Letters (16 page)

But I did not continue to enjoy ours, for having learned who my husband was, Cook now launched into a fulsome panegyric for Jeffrey’s famous ancestor, commander of British forces in America during the French and Indian War, whose notorious manner of dealing with the Indians during Pontiac’s conspiracy he lauded as “the earliest recorded example of bacteriological warfare.” Today I see that turn of the conversation in a different light, as shall be recorded on some future Saturday; at the time I thought it simply in offensive taste, and I curtly turned him off. We met again in November at the Macks’ farewell party for Jeffrey and me at Tidewater Farms, to which they’d just returned: in Jeffrey’s presence Cook did not bring up the subject of those infected blankets from the Fort Pitt smallpox hospital, but he gave me a great wink as he mused loudly upon the question, Whether our poetical attitudes might be to some extent determined by available rhymes,
e.g. wife/life/strife,
or
savage/ravage
…

A strange man; a dangerous man; a buffoon who is no fool. I have seen him since but once, at Harrison’s funeral, an encounter that leaves me troubled yet. It is unimaginable that he does not know who sits on Schott’s nominating committee for the M.U. Litt.D., and what my position is. Even Morgan, who did not
fear
him, regarded Cook as dangerous; could not quite account for the man’s enmity and alliance with Schott against him; considered him at once less and more serious than his manner implied. The Tow’r of Truth demagoguery and ideological name-calling, even the horrendous doggerel and self-advertising broadsides, he knew Cook himself to be ironic about, as Schott for example was never; and like me, Morgan had met the unpredictable sophistication under the bumptiousness and posturing. But he believed Cook perfectly capable of destroying people in that “unseriousness,” beneath which lay motives more serious than any of Schott’s own.

This apprehension of course proved true: where is Morgan now? As I intimated in my first letter, the hysterical tenor of which I shall not bother to blush at or apologise for…

No matter.

To end this history: back again in England, in the fall of 1962 and ’63 I received from André, not cryptic postcards, but full letters, the substance of which will keep till another letter of my own. The first prompted my essay “The Inconstant Constant,” on de Staël’s ill-treatment by Benjamin Constant and the beautiful Juliette Récamier, with whom both (and everyone) were in love: Constant had borrowed 80,000 francs from Germaine over the years, and now refused to repay the mere half of it which she wanted, not for herself, but as dowry for Albertine—her daughter by Constant seventeen years earlier! When she pressed, he threatened to make public her old (and heartbreaking) letters to him. I weep. The second prompted my sole excursion from my chosen field: the foreword to a new edition of the seven letters exchanged between Héloïse and Peter Abelard. I weep, and can say no more.

In 1965, my husband died of a bowel cancer. The estate was depleted by taxes, creditors, and anonymous bequests to his known natural children. He was not ungenerous to me, proportionately, but there was much less than I’d imagined: neither of us had done a day’s work for wages in our lives, and Jeffrey had neglected to tell me that it was the principal of his inheritance we were living on, not the income. Good Joseph Morgan got wind of my plight and himself invited me to lecture (upon the French Revolution!) at Tidewater Technical College. I declined—he was only being very kind—but was inspired by his invitation to accept others which suddenly appeared from the University of Manitoba, Simon Fraser University, Sir George Williams, McMaster: André’s doing, no question, and I went to Canada both in order to survive and in the hope that there might happen—what
did
happen, though it didn’t end as I had dreamed.

Nor will this letter as I’d planned. It’s past one now: I must see to what chores and errands I can, against the return of… Ambrose (I had, for an hour, forgot which letters now follow that dear initial) at teatime, when our weary, sated flesh will to’t again. These two ounces of history he shall not see: André Castine is not his affair. I permit myself this epistolary infidelity—who am too
pleine
these weeks to think of any other!

Thus has chronicling transformed the chronicler, and I see that neither Werner Heisenberg nor your character Jacob Horner went far enough: not only is there no “non-disturbing observation”; there is no non-disturbing historiography. Take warning, sir: to put things into words works changes, not only upon the events narrated, but upon their narrator. She who saluted you pages past is not the same who closes now, though the name we share remains,

Friday, April 4, 1969

Sir:

Your singular letter of March 30, soliciting my cooperation as model for a character in your work in progress, reached me approximately on April Fool’s Day. Today, which my calendar tells me is the anniversary not only of Martin Luther King’s assassination but also of Adam’s creation according to the Mohammedans and of Jesus’s crucifixion according to the Christians, seems appropriate for my reply. The more so since, if that chap in southern California turns out to have correctly predicted Doomsday for 6:13 this evening, my longhanded
no
will never reach you, and you will be free to do as you please.

The motto of one of our corporate clients, very big in the chemical-fertilizer way, is
Praeteritas futuras stercorant.
Not just my merely legal Latin, but my experience of life (your letter not excepted) makes me wonder whether the past
(a)
fertilizes the future,
(b)
turns into shit in the future, or
(c)
turns the future into shit. This year—my 70th, sir—the past has crowded in on me apace (cropped up? rained down?), faster than I can… um… digest it.

E.g.,
my old friend Harrison Mack died, as you may have read in the
Times,
in January. His funeral brought Mrs. Mack back to Tidewater Farms and, briefly, their two grown children: the “actress” “Bea Golden” (née Jeannine Mack) and the “radical activist” Andrews Mack, named after my “conservative-passivist” self. I enclose for your perusal a photocopy of the 1969 installment of my
Letter to My Father,
describing this event. Mrs. Mack has not only stayed on, but wishes to retain me as her counsel in the apparently upcoming contest over Harrison’s estate, as well as in other matters. Young Mack also, whose relations with me have not always been cordial, passes through on sundry dark enterprises of his own and, between ominous announcements that Marshyhope College’s “Tower of Truth” must fall like the Rotten Capitalist Society It Represents, offers grudgingly to engage me against his mother in the same contest, he having learned from V. I. Lenin that the institutions of the established order may legitimately be exploited to their own ultimate subversion.

Jane Mack (who is, more power to her, a handsome and vigorous 63 and a wealthy woman in her own right) wants the estate diverted to her new fiancé: a titled but no longer affluent fellow whom we shall call “Lord Baltimore,” though he is no Marylander. Drew wants it to finance a Second American Revolution. Neither seems to imagine that I might consider it my prior responsibility to defend the interests of the Tidewater Foundation, Harrison’s principal beneficiary, for whom my firm has long served as counsel; far less that I might simply wish to see my late friend’s testamentary desires, however eccentric, faithfully executed. Had he instructed me to liquidate his holdings and float the proceeds out on the Choptank tide, I would endeavor to do it.

In all this, of course, and much that I have not mentioned, I see mainly the reenactment of a certain earlier drama: the stercoration of the present by the past. And the prospect of refloating
that
particular opera gives me, let’s say, a sinking feeling.

Which almost, but not quite, brings me to your request. It is not to tease you with off-the-record confidences that I mention my current relations with the surviving Macks. It is to spell out, literally, the implications of your proposal, the better to reach some genuine accord. “You have invited me and engaged to pay me,” Thoreau used to tell his lecture audiences, “and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.” It is Good Friday morning, an office holiday, promising to warm up enough by afternoon for me to turn to a bit of fitting out of my old boat, but meanwhile cool enough to keep me in my room here in the Dorset Hotel—not my sole home any longer as in years
praeteritas,
but still my Cambridge
pied-à-terre
and the seat of my ongoing
Inquiry
—with little to do (that inquiry being presently stymied) besides respond at length, whether yea or nay, to your letter. Henry James, as I remember, used to want
not
to hear too much of an anecdote of which he wished eagerly to hear a certain amount, for imaginative purposes. But his brother William astutely remarks that to get enough of anything in nature, one has to take too much.

I wonder that your letter makes no mention of New Year’s Eve 1954, inasmuch as two of the three things of some moment that happened to me that night are known to you. Here in my room, around ten in the evening of that day, I finished drafting my memoir about not committing suicide aboard Capt. James Adams’s showboat in 1937—a story I’d been writing since the previous March as one facet of my old
Inquiry
—and prepared to resume the inquiry itself, together with the even older
Letter to My Father
of which it is a part. But to reward myself for completing the showboat narrative, I strolled down to the New Year’s Eve party in progress at the Cambridge Yacht Club. The Macks were settled in Baltimore at this time; I never saw or heard from them. But I was delighted to find Jeannine there with her (first) husband, Barry Singer, and I spent some time chatting with them. The marriage had caused a tiny stir in the old Guilford/Ruxton society in which the Macks moved, where anti-Semitism perhaps enjoys a prolonged half-life even today. But Singer was the son of Judge Joseph Singer of the Maryland Appellate bench, who had ruled with the majority in Harrison Mack’s favor in our great estate battle of 1938; Singer was moreover a proper Princetonian, and if his part-ownership of a chain of small-town movie houses was regarded by some as “Jewish,” they were pleased enough to meet at his parties the film and stage people among his friends. Barry himself was an engaging, quiet, cultured chap who should have been a lawyer and who certainly should have chosen a more stable bride, goyish or not.

But he could scarcely have chosen a lovelier. Jane Mack’s daughter was about 21 then and a beauty, with a St. Croix suntan to set off her honey-blonde hair and a smashing backless, nearly frontless gown to set off the suntan. Already she was a confirmed overdrinker (it was Singer who, that same evening, amiably corrected my misapprehension that the Yiddish term
shicker
described a Jewish man who, like himself, consorted with
shiksas)
and fatally bitten by the theatrical bug. But the booze hadn’t marked her yet, and given her looks, her youth, and her small connection with the Industry—which was still dominated by Hollywood in those days—Jeannine’s aspirations didn’t seem bizarre, at least at a party. She was happy to remeet her parents’ old and once close friend, the efficient cause of their wealth. She wondered why I didn’t see them more often, and why they chose to stay on in stuffy old Guilford, in broken-down Baltimore. Her own axis was Manhattan/Montego Bay, but they were thinking about chucking “the East Coast thing” altogether and moving to Los Angeles, if Barry could get the right price for his share of the movie-house chain. The Industry itself was no longer running scared about the TV threat, I was to understand, which it had effectively co-opted; but either such news took a while to reach the insular East, or (more likely) prospective buyers were invoking the past to keep the market down: 90 thou was high bid thus far.

We danced (the mambo!); Jeannine introduced me to a woman-friend of theirs: a handsome, fortyish New Yorker undergoing divorcé, who’d come down with the Singers to our darling town for respite from litigation, and to have a look at Barry’s string of funky little flea-traps in case the settlement gave her a bit to play with.
Her
tan (Martinique) was even darker than Jeannine’s; she pretended to be afraid of being lynched by mistake; she demanded I loosen my collar so that she might examine firsthand whether I was a red-neck; she expressed her belief that a female divorce lawyer, which she planned to become, would be even less scrupulous than we males. We danced (early rock ’n’ roll!). As always, Jeannine was thick with the musicians, a group imported for the evening at triple scale from Across the Bay. The drummer, we agreed, was the weak sister; she now informed me that it was not their usual and regular drummer we’d judged, but a local lad who knew some of the band members and had asked to sit in for one set. Upon his being relieved we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, young Ambrose Mensch, who, obviously smitten with Jeannine (I believe they had been high school lovers), was by way of appending himself and his then wife to our little party.

Thus we met, you and I; and knowing your family I recognized your name, but you did not mine (there are scads of Andrewses in the area; ours is the oldest plot in the cemetery). You told me that as a would-be writer you hoped someday to publish fictions set in this area; that having lately seen an Aubrey Bodine photograph of Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, you had a vague notion of a novel in the format of the old blackface minstrel shows—a “philosophical minstrel show,” I believe you called it—and had come down to Cambridge during your university’s Christmas recess in order to do a bit of local research on that showboat. You were aloof but not incordial; it took some pressing to get the foregoing out of you—but I know how to press.