Letters (50 page)

I shall go mad. I shall go mad. Why should not Ambrose (who shall not see the cover note) turn out to be André? Why should not
you?
Why should not my dear daft parents, decades dead, drop by for tea and declare that I am not their daughter, Germaine Necker-Gordon? Then God descend and declare the world a baroque fiction, now finally done and rejected by the heavenly publishers!

Madness! And in these letters (which you may presently read in print, for I shall do what that hand bids me, with every misgiving in the world) I perceive a pattern of my own, A.C. IV’s and V’s and VI’s be damned: It is the
women
of the line who’ve been the losers: Anne Bowyer Cooke and Anna Cooke, Roxanne Édouard, Henrietta and Nancy Russecks, Andrée Castines I and II and III—faithful, patient, brave, long-suffering women driven finally, the most of them, to distraction.

And of this sorry line the latest—unless she finds the spiritual wherewithal to do an about-face of her own with what remains of the second half of her life—is “your”

11 P.M. Friday, May 16, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613

O dear Father,

Seven decades of living (seven years more than you permitted yourself), together with my Tragic View of Order, incline me on the one hand to see patterns everywhere, on the other to be skeptical of their significance. Do you know what I mean? Did you feel that way too? (Did you ever know what I meant? Did you feel
any
way?)

So for example I did not fail to remark, on March 7 last, when I wrote my belated annual deathday letter to you, that it was occasioned by the revival of events that prompted my old
Letter
in the first place; but having so remarked, I shrugged my shoulders. Even seven weeks ago, when the dead past sprouted to life in my office like those seeds from fossil dung germinated by the paleontologists, I resisted the temptation to Perceive a Pattern in All This. I mean a
meaningful
pattern: for of course I noticed, not for the first time, that Drew Mack and his mother were squaring off over Harrison’s estate quite as Harrison and
his
mother had once done over Mack Senior’s. But I drew no more inferences from that than I shall from the gratuitous recurrence of sevens above; I merely wondered: If (as Marx says in his essay
The 18th Brumaire
) tragic history repeats itself as farce, what does farce do for an encore?

Then came, on April Fool’s Day, a letter from the author of
The Floating Opera
novel, inquiring what I’d been up to since 1954 and whether I’d object to being cast in his current fiction. I obliged him with a partial résumé—in course of which I began to see yet further Connections—then not only declined, at least for the present, to model for him, but observed that his project struck me as the sort conceived by an imagination overinclined to retracing its steps before moving on. I even wondered whether he might not be merely registering his passage of life’s celebrated midpoint, as I once did.

I’ve not
heard
from him since. But I withdraw that pejorative
merely,
and I am at once chastened and spooked by that clause
as I once did.
O yes: and at age 69 I’m also in love, Dad. Whether with a woman or a letter of the alphabet, I’m not yet certain.

Something tells me, you see—
lots
of things—that my life has been being recycled since 1954, perhaps since 1937, without my more than idly remarking the fact till now. The reenactment may indeed be fast approaching its “climax”; and as I made something of a muddle of it the first time around, I’d best begin to do more than idly remark certain recurrences as portentous or piquant.

Item:
the foregathering, in Cambridge and environs, of Reg Prinz’s film company, to shoot what was at first proposed to be a film version of some later work by the author of
The Floating Opera,
but presently intends to reprise at least “certain themes and images” from that first novel—and which features “Bea Golden.” Will she play Jane Mack?

Item:
in the morning’s mail, notice of two scheduled visits to Cambridge this summer of “our” showboat replica,
The Original Floating Theatre II,
about which Prinz had inquired of me only last Friday, in his fashion, whether it would be putting in here during the July Tercentennial celebration. He was interested in using it as a ready-made set for “the Showboat sequences”—should he have said sequel?—in his film.

For as it turns out (so I reported to him up on deck some hours ago), the
O.F.T. II
will play at Long Wharf not only during the week of July 18-25, but on the third weekend in June as well: 32nd anniversary of that midsummer night when I tried (and failed) to blow its prototype, myself, and
tout le monde
to kingdom come. Heavy-footed coincidence! God the novelist was hard enough to take as an awkward Realist; how shall we swallow him as a ham-handed Formalist?

Well, that production-within-a-reproduction must sink or swim without me; I shan’t be going. But since Harrison’s funeral on your 39th deathday; since my own 69th birthday and my letter to you; since my new association with Jane Mack, even with Jeannine—to get right down to it, since this evening’s cocktail party aboardship and subsequent sunset sail with one of my guests, since whose disembarkation I’ve sat here at the chart table drawing up parallel lists and exclaiming O, O, O—I’ve been feeling like the principal in a too familiar drama, a freely modified revival featuring Many of the Original Cast.

In the left-hand column (from early work-notes for my own memoir, drafted between 1937 and 1954, of Captain James Adams’s
original
Original Floating Theatre), the cardinal events of my life’s first half, as they seemed to me then and still seem today, 13 in number. On their right, more or less correspondent events in the years since. To wit:

Okay, the correspondences aren’t rigorous, and there are as many inversions as repetitions or ironical echoes. The past not only manures the future: it does an untidy job. #11, #12, & #13, which happened back-to-back 1st time around, are yet to recur, unless we count Polly’s airhorn work on the New Bridge in July 1967 as 11 R, and my subsequent vast suspicion (that Nothing—and everything else!—
has
intrinsic value) as 12 and 13 R. But now that I have perceived the Pattern—and just barely begun to assimilate 8 & 10 R—my standards of praeterital stercoration have been elevated. I now look for Polly to fire a literal flatus at us 32 days hence (or, like a yogi, take air
in).
It will no longer do that I have in a sense, via the foundation, already reconstructed the showboat I tried and failed to destroy in 1937 (Nature had a hard time of it, too: the
O.F.T.
sank three times between 1913 and 1938, was each time raised and refitted, was finally sold for scrap in ’41, but burned to the waterline off the Georgia coast en route to the salvage yard. Were the Author of us all a less heavy ironist, one would suspect arson for insurance; but I believe He managed spontaneous combustion in the galley, under the stage, where I and the acetylene tanks once rendezvoused). A second Dark Night clearly lies ahead for me, this June or next, followed by another Final Solution—and, no doubt, somebody’s second first novel, or first last!