Schott’s secretary made an audible, disagreeable hmp. Her employer, with a reproving smile, asked her for The Letter. There were then triumphantly distributed to us photocopies of a document which Schott directed us to read forthwith and return: it could not decently be read aloud, he averred, and ought not to go beyond our meeting room. But it would, he trusted (with a glance at me), put to rest any notion of continuing Professor Pitt on the faculty, and explain both his demand for her resignation and her tendering it without protest.
Well, it was a remarkable letter: more precisely, a 7-page abridgment or reverse bowdlerization of the discarded carbon copy of an 18-page draft of a letter from Germaine Pitt to the author of The Floating Opera and other fictions, with whom she has evidently been in personal, if one-way, correspondence. It was typed on the letterhead of the provost’s office and dated 7 June 1969. It commenced with the outcry John, John, and set forth its writer’s complaints about her tyrannical lover Ambrose Mensch, who among other things obliged her to dress beneath her age and dignity, use narcotics, and forgo contraception (he wants a child by her). The language was candid and British, often witty, the detail intimate, the complaint affecting, the spirit prevailingly good-humored, even brave. I was more touched than scandalized; indeed, my chief surprise was that so admirable a woman would put up with such bullying from so otherwise feckless a fellow, go on about it at such (apparently) unreciprocated length, and foolishly make a copy of her confessions. But the letter itself suggested an explanation: the woman is middle-aged and lonely; she upbraids herself for indulging her lover’s whims; is indeed at a loss to account for her own behavior, of which she vigorously disapproves; finally, she loves the chap despite his misbehavior, in part it seems because he evokes for her an earlier passion, in her young womanhood, for a Frenchman, by whom she bore a child. The letter was unsigned, but no one else in Dorchester County could have written it. My heart went out to Germaine Pitt: lucky, undeserving fellow, that Mensch, whose promiscuity with Jeannine aboard the O.F.T. II irked me now even more in retrospect!
My interest was caught too (should have been even more so, but other scales had not yet fallen from my eyes) by the coincidence that her former lover’s name was André Castine: I recalled, before she invoked, the Castine-Burlingame intrigues in the Sot-Weed Factor novel and the peculiarity of Andrew Burlingame Cook VI’s having a French-Canadian son named Henri Burlingame VII (we met him at Harrison’s funeral, Dad, remember?). I was struck too, of course, by the further coincidence that Jane Mack’s mysterious fiancé was named André: no more meaningful an accident, I suppose, than that Cook’s first name and my last are nearly alike, or that I happen to live on Todds Point, next to Cook Point — we’ve seen how that other Author works! But still… And there were tantalizing implications of some connection between this modern Castine and our Mr. Cook: near the letter’s end, for example, Lady Amherst complains of being variously tormented by “you [i.e., ‘John, John,’ who does not reply to her letters], Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook.” But if that connection was illuminated in the original, it was lost in the abridgment.
The committee were mightily entertained. I was not, and objected as strenuously as I was able both to the distribution of the letter in the first instance and to its abridgment in the second. Schott replied that we were not a judicial body: he had excerpted and put before us evidence of Professor Pitt’s moral turpitude by way of justifying to us his demand for her resignation, a demand he was in fact under no legal obligation to justify. I responded that my objection was moral, not legal, and all the stronger for his being not legally obligated to justify his action. Schott countered — cleverly for him — that his obligation was moral, too. As for the abridgment, Cook now put in, he would attest that it was mainly in the interest of moral — he smiled: Perhaps he should say immoral? — relevance and consideration for our valuable time; but also (and this is why he himself had been shown the “original”) his good friend President Schott had seen fit to delete references to a matter Cook would now reluctantly acknowledge, and which would explain Lady Amherst’s including him among her “tormentors.” One of the novels written by the addressee of the letter involved his, Cook’s, ancestor, the original poet laureate of Maryland, as well as an early New-Frenchman from whom (for example) the town of Castine, Maine, takes its name. Among the regrettable aberrations of Lady Amherst — for whom otherwise Cook professed esteem — was her persuasion that there must therefore be some connection between himself and that former French-Canadian lover of hers. She had, embarrassingly, gone so far as to fancy that his son by the late Mrs. Cook might be her own illegitimate child by that early romance! The missing portions of the letter, then, included her account of an expedition earlier in June to his house in Anne Arundel County, in pursuit of this aberration. Fortunately he had not been at home: his former secretary-housekeeper had reported the visit of a strange Englishwoman who claimed to have urgent business with him. Aware of Lady Amherst’s delusion and its origins, he had avoided her, and she’d not bothered him since.
Schott gruffly declared that he himself never read novels. Neither, said Provost Carter, did he. A great pity, Cook cordially chided: though his own muses were those of poetry and history, he believed that fiction, and in particular the novel, was your great mirror up to life. A dark mirror sometimes, to be sure, in which nevertheless, and whether transfigured or merely disfigured — here he gave me a surprising, meaning wink — we could best recognize our world and ourselves.
Perhaps he meant what I took him to mean by that wink: that he had read the novels in which the Macks and I — and Schott and Carter — are severally “figured.” Or perhaps the wink was no more than a sort of conspiratorial self-irony: “You and I see through these high-minded clichés, eh?” It might even have been a mere tic. But my mind had wandered from poor Germaine Pitt to Jane Mack and the young fellow in the beige Arrow shirt in 1921; from the Floating Opera novel (wherein young “Todd Andrews” sees himself copulating in a mirror) to my experience on Captain Adams’s Original Floating Theatre on June 21 or 22, 1937: my happy resolve (13 L) to blow up the showboat and myself after that dreadful dark night before.
Some things that are perfectly obvious to others aren’t obvious at all to me, “Todd Andrews” remarks somewhere in that novel, and vice versa: hence this chapter; hence this book. OK, Dad: you saw it coming a long way back (let’s presume you’re closer than I to our Author). But it took me now by total, exhilarated surprise, what Cook’s mid-sentence, mid-committee wink disclosed to me; nor can I say now what connects the wink to the revelation, any more than I can say what if anything connects A. B. Cook to André Castine. But there it suddenly, astonishingly, beautifully was: 13 R, not yet in detail, but in clear principle, as plainly as if carved into the conference table.
Well! Too bad, Germaine: nothing I could do for you beyond insisting that those photocopies be destroyed at once (I shredded mine; Cook followed suit; the others were duly shamed by our example); I wish you a better job and a better companion, or better luck with the one you have. Adieu, Jeannine: if you can’t find what you want, may you at least learn what it is you can’t find. Adieu, Drew, less and more my child than your sister is. And bye-bye, I think, dear Jane: belatedly cured of the passion I belatedly recognized, I leave you to “Lord Baltimore” and Cap’n Chick.