Letters

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N: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage of her affair. The Scajaquada Scuffle.

Kissing Bridge Motel

(near) Buffalo, New York

9 August 1969

Ah John,

Novelist Nabokov ne’er conceived for his Lolita so portentous a catalogue of motels as Ambrose and I have couched in since my last, or reserved for couching in the nights ahead: old nymph and her young debaucher! Forgetting Scajaquada, as I’d prefer, can you believe (not necessarily in this order) the Lord Amherst, the Colonial Court, the Regency, the Windsor Arms, the Gulliver’s Travels, the Kissing Bridge, and the Memory Lane? All (except Toronto’s Windsor) within a Niagara Falls radius of Buffalo — a radius we will extend early next week to Toronto and Stratford — and so, perhaps, not unknown to you. May your nights in them have been agreeable as mine!

For if the Movie is experiencing a hiatus (filming’s to resume across the river in Fort Erie on the 15th), the drama of Germaine Pitt’s sore affair with Ambrose Mensch clearly approaches some sort of climax: easier for me to savour than to characterise, yet doubtless easier for me to characterise than for any save us to savour. By the reckoning you’ll recall, it is “our” stage, this “6th” of our connexion, which I judge to have commenced sometime between the Full Buck Moon of Monday week last and last Saturday’s Scajaquada Scuffle. I had wondered what “we” would be like, if indeed we rereached “ourselves”: well, we’re All Right Jack, and not only by contrast with the madness of the past few months. Indeed, this first week of August has reminded me in some ways of our maiden month of March, except that A.’s behaviour has been more a gentleman’s and less an annuated adolescent’s.

But my last, I believe, left the beleaguered lovers on the verge of the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek, on 2 August 1814. (More precisely, my letter ended with a certain sick surmise — but never mind! I still believe myself to have been unbelievably ensnared and at least sexually abused by… “André Castine”… on that Friday night, 1 August. We understand the quotes, who will never, never understand the evening! If I do not sound here like a woman more or less assaulted in body and ravished altogether in spirit one week since, that is because age and experience have evidently taught me to contain the unassimilable, and because — I think coincidentally — the seven days since have been such balm to my sore psyche. I will speak no more of that rose garden!)

Of the details and outcome of the 1814 skirmish, not much is clear: it was a raid, not a battle, between the more important engagements at Chippewa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie. Some British and Canadian troops ferried over from the Ontario shore to attack the U.S. encampment along Scajaquada Creek, a staging area and supply depot for American movements against Canada. Both the raiders and the raided suffered casualties; some Yankee supplies were destroyed; the attackers withdrew per plan.

Our “reenactment” last Saturday evening was similarly obscure and inconclusive but, I daresay, more complex. With no further History to go on than the above, Ambrose and Reg Prinz had sharked up the following scenario, which like Freudian “dreamwork” was to echo simultaneously such disparate matters as that minor military action, the mike-boom incident at Long Wharf in Cambridge of 19 July last, the ongoing hostilities between Author and Director, and that vague circumambient business they’re calling the Mating Season or Mating Flight — which I take to refer to, at least to include, the sexual casuistries of Prinz/Bea/Ambrose/Germaine, with that horny maniac J. Bray hovering over all.

To this last (I mean the sexual cobweb) a new strand has been added. Contrary to what a nameless informant informed me in a nameless place on a night I shall not name, it seems that young Merope Bernstein is not attached to “Monsieur Casteene”; at least not enough to prevent her having conceived an attachment to Reg Prinz, under the banner of bringing the Revolution to the Media That Matter. Our Director, in his way, neither encouraged nor discouraged this attachment, but at once incorporated it into the story. Bea Golden, you may imagine, was not pleased: indeed, it wants small wit to fancy her not only jealous of this new rival (her own ex-stepdaughter!) but frightened, inasmuch as Ambrose’s “pursuit” of her had been merely and clearly per script since their Baratarian interlude, for which (even if he directed it) Prinz seems not quite to have pardoned her. Follows that she will now eagerly ally herself with the Director against the Author in our Scajaquada Scuffle, right? At once to reingratiate herself with Prinz, to score points against her competition, and to defend herself from her only current real pursuer, the lecherous Lily Dale lunatic.

Got all that? Well, our Author’s projected reenactment was to go as follows: Buffalo’s Delaware Park would serve both as the battle site (which it is) and as Municipal Park in Cambridge, which it decidedly is not; the park pavilion both as the American general headquarters and as the Original Floating Theatre II. Bea, in red-white-&-blue wrapper, would represent, let’s say, Columbia, being interviewed before the pavilion in early movie newsreel-style, by the Director, on the American position in the War of 1812. Myself to make my cinematical debut (we do not count Prinz’s surreptitious and/or illegitimate footage) in the role of Britannia, being interviewed concurrently upon the same subject as I cross Scajaquada Creek by rented rowboat just prior to the battle. My interviewer of course to be the Author, fastidiously transcribing my polished periods with a quill pen for publication in the London press. Enter by helicopter (just as A. & I reach the pavilion) the Medium of the Future — in form of J. B. Bray cast as a network television reporter! — who makes off with both willing subjects and leaves the Battle of Scajaquada Creek to be fought, not by Britain and the U.S., but by Author and Director. Weapons and outcome ad libitum, except that the famous mike boom would somehow be worked in.

Thus the scenario. I protested to Ambrose that neither Bea nor I was jolly likely to take a helicopter ride with Jerome Bray. He imagined Bea would do anything her Director asked of her at this juncture, but insisted I follow my own inclinations once the cameras were rolling: that was the Point. And Merry Bernstein? Ambrose wasn’t sure, but believed she was to begin the episode as some flower-childish avatar of his daughter (they’d not been able to lay hands on a MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS T-shirt in Buffalo, but had found one blazoned BUFFALO IS FOR LOVERS) and end it with a Revolutionary Statement made Godard-like to the camera as the ’copter reascends and the Obsolete Media slug it out.

She had been warned, though, Merope B., that her nemesis Bray was to be there? Well, Ambrose hoped so: that was really Prinz’s department; she was his hanger-on. Himself was too busy anticipating what the Director might have up his sleeve in the ad-lib assault way to bother with such niceties: he did not fancy another concussion. On that score, I was to stay clear when things got sticky between him and Prinz: he had a couple of rabbits in his own fedora if push came to shove, and not for anything would he have me endanger our just-possible You Know What.

It is evening when we commence. The park brims with floodlights, searchlights, portable electric generators, and the Buffalo curious, whom (true to form) Prinz does nothing to keep back, but often turns his cameras upon. Traffic on the Scajaquada Expressway makes its contribution to the light and sound track. Somewhere overhead a chopper chops. I do not get to hear, alas, Bea Golden’s extemporisings upon American policy objectives in the Second War of Independence: A. and I are busy yonder in our skiff, across the pond. Nor do I get to extemporise myself (I’d given the matter some thought, and concluded that Fatigue was the finally regnant factor on the British side of the negotiating table at Ghent, as it may one day be for you Americans in Vietnam: more than we wanted what we claimed we wanted, we wanted Out): the Script calls for our transit of Delaware Park Lake to be shot in flickering silent film-style, our Q & A to be transcribed into subtitles — but no one is there.

Our wigs and tights and crinolines, quill pens and Union Jacks, amuse the bystanders until, muttering that Prinz has scored again, Ambrose seizes the oars and rows us out on the dark pond toward the bright pavilion, where a Newswatch Traffkopter has already landed. Buffalonians commandeer other park rowboats and follow us. Prinz has missed a good shot: we are a proper little invasion flotilla! I wave my U.J. wanly; am even moved to attempt “Rule, Britannia” against the pavilion loudspeakers, whence softly issues “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Ambrose does my harmony, and not badly: I am touched.

At our never shall be slaves (which coincides neatly with the loudspeakers’ free-ee and the bray-ave), we attain the landing and are instantly floodlit: score another for R.P., who has monitored our approach and gets fine footage now of the surprisers surprised! In plus fours and reversed cap, hand-cranking some relic from the Eastman Kodak museum, he grins from a camera crane; Bea frowns beside him in her Stars-and-Stripes drapery, looking more like a Chenango Street hippie than like Liberty. Between us, looking merely confused, Merope Bernstein, her uniform blue denims unaccountably exchanged for honey-coloured leotard plus the aforementioned T-shirt, a tiara, of all things, in her teased-out hair, and wings, John — those same Tinkerbell pterons that erst graced the Golden scapulae (on Gadfly III) before Bea fell from favour. Hence, no doubt, her frown. Wings!

We disembark, some of us feeling mighty silly. The music stops. Moths commit enthusiastic suicide in the kliegs. The Author blinks, shades his eyes, cons the scene for light and mike booms. Prinz turns to Bea and asks in a startlingly clear, amplified, and mocking voice: “What do you think of Senator Randolph’s Quids?” No less than Columbia, we are as surprised by the articulation as by the question. I am all ears for her reply; I search for an opinion of my own about the maverick Virginian’s anti-Federalist splinter party; decide to approve it as a manifestation of Randolph’s prevailing Anglophilia… and again do not get my moment in the limelight.

For Merry Bernstein, with a shriek of nonsimulated fright, upstages us all. The spot is on her — and, clearly, vice versa; Fay Wray-like (but that tiara, those wings!) she looks up from the landing into the darkness with an expression of Terrified Disbelief. She screams again… Now a smaller spot obligingly searches the pavilion balcony, passing over grips, sound crewmen, waving bystanders, until it fixes on Jerome Bonaparte Bray. He stands outside the balcony railing, balancing who knows how; he wears no wings, but his famous cape is spread like a flying squirrel’s between his outspread arms and legs. He smiles, well, nuttily. He cries a name (not Merry’s; sounds to me like Morgana); he reaches for his crotch; he leaps into thin air; and in flickering, odd slow motion — Prinz must have wired him up! — he lands upon poor Tinkerbell.

I mean upon her. Merry is knocked flat; her wings are squashed; Bray’s cloak entirely covers the pair of them, who look to be wrestling or humping under a blanket. The girl squeals and squeals.

Prinz and Bea are nearest by, but up on their rigs. Ambrose and I, the closest on foot, dash to pull Bray off. Not as difficult a job as one would expect: he is extraordinarily light, or else somehow half suspended still by a wire I can’t see. He comes up squeaking, buzzing, clicking, salivating; no Dracula marks on Merope’s throat, but the lap of her leotard is soiled as if by axle grease. She scrambles whimpering from under like a half-swatted dragonfly. Light as he is, Bray is hard to hold on to, something about the material of that cape. He slips silkily from my grip; Ambrose still has him fairly fast, but as I make to resnatch him I see Bea Golden dollying grimly in as if to do the mike-boom trick again!

I prevent her. By 1814, Columbia may have been the new Gem of the Ocean, but Britannia was still its boss. We went at it on that dolly, then on the quayside proper, like a pair of fishwives, she wasting her breath on insults and obscenities, me settling the score not only for 4 July but as it were for all I’d put up with at Ambrose’s hands on her account till the past few days. Unfair, surely; paradoxical, too (since it was Ambrose I was fighting for!)—but mighty satisfying all the same. She snatches my hair: ha ha, ’tis Britannia’s wig! Hers is Dolly Homespun’s genuine article, which I lay hold of to good effect. My crinolines and whalebone corseting are dandy armor against her nails; if she rips one petticoat through, there’s another beneath. But her bit of bunting is all she’s got, and while it still waves at the scuffle’s end (in fact more than at the outset, for I’ve clawed it half off her) it sorely needs a Mary Pickersgill to restitch Stars to Stripes.

All this, of course, whilst cameras roll merrily and spectators cheer. Not all of them for Old Glory, either — there must have been a few Canadians in the crowd — though I grant the applause at my most telling blow might have been as much for B.G.‘s jugs as for the stroke that bared them. Comes my Author now to “relieve” me, just when I’m in position to strike Columbia’s colours altogether. Balls! cry I, when he scolds me for so exerting myself in my Condition — but enough I suppose is enough. We step out of the light, still fixed on Columbia as she regroups. Merry B. meanwhile, in proper hysterics, has fled to her Director’s arms — anyroad to his camera crane, where he coolly comforts her whilst she bawls and swipes at her lap. Somehow reascended to the balcony, Bray shrills imprecations upon us all, in particular upon Ambrose, who he ominously vows shall Pay. The crowd applauds him to the waiting Newswatch helicopter, which promptly buzzes off — to Lily Dale? (We’ve not seen him since).

Now bedraggled Bea sees what’s what on that camera crane and, her knockers rewrapped in the St Sp B, makes to turn the Eagle’s talons on Tinkerbell, who to my further satisfaction (her leotard mopped and her dander up) lays the same order of insults on her that were lately laid on me: M-F’ing Old Bag, & cet. The Director has his hands full keeping them apart. Britannia and weary Literature retire arm in arm from the scene, not much the worse for wear and withal fairly pleased with ourselves, as well as mightily entertained. In this reenactment at least, the redcoats might not have won the Scajaquada Scuffle, but Brother Jonathan surely seems to’ve come off second best.

Having been in her position myself, I was even able then to feel a certain sympathy for Bea, as aforementioned; especially next day, when word came that filming will not be resumed until Friday next, at Fort Erie. Our Director appears to have withdrawn with Tinkerbell to New York City; Ms Golden, very distraught, to the Remobilisation Farm, whether to rejoin the company on 15 August or not, we don’t know.

I worry about J. Bray, whose psychopathology I take seriously — Merry Bernstein’s hysterics I regard as entirely in order! — but Ambrose only shrugs and speculates, with further amusement, on Bray’s likely reaction upon returning to Lily Dale and discovering that Marsha too (per Joe Morgan’s report) has thrown him over. At Prinz’s departure some sort of payment was disbursed to all hands; Ambrose’s share, unaccountably, was generous (to me, even that seemed ominous). We decided to make a little vacation tour of the Niagara Frontier until the 15th — and here we are at Kissing Bridge: a low-rise ski-platz, August-empty, fit for lovers.

So much for the chronicling (the good people of Buffalo are baffled as I am by the Meaning of All This, which however they found at least as diverting as the pop art at the Albright-Knox); now for the News. As you will have gathered, my menstrual period’s nearly a fortnight overdue. Surely, surely at my age this signifies nothing. I am fifty, John: fifty, fifty! I will not, I dare not hope…

What I must acknowledge would be a real hope now, not a bitter one. Till today, Ambrose and I had not made love since Saturday morning last; yet this has been a week the reverse of loveless: reminiscent rather of our chaste May, even more so of our first courtship. We are in accord as to the probabilities — but he is all gentleness and, especially since the Battle of Conjockety, Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for my conduct on that occasion. Admiration, it would seem, for my history and character in general, and I am either vain enough or bruised enough by the season’s humiliations to find his attitude convincing as well as therapeutic. He cannot thank me sufficiently for enduring and indulging his early importunities in my office and elsewhere, his excesses and sentimentalities; his programmatical later abstinence followed by yet more programmatical inseminations; his couturial and other demands; his outrageous behaviour at the Marshyhope commencement ceremonies; his infidelities and other unkindnesses. Quite a catalogue! He declares all that to have been the purgation by reenactment (a variety of catharsis not mentioned by Aristotle) of sundry immaturities and historical hang-ups long laid on him like a spell. He declares that my love and forbearance have dispelled that spell, set him free to love me truly and properly for what I am, have been, shall be — this without regard to what’s what womb-wise, though nothing could more crown his Ad-mi-ra-ti-on than Ge-ne-ra-ti-on. Part of why we’re here, indeed (I mean why we’ll do Toronto and Stratford and, if he has his way, even Castines Hundred), is the returning of a few corners in my own intimate biography: once the Movie’s “in the can” and my Condition is established one way or the other — and his mother’s done dying, and his brother’s prognosis is clearer — he hopes we can revisit Coppet, Capri, London, Lugano, Paris, Geneva — Scenes I Have Been Knocked Up In.

I tell him I do not particularly share his taste for reruns. Why not make it Tobago, Maui, Tahiti — scenes untouched, if not by History, at least by our several histories?

Just as I wish. But I won’t object, surely, to an evening’s theatre at Niagara-on-the-Lake or a good meal in Toronto?

I jolly won’t! And jolly well haven’t objected to this week’s tender knocking about west New York in our budget subcompact, from the handsome Grape Belt down your way (but giving a wide berth to Lily Dale, and not bothering to bother anyone at Chautauqua), to the scene of Commodore Perry’s prodigious accomplishment at Presque Isle, to the haunts of the Tuscaroras and Niagara Falls.

This last by way of a revisit to ourselves, so to speak, more agreeable by far than last time ’round. The American spigot, I’m sure you know, has been fully reopened, and if still not equal to the Canadian, it at least inspired my lover and beloved (how sweet, John, at last to use those terms unironically!) to post in it, in an empty bottle of Moët & Chandon Brut, what he fancies may be the last of his replies to that famous Yours Truly who blankly messaged him in 1940. The gesture (I didn’t read the letter, but welcomed his comment as one more fatuity purged) appears to have turned his own spigot back on as well: we are now making spirited, I think reciprocal, love here at Kissing Bridge.

There, I think, is the term. It has been a week, not really of abject and fulsome apologies, solicitudes, smarms, but of easy reciprocity: two seasoned adults renewing (you know what I mean) their mutual love, which had grown rocky and uneven to say the least.

I like it! And should it (as I pray) persist, and should its persistence (as it may) come to make these weekly communiqués as unnecessary for me as Ambrose’s bottled epistles have become for him — why then, we shall be at our story’s end, you and I, and that will be that.

But we are not there yet. Seven days do not a season make. You are not done with (Ambrose’s)

Germaine

P.S.: Rereading this, I see I left out, unaccountably — I had been going to say one detail, but it struck me even at the time as the key and climax to last Saturday’s skirmishing, perhaps to my whole connexion with Mr Ambrose Mensch. The battle done, as he and I withdrew by rental rowboat back to “Canada,” in midpond our hero shipped his oars and kissed me. More particularly, as we paused there under the windy stars (early P.M. showers having ushered in a clear cool front), he bade me look him straight in the eyes whilst he took my head in his hands, declared he loved me, and kissed my mouth. That’s it. Romantical, what? I hear you ask, indeed, So what? But Britannia here declareth herself stirred to the ovaries by that open-eyed osculation, which bridged, I felt, our every past and present difference; brought us truly for the first time to ourselves with each other; sealed some compact; inaugurated this 6th, this blissful, Stage.

P.P.S.: Oxymoron! The shocking news now comes in (on the Kissing Bridge Motel telly) of the “ritualistic” murders of Sharon Tate & Co. in Roman Polanski’s villa. I think of our erratic Director, of my darling Author, of that madman Bray’s last words to us from the pavilion railing… Zeus preserve us!

O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage continues. The Fort Erie Magazine Explosion and Second Conception scenes.

Erie Motel

Old Fort Erie

Ontario, Canada

16 August 1969

Old pen pal,

Our last day on the Niagara Frontier. We’d meant to stop one more night here in the Erie (a cozy place this second time around; you recall our troubled visit of mid-June, a hundred years ago): it’s a chapter I’d consented to review, as it were, in Ambrose’s dramatised Short History of Us, inasmuch as that story’s dénouement still appears a happy one. But when we telephoned Magda yesterday, as we’ve done periodically through our absence, we learned that Mensch mère has entered what really seems to be her terminal terminality, and that Peter is worse too. (How was I? that remarkable Italiana wanted earnestly to know. Since Ambrose and I agree that the right news would actually be some comfort to her, I confessed that I’ve not menstruated since 29 June. Magda was tearfully ecstatic.)

So we shall return late this afternoon, our film work done till Sunday week hence, when action will resume at Bloodsworth Island, or Washington, D.C., or both.

In short, Zeus has preserved us and our mutuality through the week, as I prayed in my last, though his solicitude has not extended through the family. It’s been a proper honeymoon of a week for Ambrose and me, the sweeter already in retrospect for our knowing what awaits us now in Maryland. As befits what I take to be an Echo of the “Jeannine Mack” or “Bea Golden” stage of our affair — an Echo of a Reenactment, God alone knows or cares how programmatical — my friend and I have fornicated up and down the frontier, from Stratford and Toronto to the Falls and Fort Erie (not including Castines Hundred; I was adamant). A copulatory binge without the urgency of April’s — it is mid-August, even in these high latitudes — but unremittingly ardent, unremittingly thorough: as fleshly an Echo as ever echo’d. Especially on the 11th and 12th, when we hired camp gear and slept out on the shore of Lake Ontario to watch the Perseid meteor shower with the aid of a star guide, an electric torch, and a manual of Positions picked up in a Yorkville skin shop, we counted meteors and ran through the carnal alphabet as if sex were going out of style.

Which, you will be not at all surprised to hear, for the present it has done. I shall explain.

But now it’s history-lesson time! We left the War of 1812 stalemated on the banks of the Niagara in midsummer 1814. Jacob Brown’s plucky U.S. invaders, we recall, having held against us redcoats at Chippewa and won at least a standoff at Lundy’s Lane in July, withdrew to their Fort Erie beachhead: a strategic error, most historians agree, as it returned the military initiative to Britannia. She — after the Scajaquada Scuffle of 1 August — laid siege on 7 August to the Last U.S. Stronghold on Canadian Soil, bombarded it for a week with rockets and cannon, and on the 15th (as Admiral Cochrane’s fleet entered the Chesapeake to move on Washington) attempted to take Fort Erie by main strength. Night assault parties breach the northeast bastion and advance successfully as far as the powder magazine — which, in the fashion of powder magazines throughout this war, inconveniently explodes beneath them. Whether the blast is accidental or adroitly managed by the defending garrison will be much debated, but like the navy yard explosion in Washington ten days later, it knocks the wind out of our attack, which has cost us 905 casualties to the Damned Yankees’ 84 (that epithet is coined by the British General Drummond on this occasion). The survivors withdraw; the siege is maintained for another month, but no further serious attempts are made to storm the fort, nor are massive American reinforcements sent over from Buffalo to lift the siege. After Prevost’s rout at Plattsburgh and Lake Champlain, the besiegers remove downriver (up-map) to Queenston, but the U.S. does not pursue its advantage. By October all the Canadians are back in Canada except the garrison at Fort Niagara, all the Americans back in the U.S. except the garrison at Fort Erie. On Guy Fawkes Day, General Izard blows up what’s left of Fort Erie and ferries his troops back to Buffalo. End of hostilities in this theatre of the war, and end of lesson.

And in our little Theatre of the Preposterous? Just possibly ditto, though we are Wary. Yesterday’s sequence (so Ambrose reported on the Thursday, after a telephone conference with Reg Prinz’s assistants) bore the working title Fort Erie Assault & Explosion; 2nd Conception Scene. It was to commence Friday noon with a (filmed) story-conference luncheon in the mess hall of the Remobilisation Farm, then proceed to the enactment of whatever we saw fit to perpetrate under that title. It was hoped I would take an active role.

I would not, I declared; nor a passive either, unless I were promised that neither “Monsieur Casteene” nor the Medium of the Future would be on hand. The latter I feared for my lover’s sake; the former — but I will not speak of that rose garden! And I was to be counted out if “Fort Erie Assault” or “2nd Conception” involved our doing on camera what we’d been so busy at off.

Ambrose enquired (of Joe Morgan, also by telephone) and was told that Casteene had departed the Farm some days past with Merry Bernstein’s troupe of activists, presumably Remobilised for covert incitement of the Second Revolution. When or whether he would return, no one knew. That Mr Bray had not been seen since Scajaquada, but (according to Mr Jacob Horner, much distraught) had communicated by letter with Bea Golden (a.k.a. “Bibi”), who together with Marsha Mensch (née Blank, a.k.a. “Pocahontas”) had taken French leave from the Farm on Wednesday and not been heard from since. Horner was persuaded they were in Lily Dale, in Bray’s clutches, and was of course immobilised with anxiety on behalf of His Woman.

I was anxious for them both, now neither was a threat to me. Jerome Bray! Ugh! Heartless Ambrose was more amused than alarmed, particularly as Morgan himself judged Horner’s fears premature and possibly misdirected. Both “patients” had been AWOL before, it seems; indeed “Bibi” had disappeared for the whole past weekend and showed up drunk on the Tuesday declaring she’d been down sailing on the Chesapeake with a new boyfriend. Since Marsha (alas) also has tidewater connexions, and the two women have struck up an alliance, it seemed as likely to Morgan that they were lushing it in Maryland together as that they were facing Worse Than Death in Lily Dale. In good Joseph’s view, the real ground for concern was not their whereabouts but their dissolution: “Bibi’s” aggravated alcoholism and (he now regretfully reported to Ambrose) “Pocahontas’s” recent taking to unspecified and unprescribed narcotics, which she shared with her new friend. Joe wished both of them off the Farm for good and “Bibi” in a proper therapeutic institution for alcoholics.

At second hand, all this sounded reasonable enough, if not exactly jolly, and on the strength of Ambrose’s assurances — which he cautioned were not guarantees except in the matter of public coupling — I went along. (Here’s the place to declare that the fortnight past has truly coupled our spirits, John, as never in the five months and stages prior.)

Face to face it was another matter, and not only because the Farm’s dining hall was rigged up with the now familiar lights, cables, microphones, and cameras. The old folks gently exercised or sat about: whatever legitimacy that queer establishment can claim must be in the nursing-home way, where it’s not half bad; the hippies for example are in principle as down on “age-ism” as on racism and sexism, and earnestly attempt not to patronise the geriatrics. Reg Prinz, his two chief assistants (that pair of curly blond thugs featured in the “1st Conception Scene” and the “Battle of Niagara,” who more and more do his talking for him), and Merry Bernstein were positioned at one end of a central table, sipping fruit juice and regarding our entry. All wore sunglasses. Prinz grows ever more pinched and intensified; Merry’s newest denims looked to me more Bloomingdale’s than Whole Earth Catalogue, and her hair was teased out in spectacular amplification of Reggie’s, as if she’d touched an even higher-voltage line. None spoke. In the center of the table, behind coffee cups, sat “St Joe” and a pale, distraught Jacob Horner, who fiddled, twitched, eyed Ambrose uneasily as if expecting him to play the Jealous Ex-Husband, and said nothing. Morgan too, though he sucked his unlit pipe and gravely buttered a croissant, appeared to me less “together” than holding together: that mad brightness of eye I’d noted from time to time in our last conversation was now his fixed aspect.

No sign of Marsha, “Bibi,” or the other promised absentees. That black militant chap, the one who calls himself Tombo X, was at the farthest table off with a squad of Brothers and Sisters in green staff uniforms, conspicuously ignoring us. Racism, it would appear, flourishes after all in that corner of the Farm.

Ambrose and I took the two remaining seats, at the opposite table-end from the Director, behind an array of note pads, pencils, ashtrays and matches, ham sandwiches, and, of all unexpected welcome things, Bloody Marys! No one else was so provided for. We said hello to the company and microphones, waved politely to the cameras recording our arrival, and expressed a proper mild concern for Ms Blank and Ms Golden. Morgan crisply reaffirmed that they had left the premises together, voluntarily but without authorisation, and that inasmuch as they were ambulatory adults whose stay at the Farm was also voluntary, there were no grounds for mounting a search.

I think, thought Horner, they’re at Lily Dale.

So go to Lily Dale, his advisor advised. Horner does not; only wipes his unperspiring brow with a clean white pocket handkerchief.

All this filmed and watched impassively by the filmists. Clearly that ongoing rerun of your End of the Road novel is off its track, sir, and like to be abandoned for want of actors! Just as clearly, some pressure is a-building twixt protagonist and antagonist, whichever of Morgan and Horner is which.

With uneasy briskness we took our seats and our Clearly Symbolic roles: i.e. (Ambrose declared aloud), that they were symbolic was clear, but not what they were symbolic of. Was this the Last Brunch, and we the only communicants? Was it Writing that was represented to be alcoholic and carnivorous, or Great Britain, or his and my generation? On the subject of national embodiments, by the way, was it not Prinz’s turn to live up to his name and play Britannia, Ambrose’s to play the Yankee Doodler, in the upcoming fracas?

What we thought, offered Prinz’s Tweedledum, we thought we’d all meet at the Old Fort Erie magazine this evening and play it by ear. See what blows.

Whereto adds Tweedledee: First ones to back off will be the redcoats.

I’m eating my sandwich, I declared, and drinking my bloody Bloody Mary, symbol or no symbol. Ambrose nodded approval and followed suit.

Joe Morgan reminded Author and Director that, if historical accuracy was to apply, the detonation of the Fort Erie magazine ought to occur in predawn darkness. Dum & Dee looked to their leader, who quietly intoned: I think evening. The light.

And those crazy lake flies (Tweedledee): there’s a major hatch on. Millions. Joe volunteered that those clouds of insects — which hatch by the billions at summer’s end in low-lying areas around the Great Lakes, swarm about harmlessly for a few evenings, and then die — have been known since 1812 on the Ontario shore of the Niagara as American Soldiers, and on the New York shore as Canadian Soldiers.

Far out, chorused the filmists. The black contingent exited. The old folks rocked, smiled, and nodded at each remark. Homer rocked too, though his chair was no rocker, like an Orthodox Jew at prayer. I was moved to suggest: Let’s let that fly hatch be the Second Conception, what?

My lover saluted me with half a ham sandwich.

What is the Second Conception? Merope innocently enquired of Prinz, who replied without turning his head: Same as the first. Bruce?

This last to Tweedledum, who promptly brandishes some sort of periodical — clearly they’d rehearsed this bit of business at their end of the table and were ready for that inadvertent cue from ours — and read (I paraphrase, but pretty closely): The question put by the film Frames, says scenarist A. M. King, comes essentially to this: Can a played-out old bag of a medium be fertilised one last time by a played-out Author in a played-out tradition? King himself invokes William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife, whose hero pretends to be impotent in order to cuckold his sympathetic friends. Viewers of Frames may judge this wishful thinking on its “Author’s” part.

Smirks Tweedledee: Frames is our new working title. Adds Bruce: “Author” is in quotes.

The publication he identified as a Buffalo “underground” film newsletter; the article a report on Those Crazy Goings-on in Delaware Park. He had another copy; Ambrose and I were welcome to this one.

Well, I was appropriately shocked. Not stunned, exactly, but startled for sure. But the cameras — and at least four pairs of sunglassed eyes — were on us.

Dirty pool, growled Ambrose: they left out the Author’s Trenchant Irony; his Mordant Wit.

Don’t they always, I said, as levelly as I could manage. And to Prinz: If that’s your Magazine Explosion, luv, it’s a bleedin’ dud. See you at the fort.

Exeunt Played-Out Old Bag of a Medium and Scenarist A. M. King, the latter smitten (by his own protestation) with pride in my self-possession and presence of mind, the former mad as a wet hen. He was misquoted, for Christ’s sake, Ambrose complained all the way to our motel; I must learn, as he had learnt, the Larger View of Journalism, to wit: that newspapers are no doubt necessary even though they never get anything quite right. Bugger yer Larger View, humphed I: I really am nothing but an effing symbol for you, what?

Symbol yes, my companion ardently acknowledges. Effing Symbol yes; Also an Effing Symbol yes. But Nothing But? Never!

I had aborted one fetus already in Fort Erie Ontario, I reminded him; I could abort another. Ambrose was transported: Was I telling him I truly might be et cetera? If I was, said I, I wasn’t by “Scenarist Arthur Morton King,” who for all I cared could stuff himself into a bottle and post himself over the Falls. Done, said Ambrose: done and done! That King is dead!

We were stripping as we quarrelled, to shower and change for the afternoon. This last was his In-vi-ta-ti-on to come off our spat and into bed, and though I wasn’t yet mollified enough for that, my ire had indeed peaked and was passing. I understood what he meant by also symbolic but not merely symbolic, and if he truly intended to have done with that corny nom de plume and write straightforwardly under his own name, I took that for a healthy developement. In short, I was ready to return to our Mutuality and, in time, lend a hand to King John Thomas’s Restoration. But as I came from the W.C. to kiss and make up, I had a chilly flash that was nothing menopausal: the Second Conception scene!

I tore the room apart to find mikes and cameras. Ambrose swore (when he understood what I was about) he’d not Set Me Up, but agreed that Prinz might well be setting us both up, and joined in the dismantlement of Erie Motel Room 21. Nothing there, unless on the C.I.A. level of miniaturization and concealment. Spent and laughing by now at the mess we’d made — and would have to restore — we were indeed tempted to take a tumble in its midst; “bang the old symbol,” as Ambrose put it from where he lay naked on the piled-up bedclothes. Yet however well we’d searched, and however much I assured him I believed his protestations, I couldn’t bring myself to climb aboard, so repellent was the thought of Prinz’s somehow bugging our intercourse. Indeed, the more that possibility laid hold of my imagination, the more inclined I grew to declare a moratorium on sex — but not on sweet Mutuality! — till we were safely out of camera range.

Ambrose was delighted; I soon realised why, and rolled my eyes to heaven. The weekend, you see, was upon us: if we now put by our heavy humping for a spell of Chaste Reciprocal Affection, then Week 3 of this happy 6th Stage of ours would echo Stage 3 of our affair (approximately May), itself an echo of his chaste “3rd affair.” Moreover it was, I now recalled, at about this juncture in our affair that we began to realise how its ontogeny, so to speak, was recapitulating its phylogeny. Did that portend on the one hand that our Happy Sixth Stage was good for another month at least? Did it mean on the other hand that we had only another month? And — dear God! — that we were not really “ourselves” yet after all, at least not entirely, and would not be until, let’s see, the 2nd week of September (i.e., the 6th week of this 6th Stage)?

I offered to go vomit. Was truly nauseated, whether by that tiresome prospect or by the Last Brunch. Morning Sickness! jubilated Ambrose. I made good my offer.

Sunset at Old Fort Erie! Mighty Niagara chugging north before our battlements! The lights of the U.S.A. to eastward; of a coming thundershower to southwestward, out over the muggy lake; of Tweedles Dum and Dee positioned about our ramparts and especially in the neighbourhood of the restored powder magazine, a brick-vaulted subterranean chamber in the northeast bastion atop which, in director’s chairs, sat the Director and the Director’s moll: empty-handed, neither smoking nor drinking nor reading nor talking, only waiting, he in his uniform nondescripts, she in her Salvation Army chic.

And the lake flies, John! Do you have them at Chautauqua, I wonder? Overgrown mosquitoes in appearance, they neither bite nor sting, only fill the night in such numbers at the peak of their week-long hatch that the whole air thrums; gather so thickly upon any light surface that it is darkened; immolate themselves by the thousands on any exposed electric light bulb (small hills of the immolated were piling already beneath the floodlights). Tons of idle protein on the wing: the phenomenon is African, prodigious! We walked through it, exclaiming and waving our arms (luckily our clothing was not light-coloured; the insects are not attracted to people; they landed on our clothes and skin and hair only accidentally, but given their numbers, such accidents occurred by the dozens per second. Once perched, they stay there; brushed off, they obligingly die), to where the lighting crew amused themselves with raising and lowering the volume of that huge thrum at will, as if with a control knob, by brightening and dimming the floodlights. Astonishing!

Once over our initial revulsion, we found we could move through the swarm without injury or much difficulty, and that a constant easy fanning of the hands kept one’s face and hair reasonably bugless. The scene that follows you must envision in ever dimming light, however, as the lake flies becloud the floodlight lenses with their cumulative dying juices.

Can we shoot in these conditions? asks Ambrose when we reach the magazine. We’re shooting, replies the video Tweedle (Dum); you’re on. Must be the Fort Erie Assault scene, quips our Author: American and Canadian Soldiers are dying like flies.

No response from the filmists to this Mordant Wit. I then declared to the company (what Ambrose and I had rehearsed en route from our motel by way of joining the battle, as it were) that in our judgement no Second Conception scene was called for until and unless the First should prove a mis-take. In plain English: played out or not, we had reason to believe ourselves preggers already. The charade Prinz meant as Squeezing Blood from A Turnip would in fact be Carrying Coals to Newcastle; I could not reconceive till I was delivered. Preggers!

We were regarded: the tiniest hint of interest in Merry Bernstein’s eyes; none whatever in the others’ (Prinz still wore his sunglasses, so who knows). Not exactly a triumphant opening, though it was exciting for us so to declare ourselves. Ambrose therefore commenced an improvisation that led to the following exchange, which I approximate from memory and edit for concision:

A.M. (to Prinz and Merry B.): Maybe you should do the Second Conception, what? Film’s as played-out a medium as Fiction. Off with your clothes, Merry.

R.P.: I’m the Director.

A.M.: Direct, then. My script calls for a Fecund, Vital New Medium to conceive a Major Work of Art by a Virile Young Director who liberates her from residual contamination by the Old Medium she has rendered obsolete. It’s your big scene, Mer.

R.P. (quietly, to Yours Truly): You undress, ma’am.

Y.T.: I jolly shan’t.

R.P. then makes a small sign to Merope, no more than a twitch of the mouth and turn of the hand, and she begins peeling off her Salvation Armies for the cameras. I am more and more cheered: Merry’s jugs are gross of nipple and ill suspended, her thighs and bum unappealingly slack for a girl’s and striated already, her legs unshaven. Naked, she stands self-consciously in the (ever dimming) lights: a lumpy Lake Erie Venus shooing flies.

MERRY B. (approximately): Shoo!

AUDIO TWEEDLE (to A.M.): Let the Muse come to you and Reggie now. The camera will show which medium she inspires.

And dear A.M. (an able ad-libber when he’s up for the game): She’s not my muse, Reg. Exhibition is your business.

R.P. (with smile): You withdraw?

A.M. (ditto, and still ad libitum, mind): I cannot withdraw from what I decline to penetrate. Germaine and I stand pat.

This sally gained something, no doubt, from the ambiance. I happily took my Author’s arm; he bussed my cheek; the lights dimmed another quantum. Reggie shrugged, fetched up the little megaphone he’d affected in the Scajaquada Scuffle, and terminated what will no doubt prove to be the longest stretch of dialogue in this flick by calling down into the magazine for “Private Blank.”

Yup. Forth issued into the failing light the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch: dazed, sullen, and much the worse for whatever wear she’d been at. Marsha’s complexion was flushed and mottled, her gait unsteady; her eyes were wide and glassy, her hair and frock a wreck, as if she’d been in dire clutches indeed. But she was smiling, albeit loonily, as she wandered our way, waving a tiny American flag.

Ambrose squeezed my arm. Jacob Horner cried her name and hurried (for him) from the shadows behind us — we’d not seen him there — to her side. Marsha blinked and flagged him wanly off, as if he were a lake fly. Merope wondered to the Director whether it was okay to put her clothes back on — but Prinz was watching us watch Marsha. Though Ambrose’s concern was evident from his grip, he said and did nothing, sensibly leaving to Horner the anxious interrogation of His Woman.

He got not much out of her — or of Prinz, whom he understandably pressed to tell where she’d come from, where been, and doing what with whom. She’d been to “the other farm,” Marsha woozily acknowledged, and now was back at this one; bugger the rest of it. She declined to be taken to the infirmary, or home to bed. She managed after all a sort of smirk of recognition at Ambrose and me. The cameras rolled.

Joe Morgan, expressionless, appeared beside Prinz, who tersely called for “the Exercycles.” Grips at once fetched forth from the magazine a pair of those machines and placed them side by side before the Director, who clearly had prepared this odd business in advance. Docile Marsha mounted as readily as she could manage, saying Ouch, wow, I’m still sore, and began pedalling. Frowning Horner joined her on the other. Merope (dressed now) resumed her chair and lost interest in the spectacle.

It’s the Horseback-Riding scene, Tweedledum explained to a microphone held by his comrade. How can that be? that chap dutifully enquired. In the original it’s “Rennie Morgan” who gives “Jacob Horner” his riding lessons. Where’s Ms Golden?

It was her or me, Marsha muttered. What on earth, I whispered to Ambrose. He shook his head, touched my hand, replied that it looked to him very much as if his ex-wife was stoned out of her mind. Marsha was pedalling now more industriously; one would say almost grimly. Horner reached over to dab her brow with his handkerchief. Looking straight at Ambrose she enounced: You’ll get yours, too.

Prinz signalled Audio Tweedle (so it appeared to us), and, a moment after, there issued from some loudspeaker in the magazine — unnaturally clear, even strident, but as whacked-out mechanical as Marsha’s was whacked-out narcotic — the voice of Bea Golden, delivering what sounded like a pronunciamento: As of yesterday, “Phi-point of the calendar year and of LILYVAC’s Five-Year Plan,” the Mating Season was closed. Today—“St Neapolus’s Day and Bicentennial of the Emperor’s birth”—began “the Fall Work Period of Year E: i.e., Year Four of the Five-Year Plan.” Which, however, in the light of “the Perseid Illuminations,” might well prove to be “Year N, the first of a new Seven-Year Plan.” Et cetera, and don’t ask me! To be fertile matters little, Bea’s voice went on; to be fertilised, little more (this, John, addressed as if directly to Ambrose and me!): What matters is the bringing to term and the successful delivery of that Hero who is both Saviour and Golden Destroyer. Germaine Gordon Pitt, Lady Amherst: nota bene! Morgana Le Fay: your turn will come! The New Golden Age will commence April 5, 1977!

All this last, John, truly spoken as though in italics, and if any doubt remained of whose particular lunacies Bea’s voice was iterating, that doubt was blown away by her closing words: The revolutionary future belongs neither to Pen nor to Camera, but to one… two…

On three a hollow boom boomed either from the loudspeaker or from the magazine itself, whence billowed now a great puff of white smoke, and from out of that smoke a presumably recorded male laugh that could be none but Jerome Bray’s, and a great many flittering sheets of paper, as if a post office had exploded.

We all withdrew a safe distance (except Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank, who went on exercycling as if hypnotised), till the air cleared of everything save the ubiquitous lake flies. Even Prinz leapt back from his chair at the blast, and his lieutenants from their microphones and cameras. Merry Bernstein sat on the ground not far from where Ambrose and I had jumped to, drawing her clothes tight about her and verging reasonably upon hysterics.

Much shaken myself, I did what I could for her whilst the men gingerly investigated. First back at their stations were Dum and Dee, to record the last wisps of smoke and leaves of paper. Morgan demanded to know what was going on and where his missing patient was: Prinz and Ambrose both disclaimed responsibility for and foreknowledge of the stunt; indeed, each was inclined grudgingly to credit his rival with a bravura special effect. The papers, blowing about now in a mild breeze off the river, proved to be covered with printed numbers, meaningless to us. The magazine, upon inspection, yielded a portable tape machine, an auxiliary loudspeaker, and an empty canister, presumably a spent smoke bomb. No sign of Bray or Bea Golden.

Jacob Horner volunteered from his mechanical mount that it was in fact the name day of the Bonaparte family and 200th birthday of their most celebrated member, who took his Christian name from a saint martyred under Diocletian in the 4th Century. Birthday too of Princess Anne, Ethel Barrymore, Thomas De Quincey, Edna Ferber, T. E. Lawrence, and Walter Scott. Deathday of Wiley Post and Will Rogers in plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Likewise, traditionally, of the Virgin Mary, whose passing is referred to as her Dormition. Repeated Marsha: Better her than me. And on they pedalled, going nowhere.

I know for fairly certain, John, that Ambrose had no foreknowledge of the Great Magazine Explosion, and we’re fairly persuaded that it took Prinz by surprise as well. His signal had been for a tape made a few hours earlier by Marsha, whose bedraggled arrival by bus from Buffalo had inspired this more modest surprise for Ambrose. The tape — we heard it shortly after — reveals that she had indeed gone voluntarily, with Bea Golden, to Bray’s Lily Dale establishment a few days since, and returned when her unspecified business there was done. That Bea, unhappy at the Remobilisation Farm since the Doctor’s death, has chosen to stay on in Lily Dale. That coaxial television is a minor technological innovation, not a revolutionary new medium. Et cetera.

Unless, then (what we briefly considered), Prinz’s assistants have taken over the Movie (Frames!), it would appear that neither he nor Ambrose but Jerome Bray carried the field in the Assault on Fort Erie, turning all the rest of us into Withdrawing Britishers — and that he has had his revolting, nefarious Way with both Marsha and Bea. Merry Bernstein is scared out of her knickers, as well she might be. I think the New York State Police ought to be dispatched at once to Lily Dale to see what’s what, but I can interest no one in Bea Golden’s fate enough to take action (I shall ring up Morgan before we leave, and prod Ambrose again when he wakes up).

Can the Epical Feud between Author and Director have run its course, one wonders, now that the Prize is flown and nobody cares to pursue it? If so, ’twas a Conflict with much Complication and no Climax! But the two parted company last night downright cordially. And my lover is sleeping through this morning because — as excited Authorially by the day’s events as were Prinz & Co. Directorially, and liberated by our new Abstinence Week from a night of making love — he sat up happily till dawn turning St Neapolus’s Day into sentences. Not, praise be, another of those regressive epistles to Yours Truly, but (so he teases, and I’m honoring my promise not to peek) a fiction in the form of a letter or letters to the Author from a Middle-aged English Gentlewoman and Scholar in Reduced Circumstances, Currently Embroiled in a Love Affair with an American Considerably Her Junior.

Ho hum, said I, and toddled off to sleep. Whereupon that simpleminded dramaturge, my subconscious, contrived to dream that all my letters to you after the first one — not excluding this, whose sentences were already forming in my mind as I fell asleep — are in fact from the pen of our common friend Ambrose Mensch, whose Middle-aged English Et Cetera does not exist!

Good old subconscious. But now it’s I am awake, and he asleep: rest assured these pages are not from our Ambrose, but from,

As ever, your

Germaine

P.S.: Speaking of authors: I have I believe now gone quite through your published oeuvre, sir, per program: a book a month since March. What am I to read in August? In September?

V: Lady Amherst to the Author. Distress at Mensch’s Castle.

23 August 1969

Dear J.,

Vanitas vanitatum, etc. Our “mutuality” persists, thank God, Ambrose’s and mine, but our Niagara idyll seems already washed a world away by the flood of domestic emergencies we came home to. As Hurricane Camille douched Dixie (with Debbie supersaturating right behind her), so any concern of ours for “Bea Golden” and Marsha Blank, Jerome Bray and Reg Prinz, was first drowned by Ambrose’s mother and then redrowned by his brother.

I write this from the waiting room of Dorchester General Hospital, lately our home away from home. What the four of us presently await (Magda and Angie are here too) are the final laboratory-test results and diagnosis of Peter’s case. He has been confined here since Wednesday. We wish he had let us fetch him to Johns Hopkins instead, but are relieved that he is — at least and at last — in hospital. The news we await cannot be good; we may hope only for less than the worst. That Peter is here at all, you understand, implies—

Grief drops the stitches of my story. We flew home last Saturday evening, went directly to the Menschhaus, learned that Mensch mère was comatose next door in the D.G.H., found Peter chairbound with immobilising pain in both his legs (for which he would take nothing stronger than aspirin), Angela frightened into such regression that only the family totem and pacifier of her childhood, the famous Oberammergau Easter egg, kept her from bouncing off the Lighthouse walls — and Magda serene, serene, serene.

She embraced me first, her eyes all one question (Nope, no period yet. Yup, a few other signs). Serenely weeping, she made us tea and briefed us on the family crises: Andrea had lapsed into coma the day before and was not expected to revive; her death was anticipated hourly, but Mensch’s Castle being so close by, her nurses had agreed to send instant word across the street when her vital signs took their final turn. Peter’s condition, whatever it is, had worsened at an alarming rate: from a slight hobble in his left leg, to a severe one with hip and knee pain, to disabling pain in both limbs, all since the first of the month. Peter himself growled good-humouredly of “arthuritis,” his stubbled face taut. But could mere arthritis proceed so rapidly, in a man not 45? And there was backache, and dull headache; even (so Magda thought, serenely tearful) some loss of hearing. Yet he held fast to his resolve, to “wait for Ma.”

On St Helena’s Day (Monday last, the 18th), whilst Camille was levelling Mississippi, Andrea King Mensch died. As it happened, we were all present except Peter and Angela: when in the forenoon her life signs took an unanticipated upward swing and she seemed stirring from her coma, we had been summoned. Andrea had of course that Edvard Munch look of the terminally cancerous, together with the complications of inanition: she was shrunk and waxy, nearly hairless, bedsored, foul-odoured from necrosis, all I.V. and air pipes going in and catheters coming out — it was poor Jeffrey in ’65, at once heartbreaking and gorge-raising.

She was indeed stirring; had to be restrained lest she disconnect the plumbing they ought mercifully to have disconnected long since anyroad. When she began to speak deliriously of Napoleon and “the Kings of Beverly” (her ancestral family in the neighbouring county, from whom our friend took his former nom de plume), Ambrose observed the irony of its being St Helena’s Day. He fell silent when his mother — who we doubt recognised us at any point — commenced to speak less disconnectedly of her late brothers-in-law Karl and Konrad (after whom Magda’s twins are named, their initials Romanised): specifically, of her late husband’s (Hector’s) brief deranging jealousy of the former, whom he suspected of fathering Ambrose “even though it’s Peter that’s the image of poor Karl.” We hung upon her words: was that famous marriage-bed mystery, as in a Victorian novel, about to have a deathbed resolution? But her voice gave out. Ambrose took her free hand (Magda had been holding the other from the start) and called the name Karl to her. His mother smiled, closed her eyes, and spoke her last words: “He was right smart of a cocksman, that Karl.”

It took her body three hours more to complete the unsavoury work of dying, which she did not interrupt for further comment. And so, while all signs point to an intramural adultery, that little question, and a fortiori the question of Ambrose’s paternity, remains open, presumably forever.

We buried her on the Wednesday in the family plot, rich in Thomas and Wilhelm Mensch’s funerary oeuvre. Peter attended in a wheelchair and, together with Ambrose, pointed out to me their grandfather’s sturdy Gothic revivalisms and the more baroque flights of the uncle they never knew, which really were rather surprising. Also that sculptor’s own unmarked marker, which Hector Mensch, one-armed, had struggled obsessively and in vain to cut to his satisfaction. (St Helena still on his mind, Ambrose remarked that Napoleon’s tombstone on that island reads simply HERE LIES, his French attendants unyielding in their demand that the verb’s object be simply Napoleon, his British gaolers equally insistent that it be Napoleon Buonaparte.) The Mensches being at least three generations of shrug-shouldered agnostics, Andrea’s funeral service was brief as an epitaph, and at our unanimous insistence Peter went even more directly from cemetery to hospital than his mother had gone vice versa.

There he has remained since, awaiting with us the results of his “tests.” Ambrose meanwhile, not for nothing a Johns Hopkins alumnus, has “worked up” the presenting symptomatology on his own and confided to me his fearful tentative diagnosis: osteogenic sarcoma consequent upon Paget’s disease. The latter is a chronic skeletal disorder of unknown etiology, afflicting perhaps 3 % of adults over 40. Often asymptomatic, its pathology is marked by excessive resorption of bone and chaotic compensatory replacement thereof by structurally inferior “pagetic” bone, which sometimes leads to deformity (bowed legs, enlarged facial bones), altered gait, pathologic transverse fractures in the weight-bearing bones, and sundry of Peter’s complaints. It is as if (Ambrose’s dark trope) thieves stole good stonework systematically from a building’s foundation and concealed their theft with slapdash masonry: after a time the building settles, cracks, and in rare instances even collapses. Among the complications of Paget’s disease (luckily in no more than a small percent of cases) is bone cancer.

On this subject my lover would not enlarge, though given the familial disposition you may be sure he is a ready amateur oncologist. We must await, he says, the measurement of Peter’s plasma alkaline phosphatase level and the reading of the X rays, both promised for this afternoon or evening.

We have done our waiting à trois (plus Angela), in strange sad harmony in Mensch’s Castle, in order to be close to Peter, to help calm Angela, and to lend support to Magda — who however is as much our supporter as we hers. How did I ever feel for that woman the vulgar emotion of jealousy? When now I so admire her tranquil strength, her stoicism so far from unfeeling, and am at the same time so secure with Ambrose in our late connexion, I think I should scarcely mind if…

But, needless to say, the conjunction of our sorrows and of the stages of our Stages, so to speak, has in all senses chastened this 3rd week of “mutuality.” The three of us hold hands in reciprocal succour and stare at the no longer revolvable camera obscura, fixed for keeps upon the county hospital, the broken seawall, the river of incongruous pleasure boats. Angie, always with us, eyes her egg. One will not be surprised if our Week of Abstinence extends beyond the week.

Beyond it, I suppose, lie some sort of “husbandly” 4th week and “tyrannical” 5th, followed by the climax of the Climax and then by who knows what dénouement. This is no time or place to speculate on that, or on the fact that well ere then — indeed, by this time next week — another moon will have filled (the Sturgeon Moon!) and begun to empty, and I shall either have remenstruated after all or determined that I am, despite all odds and whatever the issue, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant.

And beyond our Lighthouse, our chaste hand-holding? Well, we gather that the director and company of Frames (!) have not stood still for our grave interlude. They returned to Maryland not long after us and have been busy down at “Barataria” and over in D.C., preparing sets and selecting locations for the film’s climactic scenes: the Burning of Washington and the Bombardment of Baltimore. Tomorrow being the 155th anniversary of that former — and the company having sometime since Resorbed and Chaotically Redeposited Jacob Horner’s penchant for anniversaries — we look for shooting to commence then on the Big Scene. Starring Merry Bernstein, we presume (as Dolley Madison?), but presumably not involving a resumption of the feud between Director and Author, unless someone new has been assigned the latter role. It seems to us that “Bruce” and his counterpart (Brice? I mean Audio and Video, you know: T-Dum and T-Dee) are now the acting dramaturges, regents for the Regent…

But our curiosity about these matters is understandably much tempered. Ambrose remains on the company’s payroll (thank heaven), but nothing’s being asked of him beyond his presence on the set tomorrow if our circumstances permit: we’re to hear tonight whether “the set” is Bloodsworth Island or Bladensburg. We’ll decide tomorrow whether to go: perhaps take Magda and Angie with us to distract them, if the news we await from down the hall does not distract us from all distraction.

The other large Meanwhile is that Ambrose, in part to distract himself, has, since rearriving at the Lighthouse, plunged almost fervidly into that new project I mentioned in my last. (Where is his pretty Perseus piece? Medusa’d forever, I fear; and there’s a pity, for I believe us to have been in it, he and I, properly estellated into Art. Moreover, I now trust him to have got us down Right.) What began as rather a joke, not the best joke in the world either, has become, if not a fair obsession, Ambrose’s preemptive literary concern. It will not surprise me, and now shall not you, if he really does solicit for his purposes your copies of these weekly letters (by my estimate this is the 22nd consecutive Saturday I’ve addressed you!).

A month ago I’d have been appalled at the notion of his even reading them, not to mention using them. Now… I find I don’t really mind. They do spell out something of a story, don’t they, with a sort of shape to it? Wanting perhaps in climax and dénouement, but fetching its principals withal at least to this present gravely tranquil plateau.

Yes. I think I’m granting you my permission, who never after the first time deigned to respond to me, to respond as you please to Ambrose, should he in fact make such a request of you. Always assuming that you received #‘s 2 through 22 in the first place and (here I complete — and forever put behind me! — my six months’ self-abnegation) perchance preserved them, those epistles from

Germaine

P.S. (7:00 P.M.): Laboratory and X-ray findings in, and A.‘s lay worst-case diagnosis confirmed in dreadful particular: Paget’s disease, of sufficient standing to have involved pelvic bones, femurs, lower spine, and temporal bone. “Explosive” phosphatase level. Strong roent-genographic evidence of multicentric osteo-sarcoma: apparent lesions at least in right distal femur and left proximal tibia; apparent metastasis already at least to one lung. The doctor will not speak yet of prognosis, but to Ambrose he needn’t: it’s Very Poor indeed, even with massive radiation and radical “ablative operative therapy”—i.e., multiple amputation. In all likelihood, a few hellish months.

O poor Peter! Poor Magda! Poor tumorous humankind!

E: Todd Andrews to his father. 13 R, a visit from Polly Lake, a call from Jeannine.

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Friday, August 8, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Old Progenitor,

Events recircle like turkey buzzards, from whose patient orbits — eccentric, even retrograde, but ever closing — we determine their dead sun. Seven weeks have passed since 12 R, my Second Dark Night. A full month since the subsequent illumination of 13 R: my recognition that their target is yours truly. What prompts my pen today is neither another such night nor another such dawning, but a long and oddly clouded afternoon, my last here in the office before my August vacation cruise — an afternoon which I’m moved to prolong yet further by writing you about it, in hopes of glimpsing what’s behind those clouds.

13 L, Dad (see my letter to you of May 16 last), was your son’s resolve on the morning of June 21 or 22, 1937, to live that summer day as routinely as possible and kill himself at its close. Its counterpart in my life’s recycling, 13 R, was what A. B. Cook’s mid-sentence wink — possibly alluding to the Floating Opera? — opened my eyes to, four Fridays past: a replay of 13 L in slower motion (as befits the Suddenly Old), but with a more final finale. Not jubilantly this time, but serenely, I recognized in that Marshyhope committee room what all those goodbyes were about: how my future had indeed been fertilized by my past, attained full growth with but a little cultivation, and was ripe now for harvesting. Instead of a summer’s day, the summer season, lived out as normally as possible in face of such extraordinaries as the loss of Polly Lake and the miraculous regaining (and relosing) of Jane. For the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox should serve, or thereabouts; keep late September clear on your appointment calendar, Dad, for our too long postponed reunion.

In the six or seven weeks till when, I mean to make a final single-handed circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and watch the Perseid meteors for the last time from Osborn Jones. I hope too to wind up a deal of unfinished business before my deadline: principally the matter of Harrison’s estate, but also my Inquiry into your suicide; my Letter; the little mystery of Jane’s blackmailing; and the still-unbridged crevasse, so narrow yet so deep, between me and Drew (who has avoided me entirely since his rare overtures of July).

But I do not conceive 13 R to be necessarily either a detailed rerun of 13 L or a tidy wrap-up of my life. If differences remain unreconciled, distances unbridged, mysteries unresolved, businesses unfinished by (say) 9/21 or 22, so be it, Dad: I’ll keep our appointment.

By what vehicle? The Original Floating Theatre II is too obvious to be ruled out, given our Author’s want of subtlety. But I do not consider myself bound to the letter of His crude scenarios; the choice of vehicle I regard as matter of small, if not of no, importance. I shall not, however, attempt this time to take others with me, I think; at least not Innocent Bystanders — though I am unrepentant for having so attempted last time around, and would without compunction destroy certain of the world’s Dreadfuls along with myself if such a happy dénouement could be arranged. Alas, no one conveniently to hand is to my knowledge wicked enough: not even our elected rulers over on the banks of the Potomac. My final crossing, like my final cruise, looks to be a solo voyage.

The matter of means, then, is a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it, the Author of us all and I. Wednesday two weeks past, July 23, was the second anniversary of the other bridge episode in my life — that encounter with Drew and his explosive colleagues on the Choptank Bridge in 1967. I took the trouble that noon to hike out there and fish awhile near the second lamppost from the draw, just to check whether old A. (above) had any heavy ironies up His sleeve (I admit it was sweet to recall the emotion of Courage, too, and bittersweet to recollect brave Polly’s aid, and our little sail after on Osborn Jones).

He did not. The tide ran. No fish bit.

My sense of the latitude permitted within the general pattern of recurrence was strengthened further by the passage yesterday week, eventless, of another famous anniversary: July 31, when in 1935 (see 10 L) Jane and I resumed our lapsed love affair — in effect shrugging our shoulders, along with Harrison, at the mild question of Jeannine’s paternity. Granted that Jane had 10 R’d me three months since aboard O.J. — re-reseduced me, so to speak — she had re-redropped me in the meantime too, and who’s to say those buzzards can’t spiral in for a third, a fourth, a fifth cycle before their dinnertime? Though my heart has truly bid good-bye to her, I went out to the Todds Point cottage, just in case.

Nothing. (Jane is, I understand, off vacationing with her “Lord Baltimore,” whereabouts a company secret. Cap’n Chick is being capitalized as a wholly owned subsidiary of m.e., which is gearing up Now to capacity for Tomorrow’s Crabsicles and Eastern Sho’ fillers and binders.)

We expect no surprises, therefore, on Wednesday next, 8/13, when in 1932 Jane first instructed me in Surprise. I shan’t play the game further, dutifully pretending to catch an afternoon nap out there in the cottage till she comes to me. Indeed, I shan’t be there at all: O.J. and I will be at sea (oh well: at Bay).

Presumably alone, as I told Polly Lake just this noon during her (surprise!) visit to A. B. & A. Hot as the dickens on the gulf this time of year! Makes damp old Dorchester feel like Heaven! On her way north to rescue her grandchildren from their parents for a spell; thought she’d better stop by to see whether her successor had quit or taken to drink, etc.

Oh Polly, Polly, you look terrific. Ten pounds younger (she’s become a golfer!), crop-haired and berry-brown, outfitted in trim linen from a good Sarasota shop. Florida agrees with you!

No, no, Toddy, it’s living in sin that does. But you look awful! Seriously, have you been sick?

Damn near dead, Poll, since you ran off. You mean to say that rascal hasn’t made an honest woman of you?

Hope he doesn’t till I get down to one-fifteen!

Et cetera. All Office Raillery, Ms. Pond playing Interlocutor to our Bones and Tambo. But as I parried Polly’s real concern, and she my real curiosity, an odd awkwardness developed. It was lunchtime: unthinkable that we shouldn’t go up the street together as always, or down to the boat slip, for a sandwich and ale and more-private conversation. But my head was full of 13 R, Dad, how this surprise visit fit in; it was a season for good-byes, not new hellos, and Polly and I had said our good-byes in June. Nor did I care to account for my Sudden Aging or deal with Polly’s obvious curiosity about Me & Jane, either by lying or by telling the truth.

So I let a real stiffness build, till Ms. Pond got the signal that Polly had got ten minutes earlier but refused to acknowledge, and invited her to lunch, declaring — what was indeed the case, but no excuse — that I’d taken to working through the noon hour in order to clear my desk by vacation time.

Far be it from me then, Polly said, clearly set down. I suppose it is getting on to meteor time, isn’t it? We all used to work our fannies off, she assured Ms. Pond, so he could set sail by the eleventh.

Then to me, with as forced a breeziness as ever blew through Court Lane: Got your crew lined up?

You understand, Dad. Not in a hundred years could Polly have forgot (what Jane could have in a week) that the Perseid shower was at hand, which many and many an August past, since her widowhood, she had watched with me the night through from Osborn Jones; that if we had Worked Our Fannies Off to clear the decks for that celestial anniversary, it was in order to Play Them Off together on those same decks, under the fixed and shooting stars.

Guess I’ll be single-handing it this time, Polly. Back to the old window now. Good to see you.

I felt her stare at me more consequentially by far than I’d likely stare from my staring window at my oyster-shell pile. She even complained to Ms. Pond — good honest Polly! — He makes a girl feel right at home, don’t he?

Sorry, Poll.

Oh, wow! Good-bye, Mister Andrews, and bon voyage!

Good-bye, Polly.

In forty years of staring from my office window, Dad, at that mountain of oyster shells over by the packing house, I’d never felt so forcefully as now what a quantity of death they represented. Ten thousand bushels of skeletons; two million separate dyings! I tried multiplying by three and imagining each oyster a European Jew, to comprehend the Holocaust; then I divided by 6,000,000 to put in perspective my own quietus. Only the arithmetic worked.

To business, then! If both Jane and Drew were, let’s say, too spooked by my Sudden Aging to relate to me unofficially any further, the contest over Harrison’s Follies would be strictly between me and their lawyers — a litigation that would not even wind up its overture by the equinox. A new tack was called for; but my staring window was too beclouded by thoughts of Polly for clear course plotting, even before the phone call came from Canada.

Ms. Pond had returned alone from lunch, her manner a prolonged reproof of my rudeness to her predecessor. I know I’m not supposed to interrupt, she declared icily through the intercom not long after; but there’s a lady on Line One in Fort Erie Ontario Canada who claims to be Family and says it’s urgent. To me she sounds smashed out of her mind, but that’s not my business.

I pushed One and identified myself to the (male) operator placing the call: no doubt our Author, doing a bit of subplotting of His own. For my caller — drunk indeed, alas, or doped, and desperate — was Jeannine! Up at that crank sanatorium that the foundation (I here enter on my agenda of unfinished business) ought to cease philanthropizing. Was she all right? I asked as soon as I heard the lush slur in her voice.

All wrong, said she. High as a kite and low as whaleshit, Toddy-O. Crashing! Got to talk to you.

We talked. The guru of her establishment, I learned, was dead — accidentally drowned a month since while fishing on Lake Erie — and Jeannine feared the institution was disintegrating even faster than herself. She confirmed what I had gathered from other sources: that poor Joe Morgan, late of Marshyhope, was there. Further, that he was no longer a patient but some sort of clinical counselor, to whose unlicensed ministrations she had turned in lieu of her deceased doctor’s. Further yet, that she had never needed help so sorely as now, when her Last Hope to Make It, Reggie Prinz, had dumped her. Did I understand? She was out of the movie! Prinz was shacked up in New York City with her own ex-stepdaughter, Mel Bernstein’s kid, and wasn’t that incest or something? But the main thing was, even Joe Morgan (We call him Saint Joe up here, Toddy, he’s such a fucking saint; I mean literally a fucking saint, ha ha; we’ve got a little thing going ourselves, or did have; part of my prescription) was pissed at her now, ’cause his wife didn’t used to drink, if I knew what she meant, and it looked like she’d worn out her welcome up there even though it was her dad’s money that paid the effing rent. But the main thing was, to hell with telephones: she needed a place to crash and a trusty shoulder to cry on and maybe a little fatherly advice, and she’d always thought of me as being as much her father as her father was, ha ha, and if she could make it to a plane could she come down like right away for a couple of days? At least we could talk about her dad’s estate, and like that.

She paused. Then asked startlingly, over my pause: Mom isn’t with you, is she?

Your mother’s off with your new stepparent-to-be, I reported, glad of the extra moment to consider. A sire I may be, Dad, but I am no parent. My possible daughter is a fairly hopeless mid-thirtyish drunk, once uncommonly attractive to the eye but never long on character, judgment, intelligence, or talent: a woman whose girlhood I recall with some affection but in whom my interest steadily declined from her puberty on. Her brother, her parents, most of her husbands, her current (unlicensed) therapist, even her fickle lover and her ex-stepdaughter (whom you recall I bailed out along with Drew Mack’s “pink-necks” on Commencement Day) — all in my opinion have more at their center than does poor rich Jeannine. What’s more, damn it, Osborn Jones and I are about to drop our moorings, and I’ve plenty to do between now and then!

On the other hand, she is Jeannine: companion at three years old of my original tour of the Original Floating Theatre on June 21 or 22, 1937. Quite possibly bone of my bone et cetera, and if so the last of our not very impressive line. Moreover, since our Author saw fit to place this call just as I was in mid-rumination about the Mack estate, there was plainly a Buzzard circling here.

I volunteered to fly to her: have a look at that farm, a word with Morgan, a chat with her — and bid her bye-bye when I was ready. But no, no, she had to get out of there; no privacy anyhow from the feebs and loonies. She needed (weeping now) to see me alone. She was feeling… well… suicidal.

I regarded the shell pile. Hell, I said, so am I, honey. Come on down; we’ll discuss ways and means.

Good-bye concentration. She is to call back when she’s made her reservations, so that I can haul over to Baltimore and meet her flight.

She hasn’t called. Ms. Pond reports unsympathetically, after phoning back, that officials of the Fort Erie Remobilization Farm report that Ms. Golden has left the premises without authorization or proper notification of her intentions. They will appreciate a call from her, at least, if she shows up here. Now, Ms. Pond knows that “Bea Golden” (up there she’s known as “Bibi”) is Jeannine Mack; she seems not to know further that we may be father and daughter, for it was her aspersive insinuation, as she left for the weekend, that I had given dear Polly so cold a shoulder because I was Otherwise Engaged! Her exact words: I thought it was a single-handed cruise, not a singles cruise.

Really! Five-thirty now, and no word from Jeannine, who may well be passed out in the Buffalo, or for that matter the Baltimore, airport. No response to my periodic pages at both terminals, and the airlines won’t divulge their passenger lists. There are two more nonstops this evening, also several connecting flights through Pittsburgh. I’ve a dozen things to do at the cottage before I can set sail! Not to mention before I can receive a weekend houseguest. Stupid of me not to have specified clearer arrangements…

Damn it, Author, this improvisation is wearing thin! Must I cue you, like an actor his tardy sound-effects man, who are supposed to cue me?

Just then, as if on cue, the telephone rang.

Ahem, sir: JUST THEN, AS IF ON CUE

Attaboy. ’Bye, Dad.

T.

N: Todd Andrews to the Author. A series of 21’s and an intention to bequeath.

Skipjack Osborn Jones

Slip #2, Municipal Harbor

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Friday, August 29, 1969

Sir:

Numbed by a certain letter, I am moved to this letter by a certain number.

21 Fridays ago, in early March, I declined “for the present, at least,” your request to “use” me in a projected new fiction. More specifically, I believe I promised to consider your strange proposal over Easter and let you know if further reflection should change my mind. You’ve heard no more from me since, because until today I gave the matter no more thought. It has been an eventful season.

21 days ago, on August 8, I was to have boarded Osborn Jones at Todds Point for a final cruise of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages — which number, as it happens, just about three weeks’ worth. O.J. & I got off a day late, and our itinerary suffered two major diversions, with the result that certain snug and splendid coves I shall not get to say goodbye to. Even so, we traversed a considerable stretch of tidewater, and just this morning — Day 21 in O.J.‘s log — we rearrived at Slip #2 to check in at the office and collect the mail. Tomorrow we shall move down to our starting place and complete the circuit.

21 hours ago, more or less, at our final overnight anchorage (Sawmill Cove, off Trappe Creek, off Choptank River, one of my favorites of my favorites), I began drafting the ultimate and newsiest installment of my ancient Letter to My Father, to bring him up to date on the 21 days since I’d written him last. But after an hour’s scribbling I put it by: there seemed at once too much to tell and too much of consequence not yet tellable — at least till I should get home, check in at the office, and review my mail.

For symmetry’s sake I should like to say that 21 minutes ago, in that office, I opened among that accumulated mail a letter-bomb, and was mortally injured thereby. But in fact that noiseless, flashless, unshrapneled blast went off three hours back, in mid-muggy afternoon — since when I’ve closed up shop till after Labor Day, walked back down High Street to the boat basin, and sat under O.J.‘s awning, fairly stunned by the concussion of that letter (a simple wedding announcement from my longtime secretary Polly Lake, with a note on the back in her familiar hand).

The wound is fatal, but not instantly: another 21 days or so ought to do the trick; I had been dying already. Meanwhile my head has cleared enough for me to get on with the business of putting my affairs in order. Hence this letter, to report to you that — as on your Floating Opera in 1937—I have changed my mind. A codicil to my will will bequeath to you my literary remains: i.e. (as I mean to destroy all other personal papers), my Letter to My Father, of which you may make whatever use you wish, and certain letters from other characters in the little drama of my life’s recycling.

To that former Letter, in the three weeks (or so) left to me, I’ll add my account of the Last Cruise of the Skipjack Osborn Jones, amplifying for Dad (and you) what in my log, and in this letter, are mere terse entries: E.g.:

Day 1 (Sat 8/9): Choptank R. (Broad Creek/Harris Creek/Dun Cove). 1700 hrs: Anchor in 8’, Dun Cove. Omelettes w. Caprice des Dieux & Moselle: gd. 2200: Commit 1st incest, Missionary position: so-so. Winds calm, air 79 & humid. Could last night’s call have been from Polly? From Jane?

Day 3 (M 8/11): Magothy R. (Gibson I./Red House Cove). 1200: Jeannine to Airpt & back to Buffalo/Ft. Erie, under silent protest, after final incest & no bfst. A tergo, shameful & memorable. Wind WSW 10. My my my. Chester R. (Queenstown Creek): 2400: Perseid meteors, mostly obscured by clouds. Worry abt J. Illumination re Mack v. Mack: Where is Harrison’s shit? Could Author possibly go so far as to rerun that? Mosquitoes.

Day 5 (W 8/13): Chester R. (Langford Creek, off Cacaway I.). 1600: Wind WSW 15 & rising. Reef main. Cacaway = Caca + away?

Day 14 (F 8/22): Miles R. (St. Michael’s Harbor). 1000: Call office: investigator’s report. Lord Baltimore is “Baron” André Castine of Canada, ½ brother of A. B. Cook, and possibly CIA. Continue cruise or get home fast? Will flip (coin).

Day 16 (Sun 8/24): Patuxent R. (off Solomon’s I.): 0900: Up anchor & motor O.J. upriver with Jane M. & behind André C. in Baratarian, to meet movie folk at Benedict. D.C. to burn tonight on Bloodsworth I. Thundershowers likely (70 % P.O.P.). What are they up to? What am I?

Day 19 (W 8/27): Tred Avon R. (Martin Cove): 1830: Anchor in 6’, alone. Air still & muggy. BBQ filet mignon, salad, Fr bread, gd modest Bordeaux (Château La Tour de By ’62). Are Castine & Cook conning Drew? How is my daughter? Are they rehearsing for the real B.C.? Do I care? Are Castine & Drew conning Jane? Is Drew conning me? Is our Author conning us all? Where does Bray fit in? 2100: Full moon. Herons. Bored & horny. I miss Polly.

Day 21 (F 8/29): Choptank R. (Sawmill Cove/C’bge): 1030: O.J. in slip: end of cruise. End of cruising. To hotel for mail & clean suit. To office for mail & report. Hope Jeannine’s OK and wonder what on Earth induced me to etc.

Etc. Jeannine wasn’t; isn’t. Not impossibly because her possible father first diddled and then ditched her, my possible and troubled daughter has evidently left her Fort Erie sanatorium and gone to live in Lily Dale, N.Y., with our fuzzy friend Mr. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, last seen in the Prohibited Area of Bloodsworth Island and there looked for (vainly) by U.S. Navy helicopters when Drew Mack and I sailed in aboard the O.J. on Day 17 (M 8/25). The question of Harrison Mack Jr.‘s freeze-dried excrement — whether, in their crash program to launch Cap’n Chick’s Crabsicles in 1970, Mack Enterprises might inadvertently have disposed of that item of the Mack estate and thereby once more fertilized the future with the past — no longer seems important to the case, compared with those more fertile questions of Day 19. And that call on the midnight of Day 0 (F 8/8), which Jeannine answered in the living room of my Todds Point cottage before I was awake enough to get the phone, was from Polly Lake, now Mrs. Someone Else, desperately intending after all to propose joining me in O.J. ‘s cruise and holy matrimony despite my rude failure, earlier that day, to propose the same to her. And hearing I was Not Alone, Polly felt an utter, final fool, hung up the phone, married her Florida Chap at last, and sent me on the 21st the announcement thereof, which ticked away in the Dorset Hotel till today, Day 21, when I snatched up my mail, hurried over to the office, learned many a remarkable, mysterious, and distressing thing, wondered where in the world to begin, wished dear Polly were there to advise me, recognized her handwriting on that one piece of mail, and opened that Announcement.

On the back whereof, in Polly’s firm clear precious hand, she announced further all the above: her last-crazy-long-shot visit to Cambridge and my office on Day 0 (when I rebuffed her); her crazier desperate last phone call that night; her conclusion that she was a vaster fool than even she’d supposed; and her (lethal, but) nonetheless loving last Good-bye to

Yours posthumously, 21 days (or so) hence,

Todd Andrews

O: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His rescue of Marsha Blank from Comalot Farm, and present anxiety in her behalf.

8/7/69

TO:

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

FROM:

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

Only today the Anti-Ballistic Missile bill was approved by two votes in the U.S. Senate, General Hull retreated from Canada back to Detroit, the Germans captured Liège, the Marines landed on Guadalcanal, Napoleon set out for his second exile aboard Admiral Cockburn’s Northumberland, Neptune remained stationary in Right Ascension, the United States of America established a War Department, the Viet Cong raided the “most secure” of U.S. military bases, at Cam Ranh Bay, and your Woman Marsha Blank/“Peggy Rankin”/“Pocahontas” received a packet of Honey Dust through the afternoon mails, enclosed in a letter from Jerome Bray to “Bibi” Golden/“Rennie Morgan”/Etc.

You are Concerned. “Peggy” is semicomatose again, as when you Picked Her Up at Lily Dale on 7/22, St. Mary Magdalene’s Day. “Rennie” (again) is dead drunk. Dr. Morgan impatient. You Do Not Believe that he will abide much longer Ms. Golden’s ever less convincing portrayal of the late Mrs. Morgan, who seldom used alcohol. It is only for the sake of Bibi’s own therapy, since her recent abandonment by Reg Prinz in favor of Merry Bernstein, that Saint Joe indulges her sloppy rendition of Rennie, to the point of sleeping with her. But he dislikes drunks, especially when they misplay starring roles in Der Wiedertraum, already out of gear. What will you Do, you Wonder, when he throws her out and redemands that you Produce His Wife, alive and well as before you Came Between Them?

For that matter, what will you Do if Marsha (whom you Can No Longer Easily Call “Peggy Rankin” or “Pocahontas”) really does revisit Bray next week, as she declares she must? You are Jealous (and Vaguely Frightened) of him. You are Truly Frightened for her. But you are as Terrified by the prospect of another solo expedition to Lily Dale as by the prospect of what will happen when you Fail To Restore Rennie Morgan to her husband by 9/1, per schedule.

Yet who is there to go with you, if Marsha does not return and you must Re-retrieve Her? Tombo X grows weekly more belligerent; wants all honkies off his premises. Casteene appears to have disappeared with Merry Bernstein’s group. Anarchy threatens. Reparalysis beckons.

Remarkably, you Care About All This.

Last time you were Lucky. Tell us about it, Horner, they demanded, Casteene and Saint Joe, in the P & A Room on Thursday 7/24, Fast of Av, ☌♆☽‧☌♂☽, when you Regained The Farm at last, Fetched Marsha straight to the infirmary, and were by them Shaken Awake, not from Paralysis, but from Exhausted Sleep. What’s Bray up to over there?

He wasn’t home, you Replied. Fortunately. It was your Impression that he had gone again to Maryland with the film company, leaving Marsha, in the condition to be described, to tend his automatic computer and feed his livestock.

What sort of livestock? Is the farm legit, or a front? Indian nationalism? Dope? Is it the same premises that the Remobilization Farm occupied from 1956 to 1965, before it moved here? What’s he up to with that computer? C.I.A. connection? What took you so long?

Goats: 3 nannies, 1 buck, 1 kid. Front. Don’t know. Maybe. Yes. See below. Don’t know. Rebegin:

In fulfillment of your Wiedertraum prescription — to Reenact Jacob Horner’s Movement of 7/19/53 from Baltimore to Wicomico, Maryland, his Interviews At Wicomico Teachers College of 7/20/53 and 7/21/53, and his Excursion To Ocean City of 7/22/53, where he Met and Subsequently Bedded his Fellow English Teacher Peggy Rankin — you Set Out Alone in light rain from Fort Erie on 7/19/69 in the late Doctor’s old Mercury wagon, your First Such Adventure in 16 years. Steering wheel! Accelerator! Brake! Very Nearly Paralyzed by Saturday traffic on the Peace Bridge (you are Not Surprised at Senator Edward Kennedy’s loss of control at Chappaquiddick), you were Detained by U.S. Customs officers on its farther shore on suspicion of being Stoned, but Released for want of evidence after their thorough inspection of vehicle and driver. Thirty minutes into the journey, you were Already Exhausted, and once safely out of. Buffalo, you Stopped at the first available motel on the back road you Preferred to the New York State Thruway: the Eden, in Eden, on Rt. 62, about 25 miles from your Starting Place. It was not yet noon; you Had No Baggage; they wondered. The balance of that day and night, as Generalissimo Franco captured Cadiz, Huelva, Seville, Cordoba, and Granada, you Sat in a chair before the motel TV receiver Watching Walter Cronkite watch Apollo-11’s entry into moon orbit, then the reports from Chappaquiddick, then the test pattern.

On Sunday 7/20, St. Margaret’s Day, ☌☽‧☌♃☽, birthday of Sir Edmund Hillary and F. Petrarch, cloudy, cool, breezy, you Achieved between breakfast and lunch another 25 miles and Bid Fair To Manage the remaining 10 to Lily Dale, but Reached An Impasse just into Chautauqua County, at the hamlet of Hamlet. There the road forks, State 83 continuing west to State 60, which drops south to Lily Dale; County 312 running more directly to your Destination. Both are good paved roads; County 312 is shorter, but State 60, once attained, more familiar to you. You Could Not Decide. The Kennedy accident inquiry continued. Aleksandr Kerenski became premier of the provisional government of Russia. The moon men landed.

Next day — warm, overcast, still; Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Stern — as Apollo-11’s crew lifted off from the moon and Francis Drake engaged the Spanish Armada and Jacob Horner First Met Joseph Morgan at his WTC Job Interview and news reached London that the United States had declared the War of 1812 and Union forces won the Battle of Bull Run, a New York State Police officer encouraged you, after inspecting you and your Vehicle for illegal drugs and administering a sobriety test which you Passed With Flying Colors, to Start your Engine, Shift into Drive, and Move the late Doctor’s automobile out of that fork in the road, out of Hamlet, and along County 312 to a certain familiar dirt lane on the margin of Cassadaga Lake and the Lily Dale Assembly. Past a familiar mailbox bearing an unfamiliar name: Comalot Farm. Up to a familiar house, barn, and outbuildings, all much more in need of maintenance than they had been when the late Doctor & Co. removed hastily thence to Canada four years ago.

No sign of life except the five goats aforementioned. The three nannies and kid browsed on tall weeds in the dooryard; the buck emerged from the open front door of the farmhouse as you Drove Up. The kid capered over to say hello; his presumable mother bleated some concern; his presumable sire strolled down off the peeling veranda, paused to sniff first her, then another of the nannies, finally meandered to the car and put his forehooves upon the driver’s windowsill, not unlike the two officers before him, to ask your Business.

You Bided your Time, though it grew increasingly warm in the car with all windows raised. Sounding your Horn neither fazed the buck nor fetched help from the house, whose open windows suggested it was either abandoned or actively tenanted. Ra’s voyage ended in Barbados. Savannah, the first nuclear-powered freighter, was launched. Irritated at his presumable son’s irreverent leapings upon his back, the buck ran the kid down toward the barn, whose door also stood wide. The nans ambled after. You Took The Opportunity to Dash from car to house, Realizing only as you Shut the front door behind you that there might be other bucks where the first had come from.

The familiar parlor was in filthy case: goat droppings on the floor and furniture; upholstery torn and chewed upon; soiled plates and glasses, some broken. Clinks came from the kitchen: you Froze, then Inquired Cheerily whether anyone was home? Considered Retreating to the car, but Observed that the Family Gruff had returned to the dooryard. Picked up a knocked-over straight chair to precede you like a lion tamer’s through the house.

More debris. Goat shit. Flies. And, sitting at a battered kitchen table in the dirty sunlight, Marsha Blank: naked, frowzled. Paralyzed? So you Could Almost Fancy, with a Rush of Anxious Joy. But on the table, along with a cup of moldy yogurt, were phials, a tiny hypodermic syringe, and her left arm. You Sat in your Chair, beside her. It was not morphine. Her hair was a mess. Her breasts just touched the tabletop; on the right one a housefly circumambulated. Marsha was only half comatose: she regarded you, well, blankly, and nodded or at least bobbed her head for a considerable while.

Time passed. The light changed in the room. You Sort Of Inspected her: no manacles or other bonds in evidence; no apparent lacerations or contusions, just a few bug bites and, on the arm, red needle marks. A trickly sound; you Looked; the woman was pissing in her seat. You Returned to yours and presently Inquired, Was she all right?

Through the afternoon the dope wore off. At some point you Surveyed the other rooms, most of them empty except of litter. But one bedroom was more or less furnished, with a curious five-sided bed on which was piled what looked to be computer printout: long sheets of numbers, chewed at here and there by goats and, it appeared, slept on. Creases, rips, stains. Still no sign of Bray. Marsha wandered up and sat on a corner of the bed, legs apart, blinking now. She seemed to have wiped herself. You Had Not Seen a reasonably attractive unclothed female body for some while.

What kind of dope was it, Horner? You Still Don’t Know. Bray has it in both pill and powder form, the latter water-soluble and mainlined like heroin, which it isn’t. Marsha called it Honey Dust, and was hooked on it: a fix in the late forenoon, after morning chores, spaced her as aforedescribed until midafternoon; by dinnertime she’d be reasonably herself again, enough so at least to prepare a simple meal. But there are residual effects, which two weeks of enforced abstinence and therapy have since diminished but not altogether removed, and which you Fear will be restored by today’s mail. Formerly fastidious, she was now unsanitary and heedless of her appearance. Formerly assertive, sharp-edged, she was now passive, vacant. As she boiled eggs for your Dinner this first evening, for example, padding barefoot about the kitchen in one of Bray’s capes (open at the front), the buck wandered in to check the menu. Don’t mind him, she advised you, and herself ignored his persistent snuffling at her backside, through and under the cape. But when, growing more aggressive, he thrust his bearded snout between her thighs from in front, she said Ouch I’m sore there and conked him mildly with a ladle.

Having Established that Bray had been in Maryland for a week and was not expected back for another, you Took Heart, Ate A Boiled Egg, Asked More Questions, which Marsha more or less answered. As best you can Reconstruct The Events, she went down to Maryland from the Farm in late June or early July, either in her capacity as secretary to M. Casteene, or to visit her daughter by Ambrose Mensch, or both. Falling in with Reg Prinz’s film company in Cambridge on July 4, she met or remet Jerome Bray and with him formed some project of revenge upon her former husband (against whom she still harbors a grudge) and upon Bibi Golden, who it seems had vigorously spurned Bray’s advances and gone off somewhere with Mensch. The details of their joint grievance and joint plan of retaliation are unclear and, you Gather, no longer important: to discuss them, however, Marsha had permitted Bray to drive her back to her Cambridge motel at the end of that evening and buy her a nightcap in its bar.

Her insistence that what ensued was voluntary on her part is, in your Opinion, the insistence of a victim still in thrall to her victimizer: it Seems Clear to you that she was doped and raped that night and kept in some degree of narcosis thereafter until her need for the chemical, and its debilitation of her will, made her sexual and other compliance “voluntary.” All indictable offenses, you have Indignantly Pointed Out. Marsha shrugs her shoulders. Once installed on his farm, she went naked except on cool nights or when working outdoors among briars and thistles. She prepared the meals, tended the goats, did general chores — all perfunctorily, as has been seen. No further mention was made of their original project.

It is obvious that Bray abused her sexually: a week after his departure her vulva was still sore, and even now, a full month since, your Infrequent Copulation causes her discomfort. But she remains indifferent to that abuse, even uncertain of its details. Every forenoon, you Gather, from July 5 through 13, she would “do her Honey Dust” and “zonk out,” to find herself some hours later upstairs in that bed with a sore cunt, leaking semen on that printout paper. Sometimes she slept there at night as well, sometimes not (she had a double mattress of her own on the floor in another room), but except at the noon hour Bray never touched her sexually or otherwise mistreated her — aside from his ongoing crime upon her spirit!

Was she free to leave? Matter of semantics: her chemically induced complaisance, her indifference, was entire. You Imagine that the question never came up until you Raised it, next day.

By when, ☌☿☉, Apollo-11 on course toward Earth, John Dillinger shot near movie house in Port Huron, Mich., Senator Kennedy attends funeral of Mary Jo Kopechne, Napoleon’s only son dies in Vienna, you Had a Fair Understanding of her condition. That first night you Attempted To Express your Feelings for her, and Mistaking her dozing off for real rejection, you Did Not Share her couch, but Went Upstairs to that double mattress. When she wandered in during the night you Believed she was coming to you, but her mild Oh Hi There disabused you of that belief. She had forgotten you Were In The House. Experimentally, you Mounted her: she ouched in the same declaratory tone as earlier to that goat, whom you Do Not Doubt she’d have received as indifferently. You Of Course Withdrew, not at her request. Then in the morning you Announced, rather than Suggesting or Begging Leave, that you were Returning With Her to Fort Erie. She went on, naked, about her business, which included a trip out to the barn “to check LILYVAC.”

Despite your Leeriness of the livestock, you Went Along, to See What She Meant by that phrase. Your Life since 1953 has not Kept you Abreast of the technology of automatic computers and artificial intelligence; therefore you Cannot Say For Sure, what however is your Judgment, that the extraordinary object in the barn of Comalot Farm is no usual, perhaps not even a genuine, automatic computer. Indisputably it contains what Appeared to you to be components from Eisenhower-era electronic machines, as its name suggests: dusty banks of vacuum tubes, fins and fans for cooling them, bright-colored resistors, capacitors, condensers, wires a-plenty, glows, clicks, hums. But Looking More Closely through the pigeon shit and cobwebs, you Observed that at least some of what you’d Taken for metal or plastic was a scaly, waxy stuff, unidentifiable but vaguely repulsive; some of those wires were more like heavy beeswaxed cord, or dried tendons. There were in fact a great many bees and wasps about; you Feared for naked Marsha, and Began To Wonder whether the circumambient drone was electronic at all.

Hum. Tell us more, Horner. No one else about? Only the goats, who luckily had lost interest in you. “Checking LILYVAC” seemed to involve no more than Marsha’s sitting for some minutes in a seat molded into a cube of spun yellow fibrous stuff and pressing a red button or protuberance on each of its “arms.” Nothing you Could See ensued, but en route back to the house she dreamily remarked, That’s a real buzz. Fibers still stuck to her hams and buttocks, raising gooseflesh on you both. You Made Bold To Assist in their removal. She mmmed. In nothing like the predatory spirit wherein you Laid Peggy Rankin in the Surfside, or Seaside, or some other motel near Ocean City, Md., sixteen years past, you Caressed the labia, both majora and minora, of Marsha Blank. Her ouch this time was sharp enough to send the goats scampering. You Apologized.

Then, to your Surprise, she asked only whether she might do her daily Honey Dust before leaving (she seemed to have got it from LILYVAC). You Took Heart, Said Absolutely Not, Where are your clothes and things, et cetera. There wasn’t much; she made no fuss, but lost interest in the project. You Pretty Much Had To Dress Her yourself, not a disagreeable job at all but an awkward one. Then you Led her to the toilet and Instructed her to pee before you Set Out For Home. Dutifully she did, ouching again as she wiped herself after. Your Heart Was Stirred. Get in the car now, you Gently Commanded. She got. Exhaustion overcame you, the responsibility of initiative. For a long while you Sat behind the steering wheel, Marsha beside you, whom from time to time you Patted. She was open-eyed but glazed. Sometime after noon you Started The Engine, and after a while Moved Down The Driveway to the mailbox, where you Paused. Will the goats be okay till he gets back? you Inquired. Marsha murmured: Fuck ’em. We’ll take care of Bray later, you Promised. She fell asleep.

In an Unprecedented Show Of Self-Possession, which alas Marsha was oblivious to, you Dared The Thomas E. Dewey Thruway for the 20-odd consecutive miles from Exit 59, Fredonia, to Exit 58, Irving/Angola, before your Nerve Failed and you Exited. Handing the attendant the correct change! Checking Mr. & Mrs. Jacob Horner into the Iroquois Motel, overlooking Lake Erie, as if you Did Such Things Every Day! Finding Room 121! Extracting 2 ham sandwiches, 2 ice cream bars, and 2 Pepsi-Colas from 3 several vending machines with scarcely a hitch! Spreading that repast before your Woman on one of the twin beds in Room 121, whose air-conditioning unit you Adjusted yourself, and Bidding her eat! Posting outside your Door for all to see the Do Not Disturb sign; Turning back the bedcovers; Undressing both her and yourself; and, Almost Swooning with your Authority, Very Nearly Ordering her, in consideration of her tender vulva, to perform fellatio upon you! But exhaustion, exhaustion imperiously reasserted its claims: you Stood Unsteadily before her where she sat still on her bed edge; you Cupped her chin in your Left Hand, your Already Flagging Member in the other; you Wondered Gently Whether? She obliged, mouth still ice-creamy. I Love you! you Ejaculated.

Then with the Last Of your Strength you Wiped her mouth, Laid her down to rest (it was past 3 P.M.), and yourself Collapsed Into Sleep beside her. Next day, Wednesday, as the Dow-Jones Industrial Average sank to the year’s low and General Grant died and Senator Kennedy’s driver’s license was suspended and Haile Selassie was born and the Sun entered Leo, Jacob Horner was Scheduled per Wiedertraum to Have Dinner with Joe and Rennie Morgan, his Prospective New Colleagues at Wicomico Teachers College, where he had Just Been Appointed as a Teacher Of Prescriptive Grammar. But schedule or no schedule, you Needed Further Restoration before Resuming Management both of Marsha and of the Mercury. That day, therefore, a bright still one, you Spent In your Room except for three excursions to the now friendly array of vending machines, for breakfast, lunch, dinner. The chambermaid looked at you. There seemed to be no other guests at the Iroquois Motel. Deprived of her Honey Dust, Marsha was vacant but not comatose: it Appeared To you that she understood where she was and with whom, and did not mind. Sometimes she even replied to your Remarks and Queries. Daytime TV. When you Suggested A Shower she even said My my, and as you Soaped Up in there together, she declared almost crossly that she was able to scrub her own tits, thank you. This sharpness you Took For A Sign Of Recovery. Ditto her disinclination, this time, to receive your Ejaculate in her mouth, though she had no objection to collecting it in her other hand, which promptly thereafter she washed with more soap and water.

Skip your Sex Life, Horner. Any more information about that computer?

Only that when you Asked her sometime that night, as David Brinkley reported a.6 % increase in the U.S. cost of living for June, whether in her opinion LILYVAC was a bona fide electronic computer or a monstrous simulacrum, she formed the longest syntactically coherent sentence you had Heard from her since before her disappearance, possibly excepting the one about her tits, to wit: Life is going to be a bitch without Honey Dust.

Next day, then, Th 7/24, as H. “Rap” Brown’s speech in Cambridge, Maryland, inspired some of its black citizens to arson, and Congress established the Internal Revenue Service to raise money for the War of 1812, and President Nixon greeted the Apollo-11 astronauts quarantined aboard the U.S.S. Hornet, happy birthday Dumas père, Lord Dunsany, Amelia Earhart, you Successfully Checked Out of the Iroquois and Made Your Way up through South Buffalo, across the Peace Bridge, through U.S. and Canadian Customs, and back to the Farm! Fetched Marsha to the infirmary (Just rubbed raw is all, Tombo X’s new black nurse reported: She been getting it off with a corncob?)! Et cetera.

Joe allowed that afternoon’s P & A, here reported, to serve in Der Wiedertraum as your Abortive First Interview at Wicomico Teachers on 7/20/53; the subsequent week’s P & A (7/31/69) as your Second Interview (7/21/53), whereat you First Meet Joseph Morgan — though in fact your Dinner With Joe & Rennie Morgan (7/23/53) had been reenacted, inversely, the night before, 7/30/69. 1st tropical storm of season (Anna) reported in Caribbean, Goethe’s “Albert” arrives at Waldheim, Ted Kennedy announces will rerun for Senate but not for presidency in ’72, munitions ship Black Tom blown up at Jersey City docks by German saboteurs. Bibi/“Rennie” having gone off somewhere again, and you and Pocahontas/“Peggy Rankin” (as all save yourself still called your Woman) having Established yourselves at the Farm as a Couple, it was decided that you (O heavy plural!) would Have Morgan To Dinner instead of vice versa: i.e., that he would sit at your Table in the Dining Hall; that Marsha would pass the salt et cetera; that yours would be the awesome Hostly Initiative: Welcome, How are you this evening, Splendid or Beastly Weather we’re having, Like you to meet my Woman, How about a drink, all that. For you were a Couple, though access to Marsha’s vagina was proscribed till Lammas Day, ☽ on Equator, Herman Melville’s birthday: you Personally Monitored her withdrawal symptoms and her schedule of therapies (principally workouts on the Exercycle, meant both to ward off catatonia and to toughen up her crotch); you Slept Together (but see above); you Ignored the smirks and ungenerous comments of Tombo X and others; you Even Went So Far as to Make Clear to M. Casteene that while you Had No Objection to Marsha’s resuming her secretarial activities for him, he was not to expect resumption of additional services, inasmuch as etc. Fortunately he only laughed, wished you good luck, declared his business as prime mover at the Farm was about done in any case, and gave you to understand that the services previously rendered him by Pocahontas he had made shift to secure elsewhere. Even so, your Temerity laid you out for an interval.

What shall we Serve for hors d’oeuvres? you Wondered. Marsha reminded you that the dining hall menu includes neither hors d’oeuvres nor appetizers nor choice of entrée, only the options of coffee (regular or decaffeinated), tea, milk, or water and, in summer, the first two (or three) of these either hot or iced. It did not Take you Very Long To Decide on the coffee, decaffeinated, iced, for yourself. Marsha chose the water. Your guest the milk. You yourself had Selected Marsha’s dress for the occasion from her considerable wardrobe, in which she took less interest than formerly: a short sleeveless cotton print that set off to advantage, you Felt, her excellent arms and legs, her trim figure generally, and was neither Too Dressy nor Too Casual for the circumstances. Exhaustion. Her hair — no longer the meticulous coiffure of pre-Independence Days, but not the rat’s nest of Comalot Farm, either — was Beyond your Competence: at the last moment you Gently Suggested a kerchief, whereupon Marsha asked, rhetorically, Who gave a fuck?

The evening was successful, All Things Considered. You yourself Made Frequent Trips to ice-cube bin, water tap, milk dispenser, to keep everyone’s glasses filled. The meat loaf, in your View, was not up to par, and the mashed potatoes had been too long in the steam table. Too, there were perceptible wrinkles in the Fordhook lima beans, from their having been served the previous evening and reheated. But the chef surprised everyone with orange Jell-O! At table the conversation ranged from Marsha’s chain-smoking (which we Agreed Should Be Indulged For The Present) to Marsha’s worrisome intention, which she spoke of as if it were a contractual commitment, to return to Comalot in mid-August for her Final Fix. You Took The Position that such a return would amount to a relapse, unquestionably antitherapeutic. Marsha wittily shrugged her shoulders. Joe eloquently lighted his pipe. Is it a briefer an extended visit you have in mind? you Asked Her As If Jestingly, and she parried, That depends. Joe regarded you both.

By next afternoon’s P & A, Mariner-6 Mars photos show cratered terrain, Pony-Penning Day on Assateague Island, Va., you were Enough Recovered from the social whirl to Express to Dr. Morgan your Alarm at the prospect of Marsha’s retailing into Bray’s queer clutches. He looked at you. Did it not remind you, he mused, of another woman’s Compulsive Return, should we say, to her seducer, on 9/11, 16, & 25/53? Not greatly, you Retorted, and Seeing Joe’s face darken you Added Sincerely, Except in the hurt: that she should be “intimate” with any other man. He looked at you. It was decided that the Horseback-Riding Lessons of August 1953 (wherein your Relation to Rennie Morgan grew Ambivalently Personal as you Teased her with her husband’s programmatic rationalism and her own apparent self-subjugation), would be echoed most conveniently in Der Wiedertraum, by joint sessions on the Exercycles: you and Bibi every morning that she was present; you and Marsha-as-stand-in-for-Bibi-in-the-role-of-Rennie when (what seemed increasingly the case, to Joe’s annoyance) she wasn’t.

You Admitted To Some Concern that Marsha might disapprove of your Exercycling Privately with Bibi; nor were you yourself Delighted At The Notion of Marsha in the role of Mrs. Joseph Morgan. Your Audacity astonished you. Joe smiled. Do it anyhow. End of interview.

It is not working. Marsha’s progress (till today) was unimpaired by Bibi’s return, which indeed seemed to reinspire some degree of her former bitchery; you are still a Couple; she has permitted you Brief Access To Her Vagina on two separate occasions, Lammas and Transfiguration days, without contraceptives, Tombo X having attested with relish your Surgical Sterilization on 10/25/54. But though you are Pleased To Construe Marsha’s renascent vindictiveness as recuperation from her sojourn at Comalot, it does not make your Relationship more easy. And, as Joe grows ever more disaffected with Bibi’s alcoholism (this morning she fell off the Exercycle), Marsha meaningly insinuates that she herself could play the role of Rennie more ably in all respects. Already you Recall With Nostalgia your Idyll in Room 121, Iroquois Motel, Angola, N.Y., 14006, on Gregor Mendel’s and Coventry Patmore’s birthdays. Minatory Chambermaid! Faithful Vending Machines! Only Slightly Malfocused Color TV!

Then today’s mail, today’s P & A. What Bray has written to smashed Bibi you Would Very Much Like To Know. Marsha won’t tell—can’t, now she’s Honey Dusted. But in their separate oblivions the two women Seem To you to have reached some dark sisterly understanding, just at the approach of fell August’s Ides. And, as if your Woman’s relapse weren’t worry enough, Dr. Morgan all but apprises you that Bibi won’t do. My late wife, Horner, while no teetotaler, was not a drunk. You’ll have to Do Better. Dream Up Something Else. Time is short.

But your Dreams since March have been all of a kind: a large service handgun on a table midway between Joe, Rennie, and yourself, accessible equally to all. Rennie announcing her uncertain pregnancy and certain resolve to abortion or suicide. Rennie drowned in her own vomitus on the Doctor’s operating table. The only innovations are that since 8/1 it has been Marsha Blank on that table: your Woman, for whom you Care. And the pistol, aimed at a point just above a point equidistant between your Eyes, is in Joe Morgan’s hand.

U: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His last Progress and Advice session before “Saint Joseph’s” deadline.

8/28/69

TO:

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

FROM:

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

U.S.S.R. acknowledges danger of war with China. Slavery abolished in British Empire. Moon on equator. Last of first 25,000 U.S. troops leaves Viet Nam. Kennedy request for cross-examination of inquest witnesses in Chappaquiddick investigation denied. Civil-rights marchers march on D.C. Happy birthday Leo Tolstoy, Wolfgang Goethe, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Boyer.

It is your Wish that by thus Turning Backwards that key of keys, Alphabetical Priority, you could Reverse its fellow principles of arbitrary choice: Sinistrality (never mind Sinistrality) and — back! back! — Antecedence. That Der Wiedertraum might never reach Monday next, 9/1, St. Giles’ Day, but run backwards from Horseback-Riding Lessons With Rennie through First Dinner With The Morgans through First Fucking Peggy Rankin In Ocean City Motel through Arrival At Wicomico Teachers College through Remobilization By Doctor through Rescue By Doctor From First Paralysis In Penn Station, Baltimore, March 16, 1951, to the Sweet Void between that date (28th Birthday of Jacob Horner) and your Birth.

It won’t work, Horner, Joe reminded you this afternoon, in your Last P & A Session before his deadline. You Knew, you Acknowledged: the arrow of time, etc. Only a wish.

Today is Day 41 of our original Hundred Days, he went on inexorably, ticking his pipe stem upon a square of desk calendar. Tomorrow will be Day 42, not Day 40.

You Knew.

And Sunday 8/31 will be Day 44: your and Rennie’s Evening Espial, upon Return From Equitation, of Morgan Irrational: making faces at self in mirror, speaking nonsense aloud to self, springing monkeylike about room, simultaneously picking nose and masturbating.

You Knew; you Knew. Mme de Staël bears son Auguste to lover Narbonne. 14th Sunday after Pentecost. Queen Wilhelmina, Fredric March, Baron von Helmholtz, Theophile Gautier. Stop that. You Stopped.

You and Pocahontas will Espy, Joe either prescribed or presumed.

If that was what he wanted, you Sighed. Though Marsha Blank is not Rennie Morgan. Indeed she is not, agreed your Advisor, unamused. But in default of Bibi, not to mention the original Mrs. Rennie McMahon Morgan, deceased, your Woman will have to do. How is she?

Very near the end of her Honey Dust, you Replied: that final two weeks’ worth she fetched from Lily Dale just prior to the Great Fort Erie Magazine Explosion, as if in payment for delivering Bibi to Comalot Farm. A using up (that of that supply) that you Looked Forward To with very nearly as much apprehension as to Day 45, with which it might well coincide. She was meanwhile, your Woman, you Reported, principally engaged in composition of a Bombshell Letter, her own description, to her former husband: a Bombshell that, while you yourself Did Not Precisely Know its nature, she was pleased to imagine would Knock The Bastard Dead.

Not visibly arrested by this news, Joe lit his pipe and either inquired in declarative fashion, or asserted, or reminded you: Pocahontas is pregnant.

So it would appear, you Painfully Acknowledged. Unless, as is by no means impossible, she is experiencing early menopause. Marsha is 39. Has not menstruated since June. Was “due” in mid-July and again in the first half of August. So. Her (possible) pregnancy, however, you Have Reason To Believe — at least this pregnancy — is not the substance of her Bombshell Letter to Ambrose Mensch.

Joe was not curious about your Woman’s Bombshell Letter.

The father? he inquired. You Chose Not To Speculate. But not yourself? Not yourself; your Bilateral Vasectomy of October 1954 precluded Parenthood. Hum. But you Are Still, in your Phrase, a Couple? So yourself at least Were Pleased Still To Regard yourselves.

Hum. Abortion, Horner? Such recourse is not without precedent, you Know, both historical and literary.

You Knew. You Planned To Discuss that very question with Marsha in September, after Exhaustion Of Honey Dust, Successful Passage Of Deadline, and Unequivocal Determination Of Pregnancy, but before Expiration Of First Trimester Thereof.

You Speak of Successful Passage Of Deadline, Horner.

More Wish than Hope, you Admitted; and yet more Hope than Expectation.

I should say, Joe said. Espial is one thing. You and your Fogged-Out Friend may Dismount from your Exercycles, Finish your Latest Long Conversation about my hyperrationalism and its Pygmalionizing of our marriage, Walk Around to my office window, and Peek through the blind, where you’ll See me behaving as in our novel. Your Pocahontas may then to the best of her limited ability pretend to be Rennie Shocked to the Center of her Soul, whom you will Seductively Comfort with (I believe the script reads) “the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.”

Well.

Espial is one thing, Joe repeated. Play it as you Like; I won’t have to watch. But Successful Passage of my Deadline is quite another. Surely you Don’t Expect — when I demand that you Redream History and Give Me Back, alive and unadulterated, my dead wife — to Palm Off as Rennie Morgan your fucked-up, knocked-up Pocahontas?

Stung as always by his kindless adjectives, but Judging it the part of diplomacy once again to Let Them Pass, you Acknowledged that you Entertained no such expectations. Nor any real hope. Only the wish aforementioned, and that ever more ardently.

Forget it.

Well.

Look here, Horner. You Looked. On September 1, 1953, the day following your original Espial, you Revisited The Doctor at his Remobilization Farm, then in Maryland. Yes. Your Quarterly Visit. Yes. Is the account of that visit in our script a fair approximation of what transpired? Fair. You were “Weatherless.” Mm. But you Tended, in your P & A Session with the Doctor, to a manner more Brisk and Assertive than was your Wont: a manner Imitative, the Doctor immediately guessed, of some New Friend or Colleague of yours at the College. Mm. He chaffed you a bit for the imposture, then spoke at some length of Mythotherapy: the systematic assumption of borrowed or improvised personae to ward off paralysis in cases of ontological vacuity. Mm. He then demanded a response; you Found None To Hand; he demanded more sternly; you Began Slipping Into Catalonia; and he assaulted you, briefly, to bring you to. Pugilistic Therapy, I believe the script calls it.

Yes. Well.

Hum. Joe tapped out his pipe, its charge timelily combusted. We’re done, Horner. Given the calendar and my double role in this travesty, we’ll schedule your next P & A for Monday instead of Thursday. Labor Day. Anniversary of that other one, etc.

You Shrugged your Eyebrows.

I’ll be bringing an old friend of ours, Joe announced neutrally, and To your Horror drew from the Doctor’s desk (he no longer does the facing-chairs, knee-to-knee routine considered by the Doctor to be essential to Progress and Advice) the very pistol so prominently featured in your Recent Dreams, your Last Letter, and the events of autumn 1953. A Colt.45 for Day 45, he mirthlessly remarked. We’ll combine the P & A Scene of September 1 with the Pistol Scene of October 5, 1953.

Look here, Joe, you Expostulated.

You Bring A Friend too, Joe said, not exactly an invitation. My wife. Alive and unfucked by you.

Joe.

Maybe I’ll tell you then what my real grievance against you is, Horner.

You Believed you Could Guess.

It’s not finally that you Betrayed Our “Friendship,” you Know. It’s not even that you Destroyed My Marriage, possibly Impregnated My Wife, and Contributed To Her Untimely Death.

Mm.

Rennie had a hand in all that too. So did I.

You here Assiduously Kept your Own Counsel, even unto facial expression, twitch of hand, and any other controllable body language interpretable as Yes Well.

One more thing, Jake.

That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?

Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?

Bring it, too.

~ ~ ~

D: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The third posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: the Battle of New Orleans and Napoleon’s surrender to Bellerophon.

Aboard S.S. Statendam

Off Bermuda

Wednesday, August 6, 1969

Dear Henry:

Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—

Je ne sais quoi, particularly given my disappointment of the week before, when, having transcribed at so long length for you Andrew IV’s adventures from the birth of his children through his “death” at Fort McHenry, and posted copies of my transcription to you c/o that novelist I had thought my partner (on the off chance it might be he who’d showed you the “prenatal” letters), I receive from him—crossed in the mails — nothing less surprising than a rejection of my acceptance of his own invitation to collaborate with him on a Marylandiad! And he has returned the four prenatals, which I must now assume will be followed by what followed them.

He will be sorry. Not because I plan, at least for now, any particular retaliation, but because he has cut himself off (as have you, Henry; as have you) from much that either a novelist or a 2nd-Revolutionary could make use of: the account of our forebear’s “Second Cycle,” of my own, perhaps even of yours. See how drolly, in despite of rude awakenings, I still dream!

We have, then, you and I, not yet begun to talk. Nevertheless, I shall continue, per program, that series of decipherments and anniversary transcriptions, withholding them from the mails till I shall have your proper address, or find you, or you find me. What’s more, as we are no longer to be monitored by that authorial “third ear,” I shall speak more confidentially: not of Andrew Cook IV, of whom I know only what his wife would have known had she not (like our novelist, but with better reason) declined to read these lettres posthumes, nor — yet — of my own history, but of the circumstances of these transcriptions and what I’ve been up to this past month with my left hand, as it were, while the right transcribed.

As “Andrew Cook VI” (who I “became” in 1953, nel mezzo del cammin etc.), I spent July preparing for my lectureship this fall at Marshyhope State University, where I have advertised a course in The Bonapartes of Fiction & the Fiction of the Bonapartes (did you know that Napoleon’s brothers Joseph, Louis, and Lucien all wrote romantic novels?). In that same capacity — I mean as the person I am — I have served as historical consultant to Mr. Reginald Prinz’s filming of events from the 1812 War, a project I am turning to our own purposes. I have also monitored, to some extent even discreetly managed, a number of our potential allies or adversaries: Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation, for example; the historian Lady Amherst, whom I’ve mentioned before; and the heirs of the late Harrison Mack, Jr.

At the same time, as “Monsieur Casteene”—our archancestor’s name, which I have seen fit to use at our Fort Erie base — I have been preparing an eccentric putative descendant of the American Bonapartes (Jérôme’s line, through Betsy Patterson) for a certain role he himself will be unaware of playing. And I have overseen the movement of our people from that base (which is of use to us only as long as the U.S. continues to draft civilians for military service in Viet Nam — another year or less) to “Barataria,” disguised as extras for upcoming sequences of Prinz’s film. My lodge there is our headquarters for the next academic year.

Finally, as “Baron André Castine”—the man I was until 1953 and in this single capacity am yet — I have been at the most immediately important work of all: the financing of our Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. That is the work that brings me to be “vacationing” here (as of last night, when I flew out from Washington) for a few days with your future stepmother, of whom I also happen to be fond. As we cruise in Netherlandish comfort through the waters where in May of 1814 our forebear — or some ship’s officer — impregnated the hapless Consuelo del Consulado, I make plans with the handsome widow of Harrison Mack for the settlement of his estate, which with certain other sources of revenue should carry us far toward 1976.

You remember the admirable Jane Mack, Henry, to whom (as her distant cousin A. B. Cook VI) I introduced you at her husband’s funeral. Some time before his death, when their alcoholic daughter first sought treatment at the Fort Erie sanatorium, I had arranged Mrs. Mack’s introduction to “Baron André Castine,” who subsequently comforted her, in London and elsewhere, through the terminal stages of her husband’s illness, and consoled her for his death. (I was also, for a certain reason, protecting Harrison Mack’s own comforter, the aforementioned Lady Amherst.) Mrs. Mack has taken it into her head to end her days as a baroness: she frankly suspects me of fortune hunting; I her of title hunting. We agree on the legitimacy of both pursuits when they are not cynical, and believe each of us to esteem in the other more than just the title and the fortune. Jane assumes, wrongly, that I want to enrich myself for the usual reasons, and does not disapprove: indeed, next week I shall take delivery in Annapolis of a large trawler yacht, her gift for my 52nd birthday. I have not apprised her of our cause (or the real reason I want that yacht) because — like her son, like most of our young “Baratarians,” like my own parents — she would mistake the Revolution to be still political in its goals, and would of course be as wrongheadedly its foe as Drew Mack is wrongheadedly its friend.

It is my fiancée’s plan to contest her late husband’s will — which leaves the bulk of his estate to his philanthropic foundation — on the grounds of his madness, and to negotiate distribution half to herself, the other half in equal portions to her two children and the Tidewater Foundation. Inasmuch as Jane’s moiety would be to some extent mine even during her lifetime (she is an astute and frugal manager), and Drew Mack’s would be largely applied — by his lights — to our cause, I acceded to this plan, while privately seeing to it that things will turn out somewhat differently.

Suppose, for example — but never mind! Like Jane’s (that excellent businesswoman’s), my plans are intricate but clear, and best not babbled about. True minds, we shall marry in the new year. If you’ve any objections, Henry — or suggestions for dealing with “A. B. Cook VI” when Jane Mack becomes the Baroness Castine! — speak now…

Our ancestor. The postscript to his second “posthumous” letter found him resurrected from his “death” and bound for New Orleans to meet Jean Lafitte, hoping somehow to forestall the British movement on that city. But it was a postscript penned, like the letter it ended, six months after that fateful battle; Andrew wrote it, with but the merest hint of what he is doing there, from the orlop deck of H.M.S. Bellerophon, off Rochefort in France on July 16, 1815, one day after Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender to the commander of that vessel. Not until this third and central of his lettres posthumes does Andrew’s past overtake his present, and the intricate labor of exposition give way to more immediate drama. The letter (before me) is dated August 6, 1815, and headed, in “Captain Kidd’s code”:

*‡47‡(*))**8008011‡:((82†5849‡;:52

(i.e., NOHPORELLEBFFOYRREBDAEHROTYAB, or Bellerophon, Off Berry Head, Tor Bay: that historic naval anchorage on the east Devon Coast, between the rivers Exe and Dart). He is back aboard that warship, having left it in Rochefort on an errand that fetched him overland through Tours and Rouen to Dieppe, London, and Exeter before the old Bellerophon (no Pegasus) arrived there with its famous passenger. He is about to witness, with relief, a second surrender, of another sort, by that same passenger: Napoleon has at last abandoned all hope of asylum in either America or England and, contrary to his repeated vow, agreed to permit himself and his company to be transferred on the morrow to H.M.S. Northumberland, commanded by our old friend Admiral Sir George Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” for exile to St. Helena. As Andrew writes this letter to Andrée, the ex-emperor, two decks above, is dictating a flurry of memoranda — to Commander Maitland, to Admirals Keith and Cockburn, to History — protesting (falsely) that he has been betrayed: that he was assured sanctuary and has been denied it. It is the first phase of Napoleon’s programmatic self-martyrdom, the living out of a romantic fiction instead of the writing of it. The idea has come to him in part from our ancestor, as shall be seen — for whom, however, the emperor’s exile on St. Helena is itself to be but the first phase of the Second Revolution.

But how is it I am here, he now asks with us, who last was leaving Maryland for Louisiana, newly risen from the dead, with Mr. Key’s anthem ringing in my ears? Why did I not return straightway to Castines Hundred? Why do I not now, instead of back to Galvez-Town & Jean Lafitte?

This last, at least, he finds easy to answer to his satisfaction: his Fort Bowyer postscript to (posthumous) Letter #1 had implored Andrée to come with the twins to New Orleans, where he now professes to hope to find them, under Lafitte’s protection, upon his return. And the other questions?

He reviews his official motives. In William Patterson’s house in Baltimore, where he recuperated, it was believed that the destruction of Washington on the one hand and on the other the British defeats at Plattsburgh, Lake Champlain, and Baltimore would bring the treaty commissioners at Ghent to an understanding, perhaps before 1815 commenced. But the question remained open whether such a treaty would bind the signatories to their status quo ante bellum or uti possidetis—before the fighting started or after it should end. Thus Admiral Cochrane’s race to restore his fortunes by taking New Orleans, and General Jackson’s to reach that city and muster an army in time to defend it.

Now, from Andrew Cook IV’s earlier point of view there would have been everything to be said for a British victory: Thomas Jefferson himself fears that once possessed of Louisiana the British can hold it indefinitely, navigating with impunity from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and effectively bordering the United States at the Mississippi; and radical New England Federalists are maintaining publicly that British possession of Louisiana will signal dissolution of the Union and legitimize a New England Confederation. But our ancestor has become, however qualifiedly, a patriot: if he does not want the Indians driven into the Pacific, neither does he want the Union dissolved. (A French Louisiana would be another story: a third influence, to check both British and American expansion into the West…)

He fears, moreover, that the confrontation will be horrific. Cochrane will reinforce his expedition massively at Jamaica (There are rumors that Wellington himself is being sent to lead the army. In fact, Wellington has advised the British cabinet to relinquish their demand for an Indian free state and settle a treaty: in his view, the loss of Tecumseh and of naval control of the Lakes has lost the war). Andrew is no lover of General Jackson, the butcher of the Creeks, but he knows him to be a formidable officer; if the defense of New Orleans will be made difficult by the shortage of regular troops and armaments and by the ethnic diversity of its defenders — Spanish, Mexicans, Anglo-Saxons, West Indians, free blacks and “coloreds,” Creole French both Bourbon and Bonapartist, even Italians and Choctaws! — its invasion will be also, through a labyrinth of bayous where only the alligators and the Baratarians are at home.

It is our progenitor’s official hope, then—was, he reminds Andrée — that he can help turn the battle into a siege at worst, till the treaty is announced, by persuading each side that the other is decisively superior. With the aid of the Baratarians, perhaps Jackson can contain the invaders in a holding position; knowing Cochrane’s irresolution and his greed for prizes, Andrew even imagines that the admiral might be bought off with a negotiated indemnity, and the ransom ships then seized at sea by Lafitte’s privateers. It is exactly such audacious traffic that the U.S. Navy has tried to break up by destroying Barataria in September and arresting Pierre Lafitte and Dominique You (Jean’s older brothers, the latter under his nom de guerre): a move deplored by New Orleans merchants whose stock in trade comes from the privateers.

Thus Andrew’s official reasons. But we have seen how the Cooks and Burlingames fly from husband- and parenthood; how this Andrew in particular is in flight from the general Pattern of our past and the specific course of his life’s “first cycle” (in my view, he runs into and perpetuates what he flees, like King Oedipus). There is moreover his guilt concerning Andrée, and concerning dead Tecumseh. And that blow on the head…

Plus one thing more, Henry, which he does not list among his motives but mentions promptly (as though in passing) in this letter. Andrew reaches New Orleans in late November 1814; he puts himself in touch with his friend Jean Blanque of the state legislature, who introduces him to Jean Lafitte. Cook has sensibly assumed the name of his Gascon forebear André Castine: Lafitte and Blanque are fellow Gasconards, from Bayonne, home of the eponymous ham and the bayonet. They hit it off at once; Cook’s impression is confirmed that the French Creoles want neither a British victory, which would end their influence and their privateering, nor an overstrong Federal presence: Mayor Girod himself had disapproved of the navy’s raid on Barataria. Like Andrew, but for a different reason, they prefer uneasy balances of power: it is Cartagena’s rebellion against Spain, for example, that licenses their privateering. Lafitte and Blanque are convinced that the 5,000 Baratarians, their copious munitions and supplies, local knowledge and experience of combat, could turn the coming battle in either direction. They would prefer to fight on the American side, in exchange for a general pardon and tacit permission to reestablish their “business”; but despite their refusal of British overtures to cooperate against “the destroyers of Barataria,” Andrew Jackson has ill-advisedly proclaimed against them, calling them “hellish banditti.” Jean Lafitte himself has scarcely been able to arrange Pierre’s escape from the New Orleans Cabildo, where Dominique You still languishes in heavy irons. Indignantly they show Andrew the offending proclamations, as translated and reprinted in a month-old issue of the local French-language Bonapartist newspaper, L’Abeille. He reads; he politely tisks his tongue at Jackson’s sanctimonious imprudence. Then his eye is caught by a familiar phrase in a neighboring column: “…next, drawing from her purse the deadly letter-opener…” (“… ensuite, tirant de son sac à main l’ouvre-lettre mortel…”). It is from an installment of a serial fiction, Les lettres algériennes, par C.C.

Andrew demonstrates for his companions his remarkable ability to imitate the speech and manners of rural Anglo-Americans and proposes to intercede for the Baratarians with General Jackson, under the name of Andrew Cook of Maryland. He then inquires about this “C.C.” A pregnant Spaniard, Lafitte tells him with a smile: current mistress of Renato Beluche, an old comrade and fellow buccaneer with a peculiar fancy for expectant mothers. He Jean has been instilled by his Jewish grandmother with an animosity toward all things Spanish (the Inquisition killed her husband and drove the family to Haiti, where Jean and his brothers were sired by their Gascon father); but “Uncle Renato,” a New Orleans Creole of Tourainian descent, does not share this prejudice. As for his special taste in women, Beluche declares it to be a matter of sweetened complexions, the convenience of nonmenstruation, and the freedom from responsibility for by-blows; but Jean attributes it to Renato’s mother’s having been left pregnant at her husband’s death, and to young Renato’s solicitude for her.

Satisfying himself that Consuelo is, at least until her term, in good hands (Beluche has set her up in a flat on Conti Street, near Jean’s own mistress, and prevailed upon friends at L’Abeille to translate and publish her fiction. When delivery time comes he will see to her accouchement, give the newborn a generous birthday gift, and look for another expectant beauty in need of protection), Andrew presses his inquiry no further, but decides to use some other English name in his dealings with Jackson.

It is this ready and thorough improvisation of identities which Lafitte finds most appealing in our ancestor. Himself at this time a suave 32-year-old who for a decade already has been chief among the Baratarian captains, he relishes pseudonyms and disguises, but has no gift for facial change and the imitation of speech. When Andrew now alters before their eyes the set of his jowls, the flare of his nostrils, the cast of his eyebrows and the pattern of his facial wrinkles, along with his stance, apparent height, and timbre of voice (he becomes “Jonathan Barlow, elder nephew of the late American minister to France: born in New England, educated in Paris and London, now come down from Kentucky as confidential observer for his old friend Henry Clay”), Lafitte offers him at once the post of minister of magic in whatever new Barataria might rise from the ashes of the old when the British are turned back.

But first they must be turned, and to their turning our forebear credits himself with three significant contributions. Early in December Andrew Jackson arrives, gaunt with dysentery and the rigors of his march from Florida, and assumes command of the city’s defenses. He inspires morale; he moves with industry and intelligence to fortify or block the likeliest approaches; but he has not enough men. In particular he lacks trained sailors and cannoneers, and heavy weapons for their use. Reinforcement is on the way, from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, but it is all cavalry and infantry. Delegations of Creole citizens petition him in vain to enlist the Baratarians. To the bilingual “Ambassador from Kentucky” (whom he trusts for “speaking like a proper American and not a damn’d Frenchie”) Jackson confides that he has begun to regret his proclamation, but fears he will be thought irresolute if he rescinds it. “Johnny Barlow” opines that his friend Henry Clay, in such a situation, would subtly shift his stand and refuse the next such petition on jurisdictional instead of moral grounds: Baratarian leaders are in jail awaiting federal prosecution, and he Jackson has no authority to release them. “Barlow” will then see to it that the petitioners and the federal district judge get the hint; when prosecution is suspended and the Baratarians are released, Jackson may accept their service and materiel without having solicited them. The matter of pardon can be postponed until after the emergency. Jackson will thus have at his disposal the best sailors and cannoneers in the world, at no cost to the U.S. Treasury, together with an exquisite network of strategic information. Any contradictions of his proclamation will pass unnoticed; the Baratarians’ role can be ignored or understated in official dispatches to Washington; their prosecution can even be resumed at some future date, with or without giving them covert advance warning and time to escape.

Old Hickory grimaces. “Politics!”

“John Barlow” shrugs. What is a general of the army but a sort of chief executive? he asks. And what is the President of the United States but a sort of general, strategically marshaling and deploying the forces at his disposal to carry out as it were the orders of the Constitution? Jackson’s frown turns pensive.

Two days later Dominique You and the others are free, Jean Lafitte is reviewing his own maps with the general, Renato Beluche is organizing artillery companies, and the vessels that in September had fired Barataria are now manned by the Baratarians! “John Barlow” discreetly retires.

The British land their advance parties and assemble below the city. A sustained drive against them is out of the question: even with Jackson’s reinforcements, it is some 3,000 American militia against three times that many seasoned British regulars. Nevertheless, the first action between them — a bold and successful night raid by Jackson to induce the British to delay their own attack until their whole army is assembled (thus giving him more time to complete his defenses) — convinces “André Castine” that with the help of the Baratarians New Orleans can be defended. Word has come through Jean Lafitte’s spies that the British service commanders are at odds with each other. Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, does not like the terrain: his army has the Mississippi on one flank, a swamp full of alligators and Indians on the other, the Americans before (who barbarously harass them all night long), and behind them a fleet that can evacuate only one third of the troops at a time. Admiral Cochrane is complaining that he has another General Ross on his hands; that if the army “shrinks from New Orleans as it shrank from Baltimore,” he will land his sailors and marines, storm the city himself, and let Pakenham’s soldiers bring up the baggage.

All familiar as a re-play’d play, writes Andrew Cook: the Chesapeake moved to the Mississippi! On the day after Jackson’s night raid — i.e., December 24, as Henry Clay and his colleagues in Ghent sign a treaty agreeing to the status quo ante bellum (which the British privately mean to interpret as invalidating Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase) — he puts by his French alias and under his proper name gets himself “rescued” by the British.

More specifically, he devises with Lafitte and Beluche the following strategy: their agents among the Spanish bayou fishermen, who are cooperating with the British, will identify him as a friend of Lafitte’s with whom Jean has broken over the question of the Baratarians’ allegiance to the U.S. However much Cochrane distrusts him after the Chesapeake episode, the admiral will most certainly question him about the strength and disposition of Jackson’s forces. Cook will improvise as best he can to stall and divert a major British offensive at least until Jackson’s defense line is complete.

The crucial thing is that his “rescue” seem authentic. Unfortunate coincidence comes to his aid: Lafitte arranges for a party of Baratarian scouts to bring Andrew in from the marsh as a captured British scout; he is then quickly transferred under Baratarian guard, with other captured British scouts, through a stretch of bayou known to be patrolled by Cochrane’s marines. At the first evidence of British troops nearby, the Baratarians pretend to take fright and flee to save themselves, abandoning their prisoners. As the British congratulate themselves on their unexpected good fortune, Andrew experiences the first of those post-McHenry blackouts aforementioned: he wakes to find himself under a stand of loblolly pines on Bloodsworth Island, 36 years old, the war not yet begun…

Or so for a dizzy moment he imagines, till he learns from a redcoated officer that it is Bayou Bienvenue whose muddy bank he sits on, not the Chesapeake: those are cypresses, not pines, and it is Christmas Day, 1814. The sailors who row him down to Cochrane’s headquarters are jeering openly at the soldiers encamped along the way; morale does not seem high. At the Villeré plantation, British GHQ, word has it that Cochrane and Pakenham are still arguing strategy. An army aide comes out to interrogate the rescued scouts: Andrew declares to him that the key to Jackson’s defense is two armed schooners anchored in English Turn, a bend of the Mississippi below the city. So long as they lie there, he swears, no approach by road to the American main line is feasible; but to destroy them will involve the construction of artillery batteries on the levee above.

Such exactly (Cook already knows) is General Pakenham’s plan. Gratified by this confirmation of its wisdom, the general proceeds to devote the next two days to the laborious construction of those batteries, while his army twiddles its thumbs and Admiral Cochrane sends crossly for the bearer of that information. Fickle strategist that he is, unused (as a navy man) to thinking of terrain, it nonetheless seems to him clear folly to delay the whole army’s advance in order to lay siege to a minor nuisance that can as easily be attended to when Jackson’s main line has been breached. When he discovers who it is who has confirmed Pakenham in this folly, he is ready to muster a firing squad at once — but the “Spanish fishermen,” on cue, swear that Cook is a defected Baratarian, erstwhile friend and now rival of Jean Lafitte; and Cook himself confesses at once to Cochrane that his information is fraudulent; that the admiral’s own assessment of the situation is entirely correct.

Shoot him, Cochrane orders. But Andrew then hands him a confidential letter purportedly from Jean Lafitte to General Jackson, affirming that if the British can only be led to attack those schooners first, the defense barricade will be impregnable to anything short of a full-scale artillery barrage. Shoot him! Cochrane commands, even more outraged. Andrew then asks, as his final request, a private word with the admiral and his closest aides, and as soon as the army men step outside, he draws the moral that Cochrane has not yet grasped. Let the army waste its time on the schooners (one will be abandoned and destroyed; the Baratarians will tow the other upriver to safety, from where it can strengthen the main line) and on a follow-up infantry assault, which American artillery will easily repulse, one hopes without too great loss of life. Pakenham then twice defeated, Cochrane can mount an artillery line of his own with the only heavy guns available — those from his fleet, superior in size and number to the Americans’—and make good his boast. Navy cannon will destroy the defense and most of the defenders; the marines can do the rest, with as much or little army assistance as they may require!

It is Andrew’s private hope that Pakenham’s assault will be just costly enough to persuade both commanders to await reinforcement. In fact, the Baratarians prove such excellent cannoneers that when Pakenham attacks on the 28th, his force is pinned to the mud for seven hours and obliged to a humiliating night retreat with 200 casualties, most of them dead, as against 17 on the American side. Mortified, the general accedes to “Cochrane’s” plan for an artillery duel. But it will require three days more to construct even rudimentary emplacements, while Jackson’s ditches and embankments grow daily deeper, higher, stronger, and the Americans’ morale improves with every new success…

In those three days, Andrew writes, given fair freedom of the British camp by Admiral Cochrane, I cast about for my next expedient. For tho I was assured that the Admiral’s guns, however superior, could not breach Jackson’s earthworks (in the event, all those tons of British cannonballs plough’d into the mud & but strengthen’d the walls!), and that the famous marksmanship of the Baratarians would carry the day, I was not confident that a peace would be sign’d, or we have news of it, before Army & Navy mended their differences, fetcht up their reserves, and made a mighty attempt to add Louisiana to the status quo ante bellum.

On the 29th he hears a valuable rumor: that Major General Gibbs, Pakenham’s second in command, thinks both his chief and Admiral Cochrane mad for planning to send infantry over ground so marshy that it cannot be entrenched, to cross a wide ditch (virtually a moat) and scale a high mud wall without proper fascines and ladders. Two days later he hears another: that one Lieutenant Colonel Mullens of the 44th Infantry Regiment, whose wife is among the officers’ ladies come over with the fleet, has been cuckolded by Admiral Malcolm of the Royal Oak, on which ship Mrs. Mullens is waiting out the battle; and that her husband is properly embittered by this state of affairs.

On New Year’s morning, 1815, Cochrane’s artillery mounts its barrage. The infantry await behind to make their assault as soon as Jackson’s wall is breached. Forty minutes later, so accurate is the Baratarians’ reply, half the British cannon are out of action; by afternoon the infantry must be withdrawn without ever attacking; that night the surviving ship’s guns, so toilsomely emplaced, must be toilsomely retrieved through the marsh. The Americans are jubilant and scarcely damaged; the thrice-repulsed British suffer nearly a hundred additional casualties and a great loss of face, confidence, guns, and ammunition.

Pakenham and Cochrane are now equally humiliated… but to Andrew’s distress they do not abandon the siege. Aside from the burning of Washington (in which action George Cockburn was the driving spirit) Cochrane has won no victories in this fast-concluding war; and Sir Edward Pakenham (Andrew has now learned) carries a secret commission to be the first royal governor of Louisiana. They agree to wait for the reinforcements and supplies en route from Havana and then mount an overwhelming attack from both sides of the Mississippi: if American cannon can be captured on one flank and turned against the center while fascines and scaling ladders are positioned, Jackson’s defense will be breached by sheer force of numbers. It will not be inexpensive, they agree: but the prize, and the salvaging of their reputations, is worth the cost.

I understood, writes Andrew, that my efforts to discourage them had but raised the stakes, and that as their troops grew the more disheartened, their commanders turn’d the more stubborn. Unable now to prevent a grand battle, I was obliged to see not only that it fail, but that it fail miserably, beyond that of re-enactment.

He is not surprised that, after the New Year’s Day fiasco, Cochrane no longer seeks his advice; indeed, he discreetly avoids the admiral’s sight. From those Baratarian spies among the Spanish fishermen he picks up a third valuable rumor: that Admiral Malcolm has let General Pakenham know that he will be much obliged if Lieutenant Colonel Mullens can be assigned some particularly hazardous duty in the coming action. And from the cynical foot soldiers he learns further that Pakenham has chosen his critic, General Gibbs, to lead the main assault on the American center. At Gibbs’s desperate insistence the corps of engineers is building ten-foot ladders and heavy fascines of ripe sugarcane, the only available material. Lieutenant Colonel Mullens’s 44th Regiment is under Gibbs’s command: it wants no military expertise to guess what “particularly hazardous duty” lies ahead for Mrs. Mullens’s husband, whom Andrew now befriends and apprises of the rumors current.

He was a dour, melancholical fellow, this Mullens, Andrew reports, but neither a coward nor a fool. Unsurprised & bitter as he was to learn the scheme against himself, his first thot was for his men. When his orders came down on the evening of January 7, and he was ask’d if he understood them, he reply’d: ’Twas clear as day: his regiment were order’d to their execution, to make a bridge of their bodies for Sir Edward to enter New Orleans upon.

Nevertheless, he musters his men and marches them that night toward their position, stopping en route to pick up their burden at the engineers’ redoubt. Ladders and fascines are strewn everywhere; but their makers not being among the units ordered into combat next morning, they and their officers have retired. Cursing their good fortune and his ill, Mullens goes in search of someone authorized to give him official consignment of the gear — until Andrew, who has accompanied him thus far, finds the opportunity he has sought and makes his third and final contribution to the Battle of New Orleans.

I pointed out, he reports to Andrée, that his orders specify’d taking delivery of the fascines & ladders and proceeding with them to the front, to be ready for attack at dawn. But to appropriate that equipage without a sign’d release from the engineering battalion would be to exceed his authority. If no officer was present to consign the ladders to us, I argued, the dereliction was the engineers’, not ours. We would do better to arm ourselves & take our stations for battle without the ladders, than to take the ladders without authorization.

Seductive as this logic is, Mullens fears court-martial. But dawn is approaching; they have wasted a quarter hour already at the redoubt; Andrew resolves the matter by having Mullens deputize him to find the appropriate engineering officer and bid him rouse his men to fetch the ladders and fascines forward, while Mullens sees to it the 44th are in position. Otherwise their tardiness might be imputed to lack of courage. Mullens shrugs, moves the regiment on — and Andrew does nothing.

Now, it is possible the British would have lost the battle even with their scaling equipment: the marines assigned to cross the Mississippi in 50 boats at midnight, capture the American cannon on the west bank, and open fire on Jackson’s center at dawn to signal the attack, are delayed by mud slides and adverse current; they reach the west bank only at dawn — their force reduced from 1,400 to less than 500 by confusions, desertions, and garbled orders — and find themselves swept by the current five miles below their appointed landing place. The guns are not even approached, much less captured, until well after the main assault has failed.

But the missing ladders and fascines are indisputably crucial. When General Gibbs, by dawn’s early light, sees the 44th in position without them, he claps his brow, rushes over to Pakenham, and vows to hang Mullens from the highest cypress in the swamp. Pakenham himself angrily orders Mullens and 300 of his men to return for the ladders, authorization or no authorization. But it is a quarter-mile trip each way, and the gear is heavy. From the engineers’ redoubt they hear the first shots of the battle. Dozens of the 44th refuse to pick up the equipment and return to the line; scores of others, fearing court-martial, assume their burden but take their own time, hoping the assault will have been made or abandoned before they get there.

Even now Mullens is inclined to comply, however sluggishly, with his orders. But Andrew confesses to him that he himself deliberately disobeyed the colonel’s command to rouse up the engineers; that he had done so to save the 44th from suicide, and will answer for his action to any court-martial; that it is Mullens’s feckless complaisance with his superiors that has lost him his wife; and that should he return to the line now, either Gibbs will shoot him for not ordering the regiment forward, or his men will shoot him for doing so, or the Americans will shoot them all. Be a man, Andrew ironically exhorts him: Stay here & lay the blame on me.

Mullens does, and disappears from our story (he will live to be court-martialed for incompetence; of his marital affairs no more is known). Fewer than half of the 300 return to the line; of those, many feign or suffer confusion, throw away the ladders and fascines, and open random fire. Jackson’s cannoneers reply with a barrage that blows them into panic retreat. They ignore Gibbs’s orders to regroup and charge. Pakenham himself, finding Mullens vanished, leads the remnants of the 44th some three dozen yards forward, and is killed by Baratarian grapeshot. Gibbs takes his place, gets as close as twenty yards from Jackson’s ditch, and is cut down by rifle fire. Major General Keane, third in command, falls a few minutes later trying to rescue Gibbs. The few intrepid British who actually manage to cross the ditch and scale the embankment are immediately killed or captured.

The Battle of New Orleans is less than half an hour old, and effectively over. Major General Lambert of the reserve units, unexpectedly promoted from fourth in command to commander in chief, orders his men to attack. They refuse. He then orders retreat, and is willingly obeyed. Most of the rest of the army are pinned to the muddy plain by Jackson’s barrage. At 8:30 A.M. the riflery ceases, the attackers having crawled back out of range; the artillery is sustained with deadly effect into early afternoon, when Lambert sends a flag of truce and begs leave to remove his wounded and bury his dead. They total 2,000, as against half a dozen Americans killed and seven wounded.

’Twas a scene to end an Iliad, writes Andrew, that huge interment in the bloody bog; I resolved to take advantage of it to recross the lines & resume my Odyssey. But that same sudden swoon, which had afflicted me in the bayou on Christmas Eve day, now smote me again as I mingled with the burial parties. Once more I awoke to think myself on Bloodsworth Island, and found myself on the shores of Louisiana! I had been fetcht back to Lake Borgne as one of the wounded; recognized now by Admiral Cochrane’s sailors, I was detain’d a virtual prisoner, as accessory to the Mullens affair. Had news of the Peace not reacht us ashore at Fort Bowyer (which Cochrane seized to console himself for the loss of New Orleans) instead of aboard ship, I had surely been return’d to England in irons or hang’d from the yardarm for a spy. But in the officers’ chagrin (and the enlisted men’s rejoicing) at that same news, I contrived on St. Valentine’s Day to hide myself in the Fort till my captors departed. I then posted to you the letter begun off Bermuda the summer before (which seem’d already a hundred years since), and made my way back to New Orleans, to await your arrival with the twins, when we should commence a new life in new surroundings. Whilst awaiting you there, I thot to complete that other letter begun in Washington, which I was not to finish until Rochefort in the July to come.

He has other thoughts as well. It is getting on to March; for some weeks no new installments of Les lettres algériennes have appeared in L’Abeille, though its heroine (Corinna!) has been left in parlous straits, abandoned by her protector and captured by pirates off Port-au-Prince. Andrew goes to Conti Street, makes inquiries, learns that while “C.C.” is in reasonably good health, her child, a daughter, died at birth on that same St. Valentine’s Day. Further, that Renato Beluche, no longer interested in her, has paid her rent through May and gone with the Lafittes to Grande-Terre Island (the site of Barataria) to discuss the resumption of their privateering. Understandably, Andrew does not dwell upon the reunion, but in the next passages of his letter his I turns not infrequently into a we.

He remains in New Orleans (in the Conti Street lodgings) until May, “consoling” himself (the term is his) as best he can while awaiting his family’s appearance. “Uncle Renato,” grateful, keeps him employed forging false bills of lading and other useful documents. With Jean Lafitte, Andrew’s relations grow even closer (except with Consuelo, he resumes the name André Castine). Whereas Beluche is interested in the rebel Simón Bolivar and the Mexican revolt against Spain, Lafitte is actively supporting the colony of Bonapartist exiles at Champ d’Asile. Andrew harmonizes their interests by encouraging a French and Mexican alliance against Spain; if it should succeed, Bolivar might head a federation of republics comprising most of Central and South America, while his French or Creole counterpart might found a nation from western Louisiana to the Pacific!

Consuelo, weary of America and homesick for Andalusia, even for Algiers, is not interested. Lafitte is, and proposes rescuing Napoleon from Elba to lead the campaign. As mentioned in the postscript to his “Washington” letter, Andrew doubts the feasibility of that scheme — until early April, when news reaches Louisiana that the emperor has already escaped, landed at the Gulf of Juan, and struck out for Paris! Beluche shrugs and sets about the commissioning of a ship and the assembling of a crew to begin taking Spanish prizes under license from Bolivar; Lafitte presses “André” to join him in establishing another Barataria somewhere west of New Orleans. Andrée does not appear, or reply to his letter.

In May, despairing of your coming here, & doubting my welcome at Castines Hundred, we sail’d for France, writes Andrew. His errand is to interest Napoleon — whose reascendancy in Europe Lafitte never doubts — in the “Louisiana Project,” to the extent of sending French ships and men “to aid the cause of Mexican independence” once the military situation in Europe is in hand. On the advice of Jean Blanque he carries by way of credentials a forged letter from Mayor Girod of New Orleans (who had in fact been as interested as Lafitte in the Elba mission), appealing to the emperor “on behalf of all French Creoles.” The voyage is financed jointly by Lafitte and Beluche, the latter on condition that Andrew see to Consuelo’s safe return to her homeland.

As they traverse these waters (where Mrs. M. and I now reenact together certain separate youthful passions), Consuelo endeavors, we cannot know how successfully, to reenact their earlier shipboard affairs. She has decided that the novel is a worn-out fad; she adduces as evidence the fact that she herself has ceased reading anything in that kind. Andrew’s information that Samuel Richardson himself, the father of the epistolary novel, had said essentially the same thing (quoting his booksellers, in letters dated 1758 and 1759), she takes as validation of her stand. The true romanticismo, she now believes with Mme de Staël, is the active life; despite her weariness with America, she is prepared to exchange both literary fame and the domestic joys of wife- and motherhood to hazard the world at the side of a lover in the advance guard of history, so to speak.

Andrew gently reminds her that Mme de Staël, at last report, seemed to have put by both fiction and action for reflection. And, “transported by longing for [his] own family,” he permits himself “a panegyric on parenthood, conjugal fidelity, & domestical bliss,” for all which, he declares to Consuelo, she is in his opinion more admirably suited by temperament than for literary, political, or sexual adventuring. His friend mistakes his meaning, agrees at once, and “flinging herself upon [his] neck, with tears of joy accept[s his] proposal!”

We must surmise what followed. When their ship reaches British-held Bordeaux at the end of June and they learn of Waterloo, of Napoleon’s second abdication and his flight from Paris to nearby Rochefort, Andrew offers either to dispatch her to Mme de Staël in Leghorn, Italy (whither I learn’d Germaine had fled with her guardsman-husband for the sake of his health, & to wait out the Hundred Days); or to introduce her, as one former novelist to another, to Joseph Bonaparte, presently in Bordeaux & about to flee aboard a charter’d American schooner to New York. But she declined both offers, coldly informing me she would set & sail her own course thro life, without my or any other man’s aid. That she had, she believed, found her true vocation. Finally, that the real defect in “that business of Don Escarpio’s poison’d snuffbox” was not that it wanted re-working in fiction, but that it had not workt in fact!

On this discordant note they part. After learning all he can about the emperor’s situation from Joseph’s entourage and from the U.S. consul in Bordeaux (a Mr. Lee, to whom he attaches himself long enough to observe his signature and appropriate some consulate stationery, and for whom he volunteers to act as unofficial liaison with Napoleon’s party), Andrew hurries to Rochefort to reconnoiter and to revise his plan.

Napoleon, he learns, is being uncharacteristically indecisive, to the growing desperation of his suite. Having offered his services in vain to the provisional government in Paris as a mere general of the army (he had noted on his maps a vulnerable gap between the armies of Wellington and Blücher, both marching toward Paris), he has announced his decision to take refuge in America. But as if in hope of some marvelous re-reversal of fortune, he has put off his flight aboard the French frigates at his disposal and given the British time to reinforce their blockade of the harbor. Captain Ponée of the Méduse still)believes it possible to run the blockade: he will engage the chief blockading vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow; he estimates he can survive for two hours, enough time for Napoleon to slip through on the Saale and outrun the lesser blockaders. Napoleon has approved the audacity of the plan, but declined to sacrifice the Méduse. Another loyal frigate stands ready farther south, at the mouth af the Gironde; and there is Joseph’s charter boat at Bordeaux. The French master of a Danish sloop in the Aix Roads has even offered to smuggle the emperor out in an empty wine cask rigged with breathing tubes. Every passing day makes escape less feasible; the options narrow to capture and possible execution by Blücher’s Prussians, arrest by the Bourbons, surrender to the British, or suicide (it is an open secret that he carries a vial of cyanide always on his person). But Napoleon will not act.

Delighted by this unanticipated turn of fortune — which of course revives at once his original hope that Bonaparte himself might lead the “Louisiana Project”—“André Castine” attaches himself to the emperor’s party on the strength of a letter “from Mr. Consul Lee” authorizing him to oversee and facilitate Napoleon’s “American arrangements,” should the emperor choose to go to that country. He urgently advances Jean Lafitte’s Champ d’Asile/New Orleans/Barataria connection, flourishing his letter “from Mayor Girod”; the proposal finds favor with many of the party, but the emperor himself (through intermediaries: Andrew does not see him personally until the last minute) is dilatory. On July 4, our ancestor’s 39th birthday, Joseph sails aboard the U.S.S. Pike, afraid to delay longer. Andrew begins to share the desperation of Napoleon’s aides.

Legality was the official sticking-point, he writes: Bonaparte had long since requested of the Paris government passports to America, & had renew’d that request thro Commander Maitland of Bellerophon, without reply. He had, he declared, been condemn’d an outlaw by the Congress of Vienna since his escape from Elba; moreover, he had been defeated on the field of battle & forced to abdicate. To flee now like a common fugitive was in his eyes but a further ignominy. But some said privately he fear’d life in America, so remote from the terrain of his career. Others, that he had fallen ill, slipt his hold on reality, & half believed a way would yet show itself, to make another Elba of Rochefort.

On July 8, on orders from Paris, the party boards the French frigates anchored in the harbor. On the 10th a letter arrives from Bellerophon, in reply to Napoleon’s query: Maitland does not mention the passports (he has been secretly instructed to intercept and take custody of the emperor if he attempts to flee, and deliver him to Tor Bay), but politely forbids Napoleon passage out of the harbor on any but his own vessel, and that to England. On the 11th they learn of Louis XVIII’s re-restoration. The circle is closing. On the 13th Napoleon drafts his famous letter of surrender to the prince regent:

Your Royal Highness,

A victim to the factions which distract my country, and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection of their laws; which I claim from your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies.

Rochefort, 13 July, 1815,

Napoleon

But before delivering it, and himself, to Bellerophon, he decides to make a final inquiry concerning the passports, at the same time testing the air on the subject of his second choice: asylum in England, where his brother Lucien already resides, and the likely nature of his reception there. On the morning of Bastille Day, therefore, he sends emissaries under a flag of truce to Bellerophon. Commander Maitland again declares (what is technically correct) that he has had no word yet from his admiral concerning the passports; that he cannot permit Napoleon passage to America without them; and that he is not empowered to enter into any agreement concerning the emperor’s reception in England — which, however, he cannot personally imagine will be other than hospitable. The embassy returns; there is no alternative, Napoleon decides, to surrendering to Maitland and taking his chances with the prince regent. A new letter is drafted to that effect, enclosing a copy of the “Themistocles” letter, re-requesting passports and passage to America, but accepting in lieu of them passage to England “as a private individual, there to enjoy the protection of the laws of your country.” He will deliver himself and his entourage to Bellerophon, he declares, on the morrow’s ebb tide.

Andrew sees here a long chance to salvage his mission, which Napoleon’s refusal to escape has rendered all but hopeless: he volunteers to rush overland to London “in [his] capacity as a U.S. diplomatic attaché,” discover if he can what the British cabinet plan to do with their prisoner, and, if that news is not good, do what he can to arrange Bonaparte’s escape before he is landed and taken into custody. In return he stipulates (to the Count de Las Cases, Napoleon’s acting counselor of state and second-ranking aide, whom Andrew has befriended) that any such escape be to Champ d’Asile, and that Las Cases urge Napoleon to lead the “Louisiana Project.”

A fan of Chateaubriand’s redskin romances, Las Cases declares himself ready without hesitation to hazard “the naked but noble savages” rather than the elegant but perfidious Bourbons or what he fears may be the implacable English. He is impressed by Andrew’s showing him, on a map of America, the territory he has in mind, three times the size of France. He inquires as to the quality of Indian wine. Before dawn the next morning he reports that the emperor has approved and will finance Andrew’s London mission, and has regarded that same map with interest but no further comment. News has reached them that Louis XVIII has ordered the commander of the Saale frigate to hold them all under arrest on that vessel; the officer has loyally passed word of his order along, but cannot indefinitely delay executing it. They are leaving at once.

Andrew asks and is given permission to accompany them to Bellerophon. ’Twas no reason of strategy at all, only to see, perhaps for the last time, that man Joel Barlow had come justly so to loathe, but who had play’d as none before him the Game of Governments, & convinced a whole century, for good or ill, that one man can turn the tide of history. The emperor speaks to — or of — him once, and briefly, not recognizing him as the man he’d dispatched years before to oversee young Jérôme in America. “So this is the fellow who would crown me king of the Corsairs,” he remarks, and turns his attention to the choreography of boarding the British warship with most impressive effect.

That day and the following morning Andrew spends aboard the “Billy Ruffian,” as her crew call Bellerophon. He watches Napoleon display his talent for ingratiating himself with those useful to him, intuitively exploiting every circumstance to best advantage. So far from abject, the man turns his surrender into a diplomatic and theatrical coup, and receives, without having to ask, every royal prerogative — except the passports. Andrew also completes the letter to Andrée begun in Fort Bowyer and put aside in New Orleans, describing the sack of Washington and the siege of Fort McHenry: he will leave it with Consul Lee to dispatch to Canada via Washington by diplomatic pouch, having reported “officially” to that gentleman the details of Bonaparte’s surrender. In his satisfaction at having got hold of the emperor before his superiors could snatch that plum for themselves (the sails of Admiral Hotham’s Superb are visible all through the morning of the 15th, standing in for Rochefort), Maitland accepts Las Cases’s voucher that “M. Castine” is the party’s “American liaison,” and both permits him aboard and allows him to leave at his pleasure on the 16th.

By noon of when, the emperor having breakfasted aboard the Superb with Hotham, Maitland, and his own aides — and been given a second royal reception, and returned without either the passports or any word of them, but encouraged that his reception in England will not be hostile — it is clear to Andrew that he must commence his next move at once. As the crew of Bellerophon man the yards and weigh anchor to beat out into the Bay of Biscay, Napoleon complimenting them on their quiet efficiency, Andrew returns by longboat to Méduse and thence to Rochefort, bearing in his ear the whispered last charge of the Count de Las Cases, who does not share his master’s optimism: “Sauvez-nous la peau!”

His letter sent on its way, Andrew rushes overland to the Channel, avoiding Paris lest in the confusion of the new government his credentials be too closely examined. But at Tours, at Rouen, at Dieppe, the news is the same: Louis wants Napoleon dead, is relieved to be relieved of the political consequences of seeing personally to his execution, but fears the British will give him asylum or let him go to America despite their secret assurances to the contrary. On July 20 he crosses from Dieppe to Newhaven; by the 21st he is in London, seeking out his erstwhile brother-in-audacity Admiral Sir George Cockburn. He has no plan, beyond learning what the Admiralty’s and the cabinet’s intentions are. He presumes that the dispatch boat carrying Napoleon’s “Themistocles” letter to the prince regent will have arrived, and remembers that Cockburn and the prince regent are friends.

I had learn’d in the Chesapeake, he writes, that the surest road to Sir George’s confidence was a frank confession of rascality, especially as apply’d against his rivals. And so I gain’d his presence as “one André Castine, bringing news of Napoleon”; but once in his company I reveal’d myself as Andrew Cook, & told him all that had transpired since we saw each other last off Baltimore. In particular I regaled him with the rivalry between General Pakenham & Admiral Cochrane at New Orleans, & the tale of Mrs. Mullens, & Cochrane’s disgust that the peace came ere he had properly ransom’d a city. I then recounted the details of Bonaparte’s surrender (whereof England had as yet heard only the fact) & his hope for passport or asylum.

He has judged his man correctly. At first incredulous, then skeptical, Cockburn is soon delighting in the story of Admiral Malcolm and Mrs. Mullens, of Cochrane’s artillery duel with Andrew Jackson. He calls for maps, and argues persuasively that even after the January massacre it was Cochrane’s fecklessness and General Lambert’s shock that lost New Orleans: at the time of the burial truce the British had command of the west bank of the Mississippi above Jackson’s line, 50 armed vessels en route upriver and a blockade at its mouth, and clear superiority of numbers; to withdraw and rebegin a whole month later from Fort Bowyer was a foolish judgment and crucial loss of time, since everyone knew the peace was imminent. But that was Cochrane! Did Andrew know that the man had left Admiral Malcolm the ugly job of getting rid of all those Negroes and Indians he had so ardently recruited with false promises, and himself rushed home to litigate for prize money? And that while he was about it he was suing for libel any who dared say in print what everyone said in private: that he was a fool and, but for the odd foolhardy display, a coward?

As for Napoleon (whom Cockburn, in the English fashion, calls “Buonaparte”), the truth is that the British cabinet have no mind whatever to grant him either passport to America or asylum in England: they wish him heartily to the Devil and are annoyed that he did not conveniently dispatch himself to that personage. They dare not put him on trial, for they know him to be a master of manipulating public sympathy. Their resolve is to whisk him as speedily, quietly, and far as possible from the public eye forever. The legal and political questions about his status are many and delicate (Is he a prisoner of war? Of Britain or of the Allies? Does habeas corpus apply? Extradition?), and no one wants either to deal with them or to incur the consequences of not dealing with them. Now Sir George happens to know that Prime Minister Liverpool has already decided to confine the man for life in the most remote and impregnable situation in the empire, and consulting the Admiralty on that head, has been advised that the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, owned by the British East India Company, best fits the bill.

How does Cockburn know? Why, because he himself has been proposed for promotion to commander in chief of His Majesty’s naval force at the Cape of Good Hope and adjacent seas — i.e., the whole of the South Atlantic and Indian oceans — and the immediate reason for this promotion, he quite understands, is to sweeten the responsibility of fetching Bonaparte to St. Helena and seeing to it he stays there until a permanent commission has been established for his wardenship! He expects his orders daily, and though he readily accepts the “sweetening,” it is in fact an assignment he welcomes: perhaps his last chance to walk upon the stage of History. For that reason, while the cabinet would be relieved to hear that their captive has taken poison aboard Bellerophon en route to Tor Bay, he Cockburn would be much chagrined: he looks forward to many a jolly hour with Old Boney.

Speaking of whom, and of the splendid absurdities of that “English law” on whose protection the rogue has thrown himself: has Andrew heard the tale that bids to bring together General Buonaparte and Admiral Cochrane? Andrew has not. Well: it seems that Sir Alexander’s return from New Orleans in the spring, and his commencement of prize litigations, prompted a number of sarcastic comments in the London press about his being more eager to fight in court than on the high seas. Among his detractors was one Anthony Mackenrot, an indigent merchant who had done business with the West Indies fleet under Cochrane’s command back in 1807, and who lately declared in print that out of cowardice Sir Alexander had failed to engage the French fleet in that area that year, though it was known to be of inferior strength and vulnerable. Ever tender of his honor — especially when a fortune in prize money was still litigating — Cochrane had clapped a libel suit on this Mackenrot, hoping to intimidate him into public retraction. But he misjudged his adversary: with an audaciousness worthy of Buonaparte himself (or the teller of this tale), Mackenrot had promptly sought and got from the chief justice of Westminster a writ of subpoena against both Napoleon and his brother Jérôme — who we remember had left the French West Indies fleet in 1803 with his friend Joshua Barney to come to Baltimore — commanding them to appear in court at Westminster 9 A.M. Friday, November 10, 1816, to testify as to the state of readiness of the French fleet at the time in question! And this subpoena, mind, Mackenrot had secured in June, before Waterloo, when Buonaparte was still emperor of the French and at war with England!

Cockburn must set down his Madeira (“carry’d twice ’round the Horn for flavor, in the holds of British men-o’-war”) and wipe his eyes for mirth. English law! Let that Napoleon has cost more British blood and treasure in fourteen years than a normal century would expend, he may count upon it that no sooner will Bellerophon drop anchor in Tor Bay than a cry of habeas corpus will go up from the Shetlands to the Scillys, to give the devil his day in court! Only the decommissioning of his own Northumberland in Portsmouth, and the unfitness of old Bellerophon for so long a voyage, keeps Sir George from petitioning the prince regent to let him intercept Maitland at sea, effect the transfer, and head smack for St. Helena before the newspapers know what’s what.

Andrew has heard enough: legal passage to America being out of the question, Napoleon must be rescued before he can be shipped off to exile, and the most immediate hope of rescue is delay. He reaches Tor Bay on the afternoon of the 24th to find that Bellerophon has arrived there that same morning; it rides at anchor off the quay of Brixam, already surrounded by flotillas of the curious. Next day the crowd increases, and security around the ship is tightened; Andrew cannot negotiate his way aboard. And on the 26th (the newspapers are talking already of St. Helena, and of habeas corpus, and of the right of asylum, at least of trial) the ship is moved around to Plymouth harbor and anchored between two frigates for greater security. Andrew removes there as well, and haunts Admiralty headquarters, where he learns that Cockburn’s new command has been issued and his flagship Northumberland ordered back in commission — to the great chagrin of her crew, who have just completed a long tour of sea duty and were expecting shore leave. Cockburn himself will board ship at Spithead in a week or ten days; a fortnight should see the business done. By now Napoleon must understand that neither asylum nor passport is forthcoming; the cabinet have not even acknowledged receipt of his “Themistocles” letter, lest such recognition be argued against the Allies’ decree of outlawry. Andrew hopes that Las Cases has brought him around to the Louisiana Project…

But how to rescue him? Every day the crowds grow, increasing both the confusion and the Admiralty’s measures of security. A thousand small spectator boats jam Plymouth Sound; the quays and breakwaters are thronged. Bands play French military airs; vendors sell Bonapartist carnations; cheers go up whenever the emperor appears on deck or when, to placate the crowd in his absence, Bellerophon’s crew obligingly post notice of his whereabouts on a large chalkboard: AT TABLE WITH CAPT. MAITLAND; IN CABIN WRITING LETTERS. It is common knowledge that any number of Channel fishermen were until recently in Napoleon’s pay, supplying him with information about British ship movements; but our ancestor’s attempt to locate and organize a company of such fishermen is fruitless: they are all reaping a golden harvest from the tourists.

Now the cabinet are chafing at the delay, lest it complicate relations among the Allies. The press have only one story, Bonaparte; the habeas corpus movement has become a ground swell; the emperor has never been more popular in Britain. Should he by any means once touch foot on British soil, he will not easily be got rid of. On the other hand, so great has been the publicity, Bonapartist naval vessels might imaginably attempt to intercept Northumberland at sea: a convoy of six brigs, two troopships, and a frigate must therefore be commissioned and assembled to escort the ship-of-war to St. Helena. More delay!

Faute de mieux, Andrew begins to practice the forgery of subpoenas, no easy matter by reason of their sundry official seals. If he cannot board Bellerophon illegally, he will do so “legally”—as Anthony Mackenrot, defendant in Cochrane v. Mackenrot, come to serve a writ upon Napoleon Bonaparte.

It is August 4 before he has one ready. The thing lacks finish, especially the engraving of the seals, but he can wait no longer. Rumor has it that Napoleon has decided upon suicide rather than St. Helena; that his officers are conspiring to assassinate him in order to spare themselves and their families such an exile; that orders are en route to Bellerophon to go to sea until rendezvous is made with Northumberland, lest Bonaparte escape or a habeas corpus writ be served. Andrew endeavors to imagine the accent and appearance of a Scotsman gone bankrupt in the Caribbean; he goes to the Plymouth house of Admiral Keith, commander in chief of the Channel fleet, in whose jurisdiction Bellerophon is, to demand permission to serve his subpoena. He tries out his accent on the admiral’s secretary, who angrily asks how many Mackenrots has Cochrane sued, and sends him off “to where your brother already is”: the offices of the Admiralty. Puzzled, Andrew hurries there, learns that Keith is that moment being rowed out to the Tonnant in the harbor (where lie also other veterans of the Chesapeake, among them Peter Parker’s Menelaus) to escape “you damn’d lawyers.” Cook rushes to the quay, to hire a launch. The only one in sight is being bargained for already. No matter, Andrew will double the bid — but then he sees the chap gesticulate with a rolled, sealed paper; hears him protest with a Highland burr that the boatsman’s rates are pir-r-ratical…

Pocketing my own writ, I enquired, Mister Mackenrot? The same, said he. I introduced myself then as one who knew & sympathized with his business, having the like of my own, and offer’d not only to share the hire of the launch but to point out Admiral Keith & the Tonnant among the throng of naval officers and vessels in the sound. Which (he accepting readily) at 1st I did, & was gratify’d to observe that so seriously did Keith apprehend this whimsical finger of the mighty arm of English Law, at our approach he fled the Tonnant for the frigate Eurotas, hard by Bellerophon. And whilst we were scrambling to come a-port of Eurotas, he scrambled down a-starboard and fled off toward shore at Cawsand! Where we would surely have caught him, had not his barge been mann’d by 12 oars & ours by but 4. Splendid, preposterous spectacle: an admiral of the world’s mightiest navy in flight from a lone eccentric Scotsman with a scrap of paper! Behind which, however, lay such authority as might well upset the combined resolve of the Ally’d Nations.

Indeed, this same reflection, together with two physical observations — that Bellerophon is hove short with topgallant sails bent, ready to sail at a moment’s notice, and that the Count de Las Cases is on the quarterdeck, watching their chase with interest — begins to suggest to Andrew a radical change of plan. Should Bonaparte now be landed in so determinedly lawful a country, where sympathy for him seemed to increase with every day’s newspaper, could he ever be persuaded to “escape” to America? Even if he could, how rescue him from so mighty a fortress as the British Isles, from whose invasion the emperor himself, at the height of his power, had quailed? WRITING WITH HIS OFFICERS, reads the board now on Bellerophon…

He directs Mackenrot’s attention to the sailing preparations aboard that ship and proposes they divide their pursuit. Let him, Cook, return to Eurotas, where boarding might now be permitted him to keep him from reaching Keith; he will endeavor to talk his way thence to Bellerophon and remind Commander Maitland that contempt-of-court proceedings await him if he weighs anchor to avoid Mackenrot’s subpoena. Then let Mackenrot proceed to Cawsand and press after Admiral Keith.

The Scotsman agrees (Keith meanwhile, Andrew observes, has fled toward Prometheus, where he will order out the guard boats to fend off all approaching craft), adding that if he fails to catch the admiral at Cawsand he will return directly to Bellerophon and attempt to serve his writ through Maitland. The chase has taken most of the morning; as Andrew hopes, they are permitted to board Eurotas “just long enough to state their business,” and, per plan, Mackenrot pulls away as soon as Andrew steps onto the boarding ladder, so that they cannot order him back to his hired boat. But no sooner has Mackenrot drawn out of range than Andrew sees him rowing furiously back, and then observes the reason: Bellerophon has weighed anchor and, wind and tide both contrary, is being towed by her guard boats out toward the Channel!

And with her all my hopes, he writes, no longer of saving Bonaparte from exile, but of ensuring if I could that he went to St. Helena instead of to the Wood of Suicides in Hell. For he has now decided not only that a taste of true exile might be the best argument for inclining Napoleon to the Louisiana Project, but that with the aid of the Baratarians he is far more likely to effect a rescue from St. Helena than from the Tower of London. Almost before he realizes what he’s doing, therefore, he flings himself off Eurotas into Plymouth Sound, kicks away his boots, and strikes out for Bellerophon.

A cry goes up from both vessels. Andrew has jumped from the side opposite Eurotas’s guard boats and nearer Bellerophon’s, which therefore pause in their labors to save him from drowning. Before he can be placed under arrest and transferred back to Eurotas and thence to shore, he shouts a warning to Bellerophon’s watch officer that the launch fast approaching bears the feared habeas corpus from the King’s Bench. Sure enough, Mackenrot stands in her bows, waving his paper — and now the Count de Las Cases has recognized “André Castine” and says something to Commander Maitland. Orders are given: to his great relief Andrew sees another boat lowered to fend off the redoubtable Scotsman; he himself, there being nothing else presently to be done with him, is fetched aboard Bellerophon with the guard boats and their crews as soon as the old ship has sea room enough to begin tacking under her own power out of the sound.

You have betray’d us, Las Cases complain’d to me [he writes] as soon as we could speak privately. Nor did my argument much move him; for while he agreed that rescue might be more feasible from St. Helena than from Britain, he vow’d the Emperor was still adamant on that score, and was prepared to take his life rather than submit voluntarily to exile. As for that, I thot, it was likely mere bluff, inasmuch as his sentence was now clear beyond doubt, and Bellerophon’s putting out to sea removed any hope of their being received ashore or otherwise delaying execution of that sentence; yet he was still alive. On this head, however, I held my peace, proposing instead what certain of those sign-boards had proposed to me: namely, that the Emperor might be dissuaded from suicide, and induced to go peacefully tho protestingly into exile, if he were shown the opportunity therein to increase his fame. His public confinement in Tor Bay & Plymouth Sound had workt considerably to his advantage in one respect: he was now more than ever the cynosure of all eyes, and his letters, from “Themistocles” forward (so I learn’d from Las Cases), tho undeliver’d or unreply’d to, had in fact been addrest less to their addressees than to History, which is to say, to Public Opinion. What better chance, then, to bend the world in his favor, than to turn his exile into public martyrdom, by writing his memoirs on St. Helena & smuggling them out for publication? He had made history; he could now re-make & revise it to his pleasure! Thus the world’s forgetfulness, which he fear’d would bury him, would bury instead his great crimes against mankind (I call’d them his little misjudgments) & eagerly believe whate’er he wrote.

Moreover (Andrew adds by way of clincher to his appeal), such a memoir will need delivery to the mainland, and publication, and collection of its author’s royalties. What better way for a trusted aide like Monsieur the Count de Las Cases at once to do his master a signal service and to abbreviate his own exile?

At 1st skeptical, the Count was by this last altogether convinced — if only, he declared, to save the Emperor’s life & honor. All that afternoon & evening, as we hove to to await Prometheus, Tonnant, Eurotas, & Myrmidon, and then beat southeast toward rendezvous with Admiral Cockburn, the Count prest my plan in private with Napoleon. That same night, I was gratify’d to hear, the unemperor’d Emperor dictated a grand letter of protest, addrest “to History…” And tho he still vow’d to the English officers they would never fetch him alive to St. Helena, I was pleased to gather, from Las Cases’ nods & winks, that our appeal was going forward.

He would have been further encouraged, could he have seen them, by editorials in the Times and the Morning Chronicle next day, expressing their writers’ conviction that the captive would have been securer from rescue in Stirling Castle, say, than on St. Helena, where “an American vessel will always be ready to take him off…”

Nevertheless, throughout that morning and early afternoon (154 years ago today), as they rendezvous with Cockburn’s squadron between Start Point and Bolt Head, exchange cannon salutes and visits between the admirals’ flagships, then move together to the calmer waters of Tor Bay in preparation for the transfer, Napoleon gives no public sign of acquiescence. Keith and Cockburn are moved to the extraordinary precaution of impounding the French officers’ swords and pistols, lest they attempt to resist the transfer with arms. Only when Bellerophon’s doctor reports to Commander Maitland that “General Buonaparte” has invited him to serve as his personal physician on St. Helena do the English — and Andrew — have reason to imagine that Napoleon has at last accepted his fate. Even then they fear a ruse (they have just learned that Las Cases, who has affected since Rochefort not to understand English, reads and speaks their language easily). Guard boats are posted to patrol the anchorage all night lest Mr. Mackenrot, or the habeas corpus people, or the Bonapartists, or the Americans, attempt rescue or obstruction, or the emperor fling himself from his cabin into Tor Bay.

At eight-thirty that evening Admirals Cockburn and Keith come aboard to read to Napoleon their instructions from the cabinet and work out the details of his transfer to Northumberland next morning; Andrew retires out of sight down to the orlop deck, where he had completed the “Washington” letter, and spends the evening drafting this one.

Rather (as I have done here on the first-class deck of the Statendam, where it is not to be supposed I have deciphered, transcribed, and summarized all these pages at one sitting, simultaneously wooing your future stepmother!), he extends toward completion the chronicle he has been drafting in fits and starts since Rochefort, as I have drafted this over the three weeks past. And as I expect any moment now this loving labor to be set aside for one equally loving but more pressing (Jane is in our stateroom, preparing for bed and wondering why I linger here on deck), so my namesake’s is interrupted, near midnight, by good news from the Count de Las Cases. Not only has the emperor agreed at last, under formal protest, to be shifted with his party to Northumberland after breakfast next morning; he has made long speeches to History, to both the admirals and, separately, to Commander Maitland, from whom also he has exacted a letter attesting that his removal from Bellerophon is contrary to his own wishes. Moreover, he has prevailed (over Maitland’s objections) in his insistence that Las Cases be added to the number of his party, to serve as his personal secretary; and he has clapped the count himself on the shoulder and said, “Cheer up, my friend! The world has not heard the last from us; we shall write our memoirs!”

Even as I, Andrew concludes, am writing mine, in these encipher’d pages, my hope once more renew’d. Tomorrow Admiral Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” will weigh anchor for St. Helena with the Scourge of Mankind: a voyage of two months, during which I shall make my own way back from England to New Orleans, hoping against hope, my darling Andrée, to find you there. Where, if all goes well, you & I & Jean Lafitte will devise a plan to spirit Napoleon from under George Cockburn’s nose before he has unpackt his writing-tools!

And even as I, dear Henry, hope against hope that upon my return to “Barataria” next week I shall find you there: the present point of my pen overtaken, the future ours to harvest together!

I go now to Mrs. Mack, to fertilize and cultivate that future. A fellow passenger remarks, in nervous jest, upon the “secret of the Bermuda Triangle”: the hijacking of cruising yachts by narcotics smugglers to run their merchandise into U.S. harbors. I pretend to know nothing of that scandal. Small wonder, my companion replies: the Coast Guard and the tourist industry are keeping it quiet, inasmuch as they cannot possibly search every pleasure boat entering every creek and cove from Key West to Maine. Very interesting, I agree, thinking of the gift from Jane that awaits me in Annapolis.

A word to the wise, my son? From

Your loving father

R: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fourth posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: plans for the rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena.

Yacht Baratarian

St. Helena Island, Little Round Bay

Severn River, Md.

August 13, 1969

Dear Henry,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what impostor?

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

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

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

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

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

Your father

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

Castines Hundred

Ontario, Canada

August 20, 1969

My dear Henry,

Except that you are not here, all is as it should be (i.e., as it ever has been) at Castines Hundred. A grand hatch of “American soldiers” fills the air — in which already one feels a premonitory autumn chill — as they have done every latter August since the species, and Lake Ontario, evolved. I write this by paraffin lantern in the library, not to attract them to the windows; took dinner by candlelight for the same reason, as our ancestors have done since that species evolved. A fit and pleasing mise en scène for retailing the last of my namesake’s lettres posthumes: dated August 20, 1821, addressed to “My dear, my darling wife,” and delivered here at that year’s close.

Be assured of my proper disappointment not to find you here; a disappointment for which, however, I was prepared. Be even more so of my proper tantalization by the report (from our new caretakers, who seem satisfactory) that you apparently stopped by—even spent a few days here? — in the interval between caretakers! Were here as I was writing to you off Bermuda! Left only upon the Bertrands’ assuming their duties, as I was writing to you from my Baratarian! Indicated that you would “be back,” but did not say when, or whence you came, or whither vanished!

Heartless Henry! True and only son! But so be it: I have been as heartless in my time, as have all our line. I restrained my urge to badger the Bertrands with questions — How does he appear? Did he speak of his father? — lest they think their new employer’s relation with his son as odd as in fact it is. I shall leave sealed copies here, against your return, of both the “prenatal” and the “posthumous” letters of Andrew Cook IV, as well as that one of mine reviewing our history from him to myself. And I shall hope, no longer quite against hope!

But how I wish I could report to you, Henry, confer with you, solicit your opinion now. So many opportunities lie at hand; so many large decisions must be made quite soon, affecting our future and the Revolution’s! Last night, for example, I drove up here from the Fort Erie establishment, where I had stopped to assess Joseph Morgan’s resalvageability. I am satisfied that he is too gone in his “repetition compulsion” to be of future use to us. What I advanced as a kind of lure when I first rescued him for our cause has become an obsession; he is now addicted to his medication, as it were; the only obstacle to disestablishing him altogether is that he happens to be related, through the Patterson line, to Jane Mack. But we must think of something; he is a liability.

So too, I more and more suspect, is Jerome Bray of Lily Dale — more exactly, of “Comalot,” as he has without irony renamed his strange habitation — on whom I paid a call before crossing to Canada. Even to me that man is an enigma: certainly mad, but as certainly not simply mad. His extraordinary machine, or simulacrum of a machine — you really must see it. And his “honey dust,” of whose peculiar narcotic virtue there can be no question…! He is doing us the service, unwittingly, of removing Jane’s daughter from the number of competitors for Harrison Mack’s fortune, while however adding himself to the number of our problems. For him too I have certain plans, and have urged him down to Bloodsworth Island for the “Burning of Washington” four days hence — but how surer I would feel of that strategy if I could review it with you, and you ratify it!

I have, moreover, two further problems of the most intimate and urgent sort, Henry, on which your consultation is of such importance to me that I must, insofar as I can, compel it.

Mrs. Harrison Mack now proposes to become Mrs. André Castine on September 30. (She specified “the end of the month,” leaving the precise date to me. Still amused by the Anniversary View of History, I considered the equinox, when at 9 A.M. in 4004 B.C. the world is said to have begun; but I chose at last the 30th, anniversary of our ancestor Ebenezer Cooke’s inadvertent loss of his Maryland estate in 1694 and, rather earlier, of the legendary loss of another prime piece of real estate: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.) For convenience’ sake, I have in mind to kill off “Andrew Cook VI” by some accident before that date. I am, you know, under that name, also in some second-cousinly relation to my fiancée: I propose therefore—unless as prime beneficiary you appear within 30 days of the date of your father’s death—to bequeath to Jane Mack my properties on Bloodsworth Island and Chautaugua Road. I shall cause obituary notices to be published promptly in the leading Quebec and Ontario newspapers as well as those of Maryland and the District of Columbia: the next move will be yours. “André Castine” looks forward to welcoming you (either here or at “Barataria”) as his own son!

On the other hand — for reasons that I shan’t set forth in writing but will be relieved to share with you at last in person, as they pertain to you intimately indeed — my coming forth publicly as André Castine to marry Jane raises problems of its own concerning that historian I’ve mentioned before: Professor Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, who was to have edited, annotated, and published this series of letters. It will scarcely be enough to see to her reappointment to the post about to be vacated by Andrew Cook’s death; something further is called for. We must discuss it!

And Baratarian, that fleet and sturdy fellow, who when I fetch him from the Annapolis yard this weekend will have tankage enough to run from Bloodsworth Island to Yucatan with but one pit stop, and enough secret stowage in his teak and holly joinery to fetch back a high-profit cargo along with the marlin and wahoo we are officially after. One trip, at current prices, will come near to financing us for half a year, and not even the crew need know (indeed ought not, for it is paid informants, not adroit law officers, who precipitate arrests in this line of work). But I cannot navigate both Baratarian and Barataria, or manage to our cause both Jane and Mary Jane. Come, son, and let us to Isla Mujeres, the Isle of Women!

There Jean Lafitte — alias “Jean Lafflin” or “Laffin”—is reported to have come in November 1821 to la fin du chemin, ambushed by Mexican soldiers not impossibly informed of his coming by Andrew Cook IV. So at least speculated my grandfather, Andrew V, on what grounds he did not say. It is by no means established beyond doubt that Lafitte died then and there; other legends extend his pseudonymous life to 1854. What is known is that in latter 1821, pressed by the U.S. Revenue Marine, he boarded his schooner Pride (possibly the Jean Blanque under alias of its own), abandoned “Galvez-Town,” and disappeared. Moreover, that his connection with Andrew IV, once so brotherly, had long since deteriorated into mutual suspicion and distrust.

What a falling off, between that P.S. to the first of these letters (where his fondest wish is to unite his “darling wife” with his “true brother”) and the opening of this last!

3*64;:(8¶8);*‡76‡;:905:5(;82

GNIHTYREVESTNIOPOTYMLAYARTEB

Everything points to my betrayal

— whether by Lafitte, Joseph Bonaparte, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the U.S. Secret Service, or some combination thereof, he is uncertain. He cannot say for sure even that he is in fact a prisoner in “Beverly,” the King mansion on the Manokin River not far from Bloodsworth Island; perhaps all is going well, but unaccountably slowly! Yet it is August 20, 1821, insufferably hot, damp, and buggy in the Eastern Shore marshes; he has been there above six weeks, since his 45th birthday, under anonymous guard “for his own security”; the owners of Beverly, at the urging of their friend Mme B., are off on an extended visit to Europe, as is Betsy herself; Lafitte has delivered him and is long gone: possibly back to St. Helena to rescue “André Castine” per plan, more likely back to privateering in the Gulf of Mexico. Everything points etc.

It is not, he acknowledges now, the beginning of his mistrust. Their official plan, upon setting out the year before to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena, had been that upon the emperor’s safe and secret installation at Beverly, Lafitte would send word posthaste to New Orleans for Dominique You to sail in the Séraphine to rescue Andrew, under pretext of executing Mayor Girod’s scheme to rescue Napoleon. Such was also their “backup” plan in case things went awry: the Séraphine would sail on August 15, 1821, if nothing had been heard by then from the Jean Blanque. Moreover — in view of those rumors that Napoleon was being poisoned by the Bourbons, by the English, by the Fesch/Kleinmüller/Metternich conspiracy, even by disaffected members of his own entourage; and other rumors that he was dying of the stomach cancer common in his family; and yet others that he was already dead or elsewhere sequestered and replaced by an impostor — Cook and Lafitte had agreed on a contingency plan: if the man they rescue is either an impostor or a dying Napoleon, Lafitte will bury him quietly at sea and then retrieve his surrogate to lead the Louisiana Project.

But the fact is (Andrew now declares to “my dear, my darling wife”) our ancestor has had for several years no intention of rescuing Napoleon in the first place! They have all been a blind, those elaborate schemes and counterschemes! Andrew has not forgotten Joel Barlow’s Advice to a Raven in Russia: the Corsican is a beast, an opportunistic megalomaniac whose newly invented “Bonapartism” is but the sentimental rationalization, after the fact, of a grandiose military dictatorship. Andrew has never truly imagined that his Louisiana Project would appeal to the man who sold that vast territory to Jefferson in part from lack of interest in it; in any case he would not want the butcher of Europe at the head of his (and Andrée’s) liberal free state!

And there is, in the second place, that aforementioned lapse of faith that Jean Lafitte or Dominique You will actually risk returning for him. It would be so easy not to, their main object once attained, and so perilous and expensive to do it! Jean endlessly complains of the Revenue Marine’s harassment of his New Barataria; might not the secret service offer to end or mitigate this harassment in return for his cooperation in foiling all rescue schemes, including Andrew’s? We were still to all appearances brothers, he writes; but some Gascon intuition warn’d me to trust this Gascon no longer. And warn’d me further, that that Gascon entertain’d a like suspicion of me.

What he had for some while been privately planning, therefore, he now confides: a multiple or serial imposture. He would go ashore at St. Helena and by some means arrange to have himself doped and smuggled out as Napoleon, and Napoleon left behind as himself (whose rescue he would then, as Napoleon, forestall, forbid, or thwart). Deceiving even Jean Lafitte, he would continue to counterfeit the aging, ailing emperor long enough to mobilize the French Creoles, the free Negroes, and the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Southern Indians for the Louisiana Project. Moreover, as Napoleon Bonaparte he will (“forgive me, dear dear Andrée! I had a hundred times rather it had been you, that have rightly forsaken your forsaker…”) marry Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, and turn her family’s fortune to his purpose! If he divines that Betsy might not disapprove, he will perhaps then reveal his true identity to her, “die” again as Napoleon, and carry on the 2nd Revolution as André Castine, Bonaparte’s successor to the Louisiana Project and to herself. Otherwise, he will do the same things without ever revealing the imposture. For it is not Mme B. herself he desires — vivacious, handsome, wealthy, and managerially gifted as she is — only her fortune, until he can salvage Bonaparte’s or make his own. He is not blind to her obsessiveness (“as profound as mine, but private: her son was her 2nd Revolution”), or to the sexless miser inside the Belle of Baltimore.

Concerning whom, as Jean Blanque stands out of the gulf in August 1820, there remains a tantalizing mystery. When he last queried her in Baltimore concerning the source of her information about the Roman Bonapartes, Betsy had teased him with sight of a letter from Rome written in the Pattersons’ own family cipher. Knowing him to be “a clever hand at such things,” she scarcely more than flashed the letter; even so, she underestimated Andrew’s capacity. The forger’s trained eye and memory caught only the salutation and the close, but those he retained as if transcribed, and in fact transcribed them at his first opportunity: Vs Dryejri D., it began, and ended Nyy vs Yejr, G. Like most ciphers, it was written letter by letter, not cursively; yet the handwriting seemed half-familiar. I could almost have believed it yours! he exclaims to Andrée.

En route from Baltimore to New Orleans, New Orleans to “Galvez-Town,” he studies his transcription, but is unable either to recognize or to decipher it. Throughout the long voyage to St. Helena — normally a two-month sail, but extended to five by privateering excursions at Isla Mujeres and Curaçao, and by hurricane damage off Tobago — he studies the cipher while perfecting two separate impostures of Napoleon: a public, “false” one on deck for the benefit of Lafitte and the Baratarian crew, based on popular portraits by Isabey and Ducis (short-cropped hair, bemused mouth, right hand tucked between waistcoat buttons); and in his cabin a private, “true” one based on his last sight of the fallen emperor aboard Bellerophon—paunchy, jowly, slower of gait and speech — which he means to use to deceive his rescuers when the time comes.

Vs Dryejri D… Nyy vs Yejr, G. It looks vaguely Slavic, Croatian, Finnish. He remembers pondering the hieroglyphics in the British Museum in 1811, en route to his rendezvous with John Henry: the stone discovered at the village of Rosetta on the Nile by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1799 and taken by the British, with those soldiers, in 1801. The recollection reminds him of Napoleon’s Egyptian affair with Mme Fourès, the French counterpart of “Mrs. Mullens,” and of his own amorous North African escapade in 1797… Suddenly (it is September 14, seventh anniversary of his “death” at Fort McHenry; in Paris the “father of Egyptology,” Champollion, is deciphering those hieroglyphics with that stone) he has the key to Betsy Bonaparte’s cipher, and to both her “Swiss secret” and her “secret Swiss.”

The actual words he works out, within reasonable limits, later. Most conspicuous are the repeated sequences vs and yejr; given that y is the only character to appear four times, he anticipates Edgar Poe and calls it e, but can make nothing likely in either French or English of the result: _ _ _ _e_ _ _ _ _. . _ee _ _ e _ _ _, _. The character r, which appears three times (no other appears more than twice, but in a text so short the table of frequencies is unreliable) makes a more promising e (_ _ _e_ _ _e_ _. . ._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _e, _), especially given the conventions of epistolary salutation and close. Assuming the final character in each phrase to be the first or last initial respectively of addressee and author, and remembering Mme B.‘s first and last to be the same, we have: _ _Be_ _ _e_B. . _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _e, _.), the repeated yejr is then surely love (_ _ Belove_ B. . _ _ _ _ _ Love, _.); which gives us _ _ Belove_ B. . _ ll _ _ Love, _.; which is surely My Beloved B. . All my Love, _. Only the mysterious terminal blank (G in the cipher) remains to be filled.

But the real key is not Andrew’s sorting of frequencies and correspondences, which leads after all but to that crucial lacuna. It is in the calligraphy of that very G, as it were an aborted or miscarried flourish from its final serif: the first thing that struck him as familiar, but which he cannot be certain he has accurately duplicated. From Galveston to Yucatan, Yucatan to Tobago, he does his Napoleonic homework and covers every available scrap of paper with uppercase G’s; a fortuitous stroke on the aforementioned anniversary—Jean Blanque is pitching terrifically in the storm that will carry off her foremast and half a dozen Baratarians with her square-sail yards — delivers him the key.

And show’d me at once, he writes, that my errand was very likely a wild-goose chase. That were it not for the necessity of deceiving Jean Lafitte, I should spare myself that endless voyage & elaborate imposture, and make straight for Rome, for the Palazzo Rinuccini, & for the clairvoyant “Mme Kleinmüller”… But there is no help for it: key in hand, he is obliged to postpone for nearly three-quarters of a year its urgent application to the lock — unimaginably protracted suspense! — while he sails thousands of miles down the map, from Tobago to the Rocks of Saint Peter and Paul, to Ascension Island, to St. Helena. And (it must be) in order to give Andrée some sense of his massive frustration, the impatience which no doubt contributes to Jean Lafitte’s suspicions of him, he withholds this key for many a ciphered page to come (I myself skipped ahead at once to Rome and the answer, Henry; you may do likewise), until he meets — on May 5, 1821: the day, as it happens, of Napoleon’s death — the writer of that coded letter.

In mid-January they raise St. Helena, looming sheer and volcanic from the southern ocean; they lie to for several days just below the western horizon, out of sight of the telegraphs, and seize the first small fishing smack that wanders into reach. Its crew are regaled, handsomely bribed for the imposition, promised more if all goes well, and threatened with death, pirate-style, if all does not. Two of their number are comfortably detained as hostages, obliged to switch clothes with Cook and Lafitte, and closely interrogated. They agree that despite the Admiralty’s semaphore telegraphs and strengthened fortification of the island’s four landing places, fishermen come and go as usual from footpaths down the cliffs, which rise in places twelve hundred feet straight out of the sea. Aside from vertigo, there should be no problem in getting ashore. They even know a concealed vantage point from which to survey Longwood, a favorite leisure pastime among them. But on the question whether their celebrated new resident is the former emperor of the French, there is no consensus: one vows he is, though “much changed” by captivity and systematic poisoning; another swears he was replaced a year ago; a third that he was never on the island.

Andrew and Jean go ashore (Andrew mimics the island dialect in half an hour); they make the dizzy climb from a precarious landing ledge just behind a surf-breaking rock on the island’s sea-fogged northwest shore, entirely concealed from the official landing at St. James’s Bay. A fortnight’s reconnoitering among the villagers and the garrison discovers the same variety of opinion, in more detail: the prisoner is dying of undulant fever, of venereal complications, of pyloric cancer, of boredom and inaction, of arsenic, of dysentery or hepatitis or typhus. He has gone mad, believes himself an ordinary conscript arrested and exiled by an accident of resemblance. He is that hapless conscript. He is an impostor, Metternich’s creature. He is dead.

They ascend through subtropical greenery to the temperate middle elevations, thick with cedars and willows, through Geranium Valley to the fishermen’s trysting and viewing spot, a dense bower of shrubs, withes, and creepers overlooking the tidy château of Longwood. Supplied by their hired comrades with food, wine, and blankets for the chill nights, they make a little encampment. Andrew identifies Count and Mme Bertrand, the Count de Montholon. One evening a short tubby chap in military uniform steps into the gardens (modeled in miniature after those of Malmaison) and pops desultorily with dueling pistols at a nearby goat and chicken, striking neither. A bored attendant reloads the weapons. The hidden onlookers turn from their spyglasses: Andrew nods.

I was fairly satisfy’d it was he, he reports to Andrée, tho indeed much changed since Rochefort & Tor Bay. What most gratify’d me was that Jean was less sure, and must take my word for it. Also, that one glance assured me I could manage the counterfeit, once the substitution had been arranged. Our plan was that Jean would take Jean Blanque up to the newly establisht Republic of Liberia for provisioning, & perhaps seize a Spaniard or two along the way for profit’s sake, returning at the Vernal Equinox. He would leave with me, “for my assistance,” his 2nd mate, Maurice Shomberg, a Pyrenean Sephardic Jew call’d by the Baratarians “le Maure” for his dark skin, great size & strength, and ferocity in combat: a man much given to the slicing & dicing of his enemies, and utterly loyal to the brothers Lafitte. Whilst le Maure watcht & waited in the bush, I was to install myself among the gardeners & grounds keepers of Longwood, recruit if I could the confidence of Mme Bertrand (who was known to be impatient with her exile & jealous of Mme de Montholon), verify that the Emperor was the Emperor, sound his temper on the matter of escaping, present our (forged) credentials from Joseph B. & Mayor Girod, & cet. & cet., finally delivering him to le Maure upon Jean’s return & taking his place at Longwood. In fact, I meant to do all of those save the last two, and was both reassured, by Jean’s leaving with me his trusty “Moor,” that he would probably return for us in March; and confirm’d that he no longer trusted me to do the job alone. Le Maure’s great size and visibility were no aid to concealment; he was fit only for hauling & killing, and might well be assign’d to dispatch me to the sharks, once Napoleon was in our hands.

Lafitte leaves. Andrew befriends one or two of the gardeners, is put to work spading, manuring, terracing. He converses in Sicilian with Vignali, the auxiliary priest sent out only a few months before in the party from Rome, who declares that Napoleon is Napoleon but won’t be for long: the Count de Montholon is poisoning him from jealousy of Count Bertrand. He speaks Corsican French with Montholon’s valet: the British doctors are feeding arsenic to the lot of them. He peddles a pilchard to Ortini, the emperor’s own footman: the new Italian doctor, Antommarchi, is the villain, assisted by Mme Bertrand. The French and Italians agree that Napoleon is Napoleon, and that he is nowise interested in escape. But among the fishermen and farmers who provision Longwood, and with whom both le Maure and Andrew carefully converse, there is more general suspicion that the French are conspiring to trick and/or to blame the English, an opinion shared in some measure by the British physicians on Sir Hudson Lowe’s staff: some believe Bonaparte—“if that’s who the rascal is”—to be poisoning himself, in order to consummate his martyrdom and inspire sympathy for his son’s succession. The only hypothesis not seriously entertained on the island is the one Andrew Cook more and more inclines to as his deadline nears: that while the ailing fellow who ever less frequently ventures outdoors (and in March takes to his bed almost constantly) just might be an impostor, and just might be being poisoned by one or a number of “interests,” he is most probably Napoleon Bonaparte dying in his fifty-second year of a variety of natural physical and psychological complaints.

So mutual are everyone’s suspicions among the Longwood entourage, so clear (however mixed with grief for their leader) their eagerness to begone, Andrew dares take none into his confidence; and there is no use in relaying his “credentials” to an obviously dying man. It becomes his job to persuade le Maure that he has already made contact with the emperor, who looks forward eagerly to rescue and who is feigning illness the better to isolate himself from English surveillance and mislead suspected traitors in his own household. The equinox approaches, but Andrew’s inventiveness fails him: how on earth to get himself delivered to Lafitte and le Maure as the emperor of the French, and at the same time persuade them that “André Castine” is ensconced in Longwood, composing the emperor’s last will and testament? He had not anticipated so universal and profound distrust, such general assumptions of conspiracy, counterconspiracy, double- and triple-agentry!

Word comes from le Maure that Jean Blanque has returned on schedule. Lafitte himself slips ashore, cool and smiling. With not the slightest notion how to manage it, Andrew assures him that all is arranged: after moonset next night, two of Bonaparte’s household — the lamplighter Rousseau and the usher Chauvin — will deliver their master to the trysting place. Bonaparte will be harmlessly narcotized, to exculpate him from charges of complicity should the escape be foiled by the British. He is in mild ill health, but expects to recover, the more rapidly for a bracing ocean voyage and release from captivity. He has reservations about the Louisiana Project, but is open to persuasion. Rousseau and Chauvin are acting in their master’s best interest, but will not refuse a just reward for their risk. Et cetera! Andrew even invites the Baratarian to slip back to Longwood next day and receive a signal from himself that the substitution has been successful; that he will carry through the charade of dying, return to the ranks of the fishermen, and confidently await his own rescue.

Desperate improvisation! He expects many questions, whether anxious or suspicious: Lafitte merely embraces him with a light smile, wishes him bonne chance, promises to be in the appointed place at the appointed hour on the morrow.

Throughout the 21st Cook conjures “shift after desperate shift,” and can hit upon nothing even remotely likely. He has not got through to the invalid prisoner. He has no confidence in Rousseau, Chauvin, Ortini; barely knows them. Beyond bribing a suit of Napoleon’s clothes from a laundry girl (the loss causes little stir; souvenir pilfering and counterfeiting are an industry on the island), he has been able to make no arrangements whatever. In a lifetime of stratagems and ruses he has never been so nonplussed.

At moondown he dons those clothes, assumes his “private,” “true” imposture of Napoleon, modified by what little he has seen and learned on the island. He conceals himself in the Longwood gardens, in the vague hope that Rousseau or Chauvin might wander by and be impressed into service. The hour arrives; no one is about except the regular British sentries. Feeling more nakedly foolhardy than at any moment since that night a quarter-century past when he donned Joel Barlow’s clothes and rode out to a certain Algerian headland, to enter a certain dark carriage, Andrew works through the cypresses and privet, past the sentries, toward where le Maure and Lafitte await. Can he perhaps feign detection, mimic several alarmed voices, simulate the thrash of two servants fleeing, bring the sentries running, and then stumble as if dazed into the rendezvous? Faute de mieux, he gathers himself to it…

And somewhile later woke half-tranced, knowing neither where I was nor how I came there! Bloodsworth Island? 1812? Husht urgent voices all about, in a medley of accents: French, Corsican, Italian, German, English, St. Helenish, even Yankee! A thunder of surf, & the damp rock under me, bespoke that ledge we had barely fetcht up on two months past. I guesst I had either swoon’d again, as at New Orleans & Fort Bowyer, or been knockt senseless by “friend” or “foe,” & carry’d down that terrific cliff. I heard Jean’s voice, unalarm’d, giving orders to le Maure & the fishermen. Who was that German? That New Englander? Was that a British female whisper’d?

He conceals regaining consciousness in hopes of making out his situation; permits himself to be rowed like a dead man for hours out to sea, hoisted easily over a shoulder he recognizes as le Maure’s, and put to bed in a familiar aft cabin of the Jean Blanque—but nothing he can overhear tells him what he craves to know. Now there is a lantern-light to peek by: he sees Lafitte tête-à-tête with a cloaked stranger; whispers are exchanged, papers, a small pouch or box? They examine a map. They agree. The stranger leaves; Lafitte also; one can hear orders given on deck, sail made. The schooner swings about and settles under way.

Andrew considers the possibilities. His ruse has perhaps been anticipated by Lafitte, by the U.S. Secret Service, by Metternich, the British, the French. They know he is Andrew Cook, but see fit to support his imposture? Or they don’t know; the imposture has for the moment succeeded! In the first case he must be candid with Lafitte or lose what trust after all remains; in the second, such candor might be fatal — and both suppositions could be incorrect. Should he pretend to be a willing Napoleon? An outraged, resentful one? An unperturbed Andrew Cook?

He feels his way carefully: “wakes” as if uncertain himself who and where he is; is greeted politely but ambiguously by Jean’s body-servant, by Lafitte himself, whose ironical courtesies fit either hypothesis. On deck the Baratarians receive him as the ailing Bonaparte he pretends to be, but are under obvious and sensible orders not to address him by any name. With Jean, in private, he hazards maintaining that imposture, and is puzzled: the man’s half-mocking deference suits neither the belief that he has rescued his emperor nor the knowledge that his erstwhile comrade has deceived him. He begins to suspect that Lafitte believes him to be neither Napoleon Bonaparte nor Andrew Cook, but the impostor alleged to have been substituted for Napoleon in January 1820—and that this state of affairs is for some reason acceptable to him!

But he cannot be certain, and so the voyage proceeds in an extraordinary equivocality, every gesture and remark a potential test, or sign. Where are they bound? “To America.” And to where in America? “To that place arranged for Your Majesty by his friends there.” Andrew is greatly encouraged to be presented after all, however ironically, with the agreed-upon ultimatum: to live incognito under Joseph’s protection (Lafitte does not say “your brother’s”) or, as General Bonaparte (Lafitte says neither “as yourself” nor “as the Emperor Napoleon I”), to lead a movement organized by American Bonapartists “both exiled and native, of great wealth and influence.”

He will choose, Andrew declares, when he has spoken to Joseph and the movement’s leaders and heard more details. Meanwhile it is surely best to remain incognito, if only officially, even between themselves.

Jean smiles. “I shall call you Baron Castine.”

Andrew smiles the same smile. “That is a name I know. It will quite do.”

Then he takes a great gamble. In a tone he hopes appropriate to whatever might be Lafitte’s understanding of him, he observes that no matter what fate awaits him in America, it is unlikely he will see again the land of his birth or, as it were, the theater of his life’s first cycle (the phrase is Andrew’s). Though he has a brother in America, the rest of his family are elsewhere. He does not expect to see his wife again; as for his son, that is too delicate a matter to venture upon at present. And his brothers and sisters are too various, either in their loyalty or in their good judgment, to place overmuch faith in just now. (Andrew speaks in these epithets rather than in proper names, watching Jean’s face.) But his mother, he declares, while less ill than himself, is old and cannot be expected either to live a great while longer or to undertake a transatlantic voyage. He would therefore like to pay her a call — incognito, if necessary — and bid her a last farewell before commencing his new career.

Lafiite seem’d genuinely astonisht, & without apparent guile demanded, Did I really propose a voyage into European waters under the flag of Cartagena? I took heart & breath, & told him (with just enough smile to cover my tracks), I was sure that a vessel & captain able to spirit Napoleon Bonaparte from St. Helena were able to sail him thro the Pillars of Hercules, pass him within sight of Corsica, whisk him straight up the Tiber, and land him on the steps of the Palazzo Rinuccini. That he could, if he did not trust me, keep me every moment in his view, & impose what conditions and disguises seem’d to him advisable. But that I was resolved to have a last word with my mother ere I was fetcht to my next destiny. He appear’d to consider. I made bold to enquire at once whether he was under someone’s orders to the contrary, or regarded my proposal as too audacious…

The fact is, Lafitte then acknowledges, his men have been at sea for above half a year without shore liberty, and a vessel in the Jean Blanque’s trade never lacks for alternative colors, name boards, and registry papers. But can it be true that “Baron Castine” has nothing in mind beyond bidding his mother adieu?

Not quite, I reply’d, in as level a tone as I could manage: I hoped also to have a word with her confessor. I heard him mutter: Nom de Dieu!

No more is said. Their watering stop in the Cape Verde Islands is noncommittal, a reasonable jumping-off place to either the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. But their course thence, to Andrew’s great joy, is north, not west; before long they raise the Canaries, then Madeira. By April’s end they have traversed the Strait of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica (“I dofft my hat, & look’d toward Ajaccio, & said nothing…”) and are anchored in the marshy mouth of the Tiber, off ancient Ostia. Only then, writes Andrew, I went to Lafitte & thankt him. He responded, as quizzical as ever, I was welcome, for the excursion & for his company. Which latter he trusted I would not object to, as his life depended upon my safe delivery to America. This was the 1st clear acknowledgment that he was not his own man — tho he may have invoked it by way of excusing his close surveillance.

Thus it occurred, as all biographies of the Bonapartes attest, that on the morning of May 5, 1821 (by coincidence the day, though not the hour, of Napoleon’s death on St. Helena), a “well-dressed Napoleonic stranger” invaded the Palazzo Rinuccini, made his way by sheer authority of mien past guards and attendants into the presence of Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte, “Madame Mère,” and (as his equally elegant companion, unmentioned in the chronicles, stood by, dabbing at his tears with a fine linen handkerchief) bowed and kissed that matron’s hand, touched a crucifix to her lips, and assured her that her famous son was “free from his sufferings, and happy”; that she would one day surely see him again; and that by mid-century the nations of the world would be racked by such civil strife and conflagration as to make St. Helena seem a paradise.

He bows again and leaves. Devoted son and good Roman Catholic that he is, Jean Lafitte embraces him outside the palace, begs his pardon for having doubted his motives, and declares that scene to have been the noblest he has ever been witness to (his words, Andrew notes, would apply as well to a loyal Bonapartist as to Bonaparte). An attendant overtakes them with a gift of gold Napoleons from Mme Mère. Andrew at once bestows it upon Lafitte for the trouble and expense of this diversion, reserving only two coins: one he gives the servant, in exchange for information concerning the whereabouts of his lady’s spiritual advisor, Mme Kleinmüller, with whom he has business. They are informed with a smile that that worthy has been exposed (by Pauline) and dismissed from the household as a fraud: she was not even Swiss! But she is said to be living in the northern outskirts of the city, at an address near the Villa Ada, and to be awaiting the arrival from Geneva of her wealthy American lover, whose influence she hopes will restore her to favor in the Palazzo Rinuccini.

To Lafitte, Andrew declares that he must deal alone with this woman who so egregiously imposed upon Mme Mère, to his own detriment, for so long — though his guardian may if he wishes not only accompany him to the Via Chiana but surround the address with Baratarians to assure his not “escaping.” The proposition involves a calculated risk: that Lafitte might be, as Mme Kleinmüller reportedly was, in the service of Metternich. But Jean declares himself satisfied with “the baron’s” honor: he will of course escort him to the house and back to their ship, but the interview will be as private and as lengthy as monsieur desires. He even offers a knife, which Andrew accepts only when Lafitte assures him, with a small smile, that he carries others, and a pistol as well.

They find the quarter, the street, the number, an unimpressive pensione, and are told by the landlord that no Mme Kleinmüller lives there, only a vedova spagnuola of the highest respectability. Would he be so gracious, Andrew inquires, as to deliver to that same widow a note of his respects? He presents it for Lafitte’s inspection, declaring it to be “in the family cipher”: it reads VS DRYEJRI G.G. Lafitte shrugs. Very well, thinks Andrew: if he is in Betsy Patterson Bonaparte’s pay, he is at least not privy to her cipher. With a tip of one gold Napoleon for his trouble, the landlord goes off with the message. Andrew winks, shakes Lafitte’s hand, taps the dagger in his waistcoat, and steps quickly inside the house, “praying to the Muse of Imposture” that Jean will not follow.

For all my assurances, that he was welcome to follow me & cet., were merest bluff, he now acknowledges. Had he lay’d eyes upon “G.G.” of the familiar flourish, he had surely known her face at once, as off Tobago I had finally known her hand. And knowing her, he would have known me, and all been lost. But he stopt there on the threshold, even as a cry of female joy was heard upstairs. I winkt again, closed the door betwixt us, was directed above by Signor the concierge, & was met at the door of her chamber by VS (& Betsy Bonaparte’s) DRYEJRI G.G.: Consuelo del Consulado.

An alarmed, handsome forty, “C.C.” draws back — she had expected either Betsy’s footman or Mme B. herself, come down at last from Geneva. Then in an instant she sees through Andrew’s disguise and dashes with a cry to her dressing table.

But my hand at her mouth, & my knife at her throat, prevented her [from availing herself of the little pistol Andrew now espies there and confiscates]. I vow’d to her I meant her no harm, nor was of any mind to publish her identity. That my life was forfeit if she should publish mine. That I knew her to have got intimate by some wise with Mme B., & to have posed as the Swiss clairvoyant Kleinmüller, to what end and in whose service I could not say. That I was come thither, thousands of miles out of my way, not to trouble her life but to save my own, to which end I sought no more from her than her story since our parting in Bordeaux half a dozen years past. In return wherefor, I would tell her mine or not, as she wisht, and be on my parlous way.

He now takes his final risk. His difficulty in recognizing Consuelo’s penmanship — after reading so many hundreds of pages of her manuscript fiction! — had been owing to the cipher, its unfamiliarity and noncursive letters. The identification made (nearly eight months since!) he had understood not only that Betsy Bonaparte’s Roman informant was, of all people on the planet, his erstwhile lover, but that she was very possibly, by some series of chances, that lady’s secret suisse—and that therefore Mme B. knew more about him than he had supposed, and from a particularly disaffected source, his last farewell to whom had been a bitter business. Nevertheless he now releases her, compliments her appearance, and (though retaining the pistol) resumes the manner and mien of Andrew Cook IV.

Consuelo sat; I too. She lookt me up & down; lookt away; lookt back; shook her head; reacht for her reticule. Another pistol, I wonder’d? Or the famous poison’d snuffbox? But she fetcht forth a mere silk handkerchief (gift from me in Halifax), wherewith to wipe her eyes as she rehearst her tale.

She has, she tells him, embarked since their last parting on a “Second Cycle” of her own, inspired by his rejection of her and by a certain subsequent humiliation. Against Renato Beluche she bore no grudge: he had made clear from the first the terms of their connection, and though she had hoped he might change his mind, she remained grateful for his protection. Nor could she blame Andrew for not loving her more, in Algiers, in Halifax, in New Orleans. Who can command love? Of the men in her life, only three had truly victimized her: Don Escarpio, of whom more presently; a certain ensign aboard that dispatch boat from Halifax to Bermuda in 1814, who upon a certain Gulf Stream night when she was downcast by Andrew’s teasing criticisms of her novel, had sworn to withdraw before ejaculating and had then, with a laugh, forsworn; and Joseph Bonaparte, whose patronage she had sought after all, for want of better, at Andrew’s suggestion, in Bordeaux in 1815, and who had not only neglected to give her the letter of introduction to Mme de Staël which he had promised in exchange for an hour in his bedchamber (he was summoned out by an urgent message from Napoleon in Rochefort, and never got back to either his coitus interruptus or to his payment therefor), but had neglected as well to advise her that he was enjoying a mild gonorrhea.

(I broke in to protest that I had offer’d her just such a letter, with no clapp attacht! She reply’d, ’Twas not from me she wanted it, or anything, not then…)

Disgusted, she had made her way to Leghorn, sought out Mme de Staël there on her own, been generously received by that lady on the strength of what she acknowledges having pled, in tears: her past connection with Andrew Cook; and while being cured of her venereal infection, had helped nurse Germaine’s ailing husband back toward health. Indeed she had made herself so useful to her heroine (who did not share Consuelo’s weariness with men, but sympathized with it and introduced her to the idea, but not to the practice, of le saphisme) that Mme de Staël had brought her back in her retinue to Coppet and Paris. In that city, chez Germaine, she had met a truly sister spirit, the aggrieved but undaunted Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, with whom, on the strength of their common ill-handling by Napoleon’s brothers, she had become friends. More exactly, with Germaine’s fascinated encouragement, the two women had become first friends, then quite close friends, then finally and briefly (the first such experience for either) more than friends.

Unsettled by that adventure, Betsy had returned to Baltimore, where she put by her disposition against Joseph Bonaparte and sought him out, in her son’s interest, at Point Breeze. Consuelo had remained behind to attend Mme de Staël, whose own health was failing. For a time the two refrained from correspondence — the very time, as it happens, when Andrew had made Betsy’s reacquaintance and interested her in his project of rescuing the chief of the Bonapartes. Mme de Staël died, with her last breath encouraging Consuelo, should she ever take pen again in hand, to “rework that little business of the poison’d snuffbox,” a device she could wish to have employed in her own life against more men than one.

Her words inspire Consuelo not to literature but to that aforementioned “Second Cycle.” She is 37, without husband, children, lovers, or further wish for them. She considers writing to Betsy; decides not to. Recalling Andrew’s program of “correcting his life’s first half,” she conceives a project of revenge against the man “who had 1st corrupted her, & whose life was a catalogue of such corruptions”: Don Escarpio! She goes to Rome, where she understands him to have made an infamous reputation as agent of the anti-Bonapartist secret police; she intends by some means — perhaps a poisoned letter opener! — to end his wicked life, at whatever risk to herself. But she has been prevented: a certain opera singer of that city, whose sexual favors Don Escarpio had demanded as payment for her lover’s release from the political prison at Castel Sant’ Angelo, has availed herself of an unpoisoned letter opener to stab him through the heart.

At once thus gratified and thwarted — and nearly out of funds — Consuelo is reduced to two equally disagreeable options: appealing to her friend Mme B. for money on the strength of their brief but extraordinary connection, or attempting another novel, perhaps on the subject of Don Escarpio. But the former smacks of blackmail, and for the second, despite a promising title (whose promise is perhaps diminished in literal translation: The Woman before Whom the Man before Whom All Rome Trembled Trembled), she has come to understand she has not the talent. Her investigations, however, and her credentials from Mme de Staël, have led her into Roman anti-Bonapartist circles from the early years of the century, in which there is concern that the habitation in that city of Napoleon’s mother, uncle, sister, and two brothers (Lucien and Louis), will generate schemes for his rescue and return to Europe. Consuelo herself is nonpolitical — and lonely, and at loose ends. She is befriended by, and for a modest stipend becomes the assistant of, a fellow lodger in her pensione, one Mme Kleinmüller, who is in the service of these anti-Bonapartists…

Andrew interrupts: she was not herself this Mme Kleinmüller? She has no gift for imposture, Consuelo replies — nor for dissembling, nor for fiction. She was Mme K.‘s assistant. The spiritualist herself was now returned in discredit to her ultimate employer, Prince Metternich, whose object it was to discover and forestall all rescue attempts. Consuelo’s own object, in the beginning, had been merely to survive; a remarkable letter from Betsy Bonaparte, received fortuitously at just this time (1817, when Andrew was busy with the Lakanal affair), gives her a new purpose. So far from having forgotten their brief affair, Betsy confesses that it has changed her life: ambitious as ever for her son, for herself she now craves “something more,” which she dares not spell out in plain English. She encloses the Patterson family cipher, begs Consuelo to set forth in it her own feelings…

An impassioned correspondence follows. Betsy vows to return with Bo to Europe, and to her “sweetest consolation,” as soon as the boy’s schooling permits, perhaps 1820. Meanwhile she is delighted to learn of her friend’s connections in Rome, so useful to her plans, which she now presumes to call theirs. While pretending to support Joseph Bonaparte’s schemes to retrieve his brother from St. Helena, she has hatched a scheme of her own, which Consuelo can immeasurably abet from her position in the Palazzo Rinuccini. It is Metternich’s policy with a difference: to deter all rescue operations except her own! From past acquaintance Betsy knows Mme Mère to be gullible; Mme Kleinmüller’s imposition on her will be justified by the fact of her son’s rescue. Consuelo accepts another retainer; their correspondence through 1818 and 1819 is an excited mixture of love, plans for their future, and present business. Consuelo is able to serve her American friend without really betraying Mme Kleinmüller, given the partial congruence of their interests. What is more, she believes in the spirit voices, table rapping, and the rest, which her efforts assist Mme K. in conjuring.

It is not until early in 1820 that Betsy mentions by name her “principal American agent” in the St. Helena scheme: a “handsome, worldly, & agreeable fellow” who, if he were but of the gentry and she not done for ever and all with men, she could even imagine as a lover: one Andrew Cook, of Maryland and Canada. Consuelo’s urgent, appalled reply, warning Betsy not to trust of all men that one, comes too late: Andrew has already disappeared, to Betsy and Joseph’s consternation. Mme B. wonders whether he has not been all along an agent of the U.S. Secret Service; whether Metternich might not in fact have arranged for Napoleon’s covert assassination or removal, and his replacement with an impostor. She urges Consuelo to extricate herself from Mme Kleinmüller, and makes hasty preparations to leave Baltimore. For appearances’ sake she will settle with Bo in Geneva; her father’s friend John Jacob Astor is there, and will surely urge her to visit the Roman Bonapartes, with whom he is close. Thus she will discreetly rejoin Consuelo, and they can assess both the St. Helena situation and their own.

The letter arrives just when Pauline Borghese finally persuades Mme Mère that the clairvoyant is a fraud; that Napoleon is ill, perhaps dying, perhaps dead. Mme Kleinmüller vanishes; Consuelo withdraws to her pensione and anxiously awaits her friend, fearing daily she will be done violence to by Pauline’s hirelings, or Metternich’s, or the late unlamented Don Escarpio’s.

She concludes her tale. Her friend “Dona Betsy” has put aside her ambition to rescue and marry Napoleon for her son’s sake; it is Consuelo she now desires, and Consuelo her. She is in Geneva already, and on the advice of Señor Astor will soon come to Rome. In the fall, her son will return to America to enter Harvard, perhaps also to marry Joseph Bonaparte’s daughter; Betsy and Consuelo will retire to Switzerland, officially traveling companions, in fact a couple.

She then implored me, writes Andrew, by whatever love I had once felt for her, not to obstruct this innocent aim. That she cared not whether I kill’d or saved Napoleon, or how I might re-draught the map of the world or the script of History, so I left her & her friend in peace. That the sole grudge she bore me was for having encouraged a talent she never possest, for writing novels. For the rest, she felt only gratitude: for my having more than once helpt her out of a parlous corner, & for what affection we had shared. That whatever my present danger, she wisht me safely out of it, & would aid me any way I ask’d. And that she hoped, once I was free of it, I would beg pardon of the woman I had abused long & sorely, by my absence: yourself, whom she bid me make amends to even if, as might be, I found you to have follow’d in your disappointment her & Betsy Bonaparte’s path, to el safismo!

Much moved (“& by this last not a little alarm’d”), Andrew tells Consuelo the truth about Napoleon as he knows it: that the man on St. Helena is dying, has no wish to be rescued, and thinks only of his son, “l’Aiglon,” a virtual prisoner in Augsburg. (“They will poison him too,” declares Consuelo.) His own tentative plan for “Dona Betsy” Andrew does not mention, and now quietly discards; but he reminds Consuelo of his original high ideals vis-à-vis the Louisiana Project, and the Indian Free State before it, in which good cause he hopes she will enlist Mme B.’s aid. Why should such a sovereign general sanctuary as he envisioned not extend also to such as her newly discovered self? Why not “a vast New Switzerland, or New New World to the opprest, where not only black & red & white, but women & men, may abide as equals”? And he will, he pledges — if Jean Lafitte does not discover and dispatch him to the sharks — make amends to Andrée upon his return. Herself he wishes success in her life’s Second Cycle, with which he pledges not to interfere — but he cannot leave without knowing whether her disconcerting speculation about his wife was based upon more than just her own experience. Has Consuelo somehow had news from Castines Hundred?

She reply’d, I could take her life before she would reply — shrewd insurance that I would make good my pledge! But tho she doubted so bold a creature as my “New New World” would come to light in our century, she promist to speak favorably to Betsy B. of the Louisiana Project. She then bid me adios (not hasta la vista) with words that dizzy’d me almost into a “Bloodsworth Island Swoon,” to wit: that she fear’d I was become the counterfeit, not of Napoleon, but of Andrew Cook. And that the cypher whose key I had yet to hit upon, was my own self.

They kiss farewell (“after a fashion,” Andrew says unkindly — but he is writing to Andrée); he draws a breath, resumes the mien of Napoleon disguised as “Baron Castine,” and steps outside. Jean Lafitte waits patiently, to all appearances indifferent to both the length and the issue of this interlude; Andrew returns the knife without comment. Nor does his cautious conversation, as they make their way back across the city and down the Tiber to their ship, give him any clue to how much Jean understands, or what his purpose is. (Their way takes them through the Piazza di Spagna. One wants to call across the fifteen decades, “Stay! Put by a moment these vague intrigues, this nonsense of Napoleon: young John Keats has just died here!”)

A hard suspense, he remarks, which lasted thro our crossing, & is not yet resolved. They stop three weeks in Genoa to reprovision Jean Blanque and give the crew shore liberty (Lafitte “firmly requests” his passenger to remain aboard), then set out westward at the end of May. Neither killed nor challenged nor put at his ease, our ancestor finds it no problem to maintain with Lafitte a tentative attitude concerning the Louisiana Project, for he has begun to question it himself. Jean’s sustained ironic solicitude makes Andrew reckless: he asks directly, Is that daring fellow who arranged his rescue himself to be rescued, or left languishing on St. Helena? He no longer languishes there, Lafitte replies with a smile, adding that he is not at liberty to say more.

Thus we arrived, early in July, at what I knew to be the Virginia Capes, & sail’d on up the Chesapeake, leaving Tangier & Smith Islands to port, till we came within sight of fateful Bloodsworth! I feign’d not to know the waters, and asking, was told no more than that they were full of sharks and alligators, to keep strangers off. We enter’d the marshy Manokin — where neither shark nor ’gator ever swum — and anchor’d off the King plantation, which too Jean said he could not name: only that I was to be sequester’d there in safety & comfort till my brother came for me, a fortnight or less. I was fetcht ashore, found the owners “off on the Grand Tour,” & the house in charge of a well-manner’d staff who lookt neither Baratarian nor Eastern Shore. They show’d me my quarters, comfortable indeed, & inform’d us wryly that news had just reacht the U. States of Napoleon’s death on St. Helena on May 5. Le roi est mort, shrugg’d Jean: vive le roi. Next morning he bade me adieu (not au revoir) & sail’d off, “to take the good news to Louisiana, & to rescue André Castine.” And here I have languisht full six weeks since.

His attendants are as polite and noncommittal as Lafitte. When the promised fortnight extends to a month with no word from anyone, they apologize. Andrew stages imperial tantrums at the restriction on his movements: he is free to stroll the grounds of Beverly without (apparent) surveillance, but forbidden “for his own protection” to leave the estate. They regret but have no authority to relax their orders. He suspects the secret service, Joseph Bonaparte, Betsy Patterson; perhaps all of them in concert; perhaps — long delayed and skillfully managed retribution — at Andrée’s direction!

By mid-August, convinced that he has been transported “from one St. Helena to another” and afraid for his sanity, he resolves to escape to nearby Bloodsworth, to “regain [his] bearings at the spot where 1st [he] lost them,” and then make his way to Castines Hundred, to whatever he might find there. His long, ambiguous confinement — extending really from his swoon on St. Helena — and Consuelo’s parting words have now persuaded him that the Louisiana Project, indeed his whole original conception of a Second Revolution, has been misconceived; that the true Revolution, while it might well end in politics, does not begin there…

It is now past midnight by my old Breguet, he concludes: my father’s timepiece, to which I cling as if it were the key to me. They do not know I know these marshes as I once knew my mother’s face, or your own dear flesh. Chère Andrée: if you receive this letter, it will signify that “Napoleon” has made good his 3rd escape, has survived the only sharks & alligators hereabouts (those of his treacherous imagination), & is headed home!

Receive it she does, we know, at year’s end, at this address. Andrée is 32; the twins are 9. Does she decipher, read, believe it? We do not know. Its author never appears, at least in his own person. For four years more his “widow” takes no action. Andrew’s former young acquaintance J. F. Cooper publishes his second novel, The Spy, and embarks on the Leatherstocking series. Great Romantics expire: Hoffmann, Shelley, Byron. Two French natural scientists, Prevost and Dumas, prove that the spermatozoan is essential to fertilization; Beethoven finishes the last of the nine symphonies.

At the urging of her friend John Jacob Astor, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte visits Rome from Geneva and is warmly received by the surviving family of the late emperor; the marriage of her son to Joseph’s daughter Charlotte is arranged but never comes to pass, perhaps owing to a quarrel between Betsy and Pauline Borghese! Chagrined, Mme B. returns with a traveling companion to Geneva, “Bo” to America, where to his mother’s exasperation he will marry for love a pretty and well-to-do New Englander named Susan May Williams, and settle happily in Baltimore. Betsy herself will not return until 1834, when her companion (then 54) succumbs, apparently to food poisoning. She never revisits Europe thereafter, but becomes the reclusive, snappish, coldly beautiful real-estate millionaire of Maryland legend, who in her 94th year — disappointed in her final dream of seeing her grandson crowned king of the South after the Civil War — is buried in a lonely plot of Greenmount Cemetery, in accordance with her wish “to be by [her]self.”

But that is the history, already lettered, of Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V, called to their vocation by the letter and pocket-watch sent them in 1827 by “Ebenezer Burling of Richmond,” companion of young Edgar Poe. By then Andrée will have done what we have seen her do, and disappeared into the western fastness.

Thus the long chronicle of Andrew Cook IV trails off into the same marshy equivocation that engendered it. The fate of his Utopian “Louisiana Project,” as of his Indian Free State, is all too evident: the “militant” Indian nationalist movements of our time are to his and Tecumseh’s dream as was Napoleon III’s Second Empire — that grandiose, self-conscious paradigm of the Freudian “compulsion to repeat”—to the First: pitiable travesty.

Must we not conclude the same of the Second Cycle of Andrew’s life? Was not it, was not he, a failure? Has not our whole line been, Henry, from Ebenezer Cooke the first laureate of Maryland and his tutor Henry Burlingame down to you and me? For that is whom we are come to, having traversed, between Andrew’s prenatal and his posthumous letters, all the intervening Cooks and Burlingames: the genealogical bottom line. Am I not myself, in my courtship of Betsy Patterson’s descendant for the sake (I mean also for the sake) of our cause, become my namesake’s pallid parody, and in my own Second Cycle the impersonator of myself?

Before the untimely death of Andrew Cook VI — and the wedding of Jane Mack to Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred — you shall hear, upon these questions, from

Your loving father

C: Jerome Bray to Bea Golden. Inviting her to star in the first epic of Numerature.

Comalot, R.D. 2

Lily Dale, N.Y., U.S.A. 14752

8/5/69

Mrs. Bea Golden (a.k.a. “Bibi,” “Jeannine Mack,” etc.; t.b.k.a. Regina de Nominatrix)

Remobilization Farm

Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

My dear Mrs. Golden,

Certainly a star of your magnitude must receive numbers of letters in each day’s post: solicitations to model as the heroine of somebody’s counterrevolutionary novel; to play the lead in somebody’s film derived from such a novel; et cetera. But a rising star reset should spurn such obsolescent media, soon to be superseded by coaxial television and laser holography, ultimately by a medium far more revolutionary, its essence the very key to and measure of the universe. This is to invite you to spray your past with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and take wing to your golden future, a future impatient to be RESET Mariner-7 takes 1st close-ups of Mars surface Miami blacked out Niagara Falls helicopter crashes Oil leak in Lake Erie.

Hum. Numerature!

Permit us to introduce our new self with apologies for our old. (Much better, LIL.) We are the former 10 2 2, a.k.a. Jerome B. Bray, of the former Lilyvac Farm, R.D. 2, Lily Dale, N.Y., U.S.A. 14752, born in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge and RESET Our ungallant pursuit of you; our apparent, even actual derangement since Passover and particularly since Independence Day use dash to indicate break in syntax and recommencement — these are owing to the overflow of my spirit’s vesicles as it were. Cf. W. Shakespeare’s seminal equation: lunatic = lover = poet; also the wreckage or frenzy of Greek mythic figures, in particular Io, after mating with gods and gadblanks. What indeed is inspiration if not the swelling that follows the Godflaw’s bite? The real star of the myth of Bellerophon is not RESET Who believes he can achieve mythic herohood by perfectly imitating the Heroic Pattern and who learns that by doing so what one becomes is a perfect imitation of a mythic hero no doubt a heroic mimicry in itself but not quite the same thing heh heh. It is not the triple beast Chimera nor is it the pinioned pony Pegasus (O LIL). It is the Gadflaw! And who was that poor mad fellow 10 2 2 a.k.a. RESET A lost chord on LILYVAC’s intromittent organ as it were, a stingee of the Godflew New paragraph.

M. Bernstein was but the mere anticipation of her ex-stepmother! LILYVAC will deal with her; in the meanwhile she deserves R. Prinz, who was never worth 1 grain of your pollen as it were. That’s a figure there heh semicolon a digit of speech RESET And Marsha Blank, number of our enemies, was but an unsuccessful tryout for your role, 1 of numerous understudies so to speak recruited and prepared during our Casting Season, which now approaches its culminating scenes: Rout of the Dromes, Fertilization of the Queen. No matter that in a kind of coma she let loose the goats and herself strayed from the fold; when the hour comes so shall she, plenty, see below, who 1st inspired our Gadblank Illuminations of 7/4 and later, playing at your destined role, gave LILYVAC’s domain its new and proper appellation see above. Final casting to be completed by 8/14, immediately whereafter, with the Fall Work Period, we commence “shooting” (a figure of RESET 1858 Cyrus Field completes 1st Atlantic cable and Queen Victoria exchanges greetings with President Buchanan. 1864 Union Admiral Farragut wins Battle of Mobile Bay. 1945 Hiroshima A-bombed. 1966 Giles Goat-Boy published, imperfect mimicry of a RESET Close parenthesis new ¶

Our proposal: Now that you are quit of your commitment to reactionary media and their representatives, we invite you to play a starring role in the 1st, revolutionary epic of Numerature! The details are too confidential for letters, but this much may be enumerated: (1) Its working title is 18 14 (formerly R.N.). (2) It requires a 1st-magnitude female to play Regina de Nominatrix (formerly Margana le Fay, a.k.a. y Fael), royal consort to Rex Numerator (formerly King Author, a.k.a. RESET To sit at his right hand at the Table of Multiplication, play Ordinate to his Abscissa, share the Pentagonal Bed, receive his innumerable seed, make royal jelly, and bring forth numerous golden heirs. To be the lock his key will fit, its cylinder and oiled tumblers, that together we may RESET No damn it that together they may reach the Treasure stop

Your instructions: (1) Give enclosed packet to M. Blank, your former rival, your present ally and understudy. She will share with you its coma-clearing contents and confirm the truth about yours truly, LILYVAC, and the role that awaits you in 18 14 (formerly NOVEL a.k.a. NOTES). (2) Come again to Comalot with her for 1 shining moment on Wednesday week 8/13 USS Essex captures Alert 1812 Berlin Wall 1961 to see for yourself and to make ready for Bellerophonic downfall of Author and Director by the stinging numbers of R(egina) D(enominatrix) II and her

R.N.

H: Jerome Bray to his parents. An ultimatum.

Comalot, R.D. 2

Lily Dale, N.Y., U.S.A. 14752

8/26/69

Mr. & Mrs. Gerald Bray a.k.a. Gadflay III & Betsy Bonaparte Bray

c/o Monsieur Casteene

Castines 100, Ontario, Canada, &/or lloodsworth I., Md., U.S.A.

Ma y Da (y M.C.²):

Having a wonderful RESET Wish you were Here is our (final) report of business finished et unfinished ha ha since ours to you of 6/17 when in despair over LILYVAC’s printout and Merope/Margana y Fael’s defection we appealed to you for clear programming through 8/15/69 midpoint of our life and Phi-point 6 1 8 etc. of our 5-Year Plan (i.e. Mating Season between Years T & E of NOTES a.k.a. NOVEL): i.e. How translate all those numbers into letters? And whom hump from 7/4-8/14/69 inclusive?

No reply! We begin to wonder! Où et who êtes vous etc.? Et why have you forsaken us? Vous whom all our Leben we’ve thought our allies & protectors; whom our lifework has been but une long letter to, and who we have believed responded s’il vous plaît e.g. via LILYVAC’s leafy anagram! Now Hear This is our final RESET Arabs use rockets on Israeli positions British capture Penobscot Bay ditto Castine Me stop

Madre perdida, Père perdu: Our ally Comrade M. Casteene of Casteenes RESET Son of Ranger & Mme Burlingame and thus not unrelated à nous advises us to make this last attempt to report through LILYVAC through him to you our victorious Mating Season ’69 and revised new project based on Post-Perseid Illuminations see below and exhort you to affirm those latter pronto as we are gearing up for the Fall Work Period and will commence our 7-Year Plan on Tuesday 9/23 St. Thecla’s Day Autumnal Equinox R.S.V.P. or else.

Hum! In absence of Margana y Fael et faute de mieux we fetched to Comalot on 7/5 1 Pocahontas a.k.a. Marsha Blank for standby fertilization & general chores. From 7/12 to 7/21 the Mating Flight kept us in Maryland where under pretext of collaborating mil der Prinz-Mensch gang we carried forward the Season’s activities you would be surprised e reconnoitered Merope/Margana for evidence of rehabilitability no dice.

Back to Lily Dale 7/22 ☌☿☉ we found that in unser absence anti-Bonapartists had raided Comalot, abducted Marsha le Fay, and left the goats and LILYVAC to tend themselves! Quoi to do, Ma, Pa? Giles our prix buck passed on! Les nans reduced to browsing on LILYVAC’s language circuits! Mating Season in full flight and no Io for us to gad, no Blank to fill! Veh vas us! How we implored you und so weiter no reply. We were obliged to make do with nannies blah and go to work on LILYVAC’s nibbled circuits as if the Flight were flown and Fall upon us no help from ustedes no word no patter no pater no mate no mater no matter you shall RESET New ¶

Til LIL enfin got our program recycled enough to tell us in pained English not only that we were despite all appearances OK but that Marsha’s Blank was filled per program, ha ha, not to worry, the best yet is to come: by Phi-day 8/14 we would have the Queen a.k.a. Regina de Nominatrix maintenant we had a new y powerful ally M. Casteene who would monitor both females till the time was ripeness is all we had to do was make contact with him in Buffalo 8/1 Lammas Day Nixon in Pakistan ☽ on Equator More to come.

That night under pretext of collaborating mit der Prinz-Mensch RESET We exchanged credentials in Delaware Park a quick reciprocal demonstration of mimicries our own powers were of course at their peak by reason of the Season we embraced each other with the fervor of true comrades and he revealed himself as our long-lost elder foster brother von Backwater Wildlife Refuge! Son of Ranger & Mme Burlingame! Your elder nephew, sort of, Da, und playmate of your youth!

See chart! Next page!

Much more to come, quelle nuit, we’d never compromised a Rosengarten. We retested Merope too, not quite ripe, and M. le Baron C. explained that Marsha was in care of our colleague Horner at the Remobilization Farm. That we required her there for the present while he moved our operatives to Bloodsworth Island in the Chesapeake. That she would recome to us and LILYVAC without fail for her Final Fix at the Phi-point of the RESET That her agency now was but to deliver Queen Bea to us & LIL in time for mating kein sweat if we played our cards right and laid on the Honey Dust. That he looked forward to inspecting LILYVAC and discussing further our production of said H.D., the progress of our 5-Year Plan, and the revolutionary new medium Numerature, all which he would do at commencement of our Fall Work Period meanwhile he was off to Bermuda on a mating flight of his own au revoir mon (foster) frère.

On Tuesday 8/5 we duly invited Regina de Nominatrix a.k.a. Bibi etc. via LILYVAC & Marsha Blank to Comalot for 1 shining RESET On 8/13 Sharon Tate et alii buried she came i.e. Marsha fetched her here per program Dialogue Just Honey-Dust me 1st is all I ask Rexy-boy Bea murmured We did Me too Jer said Marsha you ever promised me a RESET We did Good night sweet ladies Time to fly now We did & did & did & did & did & did & RESET Done! PUNKT!

As meteors sprayed from Perseus like pollen or golden marks of punctuation, near midnight Th 8/14 Krafft-Ebing 1840 we completed the innumeration of Regina de Nominatrix, and at LILYVAC’s suggestion, for we were spent, and sore, and weary, we took a hit of Honey Dust ourself. Happy birthday sexy Rexy, Marsha mumbled; sorry about old Giles. O fie, said we, O phi, and then the hit hit: eureka, mirabile dictu, etc.!

The Post-Perseid Illuminations! That coincidence (of the mezzo del cammin de nostra vita and the Phi-point both of Year 1969 and of our original 5-Year Plan) was no coincidence! That fiasco that was NOT (i.e. the 1st ⅗ths of NOTES) was not! Achtung, Ma, Da! Inasmuch as that aforesaid conjunction of mid- and Phi-points was the turning point of notre vie and of LILYVAC’s program, could it be, aha, that the Golden Age originally projected to arrive in Spring 1971 (i.e. end of Year S, 5th of NOTES) would not actually commence till the Phi-point of our vita i.e. age 44.64 i.e. 618 etc. of my 3-score years and 12 i.e. 4/5/77? Hum!

What say, folks? we asked you. No reply! We began to RESET LILYVAC then vouchsafed 2 seminal suggestions by dawn’s early Licht. A (1) That perhaps a new plan was called for, evolving from NOTES like the Adult from the Pupil and commencing at the latter’s Phi-point i.e. A.S.A.P.; this to be not a 5- but a 7-Yearer culminating 7/4/76, on which fit date the 2nd Revolution would commence, to be followed per schedule by the New Golden Age. And a (2) That LILYVAC therefore needed entire reprogramming with 7’s in place of 5’s, even as foreshadowed by Merope/Margana last Passover 4/3 i.e. the eve of the eve of 4/5/69 or 7 years exactly ere the eve of the dawn of the N.G.A. When we did all those 7’s? See our lettre of 5/13 to Comrade Mack in LILYVAC’s memory bank if you have the key we’ll see! I.e., exactly the reprogramming scheduled for the upcoming Year E of NOTES (which see too in my letter to Todd Andrews of 7/4/67) but necessarily there unspecified. Ergo, Ma; also, Da: all has proceeded on schedule, but on a schedule only now coming clear! ¿No? Nicht wahr? R.S.V.P. instanter!

Queen B. then securely stashed and Dusted and Mating Season done, we returned Agent Blank to Canada and celebrated there our 36th by (disguised) participation in der Mensch-Prinz son-et-lumière memorial to the fallen American & Canadian Soldiers at Old Fort Erie. Wherein, as our voice sprach also from the rising cloud of the Great Magazine Explosion and we showered the scene with numbers like meteors spraying out like RESET We came to our final Post-Perseid Illumination: that nous-mème need not nor would not bring to its climax and dénouement that toilsome new 7-Year Plan! That having so scored this Mating Season, there remained for us only to complete LILYVAC’s reprogramming, whereafter LIL itself — with but the most routine attendance by some trusted agent like our dear Merope of old (who shares Bea’s precious erstwhile amber name) — could correct e refine its own program and accomplish both this 2nd plan and the 2nd Revolution!

Where did that leave us? R.S.V.P.!

On 8/18 St. Helena’s Day notre semblable our (foster) frère M.C. good as his mot stopped by for a few shining moments en route from Backwater Refuge to Casteenes 100 and re-presented his credentials. Son and agent of our (foster) parents! Coordinator of Reenactment for 2nd Revolution! Wonderer like Yours Truly whatever happened to our true parents Gerald Bray Jr. a.k.a. Gadflew III & Betsy Bonaparte Bray i.e. vous 2 who for all he knew set us both adrift at birth in the bulrushes and buzzed off. R.S.V.P.!

With our permission he inspected LILYVAC, très interesting indeed, um hum, and firmly affirmed our P.-P. Illuminations, in particular the 7-Year Plan, which by no coincidence coincided precisely with his own. Had we considered that our destiny might be the triumphal reenactment of our ancestor Harold Bray’s apotheosis at the end of the Heroic Cycle, i.e. some mystical ascension whereof the Fort Erie Magazine Explosion was the dark prefigurement? Nein. Had we considered what considerable new funding our 7-Year Plan would require? Nyet. Hum. But sans doubt we had considered the possibility of increased production and underground distribution of Honey Dust as a means of financing the 2nd Revolution? Nay.

Well! We would consider all that! He suggested further that if all went per plan we might even hope for substantial new funding from the Tidewater Foundation. Might he examine Regina de Nominatrix, whom he understood to have given herself to our cause? We consulted LILYVAC: oui. Très très interesting! He affirmed the importance of our keeping her Dusted and stashed until she comes to term; also the usefulness of an experienced keeper like prelapsarian Comrade Merope. We would be interested to know that that once-dear faithless friend — having forsworn us as it were 1st with Rodriguez from CCNY, then with himself our (foster) brother, and then with R. Prinz — had like Peter at cockcrow so to speak recognized and begun to repent of her triple erreur: he M.C. had reason to believe she was about to abandon Prinz and petition us to let her come again to Comalot!

Ah so? Indeed, it was his opinion that Margana’s apostasy was loyalty camouflaged, a necessary cover for her infiltration of the Remobilization Farm and the Prinz-Mensch operation, both of which could be expected to have their share of counterrevolutionary anti-Bonapartists mimicking friends of la Deuxième R. N’est-ce pas? A word to the wise? In any case he knew that we knew that apparent allies may be obstacles if not actual enemies, e.g. Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation, who might have to be removed as the Doctor hélas had had to be from the Remobilization Farm, a base of operations no longer necessary to us, and whose pro tem director, Morgan, had failed to develop as Casteene had hoped when he tapped him for our cause. Got all that, Ma, Da? He was beginning to have his doubts even about young Comrade Mack, who after all had never replied to ours of 5/13 see RESET And surely the reverse was equally true: none knew better than he the painful apparent treasons people in his profession must commit in the name of loyalty and vice versa viz. his relations with his son now lost and peut-être our (true) parents’ with us.

Whereof we spoke with the full confidentiality of (foster) brothers in arms. He would combine, he vowed, his search for his missing son with a search for news of you; mais he bid us consider, as we were (foster) siblings, the lamentable pattern of his line, wherein each generation made allies with its grandparents against its parents. Not to suggest et cet. but we had after all a common grandmother in Princess Kyuhaha Bray of the Tuscaroras, wife of Andrew Burlingame Cook V in the paleface record books and consort of Charles Joseph Bonaparte in the eyes of God and the Iroquois during that gentleman’s RESET Only a suggestion, Rex. He invited us to fly down to Bloodsworth Island the following week to observe and advise upon certain rehearsals for the 2nd Revolution in its military-media aspect to be carried out down there under pretext of filming sequences for the Prinz-Mensch project. We would confer further and have another look at Merope/Margana, non? By way of auf Wiedersehen he chipped in a few 7’s for LILYVAC Days of week Liberal arts Ages of man (Shakespeare) Tones of diatonic scale Orifices of (male human) body Colors of rainbow Seas. Muchas gracias (foster) frère! Happy St. Helena’s Day!

Hum! Hum! We spent the week hard at it with LILYVAC Months of Apollo’s gestation & of Leto’s flight from Hera’s Python Letters exchanged between Abelard & Héloïse not counting “Calamities of Abelard” Years of 3rd phase of War of Austrian Succession 1756-63 Weeks of Austro-Prussian War 1866 Gasterocheires Consonants of Hawaiian alphabet. We also considered what he’d bid us consider, monitored Regina de Nominatrix so far so good she was able now to do chores between Dustings, and reflected upon Elba & St. Helena, 1st & 2nd Exiles & Returns. For he had also invoked, our (f.) frère, another link between us, which he promised to illumine further on Bloodsworth Island: the heroical efforts of one of his ancestors on behalf of the noblest of ours on the island named for the saint on whose day we conversed. Ought we, we wondered, to consider a 2nd Exile of our own, once LIL was reprogrammed, to re-return at the Phi-point 6 et cet. for the Golden Age?

R.S.V.P.! No reply. Ma! Da!

The events of 8/24 & 25 confirm this prospect. M. le Baron C. assures us that he is more and more confident of funding for our 7-Year Plan, as yet unnamed. We are considering the neutralization of both Todd Andrews and Drew Mack, and preparing Merope for return to Comalot. By way of an exercise in turning our adversaries’ strengths to our RESET He arranged a U.S. Navy aerial target practice against “D.C.,” pointing out to us that we could as readily have used it to eliminate e.g. T.A. & D.M., and might in future. In the same exercise we took advantage of Merope’s disillusionment with obsolescent media and their representatives to approach her confidentially re the prospect of recoming to Comalot as Chief Programmer no sex no housework Bea G. to do all that between Honey-Dustings, and we were pleased to hear in her scream something tentative, a camouflaged Maybe. Finally, at our () brother’s suggestion we took the opportunity to re-rehearse the apotheosis foreshadowed by the Great Magazine Explosion: an entire success. From Merope we proceeded alone into the marsh during the aforementioned night-firing exercise, made a practice lift-off in the Prohibited Area that our ancestor would be proud of, eluded without difficulty the navy search party by mimicking 1 of its members, and surprised M. Casteene himself by appearing in his study next noon i.e. yesterday M 8/25 ☽ in perigee Swallows leave North country Kopechne exhumation doubtful as he was himself in mid-metamorphosis ha ha! Dialogue. Ha ha, he ejaculated, caught me there, didn’t you, mon semblable mon RESET Well well things are moving très swiftly indeed Do you think you can wind up LILYVAC’s reprogramming by the autumnal equinox Here are a few more I just thought of Continents Hills of Rome Sleepers of Ephesus Wonders of world Lamps of architecture (Ruskin) Voyages of Sinbad Snow White’s dwarfs. How in the world did you ever et cet. & can you possibly make it to our final rehearsal at Fort McHenry Baltimore Harbor 9/13 sharp. Narrative. His own intention he declared was to issue between now and then an ultimatum to his son: Appear as my ally or be regarded as mein enemy! Perhaps we should do likewise with our parents and, faute de reply, look beyond them for our (true) derivation, as he perhaps would be obliged to look past his son to his (unborn) grandchildren as the (true) heirs of the unfinished business of the 2nd Revolution Au revoir &: don’t forget to provide him with a full report on our ascension and evasion tactics out there in the marsh quite a trick et cet. In return he would see to Merope’s recoming at least for a few (trial) shining RESET But keep her off the Honey Dust and Bea on it, d’accord?

Done. Bea/Regina reports that 1 of T.A.‘s operatives came snooping about in my absence but she was between Dustings and able to handle him, no sweat. LILYVAC confirms. Hum! Urge you send Margana soonest so that we can Dust & stash Queen B. till term, complete repair of language circuits, finish reprogramming by equinox.

Last call, Ma, Da!AF*ØAppear as our ally or RESET Your loving son 10 2 a.k.a. Rex Numerator cc: MC

H: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. His final such letter: the plan of his abandoned Perseus story, conformed to the plan of his own life.

Lord Amherst Motor Hotel

5000 Main Street

Buffalo, New York 14226

Monday 8/4/69

TO:

Yours Truly

FROM:

The Once & Future Ambrose Mensch, lately “Arthur Morton King,” Whom It Ceases to Concern

RE:

Your letter to me of May 12, 1940

Y:

Hello and good-bye. Inasmuch as in the course of

I. My life’s First Cycle

A. On Carl Jung’s 94th birthday (6/26/69) our friend Magda Giulianova underwent uterine surgery. By her own account, a hysterectomy.

B. Fitzroy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan, mythologist and descendant of the Crimean War field marshal after whom the raglan sleeve, analyzed the biography of the typical mythic hero into 22 several events or features, to wit:

1. The hero’s mother is a royal virgin;

2. His father is a king, and

3. Often a near relative of his mother, but

4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and

5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god.

6. At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grandfather, to kill him, but

7. He is spirited away, and

8. Reared by foster parents in a far country.

9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but

10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom.

11. After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast,

12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor, and

13. Becomes king.

14. For a time he reigns uneventfully, and

15. Prescribes laws, but

16. Later he loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and

17. Is driven from the throne and the city, after which

18. He meets with a mysterious death,

19. Often at the top of a hill.

20. His children, if any, do not succeed him.

21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless

22. He has one or more holy sepulchers.*

C. Joseph Campbell, mythologist and comparative religionist, drawing upon Lord Raglan’s analysis and the theories of Carl Jung, arranged these events into a cycle of 9 (or 23) several events or features, thus: †

D. I, whom these matters have long and obsessively concerned, find such divisions, while illuminating, as finally arguable as the measurement of an irregular coastline (Bertrand Russell’s example). Is the perimeter of Bloodsworth Island 10 miles? 100 miles? 1,000 miles? The answer depends upon how much particularity one ignores: the larger and smaller coves (Okahanikan, Tigs, Pone); the larger and smaller creeks (Long, Muddy, Fin); the bights and bends; the several points and spits that grow and shrink with the tide; the individual tussocks, hummocks, and fingers of each of these; the separate spartina stalks, oyster shells, and sand grains that comprise them, themselves irregular down past their molecules to the limits of definition. The coastline of Bloodsworth Island is infinite!

Likewise the itemization of, say, Perseus’s career, which I can as reasonably divide into 2, 8, 28, or 49 coordinate parts as into Campbell’s 9 or Raglan’s 22. Many of the 49, even, in my tidy 7x7 diagram thereof (which never mind), could be separated further or combined with their neighbors. Ought its items C5, C6, and C7, for example (Espial of Andromeda on Cliff at Joppa, Slaying of Sea Monster, Marriage to Andromeda), to be a single item (Rescue and Marriage)? Or ought its C7 to be divided into Rivalry with Phineus, Wedding Feast, Battle in the Banquet Hall, etc.?

All which considerations are but homely reminders of what mystics and logicians know (and mythic heroes at the Axis Mundi): that our concepts, categories, and classifications are ours, not the World’s, and are as finally arbitrary as they are provisionally useful. Including, to be sure, the distinction between ours and the World’s.

E. If therefore, for formal elegance, I divide the story of Perseus the Golden Destroyer first into 2 “cycles” (e.g., I: The official myth; II: My projected fiction about his later adventures: his midlife crisis and its resolution); and if I further divide each of those cycles into, say, 7 parts or stages, of which the 6th in each case is the climax; and if I still further divide each of those climactic 6th stages into 7 parts, of which ditto, my division will be about as defensible as those of Lord R. & Co.

F. Such an analysis might give us, for example,

1. In the First Cycle, like scenes in a mural,

I. The official myth

A. Perseus’s conception in Argos upon virgin Danaë in the brass contraceptive tower, by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold.

B. His rescue, with Mother Danaë, from the brassbound box in which his maternal grandfather has set them adrift in order to escape the usual oracle: grand-infanticide or grand-parricide.

C. After an otherwise eventless childhood-in-exile on the island of Seriphos, his advisement by Athena on ways & means to accomplish the task laid on him by King Polydectes (i.e., the slaying of Medusa the Gorgon), who wants Perseus dead so that he can have Danaë. Athena’s further equipping him with Hermes’s curved sword and her own mirror-bright shield.

D. His outwitting of the 3 Gray Ladies, who alone know where the Styx-Nymphs live, who alone can give him the other equipment he needs to kill Medusa. His theft of the Graeae’s single eye as surety, and subsequent loss of it into Lake Triton.

E. His acquisition from the odorous Styx-Nymphs of Hermes’s winged sandals, Hades’s helmet of invisibility, and the petrifactionproof sack to carry the Gorgon’s head in.

F. 1. His successful decapitation of sleeping Medusa and escape from her sister Gorgons.

2. His petrifaction, with Medusa’s head, of inhospitable Atlas into an African mountain, as he tries to navigate his way back onto the map.

3. His espial of Andromeda chained to the Joppan cliff, and his rescue of her from the sea-beast Cetus.

4. His marriage to her despite the protests of his rival Phineus, and his recitation to the wedding guests of his story thus far.

5. The battle in the banquet hall when Phineus &” Co. disrupt his recitation; their petrifaction by Medusa’s head.

6. His honeymoon return with Andromeda to Seriphos, where he rescues Danaë by petrifying Polydectes. I.e., the termination of his tasks by the extermination of his taskmaster.

7. His triumphal further return to Argos with wife and mother, his accession to the throne, and his accidental slaying of Grandfather Acrisius (his prenatal and postpartum adversary) with a mispitched discus.

G. His 8-year reign and establishment of the Perseid dynasty.

2. And if this mural exfoliated upon a wall not flat like Dido’s Carthaginian frescoes (in which Aeneas sees his own story thus far, even his own face), nor circular like Campbell’s diagram, but logarithmically spiraling out as in a snail-shaped temple, then the Second-Cycle scenes, each positioned behind the original it echoes, might well depict

II. My projected fiction etc.

A. Perseus’s fall from favor with the gods, the decline of his marriage, and the general stagnation or petrifaction of his career; his hope to be “reborn,” at least rejuvenated, by a revisit to the scenes of his initial triumphs.

B. His quarrelsome voyage with Andromeda, who scoffs at his project; their shipwreck and rescue by a descendant of old King Polydectes: handsome Prince Danaus of Seriphos, who flirts with Andromeda.

C. His resolve to continue the reenactment alone, leaving Andromeda to her affair with Danaus. His reconsultation of veiled “Athena” for advice and equipment. She lends him the winged horse Pegasus but is otherwise equivocal, even skeptical of his project. The truth is, she is not Athena but Medusa in disguise! Moreover, she loves Perseus; has loved him all along! Athena, her original punisher, has recapitated her and restored her maiden beauty, but with certain hard conditions, to be disclosed in IIF1.

D. His reencounter with the Graeae, who want their eye back. But P. has dropped it accidentally into Lake Triton in the 1st Cycle (ID). He promises to retrieve it.

E. His deep dive into that lake for that eye; his near drowning and rescue by Medusa, disguised as a Styx-Nymph.

F. 1. His lakeshore idyll with this veiled and odorless nymph, who reveals herself to be Medusa, but won’t lift her veil. For Athena has told her that if her true lover unveils her, they will be immortalized together like Keats’s lovers on the Grecian Urn; but if anyone else does, she will be re-Gorgonized and he a fortiori petrified. She’s willing to risk it, but is he?

2. His decision that he is not, yet. He slips off, attempts to fly over the desert as in his youth, loses his way, crash-lands, loses his consciousness, awakes in a spiral temple muraled with all the foregoing scenes and ministered over, as is he, by a pretty young priestess, who becomes his lover. He believes himself dead and in heaven, learns that he’s alive and in Egypt (where he’d paused for refreshment in the 1st Cycle) and that his new hero-worshiping lover, a student of mythology, is the artist responsible for the story of his life thus far, complete to IIF2.

3. His gratefully kissing her… good-bye. He departs from the temple, returns down the Nile, and secretly enters Joppa, where he learns that Andromeda is established in the palace with her new lover.

4. His confrontation with her there, among the petrified host from IF4, their original wedding guests. Danaus’s live warriors step armed from behind the “statues”; it is a trap.

5. The second Banquet-Hall Battle, a reenactment of the first, but without Medusa’s aid. Perseus’s slaying of young Danaus, arduous general victory, and sparing of Andromeda. Their final rejection of each other.

6. His unveiling and open-eyed embrace of ambiguous Medusa, let come what may.

7. Their transfiguration (along with Andromeda, her mother Cassiopeia, her father Cepheus, the monster Cetus, the horse Pegasus, and the remarkable artist-priestess of IIF2, who will by now have added these scenes to the unwinding mural) into constellations.

G. Their “posthumous” dialogue in the sky, in which, as every night, certain questions are raised (e.g., Has Medusa been truly restored, and is Perseus her true lover? Or was his kiss a mere desperate hope, and she thus a Gorgon after all?) and at least equivocally answered; the stars set until the next nightly reenactment of their story.

3. If my story were so partitioned, and further arranged in its telling so that the First Cycle is rehearsed retrospectively in course of the Second — which itself begins in medias res, in the Egyptian temple of IIF2—then the “panel” IIF6, Perseus’s open-eyed embrace of his new Medusa, would be the climax of the climax, intimated in IE (not IE) above.

4. Such a pattern might even be discovered in one’s own, unheroical life. In the stages of one’s professional career, for example, or the succession of one’s love affairs.

5. If one imagines an artist less enamored of the world than of the language we signify it with, yet less enamored of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamored of the narration than of its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking the world for language, language for the processes of narration, and those processes for the abstract possibilities of form.

6. Might he/she not as readily, at least as possibly, be imagined as thereby (if only thereby) enabled to love the narrative through the form, the language through the narrative, even the world through the language? Which, like narratives and their forms, is after all among the contents of the world.

7. And, thus imagined, might not such an artist, such an amateur of the world, aspire at least to expert amateurship? To an honorary degree of humanity?

G. And if — by a curriculum of dispensations, advisements, armings, trials, losses, and gains, isomorphic with a Perseus’s or a Bellerophon’s — this artist contrived somehow to attain that degree, might he not then find himself liberated to be (as he has after all always been, but is enabled now more truly, freely, efficaciously to be) in the world? Just as the Hero (at IF6) finally terminates his tasks by exterminating his taskmaster and (IIF6) discovers in what had been his chiefest adversary his truest ally, so such an “artist,” at the Axis Mundi or Navel of the World, might find himself liberated — Old self! Old Other! Yours Truly! — from such painful, essential correspondences as ours. Which I now end, and with it the career of “Arthur Morton King.” In order to begin

II. My life’s Second Cycle

* See Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, ch. 16 (N.Y., Vintage Books, 1956).

† In ch. 4, “The Keys,” of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (N.Y., Bollingen, 1949).

I: Ambrose Mensch to the Author. A left-handed letter following up a telephone call. Alphabetical instructions from one writer to another.

“Barataria”

Bloodsworth Island, Maryland

Monday A.M., 8/25/69

Imagine your writing hand put hors de combat by a blow from the palm of Fame! In my case, a 3-lb. bronze job — either a replica or the original snitched by the redcoats from the U.S. Navy Monument during the burning of Washington in 1814—wielded here last night during the Burning of Washington sequence by R. Prinz, who I’m happy to say got as good as he gave: I smithereened his eyeglasses, and very nearly his head, with the pen of History, ditto. More to come.

So I’m following up my Saturday night’s phone call with a left-handed letter typed in A. B. Cook’s caretaker’s cottage, kindly lent Milady A. and me till noon today. Cook and caretaker, together with the navy aforementioned, are searching the Prohibited Area of Bloodsworth Island for Jerome Bonaparte Bray, possibly blown last night to Kingdom Come by a combination of lightning and thitherto unexploded naval ordnance. Choppers, air sleds, marsh buggies, patrol boats! Round about us the filmists film themselves cleaning up the ruins of Washington. Their Director has abandoned his messed-up mistress, one Merope Bernstein, and withdrawn alone to NYC, where no doubt he’ll respectacle himself for next month’s Battle of Baltimore. Germaine and I shall withdraw likewise, after lunch today, to Cambridge, to check out my dexter carpals (presently Ace-Bandaged) and my oncophiliac ménage.

My friend History (formerly Britannia, a.k.a. Literature) will pen you the details some Saturday.

Now: re your letter of August 3, and my call. Enclosed is my ground plan for that Perseus-Medusa story I told you of, together with more notes on golden ratio, Fibonacci series, and logarithmic spirals than any sane writer will be interested in. My compliments. All that remains is for you to work out a metaphorical physics to turn stones into stars, as heat + pressure + time turn dead leaves into diamonds. I have in mind Medusa’s petrifying gaze, reflected and re-reflected at the climax, not from Athena’s mirror-shield, but from her lover Perseus’s eyes: the transcension of paralyzing self-consciousness to productive self-awareness. And (it goes without saying) I have in mind too the transformation of dead notes into living fiction — for it also remains for you to write the story!

Me, I’m done with it, as with another fictive enterprise I’d begun to fancy, which I shan’t lay on you. What occurred to me as we spoke was that a project as sevenish as the one you describe in your letter ought to be your seventh book rather than your sixth: sixes are my thing. What’s more, your busiest reader hereabouts — my good Dame History — has caught up with your production and needs a quickie to tide her over while you do that long one. So, friend, here are your alphabetized instructions:

1. Author my Perseus/Medusa story and the Bellerophon/Chimera one you mentioned, both concerning midlife crises and Second Cycles that echo First. (I see these as novellas.)

2. Bring to light a third story, from entirely different material, but with enough echoes and connections so that you can graft the three together and

3. Call the chimerical result a novel, since everyone knows that the novella is that form of prose fiction too long to sell as a short story and too short to sell as a book. Good luck.

4. Draft then that epistolary Opus #7 you speak of (including or excluding any version of Yours Truly, in or out of the Funhouse he could almost wish he’d never left, it was so peaceful being lost in there), whose theme seems to me to want to be not “revolution”—what do you and I know about such things? — but (per our telephone talk) reenactment.

5. Epistle yourself to the penultimate seventh of that septpartite opus (Yrs. T. would make it the 6th 7th of that sixth seventh, but he excuses you from such programmaticism), where you’d thought to insert a classical-mythical text-within-the-text. Leave it out (you’ll already have published it as Opus #6)! And for that crucial, climactic, sexissimal keyhole…

6. Find or fashion a (skeleton) key that will unlock at once the seven several plot-doors of your story!

Q.E.D.

As for me: if and when my good right hand is back in service (typing with my left brings me closer than ever in his lifetime to my poor dead father, who wrestled one-armed with that marble all those years) and this movie done (we’ve but two more scenes to shoot), perhaps I’ll commence my Second Cycle — with a novel based on the movie that was meant to be based on your novels but went off in directions of its own. Or perhaps with a crab-and-oyster epic: a Marylandiad? In any case, I advise us both, as we shall not likely be being brief, at least to be bright. May your progression from letter to letter be consistently so; as for Y.T., he will be content if his regression be but brightly consistent: if, like Odysseus striving home from Troy, he can

7. Go from energetic dénouement [to] climactic beginning.

A.

T: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Soliciting his advice and assistance in the LETTERS project.

Chautauqua, New York

August 3, 1969

Ambrose Mensch

The Lighthouse

Erdmann’s Cornlot

“Dorset,” Maryland

Dear Ambrose,

Time was when you and I were so close in our growings-up and literary apprenticeships, so alike in some particulars and antithetical in others, that we served each as the other’s alter ego and aesthetic conscience; eventually even as the other’s fiction. By any measure it has been an unequal relation: my life, mercifully, has been so colorless in its modest success, yours so comparatively colorful in what you once called its exemplary failure, that I’ve had more literary mileage by far than you from our old and long since distanced connection.

Neither of us, I presume, regrets either that closeness or this distance. My guess is that you, too, ultimately shrug your shoulders at “the pinch of our personal destinies as they spin themselves out upon Fate’s wheel”—your pet line from William James in graduate-school days. This letter is not meant to alter that spinning; only to solicit a bit more of that unequal mileage and to wave cordially from Chautauqua Lake to Chesapeake Bay.

I have in mind a book-length fiction, friend, more of a novel than not, perhaps even a sizable one. Having spent the mid-1960’s fiddling happily with stories for electronic tape and live voice — a little reorchestration of the oral narrative tradition — I’m inclined now to make the great leap forward again to Print: more particularly, to reorchestrate some early conventions of the Novel. Indeed (I blush to report) I am smitten with that earliest-exhausted of English novel-forms, the epistolary novel, already worked to death by the end of the 18th Century. Like yourself an official honorary Doctor of Letters, I take it as among my functions to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead.

Here’s what I know about the book so far. Its working title is LETTERS. It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles — real letters, forged and doctored letters — in the history of History. It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made. Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word letters: Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling “that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance.”

What else. LETTERS is a seven-letter word; the letters in LETTERS are to be from seven correspondents, some recruited from my earlier stories (a sure sign, such recycling, that an author approaches 40). They’ll be dated over the seven months from March through September 1969, though they may also involve the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial (a certain number of years hence), the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings generally. I’ve even determined how many letters will be required (88, arranged and distributed in a certain way: a modest total by contrast with the 175 of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, not to mention the 537 of Clarissa)—but I’m not yet ready to declare what the book’s about!

However, experience teaches us not to worry overmuch about that problem. We learn, as Roethke says, by going where we have to go; and among the things we may learn, like Aeneas, is where all along we have been headed.

Two further formal or procedural considerations. (A) At a point 6/7ths of the way through the book — that is, in the neighborhood of its climaxes — I want there dutifully to be echoed the venerable convention of the text-within-the-text: something classical-mythological, I think, to link this project with its predecessor and to evoke the origins of fiction in the oral narrative tradition. I have in mind to draft this little off-central text first and let the novel accrete around it like a snail shell. The myth of Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Chimera has been much in my imagination lately (In the myth, you remember, just at or past the midpoint of his heroical career, Bellerophon grows restless, dissatisfied that he has not after all got to heaven by slaying the Chimera; he wonders what he might manage by way of encore to that equivocal feat. There towers Mount Olympus, still beyond his reach; there grazes the winged horse, turned out to pasture and, like his master, going to fat…), but I can’t seem to get old Pegasus off the ground! Any suggestions?

Which question fetches us to (B) It appeals to me to fancy that each of the several LETTERS correspondents, explicitly or otherwise, and whatever his/her response to the Author’s solicitations (like the foregoing), will contribute something essential to the project’s plan or theme. So far, this has worked out pretty well. Never mind what your predecessors have come up with, and never mind that in a sense this “dialogue” is a monologue; that we capital-A Authors are ultimately, ineluctably, and forever talking to ourselves. If our correspondence is after all a fiction, we like, we need that fiction: it makes our job less lonely.

So, old fellow toiler up the slopes of Parnassus: Have I your permission to recycle “Ambrose Mensch” out of the Funhouse and into LETTERS? And how does all this strike you? R.S.V.P.!

As ever,

— And, friend, how do you fare? I have in the body of this letter stuck deliberately to business. But as you know, I know (by letters only) your admirable Lady Amherst; and via that correspondence — which I initiated but have not done right by — I know a great deal that isn’t my business, as well as one or two things (e.g., your adventures with Mr. Prinz) that sort of are. I won’t presume to remark on either, though I have my opinions. Except of course to say I’m sorry to hear that your mother’s dying and your brother’s ill. And look here, Ambrose: your Ex (excuse me, but I recollect her amiably from college days, when she typed all our fledgling manuscripts) — has that chap Jerome Bray really got her in his clutches?

U: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Replying to the latter’s telephone call of the previous night.

Chautauqua, New York

August 24, 1969

Old ally,

Understood. My letter to you of 8/3 awaited your return from Canada to the house I once helped you build, and the distressful urgencies chez toi kept you from replying till last night. My sympathy, old altered ego: to you, to Peter, to your sister-in-law.

See here: there was no call to call. My letter was nothing urgent — a trial balloon, not a cry for help. But perhaps the urgency was on your end; on the phone you sounded, with every good reason, strung out to the limit.

Therefore, while I look forward to the promised letter amplifying your remarkable suggestions and too-generous offers of your own invention, I’ve no mind at all to accept the latter — certainly at least not before you’re calmly sure you’ll never use that Perseus material yourself, and not unless I can present you with some quid for so handsome a quo. J. L. Borges (whose birthday today is, along with Beardsley’s and Beerbohm’s) maintains that “originality” is a delusion — that we writer chaps are all more or less faithful amanuenses of the human spirit. So be it: but let it be the human spirit, not one particular fellow human’s!

So I shall perpend with thanks, but put by for the present, your suggestion that I make a chimerical book out of Perseus, Bellerophon & Something Else before tackling LETTERS, though I acknowledge its fitness and am much impressed by the conceit.

On the other hand, I accept at once and gratefully your other suggestion: that the ground theme be not so much revolution or recycling as reenactment: the attractions, hazards, rewards, and penalties of a “2nd cycle” isomorphic with the “1st.” It’s what I’d thought around without thinking of: a kind of key — to what treasure remains to be seen. And your remark that I cannot rescue Ambrose Mensch from the Funhouse because he’s no longer there I take for good news amid all your bad. At least I understand, to the heart, your impulse at the midpoint of your life to “empty yourself before commencing its second half. Surely that’s what midpoints and the Axis Mundi are all about.

But the coincidence of that midpoint with your family griefs, and with what looks to be the climax of that crazy business between you and Reg Prinz, gives me pause. As I work and play through this bright hot Sunday (St. Bartholomew’s Day) on my upland lake, I anxiously imagine you-all down there in Tidewaterland “reenacting” today on their anniversary — which is also the traditional date of Muhammad’s flight and John Gilpin’s ride — the “Bladensburg Races” and the burning of Washington. Are you not, in your condition, playing with fire?

I must trust your excellent Lady A. to see to it you don’t get burned. Speaking of Conditions: is it premature (or presumptuous) of me to add, to my thanks and my best wishes to you both, my congratulations?

As ever,