My wedding day!
But there I spring already into the future, doubtless in flight from the shocks of the three weeks since my last: a period of being at sixes and sevens indeed. Then we had just got the horrid news of Peter’s bone cancer and were wondering whether or not to go down to “Barataria” for the “Burning of Washington.” Already an age ago, another world. Peter Mensch is dead, John! And Joe Morgan is dead! (And maybe Mr Jerome Bray, and for all we know Bea Golden. And, to be sure, Mr Ho Chi Minh.) “Washington” is in ashes; Baltimore’s about to take its lumps — and the Menschhaus is in deep mourning, and Mensch Masonry’s office has been burglarised, and we’re pretty sure I’m pregnant, and Magda is amazing, and A. B. Cook is being strangely friendly, and Marsha Blank has declared that Peter is (was, was) Angie’s father, and nobody (but Marsha) cares a damn about that one way or the other, and Ambrose and I will marry at Fort McHenry at 5:08 EDST this coming Saturday, Rosh Hashanah!
See A.‘s letter for explanation, more or less, of that specific hour and date: the 6th something of the 6th something else of the 6th 6th 6th 6th what-have-you.
Peter, Peter, Peter! and poor Joe!
Bloodsworth Island. We went down there after all on that Sunday morning, 24 August, after I’d reported to you the bad news of Peter’s diagnosis and Ambrose had telephoned you, much distraught, late that Saturday night, in reply to your letter. (On the matter of your writing to him, after half a year’s silence to me, I shall not speak.) And as he mentioned in his subsequent letter from Barataria on the Monday morning — typed with his left hand because his right was out of action and I was too busy with hysterical Merry Bernstein to do his writing for him — a lively time was had by all.
Ambrose was, you understand, feeling as emptied—by his mother’s death, by Peter’s crisis, by M. M. Co.‘s final bankruptcy, by his abandonment of that lovely Perseus project and his longtime pseudonymity — as I, in the 3rd loving week of our “mutuality,” was feeling filled. We went down there, despite our then distress, for the same reason that we will go forward with our wedding plans despite our even greater bereavement now: because Magda (and, back then, dear Peter) insisted. We wound down through your endless marshes — still, steaming, buggy — across the labyrinth of shallow waterways and distant loblolly pines in Backwater Wildlife Refuge, where I saw my first American eagle, down past Crapo and Tedious Creek to Bishops Head, at the lonely tail of Dorchester County. I thought uncomfortably of Ambrose’s having brought Bea Golden through these same marshes in July, at the beginning of hateful Stage 5, to roger her up and down the beach whilst I stewed and fretted in my flapper drag up in Dorset Heights… A hundred years ago!
But clearly, and fortunately, nothing of the sort was on my lover’s mind. I distracted him as best I could with bird and marsh plant and movie questions, but his eyes kept filling at the thought of poor Peter, poor Magda. We left our little car at the road’s end, where nothing is but a fisherman’s shack and pier, open water on three sides, and, across a mile-wide strait, low-lying, marshy Bloodsworth. Several other empty cars were parked there, among them a black limousine I knew to be Jane Mack’s — but no one was about. We wondered. Presently a lad puttered up in a “Hooper’s Island workboat” (A.’s designation) full of crab pots, and ferried us across to Cook’s lodge: a cheerful young Charon who would not accept our proffered fare.
So this, thought I, is where they fucked. Well well. There was in fact no beach, only tidal mud flats, spartina grass, cattails. A brown “gut” of water marked with stakes led to Cook’s dock; “Barataria” was a modest but comfortable white frame house, a small caretaker’s cottage, a flagpole, grass doing badly on a sandy lawn. A few crabbing skiffs and a runabout were tied at the pier; a few untidy young people loitered about (refugees from the Remobilisation Farm, they looked to me); a few mosquitoes and biting green flies said hello to us.
Where was the movie? It would arrive after lunch, Cook’s caretaker told us: a wizened, brown-burnt, friendly local whose “down-county” accent defied my ear and whose employer was off with Prinz & Co. The grips — they were indeed from Fort Erie — showed us crude sets of which they were inordinately proud, meant to represent the U.S. Capitol and the President’s House in 1814. “Gonna burn them fuckers, come dark,” etc. We were given lunch. The main company of Frames, it seemed, were shooting across the Bay, where the British had landed and reboarded after their remarkable expedition. They would return by boat sometime that afternoon.
Nothing to do but sip iced tea, worry about Peter, watch the hippies smoke dope, and wish we hadn’t come so early, or at least had brought along the Times. We were, you remember, winding up our week of ritual Abstinence, the Echo of our Reenactment of et cetera. We agreed that Monday would be welcome, family crisis or no. I found in Cook’s library a Mr Glen Tucker’s Poltroons & Patriots: A Popular Account of the War of 1812 in two volumes (1954) and did a spot of homework. Ambrose made desultory notes on his scenario.
Not till afternoon’s end did the others finally arrive, in a fine big motor yacht named Baratarian. It belonged, we assumed, to the lord of Barataria Lodge: the laureate poet and new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope State University. He was in any case conspicuously aboard, along with a paid captain and a crowd of others, including Reg Prinz, our old chums Bruce and Brice, and that Rising Young Starlet Merope Bernstein, of Fort Erie and Scajaquada fame.
They were late, Cook explained (after a bluff, booming welcome to us as the Shameless Lovebirds of Liberal-Land, who however, despite our egregious political and moral error, were to regard his Barataria as ours) because of a fortuitous encounter with Mr Todd Andrews’s cruising boat across the Bay; they had made good use of it to film Baratarian under way and had filmed it in turn for “establishing footage,” it being a renovated old oyster-dredging sailboat. And they had stopped off at Bishops Head to unload another pair of lovebirds: Jane Mack and her fiancé, “Lord Baltimore.” It turns out that the yacht is hers, or theirs; they had kindly lent it to the Frames company for the weekend, but had themselves returned to Cambridge.
I have neglected to mention that this ruddy, fulsome nemesis of mine was rigged out in period costume; made up as, and bent on playing, his ancestor and namesake Andrew Burlingame Cook IV, of whom you know from my reports of a certain painful project whereof I long since washed my hands. The fellow had been a double agent, Cook maintained, in the British Chesapeake expedition of 1814 (news to me), and indeed was allegedly killed at Ft McH., though subsequent letters over his signature are said to have reached his widow at Castines Hundred. Be that as it may (the mere mention of that fateful place-name, and of ancestral letters, gave me a proper heartache, which Ambrose perceived, and squeezed my hand), his descendant seemed very much in charge of Prinz, B. & B., the whole business. Fresh from Mr Tucker’s history, I was struck by Cook’s likeness in face and manner, not to his forebear, of whom there are no extant portraits, but to Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Scourge of the Chesapeake, whom he had better played. Reggie framed and filmed; Bruce and Brice did their audiovisual things; Merope slouched about with wary eye, doubtless on the lookout for Jerome Bray — but Cook ran the show, in high-spirited (and high-handed) collaboration with my quondam Doctor of Letters, whose undoctoring, and my dismissal, he himself had advocated!