Chautaugua Rd., Md.
Wednesday, Sept. 10, 1969
Dear Henry,
Airmail special delivery should fetch this by Friday to Castines Hundred, where I pray (having heard from our caretakers that you have been there yet again since my last) it may not only find you, but find you ready to respond, if you please, to its summons. Lest someone else find and respond to it instead, I am casting it into “Legrand’s cipher,” or “Captain Kidd’s code” as modified by A.B.C. IV, which I can write (and you will quickly learn to read) as easily as if the words were in no further code than writing itself. Tomorrow I pack off up the road to Baltimore, to the Francis Scott Key Highway, to Fort McHenry, to do a few days’ work with our “film company” (it is Ours now, virtually).
I want you there.
Since my letter of three weeks ago, our Baratarians brought off admirably the Burning of Washington on Bloodsworth Island: our first full-dress drill, so to speak, in using “the media” (in this case Reginald Prinz’s film crew; next time the local and network television news people) as well as our “enemies” (in this case the U.S. Navy; next time the Dept. of the Interior) to our purposes. This is not to say that all went, or goes, perfectly. That lawyer Todd Andrews, executive director of the Tidewater Foundation and thus a principal contender for Harrison Mack’s estate, has grown entirely too curious about the relation of Baron Castine to Andrew Cook VI. He even hired a Buffalo detective to investigate “Monsieur Casteene” of Fort Erie and the Honey Dust operation at Lily Dale! I was obliged to invoke C.I.A. credentials (city detectives have no awe of the F.B.I.) to warn the fellow off, in the process surely making him all the more curious. And Drew Mack’s radicalism, a less sophisticated version of your own, is a growing liability. I shall return to that subject.
Joseph Morgan, on the other hand, my apprehensions concerning whom I voiced in my last, is no longer a problem: we buried him three days since. A pitiful case, that — and a fourteen-year investment (i.e., since I first took an interest in him in 1955, when he was a disillusioned ex-rationalist working for the Maryland Historical Society, and proposed him to Harrison Mack to head up his projected college) down the drain. But at least we need worry about him, indeed about the whole Fort Erie operation, no longer.
Likewise “Bea Golden,” unless old Andrews’s or young Mack’s curiosity gets out of hand. She is, I cannot say safe, but safely disposed of. Her disposer, however — the squire of “Comalot”—remains a troubling enigma. I had supposed Jerome Bray no more than a crank, perhaps even a madman; now I am persuaded that while he may be mad, he is not merely so. I even begin to wonder whether his connection with the Burlingames may not go deeper than I’d supposed; whether that bizarre “machine” and Bray’s strange behavior may not be exotic camouflage. I suspect he may have abilities, capacities, as extraordinary as yours and mine. In the “Washington” action, for example, I seriously put the man’s person at risk. I even imagined, not without relief, that our friends from Patuxent Naval Air Station had obligingly, if unwittingly, “wasted” him in their routine gunnery practice over the lower marshes on that Sunday night. Then Bray appeared, unaccountably and unscathed, in my locked office in the cottage next noon, as I was in mid-metamorphosis between Castine and Cook! Disconcerting!
He exercises, moreover, a Svengali-like authority (but I think by pharmacological, not psychological, means) upon a young woman of our company, formerly his associate, who had fled to us in fear of her life last spring. We found her unconscious near the Prohibited Area that Sunday night with an obvious injection bruise on her buttock; upon her reviving, she was convinced that she was doomed. I later dispatched her to “Comalot” ostensibly for a week’s trial reconciliation with her nemesis, actually to survey the scene there and report to me. I anticipated hysterical objections, but she went like one whose will was not her own. (I should add that her lover, Reg Prinz, had abandoned her that same night; the girl was both desperate and drugged.) A week later she dutifully returned to Barataria and dutifully reported that Bea Golden is comatose, concealed, and “seeded” (?); that Todd Andrews himself had appeared at Comalot, made inquiries, had been sent packing; that she repented her mistaken defection of April and wished to return to Bray’s service. It was clear to me that she had already quite done so. I dismissed her; she is with him now. The question is, is he with us? And what is he?
It will not surprise me to see him again at Fort McHenry: Bray seems to understand that what began as Prinz’s movie — a film in its own right and for its own sake, however obscure its content and aesthetics — has become the vehicle for something else entirely, a vehicle whose original driver is now barely a passenger. Bray declares that his own “published literary works” (I have not seen them) are comparable — coded messages and instructions disguised as works of fiction — and that the “revolutionary new medium” which he and his computer have concocted will be in fact a “new medium of revolution.” I have in process a last long shot to rid us of him by his own agency before he decides to rid himself of us. Whether his madness is feigned or real, Bray has, like Hamlet, an exploitable weakness, which I believe I understand (he is a half relative of ours) and can play upon.
Now, the movie. Its two remaining “scenes”—the Attack on Fort McHenry and the Destruction of Barataria — should provide opportunity for me (Us? I pray so) to deal with at least some of these threats and nuisances, some final rehearsal in the diversion of media and “available action” to our purposes, and (as when the U.S. Navy destroyed Jean Lafitte’s base on Grande-Terre Island on September 16, 1814) a covering of our tracks in readiness for the fall/spring season. When, blending less obtrusively with our surroundings, we will ring down the curtain on Act One (the 1960’s, the First 7-Year Plan) and raise it on Act Two.
I had thought, Henry, to commence that act, and the new decade, and the Second 7-Year Plan, by marrying Jane Mack in January 1970. Last March I set that as my “target date” for enlisting you to me by putting in your way the record of our forebear’s proud and pathetic attempt to transcend the fateful Pattern of our history — that endless canceling of Cooks by Burlingames, Burlingames by Cooks, which he was the first of our line to recognize — by rebelling against himself before his children could rebel against him. Those four “prenatal” letters (which I myself discovered just two years ago in the archives of the Erie County Historical Museum in Buffalo, and which the historian Germaine Pitt was to have annotated and published) were meant to say to you what I yearned and feared to say myself. I would then have reintroduced myself to you in my proper person, who would in turn have introduced you to your prospective stepmother. Moreover, I would have introduced you, for the first time in your conscious life, to your biological mother, whom History and Necessity (read “Baron André Castine”) have dealt with sorely indeed in this particular.
Do I have your attention, son? You are not the half-orphan you have believed yourself these many years to be. I know who, I know where, your mother is. When you shall have represented yourself to me, when we are at one with each other and with the Second Revolution, I will bring you and her together. She has awaited that reunion for 29 years! For a certain reason (call it the Anniversary View of History) I propose we keep her waiting until November 5 next, your 30th birthday — and no longer.
Thus my plan. But events have accelerated and changed that original schedule. Lady Amherst’s defection (and that earlier-mentioned novelist’s lack of interest) obliged me to transcribe and attempt to send you Andrew IV’s “posthumous” letters, you having somehow acquired “on your own” some version of the “prenatals.” And Jane wants us married three weeks hence, at September’s end, instead of in the New Year. Andrew Burlingame Cook VI has therefore but a few days more to live. On our drama’s larger stage, the death of Ho Chi Minh, and Nixon’s announcement of further troop withdrawals from South Viet Nam and Thailand, signal that the war in Southeast Asia is grinding down to some appropriately ignominious dénouement, and with it the mainspring of our First 7-Year Plan.