Letters (125 page)

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

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 ¶