Half jokingly he suggested that I exploit in the college’s behalf my new role as Lady Pembroke. So the “Duke of York,” without especially intending to, had done: Morgan showed me the just completed and as yet unstaffed media centre, remarking with a smile that state legislators were ever readier to subsidize an impressive physical plant than an impressive faculty. Had I met Reg Prinz?
In early November I finally did. To spare myself (and, as I imagined, Jane) Harrison’s displays, I’d used my opening-of-semester business to excuse myself from visiting Tidewater Farms except rarely, despite Jane’s urgings. His fixation on “Lady Pembroke” was undiminished, she reported: he had annulled by royal decree all marriages contracted before 1 August 1811, and vowed to become a Lutheran in order to marry me; he swore repeatedly on the Bible to be faithful to his dear Eliza, who had been faithful to him for fifty-five years; he proposed to establish a female equivalent of the Order of the Garter, whereof I was to be the first elect; he nightly imagined me in his bed, and daily threatened to come for me in the royal yacht, crying “Rex populo non separandus!” when his male nurses (whose attendance was now required) restrained him. She found it hard to imagine that my actual waiting on him would make matters worse, and rather imagined it might temper his fantasies, which were truly becoming difficult for her to live with: so much so that, since she could not bring herself to have him “committed” (and since he had better residential care at Tidewater Farms than any institutional facility could provide), she had taken to spending more and more of her own nights at an apartment in Dorset Heights, and was contemplating an extended business-vacation trip to Britain.
It was true that in my presence Harrison behaved agreeably, spoke temperately and rationally more often than not, and made no amorous overtures. Even so… And I did have other things on my mind, including André’s business (of which nothing so far had come) and the approach of a certain fateful anniversary. For this last reason especially, I was disinclined to accept Jane’s invitation to dinner on the first Sunday in November, until she added not only that it was to be by way of being a bon voyage party for herself, who was indeed off to London for a while, but also that the annual Guy Fawkes Day fireworks would be let off at Redmans Neck after dinner, courtesy of the Tidewater Foundation, and that a number of their particular friends would be there, including Messrs Andrews from Cambridge and Prinz from New York, whom she believed I had not met, and Mr Cook from Annapolis, whom she understood I had?
I went, trembling. Harrison was all charm and gallantry, and so apparently the master of his mania that one could easily have taken the George-and-Eliza business as a standing pleasantry for the occasion. Your Mr Andrews too proved a civilised surprise: a handsome, elderly bachelor, he held forth amusingly on the C.I.A.‘s three-million-dollar involvement in the National Student Association, recently disclosed, and chided Drew Mack (in absentia) for not making our local chapter of the S.D.S. menacing enough to attract some of that money to Marshyhope. In other circumstances I’d have taken less distracted pleasure in meeting him: it pleased me, for example, that he freely broke Jane’s prohibition, “for Harrison’s sake,” of our mentioning their son “the Prince of Wales,” and that Harrison seemed unperturbed thereby; for I was disinclined myself to walk on eggs with his eccentricities as did Jane (and Doctor #2). But of course it was Andrew Burlingame Cook whom I had come there tremulously to inspect, whose reintroduction to me, on that date of all dates, it was impossible to ascribe to coincidence… John: the man cannot be André Castine. How could he be André? André is heavyset, swarthy, brown-eyed, bald, trimly moustached and short-bearded; he wears eyeglasses, can’t see without them, and partial dentures, of which he is self-conscious — and his accent is French-Canadian in all of his several languages. The “Poet Laureate” is of similar build, but his hair is thick, curly, salt-and-pepper-coloured, his eyes are hazel, he wears neither beard nor moustache nor spectacles, his teeth are his own and boldly gleaming, and while his voice admittedly has something of André’s sexual baritone, his accent is as echt “Mairlund” as Todd Andrews’s. He is not André!
Nor is he, by his own assertion, André’s half brother, though it could be held that they resemble each other as siblings might. Indeed, when I pressed him on that head (immediately upon remeeting him; he had not forgotten our previous encounter), he denied ever having heard the name Castine except in the history books and the “Student’s Second Tale” in Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. He had a grown son, he acknowledged, by his late wife — who like himself had worked with the U.S. Office of War Information in London during World War II, and who (like Jeffrey’s first wife!) had been killed in an air raid there in ’42. The boy’s name was Henry Burlingame VII, sure enough — Henry Burlingame Cook, legally, but it had been the unofficial custom of the family for generations to alternate the surnames of their two chief progenitors… He was a dandy fellow, Henry, but completely wrongheaded in the political sphere, thanks in some measure to the influence of such Commie acquaintances as Drew Mack and Joseph Morgan. Presently he was in Quebec somewhere, inciting the Canucks against queen and country, God forgive him and save all three. For he was a good lad at heart, was son Henry, and believe it or not he Cook himself had undergone a brief attack of Whiggery in his twenties — from which he had recovered with such antibodies as to have been spared the least twinge of recurrence, he was happy to report. He greatly feared (this after dinner now, as we sipped cognac and watched skyrockets from the terrace in the mild autumn night, through which sailed also incredible hosts of wild geese, chorusing south from where I wished I were) I was the butt of some silly practical joke, and expressed chivalrous indignation that “a lady of my quality” should be so used.
He was, well, charming: not at all the blustering boor of the Maryland Historical Society — except (and here too he is at least in spirit my André’s kin) in the company of “adversaries” such as Morgan, who joined us after dinner, or when the conversation turned to politics. Then he became the loud Poetaster Laureate of the Right: encouraged Harrison’s conviction that the Russian embassy had not leased waterfront acreage in Dorchester County merely for the summer recreation of their staff, as they claimed, but to spy on Mack Enterprises and “other operations in the area.” (Nonsense, Jane crisply replied, they were a Mack enterprise: she had leased them the land herself.) He declared to His Majesty that Schott’s proposed Tower of Truth would make Marshyhope “independent enough to secede from the state system”—a loaded illogic that Harrison good-naturedly reproved him for. And I could not judge, much as I needed to, how seriously he took his professed Toryism — but I believed Joe Morgan’s grim reply (since borne out) when I asked him that question: “Only half seriously, Germaine. But he would destroy us half seriously, too.”
So. The only unattached lady among so many charming, unattached gentlemen, and too unfortunately distracted to enjoy their gallantries. Or properly to acquaint myself with the youngest member of our company, the most detached certainly, if not unattached, who hovered in the margins of the evening as of this letter. “And I believe you’ve not met Mr Prinz,” Jane said at the end of our cocktail introductions, as I attempted dazedly to measure A. B. Cook against André’s depiction. In the following year, last year, when I found myself de facto mistress of Tidewater Farms, playing “Esther” to Harrison’s “Ahasuerus” (his conceit, after one of George III’s) whilst “Queen Vashti” refreshed herself at the real Bath and Cheltenham, I had occasion to re-view Reg Prinz — else I’d be unable to describe him now, so distraught was I and evanescent he that November evening. The “son [Harrison] should have had” is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht’s and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose’s phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation, or a long-term convict just released with the warden’s good wishes and a new suit of street clothes. He neither smokes nor drinks nor, so far as I could hear, speaks. It is said that he comes from a wealthy Long Island Jewish family and was educated at Groton and Yale. It is said that he “trips” regularly on lysergic acid diethylamide and other pharmaceuticals, but deplores the ascription to them of mystic insight or creative vision in their users. It is said that he is a brilliant actor and director; that he has absorbed and put behind him all the ideology of contemporary filmmaking, along with radical politics (he thinks Drew Mack naive, we’re told, but is “interested” in Harrison and A. B. Cook as “emblems,” and “admires” Henry Burlingame VII) and literature, which he is reputed to have called “a mildly interesting historical phenomenon of no present importance.” One hears that he is scornful of esoteric, high-art cinema as unfaithful to the medium’s popular roots, which however bore him. Political revolutions, he is said to have said, are passé, “like marriage, divorce, families, professions, novels, cash, existential Angst.”