Letters

In that loaded metaphor, precisely, is the rub: supposing the letters to be genuine, one may still suspect them to have been disingenuous. Had Andrew IV really changed his mind about his father’s ultimate allegiances, or was he merely pretending to have done, for ulterior reasons? Was his avowed subversiveness a cover for subverting the real subversives? And might his exhortation to his unborn child have been a provocation in disguise? So at least, it seems, some have believed, notably the author of the cover note…

John: that note is in “my André’s” hand, and in his French! It is addressed to me. It is written from Castines Hundred. It is headed “Chérie, chérie, chérie!” It alludes tenderly, familiarly, to our past, to my trials. It explains that “our plan” to insure “our son’s” dedication to “our cause” (by my publishing these letters, and others yet to come, in the Maryland and Ontario historical magazines) had to be thus delayed until “our friend the false laureate” had been “neutralised”—an event that has presumably occurred, and whereof (it is darkly implied) his declining the M.S.U. Litt.D. is the signal. We may now proceed: Given “our son’s” background and professional skepticism, it will not do to present to him directly these documents, the truth of his own parentage, and the misdirection hitherto of his talents for “Action Historiography”: I am therefore to publish the letters as my discoveries, with whatever commentary I may wish to add; the author of the cover note will then clip and send them to Henri (professing astonishment, conviction, etc.) together with “certain supplementary comment,” including the story of Henri’s own birth and early childhood, the whole to be signed “Your loving, long-lost father, André Castine.” The “false laureate” once revealed to be not Henri’s true father, we will assess the young man’s reactions and, “at the propitious moment, may it come soon,” reveal to him that the responsible, respected, impersonal historian who brought the letters to light is in fact his long-lost mother! End of cover note. Its close is two words, in two languages: Yours toujours. It is signed… Andrew!

I shall go mad. I shall go mad. Why should not Ambrose (who shall not see the cover note) turn out to be André? Why should not you? Why should not my dear daft parents, decades dead, drop by for tea and declare that I am not their daughter, Germaine Necker-Gordon? Then God descend and declare the world a baroque fiction, now finally done and rejected by the heavenly publishers!

Madness! And in these letters (which you may presently read in print, for I shall do what that hand bids me, with every misgiving in the world) I perceive a pattern of my own, A.C. IV’s and V’s and VI’s be damned: It is the women of the line who’ve been the losers: Anne Bowyer Cooke and Anna Cooke, Roxanne Édouard, Henrietta and Nancy Russecks, Andrée Castines I and II and III — faithful, patient, brave, long-suffering women driven finally, the most of them, to distraction.

And of this sorry line the latest — unless she finds the spiritual wherewithal to do an about-face of her own with what remains of the second half of her life — is “your”

Germaine!

~ ~ ~

S: Todd Andrews to his father. His life’s recycling. Jane Mack’s visit and confession. 10 R.

Skipjack Osborn Jones

Slip #2, Municipal Harbor

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

11 P.M. Friday, May 16, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

O dear Father,

Seven decades of living (seven years more than you permitted yourself), together with my Tragic View of Order, incline me on the one hand to see patterns everywhere, on the other to be skeptical of their significance. Do you know what I mean? Did you feel that way too? (Did you ever know what I meant? Did you feel any way?)

So for example I did not fail to remark, on March 7 last, when I wrote my belated annual deathday letter to you, that it was occasioned by the revival of events that prompted my old Letter in the first place; but having so remarked, I shrugged my shoulders. Even seven weeks ago, when the dead past sprouted to life in my office like those seeds from fossil dung germinated by the paleontologists, I resisted the temptation to Perceive a Pattern in All This. I mean a meaningful pattern: for of course I noticed, not for the first time, that Drew Mack and his mother were squaring off over Harrison’s estate quite as Harrison and his mother had once done over Mack Senior’s. But I drew no more inferences from that than I shall from the gratuitous recurrence of sevens above; I merely wondered: If (as Marx says in his essay The 18th Brumaire) tragic history repeats itself as farce, what does farce do for an encore?