Letters (40 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 May 1969

Mon cher (encore silencieux) B.,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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