In 1789 Nancy Russecks McEvoy Burlingame was still scarcely 30, and — to her son’s eyes, at least — still beautiful, if much distraught. She had taken one or two lovers over the years & yet remain’d faithful to her faithless husband, whom she thot Joseph Whaland & those others to have been. But this last shock undid her judgement: she came to believe that virtually everyone with his initial was Burlingame, regardless of station, appearance, or attitude. The letters still came, & the money: from Baltimore, from Canada, sometimes from Barlow’s own hotel. We took lodging there. Barlow’s land business was going badly; he miss’d his wife; they had no children; he was kind to Mother & me. She call’d him “Henry”…
Her story ends in 1790, when Ruth Barlow was finally persuaded to cross the ocean. Just before the storming of the Bastille the year before, I had been put into a boarding-school at the Pension Lemoyne, across the street from Mr. Jefferson’s house, along with another ward of Mr. Barlow’s. Not long after, Mother inform’d me that I might expect a younger brother or sister by summer. Barlow was doubly desperate: an ardent supporter of both revolutions, he nonetheless hoped to save the floundering Scioto venture by selling large pieces of Ohio to refugees of the ancien régime; a devoted husband, he nevertheless install’d Mrs. Barlow in our lodgings in London & kept her waiting there a full month until my mother was brot to childbed in mid-July. Surely now, I thot, my father will appear. I had got a letter & a cheque from him on my 14th birthday, over the initial of an obscure young Corsican sublieutenant of artillery in Auxonne…
On July 10th, 1790, just before joining others of the American community in Paris in a congratulatory address to the French National Assembly, Mr. Barlow inform’d me that he had made plans, on my father’s written instructions, for returning us to Canada as soon as Mother was able to travel. On the 1st anniversary of Bastille Day my sister was born, dead; Mother died a day or so later of childbed fever. That same day a letter was deliver’d to me by a servant of Madame de Staël, a friend of Barlow’s, whom I did not know. But I had come to recognize that penmanship. The letter purported to have been written from a place call’d the Bell Tavern in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. It declared that no force on earth could have kept the author from my mother’s side at the birth of their poor daughter, except the same historic affair that had obliged him to leave her soon after begetting that child: a business involving the reversal of both the American & the French Revolutions! I was to come to him at once, to Baltimore; his friend Mme de Staël would see to the arrangements. And once with him at last, I would see “the pattern & necessity of [his] actions, so apparently heartless, over the years: the explanation & vindication of [his] life, the proper direction of [my] own.” It was sign’d, Your loving Father, Henry Burlingame IV.
I tore that letter to pieces, burnt the pieces, pisst upon the ashes. And there commences — or shall commence when I next find leisure to write you, who will perhaps by then have commenced your own life story — the no less eventful history of
Your loving Father,
Andrew Cooke IV
P.S.: But there is a curious, painful postscript to that letter, the last I ever had “from him.” Back in his tutoring days at Yale (so he confest to Mother, who recorded the anecdote in her diary), Father had briefly courted & made verses with an intelligent young woman named Elizabeth Whitman, and had stopt short of matrimony only on account of the same infirmity that had made him so shy in Church Creek. Miss Whitman subsequently was courted by Joel Barlow, who however prefer’d & eventually married Ruth Baldwin, & by yet another tutor at Yale, who too saw fit not to wed her. She withdrew from New Haven to Hartford to live with her mother & to languish on the margin of the Hartford Wits. Early in 1788 she found herself pregnant, and in June of that year, under the assumed name of Mrs. Walker, she left town to have the baby. In July the child was stillborn, like my sister; like my mother, Betsy Whitman died a few days later of childbed fever. She left only a letter, addrest to “B,” the lover who had abandon’d her: “Must I die alone? Why did you leave me in such distress?” & cet.
It could have been Joel Barlow: he was in Hartford at the time, studying for his bar examination, involving himself in the Scioto swindle, & satirizing with his fellow wits, in the Anarchiad, Daniel Shays’ admirable rebellion. It could have been Joseph Buckminister, the other Yale tutor amongst Betsy’s former beaux. But the town to which she fled to hide the scandal was Danvers, Massachusetts; and the hostelry in which “Mrs. Walker” & her baby died was the Bell Tavern — where, she declared to the end, her husband would be joining her promptly…
Inspired by that fateful letter (and by the success in America of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa), a relative of Betsy Whitman’s named Hannah Foster turn’d her story into a romance on the wages of sin call’d The Coquette (1797): the 1st American epistolary novel. Inspired by that later epistle from the Bell Tavern, your father stay’d in Paris to join in the Terror & to applaud the guillotining of the whole paternal class. But that is matter for another day, sweet child, another letter.
A.B.C.
R: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Reviewing Year O and anticipating LILYVAC II’s first trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES. With an enclosure to the Author.
Jerome Bonaparte Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752
April 1, 1969
Mr. Todd Andrews
c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys
Court Lane
Cambridge, Md. 21613
Dear Mr. Andrews:
RESET Beg pardon. Among the carryovers of our original program into LILYVAC II is a tendency to repetition in the printouts, imperfectly corrected by a reset function. Especially on the anniversaries of significant earlier printouts, the computer inclines as it were to mimic itself: e.g., every Bastille Day since 1966 it has rewritten our 1st letter to “Harrison Mack II” (Enclosure #1 of Enclosure #1 of our letter to you of March 4, q.v.).
To which last we are distressed to have had no reply, whether because it never reached you (we know the P.O. to be infested with anti-Bonapartists, in high places as well as low: vide the “American Indian” Commemorative of Nov. 4 last, which not ingenuously passed over the noble nations of the Iroquois in favor of the Nez Percé, an idle swarm of dope-smoking savages) or because the Mensch-Prinz cabal have persuaded you against us. A prompt response from you in the matter of our proposed action is imperative, since the statute of limitations will run on August 5, and he must RESET Meanwhile, given our uncertainty both of your position and of the confidentiality of our correspondence, we are torn between our wish neither to repeat ourselves nor to divulge promiscuously details of the status of the NOVEL project, and on the other hand our concern to get on with the neutralization of our enemies and to keep our benefactors apprised of the fruits of their patronage. We are therefore attaching a copy of our latest ultimatum to the Defendant, and will summarize in only the most general way the results of our recent work periods, which summary we trust you will pass on to Mr. Drew Mack and the Tidewater Foundation.