Letters (114 page)

Not visibly arrested by this news, Joe lit his pipe and either inquired in declarative fashion, or asserted, or reminded you: Pocahontas is pregnant.

So it would appear, you Painfully Acknowledged. Unless, as is by no means impossible, she is experiencing early menopause. Marsha is 39. Has not menstruated since June. Was “due” in mid-July and again in the first half of August. So. Her (possible) pregnancy, however, you Have Reason To Believe—at least
this
pregnancy—is not the substance of her Bombshell Letter to Ambrose Mensch.

Joe was not curious about your Woman’s Bombshell Letter.

The father? he inquired. You Chose Not To Speculate. But not yourself? Not yourself; your Bilateral Vasectomy of October 1954 precluded Parenthood. Hum. But you Are Still, in your Phrase, a Couple? So yourself at least Were Pleased Still To Regard yourselves.

Hum. Abortion, Horner? Such recourse is not without precedent, you Know, both historical and literary.

You Knew. You Planned To Discuss that very question with Marsha in September, after Exhaustion Of Honey Dust, Successful Passage Of Deadline, and Unequivocal Determination Of Pregnancy, but before Expiration Of First Trimester Thereof.

You Speak of Successful Passage Of Deadline, Horner.

More Wish than Hope, you Admitted; and yet more Hope than Expectation.

I should say, Joe said. Espial is one thing. You and your Fogged-Out Friend may Dismount from your Exercycles, Finish your Latest Long Conversation about my hyperrationalism and its Pygmalionizing of our marriage, Walk Around to my office window, and Peek through the blind, where you’ll See me behaving as in our novel. Your Pocahontas may then to the best of her limited ability pretend to be Rennie Shocked to the Center of her Soul, whom you will Seductively Comfort with (I believe the script reads) “the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.”

Well.

Espial is one thing, Joe repeated. Play it as you Like; I won’t have to watch. But Successful Passage of my Deadline is quite another. Surely you Don’t Expect—when I demand that you Redream History and Give Me Back, alive and unadulterated, my dead wife—to Palm Off as Rennie Morgan your fucked-up, knocked-up Pocahontas?

Stung as always by his kindless adjectives, but Judging it the part of diplomacy once again to Let Them Pass, you Acknowledged that you Entertained no such expectations. Nor any real hope. Only the wish aforementioned, and that ever more ardently.

Forget it.

Well.

Look here, Horner. You Looked. On September 1, 1953, the day following your original Espial, you Revisited The Doctor at his Remobilization Farm, then in Maryland. Yes. Your Quarterly Visit. Yes. Is the account of that visit in our script a fair approximation of what transpired? Fair. You were “Weatherless.” Mm. But you Tended, in your P & A Session with the Doctor, to a manner more Brisk and Assertive than was your Wont: a manner Imitative, the Doctor immediately guessed, of some New Friend or Colleague of yours at the College. Mm. He chaffed you a bit for the imposture, then spoke at some length of Mythotherapy: the systematic assumption of borrowed or improvised personae to ward off paralysis in cases of ontological vacuity. Mm. He then demanded a response; you Found None To Hand; he demanded more sternly; you Began Slipping Into Catalonia; and he assaulted you, briefly, to bring you to. Pugilistic Therapy, I believe the script calls it.

Yes. Well.

Hum. Joe tapped out his pipe, its charge timelily combusted. We’re done, Horner. Given the calendar and my double role in this travesty, we’ll schedule your next P & A for Monday instead of Thursday. Labor Day. Anniversary of that other one, etc.

You Shrugged your Eyebrows.

I’ll be bringing an old friend of ours, Joe announced neutrally, and To your Horror drew from the Doctor’s desk (he no longer does the facing-chairs, knee-to-knee routine considered by the Doctor to be essential to Progress and Advice) the very pistol so prominently featured in your Recent Dreams, your Last Letter, and the events of autumn 1953. A Colt .45 for Day 45, he mirthlessly remarked. We’ll combine the P & A Scene of September 1 with the Pistol Scene of October 5, 1953.

Look here, Joe, you Expostulated.

You
Bring A Friend too, Joe said, not exactly an invitation. My wife. Alive and unfucked by you.

Joe.

Maybe I’ll tell you then what my real grievance against you is, Horner.

You Believed you Could Guess.

It’s not finally that you Betrayed Our “Friendship,” you Know. It’s not even that you Destroyed My Marriage, possibly Impregnated My Wife, and Contributed To Her Untimely Death.

Mm.

Rennie had a hand in all that too. So did I.

You here Assiduously Kept your Own Counsel, even unto facial expression, twitch of hand, and any other controllable body language interpretable as Yes Well.

One more thing, Jake.

That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?

Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?

Bring it, too.

Wednesday, August 6, 1969

Dear Henry:

Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—

Je ne sais quoi,
particularly given my disappointment of the week before, when, having transcribed at so long length for you Andrew IV’s adventures from the birth of his children through his “death” at Fort McHenry, and posted copies of my transcription to you c/o that novelist I had thought my partner (on the off chance it might be he who’d showed you the “prenatal” letters), I receive from
him
—crossed in the mails—nothing less surprising than a rejection of my acceptance of
his own invitation
to collaborate with him on a
Marylandiad!
And he has returned the four prenatals, which I must now assume will be followed by what followed them.

He will be sorry. Not because I plan, at least for now, any particular retaliation, but because he has cut himself off (as have you, Henry; as have you) from much that either a novelist or a 2nd-Revolutionary could make use of: the account of our forebear’s “Second Cycle,” of my own, perhaps even of yours. See how drolly, in despite of rude awakenings, I still dream!

We have, then, you and I, not yet begun to talk. Nevertheless, I shall continue, per program, that series of decipherments and anniversary transcriptions, withholding them from the mails till I shall have your proper address, or find you, or you find me. What’s more, as we are no longer to be monitored by that authorial “third ear,” I shall speak more confidentially: not of Andrew Cook IV, of whom I know only what his wife would have known had she not (like our novelist, but with better reason) declined to read these
lettres posthumes,
nor—yet—of my own history, but of the circumstances of these transcriptions and what I’ve been up to this past month with my left hand, as it were, while the right transcribed.

As “Andrew Cook VI” (who I “became” in 1953,
nel mezzo del cammin
etc.), I spent July preparing for my lectureship this fall at Marshyhope State University, where I have advertised a course in
The Bonapartes of Fiction & the Fiction of the Bonapartes
(did you know that Napoleon’s brothers Joseph, Louis, and Lucien all wrote romantic novels?). In that same capacity—I mean as the person I am—I have served as historical consultant to Mr. Reginald Prinz’s filming of events from the 1812 War, a project I am turning to our own purposes. I have also monitored, to some extent even discreetly managed, a number of our potential allies or adversaries: Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation, for example; the historian Lady Amherst, whom I’ve mentioned before; and the heirs of the late Harrison Mack, Jr.

At the same time, as “Monsieur Casteene”—our
arch
ancestor’s name, which I have seen fit to use at our Fort Erie base—I have been preparing an eccentric putative descendant of the American Bonapartes (Jérôme’s line, through Betsy Patterson) for a certain role he himself will be unaware of playing. And I have overseen the movement of our people from that base (which is of use to us only as long as the U.S. continues to draft civilians for military service in Viet Nam—another year or less) to “Barataria,” disguised as extras for upcoming sequences of Prinz’s film. My lodge there is our headquarters for the next academic year.

Finally, as “Baron André Castine”—the man I was until 1953 and in this single capacity am yet—I have been at the most immediately important work of all: the financing of our Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution. That is the work that brings me to be “vacationing” here (as of last night, when I flew out from Washington) for a few days with your future stepmother, of whom I also happen to be fond. As we cruise in Netherlandish comfort through the waters where in May of 1814 our forebear—or some ship’s officer—impregnated the hapless Consuelo del Consulado, I make plans with the handsome widow of Harrison Mack for the settlement of his estate, which with certain other sources of revenue should carry us far toward 1976.

You remember the admirable Jane Mack, Henry, to whom (as her distant cousin A. B. Cook VI) I introduced you at her husband’s funeral. Some time before his death, when their alcoholic daughter first sought treatment at the Fort Erie sanatorium, I had arranged Mrs. Mack’s introduction to “Baron André Castine,” who subsequently comforted her, in London and elsewhere, through the terminal stages of her husband’s illness, and consoled her for his death. (I was also, for a certain reason, protecting Harrison Mack’s own comforter, the aforementioned Lady Amherst.) Mrs. Mack has taken it into her head to end her days as a baroness: she frankly suspects me of fortune hunting; I her of title hunting. We agree on the legitimacy of both pursuits when they are not cynical, and believe each of us to esteem in the other more than
just
the title and the fortune. Jane assumes, wrongly, that I want to enrich myself for the usual reasons, and does not disapprove: indeed, next week I shall take delivery in Annapolis of a large trawler yacht, her gift for my 52nd birthday. I have not apprised her of our cause (or the real reason I want that yacht) because—like her son, like most of our young “Baratarians,” like my own parents—she would mistake the Revolution to be still
political
in its goals, and would of course be as wrongheadedly its foe as Drew Mack is wrongheadedly its friend.

It is my fiancée’s plan to contest her late husband’s will—which leaves the bulk of his estate to his philanthropic foundation—on the grounds of his madness, and to negotiate distribution half to herself, the other half in equal portions to her two children and the Tidewater Foundation. Inasmuch as Jane’s moiety would be to some extent mine even during her lifetime (she is an astute and frugal manager), and Drew Mack’s would be largely applied—by his lights—to our cause, I acceded to this plan, while privately seeing to it that things will turn out somewhat differently.

Suppose, for example—but never mind! Like Jane’s (that excellent businesswoman’s), my plans are intricate but clear, and best not babbled about. True minds, we shall marry in the new year. If you’ve any objections, Henry—or suggestions for dealing with “A. B. Cook VI” when Jane Mack becomes the Baroness Castine!—speak now…

Our ancestor. The postscript to his second “posthumous” letter found him resurrected from his “death” and bound for New Orleans to meet Jean Lafitte, hoping somehow to forestall the British movement on that city. But it was a postscript penned, like the letter it ended, six months after that fateful battle; Andrew wrote it, with but the merest hint of what he is doing there, from the orlop deck of H.M.S.
Bellerophon,
off Rochefort in France on July 16, 1815, one day after Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender to the commander of that vessel. Not until this third and central of his
lettres posthumes
does Andrew’s past overtake his present, and the intricate labor of exposition give way to more immediate drama. The letter (before me) is dated August 6, 1815, and headed, in “Captain Kidd’s code”:

(i.e., NOHPORELLEBFFOYRREBDAEHROTYAB, or
Bellerophon, Off Berry Head, Tor Bay:
that historic naval anchorage on the east Devon Coast, between the rivers Exe and Dart). He is back aboard that warship, having left it in Rochefort on an errand that fetched him overland through Tours and Rouen to Dieppe, London, and Exeter before the old
Bellerophon
(no Pegasus) arrived there with its famous passenger. He is about to witness, with relief, a second surrender, of another sort, by that same passenger: Napoleon has at last abandoned all hope of asylum in either America or England and, contrary to his repeated vow, agreed to permit himself and his company to be transferred on the morrow to H.M.S.
Northumberland,
commanded by our old friend Admiral Sir George Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” for exile to St. Helena. As Andrew writes this letter to Andrée, the ex-emperor, two decks above, is dictating a flurry of memoranda—to Commander Maitland, to Admirals Keith and Cockburn, to History—protesting (falsely) that he has been betrayed: that he was assured sanctuary and has been denied it. It is the first phase of Napoleon’s programmatic self-martyrdom, the
living out
of a romantic fiction instead of the writing of it. The idea has come to him in part from our ancestor, as shall be seen—for whom, however, the emperor’s exile on St. Helena is itself to be but the first phase of the Second Revolution.

But how is it I am here,
he now asks with us,
who last was leaving Maryland for Louisiana, newly risen from the dead, with Mr. Key’s anthem ringing in my ears? Why did I not return straightway to Castines Hundred? Why do I not now, instead of back to Galvez-Town & Jean Lafitte?