“Hum. Inasmuch as the late Rennie Morgan was not Jewish, I presume her husband had her body routinely embalmed, unless he was afraid the undertaker might spread the abortion story. But that would have been uncharacteristically irrational of him, since the county coroner had the facts already. Embalmed or not, that body that you Took such antitherapeutic pleasure in, Horner: do you Know what it looks like now, sixteen years after burial?” You Controlled yourself.
“I don’t either,” the Doctor admitted. “Nor want to. Let her rot in peace. I suppose the Freudians would say that our ‘Saint Joseph’ became a historian to sublimate his basic necrophilia. It seems as likely to me that necrophilia is an occupational hazard of historians.”
“My Own Guess,” you Offered Quietly, “is that Joe loved his wife very deeply—”
“He should have buried her as deeply.”
“—and never got over her death.”
“What is he here for? Is he really whacked out, or is that his cover for something else?”
You Could Not Resist Inquiring With Some Amusement why the Doctor should worry, the statute having long since run on prosecution for manslaughter and illegal abortion in Rennie’s case. He replied testily that “Saint Joseph” needed no waiver of the statute of limitations to pull a gun and take belated revenge for the loss of his wife, if he was truly deranged. Or, if his condition was feigned, to make difficulties for the Farm with provincial authorities.
“Last and least,” he added, “his arrival here has set back your Own Case about fifteen years, by my reckoning, and that is ostensibly what we are here to talk about. Believe it or not, Horner, there are people who enjoy their lives. I am one of them. The Farm is a going concern. We have had less trouble in Fort Erie than anywhere in the States. I have made a few good investments. In two or three years I shall retire in moderate comfort to Switzerland or St. Croix, and you and my son may do what you please with these feebs and freaks. Till then, your Welfare is not unrelated to my own. Are you Quite Sure that this fellow is Morgan in the first place?”
No question, unfortunately, you Declared — though he had obviously changed in appearance and, to some extent, in attitude: his profession that he was Joseph Morgan “only in a sense” was a taunt. You were then Able to Discomfit the Doctor with a Quick Review of “Saint Joseph’s” history: J. Patterson Morgan, born 1923 in Boston, descendant of the Baltimore Pattersons of whom the best-known wed Napoleon’s brother in 1803; served in the navy after high school, in World War II; A.B. in philosophy from Columbia in 1949, courtesy of the G.I. Bill; M.A. in history, 1950, same school, where he met and married Renée MacMahon of Wicomico, Maryland; two children, sons, born 1950 and 1951; Ph.D. work in American history at Johns Hopkins, 1950-52: degree never completed. Thesis subject: The Saving Roles of Innocence and Energy in U.S. Political and Economic History. Dissertation abandoned after death of wife. Assistant professorship of history, Wicomico Teachers College, Maryland, 1952-53, where you First Met and Became Fatally Involved with him and Mrs. M. Resignation requested by WTC President John Schott 10/27/53, to mitigate scandal of Rennie’s death.
Thus much from your Personal Knowledge, from which too you Attested Morgan’s invincible and innocent (but not ingenuous) rationalism, his intellectual and physical energy, his unsanctimonious uprightness of character and brisk Yankee cheerfulness, his intense (and oppressive, and ultimately disastrous) devotion to his wife, her spiritual-intellectual welfare, the purity and clarity of their relation.
“Assez, assez, Horner, for God’s sake.”
The rest you Had chiefly at second hand from Monsieur Casteene, who seemed as always to know everything — and who, not impossibly, played some unacknowledged role in Morgan’s appearance at the Farm. At very least they were professionally acquainted, after a fashion: Casteene himself claimed descent from a line of French-Canadian intrigants concerning whom Morgan once wrote an article — one of a number of terse, seminal sketches mined from his abandoned dissertation, published in historical journals, and much admired by your Informant as well as by the profession. You were Not yourself Acquainted with these publications, but Accepted as Plausible Casteene’s observation that their subjects were chiefly two — great imposturing schemers such as Henry Burlingame III and the Comte de Crillon; and historically important forgeries, like the Lakanal Packet and the Henry Letters — no doubt because the circumstances of his bereavement (whereof Casteene pretends to know nothing) overwhelmed their author with the power of the irrational, the inarticulate, the intuitively guileful and disingenuous, the coolly corrupt.
“Horseshit, Horner,” you can Hear the old — i.e., the young — Morgan scoffing: “I understood that before I was twenty. You romantics always overestimate capital-I Irrationality. You were no Iago, just a Horny Sonofabitch who Happened to Hit my weak spot.”
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.”