How comes A. B. Cook VI, you ask, to have a son named Henry Burlingame VII? So did I, of the ever-smiling laureate himself, at the reception after the funeral, and was answered by Lord Tennyson paraphrased:
If you knew that flower’s crannies,
You would know what God and man is.
Overhearing which, Lady Amherst commented with just-audible asperity, “We’d know of more than one marshy plot too, I daresay.” Schott harrumphed; Cook bowed to his critic; Ambrose Mensch, at her side, wondered as if innocently whether “royal dreams” was in good eulogistic taste, considering. “Not to mention the play on interred,” Lady A. added coolly. At the time I thought she referred merely and cleverly to the stercorant business in my tribute.
To all such jibes the Maryland Laureate was deaf. His son (who, one now discovered, spoke English with a heavy Québécois accent) politely asked Lady A. to explain the pun; Mensch volunteered for that duty and led the lad aside, out of earshot of Jane, who was listening with strained but ever cool expression to Schott’s hearty condolences while, as it seemed to me, trying to catch my attention. “Bea Golden” was in smoky conversation and transaction with the bartender, while managing simultaneously to keep an eye on her current lover and, if I’m not mistaken, on Ambrose Mensch as well, whom she’d greeted earlier with a string of Dahlings effusive even for her. Drew and Yvonne Mack consulted each other; Mr. Bray, himself. Reggie framed us all in his imaginary camera.
Of Jeannine Mack’s paternity, Father of mine, I’m still in doubt, 35 years after the fact. If she’s Harrison’s daughter, she’s a throwback to some pickle farmer earlier than her grandsire. What I see in her, alas for “Bea Golden,” is our own progenitors, yours and mine: the drawling, cracker Andrewses from down-county. Misfortunate child, her red-neck genes never at home in those blue-blood boarding schools and hunt clubs! For all her mahvelouses, put her in any pahty and it’s the help she’ll be most at home with: the barkeep, the waiters and musicians. No question she’d’ve flourished as a down-home Andrews, drinking beer and making out at fifteen and sixteen in the back seats of Chevrolets; left to herself she’d ’ve been impregnated at seventeen by some local doctor’s boy during the Choptank Yacht Regatta and settled down happily somewhere in the county to raise a family; by now their kids would be off to college; they themselves would be tired of weekend adulteries with the local country-clubbers; they’d be buckled down comfortably for a boozy but respectable middle age, he in waterfront real estate and Annapolis politics, she on the school board and tercentennial committee. As is, she’s staler at 35 than her mother at 63. The very obverse of her brother, Jeannine has, I am confident, never in her incoherent life voluntarily read a newspaper, much less a book, or been moved by a work of art or a bit of history, reflected on life beyond her own botch of it, felt compassion for the oppressed, or loved a fellow human being. I’m told she’s divorcing again, and feels the charmless Prinz to be her great chance…
Ach, Hebe Tochter, mein Herz schmerz!
Drew Mack, on the other hand, is altogether his father’s son, the more so with every fresh rebellion. How could Harrison ever have wondered? Underneath the beard and jeans and dashiki, Drew’s as sleek and ample as a prize Angus; the same steak-fed, Princeton-radical Harrison whom I first met in Baltimore in ’25, beaten up by Mack Senior’s strikebreakers for teaching the “Internationale” to his fellow pickle-pickets. Drew it was who revealed to me, without himself realizing it, the real sense of that pun Lady Amherst saw and groaned at. To his mother’s visible distress, and my surprise, when I made to leave for Cambridge at the end of the funeral festivities, he and Yvonne insisted on driving me (I’d come out with young Mensch); we’d no sooner squeezed into his discreetly battered Volvo wagon than he announced—
But I’m ahead of myself, and behind on my sleep. Still to describe is the ménage back at Tidewater Farms — Jane and Germaine (the latter scarcely yet moved out from the royal chambers, the former scarcely moved back in) outladying each other at one moment across the funeral baked meats, embracing tearfully the next; Ambrose and Reggie deep in cinematographic argument in the library; “Bea Golden” passed out somewhere upstairs; a raw snow just beginning to come down on Redmans Neck from a sky too leaden to alarm any groundhog with his own shadow…
But the quick must rest, if the dead will not. I’ll finish Calliope’s music another night, now I’ve got the keys tuned: introduce you to the other haunts who’ve dropped in on me lately, hic et ubique, and bring you up to date: 52nd anniversary, so I see on my calendar, of my enlistment against the kaiser in 1917.
Back to your hole, old pioner; wane with the Worm Moon! Leave me to deal with the ghosts of the living: that’s work enough for your Liebes
Todd
C: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His life since The End of the Road. The remarkable reappearance, at the Remobilization Farm, of Joseph Morgan, with an ultimatum.
11 P.M. 3/6/69
TO:
Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada
FROM:
Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada
Cyrano de Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ring Lardner, Michelangelo: happy birthday. The Alamo has fallen to Santa Anna; its garrison is massacred. FDR has closed the banks. Franco’s cruiser Baleares has been sunk off Cartagena. Napoleon’s back from Elba: we approach Day One of the Hundred Days.
In a sense, you Remain Jacob Horner. It was on the advice of the Doctor that in 1953 you Left the Teaching Profession; for a time you’d Been A Teacher of Prescriptive Grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College in Maryland, now the Wicomico campus of Marshyhope State University.
The Doctor had brought you to a certain point in your Original Schedule of Therapies (this was October 27, 1953: anniversary of Madison’s Annexation Proclamation concerning West Florida and of Wally Simpson’s divorce, birthday of Captain Cook, Paganini, Theodore Roosevelt, Dylan Thomas, Catherine of Valois), and, as you’d Exceeded his prescriptions by perhaps Impregnating your Only Friend’s Wife, Arranging an illegal abortion which Mrs. Morgan did not survive, and Impersonating several bona fide human beings in the process, he said to you: “Jacob Horner, you mustn’t Work any longer. You will have to Sit Idle for a time.”
You Shaved, Dressed, Packed your Bags, and Called a taxi to fetch you to the terminal, where you were to Join the Doctor’s other patients for the bus ride north. While you Waited for the cab, you Rocked in your Chair and Smoked a cigarette, your Last. You were Without Weather. A few minutes later the cabby blew his horn; you Picked Up your Two Suitcases and Went Out, Leaving your bust of Laocoön where it stood, on the mantelpiece. Your Car, too, since you Saw no further use for it, you Left where it was, at the curb, and Climbed into the taxi.
Interminable, that journey, up the Susquehanna and Juniata, into the cold, dilapidated Alleghenies. You Wintered near the Cornplanter Indian Reservation in northwestern Pennsylvania. In the spring, having learned from his Indian clients that the house he’d rented, together with the village and surrounding countryside, would be under water following the government’s completion of nearby Kinzua Dam, the Doctor reestablished the Farm somewhat closer to the state line, which eventually he crossed to a pleasant site above Lily Dale, New York, Spiritualist Capital of America. There you Remained for a decade before Moving to the present establishment in Canada, at the opposite end of the Peace Bridge from Buffalo.