Letters

Be that as may, those were his subjects (and you Must Remember to Enter Iago in your Hornbook, though we have only his own unreliable suspicion, in Act I, that Othello cuckolded him with Emilia). From Wicomico Morgan returned to Baltimore, found a post with the Maryland Historical Society, and lectured occasionally in the evening college of the state university. On the strength of his subsequent publications he was offered and sometimes accepted visiting lectureships at respectable universities, but he would not take a regular academic appointment. His growing reputation at the historical society led him into activity as a consultant to restoration projects, museums of local history, film productions, and historical pageants, festivals, and monuments up and down the thirteen original colonies. This activity in turn acquainted him with such pedigreed families as the Harrison Macks (Mrs. Mack also claims descent from Betsy Patterson), whose choice he became to preside over their newly founded college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was a move, so Casteene reported, contrary to Morgan’s personal inclinations; he accepted out of gratitude for the Tidewater Foundation’s support of his historical researches over the years; perhaps also because some surviving academic idealism in him was appealed to by the project of establishing a small elite center for scholarly activity.

“Merde, Horner,” you Hear Saint Joseph replying to this last. “You’re Determined to Make Me Out a naive rationalist, when in fact I’ve taken the tragic view of human institutions — including colleges and marriages — since I was nineteen.”

In any case, the trustees’ appointment of his former employer, John Schott of Wicomico Teachers College, to be his academic vice-president must soon have disabused Morgan of any such idealism. In the ensuing power struggle, Schott revived or threatened to revive the scandal of Rennie’s death. Morgan resigned and retreated north to a visiting professorship at Amherst—

“Not retreated, Horner!” one hears him protest. “Massachusetts chauvinists are just as tacky as Virginia chauvinists. I went to Amherst because Amherst invited me, and one of my sons was at school there. The other’s at Chapel Hill.”

— where he seems to have undergone a radical change of personality, whether in consequence of, or merely concomitant with, his introduction to LSD. From rationalism he moved to a kind of mysticism—

“So did Plato and William James. You may Hear me quote Blake or Suzuki, but not Castaneda’s Conversations with Don Juan.”

— from J. Press suits to hippie buckskins—

“Make it Abercrombie and Fitch to L. L. Bean. The outfit I was wearing when I came here was a gift from some Seneca Indians that Casteene and I were visiting when I freaked out.”

“So how come you’re still wearing it, Joe?” This was your First Conversation with him, yesterday, birthday of Hans Christian Andersen, F. A. Bartholdi, Carmen Basilio, G. J. Casanova, Max Ernst, Alec Guinness, Bedrich Smetana, Émile Zola. In the month since his arrival, Joe had scarcely taken note of your Existence; you, on the contrary, who ordinarily Took No Note of it either, were more Painfully Aware of it than at any time in the past sixteen years. He met daily with Tombo X, less often with the Doctor, neither of whom reported the substance of their interviews to you. He was most frequently in the company of M. Casteene, but such of their conversation as you Overheard was on the French and Indian War or the Niagara Frontier in the War of 1812: the conversation of a knowledgeable amateur and an unassuming professional. Both Pocahontas and Bibi were attracted to Morgan, as were the draft evaders; with them his talk was elliptical, ironic, nonintellectual, almost nonexistent. He played soccer and smoked marijuana with the young men (those for whom these were prescribed or permitted); with the women he played bridge, read Tarot cards and I Ching hexagrams, and practiced yoga, despite the Doctor’s disapproval of that discipline. (“It’s not immobility,” Morgan had pleasantly argued; “it’s suspended motion.” And to your Surprise, the Doctor conceded.) You Postponed your Suicide, Waiting for him to follow up on his first and only words to you: that ultimatum about rewriting history, resurrecting Rennie—

“Not resurrecting, Horner: rebirthing. I don’t want my wife exhumed. I want her reborn.”