What I did not question until later, to André’s own professed surprise, was his authenticity. Appearances and mannerisms are easily mimed: did I need no proof, after all those years, that he was he? Well, I didn’t; didn’t care (at the time) even to address so vertiginous a question. If, somewhile later, I began to wonder, it was because for the first time since our parting he had come to me in the role of himself: had he posed as another, I’d never have doubted at all.
We stayed at the Wolpert until Monday, scarcely leaving André’s room except for meals. He was obliged, as I stood about dazed, to undress me himself. When he first entered me — after so many years, so many odd others — I became hysterical. From Kitchener he took me back to Castines Hundred, where I enjoyed something of a nervous collapse. It was as if for twenty-five years I had been holding my breath, or an unnatural pose, and could now “let go,” but had forgot how. It was as if — but I can’t describe what it was as if. Except to say that for André it was as if our quarter-century separation had been a month’s business trip: a regrettable bother, but not uninteresting, and happily done with. Good to be back, and, let’s see, what had we been discussing?
Sedatives helped, prescribed by the Castines’ doctor. Arrangements were made at the university to reschedule my lectures after my recovery. André too, I learned (now Baron Castine since his grandfather’s death), had been briefly married — a mere dozen years or so, as it were to mark time “till my own marriage had run its course”—and had sired “one or two more children,” delightful youngsters, I’d love them, off in boarding schools just then, pity. Had I truly borne no more since ours? Dommage. Now that chap, our Henri, yes: chip off the old block, he: more his grandfather’s son, or his “uncle’s,” than his father’s: at twenty-six a more promising director of the script of History than either of them at his age, busy redoing what he André had spent half a lifetime undoing. Crying shame he wasn’t at Castines Hundred then and there: it was high time we approached the question of revealing to him his actual parentage…
Tranquillisers. And where might the lad be? Ah, he André had hoped against hope that I might have had some word from him: the boy was at the age when certain of his predecessors had revised their opinion of their parents, and was skilful enough to discover them for himself. Last André had heard, Henri was underground in Quebec somewhere, playing Grandpère’s nasty tricks on the Separatists, who took him for their own. So at least he’d given out. Before that he’d been working either with or against the man he understood to be his father, down in Washington. But his track had been lost, just when André much desired to find it. Of this, more when I was stronger, and of his own activities as welclass="underline" a little bibliography of “historical corners turned” that he was impatient to lay before me, “like the love poems they also are.”
He had of course followed with close interest my own career: he commended my articles on Mme de Staël (whom however he advised me now to put behind) and my patience with my late husband Jeffrey’s later adulteries. He informed me, in case I should be interested, that Jeffrey had been infertile if not quite impotent after the 1940’s, but had honoured paternity claims against him rather than acknowledge his infirmity. My essay on Héloïse’s letters to Peter Abelard, he said, had been heartbreakingly sympathetic, yet dignified and strong as poor Héloïse herself. Had I read any good books lately?
By the beginning of the new year I was, if not exactly recovered (I never shall be), at least “together” enough to return to the university and to “Juliette,” with André’s approval — which I hadn’t sought — and with three other souvenirs, two of which I had sought.
The first was that promised account of his activities since 1941. On that head I am sworn to secrecy; you would not believe me anyroad. But if even a tenth of what he told me is true, André has indeed “made history,” as one might make a poem — and to no other end! Little wonder I have difficulty accepting any document at all, however innocuous, as “naive”: I look for hidden messages in freshman compositions and interoffice memoranda; I can no longer be at ease with the documentary source materials of my own research, which for all I know may be further “love poems” from André. A refreshing way to view Whittaker Chambers’s “pumpkin papers,” or Lee Harvey Oswald’s diary! And both enterprises, I need not add, had kept him away, “for her own protection,” from me as well as from the woman he’d married “as a necessary cover” at that aforementioned turning point in his life. (He’d also been fond of her, he acknowledged, even after “her defection and subsequent demise.” I didn’t ask.)
The second souvenir was the news that our son had been raised to believe himself an orphan, the son of André’s “deceased half brother and sister-in-law!” What’s more, it now turns out (read “was then by him declared”) that he did indeed have a half brother, quite alive, “down in the States”—or half had a brother, or something. “All very complicated,” he admitted: the understatement of the semester. And his “necessary ruse” (for the boy’s own security, don’t you know) bid fair to backfire; for the evidence was that our son had located either this half brother or his semblable, accepted him as his father, and was doing the man’s political work, the very obverse of André’s own.
And, pray, what was that work? For André (since 1953) it was “the completion of his and his family’s bibliography”: the bringing to pass within his lifetime, in North America at least, that Second Revolution which, in his father’s lifetime, had been thwarted “by Roosevelt and World War II.” Did he mean an out-and-out political revolution, like the French, the Russian, the original American? Well, yes and no (André’s reply to everything!): that’s what his father, Henry Burlingame VI, almost unequivocally had meant, and had failed like so many others to bring about. What he André had in mind was something more… shall we say, revolutionary? Never mind. Immediately, his task was to make an ally of our son, by the most complicated means imaginable, which I shall return to. Suffice it here to say that “our” first problem in that line was the question whether, left to himself, the boy would spend his maturity working for or against his “parents.” If for, then we should reveal ourselves to him without delay; if against, he should be left in his present error.
Mightn’t it depend, I managed to wonder, on who those parents were? André smiled, kissed my hand: Absolutely not.
The third souvenir I took without knowing it, either during my recovery or in the weeks thereafter, when André would drive over to Toronto or I revisit Castines Hundred, with or without “Juliette.” I was well into my forties, John: a widow beginning a new life in the academy, much shaken by my history and slowly rebuilding after my “collapse.” I had learnt that I still loved André enormously, but no longer unreservedly. I believed what he reported to me, but suspended judgement on his interpretations and connexions of events, his reading of motives and indeed of history. I was in fact no longer very interested in those grand conspiracies and counterconspiracies, successful or not. I understood that I was his when and as he wished; I would do anything he asked of me — and I found myself relieved that he didn’t after all ask that I marry him, and/or live with him at Castines Hundred, and/or devote myself to his ambiguous work. It was therefore disturbing, in subtle as well as in the obvious ways, to discover myself, in the spring of 1967, once again impregnated!