Yup, parasol. It was late June, Prinz had reasoned; they’d’ve had parasols. And never mind verisimilitude, he liked the fetishistic look of naked ladies with open parasols, and had instructed the girls to hold tight to their accessories whilst being stripped. Our pirate now clutches his family jewels and begs Bea’s pardon: he was overcome with love; it was that season of year. Ambrose not quite to the rescue this time, but nearby enough to get his comforting arms about the victim, I daresay — who is inclined to bring assault charges against Bray until Prinz dissuades her. Indeed, the familiarity of the tableau — Bea in extremis, the Author to the rescue (sort of), Bray apologising — has given the Director an Idea: inasmuch as the movie reenacts and re-creates events and images from “the books,” which do likewise from life and history and even among themselves, why should it not also reenact and echo its own events and images?
Ambrose is enchanted, Bray is willing, Bea is appalled, Prinz is boss. The 4th of July re-creation of the Gadfly party is devised. But it mustn’t be a strictly programmed reenactment: we are on the Choptank now, aboard the O.F.T. II, with a different backup cast. Time has moved on: it will be Independence Day; never mind the War of 1812. Let each principal, independently, imagine variations on the original Gadfly sequence.
How is it, I wonder, Prinz gets so much said when I’m not there to hear him? In any case, my own variation, proposed at once, was that this time around I stay home in bed. Ambrose’s idea — which, along with my menstruation and the completing of his Perseus-Medusa story in first draft, kept him from me most of the week since my last letter — was to reply to Prinz’s triumphantly Unwritable Scene (on the beach of Ocean City back on 12 May) with a victoriously Unfilmable Sequence.
He was in a high state of excitement; didn’t even remark upon the fact, if he noticed it, that since the full moon I’d ceased to wear my teenybopper costumes, too depressed to give a damn what he thought. Did I not agree, he demanded to know, that we were amid a truly extraordinary coming together of omens, echoes, prefigurations? Item: On the Tuesday noon, 1 July, the midpoint of the year, he was in midst of a fiction about the classical midpoint of man’s life, and felt himself personally altogether nel mezzo del cammin etc. Item: Our sacking from Marshyhope U. had occurred (so said his desk calendar) on the anniversary of the end of Napoleon’s 100 Days. Item: Wednesday the 2nd, when Prinz began preparing his reenactment of the Gadfly’s grounding and Ambrose all but wound up his tale of Perseus and Medusa, was the date on which in 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the Cape Verde Islands and put out the raft that inspired Géricault’s famous painting; the frigate itself had just the year before — and at just this same time of year — been involved in Napoleon’s postabdication scheme to run the British blockade at Rochefort and escape to America. And — get this, now — he had just that day (i.e., midday Thursday, 3 July) been informed by Todd Andrews, whom he’d happened to meet in the Cambridge Hospital and with whom he’d had a chat about the strange Mr Bray, that that gentleman had once represented himself to the Tidewater Foundation as the Emperor Bonaparte, and had even mentioned, in one of his mad money-begging letters, his abdication, his flight to Rochefort, the plan to run him through the British blockade, his final decision to surrender and plead for passport to America: where (Bray is alleged to have alleged) he lives in hiding to this day, making ready his return from his 2nd Exile!
But we are not done. Item: Among the American friends of the emperor’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte was the King family of “Beverly,” in nearby Somerset County; and among the several plans to rescue Napoleon from St Helena, one of the more serious was that of Mayor Girod of New Orleans, who built a fast ship in Charleston to run the emperor across the Atlantic and into the trackless Maryland marshes, where he would hide in a secret room in the Beverly estate until the coast was clear enough for him to remove to New Orleans. Only the news of Bonaparte’s death in 1821 kept the Séraphine from sailing. And who are these Kings of Somerset if not the ancestors of Ambrose’s mother Andrea King, from whom he had both this story as a child and his adult nom de plume?
Pooh, said I, that’s a game anyone can play who knows a tad of history: the game of Portentous Coincidences, or Arresting But Meaningless Patterns. And I volunteered a couple of items of my own, gratis: That the British man-of-war that accepted Napoleon’s surrender and fetched him from Rochefort to England was named after Perseus’s cousin Bellerophon; that the officer who then transported him to exile in St Helena instead of to America was the same Admiral Cockburn who had raped Hampton, burnt Washington, and bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore in previous summers; that my late husband’s ancestor William Pitt, Earl Amherst (a nephew of Lord Jeffrey), stopped at St Helena to converse with Napoleon in 1816, after the wreck of his ship Alceste in Korean waters; that my other famous forebears Mme de Staël and Lord Byron first met at just about this time, and among their connexions was surely their strong shared interest in the exiled emperor (Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte dates from 1815; the “Ode to St Helena” in Canto III of Childe Harold from 1816). And one of B.‘s cousins, Captain Sir Peter Parker of H.M.S. Menelaus, was killed in a diversionary action on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during Cockburn’s assault on Washington and Baltimore, the news whereof inspired Byron to add to his Hebrew Melodies an ode “On the Death of Sir Peter Parker.” And the ship which carried Napoleon III to his American exile in 1837 was named for Perseus’s wife, Andromède; and it was the same Louis Napoleon’s grotesque replay of his uncle’s career that prompted Marx’s essay On the 18th Brumaire etc., in which he made his celebrated, usually misquoted observation of History’s farcical recyclings. And none of this, in my opinion, meant anything more than that the world is richer in associations than in meanings, and that it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.
“Thou’rt a very prig and pedant,” said my lover, not unkindly, and kissed my forehead, and repeated his hope that our connexion would survive the hard weather he foresaw, our 5th Stage.
Two things worthy of note occurred that same day, Thursday the 3rd, both reported to me by Magda when she called on me in the evening (Ambrose was Out). One was that the general migration of Strange Birds down the flyway from the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake had fetched to Dorchester County not only Bea Golden and Jerome Bray but, that very afternoon, the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch, née Marsha Blank, a.k.a. Pocahontas of the Remobilisation Farm: she had telephoned that morning from across the Bay (Chautaugua, surely) to announce that she was en route to Bloodsworth Island on business for her “employer” and, as she would be passing through town, wished to take her daughter to dinner. Magda was distressed: the woman’s infrequent, imperious visits never failed to disturb poor Angela’s fragile tranquillity, the more precarious lately anyroad on account of her grandmother’s condition. Ambrose too was always distracted by fury for days after, she said, even when things were serene on other fronts: given Andrea’s dying, the Marshyhope incident, the new crisis at Mensch Masonry, and what she gathered was the less than blissful state of affairs at 24 L, she feared for him as well as for Angela when he should learn of Marsha’s presence on the scene.