Letters

During the which, whilst I waited word from André or a fair glimpse of our son, and endeavoured to impart to my Marshyhopers some sense of what is meant by the terms Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism (but how, when almost nothing their eyes fall upon was there the day before yesterday?), and watched poor embattled Morgan yield at last on the misbegotten Tower of Truth, and confirmed my addiction to oysters in any form, I tried in vain to mend the old quarrel between Harrison and his son, whom I came to know and rather like. (The daughter Jeannine—“Bea Golden”—was another matter: between drying-out visits to that Fort Erie “sanatorium,” she was busy divorcing her third husband out in California and — what we didn’t know at this time — attaching herself to Mr Prinz.) On this subject my friend was truly deluded: he believed his son an unprincipled weakling and Reg Prinz, for some reason or other, a scrupulous fellow, when from all I could observe Drew Mack was, if somewhat gullible, the very soul of moral principle, pursuing ardently what he believed just and good, whereas Prinz (whom too I saw once or twice more that year) has I daresay no principles at all except cinematographic, and even those he seems to improvise on the run. Suffice it as illustration of their scrupulosity that Drew — who had no salary, worked without pay for his liberal causes (to which he also donated his trust income), and frankly coveted his parents’ wealth for the sake of these same causes — never to my knowledge imputed mercenary motives to my liaison with his father, whom he was gratified to see so happy in my society. Whereas Prinz, in a rare burst of sustained verbality, advised me one evening in June, just after Harrison’s great seizure: “If he leaves you a bundle, put it into the flick. Double or nothing.”

I had thought to travel that season; north from the Chesapeake at least, whose muggy summer nights I had sampled in September. Perhaps to France, to visit “Juliette.” But word came from Jane, of the most unexpected and circumlocutory sort, that “interests of a personal nature” were holding her in Britain; apprised that her husband of some forty years had taken a turn for the worse, she satisfied herself by transatlantic telephone that he was not dangerous or dying, authorised me and Doctor #2 to take whatever measures we thought necessary to provide for his comfort, hoped we would inform her at once of any crises, and begged me to stay on at Tidewater Farms at least for the summer “in my supervisory capacity,” at a salary of, say, $500 a month “over and above”!

I declined the salary for myself, looked about tor someone else to hire with it, found no one even remotely suitable except Yvonne Mack, Drew’s wife, who refused unless her father-in-law, “crazy or not,” recanted his racism and fully reinstated his son and herself in his favour. Alas, Harrison was beyond doing so. To him she was the cast-off Princess of Wales, “hot for the king’s John Thomas, what?” No lucid side to his hallucinating now: Harrison believed us seventeen years old and immortal; he declared he’d raised his daughter Amelia from the grave (and conversed touchingly with the ghosts of Drew and Jeannine Mack when they were babies); he dressed in white robes and let his beard grow. He took his bed to be “the Royal Celestial Electrical Bed of Patagonia in the Temple of Health and Hymen on Pall Mall,” and guaranteed me a healthy child if I would make love with him in it. Dr #2 (whom I fetched in, who could do nothing) became “Dr James Graham, M.D., O.W.L.” (O Wonderful Love), the inventor of that same bed, a Scottish quack who claimed to have learnt electricity from Ben Franklin and herbal medicine from the Indians; “George III the First” had declined his offer of treatment in 1788, but by charging £50 a night for the use of his famous bed and attracting to his temple such worthies as the Scotts of Edinburgh (who brought young Walter there in vain hope of restoring his withered leg), the good doctor had earned almost as much as our #2. I declined: he seldom knew me now even as Elizabeth.