Letters (133 page)

Her owner? Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred, Ontario! His “nephew”? Henry Cook Burlingame VII!

My son Henri.

Where will these accidents end? To what “final frame” must I see things through? (In case you’ve wondered: my husband and I have reviewed the several hazards of pregnancy at my age and have discussed, and rejected, therapeutic abortion.) And where do I begin, who ought by rights to be destroyed by that final news item above, but who find myself, Magda-like, unaccountably, it would seem almost reprehensibly, serene?

I shall begin where last I ended: leaving the Menschhaus that mild Saturday forenoon sennight since, our wedding day—when so many now dead were yet alive! The postman strolled up just as we left, took my letter to you, and handed Angie the mail: condolences for Magda, mostly, which she refused to open till another day; a few worrisome bills; my copy of the lease on this apartment, which I had renewed… and the letter from you addressed to
Mr & Mrs Ambrose Mensch,
which Mister fished out and tucked away in his coat before I saw it, intending a later surprise. Following Carl and Connie’s van, we crossed Choptank River and Chesapeake Bay, both as alive with bright hulls and sails as a Dufy watercolour, and shortly before noon arrived at Fort McHenry, showing our
Frames
passes to the park guards for admittance.

The “bombardment” was already in progress. From the parking lot (where with a twinge of guilt, among other emotions, I espied Drew Mack’s Volvo wagon) we saw smoke bombs, some gaily coloured, and heard a cannonading that Angie clung to me in alarm at. Lots of local media folk about, freely filming and being filmed, taping and being taped. Prinz himself descended from the ramparts to greet us, newly eyeglassed, smiling, mild—all quarrels apparently put by! He distinctly said hello to Angela! Put a sympathetic hand on Magda’s shoulder for one eloquent instant! Astonished me by bussing my cheek, and to bride and groom delivered himself of not one but
two
more or less complete English sentences:

1.
Cook’s on the boat.

2. Lunch aboard.

The action—rather, the inaction—Ambrose explained to us as we went up through the milling curious to the ramparts and down to where
Baratarian
was tied up. It represented that frustrating day 155 years before when the McHenry garrison had had to take their punishment without reply, Admiral Cochrane’s gun and rocket ships firing from beyond the fort’s cannon range. The entire British fleet was being played incongruously by the frigate
Constellation
(a controversial bit of casting among patriotic Baltimoreans), towed from her berth to anchor in midharbour, and surrounded by a flotilla of pleasure craft as well as by the docks and towers of the city. Puffs of smoke and appropriate boom-booms issued desultorily from her ports, followed by smoke canisters all about us.
Baratarian
likewise flew the Union Jack and sported her new name-boards
(Surprize),
but had suspended bombardment to host our prenuptial luncheon.

I looked about and was relieved not to see among the festive “garrison” Drew Mack or his young companion of the day before. The company in general were picnicking among the bastions, barracks, and redoubts or out on the star-shaped ramparts; the shipboard fete was restricted to the eight of us in the Menschhaus party (Ambrose & myself, Magda & Angie, Carl & Connie & their steadies), our remarkably pacific Director, the MSU chaplain, Bruce & Brice (who made a working lunch of it, as did Buck, the hired skipper), and our host.

I.e.,
A. B. Cook VI, done up again as his ancestor, who piped us aboard with a bosun’s whistle and added his hearty, faintly patchouli-fragrant kisses to our best man’s. Angie giggled at his outfit; he charmed her by wielding her Easter egg as if it were an admiral’s glass. No Jane Mack? I wondered aloud and innocently. Were the yacht’s owners never aboard? You understand that I still knew, of Jane’s engagement, no more than that it was for some reason a romantic little mystery. Even after the Burning of Washington I knew her fiancé’s
nom d’amour
only: “Lord Baltimore.” I was not to learn his real name till that night.

Madam President of Mack Enterprises sends her best wishes and her regrets, Cook replied, and produced a note to that effect from Jane: Frightfully busy with the business and with plans for her own wedding later in the month; love to us both, and her particular fond gratitude for my “loyal services” to her in the recent past. Oddly regal phrase! But then, just as I was about to put aside my ladyship, Jane was, so one understood, about to assume hers; and any such expression at once of gratitude and of remembrance was a happy rarity from that source.

What’s more, by way of wedding gift she offered us a week’s loan of yacht and skipper, all expenses paid—so Cook apprised us now—either immediately, for honeymoon, or at our later convenience. Finally, Cook had interceded on her behalf with the Maryland Historical Society to lend me one of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s gowns to be married in (not Mme B.‘s own wedding dress, which would fit only the daring 18-year-old who had shocked Baltimoreans by wearing “nearly nothing,” but a handsome green silk from her maturity, meant to impress the emperor’s family). It awaited my pleasure in the guest stateroom; our host hoped I might wear it to the luncheon, and that we would make use of that same stateroom for our wedding night.

I was touched (Cook, I should add, was now “almost certain” that he could not accept the Marshyhope appointment). Ambrose declined the wedding-night invitation: some thoughtful PR man for the Society to Restore the U.S.F.
Constellation
had been inspired to offer us the captain’s quarters of
that
historic vessel, he now informed me—an arrangement my groom thought would be, and I quote, “groovier”—but he and Magda both urged me to try the gown. His F. S. Key outfit, alas, was ashore, in the barracks being used for actors’ dressing rooms; he would don it after lunch. As for that honeymoon offer, we Would See (knowing who the yacht’s real owner was, Ambrose had of course no intention of accepting Jane’s gift; but he and I had not yet exchanged our guilty little secrets).

I needed no urging: the whole scene was so festive, as if all Baltimore celebrated our wedding! Besides, it was now noon: Ambrose and I had a certain schedule to maintain. Armed with champagne and teased by the party, we withdrew to “have a look at the gown,” I promising happy-teared Magda to call her in shortly for the fitting. B. & B. filmed our exit; Chaplain Beille liberally grinned; we winked as broadly as possible and shut the cabin door.

Sex #4. We’d been paying no mind, we realised, to the
style
of our coitions—trouble enough to keep to our timetable! #3, for example, ought to have been impossible: how couple in a manner representative of abstinence? Now it occurred to us, fleetingly, that this fourth coming together ought to be the “Marsha/marriage” one, though we were not yet wed… Oh fuck it, Ambrose said. Thank you, Marsha Horner!

Then we fetched Magda and Angie in to dress me—a touch snug, that gown of Betsy’s, but a smasher all the same—and went above for luncheon. Antipasto and Asti spumante, minestrone, cold melons and spumoni, all lightered across the harbour from Baltimore’s Little Italy by order of the (Italian-American) mayor, who would be joining us at the reception! Magda was in gastronomic heaven. Salutes to the bride-and-groom-to-be, including one from A. B. Cook oddly premonitory of your own: an alphabet toast handed down from the time of James II which had served as a code for Jacobites:

Oh, well: the wine and prosciutto were first-rate.

After lunch the
Constellation
was towed back to its berth in the inner harbour; it was the time of day when, in 1814, Cochrane’s fleet had briefly moved in closer, and the gunners of McHenry had at last been able to return their fire.
Baratarian’s
role therefore was to move out into that position (Buck alone on board) and open up with the little brass “sunset gun” mounted on her coach roof; ours was to go ashore and make ready for the wedding ceremony whilst the fort’s cannoneers raised a happy racket and Angie held her ears. Now I espied Drew (with Merope’s ex-comrades Thelma, Rodriguez,
et al.,
but not, I thanked heaven, with “Henri Burlingame”), cheerily manning a great 24-pounder. There was Todd Andrews—had he joined the
Frames
company?—in what looked to be serious cross-examination of a hostile witness: Merope Bernstein herself! Prinz looked on, bemused, from a safe distance, framing us and them with his fingers as in days gone by. No sign, thank heaven again, of J. B. Bray.

Now the big guns blasted away with their blank black-powder charges. Time for Ambrose to don his costume. Things were being filmed, he said, “not necessarily in sequence”—understatement of the season! As the full sunshine, for example, was apt for the Wedding scene but wrong for the rainy “twilight’s last gleaming” of 13 September 1814, we were pretending that today was tomorrow; tonight and tomorrow we would shoot today with the aid of fireboats and wind and rain machines. Certain scripted statements, too—not very meaningful to us lit’ry types—were delivered face-on to the camera, Godard-style, some of them by Author and Director standing shoulder to shoulder.
E.g.:

Or:

And how about this, read by Prinz’s erstwhile protégée?

Or, finally, this, delivered to
me
(Ambrose’s hands upon my shoulders) and meant to be the wrap-up shot not only of the Word-
versus
-Image theme but of the whole cockamamie film:

The scene ended at the dash. I asked him where the last two words were. Oh, well, you see, he said, they’re to be superposed in block capitals on the film…

Enough of that, yes? Getting on to half after three now, and up we trip to the dressing-room barracks, where A. strips to become Francis Scott Key, transferring your unopened letter, of the existence whereof the bride has not yet been apprised, to the waistcoat pocket of his dandy Federal-period togs. Then—well, it’s that time again, and #5, R.I.P., was his Reign of Terror—before dressing he bends me forward over a barracks-bed footboard, ups B.P.B.‘s green gown and white petticoats and downs her drawers, and, his potency more than restored by that Asti spumante, merrily puts it to me (your indulgence, sir) like a ramrod up the breech.

Wedding time! And, Zeus be praised, no hitches to our hitching! Once for the cameras: Do I, Britannia, and do you, America? We did. God Save the Queen! My Country, ’Tis of Thee! Once more for real. Who gives this woman? Andrew Burlingame Cook, sir:
Chief Singer of the Old Line State, / Bell ringer for our new fine fate,
etc. Did he Ambrose take this woman to be etc.? He did. And did I Germaine ditto? I did, I did! If there be any present who etc., let them speak now or etc…

(We held our breaths. Bray? Marsha? Merope? Magda? André? One could hear the soft whirr of cameras, the flap and crack of the great fort flag, a mockingbird practising gorgeously our epithalamion…)

We were then pronounced Husband and Wife. Off went the guns! Kisses from Ambrose, from Magda and the family! Shy gift from Angie of her treasure beyond price, that Easter egg! Bear hug from Chief Singer/Bell Ringer! (Did I espy, behind his winks, traces of a tear?) A bronze wedding band (I forgot to say) more precious than gold, because fashioned from a bit of the nib of the very pen of History: gift of A. B. Cook to me via our Director/Best Man (who framed us once through it before passing it to Ambrose) and my groom, who slipped it with a kiss upon my finger! Key to the city from the jolly mayor himself, a bit late arriving but better late etc.: Mr & Mrs Key, I give you the key! A grave blessing from Mr Andrews; a tongue-tisking one from Drew Mack, who disavows the institution on ideological grounds but wishes us the best anyroad. And a rousing chorus by all hands, standing hats off and palms over hearts (a few raised fists among the hippies), of what else but “O Say Can You See”!’

What with our late bereavement, my uncertain status at MSU, and the filming yet to be finished, we’d planned no honeymoon trip; this whole 6th Stage had been our honeymoon! At six we bade good-bye to Magda & Co., who were returning in the van; we would see them on the morrow. Then we ourselves retired for a short while from the scene. Rather, the scene moved with us (Brice, Bruce, Prinz) around the harbour to the
Constellation:
the “3rd Conception scene” after all, which—we made jolly sure—consisted on film of no more than our climbing the gangplank, descending to the captain’s quarters in the stern, and tossing my bridal bouquet into the harbour from one of the aft windows. A newlywed wave to the cameras and cheerers on the dock… and then we closed and latched that window, drew shut the curtains kindly provided for our privacy, and secured the door.