for the day, work on my unfinished boat, drop in at the office to review cases in progress and stare at my staring wall, submit to a physical examination by Marvin Rose, take lunch with Harrison Mack, premise that Nothing Has Intrinsic Value, escort little Jeannine on a tour of the Original Floating Theatre, decide to employ its acetylene stage- and house-lights to my purposes that evening, take dinner with Harrison and Jane, am amiably informed that our affair is terminated (they being about to take off for Italy), resolve Mack v. Mack in their favor by a coin flip, return to the Dorset, close my Inquiry into your suicide, which I mistakenly believe I now understand, stroll down to the showboat, attempt my own, fail, and observe that I will in all probability (but not necessarily) live out my life to its natural term, there being in the abstract no more reason to commit suicide than not to. Got that, Dad? Inquiry reopened; Letter to you resumed; Floating Theatre memoir — and Second Cycle of my life — begun.

13.

Okay, the correspondences aren’t rigorous, and there are as many inversions as repetitions or ironical echoes. The past not only manures the future: it does an untidy job. #11, #12, & #13, which happened back-to-back 1st time around, are yet to recur, unless we count Polly’s airhorn work on the New Bridge in July 1967 as 11 R, and my subsequent vast suspicion (that Nothing — and everything else! — has intrinsic value) as 12 and 13 R. But now that I have perceived the Pattern — and just barely begun to assimilate 8 & 10 R — my standards of praeterital stercoration have been elevated. I now look for Polly to fire a literal flatus at us 32 days hence (or, like a yogi, take air in). It will no longer do that I have in a sense, via the foundation, already reconstructed the showboat I tried and failed to destroy in 1937 (Nature had a hard time of it, too: the O.F.T. sank three times between 1913 and 1938, was each time raised and refitted, was finally sold for scrap in ’41, but burned to the waterline off the Georgia coast en route to the salvage yard. Were the Author of us all a less heavy ironist, one would suspect arson for insurance; but I believe He managed spontaneous combustion in the galley, under the stage, where I and the acetylene tanks once rendezvoused). A second Dark Night clearly lies ahead for me, this June or next, followed by another Final Solution — and, no doubt, somebody’s second first novel, or first last!

Meanwhile, back at 8 and 10 R…

Seven Fridays ago, the last of March, I saw her name on the appointment calendar, not in my foundation office out at the college, but in my law office on Court Lane. She’d reserved a full hour of the afternoon. I wondered what exactly for, and asked Polly; she wondered, too. Harrison’s will, we grimly supposed.

I had drawn and redrawn it for him a number of times, and was named his executor. I did not much approve of its provisions; had striven earnestly, in fact, with some success, to persuade him to alter a number of them in the interests both of equity and of maintaining the appearance of mens sana. I didn’t relish the prospect of its execution, but meant to see it through unless the will should be seriously contested, in which case I would probably disqualify myself as executor in order to defend (again with little relish) the interest of the foundation, his chief beneficiary. Thus he had stricken from his copious drafts, at my urging, all references to the flooding of England, to Her Majesty the Queen, to his disaffected American colonies, to “meae dilectissimae Elizabethae,” and the rest. The sum settled on Lady Amherst for her pains was scaled down to noncontroversial size (she deserved more); ditto the executor’s share, embarrassingly generous. And for appearances’ sake Jane was given a cash bequest in addition to the considerable jointly owned property (including Tidewater Farms) which became hers automatically by right of survivorship. Finally, I had persuaded Harrison to put in trust a sum for each of his two grandchildren. But to Drew and Jeannine he would not leave a penny, and only with difficulty had I prevailed upon him not to denounce as well as disinherit them. His share of Mack Enterprises and his other stock holdings, as well as real property inherited from his father and not jointly owned with Jane — that is, the bulk of his bequeathable estate and more than half of his net worth — were to pass to the foundation, along with the benefits of his several life-insurance policies. Especially considering how much Harrison had put already into the original endowments of the foundation and of Tidewater Tech, this bequest came to a very great deal of money: more than two million dollars. Half was to be added to “our” endowment, where it was to be vested in a contingency fund until Marshyhope College’s “Tower of Truth” was completed; should further cost overruns or budget cuts by the State General Services Department (with whom “we” have a complex relationship in such special projects) threaten to truncate the tower, it was to be rescued with this money, which otherwise would revert to the foundation’s general fund, its income to be used as we saw fit. The other half was to be divided equally into two trusts: one for establishing, furnishing, and maintaining a Loyalist Library and Reading Room in that same tower, another for founding an American Society of British Loyalists under the directorship of A. B. Cook, the self-styled Maryland Laureate.

These last were the only overt testamentary evidences of Harrison’s grand delusion. While much toned down from his original proposals (e.g., a Society for the Reunion of His Majesty’s American Colonies with Mother England), and altogether more interesting than John Schott’s tower, they remained the obvious openings for any contest of the will. Were I Jane Mack, certainly if I were Jeannine, most certainly if I were Drew, I’d contest.

And it seems they all more or less intend to. Unselfishness takes many forms, Dad: had you noticed? Drew wants his father’s entire estate returned to The People, from whom he maintains it was wrongfully wrested by two generations of capitalist-industrialist Macks. This end he would effect, not by retroactive refunds to all purchasers of Mack Pickle Products since 1922, but via free day-care centers for blacks, improved living facilities and organizational muscle for migrant farm workers, and other, more revolutionary, projects. He is neither hurt nor surprised by his disinheritance: father-son hostility he regards neither as an Oedipal universal nor as an accident of temperaments, but as “inherent in the dialectic of the bourgeois family.” He acknowledges that his father was deranged, but believes (correctly, in my opinion) that the derangement accounts only for certain of his benefactions, not for the disinheritances. He will of course have to argue otherwise in court.

Jeannine is hurt but not surprised. I do not think either the Macks or the Andrewses greatly capable of loving. Affection, loyalty, goodwill, benignity, forbearance, yes; and these are virtues, no doubt about it. But love… Yet the more imaginative of us (you listening, Dad?) can sharply wish we had that problematical capacity, which cares enough to hassle where we will not bother, to cry out where we are stoical, to treasure another quite as much as ourselves. And even the less imaginative of us can wish to be loved, and fancy ourselves capable at least of reciprocation, or heartfelt echo. Jeannine believes (I gather) that inadequate fathering doomed her to a promiscuous and unsuccessful search for substitutes. What about adequate daughtering? I ask her. She’d’ve been a good daughter, she replies, if her father had been etc. Should she contest (she’s presently too scattered to decide), it will not be simply to enrich herself — she and Drew both have trust income from their grandparents, adequate to subsist on, and there is alimony from “Golden Louie,” as she calls her last ex — it will be for reparation. And to enable Reg Prinz to produce as well as direct his next film.

As for Jane, and the first part of 10 R: she will of course contest, she informed me promptly and pleasantly that afternoon, when she came into the office: punctual as always and, as always, handsome, striking, yea beautiful. About the Tower of Truth she had no strong feelings one way or the other, though she opposed the use of foundation funds to supplement the GSD appropriation: let John Schott find his money elsewhere; that’s what college presidents were for. The Loyalist business she regarded privately as more silly than demented; while she was grateful to me in principle for having talked Harrison out of its wilder versions, she meant nonetheless to use those earlier drafts and my revisions to support her contention that he was neither of sound mind nor properly his own man in his later years. A. B. Cook — who I now learned was a distant relative of hers — she regarded as a humbug, to be neither feared, trusted, nor otherwise taken seriously. John Schott was an ass. With Germaine Pitt she had no quarrel; on the contrary; she would not dream of contesting that bequest. The disinheritance of her children was doubtless regrettable but neither surprising, given their “provocative track records” (her term), nor tragic, given their earlier legacies, their present life-styles, the trusts established for Drew’s children (Yvonne, thank heaven, could be depended upon to educate them Sensibly), and the Reasonable Provision she herself was making for Drew and Jeannine in her own will. She herself of course was well off even without all that jointly owned property, and very well off with it; she would bear Harrison no grudge even if he’d been quite sane when he made his last will. Nevertheless, two million was two million: since she had no particular fondness for the Tower of Truth, the cause of British loyalism, or Mr. A. B. Cook, she meant to sue for as much of it as she could get. She quite expected Drew and Jeannine to do the same; would urge them to, if they bothered to ask her opinion.

All this delivered coolly, crisply, cordially in my office on a spanking early spring afternoon. Since burying Harrison and reestablishing herself at Tidewater Farms, Jane had found time for a week’s rendezvous in Tobago with her new friend “Lord Baltimore” (she would not tell me his name), a French-Canadian descendant of the original Irish proprietary lords of Maryland and (more news) a relative of her relative A. B. Cook—“but not close enough to worry us about the consanguinity business.” Tanned, fresh-eyed, wrinkled only as if by too much outdoor tennis, Jane looked younger and livelier than Lady Amherst: a vigorous 45 at most — certainly not 55, most decidedly not 63! And from her I caught, among the pleasant fragrances of wools and suedes and discreet perfume, a tiny heart-stinging scent from #8 L, 37 years and several pages past: a scent of salt spray and sunshine on fresh skin, in clean hair, as if she’d just come in from small-boat sailing on a summer afternoon.

O, O, O pale pervert Proust: keep your tea and madeleine! Give me the dainty oils of hair and skin (for all I know it might have been, both then and now, some suntan preparation) to trigger memory and regain lost time! I had to close my eyes; Jane reached over the desk to touch my arm and wonder if I was all right. I was 69, I replied, and subject to attacks of nostalgia; otherwise fit as a fiddle — and ready to go to court if Harrison’s will were contested. But not, I should apprise her at once, as her counsel in the dispute — or Drew’s or Jeannine’s, both of whom I told her had approached me informally on the subject since the will was read. As Harrison’s executor on the one hand and executive director of his Tidewater Foundation on the other, I was clearly caught in a division of interest (I had urged him, vainly, to name Jane his executrix, as she well knew). As his friend, I would have to decide which role to abdicate and which to act in, the better to see his wishes carried out. As her friend, I’d be happy to recommend to her the estate lawyers I’d least like to cross swords with.

Unnecessary, she responded cheerfully: she knew scads of lawyers, bright young ones as well as sly old ones. And she had Harrison’s crazy early drafts, and letters he’d written as George III dating back to 1955, and the testimony of two psychiatrists, and enough Georgian costumery to outfit the staff of Williamsburg (where in fact she was negotiating its sale), and innumerable eye-witnesses to the long-running royal charade at Tidewater Farms — including a videotape made with Harrison’s consent by Reg Prinz only last Guy Fawkes Day. Not to mention certain freeze-dried items in safe deposit with Mack Enterprises, of demonstrated efficacy in the proof of unsound mind. No doubt whatever that she could break at least the two “Loyalist” articles in the will and, at least, divide that million with Drew and Jeannine, on the grounds that Harrison’s mad identification of them with Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, and Princess Amelia, respectively, accounted for their disinheritance. Moreover, she was reasonably confident that a separate action could establish that in her own case it was only the invidious historical identification, not any blameworthy conduct of hers, that had done the trick, whereas his disaffection with Jeannine and Drew antedated his madness and marked his lucid as well as his demented intervals. She had not yet decided which tack to take.

But that was not exactly what she’d come to talk about. She knew me well enough, she hoped, not to expect me to represent her or either of her children against a will I’d drawn for Harrison myself. She thanked me again for my attentions to him and to her through those trying years. I was as trusted a friend as she had; had always been; how fortunate they were, she and Harrison, to have renewed that friendship upon their return to the Eastern Shore! For that, if little else, she thanked Jeannine, whose warm report of her encountering me at the Yacht Club’s New Year’s Eve party in 1954 had reopened the door between us, so to speak. Poor Jeannine: Harrison hadn’t been the best of fathers, she supposed; it did not surprise her to hear that her daughter had sought me out in the matter of the will; little as she knew me, Jeannine had always had a daughterly sort of feeling for me. Even Drew, for all his rough edges and thin-skinned radicalism, trusted me, she knew, as he never trusted his own father…

I studied her. Not a trace of irony, Dad; none either of calculation (I mean conscious, calculated calculation). It was the first time Jane had been in that office since June 21 or 22, 1937, when, having slept with me for the last time the night before (my Dark Night), she’d stopped by in the afternoon with 3½-year-old Jeannine, whom I’d promised to take on a tour of Captain Adams’s Floating Theatre. I was smitten, nearly overcome by associations: sweet, painful, in any case poignant, and given resonation by that fragrance of sun and salt I’d first scented on her on the day — O my! I had forgotten nothing: my bones, my muscles, the pores of my skin remembered!

But for Jane the place had evidently no associations at all. We could have been talking across my bed in the Dorset Hotel, it seemed to me, or in the Todds Point cottage, and she’d have made no connection. But if such remarkable obliviousness (which I acknowledged might be unsentimentality instead; I’d never tested it) was characteristic of her, oblivious digression was not. I observed to her that she seemed reluctant to state her business.

“I am!” She laughed, much relieved — and then coolly stated it, as if reviewing in detail for her dermatologist the history of a skin blemish the more vexing because it was her only one, and small. Believe it or not, she said, love and sex and all that had never been terribly important to her.

She’d enjoyed her life with Harrison until his madness, which after all marred only the last 10 years or so of the 40 they’d had together. She’d enjoyed her children when they were small. If she didn’t feel close to her grandchildren, the distance seemed to her more a matter of political and social class distinctions, insisted on by Drew, than of racial bias on her part. But never mind: if family feeling was not her long suit, so be it. And she’d always liked having money, social position, and excellent health to enjoy them in: people who turned their backs on such pleasures — like Drew and to some extent Jeannine — were incomprehensible to her.

I agreed that it was better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.

“That’s right!” Jane said, seriously. But more than her married life, family life, and social life, she went on, she enjoyed the business life she’d taken up since Harrison’s decline. It was a passion with her, she admitted, her truest and chiefest; she regarded herself as having been neither a very good wife and mother nor a bad one, but she knew she was a good businessperson, and she loved the whole entrepreneurial-managerial enterprise more than she’d ever loved any human being, think of her what I would.

I thought her lucky to both know and have what she loved, and said so. But what about “Lord Baltimore”? Those trysts in London and Tobago?

She poofed away the word trysts. She and André (aha, we have milord’s first name) didn’t much go for that sort of thing — not that they just played bridge and tennis, I was to understand! But the pleasure they found in each other’s society, and the basis for their (still confidential) affiancement, was the pleasure of shared tastes and objectives, together with compensatory desires, with which sex had little to do. Think what I would of Betsy Patterson, Wallis Warfield Simpson, Grace Kelly; like them she had always hankered after a bona fide title; would almost rather be Baroness So-and-so or “Lady Baltimore” than be rich! As for “Lord B.,” never much interested in business and virtually dispossessed by Canadian social welfare taxes — he would rather be rich than titled. Why then should they not both be both, since they so enjoyed each other otherwise?

She knew what I must be thinking, Jane said here, especially as her friend was some years younger than she. But suppose he were a fortune hunter in the vulgar sense, as she was confident he was not: she was a businesswoman, and had no intention of endowing him, unless in her will, with more than the million or so (minus inheritance taxes, gift taxes, and lawyers’ fees) she hoped to win from the will suit. A windfall, really, costing her no more in effect than her title would cost him. Now, she was no child: she’d had his credentials and private history looked into, and was satisfied that he was what he represented himself to be: a middle-aged widower of aristocratic descent and reduced means (like her friend Germaine Pitt), who truly enjoyed her society and candidly wished he had more money to implement his civilized tastes. But even if she turned out to be being foolish, it was a folly she could afford.

I agreed, my heart filling with an odd emotion. But she had mentioned sex?

Would I believe it? she wondered, blushing marvelously. She was being blackmailed! Or threatened with blackmail. About… a Sex Thing! A Sex Thing?

Out of her past, she added hastily. Mostly. Sex Things that she herself had completely forgotten about, as if they had never happened.

Ah. Uneasily, but with sharp interest, I wondered whether… But no: 20 years ago, it seems, she had been briefly swept quite off her feet by another titled gentleman, now deceased: friend of the family, delightful man, I’d know his name if she told me, but a perfect rakehell; she couldn’t imagine what on earth had attracted her so, or how she’d let him talk her into doing the mad things they did. Maybe it was change of life: she’d had a hysterectomy the year before, and was taking hormones, and feeling her age then much more than now. Maybe it was that Jeannine was turning into such a little tramp already at sixteen, or that she and Harrison weren’t as close as they’d been before…

Lady Amherst’s husband? I asked, and identified my old emotion: simple jealousy. Jane nodded, smiling and tisking her tongue. It seemed a hundred years ago; she and Germaine had never even mentioned it since the latter’s return to Maryland. She doubted Germaine even remembered; it hadn’t seemed to bother her at the time, though it had upset poor Harrison. She herself had just about forgotten it, it was at once so crazy and so inconsequential. And it was immediately afterwards that she became so absorbed in business that nothing could have tempted her That Way again, not even to a flirtation, much less — she closed her eyes, breathed deeply.

Well. I had gathered, sketchily, from Harrison in his decline, that there had been some such affair, in London and Paris in the autumn of 1949, with someone they’d met in their prewar travels. And it had “upset” him, much more than Jane’s only other known adultery — her long-term affair with me in the 1930’s — because, while briefer and less serious, this one had taken place with neither his complaisance nor, at first, his knowledge. He himself, I believe, had never been unfaithful except for infrequent one-nighters with expensive call girls when he was out of town on business. He admired his wife above all other women he knew; sexual self-confidence was not his strongest trait, but it seemed to me he had a healthy, shrug-shouldered understanding of whatever in his character had once indulged our ménage à trois, and had “outgrown” it, neither repressing his past like Jane nor dwelling on it. A pity indeed, if Jane’s uncharacteristic last fling with Jeffrey Amherst (whom I never met) turns out to have been among the causes of Harrison’s madness — in which, it occurred to me suddenly and sadly, he had at once insulated himself from her rejection of him by seeming to reject her, and bestowed upon her the highest title in the book.

But as she said, I said now, that was over and done 20 years ago, and both her then lover and her husband were dead. How could she be blackmailed? Surely her new Canadian friend would not be much bothered to hear she’d once had an extramarital fling?

How warmly our cool Jane blushes. It wasn’t just hearing, she informed me. That darned Jeffrey (Jane has never used coarse language) had had the naughtiest mind of any man she’d ever met! He’d made her do crazy things! And there were pictures…

Aha. Which someone had somehow got hold of, I suggested, and threatened to show to friend André? But what difference could they possibly make?

“Toddy,” she said, in a tone I hadn’t heard for 30 years; Sentimental Jealousy would surely have taken its place with Mirth, Surprise, Fear, Frustration, Despair, and Courage in the gallery of Strong Emotions I Have Known, had it not been largely displaced a moment later by pure Gee-Whizment. For (she now revealed) it was not only the past that had been recaptured by some voyeuristic Kodak, and it was not André she feared would see the photos. André was in one… taken in London… well after Jeffrey’s death… in fact, just a few months ago…

I was incredulous. Jane in tears. It was crazy, crazy, she declared: she’d practically just met the man, though they’d been corresponding ever since he’d traced their distant relations some years before (he was big on family history, on history in general, a kind of hobby). They’d hit it off beautifully from the first, and of course she’d been distraught over Harrison’s condition, that’s why she’d gone abroad. Even so! It must have been the being in London again, with a titled gentleman again; it was even the same hotel, where she’d stopped, not for sentimental reasons, but because it was the one she happened to know best, the Connaught. And the darned thing was, sex wasn’t really a big thing with them; this must have been about their first or second time in bed; she doubted they’d ever done such things since. And how in the world anybody could take their picture without their knowing it!

My turn now to touch her arm, truly wondering whether she was quite sane. Leaving aside the remarkable assertion that there was anything compromising to have been photographed, I asked her just who was threatening to blackmail her with the supposed photographs, and how. From a slim leather briefcase she drew a Kleenex and a typewritten, unsigned note: “If you contest your late husband’s will, these will be distributed to your family, friends, business associates, and competitors.”

That demonstrative pronoun was the kicker: I’d expected, if there turned out really to be a blackmail threat, some allusion to “certain very compromising photographs in my possession.”

“These?” I inquired.

Out they came, Dad, with another Kleenex, from another partition of her case: two 8-by-10 glossies, one in black and white, the other in color. Unbelievable. Across the desk, Jane covered her eyes. Both photos were sharply focused, well-lighted, clearly resolved, full-length shots, made with a good camera by someone who understood photography. In the black-and-white, taken from the side at waist level, Jane (43) knelt naked on the floor to perform fellatio upon a paunchy but pleasant-faced elder gentleman who — remarkably, considering that her body was as perfect in that photograph as it had been at my last sight of it in 1937, when, aged 31, she’d had the body of a 25-year-old — was not yet roused to erection by her ministrations. His expression was mild, bemused, behind a full blond (or gray) mustache and the eyeglasses he’d not removed; his right, farther hand rested upon her head; his left held a cigar whose ash appeared to interest him more than the fresh-faced, hollow-cheeked (because etc.), crop-curled vision of daintiness who looked up at him with full mouth and bright, expectant eyes. O, O, O. In the other, taken apparently from above, a stocky, well-muscled, bald, dark-body-haired fellow of 50 or so with (I think) a short beard and (I know) a considerable erection was busily “sixty-nining” on a forest-green chenille bedspread with…

Absolutely unbelievable. Not the fact of sex among us healthy sexagenarians; heavens no: I myself now look forward to restful soixante-neuf at quatre-vingt-seize. But the well-dressed woman just across the desk from me there, stretched naked on her side here in living color across that bed, her upper leg raised and bent to accommodate her friend, on whose lower thigh she rested her head as he did likewise on hers — she was beautiful! Not as a well-tended 63-year-old may be, well, well tended; Polly Lake, bless her, is that. No, Dad, I mean she was a smasher, a stunner, a knockout. Where were the varicosities, striations, liver spots? The thickened waist and slacked behind and fallen pectorals? The crow’s-feet, jowls, and wattles of latter age? Jane’s hair is perfectly gray; her face is delicately seasoned rather than dewy fresh (as it had still been at 43!); her skin all over, and her musculature, also has that slightly seasoned cast. Otherwise… Fifteen years younger-looking than her inverted lover, for example, a healthy specimen himself. No question about it, she is a physical freak. But there are freaks and freaks; if this is arrested development, let them throw away the key.

Jane (I exclaimed when I was able)! You are a smasher, a stunner, et cetera! How could these photographs possibly do otherwise than delight you as they delight me, as they must be the delight of any family member, friend, enemy, business associate or competitor whose eyes are privileged to rest upon them? As they must delight God himself, whom I suspect of snapping that full-color overhead? Blackmail indeed! Have them enlarged and framed on your office walls, reproduced in the brochures of all Mack Enterprises, direct-mailed to preferred stockholders and to every senior citizens’ organization in the republic!

She thought me not serious, but was heartened enough to scold me, mildly, for reexamining the photographs, which reluctantly I gave back to her. Admiring her vanity along with the rest, I granted that their circulation could be an embarrassment and inconvenience, if not to her affiancement at least to her business and private life. And I seconded her opinion that police and private-detective files were not to be trusted with them: I knew from experience how that brotherhood relishes a good photograph; in any case (so to speak) they were not Sherlock Holmeses or Hercule Poirots, just cops and ex-cops of one sort or another, more or less competent routine investigators.

That was why she’d brought them to me. What should she do? I asked her kindly, Had they really been taken without her knowledge? The lighting and camera angles were so good, and in 1949, especially, the gadgetry of snooping was less exquisite than it had become since. What she’d acknowledged, moreover, about Lord Jeff’s eccentricities…

Okay, it came out then, with more blushes and a couple more Kleenexes: he’d been a camera buff, had set up a tripod and lights and automatic timer himself in their room at the Connaught back in ’49. But there’d been nobody on the ceiling last January! And it was still to be explained how naughty Jeff’s photo (which she’d never even thought of since, or seen a print of till now) came into someone else’s hands 20 years later. And whose? Would I please, as one of her oldest friends and the most trusted, try discreetly to find out who had sent her that note (from Niagara Falls, N.Y., 14302, on St. Patrick’s Day, the envelope revealed, with a 6-cent Cherokee Strip commemorative), so that she could protect herself and “Lord Baltimore” from further invasion of their privacy and proceed to contest Harrison’s will if she saw fit?

Well. I wondered aloud how she thought to protect herself even if the culprit could be located, since any legal prosecution would necessitate her placing the photographs in evidence; no doubt the blackmailer would publish them anyhow if he or she felt threatened. All business and no tissues now, fair Jane reminded me coolly that as president of a multimillion-dollar corporation and potential contestant of two million dollars’ worth of testamentary articles, she was not naive about industrial spying and counterspying, however innocent she might have been about lewd invasions of personal privacy. She had a fair idea of what sufficient money could hire done. If I would help her find the guilty party, the rest could be left to her.

Quite taken aback, as they say, I asked her what she meant to do if the letter’s author turned out to be Drew or Jeannine? For while I couldn’t quite imagine Drew’s highly principled illegalities extending so far, two million was a lot of bread for the Revolution, and it seemed not unimaginable that his hand might be forced by some less scrupulous comrade. As for Jeannine, I had no notion whatever of what moral lines she drew, if any, but I couldn’t imagine her standing up to, say, Reg Prinz’s silent suasion. In any event, both could surely be said to have the motive for blackmail, if not the means or, on the face of it, the disposition. So too could her cousin A. B. Cook VI, a much likelier candidate now that I thought about it. Germaine Pitt, on the other hand, would seem to have readier means, at least for having somehow come across the earlier photograph among her late husband’s memorabilia; but she had truly cared for Harrison, and I couldn’t fancy her suing for a larger bequest, much less resorting to vulgar blackmail. For that matter, as representative of the major loser in a successful action on Jane’s part, I myself ought properly to be among the prime suspects, ought I not?

Death to all of you, Jane said affably. I was in her element now — sizing up the competition — and she had of course reviewed the lot of us plus other direct and indirect beneficiaries of the will as possible authors of that letter. That she’d then come to me spoke for itself, she declared. She suspected Prinz, whose scruples were dubious but whose photographic expertise was not, or some unknown colleague of Drew’s, certainly not Yvonne. In either case, Jeannine and Drew might well know nothing of it, and need never. Would I help her?

I told her I was afraid to say no. Was she truly capable of “putting out a contract” on the person responsible? That was not what she’d said, she said: there were surely more ways than one to neutralize a threat, once the threatener was identified. Photographic negatives could be located and destroyed; effective counterthreats or other checkmates could be devised. Where was my imagination? Meanwhile, she assumed I had other appointments that afternoon, as she did, and there was no particular hurry about this inquiry, since no payment was being demanded or deadline set. Why didn’t I think about it for a while? And would I agree at least not to rush the will into orphan’s court until I had so thought, and we’d talked again about it?

When Jane is being Madam President, her briskness is a little false, at least professional, as it surely wasn’t back there with the photos and the Kleenex. She was so pleased to have had our chat; we didn’t see nearly enough of each other since Harrison’s death; we must get together socially, and soon. I tried the most obvious double entendre: Indeed it had been a joy to see her again, so little changed since old times…

Well, she declared: we’ll certainly get together. Soon. Toodle-oo now.

Ta-ta.

I wanted to believe her so unrufflable that, perfectly aware of my irony, she declined to acknowledge it because she found it vulgar, at least inappropriate. Similarly, that she quite remembered her past visits to my office, and to my room, and simply saw no reason to acknowledge the memory. But my whole sense of her told me she was oblivious to both.

Now I’m less certain. (It’s Saturday sunrise. I fell asleep over the chart table. I’m sore in every joint. We 69-year-olds can’t do the Dear-Diary thing all night like a teenager after a big date.) Of anything. Except that, as best we wretched Andrewses can love, Todd Andrews loves Jane Mack; has never ceased loving her since 1932; has never loved anyone else. How stupid my life has been, old man: empty, insignificant, unmentionable! How full hers, however “oblivious.” And who am I to speak of her obliviousness, who scarcely realized until last night that I’ve been in love with that astonishing woman for 37 years?

As Jane suggested, we got together. Not exactly “soon”: seven Fridays later, yesterday. I’d thought about those photographs in the meanwhile; had seen a bit of Lady Amherst and Ambrose Mensch (who seem to be a couple these days; lots of horny gossip; more power to them) out at the college, where things have been popping. Watched Drew and Reg Prinz in action out there too, and reinforced a few tentative conclusions. Germaine’s a stable, decent woman in an unstable situation: I see in her neither cupidity nor vindictiveness. If she’s involved in anything like blackmail, it’s against her will, so to speak. Mensch is an enigma to me: erratic, improvisatory. I can imagine him, as Lady A.’s younger lover, obliging her to do something uncharacteristic — but I daresay they’re more likely candidates for prurient photography than purveyors of it. And what would they gain? Drew is, as ever, more principled than effectual. His surviving black colleagues haven’t been in evidence in the Marshyhope riots: either they have other fish to fry or he’s still on the outs with them since the bridge business. And he’s too aboveboard about his probate challenge-in-the-works to be feasibly underhanded. Prinz is a cipher, “Bea Golden” a blank — who, however, commutes between here and that quack sanatorium of hers up in Canada, not far from Niagara Falls. Of Cook I’ve seen and heard nothing except that he has declined without explanation an honorary degree from Marshyhope this spring, one which he’d previously either been pressing for or been being pressed for by John Schott. A minor mystery, from whose rough coincidence with the blackmail business I can make no plausible inferences. That Niagara Falls postmark had led me to consider also, fruitlessly, certain recipients of and rejected applicants for Tidewater Foundation grants up in that neck of the woods: no dice, except that at least one of the latter strikes me as a certifiable madman. Then there was Jane’s “Lord Baltimore,” who dwells somewhere in those latitudes: I even considered the possibility that the threat was bogus, some bizarre test of Yours Truly, administered — but what in the world for, unless to try whether his famous old heart is breakable at last? — by the Widow Mack herself.

Nothing. And during and between these reflections and distractions, as the kids tore up the campuses and the cops and National Guardsmen tore up the kids and the federal government tore up our country and the Pentagon tore up others, I hauled, fitted out, and launched the Osborn Jones for its 69th sailing season: 10th as a pleasure cruiser under my skippership. The prospect, and the work, didn’t please me this time as they usually do. It’s not a handy boat, either for cruising or for living aboard of. Never was meant to be, certainly not for an old bachelor. It’s clumsy, heavy, slow, too laborious to handle and maintain, comfortable but not convenient. The conversion — like my life, I’d been feeling all April — had been competently done but was basically and ultimately a mistake. I’d heard nothing from Jane since the Friday of the Photographs.

So I decided to have a party aboard: Cocktails for Friends, Suspects, and Women I’d Realized Too Late I Love Only and Always. Last night, 5 to 7. Jane’s invitation urged her to bring Lord Baltimore along, if he happened to be in the neighborhood or was given to flying down from Canada for drinks. I’d like to meet the lucky chap, I wrote, trying to turn the knife in Sentimental Jealousy, which turned it in me instead. R.S.V.P. I left off the Regrets Only.

She didn’t call. By 4:45, with the deck and cabin Bristol-fashion, hors d’oeuvres out and bar set up, waiter and barkeep standing by, great wind pennant looping in the warm light air, even a gangway rigged between pier and gunwale, and faithful Polly nursing a drink while we waited for the guests, I was the one with regrets only: for having planned the stupid party (which I saw clearly now to be no more than a pretext for seeing Jane again, who was probably up in Canada with her large-tooled lover); for having lived out a life so stupid — no, so stupidly: it hasn’t been a worthless life, just a meagerly lived one — instead of ending it in 1937. At five nobody had arrived yet, of course; I felt like sending home the help and taking Polly for a sail. The movie people, we agreed, would probably show up even later than Regular People. Why had I breathed in and out, eaten and shat, earned and spent, dressed and undressed, put one foot in front of the other, for 69 years? Did you ever — but who knows what you ever.

At 1704 by the bulkhead clock (which I wouldn’t vouch for over Jane Mack’s watch) I saw her car come ’round the Long Wharf fountain: the only other big black Lincolns in Dorchester County aren’t automobiles. Up rose my spiritual barometer; sank when I saw two people in the back; rose again, part way, when the chauffeur handed Jane and Lady Amherst out. It occurred to me that Germaine Pitt had not been Lady Anything until her marriage — I know little of her background beyond a dim memory of the vita presented by Joe Morgan to the foundation trustees prior to her appointment — but she looked more to the manor born than Jane, if only because she’s so unassuming tweedy English, and My Love so American to the bone. It occurred to me further, as I handed them over the gangway, that Jane hadn’t indicated how confidential was the news of her betrothal and the name of her intended: as she hadn’t told me more than his given name and nom de guerre, as it were, I supposed it still a sensitive matter, and made no mention of it in our hellos. Nor did she in any way acknowledge my note on her invitation. A mad fancy struck me: not only had our interview been some sort of test, but her “Lord Baltimore” did not exist! She was not engaged; it was not Too Late…

I checked myself. That photo couldn’t have been faked. And for me it had been too late since 1937.

I introduced the ladies to Polly Lake and showed Germaine about the Osborn Jones, explaining what a skipjack was and how it came to pass that oysters were still dredged under sail in Maryland. She was politely interested: her late husband had enjoyed sailing out of Cowes, she said, in the Solent, but she herself was prone to motion sickness. However, she was mad about oysters: what a pity the season was ended. I thought to pick up on Lord Jeff, try whether I could sound her present feelings about his old affair with Jane; she forestalled me by inquiring about the Osborn Jones, whether I’d named it after the salty old voyeur in the Floating Opera novel or whether the fictional character and the boat were both named after an historical original. Ought she to ask Jane instead? she wondered mischievously.

I was impressed: a delicate maneuver, as if she’d read my thoughts and was gently reminding me (what in fact I’d forgotten for the moment) that during our trying days together in Harrison’s decline we’d had occasion to compare cordial notes on the apparent obliviousness of our friend Jane, both to the fictionalization of our old affair (which Germaine had heard about but not then read) and to Jane’s later fling with Lord Amherst, which Harrison sometimes alluded to.

Lucky fellow, Ambrose Mensch: I do like and trust Germaine Pitt. As if on cue, Jane saluted our return from the foredeck to the bar by explaining brightly to her friend that Captain Osborn Jones had been an old dredge-boat skipper whom I’d befriended back in the 30’s and introduced her to. He used to live alone in the Dorset Hotel, she declared, and preside over a collection of similarly aged guests called the Dorchester Explorers’ Club.

Ah, said Germaine. Even Polly rolled her eyes.

I pass over my cocktail party, Father of mine, because its radiant, miraculous aftermath so outshines it. Anyhow it was a failure in the sleuthing way, so far as I know; I’ve yet to check with Polly, whose idea of subtle investigation is the Disarming Point-blank Question put by a Fetchingly Candid Elder Lady — a device that not infrequently works, and a rôle she so enjoys playing that it’s scarcely a rôle. I’d told her, more or less, about the photos and the blackmail threat, as about all our office business. She was of course enchanted. In her immediate opinion there were but two imaginable suspects: Reg Prinz if Jeannine in fact contested the will, A. B. Cook if she did not. Therefore we’d invited Cook to the party; but a secretarial voice from his home, over by Annapolis, RSVP’d us his regrets: he was presently out of the country. Polly promised to give me a chance to observe and talk to the guests myself before she took charge of the inquiry. She also informed me (this was in the office, just after Jane’s appointment) that I was in love.

Absurd, I said. But true, said she. By six everyone had arrived: Mensch (who’s to get the honorary doctorate declined by Cook), Jeannine and Prinz and the movie crowd, Drew and Yvonne, and, for filling and spacing, some Mack Enterprises folk and a few foundation trustees. A ship of fools, Drew declared, and disembarked early: yet he said it mildly, and when Polly asked him whether he’d expected me to invite a delegation of his friends to blow up the boat, he kissed her cheek and said one never knew. Later I heard her asking Prinz whether he’d ever dabbled in still photography — couldn’t catch his answer, if there was one — and later yet I saw her at the bar, deep in conversation with Jeannine, no doubt asking what her plans were regarding her father’s will. Finally, to my surprise, she went about the boat looking at her watch and declaring her astonishment that it was seven o’clock already. Most took the hint. The movie folk had another party to go to anyhow, at Robert Mitchum’s spread across the river; Germaine and Ambrose, too, plainly had other irons in the fire. The Mack Enterprises and T.F. people remembered their several dinner plans; not a few invited Jane, who however declined, and/or their host, ditto, and/or Polly, who responded to some one or another of them that she’d be pleased to join them shortly, as soon as the party was tidied up.

An odd thing had happened, Dad. From the moment that Lincoln appeared on Long Wharf and Jane issued forth in a handsome white pants suit, blue blouse, and red scarf, I was, as the kids say nowadays, “spaced.” I’d been truly curious to hear what Germaine had to say about Cook’s declining that degree; I wanted to try to talk to Drew about the demonstrations at Marshyhope and Abe Fortas’s resignation from the Supreme Court, as well as about Harrison’s will, and to Jeannine about the progress of the film. But I had the feeling, unfamiliar since 1917 or thereabouts, that if I opened my mouth something outrageous would come out. After that initial tour of the boat with Germaine, I scarcely moved from the afterdeck, merely greeting guests, seeing to their drinks, and smiling sappily, while that white pants suit and its tanned inhabitant moved ever before my eyes. Ah, Polly, Polly: yes, I am, and passing odd it is to be, daft in love in my seventieth year!

Again like an old-fashioned teenager, I’d scarcely talked to Jane all evening, only hovered on her margins as she chatted with all hands back by the taffrail. Now that everyone was gone but her and Polly, I busied myself settling up with the help, excited that Jane had lingered behind, wondering why, still almost afraid to speak, wishing Polly would leave, half hoping she wouldn’t. Jane’s chauffeur came expectantly pierwards. It was still only seven-thirty. Now the three of us were together on the afterdeck with our last gin and tonics, and it occurred to me that Polly had walked down from the office; I owed her a lift home.

Could we go sailing? Jane suddenly asks. What a good idea! cries dear Polly, utterly unsurprised. We’ve no crew, says I, rattled. Jane guesses merrily she hasn’t forgotten how to sail: don’t I remember their old knockabout from Todds Point days, that we used to sail out to Sharps Island in? You’re hardly dressed for sailing, I point out. Listen to the man, tisks Polly; the best-dressed skipper on Chesapeake Bay. I don’t believe he wants to take us sailing, pouts Jane. Never mind us, says Polly airily: I’ve got me a dinner date, and if you don’t mind I’ll borrow your chauffeur to take me there; it’ll knock their eyes out. She was welcome to him, Jane told her — unless I really was going to refuse to take her sailing. Jane, I said (seriously now), there’s hardly a breath blowing. Very brightly she replies, Maybe something will spring up as the sun goes down. She goes so far as to take my elbow: If not, we can drift on the tide, like the Floating Opera.

Dear Father: Flustered as I was, I heard her correctly. She did not say Floating Theatre; she said Floating Opera. And thus ends this long recitative and begins the wondrous aria, the miraculous duet.

But you are wondering about Polly. Polly Lake is no martyr, Dad: no long-adoring, self-effacing secretary. Polly’s her own woman, ten years a widow and no yen to remarry, having nursed a husband she was fond of through a long and ugly terminal illness. Polly has grown-up children and grandchildren who love her, plenty of friends of both sexes, good health and a good job, more hobbies and interests than she can find time for, and at least one other casual lover besides me, who’d love her less casually if she’d permit him to. Polly Lake is mildly abashed that her romantic life is more various and agreeable since menopause and widowhood than it was before. Sex itself she neither over- nor underrates: male companionship without it she finds a bit of a bore. Even when she’s not feeling particularly horny herself, she prefers her male friends to feel a bit that way. The only woman I ever met who finds cigar smoke erotically arousing. So don’t worry about her. Good night, Poll.

As for your son. Still wondering what on earth is up with Ms. Oblivious, he motors the O.J. from its slip and out of the basin, Jane having neatly cast off the dock lines. She then takes the wheel and heads for the channel buoys, nattering on about bare-boat chartering in the Aegean, while he goes forward to winch up sails. There is a tiny southerly breeze in midriver, just enough to move old Osborn on a beam reach down from the bridge toward Hambrooks Bar Light. Gorgeous as such sailing is, though, Jane declares — the spanking meltemia of the Cyclades; the crystal-clear Caribbean, through which you can see your anchor plainly in five fathoms; salty Maine, where you can’t see your bow-pulpit in the fog — give her the snug and easy, memory-drenched Eastern Shore: cattails and mallards, loblolly pines and white oaks, oysters and blue crabs, shoal-draft sailing, the whole tidewater scene.

Except in July and August, I amended, when I would happily swap it for Salty Maine etc.; also January through March, when give me that crystalline Caribbean instead of the—memory-drenched, I believe she’d called it? With the motor off, sails (just barely) filled, and water rustling lightly now along the hull, my spirit calmed: I was able to begin to savor my unexpected good fortune, while still wondering what accounted for it. Jane, Jane.

She turned the wheel over to me, took her ease on the cockpit seat, and named off in order the points between us and Chesapeake Bay — Horn, Castle Haven, Todds, and Cook on the south shore going out; Blackwalnut, Nelson, Benoni, Bachelor, Chlora, Martin, and Howell on the north shore coming back. She guessed she and Harrison had anchored in every one of the creeks and coves between those points, and run aground on every shoal, when they’d first cruised the Choptank back in the early thirties. And before that, before she’d even met Harrison, back in her “Scott Fitzgerald” days, she’d done the regatta circuit from Gibson Island right around the Bay, bringing in the silverware with her Thistle at a time when few women raced sailboats. Let her son think what he pleased, she was glad the rich had bought up all the waterfront property in large holdings before the general prosperity after World War II; otherwise it would be subdivided by now into tacky little hundred-foot frontages, each with its dock and its outboard runabout — her own master plan for Dorset Heights! As it was, she could see on the aerial photos made by her real estate people that many of those coves were as unspoiled now as they’d been when she and Harrison first anchored in them in 1932—indeed, as when the Ark and the Dove reached Maryland in 1632.

She was being memorious, I affirmed; even historical. That she didn’t choose to live in the past didn’t mean she’d forgotten it, she replied. Her tone was neutral. I was impressed. The little breeze evaporated: the sails hung slack; we began to set gently astern on the incoming tide. Out in the Bay the sunset promised to be spectacular. In a different voice she asked: Can’t we keep right on, Toddy? Let’s motor clear out to Sharps Island again.

Toddy, Dad. And Sharps Island! Be informed, sir, that Sharps Island is where Jane and I made love for the second time together, on the beach, in the afternoon of 13 August 1932, a Saturday.

Sharps Island wasn’t there anymore, I reminded her. All washed away: nothing but a lighthouse and buoys to mark the shoal where it used to be. Imagine people outlasting their geography, I added: just the opposite of your unspoiled coves.

Ah, now she remembered: where the three of us used to tie up the boat and picnic on the beach, the last edition she’d seen of good old Chart 1225 showed only Subm piles. Let’s go to Todds Point then, okay? She’d like to see what I’d done to the cottage.

#8 L, Dad.

Not much to see, I said. I’d made a few changes, not many: new kitchen, new plumbing and fixtures. Something between unspoiled coves and Sharps Island, I supposed. I went ahead and said it: Our bedroom’s the same.

She didn’t respond; seemed truly lost in thought, looking out to westward toward Redmans Neck, where already we could see lights on the steelwork of Schott’s tower. What are we doing here? she wondered presently. I could just hear her; couldn’t judge whether she meant the Choptank or the River of Life.

Drifting, mainly, Jane, I said. Making a bit of sternway. I’ll kick in the motor if you want.

She roused herself, smiled, touched my hand, shook her head, stood up quickly. Okay, then, she said, let’s drift. But let’s don’t just drift. Shall I switch on the running lights? Down the companionway went the white suit; from the wheel I could just see it moving about the darkened cabin. She found the switch panel and cut in the running and masthead lights, then went over the AM band on the ship-to-shore till she picked up a D.C. station doing something baroque as their signal faded with the light. Smartly she located their wavelength on the FM band and set the automatic frequency control. I had come up to the companionway to watch her; no need to steer. The white jacket came off. Then the red scarf.

Then the blue blouse. Was there a hanging locker? she asked with a smile. Fine flash of white teeth, white eyes; white jacket held out by the collar in one hand, the other on the placket of her white slacks. White bra against her dark tan. I came down the ladder and kissed her.

Goodness gracious me. The main cabin settee of the Osborn Jones makes into a snug double, Dad, but Jane thought it unseamanlike for no one to be on deck. Anyhow it was balmy and beautiful up there, more like late June than mid-May. We took our time undressing; hung and folded everything. I lit a cabin lamp to see her better. She liked that: let me look and touch all I wanted; did a bit herself. Sixty-three: it was not to be believed. She was the cove, I told her, proof against time. I feared I was Sharps Island. She’d settle for Todds Point, she laughed, and went back up the ladder — calling pleasantly that I needn’t take precautions, as she’d ceased her monthlies some years ago. Jane, Jane! Above the masthead a planet gleamed: Jupiter, I believe. An osprey rose from and returned to her pile on a nearby day-beacon (19A, off Howell Point); a great blue heron glided past us and landed with a squawk somewhere out of sight. Albinoni was followed by Bach on the FM, after a commercial for Mercedes-Benz. Sedately, patiently, but ardently, Jane Mack and I made love. Traffic streamed across the New Bridge toward Ocean City for the weekend, an unbroken string of headlights. Stars came out: Arcturus, Regulus, Pollux, Capella, Procyon, Betelgeuse. Our combined ages are 132 years. Dew formed on the lifelines, gunwales, cockpit cushions.

Polly Lake goes at it like a trouper, Dad: lots of humping and bumping and chuckles and whoops. Jane Mack does it like an angel: lithely, gracefully, daintily, above all sweetly. Suddenly she clutched my shoulders and whispered a long O. For an instant I feared something was wrong. Heart attack? Coronary? Then I understood, and wondered why Bach didn’t pause, the bridge traffic, all the constellations, to hear that O.

Sweet surprise. Afterwards she lay for a minute with her eyes closed (registering with a small smile my own orgasm); then she slipped dextrously out from under and into the head compartment to clean up. The air was chill now; there were patches of mist on the river. I wiped off with a paper towel, dressed, broke out a couple of Windbreakers from a hanging locker, spread bath towels on the cockpit cushions against the dew, started the engine, and went forward to lower and furl the sails. When I came back Jane was sitting with her legs curled under — dressed, jacketed, hair in place — smoking a cigarette and sipping a brandy. Another was set out for me. When I bent to kiss her, she gave me her cheek.

I asked what we should drink to. She smiled brightly and shrugged, the old Jane. I was disappointed; the question had been serious. To the letter O then, I proposed. She didn’t know what I meant. Look at that traffic, she said: In a few years they’ll have to build another bridge and a bypass; Route 50 really bottlenecks at Cambridge. Her first words since the “Todds Point” wisecrack, not counting that O. She thought it just as well that Mack Enterprises had stayed out of the high-rise condominium boom in North Ocean City; they were way overextended; some people were going to lose their shirts.

Back at the slip her chauffeur was waiting; Jane had him toss her the forward dock lines and made fast, then gave me a hand with the aft and spring lines. Then she said, Dad, and I quote: “That was just delightful, Todd. We must do it again. Soon. Nighty-night now.”

No irony, no double entendre. Yet she had shown, out there in the channel, that she was capable of both, and of sentimental recollection too. Indeed, as we’d shucked our duds out by Red Nun 20, I’d set about amending my whole conception of Jane’s historical amnesia; now I was obliged to revise the amendment. More than that pants suit had been doffed and redonned; even when the only white left on her was what had been under her bikini in Tobago, I realized now she’d never acknowledged unambiguously our old affair; Todds Point was where she’d lived as well as where she’d 8-L’d me. A fresh frisson: had this been, for Jane, no sweet replay at all? Was she still and forever in that left-hand column, doing everything for the first time?

Well, Dad: here I sit aboard the Osborn Jones like Keats’s knight at arms by the sedgeless lake: alone, palely loitering, enthralled. And baffled to the balls, sir! Could #8 & #10 R, my reseduction, whether or not Jane was conscious of the echoes, be simply another Mack Enterprise? A bribe? A retainer? It doesn’t seem impossible; with Jane, not even quite cynical. I think of the chap in Musil’s Man without Qualities who only seems a hypocrite because of his spontaneous, genuine feeling for those who happen to be in a position to further his interests. I think of Aristotle’s sensible observation in the Ethics, that the emotion of love among the young is typically based upon pleasure, among the elderly upon utility. Then I think of that O, and cease to care.

O my heart. Whatever Jane felt out there at the dewpoint, among the blue herons, black cans, red giants, and white dwarfs, your ancient son felt, more than passion, an ardent sweetness: a grateful astonishment that life can take, even so late, so sweet and surprising a turn. Or, if after all no turn was taken, I feel at least a grateful indulgence of that Sentimental Formalist, our Author, for so sweetly, neatly — albeit improbably — tying up the loose ends of His plot.

The earth has spun nearly around again since; the world with it. Many a one has been begotten, born, laid, or laid to rest since I began this letter. Apollo-10 is counting down; #11’s to land us on the moon before summer’s done. It’s been years, Dad, since I gave a fart why you hanged yourself in the basement on Saturday 2/2/30. You frightened me then about myself, whom I’ve ceased to fear, and turned into a monologue the dialogue we’d never begun. Only the young trouble their heads about such things.

10. Mar. 28-May 16, 1969: Another Mack v. Mack shapes up, and Jane reresumes our affair, at least to the extent of reseducing me.

Where will my #11 land me, this second time around? That’s all I’m really curious about, now I’ve seen the pattern. Yesterday I took an interest in (and the Tragic View of) the careers of Charles de Gaulle and Abe Fortas, the campus riots, my government’s war against the Vietnamese, even the enlargement of our knowledge of the universe, not to mention the disposition of Harrison Mack’s estate and the threatened blackmailing of Jane Mack. But I seem to have lost something overboard last night: today nothing much interests me except that O, which fills my head, this cabin, all space. I can hear nothing else; don’t want to hear anything else. I’ve written these pages, imagined that pattern, just to hear it again.

O that O.

If I try to sleep now (it’s getting on to cocktail time again), will my dreams rerun that episode? Never mind history, this letter, the rest of the alphabet. Bugger off, Dad. Author of us all: encore! Back to #10 R, Red Nun 20, Jane’s O!

I: Jacob Horner to the Author. Declining to rewalk to the end of the road.

5/15/69

TO:

Professor John Barth, Department of English, SUNY/ Buffalo, Buffalo, New York 14214, U.S.A.

FROM:

Jacob Horner, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

Sir:

In a sense, I Am Indeed the Jacob Horner of your End of the Road novel, for which you apologize in your letter to me of May 11, Mother’s Day, Rogation Sunday, birthday of Irving Berlin and Salvador Dali. Never mind in what sense.

Your story of having discovered that manuscript in Pennsylvania in December 1955 I Find less convincing than the novel itself. As for your work in progress, your inquiries, your proposal: I am Not Interested.

You would hazard the remobilization of “Jacob Horner”; how shall Jacob Horner Go About the resurrection of “Rennie Morgan,” whose widower intends to kill me if I don’t Bring Her Back To Life by Labor Day?

If only roads did end. But the end of one is the commencement of another, or its mere continuation. Today, 15th of May, Ascension Day, 51st anniversary of the opening of airmail service between New York City and Washington, D.C., birthday of Anna Maria Alberghetti, Richard Avedon, Michael William Balfe, Joseph Cotten, James Mason, Ilya Mechnikov, I Am Back at the Beginning of mine, where I Was in 1951—what a year, what a decade, what a century — only Older; not so much Paralyzed as Spent.

Who wants to replay that play, rewalk that road?

L: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. His own history to the present writing: the French Revolution, Joel Barlow in Algiers, “Consuelo del Consulado,” Burr’s conspiracy, Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. The Pattern.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

Thursday, 14 May 1812

Dawdling daughter, slugabed son!

Last time I letter’d you, lazy child, five weeks since, ’twas mid-Aries; now ’tis the very tail of Taurus, the beast that was meant to bring you last week to breath. The good Baron your uncle has her nurse & midwife standing by; your mother frets to be discharged of nine months’ freight; I am a-fidget to be off for Washington & Bloodsworth Island, where I have business. Yet you sleep on thro the signs: another week & you’ll be Gemini! Are you storing strength for some great work? Are you tranced like the Seven Sleepers? Or does it merely suit you to linger there, in that sweetest cave of all?

Your father, too, has been gestating, with Andrée’s help, here in the womb of the Castines, whence issue forth all Cookes & Burlingames, and I feel myself upon the tardy verge of 2nd birth. Like you, I have flail’d blindly in my sleep, pummel’d a parent I had better pitied, if not loved. As late as these latest weeks, from a kind of dreamish habitude, I have scuttled up & down the shores of Ontario, Huron, Erie; John Astor’s voyageurs & trappers are now organized into a line of quick communication for General Brock in the coming war; the routes are ready for smuggling materiel from New England merchants to our government in York & Montreal. My doing, tho the doer feels, ever more strongly, that the man he is about to become must undo the man he’s been: that I myself, not my father, am the parent I must refute.

My last three letters have traced the history of your forebears down to Andrée & myself, and have shown (what your mother first discover’d to me) how each has honor’d his grandsire as a fail’d visionary, whilst dishonoring his sire as a successful hypocrite. Each Cooke the spiritual heir of the Cooke before; every Burlingame a Burlingame! Not even your mother quite escaped this dismal pattern, tho by discerning it thus early in her maturity, she finds herself with less history than I to be rewrit. But I, I am steept & marinated in the family error, to the confession whereof we now are come. In this letter — surely my last to an addressee unborn! — I must rehearse my own career, complete the tale of what Andrée has taught me, & set forth our changed resolves with respect to the coming war, together with our hopes for you.

Bear in mind, little Burlingame — what I have ever to remind myself — that Aaron Burr in Paris may not be Henry Burlingame IV! If (as Mother at her best believed, despite those late cruel letters) Father died in 1783, or ’84, or ’85—if, for example, he was the man hang’d by Washington as Major John André—then of what a catalogue of crimes against us he stands acquit! Every one of his earlier friends who thot they recognized him thereafter — Benedict Arnold, Joel Barlow, Joseph Brant, Aaron Burr, Baron Castine — acknowledged that he was much changed, and their descriptions of him differ’d greatly. Who knows better than I that letters can be forged, knowledge pretended, manners aped? And so when I received that note from him on Bastille Day 1790, written in the Bell Tavern in Massachusetts and handed me in Paris by an attendant of Mme de Staël; when I read it, wept, curst, tore it to shreds, burnt the shreds, & pisst upon the ashes — even then, at 14, I allow’d that it was not of necessity my father I pisst upon, but perhaps a heartless & unaccountable impostor, perhaps a series of such impostors.

In either case, I thereby spurn’d the declaration in that letter: that my father’s great aim & life’s activity had been 1st to prevent, and later to subvert, the American Revolution. It was Arnold had 1st put the contrary bee in my bonnet, in London in 1787, which now commenced a buzzing: that my father from the start had been a sly & wondrously effective agent of George Washington! Father’s advice to Burr & Arnold, when they were joining the Continentals at Cambridge, had invariably been sound advice. He had permitted Arnold to raise the St. Leger siege against Fort Stanwix. Arnold himself, moreover, was persuaded that Father had gull’d him into betraying West Point to Major André in order to betray the betrayal, all at Washington’s directive, to the end of uniting the “states” behind him & discrediting the Loyalists. Whether or not Father was the author of the Nicola or the Newburgh letters, their effect was altogether in Washington’s favor; Arnold believed they had been authorized by the General himself, to provide occasion for his famous replies. On the other hand, Arnold thot it very likely that Washington or his aides had arranged to have Father quietly done away with at the same time as Major André, to prevent the great duplicity’s becoming known.

Thro this new lens, so to speak, I now perceived in a different light my father’s other alleged efforts in the cause of the Loyalists & the Indians. His activities in Maryland with the Marshyhope Blues against Joseph Whaland, supposedly to keep the Picaroon inform’d in advance of the attempts to capture him, had led in fact to Whaland’s only arrest. Most painful of all to acknowledge, the Mohawk massacres led by “Joseph Brant” in Pennsylvania had led to such ruinous retaliation that the proud Six Nations were in effect no more: a decimated rabble of drunken vagrants along the Grand River. Had Father’s plan from the start been to exterminate the Iroquois, he could scarcely have devised a better means!

All this I saw, & pisst & pisst. Mme de Staël’s attendant, a boy my age who had stood courteously & curiously by, inquired whether I had any further reply to his mistress, who hoped I would wait upon her that afternoon, as upon a friend of both my father & Mr. Barlow. I bid him good day; but Barlow said I ought to go, and I would not disoblige one who had been so kind to Mother & to me. He was full of praise, was Barlow, for the young baronne, who he said had taken an interest in my situation. He hoped I might see much of her household — more particularly as his own must now change character: he was off posthaste to London to fetch Mrs. Barlow at last. It had been his design that Mother & I should return to Canada when her child was born. Now that she & it were dead, he urged me to go to my father, in Baltimore or wherever, to put an end to that painful mystery & decide with him my future course. If I would not (and I made plain that I would die first), I might always count myself welcome in his childless house. But a season in the society of Mme de Staël would improve my literary & political cultivation, he declared, and afford himself & his Ruthy a chance to reacquaint themselves after their long separation. Mrs. B. was not an ardent traveler; new cities alarm’d her, Paris especially, & the Revolution; and while not given to irrational jealousy, she was quite susceptible to the rational sort…

Good Joel Barlow: if only his poetical talents had been capacious as his heart! For the next five years I stay’d in Paris, completing my schooling in the Lycée, in the avenues of the Terror, on the margins of Mme de Staël’s salon, and — he being, as always, good as his word—chez Barlow, once “Ruthy” had settled in.

Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, ten years my senior, was 24 when I first met her, that afternoon. She was no beauty, excepting her great brown eyes & her bosoms creamy as ripe Brie; but she was possest of wondrous energy, knowledgeability, & wit, and seem’d to me the embodiment of what was most appealing in the French liberal aristocracy. Her father (who had arranged the French financing of the American war) was unendingly wealthy. Her mother had been young Gibbon’s mistress and might have been his wife, had not Rousseau disapproved of Gibbon’s early literary style. At 20 Germaine had married the Swedish minister to France, Baron de Staël, & publisht anonymously her 1st novel, Sophie. By the time I met her she had brot out in addition her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau & an unfortunate tragedy, Jeanne Grey. The Revolution at that point (that is, the reforms imposed upon Louis XVI by the National Assembly) was much to her liking, as it was to Barlow’s: liberal, atheistic, constitutionary, at once “enlighten’d” &—a term I heard for the 1st time that afternoon in this particular usage—romantique. She was thick with the Moderates: Talleyrand, Joucourt, Narbonne. This last (the Baron was complaisant) had become her 1st serious lover, who by year’s end would get her with her 2nd child, the 1st to live.

She liked my father — I mean the man who had represented himself to her, to her own father, & to Barlow as Henry Burlingame IV. She call’d him, & me, américain… Indeed, she spoke of him in the same breath with the late “Monsieur Franklin,” as entrepreneurs de la révolution! “We” were, she declared, l’avant-garde du genre humain.

My protest — restrain’d indeed, considering my feelings — that I did not regard myself as a citizen of anyplace, much pleased her: To be sure, she said, “our kind” are citizens of the world: but the new idea of political nationality, much in vogue since “our revolution,” was in her opinion the wave of the future, & not to be snift at. For my observation that, whatever his talents as diplomatist or spy, my father had been less than exemplary as a husband & parent, she took me spiritedly to task. Quite aside from such possibilities as that my father’s secret & dangerous work might truly have made a proper family life out of the question, despite his best efforts; that he himself might have been heartbroken at the deceptions & disguises he was forced to; that he might have been acting in our best interests, given for example our value as hostages to his adversaries — had I not consider’d the possibility that he had simply outgrown his wife? Or that his enemies had forged those cruel letters of invitation & promist reunion? In any case, was I still child enough not to forgive parental negligence in one whose gifts were, of their kind, comparable to Gibbon’s or Rousseau’s?

She urged me to go to him, in Baltimore. I bid her bonsoir. She complimented my independence & my unaccented French, and hoped I would call on her again: I was the first américain she had met both very young & civilized. If I would discuss our revolution with her — whose differences from the French she thot more significant than their celebrated similarity — she would discuss with me another sort of revolution already under way, tho scarcely yet acknowledged, in all the arts. Its inspirers were her old family friend Rousseau & his German counterparts. Its values were sentiment & sensation as against conscious intellection; it aspired to the rejection or transcension of conventional forms, including the conventional categories of art & social class; its spirit was manifest equally in the assault on the Bastille, in the musical innovations of certain pupils of Joseph Haydn, in the plays & essays of Schiller, above all in Goethe’s novel-in-letters, The Sorrows of Werther, even in the investigations of natural historians. Had I read, for example, Herr Goethe’s botanical treatise Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, just publisht? She would lend it me: if I had my father’s (& the author’s) eye for the connexions betwixt apparently disparate things, perhaps I would discover that an essay on the forms of plants can illumine the storm & stress, so to speak, betwixt certain parents & their children, or innovative artists & the conventions of their arts. I did read German?

I fell in love with her at once, and remain’d so for the next five years, during most of which I served in her household as a sort of English-language amanuensis & library clerk. Because my politics were more radical & sanguinary than Germaine’s (I was to cheer—& witness — the King’s beheading, & many another’s), I was able to render her a signal service on 2 September 1792. The King & Queen had been arrested, the Revolutionary Tribunal establisht; Robespierre & Danton had led the insurrection of the Paris Communards, who were now inspired to slaughter all the Royalists they could lay hands on. They broke into Mme de Staël’s house and demanded of me that I deliver my mistress up to them as a prisoner & join them in the morrow’s executions. But I had known of their coming from my friends in the Hôtel de Ville, and had bid Germaine disguise herself as one of her own servants, whom I now introduced as my mistress in the tenderer sense, & who was in a delicate condition besides. Our employer, we declared, had fled that day to Switzerland.

Thither (that very night) she flew, in her plainest closed carriage, rewarding me en route with what she knew I had long desired. The carriage pitcht & bounced over the cobbles; round about us were the shouts & torches of the sans-culottes. I was 16 & virginal; she 26 & seven months gone with her 2nd child by Narbonne. I had no clear idea how to proceed, especially in such circumstances. But no initiative of mine was wanted: for all her experience of love, Mme de Staël had never been “taken” as a serving girl; the situation excited her to such a pitch of “romantic” emotion that, so far from returning as I had intended to join my friends in the September Massacre, I found myself — your pardon, Andrée — a-humping la baronne over Brie, Champagne, Bourgogne; up her Seine, down her Saône, over her Jura, to the home-most peaks & pools of her beloved Coppet, in Switzerland.

Where arriving, she turn’d her full attention to establishing a salon for her fellow refugees, & to her own lying-in. Tho she never forgot my service to her, it was clear her heart belong’d to Narbonne. Our remarkable journey was not mention’d, far less repeated. In the spring, son Albert safely deliver’d, she moved with her ménage to England, to join her lover & M. Talleyrand. I return’d to Paris & the Terror, which now shockt even liberal Barlow out of the city & across the Channel — where he forwarded me the last letter I was ever to receive from “Henry Burlingame IV.”

It was written, purportedly, from Castines Hundred. Its author declared himself in midst of the proudest feat of his career: the reorganization, this time with British aid, of Pontiac’s old Confederacy of the Iroquois, Miamis, Ottawas, & Shawnees, under Chief Little Turtle (a Miami), to succeed against the Americans where Pontiac had fail’d against the British. Already “we” had won a great victory over General St. Clair on the Wabash River; the author was confident we would turn back the “American Legion” being recruited & train’d by General Anthony Wayne to suppress us. Our objective then, the writer asserted, was, in his words, “to call our enemy to our aid”: to form a strong independent colony of Indians, Africans, French habitants, & Spanish Floridians in the politically confused territory west of North Carolina & south of the Ohio, in the valley of the Tennessee, which from time immemorial had been a common Indian hunting ground. There John Sevier had organized in 1785 a new state called Frankland (later Franklin), which had been more or less dissolved. But the situation was still fluid enough to permit the hope of its reestablishment, if not as a sovereign state, at least as “the first non-Anglo-Saxon child of the Union.” He urged me to join him at Castines Hundred for the coming offensive & the great move south. I had a new little cousin there, he reported, born since I’d left: a charming 4-year-old, named Andrée…

I assumed the letter, & the strategy, to be duplicitous. Barlow himself thot it a tactic to the opposite end — the establishment of more & more American “defensive” fortifications in the western territories, to protect the settlers flooding illegally onto Indian lands — and did not even report it to the American minister. General Wayne’s rout of the Indian “confederacy” at Fallen Timbers the following year (and the admission of “Tennessee” into the Union in ’96 as one more slave state) confirm’d my assumptions. I liked to imagine, as I watcht King Louis & then Marie Antoinette go under the guillotine—& then the Girondists, & then the Hébertists, & then the democratic republic, & finally Robespierre himself — that the author of that letter had been relieved at least of his scalp by the surviving Iroquois; for I was certain the cause of Indian sovereignty (about which, at the time, I had no deep feeling one way or the other) was lost as long as he lived to pretend to champion it.

The end of Robespierre & the Terror on the 9th Thermidor of Year II (27 July 1794), ended also my interest in the revolution, which — even before Bonaparte came to the fore — we saw to be increasingly in the hands of the generals rather than those of the sansculottes. Barlow was in Hamburg, recouping his fortune as a shipping agent after the collapse of the Scioto real-estate swindle. Mme de Staël was back at Coppet, writing her Réflexions sur le procès de la reine, which had disturb’d her as the execution of the King had not. Both were eager to return to Paris; both sought my opinion of their safety there in Year III, under the new Directory. For some reason, Germaine’s letters to me were uncommonly confidential (I later learnt she was using them as trial draughts for her more serious epistles). Her affair with Narbonne, she confest, was ending: for one thing, he remain’d in England when she return’d to Coppet in ’94, and she suspected he had taken another mistress. Apparently, she wrote to me in the spring of that year, everything I believed I meant to him was a dream, and only my letters were real. For another, she had met & been fascinated by Benjamin Constant in Lausanne, who in turn was fascinated by the audacious young Corsican, Bonaparte.

The city, I regretfully reported, now that the Committee of Public Safety had been guillotined, was safe. I myself was penniless, & unemploy’d except as an occasional counterfeiter of assignats, the nearly worthless paper currency of the moment. I had discover’d in myself an unsuspected gift for forgery, and was being courted by minor agents of both the left & the right, equally interested in bankrupting the Directoire. I was nineteen, no longer a novice in matters of the heart. My politics were little more than an alternation of impassion’d populism & fastidious revulsion from the mob; the two extremes met like Jacobins & Royalists, not so much in my cynical expediency as in the psychological expedient that was my cynicism: a makeshift as precarious as the Directory itself. I dared to hope Germaine might find all this, and me… romantique.

And so she did, for the 1st décade of Brumaire, An IV, whilst reopening her Paris salon with Constant & the Baron de Staël. When the spirit took her, she would revert to her waiting-maid or sans-culotte costume & fetch me, in that famous plain carriage, thro some working-class faubourg to reenact “our” escape of ’92. But her heart was Constant’s; her mind was on the composition of an essay, De l’Influence des passions; the serving-girl whose clothes she borrow’d for the escapade was a secret Jacobin infested with crab lice, who thus spread the vermin not only to her mistress & to M. Constant, but also to me & thence to the bona fide (& thitherto uninfested) working girl whose bed I’d shared thro the Terror. Germaine found the episode piquant; the rest of us did not. Moreover, tho I still admired her range, I no longer found her physically appealing. When Barlow — horrified by the dangerous game I had been playing with my assignats—urged me to accompany him on a diplomatic mission to Algiers at the year’s end (I mean Gregorian 1795), I accepted with relief.

Here began my firsthand schooling in international politics & intrigue. Whilst we moved down the Rhone & then thro Catalonia towards Alicante & Algiers, chatting of Don Quixote & buying new presents for the Dey, Hassan Bashaw (to add to the $27,000 consular gift we carried with us!), Barlow explain’d the manifold delicacy of our mission as it had been set forth to him by his new friend James Monroe, Washington’s minister to France. The Barbary pirates, over the 10 years past, had seized a number of U. States merchant vessels, confiscated the hulls & cargoes, & made slaves of the crews. The American public — and U. States shipping interests, principally in New England — were indignant. France & England were either indifferent or privately content: they had no love themselves for the troublesome corsairs & could at any time have employ’d their navies to rid the Mediterranean of them. But they prefer’d to bribe the Dey to spare their own vessels, & thus, in effect, to harass their American competition, along with the Danes, Swedes, Dutch, Portuguese, Venetians, & cet. On the other hand, they fear’d, as did Washington, that enough such incidents would oblige or justify the construction of a large American navy, just as retaliatory attacks by the Indians had “justified” the extension of “our” army ever farther west of the Appalachians. To be sure, many U. States interests desired just that, & so were in a sense obliged to the Barbary pirates for rousing public opinion to their cause, and did not want them prematurely put down or bought off! Even Washington, suspicious as he was of New England Federalist shippers, and opposed in principle to standing professional armies & navies (as chancres on the economy & chiefest dangers to the peace they were supposed to ensure), had to acknowledge that nothing so strengthen’d the fragile Union as an apparent menace from beyond its borders. He also fear’d (said Barlow) that the anti-slavery or merely anti-Southern interests above Mason’s & Dixon’s Line would make factional propaganda out of the Dey’s enslavement of more than 100 white Yankee sailors. Barlow himself was of a mind to add a passage on the subject to the 8th Book of his revised Columbiad.

For the present, then, Washington had no alternative but to buy the prisoners’ freedom & negotiate with the Dey a humiliating bribe for sparing our ships in the future. The only apparent issue was the size of the ransom & bribe: even pro-Navy interests in the U. States were divided betwixt those who believed that a ruinously large payment would make the construction of warships seem an economizing measure, and those who fear’d that too large a figure would leave nothing in the Treasury to build a navy with. Behind that lay the covert question, whether the treaty negotiation should be expeditious or deliberately prolong’d. A quick settlement might be a high settlement — the Dey was asking $800,000—and (or but) would reduce the opportunity to exploit the occasion for building a navy & for propagandizing against African slavery &/or for national unity. It would also, of course, gratify the captured sailors & their families. Prolong’d negotiation might result in a better bargain, but (or and) it would also afford time to build and man warships, & cet. It could also — for better or worse, depending on one’s larger strategy — incite the capricious Dey to seize more of “our” ships, raise his ransom price, perhaps even break off negotiations altogether. In short, as many interests in both America & Europe would be pleased to see Barlow’s mission fail as would be gratified by its success.

“Bonaparte tells us that generalship is the art of improvisation,” he concluded (our calèche was rolling through the almond & olive groves of La Huerta); “Henry Burlingame teaches us that improvisation, in its turn, is the art of imagining & cleaving to that point of view from which whatever comes to pass may be seen to be to one’s interests & exploited to advantage. I pray you, Andrew, ponder that: we can lose only insofar as we may fail to improvise ‘victory’ out of ‘defeat,’ & make it work.”

His own motives were comparatively simple: to render a service to his country whilst traveling at its expense & perhaps making a lucrative investment or two in Algiers (the bulk of his Hamburg fortune he had put into French government bonds & Paris real estate, counting on Napoleon to increase their value; but he left some $30,000 liquid for speculation), and to conclude the business speedily lest his Ruthy grow jealous again. His strategy was to placate the Dey with gifts & assurances until the American minister to Portugal (his old friend & fellow Hartford Wit, Colonel Humphreys), whose charge it was to conclude the treaties with Algiers, Tripoli, & Tunis, could raise $800,000 in bullion by selling discounted U. States Bank stock in London & Hamburg: a harder job, in Barlow’s estimation, than treating with a moody & dangerous Moslem prince. He wanted me with him because my adventure with the assignats convinced him I had inherited my father’s gifts, which he believed might be of use to him in the business; and he was delighted at my “cosmopolizing,” as he call’d it, since he’d left me to Mme de Staël.

Good Barlow, at once so canny & so ingenuous! Barely 40, he had come as long & almost as various a road as my grandfather: from the conservative hymnist & naive chaplain of “our” revolution, who had watcht Major André hang’d & dedicated his Vision of Columbus to Louis XVI, he had been “cosmopolized” himself by the French Revolution into atheism & antimonarchism. He had alarm’d his British & even his conservative American friends with his tract of 1789, Advice to the Privileged Orders; with his Letter to the National Convention of ’92, which had earn’d him Citizenship in the French Republic along with Washington, Madison, Hamilton, & Tom Paine; and with his poem The Conspiracy of Kings (same year), a call for the overthrow of all monarchies by general revolution. But despite their Jacobin tone, these works had in common — so I see plainly now, but felt even then despite my own ingenuousness — more enthusiastic & sententious naivety than deep conviction. Whereas his little mock panegyric in three cantos, Hasty Pudding—a nostalgic hymn to that American breakfast & to New England, written on a January morning in Savoy in ’93—was a pure delight: a chef-d’oeuvre written as a lark.

It markt for Barlow a turn he was just now perceiving clearly, as I was later to see in retrospect certain turnings of my own: he was become at once less ideological (I mean in Bonaparte’s sense of the word) & more political; less radical & more perspicacious; less ambitious & more shrewd. He had learnt enough from his victimizing in the Scioto swindle to make a legitimate fortune in Hamburg; James Monroe — a good judge of good judges of men — had chosen wisely his representative to the Dey. Barlow’s review of the political complexities of our mission, his subsequent sharp assessment of the Dey’s character & adroit manipulation of it, together with his new-found expertise in international finance, much imprest me & endear’d him to me, the more as they were maskt (the word is too simple) by a bluff Yankee cheerfulness that was in fact his prevailing humor. It disarm’d his adversaries and led them to believe him an easy mark; they came genuinely to like & trust him, & relaxt their intrigues against him, so that in the end he most often got what he was after.

(As I write this, B. is on a mission of far more delicacy & moment as Madison’s minister to France: negotiating with Napoleon & his foreign minister, the Duc de Bassano, for repeal of the Berlin & Milan decrees, which permit French confiscation of American vessels trading with Britain. And I pray the dear man will succeed: I who am fresh from doing my utmost to ensure his failure! But of this, more presently.)

Our mission, which we had expected to complete in a matter of weeks once we arrived, kept us in Algiers from March of ’96 till July of the following year, thanks to the difficulty of raising gold bullion in a Europe still spent from the wars of the French Revolution & about to embark upon the more exhausting campaigns of Napoleon. Thanks also to the slowness & unpredictability of the mails, which I am convinced have alter’d & re-alter’d the course of history more than Bonaparte & all the Burlingames combined. Our single strategy became cajolement of Hassan Bashaw (an ape of a fellow, given to despotic whims & tantrums, but no fool) into extending his deadline for payment instead of cancelling his treaty & declaring war on the U. States. Our tactics we improvised, and Barlow now reveal’d himself an apt student of his former tutor. When we were “greeted” by an outraged Dey (he refused to receive us; would not even open Barlow’s letter of credentials) whose initial deadline had already expired & who was threatening war in eight days, Barlow bought a 90-day extension by the inspired but dangerous expedient of offering the Bashaw’s daughter a 20-gun frigate, to be built in Philadelphia & deliver’d to Algiers! It was a wild excess of our authority: $45,000 for the frigate; another $18,000 retainer to the Jewish banker Joseph Bacri, the Dey’s closest advisor, whom Barlow befriended (on the strength of their shared initials — Bacri was a Kabbalist) & thus bribed to make the offer. There was also the certainty that the frigate would be used to highjack further merchant shipping, perhaps “our” own. But the stratagem workt: the Dey (who now declared his earlier anger to have been feign’d — and demanded 36 instead of 20 guns) was delighted; so was President Washington. We got our 90 days, Bacri got his $18,000 (plus Barlow’s banking busness, which he managed scrupulously), & Hassan Bashaw, two years later, got the frigate Crescent: a 36-gunner costing $90,000.

We were also permitted to deliver our consular gifts: jewel’d pistols & snuffboxes, linens, brocades, Parisian rings, bracelets, & necklaces for the ladies of the harem.

“Your father would be proud of us,” Barlow exulted. “The Bashaw has been Burlingamed!”

I could scarcely agree; another such 90 days’ grace, I ventured to say, would bankrupt the Union. Tut, said Barlow, ’twas cheaper than one week of war. Bacri’s fee in particular he judged well invested, not only because the Jew alone could have made our offer (& added gratis the nicety of making it to the Dey’s daughter: a diplomatic stroke Barlow admitted he himself never would have thot of), but because in Barlow’s opinion the best thing we’d bought so far with “our” $138,000 was not the 90-day extension, but Bacri’s friendship. My father, he told me, used to swear by the cynical dictum of Smollett’s Roderick Random: that while small favors may be acknowledged & slight injuries atoned, there is no wretch so ungrateful as he whom you have mostly generously obliged, and no enemy so implacable as those who have done you the greatest wrong. He meant to cement his new friendship with Bacri at once by rendering him a small but signal service — in gratitude for Bacri’s advice that we not tell the Dey we were in Algiers for no other purpose than to complete the treaty & ransom the prisoners, but instead rent a villa & make a show of settling in for a permanent consular stay.

This 2nd stratagem was more Burlingamish than the 1st, for in addition to “H.B.-ing H.B.,” as Barlow put it (i.e., Burlingaming Hassan Bashaw), we served ourselves in several ways at once. One of the older American prisoners, a certain James Cathcart, had ingratiated himself with the Dey to the point of becoming his English-language secretary & closest non-Moslem advisor; he was also our chief liaison with the other prisoners & our principal go-between with the Dey himself. It was Cathcart’s errand, for example, to relay to Barlow, almost daily, the Bashaw’s impatience that the ransom money had not arrived. Not surprisingly, the Dey’s only other confidant amongst the Infidels — our friend Bacri — was jealous of this secretary, the more since Cathcart was Christian & Bacri Jewish. It was, in fact, in the course of jesting with me on the advantage an atheist like himself ought to have in negotiations involving a Moslem, a Christian, & a Jew, that Barlow hit on his pretty inspiration: if the Dey were to send Cathcart to Philadelphia to supervise construction of the Crescent, we would in a single stroke liberate a chief prisoner, oblige Bacri to us for removing the object of his jealousy, & relieve ourselves of some pressure from the Dey, who could then look to Cathcart instead of us to make good on that part of his extortion. Moreover, Barlow had the wit to see that the idea should appear to be Hassan Bashaw’s own. We discust how it might best be put to him without arousing his suspicion — and it occur’d to me to suggest that Bacri, rather than ourselves, bring up the matter. Not only was he a better hand at insinuation (& at judging the Dey’s moods), but, should the proposal arouse the Bashaw’s suspicion or displeasure, it would fall upon Bacri — who however would have only his diplomacy to blame — rather than upon ourselves.

Barlow embraced me, then waltzt merrily about the room. I was my father’s son, he cried, my father’s son! This was 1 May: a week later Cathcart set out for Philadelphia, scarcely happier than the Dey, who preen’d & strutted at his shrewd idea. Or than Bacri, who — Smollett’s dictum notwithstanding — now clamor’d to return our favor. Or than Barlow, despite his fuming over Humphreys’ inability to raise the ransom money. Or than I, who till then had not recognized in myself the family precocity in diplomatical intrigue.

Barlow took thereafter to consulting me seriously on tactical matters, tho I reminded him that calling me my father’s son was sorely qualified praise; also, that any service I might render was to him, whom I owed so much, and not to his country, for which I had at best mixt feelings. Nonetheless I was able to be of use to him, not long after, as follows:

Our dearly bought 90 days were two-thirds spent. Colonel Humphreys’ efforts to sell three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of discounted U. States Bank stock had got him no gold at all, only letters of credit on Madrid & Cadiz from the London banking firm of Baring & Co. They must have known (at least Barlow did) that the Spanish government was unlikely to permit the export of so much gold — particularly to those Barbary pirates who from time out of mind had made slaves of Christian Spaniards, not least among them the author of Don Quixote. Barlow had therefore shrewdly suggested that Humphreys transfer Baring & Co.‘s letter of credit from Spain to the branch office of Joseph Bacri in Livorno, Italy, where it could promptly be negotiated & the credit transfer’d in turn to Bacri of Algiers. The Dey would have his money (at least credit with someone he trusted); the treaty would be concluded; the prisoners could return to America & we to Paris — and the firm of Bacri would have earn’d two separate commissions on the transaction! Bacri himself had readily agreed, and we’d dispatcht a consular aide to Livorno (the English “Leghorn,” where, as it happens, old Smollett is buried) to manage the matter. But the transfer of credit had yet to be effected by Humphreys with Baring & Co.; our letters to Lisbon & London & Cadiz & Livorno & Paris & Philadelphia had as well been posted into the sea for all the answer we got. And to make matters worse, with the coming of summer Algiers was smitten by an outbreak of plague.

Of this last, dear child, I shall not speak, except to say that I had rather take my chances with a dozen red Robespierres than brave again the Terror of the Pest, the black flag of Bubonia. We were doubly desperate: by the day our three months’ grace expired (8 July, just after my 20th birthday), hundreds of Algerines & five American prisoners had expired also, and unspeakably. Daily we expected the pestilence to attack our little household. Barlow made his will. I wisht myself in Switzerland. Yet no word came from across the Mediterranean.

What came instead seem’d at first another setback, but proved a blessing in disguise. A new French consul arrived in Algiers to replace the old, bringing with him a gift to the Dey of such opulence that “ours” (which Monroe & Barlow had thot daringly extravagant) was put in the shade. To point up this disparity — and to remind us further of our tardiness with the ransom — Hassan Bashaw open’d his hairy arms to France, & would have nothing to do with us.

Prest by the Dey to ask some favor in return for his gift, the new French consul requested a loan of $200,000 in gold from the royal treasury, to defray the expenses of the French consulate! We thot the request an effrontery — the man was borrowing back more than he’d given, at a time when gold was so scarce in Algiers that even the house of Bacri had none to lend — but the Dey (a pirate after all, not a banker) granted the extraordinary loan at once. Now, it happened that Bacri’s own assets, like Barlow’s, were largely invested in French government bonds; after sharing with us his surprise that the Dey had made so improbable a loan, & his interest in anyone who had such access to the Algerine treasury, Bacri hit upon the happy idea of claiming that same $200,000 from the French consulate, in partial payment of what the Directoire owed him on those bonds, reciprocating with credit in that amount for the consulate to borrow against in its routine operations! The Consul agreed, it being more convenient for him to work thro Bacri’s banks than to be, in effect, in the banking business himself; Bacri was delighted that the French government now owed money to the Dey instead of to him; and Barlow — who by this time was heartily sorry he’d volunteer’d for the Algerine service instead of improving his own fortune in Paris — wisht aloud & sincerely he’d been born a Jew instead of a Connecticut Yankee.

“Better Yankee than yekl,” Bacri replied, by way of cordial acknowledgement that some New England traders are sharp indeed, and some Jews dull.

Now, I much admired Joseph Bacri myself, as a shrewd but reliable fellow who took every fair advantage, but fulfill’d his obligations faithfully, & who in addition was a man of culture & political detachment (all governments, he was fond of declaring, are more or less knavish, but just that fact made the more or less of considerable importance). For some reason — perhaps because his smile included me amongst the “Yankees”—I was suddenly inspired to out-Bacri Bacri in our ongoing project to Burlingame the Bashaw. Here was our chance — I declared to Barlow when our friend had left, still exulting in his coup de maître—to discharge Bacri’s debt to us for removing Cathcart. Bacri — who understood credit as the Dey did not — was as confident as we that, despite all the delays, Baring & Company’s letter of credit to Humphreys in Lisbon against their banks in Madrid & Cadiz would eventually be transfer’d to Bacri’s office in Leghorn & thence to Algiers. In that sense, our personal “credit” with Bacri was good, especially in the light of our past favors to him. Against this credit, then, why ought we not to borrow at once from Bacri the entire same $200,000 that the French Consul had borrow’d from the Dey, & buy with it the immediate release of the prisoners?

Barlow was incredulous. Why should the Dey accept his own money, so to speak, for the sailors’ ransom, especially as he would be relinquishing his best leverage for delivery of the frigate & payment of the rest of his demands? He need not know the source of the money, I replied; ’twas Bacri himself who routinely assay’d & certified, for a fee, the Dey’s revenues. As for that leverage, it should be pointed out to him that the plague was reducing it every day: $200,000 for 100 sick Yankee sailors was not a bad price; the Dey could always capture fresh hostages if “we” defaulted on the rest of the treaty. But Bacri, Barlow protested, slightly less incredulous but still shaking his head: What was in it for Bacri? I admitted that to be the harder question, for while our friend was most certainly not just a Jewish banker, neither was he just our friend. The best I could suggest was that we charter from Bacri himself a ship to fetch the sailors home in, and route it to Philadelphia by way of Livorno & Lisbon, where the captain — or one of us — might expedite delivery of the promist gold. Beyond that, we must (and, I added earnestly, we should) simply trust to Bacri’s goodwill.

It was this last touch, I believe, that persuaded Barlow in the 1st instance (who now hugg’d and waltzt about the room with me again, to the amazement of our Algerine house-servants) & Bacri in the 2nd, who did indeed drag his heels in indecision & astonishment at the audacity of our proposal, but at last agreed & took it upon himself to point out to the Dey that five percent of his hostages had succumb’d already to the plague. Mirabile dictu, the stratagem workt, with a celerity that startled even us: not 48 hours from the time we hatcht the plan, the prisoners were ransom’d with the Dey’s own gold & waiting aboard the ship Fortune (leased from Bacri, but crew’d & captain’d by themselves) for a fair southwesterly to carry them to Leghorn!

“Andrew Burlingame Cook the Fourth,” said Barlow, who had taken to teasing me with my full name, “you must go with them.” In one bold stroke, he declared, I had accomplisht the chiefest part of his mission. He himself must linger on until the gold arrived & the treaty was concluded. But much as he wisht my company & counsel, he wisht even more my being out of reach of the pest, & charged me now with a mission of more moment to him than his own welfare: I was to stop in Leghorn to ascertain that Bacri’s office there had received the letter of credit from Humphreys in Lisbon (we’d learnt, aghast, that Humphreys had sent it by the regular post instead of by express courier!) & to make sure that it was promptly negotiated & the specie shipt before Napoleon, who had open’d his great campaign against the Austrians in northern Italy, should close the port. I was then to go to his Ruthy in the rue du Bac, deliver to her his last will & testament along with letters of an equally intimate but less lugubrious character, assure her that she had no rivals amongst the pantaloon’d ladies of Algiers, & assure him, by return post, that she was similarly faithful. That is (he regarded me meaningly here: no libertine, he was no monk either, & had not been perfectly celibate all these months), that whatever shifts she might have devised to assuage her loneliness, they posed no threat to her love for him.

“And this inquiry you are to discharge with perfect tact,” he concluded, “as only you — or your father — could.” Except that, should the impulse take me, I was to consider myself free to stay aboard of the Fortune & visit the country to which I had just render’d a considerable service, perhaps even seeking out “Henry Burlingame IV” & settling once for all in my heart whether he was my father. For if he was not, or if no face-to-face accounting could justify his behavior to me, then he, Barlow, would be pleased to regard me officially as he regarded me already in his heart: as his own son.

I was much toucht, & much confused in my own heart — but enough surfeited with pestiferous Algiers to delight in putting it behind me. I went, not to Philadelphia, but to Leghorn & thence back to dear Paris. But to appease my conscience both for leaving good Joel as the Dey’s sole American hostage, in effect, & for declining that invitation to be his son (I didn’t want a father, I began with some excitement to understand), I perform’d him one final service ere I went, as important in my history as in his.

Our diplomatic successes in the cause of the U. States, remember, like most successes in international affairs, were at the expense of other governments, inasmuch as the Dey’s chief revenue was still the prizes taken by his corsairs. What game our treaty pledged him to forgo, he bagg’d elsewhere. In consequence, while Barlow was currently the envy of the Algerine consular community, he was also the prime target of their cabals. Nothing would have more pleased the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, & Venetian consuls than the default of our treaty payments & a resumption of Algerine piracy against U. States merchantmen. Thus far they had been content to asperse privily, to the Dey, Barlow’s character & intentions: he was a sodomite, they insinuated; a Christian cleric; a closet poet. But on the eve of the Fortune’s departure, when my belongings were already packt & shipt aboard, Barlow came to my chambers much concern’d that a graver move against him might be afoot.

His profession of fidelity to Ruthy, I repeat, had been a shade disingenuous. Joel loved & misst her, no question, & wisht himself in her arms in the rue du Bac; she had no rivals amongst the veil’d Algerines. But he had for some weeks been enjoying a flirtation with the young wife of a man attacht to the Spanish consulate (we call’d her “Consuelo del Consulado”), and had left off her pursuit out of delicacy only when the husband, a gambler & general libertine, had perisht of the plague a few days since. Not once had this Consuelo responded to Barlow’s gallantries by more than a flash of her Andalusian eyes; now, suddenly, a message purportedly in her hand was deliver’d from the Spanish consulate: Could her carísimo Senor B. arrange discreetly to meet her carriage — alone, in person, at once — at a certain headland not far hence, on business of a most urgent but confidential nature?

He suspected a trap, of course. The note could have been forged, or written under duress; the woman or someone acting in her stead could be baiting him into a compromising position, to the end of either embarrassing or blackmailing him. Worse, some hired ruffian might be waiting in the carriage to knock him on the head & toss him into the sea, on pretext of defending the young widow’s honor. Even supposing the message genuine, he had misgivings: what if his little flirtation should lead to something more consequential & less extricable? On the other hand, if the lady truly needed his aid or craved his company, and he injured or insulted her by not responding, he would make a considerable enemy in the consular community: a fresh widow so ready to go to’t (let us suppose) would just as readily look to her revenge if scorn’d. And what if she did innocently need his help, or crave a bit of extra-consular consolation? He’d be a knave & fool not to provide it! & cetera.

Amused as I was by his embarrassment & excitement, I quite shared his apprehensions, & proposed at once to meet the carriage in his stead. I would declare he had been summon’d to an unexpected private audience with the Dey (no consular person could fail to acknowledge such priority), but would be honor’d to meet her at her convenience in our villa. If she seem’d offended, I would improvise, confess I had intercepted her message & taken it upon myself to investigate. If she seem’d sincere — whether sincerely distrest or sincerely amorous — I would endeavor to pacify her & either fetch her to the villa or arrange another assignation in less vulnerable circumstances, for Barlow to pursue at his own discretion. If I smelt a rat, he would be forewarn’d. And if it should prove an outright ambuscade? Why, then I would make shift to extricate myself as best I could: I had learnt a thing or two in the streets of Paris.

But she had specified Barlow himself: trap or no trap, would her carriage not take flight at my approach?

I had come to know my knack for counterfeiting hands (and assignats). Earlier, in Mme de Staël’s house at the time of the Septembrist massacre, I had discover’d a sudden facility for improvising histories; and more recently, in Algiers, a gift for devising stratagems. Now, almost to my own surprise, I found myself a ready hand at counterfeiting certain actual personages. Then & there, impromptu, I walkt like Barlow, talkt & laught & gestured in his way, even improvised aloud a passage from his Vision of Columbus! Where his had read (with characteristic lack-lustre):

Glad Chesapeake unfolds a passage wide,

And leads their streamers up the freshening tide;

Where a mild region and delightful soil

And groves and streams allure the steps of toil…

“mine” extravagantly declaim’d:

Borne up my Chesapeake, [Columbus] hails

The flowery banks that scent his slackening sails;

Descending twilight mellows down the gleam

That spreads far forward on the broad blue stream;

The moonbeam dancing, as the pendants glide,

Silvers with trembling tints the rippling tide;

The sand-sown beach, the rocky bluff repays

The faint effulgence with their amber’d rays;

O’er greenwood glens a browner lustre flies

And bright-hair’d hills walk shadowy round the skies…

I meant a gentle parody — but Barlow was enraptured, as much by the verses as by my impersonation. I was my father’s & cet.! Laughing & weeping, roused & reluctant, he gave me leave to make free with his cape (his coat was too large for me; I regretted he wore neither periwig nor eyeglasses; our features were not similar; voice & manner must serve) & a fine horse presented him by the Dey. We embraced a final time, and off I rode, to the oddest assignation I hope ever to be party to.

The moon was bright, the night warm & windy. The dark carriage waited with a single coachman at the designated spot, above a rocky beach outside the city. Très “romantique”: Germaine de Staël would have fancied it, the more for its spice of diplomatic intrigue. But I was all misgivings: surely the coachman was a Spanish thug, the carriage full of his cohorts. Why had I not come in our own carriage, her stipulations be damn’d, with Barlow drest as coachman, & demanded she change conveyances to prove her goodwill before proceeding farther? Too late for such hindsight: moreover, tho my disposition was & is not reckless, some intuition (I have learnt to recognize & honor it since) urged me, in this instance, not to reck. I took a large breath & walkt the horse forward, my hand on the pistol Barlow had lent me with his cape & the rest…

In the 15 years since, only three people have heard without scoffing the full tale of what ensued. I have ceased to recount it even to my friends, not to try their confidence unnecessarily. Andrée herself I have declined till now to test the faith of in detail, as (witness my faltering pen) I hesitate to test yours, child, when you shall scan these pages in time to come. What matters, after all, is not the business in the carriage, but the sparing of Barlow’s life (he himself was able to verify later, thro Bacri’s informants in Madrid, that the Spanish consul in Algiers had indeed got cipher’d instructions to assassinate him if the job could be done for $50,000) and the demonstration, to myself, of my little knack for impersonation.

That knack was call’d for only at the opening of the adventure, when the coachman cried me to a halt & uncover’d his lantern to inspect me. I saw the carriage window-curtain drawn aside; then I screen’d my face with Barlow’s hat and call’d back in Barlow’s voice that I was he whom a certain Senora del Consulado had sought aid of. If she was within, let her show herself, otherwise I would back to my own affairs — and, I added, I could see nothing with that lantern shining in my face. The carriage door open’d partway: a woman’s voice instructed the coachman in Spanish to put out the light, and me in soft accented English to secure my horse & enter without fear. I did so, keeping my visage lower’d, muttering in Barlow’s way about the lateness of the hour, & cet., and glancing up under my brim as I climb’d the step to make certain the lady was alone inside. She was barely illuminated by a tiny cover’d lamp fixt to the carriage wall. I stept in quickly & turn’d away from her to close the door & draw its curtain.

Even Germaine de Staël & the Barlows, back in Paris, accepted this much without question. Ruthy Barlow & Germaine defended somewhat further — against the skepticism of Joel & of the Barlows’ new American friend, Robert Fulton, whom they more or less adopted in my stead when he left off painting with Benjamin West in London and came to Paris with his schemes for canalways & submarine vessels — the possibility of what happen’d next: Consuelo’s calling to the coachman to ride on even as she flung herself ardently upon me; my struggle to keep her mouth cover’d when she realized, at once, that I was not the man she’d summon’d; my urgent whisper’d assurances that I had no dishonorable intentions, & wisht only to ascertain, for the gentleman whose person I feign’d, that the Spanish consulate had none either. No one seriously doubted — especially given Barlow’s subsequent verification — the essentials of Consuelo’s story: that she had at one time briefly been the mistress of the political attaché of the Spanish consulate, a dashing, unscrupulous fellow named Don Escarpio; that her worthless husband, who encouraged the affair in hopes of advancing his own fortunes, was smitten with jealousy upon its consummation & challenged Don Escarpio just when that fellow (who had better been named Don Juan), having made his conquest, began promptly to tire of her. It was Consuelo’s conviction, in view of what follow’d, that Don Escarpio then arranged her husband’s death by plague in order to rid himself of the nuisance without risking a duel, & to put her the more at his mercy. Her profligate spouse had left large debts in the consular community, which she had no means of paying; Don Escarpio proposed to liquidate those debts & return her safely to her family in Málaga with a $10,000 secret bonus from the Spanish government if she would seduce & see to the death of Senor Barlow, the too successful American diplomat who had so clearly been captivated by her beauty. Consuelo had protested that she could not kill, unless perhaps in a passion of anger. Her ex-lover, of whom she was now terrified, had replied with a cold smile (“una sonrisa fría”) that no anger was required, only the sort of passion of which none knew better than he her breast was full. He then disclosed to her—& she to me — the singular means she was to employ.

For Fulton, more engineer than artist, the question was not whether one could in fact prepare a snuffboxful of infected matter from the buboes of a plague victim, apply that poison to one’s fingernails as to a quiver of savage arrowheads, & infect the victim by raking his back or arms with those same nails in the throes of passion, so that he would perish miserably three days later & be counted simply one more casualty of the pestilence. Fulton had heard enough from Barlow & me (who had it from my father) of Lord Amherst’s successful employment of smallpox against the Indian besiegers of Fort Pitt to credit that possibility. What he doubted was that all this information — together with Consuelo’s conviction that Don Escarpio would surely see to her own death too, whether she refused or complied, & her decision therefore to agree to the plan but plead with Barlow instead to smuggle her aboard the Fortune & look to his own safety — could feasibly have been convey’d to me whilst we shook the carriage, first in our struggle with each other (she to call alarums to the coachman, I to prevent her & win her confidence) & then in pretended passion, punctuated with cries of delight in two languages.

I would smile here at Germaine, who declared that while she thot the whole Don Escarpio business smackt more of Italian opera than of Spanish diplomacy, she knew from experience that much ground could be cover’d in a bouncing carriage. She allow’d, moreover, that it was my modesty to call the passion & attendant noises merely feign’d, as I had been a notable gallant even before improving my skills in naughty Barbary. She would even grant that Consuelo had messaged out the business beforehand in her fetching skew’d English (I show’d the messages as proof) for “Barlow” to read as she moan’d & thrasht & annotated in whispers: Germaine herself permitted no drawing-room conversation at Coppet whilst she composed; her staff & houseguests communicated by messages written & replied to on the spot — what we call’d “la petite poste.” She cited Prince Hamlet’s scribbling in the grip of his emotions, “A man may smile and smile,” & cet. What she found hardest to believe was my trusting Consuelo not to poison me by the same device.

I did not quite so trust her, I would admit: as I happen’d to have been gripping both her wrists in one hand from the start (& covering her mouth with the other until I was assured it was no longer necessary), when she discover’d to me her stratagem I obliged her to rake her own flesh at once, to prove her assertion that she had not tapt the dread snuffbox (she declared it was in her reticule) in advance.

And how could I be sure, demanded Ruthy Barlow, that the woman was not up to suicide as well as the seduction & murder of flirtatious diplomats? Trop romantique, her husband scoft, who had taken up that term from Germaine upon his belated return to Paris. (Faithful to my word, I had written him in Algiers of Ruthy’s new friendship with young Fulton, which I judged harmless; it was not until 1800, after the “XYZ Affair,” that Fulton moved in to make their ménage à trois.) Trop or non troppo, I replied, I could not take measures against every eventuality, especially in the heat of the moment. Consuelo had claw’d thro her skin unhesitatingly at my order: once on the inside of her thighs, again on the underside of her bosoms. I took the rest on faith.

“As ought we,” George III is wont to put in at this point. So reports the author Madame d’Arblay (“Fanny Burney,” whom I met thro Mme de Staël) from Windsor. The King had the story originally from her after his seizure of 1808, when in his blindness he took a sudden fancy to novels & insisted that his daughters & Mrs. Burney read him long passages from Fielding “and those like him.” At my own single audience with the King, in 1803, I had not brot the subject up, inasmuch as I was posing as Robert Fulton at the time, and in any case did not then know of His Majesty’s interest in erotic narrative. We spoke of the submarine boat, which George argued was militarily more important than the steamboat; also of Don Quixote & King Lear, both of which characters interested him greatly. It is on Mrs. Burney’s authority that I list the King as my 2nd uncritical auditor. He still calls for the story, I understand; rather fancies that Consuelo might be his eldest son’s discarded wife the Princess of Wales, & particularly applauds my having accepted this piquant demonstration of her good faith.

“But you want us also to accept these messages as Consuelo’s,” Joel & Ruthy & Germaine protested good-heartedly, “when we know at 1st hand what an accomplisht forger of letters you are.” (At 1st hand because, most recently, I had forged certain messages over the signature of M. Talleyrand to “Messieurs X, Y, & Z,” the anonymous intermediaries in Talleyrand’s dealings with President Adams.) I take it as a measure of Germaine de Staël’s limitations as a novelist, compared with such an untried, even unwilling imagination as that of my first uncritical auditor, that she did not observe what Midshipman James Fenimore Cooper remarkt at once: that the acceptation of “historical” documents as authentic is also an act of faith — a provisional suspension of incredulity not dissimilar, at bottom, to our complicity with Rabelais, Cervantes, or George III’s beloved Fielding.

Midshipman Cooper, then eighteen & freshly expell’d from Yale for insubordination, had the story from me in the Hustler Tavern in Lewiston, New York, next door to Fort Niagara, one night in 1807. That was the year of “Burr’s conspiracy” to separate the western territories & Mexico from the Union; also of Barlow’s publication of the first full edition of his Columbiad (including my impromptu on “Glad Chesapeake”) and Mme de Staël’s of her Corinne; of Fulton’s steamship Clermont’s going into regular service on the Hudson; and of my fateful meeting with Tecumseh & his brother the Prophet. Cooper was on shore leave from the brig Oneida, the U. States Navy’s total Lake Ontario fleet. I was en route to Castines Hundred to rejoin cousine Andrée & recover from the shock of “Aaron Burr’s” failure. We were sampling a drink called “cocktail,” just invented at that tavern (a mixture of brandy with some flavoring such as curacao & sugar, shaken with ice chopt from the lake), singing Yale songs I’d learnt from Barlow, & discussing Indians, a subject of interest to us both. I retail’d to Cooper what I knew of “Joseph Brant” & the destruction of the Mohawk Valley Iroquois, with whom he was especially preoccupied. He made copious notes, declaring he had a friend who aspired to write novels about Indians; he heard out with interest my enthusiasm for the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, whom Andrée had grown fond of & taught English to when she was sixteen, & whom I regarded as the red man’s last hope to found a sovereign state east of the Mississippi. It was in the course of explaining my half-belief that Tecumseh was Jewish that the subject of my Algerine adventure came up. I had pointed out the singularity of the Shawnees’ myth of their own origin: that unlike other tribes (who all reckon’d their emergence from the center of the earth), they traced their descent from twelve original clans who migrated from the east across the bottom of the sea, which parted to let them pass. This myth I related to the notion of my ancestor Ebenezer Cooke, who supposed in his Sot-Weed Factor poem that all Indians are descended from the lost tribes of Israel; and I remarkt to my young drinking companion the peculiar ubiquitousness of the Shawnee, bands of whom, like Jews after the Diaspora, were to be found everywhere: from Florida, Georgia, & the Carolinas to Pennsylvania, the Indiana territory, & Lake Erie. True, they were hunters rather than merchants (the ancient Hebrews had not been merchants either). But they were famously abstemious, and regarded themselves as the elect of the earth. Tecumseh in particular had a fine Semitic nose, a Jewish distaste for drunkenness, rape, firearms, & torture (but not for tomahawks & hand-to-hand combat), a good legal-political mind, a talent for sharp bargaining in his treaty dealings, & a loyalty to his family — especially to his visionary brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet — which might prove his most vulnerable aspect. My persuasion was that one of his ancestors had been, not a colonial governor of South Carolina as the Prophet maintain’d, but an early Jewish settler’s child captured & adopted by the Shawnee.

Cooper order’d another round of cocktails, observed that Jews were not admitted to the new U. States Military Academy at West Point or to the naval officer corps, & ask’d whence my familiarity with things Hebrew. Thus we got to the remarkable Joseph Bacri, to Joel Barlow’s finally successful Algerine mission, & to my adventure with Consuelo “del Consulado.” He was full of questions, but not of the skeptical sort, and made note of my replies for his unnamed friend. Of the matter of our protracted coupling in the carriage — first feign’d & then not — whilst Consuelo disclosed her written “exposition” (as he call’d it), Cooper observed: “That will have to be toned down.” He applauded my test both of her “innocence” (by obliging her to scratch herself) and of her sincerity (by taking her directly aboard the Fortune, sans papers, baggage, or interview with Barlow; I prevail’d upon the Captain — with a bribe from my travelling-funds & a quickly forged sailing order from “Barlow”—to accept her as a passenger & get under way at once instead of waiting till morning, as we believed the Dey plann’d to intercept the ship outside the harbor). Cooper question’d, not the verity, but the verisimilitude — that is, the plausibility as fiction—of my account of all this: the sailing order forged in my cabin in the ten minutes I’d requested to indite a “farewell” (& warning) letter to Barlow, whom I would not see again till mid-September; my inditing, in the same ten minutes, that farewell & warning, in which I enclosed Consuelo’s account of the Spanish plot; our bribing the Algerine harbor-master to agree that it was the current high tide, not the next, we were clear’d to sail on; our weighing anchor, making sail, & standing out of the harbor for Leghorn, Marseilles, & Philadelphia even as the carriage — which I’d first approacht not three hours since! — climb’d up from the quay in the direction of Barlow’s villa, my horse still tether’d behind.

“That too would all have to be reworkt,” said Midshipman Cooper. “The coachman, for example: How could you know he wasn’t an agent of that chap…” He consulted his notes. “Escarpio?” Lifetime servant of Consuelo’s family, I replied; had known her from her birth, & cet. But how was it Don Escarpio hadn’t put his own man on the carriage, to ensure against Consuelo’s defection? Couldn’t account for that myself, I admitted: bit of good luck, I supposed. That would have to be reworkt. And did the fellow not fear for his life when he should return to the Spanish consulate minus his passenger?

“Ah, well,” Barlow himself explain’d in Paris just five months ago (December 1811, my last meeting with him) to the bright 12-year-old whom Mme de Staël (herself 45 now, ill, pregnant by her young Swiss lover Rocca, & exiled to Coppet by Napoleon, who had confiscated the first press run of her book De l’Allemagne and order’d her to leave Paris at once) had taken an interest in: “Poor Enrique never return’d to the consulado, you see. When he deliver’d Andy’s letter he was trembling from head to toe. I thot ’twas fright, especially when I’d read the letter — but ’twas chills & fever. The servants would not let him into the house, but bedded him down in his own carriage. Sure enough, the 1st bubo appear’d next day in his groin, and by the time Senor El Consulado came ’round to fetch the horse & carriage, the wretch was dead.”

Young Honoré, who loved the story even more than had Fenimore Cooper & King George, would not have it that the coachman’s infection was coincidental, even tho Barlow’s favorite manservant had succumb’d to the plague just a day or two earlier. No, he insisted: Don Escarpio had infected the man deliberately, to cover his tracks, for “Enrique” was actually Henry Burlingame IV in disguise, seeing to the safety of his long-lost son; and Consuelo had not disembarkt at Málaga after our tearful farewells at Marseilles, but been kidnapt by the lusty sailors & fetcht to Philadelphia, where she escaped & tried to rejoin me at Castines Hundred, but was captured by the Shawnee but spared by Tecumseh because her then pseudonym, Rebecca, together with her raven hair & olive skin, reminded him of his great-grandmother, a Spanish Jewess captured & adopted by the Creeks in Florida…

“Too romantical by half, Master Balzac,” I advised my 3rd uncritical auditor, who, unlike Midshipman Cooper, frankly aspired to literature & was already scribbling vaudevilles at a great rate. He promist to rework it & show me an amended draught by New Year’s Day. But on the darkest night of the year a courier from the office of the Duc de Bassano, drest in the particular shade of brown fashionable that season in Napoleon’s court (“Caca du roi de Rome,” after the stools of the Emperor’s infant son), deliver’d to me an urgent letter from Andrée. It had been written at Castines Hundred only 30 days past & sent via Quebec & the secret French-Canadian diplomatic pouch: “Cato” (our code name for Tecumseh, who deplored the white man’s influence on the red as had Cato the Greek influence on the Romans) had suffer’d such a defeat on the Tippecanoe River that he was inclined to make peace with the U. States & remain neutral in the coming war. Furthermore, my man John Henry (of whom more presently), frustrated in his attempt to get from the British Foreign Office what he felt was owed him for his espionage in New England, was rumor’d to be leaving London in disgust & returning to Lower Canada. As for the author of the letter herself, she was gratified to report that in consequence of our close cooperation in July, when we had successfully “torpedo’d” (Robert Fulton’s word) the negotiations between William Henry Harrison & our friend “Cato,” she found herself in the family way. Would I please see to the completion of my current torpedo-work (on Barlow’s negotiations with the Duc de Bassano) in time to marry her before April 1812, when our baby was expected? And by the by, in case we should decide to assassinate either William Henry Harrison or Tecumseh’s Prophet: Whatever happen’d to my friend Consuelo’s dandy little potion? Was I so certain that it had contain’d what she described?

I was not, never had been, never would be certain. For, as I explain’d to your mother when I first met her in 1804 (and told her a version of this adventure suitable for the ears of a lady of fifteen), and re-explain’d when I remet & fell in love with her in 1807, and reminded her upon our marriage three months ago, Consuelo had flung her singular snuffbox straight into the Mediterranean when the Fortune clear’d Algiers. For all I knew & know for certain, “Don Escarpio” might have been tricking her for some complicated reason into an unsuccessful attempt on Barlow’s life, or she me into her rescue — tho she needed no such risky stratagem. I was certain only that it was good to be out of Algiers & to have such ardent company en route to Leghorn (where I was able to confirm the transfer of “our” letter of credit to Bacri’s Italian office) & Marseilles, where I left the ship. Consuelo wisht to come with me — to Paris, to anywhere — but I was too uncertain of my plans to undertake that responsibility. The Captain offer’d to carry me on, to Málaga or to Philadelphia: I return’d to Paris, & to a different uncertainty: one that persisted another half-dozen years.

Indeed, it was not until 1805, one Saturnian revolution since my birth, that I addrest myself clearly to what I thot of as “the American question.” I was de trop in Barlow’s household after “Toot” Fulton join’d it, tho Joel was glad of my assistance in the “XYZ Affair” & the revision of his Columbiad for the press. I was no less so in Mme de Staël’s: still Constant’s mistress and (in 1797) mother of his child, she turn’d her disappointment with Napoleon’s lack of interest in her into formidable political opposition to his 1st Consulship, & a fever of literary activity. I was able to help with the research for her essay De la Littérature (considéréé dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales); but after 1800 it was the autobiographical novel that most appeal’d to her, and such adventures as mine with Consuelo she found insufficiently “esthétique” (her new favorite adjective) for her Delphine, Corinne, & the rest. She was kind, but no longer interested, & frankly bored with my hatred of my father, which she declared had become mere wrongheadedness. “Henry Burlingame IV,” she confest, had assisted her in the purchase of 23,000 acres of former Iroquois land in upstate New York, as well as investments in the munitions firm of E. I. Du Pont in Delaware, for which assistance she was his debtor. Her comparison of him to me was in terms borrow’d from “Monsieur Fulton“: I was all vapeur, still in quest of a proper instrument of propulsion (Fulton was tinkering on the Seine with oars, paddle wheels, screw propellers); my father, more subtle, was a sous-marin, quietly applying torpilles to what he opposed. She thot I might well take a leaf from his book. Richard Alsop’s rhymed attack on Barlow in the Hartford Courant (after publication of Barlow’s letter criticizing President Adams’s French policy) characterized my own inconstancy:

What eye can trace this Wisdom’s son,—

This “Jack-at-all-trades, good at none,”

This ever-changing, Proteus mind,—

In all his turns, thro’ every wind;

From telling sinners where they go to,

To speculations in Scioto, …

From morals pure, and manners plain,

To herding with Monroe and Paine,

From feeding on his country’s bread,

To aping X, and Y, and Z,

From preaching Christ, to Age of Reason,

From writing psalms, to writing treason.

This “Proteus mind” permitted Barlow in 1800 to help Fulton persuade Napoleon to finance his submarine project against the British navy, and then in 1804 to encourage him to build torpedo-rafts for the Admiralty to use against Napoleon’s channel fleet — whilst at the same time projecting a four-volume opus in verse to be called The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy, and drafting liberal pamphlets on the incompatibility of large standing military establishments & political liberty!

My own mind was less protean than protoplasmic; less a “shifter of shapes” than a maker of shifts. On errands for Barlow & Fulton I went to London as aforemention’d & met the King (& Mrs. Burney, & the beautiful Juliette Récamier). On errands for Mme de Staël I came to meet & be befriended by Napoleon’s young brother Jérôme, eight years my junior; on account of this connection, & my “American origins,” in 1803 I was sent on an errand by a minister of Napoleon himself, to warn Jérôme against contracting “permanent personal alliances” during his tour of the U. States (a naval officer at the moment, he had left his ship in the West Indies and was carousing his way north towards Philadelphia and New York). I arrived in Baltimore on Christmas, 1803, one day after his marriage to Betsy Patterson of that city. It was my task to inform Jérôme privately that his brother — having banisht Mme de Staël from Paris in order to intimidate the anti-Bonapartist salons, & having arranged several unsuccessful assassination attempts against himself to cement his popularity with the masses, all in preparation for having Pope Pius VII crown him Emperor of France in the coming year — would never acknowledge Jérôme’s marriage to a commoner. The bride, a wealthy Baltimore merchant’s daughter, was indignant. Jérôme merely shrug’d & invited me to tour America at the First Consul’s expense, on pretext of dissuading him from the marriage he had already consummated.

Thus I found myself, full of misgivings, in the country & state of my birth, for the 1st time since Mother & I had left them in 1783, when I was seven. I crost “glad Chesapeake” to the broad Choptank & Cooke’s Point, half expecting to be greeted by some version of “Henry Burlingame IV.” There were the frozen marshes of my childhood, the geese flown down from Canada to winter, the graves of good Maggie Mungummory & divers ancient Cookes, the tall-topt pines, the house of my ancestors (long since sold out of the family, & in need of repairs), the ice-blue water lapping chillily at the beach. The scene spoke to me of my namesake’s journey north to where those geese came from (I mean my grandfather’s, A.C. III’s), to learn the truth about his derivation & then to deal with it. ’Twas a tale I’d had in mythic outline, so to speak, from Mother, and from “Father” in the opprobrious detail rehearst in my 2nd letter (I had not yet seen all the diaries & other documents). I was nearing 30, sans course or cause or calling; I had not been to Castines Hundred myself since my 10th year. It was time.

Now we move more swiftly, as my life has moved through the eight years since. I spent that winter as a guest of the Pattersons in Baltimore, acquainting myself with American society in that city as well as in Philadelphia &, especially, the new capital town of Washington, still a-building. There Jefferson, friend of Barlow & of France as his predecessor had not been, was in the new President’s House, having been elected by the House of Representatives after a tie vote with Aaron Burr in the electoral college. Tho he opposed the strong navy built under John Adams’s administration (with the help of the Barbary pirates, who had already broacht “our” treaty!), the same amity with Napoleon that put an end to the naval quarrels between France & the U. States had made possible Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from the First Consul. “America” now extended even west of the Mississippi, no one knew how far, some said all the way to the Pacific; Jefferson was sending an expedition from St. Louis to find out. Already nearly a million people had crost the line Pontiac fought for, and settled west of the Appalachians; Jefferson’s purchase would redouble that flow of settlers onto Indian lands, now going for $2 the acre. But as the Burr-Jefferson campaign made clear (and the earlier disputation over where the new capital should be built), the union of states was fragile yet; much, much was in the balance. I convey’d Barlow’s regards to the President, who pleasantly inform’d me that I was “much changed” since he had known me as Joel’s ward in Paris. He instructed me to advise Barlow that building lots, both in the city proper & in Georgetown, were still cheap: B. would do well to buy a few now if he was interested. But he should probably postpone his return to the country (another of my errands was to make this inquiry) until after the coming election, when the Republicans expected to sweep the field. Once reelected with a clear mandate, Jefferson could respond favorably to Barlow’s proposal that a national university be establisht in the capital, as suggested in George Washington’s will. He promist to invite Barlow himself to preside over its establishment.

Before I could sound him out on the question of a free state for Indians & manumitted or escaped African slaves — who since 1795 had been living together peacefully in the refugee Iroquois villages along the Grand River valley — he astonisht me by asking candidly whether I believed my father dead. I replied, I could but hope so, and ask’d him why he ask’d. Because, he said, he had heard from Mr. Alexander Hamilton, who had marshal’d his defeat of Burr in the House elections, that the man he had so narrowly defeated — now Vice-President of the nation! — was scheming with someone known to Hamilton’s informants only as “H.B.,” to promote a war with Spain & lead an expedition to snatch Mexico. Given the prevailing scurrility of the political climate, where Burr’s “low morals” (like John Randolph’s “impotence” & Barlow’s “free-thinking”) were openly lampoon’d, it was perfectly likely that the rumor was a Republican fabrication. On the other hand, given Burr’s energy, competence, unpredictability, & great ambition, together with the fluidity of the international situation, the rumor might be true. There was more America between the Appalachians & the Mississippi than between the Atlantic & the Appalachians, & yet more west of the Mississippi than those two regions combined, all of it up for grabs; plus giant Mexico below & giant Canada above, great prizes both. Bonaparte’s example was infectious: many besides Aaron Burr must be dreaming, not only of empire, but of literal emperorhood. Even Barlow, Jefferson had heard, that utterly unmilitary man (from whom he had the legendary exploits of my father), had petition’d the French Directory to lead an expedition into Louisiana…

Calling on Burr was my last errand in Maryland. The President, tho he could spare me but a quarter-hour, had done so promptly & cordially; the Vice-President did not want to see me. Burr protested his disbelief that I was who I claim’d to be (I was “too much changed”); then he kept me half an afternoon whilst he fulminated against Jefferson, against the Republicans, against the southern states, against the New York Tammany society which he himself had organized politically for the 1800 elections, only to have them turn on him after the contest in the House; against Alexander Hamilton, whose opposition would make it difficult for Burr to win even the governorship of New York, much less the presidency, in the current campaign. Barbarous, impossible, splendid country! Did I know that Hamilton had seriously consider’d leading an army into Mexico and proclaiming himself Emperor of Central & South America? & cetera. I ask’d for news of “H.B.” Burr said he expected me to have brot news from him; then he repeated his conviction that George Washington had had my father done away with after his betrayal of poor Benedict Arnold. Finally he mutter’d: “If he is not dead, he has turn’d into an Ohio River Irishman.” This remark he would not amplify. When I prest, he told me crossly I had been too long a Frenchman; that it was a mere idiom of the country. And he bid me good day.

Errands done, come spring I crost the mountains myself (in a wagon train bound for Governor Harrison’s Indian country) thro the Cumberland Gap to Pittsburgh, a brawling city sprung up where Pontiac’s Indians had been “Consuelo’d” with smallpox blankets. Thence up the Allegheny to Chautauqua Lake, where my dear grandparents had schemed & trysted half a century before. Over the portage trail to Lake Erie; by rough boat across to chilly Upper Canada, then again by wagon to Niagara (where I re-met Jérôme Bonaparte & his bride, honeymooning at the Falls), & anon to Castines Hundred. With every additional degree of north latitude and west longitude, my head clear’d. Even before I met your mother (then a fine fifteen) and fell in love with her on the spot, my movement from Napoleon’s France (and George’s England) to Jefferson’s America show’d me what Barlow & Tom Paine had been talking about: I understood I was not European. Moving farther, from the fail’d ideals of the French Revolution, thro the failing ones of the American, to the open country of the Indians, show’d me what my grandparents (and J. J. Rousseau) had been talking about: I understood I was not “American” either. My first adult glimpse of a Canadian village populated by white Loyalist refugees, displaced Iroquois, escaped Negro slaves, French habitants, & (a very few) British Canadians, cohabiting uneasily & in poverty but on the whole not unsuccessfully, set me to dreaming the family dream: a harmony not only between man & man, but between men & Nature. Jefferson’s ideal for the Indians — that they should all become little farmers, homesteaders, settlers—struck me now as no less grotesque than that they should become shopkeepers or sailors: I understood what Major Rogers had been talking about in his Ponteach; or, the Savages of America: A Tragedy. I was yet to meet Andrée’s idol Tecumseh, & do my utmost to advance his cause in the manner of us Cooks & Burlingames, and come to learn what a greater writer than any of these, old Sophocles, was talking about.

But I met ma belle cousine & her gentle parents, the lord & lady of Castines Hundred. I fell in love; not so Andrée, still under the spell of her Shawnee hero — her worrisome infatuation with whom led the Baron & Baroness to look favorably on my own attentions to her tho I was unpropertied, footloose, & as much her senior as Tecumseh, without his nobility of character. Being of French rather than English extraction, and part Indian himself thro his ancestor’s marriage to Madocawanda, the Baron was no bigot, but his tastes were those of a country gentilhomme, and he had opposed Andrée’s passion for Tecumseh not only on the grounds of her age but because he wisht a more settled life for her. (He was later to oppose our own match on that same sensible ground, when it became clear I was “my father’s son”; but when you made your existence known, he put by his objection with the good grace of the Barons Castine.) They had no firm word of my father since his visit of 1793, en route to Chief Little Turtle’s efforts against the American Legion: they had found him much changed; would not have known him but for his knowledge of our history & his characteristic enterprises. One rumor had it he was establisht on an island in the lower reaches of the Ohio, under an assumed name…

I took the occasion to make my filial feelings clear. The Baron & Baroness were taken aback, less by my sentiments (they had gravely mixt opinions of the man themselves, especially in his “Joseph Brant” metamorphosis, and they remember’d sympathetically my mother’s distraction) than by the indelicate vehemence of my expression. But Andrée brighten’d at once; lookt on me thenceforward with real interest, & question’d me endlessly thro the summer upon my theory that her Uncle Henry—& his grandfather H.B. III before him — had been secret Judas Iscariots of the Indian cause at Bloodsworth Island, at the Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, at Fallen Timbers, & the rest. She reminded me that he had made the same sort of charges against his father, Andrew Cooke III, vis-à-vis Pontiac’s betrayal. She urged me to meet Tecumseh, “the Shooting Star.” I declined, jealous, & declared the Indian cause already lost. A receding series of betrayals & retreats was their future, I opined: along the Eastern seaboard they were already but a colorful memory; in a hundred years they would be no more than that along the Pacific.

Andrée agreed, so long as the U. States’ westward expansion went uncheckt. And what could check it? Not Tecumseh’s daydream of confederating all the Indians from Florida to the Lakes, I scoft: that was but the tragedy of Pontiac replay’d. So it would be, my young friend conceded — unless, as she & Tecumseh plann’d, the action of the Indians coincided with full-scale war between the U. States & G. Britain!

I was astonisht, not only by the boldness of her suggestion, but by her precocious grasp of history & politics. It was not just to westward the “Americans” were moving, she declared: the U. States merchant fleet was grown prodigious in the Atlantic trade. But since Napoleon had broken the Peace of Amiens last year & gone to war in the Mediterranean, Britain had extended her policy of economic warfare by blockading French & Spanish ports against neutral shipping, & Napoleon must surely retaliate with a similar blockade against Britain. U. States ships & cargoes were being snatcht by both sides for running these blockades, & U. States sailors were being imprest into the Royal Navy. John Adams’s Federalist administration, sympathetic to the ties between old & New England, had come close to war with France in 1798 on these accounts. Jefferson’s Republicans inclined against Britain despite their reservations about Napoleon. My excellent cousin was persuaded that since the U. States could not afford to fight both major powers, it was likely to refight the War of 1776 if peaceful Jefferson — who would surely be reelected this year — were succeeded in 1808 by a less formidable or less pacific Republican. To the Loyalists in Upper Canada the ’76 war was still a rebellion, not a revolution; it was they who had prest Governor Haldimand not to return Fort Niagara to the U. States at the war’s end, and when he was obliged to — but only in 1796—to construct another fort on Canadian soil just across the gorge from it. A quarter-century of exile had dimm’d but not extinguisht their hope that New England, at least, might still secede from the Union, annex itself to Canada, & welcome them home. Young Republicans from the new western & southern states, for their part, were eager to move against the Canadas & the Floridas, on pretext that Britain was arming & inciting Indians against the western settlements. If they gain’d sufficient strength in Congress, especially in the off-year elections of 1806 and 1810, they could surely exploit the maritime issues to ally New England & the mid-Atlantic states to their cause. And if finally, over that same period, Britain & France continued to exhaust each other’s resources in European wars, & “we” were able to turn the western congressmen’s pretext into a fact by organizing Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy (a popular idea in the British cabinet, as it would make western America in effect a royal protectorate), there could be a 2nd Revolutionary War, as it were, as early as 1809 or ’10! To give her projections a little margin, Andrée was already speaking of it as “the War of 1811.” She would be 22 then: “we” had seven years to make our preparations.

I.e., herself, Tecumseh, me… and my father, her legendary Uncle Henry, if we could find him & determine once for all his true allegiance. Ten years past, her Indian friend had fought with Little Turtle’s Miamis in their victory over American soldiers on the Wabash & their defeat by Wayne’s American Legion at Fallen Timbers; thus his introduction to my father & subsequent visits to Castines Hundred. But Tecumseh was his own man, and tho he had valued “H.B.‘s” high opinion of Pontiac (his own model & exemplar), he had not always trusted his advice, particularly after Fallen Timbers. Just then, neither’s whereabouts was known.

I reported what I’d heard from Jefferson and Burr, which corroborated the Baron’s last news of “H.B.” I knew too little of American politics to yea or nay Andrée’s complex prognostications, but enough of French & Algerine, & of history generally, to warn her that events have their own momentum, & quickly get beyond the grasp of those who would control them. And if I should ever go in search of my “father,” I declared, it would not be to enlist myself in his cause, or him in mine.

“We don’t know his,” Andrée said tartly, “and you have none.”

True enough — till love & Aaron Burr gave me one, that same year. News reacht us of Burr’s duel with Hamilton on the Hudson Palisades, which spoilt his bid for the New York governorship & forced him into a kind of hiding. He was headed, we heard, for the Louisiana territory, where he own’d land, with a band of settlers, perhaps to establish a new state. But there were also rumors of intended rendezvous with a volunteer army that had been training on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, no one knew what for. Napoleon, age 35, was crown’d Emperor of France & Anointed of the Lord, and prepared to make war against Austria & Russia. Jefferson handily won reelection; Republican strength increast in the Congress. I turn’d 28, & proposed marriage to my 16-year-old cousin. The Baron & Baroness said she was not ready; Andrée declared I was not, till I had accomplisht something in “our cause.” She bade me reconnoitre the activity on Blennerhassett Island, determine whether “Harman Blennerhassett” (so we had learnt its owner to be denominated) was my father, & whether whatever was afoot ’twixt him & Burr was an aid or a threat to Tecumseh’s program. I was then to take “appropriate measures,” report to Tecumseh, & ask the Chief’s permission for her hand! If he approved, she was mine whatever her dear parents thot.

Well, I could not stay on at Castines Hundred. In 1805 & ’06 & ’07—whilst Napoleon won at Ulm, Austerlitz, & Jena, lost at Trafalgar, and, just as Andrée had forecast, issued the Berlin Decree against trade with Britain in retaliation for Britain’s Orders in Council against trade with France; and whilst a sea battle was fought off the Virginia Capes betwixt the USS Chesapeake and HMS Leopard, such as she had hoped for (and whilst Jérôme Bonaparte’s marriage was annull’d by his brother, who made him King of Westphalia, and whilst Joel & Ruthy Barlow settled down in Philadelphia to bring out the Columbiad, and Toot Fulton helpt him with the engravings & built the Clermont)—I follow’d Burr’s fortunes from Blennerhassett Island, by flatboat down the Ohio & Mississippi to New Orleans & his arrest for conspiring to separate the western states from the Union; thence to Richmond & his trial & acquittal.

When Burr fled to Europe in perfect disgrace, and Harman Blennerhassett settled down to raise cotton in Mississippi, I came back to make my report (and en route met that 1st uncritical auditor of my Algerine adventure, Midshipman Cooper). Taken separately, I declared to Andrée, neither Harman Blennerhassett nor Aaron Burr was guilty as charged, and Justice Marshall had fairly resisted Jefferson’s pressure to convict. Blennerhassett, an Irish lawyer & adventurer, was in my opinion primarily bent on marching on Mexico, and Burr on bringing a large new state into the Union with himself as governor, tho each was prepared to do both if it should prove feasible. The conspiracy was mainly the invention of Jefferson’s western army commander, General James Wilkinson, a bona fide traitor in the secret pay of Spain, who (again in my opinion, because at my urging) had prest the Western Empire idea on B. & B. to divert them from Mexico; aroused their interest in it as a possibility if their “legitimate” program should fail; and then tattled on them to Jefferson & turn’d state’s evidence to cover his tracks as a Spanish agent!

In the same way, I did not believe that either Blennerhassett or Burr was guilty of being “Henry Burlingame IV,” whether or not that fellow in his latter guises was my sire.

Drawing on what I’d learnt from Consuelo to pose as a fellow agent of the Spanish minister to the U. States, I had enlisted Wilkinson to scotch their plan, not altogether on Tecumseh’s behalf (tho anything but the Mexican enterprise would have meant more encroachment on Indian lands) but principally to thwart two people who — separately or together! — might be H.B. IV. It was my intention to keep an occasional eye on both, especially on Burr, who it pleased me to report had at no time penetrated my disguise. Finally, at 18 my taskmaster was more desirable than before, & would she marry me?

She would be happy to, your mother replied, with Tecumseh’s consent. What had been his judgment of me?

I confest I had been too proud to seek him out & ask it, tho I’d heard his praises sung from Buffalo to New Orleans. A pity, Andrée said, since on the strength of her descriptions of me to Tecumseh during his recentest visit to Castines Hundred, he seem’d favorably inclined to the match. He had agreed in principle, she declared, that a war betwixt the British & the “Seventeen Fires” (as he call’d the U. States) would serve the interests of the Indians if the British won. They had proposed to him already the establishment of an arm’d Indian free state extending south from the Great Lakes. But he had seconded also my caution that events have energies of their own, and he worried that a U. States victory in such a war would be the end of Indian sovereignty. Even more he approved any plan to divide the Union, so long as it did not involve the formation of new white nations on Indian lands, as had Aaron Burr’s. Non-literate himself, Tecumseh was particularly imprest with my reported ability to counterfeit letters & other documents, so important in the white men’s commerce with one another. He had inquired of Andrée whether that talent might be put to use to disunite the Seventeen Fires whilst he tried to unite with his oratory the nations of the Indians.

And why, I ask’d, had Tecumseh paid this call on her? Because, she replied, his younger brother’s assumption in 1805 of the role of prophet & visionary, following upon Tecumseh’s own revival of Pontiac’s plan for an Indian confederacy, had put him troubledly in mind of Pontiac’s association with the Delaware Prophet, whose “vision” he knew to have been influenced by the 1st Andrée Castine. Tecumseh was uneasy about this reenactment; he trusted his brother’s loyalty, but not his judgment; he wanted, Andrée believed, both to reassure himself that she would not be another “Angélique Cuillerier,” & at the same time to learn whether she had any suggestions for improving his brother’s “vision” in the way the first Andrée had improved the Delaware Prophet’s. Your mother tactfully responded that her only vision was of Tecumseh at the head of an Indian empire rivalling that of the Aztecs or the Incas. Then she made the practical suggestion that the Prophet establish a religious center at some strategic location convenient to the principal nations of the confederacy — say, at the confluence of the Wabash & the Tippecanoe in the Indiana territory — to give the proposed union a physical headquarters like that of the Seventeen Fires in Washington. An “official” seat of authority, she maintain’d, might help to counter the Americans’ practice of making treaties to their own advantage with disaffected groups of Indians or self-styled chiefs. And the establishment of an Indian Mecca or Vatican, with the Wabash prophet at its head, would also help distinguish & fix him as the religious leader of the confederacy, & keep him out of Tecumseh’s hair in political & military matters. Tecumseh had thot this an inspired idea, thankt her happily, & urged her to send her intended to him.

For so she now declared me, in recompense for my work against the western empire of Burr, Blennerhassett, & General Wilkinson. But if I would have her to wife, I must complete two further tasks, one as it were for Tecumseh & the other as it might seem against him, for herself. She had learnt from her father’s friends in the Canadian Governor-General’s office that that worthy, Sir James Craig, was much pleased with a series of newspaper articles lately publisht by one John Henry of Vermont, attacking the republican form of government in general & the Republican administration in Washington in particular. Craig wanted to know whether this Henry could be hired to agitate in the Federalist press for the secession of New York & New England after the 1808 elections, when another Virginian was expected to follow Jefferson in the President’s House. Andrée had proposed me as one who could not only make that ascertainment, but supply Henry with appropriate copy, if necessary, to publish under his name. Her Quebec associate had offer’d to provide me with expense money & a stipend for this not very difficult assignment, which would serve also as my initiation into the British-Canadian secret service.

The 2nd task was more delicate. Governor Harrison of Indiana was negotiating with minor chiefs of the Delawares, Kickapoos, Miamis, & others of Pontiac’s old confederates to sell some 3,000,000 acres of their prime common hunting territory along the Wabash, for an absurdly small sum. Tecumseh opposed such a sale at any price; had even threaten’d to kill the potential signatories of Harrison’s treaty. My task was to suggest to him that his cause might better be served by permitting the treaty to be sign’d over his protests (but not by the Shawnees) & then enlisting the fierce Lake Erie Wyandots, who so far had held aloof from his confederacy, to aid him in punishing the “degenerate village chiefs” who sign’d it. The action would appeal to the Wyandots; their enlistment would impress the Potawatomis & other reluctant tribes; the elimination of those defectors amongst the minor chiefs would strengthen the Indian alliance & serve as a warning against further such treaties. It would also serve to introduce me to the Indians, whom I did not yet truly know… & to Tecumseh.

I observed to my young fiancée that she was ordering the deaths of some half-dozen human beings. She replied that they were cynical, drunken traitors who would trade their birthright & their people for a barrel of whiskey. If she could, she would perform the executions herself, with pleasure.

The 1st task was both easy & agreeable: it fetcht me in 1808 to Montreal & across the St. Lawrence into Vermont, where I readily enlisted the ambitious & erratic Mr. Henry — a former greengrocer, newspaper publisher, & artillery captain — to go down to Boston & test the air there for secession. I provided him with a simple cipher & instructions for transmitting his reports to the Governor-General’s office. Then, after Madison’s election & inauguration, I went to Boston myself to retrieve the man from the taverns & brothels where he claim’d to be keeping his finger on the pulse of public sentiment, and scolded him for providing “us” with no more than we could read more cheaply in the Boston newspapers: e.g., that the Federalists would oppose any move against Britain and, if Madison yielded to the western war-hawks, would perhaps attempt to set up a Congress of Federalist States in Boston or Hartford & remain neutral. I myself predicted (& still predict) against their actual secession, but felt the question to be of slight importance: there was enough pro-British, anti-French, & especially anti-Republican sentiment amongst the Yankees to guarantee a steady illegal sale of supplies from New York & New England to British forces in Canada. If the war goes successfully for Britain in that theater, annexation of those states to Canada should be negotiable without great difficulty. Whilst in Boston I draughted a few sample letters for Henry to cipher & transmit as his own. It did not trouble me that the man was of no consequence as a spy, for I saw already to what better use his letters could be put. I instructed him to keep copies, for the purpose of documenting his service to the British Foreign Office, and let him back to his tarts & ale.

The 2nd task was another story. Acting on your mother’s suggestion, in 1808 Tecumseh establisht for his brother “the Prophet’s Town” near where the Tippecanoe joins the Wabash: a mixt Indian community dedicated to industriousness, sobriety, the common ownership of property, brotherhood amongst the nations of red men, & repudiation of all things learnt from the “Long Knives,” by which term they call’d us whites. So successful was the town, & the strategy, Governor Harrison mistook the Prophet (who had changed his name from Lalawethika, or “Loud Mouth,” to Tenskwatawa, “Open Door”) for the leader of the confederacy, & invited him in the summer of 1809 to confer at Vincennes, the territorial capital, concerning the proposed treaty. That year I met all three.

Child: I am a Cook, not a Burlingame. You Burlingames get from your ancestor H.B. III a passion for the world that fetches you everywhere at once, in guises manifold as the world’s, to lead & shape its leaders & shapers. We Cooks, I know now, get from our forebear Ebenezer, the virgin poet of Maryland, an inexhaustible innocence that, whatever our involvement in the world (we are not merely Cooks), inclines us to be followers — better, learners: tutees of the Burlingames & those they’ve shaped. If Aaron Burr & Harman Blennerhassett had been one & the same man, as it sometimes seem’d to me they were, that man would be the Burlingame I despise & wish dead. If Tecumseh & Tenskwatawa were one man — a distillation & embodiment of the Indian blood flowing thro our line — that man would be the father I could love, admire, & pity. Of the Prophet I will say little: Jefferson agrees with Harrison that he is a rogue & charlatan, a former brawling drunk who, after a “conversion” as dramatical as Paul’s on the Damascus Road, became a teetotaling faker. I myself believe him to be both authentic & authentically half-mad, nowise to be trusted; I believe further that Tecumseh so saw him too, from the beginning.

As for the “Shooting Star”: what greater expression of my admiration can I make than that Tecumseh is more deserving of Andrée’s love than I? That I had rather be esteem’d by him than by anyone save her? That I think him worth a Jefferson, two Madisons, three Barlows, five Napoleons? I never felt more my grandfather’s son (but remember, I did not yet know that history in detail) than when I first sat at the feet of this successor to Pontiac, whom I pray it will be your fortune one day to meet as the head of a great free league of Indian nations, and to love as I do.

He began our closer connection in July 1810, by saving my life. On the strength of my relation to Andrée & my father’s & grandfather’s to Pontiac, Tecumseh had permitted me to live in the Prophet’s town (over the Prophet’s objections) & practice the Algonkin language thro the summer & fall of 1809, between my embassies to John Henry. He had heard me out carefully, thro an interpreter, on Andrée’s proposal regarding the Wyandots & the Harrison treaty, and had replied that while it did not strike him as the best strategy, it was the course he would probably follow anyhow, inasmuch as he expected the “village chiefs” to sign the treaty despite his threats. He also told me that William Henry Harrison was no villain, but a worthy tho implacable adversary who had champion’d legal justice for the Indians (vainly) in the Indiana legislature in 1807, even whilst dickering to buy their land at 3½ mills the acre—600 times less than the government’s standard selling price! But he would not talk to me further about such important matters as Pontiac’s rebellion, or his opinion of my father & grandfather, or my betrothal to his young friend “Star-of-the-Lake,” until we could discuss them in Algonkin.

I learnt fast. And in the process came to respect, even more than formerly, the red men’s famous harmony with their land (to sell which, they regarded less as treason than as fraud, since in their view no man had title to what was every man’s). I saw the ultimate harmlessness of even the fierce Wyandots & once-fierce Senecas, by contrast with the whites: Tecumseh’s comparison was of a pack of wolves to a forest fire. To my surprise I came to feel ever more clearly my distance from the Indians, even as I bridged it: were I not part Indian, there could have been no bridge; were I not mainly & finally European-American, no bridge would have been needed. From this last I came to see what Tecumseh later told me Pontiac had seen (and what I now know my grandfather knew before Pontiac): that while the wolf may make the deer a finer animal, & the eagle quicken the race of rabbits, all flee together from the fire, or perish in it. As there was no longer any real where for the Indian to flee…

Yet he was no defeatist. That the Indians perhaps had only different ways to lose meant to Tecumseh that the choice of ways was all the more important. Hence his preference for the tomahawk, for example, together with his recognition that only British artillery might truly drive back American artillery. Hence his tireless exhortations to the chiefs not to forget their differences, which were as old & “natural” as those between hare & hawk, but to work for their common good despite them, against the menace. The flaw in his reasoning, of course, was that exemplary conduct presumes someone to benefit from the example. If deer & wolf rise above their ancient differences to stand together, what have they taught the fire? Tecumseh’s reply to this question (which I never put) was in his bearing, his eloquence, his selfless energy, his spaciousness of heart & the general fineness of his character, which I think must far exceed his hero Pontiac’s: to be thus-&-such a man (these virtues preacht), to behave in thus-&-such a fashion, were excellent & sweet yea tho one perish — especially if one is to perish in any case. This tragical (but nowise despairing) lesson is what Tecumseh taught, in a language neither English nor Algonkin.

By the time that contemptible treaty was sign’d (September 30, 1809, anniversary as it happens of Adam & Eve’s eviction from Paradise, according to tradition, & of Ebenezer Cooke’s inadvertent loss of his father’s estate), I had enough grasp of the language to be trusted with the errand of reporting to Governor Harrison Tecumseh’s anger, as well as the Wyandots’ enlistment into the confederacy. With credentials supplied by the Canadian secret service, I pass’d as a scout for the U. States secret service charged with learning the extent of British instigation of the Indian alliance, and reported truthfully to Harrison that the confederacy grew stronger every season. That while the British understandably were cheer’d by it, they had as yet provided little beyond moral support to Tecumseh & the Prophet, but were likely to supply them with weapons if the confederacy chose to resist the new “treaty” with force, as Tecumseh was prepared to do. That the real instigators of Indian solidarity were just such spurious or broken treaties. That the best strategy against that solidarity (and against driving the Indians to join the British in the coming war) was to cease invading their territory & murdering them with legal impunity.

The last point Harrison granted; he even worried (what I’d not dared hope) that President Madison, who rather shared my general position, might be persuaded to set aside the treaty he Harrison had just negotiated — a move which would put the Governor uncomfortably betwixt his constituents & the man he must rely on for political & military support. Cheer’d, I went off to Boston & my business with John Henry; then return’d to the Prophet’s town by way of Vincennes (& Castines Hundred) in the spring, this time as Harrison’s messenger to the Prophet, whom he invited to the capital to discuss the treaty. I reminded him that the real leader was Tecumseh. All the more reason to invite his brother instead, Harrison felt: promote any jealousy betwixt them. Andrée & I agreed that now the obnoxious treaty was accomplisht, the next great step toward Indian confederacy would be for Tecumseh successfully to resist by force its implementation, then to negotiate with President Madison its repeal. This would establish his leadership in the eyes of the Americans, the British, & his own people, & give him authority in Washington & London to barter his allegiance or neutrality in the coming war for firm guarantees of an Indian free state. I deliver’d myself (in Algonkin) of this opinion, together with Harrison’s invitation. To my dismay, Tenskwatawa loudly declared I should be executed as a spy: he had got wind thro the winter of my pose with Harrison, and feign’d to believe it was no pose; that I & possibly Star-of-the-Lake as well were in the pay of the Long Knives.

It was fortunate for me that his indictment included your mother, for while Tecumseh forbade torture, he believed in the swift execution of spies. But the Chief knew of my facility with documents & other credentials; he chided his brother, veto’d my execution, praised my improvements in their tongue, & subsequently took me as his interpreter — with 400 fine young warriors, for effect — to the 1st of a series of conferences with Harrison in Vincennes. It was my 1st experience of his statesmanship: the man was magnificent, both as orator & as tactician: always eloquent; tactful & forceful by turns; & so possest of memory & information that he could recite the provisions & violations of every Indian treaty made & broken by the Long Knives “since the Seventeen Fires had been Thirteen & had fought for their sovereignty, as his people were now conjoin’d to fight for theirs.” The pretenders who had sign’d the last of those treaties, he declared, were dead men. The confederacy would no more accede to Madison’s order to disband than would the Seventeen Fires to such an order from himself. & cetera. Harrison was enough imprest with Tecumseh to delay moving settlers onto the treaty lands—& to request troops from the War Department. Tecumseh was enough imprest with my services, & my Algonkin, to speak to me now on those matters he had tabled earlier.

What he vouchsafed me, in effect, over the following year, was a clear tho fleeting glimpse of what Andrée has since seen to be the pattern of our family history; more generally, he re-introduced me to the tragical view. Tecumseh understood to the heart Pontiac’s dilemma at the siege of Detroit (as explain’d in my 3rd letter); for that reason he would always attack, attack, preferably at night & hand-to-hand, & leave siege operations when necessary to whatever white allies the confederacy might enlist from time to time. The confederacy itself he view’d as a necessary evil, contrary to the Indians’ ancient pluralism, & for that reason he thot its central authority best left more spiritual than political. Thus his willing dependency on his undependable brother. Farther down the white man’s road toward a central government he would not go, tho he was not at all certain the Indians could prevail without one. He pointed out to me that my father & grandfather had had a common esteem for Pontiac, whatever their other motives & differences. Perhaps one or both of them had thot to aid him in the long run by misleading or impeding him in the short, as one strengthens a child by setting obstacles in his path, or tells him simple myths till he can grasp the hard true ones. But Tecumseh question’d both my father’s conviction, that his parents had betray’d Pontiac, & mine, that my father had betray’d, for example, the Iroquois under Joseph Brant. If he believed that, he declared, he would have permitted Tenskwatawa to tomahawk me, & would himself put a knife thro the heart of Star-of-the-Lake, whom he still loved, ere we could betray him. As it was — and since he had little time for a wife & children nor any wish to leave behind a young widow & orphans — he gave his blessings to our match, hoped it would be fruitful, & pray’d that we would set no helpful obstacles in his path, as he was no child.

I rusht to Castines Hundred with these tidings. To Andrée (now 22, & I nearing 35!) they were not news: she came to me smiling, & soon after wed me privately in the Iroquois ceremony, as my grandmother & grandfather had been wed. Andrée had just commenced her research of the family history; she was fascinated by our likeness to our grandsires. And tho she knew I had not the peculiar defect of male Burlingames (which they have always overcome), she follow’d the example of Andrée I in declining to marry me Christian-fashion till I had got her with child.

Sweet last summer! Mme de Staël wrote me from Coppet of her troubles with Napoleon; of her friend Schlegel’s narrow rescue of her manuscript De l’Allemagne; of her current affair with a Swiss guardsman half her age, très romantique mais peu esthétique. She wonder’d whether I thot it safe for her to move to her New York property if Napoleon hounded her from Coppet; surely “we” were not going to war with Britain, Europe’s only hope against the bloody Corsican? I was obliged to reply that unlike Paris in Year III, which appear’d dangerous but was safe, upstate New York in 1811 appear’d safe but would soon be dangerous. To convince her, I attacht a copy of a letter I’d forged with Andrée’s help for the purpose of inflaming the American press against the British: based on a real one sent from Major James Crawford at Niagara to Governor Haldimand in Quebec on January 3, 1782, it itemized eight boxes of scalps lifted by the Senecas & presented to the Governor-General for bounty payment: 43 “Congress soldiers,” 93 “farmers kill’d in their houses,” 97 farmers kill’d working in their fields, 102 more farmers of which 18 scalps were “markt with yellow flame to show that they were burnt alive after being scalpt,” 81 women, “long hair, those braided to show they were mothers,” 193 boys’ scalps “various ages,” 211 girls’ scalps big and little, “small yellow hoops markt hatchet, club, knife, & cet,” 122 “mixt scalps including 29 infants… only little black knife in middle to show ript out of mothers body,” & cet. Joel Barlow wrote from Kalorama, his house in Washington, that he was sailing reluctantly from Annapolis aboard the Constitution as Madison’s minister to France, to deal with Napoleon’s foreign minister in a final effort to prevent war betwixt the U. States & G. Britain. He recall’d fondly my assistance in his dealings with the Dey of Algiers, & wisht I could be with him now. Toot Fulton, he was sad to report, had married soon after the Clermont’s success; Ruthy was disconsolate. The war-hawk American Secretary of State, Barlow’s friend James Monroe, had instructed General Mathews in Georgia by secret letter on January 26 to move against the Floridas “with all possible expedition, concealing from general observation the trust committed to you with that discretion which the delicacy and importance of the undertaking require.” In May the U. States frigate President crippled the British sloop-of-war Little Belt off Sandy Hook, to the delight of Henry Clay & his fellow hawks, much increast in strength since the 1810 congressional elections. Surely the 12th Congress would declare Andrée’s War of 1811 when it convened in the fall! Tecumseh inform’d Governor Harrison early in the year that he would not only remain neutral, but fight on the side of the Seventeen Fires in the coming war if President Madison would set aside Harrison’s false treaty & make no future ones without consent of the chiefs assembled at the Tippecanoe. White citizens’ committees from Vincennes to St. Louis petition’d Madison to move against the Prophet’s town, disperse the confederacy, & drive out the British Indian traders who were “behind it.”

At Castines Hundred, whilst the Baron tiskt & tutted, your parents kiss’d & coo’d — and made plans. Barlow himself believed that inasmuch as the Westerners & Southerners were hottest for the war, my friend Tecumseh was of more immediate moment in the matter than Napoleon & George III together (that latter so sunk into madness now that a Regency bill was expected daily, but still urging in his lucid moments that troops be sent to recover his lost America). Joel could but hope that if France & England were persuaded to lift their decrees against American merchant shipping, the Indian issue itself would not be a sufficient casus belli; he implored me to use whatever influence I had to keep Tecumseh neutral. I had not seen fit to tell him that I was become a hawk myself, tho at the time of Burr’s trial in Richmond, when I had visited Barlow in Philadelphia to aid him with the new Columbiad, I’d spoken warmly of Tecumseh’s plan for an Indian nation, and tried to work into Joel’s epic a denunciation of “Manifest Destiny” by Columbus himself.

It seem’d to us now — your mother & me — that Tecumseh’s willingness to treat directly with Madison, before the confederacy had proved its strength to both Washington & London, was premature. Our friend replied that they would not be ready to prove their strength for another year, by when he hoped more of the southern nations, especially the Creeks, would be represented at the Prophet’s town: his present objective was to temporize with Harrison thro the winter whilst he did more diplomatic work in the South. It seem’d to us too that Barlow’s mission was dangerous to our cause: just possibly Madison’s gamble would work, and if there were no war to bring British troops to the Great Lakes & the Mississippi Valley (and divert the Americans’ energies from their Manifest Destiny), Tecumseh’s cause was lost. We resolved therefore on a double course: to make sure — what was anyhow unlikely — that Harrison did not agree to send Tecumseh to Madison before our friend left for his southern enterprise; and to see to it Barlow’s French mission fail’d.

The 1st we accomplisht in July, by suggesting to Harrison that his own goals might be attain’d without bloodshed, in Tecumseh’s absence, by moving infantry and militia conspicuously up the Wabash to establish a fort near the Prophet’s town: their leader gone, the Indians would likely disband before such a show of force, and Harrison would then negotiate from a position of strength with his own Indiana constituents as well as with Tecumseh. We caution’d him that attacking the Prophet’s town directly would serve only to rally the Indians, as an attack on Mecca would rally the Islamites (had we actually believed that, of course, we would have urged attack). Harrison agreed, and after a last fruitless conference at Vincennes on July 27, Tecumseh bid us farewell till spring & set off southwards down the Wabash with 20 warriors.

To accomplish the 2nd objective I sadly bid my bride au revoir immediately after, struck out eastwards down the Mohawk & Hudson to New York City, and took ship for France to try whether I could “torpedo” good Joel’s negotiations with the Duc de Bassano, described above. In October I reacht Imperial Paris (much changed), where everyone but the Barlows, so it seem’d, went about drest in “Caca du roi de Rome” & reenacting the age of the Caesars. I found Aaron Burr (much changed) so sunk in Baroque vice as to seem more than ever the descendant of Henry Burlingame III, were he not equally sunk in despair & alcohol. I found Germaine (much changed) newly pregnant by her sturdy guardsman — now secretly her husband — whom the household call’d Caliban behind her back: she was become nervous, insomniac, a touch dropsical to boot, & much given to laudanum in consequence; yet no less busy & brilliant than when I had first met her.

She scolded me for not bringing with me my belle sauvage, & insisted that I rehearse to her new young protégé the story of the original Baron Castine’s romance with Madocawanda, & my own with “Consuelo del Consulado.” She was certain her needling letters to Napoleon, on the occasion of De l’Allemagne’s French publication, still rankled the Emperor; he had banisht her beautiful friend Juliette Récamier for the crime of visiting her in Switzerland; if his secret police continued to harass her at Coppet, she would have to flee to Vienna, to Russia, to God knows where, since she had no wish to lose her scalp in America. If only she could resist writing letters! All the same, she believed the Emperor to be fascinated with her: let her set out for Russia, she bet he’d not be far behind. Had I read M. Chateaubriand’s silly Indian novels, Atala and René? Really, she thot her precious romantisme could be carried too far, and no doubt the worst was yet to come; if she were as young as young Master Balzac, she would set about to invent whatever was to follow it. Someday soon she meant to write her own version of la révolution: perhaps I would assist her with the chapters on the Commune & the Terror? Or was I back to my Pocahontas? In any case, I look’d more like my father every day. The Duc de Bassano? No wilier or more dishonest than the run of foreign ministers, she reckon’d, Napoleonic or Bourbon: he would promise Barlow everything, & (wise man!) put nothing in writing. But she would not advise me on how to thwart my friend Barlow’s mission, for while she approved the idea of an Indian free state, & agreed that another war with England would distract the Americans from westward expansion — just as Britain’s war with France kept both countries from expanding their influence in America — she believed it more imperative to curb Napoleon than to curb the pioneers. Better the Indians be lost than the British! Now: what was it I said happen’d to that famous plagued snuffbox?

Only stout Joel and Ruthy, it seem’d to me, were not much changed, simply mellow’d into middle age. Resign’d now to childlessness, they had replaced me & Fulton with a nephew of Joel’s from Yale. Resign’d also to less-than-Homerhood after the mocking critical reception of his huge Columbiad & his ode to Captains Lewis & Clark (ably parodied by John Quincy Adams), he regretted not having stuck to satire as my father had advised, and doubted he would go to the Muse again. He agreed now with his former tutor that History is your grandest fiction, tho he had not yet come to my father’s modest corollary (which I heard now for the 1st time): that its eloquentest authors, like those of the ancient ballads & Eastern tales, are anonymous, their subtlest “works” known only to the elect. Our deals & double-deals with Joseph Bacri & Hassan Bashaw, for example, were surely works of art, which gave him more pleasure than the whole Columbiad. He hoped his work in progress would equal it.

But he cordially declined to make me privy to his strategy with the Duc de Bassano, beyond acknowledging that he was not imprest with that gentleman’s verbal assurances that the Berlin & Milan decrees had been effectively revoked. The Duke was a regular Burlingame, he said, even whose written word could not be assumed to be authentic; and I was grown too much my father, & my interests too far from his own, for him to confide in me as he had used to, now he’d re-met me. My Tecumseh sounded like a splendid fellow, my “wife” a splendid woman; he hoped that the red men would not be hounded from the continent to become, like the black slaves, an indelible stain on the conscience of white America. But even as we spoke, the 12th Congress would be debating a war with England which Madison did not want yet must surely yield to if Prime Minister Perceval fail’d to rescind the Orders in Council, & Tecumseh’s confederacy did not disband. He Barlow would be pleased to be remember’d as a diplomatist instrumental in avoiding that war; if he should fail, he bade me seriously consider what I seem’d to him to have given no thot to: that with the cream of the British military engaged against Napoleon in Spain, the U. States might very well win the war, in the process destroying Tecumseh, annexing Canada, the Floridas, & Mexico, & sweeping uncheckt across the entire continent of North America as Napoleon was sweeping across Europe. Patriotic as he was, Barlow did not believe American destiny to be quite that manifest: he urged me to turn my energies to the course of peace.

I was moved by what he said, not to believe that the Indians’ cause would be better aided by peace than by war, but to see more clearly than ever, from the perspective of Paris, what Tecumseh knew: that their cause was lost in any case; that their future lay not in history but, as it were, in myth, & that therefore their only victory would be in valiant tho futile resistance. I wisht Andrée there to advise me. My plan had been to reestablish my acquaintance with Jérôme Bonaparte, now divorced from his American wife & restored to his brother’s good graces, & thro that avenue assure Napoleon that even half a year’s dallying with Barlow should suffice to see war declared betwixt the U. States & G. Britain, especially given the slowness of transatlantic communications. Only keep Britain from revoking her Orders in Council before Congress adjourn’d for the summer; Tecumseh’s confederacy would do the rest.

But before I could begin to put this strategy into action, your mother’s urgent letter reacht me: our stratagem with Harrison had misfired, not because he had attackt the Prophet’s town, but because, incredibly, Tenskwatawa had tried to win a military victory in his brother’s absence by attacking Harrison! Losses had been high on both sides, but the victory was unquestionably Harrison’s: the Indians were disperst from the Tippecanoe, the Prophet had fled, the town was burnt to the ground; the army had return’d triumphant to Vincennes with British rifles taken from the Indians; Harrison was everywhere acclaim’d a great hero. “Cato” would be furious: with his brother for having launcht so premature an attack; with us if he learnt we’d advised Harrison to make his threatening move. Andrée was the more distrest because, to console herself in my absence, she had pursued her research into our family’s history, particularly the activities of our namesakes in Pontiac’s rebellion, and was horrified at what she saw as a pattern of deadly reenactment, too mattersome for her to put in a hasty letter. Finally, our labors of the summer had, if not borne other fruit, at least sown other & sweeter seed: she was expecting! I was to forget Napoleon, Joel Barlow, & the Game of Governments, & come posthaste to make an honest woman of her; then together we must examine History, our family’s & our own, to the end of making honest people of ourselves.

But (she could not help adding, out of self-confest habit) it would not much delay me to return to her by way of London, where “our coney J[ohn] H[enry] was ripe for catching.” That was a trap too shrewdly set to go unsprung, & should provide our baby with a handsome & much-needed nest egg.

I was alarm’d as she. To settle that certain old family score with the late Duc de Crillon which I explain’d in my 2nd letter, I had assumed the name “Jean Blanque” & had imposed upon his son for a loan of £1,200 against a pledge to help restore him to Napoleon’s good graces, which he did not currently enjoy, via my friend the American minister, who did. Given time (and Barlow’s increasing popularity in the court of St. Cloud) the man would have been good for another thousand: but I cut short my mining of that vein as well as my futile intriguing against dear Joel. I’d not had time to make real headway on that front, but then, none seem’d especially call’d for, inasmuch as I’d learnt from aides of the Duc de Bassano what Joel himself was beginning to understand: that Napoleon’s policy, like mine, was to forestall England’s lifting her Orders in Council until war with the U. States was inevitable. I bade my friend farewell.

So relieved was Barlow to see me go, all his natural affection came to the fore. He was old enough now, he declared (nearing 60), & the times parlous enough, that he could not bid a friend good-bye without wondering whether they would meet again. He misst Toot Fulton & Benjamin West, Tom Paine & Jefferson, Jim Monroe & Dolley Madison; he even misst that old Yale fossil Noah Webster, who’d been so unkind to the Columbiad; aye, & Joseph Bacri, & my father, of whom I was now the very spit & image. And he would miss me, tho not my work against his peaceable aims, which he could excuse only because so many of his countrymen shared my belligerence. It was a snowy forenoon, one of 1811’s last. Barlow was reminded of his earliest satirical verses, written for my father even as I was being conceived: “And Jove descends in magazines of snow.”

Using my Canadian credentials in London, I learnt that British elements opposed to a 2nd American war had gone so far as to plot the assassination of Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch defender of the Orders in Council, knowing that Lord Castlereagh, his likely successor, was inclined to revoke them. Also that the King was in strait-waistcoat, pissing the bed & fancying that England was sunk & drown’d, himself shut up in Noah’s Ark with his Lady Pembroke (a Regency bill was expected momently). Also that the Foreign Office had rejected John Henry’s claim for £32,000 and a good American consulship in reward for his espionage, on the grounds that his reports were valueless: they referr’d him for emolument to his employer, the Canadian Governor-General’s office. But Sir James Craig was by then gone to his own reward, & Sir George Prevost was not inclined to honor his predecessor’s secret debts. Embitter’d & out of funds, Henry had left London to return to farming in Vermont.

I overtook him at Southampton and (in the guise of le Comte Édouard de Crillon) won his sympathy on shipboard by declaring myself to be a former French secret agent temporarily out of favor with Napoleon by reason of the machinations of my jealous rivals. When Henry confided his own ungrateful treatment by the British, & prepared to post into the North Atlantic those copies of his letters which “a friend” had advised him to make, I suggested he permit me to do the two of us a service by engaging to sell them to the Americans via the French minister Sérurier & Secretary of State Monroe, both of whom would be pleased to present to the Congress such clear evidence of British intriguing with the New England Federalists. There should be $100,000 in it for Henry, I maintain’d, & for myself the chance to regain the Emperor’s favor. Delighted, Henry entrusted the letters & negotiations to me. I was at first dismay’d that his “copies” were but rough summaries in an unimpressive notebook, & that he’d neither named the New England separatist leaders by name nor invoked such useful embarrassments as the Essex Junto of 1804, which had plotted with Burr to lead New England’s secession if he won the New York governorship that year. I consider’d dictating to Henry a fuller & more compromising text, but decided it were better not to reveal overmuch knowledge of such details. The holograph letters from Lord Liverpool & Robert Peel were enough to implicate Britain & serve our purpose; relieved not to be directly incriminated, the Federalists could retaliate against Madison by declaring Henry’s notebook a forgery, and we could have it both ways, promoting war & disunity at once.

All went smoothly. My apprehensions were that M. Sérurier would hesitate to vouch for me before making inquiries of the Duc de Bassano, or Madison to buy the letters before making inquiries of Joel Barlow (whose Washington house Sérurier was renting); also that Monroe might see thro my disguise. But I was enough alter’d by nature & by art since my last interview with Monroe, and enough conversant in the gossip of St. Cloud & the family affairs of the Ducs de Crillon, and they eager enough to put the letters before Congress as a prelude to Madison’s appealing for a declaration of war, that the only hitch was financial: I ask’d $125,000, hoping for $100,000; Monroe agreed, but Albert Gallatin declared that the Treasury’s whole budget for secret-service payments of this kind was but $50,000. Fearing Henry might renege, I threw in for my part the (forged) title to an (imaginary) estate of mine at “St. Martial” & an additional $10,500 worth of (counterfeit) notes & securities negotiable in Paris, thus further demonstrating my good faith to Sérurier & Monroe. By February the deal was closed: Henry gave me $17,500 of his $50,000 & set out for Paris, as Eben Cooke had once done for Maryland, to claim his estate. I then successfully coaxt another $21,000 from the Secretary of State, & might have got as much again from the French ministry had I not fear’d discovery of my imposture & yearn’d above all else to rejoin your mother (before she should become your mother) at Castines Hundred, to put right if I could our great disservice to Tecumseh, to watch over your wombing, & to learn what my beloved might have learnt.

Et voici! Tecumseh, Andrée tearfully reported, would have none of us. Publicly he deprecated the loss at Tippecanoe as a mere imprudency by rash young warriors indignant at Harrison’s trespass, but he was in fact enraged; had seized his brother by the hair & banisht him from his sight. He was constrain’d from making a treaty with Madison (in order to gain time to reunite the scatter’d tribes) only by Harrison’s insulting stipulation that he go to Washington alone instead of with the 300 young warriors he wanted to comprise an effective retinue. Now he was off to Fort Malden & Amherstburg, at the farther end of Lake Erie, overseeing General Brock’s re-arming of the confederacy & directing minor raids against American settlements to restore his authority & the Indians’ morale. He rejected angrily Andrée’s suggestion that the Tippecanoe fiasco had, after all, purged his camp of some of its less reliable members. He had not accused us outright of treachery, only of being “our grandparents’ grandchildren.”

Which was enough. For (having re-married me in the Christian tribal ceremony to appease her parents) Andrée review’d for me, & enlisted my aid in the completion of her inquiry into, what in these three months & four letters I have set forth to you, & can now conclude: the history & pattern of our family error. Halfway thro life’s journey & about to become a father, I can now no longer properly despise my own, whoever he was, whyever his neglect of me. I wish only he had vouchsafed me some account—of his motives, his confusions, false starts, illuminations, mixt feelings, successes, failures, final aims, net values — that I might have understood & believed when my mind was ready, however much I had spurn’d it in my younger cynicism. We have tried to help Tecumseh, & fear we have undone him (we shall try again); surely our grandparents did not intend to be Pontiac’s undoing, as my father declared. Whence then my confidence that H.B. IV workt with Little Turtle to undo him, or my grandfather’s confidence that H.B. III workt with the Bloodsworth Island conspirators to undo them? Oh, for an accounting! We have misspent, misspent our powers, Cookes & Burlingames canceling each other out. May we live, Andrée & I, to be the 1st of our line to cancel out ourselves, to the end that you (guided by these letters, which must be your scripture if aught should take us from you) may be the 1st to be spared the necessity!

To sum up: We no longer believe (what my grandparents taught) that Henry Burlingame III was a British agent out to divide the Bloodsworth Islanders (his Ahatchwhoop brother “Bill-o’-the-Goose” and the rest): we believe he meant in good faith to unite them, & fail’d. We do not believe (what my father taught) that my grandparents were British agents out to subvert Pontiac’s conspiracy; we believe they meant to abet it, & fail’d. We no longer believe (what your parents would have taught, this time last year) that Henry Burlingame IV was (is?) an American agent bent on dividing first the Iroquois League & then Little Turtle’s; we believe he workt for their best interests, & fail’d. So we pray you will not believe us to have been in the employ of William Henry Harrison or James Madison against noble Tecumseh: we wisht to aid him, & have so far fail’d.

Father, I forgive you. My life’s 1st half is done: it too I forgive, & the Andrew Cook who lived it, who now must set about its rectification so that you (my Henry, Henrietta), when in years to come you shall have read this long accounting, will have nothing to forgive or be forgiven for.

Envoi. I commenced this letter on 14 May; ’tis now a dozen days since, & still you linger! Andrée is huge, predicts a Gargantua — or, as the sun is now into Gemini…

You will be born into a war: I think no one can now prevent it. I must hope (& try with my life) that no one will “win” it, or all is lost. Andrée & I are pledged now neither to the British nor to the “Americans”—nor, finally, to the Indians — but to division of the large & strong who would exploit the less large, less strong. Thus we are anti-Bonapartists, but not pro-Bourbon; thus, for the nonce, pro-British, but no longer anti-“American.” No hope or point now in destroying the United States; but they must be checkt, contain’d, divided, lest like Gargantua’s their mad growth do the destroying. May this be your work too, when your time comes. Farewell. Do not restart that old reciprocating engine, our history; do not rebel against the me who am rebelling against myself: the father of

Your new-born father,

Andrew Cook IV

~ ~ ~

S: Jerome Bray to Drew Mack. LILYVAC’s LEAFY ANAGRAM.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

May 13, 1969

Andrews F. Mack

c/o Tidewater Foundation

Marshyhope State University

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.

Erdmann’s Cornlot, etc.

May 12, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Whom etc.

TO:

Yours Truly, Author of

RE:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Madam or Sir:

History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into HISTORY. She is a scattered sibyl whose oak-leaf oracles we toil to recollect, only to spell out something less than nothing: e.g., WHOL TRUTH, or ULTIMATE MEANIN.

Item: On the bumper of the car next to mine in the hotel parking lot in Ocean City this morning, a sticker reading, in large capitals, BUMPER STICKER. This evening at the Lighthouse, on the rear of Peter’s pickup, another, put there by the twins, declaring in ever diminishing type:

THE CLOSER YOU GET THE LESS YOU SEE

Item: My attempt to reenact in Ocean City this morning what I am only now and here enacting: this latest reply to your letter of etc. 29 years ago today — when, as now, Saturn was on the farther shore of Pisces, leaving the water signs for another revolution of the zodiac — on the beach below Willy Erdmann’s Cornlot I received your water message, the sense of which perhaps only now I begin to see. Zeus knows I have been bone-tired before: wrung out, hung over, down. But never heretofore all these and almost 40 too, my life’s first half wound past its terminating ticks, no key in hand yet to rewind me for the second. Only some portents that, if one does not look to’t, biography like history may reenact itself as farce.

Amazing, this A.M.‘s business on the beach! To have wrestled all night with Prinz’s damned scenario; to have found after all the words that might make the wordless happen; then to be shown—so roughly, publicly, instantly, and incontrovertibly! — their irrelevance… We’ve lost a battle, Ma’am or Sir, in what till now I’d not understood to be a war. That P. is a genius (at improvisation, at least: a master of the situational moment) merely surprises me: I’d thought him able at his trade; now I believe him to be a genuine virtuoso. What shocks is the revelation of his absolute enmity: the man contemns, the man despises me!

Is it less or more distressing that his contempt is not even particularly personal? I ought to find it amusing that he’s out to get, not Ambrose-Mensch-the-oddball-in-the-tower, but “Arthur Morton King,” whom in his antiliteracy he mistakes for an embodiment of the written word as against the visual image; of Letters versus Pictures! Does he not see that what he’s acting out is a travesty of my own running warfare against the province of Literature? That we are comrades, allies, brothers?

Of course he sees — with the wrongheaded clear-sightedness of Drew Mack, who lumps stock liberals like Todd Andrews with reactionaries like A. B. Cook. And it “proves” P.’s point, I suppose, that in the face of his blank hostility I see my own dispute with letters to have been a lovers’ quarrel. Sweet Short Story! Noble Novel! Precious squiggles on the pristine page! Dear Germaine.

Your old letter, then, Ms. or Mr. Truly — that blank space which in my apprenticeship I toiled to fill, and toward which like a collapsing star I’d felt my latter work returning — was it after all a call to arms? Left to right, left, right, like files of troops the little heroes march: lead-footed L; twin top-heavy T’s flanked by eager E’s, arms ever ready; rear-facing R; sinuous S — valiant fellows, so few and yet so many, with whose aid we can say the unseeable! That green house is brown. Sun so hot I froze to death. History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into etc. Little comrades, we will have our revenge! Good Yours, I have never been more concerned!

Bea Golden. Aye, Bea, I see still in my dark camera the honey image of your flesh. Your beach-towel twitches: there are the breasts Barry Singer sang, the buttocks Mel Bernstein bared, Louis Golden’s glowing gluteus, Prinz’s pudenda! A little shopworn, sure; a little overexposed. Prinz’s cold judgment, as you report it, is surely right: that you will never be an actress unless in the role of yourself-without-illusions, a washed-out small-timer, wasted prematurely by an incoherent, silly, expensive life: the role he would have you play in “our” film. (When did he string so many words together? Or was his message in some tongueless tongue?) But Bea, Bea, battered Aphrodite, how I am redrawn to you, to my own dismay! Not to “Jeannine Mack,” the little tart who frigged me to a frazzle in my freshman year, no; there’s a passion I’ve already reenacted, and have nor wind nor sap to re-re-run. It’s Reg Prinz’s played-out-prize perversely I would prong: the Bea you have become: unmobled quean of bedroom, bar, B movie. Why in the world, Y.T., do I itch for Bea? Not just that she’s Prinz’s, surely? And surely not for want of other blanks to fill?

Au contraire: the scent seems to be on me since crazy April, and will not leave me be in abstemious May. Young “Mary Jane” in the beach hotel this weekend: a ringer for Jeannine Mack 20 years ago except less well washed and high on grass instead of bourbon; hoping His Nibs the Director would notice her, but settling in the woozy meanwhile for the worn-down nib of her ex-Freshman-English prof. Nothing wrong with shagging a former student, Mister Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents: anyhow she was C+ in class, high B in bed (my curve is lower than in yestersemester); I was tired, my mind was elsewhere (hi, Bea), and I don’t dig sex with the inarticulate, though those 21-year-old bodies are, as the children say, Something Else — not even conceived yet, Y.T., when I was first laid.

Which fetches us to the other anniversary we celebrate on this date, fortunately unbeknownst to Prinz: the loss of my virginity in 1947. And to my second Remarkable Reenactment of the day. Home from the sea I drive at sundown: beaten, wordless, Mary Jane’s juices drying on me and mine on her, the Bea-Prinz image beprinted on my ego like a cattle brand. I stand her to dinner, drop her off at her dorm (C you later, Allgelehrte), and head for mine. I pause to consider a pause at 24 L St., Dorset Heights, and decide against it: I have begun to love milady A., but it isn’t she I wish to see in this particular distraction. I reflect that we have not coupled, she and I, since May Day, near two weeks gone. This reflection, itself coupled with the scents and images of Bea-Plus, not surprisingly reminds me of that time in my life when I was chastely loving Magda while humping Jeannine around the yacht-club circuit. Harry Truman days. And that reminds me…

The Lighthouse is dark but for the driveway light. Peter’s pickup advises me that the closer I get the less. Angie is abed but waiting to say good night: I bring her saltwater taffy and a coin with her name lettered round it so:

We speak awhile in the dark of angels, stars, and Ocean City. As I kiss her good night I think of her mother and other bad news. She mortifies me with the giggled observation that my mustache smells like “Bibi” (her pet name for her vulva, Truly, derived in baby days from pee-pee, to make water). My not very inspiring private history seizes me by the throat. Dear menstruating, masturbating, certainly motherless, uncertainly fathered child: what is to become of you? Peter, Magda: why do you put up with us, and what on earth would we do if you didn’t? Dear Mother, dying next door: Am I legit, prithee, and does terminal cancer hurt awfully? Marsha Blank, chucker of responsibilities, exacter of two eyes for an eye and whole dentitions for a tooth: let him look to’s balls, whoever fills you now! Germaine, Germaine: why am I taken with the crazy craving, even as I write these words, to do it over again, and specifically with you? Why not get a child on Magda, tat for tit for tat?

Et cetera. Nighty-night, Ange. Not a little shaken, I go downstairs for a nightcap. No ale in the kitchen: since Peter and the twins, great do-it-themselfers, finished the basement into a Family Room (in which our old camera obscura stands like an improbable TV), all alcohol is stowed belowstairs, in the fridge behind the “wet bar.” It is nearly midnight. I pour a Labatt’s India Pale, turn down the rheostated lights, and contemplate an actual Choptank lighthouse winking from the c.o. screen every 2½ seconds, off to westward. It does not suggest what I am to do with the second half of my life.

Familiar female footsteps overhead: Magda, in her slopping slippers. She pauses in the kitchen — Ambrose? Mm hm — then pads on down. Can’t seem to get to sleep. Cotton nightgown, demure. How was Ocean City? Don’t ask. Pours herself one. We almost drove down to watch the shooting. Glad you didn’t. Did you really do the water-message thing? Yup. Peter says if they’re hiring you to be Ambrose in the picture, they ought to hire me to be Magda. Your ass is too big, Mag. Happy anniversary.

She said it first, raising her mug, and when I asked, neutrally, Which one, she replied, cheerfully, Who cares about that stupid note in a bottle? I mean your 22nd year of prickhood. Ah. We sipped to it. I couldn’t assess her tone, quite. How are you, dear Magda?

As is her wont with me, she answered calmly, gravely, fully. She was okay, all things considered. She no longer feared, as she had last winter, that she would kill herself. She had assumed, when we began our affair in ’67, that it would be brief and end in the destruction of someone she much loved: Peter by suicide; me by homicide; herself by either; the children somehow. For she had hoped and expected that we two would chuck the world and go away together — to Italy, to Italy — and she had imagined that Peter, despite his best resolves and infinite responsibility, would find the situation unendurable. Since things had not gone as she’d wished, she was relieved that nothing fatal had ensued. But that fact reminded her that her love for me, and whatever it was I’d felt for her, had been inconsequential; she hated that. With all her heart she wished still that we had run off to Italy, if only for a season, and let the chips fall where they might. She did not hate Peter for being complaisant (out of his fancied and unwarranted guilt for having let Marsha once seduce him); but she didn’t admire him for it, either. She did not hate me for having been unable to love her as she’d loved me: she only regretted it — almost, but not quite, to the point of self-destruction.

Most of all she lamented my refusal to make her pregnant. Marsha’s opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, Magda believed me capable of loving deeply; but even if I’d gone so far as to marry her (which she’d never expected), she would not have given my love for her more than two years — inspired as it was in part by the shock of my divorce. Inasmuch as she herself would never cease to love me, she wished as strongly now as ever that we’d had a child together, through whom she could gratify that love. A child — and my removal from the scene — would have been the fittest end to our affair, in her judgment. It was only because I’d not given her that child that she was able to bear, indeed required, my continued presence in the house: I was surrogate for the child who was to have been surrogate for me. And how are you, Ambrose?

Oh, shot to hell. I told her the story of my set-down on the beach and my rewakened interest in Bea Golden. The former mightily amused her, as I meant it to. She hoped and trusted I was teasing her about the latter. I’m drawn to has-beens, I said. The exhausted. The spent. Maybe I’ll write an old-fashioned novel: characters, plot, dialogue, the works. Maybe I’ll remarry and start a family.

That hurts, Ambrose.

Sorry, said I, taking her hand. It’s late. I’m tired and a little drunk. What I really feel is a mighty urge to go forward by going back, to where things started. Rewind, you know. Rebegin. Replay.

That is known as regression, Magda declared; I bid you good night. She leaned to buss me; got wind of old Bibi, perhaps; anyhow made a small sound of pain, an indeterminate whimper. I held her to it. I don’t know what yours are like, Yours, but Lady Amherst’s lips are pleasingly dry and firm; Jeannine Mack’s (in the old days) were hot and hard; “Mary Jane’s” just lately were wet and thin and a touch maloccluded; Marsha Blank’s I don’t remember — but Magda Giulianova’s, now as a quarter-century ago, are two extraordinary items of flesh. A man cannot kiss those lips without craving to take one into his mouth; a man at once wants more… come on, Language, do it: read those lips, give them tongue! Language can’t (film either, I’m happy to add; it’s the tactile we touch on here, blind and mute) do more than pay them fervent, you know, lip service.

Tears. Not her, Magda prayed. Meaning Marsha! I shook my head. Time to end the mystery, at least the evening; I wanted that mouth again, that man cannot kiss without tumescing. To cool us down (so I truly, innocently intended) I told her gently of Germaine.

Something of a male chauvinist, Magda was at first startled and a bit amused (the lady had once been pointed out to her in a shopping plaza). The woman’s fifty, Ambrose! Etc. Then relieved, clearly, that her successor was no smashing 25-year-old. Then curious: bona fide British nobility? Well, part Swiss, and not born to the gentry; more of a scholar than a blue blood; disappointed writer, actually, like yours truly. Then more curious, and a touch excited: What’s she like? Is she crazy about you? Are you madly in love? Well, let’s say ardently in sympathy. Remarkable woman, Germaine Pitt: I suspect she’s as given to Erotic Fantasy as I am, for example. Then more excited than curious: Did you have to teach her how to do it right, the way you did me, or had she had a string of lovers already?

Magda.

She was glad, she said. She’d been worried for me since our breakup. I needed sexual companionship, not just the odd lay. She’d known I was sleeping with someone; had hoped and prayed it was someone good both in and out of bed… Breathier now, and tearier, that remarkable lower lip shaking. But God I miss it, Ambrose (Magda seldom uses nicknames, nor enounces that trochee without stirring me to the bowels. I think I know who Ambrose is only when Magda speaks the name): it isn’t fair; Peter can’t do it; you shouldn’t have showed me those things are real; I was satisfied enough; I don’t want to be unfaithful to him; it’s only sex; who gives a fuck; anyway that’s not it, that’s just not it. I miss you. I love you. I’m going crazy.

Ditto, Truly. Look here, Mag…

You mustn’t refuse me when I beg you, Ambrose.

Magda, you know as well as I. She was on me then: the lips, the lips, hands, hair. Poor John Thomas, thought his shift was done, took a bit of coaxing he did. Magda favors the rec-room Barcalounger, herself on top: still shy of her heavied hams, she eases herself onto me with a happy gasp, slips the gown off to give me her breasts and shoulders, goes to it. I’d early learned — unemancipated Mag! — in these circumstances to give detailed running orders for my gratification. When she gets it off she never cries out (there’s usually a sleeping child, or adult, about), just closes her eyes and makes a small, awestruck sound that goes on and on.

Sex.

Now what. She sat there a postclimactic while, holding shrunk J.T. tight in her vaginal fist and giving me serene instructions. I was not to worry. She would not keep after me to make love to her or otherwise infringe on my new attachment, which she approved. I should fetch — Mrs. Pitt? Mrs. Amherst? — over to meet the family as soon as possible: it would help her, Magda, to see us together as a couple, and to have the family so see. I should make plans to move out of the Lighthouse — in easy stages, for Angela’s sake. Maybe first to the old Menschhaus up the street, now that Mother’s hospitalizing had left the place vacant. Angela of course must stay with them, until and unless… A few tears here (J.T. was released). Soon the twins would be off on their own; dear Angela was all she had left. Why hadn’t I given her a baby? She quickly calmed, apologized. I reminded her she’d doubtless be a grandmother before very long: young Connie had the looks of an early breeder, and Carl was obviously a stone-horse: both would marry within the year and get offspring at once.

This talk pleased her; she climbed off me, smiling. I’ve done an immoral thing, Ambrose, she said then, and I don’t care what you or anybody thinks. I thought she meant this anniversary reenactment of our original infidelity, and waved it away; reminded her wryly I’d been doing retakes all weekend. Not that, she said. All those months I begged you to make me pregnant, and you said No, it wouldn’t be right, I never once tried to trick you. I wanted everything we did to be together, 100 %. The IUD was in there, every time, even when you’d forget to remind me.

Magda.

But you were so selfish yourself, completely selfish. I’m not blaming you. You can’t make a person love another person. You can only pray for it…

Mag?

And I won’t bother you, Ambrose. I love you, always will, and I wish you well. I even know you love me, in your way. But I want that baby. So tonight I cheated. I wasn’t even going to tell you.

I closed my eyes. You know I’m practically sterile.

Not absolutely. When was your last ejaculation?

Hum. Not counting this one? This morning.

That hurts a bit. But you filled me up. And I’m ovulating; I can tell.

Not a Chinaman’s chance, Mag.

I’ve never understood that saying, she said. There are so many Chinese. Anyhow, we Catholics believe in miracles. Don’t be angry. If nothing comes of it I’ll settle for grandchildren, like you said. I’m going up to bed now, so it won’t all run out.

And having come, with a smile and a little tossed kiss she went.

Truly, Yours, I am back not where I started but where I stopped: restranded on the beach of Erdmann’s Cornlot, reading your water message; relost in the funhouse — as if Dante, in the middle of life’s road, had made his way out of the dark wood, gone down through Hell and up Mount Purgatory and on through the choirs of Heaven, only to find himself back in the dark wood, the right way as lost and gone as ever.

Jeannine. Germaine. Magda. Longest May 12 on record. No copy of this one to milady. What would it spell, deciphered?

Ambrose His Story.

S: The Author to Jacob Horner. The story of a story called What I Did Until the Doctor Came.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

U.S.A.

Sunday, May 11, 1969

Jacob Horner

c/o Remobilization Farm

Fort Erie, Ontario

CANADA

Dear Mr. Horner:

Some years ago — fourteen, when I was a young college instructor in Pennsylvania — I wrote a small novel called The End of the Road. Its “hero,” an ontological vacuum who shares your name, suffers from attacks of futility manifested as literal paralysis, to cure which he submits to the irrational therapies of a nameless doctor at an establishment (on the Eastern Shore of Maryland) called the Remobilization Farm. In the course of his treatment, which includes teaching prescriptive grammar at a nearby state teachers college, Horner becomes involved in and precipitates the destruction of the marriage of one of his colleagues, a morally intense young historian named Joe Morgan. Mrs. Morgan, “caught” between her hyperrationalist husband, whom she loves, and her antirationalist “lover,” whom she abhors, finds herself pregnant, submits to an illegal abortion at the hands of the Doctor, and dies on the operating table. Her husband, in a state of calm shock, is quietly dismissed from his post. Jacob Horner, contrite and reparalyzed, abdicates from personality and, with the Doctor and other patients, removes to an unspecified location in the wilds of Pennsylvania. The narrative conceit is that he writes the story some years later, from the relocated Farm, as a first-person exercise in “Scriptotherapy.”

If I were obliged to reimagine the beginnings of The End of the Road, I might say that in the fall of 1955, having completed but not yet published my first novel, I began making notes toward its companion piece: a little “nihilist tragedy” to complement the “nihilist comedy” of The Floating Opera. At twenty-five I was married, had three young children, was getting by on the four thousand a year I was paid for grading one hundred freshman themes a week, and moonlighting in local dance bands on the weekends. As there was seldom money in those years for an evening’s baby-sitter, much less a genuine vacation from responsibility, I now invent and grant myself retroactively this modest holiday:

It is the last week of the calendar year. A live-in baby-sitter, unprecedented luxury, has been engaged to care for the children for the weekend, so that their parents can drive with another couple up into the Allegheny National Forest for two days of skiing. We have never skied before, never seen a ski slope. The expense will be dizzying, by our standards, even though we’ve borrowed and improvised appropriate clothing and plan to cook camp dinners on a hot plate smuggled into our room: equipment must be rented, lodging also, the sitter paid, car expenses split, lift tickets purchased. We are intimidated by the novelty of such adventure, much as we enjoy the long drive with our friends up into the bleak mountains, Iroquois country, where natural gas and oil rigs bob like giant bugs in the rocky clearings, and black bears are still hunted among the laurels and rhododendron. Skiing has not yet become popular in these parts; metal and fiberglass skis, stretch pants, plastic boots with buckles, snow-making machines — all have yet to be invented. We have never been to New England, much less to the Rockies or to Europe; the whole enterprise, with its international vocabulary and Alpine ambiance — chalets, stem christies, wedeln, Glüwein, après-ski — is outlandish, heady, alarming. We make nervous jokes about broken legs and Nazi ski instructors.

The facilities are primitive: at the slopes (a modest 400-foot vertical drop, but to us tidewater folk even the beginners’ hill rises like the face of a building), rope tows and Poma lifts; at the lodge — but there is no lodge, only a dirt-floored warming hut at the base of the mountain, with picnic tables, toilets, and vending machines. We rent our equipment — wooden skis with cable bindings, double-laced leather boots — not there but at a cheaper place near our Gasthaus, also chosen for economy: a rude board-and-batten farmhouse just purchased (the proprietor’s wife tells us crossly) from “a bunch of crazies” who in her opinion had used the place for dark unspecified goings-on. She refers to her husband as “he,” without further identification: “He had to go ahead and buy it. We’re still clearing out the junk. He says it was some kind of a rest home, but there’s an awful lot goes on, if a person knew. He’s crazy himself, you ask me.” She is a Seneca woman in her fifties with the odd name of Jimmie Barefoot.

The place is overheated but drafty, clean but cluttered, as if the former occupants have moved out hastily, taking only their necessaries, and the new have tidied up but not removed the leavings. In our room there are a pile of boardinghouse Victorian furniture in dark oak, sentimental 19th-century engravings of moon-faced children and pet animals, a glass-fronted bookcase with the complete works of Walter Scott, and the 92 volumes of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine in cheap turn-of-the-century editions with matched green bindings.

I shall later become an enthusiast of skiing, but this first attempt is merely clumsy and a little frightening: I am relieved when, at the end of the afternoon, I injure my shoulder enough to be honorably hors de combat for the rest of the weekend. While the others advance from the bunny hill to the novice runs, I follow Lucien de Rubempré from the provinces to Paris and through the loss of his several illusions, and sip the homemade beer I’ve brought along to reduce our expenses. I am not a great fan of either Balzac or Walter Scott. Not having expected to spend our holiday reading, I’ve brought only one book with me, a half-read Machado de Assis, soon finished and reread. I yearn for my notes and manuscript from home, especially as my shoulder stiffens and makes sleep impossible. I spend most of the night reading Balzac in a hard ugly rocker and deciding to write no more realistic fictions.

When I can take no more of the Abbé Carlos Herrera (I could take none of Captain Edward Waverly) I cast about for something else, anything else, to read. In the drawer of a crazed and knobby end table I find an inch-thick typescript of yellow copy paper bound into a school report binder, the title inked in block capitals on white adhesive tape: WHAT I DID UNTIL THE DOCTOR CAME. I read the first sentence—In a sense, I am Jacob Horner—and then the others.

The narrative is crude, fragmentary, even dull — yet appealingly terse, laconic, spent. I have no idea whether it is “true” or meant as fiction, but I see at once how I might transform it to my purposes. Now I am impatient for the precious holiday to end!

I leave the typescript where I found it; all I need is the memory of its voice. Once back in the college’s faculty housing project, I write the novel very quickly — changing the locale and the names of all but the central character, making the Doctor black and anonymous, clarifying and intensifying the moral and dramatic voltages, adding the metaphor of paralysis, the small-time academic setting, the semiphilosophical dialogues and ratiocinations, the ménage à trois, the pregnancy, abortion, and other things. Now and then, after its publication in 1958, it occurs to me to wonder whether the unknown author of What I Did Until the Doctor Came ever happened upon my orchestration of his theme. But I am too preoccupied with its successor to wonder very much.

Well. I don’t recount, I only invent: the above is a fiction about a fiction. But it is a fact that after The End of the Road was published I received letters from people who either intimated that they knew where my Remobilization Farm was or hoped I would tell them; and several of the therapies I’d concocted for my Doctor — Scriptotherapy, Mythotherapy, Agapotherapy — were subsequently named in the advertisements of a private mental hospital on Long Island. Art and life are symbiotic.

Now there is money for baby-sitters, but I don’t need them. I’ve changed cities and literary principles, made up other stories, learned with mixed feelings more about the world and Yours Truly. Currently I find myself involved in a longish epistolary novel, of which I know so far only that it will be regressively traditional in manner; that it will not be obscure, difficult, or dense in the Modernist fashion; that its action will occur mainly in the historical present, in tidewater Maryland and on the Niagara Frontier; that it will hazard the resurrection of characters from my previous fiction, or their proxies, as well as extending the fictions themselves, but will not presume, on the reader’s part, familiarity with those fictions, which I cannot myself remember in detail. In addition, it may have in passing something to do with alphabetical letters.

Of the epistles which are to comprise it, a few, like this one, will be from “the Author.” Some others will be addressed to him. One of the latter, dated May 3, 1969, I received last week from a certain Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost of the Faculty of Letters at “Marshyhope State University College” in Maryland. In the course of it Mrs. Pitt mentions having visited in 1967 a sort of sanatorium in Fort Erie, Ontario, “very much like the one described in The End of the Road,” complete with an unnamed elderly black physician. The lady did not mention a “Jacob Horner” among the patients or staff (she was there only briefly); but the fact that her letters speak in another context of a “Joseph Morgan” (former president of the college, whereabouts presently unknown) and a “John Schott” (his successor) prompts this inquiry.

That you have received and are reading it proves that its proximate address and addressee exist. Were they ever located in the Allegheny Valley, beneath the present Kinzua Reservoir? Are you the author of What I Did Until the Doctor Came? My having imagined that serendipitous discovery does not preclude such a manuscript’s possible existence, or such an author’s. On the contrary, my experience has been that if anything it increases the likelihood of their existing — a good argument for steering clear of traditional realism.

Do you know what happened to the unfortunate “Joe Morgan”? Are you still subject to spells of “weatherlessness” and the paralytic effect of the Cosmic View? Do you still regard yourself as being only “in a sense” Jacob Horner? That whole business of ontological instability — not to mention accidental pregnancy and illegal abortion — seems now so quaint and brave an aspect of the early 1950’s (and our early twenties) that it would be amusing, perhaps suggestive, to hear how it looks to you from this perspective. If you did indeed write such a memoir or manuscript fiction as What I Did etc., and my End of the Road caused you any sort of unpleasantness, my belated apologies: if literature must sometimes be written in blood, it should be none but the author’s.

I’d be pleased to hear from you; could easily drive over to Fort Erie from Buffalo for a chat, if you’d prefer.

Cordially,