Letters (146 page)

I Paused, Reflected, then Declared: I Hate This. But okay. Joe asked my Wife whether she heard and understood. Marsha cleared her mouth and throat and said, to me: You creep. To Morgan: Dust me, Dust me. To me: Want to Put It In for him, too? To Morgan:
Dust
me, for Christ sake. Thanks. To me: Oh, Buddy, will you ever Pay for this.

Etc. I Went Outside, Took up Position; they came to the window to make sure I Didn’t Cheat. I Hated it. They laughed; I Dry-Heaved: Then Marsha Dusted Off. I Said Huskily through the window: Let me Take her home now, Joe. He responded: Bugger off, Horner.

Bad night; I’ll Skip the Details. Sometime after midnight, in my Room, I Entered my Name in Column One,
Cuckold,
of my Hornbook:
HORNER, Jacob,
between
Hephaestus
and
Hosea:
Marsha in Column Two,
Wife,
between
Aphrodite
and
Gomer,
Joe in Column Three,
Lover(s),
between
Anchises, Ares, Butes, Dionysus, Hermes, Poseidon, Zeus, etc., etc.
and
Everybody.

It is a listing I Keep, sir, have for some years Kept, at the (late) Doctor’s Rx. Before dawn I Actually Fell Asleep, so finally and truly Purged After All, even Pissed Off, did I Feel.

Woke up ditto! Monday 9/1: Labor, St. Giles’, and Confrontation Day! Went to Claim my Wife, plenty Fed Up sir! Running a touch late, Charged down to the P & A Room to Have It Out Quickly for good and all. Collect Marsha; Try to Make Things Up. Suggest to Tombo X we Oust Morgan and Run the Show Together upon my Return From Honeymoon: me Keep the books, him book the creeps, ha ha.

Remobilized!

Joe was dressed, smoking but not reading; apparently waiting for me, though I was by now a touch early. Desk clear except for Colt .45. Cut (I Cleared my Throat and Rebegan) Cut the Comedy, Joe. Put that thing away. Where’s Marsha? Etc.

Joe replied calmly, hands behind head: Your Wife is a lousy lay, Horner.

Undeterred, I Showed him with a Determined Sneer the Hornbook entry: my Name in the same column as, five letters later, his, and in Column Four
(Remarks): All scores settled.

Hmp, said Joe (approximately). I then Ripped Up the book, several pages at a time when I Found myself Unable to Rip them all at once. This session is canceled, I Declared. Put that gun away. No more reenactments. Your wife is dead, Joe. Partly my Fault, partly hers, partly yours. Etc. You’ve humped mine; she’s pissed at me; I’m Pissed at you.
Genug! Basta!
Gun away!

M
ORGAN
(
VERBATIM
): The score is not settled, Jake. You never Knew the score.

I (
IN EFFECT
): How so? Because Rennie’s dead and Marsha’s alive?
I Didn’t Kill Rennie!
[Sudden panic; you understand.] Where’s my Wife?

But as I Made to Leave, Joe picked up and aimed the pistol at me, saying: Dead asleep when I left her. Sit, Horner.

Well. He had explained already, Joe said when I Sat, at least remarked, that his grievance against me was not—at least had for many years not been—that I had Done
A
and
B
and
C
with Rennie, which led to
D,
which led to
E
and
F
and
G
. It was not even that, for all his efforts to the contrary, his own life, as much as Rennie’s and mine, had been arrested in 1953 by what transpired on 8/31, 9/2,
et seq.
of that fell year. No. It was (his final, unremitting, unappeasable grievance) that I had Written It All Down.

Wrote It All Down,
Horner! he now repeated in a Cold Fury. Just as you’ve been Writing All
This
Down, since March!
That
[verbatim, sir] I don’t forgive you, Horner. Even when I contemplate your miserable, your creepy Life; even when I consider, with pleasure, what surely lies ahead for you [I Paraphrase: Condemnation to Life,
i.e.,
to Personality & Responsibility, which in fact, in my View as in his, I had never successfully Quite Abdicated. Petty career as 45-year-old Failure: dull bumbling teacher of remedial English, say, at bottom of pay scale, in 5th-rate community college, to dyslexic dolts. Pussy-Whipped Cuckold Husband of Termagant WASP already pregnant by God knows whom, & who will surely in future either polish & repolish my Antlers or divorce me with punitive alimony. Etc.], [he went on] I do not consider that score settled. I am not reconciled. I do not forgive you. I want you dead. I will now shoot you in the heart. [End of quote.]

But aha, I was Remobilized, and though I Could Not Deny the likelihood of his prophecy, with more spontaneity than I Have on any prior occasion Mustered I here Sprang across the Doctor’s desk and Clutched Joe’s pistol hand with such force (and momentum) that he, it, & I Went Tumbling with his swivel chair to the floor, where, despite his relatively good condition and my Years of Diminished Physical Activity, I Wrestled him to an impasse. Our faces were inches apart. Joe closed his eyes, almost smiled; it was a swoonish moment; I Rallied my Last Strength not to Drift off into Weatherlessness. Then he said, in effect: You
are
Behaving Like Me, Jacob. I see what the [late] Doctor meant. Look: you’re Mobilized. Your Therapy is done. Your Wife is okay, and she understands about last night. There are no bullets in this gun: only one
blank,
get it, to scare you with. Our session is finished. Also
Der Wiedertraum.
Also your Stay at the Farm. Mine too. It’s all finished. Let go now.

He
did (I Mean end his resistance), whereat my Grip on his arm (I Meant to Commandeer that pistol, sir, no matter what he said, till I was Up and Out of there) happened to bring the gun barrel to his temple. At the touch of it he opened his eyes—calm and lucid and blue as when I’d First Seen them in Wicomico, but focused somewhere past me—and pulled the trigger.

The gun went off with an astounding bang, and (literally, sir) blew Joe’s brains out. People came running. The mess was dreadful; there was retching. My Head rang. Tombo X was furious; declared this was it. Marsha came in, Cross as a Bear, but then said Wow and after that mainly stared at me. I am Proud to Report that she supported my Subsequent Testimony to the Ontario Provincial Police, a briefer version of the foregoing. I was by them Detained, Interrogated, and Released on my Own Recognizance pending (possible) further inquest—until when, at least, Joe’s death has been ruled Accidental. I myself Engaged our regular undertaker (many of our patients are old) and Set About to Send Word to Morgan’s sons, of whose whereabouts we had no clear record. Burial was planned for today, in the Fort Erie Cemetery, until your fortuitous arrival this morning changed, welcomely, that plan. We are Grateful that the Tidewater Foundation sees fit to arrange and cover the expenses of the funeral of the first president of Marshyhope State University. May I Add my Hope that your client and our former patient Ms. Golden will turn up unharmed. Our files are open for your inspection.

Tombo X has played the Ace Up His Sleeve. Using Morgan’s death as his pretext, he has cashiered all white staff members of the Remobilization Farm and is evicting all white patients therefrom without regard to age or degree of mobility. It is his announced intention to turn the place into some other, unspecified, sort of operation. I Disapprove, but Have No Authority to Countermand him. My Wife and I will therefore Take the hearse for Wicomico tomorrow morning, in company with Morgan’s casket. Joe’s statement, that Marsha Understood About Last Night, was, unfortunately, of a character with that about the
other
blank (ha ha), if you follow me. But I Have Cause to Imagine that he was perhaps correct about my Remobilization, though experience tempers my Optimism. In any case, such things are relative.

I Have some Modest Savings. I Mean to Inquire of Dr. John Schott, whom I Have the Pleasure to Know Personally from 1953, concerning openings in Remedial English at Marshyhope State. My Wife can type many words per minute, when she is Together. I am Urging her to have her baby. It is my Understanding that no one’s permission is required for us to name it Rennie Morgan Blank, or Joseph Morgan Horner, as the case may be. The names Marsha herself proposes for it I Believe to be of a jesting character. On the other hand, I Defend her right to abort the fetus if she so chooses. I Wish she would decide. But when I Bring Up this, or any, subject, she tells me: Bugger off.

I Do Not Expect the road of our New Life to be free of detours, forks, impasses, potholes, rocks. God alone knows where, past Wicomico and (maybe) Marshyhope, it will lead; nor is it my Intention to Record (ever again) our Passage down it. But with tomorrow’s (admittedly tremulous) first step, it will begin.

JH/jh (7 encl)

Wednesday, Sept. 10, 1969

Dear Henry,

Airmail special delivery should fetch this by Friday to Castines Hundred, where I pray (having heard from our caretakers that you have been there yet again since my last) it may not only find you, but find you ready to respond, if you please, to its summons. Lest someone
else
find and respond to it instead, I am casting it into “Legrand’s cipher,” or “Captain Kidd’s code” as modified by A.B.C. IV, which I can write (and you will quickly learn to read) as easily as if the words were in no further code than writing itself. Tomorrow I pack off up the road to Baltimore, to the Francis Scott Key Highway, to Fort McHenry, to do a few days’ work with our “film company” (it
is
Ours now, virtually).

I want you there.

Since my letter of three weeks ago, our Baratarians brought off admirably the Burning of Washington on Bloodsworth Island: our first full-dress drill, so to speak, in using “the media” (in this case Reginald Prinz’s film crew; next time the local and network television news people) as well as our “enemies” (in this case the U.S. Navy; next time the Dept. of the Interior) to our purposes. This is not to say that all went, or goes, perfectly. That lawyer Todd Andrews, executive director of the Tidewater Foundation and thus a principal contender for Harrison Mack’s estate, has grown entirely too curious about the relation of Baron Castine to Andrew Cook VI. He even hired a Buffalo detective to investigate “Monsieur Casteene” of Fort Erie and the Honey Dust operation at Lily Dale! I was obliged to invoke C.I.A. credentials (city detectives have no awe of the F.B.I.) to warn the fellow off, in the process surely making him all the more curious. And Drew Mack’s radicalism, a less sophisticated version of your own, is a growing liability. I shall return to that subject.

Joseph Morgan, on the other hand, my apprehensions concerning whom I voiced in my last, is no longer a problem: we buried him three days since. A pitiful case, that—and a fourteen-year investment (i.e., since I first took an interest in him in 1955, when he was a disillusioned ex-rationalist working for the Maryland Historical Society, and proposed him to Harrison Mack to head up his projected college) down the drain. But at least we need worry about him, indeed about the whole Fort Erie operation, no longer.

Likewise “Bea Golden,” unless old Andrews’s or young Mack’s curiosity gets out of hand. She is, I cannot say safe, but safely disposed of. Her disposer, however—the squire of “Comalot”—remains a troubling enigma. I had supposed Jerome Bray no more than a crank, perhaps even a madman; now I am persuaded that while he may be mad, he is not merely so. I even begin to wonder whether his connection with the Burlingames may not go deeper than I’d supposed; whether that bizarre “machine” and Bray’s strange behavior may not be exotic camouflage. I suspect he may have abilities, capacities, as extraordinary as yours and mine. In the “Washington” action, for example, I seriously put the man’s person at risk. I even imagined, not without relief, that our friends from Patuxent Naval Air Station had obligingly, if unwittingly, “wasted” him in their routine gunnery practice over the lower marshes on that Sunday night. Then Bray appeared, unaccountably and unscathed, in my locked office in the cottage next noon, as I was in mid-metamorphosis between Castine and Cook! Disconcerting!

He exercises, moreover, a Svengali-like authority (but I think by pharmacological, not psychological, means) upon a young woman of our company, formerly his associate, who had fled to us in fear of her life last spring. We found her unconscious near the Prohibited Area that Sunday night with an obvious injection bruise on her buttock; upon her reviving, she was convinced that she was doomed. I later dispatched her to “Comalot” ostensibly for a week’s trial reconciliation with her nemesis, actually to survey the scene there and report to me. I anticipated hysterical objections, but she went like one whose will was not her own. (I should add that her lover, Reg Prinz, had abandoned her that same night; the girl was both desperate and drugged.) A week later she dutifully returned to Barataria and dutifully reported that Bea Golden is comatose, concealed, and “seeded” (?); that Todd Andrews himself had appeared at Comalot, made inquiries, had been sent packing; that she repented her mistaken defection of April and wished to return to Bray’s service. It was clear to me that she had already quite done so. I dismissed her; she is with him now. The question is, is he with us? And what is he?

It will not surprise me to see him again at Fort McHenry: Bray seems to understand that what began as Prinz’s movie—a film in its own right and for its own sake, however obscure its content and aesthetics—has become the vehicle for something else entirely, a vehicle whose original driver is now barely a passenger. Bray declares that his own “published literary works” (I have not seen them) are comparable—coded messages and instructions disguised as works of fiction—and that the “revolutionary new medium” which he and his computer have concocted will be in fact a “new medium of revolution.” I have in process a last long shot to rid us of him by his own agency before he decides to rid himself of us. Whether his madness is feigned or real, Bray has, like Hamlet, an exploitable weakness, which I believe I understand (he
is
a half relative of ours) and can play upon.