Letters (21 page)

“Horseshit, Horner,” you can Hear the old—i.e., the young—Morgan scoffing: “I understood that before I was twenty. You romantics always overestimate capital-
I
Irrationality. You were no Iago, just a Horny Sonofabitch who Happened to Hit my weak spot.”

Be that as may, those were his subjects (and you Must Remember to Enter Iago in your Hornbook, though we have only his own unreliable suspicion, in Act I, that Othello cuckolded him with Emilia). From Wicomico Morgan returned to Baltimore, found a post with the Maryland Historical Society, and lectured occasionally in the evening college of the state university. On the strength of his subsequent publications he was offered and sometimes accepted visiting lectureships at respectable universities, but he would not take a regular academic appointment. His growing reputation at the historical society led him into activity as a consultant to restoration projects, museums of local history, film productions, and historical pageants, festivals, and monuments up and down the thirteen original colonies. This activity in turn acquainted him with such pedigreed families as the Harrison Macks (Mrs. Mack also claims descent from Betsy Patterson), whose choice he became to preside over their newly founded college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was a move, so Casteene reported, contrary to Morgan’s personal inclinations; he accepted out of gratitude for the Tidewater Foundation’s support of his historical researches over the years; perhaps also because some surviving academic idealism in him was appealed to by the project of establishing a small elite center for scholarly activity.

“Merde, Horner,” you Hear Saint Joseph replying to this last. “You’re Determined to Make Me Out a naive rationalist, when in fact I’ve taken the tragic view of human institutions—including colleges and marriages—since I was nineteen.”

In any case, the trustees’ appointment of his former employer, John Schott of Wicomico Teachers College, to be his academic vice-president must soon have disabused Morgan of any such idealism. In the ensuing power struggle, Schott revived or threatened to revive the scandal of Rennie’s death. Morgan resigned and retreated north to a visiting professorship at Amherst—

“Not
retreated,
Horner!” one hears him protest. “Massachusetts chauvinists are just as tacky as Virginia chauvinists. I went to Amherst because Amherst invited me, and one of my sons was at school there. The other’s at Chapel Hill.”

—where he seems to have undergone a radical change of personality, whether in consequence of, or merely concomitant with, his introduction to LSD. From rationalism he moved to a kind of mysticism—

“So did Plato and William James. You may Hear me quote Blake or Suzuki, but not Castaneda’s
Conversations with Don Juan.”

—from J. Press suits to hippie buckskins—

“Make it Abercrombie and Fitch to L. L. Bean. The outfit I was wearing when I came here was a gift from some Seneca Indians that Casteene and I were visiting when I freaked out.”

“So how come you’re still wearing it, Joe?” This was your First Conversation with him, yesterday, birthday of Hans Christian Andersen, F. A. Bartholdi, Carmen Basilio, G. J. Casanova, Max Ernst, Alec Guinness, Bedrich Smetana, Émile Zola. In the month since his arrival, Joe had scarcely taken note of your Existence; you, on the contrary, who ordinarily Took No Note of it either, were more Painfully Aware of it than at any time in the past sixteen years. He met daily with Tombo X, less often with the Doctor, neither of whom reported the substance of their interviews to you. He was most frequently in the company of M. Casteene, but such of their conversation as you Overheard was on the French and Indian War or the Niagara Frontier in the War of 1812: the conversation of a knowledgeable amateur and an unassuming professional. Both Pocahontas and Bibi were attracted to Morgan, as were the draft evaders; with them his talk was elliptical, ironic, nonintellectual, almost nonexistent. He played soccer and smoked marijuana with the young men (those for whom these were prescribed or permitted); with the women he played bridge, read Tarot cards and
I Ching
hexagrams, and practiced yoga, despite the Doctor’s disapproval of that discipline. (“It’s not immobility,” Morgan had pleasantly argued; “it’s suspended motion.” And to your Surprise, the Doctor conceded.) You Postponed your Suicide, Waiting for him to follow up on his first and only words to you: that ultimatum about rewriting history, resurrecting Rennie—

“Not resurrecting, Horner:
rebirthing.
I don’t want my wife exhumed. I want her reborn.”

Then yesterday morning he stepped into your Office here as calmly as he had once into your Office at Wicomico Teachers to discuss your Seduction of his wife. You had Long Since Given Up your Rocking Chair, the motion of which, in the Doctor’s judgment, was more conducive to than protective against immobility. You Sat in your Stiff Ladderback, Contemplating the empty
U
page in your Hornbook. The inclusion of Odysseus among the O’s was questionable enough in the first instance: it is only a scurrilous early variant of the myth which holds Penelope to have cuckolded him with all 108 of her suitors, plus nine house servants, Phemius the bard, and Melanthius the goatherd. To cross-enter him as Ulysses Seemed a Cheap Shot. Morgan considered the bare walls and floor of the little space, the curtainless window that overlooked the surging river.

“So this is your Life, Jake.”

Your Voice would not Immediately Come.

“Casteene tells me you’ve been with your Quack Friend ever since Wicomico.”

You Put the Hornbook by. “In 1953,” you Answered Finally, “I Decided to Commit Suicide. And I Did.”

Joe leaned against the wall, arms folded, and sniffed. “Dying’s different from this. Dying is something. This is nothing.” You Waited.

“Sixteen years,” he said. “They seem hardly to have touched you.” He surveyed you. “Early Eisenhower haircut. Sears Permapress worsteds. Inch-wide necktie. And a
white shirt.”
He bent to look at your Feet beneath the unornamented desk where you Do the Farm’s bookkeeping and correspondence, and your Own Scriptotherapy. “With
white socks!
And low-cut oxfords! All you Need is a batch of freshman theme papers on your Desk and a red pencil behind your Ear. If Rennie were to walk in here, she’d feel right at home with you.”

You Most Certainly Did Not Answer.

“Whereas with me she’d have very little in common anymore, I suppose, even if she recognized me.” He beamed, not warmly. “The sexual revolution, Jacob! Open marriage! Freedom of abortion constitutionally protected! And the Pill, Jacob! Even high school girls get it these days from their family doctors. It makes our old troubles seem as quaint as Loyalty Oaths and existential Angst, doesn’t it?”

“But Alger Hiss isn’t back in the State Department,” you Answered Levelly. “And Rennie’s still dead. What’s the hippie getup for, Joe?”

He replied as aforequoted, cheerily adding: “Indians are Where It’s At these days, Jacob. Very in on the campuses—which you Wouldn’t Recognize anyhow. No Freshman English requirement! No letter-grades! Rap sessions instead of lectures; open admissions; do-it-yourself doctorates. Maoist cadres instead of cheerleaders; acid trips instead of beer blasts; full parietals in the dorms!”

“So I’ve Heard,” you Dryly Acknowledged. “But I Can’t Imagine you’re into all that.”

“Into all that!”
Joe echoed with interest. “So he
has
been touched by the times, after all.”

“What are you here for, Joe?”

“Bad trip in a Seneca longhouse across the river,” he answered. “Doing peyote and rapping about Indian nationalism with friends of my sons, who’re into an independent study project on the subject. I.S.P.‘s are all the rage now, Jacob! They’d heard of this place from their friends in the Movement.”

“You’re not immobilized.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly self-propelled there for a while. But
you
Used to Get Around a bit, too, between your Spells of Bad Weather.”

You Did Not Trouble to correct “bad weather” to
no
weather. “Here I Am,” you Said Simply.

“There you Are. Wondering whether I’ve come at last to pull out the old Colt .45 and blow your Head off. Remember that scene?”

“I’m Not Responsible for either the book or the movie,” you Felt Moved to Declare for What It Might Be Worth. “I did Write a sort of report in ’55: what we call Scriptotherapy. It got left behind in Pennsylvania when we moved out fast.”

“Responsibility never was your Long Suit,” Joe observed. “Maybe I want to see what a corpse looks like sixteen years after. Maybe I’m moonlighting as a technical consultant for a film about the 1812 War. Maybe Casteene and I are secretly organizing a Second Revolution to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial. Maybe I just want to scare the shit out of you and your Doctor friend.”

You Waited, Speculating which of those maybes could be said to have alphabetical priority.

“Maybe I want you to Rewrite History. Put a different ending on that report.”

You Waited.

“Why not Historiographical Therapy?”

You Did Not Bother to Mention Cliotherapy, a traditional feature of many patients’ schedules despite the Doctor’s own aversion to etiological analysis.

“We historians are always reinterpreting the past,” Joe went on. “But if history is a trauma, maybe the thing to do is redream it.”

“The thing to do,” declared the Doctor when your Account of this conversation had reached this point, “is keep moving in the daytime and take Demerol at night. Get to the dénouement, Horner: narrative suspense does not interest me. What does he want?”

You Could Not Say, Saint Joseph having terminated the interview just there; but you Reported your Opinion that he was nowise “spaced out” (though the episode with the Senecas may well have occurred as he declared) and that, distressing as must have been his defeat by John Schott at Marshyhope, it had not unhinged him. Some sort of punishment—of yourself in the first instance for Disrupting His Marriage; perhaps of the Doctor for performing the fatal abortion—might well be among Morgan’s intentions, but you Did Not Quite Believe it to have brought him to the Farm. From Monsieur Casteene, in whose disinterestedness you Had No Great Confidence, you had Learned that a film director named Prinz was in fact at work on some sort of production involving scenes from the War of 1812 in Chesapeake Bay and on the Niagara Frontier: perhaps the blowing up of old Fort Erie, or the British capture of Fort Niagara, or the burning of Buffalo. Quite possibly Morgan
was
advising him on these scenes; Casteene himself hoped to be of use to the project when the company arrived, sometime during the summer, inasmuch as his forebears had played a certain role, so he asserted, in the original events.

“But that’s Casteene,” you Concluded. “Do you know who
he
really is?”

The Doctor twitched his nose. “No idle ontologies, Jacob Horner. ‘Casteene’ is sufficient for our purposes. So. Like yourself, I find our Saint Joseph to be altogether rational, certainly hostile, not so certainly threatening. He has paid in advance for the month of April, so we shall be seeing him for a while yet. If he does not murder us or have us arrested—either of which I regard him as quite capable of doing but not
very
likely to do—his presence here may have its benefits. Bibi and Pocahontas have certainly been easier to live with lately, though I foresee trouble if he shows a preference for one or the other. But you.”

You Waited.

“You Locked Up again, did you?”

“Not Locked Up,” you Corrected, “Petered Out. When Joe spoke of redreaming history, we were both looking out of the window. I was Waiting for him to explain and at the same time Thinking of all that water going by, that started out clean in Lake Superior and then flushed down through Huron and Erie. Heraclitus says you can’t step into the same stream twice: I’d be Content to Step Into It once. And Horace speaks of the man standing on the riverbank, shoes in hand, forever waiting to take the first step, till all the water’s run by. I’m that man.”

“Literature,” the Doctor said contemptuously. “That reminded me that the corps of engineers is supposed to turn off Niagara Falls this summer, the American side, to see whether it can be made as spectacular as the Canadian Falls: the most American project I Ever Heard Of. It’s expected to be a great tourist attraction, a sort of negative natural wonder. Then I Got To Thinking about negativism, how it would be positive in the antiworld, where entropy would be ectropy and we’d be running an
Im
mobilization Farm—”

“Horner, Horner.”

“That was it, till Tombo X came by and laid his Straight-Razor Therapy on me.” It is that young man’s wont, with white male immobiles, to terrify them into motion by whipping out an old-fashioned straight razor, rolling his eyeballs and flashing his teeth blackamoor-style, and, seizing the patient by the scrotum, threatening in Deep Dixie dialect to relieve him of his honky nuts. “One day he’ll go too far with that.”

“One day,” the Doctor said, “you will Tell my son to get his pickaninny hands off you or you will Burn a cross on his lawn. That day the conversation can begin.”

“He cheats,” you Complained. “By squeezing. It wasn’t fear of castration that fetched me up. It was pain.”

“Never mind. You had Been Out for five hours. And you might Still Be There if he had not been dodging Pocahontas. It was exactly like old times?”

“Exactly. I was Aware of everything going on, but Weatherless. Couldn’t Bring myself to Move. Zen Buddhists speak of
the air breathing you
…”

“For pity’s sake, Horner, do not Add Zen Buddhism to your White Socks and Skinny Neckties. This is 1969. You are Forty-Six. Most men of your Age and Class have children in college who have gotten over their
own
adolescent mysticism by this time. We are right where we started.”

You Waited. The Doctor took his time. His own hair and mustache, now entirely white, he has let grow longer in the current fashion, and has added a small goatee: he looks like a bald black Colonel Sanders, or a dapper negative of Albert Einstein. Your Mind Began to Wander, then to Dissipate. Though you Would Not Join the Generation, seriously to yourself you Enounced the current test pattern of your Consciousness: