Letters (92 page)

And nailed the kids. And Mensch. And even Lady Amherst, at John Schott’s insistence, though I was able to persuade them to let her go before they got hit with a false-arrest suit. I was
not
able to persuade Schott to resume the ceremonies: he was as certain the Commies had further tricks up their sleeves as I was that they hadn’t, and I suppose he understood (his sort would) that terminating the exercises would magnify the gravity of the disruption and thus justify whatever reprisals he chose to indulge in. I got myself together enough to hitch a ride back into town in a state police car (Patrolman Jimmy Harris, our friend from the New Bridge Incident,
q.v.,
scolded Drew all the way to the courthouse: an educated fellow carrying on like a nutty kid!) to see that everybody got decent bail and that the sheriffs people didn’t rough them up. My excuse to Schott would be that mishandling the arrests or the arrested would blow the college’s prosecution.

Anyhow, the police had learned a few things since the civil-rights years: the shouted obscenities offended but didn’t anger them; they brought charges but cracked no heads. Drew said I looked awful and recommended a macrobiotic diet. Beyond that we had no conversation; he did not thank me for arranging bail (Mensch did, cheerily). I learned that one of the nonlocal demonstrators, by odd coincidence, was Jeannine’s ex-stepdaughter, her second husband’s child. I telephoned Schott’s office to urge him not to take action until we could confer; no one answered. I was too exhausted to trek back out to Redmans Neck. The kids all said thanks and ’bye.

The Message, so long and repeatedly telegraphed, was buzzing at my ears, but not yet intelligibly. I crossed the park to the hotel, thinking vaguely I’d catch another nap and see Jeannine
that
evening on the
O.F.T. II.
As it turned out, I slept from four in the afternoon till five the next morning.

For all that, I felt no younger on the Sunday, nor looked less wasted. I seem truly and irrevocably to have moved overnight from middle to old age. I got through to Schott: he’d terminated both Mensch and Pitt, and was determined to revoke Mensch’s doctorate. Three days earlier, I believe, I could have talked him out of those actions; clearly I’d lost authority! I telephoned my sympathy to Lady Amherst, who undeniably was on some wrong track with that Ambrose Mensch (why didn’t she dress her age?), but was surely blameless in this affair. Miserable, she nonetheless thanked me—and hoped I was feeling better! To my surprise,
Drew
stopped by the room to make sure I was all right; an extraordinary gesture on his part, which at any time in the past many years, until three days since, I’d have tried with my utmost tact and gratitude to make the most of. As it was, I could scarcely register his confession of disillusionment with petty disruption, his shaken but not yet shattered faith in the Second Revolution. The 1960’s were about done with; he himself would soon be 31. It was time, I believe he asserted, for the Movement to escalate from “trashing” to serious demolition; for himself to escalate his struggle against a real pull in him toward Centrism or worse, the gravitation of his age and ancestry. A surprising admission! At once embarrassed to have made it, Drew went on more surlily to predict that if he lived long enough he’d turn into me at best, his father at worst, and that he’d rather die.

Where in the world
was
I? At least, in my geriatric stupor, I didn’t turn him off with Judicious Sympathy. He fidgeted awhile—a large, handsome, ineluctably wealthy-looking young man no matter what he wore—and then courteously bid me good-bye. Buzz buzz went the Message, no more clear.

Though I daily expected they would, things did not get better. Everyone at the office was concerned; at their insistence, and because I truly was not clearheaded enough to work, I took a week’s leave, then another, thinking that perhaps a bit of a cruise on
Osborn Jones
would restore me to myself. But I was too dispirited to provision and cast off. What was the point of sailing, of anything, except in 1921, with a beige Arrow shirt and the girl in that middy blouse? I languished out at the cottage with gin, tonic, and aspirin. Jane did not inquire. Others did—even Drew and Yvonne again!—but I didn’t pick up on the opportunity to work something out, somehow, between us, after so many years. That tender, devastating Dark Night dream remained as fresh in my imagination as the morning I’d dreamed of; nothing interested me any longer.

Last Friday, July 4, I bestirred myself enough to drive into town. Jeannine had joined the list of Inquirers After My Welfare and invited me to view the evening’s fireworks from aboard the
O.F.T. II,
which Reg Prinz had chartered for some sort of combination cast party and filming session. I thought, vaguely, to sound her out on her mother’s proposal to settle the estate contest out of hand and out of court; and I felt more than ever—but vaguely, dully—on the verge of seeing belatedly something obvious to our Author but not to me.

It was a peculiar voyage—I’m not sure whether even my former self would’ve quite comprehended what Prinz and Mensch and Company were up to!—but not a voyage of discovery. I condoled Peter Mensch and wife (he’s bankrupt and unwell, and his mother’s dying, an old flirt I’ve known all my life and even courted briefly in the Nineteen-Teens, before she made a bad marriage to Hector Mensch). I chided his brother—mildly, as it was after all none of my business—for having so inconsiderately embarrassed his good friend Lady Amherst, whose reinstatement I was by no means confident I could effect. He told me, more or less, it was All Right, without telling me how so. I do not greatly like nor much comprehend that fellow! Germaine herself was not there—just as well for her self-respect, since Dr. Mensch seemed in ardent pursuit of Jeannine; whether in earnest or in connection with their experimental movie, I cannot say.

I did not see Jane, either. I apologized to Jeannine for having missed her opening two weeks earlier; she to me for having missed it too, that first night. She wondered politely if I was feeling better; said I looked as if I needed a vacation. There was no opportunity to bring up the will; anyhow it was hard to remain interested. Neither the literal fireworks from Long Wharf nor the figurative ones aboardship (too complicated and obscure a business for me to recount, Dad) illuminated the Message. It thrummed in my head again when Jeannine, at the party’s end—she appeared to be running off somewhere with Ambrose Mensch!—bid me good night in an odd tone that seemed to me to have nothing to do with her promiscuous behavior. But I didn’t quite catch it.

Then today—three Fridays and three dozen pages since 12 R!—the message of that Dark Night dawned on me. John Schott convened a morning meeting of what amounted to an ad hoc executive committee of the college: himself, his new provost Harry Carter, sundry deans, and (for reasons not at all clear and never explained) A. B. Cook the poet, who is to replace Germaine Pitt in September as Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English but who presently has no official connection with the institution. I was there as counsel to the college, and in clearer days would routinely if cordially have challenged the chap’s credentials; but I didn’t care. He inquired, solicitously, Had I been ill? We were met, Schott announced, to review the events of June 22, their implications and consequences. We did so: the disruption, the arrests, his cashiering of Adjunct Professor Mensch, his dropping of criminal charges against Acting Provost Pitt in return for her resignation, his intention to press them against Drew Mack and “the hippies,” and his recommendation to the board of regents of the state university that Mensch’s honorary degree be revoked.

Asked for confirmation, I acknowledged that no rules of the American Association of University Professors or bylaws of the state university had been violated, inasmuch as they did not cover adjunct and visiting professorships. Ms. Pitt’s appointment as acting provost had been unusual in the first place, given her visiting status, and might be argued as de facto regularization of her professorial appointment; but if she really had resigned instead of being fired, she could of course not litigate. Had she, though? I asked. And why, since the college clearly had no case against her? Indeed, I declared (as forcefully as I could in my still-torpid state), it had been my intention to urge once again her reinstatement, the dropping of all charges against the demonstrators, and the recall of “our” recommendation to the regents concerning Mensch’s Litt.D. The 1960’s were winding down; so was our war in Southeast Asia; such demonstrations were not very likely to recur in the coming decade unless our government embarked on another adventurist binge, and inasmuch as (this time) no property damage to the campus or personal injuries were involved, prosecution of the demonstrators, including our founder’s son, seemed to me likely to gain us little more than undesirable publicity. Even as we foregathered, I pointed out, the U.S. Court of Appeals was reversing the conspiracy convictions of Dr. Spock and Messrs. Coffin, Goodman, and Sperber: a sign of the changing climate of public and judiciary opinion.

Schott disagreed. What it was a sign of, in his view, was simply the old liberal Commie-coddling responsible for such conspiracies in the first place. Today was the anniversary, he observed, of the worst of the first series of Cambridge race riots, in 1963, a summer so violent that even the July 4th fireworks had had to be canceled. His point seemed to be that uncompromising prosecution could have spared us the decade, and was still necessary if we were not to carry the sixties into the seventies. The deans did not disagree. Harry Carter, less flaccidly than usual, reminded me (so had my authority waned!) that we had after all pressed no charges against Lady Amherst. There were none to press, said I. He and Schott smiled knowingly at each other.

Cook then, apropos of who knows what, remarked that today was also the anniversary of Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr on the Hudson palisades at Weehawken. We must be vigilant, gentlemen! And just seven years ago, on 7/11/62, Telstar I had inaugurated the era of satellite communications with a transmission from Maine to England. This very moment, eight Russian vessels were steaming toward Cuba! Who knew, he asked darkly, what seven years hence, the 200th birthday of our republic, would bring? Again I considered questioning his presence in the room. But to my surprise he here came off his patriotic bluster and, with a show of reluctance, agreed that revoking Ambrose Mensch’s degree would prolong the publicity of the late lamentable events; he urged Schott to withdraw his recommendation in that matter. Further, he declared himself gratified to hear that Lady Amherst had not been stigmatized by summary dismissal: no doubt she was under young Mensch’s unfortunate influence; very likely she’d been a party to the disruption; he Cook even understood that the pair were, ah, a couple. But she was, after all, a lady.

Schott’s secretary made an audible, disagreeable
hmp.
Her employer, with a reproving smile, asked her for The Letter. There were then triumphantly distributed to us photocopies of a document which Schott directed us to read forthwith and return: it could not decently be read aloud, he averred, and ought not to go beyond our meeting room. But it would, he trusted (with a glance at me), put to rest any notion of continuing Professor Pitt on the faculty, and explain both his demand for her resignation and her tendering it without protest.

Well, it was a remarkable letter: more precisely, a 7-page abridgment or reverse bowdlerization of the discarded carbon copy of an 18-page draft of a letter from Germaine Pitt to the author of
The Floating Opera
and other fictions, with whom she has evidently been in personal, if one-way, correspondence. It was typed on the letterhead of the provost’s office and dated 7 June 1969. It commenced with the outcry
John, John,
and set forth its writer’s complaints about her tyrannical lover Ambrose Mensch, who among other things obliged her to dress beneath her age and dignity, use narcotics, and forgo contraception (he wants a child by her). The language was candid and British, often witty, the detail intimate, the complaint affecting, the spirit prevailingly good-humored, even brave. I was more touched than scandalized; indeed, my chief surprise was that so admirable a woman would put up with such bullying from so otherwise feckless a fellow, go on about it at such (apparently) unreciprocated length, and foolishly make a copy of her confessions. But the letter itself suggested an explanation: the woman is middle-aged and lonely; she upbraids herself for indulging her lover’s whims; is indeed at a loss to account for her own behavior, of which she vigorously disapproves; finally, she
loves
the chap despite his misbehavior, in part it seems because he evokes for her an earlier passion, in her young womanhood, for a Frenchman, by whom she bore a child. The letter was unsigned, but no one else in Dorchester County could have written it. My heart went out to Germaine Pitt: lucky, undeserving fellow, that Mensch, whose promiscuity with Jeannine aboard the
O.F.T. II
irked me now even more in retrospect!

My interest was caught too (should have been even more so, but other scales had not yet fallen from my eyes) by the coincidence that her former lover’s name was André Castine: I recalled, before she invoked, the Castine-Burlingame intrigues in the
Sot-Weed Factor
novel and the peculiarity of Andrew Burlingame Cook VI’s having a French-Canadian son named Henri Burlingame VII (we met him at Harrison’s funeral, Dad, remember?). I was struck too, of course, by the further coincidence that Jane Mack’s mysterious fiancé was named André: no more meaningful an accident, I suppose, than that Cook’s first name and my last are nearly alike, or that I happen to live on Todds Point, next to Cook Point—we’ve seen how that
other
Author works! But still… And there were tantalizing implications of some connection between this modern Castine and our Mr. Cook: near the letter’s end, for example, Lady Amherst complains of being variously tormented by “you
[i.e.,
‘John, John,’ who does not reply to her letters], Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook.” But if that connection was illuminated in the original, it was lost in the abridgment.