Letters

I “supervised” Harrison through the fall — no labour, only a sadness — when too, after Morgan’s departure, I assumed the real labour of the acting provostship at Marshyhope. This for the reasons set forth in my first letter, plus one other, which you will now understand: unbelievably, on Guy Fawkes Day, beyond Hubert Humphrey’s defeat by Richard Nixon… nothing happened! I had scarcely doubted that this was the date André had waited for; was cross in advance with his damned rituality. Schott had won the field at Redmans Neck; had already made his unexpected offer (perhaps at Cook’s inscrutable prompting?), and I’d asked for a week to consider it — actually to learn whether André wanted me elsewhere. I had no other invitations or income. Lyndon Johnson had vacated the presidency, Robert Kennedy and Martin King had been assassinated, the Democratic convention in Chicago disrupted; the Left was everywhere in disarray; it was past time for André to make whatever grand moves he had in mind. We’d even cancelled our fireworks (Harrison no longer followed the calendar anyroad), lest they be mistaken for a premature Republican celebration on the one hand or an armed student rising on the other. I sat up past midnight with the dreary election returns on the telly, waiting for the phone, the doorbell, a special-delivery letter at the least — His Majesty beside me clucking his tongue at what his mutinous colonies had come to.

Nothing! In a state of mild shock I accepted Schott’s “promotion”; prepared to stay on, out of dull necessity, where I had no wish nor other reason to be; notified Jane that I would be moving out of Tidewater Farms before the spring semester in any case, as Harrison needed his Lady Pembroke no longer, only his trained nurses (he was making his own floods by this time, in the Royal Celestial Electrical Bed of Patagonia — and, yes, ordering his feces freeze-dried by Mack Enterprises, to “fertilise the hereafter”). On 14 January — anniversary for me of Germaine Necker’s marriage to the Baron de Staël in 1786; for Harrison, of Congress’s ratification of the Treaty of Paris two years earlier — he suffered the stroke that blinded and half paralyzed him. Jane flew home; I withdrew to the flat I’d scarcely tenanted since hiring it. A fortnight later the second stroke killed him.

Among the mourners at my friend’s funeral were Prinz — whose mistress Jeannine Mack now openly was — and Ambrose, already engaged by him to write the screenplay from your fiction. Have I told you that Harrison never knew it was a story of yours that Prinz meant to film? (The foundation’s subsidy was for an unspecified film project set in the tidewater locale.) That he lent his support to a medium whose novelty he disliked, only when Prinz assured him that the film would “revise the American Revolution” and “return toward the visual purity of silent movies”? (George III was very big on purity in his latter days.) I myself was at the time unaware of and uninterested in the nature of his and Ambrose’s project, and cannot tell you whether Harrison and Jane ever read the novel in which you feature them: Tood Andrews has done, and seems to hold no grudge. He, Jane, Drew, Yvonne, Ms Golden, and John Schott were there, others I didn’t know… and A. B. Cook… and with him an impassive, reticent young man whom he introduced as his son Henry Burlingame.

I don’t know, John. He seemed about the right age. He could be said to resemble either Cook or André or me at least as much as “Bea Golden” resembles Harrison or Jane (or Todd Andrews). He spoke — when at all — with a slight Québécois accent, but spelled his name with a y and made no reply to Cook’s stage-whispered tease that the accent was affected. In the same mock whisper Cook declared to me that he’d asked his son on my behalf about the impostor I’d mentioned at our last meeting — that chap who claimed to be a relative? And that Henry had denied having ever heard the name Castine except, like himself, in the annals of colonial America. But who knew whether to believe a cunning rogue like his son? And he supposed we oughtn’t to mention colonial America in the house of the late lamented, what?

So I don’t know. If Cook had whipped off a wig, changed teeth and voice, donned eyeglasses, declared himself André Castine, and proposed marriage on the spot, I still wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have known (though I’d no doubt have said yes).